Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  I was stricken. “But that’s what you call everybody.”

  “Not anymore, you fool.” She bent and kissed me lightly on the lips. I could feel the breath leave her nostrils so I breathed through my own to capture it.

  “I hope you don’t kiss like that all the time,” she said.

  I didn’t laugh until I saw the merriment in her eyes. If I had ever been teased before, except by my father and by boys at school who had resented my wealth and the wall of words behind which I lived, I hadn’t known it. It turned out to be a peculiarly flattering kind of attention, at least coming from a woman with whom I was so treacherously smitten.

  But Johnny? I was not a Johnny. No one had called me that in my life. Even my mother in lifting me from the bath and wrapping a towel around me and singing Gluck as she put me into bed (“Chiamo il mio ben cosi, quando si mostra il di …,” a veritable Pauline Viardot) had not called me Johnny. I was a John. A common slug of a name, uneventful, unelongated, destined, I had thought, gratefully, to be eternally without hypocoristication. Johnny? I? I would not have believed that I could be reborn, become a child with a pet name and learn to beam and scream with the fun and pleasure of love, of marriage.

  “Don’t you want to know my name?” she asked.

  “I’ve wanted to know your name ever since I met you.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “To know me?”

  “To lose you.”

  “And you thought that if you knew my name …” She stopped not because she seemed puzzled but because she wanted me to say it.

  “Then you might be real.”

  “I am real.” She put the back of her hand gently on my ear. “I wouldn’t have told you anyway. I don’t tell anyone my name until I trust him. I’m ready to tell it to you now.”

  “Let me guess.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll never guess. It’s a funny name. It makes people laugh. I used to hate it so much that I never forgave my parents for giving it to me. I ran away—all the way from California to New York. I was sixteen years old. It was almost exactly ten years ago. I’m probably the only person who ever ran away from home because of her name.”

  “I know your initials,” I said.

  Playfully, she looked down at her naked body and investigated it the way one might for moles or insect bites. “I hope you don’t think I’m the sort of person who wears monograms.”

  “C. B.”

  I’d finally said something that shocked her. My year of silence, my confession of sexual innocence, my father’s condemnation—none of those seemed to push her off the axis of her beguiling upper-handedness. But she seemed genuinely surprised, almost violated yet pleased to be violated, at my having said her initials.

  “How do you know?” She had taken me by the shoulders and was shaking me. Her breasts bobbed unnervingly near my mouth.

  Though I knew it was dangerous, I couldn’t resist telling her. “Your initials are right in the front of that notebook I returned to you. As words. See. Be.”

  She released me. Tears came to her eyes, even as they wrinkled in a big smile. “You fucker! You cracked my code! Now I’m going to have to marry you. So what,” she challenged, “is my name?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said, which caused both of us to burst into laughter.

  “Guess,” she insisted.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t like guessing games, especially onomastic guessing games.”

  “I know what that means,” she said coyly. “And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “It only sounds like masturbation,” I explained.

  “It isn’t masturbation when someone’s watching. So what’s my name?”

  “Constance,” I hazarded.

  “Not in a million years.” She held out her hand. I took it. “How do you do,” she said. “My name is Clara. Clara Bell. I was named”—she let go of my hand and threw herself, at long last, into my arms—“after a fucking clown!”

  “Clara,” I said for the first time and felt my lips and tongue embrace her name.

  WE DID NOT make love that night. We did not make love until our wedding night. This was at Clara’s insistence. She wanted, she said, to purify herself. I told her, in my lame effort at premarital seduction, that she was a virgin to me.

  What we did do that night, and have done every night since, is sleep in one another’s arms.

  I had come up off the floor and out of the cracks in the walls.

  I was reunited, through her, with myself.

  11 P.M.

  I am lying in bed, waiting for Clara.

  I am positively esurient. My senses are all atumble. I taste the music and hear the quilts blazing on the walls and see Clara on my skin. So does hunger rearrange one, to say nothing of how it loosens the mind in the way it devours thoughts.

  I get up from the bed and then am nearly tossed back onto it by what the Shostakovich cello sonata does to my feet. It sounds like a piece of this fractured city that’s been torn out and cast up to this peaceful halidom, bullets shot at the pavement to make you dance.

  Its anarchy is perfect for me now. I am free of everything but desire. And there are those who believe that this was the last piece Shostakovich himself wrote as a free artist, before his music was condemned as “fidgeting, screaming, neurasthenic, and messy” because it was created to no political purpose. And to this I say, it would have been political had he never written it down but merely heard it in his head. The least of politics are its public manifestations; the most political acts are those most private. It’s not the public hanging that’s political; it’s the hangman’s dreams.

  I dodge the music like some unbound wraith before a firing squad and prance half the length of the loft to the kitchen and pull down the box of take-out menus and decide to order from Take A Wok rather than Oriental (how un-PC) Palace or Auntie Ha Ha’s, not because the food is better but because I like the name (its playfulness puts me in mind of Call It Quilts, though it lacks the underlying religious provocation of Clara like Parmenides giving God the name of It).

  I shall order no dumpling or noodle or military-brass chicken despite the earlier image of my ingesting them, for that was an image born not out of hunger but out of an oily vision of the food itself. Now I want nutrition and purification and beauty, so I choose vegetables only, to obtain that perfect green of the spinach and of the broccoli that snaps in the bite and the purple of the eggplant that were it not quite so dark would match the color of my beloved’s eyes and why not throw in a few black mushrooms that can be rolled on the tip of the tongue like her pinguid clitoris that in its swelling resembles more, now that I think of it, a palmaryly perfect pearl onion.

  I am forced to repeat my order several times and to suffer its being repeated back to me several times, each time incorrectly, so that when I am finally told, “Okay got it, mister, okay,” it is I who must ask to have it repeated yet again and it is wrong again and I resign myself to the very real possibility that I will find a carton of sautéed string beans in place of my spinach. I dread the arrival of the delivery man, who will be even more oscitant than this man at the take-out phone.

  “Okay thirty minutes, mister, okay,” he says and hangs up as if I might question his ability to tell time as well.

  How am I going to survive thirty minutes without food?

  But wait.

  I realize I am no longer hungry.

  What is it about Chinese food, I wonder, that in the ordering of it quells the hunger for it?

  On that night of the day we met, as I have said, we ate no dinner. I slept in a bed for the first time in over a year and in the arms of a woman (as a grown man, I mean) for the first time in my life.

  When I awakened in the morning, I was struck by how little hungry I was, which only added to my sense of the unreality of the whole encounter. Had this really happened? And if it had, had it happened to me? But then, I wondered,
what after all do people do behind all those windows out there? They do, I realized, exactly, in one variation or another, what we had done. Wake up and smell the linga, John!

  When Clara finally opened her eyes, I said to her, “You were sarmassational!”

  “God am I hungry,” she replied.

  So was I.

  We ordered breakfast to be delivered, for I had no food in the apartment.

  She hated the place. I put it on the market the same day.

  I confessed I didn’t know anything about the clown after whom she claimed to have been named.

  “You’ve never heard of Howdy Doody?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I fail to see the humor in someone greeting a bowel movement.”

  Perhaps I was being too literal. Once she had stopped laughing, she told me all about Howdy and Clarabell.

  I told her about the Bloomsbury Bells.

  I showed her my violin.

  She showed me each and every quilt in her shop and began to educate me about them.

  Clara is visual, visual and tactile, the ideal combination for someone in her business. She seems to believe with Wittgensteinian instinct that there are things that cannot be put into words, that make themselves manifest, and this belief renders her mystical. See Be—the perfect motto for her, coded initialing aside. She is positively eidetic, able to see something forever in her mind if she has seen it once, whereas I cannot see even her, though I am unable to take my eyes off her when she is with me and I see myself so much more clearly through her seeing me (I tell her that I call this Clarafication and that I cannot imagine her with any other name).

  She told me about Madonna.

  I asked her birth date.

  “November 22, 1963. Why?”

  I was taken aback. “That’s the day—”

  “Kennedy was shot,” she said impatiently.

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” I said, for John Kennedy’s death had hardly been an occasion for mourning in my family, which I remembered though I had been but three years old at the time. “I was going to say that it was the day Aldous Huxley died.”

  She told me about the Doors.

  From then on, for each of her birthdays and on inconsequential occasions as well, I have bought her as fine a print as I could find of a Madonna. I started, naturally, with Il Parmigianino’s Madonna dal Collo Lungo and followed that with Botticelli’s and Cimabue’s Madonna with St. Francis and the seductive van Hemmessen and Lochner’s Madonna in the Rose Garden and da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks and Raphael’s Virgin of the Fish. For her thirtieth birthday in two months I shall give her another Raphael, his Madonna del Cardellino (as well as a 1929 first edition of the Hogarth Press A Room of One’s Own), unless by then we know we have a child on the way, in which case I will give her a Madonna with Child, probably Fra Filippo Lippi’s, which I’ve decided, under the tutelage of my all-seeing wife, is the most magnificent of all.

  She played popular music for me.

  I played classical music for her.

  We learned about jazz with each other.

  The only thing we didn’t do was make love.

  True to her word, she wanted to wait.

  I might have thought this was a ploy to get me to marry her sooner, but I didn’t think that, because I could not make myself believe she might want to marry me in the first place.

  “What do you see in me?” I finally worked up the courage to ask her.

  “Someone who can read me,” she said.

  “Innocence,” she said.

  “The father of my children,” she said.

  “The love of my life.”

  At our wedding, which was the simplest possible thing at City Hall, I got the clerk to let me turn on Clara’s boombox to play Yo Yo Ma’s recording of the sarabande from the fourth cello suite, and with that as our hymeneal, I told the assorted throng of strangers awaiting their turn to do what we were doing that when I met Clara Bell I felt what Henry James Senior had felt when first he met the woman, Mary Walsh, whom he was to marry. He reported, to Emerson: “The flesh said It is for me, and the spirit said It is for me.”

  No one there seemed to know what I was talking about.

  WE CAME HOME to this loft of ours, which we’d bought and designed together and had furnished in anticipation of that day, that night, and we drank champagne and talked for a while until finally Clara said, “Fuck me, Johnny,” and we consummated our marriage upon this bed.

  I sit on its edge and recover from the desperation of hunger only to have it replaced, blessedly, by the desperation of lust. At last, I am approaching that pinnacle of desire that I have suffered so much, in being separated from Clara, to attain. Nietzsche called us the bravest of animals and those most accustomed to suffering and knew that we not only don’t repudiate suffering, we desire (his italics) it, so long as we’re shown the meaning of this suffering.

  I try to picture her now, not in my usual hopeless attempt to see her but to see what she is doing. I cast her out from my mind in order to bring her into my flesh. I create of her a stranger.

  Where can she be? With whom?

  She is not with another man, which is to say she is not with another man, though the chances are good that she’s with a man, for most of her dates and meetings in the evening are with men: her hairdresser is a man; her internist is a man; her gynecologist is a man; her accountant is a man; her aerobics instructor is a man; those people who truck in with quilts from America are men (and not one of them homosexual, according to Clara); her masseur is, obviously, a man.

  I have in the past enjoyed the image of Clara having a massage. Then I can see her, not her face, really, which is half-obscured by the table on which she lies, but the rest of her, naked, only a small towel over her buttocks, while a man moves his hands across her skin and presses them down upon her, hard enough so that the outside edges of her breasts become visible upon the surface of the table. When his hands have reached that marvelous little concave small of her back, where the solid strength of her supple spine meets with charming incongruity her two darling dimples, his little finger slips under the white towel. Her buttocks flutter beneath the towel. As he moves that finger and then the next and next and next down the crack between them, her whole ass rises, magnetized. The towel slips off and falls slowly from the table to the floor. I am so happy to see my wife’s beautiful ass I could weep. My cock quops with delight.

  It is not that I want my wife to be with another man. I merely want to see her with another man. It is she who has taught me to see things—paintings, quilts, my crescive cock in her mouth that she eats like a croissant, delicately and edaciously at the same time.

  It is Clara who has opened my eyes. She has shown me that the only way to see her is to see her not merely as someone apart from myself but someone apart from herself.

  To have her, truly, I must give her up.

  So I do. I give her up to my imagination and in that way get to keep her, real and for real.

  What is more exciting, after all, for a man: to imagine having sex with another woman or to imagine his wife having sex with another man?

  The former erases her, casts her out; the latter recreates her.

  I have never dreamed I was making love to another woman when I was making love to Clara.

  But sometimes I dream that I am someone else making love to Clara.

  Someone from her diaries, her past, a forgotten lover from among the multitude of her lovers, given life anew by me and in turn giving life to me and through me to Clara, for I’ve found that I can bring myself to an absolute frenzy of desire by using a succedaneous cock on her and watching her use it. My frenzy is contagious. Clara is delivered to bliss. “Sometimes I don’t even know who you are,” she says. She looks at me through lust-puffed eyes as if she has never seen me before.

  I say nothing but her name: “Clara.” I say it again and again. How powerful a sound it is, this name of hers, fresh off the lips of a stranger. No other wor
d quite so arouses her, no vulgar sex word, no description of what’s happening between us, no tease or praise or demand. I say her name as if I had just come upon her, as if I were saying it for the first time, as if it were flesh itself. She pulls my head down to hers, my lips to her ear, and hears the whisper of her name until she cries out mine in her climax.

  And thus I have her, truly, by having given up myself.

  To imagine your beloved is someone else insults her, diminishes her, and removes her from you and you from her. Even that old hypocrite St. Jerome was wise enough to recognize that the husband who is lost in immoderate love is exalted in sin when he screws his wife so passionately that he would have done it with like abandon even were she a stranger. (It is he who also said, “The wise man should love his wife with judgment, not with passion.” So how, then, is a man to love his wife?)

  Is it not the greatest of all relationships, this accidental bond, this lifelong pledge, this pleasure, this plicate gathering of limbs and breath in the hasp of sex and the trust of sleep? We come together as strangers, aliens, and are folded, crushed, into a single, resurrected blood. Out of thin air, with someone who did not exist until we met, we make family. This is the will to life. This is the death of death.

  Is it any wonder that I wonder where she can be? With whom?

  I am right where I want to be. At home. Waiting for her. Beginning to ache.

  I leave the bed and go to her handbag, from which she’d taken money and keys. It is lying just where she had left it on the floor by a small bird-cage tea table we’d bought on a quilt-hunting trip to western New York. The inside of the bag is comfortably cluttered, but I have no trouble finding what I am looking for. It is her Week-at-a-Glance datebook, which, I must confess, I do not consider sacrosanct like her diary, though into which, I must further confess, I have not peeked before except on those occasions when she’s shouted to me from bathroom or closet to check her schedule.

  She has torn off the corners at the bottom of the pages so that, when the thumb encounters the first untorn page, the book opens exactly to this week. This evidence of Clara’s precision makes me miss her all the more. Has there ever been someone so wanton and unrestrained who is also so punctilious? It is my duty to know her and my desire that she remain, finally, unknowable. It is like wanting to get to the bottom of something that has no bottom.