Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  "He was mean," Melanie explained a few minutes later.

  "Probably," Ev agreed. Paddy had been about to scold Melanie, to remind her to give people the benefit of the doubt. He had a basically charitable vision of the world, one it had never occurred to him to question.

  "You think?" he asked Ev, genuinely surprised.

  "Sycophantic sleazebag," Ev said.

  Paddy laughed nervously; he didn't know what sycophantic meant, but it sounded as if it ought to be funny. Ev smiled with half his mouth, a sly expression.

  The aquarium was crowded yet peaceful, everyone moving through the dusky light from tank to tank, room to room. And there the fish were, ignoring the people, going along with their lives without caring who watched. Paddy breathed easier among animals, even cold-blooded slimy ones like fish. It was probably a good thing that Didi was allergic to most pets; otherwise, they might have a whole brood of them, a regular urban farm.

  Melanie held the coffee cup with the scowling picture of herself on its side, thumping it against her leg. On her other arm was the cast, glowing green in the murky illumination. Paddy was glad she seemed to like Ev, who'd begun giving the fish dialogue. "Move, fat thing," he said for the slinking stingray. "Shut your mouth, will you?" he made the neons say to the grouper. "Turn out the lights, boys," the grouper mouthed back. Soon Melanie thrust her new cup at Paddy and took Ev's hand.

  Ev was startled by the child's hand in his; he'd forgotten the specific comfort of a small child's hand. Melanie's was tiny inside his, a reminder suddenly of the power of his grip. He held on lightly, aware that he could crush her fingers, thinking of his hand, this same hand, over his father's mouth and nostrils, his father's hands rising, motioning, then ceasing.

  Paddy ambled behind them, unhurriedly reading the placards beside the tanks, standing for long periods of time just studying the fish, engrossed in an aspect of their existence that Ev did not believe he himself grasped. At home, his sentimental son Zach approved of Ev's vegetarianism, believing that his father loved animals. But Ev had no particular thought for them; he was interested in his own health. Fish did not move him; they seemed an embodiment of meaninglessness, caught in their small tanks, circling as they waited for food—affectless metaphors in a godless universe.

  "I need to go potty," Melanie suddenly announced, dropping Ev's hand to clutch her crotch. Ev smiled as Paddy looked confused.

  For his part, Paddy couldn't think what to do: send her alone to the ladies' room? Give her to a friendly-looking woman for safekeeping in there? Or take her to the men's?

  Ev said, "I'd take her to the men's if I were you, and let her use the stall."

  "Good idea," Paddy said, leading her hopping away. While standing crushed against the inside door of the tiny toilet cubicle, waiting for her to finish, Paddy reflected on his past adventures with his daughter. Hadn't she ever had to pee before when her mother wasn't around? He couldn't think of a single time. Of course, she'd been potty trained late, and he didn't often take her places without Didi. Still.

  She concentrated on her task, her face squeezed in the breathlessness of expulsion, red. Looking down at her, Paddy was saddened by the wad of hair stuck to the grubby ceramic, by the soiled toilet paper on the floor all around her. The tile was sticky and the metal walls were lousy with graffiti—he was glad Melanie didn't yet know how to read; he hoped the crude pictures weren't inciting her imagination in some damaging way. He envisioned her in other public bathrooms, her future in them, at gas stations in the middle of the night, in restaurants on dates, in loud bars as she sat, drunk and reeling. Perhaps she'd flee to one to smoke, as Paddy had done in school, or perhaps to cry over some worthless boy who'd broken her heart. It occurred to Paddy that the next man to see his little girl sit on a toilet would probably be her husband. He hoped she would marry the kind of guy who wouldn't make a big deal out of bathroom sharing. He hoped Melanie would be the kind of woman who joined her husband in the bathroom without making a fuss, an intimacy her mother tolerated but did not feel particularly comfortable with. One of Paddy's most striking childhood memories was of his parents both disappearing into the bathroom near bedtime, getting ready together, shuffling about in their scuffs and bed clothes, the single flush of the toilet. He had loved that knowledge he had of them, and that they had of each other. He hadn't thought of it in many, many years, and his eyes filled suddenly, this image of his father sabotaging him, his own adulthood making him sad.

  "Wipe me," his daughter ordered, leaning forward off the seat and revealing her pink puckered bottom hole. Paddy knelt with the coarse tissue provided by the dispenser. Outside the stall, he heard two teenagers talking as they used the urinal, and he waited until they'd left before opening the door.

  "Wash hands," Mel reminded him. He hurried her through this as a group of boys came yelling in.

  Ev was circling the coral reef tank, watching the diver get ready for the feeding session. He lifted Melanie up to see the woman fall backward into the tank, the turtles and fish lazily floating away from her.

  "I want to be a underwater lady," she told Paddy from Ev's shoulders.

  "Girls can be whatever they want," Paddy replied loftily, "just like boys." He thought this was a good response.

  Melanie said, "Girls can't be daddies."

  Ev said, "Or brothers." They both gave Paddy the same challenging look. "Or uncles," Ev continued.

  "Or bad guys," Melanie said. "Can they?" she asked Ev, leaning down to watch his face.

  "Girls are not bad guys," he agreed.

  "And girls can wear anything," Melanie went on, "but boys can only wear pants."

  "So true," said Ev. "I wish I were a girl."

  "Poor boys," Melanie said.

  In the gift shop, Melanie asked Ev what he would get if he were getting something. "I'd buy that big killer whale and sleep with it at night," Ev said. "I'd make it watch for bad guys for me."

  The killer whale had pink gums and white teeth, a kind of snarl. "Isn't he cute?" Melanie crowed.

  They purchased it. Outside, the photographer was packing his cart up, the spring wind flapping his banners and shirts. His expression when he saw Ev was full of hatred. Paddy turned his face away, embarrassed to seem to condone his friend's rudeness.

  "Fucking pedophile," Ev muttered. Paddy again felt thrilled, scandalized. Also curious; was pedophile related to podiatry?

  Ev had ridden the train down to the aquarium but accepted Paddy's offer of a ride. "Good God," he said in the parking lot before Paddy's Bronco, jumping back as if receiving an electric shock.

  "All-terrain vehicle," Paddy said. "Better for potholes."

  "Need a ladder?" Ev asked Melanie as he hoisted her up. "Maybe an elevator?"

  They rumbled out of the lot. "What a view," Ev said. "You can see right into the laps of the other drivers. What a frightening prospect."

  They were quiet a while. Melanie fell almost instantly asleep in the back seat. Ev turned to check on her, then said, "How would you feel if some complete stranger jerked you off your feet and put his mouth on your neck?" He meant the photographer, the event that had started the day, and he meant it from Melanie's point of view.

  "I wouldn't like it," Paddy guessed.

  "No shit."

  And she wouldn't have liked going to the bathroom with a stranger, either. Paddy felt a precarious and tender pride in himself, and looked in the rearview mirror at his daughter, at the way she listed sideways in sleep and resembled her baby pictures, with her hair stuck to her chubby cheek. Watching her sleep often made him ashamed of himself, as if he would never be good enough to be her father. He now wished that he'd let her wear her princess clothes, and that it had been he instead of Ev who'd bawled out the photographer, but he was nonetheless glad he'd taken her to the men's room.

  "She seems O.K. to me," Ev was saying, "but that's only an informal guess." Paddy was bewildered for a moment, having forgotten entirely his excuse for inviting Ev along. They had reached Ev's build
ing on Fullerton, and he pulled over before it, his right wheels up on the curb to allow traffic to continue past him. Ev went on. "She's smart, she has a healthy mistrust of assholes and a good curiosity about the world."

  "She wasn't afraid of you," Paddy said. He'd watched carefully the way Ev handled her, the way he stooped to listen to her, the way he did not try to read every single sign to her. As a father, Paddy often felt obliged to narrate and impart knowledge endlessly, loading Melanie up with data he himself didn't know, couldn't hold on to. An appetite for learning things was not enough; he wanted to fill her full. She would embody his reverence for education. This, he supposed, was the result of his not having finished college.

  "She doesn't consider me an asshole," Ev said, opening the door. "Say, don't you think you could just charge on up the stairs in this thing?"

  Paddy gunned the engine, grinning. "Thanks," he said, truly grateful. "Thanks for coming with us."

  "My pleasure," Ev said, unbuckling his seat belt. He'd climbed out and was about to close the door when he leaned back in. "Did you get that sack I left at your house last summer? Your dad's stuff?"

  "Oh yeah. Thanks for that, too. I was a mess that night."

  "Actually," Ev said, frowning, "you seemed pretty sane. I admired how you kept your head with that woman."

  "What woman?" Paddy summoned the faces of nurses, visitors, the Oriental woman who turned out to be a doctor—Dr. Ono, Dr. Oh No. He couldn't think of anybody. Behind him, another big vehicle honked. Paddy waved, as was his habit, left over from his young life, when honking at fellow drivers had been a way of saying hello.

  "That crazy woman in the parking lot. The one I thought was trying to steal my car. Remember?"

  In an instant, she inhabited Paddy's mind, with her funny hat like his father's. "Oh yeah. Her. I wonder what happened to her daughter?"

  "I don't know. But I have to say, I really did admire how you knew she was in trouble. I didn't see it, myself. I learned something from you." He was squinting at Paddy with one eye in a way that made Paddy uncomfortable. Exhaust fumes were filling the car; the truck honked again. "Sometime I want you to come meet my family," Ev said. "My wife and sons. My youngest is only a few years older than Melanie. You guys could come for dinner. You want to, sometime?"

  "Sure," Paddy said. "Why not?"

  "Good. That's good." Ev held his palm out as if to show Paddy his life line and then pressed the door quietly shut. Melanie, deeply asleep, clutching her killer whale with her good hand, did not stir.

  Four

  ON WEDNESDAY EV saw only women. He and Rachel called it Seven Brides Day; at breakfast, Rachel would sniff around his collar and make comments if he'd used aftershave.

  Long ago Ev had acquiesced to his gloomy, guilt-ridden conscience and made it his policy to reserve roughly a third of his client hours for indigents, people in the same straits as his brother Gerry. Try as he might, he could not rescue Gerry; he hoped to have better luck with his clients, not his own sibling but the siblings of others. He would have to have faith that Gerry would meet with similar generosity. And was it generosity? Because Ev knew that his actions, though they looked kind, did not feel kind. He was pantomiming kindness, method acting mercy.

  The dilemmas of the impoverished were not, in general, as tantalizing as those of the middle class. They seemed more physical, meatier and less cerebral. The poor were typically caught up in a conundrum of bureaucracy and bad luck, often topped, like a cherry, by violence, becoming victims or perpetrators of it. Ev had been known to babysit a feverish child while her mother went on a job interview, to hold the door against a brutal husband who'd come gunning for his wife. Once he'd installed a wheelchair ramp to a double-wide trailer in the dead of winter, when no one else would. His partners considered this the purview of their lesser comrades, the social workers, but Ev adamantly refused to find it demeaning.

  And although these services were useful, it was true they weren't exactly tapping his expertise. The poor did not have as much idle time as the middle class to worry over parental favoritism, over marital peccadilloes, over general philosophical angst. Of course, the poor did not concern themselves with the care of their corgis, either. Their problems did not usually involve the question of whether or how to be; they involved more immediate issues, like custody and rehabilitation and recovery. He could appreciate this, the fact that they did not seem to be whining. But they also had a curiously fierce hold on their problems, an especially difficult time in abandoning them, which made his work harder. He did not like to be bored by them as they pursued the same stubborn path week in and week out; it occurred to him that his boredom had to do with their simple bullheaded dishonesty. They were not often interested in arriving at the truth—the truth was too frightening, too abstract. They were not interested, and not skilled in the imaginative pyrotechnics it might require to get there. If a man beat his wife, she did not possess the luxury of contemplating her own complicity; first, she simply had to get out of the range of his angry fist.

  And then return, tearful, loyal to an innocent and fundamental lie: he needed her, she him.

  Yet Ev's favorite client was one who could not really afford his services. This was Luellen Palmer, assistant to a fashion photographer. Today, during the ten-minute break before Luellen's hour, the time he usually spent making himself a cup of tea or glancing over last week's notes, he sat perfectly still at his little desk in the corner, pinching the inner flesh of his elbow. Why couldn't he feel this? He pinched his forearm, which hurt, then moved back to the place inside his elbow, the soft fold. No pain, no matter how hard he pinched. In fact, when he released the spot, a bit of his skin came away beneath his thumbnail. Horrifying. "I'm numb," he told himself out loud, then snorted. He quickly dialed his home phone. When Rachel answered, he said, "Do me a favor."

  "O.K."

  "Roll up your sleeve and pinch the fold of your elbow."

  "What?"

  "Inside your arm, the other side of your elbow, the anti-elbow. Pinch it for me."

  "Yeah, and what?"

  "Are you doing it?"

  "Sure."

  "And can you feel it?"

  "Of course I can feel it. I'm pinching my arm. What is your story, Ev?"

  "I can't feel it." He was doing it again, phone tucked between ear and shoulder, pinching the other arm with all his might. "It's weird, but I've done both sides now, and I can't feel a thing. My skin appears to be completely insensitive here. Why would that be?"

  "It's your big brain," Rachel said. "Sapping your feelings. Most unyusular."

  Evan smiled. Until Zach was seven, he'd completely jumbled the pronunciation of many words. Ev missed the hambgubers and hostipals and things that happened sunnedly or that goed instead of went. It was difficult to remember the boys as toddlers, difficult to reconcile their apparently grownup characteristics with their former naive selves. Ev missed their naivete; he thought of Paddy Limbach's daughter, her little hand in his as they wandered around the Shedd. Maybe he and Rachel should have another baby. Maybe his father's death had made room for another family member, the way Ev's mother's death had made way for his two sons.

  And maybe his numbness had to do with the circumstances of his father's death, his questionable expediting role. Perhaps he'd turned himself into a man without feelings. It wasn't his big brain but his tiny heart that explained the lapse.

  Rachel said, "You've discovered a new evolutionary trick. You're being selected for something."

  "Such as what? Intravenous feedings?"

  "Show me when you get home," she said. "Show me where you don't hurt, and I'll fix it."

  "Stop my crying or you'll give me something to cry about?" he asked. And wasn't he whining, anyway, just like his most irksome clients, dishonest and dull?

  "You O.K.?" Rachel asked.

  "Just numb."

  Why, he wondered, did he not want to tell her what really bothered him, the other places he'd found where he was also numb? Ev had be
gun wondering about the deepening malaise he seemed to be suffering. He was unwilling simply to attach it to his father's death, disappointed to think of it as standard male midlife crisis. Some days he didn't have sufficient energy to stand up straight; he just slumped through those days. His life had been a persistent inquiry into the nature of humans, into their various motives and rationales, their checks and balances, their quirks and quarks. He thought he'd even felt suicidal before, but probably only as melodramatic entertainment for himself, thrilling himself with the possibility while understanding his true inability to follow through. Since having children, he'd no longer considered that an option. Now he felt more seriously frightened of the prospect, unable to hold his sons' bereft faces before him as adequate deterrent. He knew himself to be depressed. Shades of paranoia and apathy were afflicting him, lethargy and distraction, regret and anxiety, periods of time that genuinely disappeared without his knowing where.

  He'd been out walking just yesterday and suddenly discovered himself literally miles from his office—say, three—late for his next appointment, going through a neighborhood he shouldn't have been anywhere near. How had he wandered so far? Thinking and, more alarming, not thinking. It was the not-thinking that worried him, the lapse of consciousness—as if he'd taken a nap on his feet, to wake way down on Wabash, transported deep into the South Side. He'd come to with a squawk, reversed himself like a soldier, located the defaced street sign, and then hastened north until he could hail a taxi. He felt like a befuddled old man, exclaiming to his indifferent driver over the startling terrain.

  The last thing he'd had consciousness of was the word bound. Two of its meanings, he'd realized, were opposite: to progress and to be restrained. His legs had trekked forward while his mind went spiraling around an etymological corkscrew.

  Shouldn't a man wonder, after such an event, if he was qualified to oversee the mental health of others, even those whom society has deemed economically unfit and therefore expendable? Maybe all he should ever do was build wheelchair ramps and babysit preschoolers.