Talking in Bed Read online

  "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.

  Two

  RACHEL 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.

  Her father-in-law's latest hospitalization had lasted two weeks, but before that he had been living with her and Ev and the boys, staying in the pantrylike space beyond the kitchen at the far end of the apartment, a cozy little nook Rachel had intended to use as a kind of private office for herself, a place to take phone calls, a tax writeoff. She'd enjoyed the bright white walls, the nearly seamless job she herself had done of the sheetrocking and taping, with indentations like thumbprints where she'd pounded in nails. It had taken her months to finish the room; it had still held the optimistic odor of newness when, at the last second, her father-in-law had been evicted from his nursing home. The coincidental timing made Rachel feel tricked, as if all along she'd been preparing a place for him rather than for herself.

  His caretakers at the home were sick of his behavior; they couldn't be paid enough to endure him any longer. Who could? Rachel wondered. Only family was ever expected to tolerate such conduct, to take you in when what you deserved—and sometimes needed—was to be tossed out. The home had called Ev, and Ev had no one to whom he could pass the buck. That was Ev's fate in the world: being responsible. His only living relative, his brother Gerry, who literally had no. home, couldn't be reached. Rachel had been forced to imagine sad, woolly Gerry, wandering around downtown from heat grate to heat grate in his coats and hats. Many winters past, he had lived on the roof of their very own building.

  "I'm tempted to let my father try to make it on the streets," Ev had told her, perhaps also thinking of Gerry, or of how he would like to question what everyone assumed was self-evident, dispute what was perceived as indisputable: namely, that family had to open the door when you knocked. This was on the night the nursing home staff called. He'd been given thirty days to get the old man out. Two different caretakers told Ev stories: his father was peeing in drawers and trash cans, smoking in no-smoking lounges, making harassing phone calls (Rachel herself could attest to those; she had listened and seethed as her father-in-law swore about her husband), upbraiding his black roommate, announcing obscene intentions to the women nurses, and spitting whenever the urge came over him—on the floor of his room, on the wheels of his chair, on the perennial towel-bib that, tucked into his ratty shirt, covered his chest. In the past, it had been his scathing words alone he wouldn't c
ontrol; now, more literal bile spewed forth.

  "If I simply didn't respond," Ev went on, "what could they do? They'd have to either keep him or throw him out on his ass."

  "I'd like to see them try," Rachel said, picturing her father-in-law with his heavy wooden cane, swinging at orderlies from his wheelchair as they shoved him through halls.

  But despite the subject matter, Rachel enjoyed that conversation with Ev. They sat at their kitchen table, Rachel with a glass of wine, Ev with hot tea. She liked to talk to Ev in the kitchen, at night, after the boys were asleep. She liked to stare over his head at their cabinets full of pretty pottery and china; she liked the look of their appliances after the dishes had been done, in the warm haze of what Ev called her evening toddy. Although he did not drink, he liked her to. Her husband liked to feel he was openminded and accommodating, a big strong umbrella under which others' weaknesses were sheltered. Superior to them, evolved beyond them.

  Rachel was pleased with the kitchen's black windows, the way everything in the world was shut away from her and Ev, as if they sat in a lighted box, alone. These conversations occurred late, after the time when one of the boys would rouse himself to demand a parent's steady presence beside him, after Ev's crazy client Dr. Head's nightly call. Dr. Head phoned every evening to review the day with Evan, always after the boys were in bed: a brief conversation to calm him, to permit him to sleep, a kind of prayer-and-absolution combo. From Rachel's occasional exchange of pleasantries with Dr. Head—he never failed to ask a few polite questions of her—she would never have guessed his paranoid delusions. He would extend his cordial greetings; she would pass the phone to Ev. Then Dr. Head would notify Ev that his downstairs neighbors planned to murder him in his sleep. Or that the newspaper had buried in its articles a code designed exclusively for the discerning readership, one that would tell them where to meet on the day of apocalypse. For the duration of her marriage, Rachel had never gotten familiar with more of Dr. Head than his educated voice and impeccable manners. Often Ev argued with him, but they always ended their calls civilly, ritualistically agreeing to disagree. Dr. Head had a notion that the planet would die when he did; he'd once been convinced that Dutch elm disease would include him as it made its way up his neighborhood street. At night he phoned to put himself, and the world, to bed.

  And after that, there was nothing in the apartment but Rachel and Ev, their reflections cast back at them from the dark glass, their range of topics shared, their understanding rich. Whatever Rachel said, her husband would comprehend. She had no need for carefulness or for taxing explanation, hesitation or premeditation. They were comfortable together. Had she anticipated such a state of comfort when she'd imagined marriage? Such contentedness with the mundane? Not likely.

  But, too, she assumed that her former self would never have conceived of this—a brooding, picky, forty-five-year-old man in a modest kitchen wearing slipper socks—as a fantasy life. Yet she was happy. Or, more exactly, she was not unhappy. She had done what Ev called leveling off, something his manic-depressive clients were encouraged to do, too, those bipolars. They were made to stop that up-and-down stuff, that globe-trotting, to settle for a moderate middle ground. The secret, Rachel deduced, was finding it satisfactory, was naming it lucky or blessed instead of dull.

  Of his father, Ev said, "With our luck, he'd come live on the roof, like Gerry."

  "Our own gargoyle," Rachel said. "Pissing over the sides, making a mess like the pigeons. The neighbors would bring back their plastic owls and fake snakes and rifles. Only this time I wouldn't complain."

  Ev hesitated in finding this funny. Although his feelings about his father seemed kindred to Rachel's (she had learned from him how to hate the man, after all), he did not like to see them so blatantly laid before him. It was a slender little line that Rachel mostly understood, but sometimes she got careless and stepped over. This time, however, Ev relinquished a snort. He was disinclined toward real laughter; a snort was as close as he got. It had once been Rachel's secret goal to make him actually break down and guffaw, become helpless with laughter, but she'd given that up. Apparently his father had driven giddy hilarity out of Ev's character.

  "He'd be bad for business," Rachel went on. "Imagine if your clients discovered that your father and your brother were street people."

  "To hell with what my clients think."

  "Uh-huh," she said, well aware of his desire to believe he did not care what people thought. She knew better, and she knew he knew she knew better. A flare of marital love went up inside her; the elaborate, convoluted, knotty way they knew each other still delighted her, made her feel toward Ev as she did toward their sons, full of an irrepressible, absolute affection, not sexual but deeply fond.

  And not always not sexual, Rachel reminded herself. There were times, rare and poignant, when sex with Ev was dramatic and heart-stopping—it was heady and holistic, like loving a long, sad novel, feeling wrung out and nobly wounded when it ended. Something like that. Good novels and married sex were related that way; Rachel filed this away as a topic to broach some other time with Ev, a kernel of smartness to give him like a gift at an unexpected moment.

  "I certainly hope you've inherited his endurance," Rachel told Ev, for the hundredth time. It was the sole silver lining she could unearth. That and the fact that Ev's saintly mother had died early in his father's progress toward Bastard Incarnate.

  Ev said, "I'm afraid he's going to have to come live with us."

  "Ugh," Rachel said. When they were first married, she had sworn to succeed with Ev's father where others had failed. She would be the one to bring him out of his grim stinginess; she would delight him with flattery, listen to his stories without judging their contents. She would flirt with him. She would charm him in the way only a skillful young woman could. This was Rachel's intention, to prove herself superior to any others who might have tried before with Ev's father. Her faith in her own femininity carried her for months, an arrogance derived from her happiness in having found Ev, from her smug youthfulness. She could not envision a greater happiness; she wanted to spread it around like a big pollinating insect fluttering from person to person, infecting them with her own copious magnanimity.

  But Ev's father hadn't wanted to be converted. He didn't want to be seduced by his daughter-in-law. He didn't want to be mesmerized into revealing his lighthearted and kind self. Instead, he wanted her to sit in subdued silence while he berated his son. He wanted her to deliver another generation of boys before him so that he could inflict his venom upon them. He was a snake, and Rachel had later had to explain to her sons when they came to her in tears after Grandpa had rapped their shoulder blades with his cane that he was a big grumpy bully, like the ones they'd heard about in stories, whose path they should avoid. He seemed set on defying the modern notion that people could not be evil, only misunderstood.

  Rachel put her feet up in Ev's lap. He spread his thighs to make room, laying a hand on her bare toes. "Cold feet," he said.

  "Warm heart," she answered. They looked at each other with shabby, tired smiles. "He can stay in my pantry," she offered. She had learned to act when she felt generous; otherwise, she might never be generous. It wasn't often she regretted generosity. Even if its recipient was ungrateful, she could later rationalize one of her own less than generous acts. Who was keeping tabs, she could not say.

  Ev and Rachel got up from the kitchen table to investigate the little room for future use as a bedroom. "No carpet," Rachel said, already cataloguing its virtues. "One can clean up linoleum more easily than carpet."

  "One can," Ev agreed.

  "Room for a bed here," Rachel said, standing beneath the window, whose sash she'd just painted that afternoon, using a spongy trim brush and a paint called periwinkle, her favorite color.

  "A twin bed," Ev said.

  "Of nails," Rachel added. "At least with a rubber sheet, am I right? He must wet the bed?"

  "I suppose."

  "What besides a bed? He's got
his wheelchair, so no need for a chair."

  "A dresser."

  "He'll pee in the drawers. You said they said he peed in drawers."

  "True. Maybe just a coat rack for his clothes."

  "It's hard to believe he'd pee on his own clothes. Maybe it was his roommate's clothes. He never did like that black guy, what was his name?"

  "Maurice. A television would be useful, almost essential."

  "Cable." Her father-in-law liked to fire through the channels, grunting in disgust: all his worst expectations, confirmed again. Nothing was on, but he wanted to complain about it anyway; Rachel entertained the thought of her father-in-law answering one of Dr. Head's nightly calls, not comforting him as Ev did by providing evidence of the randomness of fate (randomness being as close as Ev would come to optimism), but attesting to the world's malevolent designs. "Of course the newspaper editors want you to die," he would say. "You're a filthy schmuck, you deserve to die."

  Rachel sighed. Her little room, which had had its birth in hopes of a chintz loveseat and an antique bookcase, desk and chair, flowered lampshades, old photographs, was turning into a cell: single bed, TV bolted to the ceiling. Her father-in-law would smoke in here and the paint would turn mustard yellow. Everything he touched turned mustard yellow; he had a sort of anti-Midas knack. Up to now, the room had held a huge broken freezer and a lot of shelves full of tools and boxes and castoff appliances. It hadn't seemed like a room at all, more like a closet, a dark place to store things you couldn't make decisions about. There'd been a real sense of joy and discovery in opening it up, cleaning it out, covering its dinginess with white and blue paint. The window, a coal chute that Rachel punched larger and glassed in when she began remodeling, gave a view of the slate roof over the elevator shaft, a quaint mottling of green and gray stone where rainwater ran as if over a streambed. Sun struck in four bright patches on the new floor every afternoon around two. Rachel had begun feeling she'd moved somewhere new, started a slightly different, better life. Now her father-in-law was coming.