Talking in Bed (11 page)

Rachel laughed until tears came to her eyes. The evening was ludicrous. She retrieved the liqueur tray from the buffet and poured herself a stiff brandy, then passed the clinking bottles around the table. No one else had any, and once more she sort of wished Ev would take up his old habit. After dinner, he used to enjoy sipping port. The effect of having a Mormon in the house was to make Rachel feel guilty about drinking, a response she supposed Mormons intended, and guiltiness made her want accomplices.

Marcus finished his repertoire and excused himself. Zach invited Melanie to play Nintendo, but Melanie was hanging on her mother.

"Maybe it's time for bed?" Didi said plaintively to Paddy. They made their goodbye noises—the gratitude and apologies, the compliments on the food they hadn't enjoyed, the apartment they'd found confusing, the company that had offended them, the promise to return the hospitality—then hurried away to the elevator. Didi's small bottom was the last thing Rachel saw before closing the door.

"If she's a Mormon, why doesn't she have a dozen children, like all the rest of them?" she asked Ev as they cleared the debris of the evening.

"You're just mad because you put your foot in your mouth," he said.

She followed him through the swinging door into the kitchen. "Fuck you. I'm serious, how was I supposed to know? What kind of intelligent human in the final hours of the twentieth century is a Mormon?"

Marcus, who'd appeared from his room and begun helping as a way of eavesdropping, said, "Who says she's intelligent?" as he entered with a load of sticky dessert plates.

His father spun at the sink, fork in one hand, dirty platter in the other. "You don't
ever
get to talk about our friends that way, you understand?
Ever.
"

Marcus deposited the plates without looking up, the tops of his ears turning red.

"You understand?" Ev demanded.

"Yes." He fled down the hall.

Rachel felt bad for her son, who cared so violently what his parents—in particular his father—thought of him, although it was usually Rachel who had to censor his tongue.

"You're the one who encourages him to be critical," Rachel told Ev. "You're the one who usually thinks it's funny. He always talks about our friends this way." She did not add that most of their friends were not such easy targets.

Ev didn't answer; his back at the sink was a tense and forbidding thing. His anger made Rachel furious, as if she ought to step carefully around it like a child. It made her want to taunt him.

After rinsing and stacking plates, he called the boys to finish the dishes. He stuck his hands in his pockets and disappeared down the hall toward his study. Marcus, in his absence, took a huge bite of leftover meat, then pulled the messy wad from his mouth to say, "Yucky! I hate everything but mac and cheese, and not
your
mac and cheese, only a special kind of mac and cheese, princess mac and cheese!" Zach giggled, and Rachel, though she ought to have done otherwise, joined them. "Oh, I just
knew
you were a Jew," Marcus went on, "with that
nose,
or do you call it a
schnoz
?" In his regular voice, he said, "She was dumb. Are they really your friends?"

"Yeah, Mom, who are they?"

"Mr. Limbach's father died at the same time your grandfather did. That's how your dad met Paddy. Mr. Limbach."

"So what?" Marcus said.

"Ask your father," she answered. "And don't forget to wipe down the countertops. I don't want to encourage the rodents."

Rachel left the boys in the kitchen. She went to Ev's study door and listened to his silence. On the other side of the closed door was nothing but an easy chair and books and a stereo and old jazz albums, which he listened to with headphones, by himself. When the boys were young, before he'd given up all his bad habits, he'd gotten high in there, also by himself. He had a capacity for privacy that Rachel could not understand. This room probably replicated his childhood bedroom and his adolescent dorm room, the way Rachel's did hers—a comforting womb, a place to sulk or weep. He was a mysterious man, even after sixteen years. Rachel liked his mysteriousness. Liking it, she would have to accept Paddy Limbach as part of its continuing evolution. She touched the door with her fingertips, as if she might discover it to be hot.

Later, Rachel listened from bed as Ev received his nightly call from Dr. Head. He adopted a particular tone for this phone call every evening, a smooth, patient voice, fully accepting and forgiving, dispensing a lulling benediction to a troubled old man. "No doubt," Ev said to Dr. Head, "but that needn't bother you."

"What?" Rachel asked him when he came to bed. When he didn't answer, she repeated herself, stubbornly pretending it was an average evening.

"The post office," Ev told her, pulling off his socks. "They're withholding his letters so that his family can't reach him."

"His family doesn't use phones?
He
certainly uses the phone."

Ev didn't respond; he continued undressing slowly, throwing items across the room into the hamper.

"Don't be angry," Rachel said. "Please don't be angry with me."

"I'm not angry with you," Ev said. "It was just an awkward evening. It was my fault." He stretched out naked on the bed and tossed the pillow onto the floor. His chest hair had turned gray lately, to match his eyebrows, but his pubic hair retained its black shine. "Did you find Paddy attractive?"

"No," Rachel said without hesitating, pushing away the image of Paddy's smile. "He's so typically handsome, like an L. L. Bean guy, like an L. L.
Bean
—so empty in the eyes, so looking-into-space-with-a-vacuous-expression."

"You think he's vacant?"

"Like a legume. Like a trout."

"No sexual tension whatsoever?"

"None. How about you, with Didi?"

"Kind of Didi-like, isn't she?"

"Very." Rachel sighed, relieved they agreed about Didi, and switched off the lamp. In the dark, she moved closer to Ev's naked heat. "Why do you like them?"

"I don't know that I do like her; but Paddy interests me. There's something about him I'm drawn to. You didn't think he was sexy?"

"No. I just didn't find him attractive, to me not interesting.
You
find him sexy?"

"No, I don't find him sexy." He was silent a moment. "I find him simple. I find him kind."

"An idiot savant," Rachel said.

"Possibly."

They frequently revealed their attraction to other people. It was one of the things that kept them interested in each other, guessing predilections and tastes, talking about desires. It would never be more explicit than that: sexual tension. Flirting. Rachel had once spent a lot of time having crushes—on her boys' pediatrician, Dr. Nixon, and on a former college boyfriend who'd dropped her unfairly long ago, a man she saw frequently still and who she liked to think was sorry he hadn't recognized her worth. So she knew she did not feel sexual tension with Paddy Limbach. With him, she had felt somehow defensive, as if she would have to explain herself very slowly, as well as a kind of mean desire to provoke him, to make him display something besides cheerfulness.

No, the interesting thing was that Ev liked the man. Usually their feelings about people were nearly identical, their impressions so highly tuned to each other's that they would lie in bed after an evening's social assembly in a kind of celebratory shakedown of the various offenders. About people they enjoyed, they said very little. About people who incensed, they could go on and on. They might have scolded Marcus in the kitchen for questioning Didi Limbach's intelligence—they weren't trying to create monstrously rude children, after all—and later laughed at the boy's flawless aim in targeting her.

Not tonight. This was a letdown for Rachel. Ev lay quietly on his side of the bed, hands crossed behind his head, feet crossed at the ankles, radiating heat. Eventually he pushed back even the sheet, despite the chilly air. It was raining again; the blinds clicked against the windowsills, letting in damp bursts of breeze. Rachel, wrapped in a cocoon of bedclothes, curled on her side away from him, wishing she had something lightweight—a trashy mystery novel—to read, so that the little nodule of disagreement between her and Ev wouldn't keep her awake. Inside him, something was changing, and as far as Rachel could tell, it was a change going on without a concurrent, symbiotic one in her.

E
VAN HAD A THEORY
that all people had secret lives, ones that went on simultaneously with their public lives. These secret lives involved blatant betrayals—having affairs, robbing homes, hurting children—or they involved squinting offenses, things one might catalogue under the heading Bad Habits: smoking cigarettes, reading pornography, shopping compulsively.

For many years, Evan had known of his own secret life without considering that Rachel, too, had one. His included having a hidden bank account, one that he kept for his brother. He had added to this the fact that he had hastened his father's death, something he had no plans of confessing to another human. Alongside these secrets sat another, his correspondence with a woman he'd met six years earlier at an APA conference. They were friends, and Rachel would have understood that, but they were also more than friends, and it was that part that Evan himself didn't fully understand. He saw her only once a year, when they met in large anonymous hotels and sat together at the inevitable hotel bar. He'd never slept with Joni, did not plan to. She would have slept with him, if he'd wanted to, but she seemed content to keep things less messy.

Oddly, Joni was very little like Rachel. Evan had assumed he preferred a type of woman, someone with large breasts and a sense of humor, someone who liked throwing parties and having children, someone with a stable presence, a wry clearheadedness tempered by a dollop of sentimentality, a longsighted patience that Ev supposed one might call wisdom. Joni came nowhere near that description—a description based on his wife, Rachel.

Joni was small to the point of boyishness, her face crinkled brown with fine lines by the sun, and she claimed never to have needed a bra in her life. She rarely smiled, did not particularly like people (in fact, enjoyed frightening them with her unkind wit), and had had herself "fixed" when twenty-two. She was two years older than Evan and never wore colors, only black, like a little widow. She had dark hair cropped to the pumpkin shape of her head. No one would have called her pretty, but most people would have said "striking." She was striking, and precisely the person under whom Ev would have chosen to go to therapy. Whenever they convened with their fellow therapists, he realized this anew. He would choose a woman and it would be Joni. Her expression eschewed bullshit. Her demeanor said, "Get to the point." She was the embodiment of the whole idea of "literally." It was possible that she literally had no secret life. Or maybe her whole life was a private one, rendering the notion of two lives completely meaningless, something Ev envied.

Or thought he envied. Maybe he loved his secret life the way people love their own guilt. Maybe he hoarded it as if it were proof of his uniqueness.

Or, Ev thought as he sat typing Joni a letter, maybe he bestowed on her the qualities he admired, ones he could not seem to adopt for himself. He had described his numbness to her in his last letter—his boredom, his ennui. He liked the word
ennui
and had digressed for a parenthetical moment. Joni, he thought, was his reader. She read his letters without assuming he needed fixing. She was interested without being implicated. She looked at him, and maybe all humans, as if he were simply another natural phenomenon, not necessarily a benevolent one—in fact, most assuredly not a benign presence. But she had the great ability to scorn most of humanity. Evan felt like her apprentice in that way.

Or maybe he was making up her character. Perhaps she was a mere mortal woman, not so different from Rachel after all. Some part of him understood this, some barely acknowledged part, and it was that part that did not permit him to sleep with her. Everything would shatter into a million meaningless pieces if they slept together—all the expectation and tension, all the forbidden longing that was so central to Ev's private existence.

Unlike his clients, Ev had no desire to confess his secret life. Instead, he retreated to it as if it were a closet in his heart, a lightless little room containing his life, a core of confidences like a box of chocolates he squirreled away, sharing the bittersweet morsels only with himself.

He did not assume that Rachel's private soul needed the protection his seemed to, although he knew she must have secret impulses. She drank too much, but she did not hide that fact. Evan assumed she talked about him with her friend Zoë, and probably with others, but he knew she thought of their family life as blessed in some way, above the average sinking tendency toward disaster. She had to fight her own smug urge to brag about it. Their children liked them, they liked their children. They liked each other. And though Ev kept in mind the narcissism such an arrangement was supposed to breed, he also felt that Rachel protected his sanity; he had a feeling that Joni could make him crazy.

Joni's letters arrived from New Mexico in recycled envelopes, former addresses and cancellations covered over; Joni thought stationery ostentatious, phony. She shared with Ev a hatred of waste. She wrote on a computer someone had willed her, an ancient model she attached to a printer whose daisy wheel had lost both H and R. Like most people, she'd fashioned a life for herself that accommodated her habits and desires, that was in most ways healthy and in a few ways not, that included a paying practice and a small house in Santa Fe, that included a friendship with Ev.

In July, a year after his father's death, Joni did not answer one of his letters. Typically, she wrote back to him within a day of receiving his correspondence. She did not play games, letting time pass or being sticky about taking turns. There'd been a season when she'd written to him too frequently for him possibly to keep up with—nor did he have that much to say to her. But he had been there to listen, and she'd written without caring that he answered only every fifth or sixth letter.