Talking in Bed (25 page)

A beachball sailed by. People stood and sat, stood and sat, raising their arms and lowering them. "Here comes the wave," Paddy shouted to her, standing and sitting with the rest. It was sort of phenomenal that so many grownups could be persuaded to wear blue sweaters and pretend to be a wave. Rachel tried to think of attending a basketball game as an enriching experience, a mother-son bonding event. She tried to believe she was having fun. It seemed to her that having fun was something she'd outgrown, like reading the comics or going dancing. She'd lost the knack. Or maybe she'd never had it.

Unfortunately, her sons looked as baffled as she felt. Zach chewed a licorice whip and Marcus was reading the pamphlet Paddy had bought for them with the players' names and photographs in it. Up and down the court stomped the teams, great big boys, the basketball sailing from hand to hand, the players' faces hermetic and obsessed. Part of Rachel wanted to escort her sons away from here, hustle them to the car and then back to their condo, hide them from such grotesque displays of aggression. She felt extraordinarily exposed: the proximity of everyone, the noise and action. The other part of her welcomed the normality, the prototypical American fun of it all. The thing about fun, she thought, was that you couldn't concentrate on it. Otherwise you saw how absurd it was. Boys trying to poke a ball in a basket, adults avidly following, up and down, up and down, firing off obscenities, howling at the boobish referees wearing zebra shirts.

But Rachel decided to let it fascinate her. She gave herself permission to study Paddy and his world. She let him take her hand when the game was over and lead her through the crowd to his car.

He knew many things Rachel didn't, but what she came to admire in him was the fact that he owned up to what he didn't know, which was substantial. He had a foggy sense of geography, one inferior to Rachel's sons'. He did not, for example, know where Mount Everest was, nor which countries surrounded France. She'd only discovered this because Marcus had a project due; but it successfully opened the possibility that he knew much, much less.

One of Rachel's most debilitating fears was that people would discover how little prepared she was to understand the world: scientifically, politically, organically. With her brainy son Marcus she feigned feigning ignorance, his assumption being that she did so in order to get him to research his own answers. In social circles where she might have to comment on world events or historical facts, she fell back on idiosyncratic anecdotes she'd picked up from television reports or a recently read magazine article. She listened to the news on public radio every day, but her attention to it was purely temporary: she did not have sufficient background to draw conclusions. And when she asked Marcus to help locate a plug-in for a new reading lamp, he said to her with disdain as he crawled under the sideboard, "Could it be called an
outlet
?" Later, when he sat researching the lifespans of bats, Rachel read a few paragraphs about their feeding habits, their radar and parenting. It was all too much, the world. She could never get an adequate handle on it. Whatever she learned, she seemed to forget: names of painters, philosophies of great thinkers, the temperature at which water boiled, the exchange rate of the British pound, the different types of clouds, the depth of the ocean, the size of the sun, the arrangement of the universe.

Paddy didn't know much of this stuff either, although he read the
Old Farmer's Almanac
religiously. He had a beaming way of smiling at Rachel when she pointed out his ignorance, a smile that successfully let her know she was the only one who thought it was important. Other people, he implied, did not so fervently worry about what they were revealed not to know. He gave her gifts; he certainly would not judge her deficiencies.

And that felt novel. Her husband, she'd believed, found her lacking.

***

Rachel knew she had fallen solidly in love—had moved from the temporary, suspended
falling
to the thudding past participle,
had fallen
—when she delighted in hearing her sons say Paddy's name, illicitly and innocently. "Paddy told me..." Zach would begin, his side of an argument aided by the simple masculine invocation. And Marcus would answer "
Paddy
" in his scornful, patronizing way. She'd loved to hear them call Ev Papa, to watch them run at him full-tilt when he came home from work.

Paddy,
they said now, and her heart bloomed.

"P
ADDY SAYS
our pipes are lead," Zach reported to his father. Before Evan could reply, Marcus corrected his brother.

"He said the
seams
were lead, not the pipes. Idiot," he added scornfully, a tag intended for either Zach or Paddy, Ev wasn't sure which.

"Marcus." Ev sighed, too tired to get upset. The habit of relentless parenting—stalking, catching, punishing—had fizzled inside him; he wasn't in the mood to rekindle it. The combination of a drink and a long walk had made him successfully exhausted. He'd forgotten the boys would be arriving; they were waiting in the liquor store across the street, sucking lollipops the Chinese proprietor had given them. The lollipops were pink, heart-shaped, a pair of nippled breasts. Evan had purchased cigars just to express his gratitude.

Marcus had eyed the cigar package suspiciously. "You gave up smoking," he told his father.

"I'm being friendly," Ev said. Then, because he thought he was lying and he remembered that he didn't lie to his son, he said, "And I might feel like smoking one later."

Marcus's face made Ev feel villainous.

"If our seams are lead," Zach went on in the apartment kitchen, hours later, "we could be getting brain damage when we have a drink."

Evan sat with them while they did their homework, Zach dreamily, Marcus furtively. Their scritching pencil noise seemed endless; every few minutes, Ev would leave the room to wander around the apartment as if he were looking for something. He was restless and weary at once. When he got back to the kitchen, everything was as he had left it, flat. Time itself was bored with proceeding.

"All Paddy said," said Marcus, "was that we should run the water for a minute before we fill our glasses. That's all. Then the water that's been sitting in the pipes washes away. You always exaggerate, Zach. You're always getting all excited."

"
You're
the one who stayed up all night scared for your brain cells," Zach said amiably. "Not me."

"You don't have enough brain cells to worry about."

Evan wondered why his tolerance for their bickering had lessened instead of grown larger. Wouldn't it have made more sense for him to sort of miss it, to feel nostalgic toward it, to indulge it happily, stocking up for the lonesome moment when they'd gone?

"The plumber said it was unlikely our seams were lead," Marcus told his father as if he and Ev were the two adults at the table, as if Ev had expressed concern, which, in a former time, he would have.

"Paddy—" Zach began.

"When did you see Paddy?" Ev asked, hoping to distract them.

They looked up at him simultaneously, their expressions the same, that suddenly regretful, "oh, never mind" face.

That came first.

Then there was Paddy himself, oddly sheepish lately, unable to meet Ev's gaze. Zach had reported that Paddy sometimes ate dinner with them, although Paddy had never mentioned it, and Marcus had perfected an imitation of him, a cruel parody of a retarded person, the lolling tongue, the spastic hand gestures. He bulged his jaw and blew hair from his forehead, a move he might have had to study Paddy, maybe for an extended period, in order to acquire.

Paddy and Ev still met for racquetball in the Y, a sweaty warren, a warm haven in the unremitting winter. Ev scrutinized Paddy; Paddy behaved like a man with a guilty conscience and a child with a giddy secret, averting his eyes, demure as if making up for bad behavior yet gleeful as if in love. It surprised Ev how peacefully he accepted the possibility that Paddy and Rachel were sleeping together. Was he just that incredulous, his ego just that big? Did it mean he had truly left his wife? Or did it mean he couldn't take Paddy seriously as a threat? Or did he enjoy thinking of Rachel as attractive to another man? Perhaps this was how he would have to learn about his feelings, by having them tested, one by one.

His reflexive anger, hidden away from himself, surfaced on the racquetball court. He served into the corner eight points in a row, a shot he'd developed and held in check, now gone wild, merciless. Paddy, overconfident, waited in the corner the ninth time while Ev sent a slow lob in the other direction. The game continued in a childish vein, Paddy hustling to keep up with Ev's trickiness, then resorting to his original advantage of simple brute strength, each forgoing the unspoken restraint they'd previously played with. At first Paddy seemed willing to let Ev win the game, but then he seemed to take stock of the situation and decide, in his boyish way, that he
wouldn't
be losing this third game, never mind whether he'd won the wife.

"Fuck!" Ev shouted when he spun and missed a return. His forehead throbbed; the vein in his temple stood out as if it would burst. Paddy, who'd fallen into the competition easily, recognizing it from high school, from other games with other men, suddenly remembered who he was playing with.

"What's wrong?" he asked, stopping play entirely. The face Ev turned to him—hostile, teeth bared beneath protective prescription glasses, nostrils flaring—startled Paddy and brought him instantly around: he was standing in a locked room with his mistress's husband, who held his racquet like a weapon.

But Ev shook himself. The skin on his upper arms was loose; his white doorknobby knees were decidedly unattractive. Paddy could not help comparing his own muscular arms to Ev's, his own smooth brown back to Ev's skinny flaccid one. He tried to suppress his sense of victory, the surge of pure happiness. Ev might have won two of their three games on the court, but Paddy had Rachel's heart—or if not her heart, her sighs, her teeth at his ears and lips. And having her meant he did not care about racquetball. They finished their game and he lost again, for once not having to pretend to be gracious as a loser. He clapped Ev on the shoulder, feeling for the first time toward him genuine and complete pity.

It was Paddy's smugness, his condescension, that began to convince Ev he was right about an affair. Part of him wanted to shove Paddy onto the floor and beat his mouth until his lips quit looping in a smile around those perfect teeth; another part wanted to quiz Rachel:
now
did she understand the elusive attraction of Paddy Limbach?
Now
could they explore his curious appeal?

In the shower, Paddy and Ev stood silently under two steamy spigots, separated by a partial wall, the tops of their heads and their toes visible to each other. All five of the toes on Paddy's left foot were capped by dented purple nails; he'd dropped a tarbucket on them over the summer, and the injury was slowly pushing out of him. He liked his wounds, the signs of labor. Ev's feet resembled his father's, long and pale, the toes nearly prehensile. He had no deformities that weren't inherited. They were both thinking of Rachel as they soaped their hairy parts: heads, armpits, crotches. They were both considering divorce because of Rachel.

Like their fathers' deaths, this parallel milepost struck them differently. Paddy turned his face to the invigorating spray and grinned, letting the water strike his teeth. He was making a case for leaving Didi, feeding himself a theory that she'd grown as unhappy in their marriage as he: hadn't it been Didi who'd quit enjoying sex? As far as he could tell, Didi spent the day moping around the house, playing church music on her organ, dusting her animal figurines. And as for Melanie, wouldn't the presence of two stepbrothers be good for her, with Marcus teaching her calculus, Zach giving her piggyback rides?

In the next stall, Evan felt the merciless stinging pulse on his scalp and imagined it eating him away incrementally like acid rain ate statuary. He was picturing the future, a frightening absence of image in his consciousness, like the blinding aftereffect of a flashbulb, an explosion of dense mercury behind his closed eyelids. He hated the future, the nothingness of it, the fact that he seemed to be inviting it in, or at least doing little to prevent its arrival.

In another time, the two men would have mentioned their thoughts on divorce; in another time, Ev would have encouraged Paddy's, and Paddy would have discouraged Ev's. Now their advice to each other would run exactly counter to that. Their advice would reveal their secret knowledge.

"Same time next week?" Paddy asked in the lobby as they retrieved their cards from the file box.

Ev nodded, slipping a toothpick into his mouth. His eyeglasses still held a breath of fog; he could not have clearly seen Paddy, even if he'd wanted to, as they said goodbye.

***

Rachel admired Ev's running away, despite his leaving her. She'd always wanted to run away herself—didn't everyone?—but hadn't had the courage: not as an adventurous child or rebellious adolescent, not as a bored adult. But Ev had done it, and she admired him, there was no denying it.

Of course she was also angry. And it went without saying, he'd hurt her feelings. These were the ways she'd found to make her affair justifiable, to make her behavior fitting.

After eight months, she went for the first time to visit Ev in his new apartment, a formerly nice place, now brown top to bottom. The building was just east of Wrigley Field, too close to the Addison el stop. In it lived poor hip young people who played loud music and persisted in leaving the vestibule door ajar, so drunks slept under the mailboxes. Rachel sort of liked the atmosphere, in spite of herself. It reminded her of college, of other romances gone bad: the squeaky floors and Escher-like staircase, the comprehensive industrial paint job—brown, brown, brown, banister, wainscoting, floor.

Inside Ev's apartment hung dirty vinyl shades that snapped open when you gave a little pull; through the dormer window cold light shone from the fluorescent streetlamp. Ev had only to walk next door to fetch taquitos or Schlitz malt liquor—not that Rachel could imagine him ingesting such things, but the proximity of them, the odors in the air of foreign food and diesel exhaust, made his existence appear exotic. Because Rachel had gotten the Saab when he moved away, Ev had no choice but to take the el downtown every morning and probably had established a morning ritual at the station newsstand. In his apartment, Rachel felt the ghostly presence of a long line of single men. She tightened her coat around herself, an alleged ambassador from what was supposed to be the good life, hausfrau come to restore her husband's faith in the same.