Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

David says, and he is about to add “and sodomy” just to keep the conversational ball rolling, when Isabel he can’t remember her last name walks into the room, with bags of things. No one bothered to tell him she was coming. He would have put on a fresh shirt. He might have shaved. She’s a good-looking woman, and well read for a real estate agent, and she has that quality, that way of making it clear that she wants him to get what he wants, that makes even plain women—and Isabel is not plain—very attractive. Clare is the more interesting person; as a human being, he’d pick Clare over Isabel, but he can’t see how you’d be married to Isabel and chase Clare. It would make no sense, except David does remember chasing, and catching, a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams, and after her, chasing an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sports coat, so he had to just leave it, streaked and stuffed into a wastebasket, in Grand Central Terminal—all while married to the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman who turned heads until the day she died. He can see his wife and those girls, and a few other women, all rotating delicately in the same shadowy, treacherous light.
    “We brought nice things,” Isabel says, and kisses them both.
    “You smell good,” Clare says. Clare doesn’t smell good. She smells like rancid butter and wet wool. She smells just like a yak, and her one skimpy shower didn’t change that or keep her hair from hanging in limp coils, so that she now has yak ears as well. Uncle David, for whom the word natty was invented, who loved to tell people that his late wife always got ready for bed behind a closed door and that as far as he knew, she woke up every morning with brushed hair and a hint of lipstick, should not have to see his niece like this. She’s not fit for company, even if it is only Isabel and William, and it never is only Isabel and William. What comes through the door is William as only Clare knows him, naked on a motel bed, sweating like a man with a fever, or cupping her chin in a restaurant and leaning forward with great, premeditated grace to kiss her. And right behind those stolen pictures come Clare’s old friends Isabel and William, the four of them playing Monopoly at Cape Cod, and right behind them, her husband, Charles, slicing limes, and behind Charles, their sons, not as they are now, but pink and adorable in their footy pajamas, Danny holding his father’s hand, Adam carrying his briefcase. Some of you will simply have to go, Clare wants to say. She smoothes out her ice pack, watches her uncle leer at Isabel, and longs for the thick, amiable hours of Percocet.
    William comes in, leaning heavily on a cane, and Clare can’t even say hello; the sight of the cane just snaps her mouth shut.
    David stands up to shake William’s hand and tries to take the bag of nectarines from him. He stands to demonstrate to Isabel—and it’s all right for William and Clare to see this, too; he has no objection to either of them noticing—that David and Isabel are the only two people in the room able to get up and down from the furniture whenever they please. William hugs the nectarines.
    “What happened to you?” David says.
    William is sorry to see David, as he always is. David is the living embodiment of William’s bad conscience about sleeping with Clare, and he is not a rueful, forgiving conscience. He is Con science as a caustic, sensual, dyspeptic old man.
    “Nothing much,” William says. “How’s the heart?”
    Isabel says, “Where’s Charles?”
    “He’s running errands,” Clare says, and Isabel picks up the tea tray. Privately, Charles and Clare call Isabel The Governess. Isabel purses her lips just a tiny bit as she gathers the cups, and Clare can see her thinking that Charles is out gallivanting—and that would be Isabel’s word for it, gallivanting —when he should be home supervising Clare, who might try to get herself a