Talking in Bed (3 page)

"Let me help you," Paddy said, moving toward her without taking his eyes off her, squeezing in between the bumpers and hoods, his own hat in his hand—the polite gesture of a boy before a woman—then placed on a car hood as he reached her and produced his blue bandanna, still damp from his own tears. She began crying, holding the dangling ring of keys in front of her for explanation.

She said, sobbing, "I borrowed my
neighbor's
car to come here with my daughter. I have no
idea
what kind it is. I can't remember a
thing
about it."

"Where's your daughter?" Paddy asked, taking the keys from her and fumbling with them.

"Oh," she said, her crying too violent to permit her to speak. "Inside," she finally said, covering her face with her hands.

Paddy turned to Ev, holding up a big key that opened an automobile, and told him they had to find a Toyota. "Her daughter's sick inside there."

"She's got a fever of a hundred and six," the woman said, re-covering some control. "No one knows what's wrong—it's been hours."

"She borrowed a car to come here," Paddy explained to Ev, who'd reluctantly joined them. Paddy had straightened up, grown confident in this new wrinkle. His own crippling sorrow he had put on the back burner; the woman's need was more dramatic, distracting.

"It was like my father was the one who really led her to that Corolla," he told Ev excitedly after they'd helped the woman on her way. Down four lines of parked cars they'd gone, G, H, I, and J, as a trio, trying each Toyota until they found the little white one she'd been looking for. "It was my father," Paddy insisted later, "like an angel of mercy."

An angel of mercy,
Ev noted; precisely the way he would have liked to think of himself. They'd shaken the woman's hand good-night and wished her good luck, Paddy's eyes welling with bothersome tears like those he'd had such trouble shedding earlier.

The men returned to Ev's car afterward, Ev silent, brooding. Did Paddy understand his embarrassment at being suspicious of the woman? Thinking she was first a thief, then a bag lady? Had Ev been suspicious of her because he'd committed his own crime, never mind that he could justify and qualify it? For an instant, Evan pictured himself in a courtroom, actually having to defend what he'd done, asking Rachel and the boys to corroborate his story.

Paddy folded himself inside Ev's small car almost happily, as if proud to have come through the episode looking better than his companion. He inhabited the world without guilt. Ev sighed, sorry for himself and his big guilt.

"Never ridden in one of these," Paddy commented, checking around his seat. "My dad always bought American. Kind of like an egg, isn't it?"

"Kind of. Where are you from?" Ev asked as they circled the ramp down.

"Normal," Paddy replied. "Just outside the city limits."

"Just outside Normal," Ev mused. "I've always thought Normal was the funniest-named place in Illinois."

"Huh," said his passenger. "I don't guess you ever heard of Goofy Ridge."

"I guess not."

A storm was moving in over the lake, reflecting the city's lights from the east. Behind him, clouds hid the Sears Tower and Hancock building goal posts. Ev assumed there were whitecaps on Lake Michigan tonight. He took solace in the presence of Lake Michigan even when he could not see it; it made him feel singularly melancholy and isolated, even in a city peopled with millions of strains of melancholy more severe than his. He knew this—as a psychologist, he listened all day to the various themes of ubiquitous isolation—and yet the lake still offered the absolute promise of uniqueness.

Paddy said, "Twenty-four hours ago I was casting line up in Wisconsin with my dad." He looked at his cumbersome clock. "Well, actually we were asleep."

"Change," Ev said, "by definition means quick." He snapped his fingers, felt again his father's face beneath his hand, the still warm forehead.

"At least it wasn't my daughter," Paddy said, staring out the window at the passing storefronts. "I have a little four-year-old girl."

"I have boys," Ev said. "Nine and twelve." Zach and Marcus, asleep in their beds, mouths slack. Rachel sitting in her stuffed chair reading a book, drinking wine. They were a comfort, pinned there in Ev's mind, safe, alive.

By the time they got to Paddy's bungalow in Oak Park, it was after one. Ev had not spoken with Rachel since dinner; these days it was understood that Ev's appearances at home would be sandwiched between work and hospital. A creature of habit, Ev had almost enjoyed the regularity of his time the last few weeks, the predictability of traffic, the instant familiarity of the hospital, the pleasingly lonely drives home down empty streets. He had begun seeking radio phone-in shows, excited and repulsed by the tone of the advice dispensed. Why were all the hosts so angry? The callers so timid and cowed? These forays into average America always stunned Ev; his own insulated life—his family, his practice—allowed him a safe distance from such encounters. They would charm him for a while, then appall and depress him.

He'd arrive home exhausted, yet lie in bed beside Rachel wakeful, with ridiculous images scrolling inside his eyelids. He seemed to have been having dreams while awake, and they weren't unpleasant. Best of all was his magical ability to put into them whatever he wanted: flights around Europe, unusual sex partners, his lost childhood self.

Again he recalled that frightening dream of his father pulling him through the door of death, a tall door, a black-and-white, film-noirish dream, the long bright beam of death's light.

Now his father had died. The routine was over. Ev had hastened the inexorable future and there were arrangements to make (he'd told Nurse Amy to have his father cremated) and debts to settle. People who might genuinely mourn the old man's passing would soon come to Ev expecting cathartic reciprocity. A new era was on its way.

Beside him, Paddy Limbach said, "Man, my mother's going to take this like a ton of bricks."

"Mine, thank God, is already dead." He told Paddy that his father had killed her, had driven the life out of her, had made living miserable and dying a salvation. He found he liked Paddy, who listened attentively, although Ev did not typically like his type. Too rugged, too entrenched in the league of the dumb and fit, the ones Rachel called body Nazis. But his pain had shown on his face. There'd been that ridiculous kick, and then that shaming, hurt glance. Paddy had understood the woman in the parking lot, the one Ev had missed completely, and, maybe predominantly, he represented the antithesis of Ev's relationship with his father. Here was genuine grief, completely unlike the vague anxiety that Ev felt creeping toward him, an anxiety that had everything to do with getting caught and nothing to do, as far as Ev could tell, with having pushed forward the end of his father's life.

"Thanks for the ride," Paddy said, swinging open the car door. "Hey, you seen my hat?"

"You left it on the hood of a car, back at the garage."

"Shoot."

"And your bandanna, too," Ev told him. "With the woman."

"I'm always losing my hankies, but I don't usually forget my hat." Paddy looked toward his house, the place thoroughly ablaze except for a softly lighted room on the far side: his daughter's night-lighted room, no doubt. "Lot of sad girls inside there," he said. His instinct was to shut the car door, stay in Ev's passenger seat, avoid his home, suspend the moment. "All praying my dad'll be O.K. I feel like I let them down." Going fishing had been Paddy's idea, and if they hadn't been so far from help, maybe his father's heart wouldn't have had to work so hard in damaged condition. No one was going to blame Paddy except Paddy himself, but just looking at those female faces was going to make him want to die.

"I'm sorry about your loss," Ev said—the one time in his life he'd uttered the words, the one time he could imagine meaning it.

"Oh yeah. Ditto," Paddy told him. He shook his hair from his eyes and nodded to Ev, then climbed clumsily from the car and walked up the steps with his hands jammed in his pockets. He rehearsed his entrance:
I have some terrible news,
he whispered.
Peepaw has died.

Ev listened to his engine idling, the Saab's chirpy thrum, the sound of a machine eager to go places pretty fast. Where he wanted to go was a bar, and what he wanted to drink there was scotch. He hadn't had scotch for eight years, and his sudden desire for it made his heart grow alert and begin thudding. Ev had not had scotch or any other alcohol, hard or fruity, neither for social nor for ritual reasons, in eight years. All of his bad habits he'd been paring away over the years, beginning with smoking, when he was in college, and progressing through all the others, sugar and salt, red meat and dairy, then white meat and fat, always preserving alcohol as an indulgence, until he excised it, too. If he was going to be honest, he would have to let it go. He loved it best, so clearly it would harm him worst.

"Why are all the good things bad?" his poor son Zach had once wailed, saddened by the withholding of his glorious Halloween loot.

It was only after Ev had driven away, speeding with his racing heart toward a neighborhood bar called the Elms, that he noticed the effects bag left on the floorboard, white, glinting under passing streetlights. He pulled over, switched on the dome light, and peeked in the sack to make sure it was Paddy's and not his own. There was the soft fishing hat, folded away to one side, brown with a tidemark of sweat along the rim. Checked shirt, blue jeans, dock shoes, jockeys, wristwatch, pocket knife, key ring, wallet. Utterly dull. Opening the wallet was an invasion of privacy, though the other perusal had been justified. Inside were the usual series of cards and ID: Visa, Diner's, NRA, AARP; a driver's license from Normal showing a red-faced blond not very different from the son, a meat-eating, beer-swilling good old guy, smiling, gap between the front teeth; photographs of Paddy and a woman who must be his wife, big teased head of hair, bright red lips. Little girl in Paddy's arms. And then there was the photo of the deceased's wife, a black-and-white picture taken a good thirty years earlier, one of those studio portraits wherein the subject seems to be rapturously viewing heaven. This woman was one of the earth's kind sorts. She had a tender uncertain smile, eyes sloped by apostrophe-like curves on either side, and a tiny dimple in the center of her chin. She looked as if she were sentimental in life, a woman who cried easily and often. Yes, she would take her husband's death like a ton of bricks.

He spun a wide U-turn on Chicago Ave., the Saab just as eager to go this way as that, back to Paddy's house. The lights still burned; even the Limbachs' doorbell was lit—little orange button—but Ev didn't ring it. He pulled open the screen door and set the effects bag between it and the wood door. He heard voices, Paddy's and one other—his wife's, Ev supposed—the two of them murmuring together. At first he thought he was overhearing their intimacies, the inflections of sex, the up and down, bad air and good air being exchanged as they pressed on each other's lungs, the happy gasps and sighs. So rarely did a person actually interrupt sex, Ev couldn't believe that was what he was hearing. Then the noise suddenly clarified, as if he had located an elusive radio station: prayer. It was words, but not known ones, a sort of
bey-nonny-nonny,
the solemn nonsense of an auctioneer. He shivered, aware that overhearing sex would have been less abashing to him. An unfamiliar litany but with the familiar supplicating rhythm, begging, beseeching, bad air and good.

He listened for only a few seconds, then gently closed the screen door. From the yard, he glanced at the soft pink glow in the far window; apparently the little girl was spared the liturgy. The annoying metallic racket of cicadas surrounded him, insisting on a sense of the average and incessant.

His desire for a drink had died; he'd been rescued from his bad habit.

It was only when he was finally perfectly alone with his father's death—just him and his own bag of effects, driving in his closed egg toward home—that Ev felt the single fragment of remorse, like a burst of snow in his chest: he would never see his father again.

R
ACHEL COLE
was wakened that night by her husband's hot naked body curling around her. Bored, she'd drunk too much wine and now felt woozy, cotton-mouthed, and eye-achy. Her hand lay pocketed between her thighs, reminding her that she'd had an idea about masturbating before she had simply plopped into sleep. The digital clock read 2:22—orderly time, as usual. Ev said, "He died."

She was immediately awake, riveted, un-hung-over, eyes wide. Excited. Her husband's erection bobbed around her backside, his coarse springy hair causing its usual tickling friction. He was excited, too. She rolled over to hold him. "You O.K.?" she asked.

"I'm good," he said. "Suffering some nonspecific weirdness, otherwise fine. I almost went to a bar—it's just a weird old night. Let's fuck."

Rachel turned over his words while they had sex. Although she hadn't thought he needed to quit drinking when he did, it still bothered her that he might be tempted now to start up again. He seemed to know himself best, to predict his own lapses, to execute punishment. He was hard on himself, critical and exacting, but perhaps his diligence had kept him from falling into the kind of decline his brother had fallen into. Even after fifteen years, Rachel did not feel qualified to pronounce with any kind of certainty on her husband's dormant character.

He could not come, although they tried for a long while, the clock's little green slashes clicking and contorting along—horizontal, vertical, Rachel compliant beneath him, active on top of him, adaptable in between. Still, nothing happened for him. Finally Ev flopped exhausted beside her, kissed Rachel's neck, then climbed out of bed. "Go to sleep," he told her, but, not surprisingly, she found herself unable to do so, her drunkenness fuzzing up once more to muddle and woo her unsuccessfully.

Rachel was not sorry to see the last of her father-in-law. He had on the one hand enraged her and on the other terrified her. The rage came from his meanness; that was easy enough to explain. But the terror was less simple, since it came from his being related to her husband, from the physical resemblance Ev bore to him: the long scaly feet, the disarming squint of his left eye when he concentrated, the mesmerizing vein in his temple. Rachel hadn't known her father-in-law long before he became ill; her entire marriage to Ev had taken place in the shadow of the old man's alleged former personality, gone for good. So wasn't it possible that Ev's progress through this world would mirror his father's? That he would turn from moodily complex to witlessly malicious? Rachel could stare at Ev, the man she loved, blur her eyes in the way one does to generalize impressions, and see her father-in-law. The signs of Ev's aging—graying, sagging, slowing—troubled her.