Talking in Bed (32 page)

"I'm sorry about your brother," he said quickly, before he put much thought into it. That, after all, should be the evening's primary focus: the dead brother.

"I had already guessed about you and Rachel," Ev told him. "You don't have to pussyfoot around, you don't have to be so fucking guilty and hangdog. I already knew. Snap out of it!" His right hand suddenly jumped away from the steering wheel to slap at Paddy's thigh just above the knee, to give him a sharp flick with the backs of his fingers. The car veered in its perky foreign way, then righted.

Paddy wanted to rub the stinging spot. How he hated that word
fuck,
like a second slap; it never failed to evoke the cruder aspects of sex. What else did he deserve? At least this time Ev didn't have a racquet in his hand.

Paddy had the perverse curiosity of the caught; he wanted to know precisely what had given him away, as if he might rectify it in another lifetime, during his next affair. But the idea of another affair exhausted him. The idea of
this
affair exhausted him. He again wished he were camping, longed for woodsmoke and a flannel-lined sleeping bag, the cold damp mugginess of sunlit tents, the green heat of summer mornings. His associations with camping were solidly linked with his senses, all pleasant associations, things designed to feel or smell or taste or sound or look good. Nothing surrounding him at present—not the car or the city or the dark hour or the situation or Ev, especially not Ev—seemed good to Paddy.

At St. Mike's they were escorted to an elevator by a young security guard who kept one hand locked on his pistol. They rode down without speaking. It was an old elevator named Otis, a metal cage enclosed by windowed doors. They descended through two other floors before landing at the bottom: the gloomy basement, unrenovated, unclean. The first set of doors opened itself; the second set Ev pulled impatiently apart.

"The last dead body I saw was my dad's," Paddy said suddenly.

"Same here," Ev answered. "Here at good old St. Mike's," he said wryly, summoning all of the past two years' irony for Paddy to contemplate.

But Paddy said, "We had an open casket at the funeral. The last time I saw my dad was at Resthaven. Sleeping in his suit, in his coffin. They made him smile, just like when he was alive. I wish you'd met him."

"He wouldn't have liked me," Ev said.

Paddy nodded. This was true. Still, he knew his father would have impressed Ev, and that's what he meant: that
Ev
would have liked
him.
Paddy's father remained, for Paddy, the superior version of himself, the model.

The security guard led them down a hall until they reached a big locked metal door, its handle a huge latch, like something on a Coleman ice chest. There a doctor met them. He was also young, black, with big lobeless ears. He seemed far too youthful to be an M.D. Paddy wondered if this was a sign of his own age, that he thought of other men as too young.

"Did you want the chaplain to meet you with the deceased in the viewing room?" the doctor asked.

"No," Ev snarled.

The young man nodded, unmoved by Ev's choice. He had the security guard unlock the metal door and pull open the suctioned latch.

Paddy thought they were in some sort of anteroom, a chamber preceding the big warehouse for the dead. When neither the guard nor the doctor nor Ev seemed to be going anywhere, he took note of the little room's contents. This, he then concluded, was the morgue, like a walk-in refrigerator similar to what you might find in the kitchen of a restaurant. A large fan blew cold air from the back; a bright appliance light bulb hung from the ceiling. The temperature was probably just above freezing; along the walls ran metal shelves like those in a refrigerator; on one sat a dishpan with a towel in it. In the middle of the room was a gurney, on top of which lay a shrouded body, that unmistakable prone human shape. No drawers.

"No drawers," Paddy whispered.

"Nope," the guard said. "Everyone thinks there's going to be drawers. That's 'cause of that
Quincy
show. But he was an M.E. Here's our body."

Paddy wished Ev had selected the viewing room instead of the cooler box.

Ev's brother was the only dead person in the morgue tonight, covered with a sheet, zipped in a vaguely translucent bag underneath that. The doctor unzipped the vinyl, and there he was, tinted blue like wax, either by the room's lighting or by death. He wore boxer shorts and a toe tag. Paddy could not see a particular resemblance between the brothers; Ev was so dark and fierce, the brother pudgy and sleepy looking, his fair hair, even in death, boyishly wild.

The doctor turned to Paddy and said, "You can positively ID this man as your brother?"

"No," Paddy said, alarmed, stepping back as if he'd been caught claiming undeserved recognition. He banged into a metal shelf. "Not mine, his."

"Oh." The doctor turned calmly to Ev, his head and its big ears like a radar scanner and asked the same question. Ev affirmed Gerry's identity.

"That's tough," the guard said, scowling unhappily, hand cocked on the gun at his hip. "I'm sorry, sir."

"He seemed to resemble you," the doctor explained to Paddy, who did not want to resemble the dead man.

Ev now appraised Paddy with this in mind. Could that possibly explain something that had bothered him these last two years—his involuntary affection for Paddy? Could it just be that absurdly transparent and simple, that Paddy reminded him of Gerry?

His brother had a faint guileless grin on his face. Ev had no illusions that his death had been peaceful, as overdoses generally weren't, but it reminded him that Gerry had frequently been accused of foolishness when in fact his natural expression, even at rest, had been amiable, dopey. Ev remembered him slipping down a chair at a party, unable to sit upright, his face turning this bloodless color, his eyes rolling upward. That had been a near overdose; it had been Ev who'd dragged him vertical and forced him to walk, around the block, through the park, along the cold shore of Lake Michigan, with Gerry crying to be let alone, to sit down, to give in to the high, all the time grinning through his misery. You could miss his discomfort if you were only looking at his smile.

Perhaps he had saved Gerry then, twenty-five years ago; perhaps he'd rescued him since; but death had been waiting, not prevented, simply postponed. His brother had been self-destructive, and the inevitable had come to pass.
So high I won't notice I'm dying,
Gerry's self-composed epitaph might have read, on Luellen's wall.

Before they left the cold morgue, Ev reached to the corpse—he heard Paddy faintly hiss, drawing air between his teeth—and placed his hand on Gerry's forehead, which was cool and smooth as a round of cheese, then pushed the hair back instead of permitting it to flop sideways, as it had been, covering one of Gerry's eyes. He repeated this, curious as to whether his brother's forehead felt like his own, like their father's, but the hair remained stubbornly parted, even in death, and the shape of the head was different, as was the texture of his hair: softer, more like their mother's.

"He's the only one tonight?" Paddy asked.

"Well," the guard said, "him and the infant." He indicated the dishpan on the shelf behind Paddy. The bundle of towel inside it now took on sinister proportions.

"Oh," Paddy said, breathing deeply.

"Let's go," Ev said. He brushed past the other three men, eager to be out of the cold room. Paddy wasn't unhappy to leave, either.

That was the end of his old family, Ev thought on the ride back up in the elevator. Now he was the only one left.

In the cai; under the familiar green lights, with a familiar white bag of personal effects riding on the back seat, he asked Paddy where he should drop him off. An unexpected moment of déjà vu made Ev's spine feel suddenly weak. It had been summer two years ago when they'd made this same drive. He was not in the habit of being nostalgic, of aching for what had been his. Typically, he was prepared to spurn that sort of useless and dishonest sentimentality.

"Where shall I take you?" he repeated, recovering.

Paddy had left his Bronco at Rachel's place, but that didn't seem a tactful destination. Neither did he want to see Rachel at Ev's place. Nor could he go home, since Didi believed he was in Wisconsin. "To my office," he said, deciding. It was already four
A.M.
; he could simply get a start on the day. Not until Ev left him at the front door did Paddy realize that today was Sunday.

Inside, he arranged himself on the waiting room couch, crunched between the armrests, stiflingly hot because Limbach Roofing policy was to turn the thermostat off over the weekends. When he slept, he descended an elevator in his dreams, so hot it seemed he must be destined for hell. At the bottom waited Rachel's family, all four of them alive in the refrigerator; his job was to get her out without disturbing the three sleeping males. And once he'd succeeded, she remembered her baby. "We have to get the baby," she told Paddy. She wouldn't come with him without the baby. "It's dead," he told her. "The baby is dead, I saw earlier." But she wouldn't listen.

Paddy woke on the couch, sweating prolifically, ascertained his true surroundings, situated himself in the real world, then drifted back into an equally horrifying dream.

The last thing Ev had said when he dropped Paddy off was "Thank you for coming with me."

Paddy found his gratitude more tormenting than his anger;
thank you
hit him with the force
fuck you
might have.

***

Rachel sat without moving in her husband's apartment. On one hand she could count the number of nights Paddy had actually stayed over; poetic justice had ruled, just as her husband might have predicted. She tried to fix her attention on Gerry's death, but she kept returning to Ev's knowledge of her affair. She concluded that she'd always considered her brother-in-law to be an iffy relation, someone whose continuing vitality should be approached as a random gift; and she also concluded that her husband had always known her better than she wanted to admit. His smoky knowledge made her breathe shallowly, made her feel she'd wasted those months loving Paddy, as if she'd given up a scholarship to the better school.

Ev returned quietly. He locked the door, went to pee in his noisy bathroom, and then came to lie on the floor near her feet, resting his legs on a chair. In the dark, she could see his chest rising and falling. She supposed he considered it her turn to speak, but she had nothing to say, which he also probably knew. They stayed silent for a long while, although the time could not have been calculated with a clock. It was time of a different nature, based on their long relationship, based on grief and obligation. They were having an imperceptible conversation, not saying things to each other but hearing them nonetheless. For a year, Rachel had been exempt from Ev's taxing expectations of her, and she now felt his substance in her body like a forgotten organ, the tumorlike presence of her conscience. It was heavy and joyless, like a documentary film, like a news bulletin from a war zone, like reality.

They stayed up all the rest of the night together, the way they had when he announced he was leaving. They were doing the opposite of arguing, they were having sex without touching, they were talking in bed without customary words or props, they were occupying space that didn't exist, they were surviving together what each would rather not survive alone, they were defining marriage.

Sunday morning happened outside the windows; first birds, then cars, then human voices and the sounds that summoned human attention—churchbells, a police siren.

When the boys wakened to find their mother in the apartment, it was Ev who broke the news.

"Gerry died," he said to them, and they instantly went to Rachel to be held. It was Ev who made tea and brought glasses of milk, working on the periphery, but it was Rachel who cleared her throat and answered their sons' questions.

"What about Yolanda?" Zach cried.

"Who?"

"His girlfriend, Yolanda, the comedian."

"Gerry didn't have a girlfriend," Marcus said. "Gerry didn't even have a house."

"You can have a girlfriend without a house," Zach said. "Somebody should tell Yolanda."

"I'm sure Yolanda will find out," Rachel said. It was hard for her to imagine Gerry with a woman. In the past, there had never been mention of a specific woman; in fact, for many years Rachel had thought of Gerry as a kind of eunuch, without particular sexual disposition.

"What are you doing here?" Marcus asked, stepping back to assess the situation. "Why did you come here?" He was angry to have slept through an evening's events like a smaller child than he was.

"I came to help your father;" she said promptly, hoping that Ev would not feel it necessary to explain the night's history fully; he could be such a stickler for the truth.

"Is Dad moving home?" Marcus asked.

"I don't know," Rachel said, sighing. She thought the evening had provided answers and insights, but in fact she had none to share. They dissolved like important but forgotten dreams, like notes written wronghandedly, illegible and misremembered in daylight. She shrugged. "Ask him."

"I
KNEW
you'd been seeing Paddy," he said wearily to Rachel the day she agreed to let him move home. He'd planned to use
fucking
instead of
seeing
as the sentence's verb, but he just couldn't summon the zest for such candor. His zest had fled, drained out of him like air from a tire. His desire to know people or care for them was sorely absent, and he had to rely on habit. He loved Zach and Marcus the way he loved his vanished mother wholly, without reservation or rationale. Everyone else was too complicated to love right now, even Rachel, nice as it might feel to be held by her. Evan couldn't stand the thought of talking to her, so he just put himself so close to her that they couldn't do anything but hold each other. And perhaps that had less to do with her than with the fact that, besides his one night with Luellen, he hadn't held anyone for a long while.