Talking in Bed (17 page)

At the same time, the house was completely devoid of mirrors. Her parents claimed that mirrors caused vanity, a simple unyielding equation. As a teenager, Rachel had purchased compacts and checked herself in a silver coffee service kept on the dining room buffet. At school she frequently requested bathroom passes so that she could jump up before the sinks and take stock of her flying plaid uniform as quickly as possible in the dingy mirrors, never being sure about anything below her knees. She resented the absence of mirrors. In desperation she'd glued a brand-new cookie sheet to her inner closet door, which presented her with a warbled tinny approximation of herself, like something from the funhouse—though in college it became an anecdote that set her apart from the other women in her dorm at Northwestern. There, under heavy wet skies and suicidal anxiety over grades, a lack of mirrors seemed to give Rachel an edge her classmates envied. They viewed her as someone with a serious destiny. Late at night Rachel might secretly enter the empty fourth-floor bathroom and stand naked before a full-length mirror, touching herself and watching, fascinated with self-pity. It was something she should have been allowed long ago.

When she and Ev met at the university counseling office, Ev had also been interested in her unusual image problems. He was seven years older than she, studying affluent undergraduate women who were depressed. Rachel had been recommended for counseling by her Victorian novels professor, who found her themes on literature "disquieting." Ev, a graduate student at the time, considered her a therapist's dream—bright, forthright, self-effacing. Even then, though, Rachel had felt herself playing a kind of role in which those traits were mandatory. She would sit in his small office and stare out at the enormous squirrels dashing about the campus lawn, relating her life, omitting nothing. "Don't lie to me," Evan had requested, and she didn't.

It was liberating and made her mind race—she wanted to be better than she was, she wanted to behave with integrity, she had high ideals. Ev listened to her, allowed her her elliptical excited style, followed agreeably, and she sensed his pleasure—not judgment but curiosity; not pity but esteem. She fell in love with him. Their sessions ceased—his stubborn ethics would not allow him to date a patient—and became conversations, moving away from his TA office to the cafeteria and student union, their subject matter turning reciprocal, Ev revealing his father's high and insurmountable ambitions for him: he would never be enough. Yet he did not chafe under that ambition, did not complain about it, either.

They were married in the spring of 1977 in a windowless justice of the peace's office. There was no honeymoon; even the word made them scoff. They left the courthouse and took the train down to the city, to Diversey, to Ev's family's duplex. Just an hour earlier, perhaps at precisely the same moment they had been exchanging vows, Ev's father had suffered his first stroke. He was not expected to live more than a few months.

"Let him do what he wants," the doctor told the family. "He gets pleasure from smoking—I can't see any reason to deny him."

It was terrible advice. Ev's father continued to live, on and on, less and less able to do anything except smoke. Ev could still rage over that doctor's flagrantly negligent words. He did not let go of his fury, over this or any other mistake. He held people responsible. He believed in culpability.

Ev. She missed him so thoroughly it was as if he were always just on the other side of the wall, behind a door, disappearing in the mirrors when she entered a room. She could see him that clearly, in his bright T-shirts and black leather jacket, his tidy chinos and round-toed suede shoes. He kept his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. He didn't mind staring at people. He was a tense-seeming type, as if he were a man hanging by his feet—his eyes slightly bulged, his face red, the vein in his temple a distinct ripple in his skin, his hair on end. Yet he was right side up.

"You exaggerate," Ev would say, sighing, twisting the tip of his pinky in his ear. His gestures were so constant that Rachel found herself imitating them, twitching while she stood in line at the bank machine, tapping the steering wheel when she drove, flipping from one radio station to another, manic AM, depressive FM. He was not nervous but impatient, worried, highly aware of the waste around him. One of his favorite motifs for conversation was the uselessness of things. At the grocery he would lift a box of Constant Comment teabags and start in. "First, the plastic wrap around the box," he'd say, trailing behind Rachel as she pulled things off the shelves, all the fragile joy of shopping gone. "Then the box, never mind the plastic bag they'll pop this in at the checkout line. Inside are the individually wrapped foil packets, inside that the teabag itself with its paper tag, and finally the tea. About a half a teaspoon. You get home, you have a pile of paper and wrapper and plastic the size of a small bush and a lousy handful of tea. Waste. Unbelievable." This was what Marcus referred to as Ev's Ralph Nader mode.

Rachel smiled, keeping her son in mind as she turned now toward sleep, just a little drunk. She sprawled in the bed. Her husband slept lightly, muttering, curled always tight as a fetus, cold yet producing sweat. His odor Rachel could still manufacture when she lay here by herself; she could smell him despite the fact that she'd laundered the sheets many times by now.

***

Five months after Ev moved away to what Rachel had begun thinking of as the Ballpark, the phone rang one afternoon while she napped. Groggy, vaguely hung over, recovering from a sleepless, anxious night before, she listened to Paddy Limbach inquire about Ev's tardiness at the racquetball court.

"You know Ev doesn't live here anymore," she said flatly. Her voice was froggy with exhaustion. Maybe Paddy would find it exotic; that had, after all, been his only appeal for Rachel, that he might flatter her with a cornpone's reverence.

"Well, he wasn't answering his phone. I thought maybe you..."

"We separated," Rachel said. The more often she said it, the colder she felt toward the news herself. "I'm not taking Ev's messages. He's got an office and a secretary for that." She frowned; wouldn't Paddy have logically called there in the first place? "Did you try his office?"

"He left already. I figured he was coming to the court, but he's late. I'm really sorry."

Rachel wished he would say "Oh my heck," the way he sometimes did. That was her favorite of his reputed vernacular expressions. According to the boys, he was also known to declare, "Holy catfish!" She yawned, tasting in her breath the dry horror of too much champagne the night before. "Thanks," she told him on the end of the yawn. "I'm surprised Ev didn't cancel your game if he couldn't make it. Actually, I'm surprised he didn't show up. The boys claim he really likes the sport."

Paddy said nothing; Rachel could hear his breathing, as if he were huffing. Then he said, "Well, guess I'll go," as if hoping Rachel would keep him on the line.

"O.K.," she said.
Okey-dokey,
she thought. They hung up.

Rachel looked down at her wrinkled clothes and wondered whether she would bathe today. What was the point of bathing when it was as late as one-thirty? She focused on the wall calendar, relieved to see today's big blank square: no place to go, no one to call. In front of her on the kitchen table were the boys' cereal bowls; the bloated floating Cheerios made her want to fall back in bed.

The phone rang again.

"Rachel?" said Paddy Limbach, as if there were more than one croaky-voiced woman who might pick up the telephone at her apartment. "Rachel?" She couldn't recall having heard her name on his lips before.

"Yes?"

"This is Paddy again."

"Yes, I recognized your voice."

"Well, I was wondering if
you
wanted to play racquetball?"

"Me?" she said, wondering if she should say
I
. "I don't know how," she said. "I have never even
held
a racquetball. Maybe I've never
seen
one."

"It would be blue," he said. "The ball. I can teach you. I've been teaching Ev. It's a good sport."

"Are you feeling sorry for me? Is that why you're asking me?"

"Oh my heck, no," Paddy said. "I just thought since it's nearby, and I've got another hour on the meter here, and I brought all my stuff..." His voice faded, as if he were looking down to inventory all the stuff he'd brought. "And it seems like Ev's a no-show..." He cleared his throat. "Want to?"

Rachel stood up and then promptly sat back down; she was dizzy, her dehydrated brain shrunk in the casing of her skull like a peach pit. She would have to get her act together or she would become, at the very least, fat and slovenly, and at the worst, an unfit mother. "What should I wear?"

She hung up and promptly drank four glasses of water, swallowing ibuprofen with the last. She put on an approximation of what Paddy had told her: sweatpants and a T-shirt, some paint-splattered tennis shoes. It felt liberating to be costumed as an athlete, something Rachel had never been. On occasion she'd hauled herself on a whirl around Lincoln Park, just to feel her heart pound and her lungs ache. She could
picture
herself being wholesome, but she couldn't quite endure the daily tedium of it.

Paddy's club was a public Y, cavernous and drippy with the inevitable stench of generations of men exerting themselves. She wondered what Ev made of the place—Ev, who had ridiculed competition and teams, male jocularity, jockstraps, sweat.

"Teach me," she said to Paddy, who was nearly unrecognizable in goggles and gear, a bug-eyed exterminator. He led her through a dwarf door into an echo chamber. When the door slammed with a prisonlike, fatalistic boom, the lights flashed on above.

Paddy said, "The basic rule is hit hard and hope. I use the same one for pool."

"Hit hard and hope."

Racquetball, Rachel discovered, was a very forgiving sport. One simply had to smack the ball—it had nowhere to disappear to—with all one's might. It was oddly therapeutic. One could vent a lot of anger here, in this big white box. One could sweat out a lot of alcohol. She watched Paddy crouching in front of her and could imagine Ev there, waiting pessimistically to be smashed from behind by a ball. Of course Ev would fret about this, about being whapped on the head with a well-placed shot. She laughed at the image—Ev's cringing hunched shoulders, his anticipation of disaster. Running and slamming the ball made her happy, and Paddy didn't seem to mind her beginner's ineptitude, her sporadic whoops and curses, her missed swings and erratic charges.

At the end of their third game, as she was trying to send back Paddy's serve into the corner, she hit herself in the face, full force, with her own racquet. Her upper lip puffed instantly, like a balloon.

Paddy was furiously unwinding the loop of racquet rope around his wrist, disentangling himself so that he could help her. "Move your hand," he said, pulling down his goggles and peeling his glove off. "Let me see."

She did as he commanded, feeling the blood run over her mouth and chin, bright and salty on her tongue. He stared at her intently, touching her lip gently with a fingertip, as if it might burst. "Ow," he said.

"Yes." She mopped up the blood on her chin with her borrowed wristband, watching drops fall on the blond wooden floor.

"Are your teeth loose?" He opened his mouth in sympathy, in illustration. Rachel remembered his whiny daughter Melanie now. She also could smell his sweat, the moisture radiating from his chest and neck.

"Oh, it's nothing," she tried to say around her fat lip. She felt herself blushing and wished there were a mirror around so that she could gauge the precise size of her embarrassment.

"Hematoma," Paddy said, poking the blue ball in his shorts pocket to create a big lewd bulge on his hip. Then, without appearing to think it over at all, he tipped forward and kissed Rachel on the mouth, so softly, so tenderly, it was as if a moth had simply flitted by her face.

What an astonishing gesture.

"So that's supposed to make it better?" she asked, trying to cover her alarm. She hadn't been kissed on the mouth by a man other than Ev in sixteen years. Could that be? she wondered desperately, speeding through male faces in her mind to locate one whose lips she'd kissed. Paddy stared hard at her—she could feel his gaze, though she did not meet it, stepped back in order to dilute it. Would he try to make love with her, right here in the YMCA racquetball court number two? Many men, she recalled, were like that, driven and reckless as bulls in the face of passion. She couldn't help looking past Paddy to the observation deck above.

He, too, stepped back and stared with discomfiting severity at her mouth. "It's still swelling."

Rachel ran her tongue over the lip, which felt, beneath her tongue, the size of a ... well, of a racquetball. "Ick," she said. "I think my fun is over."

She drove home holding ice to her mouth—provided by the boys in the rackety equipment cage, who told her she should take an anti-inflammatory as well and avoid alcohol—though what she felt beneath the cold was not the smack and swelling but Paddy's kiss, that sweet little action. He had pretended nothing had happened, or perhaps he had meant the kiss to be genuinely and exclusively curative. Was it good that he made her think of her dear son Zach, who used to kiss the part in her hair when she complained of migraine?

That night, at the hour when she began pouring herself glasses of wine and when she usually missed Ev most, Rachel sat with her pulsing fat lip and thought of Paddy bending toward her on the racquetball court, touching her mouth with his. There was a twinkling curiosity idling somewhere in her lonesomeness, a bright lure spinning through cloudy water.

M
ELANIE LIMBACH
would not come out of her room when the guests arrived. Evan respected this; he felt like hiding behind a closed door often enough himself.

Her mother banged with her knuckles, protecting her fingernails, which had to be phony and which were painted a flashing bloody red, as if she'd clawed herself with them. Evan could not understand why he disliked Didi so intensely. Perhaps it was simply because he liked her husband and daughter so much. That she wasn't worthy of them seemed obvious; but why bother hating her?