Talking in Bed (2 page)

He released his father shuddering as if chilled, as if the warmth had drained away, wiping his palms on his pants. Then he rubbed sweat from his forehead, pushing it up into his hair, his hand still heated from his father's face. His own face was more than damp; his glasses slid down his sweaty nose. His heart banged. And then he reached to smooth his father's hair over his head, alarmed at how similar their two heads felt, his father's hair just slightly sparser and coarser, his skin just slightly drier. This gesture was one he would recall over and over in future months, one that would imprint itself more fully than the preceding one of suffocation.

What a strange coincidence, he and Paddy Limbach would agree later, when they were friends, that their fathers had died at the same time.

"Papa," Evan said, the word like two popped bubbles, leftovers from childhood. Finally he had let his father go. He had made his father leave him.

***

Paddy Limbach sat on the edge of the bench alongside the bank of telephones in front of the nurses' station, where he'd kicked a foot-size ragged break in the tongue-and-groove paneling. Peach-colored lights shone on the desktop in perfect cones, giving the place the feel of October, harvest twilight, though it was eleven-thirty on a hot summer's night outdoors. Could that dusky, autumnal light be intentional? Part of the gently guided drift toward death?

Paddy leaned over his spread feet with his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, his hat shielding him from observation. He had no idea how to proceed, no idea who to call first nor what to say. The females waited: his mother, his aunt, his wife, his little daughter, all of them at home praying for Peepaw. Who was he to tell them their prayers had failed?

His hair was gritty and his hands smelled of fish. Up under each fingernail was an arc of slate-colored fish matter, stinking, possessing an odor Paddy immediately associated not with fishing, which is where he'd acquired it, but with sex, which he hadn't had in weeks. He sniffed his fingers, his hat creating a kind of trapped airspace, and forced the smell to conjure a cold lake and pointed trees. Twenty-four hours ago, he and his father had been camping in Wisconsin. Paddy supposed he was in shock, unable to raise his nose from his own fingers, unable to remove himself from the nurses' station.

The man who looked like a Marx brother returned now, wiping his face as if smelling
his
fingers. "My father has died," he told the nurse typing at the computer terminal behind the desk. She made an O with her mouth. "Just to let you know," he went on, as if it were a joke. "Down there, room 14D. He went peacefully, for the record, and quite uncharacteristically."

Quite uncharacteristically,
Paddy repeated to himself, wondering if the man was crazy.

Quite uncharacteristically,
Ev repeated to himself, wondering if the cowboy thought he was an asshole. He supposed he should be troubled by his own calm, but it was not his habit to manufacture emotions to suit conventional wisdom. He was a criminal according to the letter of the law, but as far as the spirit of the law went, he wanted to believe himself some sort of an angel of mercy. Now he would have to wait and see if that was the proper name.

As the nurse radioed for assistance, Ev sat down beside Paddy, who'd rested his head against the wall behind him, his cowboy hat at his feet. Ev, suddenly generous, said, "Sorry about your father. Mine just died, too."

"They're o for 2 here," Paddy said, trying on a joke. It felt dangerous. The men shook hands, Paddy mishearing Ev's name and calling him Ed.

Paddy was waiting for a death certificate from Dr. Ono and some change for the five-dollar bill he'd given a candy striper. He had to phone his girls, the thought of which made him tremble; he didn't like to be the bearer of bad news. Two days ago, he and his father had gone camping. Then last night there'd been seizing chest pain and a frenzied drive to Beloit, Wisconsin, and then a screaming ambulance ride down to Chicago. Paddy had had to phone his mother three separate times in the last twenty-four hours, on each occasion listening to her fearful breathing. She'd never been comfortable with the telephone; Paddy supposed he'd inherited his own uneasiness from her. She picked the nearest hospital to her son's home in Oak Park and then put herself on a train from Normal. When his father had stabilized, Paddy's mother and aunt and wife and daughter had all gone home in the car, which also smelled of fish. They believed the worst had passed, and now Paddy would be responsible for more bad news. Was it any wonder he was putting it off?

As he told Ev these things, Ev realized how few calls he would have to make: the friends of his father who'd outlived him; Rachel, who would cry, despite her resentment and revulsion concerning her father-in-law; and his sons—Marcus, who'd learned to play chess and bridge from the old man, and Zach, who'd simply tolerated his grandfather's belittling remarks. "Hey pudgy," Ev's father had always said to poor Zach, "you get enough to eat?" Always in a tone that was intended to be understood as teasing, lighthearted, but that was transparently hostile. Even though Ev hated these jibes, he often felt tempted to make them himself, to indulge the same antagonism, the little niggardly desire to feel superior. That was the true aggravation between him and his father: they shared a superiority complex.

His brother Gerry he would have to wait to hear from; there would be nowhere to call to locate him.

No one would be sorry; no one would mourn his father's passing, Ev least of all. At night, his dreams had been teaching him how he would react when the old man finally died. His father would die in these dreams, and Ev's reaction in each and every instance was relief, pure relief. Although there'd been one dream, recollected now for the first time, which made Ev jerk and blink, wherein his father had pulled Ev along with him, through a door, over the edge of the universe, into the unknown, away. His father had never wanted to go anywhere alone; death was no exception. And Ev, naturally, understood himself to be the only possible escort.

"I hate the phone," Paddy muttered beside Ev.

The simple act of lifting a phone receiver and punching familiar numbers seemed impossible for both men at the time. They'd placed themselves before that remarkable nurses' desk—so serene and unblemished, pink Formica flecked with gray like spilled pepper—and were staring at ordinary objects without registering their identities or uses. They watched the station as if watching television. The hospital drama: Dr. Ono had gone home; Dr. Kneister, one of the golfing good old boys, had come on duty wearing tartan pants and matching cap.

Paddy rotated his big blond hairy wrist to study the compasslike clock strapped there, a waterproof, indestructible model designed for people who climbed cliffs and overturned kayaks. "Thirty hours ago, Dad and I were fishing on Sugar River," he announced. "Having our dinner beside the fire, shooting the breeze."

"I'm sorry about your father," Ev told him, recovering composure. "You seem completely unprepared."

"Who could be prepared? This is the first I ever heard about a heart problem."

"I know this is going to sound cold, but you're lucky not to have to watch him deteriorate. My father has been dying for years and years.
Had,
" Ev corrected himself. "Had been dying. Now he's dead." These words meant almost nothing to Ev. He felt instantly giddy with meaninglessness, acting his part in the hospital story, the bereft mourner, the grieving actor. He was processing his role, trying to behave the way he would behave if his father had died naturally. So far, guilt had not made much of an appearance. Nor had fear. He felt that dreamy relief.

Dr. Kneister bustled over to give his generic condolences: he was damned sorry to hear about their losses, damned sorry.

"I'm relieved," Ev told the doctor. "I'm happy. I've been waiting for years for him to die."

"Oh, hell yes, your dad was in some bad shape, I know how you must feel."

Ev recalled Dr. Ono's quiet look at the hall floor and her own small shoes, the way she seemed incapable of manufacturing this ghastly patter. Dr. Kneister spoke too loudly, as if certain he could offend no one in the range of his considerable voice, and had a tendency both to stand too close and to spray. On his hip, he wore a holster and a telephone.

"I would have smothered him with a pillow years ago," Ev went on, gloriously indiscreet, "except my wife kept telling me someone would find out."

Dr. Kneister snapped his mouth shut. Paddy moved his hair out of his eyes to get a better look at Ev. His expression was hurt, as if Ev had disappointed him. It was an odd, shaming glance, and Ev's certainty about his own indifference faltered for a second. A little plume of regret came wafting toward him.

Dr. Kneister rested his hand on his phone, as if it might protect him, and decided to ignore Ev. He said to Paddy, "How old was your dad, son?"

"Fifty-four," Paddy answered promptly. Ev could not immediately remember his own father's age. Seventy-two? Seventy-three? Had he been born in 1918 or '19? "Just fifty-four," Paddy repeated. "I thought he was middle-aged, you know, only half done with the thing."

Dr. Kneister gave him a clap on the shoulder, one meaty-pawed mammal to another—"Brings you right up to mortality, doesn't it, son? I know, I know"—and left them at the nurses' station, where the women came and went softly, eyes fixed on the middle distance in disinterest, a state of mind they must have had to cultivate in order to work with continuous death. They murmured to one another in passing. Amy had been flipping papers over the wide metal rings on a clipboard during the exchange among the men, her red hair shining like gold under thè peachy light. On the exposed nape of her neck were the inevitable freckles of a redhead. Her round buxom chest and the small mound of tummy beneath her uniform soothed Ev. She could manage men like Dr. Kneister and Ev, each difficult in his own way, and she could manage Paddy, the grieving jock, the cowlicked cornpone. It was she who delivered their death certificates to them, like report cards to grade-schoolers, she who took instructions on what to do with the bodies, she who dispensed the personal effects of their fathers, in two white plastic bags soft and bulky as trash.

She could have patted their bottoms and sent them on their way.

There was nothing to do now but leave.

"You need a lift?" Ev asked Paddy as they followed the exit signs through the winding halls of St. Michael's, their bags in their hands. Ev offered because he was not yet ready to be alone, not quite yet. His deed required some fraternity for just a little longer.

The hospital was old, perpetually under renovation, so that they passed through ancient clattering hallways with dangling metal-cased bulbs into hushed low-ceilinged ones lit by recessed fluorescents into ones curiously half and half, with rolls of industrial carpet parked alongside the doorways like sentries, stepladders laid near the walls between rooms, the heady odor of glue in the air. Ev had suggested that his father spend his final days at Northwestern Hospital, but his father had insisted on St. Mike's: the neighborhood institution, the place where Ev had been born, where his mother had died. It was small and hopeless, like the public schools Ev had attended, functional brick structures built optimistically in the 1920s, overloaded and underfunded ten short years later.

Paddy accepted Ev's insistent offer of a ride home. "I guess so," he said, as if he might agree to anything anybody offered him at this moment, as if he needed a new parent. Ev kept an eye on him as they charged through the corridors. Paddy was like Ev in his quick gait, and together they seemed to be trying to stay ahead of each other; they were practically running when they approached the big glass doors. They burst into the humid evening.

Ev instantly felt a sweat break on his forehead and chest, and the moist air seemed a forgiving cushion, the doors a gateway to the enormous forgiving world. His pace increased again; he felt curiously nimble. Metaphors filled his mind: he had set down a heavy load, left a great weight behind, the monkey had leapt off his back, from round his neck the millstone had been removed.

Literally he'd killed his father, but metaphorically his father had been trying to kill him. He let this supposition float around his mind, trying to decide if he could take solace in it.

The parking garage was catalogued by numbers, letters, and directionals. Ev had parked in 3F West, a confusing trek from the exit, down two flights and all the way through South. He spotted his Saab beside a dripping concrete post and suddenly grabbed Paddy's arm, pointing. "That woman's stealing my car!" he said.

Paddy lifted his eyes from the oil-spattered deck he'd been watching—his downward gaze had caused him to run directly into a fire lane sign—and said, "What?," focusing on Ev's words as if they were a single tree in a vast forest.

The woman had stopped poking at the keyhole of Ev's car and shuffled around to the car beside it, feeling her way like a blind person. By the time Paddy and Ev reached Ev's car she was yet another one over.

"Excuse me!" Ev demanded over the car tops. "Should I report you inside?"

The woman turned. Her face beneath her hat was wide and pale, her mouth caving in on itself, her expression caught. The lights in the parking garage were green, and thousands of bugs fuzzed around them like aureoles. The woman's skin looked unhealthy in this light, but no doubt Ev's did, too. Paddy, beside him, said "Wait" and reached for Ev to shush him, his large hand warm and solid on Ev's forearm.

"I've lost my car," the woman said.

"Uh-huh," said Ev. No longer interested in her, he was reaching for his door, shaking loose Paddy's grip, his own keys in his hand. She could be crazy—she was dressed in a hodgepodge of colors, a man's suit jacket and a canvas fishing hat—but was probably harmless, checking for change in unlocked cars. And who was he to judge someone's nefarious nighttime business? Ev slid into his seat and reached for the passenger door lock.

It was her hat that made Paddy look at her more closely, made him understand she was in shock—a cotton fishing hat just like his father's, just like the one jammed into his effects bag.