Talking in Bed (22 page)

"Listen, Didi, I've been mugged. I'm calling you from the police station. I'm sure Paddy's fine, but he's not my big concern right now."

"Mugged?" she squeaked.

"Yeah, the whole nine yards, my money or my life, that kind of thing."

"Oh, where is Paddy?"

Evan hung up on her. Although Didi was not entirely unlike a few of his clients, he rarely had much contact with people as thoroughly dishonest with themselves as she appeared to be. Her sincere feelings he imagined encased inside her, a vital little nesting doll held in place by bright lacquered versions of herself. He felt sorry for the daughter, Melanie, recalling the way she'd put her hand in his, the way she simply liked him. It was Melanie's trust in him that he latched on to, because he needed to latch on to something. Melanie, and his own sons, those absent, missed party guests. He could hang up on Didi Limbach and he could move away from the double bed he shared with his wife, but the children would still be there. He had forsaken his father, his brother but he had not left the children. The clarity of this revived Ev.

"You have something for my head?" he asked one of the cops, touching the throbbing blood vessel. A butterfly bandage was located and successfully squelched the messy pulse from his temple. He took a cab to his apartment building and heard his phone ringing as he entered: Dr. Head, who could not sleep until he'd had his nightly chat. Ev had forgotten all about him.

In no particular hurry, Ev situated himself at the kitchen table with a cup of water, removed his glasses and tenderly touched his bandage, then lifted the receiver. Dr. Head, unflustered by the improbable amount of time it had taken Ev to answer asked in his gruff New England voice how Ev's day had been. Ev told him it had been difficult. "I'm sorry to hear that," Dr. Head said, without bothering to ask for details. Then he moved quickly to manholes.

Manholes. Ev let his mind become absorbed by manholes, their comic and civic usefulness, their sudden unpatriotic terrorist potential, enumerated by Dr. Head. Ev sat in the dark, still wearing his ruined suit, waiting for the sky to turn light, listening to Dr. Head, trying to recall where he'd seen a dry cleaner's, anticipating the surprised expression of the person to whom he'd hand his bloody jacket, wondering when the trains would begin to arrive more frequently at the Addison stop. He asked himself why he tolerated Dr. Head, what he himself gained from this nightly exchange. He'd explained to his colleagues and to his wife that he was the only therapist he knew who would permit the man this necessary eccentric treatment, but that couldn't be the only reason. Ev refused to see himself as some sort of crusading martyr.

It was probably that Dr. Head's paranoia topped Evan's, kept his steadily within the realm of the real. If Dr. Head was a genuine paranoid, then Ev wasn't. Out in the world lived all the extremes, and Ev maintained his own equilibrium by calibration. He wasn't as pessimistic as Dr. Head; he wasn't as uncontrolled as his brother. He wasn't as mean as his father had been; he wasn't as smart as Joni had been. He wasn't as innocent as Paddy Limbach, nor was he as kind.

Tonight Dr. Head claimed he had published a volume of poems, some of which would cause him a great deal of trouble if any of his so-called friends ever read them. That was why, he told Ev, he had used a pseudonym. Ev waited to hear what famous poet Dr. Head had selected as himself. He was betting on a Robert: Frost, Bly, Penn Warren. But Dr. Head said, "Dick Stubbs."

"I've never heard of Dick Stubbs," Ev said.

"Well, of course not," Dr. Head growled. "You don't read poetry, do you?"

Ev admitted he didn't, although he thought he probably should read more of it. Hadn't literature, once upon a time, made him feel saved?

"I'll send you a copy," Dr. Head said. "But you have to promise to send it back."

"I'll do that." He imagined a stapled sheaf of typed pages arriving sometime next week with Dr. Head's monthly check, each poem testimony to the world's wickedness.

"What's your book called?" Ev asked.

"
Black Universe
," Dr. Head promptly replied. "It's all about bad seeds like my neighbors, family, et al."

Dr. Head had been suspicious of Ev's new phone number; he thought perhaps his family had gotten hold of Ev and persuaded Ev to talk about him. For a few weeks after Ev's move, Dr. Head had called only when truly desperate, when sleeplessness tormented him. He'd said at one point, "You should go back home," but that was all. He didn't have much interest in Ev's personal life, unlike Ev's other clients. This contrary response provoked a contrary one in Ev: he sometimes wished to tell Dr. Head about himself. Their relationship was so unlikely, and their conversations so thoroughly one-sided.

Eventually, the men wished each other a peaceful sleep and hung up. Ev laid his head and arms on the table and drifted off, a small pool of blood forming beneath his face, his dreams involving the black universe under the city, the one you could fall into if you opened a manhole, the one his brother Gerry inhabited every single day of his life.

***

Didi waited up for her husband, who had apparently lied to her. She stared at the telephone as if it were to blame. She resented Evan Cole for waking her, for alerting her to Paddy's deception, and for hanging up on her as if he knew more than he would bother to say to her.

In Melanie's room the vaporizer whistled quietly away. Mel slept with her mouth open, her face seeming oddly large and unattractive. Much of the girl's prettiness had to do with her huge blue eyes, inherited from her father which were of course closed now. She had stringy blond hair with a hint of pink in its underside. Her right arm, which had been broken, was still thinner than the left and now lay draped over a fireman's hat she'd insisted on taking to bed with her. Every week she adopted some new object as her favorite, the thing she couldn't sleep without. Her fingernails were black-rimmed, every one of them, and when Didi leaned over to give her a kiss, the smell of soiled clothes made her wrinkle her nose. Didi wondered if her daughter had remembered to use the bathroom before bed.

Didi replayed the evening, which resembled most evenings: the wheedling and clock watching, the mocking laugh track of television, the annoyingly slow and messy snack Melanie insisted on having before bed. For reasons Didi could not explain, it was imperative that Melanie be folded away in bed by eight o'clock. That didn't happen when Paddy was home. When he played with Melanie, it was in that distracted way of his, the way that involved all the blocks and all the plastic figures, all the sets of toys jumbled together in a displeasing chaos of discordant sizes and shapes: the jumbo rocket beside the frail dollhouse furniture, the life-size and lifelike endangered turtle carrying the plastic firefighter—who had no appendages, nothing but a little fireplug figure and a set of black freckles on his smiling face—on his back. These fusings and shufflings distressed Didi. She preferred to have everyone in his place, among his intended kind, within scale. It was as if the toys might all start occupying the same baskets and boxes, all thrown together in a haphazard fashion that might never permit her to sort them out again, to put them right. But Paddy encouraged this kind of democratic hubbub—everything equal, everyone welcome. He did not care where they all went later, for cleanup, and he did not pay attention to the time. Didi found herself circling his and Melanie's play like a sheepdog, herding them toward bed. Although she had chosen against giving Melanie a bath tonight, Didi was now aware of the girl's stickiness. Perhaps she'd forgotten to point her to the potty as well.

Didi hesitated just a few seconds before lifting Mel out of bed and carrying her to the toilet. Her pajamas were footed and had to be unzippered along her leg, a process that made Didi think of boning fish, of her dead father-in-law's skill with the slim knife. "Go. Potty," Didi enunciated, hoping to penetrate the recesses of her daughter's sleepy mind without actually waking her: a command to appeal to the well-trained child. Melanie slept, propped up by Didi on the toilet. Soon there was a trickle, which went on and on; Didi's concern had been justified, she was pleased to note. Melanie's head lolled as Didi shifted, allowing Didi to see the wrinkle of dirt in the folds of the child's neck. Didi wiped away the moist grunge, only to feel more, a tacky, gritty necklace of filth around Mel's throat.

Didi shook her daughter's shoulders. "Wake up," she said to her face, angry suddenly at the child's ability to sleep so soundly, as if she might be taken advantage of later in life. "Wake up and get in the tub," she ordered, already reaching behind her to swing the old metal faucets on full force.

Melanie woke weeping, roused so unfairly in the middle of the night, so harshly, and for something so thoroughly tumultuous. Her mother landed her in the water and scrubbed her throat, her chest, down between her legs, splashing about as if to drown Melanie; the cloth and the hand it covered were fierce over her small chilled body. Some part of her was still asleep, awash in a new kind of nightmare, crying and crying.

Didi did not lather up her daughter's pink hair decided that that could be tomorrow's project. She carried her wrapped in a towel, still sobbing, back into her bedroom, where she pulled new pajamas over her damp skin and zipped her quickly inside them as if to contain the fleeting perfume of cleanliness. She switched off the light and sat beside Melanie while the child snuffled, wounded by her mother's compulsiveness yet still sleepy, unable to sustain her huff in the face of the warmth and solace of bed, of being stroked on the back.

It was just after Melanie drifted away that Didi heard Paddy come home, closing the front door behind him. On impulse, she slid from Melanie's bed into her closet, a shallow space full of pretty dresses hanging on the bar. She hid, thinking he could have a taste of his own medicine. Let him think she'd left him, abandoned Mel, gone away. She listened as he moved quietly through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen, where the sink tap ran for a moment, then the bathroom, where he peed for a good long while, then spat, then flushed. He would not notice the soggy bathmat or the moist air, the scent of soap. The light switch clicked off; he checked the back door. He opened the refrigerator and moved the condiments around; Didi could hear the clinking, then the soft suction as the door closed. He stumbled leaving the kitchen, catching his foot on the new wooden threshold. In the dark bedroom he was silent—undressing, she supposed. Finally he must have eased into his side of bed, confident of his stealth.

Didi's heart banged the way it had when she had played games with her siblings, full of the anticipation of being found, the thrill of being hidden where people didn't know to look, of being a hider and a seeker, of waiting. Quickly she shucked her nightgown, letting it fall to the closet floor at her feet, breathing in her own sour odor, shivering in excitement.

"Dee?" she heard. He had padded to Mel's room, and she wondered if he would wake their daughter, if Melanie would have to endure another arousal by one of her foolish parents. The light clicked on; she could see the bright stripe beneath the closet door. Mel's dresses hung on either side of her on their plastic hangers. Her ear was against the cool metal bar; a ruffle was at her bare navel.

She stepped from the closet, naked, to see him, naked, leaning over Melanie, about to shake her. He jumped.

"Oh my hell, honey, you scared..."

Didi walked through the room without stopping, switching off Mel's light as she left. She returned to her side of their bed and waited for him as if she had beat the seeker to base, her heart still banging away in her chest. He would
have
to come home if she was hidden every night from him in a closet, wearing no clothes. He did not entirely know her, she told herself.

"What's this all about?" he said as he fell in next to her and put his big hands on her hips. She had not lain naked in bed in a long time, although Paddy frequently slept without clothes. He did not smell of liquor. He did not smell of perfume. "I'm sorry I'm late," he said. "I got tangled up in a bid with Jim. Then we went to his house and moved a hot-water tank. I think I hurt my back," he added, looking for sympathy, as if to distract her.

"You said you were going out with Evan," she said. "You said a drink with Evan."

"No, babe, that's tomorrow night."

Now it was Paddy's heart that raced. It was Rachel he'd arranged to meet tomorrow, not Ev. "I can cancel," he said, grateful for an excuse to abandon his plans. He'd been having second thoughts all week. He rolled toward Didi, toward her unusual nakedness. "Wanna fool around?" he murmured in her ear.

She seemed to want him to hold her, but she did not want to make love. If she let him have sex, he told himself, he would break his plans with Rachel. For a while he tried to save his marriage, bumping his erection against her thigh, covering her neck with kisses, but she turned away, and rose eventually to retrieve her nightgown from Mel's room.

When she climbed back into bed, she considered telling him that Evan Cole had gotten mugged. She considered it, but did not tell him. She didn't want to be left alone again. Evan Cole could wait and tell him himself tomorrow.

I
T WAS
C
HRISTMAS
, Rachel thought later, that was responsible for her affair. It was the fact of the holiday, of gifts and generosity, that made her succumb to infidelity. It was because Paddy liked to give gifts, and because her birthday fell just a month before Christmas; the combination was deadly. "I find him simple," Ev had said. "I find him kind."

Rachel and Paddy did not go to bed together until January, at Paddy's bungalow in Oak Park, on a night when the boys were staying at Ev's. School had been canceled a few days because of heavy snows; the wind blew until the streets, deadly serene, shone with ice and the trees and rain gutters and balconies and playground equipment were hung with transitory frozen daggers.

In the face of this, Paddy's house was too hot. He had turned up his heaters—perhaps he'd gone and bought a new one for each room, big ones for big rooms, little ones for little rooms—in order to keep Rachel comfortable. She was both touched and frightened by this gesture. If it was a gesture.