Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  I turn the book upside down and crack it open like a lobster tail and out into my lap and upon the quilt drop little pictures of my noctivigant wife, a girl, such a beautiful young girl, ripe in her pucelage, with beautiful fingers and lips and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin and hair. I can hardly bear to look, not out of jealousy but envy, of these boys, that I should not have known her then. Oh how I would have swept her in my arms away and never let her go. She would not have been forced to give herself another name nor I to lucubrate over these photographs of her, a ghost now, gone, nothing left of her but these puisne, pistic pictures (as if I needed them!) and these unbearable words. These words—my own, which choke me, blind me, deafen me, these ugly, indefinable words, and hers, which break my heart.

  Job’s Tears

  A man came into the shop today and asked for the Stars Within Circles quilt begun in 1850 by John Brown’s mother. I happen to know the quilt because I’ve seen it in a book.

  “I don’t have it,” I told him. “Can you get it?” “No. It’s part of the Lenice Ingram Bacon collection. Perhaps there’s something else I can show you. I have a number of quilts with small, contained stars. There’s a Sunburst from 1850 as well. Listen.” I grabbed Robert Bishop’s book to read him something about Sunbursts when he exploded. “I didn’t come here to buy some design. I am not looking for a pattern. I am not decorating.” He spit not only his contempt but also his spit. Why does it always seem to land in my eyebrows. “I want that specific quilt. I want Mrs. Owen Brown’s quilt.” “I’m sorry then.” And I was. He left me. His skin was that bruise-purple you sometimes find in Amish quilts as if a few drops of blood had fallen into the dye. He’s a severe man. I’m attracted to his intense concentration.

  I unfolded the Sunburst and studied the quilting. Then I read what it took to make one of these: “It took more than 20 years, almost 25, at night after supper when the children were all put to bed to make that quilt. My whole life is in that quilt. All my joys and sorrows.”

  I wanted to call Johnny at home. I wanted to read this to him. But he doesn’t answer the phone.

  When I got here I told him the story. I thought he might be interested in discussing why black people hardly ever come in or how the woman in Ohio working on her quilt reminded me of him. But all he said was, “Imagine what it must be like, not looking for a pattern.”

  And I thought I worked long hours!

  Bow Tie

  Tonight Johnny told me the story of a girl who decided to call herself Cosima. “The one girl you ever had,” I said, “and you don’t even know her name.” Make that the 2 girls he ever had.

  “Why Cosima?” I asked. I am interested in what name a person chooses when a person chooses a name.

  That got him started on Nietzsche. I should have known. Here’s what I remember.

  Cosima was the name of Franz Liszt’s daughter. First she was married to Hans von Bulow. He was a great pianist too. Like Cosima’s father. But he was a lousy composer. So she left him for Wagner. Nietzsche and Wagner were friends. Nietzsche was in love with Cosima. Everybody was. She had a little overbite. Just like me. Otherwise I am vastly more beautiful to quote my husband. But Nietzsche’s problems weren’t about love. They were about art. He believed that art is what keeps the truth from destroying us. That art is the only thing that redeems humanity. Not love. Not religion. Not philosophy. Art. Johnny quoted Franz Kafka about art being an axe for the frozen sea within us. I like that. It reminds me of marriage of all things. Anyway, what did old Nietzsche do? He tried to make art. What kind of art? Music. He wrote little romances like the piece for Cosima’s 33rd birthday party and when she played it Nietzsche sat there beaming with pride and Wagner left the room. People thought he was either jealous or ill. But when they found him he was lying on the floor nearly puking with laughter.

  I got him to tell me how he had her. I could see him in his big clumsy shoes running out to buy another condom. I never heard them called safetys before. You can use all the safetys in the world, you still can’t make sex safe.

  My favorite part of the Cosima story is how he came right into the condom. When you love somebody you want to possess them all the way back to the day they were born. Every day they lived before the day they lived with you is a day lost from your life. But at least I have that: my Johnny as a boy so excited that just a touch drives him wild.

  He has no shame over his inexperience. Most men like to boast of all they’ve done. Like me. Or lie. Not that I lie exactly. But I certainly don’t tell him the truth.

  Tree of Life

  Tonight we danced. We were clearing the table when Johnny said “What’s that?” and I said “It’s Ornette Coleman. Just For You is the name of the song, I think,” and he put down his dishes and took my dishes out of my hands and put his arms around me and we danced.

  I never danced with anyone before when we were all alone. No, that’s not quite true. Men who’d never touched me used to put on music and say let’s dance. To try to get to hold your hand and maybe touch your waist.

  I’m very sensitive on my waist. Even somebody’s fingertips when I’m going through a door and a shiver goes up me through my breasts all the way up the sides of my neck.

  But to dance with your husband, unexpectedly, when you’re all alone, home, and there’s nothing of you left for him to explore, there’s no intimacy he hasn’t enjoyed with you inside or out, and it’s over as quickly as it began, when the song ends, and you go back to the dishes or whatever you were doing … it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine, just his hand on my waist and not a word to be spoken.

  Barn Raising

  For Valentine’s Day, 1990, our first Valentine’s Day together, or married, or both, which is tomorrow, I’m giving him a copy of Israhel van Meckenem’s engraving of himself and his wife Ida. I wanted something special for him. Something symbolic. This was done before Columbus discovered America. Johnny will understand the meaning of that. He told me I have made him an American. That I have brought him home. That we are the great American couple because we embody all the best ideals of our society. “We live in peace. We promote beauty. We honor the mind.” “And we fuck our brains out,” I had to add because Johnny can be such a pompous asshole sometimes.

  It’s supposed to be not only the earliest known self-portrait ever printed but the earliest printed portrait outside of Asia. Israhel and Ida don’t look like me and Johnny (thank goodness) but I love to think of this man so in love with his wife and of how this emblem of their marriage has survived for so long. He’s got a nice smile. The most wonderful deep furrow in his skin from the side of his nose to just below his bottom lip. His eyes are sleepy—from art or sex? She however looks like a nun. Especially in the eyebrows—they are arched but fuzzy. I’m sure she didn’t like what he did with her chin. It looks like a golf ball glued to the bottom of her face. “I know I look like that, but did you have to be so realistic!” What she doesn’t know is that he would never have drawn her exactly as she is if he didn’t love her completely.

  Ladies Delight

  I walked to work today. It took me nearly 2 hours. I didn’t care if I was late opening the shop. I went all the way up Avenue of the Americas into Central Park and came out at 72nd Street and stopped to look into the courtyard of the Dakota and went into Nancy’s to buy a bottle of wine for dinner. Sometimes I do that—walk. Usually I take the subway, though Johnny thinks I take a cab, because he says if I take the subway he’ll be unable to concentrate on anything all day out of worry for me. He says his father always took the subway down to court because it put him in the mood to lock people up and he took a limousine home because by then he’d smelled enough humanity for one day.

  I love to be out in the city. I could never stay home the way Johnny does. Where does he find the strength to spend so much time by himself. He doesn’t belong to anything. Nothing. Not even a book club. He doesn’t have a religion. Or a political party. A home team. An away team. He’s not part of any gene
ration. He’s the most alone person I’ve ever known. Nobody on earth has a harder job. No distractions. Nothing between himself and himself. He calls music a divertissment. But I don’t think it is. Neither is sex. Johnny doesn’t want to get lost. Johnny doesn’t want to wander through the city. Not any longer. The day I met him was the day he stopped. Since then the only thing he’s explored is his own mind.

  I’m not as strong as he is. I need to be away from myself. I need to stop thinking. I need to feel the city in my legs. I need to hear it scream. I need to rub my eyes against the world.

  Today I wondered what would happen if I just kept walking. Out of Manhattan. Over the Hudson. Out of my life. I could disappear so easily. I could go back to the Valley of the Moon and lie in my old room with swollen, panting, grateful boys. I could be a child again. Because now the only place I am is in my father’s pictures. I wonder when I stopped hating him for taking them. I wonder when I became grateful. Is that perverse. I was never so innocent as when I touched those boys and let those boys touch me. I’m glad my parents got to see it.

  And I realized that when I think of leaving here, it’s not to escape the city or my marriage or Johnny. I don’t just want to go back. I want to go back in time. And I want Johnny to follow me. I want us to have our past together.

  White House Steps

  We were lying on the bed as usual just reading. Johnny had vin santo on his side with bisquits. He’d dip a bisquit in and shake it off and tap me on the shoulder and bring it to my lips. I’d suck some wine in and give the thing a little bite. My lips were all it took. The wine and spit had saturated it. It made me want to blow him but not right away. I was reading a new novel about quilts by Whitney Otto and feeling very discrete the way a book can make you feel. I love that word even though Johnny would kill me because I couldn’t say if it makes a homonym or homograph or homophone with discreet. He likes to put things in my mouth or on my lips. Sometimes when he’s fucking me he sticks his thumb or his first two fingers in, and I can always make him come if I start sucking on them hard. It’s funny how we read most nights, together on the bed, one of us in one book, one of us in another, worlds apart, the only thing connecting us whatever music’s playing and the way we touch. The way we touch is usually the way we’ll fuck. As with the bisquit. We’re like 2 telegraph machines talking dirty across the ocean when our books and minds are continents apart. So when I got to a point in my book where I didn’t mind stopping and to tell the truth didn’t want any more bisquit dipped in vin santo, I closed my book and smiled because I didn’t care where he was in his book and put my head on his stomach and opened up his robe and lifted up his dick and glided it over my lips like lipstick. But before I could put it in my mouth, he cupped his hands in my armpits and pulled me up to him and said, “One must cease letting oneself be eaten when one tastes best,” and I thought O my new husband, you’ve outdone yourself this time. He’d rather kiss me than have me suck his cock. He’d rather look into my eyes than watch my hair wave in the southern sea. And he did kiss my eyes. But then his hands slid down to my waist and closed upon me there and lifted me up so for a second or 2 I was completely off the bed. And put me down. On my stomach. The first thing I thought of was how to tell him I was too impatient to have him in me for a backrub when he swung his leg over me and straddled me and rose up on his knees. It still might be a backrub till he put a hand under my stomach and scooped me up so I was on my knees and forearms and my ass was pressed against one side of the circle of his dick. Forget backrubs. How was I going to tell him not to stick that in my poor little heinie. Just the picture of it in my mind brought tears to my eyes. Could he possibly think I had done this with all those men he thought I had done this with. “Don’t,” I said. But did I mean it. I was very comfortable. My eyes were closed. My face was in my palm. My ass was open to the air and much more sensitive than I’d have thought. But I could tell he was confused. I’d never refused him anything before. And now he’d stopped touching me. So I took one arm off the bed and rose up on my other hand and reached around behind me and pulled his dick back onto my ass. I rubbed it along the crack. I could feel it tighten on me. I’d like to feel him come all over me in there but I still certainly didn’t want him buried in me. So I pushed him down and aimed him at my lips and pressed him up against them and told him “In.” His hands went around the sides of my ass. I was in a vice. His fingers stretched around my front and hooked into my pelvic bones which I always think of as the ears around my pussy. He pulled me back and forth onto his dick. I shoved a pillow under my face and buried my face in it. I never felt so blind. I thought I wanted to see him. I thought I must be missing him. But when I pictured what was actually happening John was gone. It was like God came down and put a hand on John’s shoulder and tossed him aside and looked at me like I was in prayer. Which is what I felt like. I was all stretched and humbled. I was blind. I was whispering things into the pillow. I didn’t even sound like myself. I didn’t know who I was. Or who was behind me. I was wiped out. I was in ecstasy. Fuck me, I said to It. Fuck me. More. More. More.