Curled in the Bed of Love (15 page)

How thin relief seems compared to the leaden compactness of pain. It doesn't keep Bill from being bored with watching
TV
all week. Sick of Oprah, he wonders how he might find a witness to vindicate him. There must be plenty of them, maybe even someone he knows—the accident happened at rush hour just a few blocks from home. He takes a poster board his son used for a science project and writes a plea for help in large block letters on the back, and at 4:45 he walks to the intersection. He wears the poster like a sandwich board, held in place by twine looped around his neck. Even fortified with Vicodin, he can't stand the strain of holding up the sign with his hands.

Standing on the corner, inhaling the sweet fumes of car exhaust, Bill is encouraged by the fact that so many cars go by. Hundreds every minute. Someone in one of these cars will know what happened to him.

When a van pulls up next to the curb and honks, he is disappointed to discover that the driver is his wife. Pam leans over to unlatch the passenger door for him. “Get in,” she says. “Hurry up. Before one of the neighbors sees you.”

Bill climbs into the car—slowly, fine-tuned to the compromised functioning of his body. From the back seat, his kids stare. Pam has to pick them up from the after-school program now that Bill can't bring them home with him after school. This has been rotten for her. Ordinarily Bill fetches the kids and does the little daily errands, the late-night run to the grocery when they're out of milk, the kids' dentist appointments, the dry cleaning.

Bill rolls up the poster board and holds it between his knees. “I thought it was worth a shot,” he says. “Too many good drugs, I guess.”

He's sure Pam will tell him he's crazy, right in front of the kids.

“Let the insurance company handle it,” she says.

When they pull into the garage, Pam jumps out of the car to unload groceries from the back, where the bags have been shoved in
among the accessories she carts around for the houses she stages. With the bare minimum, Pam can furnish an empty house from her inventory or repair the bad taste of sellers who don't know how to arrange their possessions in a cunning way. People don't just sell a house in San Francisco anymore, not in a market pitched to frenzied desire. Spending a few thousand dollars on Pam's fee and a coat of paint and artful flower arrangements translates into tens of thousands in the actual offer, more like a miracle than an investment.

Pam issues instructions while the kids are still slamming the car doors shut. Arianne is to go and empty the hamper into the laundry basket so Pam can get a wash in, Liam has to set the table, and Bill needs to help them start their homework. Juggling two grocery bags and her purse, Pam frees a hand to grab the mail and uses her elbow to switch on the light on the stairs.

Bill lies down on the sofa to ice his back and tells the kids they have to bring their homework to him. Arianne wants to know why he can't come to her room to help her with long division. She stabs her sheet of notebook paper with her pencil. “See? I can't do it in my lap. It won't work.” She begins to weep. “And I can't find my right pencil.”

She insists on using only a pastel mechanical pencil for homework. She clips her hair into a ponytail with an elastic hair band that must be new every day, cried this morning because Pam hadn't done a wash, and the shirt she always wore with her corduroy pants was still in the hamper. She can't bear to lose things and accuses her little brother of stealing them when they go missing. Her sneakers must be wiped clean every night or she won't wear them in the morning. She's ten. How can she have so many requirements?

Bill promises to buy more mechanical pencils tomorrow.

“No you won't,” Arianne says. “You won't even drive.”

These tiny probes of hers uncover such large flaws.

“I can't,” Bill says. “Not with my back.”

“You don't look like it hurts,” Liam says.

Through the soft haze of the drugs, Bill reaches for Arianne. His hand cups her skull, bumpy, somehow stubborn beneath his fingers. She nudges his hand away with the pencil. Liam asks Bill what he should do for his book report. How blank and erasable their faces are, how much like any other kid's face, lips and nose still smudgeable and cheeks smooth and eyes another kind of indefinite. Not written on yet. How large would Bill have had to make the letters on his sign so that they could be read by people in moving cars?

Bill is tired from doing nothing all day. He keeps his eyes half closed even when Liam punches his arm. His children swim like tadpoles in his dimmed and narrowed field of vision. They bicker with one another, a persistent butting of dissatisfaction. Tadpoles. Balls of blind guts with a tail for motility. Pam hollers from the kitchen that Bill could at least keep the kids out of each other's hair. Sounds are as buffered as the pain signals arriving like huffing, smoking locomotives in Bill's brain.

Bill flips through a magazine while Pam conducts business on the cell phone, rearranging the appointments she had to cancel so she could bring Bill here to the back clinic. He can't drive yet. He made a stab at going back to work; he spent one day in his classroom, talking to his students about
Huck Finn,
and whether he stood or sat, any single position made his back hurt. He was up and down and up and down until the accumulated pain at day's end made him wish he could hang himself from a hook.

They didn't expect this would take all morning. The specialist examined Bill in less than fifteen minutes, but the X ray he sent Bill for required an hour's wait, and now they are waiting again for the specialist to interpret the results. When Bill stood in the dark X-ray room, holding his breath while the technician took the
picture, he had a moment when he thought he might faint. He felt queasy, as if the injury had been inflicted fresh, first by the doctor's hands during the exam—mere touch inflaming every nerve in his back—and then by the technician's hands as he positioned Bill before the plate that held the film.

Bill watches Pam punch out numbers on the phone, demolishing her list of calls, brisk and chatty. She smiles as if the person on the other end of the line can see her, keeps trying to tuck a loose strand of blond hair back into her ponytail, smoothing her hair in place, this quiet gesture betraying her anxiety only to him, like a private gift of love. His wife. His sweetie.

What was that bad patch about anyway? Irrelevant stuff. Bickering over Bill failing to put up the screens on the windows or not talking to Pam the right way about things. So what? What did they even have to discuss? Whether Liam needed to be tested for learning disabilities because he didn't like to read, Arianne should be coaxed to make more friends, or Bill should think about moving into administration. Whether Bill complained that Pam had missed the school play and most of Liam's soccer games because he resented her for being the big breadwinner.

Is that all it was about? The housing market in San Francisco has cooled a bit, but when it was peaking, Pam worked like crazy; everyone in real estate was scrambling to make a buck before the bubble burst. The houses Pam staged sold for 8 percent more than comparable ones. She kept her cell phone on the table when they had dinner; in real estate you worked the hours when clients were at leisure to tour houses. She adopted the habits of the realtors who supplied her with clients; she wore a lot of perfume, bought handbags that matched her shoes, indulged in a lavish gift exchange with the realtors. They sent Pam wine-and-fruit baskets when a sale closed, and she boxed for them leather desk sets and raku bowls. In the worst of the frenzy, Bill, not Pam, woke up sweating in the middle of the night, began talking in his
sleep. Loud enough that Pam would have to elbow him to shut him up.

Bill stands up to relieve his back. Pam looks at him. “Does it hurt?”

He has to take a breath before he answers. “I just got this weird stabbing pain. Usually it's a dull ache, this dense sensation.”

Pam laughs. “Dense sensation? This isn't English class. You don't have to interpret it.”

Bill laughs with her. “I'm beginning to understand how hypochondriacs get the way they are.”

“The back X ray will turn out to be a waste of time,” Pam says. “You should push this doctor for an
MRI
.”

Another insult to his precious pain. Bill's doctor was reluctant to refer him to this specialist and noncommittal about whether seeing a chiropractor would help. Walk, the doctor said. Walk for forty minutes a day. Now the specialist seems convinced Bill's pain stems from nothing but tendon and muscle damage. He authorized the X ray only because Bill asked for it.

“What if I insist on an
MRI
for nothing?” Bill says. “This is my manhood at stake here, honey.”

Bill can't tell if the walking is doing him much good. He goes out in the neighborhood at dusk and walks streets he has only ever driven through. Their new neighborhood has stucco houses with tiled roofs and soothing green lawns, a far cry from their old neighborhood of ticky-tacky boxes built in the sixties. Bill savors the flower beds, the trees, the flagstone paths, and wrought iron fences of this neighborhood, all the ornamentation that evinces a careful husbandry. He feels sorry that he teased Pam when month after month last spring they spent their Sundays hunting for just the right house. On his walks he has scouted a couple of houses for her, come home to announce For Sale signs on lawns, and she's about to sign a contract for one of them, a house left empty by its former tenants. Now he takes a proprietary interest in that house, in all the houses whose gardens and window treatments
he has memorized in his slow pacing. The lit windows, tantalizing behind drawn curtains, beckon him, and on those rare occasions when he passes an uncurtained window, he slows to seize this glimpse through a peephole into another world.

A nurse opens the door to the inner office and calls Bill's name. The back specialist doesn't smile when Bill enters his office, and Bill immediately begins to sweat. He knows too many people who've had back surgery and were the worse for it. Or who went from specialist to specialist until finally and too late someone discovered the damage.

The back specialist clips Bill's X ray to a light board. Bill can read nothing in the swirly grays that make his solid skeleton look as if it were made of smoke.

“There's mild joint damage,” the doctor says, tapping the X ray. “But that could be arthritis. A simple fact of your age. It proves nothing.”

What can Bill say?
I demand an
MRI
for mydense sensation!

When Bill comes out to the waiting room after just a few minutes, Pam looks up expectantly. He's ashamed he has so little to report to her.

Bill shrugs. “Whiplash doesn't show up on an X ray.”

She smiles. “But that's good news.”

“How can it hurt like this, and nothing shows up?”

“Get that
MRI
,” Pam says. “So you can put this behind you.”

When she stages houses, Pam does simple things like remove ruffled valances from curtain rods, set out a wine rack on a kitchen counter, move sofas and chairs in from the walls, set out towels of a certain delicious color in the bathroom, replace a spider fern with a blooming phalaenopsis. Pam can predict what triggers wanting, and it's so simple, nothing complicated about it, nothing hidden from sight.

Bill nags the kids to make lunch for school the next day. He has to stand over them every night to make them do it because they
can't manage it in the morning. Five nights a week, nine months of the year, minus four weeks vacation—that's one hundred and sixty times annually. When he made dinner earlier—forcing himself, because it hurt and Pam couldn't be expected to carry him forever—he wondered how many times a day he checked his pocket for keys, calculated how many leaves of lettuce he washed every night, how many dinners—assuming they had dinner out an average of once a week—he would have to make in this decade and the next and the next. Maybe when Bill's bones jumped and scattered and snapped back into place, they landed wrong. Maybe a disk presses on some secret nerve or occludes the flow of blood to his brain.

While Pam finishes the day's calls, Bill stands over Liam and Arianne to make sure they brush their teeth, which they should do for a full 2 minutes, or 728 minutes a year, and as he kisses them good night and tucks them in, he totals the number of bedtime kisses he has given them so far in their lives. Thousands.

Pam comes into the living room after she delivers her kisses to the kids. She twirls. “Free at last,” she says, which she says nearly every night after they get the kids into bed. She sits on Bill's lap, facing him, straddling his legs.

He's a little surprised. He thought she might be mad at him. He has refused to get an
MRI
, couldn't come up with a better reason than embarrassment. Pam will shrug off clients who insist on leaving their bowling trophies on the mantel, and she has apparently cut her losses with him too.

Pam unbuttons his shirt. “Now let's have sex.”

There's something about her bluntness. It's good for him.

Pam kisses him and slips her hands under his shirt. Then she gets up and leaves him. She has gone to brush her teeth and get ready for bed. Like a commercial break. They'll meet in the bedroom and take up again as if there were no interruption.

While she's in the bathroom, Bill strips off his clothes and gets under the covers, shy. This is the first time.

Pam talks to him while she undresses. She hangs up each garment as she removes it, snapping out wrinkles. In bra and underpants she removes her jewelry and her watch. The chunky metal links of her watch make Bill think of her heavy key ring, the one she drops in the bowl by the front door when she comes home, carefully tagged keys to all the houses to which she has access. Keys. Checking for his keys in his pockets, two dozen times a day. Fingering the key he lifted from Pam's key chain yesterday, stroking it in his pocket while he took his daily stroll.