Talking in Bed (20 page)

They'd opened another bottle of champagne to toast her birthday. He'd made her sons sing to her with him, the two of them plodding through the song as if Paddy were punishing them. If he had been their real father, he would have chastised them for their lack of spirit, but as a guest, he simply tried to rise above it.

"What's in that box?" Zach asked, pointing at Paddy's gift.

Marcus gave him the laser glare again.

"That's for your mom, of course, but let's play bridge first, huh?" He didn't want her to unwrap her present until later. He had a feeling the gift was a bit inappropriate. He'd bought it uneasily, making a grander gesture than was called for, just like kissing her had been; charging fifty-some dollars on his credit card at Marshall Field's was something he'd have to explain to Didi, bill-payer, later.

When Rachel looked at him now, across the table, across the two greasy cardboard boxes that had contained dinner, he could swear he saw interest in her eyes, an interest he knew had grown there completely because of grand yet potentially stupid gestures. She was trying to figure him out. She did not take him entirely seriously, he saw that; there was not scorn in her eyes but amusement.
Willing
amusement. She was willing to let him prove himself to be something besides the bungling goof he appeared to be, blue-collar and uneducated.

Paddy wouldn't have contradicted her on that count. Most of the history of the world escaped him, the huge unknown mass of it lurking beyond him like a tidal wave, something likely to overwhelm and submerge him. He'd stayed only a year at college, in Champaign-Urbana, long enough to get a sense of how weighty his ignorance truly was but not long enough to put a particular dent in it. With a new respect for everything he didn't know, he returned home to Normal, to Didi, to his father's farm—the things he
did
know—and then he had gone to his father-in-law's construction company in Chicago, which soon required its own roofing division.

He would come at Rachel with confidence, trusting the only quality in himself that had ever paid off; she would not be able to resist. She had big eyes, big lips, big hands, big breasts, big brains. She was tall and solid and smart, but he could infiltrate if he pretended to feel one hundred percent surer than he actually felt.

***

Her sons had been missing bridge, one thing the family used to do together. Dizzily, Rachel cleared the pizza boxes and the champagne bottles and told Zach to find the cards.

Family rules dictated that the boys could not be partners. "You pass information," she complained. "I think you use little signals, you cheaters."

"The Cole Convention," Marcus told her.

Zach, throwing items from the deep buffet drawer, called out, "Then I get Mom for my partner."

Rachel started to ask him to be Paddy's partner instead—Marcus was the most serious player, and he could be sharp and digging with his complaints about technique—but didn't, afraid this was patronizing.

"Refresh me on the rules?" Paddy asked, staring, perplexed, at his fan of cards. Rachel wondered if he was considering how to arrange them—by suit or by value?

Marcus sighed dramatically. Rachel recalled what Paddy's wife reportedly said of Marcus at dinner the night before, acting as if it were a compliment: "He has the vocabulary of a simultaneous translator." Marcus had imitated her, rolling his eyes upward in the campy way of a dumb blonde.

"One spade," Paddy announced, making a digging motion with his free hand, grinning at Rachel. He, too, seemed to be getting drunk. His long legs kept swinging open beneath the table, and his knee had fallen against hers once or twice.

Zach passed. Marcus raised the bid to four spades, adding, for Paddy's information, that that was a cutoff bid. "And game," he tacked on after Rachel had passed and while Paddy sat considering what to do.

"Pass?" he said.

"Doy," said Marcus, scratching his head in annoyance.

"Marcus," Rachel warned.

"And he's
playing
it," the boy complained. Paddy laughed self-consciously, perhaps drunkenly. Zach led an ace of diamonds and Marcus laid out his hand, snapping five spades down one at a time. "Pretty good support, eh?" Marcus said, pleased.

Rachel could hear Ev in the boy's inflection, though what was gently ironic in her husband came out like arrogance in her son. She felt sorry for him for a second; somebody was going to squelch that tone sometime soon. And she also missed Ev—sharply, angrily. He had bred this personality, but where was he when it needed cultivating?

"
Great
support," Paddy said absently, "just super-duper."

Of course Rachel didn't
mind
that Paddy didn't seem to play bridge. She
wished
he did, but ... Zach certainly didn't care; after his lead, he'd gone for Cheerios and milk, prepared a bowlful to eat while he threw cards on tricks. But to Marcus the game mattered, and now Marcus's father, who was the superior player, was gone. Paddy was here in his place; Rachel felt his fidgety desire to do well.

"Get the boys off the streets," Marcus chanted in an undertone, leaning over the dummy hand.

Paddy looked at Rachel after she scooped up the first trick. She was waiting for Zach to lead again. Zach glanced over his cereal at the board and then led a club. There was an ace from Marcus's dummy hand, so Paddy pulled it out and laid it on top of Zach's three. Marcus sighed again. "No finesse," he muttered.

Paddy shrugged sheepishly. "That's what all the women say," he said. Rachel tried to chuckle. He tapped the trick closed and set it before him, glancing up at her and grinning again. His eyes, she thought, were quite arresting, blue where Ev's were brown. If he had been standing with the clear blue sky behind him, it might look as if he had two holes in his head. Again Marcus was chanting about the boys on the street.

"Stop it!" Rachel suddenly said, addressing both the game and her own fantasizing. The three males fell silent. A drop of milk slid down Zach's chin.

Paddy tried to lighten the moment, leading with his ace of spades, saying, "What the heck."

"You're on the
board!
" Marcus screamed. In a flash he was out of his chair and down the hall to his bedroom. Since he was dummy, there was no reason for the game to stop except general shock.

Rachel sighed. "Well, he misses his dad."

"Me, too," Zach said, perfectly cheerfully. "But I don't go crying out the door about it."

"No," Rachel confirmed. "No, you don't."

"The 'boys' are the trumps," Zach told Paddy agreeably. "When you get them off the street, it means you try to gather them up."

"Oh-ho," Paddy said. They finished the hand, Paddy going down one. When Zach had had enough to eat, he asked if he could go play with his computer. Rachel excused herself, leaving Paddy at the table shuffling cards.

At Marcus's door she hesitated, listening the way she sometimes had at her husband's study door. When she rapped, Marcus said, "I'm sorry, O.K.?" in an aggrieved voice.

"You all right?"

"Just super-duper."

"What are you doing?"

He sighed loudly. "Reading. A book."

When she closed her eyes, Rachel could feel the gentle spin of her inebriation. It was her birthday, and she didn't want to pursue her son's unhappiness. She hadn't the patience. She was weary of appeasement. "Goodnight, son," she said, laying her hand on the door as she might once have laid it on his back, and then she returned to her guest.

Paddy had moved to the couch in front of the coffee table, the only real furniture in the living room. His gift rested on the open palm of the coffee-table girl, teetering, barely balanced there.

"I need a present," Rachel told Paddy, smiling.

He nodded toward the wrapped box, seeming as eager as she to get rid of the cheery paper and chaotic ribbons. She opened it to discover something purple, velour. A long shirt, heavy and with the odd pliant warmth of an animal in her hands.

"You like it?" Paddy asked.

"Yes," she said, trying to remember the last time she'd worn something velour. Or purple, the shade of which made her think of crayon manufacturers, desperate for more variations.
Eggplant,
they would have named this.
Aubergine.

"I thought you'd look good in a short dress."

Rachel held the bulky garment up again. Now she saw the gathered waist, the slight flare of the skirt. She turned it around, measuring with her eyes the narrow width of its hips, the clingy aspect of its bodice, the little size 8 tag.

"Try it on," Paddy urged.

Rachel took the dress into her bathroom and shut the door. In the mirror she told herself, "This is ridiculous." She made a dead-fish sort of face, stupid and flabby, her neck and shoulders defeated. "Who does he think I am?" she asked her dour mouth, grateful for her tipsiness.

Though she knew the dress would never fit, Rachel wished it would slide over her like a magic spell, make her beautiful. She wanted Paddy to have that talent. But the purple dress would not go over her hips. The top half was nice, actually, the neckline a daring and successful sweetheart dip, beneath which Rachel's breasts buoyed nicely, but just below her waist the thing wouldn't budge. A lumpy inner tube, it felt alive. Now she had to decide how intimate she felt toward Paddy. Or, more precisely, how intimate she wanted him to think she felt.

Leaving the dress bunched at her waist, she pulled her black pants back on and returned to the living room. "I do busts best," she said heartily.

Paddy stood. "Oh." He winced. "Wrong size?"

"Way small."

"I described you to the saleswoman, and she said this was your size."

"What did you say about me?"

"Well, I don't know." He was close enough to touch her, and did, at the hips, where the trouble was. "There's the second zipper," he said hopefully. "Did you try the second zipper?"

"I wasn't aware of a second one," Rachel said. She felt her heart pumping blood to the surface of her skin. Paddy found the zipper and opened it, the backs of his fingers for a moment next to her flesh, his warm knuckles the texture of brown paper bag. Then he eased the skirt down over her hips and pulled the zipper shut with a satisfied
zzzz.

"Perfect," he said, relieved. "Take your pants off." He covered his mouth as if she would reprimand him for naughtiness, a gesture Rachel ignored.

She pulled her pants off while he watched. Her legs looked pale and gelatinous to her, like something left too long in cold water. She fled once more to the bathroom, to stand again before the mirror. Her face was splotchy with her sudden desire for Paddy. Perhaps Ev had been gone so long she would fall for any man who seemed to like her. How could she know, when she'd had so little practice? From the drawer beside the sink she pulled black pantyhose. She yanked them on impatiently.

"Rachel?" She heard him at her bedroom door and opened the bathroom door so he wouldn't alert the boys, whose understanding of this scene would be thoroughly certain: another man where their father ought to be.

"You look great," he told her, steadying himself with a bedpost.

"I like it," she admitted, happier than she could explain. She had no idea what might happen next, a condition she'd inhabited without pleasure all fall, but one that suddenly appeared to be edgier and more exciting. Though the dress was snug, it was not unflattering, at least from the front.

Paddy ran his hand over the wooden ball on the bedpost and stared at her. He asked, "How come you don't wear makeup?"

She shrugged. "My mother wouldn't let us look at mirrors when I was young. We had no mirrors in the whole house. She thought mirrors made you vain. Same with makeup. For a while I wore it, in college, but I just quit, I don't remember why." Of course Ev objected to makeup. She quit because Ev found it reprehensible. He had seemed to believe she ought to admire his thinking on this issue, and she supposed she did. "Plus," she confided to Paddy, "I keep thinking teenagers will point and laugh. I was never very good at putting it on. I think you have to learn it young, at your mother's knee, for it to take."

"I'll make you up," Paddy said. His palm rolled over the bedpost. "I used to do makeup for all the plays at my high school. I was good at it."

Rachel raised her eyebrows. "Oh, go ahead," she finally said. "Make me over, I dare you."

In the bathroom, she switched on the panel of lights over the mirror and drew the clothes hamper to the sink to sit on, shaking her hair from her eyes. Paddy stood behind her, blinking in the sudden brightness. She did not want to contemplate their reflections together him with his sky-blue eyes and corn-yellow hair, his youth and her own agedness. When she had been thirty, she might have looked twenty-five; now that she was forty, she could look thirty-five, but he would still appear to be younger. When people commented on her looks, they most often told Rachel she looked healthy, a word she had decided was simply a euphemism for plain.

She opened a drawer and let Paddy handle the slim, mint-green, pristine containers of pore minimizer and blush and the wine-colored eyeliner, bought long ago during a shopping trip with Zoë, who purchased makeup with insatiable optimism about its transfigura-tive powers.

He bent over her upturned face, beginning with coverup, spreading it in circles, his lips open until Rachel smiled at him, imitating his slack-mouthed expression. Her chin was aimed at his jeans zipper. Next he brushed highlighter beneath her cheekbones, then lined her eyes, holding the corner of one lid while stroking over it dexterously with the crayon. His hand trembled near her eyes, but he smoothed the snaky line with his thumbtip, creating a smudgy shadow like smoke on each eyelid.

"Open your mouth," he told her, once more opening his. He flicked mascara up and down, over and under the lashes. "I lied," he said softly. "I never did makeup in high school. I just used to watch Didi." His hands were warm and uniformly callused, like leather. He had a physical confidence with her that Rachel both liked and was wary of. He was not good at bridge, but he was good at this, he seemed to be telling her—he was good at touching her.