Talking in Bed Read online

  Talking in Bed

  Antonya Nelson

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Company

  BOSTON NEW YORK 1996

  * * *

  Copyright © 1996 by Antony a Nelson

  All rights reserved

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nelson, Antonya.

  Talking in Bed / Antonya Nelson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-68678-4

  1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction, 2. Women—

  Psychology—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3564.E428N45 1996

  813'.54—dc20 95-46802 CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design by Melodie Wertelet

  * * *

  For Robert

  and Jade and Noah

  * * *

  Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

  Lying together there goes back so far,

  An emblem of two people being honest.

  Yet more and more time passes silently.

  Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest

  Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

  And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

  None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

  At this unique distance from isolation

  It becomes still more difficult to find

  Words at once true and kind,

  Or not untrue and not unkind.

  —"Talking in Bed," PHILIP LARKIN

  I

  One

  THEY MET at a hospital nurses' station, a smooth, flesh-toned, bent elbow of a desk separating two hushed corridors, an axis around which wheeled all the facets of living.

  Their fathers were dying. While at one end of the desk Paddy Limbach, wearing a cowboy hat, was commanding an Oriental woman in whites to come immediately, with morphine, to his father's room, which was down the south wing, Evan Cole stood at the other end of the desk, smugly taking it all in behind his thick eyeglasses. He was attempting to get drugs for his father, too. The difference was that Ev wanted his father to die as quickly as possible—he'd been languishing for years—whereas Paddy was desperate to keep his alive. The other difference was that Ev knew the Oriental woman was a doctor. He knew the man's badgering her was pure presumption and ignorance.

  Ev thought, Sexist, xenophobe, asshole, cowpoke, tough guy. He made a sneering curled-lip expression. But Dr. Ono wouldn't hold it against the man; she was secure enough, majestic enough, to extend automatic forgiveness—akin to pity—to the dope, the hayseed whose father would not live through the night. Ev could only wonder, and only mockingly, at a man whose feelings about his father were so uncomplicated. Ev himself had indulged fantasies of murdering his father. Patricide, he'd whispered, tasting the specificity of the English language, marveling. His wife, Rachel, had grown alarmed at the exquisite detail Ev could provide—the pillow, the closed door. "You've imagined it too thoroughly," she had said. "You're frightening me."

  "Who would ever in a million years order an autopsy?" Ev had demanded as Rachel made a show of covering her ears. "No one, that's who. We should order an autopsy now, while he's living, and find out why he's not dead. That's the real mystery."

  "It's an enigma," she had agreed, unbuttoning her blouse for bed, kicking off her shoes, and nudging down her jeans zipper—always three or four things at once, Rachel. "But do you think you'll be given conjugal rights in prison?" she had asked him, pulling off her panties and spinning them on her finger. "Please don't suffocate your father."

  Ev left Paddy at the desk and returned to his father's bedside, where he sat and stared in a way he could only describe as dispassionately. When had he last looked with passion at this person? His father might live another month, but no more. That he had survived the last fifteen years was shocking: he'd suffered so many strokes that Ev imagined his brain and bloodstream as a veritable fireworks display.

  His father's stubborn survival—"He's unkillable," Rachel had claimed, "the first immortal!"—had made Ev alternately sloppy and cautious about his own life. Some days he believed genetics would keep him invincible. He certainly looked like his father, in physique and complexion and features; wouldn't that suggest a similar physiological disposition? But other days he believed poetic justice would prevail. He'd spent his life opposing his father, becoming contrary at every turn as a matter of principle. Why wouldn't this contrariness in the end tell some nasty ironic joke?

  He could convince himself that he'd be struck dead in a car accident driving home from the hospital, that his father would live to hear the news of his death by four-car pileup and respond with a satisfied grunt.

  That grunt! Those rolling eyes!

  Before him on the bed, his father's face was yellow. His whiskers were yellow, his fingers were yellow. The long nails, thick and opaque like bear claws, were also yellow, and appeared to be more substantial than the flesh from which they erupted. There was no way not to imagine them continuing in their ugly stubborn growth, the body feeding on and excreting from itself into eternity. Did everyone picture death the way Ev did—the decomposing corpse in its dark box, the slow encroachment of nature, the tactless tread of living feet far above?

  "How is he?" a nurse asked Ev. She had entered tentatively, as if Ev and his father might be involved in a final moment of bedside tenderness, and Ev pretended to be startled so that she would apologize.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "How is he?"

  "He's unkillable," Ev said flatly. In life he sometimes found himself required to shock people. Women such as this, polite and timid, he frequently saw as his most significant targets. Their meekness was dishonest, as if a demurely averted gaze and a capacity to blush might hide the fact that, on a daily basis and with indisputable competence, they wiped the foul naked buttocks of dying strangers.

  But she smiled pityingly at him, focused on his father, her patient. Perhaps she had not recognized the word unkillable. Perhaps she took that to be a grieved and mangled pronunciation of his father's illness; Ev had a tendency to snarl and mutter and be misunderstood. As she stood calmly beside the bed, squat and firm like a pincushion in her whites, measuring pulse, touching the bottom eye-lids to reveal the surprising deep pink beneath, she ignored Ev. He was not her concern. He was a miscreant child proceeding through familiar stages of grief. And Ev felt too tired to prove himself otherwise, grateful for her composure. He could always respect a professional.

  "I'm Amy," she told Ev as she ran her hands beneath his father's sinewy yellow neck, tilting the head back.

  "Night shift," Ev said. "I don't suppose you call it graveyard duty in a hospital?"

  "No, you don't," she agreed.

  "Lousy hours."

  "Oh, it's not bad, once you adjust for sleeping during daylight. In the night, it's peaceful. Hardly any visitors."

  "Except annoyances like me," Ev said.

  "No, I didn't mean that." She spoke without missing a beat in her evaluation of his father, pulling down the thin hospital blanket to lay a stethoscope on his skeletal chest. "He's a tough bird," she said.

  "Unkillable," Ev repeated. "Immortal."

  When Amy pulled back the covers to check lower reflexes, Ev's father suddenly got an erection, the lump unmist
akable beneath the thin gown, rising in a slow, regal manner. Ev looked away, then back, too fascinated to ignore it.

  "How's that for reflex?" he asked Amy.

  She shared a smile with him; small lines spread from her eyes and mouth. She was older than he'd thought originally, and instantly more interesting to him. She'd seen plenty of boners, had probably been propositioned and insulted by a hundred horny old men, had cleaned up their semen and saliva and blood, had seen all life forces exert themselves, bloom, and fade. Ev fought the temptation to slap at his father's hideous hard-on, now the staff of a tent erected in the middle of his bed. It was ludicrous and pathetic, undeniable.

  Fortunately, there was a yell from down the south hall; Ev and the nurse both started for the door and passed through it at the same moment, shoulder to shoulder.

  They found Paddy Limbach throwing a fit at that amazing nurses' desk, Dr. Ono beside him, gazing in a pained way at the floor. Paddy's father had been whisked away to the ICU only a few minutes earlier, his rolling bed flying through the halls, then disappeared as if in the wake of a startling blast, as if an unexpected train had come suddenly roaring through. He hadn't made it. He'd died despite everything, there one minute, gone the next, forever. Paddy, a large blustery blond who obviously did not have to explain himself very often, was trying to articulate his considerable rage, his impotence. His hands opened and closed in front of him as if he were squeezing teats, and his expression flipped like a light switch from horror to fury, off and on, off and on.

  "You said the surgery was a success, you said he had good prospects, you said his signs were strong, you said—" Here he broke off to sputter, a man unaccustomed to crying. He had no idea how to do it. Instead, he gave a magnificent blow with his booted foot to the base of the nurses' station, a rattling impact that yielded him the seeming satisfaction of his own injury. "Oh my hell!" he cried. "Oh my frigging hell!"

  Ev almost smiled, then thought perhaps the women were waiting for him, as the only available man, to do something. He said, "Hey, now."

  Dr. Ono, though a conscientious doctor, was not big on bedside manner. This had always been perfectly fine with Ev; he mistrusted the jolly golf-playing fat doctors who'd previously dealt with his father. Dr. Ono never smelled of bay rum or spearmint. She did not leave town for extended vacations on yachts. She did not tell distasteful jokes. And she did not know how to offer comfort to an unpredictable former athlete. The blond looked like the sort of male grown from farmland— strapping, Ev thought, like a big healthy bull pawing at the ground, preparing for the charge.

  Like Zach, Ev thought. Instantly his younger son's face flashed to mind—the slow crooked smile, a goofy expression, as if a tooth were permanently missing, as if Zach knew your secret foolishness and could summon it forth. Zach was the good-natured husky one, a slightly dense boy who ordinarily suffered the nasty jibes of his intellectual older brother with an astonishing patience—resignation, Ev thought, admirable resignation—but who also occasionally exploded, his temper being of the volcanic variety. Brawny and Brainy, Rachel called them, her two boys.

  But Paddy Limbach seemed to have exhausted his fury. Defeated, he simply wept, which was maybe worse. "Oh my hell, oh my hell," he moaned, wiping a bedraggled blue bandanna across his face. Ev turned back to his father's room. Women, after all—kind Amy and awkward Dr. Ono, the candy stripers who watched fascinated from the sidelines—could better handle this sort of grieving. Ev would gladly have offered up his own father's life for Paddy Limbach's father's; obviously the man required a paternal presence. He was not done with it, while Ev felt decidedly over done.

  Under the cold fluorescent light of Ev's father's private room, the erection had wilted away and the yellow hands with their thick talons covered the smooth place where it had stood, an illusory gesture of modesty. Ev's sons often slept with their hands over their penises in this precise manner, protective. Rachel had pulled back the older's, Marcus's, sheets to show Ev the wet-dream stains, blossom-shaped gradations of yellow splashed together like an old-fashioned map of Europe. Rachel had wanted to know how normal this ejaculation business was; how much would be too much?

  "How much did you play with yourself?" he'd asked her.

  "Constantly," Rachel said. "I was a maniac."

  Ev shrugged. "He inherited it from you."

  "Girls don't leave stains," she said. "Nobody had to clean my sheets."

  In his pleasure at considering his son's sexual life and his wife's serious but unnecessary concern, Ev took a moment to realize that the blanket before him, the cover over his father, had ceased its rising and falling. He stared transfixed at the chest, the area bracketed by his father's yellow arms, waiting for its faithful swelling, for whatever tenacious purchase the body had on this world to assert itself once more. His father had finally died; Ev felt relief well inside himself like warm water, a flooding sensation of happiness. The misery, his own and his family's, his father's too, had ended.

  Seconds passed, and then others, and then, just as Ev was beginning to go dizzy under the spell of his own held breath, of the warmth inside, of the pure reprieve he'd been granted, his father's breathing resumed. Ev watched, incredulous, horrified, enraged, as the old man reignited, as the bellows of his lungs drew in again, ambushing Ev with their ability to perform against all odds. Ev watched his breathing father so long and so hard that his peripheral vision began to burn away, the center to turn plum-colored, blurred.

  And then he simply watched himself reach down and hold the old man's nose with his fingers, rest the convenient palm over the open mouth. His other hand he braced against his father's chest, as if pushing him into a too-small space, something like a coffin. Over his shoulder, he watched the doorway, waiting for witnesses. He did not watch his father's face, the yellowed eyes, cow brown in the center, which would be open now, revealing understanding, however briefly, of who was responsible. Ev held firm against his father's struggle, which was not as fierce as his own. His desire for his father's death was larger than his father's for life, and in this discrepancy resided Ev's slim faith in his behavior. He was prepared to exert more force if necessary, but it was not necessary, and soon there was no struggle at all.

  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 f
ish 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?