To put an end to this line of thought, Paddy rolled toward Didi, who slept solidly, her breath whistling like an innocent child's. He told himself that he should dedicate himself to Didi, that she was the real thing, that they were perfect for each other. When he'd married her, he'd soothed his clamoring heart with the option of divorce: there was an escape clause. But since Melanie's birth he had not thought of himself as a free agent. He'd admired his parents' long faithful marriage, and to be honest, he hadn't yet met anyone he preferred to Didi. She tolerated him, and until he'd met Evan, that had seemed reason enough to love her. He was not someone who made particularly radical life decisions; rather, they were based on comfort, ease, necessity. Didi, like his job, had fit into his family's best interests.
Now he held her from behind and imagined that if he woke her, she might agree to having sex. She didn't like to make love, but she might keep still and allow him to do what he wanted, sighing every now and then, good-natured enough about it. He would have preferred that she enjoyed sex, but it wasn't absolutely necessary. Most often she pushed him away from her when he wrapped his arms around her. "I'm in the middle of this," she would say, waving a spatula or an envelope, hustling from his hug. "I'm too tired," she'd say, if they were already in bed, then fall immediately asleep, as if to prove it. They'd managed to have a conversation or two about the problem, after which they'd wound up in bed. Paddy had won, in other words, but Didi had won, too, since these conversations usually took a good hour or so to wade through, and she usually cried, and Paddy held her in a comforting, asexual sort of way, and then her crying seemed to stimulate some erotic impulse in her, and then they'd be rolling between the sheets.
"Don't those girls in your novels do the deed?" Paddy asked her. "Isn't that what those books are about?"
"Romance," Didi said. "They're very romantic. Not just rutting pigs."
Of course, their sex life had not always been so troubling. Didi had in the past required lovemaking in the way Paddy did, with a single-minded hunger, which had made them seem well suited. Her Mormonism had created a mystique around sex, around nudity, a mystique Paddy had gloried in taking advantage of, in demystifying like a maniac. But Didi had stopped needing sex after Melanie was born. Paddy had waited the six weeks the books talked about, then six more, then a couple more just to make sure, to be a good guy. But the only time she made love anymore was when she had had a little to drink, which made her feel guilty anyway; her logic seemed to be "What the hay?" Otherwise she was not interested, and complained that intercourse hurt her. She blushed as she told Paddy that her obstetrician had been too zealous with the episiotomy, leaving nerve endings exposed. All that had been years ago, five of them—nearly three hundred weeks, Paddy would insist—but Didi was too ashamed to explain the problem further. He knew it was a big problem for her, too, as her family and religion both encouraged having many babies.
Speaking to Ev when he had met him at the racquetball court the preceding week—neither one mentioned Ev's absence the Wednesday before—Paddy had said that sex was the big issue. He had hardly confessed this to himself, but Ev didn't seem surprised to hear it. Ev must hear worse on a daily basis; maybe that was part of Ev's appeal for Paddy, that nothing seemed capable of shocking him. He expected the dark and bitter and unpleasant, the perverts and delinquents and unsavories of the world. Other things had wandered into the marriage, Paddy had explained, reporting this as they smacked the racquetball around, having to repeat himself in the noisy echoing room. He and Didi were impatient with each other, he had a recent need to criticize her, there was a sense of tedium and obligation, there were long evenings spent waiting for the hour when they could close up into their private slumbers and dreams. "I'm always checking my watch," he told Ev, who asked if Paddy thought it was the marriage or Didi or he himself who'd changed.
The part Paddy couldn't quite admit was Ev's role. In fact, he might never have considered divorce if Ev hadn't separated from Rachel. Until Ev moved into his new apartment, Paddy had never thought very hard about his marriage. He still believed himself lucky, happily wed, Didi pretty if not particularly carnal. Other men, the ones he worked with, thought she was beautiful, and Paddy had taken pride in that: that beauty was his to hold, his alone.
He'd also never experienced insomnia until he'd met Ev. Of course, meeting Ev had coincided with his father's death, so it was possible that insomnia had been waiting for him regardless; hadn't his father padded around the house at night, checking the locked doors and lighted yard, drinking Ovaltine and reading the almanac? And in Ev's honor, Paddy thought about dying—not as an involuntary subject but as one generated by remembering Ev's claim that he considered his own death on a daily basis. Paddy revved up his imagination, positioning Didi and Melanie graveside, himself disappeared, never to know how it all came out. Despite its now being the middle of the night, he could not muster much genuine fear at the prospect of dying; Ev could make him think of it, but he couldn't make him afraid. The whole thing was too far-fetched.
He rolled from bed and wandered around the house, opening the refrigerator and marveling at the tidy Tupperware, doing the same with the freezer, momentarily shocked by the big Thanksgiving turkey Didi had put there for next week—it resembled a human body part, flesh-colored as it was. He then looked in on Melanie, who was sleeping this week with a birdhouse clutched beneath her arm. Finally he sat on the couch with his bare feet on his own coffee table, thinking of Rachel's. His hand fell on his open pajama fly and he slid it casually along the length of his penis. What made it semierect at night, as if heavier, a larger, lazier instrument than in the daylight hours? This was a question he could have asked Ev but not his other friends, who would make jokes and slug his arm. As usual, he let images of animals flow before him, horses, bulls, their big, eerily unselfconscious readiness to mate, to do what Didi called rutting, the sheer muscular necessity of it, the full-bodied pulsing instinct. He told himself he wasn't thinking of Rachel as he masturbated on the couch, eyes closed, hand busy and busier, his back arched; he told himself it was Didi he imagined, Didi's fair pubic hair and small shy breasts, her painted toenails, her mouth around his penis, her face in his lap. (She made him bathe before she'd even consider taking what she called his thing between her lips.) He told himself he needed to sleep and this would make him sleepy, and Didi would appreciate his taking care of his own needs—wasn't she always after him to do stuff for himself?—and he summoned her image and tried to force it before him. But it was Rachel he saw there, her legs as they scissored around him underwater. He said her name softly, experimentally, telling himself he wanted to make love with her once, just once, once wouldn't hurt anything. He saw her big loose breasts in her black dress...
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a red jacket dangling from the dining room doorknob. He started as if caught: ashamed, soggy. An unfamiliar jacket, about the size a teenager might wear. His heart thudded in postcoital animal happiness: he would return it to Zach or Marcus. He would take it to their home. He wiped his hand on his pajamas, striped ones like his father's, picturing himself as he gave the jacket to Rachel.
***
The next day, Paddy Limbach showed up at Rachel's door with a sweatshirt she'd never seen before. "One of your sons'," he insisted.
She shook her head. She hadn't seen him since their ill-fated racquetball game two weeks ago. He was taller and better looking than she remembered, with his ready smile, his flap of blond hair, and the memory of his kiss made her suddenly frown. She asked him in because he looked clumsy standing in the hall.
"Well, I wonder whose jacket this is?"
Rachel thought he'd bought it just to bring over, just to have a prop. "I can't imagine," she said. She'd been about to go to lunch with Zoë but thought she could offer him coffee, wondering if he drank coffee.
"Maybe Ev's," he went on. His motives escaped her. Surely he didn't think he could seduce her by talking about her husband? "Or maybe it's Didi's?" he
suggested, studying the garment anew.
"You want something to drink?" she asked. "Sit down?"
"I wonder whose jacket this is," he said, genuinely fretting. Rachel discovered she had liked it better when he'd believed the coat was one of her sons'. She preferred his innocence.
"Let me ask the boys," she offered, taking the jacket from his hand. "If it's not theirs, they can take it to Ev. If it's not his, he can return it to you. Don't give it another thought." She threw the jacket in her study, out of sight.
Today was Rachel's birthday, November 22, also the anniversary of JFK's assassination. All morning she'd worked hard against feeling sorry for herself. Ev wouldn't call; he didn't believe in celebrating the birthdays of grownups. Over the years, Rachel had succeeded in adapting to his thinking, but now she was lonely. Zoë, who pitied Rachel for her cold-hearted husband, traditionally bought her lunch on this day, but this year was bringing a new boyfriend to the restaurant, a meeting Rachel didn't feel up to. At ten o'clock this evening she would be forty years old. The thought depressed her; middle age would officially arrive. Her sons had remembered her birthday only when she'd turned on the news before school; the mention of JFK had made them both jump. A few minutes later they'd dashed out the door, telling her they'd see her. Their guilt made her feel sorry for herself. She had a whole apothecary's supply of cheap perfume they'd bought for her over the years.
Paddy asked for hot chocolate. Outside, the sky was growing dark; more snow was in the forecast. Rachel's father would have made a joke about the sun and the yardarm, she thought as she decided to open a bottle of champagne. The cork hit the ceiling, the foam churned orgasmically. She clinked cups with Paddy. "It's my birthday," she explained morosely.
He did what could only be described as lighting up. "Hey, happy birthday!" The news seemed to make him ecstatic. Rachel laughed at his excitement. No one, including herself, had had this sort of response to her birthday since she was ten years old; the next year the president had been shot. In her fifth-grade classroom, they'd been planning on singing to her the way they did to everyone on birthdays. In her memory, the song had been about to begin when the news came, everyone's mouth had been open like a baby bird's. There would have been homemade cookies and a small present from Miss Skidmore, a jumprope or a bag of jacks. Instead, Miss Skidmore had wept. She'd had a glass eye, and Rachel remembered attending to the possible difference between a normal eyesocket producing tears and the one with the glass eye doing so. The principal's voice had come solemnly over the staticky intercom and directed everyone to go home. Rachel's mother had accused Rachel of being a selfish girl when she complained of not getting her gift, of the unfairness.
"Don't be so ugly!" her mother had said. Rachel could recall it more clearly than any other part of her childhood.
Paddy said, "What're you going to do?"
"Oh, I'm lunching with a friend and the boys will bring me a gift and tonight we'll order pizza, maybe watch a movie together maybe not." She shrugged, drinking her champagne. It didn't sound so bad, really. "My friend has a new boyfriend," she said. "I'll get to meet him."
Paddy frowned. "Let me take you to dinner," he said. "I'll just call Didi—"
"Oh, no, that's O.K., don't do that."
"I want to," he said. "It's your birthday, you should have dinner. I'll get Didi to meet us somewhere, you and the boys, a nice place, maybe a Greek place, they can do that flaming cheese for you. That's where Didi took me last year. It was a gas. Oompah."
"Oh," Rachel said. Flaming cheese with Didi. "No, Paddy, really, you're so nice, but the boys will come up with something. I wouldn't want to spoil their surprise."
"You sure?"
"Oh, positive."
Six hours later, after her dismal lunch, at which Zoë and her boyfriend had played footsie with each other and made nothing but sexually suggestive conversation, after the boys had delivered the annual malodorous perfume and waxy chocolate, then headed to their rooms, after Rachel had finished the champagne she'd begun at lunchtime, which had lost a lot of its sparkle, the doorbell rang.
Expecting pizza, Rachel opened it barefoot, with a sack of loose change in her hand. For the second time that day, Paddy stood on her threshold, this time bearing not a red jacket but a red wrapped box, ribbon dangling from it.
***
The four of them ate pizza while snow fell outside. Paddy had lied to Didi and was still marveling over the simplicity of doing so. In his lie, it was Ev's birthday. In his lie, he was eating with Marcus and Zach and their father—boys' night out—instead of with their mother. "I don't know how you can do it," Didi had said. "Two nights in a row with that bunch."
He felt like he'd joined a new family, filled the dad slot the way a new actor sometimes did on the soap operas, and was now sitting in his dad chair. He patted the arms of it.
"Do you know how to play bridge?" Marcus asked him, squinting with one eye the way his father did, as if a laser might shoot out.
"I used to," Paddy said. He had played with his mother and her friends, mostly so he could eat the goodies she supplied for her club: little mayonnaisey sandwiches with the crusts snipped off, two-colored cookies in the shape of pinwheels, followed by a minty green, mildly alcoholic drink like a milkshake. Just before dispersing, all the ladies received party favors, baskets filled with sachet or hotel-room soaps. Paddy liked bridge.
"Let's play," Marcus begged his mother. "Let's play after dinner."
Rachel looked at Paddy skeptically, as if doubting his ability.
"I can play," he assured her. "I'd love to." She was beautiful, he thought. Her beauty was not like his wife's—which was right in front of you, the obvious beauty of a cheerleader's perky smile or a doll's groomed perfection—but somehow skittish, elusive, tragic, as if she'd been witness to something unspeakable. The expression on Rachel's face that Didi hated, the little smirk, seemed more shy than smug to Paddy. When she tilted her head to listen to her sons, a long smooth sweep of flesh was created, curving like a ski trail from jawbone to the shadowy cleavage revealed by her workshirt, which was buttoned to hide the rest. How had he underestimated her sexiness the first time he'd met her? Or was he simply drunk?
They'd opened another bottle of champagne to toast her birthday. He'd made her sons sing to her with him, the two of them plodding through the song as if Paddy were punishing them. If he had been their real father, he would have chastised them for their lack of spirit, but as a guest, he simply tried to rise above it.
"What's in that box?" Zach asked, pointing at Paddy's gift.
Marcus gave him the laser glare again.
"That's for your mom, of course, but let's play bridge first, huh?" He didn't want her to unwrap her present until later. He had a feeling the gift was a bit inappropriate. He'd bought it uneasily, making a grander gesture than was called for, just like kissing her had been; charging fifty-some dollars on his credit card at Marshall Field's was something he'd have to explain to Didi, bill-payer, later.
When Rachel looked at him now, across the table, across the two greasy cardboard boxes that had contained dinner, he could swear he saw interest in her eyes, an interest he knew had grown there completely because of grand yet potentially stupid gestures. She was trying to figure him out. She did not take him entirely seriously, he saw that; there was not scorn in her eyes but amusement. Willing amusement. She was willing to let him prove himself to be something besides the bungling goof he appeared to be, blue-collar and uneducated.
Paddy wouldn't have contradicted her on that count. Most of the history of the world escaped him, the huge unknown mass of it lurking beyond him like a tidal wave, something likely to overwhelm and submerge him. He'd stayed only a year at college, in Champaign-Urbana, long enough to get a sense of how weighty his ignorance truly was but not long enough to put a particular dent in it. With a new respect for everything he didn't know, he returned home to Normal, to Didi, to his father's farm—the things he did know—and then he had gone to his fa
ther-in-law's construction company in Chicago, which soon required its own roofing division.
He would come at Rachel with confidence, trusting the only quality in himself that had ever paid off; she would not be able to resist. She had big eyes, big lips, big hands, big breasts, big brains. She was tall and solid and smart, but he could infiltrate if he pretended to feel one hundred percent surer than he actually felt.
***
Her sons had been missing bridge, one thing the family used to do together. Dizzily, Rachel cleared the pizza boxes and the champagne bottles and told Zach to find the cards.
Family rules dictated that the boys could not be partners. "You pass information," she complained. "I think you use little signals, you cheaters."
"The Cole Convention," Marcus told her.
Zach, throwing items from the deep buffet drawer, called out, "Then I get Mom for my partner."
Rachel started to ask him to be Paddy's partner instead—Marcus was the most serious player, and he could be sharp and digging with his complaints about technique—but didn't, afraid this was patronizing.
"Refresh me on the rules?" Paddy asked, staring, perplexed, at his fan of cards. Rachel wondered if he was considering how to arrange them—by suit or by value?
Marcus sighed dramatically. Rachel recalled what Paddy's wife reportedly said of Marcus at dinner the night before, acting as if it were a compliment: "He has the vocabulary of a simultaneous translator." Marcus had imitated her, rolling his eyes upward in the campy way of a dumb blonde.
"One spade," Paddy announced, making a digging motion with his free hand, grinning at Rachel. He, too, seemed to be getting drunk. His long legs kept swinging open beneath the table, and his knee had fallen against hers once or twice.
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