Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  Ev sat on the coffee table beside her. His eyes adjusted to the dark so that faces began appearing once more. To avoid her gruesome collage, he rested his cheeks in his palms, stared at the blank floor through spread legs as if combating faintness.

  "Maybe she wanted to die," Luellen said. "Maybe Valerie Laven asked that guy to kill her. The truth is, most people want to kill themselves rather than someone else. That's the consensus, in my limited field research."

  Ev turned his head without actually lifting it. He was tired. He could see Luellen's jaw and throat but not her face. "It's a painful way to want to die," he said, leaving the subject open but patently rejecting it as untrue. Luellen may have needed to believe that Valerie Laven had control over her destiny, but Ev needed to believe the opposite. Perhaps because he had killed someone; he did not want to hand over the burden of blame. Maybe because he enjoyed hating himself.

  Luellen said, "For example, I don't think those bottles were his idea. I think they were hers, and I think the ropes were hers, and I think the stun gun belonged to her, not him, and that's why he left it there, and I think those were her handcuffs. I have handcuffs, so I know they could be her handcuffs." She sighed. "I think I've stopped bleeding," she added, turning on her side, her head still thrown back over the pillow. "I can't taste it in my throat anymore." The wad of tissue plopped on the bare floor by Ev's feet. "Maybe she didn't want to die, exactly, but she wanted to be hurt, that's all I'm saying. You probably think that's projection."

  "Probably," Ev agreed.

  "And you'd probably be right."

  It occurred to him that his sessions at the office might be better run in the dark, under the influence of four scotches, with scary pictures all around. He felt as if he'd finally entered Luellen's mind, here in her dim apartment, beneath the images adorning her walls, the carefully executed windows to her soul, these compositions of brutality. Here he was, looking not at but through the filter of her experience. Finally he'd come into the dark with her. He'd joined her, and he no longer had particular answers, nor a fifty-minute time constraint, nor a little emergency buzzer to hit for help. She was right; he'd come to her.

  "Please stay," Luellen said, as if she'd sensed his impulse to flee.

  He would not have sex with her, although the desire was there, like tiredness, like gravity in his limbs. Sex, at this point, did not feel like the most intimate thing he could have with Luellen; they'd already had that. So he did not have to work against temptation, did not have to transcend it; rather, he worked hard to perceive it as a meaningful gesture to forsake.

  "Sleep with me," she said.

  He eased off the table and onto her couch, reclined to lie beside her, the two of them impossibly close. When she butted her head against his shoulder he put his arm around her. She settled like a child, squirming, adjusting, poking at his ribs to make herself comfortable. Evan realized that Rachel had often wanted to lie with him like this, to manipulate his arms to feel just right around her, to collapse together in a comforting small space, fulfilling an asexual need simply to be held, and he realized that he had not had the patience for it with her yet now felt no great hurry to leave Luellen. And maybe Paddy Limbach lay at this very moment with Rachel, indulging a similar need. Did this make them even? Ev wondered. Would sleeping with Luellen settle the score?

  "Tell me you never thought about us fucking," she said.

  "I thought about it," he said, although that wasn't strictly true. He'd entertained the notion, like the rest of her life, only from a great distance, as a narrative for him to behold rather than an actual ongoing existence. He had observed her life as a thing in which he could not possibly make an imprint, and, more arresting, as a thing with no bearing on his.

  "I was in love with you," Luellen said. "It was starting to break my heart to go see you every Wednesday. I called it Sadnessday. There's just nobody else who knows me as well as you. Think of that, Dr. Cole. And you didn't seem to be afraid of me. I hate how people seem afraid of me. I don't really try to scare them, but I do. I just do."

  Evan understood how that would make him appealing to her; he knew that he himself was drawn to people who weren't intimidated by him. But he was also afraid of her. He hadn't been until he saw her walls; now there was no denying that she had a formidable ingredient in her composition, something that not only acknowledged darkness but traded actively in it. He pursued his fear one step further, then said, "These violent pictures make me afraid. They make me think you find them beautiful. Or true. And I can't stand the idea that you think they're the only true thing, that one hundred percent of this room is made up of killing and pain."

  She snuffled. "Shit, I'm bleeding again."

  Ev reached for the soggy blood-soaked wad on the floor. When she'd pressed it to her face, she said, "I'm going to sleep now." Her voice was bored, no longer interested in Ev; he had apparently disappointed her, the way earlier his appearance at Friendly's had seemed a letdown to her, as if she'd had a fantasy slayed. "Just hold me, O.K.? You don't have to do one other thing in the world tonight, just lie here with me."

  For a long time they lay without moving. Ev's arm, underneath Luellen, fell into a penetrating tingling, then numbness. He paid attention to it as he would to weather out the window—something that did not involve him. His sleeping arm was another loose extremity in a room full of them, nothing more. At last Luellen slept, her hair on his dead forearm, her bloody tissue in his fingers. Above him her illustrations loomed. Now, if he slept, he might enter her nightmares, her vista becoming the canopy over a tumultuous sleep. Her hell, and the way she woke cheery under its weight in the morning, made Ev more deeply frightened. That day, he began to imagine moving home to his family.

  ***

  He needed to see them immediately, ascertain not only their safety but their ordinariness. Valerie Laven had sent him to Luellen; Luellen sent him, if not to Rachel, then to Zach and Marcus, who seemed to sense the desperate nature of his sudden attention to them.

  He took them on an uncharacteristic excursion to Melrose Park, to Kiddie Land, where Zach, in the spirit of happy weather, ate and rode everything, and where Marcus grew simply nauseated and needy, like Evan.

  "What's wrong?" Marcus asked him miserably as they sat on a bench watching Zach doing circles on the Mexican Hat.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're mad," Marcus said.

  "Not mad, worried. I'm worried about a client," Evan told him. "I'm worried she's in danger." He explained the murder his concern for Luellen, the pornography on her walls that made her life seem like one long death threat and suicide oath. It was not Ev's habit to lie to his sons. He'd laid the world before them early on; their opposite responses to it seemed confirmation enough that brutal truth alone could not create—in fact, could hardly tint—their individual fates. Zach, the boy now whirling on the sombrero, would accept information of this sort—news from the subterranean, dark sector of life—as material outside his reach. He believed in it only theoretically, like infinity, like mortality, but he was not at its mercy. He might be occasionally moved by it, but he would never be its victim. Marcus, in contrast, fretted, worrying not only that a dark cloud was following overhead but that his very nature would edge into a black realm, that the cloud would slip into his heart, would become part of him, would seize his goodness.

  "What kind of pictures?" Marcus asked, of Luellen's walls.

  "Naked women, impaled and hurt and horribly tortured."

  Marcus was silent for a moment, his large open shoes below his bony ankles a source of pain to his father. He said, "We have a naked woman in our living room."

  "That's true." Evan weighed the differences between the coffee table he and Rachel had bought so long ago and the pictures on Luellen's wall. He explained the pornographic aspect of Luellen's pictures, but Marcus interrupted, asking if Ev's client was a nice person.

  Evan looked at his son in the garish illumination of the amusement park; the glossy red and yellow
shades that flashed over Marcus's eyeglasses reminded Ev of emergency vehicle lights. Marcus's upper lip showed the beginnings of a mustache; perhaps he would soon have to shave. Acne dotted his forehead, scabbed from the boy's predictable picking.

  "You're a nice person," Ev told him, answering the question his son really cared about. "You're a good person and you'll be a good man, I don't have any doubts."

  Marcus looked sharply away. Zach's Mexican Hat was slowing and falling like a spun coin, soon to lie flat so its woozy riders could disembark.

  Ev continued as they stood to wave for Zach, whose eager face searched the crowd, his soft lips open. "My client doesn't think she deserves to be happy. Somebody told her she was rotten so many times that she believes it, even when it isn't true. Does that make sense? She thinks she deserves to be hurt. She's waiting for someone to do it."

  Marcus nodded. He wouldn't look at Evan, but he was listening hard, his left eye squinting at Zach, who had found them and was pushing through the crowd, approaching.

  "I love you," Evan told Marcus, gripping his son's shoulder. "You boys mean the world to me." Just before he pushed away, Marcus's body felt pliant against Ev, soothed, salved. Then Zach bumped into them and grinned.

  "Dizzy," he said, laughing. "Stop giving me the evil eye, Marcus. Can I go again, Dad?"

  Sixteen

  IT WAS RACHEL who received the call about Gerry Cole, since her phone number was on his wrist, and it came at the god-awful two A.M. moment when all such calls seem to come. Paddy was spending the night, and they both jerked guiltily awake when the phone began to shrill. Caught! Punished! Each imagined the worst: a death—first of a child, then of a spouse. Rachel could not help breathing a sigh of gratitude to discover that it was her brother-in-law who'd been taken; his death somehow was not punishing enough to be considered her just deserts, not yet the judgment that would be passed on her. She listened to the news while Paddy went to pee, then told him she had to call Ev.

  "You want me to go home?" Paddy asked, standing before her naked, scratching his testicles. His hair had bleached to a near white over his summer on the roof; his nose was a dark red like bricks. Below the waist he was sickly pale, and his dark hand by his fair penis appeared not to belong to the same body, as if some other man, some red devil, were scratching him. "What should we do?" he said.

  "You don't have to do anything. I have to call Ev." She dialed, watching Paddy, who sat beside her, his bare thigh touching hers.

  "Evan," she said, "there's bad news." She laid her hand on Paddy's leg as if to assure him she still liked him best. Paddy listened to her tell her husband that his brother had died, appreciating the care with which she delivered the news, curious as to why he'd never met this brother. He had always assumed Ev had no siblings, certainly none in Chicago. And he would never have imagined a brother who could die of an overdose of heroin, which was what Rachel was telling Evan, what she'd heard from the police. Heroin, Paddy thought, picturing the rubber tie-off belt and the hypodermic needle, black lights and Jimi Hendrix posters, all summoned from his stockpile of cinematic images. And Rachel hadn't seemed alarmed, had seemed to have expected such news eventually, and was even saying so to Evan now. She was using we a lot, meaning her and Evan. "We should be glad he died without feeling pain," she said. "It's cold comfort for us, I suppose, but some nonetheless, isn't it?"

  They arranged for Rachel to go to Evan's apartment, where the boys were spending the night, and for Evan to go to the hospital morgue to identify his brother's body. Paddy let his sleepy brain idle over the phrase his brother's body for a while, curious as to what it could mean to Evan. Paddy had no siblings—his mother's sorrow—and so could only project a half-formed sentimental empathy.

  "You can go on back to bed," Rachel said. "You don't have to get dressed."

  Paddy realized this was true; there was no reason for him to get up.

  While Rachel pulled on clothes, she told him about Gerry. "He hadn't had a job since I think 1984, when he was a nurse in training, or maybe a damned candy striper, at St. Michael's."

  "That's where I met Ev," Paddy said, resurrecting the peculiar light of that evening at the nurses' station, resurrecting, too, the time before Rachel, the time when he thought more often of Ev than he did of her.

  "That's where I told the cops to take his body," Rachel said. "St. Mike's. Odd coincidence, isn't it? Anyway, he got fired there because he kept stealing drugs. He was a big-time addict and a big-time slouch. He used to write checks on his dad's account, sometimes ours, his friends', forging signatures. Nothing outrageous, just drug money, thirty or forty dollars at a time. Once he lived on our roof for a few months."

  "Here?"

  Rachel pointed upward while she slipped on her shoes. "Poor Gerry. I haven't seen him in ages—I feel awful. And poor Evan. Jesus Christ, first his dad, now Gerry."

  "And Joni," Paddy said without thinking.

  Rachel had lifted a brush to her hair but turned away from the dresser mirror to look Paddy full in the face. "Joni?"

  Paddy's dream in which he threatened to tell Rachel about Joni had not prepared him for the mortification he now felt. Nor did he have much expertise in spontaneous deception, especially with Rachel. He'd lied successfully to Didi for the last eight months, but his relationship with Rachel was grounded in a kind of forthrightness. Moreover, he had no idea how to explain adequately the role Joni seemed to have played in Evan's life. He feared he could only make her sound more threatening than she'd actually been; he feared he could do nothing but shove his other foot into his mouth while trying to extricate the first.

  "A friend," he said lamely. "A friend of Ev's, another shrink, from out West somewhere." Was it Colorado or Arizona? All he could really recall was the image of a rattlesnake in a refrigerator, the woman having to axe the head from the body to make the thing die. That, and the stinking cigar Ev had been smoking when he had talked about her.

  Rachel said, "Do you know something you're not telling me? Has Evan been having an affair?"

  "No!" Paddy replied—too hastily, Rachel thought. It surprised her how stunned she was, how hurt, at the possibility of Ev's infidelity. But his unfaithfulness would be of a quality different from her own. He would have lied outright to her, where she had yet to lie to him. Plus, to be perfectly honest, she could not imagine a woman better suited to Ev than she herself. She supposed her vanity was just that big: that she could not really imagine him preferring somebody else. Besides, his malaise had seemed on a grander scale; he had been off finding himself, not some other woman. It was not so much jealousy she felt as genuine shock.

  She looked at Paddy sitting on her bed. He had gotten as far as holding his Levi's on his lap, undecided about whether to dress or go back to sleep; his bare feet were marked by the tan lines of flip-flops, his hair was unruly as a child's. He was castigating himself and his big mouth; she could practically see the cogs moving. Her husband's complicated life was drawing her back to him; she was going to give Paddy up, she recognized now, feeling the tiny seed of inevitability take root and begin growing.

  And then the phone rang once more.

  Rachel picked it up. Evan said, "I'm sorry, I'd like some company at the hospital, I just can't go alone." He paused. Rachel imagined the four of them, Ev, herself, their sons, arriving at the morgue in the middle of the night. It was not an altogether unthinkable scenario: a bonding experience, a new rite to kick off their reconstituted family, the solemn chore of identifying the dead body of Uncle Gerry. It was unfortunate that he'd had to die to reunite them, yet perhaps that was the only possible way.

  Then Ev said, "I need company, Rachel, so will you please let me speak to Paddy?"

  ***

  Ev had identified a body before, an indigent client, a harmless old perverted man whose monthly appearance at his office had accompanied a minor penalty for exposing himself to schoolchildren. And then, ironically enough, he'd died of exposure. Ev had been contacted because his appointment card w
as the only clue to identification left on the guy. Ev was grateful for the experience; he knew the drill, he knew the morgue would be in the basement. He knew how to find his brother; for once, it would be simple to find Gerry.

  His motives for bringing Paddy Limbach along with him he was not at present investigating. He gave himself permission not to think about it for a while. After all, he was the bereaved, the next of kin. He was entitled to irrational behavior.

  "Don't apologize or explain," Ev told Paddy before Paddy could do either one. "I sure as hell don't want to hear any apologies or explanations." At least Paddy was sitting in the passenger seat of the Saab. At least Ev didn't have to ride to the morgue with Paddy behind the wheel of his own car.

  "O.K.," Paddy agreed. He sat in an appropriately miserable attitude, slumped in his seatbelt as if nothing more than its fabric were holding him upright. He wore a baseball cap with Limbach Roofing embroidered on the front. His shirt was wrinkled; Ev pictured it lying on the floor of his own former bedroom, pictured also the green carpet with the tiny Valentine-shaped bloodstain before the bureau. He stopped himself from imagining Rachel buttoning the shirt over Paddy's chest; it was bad enough to remember the morning she'd dripped the blood on the rug, her period early, a surprise. Tonight, she'd stepped into his apartment without saying a word; she just handed him the Saab keys and waved him away, indicating that he should get going, that she would listen for the boys. Ev told her she could lie down on his futon, since Zach and Marcus slept on the bed, but she shook her head. He left her sitting on the box beneath the window, the place where they'd made love not so long ago, her arms wrapped around herself, staring out at the nonview, the brick wall.

  And how honest was he being, anyway? He'd wanted to fuck Rachel as soon as he knew she was sleeping with Paddy. What gave him the privilege of feeling so wounded and self-righteous? Ev pulled onto Addison jerkily, heading west, back to St. Mike's, the family hospital.