Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  "So what?" Marcus said.

  "Ask your father," she answered. "And don't forget to wipe down the countertops. I don't want to encourage the rodents."

  Rachel left the boys in the kitchen. She went to Ev's study door and listened to his silence. On the other side of the closed door was nothing but an easy chair and books and a stereo and old jazz albums, which he listened to with headphones, by himself. When the boys were young, before he'd given up all his bad habits, he'd gotten high in there, also by himself. He had a capacity for privacy that Rachel could not understand. This room probably replicated his childhood bedroom and his adolescent dorm room, the way Rachel's did hers—a comforting womb, a place to sulk or weep. He was a mysterious man, even after sixteen years. Rachel liked his mysteriousness. Liking it, she would have to accept Paddy Limbach as part of its continuing evolution. She touched the door with her fingertips, as if she might discover it to be hot.

  Later, Rachel listened from bed as Ev received his nightly call from Dr. Head. He adopted a particular tone for this phone call every evening, a smooth, patient voice, fully accepting and forgiving, dispensing a lulling benediction to a troubled old man. "No doubt," Ev said to Dr. Head, "but that needn't bother you."

  "What?" Rachel asked him when he came to bed. When he didn't answer, she repeated herself, stubbornly pretending it was an average evening.

  "The post office," Ev told her, pulling off his socks. "They're withholding his letters so that his family can't reach him."

  "His family doesn't use phones? He certainly uses the phone."

  Ev didn't respond; he continued undressing slowly, throwing items across the room into the hamper.

  "Don't be angry," Rachel said. "Please don't be angry with me."

  "I'm not angry with you," Ev said. "It was just an awkward evening. It was my fault." He stretched out naked on the bed and tossed the pillow onto the floor. His chest hair had turned gray lately, to match his eyebrows, but his pubic hair retained its black shine. "Did you find Paddy attractive?"

  "No," Rachel said without hesitating, pushing away the image of Paddy's smile. "He's so typically handsome, like an L. L. Bean guy, like an L. L. Bean —so empty in the eyes, so looking-into-space-with-a-vacuous-expression."

  "You think he's vacant?"

  "Like a legume. Like a trout."

  "No sexual tension whatsoever?"

  "None. How about you, with Didi?"

  "Kind of Didi-like, isn't she?"

  "Very." Rachel sighed, relieved they agreed about Didi, and switched off the lamp. In the dark, she moved closer to Ev's naked heat. "Why do you like them?"

  "I don't know that I do like her; but Paddy interests me. There's something about him I'm drawn to. You didn't think he was sexy?"

  "No. I just didn't find him attractive, to me not interesting. You find him sexy?"

  "No, I don't find him sexy." He was silent a moment. "I find him simple. I find him kind."

  "An idiot savant," Rachel said.

  "Possibly."

  They frequently revealed their attraction to other people. It was one of the things that kept them interested in each other, guessing predilections and tastes, talking about desires. It would never be more explicit than that: sexual tension. Flirting. Rachel had once spent a lot of time having crushes—on her boys' pediatrician, Dr. Nixon, and on a former college boyfriend who'd dropped her unfairly long ago, a man she saw frequently still and who she liked to think was sorry he hadn't recognized her worth. So she knew she did not feel sexual tension with Paddy Limbach. With him, she had felt somehow defensive, as if she would have to explain herself very slowly, as well as a kind of mean desire to provoke him, to make him display something besides cheerfulness.

  No, the interesting thing was that Ev liked the man. Usually their feelings about people were nearly identical, their impressions so highly tuned to each other's that they would lie in bed after an evening's social assembly in a kind of celebratory shakedown of the various offenders. About people they enjoyed, they said very little. About people who incensed, they could go on and on. They might have scolded Marcus in the kitchen for questioning Didi Limbach's intelligence—they weren't trying to create monstrously rude children, after all—and later laughed at the boy's flawless aim in targeting her.

  Not tonight. This was a letdown for Rachel. Ev lay quietly on his side of the bed, hands crossed behind his head, feet crossed at the ankles, radiating heat. Eventually he pushed back even the sheet, despite the chilly air. It was raining again; the blinds clicked against the windowsills, letting in damp bursts of breeze. Rachel, wrapped in a cocoon of bedclothes, curled on her side away from him, wishing she had something lightweight—a trashy mystery novel—to read, so that the little nodule of disagreement between her and Ev wouldn't keep her awake. Inside him, something was changing, and as far as Rachel could tell, it was a change going on without a concurrent, symbiotic one in her.

  Six

  EVAN HAD A THEORY that all people had secret lives, ones that went on simultaneously with their public lives. These secret lives involved blatant betrayals—having affairs, robbing homes, hurting children—or they involved squinting offenses, things one might catalogue under the heading Bad Habits: smoking cigarettes, reading pornography, shopping compulsively.

  For many years, Evan had known of his own secret life without considering that Rachel, too, had one. His included having a hidden bank account, one that he kept for his brother. He had added to this the fact that he had hastened his father's death, something he had no plans of confessing to another human. Alongside these secrets sat another, his correspondence with a woman he'd met six years earlier at an APA conference. They were friends, and Rachel would have understood that, but they were also more than friends, and it was that part that Evan himself didn't fully understand. He saw her only once a year, when they met in large anonymous hotels and sat together at the inevitable hotel bar. He'd never slept with Joni, did not plan to. She would have slept with him, if he'd wanted to, but she seemed content to keep things less messy.

  Oddly, Joni was very little like Rachel. Evan had assumed he preferred a type of woman, someone with large breasts and a sense of humor, someone who liked throwing parties and having children, someone with a stable presence, a wry clearheadedness tempered by a dollop of sentimentality, a longsighted patience that Ev supposed one might call wisdom. Joni came nowhere near that description—a description based on his wife, Rachel.

  Joni was small to the point of boyishness, her face crinkled brown with fine lines by the sun, and she claimed never to have needed a bra in her life. She rarely smiled, did not particularly like people (in fact, enjoyed frightening them with her unkind wit), and had had herself "fixed" when twenty-two. She was two years older than Evan and never wore colors, only black, like a little widow. She had dark hair cropped to the pumpkin shape of her head. No one would have called her pretty, but most people would have said "striking." She was striking, and precisely the person under whom Ev would have chosen to go to therapy. Whenever they convened with their fellow therapists, he realized this anew. He would choose a woman and it would be Joni. Her expression eschewed bullshit. Her demeanor said, "Get to the point." She was the embodiment of the whole idea of "literally." It was possible that she literally had no secret life. Or maybe her whole life was a private one, rendering the notion of two lives completely meaningless, something Ev envied.

  Or thought he envied. Maybe he loved his secret life the way people love their own guilt. Maybe he hoarded it as if it were proof of his uniqueness.

  Or, Ev thought as he sat typing Joni a letter, maybe he bestowed on her the qualities he admired, ones he could not seem to adopt for himself. He had described his numbness to her in his last letter—his boredom, his ennui. He liked the word ennui and had digressed for a parenthetical moment. Joni, he thought, was his reader. She read his letters without assuming he needed fixing. She was interested without being implicated. She looked at him, and maybe all humans, as if he
were simply another natural phenomenon, not necessarily a benevolent one—in fact, most assuredly not a benign presence. But she had the great ability to scorn most of humanity. Evan felt like her apprentice in that way.

  Or maybe he was making up her character. Perhaps she was a mere mortal woman, not so different from Rachel after all. Some part of him understood this, some barely acknowledged part, and it was that part that did not permit him to sleep with her. Everything would shatter into a million meaningless pieces if they slept together—all the expectation and tension, all the forbidden longing that was so central to Ev's private existence.

  Unlike his clients, Ev had no desire to confess his secret life. Instead, he retreated to it as if it were a closet in his heart, a lightless little room containing his life, a core of confidences like a box of chocolates he squirreled away, sharing the bittersweet morsels only with himself.

  He did not assume that Rachel's private soul needed the protection his seemed to, although he knew she must have secret impulses. She drank too much, but she did not hide that fact. Evan assumed she talked about him with her friend Zoë, and probably with others, but he knew she thought of their family life as blessed in some way, above the average sinking tendency toward disaster. She had to fight her own smug urge to brag about it. Their children liked them, they liked their children. They liked each other. And though Ev kept in mind the narcissism such an arrangement was supposed to breed, he also felt that Rachel protected his sanity; he had a feeling that Joni could make him crazy.

  Joni's letters arrived from New Mexico in recycled envelopes, former addresses and cancellations covered over; Joni thought stationery ostentatious, phony. She shared with Ev a hatred of waste. She wrote on a computer someone had willed her, an ancient model she attached to a printer whose daisy wheel had lost both H and R. Like most people, she'd fashioned a life for herself that accommodated her habits and desires, that was in most ways healthy and in a few ways not, that included a paying practice and a small house in Santa Fe, that included a friendship with Ev.

  In July, a year after his father's death, Joni did not answer one of his letters. Typically, she wrote back to him within a day of receiving his correspondence. She did not play games, letting time pass or being sticky about taking turns. There'd been a season when she'd written to him too frequently for him possibly to keep up with—nor did he have that much to say to her. But he had been there to listen, and she'd written without caring that he answered only every fifth or sixth letter.

  For a while, Evan assumed that Joni was away, or that the letter had gotten lost, but then it came back to him unopened, with a red notice over her P.O. box number reading DECEASED. Supposing that the tangle of former addresses and postage on the recycled envelope had confused some postal employee, he did not fret as he phoned her office in Santa Fe.

  Her practice was a cooperative one, and he reached, finally, one of her partners. From the way the secretary handled the call, he knew Joni had died—people gave themselves away so subtly, in the barest of inflections, in the most minute mistiming—but he waited until the partner came on the line.

  "A letter was returned to me," Ev said, the first time he'd mentioned his letter-writing aloud to anyone except Joni herself.

  "I'm sorry you had to find out that way," the man answered. Evan pictured him bearded, wearing those hideous sandals he imagined everyone in Santa Fe wore. "She had a hiking accident, up in Colorado."

  "What happened?"

  "She fell. She was at about eleven thousand feet and it was still a little icy—this was last month. Apparently she slid, tumbled down some slide rock, and then free-fell. It was quick. I'm sorry, I thought her friends had all been contacted."

  What friends? Ev wanted to ask. He thought of himself as her only one, though of course that was laughable. "Who was she hiking with?" he asked suddenly. He could sense the man's need to get off the phone, the busyness at the other end—all the crazy Santa Feans with their crystals and purebred hairless cats—but he wasn't willing yet to give up this last contact with Joni.

  "She was alone," the partner said. "All by herself where she shouldn't have been by herself. If you want, I can send you the article about the accident."

  Evan gave him his office address and hung up. He sat with his elbows on his blotter, his hands useless by his temples. The last time he had seen her had been in March, in New York, the two of them at a piano bar debating whether the player wore a wig or not. She had toasted Ev's abstinence with her own double Glenlivet neat, followed by a glass of icewater. She liked very simple silver rings, one on every finger, including her thumbs, a couple on her toes. She wore no bra; her hair conformed to the roundness of her head; she had a mole on her earlobe like a raisin, a faint mustache of downy hair on her lip, a thin band of white skin across her nose, a way of smiling and blinking her dark eyes that alluded to sex without promising a thing. He summoned this image as if to hold on to it; it was the last one, and he needed it. She'd been seductive because Ev wouldn't permit himself to achieve her. And now she was gone. How could he mourn her? There wasn't a soul to tell, no one who would quite understand; the closet in his heart was suddenly a deep well and no place to seek solace. He felt death's big blankness once more, the same feeling he'd experienced for a brief second when his father died, the lightness, the sense of being less attached to the world—and of having brought it on himself.

  He had failed her, he thought, panicking. He had done or not done, said or failed to say, felt or refused to feel something, some crucial thing. It was familiar, this spacious sense of responsibility, of fatal failure. A man without feelings, the numb man, cannot be expected to feel for others. Sensitivity appeared to have drained from him. Ev quickly took inventory of his other relationships, of people who might be faltering because he'd forgotten to properly care.

  And then the image of Paddy Limbach appeared, his lumbering manner like an anchor. Ev remembered the curious comfort Paddy had produced in him the night of his father's death. It wasn't exactly that Paddy had been disappointing in other circumstances, it was just that he had been a particular help in the face of death. Paddy's grief was so pure, Evan thought, it was as if he suffered enough for two people. Or maybe Ev was constructing Paddy's character to suit his own needs? No matter. He resorted to his first instinct, which was to tell Paddy.

  ***

  "I never liked those things," Paddy said of Ev's cigar, which bobbed between Ev's lips. "But my father used to enjoy one now and again. You get those gummy leaves? On your tongue?" They reminded him of eating dirt, picking grass from his teeth. The stench of the smoke always gave him a headache. But he sort of liked knowing that Ev had a vice, that Ev wasn't as holy about health as he'd seemed to be, and that Ev didn't want him to tell his wife about it. He was pleased to think of them as friends, buddies with secrets.

  "It's an acquired taste," Ev said, blowing out smoke. "I haven't smoked one of these in a long time." He held the cigar the way a pirate held a spyglass, spying land, and seemed complete with his new prop, his resemblance to Groucho Marx nearly perfect, an uncanny likeness.

  The bar was midway between Ev's office and Paddy's, a sports hangout with four television sets tuned to twenty-four-hour coverage of events ranging from basketball tournaments to bass fishing. Paddy had watched the fishing show with his father just to make jokes with him about the fishermen's methods. Paddy's father had taken pride in being a fly fisherman, tying his own flies, working quietly up tributaries on foot, throwing back most of what he caught. There was an art to it not everyone understood; there was a mysticism, a meditative quality, that Paddy could not hope to discuss with his fishing friends. It was this subject that he wished to broach today with Ev, as he sensed that Ev might be sympathetic to it as a conversational topic. Plus he wanted to talk about his father with someone who hadn't known him. He wanted a clean, deep response today.

  "I had some bad news earlier," Ev said. "A friend of mine died, sometime last month, and I didn't find out
until today."

  "Oh, drag," Paddy offered. "A close friend?"

  "Very close. A woman I've known for six years."

  Paddy frowned. Although he liked the cigar secret, he didn't want to discover that Evan had affairs. He'd thought of Ev's and Rachel's marriage as something to aspire toward; he'd been having serious doubts about his marriage to Didi after seeing Ev's life as a model. At dinner, he'd caught them exchanging glances, Ev raising his eyebrows, Rachel grinning brattily, turning her head away as if Ev had signaled something suggestive. So he didn't want to see the flaws in the idol. That was on one hand. On the other, he was thrilled to obtain Ev's confidence. Having someone confide in you was like receiving an undeserved gift: it was a mark of affection, of esteem.

  "Six years," Paddy finally said, realizing it was his turn to talk.

  "Yes. Six years."

  Well, Ev wasn't going to make it easy to be his confessor, that was clear. He held up his drink—straight scotch—and then drank it in three swallows, something Paddy saw in movies but rarely in life. He said, "Want another?" and Ev nodded, which also reminded him of cinema.

  With the second drink—scotch again, icewater chaser—came Ev's story. He'd met a woman who sounded like a dyke to Paddy, but she was someone Ev had grown very attached to, even though he only saw her once a year and they didn't sleep together. Paddy was impressed with Ev's ability to charm her. Women like her—Ph.D.'s with muscles, women who did not play girls' games—intimidated Paddy. They did not seem to need men. He wondered if there was a similarly independent category of men, the type who didn't need women. Even homosexual men seemed by and large fascinated by the culture of women, or, more specifically, the culture of teenage girls. Were there men out there who thoroughly had no use for women? Probably not. That was women's great advantage, Paddy discovered; men were expendable to them.

  Ev was still talking, but Paddy had lost the thread. He listened to catch hold again.