Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  And this fact suggested a different, harder life. But sometimes harder was better, too. Character building, soul enriching, heart expanding. She could not deny her very familiar, foolish urge to shake things up just for novelty's sake. She and Ev and the boys would most likely rally round the old man's presence. And it would be O.K. unless it went on too long, unless he stayed with them for years and years, unless his influence began to feel influential.

  "When do you think he'll finally die?" she asked Ev then, standing in the blank, vaguely noxious-smelling new room. Small as it was, it gave the impression of echo.

  "I don't know," Ev told her. "He's been dying so long now, it's as if he's already gone."

  "If he moves here, he might come between us."

  Ev studied her. It had always bothered her when he did this, narrowing that left eye at her, thinking about her words. She was not careful when she spoke around him, and on rare occasions she regretted that.

  "We could try him in another home," Ev said finally, crossing his arms over his chest.

  "We're running out of ones that don't know him," Rachel answered, although the old man had only been in two others before the current place.

  "Blackballed by the rest homes."

  "Ev," she said, "if your father could have seen himself the way he is now, back when he was sane and human, do you think he would want you to..." She stopped. What was she saying, anyway?

  "Kill him?" Ev finished for her. "You've already convinced me that that wouldn't be a good idea. All I can say is that if it were me, if I saw myself becoming that monster, then I would want myself gone, offed. The thing is, I can't know what his truth is. What's his world like, anyway? We might seem like sadists to him, bigger assholes than he seems to us."

  "No way," Rachel said.

  "But we can't know. We could all be headed in the same direction."

  She didn't want her own worst-case scenario voiced by Ev; she wanted him to think it impossible that he would become like his father. She stuck her hand between her husband's crossed arms and pulled free one of his hands, then pressed herself against him. If she wanted to make love with him, then he could not resemble his father—that was her logic. They kissed; then came the single moan Ev always began sex with, as if sex's power gave him an ache even in anticipation. That night, on the floor of Rachel's pantry, they made love, Rachel's buttocks cold on the linoleum, her jean skirt bunched at her waist, her own slipper socks still on her feet. Her husband, though smallish, was solid and heavy, like a paperweight. His density made her shoulder blades hurt. In the middle of things, Rachel wanted to talk again.

  "He'll need a babysitter, just like the boys," she told Ev, who had begun a quick series of thrusts, darting in and out of her in a way that reminded Rachel of hummingbirds.

  "True," Ev said, slowing his pace. He didn't mind stopping to chat.

  Rachel reached between her body and his and held his testicles, running a finger up the crease, winding his springy hairs around her knuckles. "I like you hard," she said.

  "I like you soft," he answered. He rested on his hands, staring down at her. The vein at his temple throbbed crazily in this position; gravity pulled his flesh toward her.

  "Your face is very red. Don't have a heart attack," she warned him as he started slowly moving in and out again. "You feel ... good," she added.

  In truth, it frightened her to feel his heart against her chest. His was an active heart, loud when he came, pounding on her rib cage as if hammering its way out of his. "Wait, wait," she said, pushing his chest up.

  "What?" he asked, smiling. Making love made him happy. It was the one time Rachel could see his childishness, the boy that got trampled on and left, for the most part, behind. She cherished that look in his face, the open revelation.

  "Why wait?" he asked, his lips at her hairline.

  "You ever think about your parents while we're fucking?"

  "I try not to do that."

  "Sometimes I can't help it. I think about my mother. I wonder if she ever let herself enjoy sex, or if it seemed like too much work—getting ready, cleaning up after, all that technical, houseworky part of it."

  Ev said, "Maybe you'd prefer thinking she didn't enjoy sex?"

  "Oh, please!" Rachel pushed his shoulders up. "No analysis, please. I can have fun without it, thanks."

  "If you're sure..."

  "Positive. You still like me?" she asked. "Even though I'm kind of old?"

  "Not that old."

  "Not as old as you," she agreed. He'd begun moving again, this conversation having happened many times before. "You still like my breasts?"

  "You have amazing breasts, very nice breasts." He pushed up her shirt and sucked one happily.

  "Maybe it would bother you if I were on top and you could see all my extra skin hanging around?"

  "I like you," he said. "You're beautiful."

  "But not like I used to be."

  "Better. I love you better." His desire for her, for release, for pure pleasure, was transparent in the instant he came. And her own satisfaction—the thrill, the melancholy, the urge to cry—followed. Their sex had metamorphosed to this point. How did they know how to care for each other? How did Ev know to stop his pumping precisely now, to push his pelvis against hers, to wait while she oscillated two or three times, then to move again? His understanding of her physical preferences was like masturbation, as if she were responding to her own hunger. In the beginning, years earlier, sex had not been like this, had been not tacit but clumsy. In that clumsiness was delicious fire and tumult, but there was a power in this sex, this accomplished, timeworn thing between them, that Rachel had not expected, had not even tried to explain to herself. There used to be simple but substantial passion. Now the passion had slid away, leaving in its void this thorough knowledge of each other, a giant black universe Rachel continued to navigate, by intuition and other ill-defined resources. Everything they were and knew and had created between them existed here, a great voluminous invention, entirely invisible, inexplicable, exclusively theirs. She reeled while they made love, then forgot it later. Sometimes she mentioned it to Ev just before they fell asleep, and he would briefly hold her, wiping away her tears.

  Rachel felt she would cry, her achievement now in sex not joy but fullness—all the emotions at once, simple Dr. Seuss emotions, sad, mad, glad. She ran her fingernails over Ev's sweating back. He'd fallen like a dead weight against her; he was exhausted. Their birth-control method was withdrawal, so he'd left on her tummy what they'd named, between them and only them, white mud. He would sleep that night like something dead.

  But she would lie awake later, just as she was this night, the night of her father-in-law's passing, sailing on the murky current of her marriage, her sex life with Evan, following its long and uncharted course. A few weeks ago, on the floor just off the kitchen, she had pressed her thumbs into the solid muscle of Ev's buttocks. She had pulled the teardrop of flesh at his earlobe between her teeth and given it a nip. She had bitten his shoulder and studied the mark. She had traced the scary bolt of lightning at his temple that was just exactly, just precisely, like his father's.

  Three

  PADDY MIGHT have forgotten Evan Cole altogether. His widowed mother, his own wife and daughter—they were enough to occupy him in the coming months. The grief of women made his own, by contrast, stoic and dignified. There was to be no more weeping from him. His father's death reverberated through their lives relentlessly: it had come too fast, a severing rather than a gentle easing away. Paddy could not get over the urge to call his father up and ask his advice. And since he couldn't call, his decisions felt faulty. Everyone had faith in him suddenly. They turned to him, and he could neither refuse nor consult. There was a farm to dismantle, animals to feed and then sell, Paddy's senile great-aunt in Normal, who couldn't reconcile herself to her nephew's startling absence during visitors' Sunday.

  But Paddy felt fraudulent as he handled it all, like somebody pretending to be a grownup man.
Hey, he wanted to say, I'm not really this competent—are you sure you want to trust me? He imagined his father staring down at him from some unnamed height, smiling pityingly, knowing that Paddy wasn't ready, but what could he do? Paddy would construct elaborate conversations with his father, composed of real and extrapolated knowledge of him, then suddenly realize that there was nothing to support it, that his father was simply gone, a whoosh of wind.

  He remembered, months after meeting Ev, that Ev had said he was a psychologist. Things kept happening that seemed remotely related to Paddy's father's death: his mother took up smoking; his great-aunt began wandering in traffic outside her nursing home; Paddy's four-year-old became convinced she could fly and jumped from the top of the piano, thus breaking her arm. Suddenly his females seemed to have death wishes of their own.

  He drove his daughter to the hospital wondering what part of her mind had short-circuited. She looked normal, but something must certainly have gone wrong inside, something he, Paddy, should have been able to anticipate and prevent.

  Confused, Paddy searched for Ev in the telephone book and called one E. Cole, Psychiatrist, in order to discover that Ev was "the other Cole," psychologist. Paddy had never been clear on the difference. He phoned one morning in March, eight months after the deaths of their fathers, just to say hi. Ev returned the call promptly at 10:52, after what his secretary called his session. He remembered Paddy but didn't seem to feel particularly friendly. Paddy had the sense Ev was waiting for him to prove himself worthy.

  Paddy said, "Everything's pretty bad since my dad died."

  Ev breathed noisily into the phone, like a pervert. In the background Paddy heard nothing. He pictured Ev's office as a black-and-white, windowless cell, a room in which to judge a person's sanity. Ev said, "You're what, thirty?"

  "Thirty-four."

  "Uh-huh. I'm forty-six. Now I think of my own death every day, don't you? I have my father's ashes here and I still can't decide what the hell to do with them. I never could figure out what to do with him."

  Relieved, Paddy wanted to confess everything. Something about Ev, even over the telephone, inspired him to talk—maybe it was Ev's tangible impatience, that hovering irritation that made Paddy feel as if his problems were probably going to be revealed as trite. He remembered the sick joke Ev had made at the hospital about suffocating his father; such a person commanded Paddy's respect, the way his professors had, years earlier, at the University of Illinois. He'd often wanted to phone them up, ask them just to keep talking to him, fill him in about the truly significant concerns. From them, he learned that there was another way to look at the world, a way that opened it up like the 3-D glasses they used to hand out at movies; he wanted in on the trick. Now that Ev had mentioned it, he knew he would contemplate his own death every day, too.

  "What can I do for you?" Ev asked.

  Paddy said, "Well, this will sound kind of dumb..."

  "Nonsense," said Ev impatiently.

  "My daughter thinks she can fly. I mean, she just jumped off a piano and expected to go. I started to think she was, well, disturbed." Because his wife had been so shaken by Melanie's jump, by the sickening cartoonish angle of her broken arm, Paddy had had to become the firmly convinced member of the partnership, the man. To her, all the way to the emergency room, he had said Melanie was a typical four-year-old. To Ev, he admitted his deep fear that his daughter was—he dropped the euphemism—insane.

  "Back at old St. Mike's, eh?"

  Paddy paused, the setting of his father's death visited upon him. The place had not seemed like the same place when he'd gone there with Melanie and Didi. He hadn't given it even a glancing consideration. Of course, the season had changed, and the ER was in an entirely other part of the hospital, but his own state of mind was the largest variable, and it had been different, no denying it.

  "What is it I can do for you?" Ev repeated into Paddy's ear. "You want me to see your daughter for an evaluation? I don't take children as clients, by and large, but I can recommend one of my partners here who's—"

  "No," Paddy said. "Oh my heck, no, I was just thinking about getting together for coffee or something, maybe bring Mel along to meet you, or..." He did not like the silence that greeted him. People generally filled silences for him. He only learned this about himself as he listened and Ev did not accommodate him. At last there was a faint crabby sigh from the other end.

  "O.K.," Ev said. "But let's don't just sit. Let's walk around somewhere with her."

  Paddy suggested the first place that occurred to him, a place with animals, whose presence never hurt.

  The three of them, Paddy and Melanie and Ev, were to meet at the Shedd Aquarium the following Saturday. For some reason, Paddy felt critical of the little girl's clothing after her mother dressed her that day. He removed her silver princess skirt—as she shrieked—and put her in jeans and a panda bear sweatshirt, easing her broken arm into the tight sleeve. In order to get her to cheer up, he promised to buy her something at the aquarium gift shop. Her casual and unfeminine outfit made her seem more presentable to his new friend, the psychologist.

  During the episode of the clothing, Paddy's wife stood watching from the doorway, saying, when Melanie appealed to her, "Daddy wants you in pants, baby. I don't know why," using a sticky voice Paddy particularly disliked, one that was intended to glide over Melanie and adhere to him. "Have fun," she added, her tone suggesting he'd already ruined the possibility of doing so.

  Paddy had not told Didi that he was taking Melanie to be unofficially checked by a shrink (maybe that was the difference: you didn't call psychologists "shrinks.") No need to have an argument; no need to upset her. Already she had her suspicions about his suddenly wanting to make an excursion alone with their daughter.

  To Melanie, alone in the car, he said, "Daddy's friend Dr. Cole will be coming along with us, won't that be fun?" Or maybe psychologists weren't doctors. He then amended it to "Daddy's friend Ev, a nice man I met at the hospital when Peepaw died. Remember when Peepaw died, and I came home late from the hospital? It was Ev who gave me a ride, wasn't that nice of him?" Paddy loved talking to her in the car, chattering at her; his hostage audience.

  "Does he have some children?" she asked.

  "He has two sons."

  "What are their names?"

  "I don't know. You can ask him that." They stopped at a red light. When Paddy inspected his passenger, she was rubbing her cast, a habit she'd quickly fallen into. A big ugly smudge had formed where her dirty hand had been at work.

  "Whattaya waiting for?" she asked him. "The pole to turn green, too?" She then laughed uproariously. Her favorite car line, learned from her Peepaw.

  At the Shedd, Ev was waiting on the steps, stretched in the pale spring sunshine, eyeglasses blazing in the light. He was smaller than Paddy remembered, also fiercer and more frightening looking. Though the hair on his head was still mostly black, his eyebrows sprouted on his forehead like steel wool.

  Beside him, an old fellow in a seedy brown suit had set up a booth for taking photographs. Melanie made a beeline for his display. He swept his hand over the variety of things onto which he could apply his photos: T-shirts, pins, calendars, coffee mugs. Most people passed by his booth into the museum without seeming to see him. Melanie studied the mugs. "We could get one of these for Mama," she called to Paddy. When looking for gifts for her mother, the two of them had often fallen back on coffee mugs, although Didi, who was Mormon, didn't drink coffee.

  Paddy looked at Ev, but Ev didn't appear to be in any hurry. His long legs extended before him, he scowled in the bright light, and Paddy noticed a vein at his temple, a throbbing zigzag that made him seem angry. The man in the suit had begun selling the mug idea to Melanie, telling her she sure was a sweet pretty girl, asking if he could put his John Hancock on her cast. Paddy felt bad about the disaster he'd manufactured earlier concerning her clothes, and agreed. "Sure. Let's get Mama a cup."

  The photographer sat Mel on the top step and aske
d her to smile. She shook her head. "Mama likes me just like this," she told him. Paddy grinned, looking again at Ev to see if he'd heard this healthy self-report. He hadn't, was staring up into the branches of an overhanging tree. When the man had completed his photo, and while he was waiting for it to finish making in his machine, he tried to scoop Mel up in his arms, nuzzle her neck. Melanie screamed, clawing for her father. She came into Paddy's arms like a monkey and he held her as she cried, comforting her, trying to persuade her the guy was friendly rather than menacing.

  "I'm a grandpa, myself," the photographer said defensively. "I've got lots of grandbabies, I love them all. Love children, wouldn't make one cry to save my soul." He continued to pat Melanie's back as she clung to Paddy, clubbing him with her small cast. She screamed and screamed, lurching away from his touch, clinging so that Paddy nearly fell over backward. Maybe she was going insane, Paddy thought. Maybe a complete breakdown was about to happen.

  It was then that Ev, standing to join them, focused on her. "Keep your hands off," he told the man sternly. "And your John Hancock, too."

  Paddy, who'd been raised to treat his elders politely, was stunned.

  "I wouldn't make a child cry to save my soul!" the man was repeating as Ev led them away, Paddy's thirty cents change neglected.