Talking in Bed (35 page)

She woke to find the digital clock reading 3:32, the 2 rolling as she watched to 3. 3:33. Ev lay beside her; the room was cool, the air damp, as if rain had broken outside. He was awake; she could sense his unrelaxed not-moving, the twitch of his toes. She'd been sated in her dreams, but she was not sated now. She moved against Ev, kissing him, rubbing his penis between her palms as if to start a fire, comforted to find it intact. "I want to make love with you," she whispered.

"O.K.," he whispered back. Her relief overwhelmed her; she slid on top of him and reached orgasm so quickly she felt afraid of her need. She sank onto him and his new old smell, reluctant to move.

But then they went to work on his climax. For twenty minutes the clock changed, the wind picked up outside, the two of them turned over, then back, Ev pulling out, then reentering, asking Rachel to lie on her stomach, on her side, then back on her back, her legs scissored around his calves, then wrapped over his hips, then together to increase friction. She was beginning to chafe, to ache, to be impatient, to get her feelings hurt. Her dream returned, this time to corroborate some instinct she had that Ev did not desire her any longer.

"Aren't you attracted to me?" she asked.

He stopped moving, propped on his hands over her face, tired but too frustrated not to try to continue. "I don't know," he said. His cold honesty was unbearable.

Rachel said, "What, you preferred Joni?" and in that instant, as the name emerged from her mouth, Evan came, unable to withdraw before sending semen deep inside her.

They lay afterward without moving, Evan heavy on Rachel's body, profoundly crushing. Incapable of stopping herself, she began to cry. There was an actual hierarchy of dismay for her to feel, pregnancy among the possibilities. She couldn't help crying, and she couldn't help taking solace in the stable presence of Paddy Limbach, reserve backup, benchwarmer. Maybe Ev didn't love her anymore; maybe so much had happened between them that they would never again make love to each other as themselves. But she had Paddy, she told herself. Paddy still loved her. Paddy had moved to the Addison bachelor pad on her behalf. Paddy experienced no difficulty in finding sex with her erotically charged. If she was pregnant, Paddy could be expected to take responsibility for raising another child; she could have sex with him tomorrow, she could claim the child was his ... For a second, Rachel was appalled at her pragmatic and defensive skill at coping.

"I have to tell you something," Ev said, his voice unexpected despite his stifling physical weight on her. She'd traveled so far into her own despair she'd felt alone.

Rachel said, "O.K."

"Two years ago, when my dad died, I killed him."

"What?" Rachel instantly stopped crying; instantly Ev's weight was as nothing, and her many random thoughts were utterly abandoned.

"I suffocated him. I closed my hand over his mouth, like this." Now Ev leaned away on one arm while using his free hand to cover Rachel's mouth and nose. In the dark, she could not make out his features, just his looming shape. She also could not breathe; the sensation upon her was suddenly dreamlike, as if she had been thrust into black outer space. For a second she felt his strength as she smelled herself on his fingers—his anger, his power, his capacity to behave as he was claiming he had behaved. And she felt his temptation to kill her, just a passing flicker, like a child's perverse impulse to hurt an animal, like the violent downward thrust of the wrist when kneading bread dough, before he took away his hand. It did not particularly scare her, so shocking did she find the whole series of this evening's events. Like space, it was just so breathtaking and vast, blackness without boundary. She felt wise, fascinated by Ev's dark character rather than threatened by it.

"I know his life was miserable, I know he was suffering, I know
we
were suffering, and still, I probably shouldn't have killed him. And the reason I shouldn't have killed him is not that I felt, or feel, guilty, but that I don't feel guilty. That's why. This not feeling guilty has been intolerable. What sort of man could feel that way?" Now he rolled away, sat on the edge of the bed, and palmed his head, back and forth.

Rachel lay staring at the windows. Reflected on them were the city lights, dividing the glass neatly into a tick-tack-toe grid, one that trembled as the curtains moved, as the building settled, a reminder of other lives happening simultaneously with her own. How did they all continue feeling it was worthwhile? Was every life as complicated as hers? She pictured Evan with his large hand over his father's face. And then she thought,
This is a trick.

His timing, his telling her now, in bed after troubling sex, as opposed to any other time, suddenly made her furious. He was trying to distract her from Joni, whoever that was. He had confessed in order to divert her attention, in order to inspire her sympathy, her awe, perhaps her fear.

"You're too difficult, Ev," Rachel said. "I love you, I guess, but I'm not sure I can live with you—you're just that difficult." She felt too tired and suspicious to manage any kind of conversation. And a part of her felt something new: fear—not of his killing her, which he could do, but of who he was. What her husband seemed capable of had ballooned in the few hours since they'd gone to bed tonight from crass deception to murder. And as an auxiliary irritation, as a bonus annoyance, she still had no idea who Joni was.

***

But oddly enough, Evan's confession to Rachel produced precisely the effect confession was reputed to elicit: absolution. In the morning, after an uneasy sleep, he felt curiously nimble. Enthusiasm for his profession had regained some persuasive purchase in his soul.

Rachel, however, felt tender, as if hung over, as if recovering from illness. Her genitals were sore; her head ached from too much thinking; her limbs felt too long for her body, the appendages of a gawky marionette; and her eyes seemed dilated, overtaxed by bursting images. When Ev and the boys left the apartment, she retreated to her tiny study and its calming view. Water trickled gently over the slate, smooth brown and green like the back of a wet frog; the tiny windows of the shaft casing shone black and impenetrable. A plain bird stood on the roof, motionless, brown with a steady yellow gaze. There was her safe cottage in the fairy-tale forest.

***

Ev convinced himself on the way to work that geniuses were people whose intellectual powers were inscrutable and whose emotional ones were a mess. He couldn't think of a single genius whose makeup wasn't dependent on those precise conditions. If he were an emotional cripple, which he suspected was the truth, mightn't he still be a kind of intellectual superior, close to cerebral perfection? And should such a theory comfort him?

No matter; it did comfort him. He spent his day like a professional, reading books between clients, following up on difficult issues, making two people cry. "Why do you blame your father?" he asked Rosie Challez coldly, an unempathetic smile on his face. "When will you take responsibility for your decisions?" he demanded of the whining high school principal. And over his nine-fifty break, he opened his mail. In among the journals and book catalogues and junk lay a letter from a RO. box number here in Chicago. He opened the envelope expecting a query, someone who wanted to become a psychologist, someone who wanted to get free help through the mail instead of paying for it in person.

But no, the note was from Luellen, accompanied by a newspaper photo of Valerie Laven, victim. Luellen's note, like a kidnapper's, was compiled of words snipped from printed matter.
He hasn't got me yet!!
it said; under that, in parentheses, was the single word
Meow,
clipped from a kibble sack. He pondered her note—glued to a paper torn from a stenographer's notebook, precisely the same kind of pad he took client notes on—then quickly composed his own.
Don't let him!!
he wrote, then added
Woof
and tucked it in an envelope. He addressed it and buzzed the office secretary to post it. He thought perhaps he'd engage in another correspondence like the one he'd had with Joni.

It was useful to maintain that shadow presence in his life, the embodied abyss. In his drawer lay Joni's last letter to him; on the shelf below his father's ashes rested his brother's dog tag,
My name is Gerry
on the front,
I belong to Evan Cole
on the back. Here were the dark artifacts of those who'd once balanced him.

But what about the other side of the shadow, the source of light?

Today was racquetball day, but there would be no racquetball. Since Gerry's death, there'd been a tacit understanding that Ev and Paddy would not play ball. In fact, he felt sorry for Paddy. He knew Paddy would be hurt by losing Rachel; he knew he'd flagellate himself, take full blame. If Paddy were his client, Ev would tell him that exposing oneself to the possibility of pain was not a bad thing. One had to open oneself for love. Getting hurt was only sometimes the consequence, not always. Maybe next time it would be better. He knew plenty of people who, after one such hurt, never permitted themselves to be in the position again, never laid themselves open to that sort of punishment. That would be unfortunate, he would tell Paddy Limbach if Paddy were sitting in the client chair. When Paddy felt wrong and foolish and humiliated and angry, Ev would be there to say he wasn't. Was right to love, wise to explore, brave to put himself on the line, and justified in feeling betrayed.

There were people who protected themselves and those who made themselves vulnerable. Ev supposed he himself belonged in the former category, along with his son Marcus, along with Luellen, along with his old friend Joni, along with his father. But all the people who mystified him, who, he grudgingly had to confess, he
admired,
belonged in the latter category: his mother; his brother; his wife, his son Zach, and, of course, Paddy Limbach.

Z
ACH THOUGHT
of his uncle Gerry and the night last spring when Gerry had rescued him from a grim evening with his father. The ten dollars his father had given him Zach had handed over to Gerry at the liquor store; his uncle had come up short at the checkout. "Big gulp," Gerry said of his two beers, extra large size. The Chinese proprietor remembered Zach from the time Zach and Marcus had waited for their father in his store; he gave Zach another female lollipop, another pair of pink breasts to suck on while he and Gerry rode the el.

From their seats in the lighted train car, they watched people, Gerry not so secretly drinking from his bagged bottle of beer, making jokes about everyone who got on. He liked to talk to strangers, and although this habit made Zach's brother embarrassed and angry, Zach didn't mind. Usually people responded, laughing along. Only the stuck-up ones refused, passed by as if Gerry hadn't said hello and commented on the weather, which was pretty bad, as usual.

They rode downtown first, swallowed by the tunnel like a screaming snake sucked into the earth, roaring noisily beneath the city, and got off two stops farther south than Zach's parents ever let him go. Up the steps they went, into the dusk, where trash blew, where graffiti covered buildings like camouflage, then across the street and back down, northbound. Underground stops reminded Zach of bathrooms: the white-and-black tile, the echo, the dampness, the odor. As usual, he watched between tracks for rats, although none appeared this evening; summer was coming, they'd resumed roaming the streets above. A band of black musicians were setting up their battered instruments—saxophone, xylophone, drums, and guitar. The vocalist kept singing the same line over and over: "Darling, yooooooouuu send me." Although Zach and Gerry waited for a good ten minutes, the band never quite got around to joining the singer, nor did the singer ever quite get around to the rest of the words. They went about the setup as if they were on a stage instead of in a train stop. The guitar case they opened for donations was ringed by flashing lights and little electric bells, Christmas tree decorations.

Gerry finished his first beer and delicately set the bottle on an overfull trash can before they boarded a northbound train. Their seats faced backward, so Zach felt as if he were being pulled uptown by his belt loops. They finally returned, bursting onto street level, where the train noise dispersed, where darkness had fallen. Now the wind didn't matter; now it was Friday night. Zach found himself humming the tune he'd just heard. This was the third train he had traveled on that day, and it was by far the j oiliest. Work and school had ended; parties had begun.

"You want a hit?" Gerry offered Zach his second bottle, thoughtfully wiping the opening with his palm.

Gerry's beer smelled terrible, in Zach's opinion, and he couldn't imagine he'd ever choose to drink the stuff. The gap between childhood and adulthood troubled him momentarily, that chasm wherein all the unthinkable characteristics apparently attached themselves—and apparently without resistance on the part of the victim. He just didn't get it.

"Does that taste good to you?" he asked his uncle.

"Sure," Gerry said. "But that's not why I drink it."

"Why, then?"

"Because it makes me happy. And I like to be happy."

"Me, too."

"Who doesn't?" Gerry said. "That's what I like about the human race."

In Evanston, where the two of them hopped off on the east side of the track and then immediately back on on the west side, a group of teenagers pushed aboard with them. They wore evening clothes—boys in tuxedos, girls in velvet dresses—and they brought a cloud of perfume on board with them. "Prom," Gerry said ominously as he and Zach sat in their plastic bucket seats.

He waved to the prom kids and they tittered in response, the boys making snide remarks to each other that Gerry and Zach couldn't hear. "The thing is," Gerry went on, finishing an earlier thought, "that most people don't get happy on a daily basis, which is very, very unfortunate. You sure you don't want a hit?" He put the sack in Zach's hand. "You know, it was your dad who took me drinking first. He and I used to ride the trains drinking beer. I can remember sitting with a couple of six-packs at the Howard Street platform for hours one night, laughing. Back when he drank. Back when we drank with each other. Back when a six-pack apiece was plenty for us."