Talking in Bed (30 page)

From nowhere, a voice entered, a man's aggressive demand. At first Ev thought he was ordering a drink from the bartender. Then he realized the man was talking to Luellen.

"Lu," he said. "Lu, let's party, Lu."

"Fuck off," she said.

"What's that?" he said.

"Fuck. Off."

Without warning, the guy shoved her. It might not have been intentional; the bar was crowded, and he could have been pushed from behind, sending Luellen like a domino. She fell against Ev. Then the man, short, bearded, relatively mild looking, shoved her again, as if, like a child, he was so happy with the results of his last push he just had to try it again. Ev understood that it fell to him to do something.

"What should I do?" he asked Luellen, who hadn't moved from his thigh and arm. Her white dress felt cool, like ribbed rubber, smooth and rivuleted.

"Don't do anything," Luellen said, her hair warm against his forearm. "That's your style, isn't it?"

"Not necessarily," he said, hurt that she saw him as passive.

"You could ask him how he's feeling," she said, turning her head so that her mouth was on his arm. Her breath was warm, moist. And then she was suddenly up and swinging at the stranger, who held his hands over his face, defending himself, baffled. She walloped the stranger, but Ev knew it was he, Ev, she wanted to hit.

The bartender reached across to grab one of Luellen's wrists; Ev took the other. Since she was disarmed, the bearded man took the opportunity to strike her fully, with a palm thrust hard into her nose. "Cocktease!" he yelled at her face. "Think you're so fucking good!"

"Fuck you!" she yelled back. "I
don't
think I'm so good, ask him." She indicated Ev, her therapist, but the guy was already on his way to the poolroom, satisfied, sauntering.

Luellen wrenched her arms free and tossed her head. Blood flew. "There's the product of rejection," she said to Ev. "I reject him, and he gives me a bloody nose. You reject me, and what happens? Nothing. Consider yourself lucky."

He had not been a participant in a fight since high school, and then it had been to protect Gerry, who had been accused of being a fag. Gerry hadn't cared. Evan had only slugged the other boy because he was tired of defending Gerry, tired of always having to think about it.

Luellen's nose was bleeding through her fingers, onto her dress. "Leave it to me to wear white the night I break open and bleed," she said wryly. She used little bar napkins to soak up the splashes of red.

Ev realized the extent of her drunkenness by the bartender's expression, by the slow way she processed the sight of her dripping face in the bar mirror. He wished he had a bandanna handy, the way Paddy Limbach always seemed to. He said, "Let me walk you home."

The night was warm. Luellen held a sodden lump of napkins to her nose. She and Ev walked quickly, even though she was very drunk. She had the air of someone who handled being very drunk very well, as if she'd done it countless times and with utter competency. Ev judged his own inebriation, its depths. He, too, could be very drunk (he'd had four scotches on an empty stomach), or he could be very sober (his mind would not let his body off the hook). If he slept with Luellen, it would not be because he was too drunk to do otherwise.

"I wouldn't expect anything out of you except copulation," she said, returning without prologue to their former topic. "Really. You know me well enough to know I wouldn't force some guilt trip on you later. I'm not going to blackmail you or anything. Your family would never know."

"I'm flattered, truly I am," he said. "But the idea doesn't appeal. I don't want children I don't take care of." What a hypocrite, he thought. Where were his sons tonight, for example? What was he doing to be such a grand example of paternal responsibility?

"I mean, the best thing about you is that I can't imagine you'd get involved," she went on. "You don't seem like somebody who'd get attached and difficult about it. You know?" She went on to extol his other virtues—intelligence, healthiness, nice thick curly hair—but Ev contemplated her belief that he was uninvolved, that a child wouldn't compel his interest. It hurt his feelings even as he recognized the truth of it. He preferred to think of himself as someone who could hide the less charitable aspects of his personality.

The walk to her apartment took a bare five minutes. At the building's door, she said, "Please don't just leave me with a bloody nose."

"I'll walk you up," he said, still unsure of whether he would sleep with her. The scotch had shaken his imagination loose: fact and fantasy now joined in a stew. Things that had only resided in fiction for Ev now circulated like probabilities. He remembered suddenly what had once made him give up liquor: not merely its unhealthy hold on his behavior, its demand that he look forward to it, that he count on it to cheer him up, but the more frightening way it rearranged priorities while he wasn't looking. Of course he should accompany Luellen to her apartment, liquor let him lie to himself. Of course nothing would happen, the scotch insisted.

Upstairs, she opened a door into her nightmare. That was the only way Evan could describe it to himself. The room they entered was dark, then suddenly brilliant with what first appeared to be flowers, a busy floral wallpaper. Then, almost instantly, Ev saw the little faces and wide-flung appendages. The walls were covered not by flowered wallpaper but by photographs—magazine models, catalogue bodies, newspaper halftones. Except that everyone was severed: bodies without heads, heads without bodies, familiar people in unfamiliar formation, juxtaposed with guns and knives and penises, everywhere penises, snipped from somewhere and inserted here like sabers, in the eyes, in the mouth, between the legs. The room was chaotic with pain: faces and limbs and genitals and words, pink and yellow and gray and brown and black, soldered thickly together, glued right to the wall with something glossy like shellac, a shining mural of misery, a great greeting card in the style of a massive ransom note.

"My God," he said.

Luellen smiled a satisfied smile at him as she disappeared down the hall. He felt accosted. He felt surrounded, drowning, as if he ought to turn right around and run, run, run. The walls were threatening and specific with the horror they promised. Each was totally covered, up to the ceiling; Luellen would have had to stand on a stepladder, placing tiny figures up high, where no one could make them out clearly. You couldn't focus on the furniture for the howling of the walls. It was intensely layered labor, alarmingly dense with passion. Evan didn't like to consider how much time had been spent cropping these parts, arranging them, and now living with them. He thought about the newspaper account of the stranger's murder, the body stoppered with bottles at all of its tender apertures: anus, vagina, mouth.

"What do you think?" Luellen asked, returning from the bathroom with a fresh wad of tissue at her nose. She did not apologize for the effect such a place would have on the uninitiated, and so Ev felt tested.

"When you bring men here, what do they say?"

"I don't generally turn on the lights," she said. "They don't generally have anything to say about the apartment. And if they
do
say anything, I tell them they have to live with my art. Like it or lump it."

A strung-together series of words ran like a headline beneath a woman skewered by the Sears Tower antennas:
I WOULD THROW HIM FROM THE TALLEST BUILDING IN TOWN.

"I ask people how they'd kill somebody," she explained. "This is what they say."
EVERY PILL IN THE HOUSE
ran around an aspirin bottle with breasts and labia,
MY DADDY'S
22
RIFLE, RIGHT HERE
accompanied a bathing suit model straddling the barrel of an enormous black-and-white gun; a white dildo was protruding from her mouth.

"Who do they say they'd kill?"

"Themselves, a lot of the time. Ex-husbands, the evil aunt, politicians, talk-radio hosts, their dads. That's who I would have killed, I think, either him or myself."

"Your father?"

"Sure. He was bad, a total fuck. Aren't you supposed to think that's healthy, for me to hate him? Haven't I put my hatred in the right place? I didn't make this stuff up," Luellen told him. "These are direct quotes. I'm just reporting, taking a poll. You'd be surprised how many people want to kill someone."

Ev was surprised, although he didn't think he ought to be. Hadn't he been taking a kind of poll, too, all these years? Listening like a priest as people dumped their secrets, their fury and horror and sickness and guilt, before him? Yet his findings differed; apparently his sampling was of another populace.

"What did you think when you read about the woman in this neighborhood?" he asked Luellen, thinking of the man who'd shoved her at the bar, the one who if asked might say he wanted to kill Luellen, do it with his bare hands, leave her bludgeoned on a barroom floor.

She flipped off the light and lay on the couch, a pillow rolled beneath her neck, her head tipped back to slow her bleeding. She worked at kicking her shoes loose while still holding the tissue to her face. "I thought a few things," she said. "At first, I had a Jack the Ripper response—you know, he's-still-out-there kind of thing. I've been thinking about her a lot, to tell you the truth, Valerie Laven. They said her name on the news tonight, in the bar. As soon as they run her picture in the paper, I'll put it up on the wall." She lay silent for a few moments; Ev wondered if she'd passed out. He stood where she'd left him, the pictures and words mere clutter around him now, lurking like bad dreams, the thankfully hidden subconscious. Then she said, "Dr. Cole, will you stay and talk with me, please? I haven't talked to anybody smart in a long time."

Ev sat on the coffee table beside her. His eyes adjusted to the dark so that faces began appearing once more. To avoid her gruesome collage, he rested his cheeks in his palms, stared at the blank floor through spread legs as if combating faintness.

"Maybe she wanted to die," Luellen said. "Maybe Valerie Laven asked that guy to kill her. The truth is, most people want to kill themselves rather than someone else. That's the consensus, in my limited field research."

Ev turned his head without actually lifting it. He was tired. He could see Luellen's jaw and throat but not her face. "It's a painful way to want to die," he said, leaving the subject open but patently rejecting it as untrue. Luellen may have needed to believe that Valerie Laven had control over her destiny, but Ev needed to believe the opposite. Perhaps because he
had
killed someone; he did not want to hand over the burden of blame. Maybe because he enjoyed hating himself.

Luellen said, "For example, I don't think those bottles were his idea. I think they were hers, and I think the ropes were hers, and I think the stun gun belonged to her, not him, and that's why he left it there, and I think those were her handcuffs. I have handcuffs, so I know they could be her handcuffs." She sighed. "I think I've stopped bleeding," she added, turning on her side, her head still thrown back over the pillow. "I can't taste it in my throat anymore." The wad of tissue plopped on the bare floor by Ev's feet. "Maybe she didn't want to die, exactly, but she wanted to be hurt, that's all I'm saying. You probably think that's projection."

"Probably," Ev agreed.

"And you'd probably be right."

It occurred to him that his sessions at the office might be better run in the dark, under the influence of four scotches, with scary pictures all around. He felt as if he'd finally entered Luellen's mind, here in her dim apartment, beneath the images adorning her walls, the carefully executed windows to her soul, these compositions of brutality. Here he was, looking not at but through the filter of her experience. Finally he'd come into the dark with her. He'd joined her, and he no longer had particular answers, nor a fifty-minute time constraint, nor a little emergency buzzer to hit for help. She was right;
he'd
come to
her.

"Please stay," Luellen said, as if she'd sensed his impulse to flee.

He would not have sex with her, although the desire was there, like tiredness, like gravity in his limbs. Sex, at this point, did not feel like the most intimate thing he could have with Luellen; they'd already had that. So he did not have to work against temptation, did not have to transcend it; rather, he worked hard to perceive it as a meaningful gesture to forsake.

"Sleep with me," she said.

He eased off the table and onto her couch, reclined to lie beside her, the two of them impossibly close. When she butted her head against his shoulder he put his arm around her. She settled like a child, squirming, adjusting, poking at his ribs to make herself comfortable. Evan realized that Rachel had often wanted to lie with him like this, to manipulate his arms to feel just right around her, to collapse together in a comforting small space, fulfilling an asexual need simply to be held, and he realized that he had not had the patience for it with her yet now felt no great hurry to leave Luellen. And maybe Paddy Limbach lay at this very moment with Rachel, indulging a similar need. Did this make them even? Ev wondered. Would sleeping with Luellen settle the score?

"Tell me you never thought about us fucking," she said.

"I thought about it," he said, although that wasn't strictly true. He'd entertained the notion, like the rest of her life, only from a great distance, as a narrative for him to behold rather than an actual ongoing existence. He had observed her life as a thing in which he could not possibly make an imprint, and, more arresting, as a thing with no bearing on
his.

"I was in love with you," Luellen said. "It was starting to break my heart to go see you every Wednesday. I called it Sadnessday. There's just nobody else who knows me as well as you. Think of that, Dr. Cole. And you didn't seem to be afraid of me. I hate how people seem afraid of me. I don't really try to scare them, but I do. I just do."

Evan understood how that would make him appealing to her; he knew that he himself was drawn to people who weren't intimidated by him. But he was also afraid of her. He hadn't been until he saw her walls; now there was no denying that she had a formidable ingredient in her composition, something that not only acknowledged darkness but traded actively in it. He pursued his fear one step further, then said, "These violent pictures make me afraid. They make me think you find them beautiful. Or true. And I can't stand the idea that you think they're the only true thing, that one hundred percent of this room is made up of killing and pain."