Talking in Bed (27 page)

And now she was miserable again, wedged between other shoppers in their icy cars, cursing the arctic Midwest and its deadly seasons. The setting sun reflected mercilessly from the icy shimmer of every surface. Winter wouldn't go away this year. This was when the pendulum swung into guilt, in the closing hours of the day, when the cold oppressed her and her sons had disappeared into self-sufficiency, when she waited for Paddy to want her, when she waited for the cocktail hour to arrive. It seemed to Rachel she could attach her emotions to a simple clock and watch them play out on her own face all day long: eager morning, melancholy afternoon, resigned evening, and then unknown darkness as
P.M.
clicked once more into
A.M.
, a time wherein she might be kissing Paddy on her very own marriage bed or she might be all alone.

And so she'd gone to the tropical warmth of the mall, to the unlikely makeup counter and the pseudo-French girl, and bought herself some insoluble mascara. It was a troubled time and she was arming herself.

She wanted to tell somebody about her dilemma, about having two men—did she have two men?—but who? Zoë came to mind, but Zoë was traveling, sending postcards of Turkish baths and gruesome priapic statuary. Finally Rachel had a problem Zoë might fully engage herself in, a juicy bedroom quandary, a story, and, of course, nowhere to tell it.

For about five seconds, Rachel considered going to a therapist. But living with Ev had made her into a psychologist snob: she didn't think anybody could tell her more than she already knew about her feelings. She wanted to talk, but she didn't want advice she would feel obliged to follow. She didn't want to think of this as a serious problem, one to which she had committed money and time. Maybe this was an urge best satisfied by phoning talk radio, discussing her dilemma anonymously. Not that she expected anyone to help her solve it: she just wanted to hear how it sounded, spoken aloud. She wanted someone to say, "Really, two men? And you love them both?"

Yes, she loved them both. They were two sides of Rachel herself, one side hopeful, the other skeptical, one side contented, the other driven by discontent, one side easygoing, the other on edge. And so on. They represented a full range, and Rachel didn't want to deny herself either part. But of course she was going to have to choose. Nobody could live this way, agonizing over the decision. Regardless of who chose hen, whether Ev came home or not, she had to choose whom to love.

She read books, looking for someone with a similar problem, but always—without exception—there was an obvious choice to be made. In literature, the spouse was always a secondary character, the product of an arranged marriage, no fun. Society conspired against the lovers, and though the adulterers ought obviously to choose against the spouses, they always ended up miserably guilt-ridden, ostracized, dead—poor Anna Karenina, poor Emma Bovary.

But Rachel loved both men. She wanted to have her cake and she wanted to eat it, too. She was starting to think of them as incomplete without each other. She wanted to fuse them together, their personalities and appearances and the strangely different ways in which they had erotic appeal. She wanted Paddy's body to go with Ev's expressions; she wanted Paddy's playfulness with Ev's irony; Paddy's naivete with Ev's knowingness; Paddy's shame with Ev's frankness.

At home, she unloaded her cosmetics into the bathroom drawer with the others, the ones Paddy had used to make her up. Leaving the room, she banged her thigh against the counter, and tears sprang to her eyes. She took a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and lay on her bed, equipped, crying again.

***

In the middle of a session with an adolescent kleptomaniac, Evan suddenly could not concentrate. He was thinking of Rachel again, of her long comfortable body, of her whimper when she reached orgasm, of her strong thighs around his hips. He had not officially fantasized about his wife for a number of years, but he now found himself utterly unable to focus on his client's speech. The words had begun coming out like meaningless sounds, a spurt of random notes, confetti.

When he'd finally finished the hour and ushered the boy out, he phoned Rachel.

"You want to fuck, here at my office?"

"Ev?" she said.

His own name stopped his desire cold. Who else would it be? He should have been able to say that to her, but of course he knew who else it could be. He hung up, then buzzed the receptionist to tell her he wouldn't take any calls, not even from his wife.

He wanted her, but for the wrong reasons. She'd said his name, reminding him of the complexity of her sexual life these days, the very complexity that seemed to arouse him, and he'd had to hang up, capping the phone as if capping his desire. He laid his head on his desk, listening to the phone buzz in the outer office, the soothing tones of the receptionist, a temp from the agency who wouldn't ask questions. He stuck out his tongue to taste the unpleasant dry surface of his green blotter. He tried not to, but all he could imagine was Rachel's naked bottom sitting on his desk while he put his face between her legs, then fucked her. He wanted badly to throw himself against her on this desk.

A
S USUAL
, Marcus was having no success at concealing his hurt. He had just been punched in the face, hard, and tears had started up as if his head were full of them, as if he were a walking water balloon, primed for popping.

"White boy, you a fuckin' snail," the boy had said as he pushed Marcus onto the train car. At school, it might have been the baffling opening lines to a friendly exchange; the black students frequently panicked Marcus unnecessarily. They seemed angry when they weren't, he'd figured out; their emotional thermostats were set higher than white people's. But it was a rough shove, and he stumbled over Zach's soccer bag and backpack. Zach always took more than necessary to school; he looked as if he were running away from home every morning—and like a bum by sunset, shirt untucked, belongings leaking from their containers.

"I ain't got the time, whitey," the boy went on, pushing Marcus again.

Staggering over Zach's bag, Marcus fell backward against a post and landed facing the boy from near the floor. The boy casually pulled back his fist and gave Marcus a punch, his knuckles slicing sideways over Marcus's face, as if he wanted to take off the nose. Then he calmly sidled down the crowded aisle and through the doors to the car behind. It was this unnecessary punch that would later infuriate Marcus; after all, he was already effectively out of the way by the time it came.
Gratuitous violence,
he would think, when he was composed.

Zach had not noticed what had happened. It had happened so quickly, in fact, that only the two old women in the old-woman seats beside the door had noticed. They weren't going to mention it, apparently. Marcus purposely trod on one of their feet as he fell into the seat behind them that had just been vacated.

"What happened to your
nose?
" Zach asked, alarmed. Instantly Marcus covered it with his palm. Beneath his fingers he could feel his own pulpy flesh, made unfamiliar by swelling, by humiliation.

"That"—Marcus was unaccustomed to saying something bad about a black—"asshole hit me. Because of all your shit in my way." He kicked Zach's soccer bag. Blaming Zach, of course, felt totally familiar.

"What asshole?"

"Shut up," Marcus said. "Just shut up." He turned his messy face toward the window and watched the buildings go through his reflection. He was furious.

They went north, headed toward their father's apartment. Their weekend visits had grown less interesting to both boys. Zach missed his mother when he was with his father more than he missed his father when he was with her. His mother kept things normal. She made him feel normal, taken care of. She reminded him to put on clean underwear. She remembered to pick up his Ventolin inhalers, for his asthma, and she remembered to tell him to put one in his pocket when he left the house. She liked to hug him, and she was soft, and she smelled good. She called him "Babe" and "Hon," and "Monkey" if she was especially happy.

His father seemed sometimes to forget the boys were with him; a few weeks ago he'd come home so late they had had to wait at the liquor store for him. Then he'd looked at them, scowling, as if they'd not been invited. As if there had to be an invitation.

"You want to go home?" Zach said suddenly to Marcus. If he'd been punched on the el, that's where he would want to go. "You could go home. I'll tell Dad you aren't feeling well."

Marcus looked into Zach's face. Zach smiled so that he wouldn't grimace; Marcus's nose resembled a yam, discolored and big. The train pulled into the Fullerton station and Marcus jumped up.

"I'm going home," he announced, as if he'd come up with the idea himself.

"Goodbye," Zach said, careful to pull his bags out of his brother's way. He sighed, wishing he had a good reason to go home, too.

***

Marcus ran down the platform steps with his head lowered. His fury at the black boy seemed larger than his body could contain. Here he was, the advocate for equality at his school, the boy who'd phone-canvassed for Mayor Washington's campaign six years ago (at age eight! the youngest one there!) and then wept when the man died. It was utterly unjust, thoroughly unfair, entirely ridiculous and dismaying that Marcus had been struck by a black boy! He could not believe the injustice. Hadn't it been Marcus who had made the gang of neighborhood children insert
tiger
when they said, "Catch a
nigger
by the toe"? Hadn't it been Marcus who had intentionally broken the racial segregation in the chem lab by choosing a black partner?

Without thinking, Marcus ran east, facing the high April wind, heading home. He didn't want to have to discuss his injured face and feelings with his father. He didn't want his father's philosophical, psychological calm. He didn't want to hear how his pain measured against all the other pain in the world, how small his was by comparison. He wanted instead his mother's horror. He would walk into the apartment and thrust his beaten face at her like a rebuke: see. He wanted her sympathy; he wanted her guilt, guilt that she hadn't been there to protect him, hadn't been there to stop the stranger from punching her son.

Fresh hot self-pity filled Marcus's face. Now his nose was sore; now he could feel his top gum throbbing; the nosepiece of his eyeglasses felt newly tight on his swollen bridge, as if he'd bent the wire. The icy wind felt good for once.
Fucking nigger,
he thought experimentally.

In the building's entryway—glorious warmth—he found Paddy Limbach, who stood there like a feeb pulling his work gloves off one finger at a time. Paddy's face went through a few expressions when he saw Marcus: surprise, polite pleasure, then the desired dismay. "Holy catfish! What happened?"

Marcus started up the stairs without answering, unwilling to join Paddy in waiting for the elevator and besides, plodding up all sixteen floors would leave him winded when he finally reached his mother. He let his blood drop on the carpet.
Holy catfish.
Paddy's presence made him outraged with his father: if his father would move home, that moron wouldn't be coming around.

When Rachel heard somebody at the door, she opened it, expecting Paddy. Instead, her son stood there with a broken nose, heaving his chest mightily, a brown membrane of blood wheezing in and out of one nostril. She gasped, then took him into her arms, the first time she'd held him in maybe years, a thought that saddened her.

"It wasn't fair!" he sobbed.

"No, it wasn't," she soothed, shutting the apartment door behind him and leading him to her bathroom, where she studied him under the bright lights. "Tell me what happened, sugar."

A few minutes later, Paddy stood awkwardly outside the door, wondering if he should go home. His hands ached from working outside in the cold all day, all winter and into spring; he wanted to soak them in hot water and have Didi rub her hand cream on them while he and she watched television. It was a simple enough need, one he could fulfill within twenty minutes if he just turned around and got home. He debated going or staying as he stood in Rachel's quiet hallway. Not many of the other occupants had children, he decided; the place was too still. There was no parking—he'd left his Bronco six blocks away, in a two-hour zone where he'd no doubt receive a twenty-five-dollar ticket—and now her son was here. Today, for the first time, his affair did not attract him as much as his other life. He flexed his fingers, which made his dry knuckles crack; he could almost smell the Pacquin lotion Didi liked to massage in, thinking of the way she warmed it first between her own hands, the wet, vaguely obscene noise. He was just about to turn around and leave, relieved, when he realized that Marcus would have mentioned seeing him downstairs in the vestibule.

He knocked with his sore, bloody knuckles, then wiped away the red stain he had made.

"Need a ride to the emergency room?" he asked Rachel, who did not look all that happy to see him.

"I don't think that's necessary." She led Paddy to the kitchen, where the boy sat with a bag of frozen lima beans on his face. Paddy laughed in spite of himself.

"In my day, we wore steak. How's the other guy look?" he asked, dropping his jacket on the back of a chair.

"What other guy?" Marcus said.

"The one you fought with."

"I didn't fight. I got hit." His voice could be described as fuming.

Paddy took the chair and straddled it, which always made him feel spontaneous and secure at the same time. "You fight back at all?"

"No," Marcus said disdainfully, as if fighting back were only for people who invited broken skulls.

"You ever been in a fight before?"

"Of course not."

Of course not. Paddy nodded. "You mad?"

At this, Marcus's lip began to twitch and his visible eye to narrow. Under his bag of beans, he was seething.

"Sure you're mad," Paddy said. "Guy just sucker-punched you, huh?"

"He was black," Rachel said. She set down an orange soda for Marcus and told him to swallow some aspirin with it.