Talking in Bed (16 page)

The bracelet was for identification; it listed Ev's name, address, and phone number. It was literally a dog tag:
My name is Gerry,
read one side, and on the reverse
I belong to.

"Used to have a wallet, then I lost it. Can't stand things around my neck," Gerry said, tugging at nonexistent neckwear. "Never have been able to. You think I should have this rash looked at?" He was opening his jacket and shirt once more, making a path through the layers for himself to peer into. "How about another hundred fifty or so? Hundred fifty O.K.? Maybe just forty-five, one forty-five?" He was speaking into his chest, the patch of acne that had cropped up. Asking for money appeared to embarrass him, but it also appeared to amuse him, being a kind of taunt, a demand that Evan would never deny.

Gerry's body odor would linger, although Ev had a functioning window he could open after Gerry left. He had dropped his brother's wrist and now plunged his hand into his back pocket, was counting out cash without thinking about anything but opening the window, perhaps purchasing a small fan to circulate air better about his next client, a woman whose two children and husband had died in a car accident, who couldn't overcome her grief, who was paralyzed now with a barrage of fresh phobias and worst-case scenarios.

"Oh yeah, great," said Gerry, taking the cash without touching Evan's hand, which was precisely the way Evan wanted him to take it. "Oh yeah, this is the ticket, this fits the bill. You gonna vote? I was thinking of not voting this year, what the hell, make a statement, it never helps, but you can never tell. I like Bill's wife, I'm thinking of becoming Gerry Rodham Cole myself, what do you think?" He was buttoning his shirt, zipping his jacket, stuffing money in his pockets, pulling on a hat—not the thermal one Rachel had taken the time to order from a catalogue for him but a cheap Cubs cap—and was suddenly gone, precisely ten minutes after entering. Was it the exact timing that bothered Ev? Was it the tightness in his stomach as he watched Gerry gently close the outer door, wiping away an errant fingerprint? Was it the flow of what he should have said that would plague him the rest of the day?

If he were Rachel, he might cry. She had a brother she cried over, a perfectly functional human being with children and a job and a mostly acceptable wife. It was this emotion, this not-crying, that he took with him weekly to the racquetball court with Paddy Limbach. He'd recommended hitting sports for several of his clients in the last few months, having found it helpful for himself. When Paddy had suggested it, Ev could not have imagined anything more unlikely. But he now looked forward to their weekly games, to the unspoken exclusion of women. If Lisel Carson and her dire grief weren't already awaiting him, he might have called Paddy and tried to set up a game. Rachel always thought it was the money that bothered Ev about Gerry, but the money, the thing that brought Gerry time and again to Ev's door, was the very least of it. Ev felt responsible and guilty and angry and despairing—parental, as if Gerry had three instead of the standard two, as if Ev had an extra son—and Gerry seemed both to know and not know it. He came to collect payment on a debt that would never be satisfied.

"The wrong address," Ev said aloud in the middle of his session with Lisel Carson.

"Beg pardon?" she asked. It pleased her to have Ev mutter anything at all during her sessions; he was so quiet she tended to babble.

"Nothing, go ahead, I'm sorry." His old address, the one where Rachel and the boys lived, now swung on Gerry's wrist.

***

Rachel drank more now that Ev had gone. She looked forward to it the way magazine articles told her she shouldn't. The first drink relaxed her made her glowing and somehow optimistic, happily miserable, gung-ho for her glumness. The next three or four dampened her spirits, but they also eased her like a shoehorn toward sleep.

She was prone to reminiscence, and now indulged it methodically, chronologically, as if she were old. She thought about when her boys were young enough to cry in the night, the way she lay in bed with them, cramped and uncomfortable, smoothing one's sweaty hair, rubbing the other's cold feet. How temporary it had been. How condescending she'd felt toward women who approached her to call her lucky, to warn her that she ought not to squander the brief days of her boys' youth. Now it was as if those tiny children had died. She thought about her husband's love, which she had apparently taken for granted. She thought, with genuine amazement, that she had felt too much needed then, as if she were the heart of the house, the busy organ that kept it alive, and of how she had often fled to the bathtub, locking her family on the other side of the door, submerging herself in oily steaming water until all she heard was the faraway clang of the apartment building's plumbing and her own selfish heartbeat.
You, you, you,
it said.

Then, she had felt stuck and frustrated, unable to be autonomous in the world, scattered like buckshot, little parts of her flung all over town, at day care and kindergarten, riding buses and trains with people who couldn't have cared less whose life they touched, short-temperedly, recklessly. Her burdens then had seemed sticky and warmly damp: tears and urine and feverish foreheads. She and Ev had often reached their bed at the end of the day as if it were a foxhole, a place to fall into and take refuge in. It could overwhelm her, once upon a time, such neediness and need.

And now she seemed hardly necessary at all. Zach and Marcus snapped into action every morning as if wound up during the night: they rose before Rachel, fed themselves, pulled on their jackets, took their bus passes and lunch sacks, summoned the elevator, and disappeared down the shaft into the clockwork of their day.

Rachel would rise later, restore herself to reasonable enough shape to attend a consultation or hearing, then return home and stare out her office window. It was a good view for thinking, she'd discovered. Although the rest of the building had had its roof replaced, the patchwork green and brown slate still remained over the elevator shaft, a pitched roof over a box like a cottage in a forest, complete with small, decorative leaded windows. When it rained, water ran over the stones like a stream, a small piece of nature for Rachel to turn her eyes toward: the Virginia creeper sneaking up the drainpipes, an autumn orange flushing its leaves; the water dripping unhurriedly down, down, down. It was a place where elves might be imagined to live, or foundlings, or a warty witch.

Rachel was assessing her life because apparently it had changed, veered around a corner and aimed itself elsewhere. She and Ev had modeled their life on nutrition—for the body, the mind, the soul. The bookshelves were cluttered with books on vegetarianism, nonviolent child-rearing, nonsexist lovemaking, socially conscious consumerism. Two thirds of the daily mail was always dismal left-wing solicitation. Ev's obsessiveness with doing the right thing had taken over their lives like a weed: it couldn't be killed.

Now Rachel felt furtive when she went to the grocery store, purchasing everything legitimately but slinking about like a shoplifter. Ev had left her, and it seemed he took their healthy lifestyle when he went. Gone were the brewer's yeast and organic apples, the wobbly tofu bricks and fat-free cereals; gone were the opaque bottles of viscous carrot drink. Hello, white baguette and boycotted green grapes. Welcome, processed smoked cheese spread, sitting arrogantly on a shelf, defying refrigeration. At home, Zach and Marcus would perch on the other side of the kitchen bar eyeing their mother with something like pity, tainted by suspicion, crowned with simple glee: food they coveted! It was as if they'd gone shopping themselves in a guilty miracle dream. There were even forbidden plastic Baggies—goodbye forever, embarrassing wax-paper-wrapped crumbling whole wheat gritty organic peanut butter and home-canned jam sandwiches! So long, celery sticks! Rachel unloaded what felt like contraband, thinking,
Their father has left them; what possible difference can a single-serving-size ripple potato chip sack make?

Last she would unsheath three bottles of champagne and a six-pack of orange soda. She not only kept champagne on hand but found herself purchasing saltines and soda to combat hangovers. Was it pathetic? It reminded her of another time in her past, before Ev and the children, when she'd wanted to be thin, dark, and European and poetically undernourished, and had bought food she'd intended merely to rent: eat and then disgorge. This buying of hangover remedies struck her as similar: planning her bad behavior. It was wasteful and indulgent and, she supposed, sick. But she also supposed, when she looked over the stages of her life leading to now—happy childhood, grim college, happy marriage—that it was only momentarily grim. She may have veered down an alley, but at the end was virtue once more, sometime in the future. She would haul her cloth Save-the-World bag out shopping with her, she would purchase little baskets of weightless sprouts once more. In the meantime, she would look forward to having a drink in the evening and ibuprofen and Crush in the morning. Perhaps a sweet Danish or candy bar to go with.

She'd taken to watching television, too, thinking that if she had to have a new, single life, why not adopt a whole new country as well? Sitting in the quiet living room reading, as they used to do as a family, now made Rachel anxious—the turning pages, the militant mantel clock. Zach and Marcus were fascinated and dismayed when she cozied up to the commercial networks; previously they had been allowed to watch only what Marcus called the whale channel, PBS. Rachel was weary of public broadcasting, tired of the British narrators on TV, tired of their stepchildren, the sonorous, self-important radio announcers with their tongue-twisting classical composers.
Bleak,
she thought.

In the late evenings, after her sons had wound down and fallen asleep, when the standup cable comedians were through, when the Chicago street beneath her window was empty of bundled neighbors, Rachel would consider her plight sentimentally, drinking champagne. The bottle's silhouette on the coffee table pleased her. She felt like a has-been beauty from a 1940s movie, tossed and wry. Champagne, contrary to what she'd been led to believe, kept well. You could cork it and have perfectly drinkable wine the next day. Mostly she felt warm sipping by herself in the dark (she'd twisted the thermostat far above Ev's conservative sixty-eight degrees). The windows were beginning to freeze, giving the outside lights a fuzzy aureole-like effect that signaled the onset of winter, and the street sixteen floors down appeared hushed and melancholy, like a village. Outside her study window, the slate roof over the elevator held a light snow in a quilt pattern, the little house in the forest blanketed overnight. She could invest herself in her sadness, she felt so wholly
of
it.

And it wasn't as though Ev were any happier. He was having a crisis, perhaps what would have to be his own idiosyncratic version of the one all men were supposed to pass through in middle life. But he hadn't purchased a hairpiece or a sports car or a rowing machine. As far as she knew, he hadn't fallen in love with some young thing, either male or female. His was a mess of a different color, less personal—impersonal, as far as Rachel could tell—but still messy. She understood it, though only at dark honest moments she tried to avoid. For those moments, it was as if she were he, so well did she know him. And she worried then that he wouldn't be back, not in any sense, that she had lost him, that he had lost himself.

Her husband required perfection—and that was the good news. From her, from the boys, from himself. It always came back to that single simple premise. He demanded perfection. If he could imagine it, then it was possible. This same philosophy guided his appalling imagination for disaster: any grotesque monstrous act he could envision had undoubtedly been committed, was being committed that very instant. That was the bad news. Certainly the world could bear him out on this supposition; he was corroborated daily.

For herself, Rachel had often thought he was trying to extract something essential from her something undeveloped or dormant, as if she were a flower he might coerce into bloom. His habit was to test or teach her, as if her soul, like the typical human brain, went ninety-one percent unused.

Her children looked like Ev's parents, Marcus dense and critical like Mr. Cole, Zach big and impervious like Mrs. The personalities that had kept Ev's parents married to each other for forty-three years seemed to sustain the boys' love/hate relationship, too. Marcus would badger and berate; Zach would absorb like a pudgy sponge until he'd had enough, then either cry—fat tears sliding quietly down his cheeks—or casually wallop Marcus across the chest. Rachel had yet to figure her role in their lives; they seemed Cole clones who'd leased her womb for compulsory spawning purposes. Her sons liked her; until they were three years old, they'd thought she was flawless, indispensable. Now, prepubescent and pubescent—such an awful word—and with Ev suddenly AWOL, they'd come to feel a bit protective toward her giving each other glances. She wanted to slap their faces when they exchanged these worried superior looks. But they didn't
get
her. "You're nice," Zach had tried to explain, "but Dad is fun."

This made Rachel remember the morbid bedtime stories Ev had told the boys about Hot Frank, the wiener dog with an unlighted sparkler for a tail whose life was an epic search for the cook who'd cleaved him, or about the Little Leper a man whose purpose in the world was literally to scare people to death, by pulling off his own digits and limbs, leaving himself strewn across the countryside.

Fun?

But Rachel had married Evan because he was capable of facing darkness, capable of not being shocked in its presence. He knew humanity could improve itself, but he also knew the depths of its depravation. Rachel appreciated that about him. And his interest in human potential focused so exclusively on her. It was almost parental, not unlike her childhood experience, living in the midst of teachers, people whose inclination was to instruct. Except that her parents had been unnaturally hopeful, optimistic. One Catholic, one Quaker, they'd crafted an odd, seemingly contradictory philosophy of bodily shame and group fellowship. Rachel could explain only by illustration: during her entire childhood, there had always been people living with her family; one or two bedrooms had been occupied by needy friends or students or relatives, a revolving group, their troubles brought to Rachel's parents for resolution. Rachel enjoyed some of them, resented others, occasionally felt neglected, later was proud of her parents' compassion.