Jacqueline Gay Walley - The Bed You Lie In

The Bed You Lie In

Books by Jacqueline Gay Walley

Venus As She Ages Collection of Novels:

Strings Attached (Second Edition, Gay Walley)

To Any Lengths

Prison Sex

The Bed You Lie In

Write, She Said

Magnetism

Books by Gay Walley

Novels:

Strings Attached (First Edition)

The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable

Lost in Montreal

Duet

E-Books on Bookboon:

The Smart Guide to Business Writing

How to Write Your First Novel

Save Your One Person Business From Extinction

Amazon Chap-Books:

How to Be Beautiful

How to Keep Calm and Carry On Without Money

The Bed You Lie In

A novel

Jacqueline Gay Walley

Book Four of the Venus as She Ages Collection

I have lived many of the places I write about, many of these characters are based on real people, alive or dead. But this book is a work of fiction, because all the events and places got transmuted into a story that the real people would not even recognize. In addition, just as many of the characters are fictitious, the events are fictitious, perhaps even my analyses in the books are fictitious. That said, it bears repeating that nothing in the novel is intended as a recounting of actual events. Apart from the broad parallels, this is not what actually happened to me, nor to the people I write about.

Copyright 2021 by Jacqueline Gay Walley

www.gaywalley.com

Published by IML Publications LLC

www.imlpublications.com

Distributed worldwide by Ingram Content Group

www.ingramcontent.com

Book cover design by Erin Rea

www.erinreadesign.com

Interior layout by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India

www.medlar.in

Cover Image: Alamy T3PTBN

Crouching Venus (Roman Antonine period, 2nd century AD)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written consent of the publisher except for brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

ISBN: 978-1-955314-17-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941312

IML Publications LLC

151 First Avenue

New York City, NY 10003

This book is dedicated to all of us who got freed of our pain the hard way.

One

Maybe Arieh was right. I was nasty in bed.

You mean last night? I asked as I put on my dress and looked around for my sandals underneath piles of his shirts and t-shirts crumpled on the floor. There were piles everywhereon his chest of drawers, on his air conditioner, on side tables; DVDs, coins, everything a mess, full of dust, tilted, it seemed, like a Soutine painting.

I was depressed, I explained, buttoning up my blouse. And who wouldnt be? I thought, looking around this chaotic, filthy room. Is this a man a woman should want to be with?

You were pugnacious, he replied.

I tried to remember when I had been pugnacious, as he called it, and all I could think was that maybe he was referring to my pushing him away. I do that in bed when I am restless.

I kissed him quickly once on his balding head while he was looking for his eyeglasses and then rushed out of there, hair uncombed, handbag open, before we could get into a wrangle.

I took a taxi home, which I could ill afford, since I live as close to the edge financially as I do in my choice of men. I was working in a tiny media company that paid less than any job Id ever had, and had the gall to pay late. This was not perhaps the most terrible thing since, after all, it was still some income, but my inability to live within a budget of any kind was the real problem. The government and I finally had something in common.

When I got home I immediately changed into slacks and a sweater, and hurried to a subway so I could meet my boss for our weekly summit meeting at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side. At these meetings, wed go over a list of diminishing clients and what I was doing for them, while I ate a fruit salad and she ate egg whites, and she promised me a fantastically wealthy future once the money came in. At this convivial breakfast where we mostly talked about our love lives, politics, and then, reluctantly, the clients, I would forget that this company I worked for could not afford an office, that it rescinded on health insurance and rarely delivered what it promised to me or the clients. I simply chose to believe there would be a happy ending to this story, as my boss liked to purport ad nauseum.

On the other hand, I was secretly thrilled that this job entailed only a weekly meeting in a coffee shop, that I could work at home, and that I could keep my own hours, and since the company had little business, I managed to get all the work done and still have plenty of time on my hands.

After my meeting with her, I went home and called the owner of an underfunded golf destination club, about an internet ad, which I was writing to save our company money. Then I called an underfunded real estate company in New Mexico about a press release, which I was writing to save our company even more money. I checked my emails and then I looked out my window at a sunny day on Second Avenue, people walking slowly in the warmth, girls in very short skirts and men with swivel heads on cellphones.

I called Arieh. I called him because here we were, both on the same planet in the same year in the same city on the same sunny daya miracle of a sort. I asked him, What are you doing?

Working.

I thought Id come over this afternoon.

Come over then, he said simply, as if A equals B. He could as easily have given one of his other standard replies, Why would I want you to come over? But this time he didnt, so around 2 pm, I took a cab again (I had every intention of taking the bus but its as if my anxieties run on taxi time) and Arieh answered the door naked except for blue underpants, sighed dramatically and shook his head as he let me in.

Translated: You again. Why do I bother?

Or translated in Yiddish: Im happy to see you.

I wasnt sure.

Then he strode right back to his desk where he returned to reading a legal document pulled from the top of a very tall pile of legal documents.

What did your father die of? he suddenly asked me.

I already told you, I said, lung cancer.

What does that have to do with anything, I wondered. My father died years ago. But Arieh is obsessive with questions since he is a lawyer and apparently a good one, according to him, with the highest rating, even though he is without an office or secretary and lives with files everywhere, on the floor, his conference table, his desk. How can he be a good lawyer?

And I regret to say a part of me admired this working of his against the grain. I even believed that he was a good lawyer. Certainly he was aggressive and anal retentive enough. Why would he need a conventional office, I thought? For that matter, why would I?

I went past him to the bedroom, lay down and pulled Ecclesiastes out of my bag, which I was reading at his suggestion. I heard him call out to me, amid his phone calls, What are you doing?

The first time I did not answer, because I knew it would only be moments before he would come in to check up on me to make sure I was not doing anything that would annoy him, such as putting a glass on his wooden side table, or taking a book out of his bookcase and not putting it back properly. This when the room looked like it had been hurled to and from Kansas.