Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  III

  Fifteen

  SUMMER SWELLED UP once more. The trees burst open along with the windows. All sorts of things leapt free: the song of insects, birds from eggshells, sentimental pink blossoms, the cacophony of neighbors, and a nameless correlating bunch of human urges.

  In the newspaper Evan read about a woman found murdered in Bucktown, Luellen Palmer's neighborhood. He read hungrily, consuming the details that seemed to point to his former client. What perversity made him excited to think it was her? He read without having his fears allayed. For years Luellen had been playing a sexual game of Russian roulette, spinning the nightly round of shells, waiting for somebody to explode in her vicinity. Perhaps there was a statistic to explain the odds; perhaps one in a thousand men was likely to finish sex by beating a woman to death. It seemed utterly plausible to Evan that Luellen had fucked a thousand men in her life; not so many years would have to have passed for that to be the true number.

  Apparently nobody had missed this anonymous—pending family notification—woman for a week; neighbors did not know her, coworkers did not mourn her absence. But her cat, a Siamese with the vocal cords to prove it, had run out of food near the end of the week and begun complaining. Ev, who'd brought the newspaper with him to his office, flipped pages on the steno pad in which he'd taken notes during his sessions with Luellen. He did not remember a cat. He thought he'd remember a cat, a liaison with the maternal. Eventually the Siamese had clawed her way through a window screen and onto the fire escape, where she sat on the retractable ladder, howling, until a neighbor across the back pursued an investigation. It was the SPCA, come to rescue the animal, who found the woman-who-might-be-Luellen. Her front door had been left unlocked, her refrigerator had been emptied—as if her murderer had worked up an appetite and taken time to sate it—and her bleeding body had been stoppered with wine bottles at the mouth, rectum, and vagina.

  He'd used a lit cigarette on her navel. He did not, it seemed, know his victim.

  Evan walked that evening on a mission, with the self-absorbed intensity of a savior. Luellen's bar was called Friendly's; Ev suspected irony in its name, and entered warily, afraid of not finding her, or anything friendly, there. Her phone, he had discovered earlier, had been disconnected; she had quit at the photo studio months ago. Her street address had never been registered in her records, a fact Ev pondered as he walked. He told himself he had good reason to assume it was she who had been killed.

  Plus he sensed his culpability. He had let her stop therapy easily, had not insisted on stepping down sessions, had not followed up. Perhaps he took credit when it was not due, but he could assume responsibility just as easily, he told himself. He had failed, yet again, to rescue a life.

  But he found her alive, sitting in Friendly's in a short white dress looking quite sophisticated, attractive, at peace despite the throbbing tumult of the place. He'd made her life into a nightmare and her into its victim so completely that he was jolted by how mundane she seemed. Ev slid into a corner and sat there breathing evenly. She was O.K. His relief surprised him; he had not been aware of how seriously he had regarded his fear. A premonition had been successfully dispelled, superstition and self-importance thwarted. Luellen, sitting casually at the bar, had not seen him. He appreciated her living body, the way she shook her ice before she took a drink, the way her head tilted back as she drained the glass. Her bare arms were muscled and tan; she was pretty, here in the benevolent evening light of Friendly's. Her father had been wrong in naming her unattractive. Calm and pretty, she didn't look like somebody at the mercy of a lethal addiction, her own or anyone else's.

  She turned suddenly and spotted him, as if news of his presence had been whispered in her ear. They blinked at each other, then she motioned for him to join her.

  "It was like, don't I know him from somewhere?" she said, shouting over the noise. "I used to get that all the time when I lifeguarded. People would see me on the street and go, 'Hey, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on.' I suppose I didn't recognize you without my neuroses on. How are you, Dr. Cole?"

  "I'm doing fine, Luellen." He sat beside her, rehearsing whatever excuse he would need to explain his seeking her out.

  "You've lost weight," she said. "Or something." She puzzled over his changed appearance, as if Ev had shrunk. Then she shrugged. Maybe it was her.

  "Scotch," Ev told the bartender, digging in his pants for his soft dollar bills.

  "Those are hard-earned bucks," Luellen said of the limp currency. "You been saving up long for this drink?"

  "In a manner of speaking," Ev said. He felt that way about every drink he'd had this year. "How have you been?"

  "Unchanged," Luellen said. "Looking for love in all the wrong places. Like that."

  "You're not at the photo studio anymore."

  "That's right," she said. "What else do you know?"

  She was not forthcoming in this atmosphere; Ev did not like her as much as he had at his office, where they had each had a role to fill, where she had been on a running meter, one dictated by his valuable time. Now time stretched ahead of them, a yawning Friday evening. Maybe she was angry with him for letting her disappear so easily. Maybe she wanted proof, like everyone else, that somebody cared. With this hypothesis in mind, he began asking questions, just as he would have during a session: how was she feeling? How were things with her sisters, her mother? Was there something she wanted to talk about?

  Even before Luellen laughed at him, Ev could feel the wrongness of his tack, the peculiar way his words sounded when he had to repeat them over bar clatter when they were punctuated by the real lives of others, laughter and music and small talk and cursing.

  "Did you think you were in your office?" she shouted over the jukebox, draining another drink. "Did you think I was still paying to have your precious undivided attention? Did you think this was about moi?"

  "I don't know," he said honestly.

  "You came to me," she told him, using her finger to point. "This is the exact opposite of me coming to you. Welcome to my place of employment. You like the decor?"

  He shrugged.

  "Gloom," she said, leaning close to explain. "Neon, with glass accents, eau de smoke, and desperation." Her drink was gin and tonic, bubbling before her like harmless sparkling water. She sucked on a skinny straw, cheeks going hollow. In the mirror behind the bar they looked unhappy, both of them. Other people smiled, Ev noted, other people laughed, the music pumped in and they responded, got in the mood. In their cheerless way, he and Luellen were linked: two miserably serious patrons of the planet alcoholic, WELCOME TO FRIENDLY'S, the sign read over the mirror, taunting, cynical.

  "Listen," Luellen said, "I'm going to ask you something that you probably knew I wanted to ask you a long time ago. Stop me if you've heard this one, but..." She took a breath. "If I wanted to have a baby, would you agree to impregnate me?" She grinned without humor. "How's that for a come-on? 'Knock me up, please.'" She sighed orgasmically; the bartender aproned, hustling from one end of the bar to the other, took a moment to eavesdrop, to lift his eyebrows.

  "I can't see that happening," Ev told her, although he could see it, all too clearly, and all too clearly felt the urge to lead her away into the temporary ecstasy of her request. To drive this urge back where it came from, he asked her if she'd read about the murdered woman.

  "Naturally I have. Is that why you're here, checking on me?"

  "I came to warn you," he said. "And to say hello."

  "Consider me warned," she said. "And hello. And goodbye." She wouldn't relinquish her restlessness; she was angry with Evan, or maybe with the world. Maybe he was simply cramping her style, glowering beside her while potential lovers glided by. Or maybe she had genuinely requested the presence of his sperm. He had offended her by denying the most flattering favor a person could ask of another: come commingle in my gene pool.

  "It wouldn't be responsible," Ev said eventually.

  "Bullshit," she answered flatly.r />
  He ordered another scotch. One thing in her favor, she didn't mind silence. In that way, she was like Joni, comfortable simply sitting quietly. They sat companionably enough. The more he drank, the tighter and more insular became the pocket he and Luellen inhabited together.

  From nowhere, a voice entered, a man's aggressive demand. At first Ev thought he was ordering a drink from the bartender. Then he realized the man was talking to Luellen.

  "Lu," he said. "Lu, let's party, Lu."

  "Fuck off," she said.

  "What's that?" he said.

  "Fuck. Off."

  Without warning, the guy shoved her. It might not have been intentional; the bar was crowded, and he could have been pushed from behind, sending Luellen like a domino. She fell against Ev. Then the man, short, bearded, relatively mild looking, shoved her again, as if, like a child, he was so happy with the results of his last push he just had to try it again. Ev understood that it fell to him to do something.

  "What should I do?" he asked Luellen, who hadn't moved from his thigh and arm. Her white dress felt cool, like ribbed rubber, smooth and rivuleted.

  "Don't do anything," Luellen said, her hair warm against his forearm. "That's your style, isn't it?"

  "Not necessarily," he said, hurt that she saw him as passive.

  "You could ask him how he's feeling," she said, turning her head so that her mouth was on his arm. Her breath was warm, moist. And then she was suddenly up and swinging at the stranger, who held his hands over his face, defending himself, baffled. She walloped the stranger, but Ev knew it was he, Ev, she wanted to hit.

  The bartender reached across to grab one of Luellen's wrists; Ev took the other. Since she was disarmed, the bearded man took the opportunity to strike her fully, with a palm thrust hard into her nose. "Cocktease!" he yelled at her face. "Think you're so fucking good!"

  "Fuck you!" she yelled back. "I don't think I'm so good, ask him." She indicated Ev, her therapist, but the guy was already on his way to the poolroom, satisfied, sauntering.

  Luellen wrenched her arms free and tossed her head. Blood flew. "There's the product of rejection," she said to Ev. "I reject him, and he gives me a bloody nose. You reject me, and what happens? Nothing. Consider yourself lucky."

  He had not been a participant in a fight since high school, and then it had been to protect Gerry, who had been accused of being a fag. Gerry hadn't cared. Evan had only slugged the other boy because he was tired of defending Gerry, tired of always having to think about it.

  Luellen's nose was bleeding through her fingers, onto her dress. "Leave it to me to wear white the night I break open and bleed," she said wryly. She used little bar napkins to soak up the splashes of red.

  Ev realized the extent of her drunkenness by the bartender's expression, by the slow way she processed the sight of her dripping face in the bar mirror. He wished he had a bandanna handy, the way Paddy Limbach always seemed to. He said, "Let me walk you home."

  The night was warm. Luellen held a sodden lump of napkins to her nose. She and Ev walked quickly, even though she was very drunk. She had the air of someone who handled being very drunk very well, as if she'd done it countless times and with utter competency. Ev judged his own inebriation, its depths. He, too, could be very drunk (he'd had four scotches on an empty stomach), or he could be very sober (his mind would not let his body off the hook). If he slept with Luellen, it would not be because he was too drunk to do otherwise.

  "I wouldn't expect anything out of you except copulation," she said, returning without prologue to their former topic. "Really. You know me well enough to know I wouldn't force some guilt trip on you later. I'm not going to blackmail you or anything. Your family would never know."

  "I'm flattered, truly I am," he said. "But the idea doesn't appeal. I don't want children I don't take care of." What a hypocrite, he thought. Where were his sons tonight, for example? What was he doing to be such a grand example of paternal responsibility?

  "I mean, the best thing about you is that I can't imagine you'd get involved," she went on. "You don't seem like somebody who'd get attached and difficult about it. You know?" She went on to extol his other virtues—intelligence, healthiness, nice thick curly hair—but Ev contemplated her belief that he was uninvolved, that a child wouldn't compel his interest. It hurt his feelings even as he recognized the truth of it. He preferred to think of himself as someone who could hide the less charitable aspects of his personality.

  The walk to her apartment took a bare five minutes. At the building's door, she said, "Please don't just leave me with a bloody nose."

  "I'll walk you up," he said, still unsure of whether he would sleep with her. The scotch had shaken his imagination loose: fact and fantasy now joined in a stew. Things that had only resided in fiction for Ev now circulated like probabilities. He remembered suddenly what had once made him give up liquor: not merely its unhealthy hold on his behavior, its demand that he look forward to it, that he count on it to cheer him up, but the more frightening way it rearranged priorities while he wasn't looking. Of course he should accompany Luellen to her apartment, liquor let him lie to himself. Of course nothing would happen, the scotch insisted.

  Upstairs, she opened a door into her nightmare. That was the only way Evan could describe it to himself. The room they entered was dark, then suddenly brilliant with what first appeared to be flowers, a busy floral wallpaper. Then, almost instantly, Ev saw the little faces and wide-flung appendages. The walls were covered not by flowered wallpaper but by photographs—magazine models, catalogue bodies, newspaper halftones. Except that everyone was severed: bodies without heads, heads without bodies, familiar people in unfamiliar formation, juxtaposed with guns and knives and penises, everywhere penises, snipped from somewhere and inserted here like sabers, in the eyes, in the mouth, between the legs. The room was chaotic with pain: faces and limbs and genitals and words, pink and yellow and gray and brown and black, soldered thickly together, glued right to the wall with something glossy like shellac, a shining mural of misery, a great greeting card in the style of a massive ransom note.

  "My God," he said.

  Luellen smiled a satisfied smile at him as she disappeared down the hall. He felt accosted. He felt surrounded, drowning, as if he ought to turn right around and run, run, run. The walls were threatening and specific with the horror they promised. Each was totally covered, up to the ceiling; Luellen would have had to stand on a stepladder, placing tiny figures up high, where no one could make them out clearly. You couldn't focus on the furniture for the howling of the walls. It was intensely layered labor, alarmingly dense with passion. Evan didn't like to consider how much time had been spent cropping these parts, arranging them, and now living with them. He thought about the newspaper account of the stranger's murder, the body stoppered with bottles at all of its tender apertures: anus, vagina, mouth.

  "What do you think?" Luellen asked, returning from the bathroom with a fresh wad of tissue at her nose. She did not apologize for the effect such a place would have on the uninitiated, and so Ev felt tested.

  "When you bring men here, what do they say?"

  "I don't generally turn on the lights," she said. "They don't generally have anything to say about the apartment. And if they do say anything, I tell them they have to live with my art. Like it or lump it."

  A strung-together series of words ran like a headline beneath a woman skewered by the Sears Tower antennas: I WOULD THROW HIM FROM THE TALLEST BUILDING IN TOWN.

  "I ask people how they'd kill somebody," she explained. "This is what they say." EVERY PILL IN THE HOUSE ran around an aspirin bottle with breasts and labia, MY DADDY'S 22 RIFLE, RIGHT HERE accompanied a bathing suit model straddling the barrel of an enormous black-and-white gun; a white dildo was protruding from her mouth.

  "Who do they say they'd kill?"

  "Themselves, a lot of the time. Ex-husbands, the evil aunt, politicians, talk-radio hosts, their dads. That's who I would have killed, I think, either him or mys
elf."

  "Your father?"

  "Sure. He was bad, a total fuck. Aren't you supposed to think that's healthy, for me to hate him? Haven't I put my hatred in the right place? I didn't make this stuff up," Luellen told him. "These are direct quotes. I'm just reporting, taking a poll. You'd be surprised how many people want to kill someone."

  Ev was surprised, although he didn't think he ought to be. Hadn't he been taking a kind of poll, too, all these years? Listening like a priest as people dumped their secrets, their fury and horror and sickness and guilt, before him? Yet his findings differed; apparently his sampling was of another populace.

  "What did you think when you read about the woman in this neighborhood?" he asked Luellen, thinking of the man who'd shoved her at the bar, the one who if asked might say he wanted to kill Luellen, do it with his bare hands, leave her bludgeoned on a barroom floor.

  She flipped off the light and lay on the couch, a pillow rolled beneath her neck, her head tipped back to slow her bleeding. She worked at kicking her shoes loose while still holding the tissue to her face. "I thought a few things," she said. "At first, I had a Jack the Ripper response—you know, he's-still-out-there kind of thing. I've been thinking about her a lot, to tell you the truth, Valerie Laven. They said her name on the news tonight, in the bar. As soon as they run her picture in the paper, I'll put it up on the wall." She lay silent for a few moments; Ev wondered if she'd passed out. He stood where she'd left him, the pictures and words mere clutter around him now, lurking like bad dreams, the thankfully hidden subconscious. Then she said, "Dr. Cole, will you stay and talk with me, please? I haven't talked to anybody smart in a long time."