His fantasy often fell apart when he tried to bring his father into it. Apparently his imagination couldn't bear up under the strain of resurrecting the dead; nor could it do much with the extraneous living: Ev, Didi, Marcus.
The photographs of Didi made Paddy feel like crying. The desperation they revealed, and the misunderstanding she had of the nature of their separation, made Paddy wholly sorry for her. He had pushed aside the happy family bit and started to read about Oblon-sky when the mail came; without thinking about it, he laid Didi's picture in the thick book to keep his place, her legs peeking out the side of the yellowed paperback, her hair out the top. He didn't want to read anymore—a previous reader had underlined passages, sentences that must have been significant but that Paddy could not understand as more meaningful than any other part, which distracted him and seemed to highlight his ignorance—and he didn't want to look at his wife in unrecognizable underwear. Those legs—how had he missed Didi's legs?
He sat paralyzed in his little low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lighted office, the phone, slick with someone's hair oil, ringing, the attached machine taking messages from contractors who called to update him on his business, their monotonous voices, like Paddy's life, unbearable: halting and dull and endless.
Twenty
IN THEIR BED they lie both awake, ostensibly because they are holding hands, a position they've never, to either's memory, fallen asleep in. Paddy Limbach still lingers between them, less distinct, dissipating. His offstage role in their lives intrigues them both, although neither will ever see him again.
There will be Rachel's birthday gift, this November 22, a beautiful golden puppy left anonymously, whimpering and leaking at her doorstep, an exuberant young blond animal wearing a red bandanna around its fleshy neck, sent as Paddy's surrogate into her life, a fellow for Zach and Rachel to love like a baby, without reservation, for Marcus and Evan to observe with skeptical affection, to love secondhand.
And ten years later, when Paddy and his wife have been divorced for longer than they were married, their sixteen-year-old daughter Melanie will take an overdose of Valium and end up at the St. Michael's emergency room for the second time in her life. Paddy will weep beside her bed. It will be Evan Cole he thinks of then, and the Shedd Aquarium of years past—the way she followed Ev, the way her yellow hair glowed green before the murky tanks of water the way the small plaster cast on her arm stood for the worst thing that had happened to her yet. It is her father she'll want at the hospital—adamantly not her mother—but Paddy will wonder if it wouldn't be more honest to admit it's Ev she has really sought. It was he who defended her and it is he Paddy will emulate when he talks with her. Paddy will find himself pretending Ev can see him, Ev and Rachel both, witnesses and patrons. With his daughter, from the time she was four years old, from the Shedd Aquarium on, Paddy has tried to think how Ev would handle her various crises and quandaries. As the years pass, he will more and more often squelch the voice in his head that rants about the money involved (the ambulance, the hospital, the therapy that will come), the voice that is his father's, the one that calls episodes like these "stunts," the voice that responds to terror only with anger. When Melanie pleads with him not to tell her mother what she's done—her clawing fingers, her wild, panicked eyes, her appearance and behavior, which Paddy desperately tries to link to something recognizable from his history with animals, and can't—he will go to the pay phone beside the complimentary scorched coffee—as if anyone in an emergency room needed further stimulation—and be convinced it is time to call Ev.
But for now, the Coles lie together in bed.
Rachel thinks of her sons, their uncertain lives ahead of them, their characters so firmly set from the moment they were born—placid Zach, discontented Marcus, each with the possibility of joy built in, a dependency on the peculiar tricks of their fates, a desire to be loved, some inclination toward kindness, pleasure. She tries not to think too much of Paddy, who, she is sure, will be her only affair. How do people manage more than one? The conundrum that frequently occupies her finds a way to apply here: is she like other people, or is she different? Even though she is forty years old, she has no idea how to answer, and she expects she never will. She wants to be like everyone, and she wants to be different from everyone. Against her wishes, she imagines Paddy, and a renegade thrill loops in her torso, an electric eel in the bathtub of her quiet home. That he is also thinking of her, and that she knows it without question, as if a taut string were linking their chests, makes it seem as if they are still lovers. It is possible to love two men, she understands, but they have to be good men, and each has to love her exclusively. It is utterly unfair; and utterly wrong, but that is her thinking: she can keep them both. But only in her heart. In the land of the living, in the true and literal house, she has chosen her husband. And now, although she takes enormous solace in the existence of Paddy—a presence in the world like happiness, known, yet always elsewhere—she holds her husband's hand.
That Ev is a good man she accepts as a matter of faith, as she does the correctness of her gesture in having chosen him over the other.
Ev is thinking about his father. He does not run his hand over his forehead and through his hair because Rachel is clutching it as if she were falling from their bed, so instead he is treated to a memory. In it, he is still young enough to lie on the floor before the radio, his feet on the couch, young enough to be unselfconscious as the wind from a fan blows on his thighs through the open holes his shorts make, an oscillating breeze over his sensitive skin, his antsy penis. Horsehair sofa beneath his calves, cool slick floor beneath his head. A Chicago summer night, the dim lighting of childhood, the slender spyglass of memory. From the floor, he looks up at them, his family—brother, mother; father—from their knees to their laps, where their hands are at work, Gerry slipping a knife beneath the paper label of a ribbed tin can, his mother embroidering, stabbing a needle into the tight surface of a white oval, his father holding a book, and he feels contented. It is hot, but the heat does not bother him, although it seems to be sitting on his chest, pressing him pleasantly to the floor. The hour of his and Gerry's bedtime has passed long ago, but no one is noting it; they are consciously not noting it, as if the heat has also stalled the clock. Everyone, the young Evan thinks, is aware that they reside in a pocket of peace, a moment outside the ordinary friction of their life as a group—that the fragility of this happiness, this ease in which they can love each other, demands their complicit silence, their conspiratorial care, their studious attention to not moving from their places. Anxiety has taken a rest, floated away, carrying with it fury and sorrow and pettiness. Only the radio speaks. Only the hands shift, bearing knife, needle, book. Only the fan seems to breathe.
"Goodnight, babe," Ev's father said to his wife when she went to bed. "Babe," he said. Evan blinks beside his own wife, fingers fluttering in her palm. In the two years since his father's death, he has not heard this voice so clearly. Not the voice after the strokes, resolutely not the one that gradually became mechanical and monotonous over the years, turning unrecognizable, anonymously robotic and just as impersonally driven, but his father's true voice. "Good-night, babe," he said, simply, unfailingly, night after night, mild as milk.
Ev tightens his hold on Rachel's familiar hand, which is large and dry and soft, and which has been held by a better man. He knows Paddy is a preferable person, that humanity would benefit by being populated more fully with his ilk. He assimilates this fact and vows to treat it as a fact, indisputable, humbling. As for his own character his true nature, he supposes he is cynical and selfish, a nagging reminder of the dirty urges that run concurrently with the decent—not evil, but its occasional conduit. Once he arrogantly, ungraciously assumed the luxury of leaving his life, of walking away from the merciful claim of his family, and now he knows he must not make that mistake again. The world is crowded with people, and yet the ones that are, and were, important to him have been falling unjustly, disproportionately away. To d
eath he has lost his mother, his father, Joni, Gerry; to other forces he has lost Paddy, and he has almost lost his wife. He needs Rachel, he needs his boys. They need him, he believes. The land around them all is both benign and brutal, and Evan its most useful mediator.
Maybe.
If he were still in the habit of taking his emotional temperature, he might note that he is, if not happy, then not unhappy. Akin to being not guilty instead of innocent. Not unhappy. "Happy" is something Ev might expect to be the name of a pet. (In fact, in November, they will name their new dog Happy.)
The phone rings: dutiful Dr. Head, who mistrusted Ev's move home as thoroughly as he did the move away, and who is punishing him by ringing late at night. Rachel squeezes her husband's hand before letting it go. She admires his concern for his irascible client; she believes Dr. Head represents one version of a helpful sort of father figure to Ev, the man he will never let himself become.
"Back in a minute," Ev tells Rachel, knowing that by the time he returns to bed she'll be asleep, her body warm and solid, her self off in its own abundantly mysterious, secret life. In the dark, Ev needs no lights, no clothing, no glasses, as he crosses his home to take the call.
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ANTONYA NELSON is the author of three short story collections, The Expendables, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, In the Land of Men, and Family Terrorists. She has won numerous awards and grants, including the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, three PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and the Mademoiselle Short Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and Redbook as well as various literary magazines. She lives in New Mexico and Colorado with her husband, the writer Robert Boswell, and their two children.
Front jacket painting: Picturing Will, © Lincoln Perry
Front jacket design: Michaela Sullivan
Houghton Mifflin Company
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Talking in Bed Page 29