Talking in Bed (21 page)

"I would hate that name, Didi," Rachel said, just to introduce a spouse into the events. "How can she stand it?"

"Her real name's Deirdre. She prefers Didi. Says it's friendlier."

"Oy." She watched him as he worked, moving her features accommodatingly. When he finished tamping her lips with a liver-colored lipstick, she stared at her reflection unselfconsciously. She didn't begin crying, but she began feeling like she ought to. Something pathetic was invading her life, something foolish—this makeup job had just enough of the clown in it to make her see that. There were dots of lipstick on her teeth, circles of cheery red on her cheeks. She was not the kind of woman who would lean onto a friendly man's shoulder and sob. She was just barely the kind of woman who would spontaneously invite a man to dinner and bridge, and because Paddy seemed to understand this, he moved timidly into a position that would appear neither too forward nor too remote, squatting beside the little vanity they'd rigged. "Here's my shoulder," he said into the mirror. He still held the bullety lewd lipstick in the fingers of one hand; in the other, he waved a pink bandanna.

Rachel sighed and lifted her head, tilting her chin to tighten the throat. Her features stood out now that Paddy had emphasized them; her pores had been minimized, as promised by the bottle. How would she ever have predicted this was the way she'd spend her fortieth birthday?

"All vamped up and nowhere to go," she said. "You want another drink?"

They left the bathroom as if suddenly realizing its intimate dimensions (small) and furnishings (toilet and tub and scales, places for naked flesh to rest itself) and returned to the big public living room. Rachel brought out brandy in glasses the boys had made, employing a kit they'd found in the storeroom when Rachel redecorated it.

"I used to buy Didi clothes," Paddy said. "I don't think I ever got her size right either, come to think of it."

"She's a single-digit gal, I have a feeling," Rachel said.

"Beg pardon?"

"I like this dress," Rachel told him. "It was really too kind of you to get it." When he smiled at her, relieved, she saw that his upper lip was bleeding.

"Oh Paddy, I'm so sorry," she said, stopping herself from reaching forward to touch the small cut. "The boys have been recycling jars into drinking glasses. They like to pretend we're so disadvantaged here with no man in the house, surviving by our wits and our Swiss Army knives. What can I do for you?" It would have been possible—so neatly parallel—for her to take her turn at kissing his wounded lip. But she didn't. Though he had given her permission to fall in love with him, she did not yet want to accept the offer. She would have to stare out her window and think it over.

"More brandy," Paddy said, wiping his mouth in a manly manner with the back of his hand, then wiping his hand on his bandanna. "There seems to be blood in this drink."

He wouldn't accept a new tumbler.

"Broken glass has always terrified me," she said, pouring him more of the aromatic liquor, then sitting back on her section of the couch and pulling her legs beneath her. She ran her index finger around the rim of her own glass.

He turned his glass so that he could continue to drink, letting the brandy burn his cut each time he took a sip.

"The boys think our life is falling apart since Ev left. They cope by circling the wagons—isn't that the expression? Pulling everything in tight, taking five-minute showers and clipping coupons." She laughed. "And sometimes I wake up with an empty wineglass beside the bed, and I'm sure I'm turning into an alcoholic—my teeth all furry from forgetting to brush, a half-drunk drink waiting where there ought to be a water glass..." Rachel filled her mouth with brandy, let it seep down her throat. "I like to drink."

"I figured that out about you."

"You think I should worry?"

"Nah. How old are you today, anyway?"

She frowned. "Forty. It's dispiriting."

"Forty," Paddy said. "You're older than me."

"You sound surprised. Didn't you know that?"

"Well, no."

Rachel suddenly felt the full bulk of her foolishness: sitting in a tight purple minidress on her fortieth birthday. Flirting with her husband's friend, a man she hadn't even particularly liked until he brought her a gift. Would the future ever offer up sophisticated surprises instead of demeaning ones? At sixty, would she be seducing one of her sons' friends, piercing outrageous body parts, investing money according to zodiac counsel?

Rachel could feel herself slipping into a bitter associative mode that had nothing to do with Paddy, one that would make her miss her husband, who would have known how to pursue a conversation through its peculiar unspoken maze, coming up with a tidbit in five minutes that resulted from following her silently on his own, something that would raise the evening's tone to a more acceptable level. To bring herself back, to rise from the subterranean territory they appeared to be in, she asked, "What are we up to?" She had arrived at a tired bluntness that was not joyfully drunk but simply pre-hung-over.

Paddy scooted over closer on the couch. He put his arm around her, and almost against her will, as if her ear or neck were doing its own thinking, her head lowered itself onto his shoulder. He smelled of some cheap aftershave, a quaint aroma Rachel recalled from her adolescence. "Happy birthday," he said, squeezing her.

She lifted her head, leaving a flesh-toned smear on his white shirt. He'd said "Happy birthday" in such a way that she knew he meant "Goodbye for now." He meant they were going to take things slowly, if at all, which was prudent, and disappointing, and exhilarating.

L
UELLEN PALMER
canceled her sessions with Evan before he had a chance to suggest closure. This was like her, he thought: wanting to be in charge, wanting to reject him before he rejected her. He recognized her behavior from his own, the need to preempt, to protect. He reassured himself he'd advised her properly before they parted ways: against having a baby, against one-night stands, against guilt and self-hatred.

But he missed her. He missed the way she cursed, the way she snorted in laughter the anecdotes she told him, the merciless way she berated her mother and sisters, her colleagues at the photo studio, herself, and especially the men who loved her. Was there any disdain more vicious than that of the self-loather toward her fans?

Instead of filling her weekly time slot, Ev took walks during it. He could have used the money—he was maintaining two homes now—but the urge to escape the office early and get out into the air overruled financial concerns.

His need to walk had grown since leaving his family. Before, he'd taken time over lunch or during a cancellation to walk the streets near his office: under the Loop tracks, down South Michigan, alongside the river, occasionally into a building and up its stairs or elevator. Now he often walked home—over an hour's trip on foot—and sometimes wandered from his new apartment after dinner. The evenings were long and dead, his attention span shrunken. The light bulbs in his apartment bothered him; his neighbors made too much noise and odor. He had no patience for books or music, not even for marijuana, which he'd bought optimistically but found disappointing. It did not cut through his impatience the way it once had; it did not make him able to live happily in a present moment. Life in his apartment should have been as soothing as disappearing into his study had once been; but his family wasn't waiting on the other side of the door, and that made all the difference.

On the other side of
this
door was the world, unbuffered, unmitigated. He began to feel as if this move away from home were senseless, as if he were staying away not because he wanted to but because he was too humiliated to move back. Stubbornness was dishonest, in his opinion. And so was moving home because he found his own company lacking. Hadn't he always insisted that he was someone who enjoyed being alone? Instead, he walked to bars, and he occasionally had more than one drink. Drinking made him guilty; guilt felt like an emotion he wanted to suffer. But then he was walking again, vaguely drunk, improperly guilty.

Only walking allowed him to think straight. Only walking permitted a balance that kept him from sinking. Mindless movement and mindful contemplation: he wondered if his brother had discovered something like this years ago, the need to satisfy a pressing present urge.

He was mugged on a Friday night in December as he walked home from a dull Christmas party. A gun was shoved into his spine so firmly he thought he'd already been shot; the picture of a silencer flashed in his mind despite his never, to his knowledge, having seen one.

"Here we go," said his assailant, snapping the fingers of his free hand. "The wallet and the watch, big guy, Mr. Gay Blade."

In fact, Ev had no wallet, was wearing his only suit, and had stuffed a few dollar bills in his jacket pocket (this for one scotch at a bar; he'd been at a holiday party, but his friends could not know that he was drinking again after so long an abstinence, could not be given yet another aspect of his life to pity; his separation from Rachel was fodder enough). Ev found it difficult to convey his meager holdings to his mugger, as if the encounter were happening in a dream and he were sleepily mute. Eventually the man felt for himself the absence of wallet and watch, one fist ramming into Ev's pockets while the other one held the gun against his ribs, the man cursing Ev while Ev wanted to apologize. He knew he was going to suffer some abuse for not being prepared; he received a hard whack on the side of his head.

Pistol-whipping, the police called it, though that sounded exaggerated to Ev, since there'd been only one strike. However, the skin had been broken and a strange vessel had burst, sending a rhythmic spurt of blood from Ev's cheek, a projectile leak onto his nice wool suit, a pewter gray now dashed with the Tabasco red of emergency. He could not get the bleeding to stop; the police didn't want to leave him by himself, as his utter calm was a reaction they did not understand.

In fact, the gun in his back had not made his life fly before his eyes; he had not experienced a sudden desire to reform. It was with profound patience that he'd suffered his mugging, which he viewed as a kind of ironic cap on an tiresome evening. He'd been walking home from his partner Lydia's, taking a distant detour through Bucktown, the neighborhood of Luellen's bar, Friendly's, the place she went to pick up men. The street had been momentarily empty—cars at an intersection behind him, patrons of a restaurant across the street, Christmas lights over the business fronts as if over a tiny sleeping town—and Ev had been wondering if he was making excuses for searching Luellen out, if he had brought along his dollar bills to buy her a gin instead of himself a scotch. He'd been thinking about her worrying that her decision to stop her sessions had to do with him. Perhaps he'd committed some subtle fumbling gesture that made her think he thought she was hopeless. But he did not believe he'd been completely honest about his motives; other clients had halted sessions and he'd not sought them out.

He missed her. It was possible he missed her more because he also was missing his wife. And Joni. All the intelligent women were disappearing from his life. He seemed to be driving them away. And at the party, he'd been missing alcohol, and his children, and randy jokes, all the ingredients of a truly festive evening. They were achingly absent at Lydia's apartment, where everyone was tactful and solicitous, where there was no sexual tension and no drunken behavior, where nothing unexpected was going to happen unless Ev himself provided it. The eggnog hadn't even had eggs in it; Lydia was living low-fat, vegetarian, chemical-free—virtues that had once given Ev something to talk with her about and that now, he'd discovered, he was savagely scathing about.

As if abstinence made you blessed. As if denial gave you celestial credit. When Lydia had told him that she'd finally managed to eliminate all animal products from her life, even the ones the animals gave up willingly, Ev had sourly said, "There'll be another star in your heavenly crown."

"Who can we turn you over to?" his cop asked him when he refused to go to the ER. "Who you want to call?"

It was not fair to phone Rachel; he didn't want to endure her pity, either. She'd been angry with his desertion but now seemed strangely sympathetic when he happened to see or speak to her, as if she were making peace with their separation, getting used to the extra space it must afford. He thought of the small gathering of people he'd left at the party: Lydia and her lesbian lover; his other partner, Jean, and her vulturine writer husband; other business associates, all decent enough but with their own grubby reasons for wanting to see Ev further down. He thought of several friends he hadn't spoken with for a few months, who didn't know he and Rachel had separated, married couples who most likely would opt to remain friendly with Rachel rather than Evan. Rachel had more talent for keeping friends; she kept better track of their lives, of their phone numbers, of their habits. Ev could not stand the thought of these husbands leaving their warm beds, leaving their warm wives, arriving smooth and concerned and still warm themselves to care for him. It was the image of the wives, who would rise to phone Rachel, that irked him.

Only Paddy seemed tolerable, only Paddy Limbach, who would leave Didi in her baby-doll nightgown, amble into the police station, mildly fuzzy, wearing his cowboy hat or maybe a fluorescent-orange hunter's cap with earflaps, now that it was cold. Didi wouldn't call Rachel. Paddy wouldn't give advice or make judgments. Ev could see himself sitting with Paddy in a diner afterward, eating greasy hash browns and drinking scorched coffee, surrounded by drunks, the evening weirdly rehabilitated.

But it was Didi who answered the phone, her childish voice alarmed.

"Paddy said he was going out drinking with you," she told Ev.

Ev, annoyed by the dopey lies of typical marriages, could not think of a satisfactory response.

"When did you last see him?" Didi asked. "Were you at a bar together?"