Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom Page A

should call the hospital or someone.
    “I have no idea,” Clare said, lying on the bed beside William, staring at the ceiling. These things get done, Clare thought, whether you know what you’re doing or not. The hospital is called, the funeral home is contacted, the body is removed, with some difficulty, because he was a big man and the stairs are old and narrow. Your sons and daughters-in-law call everyone who needs to be called, including the terrible sister in England who sent them a note and a chipped vase, explaining that she could not bring herself to attend a wedding that so clearly should not be taking place.
    Margaret comes back the next day and makes up one of the boys’ bedrooms for you, just in case, but when your best friend flies in from Cleveland, you are lying in your own room, wrapped in William’s bathrobe, and you wear his robe and his undershirt while she sits across from you, her sensible shoes right beside William’s wing tips, and she helps you decide chapel or funeral home, lunch or brunch, booze or wine, and who will speak. Your sons and their wives and the babies come and it’s no more or less terrible to have them in the house. You move slowly and carefully, swimming through a deep but traversable river of shit. You must not inhale, you must not stop, you must not stop for anything at all. Destroyed, untouchable, you can lie down on the other side when they’ve all gone home.
    Clare was careful during the funeral. She didn’t listen to anything that was said. She saw Isabel sitting with Emily and Kurt, a little cluster of Langfords; Isabel wore a gray suit and held Emily’s hand and she left as soon as the service ended. At the house, Clare imagined Isabel beside her; she imagined herself encased in Isabel. Even in pajamas, suffering a bad cold, Isabel moved like a woman in beautiful silk. Clare made an effort to move that way. She thanked people in Isabel’s pleasant, governessy voice. Clare straightened Danny’s tie with Isabel’s hand and then wiped chocolate fingerprints off the back of a chair. Clare used Isabel to answer every question and to make plans to get together with people she had no intention of seeing. She hugged Emily the way Isabel would have, with a perfect degree of appreciation for Emily’s pregnant and furious state. Clare went upstairs and lay down on the big bed and cried into the big, tailored pillows William used for reading in bed. Clare held his reading glasses like a rosary. Clare walked over to the dresser and took out one of William’s big Irish linen handkerchiefs and blotted her face with it. (Clare and Isabel did their dressers the same way, William said: odds and ends in the top drawer, then underwear, then sweaters, then jeans and T-shirts and white socks. Clare put William’s almost empty bottle of Tabac in her underwear drawer.) She rearranged their two unlikely stuffed animals.
    “Oh, rhino and pecker bird,” William had said. That’s how he saw them, and two years ago Clare had found herself in front of a fancy toy store in Guilford on a spring afternoon and found herself buying a very expensive plush gray rhino and a velvety little brown-and-white bird and putting the pair on their bed that night.
    “You’re not so tough,” William had said.
    “I was,” Clare said. “You’ve ruined me.”
    Clare wanted to talk with Isabel about Emily; they used to talk about her all the time. Once, after William’s second heart attack, when William was still Isabel’s husband, Isabel and Clare were playing cards in William’s hospital room and Emily and Kurt had just gone off to get sandwiches and Clare had stumbled over something nice to say about Kurt, and Isabel slapped down her cards and said, “Say what you want. He’s dumb in that awful preppy way and a Republican and if he says, ‘No disrespect intended,’ one more time, I’m going to set him on fire.” William said, “De gustibus non est disputandum,” which he said about many