Talking in Bed (29 page)

He'd fought with Didi before bed, and now he was ruining his mistress's furniture. He was a failed husband, a failed lover. A written test was administered by Evan Cole at the YMCA. Paddy received his back with a D on it, although others who'd also been tested had received A minuses for simple childish drawings. "It's a
written
exam," he protested to Evan, who merely shrugged, disappointed in him.

And then he remembered that he knew Evan's secret, that he could tell Rachel about the suicide woman. No one would expect him to do that. "I'll tell her," Paddy told Ev smugly in the dream. "I'll tell her all about it."

***

Rachel dreamed she was watching a movie. She sat between Evan and Paddy. She had her hands in theirs. It was dark, but each of them seemed to be aware of the other's claim to her other hand. They were separated by her. They were seeing the movie differently. To Paddy it was an adventure; to Ev it was an ironic tale of corruption. Rachel became annoyed when she discovered herself thinking about their reactions to the movie rather than formulating her own. Yet she was also entertained by understanding both versions, Ev's and Paddy's. Both were interesting, both were valid, and she was proud of her competence—her superiority—in seeing the situation so objectively. Women mediated, she told herself as the movie washed over her and caused the men to react, each in his own way and each drawing Rachel's complete attention and sympathy and understanding. She squeezed Paddy's hand when the bad guy was in trouble, she squeezed Ev's when a dry line of dialogue emerged, all the while entertaining herself with the superiority of her position, wishing Zoë was there so they could discuss it.

At the end of the film the men argued with each other, but Rachel wandered amiably along, wishing she'd eaten popcorn, great greasy boxes of it, because in dreams, of course, popcorn has no calories, no consequences.

***

Marcus dreamed his recurring dream, the one in which Paddy Limbach was tied naked to a cable spool, stretched around it like a tortured man, held in place with barbed wire. Typically, in this dream, the spool would be sent rolling down a rocky hill, off a cliff, and into the ocean. He himself would set the wheel in motion, giving it a mighty shove. Marcus had never loathed anyone the way he loathed Paddy Limbach.

And typically, after Paddy landed in the ocean, Marcus would fall to the ground, horrified, guilty. He'd killed a man, and he would wake frightened, then relieved: just a dream.

This time, however, he didn't push Paddy from the cliff. This time he tried to untie the barbed wire, but it was too late. Away Paddy went, rolling toward death once more. When Marcus woke, he told himself he would have to get to Paddy sooner next time, keep him from ever being near the spool. He was glad not to want to kill somebody.

To Rachel, whom he'd wakened by calling out, he said cheerfully, "I always dream Paddy dies," and Rachel was distressed to think that Paddy's death would affect Marcus so little, that he would want to tell her so cavalierly about it. Why had he called her to his room to report his callousness? Did he really hate Paddy that intensely? Was her son becoming not only cold and dispassionate but proud of it?

But she had a headache from drinking wine and wanted more than anything to get back to bed and her own dreams, so she told Marcus to turn on his light and read for a while, and then returned to sleep herself without giving the issue of his hostility further thought.

***

Melanie Limbach dreamed of the wolf in the woods; the bright cracking shot of lightning became the fall of a tree, her mother's and father's shouting was the voices of all the animals, screeching as they tumbled from or were crushed under tree branches. She was wakened by the wolf himself, who'd managed to creep through the litter and disruption of the falling tree, who'd pursued her even while she'd thought of other things, of the tiny birds flung far from their nests. He crept and pounced, and it was his teeth, so unthinkably near and large, like a roaring drawerful of knives, that forced her awake.

And there was her father, saying her name,
Melanie,
their faces nose to nose, her father's fingers smoothing over Melanie's mouth and eyes.

Their nightmares, Paddy realized in a wild second, were precisely identical: they dreamed of losing each other.

***

Zach dreamed he rode his bike into a grocery store and sacked the shelves, pulling all the food he could into his backpack. He loved the canned beef stew and the frozen tamales and the ice cream candy bars and the sour cream potato chips. Miraculously, everything fit. Nobody stopped him. The aisles were wide enough to navigate easily, and Zach was surprisingly agile on the large bike. He waved to the cashier, he rode through the automatic doors, he rode into the streets dreaming of his booty, the bulk of which rested comfortingly on his back. He would eat and eat and eat.

***

Gerry Cole spent the night high on Seconal and morphine. The Seconal made him sleep, the morphine gave him great dreams. In one, he invented a game that involved a chessboard and hardware store goods, nails and screws and bolts and tiny pipes. Moving them required the proper tools, tweezers and hammers and a curling iron and a corkscrew; there were teams, designated by mortal status, the dead versus the living; his father cheated, using a hacksaw instead of a nail file. For a cogent moment Gerry woke, lying on Yolanda's bathroom floor—the bathmat padded, the tile pleasingly cool—and believed himself a pawn in the game. The tool to move him was a clever drug, something poured or shot or blown into him to make him ooze willingly forward. He had to hold on to the sink, he understood. Its smooth pedestal would slide or roll or stump onto the next square, and he with it, if he held on.

S
UMMER SWELLED UP
once more. The trees burst open along with the windows. All sorts of things leapt free: the song of insects, birds from eggshells, sentimental pink blossoms, the cacophony of neighbors, and a nameless correlating bunch of human urges.

In the newspaper Evan read about a woman found murdered in Bucktown, Luellen Palmer's neighborhood. He read hungrily, consuming the details that seemed to point to his former client. What perversity made him excited to think it was her? He read without having his fears allayed. For years Luellen had been playing a sexual game of Russian roulette, spinning the nightly round of shells, waiting for somebody to explode in her vicinity. Perhaps there was a statistic to explain the odds; perhaps one in a thousand men was likely to finish sex by beating a woman to death. It seemed utterly plausible to Evan that Luellen had fucked a thousand men in her life; not so many years would have to have passed for that to be the true number.

Apparently nobody had missed this anonymous—pending family notification—woman for a week; neighbors did not know her, coworkers did not mourn her absence. But her cat, a Siamese with the vocal cords to prove it, had run out of food near the end of the week and begun complaining. Ev, who'd brought the newspaper with him to his office, flipped pages on the steno pad in which he'd taken notes during his sessions with Luellen. He did not remember a cat. He thought he'd remember a cat, a liaison with the maternal. Eventually the Siamese had clawed her way through a window screen and onto the fire escape, where she sat on the retractable ladder, howling, until a neighbor across the back pursued an investigation. It was the SPCA, come to rescue the animal, who found the woman-who-might-be-Luellen. Her front door had been left unlocked, her refrigerator had been emptied—as if her murderer had worked up an appetite and taken time to sate it—and her bleeding body had been stoppered with wine bottles at the mouth, rectum, and vagina.

He'd used a lit cigarette on her navel. He did not, it seemed, know his victim.

Evan walked that evening on a mission, with the self-absorbed intensity of a savior. Luellen's bar was called Friendly's; Ev suspected irony in its name, and entered warily, afraid of not finding her, or anything friendly, there. Her phone, he had discovered earlier, had been disconnected; she had quit at the photo studio months ago. Her street address had never been registered in her records, a fact Ev pondered as he walked. He told himself he had good reason to assume it was she who had been killed.

Plus he sensed his culpability. He had let her stop therapy easily, had not insisted on stepping down sessions, had not followed up. Perhaps he took credit when it was not due, but he could assume responsibility just as easily, he told himself. He had failed, yet again, to rescue a life.

But he found her alive, sitting in Friendly's in a short white dress looking quite sophisticated, attractive, at peace despite the throbbing tumult of the place. He'd made her life into a nightmare and her into its victim so completely that he was jolted by how mundane she seemed. Ev slid into a corner and sat there breathing evenly. She was O.K. His relief surprised him; he had not been aware of how seriously he had regarded his fear. A premonition had been successfully dispelled, superstition and self-importance thwarted. Luellen, sitting casually at the
bar,
had not seen him. He appreciated her living body, the way she shook her ice before she took a drink, the way her head tilted back as she drained the glass. Her bare arms were muscled and tan; she was pretty, here in the benevolent evening light of Friendly's. Her father had been wrong in naming her unattractive. Calm and pretty, she didn't look like somebody at the mercy of a lethal addiction, her own or anyone else's.

She turned suddenly and spotted him, as if news of his presence had been whispered in her ear. They blinked at each other, then she motioned for him to join her.

"It was like, don't I know him from somewhere?" she said, shouting over the noise. "I used to get that all the time when I lifeguarded. People would see me on the street and go, 'Hey, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on.' I suppose I didn't recognize you without my neuroses on. How are you, Dr. Cole?"

"I'm doing fine, Luellen." He sat beside her, rehearsing whatever excuse he would need to explain his seeking her out.

"You've lost weight," she said. "Or something." She puzzled over his changed appearance, as if Ev had shrunk. Then she shrugged. Maybe it was her.

"Scotch," Ev told the bartender, digging in his pants for his soft dollar bills.

"Those are hard-earned bucks," Luellen said of the limp currency. "You been saving up long for this drink?"

"In a manner of speaking," Ev said. He felt that way about every drink he'd had this year. "How have you been?"

"Unchanged," Luellen said. "Looking for love in all the wrong places. Like that."

"You're not at the photo studio anymore."

"That's right," she said. "What else do you know?"

She was not forthcoming in this atmosphere; Ev did not like her as much as he had at his office, where they had each had a role to fill, where she had been on a running meter, one dictated by his valuable time. Now time stretched ahead of them, a yawning Friday evening. Maybe she was angry with him for letting her disappear so easily. Maybe she wanted proof, like everyone else, that somebody cared. With this hypothesis in mind, he began asking questions, just as he would have during a session: how was she feeling? How were things with her sisters, her mother? Was there something she wanted to talk about?

Even before Luellen laughed at him, Ev could feel the wrongness of his tack, the peculiar way his words sounded when he had to repeat them over bar clatter when they were punctuated by the real lives of others, laughter and music and small talk and cursing.

"Did you think you were in your office?" she shouted over the jukebox, draining another drink. "Did you think I was still paying to have your precious undivided attention? Did you think this was about moi?"

"I don't know," he said honestly.

"
You
came to
me,
" she told him, using her finger to point. "This is the exact opposite of me coming to you. Welcome to
my
place of employment. You like the decor?"

He shrugged.

"Gloom," she said, leaning close to explain. "Neon, with glass accents, eau de smoke, and desperation." Her drink was gin and tonic, bubbling before her like harmless sparkling water. She sucked on a skinny straw, cheeks going hollow. In the mirror behind the bar they looked unhappy, both of them. Other people smiled, Ev noted, other people laughed, the music pumped in and they responded, got in the mood. In their cheerless way, he and Luellen were linked: two miserably serious patrons of the planet alcoholic,
WELCOME TO FRIENDLY'S
, the sign read over the mirror, taunting, cynical.

"Listen," Luellen said, "I'm going to ask you something that you probably knew I wanted to ask you a long time ago. Stop me if you've heard this one, but..." She took a breath. "If I wanted to have a baby, would you agree to impregnate me?" She grinned without humor. "How's that for a come-on? 'Knock me up, please.'" She sighed orgasmically; the bartender aproned, hustling from one end of the bar to the other, took a moment to eavesdrop, to lift his eyebrows.

"I can't see that happening," Ev told her, although he could see it, all too clearly, and all too clearly felt the urge to lead her away into the temporary ecstasy of her request. To drive this urge back where it came from, he asked her if she'd read about the murdered woman.

"Naturally I have. Is that why you're here, checking on me?"

"I came to warn you," he said. "And to say hello."

"Consider me warned," she said. "And hello. And goodbye." She wouldn't relinquish her restlessness; she was angry with Evan, or maybe with the world. Maybe he was simply cramping her style, glowering beside her while potential lovers glided by. Or maybe she had genuinely requested the presence of his sperm. He had offended her by denying the most flattering favor a person could ask of another: come commingle in my gene pool.

"It wouldn't be responsible," Ev said eventually.

"Bullshit," she answered flatly.

He ordered another scotch. One thing in her favor, she didn't mind silence. In that way, she was like Joni, comfortable simply sitting quietly. They sat companionably enough. The more he drank, the tighter and more insular became the pocket he and Luellen inhabited together.