Lying in Bed by J. D. Landis

the sensitive skin on the underside of my arm. “Where are they now?”
    â€œIn a closet. At home. In my apartment.”
    â€œI’d like to see it.”
    â€œThe violin?”
    â€œYour apartment.”
    I looked down at her hand on my arm.
    â€œSay something,” she said.
    I was so overwhelmed by her directness in saying she wanted to come to my home and by her touching me that I could think of nothing to say that was my own. I watched the back of her hand move further up my sleeve and said, “You have uninhibited fingers.”
    Her breathing quickened at my words. One of her fingers pressed into my skin as if I were a violin myself. “You have no idea.”
    â€œI was quoting Nietzsche,” I confessed. “One of the attributes of free spirits is what he called uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable.”
    â€œI’m a free spirit,” she said.
    I could imagine she was. “He was talking about people who sacrifice everything in their search for the truth. Hecalled them the new philosophers.”
    â€œI didn’t think he was referring to girls who went around swinging their underpants over their heads.”
    She was the first person I had ever wanted to hold in my arms. I wished I knew how. It is such a long and dangerous journey out of emptiness.
    â€œStop laughing,” she said, “and take me home.”

10 P.M.
    I press the pillow once more to my face, smelling her though being careful not to speak to her, before I throw it back against the headboard and reach in the darkness for the console on Clara’s side of the bed. There I find the rheostats that control the entire rectangular track of lighting along all four walls of the loft.
    I push one slowly up. The far wall emerges in the light breathing with color.
    I am enveloped by quilts. Clara has hung them all with great care, stretching each one over a wooden frame so its weight will be distributed evenly. The quilts in her shop, on the other hand, are hung by Velcro or are folded in piles, though once a month, wearing latex gloves, Clara refolds each one.
    She has taught me to love quilts and their creation as I have taught her to love music and its creation, beyond her own fancying of Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and Madonna. And as I feel my human connection most tothose who have died and left their music behind, so Clara feels joined to those women who pieced or appliquéd scraps of fabric into entire designs of great beauty and durable life. She has read to me of, and imagined aloud for me, the great quilting bees of the two centuries before ours, and we have imagined together the life of a young woman beginning the traditional thirteen quilts in the days of her maidenhood—twelve for quotidian use and the thirteenth her bridal quilt—and then the bee itself, which could not be held until she had betrothed herself to her beloved, when she would be joined by her friends and they would back and interline and finish her bridal quilt, and through their very gathering announce to the world that she is to be married.
    I have joined the life of my country through these quilts around me and ended what I realized was a lifelong exile in the culture of Europe. As I lie here on the Double Wedding Ring that covers our bed and was Clara’s wedding gift to me, I am the true, evolved American man, beyond action, beyond provincialism, beyond greed, ambition, destructiveness, and the illusion of omnipotence.
    Surrounding me are a Stair-Steps Illusion quilt from Kentucky, a Friendship quilt from Ohio, a Mennonite Light and Dark from Pennsylvania, a Sunshine and Shadow also from Pennsylvania, a Beloved Flag from Hawaii, over near the kitchen a Broken Dishes quilt from Indiana (which Clara gave to me on our first wedding anniversary and to honor the fact that we had broken no dishes, had no fights, as if it were conceivable to me even to raise my voice at her), a Stairway to Heaven (one of