Talking in Bed (8 page)

At first Ev thought her father must have molested her, too. Then he thought the man had probably not abused any of the children. Now he believed Luellen: her father had chosen to have sex with her sisters and not to have sex with Luellen. The father always determines the sex, Ev thought idly as he listened to Luellen, from the X and Y chromosomes right on through to adult preferences and perversions. And what constituted a perversion? he asked himself. It was a question he would never successfully answer. Mightn't the human animal instinctively mate with many? Mightn't Luellen's sex drive be perfectly normal, albeit out of keeping with contemporary prudence and paranoia?

But so much interfered with what was natural or animal. The oversize human brain, for example. The more you could disengage it, the better. Ev himself had never managed to feel comfortable making love in any house where his father slept. It had made his and Rachel's sex life awkward during the months the old man had lived with them, right before dying. Before even considering fucking his wife, Ev had had to tiptoe through his own apartment, an adult man, and listen for the harsh but steady breathing—"Darth Vader," Rachel had nicknamed it—that signified his father's deep sleep. Utterly humiliating. But not unusual, Ev knew. Many of his clients complained of feeling uncomfortable about having sex in the same house as their parents. That was one of the many confessions he'd heard that he could have empathized with. But he didn't—not to the client, not even privately. He might pretend to empathize in order to impress Rachel or friends, practice his miming altruism. But though his clients' troubles resembled his own, he did not consider himself among them, he was not
of
them, the messed-up humans. He was above them. That was his largest problem, he knew, the fact that he could not see himself as an ordinary man among others. That was his legacy; he considered it his father's curse, the narcissistic confidence in his own specialness, his superiority complex. It was not as imperiling as Luellen's father's curse on her, but Ev knew it had as lasting an impact.

Today Luellen told Ev about an errant generator that had rolled down a hill during an outdoor shoot, the driver who'd tried to stand behind it and gotten run over, which broke his leg and collarbone. She had a talent for storytelling, and instead of tragic, the event was rendered comic. Ev appreciated it. She dressed neither too casually nor too formally for her sessions, so that she appeared to have a healthy relationship with him, her therapist. She did not flirt with him; she did not offer titillating stories of her sexual escapades, though presumably she could have. She was only a few years younger than Ev, so that their frames of reference in the world were identical: they remembered all of the same national assassinations and vanishings; they hummed the same songs. They shared a cynical, passive, left-wing ideology. They both disdained smiling and sentimentality. They scowled at people. They deprecated themselves as a kind of competitive sport. Ev
liked
Luellen; if she hadn't been his client, he could imagine inviting her to meet Rachel. But even then, even in his own home in the role of friend, he would have felt slightly superior to her, capable of understanding just a shred more of her neuroses than she ever would of his.

His business encouraged this, he thought.

Luellen's mother and oldest sister were coming to visit her. Neither of them believed that Luellen's father had passed her over. The other three sisters had such clear memories—evoked only through therapy within the last few years—that the mother was convinced Luellen, too, would begin to recall. But what Luellen recollected was her father inviting one or another of her sisters to go places with him, to restaurants or movies or even into his study. She could not remember ever having been touched by her father in any context. He had not liked her. She was unattractive. Now she picked up strangers and endangered herself as often as possible, amassing a whole fleet of men who found her worthy. It was a simple equation. Ev understood her, and he didn't mind covering precisely the same ground with her week after week, because she was telling the truth, she was diving for the source of herself, never mind the danger down there. Ev operated on the premise that she was better than she'd been a year ago (he made a mental note to check his file on her, ascertain that she had actually improved).

He did not like to keep clients for much more than a year. He liked to feel that they left his office slightly better after their time with him, slightly more objective about their problems, clear on what they were responsible for and what they weren't. Mostly this happened, with a few exceptions; Dr. Head had remained a client, though only over the telephone, for more than fifteen years. Ev felt his usefulness for Luellen was about to expire. He would soon suggest closure; she would agree, because she was smart enough to know that if he recommended it, even if she didn't feel ready to quit, it would be best if she did.

"I've been working on figuring out exactly how I feel every second of the day," Luellen was saying.

Ev perked up; this was what he'd been doing.
The man felt kinship with his client.
"And?"

"Well, in the morning I have a lot of willpower, but in the evening I'm a disaster."

Ev sighed, recognizing his own tendency to lose enthusiasm during the day. Perhaps he would start canceling his afternoon sessions, going home and taking a nap with Rachel. He remembered to ask Luellen if the nights she had class were better.

"Well, until class is over, they are. Then I stop at Friendly's. And I don't think avoiding the bar is the best idea, although I know that's what you recommended."

"I asked you if
you
would recommend it to yourself."

"Right, well, I don't. I recommend to myself that I just
straighten up,
for God's sake, and stop fucking strangers. Stop feeling like I have to." She sighed pleasantly. Her frustration with the gap between what she knew and what she felt was large but familiar to her. She had a partner to call when she was feeling especially bad, another woman obsessed with sex. This woman was in deeper trouble than Luellen; she was a woman with two children she'd sexually abused, though she was now trying to stop. It was good for Luellen to have a partner in worse straits, good for her to feel
not that bad.
Like Ev's father, whose badness kept Ev's in perspective, Luellen's partner could be counted on to offend more gloriously.

Luellen said, "Isn't that what you'd like to tell all of us, your fucked-up clients—
straighten up?
When Meredith calls me, that's what I want to say.
Just don't do it.
What could be so difficult? And she could say to me,
Physician, heal thyself,
or something like that. We talk and talk and talk, and then we go out and do and do and do, as if the two things weren't related."

"It's very human."

"Like that's a good reason?"

"No." Ev nodded; she was smart, and she made him feel less bland. If she was lucky, Luellen would survive. And perhaps something about the men she chose illustrated her own self-protectiveness in operation. Perhaps they were nice men, or at least healthy and with some moral sense intact. But he doubted it. Luellen had told him she was afraid of being tested for AIDS.

"It's funny, but I'm realizing how angry I am at my mother all of a sudden. This visit makes me furious. I don't want to see her. I don't want to hear her tell me how bad she feels about our past. I'd like to have been born without her. Why can't I just live like I never knew them, either parent?"

"Same problem as before—head and heart in opposition. But simply naming the discrepancy is useful, don't you think?"

"What discrepancy?"

"Between what you want intellectually and what you feel emotionally."

"Intellectually, I'm fine. Emotionally, I suck. And I'm a big coward, too, because I won't just tell her how miserable she makes me, she and my sisters, all chatting long-distance on the phone about how I still haven't broken through, haven't unrepressed. They probably think you're a lousy therapist."

Ev agreed. They probably did. He wouldn't have exactly denied it, today.

"But," she continued, "you should be grateful not to deal with my sisters or mother."

He shared with Luellen a big skepticism about the literature her mother and sisters continued to send her, bestselling books that simplified matters to the point of pablum, that encouraged wallowing in victimization, the whining manuals of crybabies. Ev didn't want to talk about Luellen's sisters or mother; it was unfortunate she was at the mercy of clods, but why dedicate time to them? He had conflicting feelings about family, similar to his outlook on organized religion: had it done more harm than good, historically speaking? Had blind faith more sustained lives or crushed them? Was coping with bad family a test of character or an unnecessary expenditure of energy? In Luellen's case, Ev couldn't help thinking reconciliation with the family was a nearly hopeless prospect. There were too many of them; they seemed allied unfairly against her. He didn't want to talk about them today.

He said instead, "Tell me about the last man you picked up. Describe him to me."

Luellen cleared her throat. "Well, actually, it's kind of interesting, because he's also in the modeling biz, though I've never worked with him except this last catalogue cover. I picked him up at the bar near the studio, and he told me he knew who I was, that he'd seen me at the shoot."

"Did you worry about meeting him again at your job?"

"Sure, that's a problem, and I did think of it before we went to my place, but I hadn't seen him before, so why should I see him in the future? Anyway, the sex was only so-so, and I've been avoiding being anywhere near where he might be at the studio. So I'm a big chicken." She sat for a moment; Ev let silence fall. Luellen said quietly, "He was a premature ejaculator."

"Did you like him?"

"No," she said. "I can't like anyone who isn't a shit. And he wasn't a shit, and I didn't like him. And I can make fun of his eager dick, too. You know, sometimes I'm feeling worse instead of better about my problems. I'm starting to sound kind of hard-ass, don't you think?"

"No, I don't think. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to beat this." Ev stared at her suddenly with a frightening clarity: he could see her as a child, an average little girl—not unlike little Melanie Limbach—with three pretty sisters. The conflict would have started so simply, with small remarks about her looks, about her being the brain rather than the beauty, or perhaps they said
beast.
It all took on hideous proportions, grew like some cancerous cell in the psyche, came to inhabit her at the expense of nearly everything else. A small seed, growing to devour everything else inside her. The fact that she survived at all overwhelmed him for a moment. How did anyone do it? He had an impulse to rush to his own sons, lock the doors, and hold them close.

Luellen had begun crying. "I'm so tired of thinking about this stuff," she said. "I wish I could just stop thinking about it and start thinking about other things."

"What things?"

"I don't know. What do you think about? What does a normal person think about?"

"I think about the exact same things you do," Ev told her. "I think about my father. I blame him and forgive him and blame him and forgive him. I get tired of my problems. I fall asleep hoping I'll have an interesting dream. I look forward to sleep, then can't actually fall asleep. Like that." Ev put his hand to his forehead and swept it over his hair, feeling as he did so his father's head, the surprising way his father's head, in the hospital immediately following death, had felt just like his own. Now he had a curious dislocation when he felt his own head, as if he were touching both his father and himself simultaneously. Every time it gave him a small shock.

"I think about words," he added. "I was thinking about an oxymoron this morning—
casual sex.
" He stopped. Maybe Luellen wouldn't think of this as an oxymoron at all. "And
recover,
which seems to mean two opposite things—to find, and also to cover again."
Nuclear
and
unclear,
he might have continued, just two funny words.

"Uh-huh," Luellen said, uninterested. It was so rare to find someone fascinated by your fascination. That was one thing Evan had always appreciated about Rachel; she pretty cheerfully tried to follow along.

"You like your kids?" Luellen suddenly asked. "I mean, you think having kids is a good idea?"

Evan sighed. This can of worms was a troublesome one, especially in cases of abuse. There were only three kinds of parent to be: good, bad, or good and bad.

"For some people," he said. "It's true children can be thorough distracters from problems. Better than other addictions. They're kind of friendly addictions."

"I was thinking I ought to get pregnant. My sister the anorexic got over her anorexia by getting pregnant. You know, hatched her own higher being. I was thinking I might stop fucking around, stop drinking, all my dirty little habits. Maybe it'd help me get over my dad."

"It might."

"Of course, I'm probably not even fertile anymore, forty-two years old. My uterus probably looks like a saggy saddlebag. But will you do me a favor and think about that? Will you think a lot about my having a baby? So we can talk about it next time? I can tell you're about to cut me off, so I want to have just a few more conversations about what to do next, O.K.?"

"I won't cut you off," Evan assured her.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." She stood abruptly; Ev joined her and walked her out to the waiting area. Clarissa, the office receptionist, had gone home. His partners, Lydia and Jean, had also left. Downstairs, the hairdressers would be sweeping up the clipped curls, the foyer would smell of mousse and shampoo and ammonia. Outside it was growing dark; a spring wind sent eddies of loose trash down the street; cold rain waited in the air. Luellen felt like a friend today. Ev was tempted to tell her she'd be a good mother, because she probably would be. And it would help her to hear it, he knew, in dealing with her own mother, who was coming tomorrow. But she was addicted to a dangerous lifestyle and had sex nearly every night with strangers; he wouldn't accept responsibility for her becoming suddenly pregnant, on the chance that his praise might be understood as advice.