Curled in the Bed of Love Read online

  curled in the bed of love

  WINNER OF THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION

  curled in the bed of love

  stories by catherine brady

  Published by the University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  © 2003 by Catherine Brady

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

  Set in Electra and MetaPlus by Bookcomp, Inc.

  Printed and bound by Maple-Vail

  The paper in this bookmeets the guidelines for

  permanence and durability of the Committee on

  Production Guidelines for BookLongevity of the

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  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  07 06 05 04 03 C 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brady, Catherine, 1955–

  Curled in the bed of love: stories / by Catherine Brady.

  p. cm. — (Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction)

  ISBN 0-8203-2545-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Love stories, American. 2. San Francisco Bay Area

  (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3552.R2375 C87 2003

  813′.54–dc21 2003006539

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4369-3

  FOR ILSE KAHN

  I dreamed that I died: that I felt the cold close to me;

  and all that was left of my life was contained in your presence:

  your mouth was the daylight and darkof my world,

  your skin, the republic I shaped for myself with my kisses.

  PABLO NERUDA, “NIGHT,” XC

  contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Loss of Green

  Comfort

  Nothing to Hide

  Honor among Thieves

  Curled in the Bed of Love

  Light, Air, Water

  Side by Side

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

  Roam the Wilderness

  Written in Stone

  Behold the Handmaid of the Lord

  acknowledgments

  The stories in this collection owe more than I can say to the editorial acumen and persistent faith of Steven Kahn, my first reader, my dearest friend. For their comments on individual stories, I am grateful to Linda Brady, Aaron Shurin, and Maureen Brady. Margaret Hansen, Patricia Hein, Mary Nisbet, and Tim Sheils made helpful suggestions along the way. Aaron Shurin, Deborah Lichtman, and Lewis Buzbee, my colleagues in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco, have been extraordinarily generous in their support for my work. Last but not least, I want to thank David and Sarah Kahn, just because.

  The following stories have appeared in the following magazines:

  “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord,” in The Cimarron Review (spring 2002)

  “Comfort,” in Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing (fall 2001)

  “The Loss of Green,” winner of the 2000 Brenda Ueland Prose Prize, in Water-Stone (fall 2000)

  “Nothing to Hide,” in Other Voices (fall 2000)

  “Light, Air, Water,” in Natural Bridge (fall 2000)

  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in The GSU Review (spring 2000)

  “Curled in the Bed of Love,” winner of the 2001 Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize, in The Cimarron Review (spring 2003)

  curled in the bed of love

  the loss of green

  Every night, Sam makes Claire and Russell dance. He pushes the sofa and chairs against the wall, rolls up the rug, and puts one of the CDS he brought with him on the CD player. In the three weeks he has been staying with Claire and Russell, he has abolished the neatness by which they live their daily lives just as he’s thrashed their habit of early evening hours. He filches more books from their shelves than he could possibly read at once, scatters books, maps, and unpartnered socks throughout the house, and marks his trail with plates and knives rimed by butter, bread crumbs, rinds of fruit. Claire is grateful that he works like a demon during the day, writing in the shed that Russell built for her on the bluff below the house, and just as grateful that at sunset he comes back up to the house to batter them with his careless, teeming presence.

  Given Sam’s hearty appetite for novelty, Claire is not surprised by his enthusiasm for ballroom dancing. And what Sam loves, he generously forces on others, so that Claire isn’t certain whether she and Russell have been coaxed or bullied into learning to tango.

  Sam makes Russell lean Claire backward, razzing Russell about looking into her eyes. “Never break eye contact, never. Come on, Russell. You are seducing her. Hold her like you mean it.”

  Russell laughs. Russell likes everything Sam dreams up for the evening, like a growing boy who enjoys whatever is put on his plate. When Russell pretends to lose hold of Claire, Claire clutches at his arms, and Sam shakes his head in disapproval.

  Claire ends the lesson, as she does every night. She’s still physically weak from her miscarriage three months ago, still finds herself suddenly exhausted by the effort to accommodate Sam’s desire for fun.

  Claire flops onto the cast-aside sofa and grabs the wine bottle that Sam has hogged while he ordered them around the room. He will be here for another month, finishing his book of nature essays. He wants to call it Wild to the Bone. He’s managed to stay wild enough, never settling, never stooping to more than temporary work when he can’t sell any freelance pieces, wangling his way onto naturalist junkets around the world, daisy-chaining together a string of women, none of whom has ever given him pause.

  Claire and Russell sit together on the sofa, and Sam perches on its arm, jealously regarding the generous portions of wine they pour themselves.

  “Claire, I wish you would wear a dress to dance class,” Sam says. “Something sheer. Orange.”

  “And I wish you would wear fuzzy bunny slippers,” she says.

  Sam reaches over and draws his fingers through the thickblack tuft of Claire’s hair, shaped to frame her face and fan bluntly at the nape of her neck. “You could wear a flower behind your ear if you still had long hair.”

  Russell never seems to mind Sam’s intimacies. Sam is the only one of Claire’s former lovers who has remained a friend. That life, that wild life of Claire’s before she met Russell, is over now, and Russell is the rock on which she hauled herself out, out of the chaotic sea of hard-drinking, hard-partying, heart-smashing, promiscuous years when she still believed that suffering was a kind of vocation.

  Russell puts on a CD of Jacqueline du Pré playing Boccherini’s cello concerto and turns out the lights so they can see the stars beyond the windows. Situated on a bluff at the tip of tongue-shaped Tomales Bay, the house faces the water, walled by windows that let in the night sky as gloriously as they let in the daylight view.

  Sam grumbles. “Why do we have to have a show? Why can’t we go outside and stumble around if we want stars?”

  “Shut up and just take it in,” Russell says good-naturedly. “You’re the self-proclaimed Man of Nature.”

  “There is no nature with a capital N,” Sam says. “That’s a whitewash, that religious crap.”

  Claire’s study, like the living room, faces the marshy flats where the land and the bay contend for dominance, fields of rich alluvial soil where dairy cows move slowly as silt, with Inverness Ridge to the west and the bay itself a crescent of blue foil at the horizon. She can’t imagine feeling anything less than holy reverence for this place, the gift she mines in her thin books of poetry, and even the obscure destiny of her books seems of a p
iece with the humility awe engenders.

  “Excuse me,” Claire says, “but it sounds like you’re the one preaching.”

  “It’s always two against one around here,” Sam says.

  Russell yawns. “I need to get some sleep.”

  Sleep is hard to come by with Sam around. Tomorrow morning at six, Russell will roll out of bed and climb into the car, a cup of coffee in his hand, to drive two hours from Point Reyes Station into San Francisco, where he practices immigration law. He’s negotiated a four-day workweek, but it’s still a lot of driving. Claire, who commutes only two evenings a week to the poetry workshops she teaches, takes on all the peripheral commutes for necessities that can’t be found in their rural town.

  When Claire inherited the house from her uncle, she and Russell never considered selling it, even though the house was built on the San Andreas Fault, the rift zone that records the efforts of the Pacific plate to move northwest and tug free of the North American plate, working for millions of years to take the coast of California, including the headlands to the west of them, with it. Geology is more metaphor than fact to Claire, and the secret strain in the earth beneath them makes her delight all the more in her solid house and lush garden. For Claire, moving here marked the completion of her reform. She thinks that for Russell, who was less sure, their move offered insurance against the risks she might incur in the city.

  “Why don’t you go on upstairs to bed?” Claire says to Russell. “I’ll do the dishes.” She looks pointedly at Sam. “Maybe I can get someone to help me.”

  “Leave them ’til morning,” Sam says. “Give entropy a chance.”

  Claire gets up. If Sam is going to stay here for another month or so while he finishes his book, he’ll have to earn his keep. “Let’s go.”

  “Just when I was going to ask you to adopt me,” Sam says.

  Claire’s eyes meet Russell’s. It’s so like Sam to trip carelessly on the wide and shallow root network of their recent loss. He sleeps in the guest room that would have been the nursery, and he has happily taken over the writing shed Russell built for Claire so she would have a separate space to work once the baby came. Claire has never used the shed. Someday, Russell promises. She has miscarried three times. A bout of endometriosis in her twenties, belatedly treated, has made it hard for her to get pregnant at all. At thirty-eight, she isn’t sure she wants to keep trying.

  In the kitchen, Sam hinders rather than helps. He blocks Claire’s path from the sink to the butcher-block island so he can tell her about a camping trip in Yellowstone with his old girlfriend Andrea, boasting of their rowdy and constant sex in the tent.

  “One day we came back from a hike, and the tent was torn up. It had to be the smell of sex that attracted the bear—we’d cached the food far away, like responsible ecotourists. I just wished we’d gotten back in time to see the grizzly at it. I’ve never laid eyes on one.”

  A little sparrow inside Claire pounces on this tempting morsel, a grizzly demolishing the flimsy temple of love, and gulps it down, guiltlessly driven by metabolic need. She’s less quick to swallow Sam’s declaration that Andrea broke his heart. More likely, Sam left Andrea, not brutally—he’s a cowboy, not a conquistador—but in such a way that he could allow himself to feel wounded, regretful. That’s how he left Claire, and quite a few women since. Claire couldn’t let Sam go easily: she hunted him down at bars, to weep in his arms as he tried to lead her somewhere private; she spent sleepless nights smoking and drinking and scrawling bitter poems; she tore the poems into tiny pieces and mailed them to him.

  “You have to cut your losses in bear territory,” Sam says. “And I don’t see why they shoot the bears when there’s an attack. It’s usually human carelessness, or stupidity, that provokes the attack. They ought to shoot the humans.”

  Sam is like a grizzly himself, looming and large and territorially rapacious. He doesn’t even realize that he’s backed her against the counter.

  “I don’t feel like sleeping, do you?” Sam says. “Let’s go kill another bottle of wine and play some poker. Strip poker would be my preference, but I’ll understand if you only want to play for pennies.”

  Claire hasn’t wanted sex since the last miscarriage. Maybe her bottled-up instinct exudes a scent that provokes Sam, arouses his marauding desire. She has to push him to get him to step back from her.

  Sam wants to hike around this end of Tomales Bay, and he doesn’t want to get in the truck and drive to the trailhead in the state park. Not when they can walkthrough the gate below the writing shed and take a path along the bluff. Claire explains to him again that they can’t trespass on the dairy farmer’s land.

  “You never used to be so finicky.” He tugs the rusted gate open and walks off.

  Claire follows him. They are cheating anyway. They hardly ever shirk the discipline of their work days. Claire often feels she owes it to Russell, who is right now dutifully putting in a ten-hour day, to work strictly in his absence, to earn their three-day weekends in the garden or hiking in the abundant wilderness here.

  She and Sam don’t walk in silence for long. Sam is full of questions, sucking down whatever information Claire can provide about their surroundings. She explains that the summer gold of these California hills is not natural, but the consequence of overgrazing by cattle in the early days of European colonization. In its natural state this place would have remained green all year round. Claire regrets the loss of green as keenly as if she once knew it.

  Claire doesn’t mind Sam’s questions, since she too is a devourer. She keeps notebooks full of notations on the color of ripening peaches, the drift of chameleon fog over the hills of the Inverness Ridge, the number and shape of the petals on a lily. She must take in a disproportionate excess of detail to feed the slender body of the poem that will eventually emerge, a compound of greedy pleasure and disappointment that the senses can’t dam and hold the world in words.

  They follow a track of trampled grass along the sloping hillside. Sam tells Claire of walking through golden fields of grass in a game preserve in Botswana, coming suddenly upon lions who held their ground because they must have had a fresh kill nearby, and pissing his pants with fear. Claire smiles. Sam must have his nature red in tooth and claw.

  Barn swallows dart past them, tilting like paper airplanes on the breeze, flashing their russet bellies. The trail leads into a tightly packed thicket of bushes and trees, and Sam pushes branches aside and crouches to move in the compacted space. Following him, Claire ends up crawling on her hands and knees. When they come out, they are trapped by a creek, its muddy bank scalloped by the hooves of cows. Sam wants to wade through it, water up to his ankles, but Claire refuses. When they were lovers, Sam favored walks that required fording rivers, climbing steep, rocky slopes, leaving the trail and getting lost in the woods at dusk.

  They return the way they’ve come, still at a military pace, with Sam eager to try every fork in the path. Claire often walks here with Russell, and they meander, not even aware of which path they choose. They talk very little about what they see—they need only touch one another or point—but a lot about Russell’s work. Russell, who shrugs out of his suit jacket and into jeans as soon as he arrives home, is buried by the copious paperwork the INS requires, must share his clients’ anxiety over their poor odds for victory, and he sheds the pressures of his work by spilling them here.

  When Claire and Sam are again halted, this time by the farmer’s fence, he holds barbed wire apart for her so she can follow him through. As they walk down toward the fingerlets of water where the bay and the streams that feed it first intermingle, they surprise a flock of seven white pelicans. The big birds lift into the air, unwieldy as laden bombers, their fight with gravity making Claire hold her breath.

  The pelicans settle again in the water with timid fuss, like ungainly, plain girls invited to the ball after all—there’s something so pleased and modest about their tucked heads. Claire asks Sam to stop and sit down to watch them. Overhead, a t
urkey vulture circles as it searches for carrion, its silhouette a gently sloping V, the feathers at its wing tips articulate as fingers.

  “I never pictured you ending up in a place like this,” Sam says. “You were such a city girl.”

  “Me? When we met, we were living in the country, remember?”

  “A little college town in New England hardly qualifies as raw country.”

  Claire met Sam on a sidewalk, introduced by a woman in the graduate program Claire had just begun and Sam was just finishing. He was moving into a house down the street from Claire’s, carrying a mountain bike over his shoulder and two disk-shaped weights in his fist. For Claire, it was disdain at first sight. A few days later, when she was passing his house on the way to campus, Sam startled her by coming around from the back and dragging her into his yard to watch a snake eating a frog. No words sealed this mutual seduction, only that fierce death they witnessed, the frog squirming and kicking as the snake’s muscles forced it down the long tunnel of its digestive tract, the snake enduring that terror and panic in order to swallow it whole. Sam had given Claire a poem to write.

  Claire looks up at the vulture still wheeling above them. “Where did you imagine me ending up?”

  “I thought you’d stay in New York. In some little apartment crammed with African fetishes and Mexican pottery. I thought you’d run through men the way that I run through women.”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “You’re like another person.”

  Russell introduced Claire to mornings in bed with the Sunday paper and coffee, to games played with flashlights under the covers when the power went out, to the names of flowers and their preferences for direct light or shade. He taught her that the world was a shell whose hinged mouth could be pried open to reveal a secret, smaller morsel of joy.

  “I guess I am another person,” Claire says. “I can’t remember now why I liked the parties so much, and the men, from bad to worse, and swapping drugs with my friends. In case you didn’t know, you should never mix downers and Prozac.”