Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady

there’s more to see.”
    His hand, as mechanically accurate as a pincer, propels her into the dining room, dominated by a huge darktable so shiny it makes her think of a polished casket, then through the kitchen, so perfectly appointed, and into the family room. This room offers the first lovely thing she’s seen here, if she excepts the Oriental rug in the dining room, a purchase she made long ago and left with Foster as ransom. A huge picture window opens onto a lush garden and an expansive, unobstructed view of the bay. The floweriness of this room—the pink-and-yellow chintz sofas, the lettuce green carpeting, the doll collection in a display case—pales before the magnificent window. Foster doesn’t bother to point out her painting, which he somehow cheated her out of only so Lisa could hang it in a corner, in the least obtrusive spot she could find.
    â€œI know this place is probably a bit precious for your taste,” Foster says. “I keep telling Lisa to go easy on the pastels. But will you look at the view I’ve got?”
    Carrie could have been living here in this house with him. Sometimes she boasted to her friends that she used to be married to a surgeon: I gave it all up. As if she’d done something noble.
    She can’t yank her arm free of his. “Foster, let go! You just want to punish me.”
    â€œYou can handle that all by yourself,” Foster says. “You’re an expert at it.”
    He drags her up the stairs in that mysteriously unbreakable grip, and when she stumbles, he keeps pulling her. He shoves open the door of a bedroom. The twin bed, neatly made, covered by a handmade quilt, must be Anya’s. Anya never makes her bed at home, and Carrie and Anya have argued for years about her sloppiness. More sheer curtains, delicate jewelry boxes, a Matisse poster on the wall, a cluster of framed photographs on the bureau. This is the room of another girl, someone Carrie doesn’t know. The photos prove it: pictures of the three of them, Foster, Lisa, and Anya, the reconstituted family in frames that Carrie knows Lisa picked out, Lisa filled. Proof. Those slide shows, the grand finale against which Carrie’s own desires were nothing.
    Foster has tempted her, finally, to feel longing, even if it is not the kind he wishes her to feel.
    â€œI’ve put up with your irresponsibility for long enough,” Foster says. “The way you rub my nose in it.”
    To remember the sweetness of that morning in Mexico, sharing the syrupy coffee from one tin cup, pains her as much as it does to owe him her life. There’s no proof.
    Her body moves to comfort him, reflexively, but he shifts his grip to keep her at arm’s length.
    â€œI want Anya to stay here,” Foster says. “Any court would back me up.”
    â€œDon’t do this,” Carrie whispers. She tries again to touch him.
    He pushes her against the wall with a fury she knows is her fault. “It’s too late to be sorry now. But are you? Are you sorry?”
    His face is so close to hers, their mouths only a few inches from a kiss. He trembles, pressed against her. She has used her body so carelessly and so often in the service of frantic, deluded hope, why shouldn’t she barter it now for her daughter, her only child, her one true need?
    â€œNo,” she says.

curled in the bed of love
    Their friends are not dropping like flies anymore. Now twenty-five pills a day will keep death from the door indefinitely. And all the medieval horrors—the purplish lesions of KS mottling the beautiful curve of a young man’s calf, thrush growing thick as a furry pelt in a mouth that should have been kissed, a dark neck wound opening like an obscene portal—are no longer a daily fact of their lives.
    Sometimes Jim imagines that his and Jordan’s love has grown like the lush grass on all the graves they have each visited in the last decade. They met at an open