Lying in Bed by J. D. Landis Page B

had undoubtedly defeated me.
    â€œNot really. There are closets everywhere. I hang my suits in one room and keep my shirts in a linen closet outside one of the bathrooms. They smell so clean when I take them from there and put them on. I really don’t have a room of my own here. I didn’t grow up here. I inherited this place from my mother.”
    â€œThen this can be your room,” she said as she opened the door to one of the bedrooms and looked in.
    I followed her into my new room. It was a room in the cracks of whose walls I had sometimes tried to sleep. Like most of the rooms in the apartment, it was furnished with antiques, mostly American like the Federal cherrywood chest of drawers made by Triphem Gorham in Connecticut at the turn of the eighteenth century and the simple Chippendalemaple blanket chest made in Rhode Island about a quarter-century earlier, though the bed was a Charles X mahogany lit en bateau , chunky and substantial but not, thank goodness, a four-poster like the beds in some of the other bedrooms, with their pleated canopies and pencil posts or fluted columns and not at all suited to the night of love I could feel crawling up through my thickening blood as she pushed the claw-footed brass doorstop against the door to hold it open and went to the bed and pushed off her short black boots and lay back against the square white pillows and I prepared to follow her because I didn’t know where else to go when she pointed to the Irish fools chair opposite the foot of the bed and said, “Sit there, I want us to be able to see each other,” and I sat there utterly in her thrall.
    I looked at her. She looked at me. I was happy to be exiled to this chair against the wall, for I was afraid of my desires, or at least of my being able to fulfill them in some way that would fulfill hers also, and at the same time I wanted to leap across that space between us and bury her beneath me until she might try to claw her way out into the peach light that melted into the room through the frosted globe held aloft on the tiny muscular hand of the naked male figure of the spelter lamp on the table beside the bed.
    I knew she sensed both my fear and my desire. I was grateful to her for this more than anything, more even than for being there with me in the first place: for recognizing my ambivalence.
    â€œSomebody sure mixed the woods in this place,” she said.
    I was amused at the thought of my mother so painstakingly collecting all these valuable pieces, only to have thefirst girl I’d ever brought home point out so casually how they were inharmonious. I felt that I had somehow been put together in the same way, with my unearned muscles and my careful woolens and my guarded spectacles on my pretty face and my vetust mind.
    â€œSo talk to me,” she said. “I love to hear you talk. I loved your story about the violin. Tell me about how you stopped talking.”
    â€œOne day I just stopped.”
    â€œJust like that,” she said skeptically.
    â€œThat’s how it seemed. One day I was reading about the death of rhetoric and how it coincided with modernization, with rationalization replacing religion, and when I saw the word axes, the plural of axis and a word I’d been reading in book after book because it’s the kind of word that language people love, I read it as axes , the plural of axe. And no matter how many times I read that word over and over and over again, all I could hear was axes, axes, axes in place of axes, axes, axes .”
    â€œSo is that when you stopped talking?”
    I nodded.
    â€œSay something.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œSo you were chopping off your head to spite your mind.”
    It was an image so clear, and so clearly accurate, that I found myself bending forward as if there were literally a blade at my neck.
    â€œYou might say that.”
    â€œI’m glad you didn’t.”
    â€œDidn’t what?”
    â€œChop off