Talking in Bed (34 page)

Paddy phoned to say he missed her.

"I miss you, too," she lied. She didn't have time to miss him, she didn't have sufficient love to include him. He would always be there. There was no urgency in sending him her love; he was stable. At present, her love had to direct itself toward her husband, their bewildered sons.

"I'm moving away from Didi, you know," Paddy told her.

"Oh, no!" Rachel was genuinely distraught to hear this news. Now she was responsible for someone else's misery. Now the affair had larger consequences. "Why are you doing that?"

"Why? Because I don't love her."

"Please don't say that."

"It's true, I don't love her. I can't stand to deceive her anymore. I'm going to tell her everything."

"What do you mean, everything?"

"Us. About us."

"Paddy, I want you just to think of this—what good will it do? There is no us anymore." She didn't want him to use her name. She didn't want to be on Didi Limbach's hit list. She wanted a cleaner exit than she deserved, and she wanted Paddy to endorse it. "Ev needs me," she said. "He's miserable. I'm afraid he's suicidal." This was true, but Rachel's reasons for telling Paddy the truth were dishonest. She wanted Paddy to leave her alone. And besides, there were other kinds of suicide than corporeal.

"See me," Paddy said. "Just one more time, just to say goodbye. We didn't get to say goodbye. It's the least you could do."

It was not the least she could do; she was already doing the least she could do. Rachel closed her eyes. It seemed unfair how her energy was being sapped these days, being taken by people who believed themselves to require it more than she did. The boys needed her to interpret their father's moods, yet she could not fully disclose the sources of his sadness. Ev himself needed company, somebody who knew and understood the extent of his feelings toward his brother. There was no one qualified but Rachel. She was the only one available to fill the job. Same with Paddy, it appeared; nobody else would do. Women's work: being indispensable.

She agreed to meet him, that afternoon, at a hotel. It was decadent and stupid. If Ev found out, the betrayal would be too large to surmount. Rachel turned over all the facts of her commitment and still found herself going through with it, preparing her body, preparing her excuse for being gone this afternoon if anyone asked.

***

Paddy reserved a room at the Raphael, an old grand hotel lurking in the shadow of the Hancock building, hidden by the high-rises. He checked in at one and admired the decanters of liquor, the television remote control, the plush hotel bathrobes, two of them hanging behind the bathroom door, and the big wood-framed windows that looked out on Delaware and muffled the noise of traffic. He lay on the bed and felt his heart race, literally put his hand over the fracas. He had been missing Rachel steadily, but now he was afraid of seeing her; he was afraid of having to admit his need for her. What if he couldn't let go? What if she said they'd never meet again and meant it? What if this was the last time? He had to acknowledge that he'd used this goodbye business as a ploy; he knew it wouldn't be enough. He knew he would need her. He would require a dose of her beyond this afternoon.

Furthermore, he'd apparently left his wife and daughter. He'd adopted Rachel's technique and was pretending she was watching him, a witness to his daily nonsense, his selectively summoned spy.

Rachel rang the room and he gave her the floor number. He waited outside the door, appreciating the charming silence of the Raphael at midday. Its fixtures were old, with newer sprinkler attachments; Paddy liked buildings that complied with safety codes. The elevator took forever, but then there she was, Rachel coming around the corner and walking quickly toward him, not seeing him until she was nearly upon him, so busy was she reading room numbers.

"Hi," he said helplessly. She let him hold her. She collapsed into his arms before they even got into the room. Paddy had removed the bedspread and untucked the strictly tucked corners—those parsimonious maids, cinching the sheets, squashing the pillows—had opened the windows and turned out the lamps. The room was to remind them of nature, that was his intention. Nature soothed him; it was his own animal self he wished to indulge. Now they lay on the blank top sheet, their shoes kicked off, their other layers still between them. Paddy was optimistic, since the rest of the bed and room and hotel spread around them like insulation. No one could find them.

Rachel hadn't worn underwear, and in her shrimplike curl she laid her right hand over her left breast for reassurance. Paddy cupped her hand. "I love you," he blurted. "All I do is think about you."

Rachel didn't want to talk. She butted her head into the cave Paddy's chest and neck made. She had created a terrible mess, she told herself, nuzzling her way closer. She had permitted herself to fall in love with Paddy, she had permitted him to fall in love with her; now they'd conceived something between them as ungainly as a pregnancy, as complicated as a child, and they could not just send it away. She sincerely wished it undone. She could not undo it, but she could wish it had never happened; she could wish she had turned Paddy away when he'd come to her apartment door last year. She could have sent him and his birthday gift away.

Hungry for him, Rachel began to kiss his lips, giving him bites, which Paddy welcomed. She rolled against him hard, like a log on a river of logs, and made a grab at his belt buckle. She wanted to quit thinking about Paddy, and that was fine with Paddy. He didn't want to think, either. He wanted to move around in his body, touch Rachel, put himself inside her and reclaim her. He didn't want to consider the future; he certainly didn't want to dwell on the fact that this meeting had been arranged as their official farewell.

***

Not far away Ev sat in his office, between clients, realizing that a new season was upon him, one that wouldn't announce itself by his brother's appearance. He could close the bank account he'd kept for Gerry.

What he couldn't do was quit remembering the way Gerry had been dressed that night last April, his suit which had seemed expensive but was old, its nap shining with wear. What had become of it? The police had found Gerry on Western, not far from the Y where Ev and Paddy had played racquetball. He'd been wearing his shorts and his dog tag, nothing more; his head was resting on an army knapsack full of papers, trash that Ev carried home in the effects bag a few hours later. Ev remembered watching Gerry and Zach stepping into the liquor store across the street before they went up the el steps, Gerry leaving the store with a brown paper bag, Zach trotting companionably beside. Standing at the window, Ev had had the urge to turn the moment into something harmless, had had the impulse to dash down the stairs so the three of them might ride merrily along in the el cars, traversing the North Shore. But he had not been able to join them; whatever distance existed between him and his brother was insurmountable. It made him proud and grateful to have provided a fitting compatriot in his son Zach. He'd sent Zach out to do his job.

E
V LAY WITHOUT TOUCHING
his wife, who lay also conscious of this fact. Paddy seemed to lie between them. She was forcing them to talk about him, as if discussing him would make him less problematic, as if confrontation would defuse his force. Ev knew she'd learned this tactic from him; too bad she didn't know he'd forsaken it.

"Have you noticed how his voice doesn't seem to go with his body?" Rachel said.

Ev said nothing, so Rachel plunged on: "It's a higher-pitched voice than you might expect, since he's tall..."

"You mean he has a big dick," Evan said.

Rachel caught herself before she corrected him. Paddy's penis wasn't particularly large, and Ev, in other circumstances, wouldn't have cared one way or the other. He pretended not to care now, but Rachel wasn't going to acquiesce to whatever game he was playing. Moreover, wouldn't Ev have seen Paddy's penis himself, off at the YMCA, disrobing before or after racquetball? And besides, through which maze had he puzzled to arrive at Paddy's penis?

"He's nasal," she continued, taking the high road. "He opens his mouth and is midwestern nasal, that's all."

"To be honest, Rachel, I don't care that you slept with him. I don't really care. I understand everything that went with it, or I basically understand everything. I understand the
idea
of everything, if not the niggling details, but what interests me, what matters to me, is what happens next. O.K., you slept with him. O.K., there was sex, there was romance, there was a crush and a flirtation that went further, there was sexual tension that got played out, consummated, O.K. Fine. But now what? That's the thing I'm interested in. Now. What. Now."

"Now I love you, now," Rachel promptly responded. She'd had her mouth open, waiting for a pause so that she could insert her assurance. "I love you more than anyone, ever." She wanted to reach her hand over to him, to assure him physically, but she held back, waiting for him to signal that such assurance would be welcomed. Since Ev had moved home, they'd been touching each other only in consoling ways, the embrace of people mourning shared losses.

Ev said, "I mean, I can imagine your situation last year perfectly. I leave you for no discernible reason, I ask you to simply wait without any sense of how long that might be, you agree without understanding the terms. Really, you were generous. You were more than compassionate. I wasn't fully honest with you, I didn't confide in you the troubles I was having—to be even more honest, I think they
did
have something to do with us, with me and you, with me toward you, with age, with my father, all of it, all of it had something to do with my feeling that I was going out of my mind. I think I was going out of my mind. I was not myself. I may still be not myself. I may never be myself, or maybe this is myself and the rest was a game, I don't know. In fact, I feel crazy just lying here talking about it, as if I might talk and talk and talk and still get absolutely fucking nowhere."

He sprang out of bed, snatching his glasses from the nightstand, and Rachel watched his dark shape move around the room. His hand swung in the air to locate himself; he bumped into their dresser and said "Fuck." He shut the bathroom door hard but didn't turn on the light. He would have to pee sitting down, Rachel thought, if there was no light. Wasn't that a pathetic gesture for a man, peeing sitting down? Her face went hot with tears. He was still miserable, maybe more miserable than he'd been before. She was directly responsible for his new misery, for not being faithful, for not keeping her life afloat during his brief going-under. She could argue against this perception, but she knew deep down it was the truth: she'd succumbed when she should have held firm. She'd withstood exactly nothing; she was an impressionable, selfish spouse who'd given in to the first man who'd kissed her swollen lip.

The toilet flushed; the tap ran; the medicine cabinet squeaked open and then banged closed. Ev had sleeping pills now, prescribed by a naturopath, big brown pills the color and consistency of pressed dirt, the size of rabbit turds. He took two or three a night, although he tried not to.

He returned to bed in the dark. "Why didn't you turn on the light?" Rachel asked.

"I don't know. I'm up every night and I try not to wake you, so it's just getting to be habit. Kind of a dangerous one, though. Last night I brushed my teeth with cortisone cream."

Rachel laughed, too eagerly, aware of her own eagerness to laugh. When would their marriage be their marriage again? "I'll move it away from the toothpaste." She now rolled toward him, safely within the domestic landscape of the warm double bed, and put her arm over his chest. "I love you," she said. "I love you more than anything. Please don't be sad."

He breathed deeply; Rachel could feel his chest expand beneath her forearm, his breath in her hair as he exhaled. His odor had aged, gotten bitterer, earthier. Or perhaps it had not changed, and she was now accustomed to Paddy's odor, which was younger; perfumed by Old Spice, that American high school institution. Still Ev did not hold her; did not do what must be automatic in most people, return the embrace. Surely it was his reflex, too; surely he was suppressing it, punishing her. And this made her angry and impatient with him. She abruptly let go and scooted back to her side.

"Goodnight," she said, her face toward her clock. The digital numbers read 11:34, a sequence she liked to up-end:
hEll,
the clock said. Digital clocks always seemed to present her with calculated arrangements, as if to entertain her, to make up for the fact that she had to transcribe their message to the face of an old-fashioned clock in order to make meaning of it. Her favorite was 12:51, the lighted green crosshatches so nicely parallel, mirrored that way, looking like hieroglyphs.

It was late. Very late. She was exhausted yet unsleepy. She was tired of her life. In this, she and Evan felt exactly the same.

***

For weeks, their arrangement seemed based on survival tactics and nothing more. The cupboards full of sugared cereals and white bread and unrefrigerated peanut butter did not draw Ev's anger or disappointment the way Rachel might have supposed: these were the provisions, he appeared to understand, and that was what he made do with. The boys behaved themselves, Marcus keeping an eye always turned toward his father; waiting for signs, reading him so cautiously that Rachel wanted to knock their two heads together like coconuts.

She and Ev did not make love.

Rachel's feelings about this ran from relief to annoyance, from guilt to self-pity.

Then one evening, after a series of sleepless nights, Rachel drank a bottle of wine by herself. She skipped dinner and fell into bed before the boys, before Dr. Head's nightly call, and had sodden dreams for several hours. They were deliciously sexual, full of strange men and women. She knew she was dreaming, so she just enjoyed the sex, one episode after another, a decadent smorgasbord. Finally her partner was Evan. She felt sated by then, but was happy to see him prepared to turn his sexual attentions toward her again at last. They were deep in their intimacies when she realized that he had no penis, that it had been removed. "What happened?" she asked. "I did it to myself," he told her. Then another man entered the dream room, a naked man who did not really resemble Paddy but who was clearly meant to fill the role. The two men sat beside each other on a chaise longue (this piece of furniture did not exist in their real home, Rachel noted absentmindedly; where had it come from?) across the room from the bed where Rachel lay, naked, waiting for her husband, confused and alarmed by his castration, by his having done it, apparently, for the-person-who-would-be-Paddy.