Curled in the Bed of Love

The Loss of Green

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. 1 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 thick black 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, 2 Curled in the Bed of Love 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...