The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories Read Free Page B

consciously, but ... Look, we all know I’m her little Frankenstein monster. She can do what she wants with me. Even dream up that I like to eat fucking plum stones.”
    “It’s so wrong!”
    Sighing, he sat up and started pulling on his shirt. “It’s wrong, but it’s life, sweet girl. Not much we can do about it, you know.”
    “Yes we can. We can do something.”
    His back was to me. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him. His back was to me then too. The long red hair falling over his collar.
    When I didn’t say anything more, he turned and looked at me over his shoulder, smiling.
    “We can do something? What can we do?” His eyes were gentle and loving, eyes I wanted to see for the rest of my life.
    “We can make her sad. We can make her need you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just what I said, Fiddy. When she’s sad she needs you. We have to decide what would make her sad a long time. Maybe something to do with Michael. Or their children.”
    His fingers had stopped moving over the buttons. Thin, artistic fingers. Freckles.

UH-OH CITY
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity ...
In my end is my beginning.
T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”
    A LL RIGHT, LOOK AT it this way. If her name had been Codruta or Glenyus or Heulwen, it would have been easier to accept. Some exotic name from the Urals or Druid country, places where strange events are as common as grass. But no, her name was Beenie. Beenie Rushforth. Doesn’t that sound like a fifty-year-old golfing “gal” from the local country club! It does to me. A woman with too loud a voice, too deep a tan, and too much bourbon in her glass at eleven in the morning. Beenie Rushforth, Wellesley, class of ’65.
    Even the way she arrived was no big deal, either. Our last cleaning woman decided to marry her boyfriend and move to Chicago. No great loss. She wasn’t the world’s best worker. She was the kind who swept around a rug rather than under it. My wife, Roberta, is also convinced this woman was taking nips from our liquor bottles, but that didn’t bother me. What does get on my nerves is paying good money for a clean house, but getting instead secret corners of dust, and streaked windows in the guest room.
    She gave notice, and Roberta put a file card on the bulletin board outside the supermarket. You know, along with the “lawns mowed/German lessons/portable typewriter barely used ... signs. The place you check when you’re either in need, or only bored.
    We can clean our house well enough, but since the kids left and I was given a chair at the university, there is more money now than ever before. I want to use some of it to make life nicer for us. Roberta deserves it.
    Throughout my adult life, I have had an uncanny talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I specifically chose the U. of Michigan graduate programme so that I could study with Ellroy, the greatest Melville scholar around. Who just happened to die six weeks after I began there. Roberta was pregnant with our first daughter, Norah, and was having her own tough time. But she was magnificent. Told me I had a full fellowship to a great school, and, Ellroy or not, a PhD from the place meant something; so shut up and get to work. I did. Three very lean years later, we walked out of there with a doctorate and two babies in hand. For the next decade, we lived your typical academic vagabond’s life, loading up the VW bus every couple of years and driving from one end of the country to the other to new jobs. The students liked me, but my colleagues were jealous. I was writing fast and well then, and had already knocked out the monograph on Melville’s Gnosticism that sent a lot of people running to their copies of Moby Dick to see what they’d missed. Then came “Moonlight marines—a study of the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Herman Melville”, which should have made me a famous man, but did