Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  "Have you noticed how his voice doesn't seem to go with his body?" Rachel said.

  Ev said nothing, so Rachel plunged on: "It's a higher-pitched voice than you might expect, since he's tall..."

  "You mean he has a big dick," Evan said.

  Rachel caught herself before she corrected him. Paddy's penis wasn't particularly large, and Ev, in other circumstances, wouldn't have cared one way or the other. He pretended not to care now, but Rachel wasn't going to acquiesce to whatever game he was playing. Moreover, wouldn't Ev have seen Paddy's penis himself, off at the YMCA, disrobing before or after racquetball? And besides, through which maze had he puzzled to arrive at Paddy's penis?

  "He's nasal," she continued, taking the high road. "He opens his mouth and is midwestern nasal, that's all."

  "To be honest, Rachel, I don't care that you slept with him. I don't really care. I understand everything that went with it, or I basically understand everything. I understand the idea of everything, if not the niggling details, but what interests me, what matters to me, is what happens next. O.K., you slept with him. O.K., there was sex, there was romance, there was a crush and a flirtation that went further, there was sexual tension that got played out, consummated, O.K. Fine. But now what? That's the thing I'm interested in. Now. What. Now."

  "Now I love you, now," Rachel promptly responded. She'd had her mouth open, waiting for a pause so that she could insert her assurance. "I love you more than anyone, ever." She wanted to reach her hand over to him, to assure him physically, but she held back, waiting for him to signal that such assurance would be welcomed. Since Ev had moved home, they'd been touching each other only in consoling ways, the embrace of people mourning shared losses.

  Ev said, "I mean, I can imagine your situation last year perfectly. I leave you for no discernible reason, I ask you to simply wait without any sense of how long that might be, you agree without understanding the terms. Really, you were generous. You were more than compassionate. I wasn't fully honest with you, I didn't confide in you the troubles I was having—to be even more honest, I think they did have something to do with us, with me and you, with me toward you, with age, with my father, all of it, all of it had something to do with my feeling that I was going out of my mind. I think I was going out of my mind. I was not myself. I may still be not myself. I may never be myself, or maybe this is myself and the rest was a game, I don't know. In fact, I feel crazy just lying here talking about it, as if I might talk and talk and talk and still get absolutely fucking nowhere."

  He sprang out of bed, snatching his glasses from the nightstand, and Rachel watched his dark shape move around the room. His hand swung in the air to locate himself; he bumped into their dresser and said "Fuck." He shut the bathroom door hard but didn't turn on the light. He would have to pee sitting down, Rachel thought, if there was no light. Wasn't that a pathetic gesture for a man, peeing sitting down? Her face went hot with tears. He was still miserable, maybe more miserable than he'd been before. She was directly responsible for his new misery, for not being faithful, for not keeping her life afloat during his brief going-under. She could argue against this perception, but she knew deep down it was the truth: she'd succumbed when she should have held firm. She'd withstood exactly nothing; she was an impressionable, selfish spouse who'd given in to the first man who'd kissed her swollen lip.

  The toilet flushed; the tap ran; the medicine cabinet squeaked open and then banged closed. Ev had sleeping pills now, prescribed by a naturopath, big brown pills the color and consistency of pressed dirt, the size of rabbit turds. He took two or three a night, although he tried not to.

  He returned to bed in the dark. "Why didn't you turn on the light?" Rachel asked.

  "I don't know. I'm up every night and I try not to wake you, so it's just getting to be habit. Kind of a dangerous one, though. Last night I brushed my teeth with cortisone cream."

  Rachel laughed, too eagerly, aware of her own eagerness to laugh. When would their marriage be their marriage again? "I'll move it away from the toothpaste." She now rolled toward him, safely within the domestic landscape of the warm double bed, and put her arm over his chest. "I love you," she said. "I love you more than anything. Please don't be sad."

  He breathed deeply; Rachel could feel his chest expand beneath her forearm, his breath in her hair as he exhaled. His odor had aged, gotten bitterer, earthier. Or perhaps it had not changed, and she was now accustomed to Paddy's odor, which was younger; perfumed by Old Spice, that American high school institution. Still Ev did not hold her; did not do what must be automatic in most people, return the embrace. Surely it was his reflex, too; surely he was suppressing it, punishing her. And this made her angry and impatient with him. She abruptly let go and scooted back to her side.

  "Goodnight," she said, her face toward her clock. The digital numbers read 11:34, a sequence she liked to up-end: hEll, the clock said. Digital clocks always seemed to present her with calculated arrangements, as if to entertain her, to make up for the fact that she had to transcribe their message to the face of an old-fashioned clock in order to make meaning of it. Her favorite was 12:51, the lighted green crosshatches so nicely parallel, mirrored that way, looking like hieroglyphs.

  It was late. Very late. She was exhausted yet unsleepy. She was tired of her life. In this, she and Evan felt exactly the same.

  ***

  For weeks, their arrangement seemed based on survival tactics and nothing more. The cupboards full of sugared cereals and white bread and unrefrigerated peanut butter did not draw Ev's anger or disappointment the way Rachel might have supposed: these were the provisions, he appeared to understand, and that was what he made do with. The boys behaved themselves, Marcus keeping an eye always turned toward his father; waiting for signs, reading him so cautiously that Rachel wanted to knock their two heads together like coconuts.

  She and Ev did not make love.

  Rachel's feelings about this ran from relief to annoyance, from guilt to self-pity.

  Then one evening, after a series of sleepless nights, Rachel drank a bottle of wine by herself. She skipped dinner and fell into bed before the boys, before Dr. Head's nightly call, and had sodden dreams for several hours. They were deliciously sexual, full of strange men and women. She knew she was dreaming, so she just enjoyed the sex, one episode after another, a decadent smorgasbord. Finally her partner was Evan. She felt sated by then, but was happy to see him prepared to turn his sexual attentions toward her again at last. They were deep in their intimacies when she realized that he had no penis, that it had been removed. "What happened?" she asked. "I did it to myself," he told her. Then another man entered the dream room, a naked man who did not really resemble Paddy but who was clearly meant to fill the role. The two men sat beside each other on a chaise longue (this piece of furniture did not exist in their real home, Rachel noted absentmindedly; where had it come from?) across the room from the bed where Rachel lay, naked, waiting for her husband, confused and alarmed by his castration, by his having done it, apparently, for the-person-who-would-be-Paddy.

  She woke to find the digital clock reading 3:32, the 2 rolling as she watched to 3. 3:33. Ev lay beside her; the room was cool, the air damp, as if rain had broken outside. He was awake; she could sense his unrelaxed not-moving, the twitch of his toes. She'd been sated in her dreams, but she was not sated now. She moved against Ev, kissing him, rubbing his penis between her palms as if to start a fire, comforted to find it intact. "I want to make love with you," she whispered.

  "O.K.," he whispered back. Her relief overwhelmed her; she slid on top of him and reached orgasm so quickly she felt afraid of her need. She sank onto him and his new old smell, reluctant to move.

  But then they went to work on his climax. For twenty minutes the clock changed, the wind picked up outside, the two of them turned over, then back, Ev pulling out, then reentering, asking Rachel to lie on her stomach, on her side, then back on her back, her legs scissored around his calves, then wrapped over his hips, then
together to increase friction. She was beginning to chafe, to ache, to be impatient, to get her feelings hurt. Her dream returned, this time to corroborate some instinct she had that Ev did not desire her any longer.

  "Aren't you attracted to me?" she asked.

  He stopped moving, propped on his hands over her face, tired but too frustrated not to try to continue. "I don't know," he said. His cold honesty was unbearable.

  Rachel said, "What, you preferred Joni?" and in that instant, as the name emerged from her mouth, Evan came, unable to withdraw before sending semen deep inside her.

  They lay afterward without moving, Evan heavy on Rachel's body, profoundly crushing. Incapable of stopping herself, she began to cry. There was an actual hierarchy of dismay for her to feel, pregnancy among the possibilities. She couldn't help crying, and she couldn't help taking solace in the stable presence of Paddy Limbach, reserve backup, benchwarmer. Maybe Ev didn't love her anymore; maybe so much had happened between them that they would never again make love to each other as themselves. But she had Paddy, she told herself. Paddy still loved her. Paddy had moved to the Addison bachelor pad on her behalf. Paddy experienced no difficulty in finding sex with her erotically charged. If she was pregnant, Paddy could be expected to take responsibility for raising another child; she could have sex with him tomorrow, she could claim the child was his ... For a second, Rachel was appalled at her pragmatic and defensive skill at coping.

  "I have to tell you something," Ev said, his voice unexpected despite his stifling physical weight on her. She'd traveled so far into her own despair she'd felt alone.

  Rachel said, "O.K."

  "Two years ago, when my dad died, I killed him."

  "What?" Rachel instantly stopped crying; instantly Ev's weight was as nothing, and her many random thoughts were utterly abandoned.

  "I suffocated him. I closed my hand over his mouth, like this." Now Ev leaned away on one arm while using his free hand to cover Rachel's mouth and nose. In the dark, she could not make out his features, just his looming shape. She also could not breathe; the sensation upon her was suddenly dreamlike, as if she had been thrust into black outer space. For a second she felt his strength as she smelled herself on his fingers—his anger, his power, his capacity to behave as he was claiming he had behaved. And she felt his temptation to kill her, just a passing flicker, like a child's perverse impulse to hurt an animal, like the violent downward thrust of the wrist when kneading bread dough, before he took away his hand. It did not particularly scare her, so shocking did she find the whole series of this evening's events. Like space, it was just so breathtaking and vast, blackness without boundary. She felt wise, fascinated by Ev's dark character rather than threatened by it.

  "I know his life was miserable, I know he was suffering, I know we were suffering, and still, I probably shouldn't have killed him. And the reason I shouldn't have killed him is not that I felt, or feel, guilty, but that I don't feel guilty. That's why. This not feeling guilty has been intolerable. What sort of man could feel that way?" Now he rolled away, sat on the edge of the bed, and palmed his head, back and forth.

  Rachel lay staring at the windows. Reflected on them were the city lights, dividing the glass neatly into a tick-tack-toe grid, one that trembled as the curtains moved, as the building settled, a reminder of other lives happening simultaneously with her own. How did they all continue feeling it was worthwhile? Was every life as complicated as hers? She pictured Evan with his large hand over his father's face. And then she thought, This is a trick.

  His timing, his telling her now, in bed after troubling sex, as opposed to any other time, suddenly made her furious. He was trying to distract her from Joni, whoever that was. He had confessed in order to divert her attention, in order to inspire her sympathy, her awe, perhaps her fear.

  "You're too difficult, Ev," Rachel said. "I love you, I guess, but I'm not sure I can live with you—you're just that difficult." She felt too tired and suspicious to manage any kind of conversation. And a part of her felt something new: fear—not of his killing her, which he could do, but of who he was. What her husband seemed capable of had ballooned in the few hours since they'd gone to bed tonight from crass deception to murder. And as an auxiliary irritation, as a bonus annoyance, she still had no idea who Joni was.

  ***

  But oddly enough, Evan's confession to Rachel produced precisely the effect confession was reputed to elicit: absolution. In the morning, after an uneasy sleep, he felt curiously nimble. Enthusiasm for his profession had regained some persuasive purchase in his soul.

  Rachel, however, felt tender, as if hung over, as if recovering from illness. Her genitals were sore; her head ached from too much thinking; her limbs felt too long for her body, the appendages of a gawky marionette; and her eyes seemed dilated, overtaxed by bursting images. When Ev and the boys left the apartment, she retreated to her tiny study and its calming view. Water trickled gently over the slate, smooth brown and green like the back of a wet frog; the tiny windows of the shaft casing shone black and impenetrable. A plain bird stood on the roof, motionless, brown with a steady yellow gaze. There was her safe cottage in the fairy-tale forest.

  ***

  Ev convinced himself on the way to work that geniuses were people whose intellectual powers were inscrutable and whose emotional ones were a mess. He couldn't think of a single genius whose makeup wasn't dependent on those precise conditions. If he were an emotional cripple, which he suspected was the truth, mightn't he still be a kind of intellectual superior, close to cerebral perfection? And should such a theory comfort him?

  No matter; it did comfort him. He spent his day like a professional, reading books between clients, following up on difficult issues, making two people cry. "Why do you blame your father?" he asked Rosie Challez coldly, an unempathetic smile on his face. "When will you take responsibility for your decisions?" he demanded of the whining high school principal. And over his nine-fifty break, he opened his mail. In among the journals and book catalogues and junk lay a letter from a RO. box number here in Chicago. He opened the envelope expecting a query, someone who wanted to become a psychologist, someone who wanted to get free help through the mail instead of paying for it in person.

  But no, the note was from Luellen, accompanied by a newspaper photo of Valerie Laven, victim. Luellen's note, like a kidnapper's, was compiled of words snipped from printed matter. He hasn't got me yet!! it said; under that, in parentheses, was the single word Meow, clipped from a kibble sack. He pondered her note—glued to a paper torn from a stenographer's notebook, precisely the same kind of pad he took client notes on—then quickly composed his own. Don't let him!! he wrote, then added Woof and tucked it in an envelope. He addressed it and buzzed the office secretary to post it. He thought perhaps he'd engage in another correspondence like the one he'd had with Joni.

  It was useful to maintain that shadow presence in his life, the embodied abyss. In his drawer lay Joni's last letter to him; on the shelf below his father's ashes rested his brother's dog tag, My name is Gerry on the front, I belong to Evan Cole on the back. Here were the dark artifacts of those who'd once balanced him.

  But what about the other side of the shadow, the source of light?

  Today was racquetball day, but there would be no racquetball. Since Gerry's death, there'd been a tacit understanding that Ev and Paddy would not play ball. In fact, he felt sorry for Paddy. He knew Paddy would be hurt by losing Rachel; he knew he'd flagellate himself, take full blame. If Paddy were his client, Ev would tell him that exposing oneself to the possibility of pain was not a bad thing. One had to open oneself for love. Getting hurt was only sometimes the consequence, not always. Maybe next time it would be better. He knew plenty of people who, after one such hurt, never permitted themselves to be in the position again, never laid themselves open to that sort of punishment. That would be unfortunate, he would tell Paddy Limbach if Paddy were sitting in the client chair. When Paddy felt wrong and foolish and humiliated and angry,
Ev would be there to say he wasn't. Was right to love, wise to explore, brave to put himself on the line, and justified in feeling betrayed.

  There were people who protected themselves and those who made themselves vulnerable. Ev supposed he himself belonged in the former category, along with his son Marcus, along with Luellen, along with his old friend Joni, along with his father. But all the people who mystified him, who, he grudgingly had to confess, he admired, belonged in the latter category: his mother; his brother; his wife, his son Zach, and, of course, Paddy Limbach.

  Nineteen

  ZACH THOUGHT of his uncle Gerry and the night last spring when Gerry had rescued him from a grim evening with his father. The ten dollars his father had given him Zach had handed over to Gerry at the liquor store; his uncle had come up short at the checkout. "Big gulp," Gerry said of his two beers, extra large size. The Chinese proprietor remembered Zach from the time Zach and Marcus had waited for their father in his store; he gave Zach another female lollipop, another pair of pink breasts to suck on while he and Gerry rode the el.

  From their seats in the lighted train car, they watched people, Gerry not so secretly drinking from his bagged bottle of beer, making jokes about everyone who got on. He liked to talk to strangers, and although this habit made Zach's brother embarrassed and angry, Zach didn't mind. Usually people responded, laughing along. Only the stuck-up ones refused, passed by as if Gerry hadn't said hello and commented on the weather, which was pretty bad, as usual.

  They rode downtown first, swallowed by the tunnel like a screaming snake sucked into the earth, roaring noisily beneath the city, and got off two stops farther south than Zach's parents ever let him go. Up the steps they went, into the dusk, where trash blew, where graffiti covered buildings like camouflage, then across the street and back down, northbound. Underground stops reminded Zach of bathrooms: the white-and-black tile, the echo, the dampness, the odor. As usual, he watched between tracks for rats, although none appeared this evening; summer was coming, they'd resumed roaming the streets above. A band of black musicians were setting up their battered instruments—saxophone, xylophone, drums, and guitar. The vocalist kept singing the same line over and over: "Darling, yooooooouuu send me." Although Zach and Gerry waited for a good ten minutes, the band never quite got around to joining the singer, nor did the singer ever quite get around to the rest of the words. They went about the setup as if they were on a stage instead of in a train stop. The guitar case they opened for donations was ringed by flashing lights and little electric bells, Christmas tree decorations.