Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  Nobody was happy.

  They started off slowly, Zach's hand out one window holding the mattress, Marcus's out the other. Soon the boys were sitting on their respective doors, both hands gripping the futon, which wanted to slide off. Wind pulled their hair from their faces. Their father drove slowly, but the mattress inched backward as they continued down Clark onto Sheffield. Eventually, even though Marcus would be angry, Zach had to let go—either that or fall out himself. The futon slid from the Saab and thudded solidly on the street; the car behind them screeched to a halt.

  "Dad!" Marcus shouted. "Stop, stop, stop!"

  But their father wouldn't go back. "Fuck it," he told them. "I didn't want to bring it, I'm not going back for it. Fuck it." And he took a sharp turn down a side street and went right through a pothole, as if to punctuate his resolve. The boys looked at each other.

  Zach watched out the back window as if their car were involved in a chase scene. His father turned again, then sharply again, then again, until he was back on Clark, headed south. His anger resided in his driving technique, Marcus's frustration came from his narrowed eyes, but Zach felt sort of amused. He imagined all the cars lined up honking at the futon in the road; he wondered if someone would drag it away and sell it, the way Marcus had wanted to, or if someone who actually needed a place to sleep would retrieve it, haul it to an alley the way his uncle Gerry might once have, and fall gratefully into a nap. He wondered if any of the drivers behind them had seen their license plate, and whether police at this very moment were gearing up to come after them.

  "I'm carsick," Marcus said sullenly. "All this swerving around is making me sick."

  Zach said, "We should have had Paddy help us, with his big Bronco."

  They were stopped at a red light, and Evan suddenly leaned over the seatback to slap Zach, who blinked incredulously, believing then what his brother had told him earlier. Paddy liked their mom. Tears came to his eyes.

  "Don't hit him!" Marcus screamed, reaching over to slap at his father's seat. "Keep your hands off him, you jerk!" This, too, surprised Zach, almost as much as the slap, because Marcus rarely came to his defense. Usually Marcus was the cause of his crying. And then Marcus looked like he might start crying, too, and the car was moving once more through traffic, although more slowly now, their father sighing behind the wheel.

  Zach thought a new, surprising thing, the words so clear it was as if somebody were speaking inside his head: I don't want him to come home.

  ***

  Paddy remembered what she once had told him, that she imagined him watching her, the audience for her daily life, and now he understood what she meant. Now he knew precisely what she had been talking about.

  He tried not to think about Rachel in the way one tried not to think about mortality: it was a solid inevitability around which all other possibilities took shape and from which they derived meaning, the sun in the center of the planets' spinning agenda, something so stunning and luminous one might try to avoid considering it on a daily basis. He launched like a booster into the school year with Melanie and Didi, going shopping for supplies at Kmart, reading over Didi's lesson plans, sitting through shoe and dress fittings. He'd been predominantly unconscious through Melanie's kindergarten experience; he swore to shape up for the first grade, pledging himself to weekly visits to her classroom, an activity he couldn't help imagining Rachel endorsing, loving him for.

  He tried not to think about Rachel. He made love with Didi. Because he had not pressured her about sex since January, she was more eager now. It was better sex than they'd had for years. For a few weeks this pleased Paddy, the part of him that felt guilty toward Didi, the part that wanted to be kind to her, to honor the love she clearly still felt for him. In her eyes he could see fear, in her body he could feel it; his lies had threatened her, his absences had forced her to act at fault. In return, he was careful with her; he did not ask her to do any of the things she did not like to be asked to do. But he could not help imagining Rachel as he slipped inside Didi, heightening his moment of climax by putting Rachel where his wife lay beneath him.

  He tried not to think about Rachel. He made plans to visit his mother; he'd not seen her since last Christmas, had woefully neglected his duties to her. He made plans to send her to England, where her family had originated, and to Ireland, where his father's family still lived. He purchased a ticket and took off work to drive to Normal, taking Didi and Melanie along, on the long Labor Day weekend. They rode through the heavy haze of the late summer harvesting weather, the hedges thick on the sides of the road, dead insects blurring the windshield. Evening fell and Paddy could not help imagining Rachel in her kitchen, pouring her evening glass of wine, hesitating to switch on lights, wandering into her study, gazing, relaxed, out the window.

  He tried not to think about Rachel. He got up early every morning and helped dress Melanie while Didi made breakfast. They ate together, listening to Christian radio ("Have a good and godly day!"); he dropped Melanie at her school, waiting in the line of idling cars until she entered the big double doors—she always turned to wave, happy to see him there watching, her hand lifted as if she were going off to war, never to see him again—and disappeared. He drove to work drinking Coke, listening to country-western music. He switched on the same music at the office and found that all the lyrics applied to him and his life. His poor heart was breaking, his aches were all aching, riding solo in the saddle again. Rachel would have hated it—he could imagine her scorn, the way she would smile at the foolish twanging and wailing—and still he could seriously weep at the applicability of this music to his life.

  He tried not to think about Rachel. He was not thinking of her the day he detoured distractedly north, around Hollywood Ave., and got thrown onto an artery that led him, winding past orange cones and jackhammers, hitting every single red light, to Wrigley Field, and from there down Addison until he was directly in front of Ev's old apartment building. Paddy glanced at the brown double door, the scummy glass, its big crack, and there hung the sign, APT FOR RENT, white on red, a phone number Magic Markered beneath. This would be Ev's apartment, the top floor. Paddy swung the Bronco around the next corner, circled back, and parked illegally in a loading zone in front of the liquor store.

  The foyer doors were not latched, in fact were breathing in and out with the wind. Paddy stepped in and climbed the steps, which seemed to be leading him to the great unknown. On the fourth floor, Ev's door was open; the air was chalky with the smell of paint. The floor was covered with splattered bedsheets, and a radio played from the kitchen. A fat man and a thin man in white coveralls, black Laurel and black Hardy, stood having coffee over the sink, the fat one shaking milk from his fingers, cursing.

  "What?" he demanded of Paddy.

  "I..." Paddy had no clue what he wanted. The apartment didn't look significantly changed since Ev had moved out, despite the painters' tarps and the ten-gallon tub of industrial white paint. The windows stood open; the wet air of fall blew through.

  "I'm the new tenant," Paddy claimed, hoping they didn't know any better than he who the next tenant was.

  "Nice place," the thin guy said. The fat man barked. A laugh? A snort?

  "You approva our work?" said the thin man. "We doing a good job?"

  "Looks fine," Paddy said, turning to go. He didn't like the feeling he got from these guys; he wondered if they were union. If so, he could report them, but for what? Barking?

  At the front door a trim brush rested in one of Ev's broken coffee cups, a Pfizer Pharmaceuticals cup with half the handle gone. Paddy had not realized how much he missed Ev until Rachel, too, had departed from his life. It was as if they'd died.

  "This was my friend's," he told the painters as he dumped the brush into a dishpan and poured the milky turpentine after it.

  "Fuck you, man," one of them called cheerfully as Paddy rushed down the brown steps, his feet sliding on the smooth surface. Why did he hate that word so much? Maybe these guys had painted the buildi
ng for years; maybe they were responsible for the shiny diarrhea-brown lacquer on the railing and floor. He burst onto the street, memorizing the phone number on the APT FOR RENT sign by various little strategies—his mother's birthdate, the omission of odd numbers. He noticed the liquor store owner's glare before he reached his vehicle and veered that way first to purchase a big jar of olives, a packet of jerky, and a big beer that looked like a can of motor oil, at nine-thirty in the morning.

  He told the owner, "I just moved in across the street. In my friend's apartment, did you know him? A psychologist? Looked like Groucho Marx? The eyebrows, glasses?" The owner eventually agreed, nodding nervously; he remembered Ev mostly, Paddy realized, as an attempt to get Paddy out of his store, out of his loading zone.

  Paddy phoned from his office; the apartment was vacant, the last tenant's lease didn't run out for another two weeks, Paddy was welcome to wait, there would be new paint, a damage deposit. He wrote a check and addressed the envelope, cutting his lip as he licked the adhesive. When he put his finger to the cut, he thought of Rachel, a hot unbearable flash, her absence something like death, himself like an untethered planet hopelessly at large in the universe. He had to see her again. He told himself he needed only to hold her for a minute, just a little hug, just a quick fix. He told himself he could sleep with her just one more time, that it would be enough to last him, that he could survive if he just had her for a minute. But he needed to see her, he had to see her, he had to put his hand beneath her shirt, had to put his lips to her ear, had to lie with her in bed one more time; he would go crazy if he couldn't watch her walk across her bedroom naked, her rippling buttocks, her lovely skin moving through the room, the whole her.

  In most ways, he succeeded in putting mortality out of his mind. He didn't often let inevitable truths and tragedies into his heart. He was distractable; he was optimistic. And though he had worked very hard, had tried diligently and unyieldingly to think of everything in the world except Rachel, there, unfortunately, he had failed.

  ***

  Paddy waited two weeks to try to contact her; she appreciated his tact. Plus she was busy. There was a lot of grief and anger to manage at her house. She had yet to bring up the name Joni, yet to fly that trial balloon and see what fire it drew. Ev had told her about a client, a woman whose sexual addictions led her into mortal danger; Rachel could not understand what made this client different from others, why her squalid situation impinged so dramatically on Ev. In addition, there was his brother's death; he'd run home because he was afraid, exhausted, near the edge of something desperate and dangerous in himself. Rachel had never seen him so whipped, so affectless; his face was slack, as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. The quick emotions that had once characterized him seemed to have disappeared. He approached each day in the methodical, patient way of a drugged person drinking coffee to keep himself awake. Rachel sent him off in the morning like another child, hopeful that the day would spit him back out at the end, that he would return intact.

  Paddy phoned to say he missed her.

  "I miss you, too," she lied. She didn't have time to miss him, she didn't have sufficient love to include him. He would always be there. There was no urgency in sending him her love; he was stable. At present, her love had to direct itself toward her husband, their bewildered sons.

  "I'm moving away from Didi, you know," Paddy told her.

  "Oh, no!" Rachel was genuinely distraught to hear this news. Now she was responsible for someone else's misery. Now the affair had larger consequences. "Why are you doing that?"

  "Why? Because I don't love her."

  "Please don't say that."

  "It's true, I don't love her. I can't stand to deceive her anymore. I'm going to tell her everything."

  "What do you mean, everything?"

  "Us. About us."

  "Paddy, I want you just to think of this—what good will it do? There is no us anymore." She didn't want him to use her name. She didn't want to be on Didi Limbach's hit list. She wanted a cleaner exit than she deserved, and she wanted Paddy to endorse it. "Ev needs me," she said. "He's miserable. I'm afraid he's suicidal." This was true, but Rachel's reasons for telling Paddy the truth were dishonest. She wanted Paddy to leave her alone. And besides, there were other kinds of suicide than corporeal.

  "See me," Paddy said. "Just one more time, just to say goodbye. We didn't get to say goodbye. It's the least you could do."

  It was not the least she could do; she was already doing the least she could do. Rachel closed her eyes. It seemed unfair how her energy was being sapped these days, being taken by people who believed themselves to require it more than she did. The boys needed her to interpret their father's moods, yet she could not fully disclose the sources of his sadness. Ev himself needed company, somebody who knew and understood the extent of his feelings toward his brother. There was no one qualified but Rachel. She was the only one available to fill the job. Same with Paddy, it appeared; nobody else would do. Women's work: being indispensable.

  She agreed to meet him, that afternoon, at a hotel. It was decadent and stupid. If Ev found out, the betrayal would be too large to surmount. Rachel turned over all the facts of her commitment and still found herself going through with it, preparing her body, preparing her excuse for being gone this afternoon if anyone asked.

  ***

  Paddy reserved a room at the Raphael, an old grand hotel lurking in the shadow of the Hancock building, hidden by the high-rises. He checked in at one and admired the decanters of liquor, the television remote control, the plush hotel bathrobes, two of them hanging behind the bathroom door, and the big wood-framed windows that looked out on Delaware and muffled the noise of traffic. He lay on the bed and felt his heart race, literally put his hand over the fracas. He had been missing Rachel steadily, but now he was afraid of seeing her; he was afraid of having to admit his need for her. What if he couldn't let go? What if she said they'd never meet again and meant it? What if this was the last time? He had to acknowledge that he'd used this goodbye business as a ploy; he knew it wouldn't be enough. He knew he would need her. He would require a dose of her beyond this afternoon.

  Furthermore, he'd apparently left his wife and daughter. He'd adopted Rachel's technique and was pretending she was watching him, a witness to his daily nonsense, his selectively summoned spy.

  Rachel rang the room and he gave her the floor number. He waited outside the door, appreciating the charming silence of the Raphael at midday. Its fixtures were old, with newer sprinkler attachments; Paddy liked buildings that complied with safety codes. The elevator took forever, but then there she was, Rachel coming around the corner and walking quickly toward him, not seeing him until she was nearly upon him, so busy was she reading room numbers.

  "Hi," he said helplessly. She let him hold her. She collapsed into his arms before they even got into the room. Paddy had removed the bedspread and untucked the strictly tucked corners—those parsimonious maids, cinching the sheets, squashing the pillows—had opened the windows and turned out the lamps. The room was to remind them of nature, that was his intention. Nature soothed him; it was his own animal self he wished to indulge. Now they lay on the blank top sheet, their shoes kicked off, their other layers still between them. Paddy was optimistic, since the rest of the bed and room and hotel spread around them like insulation. No one could find them.

  Rachel hadn't worn underwear, and in her shrimplike curl she laid her right hand over her left breast for reassurance. Paddy cupped her hand. "I love you," he blurted. "All I do is think about you."

  Rachel didn't want to talk. She butted her head into the cave Paddy's chest and neck made. She had created a terrible mess, she told herself, nuzzling her way closer. She had permitted herself to fall in love with Paddy, she had permitted him to fall in love with her; now they'd conceived something between them as ungainly as a pregnancy, as complicated as a child, and they could not just send it away. She sincerely wished it undone. She could not undo it, but she cou
ld wish it had never happened; she could wish she had turned Paddy away when he'd come to her apartment door last year. She could have sent him and his birthday gift away.

  Hungry for him, Rachel began to kiss his lips, giving him bites, which Paddy welcomed. She rolled against him hard, like a log on a river of logs, and made a grab at his belt buckle. She wanted to quit thinking about Paddy, and that was fine with Paddy. He didn't want to think, either. He wanted to move around in his body, touch Rachel, put himself inside her and reclaim her. He didn't want to consider the future; he certainly didn't want to dwell on the fact that this meeting had been arranged as their official farewell.

  ***

  Not far away Ev sat in his office, between clients, realizing that a new season was upon him, one that wouldn't announce itself by his brother's appearance. He could close the bank account he'd kept for Gerry.

  What he couldn't do was quit remembering the way Gerry had been dressed that night last April, his suit which had seemed expensive but was old, its nap shining with wear. What had become of it? The police had found Gerry on Western, not far from the Y where Ev and Paddy had played racquetball. He'd been wearing his shorts and his dog tag, nothing more; his head was resting on an army knapsack full of papers, trash that Ev carried home in the effects bag a few hours later. Ev remembered watching Gerry and Zach stepping into the liquor store across the street before they went up the el steps, Gerry leaving the store with a brown paper bag, Zach trotting companionably beside. Standing at the window, Ev had had the urge to turn the moment into something harmless, had had the impulse to dash down the stairs so the three of them might ride merrily along in the el cars, traversing the North Shore. But he had not been able to join them; whatever distance existed between him and his brother was insurmountable. It made him proud and grateful to have provided a fitting compatriot in his son Zach. He'd sent Zach out to do his job.

  Eighteen

  EV LAY WITHOUT TOUCHING his wife, who lay also conscious of this fact. Paddy seemed to lie between them. She was forcing them to talk about him, as if discussing him would make him less problematic, as if confrontation would defuse his force. Ev knew she'd learned this tactic from him; too bad she didn't know he'd forsaken it.