Lying in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page B

shroud and within her closed eyes the knowledge of all the untold secrets of her life, never now to be whispered to him through those dry, dampened lips.
    I think of Clara dying without my being there and without my even knowing. I never worry about this during the day, when we are separated, she running her shop, I right here where I always am. But sometimes, at night, when she is out, I feel like Pergolesi’s Orfeo, afraidof death only to the degree that I am separated from her. But we are almost always together at night. We love to sit and talk and drink our wine as this infinite room grows ever darker until finally we grow invisible to one another and our disembodied voices become entangled vapor trails in the illimitable sky. As long as we are talking, I know we are alive.
    I get up from this bed and go to the north windows. The city spreads out before me the chaotic aftermath of a lavish dinner party, all tumbled glass and unfinished heaps of life. Where is Clara in all of this? Is she safe? Is she whole? Is she real? At least she had been wise enough not to carry her handbag in a city where you expect to see people wearing signs that say NO ILLUSIONS—ALREADY STOLEN .
    But what if she too were to die and be buried before I had knowledge of either? I would lie down upon her grave like Julia Duckworth upon her husband’s and attempt to lift from it the veil of grass as I do the nightgown from her knees and thighs at night and claw my way through the dirt into the haven of her arms.
    Unlike Bach, I would take no other wife for as long as Clara were to remain dead.
    Bach lasted hardly a year before he relinquished a maiden’s strangeness and married her.
    She was twenty years old, and her name was Anna Magdalena. That is a wonderful name to be able to whisper over and over as you sink ever more deeply into its proprietress, even better than Maria Barbara, and we may be sure Bach whispered it many times, for Anna Magdalena bore him an even greater number of children than he had been left with by Maria Barbara.
    But what is most enticing about Anna Magdalena, and why I sometimes whisper her name myself into this roomwhen I am alone here in the day and listening to the music I now call forth with my innocent remote, is her being the inspiration for a sarabande that Bach wrote down in a little notebook.
    Clara writes things down in little notebooks too. Not music. Private things. She records her life and fantasies in a handwriting that is such a salmagundi of slashes and dots and scars and the amputation of abbreviation that it is literally cryptographic and therefore leaves her life and mind indecipherable to anyone who might be so crude as to attempt to violate her diaries.
    Only on the day of our first meeting was I privileged to see what sort of thing she records in those pages. Since that day, I have not even peeked, though I find it more difficult as time goes by and we consume one another within the fire of our marriage not to want to see her in those pages, to experience her mind and history apart from how we live our lives together.
    The closer we become in our marriage, the more a stranger she seems to me and the more a stranger I seem to myself. It is as if our separate identities were being erased by the very thing that secures our identities. I am losing Clara even as she becomes more a part of myself. I am losing myself not simply as I become more a part of her but also as I lose her. When there is no difference between gain and loss, the result is not stability but chaos.
    It is ascertainable even in our lovemaking now, which approaches masturbation in its familiarity and inspires aprosexia, as it were, in the very midst of sex, driving us to push one another away in order to be closer, to become strangers in order to remain confidants, to pretend we are not who we are as we claw at each other’s skin and minds on that bed there.
    I do not want to read Clara’s diaries in order to know her