Talking in Bed (33 page)

Rachel seemed to understand that it was useless to talk. There was nothing anyone could say that would help Evan. Considering this, he wondered if his whole profession didn't operate with a misguided method, this talking and talking and talking, when what was awfully clear to him was the need for silence, and great long lengths of it. Only time would help, and the sooner it began passing, the better. If he could have fallen asleep now and wakened deep into next year, he would gladly have laid back and shut his eyes.

***

Once again the boys had to move their father's furniture, this time without Paddy's Bronco.

"Let's call him," Zach suggested. "Otherwise, we'll never get that futon home. Remember, Marcus? He called it a futron?" Zach giggled.

"I don't want the futon," his father said. "I'm leaving it here."

Zach felt contented with this decision, simply thankful he wouldn't have to lug it down one set of stairs and up into the condo. Besides being a monstrous thing to move, it was an uncomfortable place to sleep. But naturally his brother would not let go of the subject.

"Even if you don't want it," Marcus said, "it's worth money. We could sell it. Let me sell it."

"We're leaving it," his father told him patiently, again and again, in response to whatever possibility Marcus broached for getting the thing back to their apartment.

Finally, Zach figured something out: his father didn't want Paddy to help them. They'd made three trips by then; everything except their father's clothes and miscellaneous books was back home. And the futon, of course. To Marcus, he said, "Dad's mad at Paddy." He laughed at the unexpected rhyme.

Marcus said, "It's wasteful to leave the futon here."

"But he's mad, so it doesn't matter. I wonder why he's mad."

"Because Paddy likes Mom," Marcus told him. "Idiot moron, don't you know anything?"

"He does not," Zach said feebly. "Maroon," he added.

Although Marcus had thought that he wanted his parents to reunite, he found himself dissatisfied once it was happening. And though he had always believed he would someday do something noble and benevolent for his uncle Gerry, he had to admit that he was relieved not to have to think about him anymore. The third thing he felt, forcing himself to be as ruthless and honest as possible in examining his feelings, was that he sort of missed Paddy Limbach, who apparently was not to be mentioned.

Paddy had given him permission to kick the bathtub and to hate a black boy if that black boy deserved it. Marcus believed in due credit. So he could no longer hate Paddy. In fact, he wished he might run into Paddy somehow, ask him about a few other things, girls among them. His mother had questioned him about girls in his classes, transparently trying to make him express interest in one of them. Marcus stubbornly pretended he hadn't noticed girls in his classes. Or if he had, to have paid attention only to their brains, the developmental progress of their senses of humor; their relative talent or stupidity. His father would never mention girls in the knowing, irksome way Paddy Limbach once had. "Got yourself a girlfriend, pal?" he'd said. Pal. At the time, Marcus ignored him. Now he would have liked to hear what Paddy had to say.

Clearly Paddy was in love with Marcus's mother. Clearly he had some thoughts on the subject that weren't about respecting a girl's intellect.

So Marcus would not give up his argument for the futon. He was almost in tears before their father angrily relented and helped the boys roll and shove it down the three flights of dirty steps, then flop it on the roof of the Saab like a big hamburger bun.

"You happy?" he asked, disgusted as he slammed his door.

Nobody was happy.

They started off slowly, Zach's hand out one window holding the mattress, Marcus's out the other. Soon the boys were sitting on their respective doors, both hands gripping the futon, which wanted to slide off. Wind pulled their hair from their faces. Their father drove slowly, but the mattress inched backward as they continued down Clark onto Sheffield. Eventually, even though Marcus would be angry, Zach had to let go—either that or fall out himself. The futon slid from the Saab and thudded solidly on the street; the car behind them screeched to a halt.

"Dad!" Marcus shouted. "Stop, stop, stop!"

But their father wouldn't go back. "Fuck it," he told them. "I didn't want to bring it, I'm not going back for it. Fuck it." And he took a sharp turn down a side street and went right through a pothole, as if to punctuate his resolve. The boys looked at each other.

Zach watched out the back window as if their car were involved in a chase scene. His father turned again, then sharply again, then again, until he was back on Clark, headed south. His anger resided in his driving technique, Marcus's frustration came from his narrowed eyes, but Zach felt sort of amused. He imagined all the cars lined up honking at the futon in the road; he wondered if someone would drag it away and sell it, the way Marcus had wanted to, or if someone who actually needed a place to sleep would retrieve it, haul it to an alley the way his uncle Gerry might once have, and fall gratefully into a nap. He wondered if any of the drivers behind them had seen their license plate, and whether police at this very moment were gearing up to come after them.

"I'm carsick," Marcus said sullenly. "All this swerving around is making me sick."

Zach said, "We should have had Paddy help us, with his big Bronco."

They were stopped at a red light, and Evan suddenly leaned over the seatback to slap Zach, who blinked incredulously, believing then what his brother had told him earlier. Paddy liked their mom. Tears came to his eyes.

"Don't hit him!" Marcus screamed, reaching over to slap at his father's seat. "Keep your hands off him, you jerk!" This, too, surprised Zach, almost as much as the slap, because Marcus rarely came to his defense. Usually Marcus was the cause of his crying. And then Marcus looked like he might start crying, too, and the car was moving once more through traffic, although more slowly now, their father sighing behind the wheel.

Zach thought a new, surprising thing, the words so clear it was as if somebody were speaking inside his head:
I don't want him to come home.

***

Paddy remembered what she once had told him, that she imagined him watching her, the audience for her daily life, and now he understood what she meant. Now he knew precisely what she had been talking about.

He tried not to think about Rachel in the way one tried not to think about mortality: it was a solid inevitability around which all other possibilities took shape and from which they derived meaning, the sun in the center of the planets' spinning agenda, something so stunning and luminous one might try to avoid considering it on a daily basis. He launched like a booster into the school year with Melanie and Didi, going shopping for supplies at Kmart, reading over Didi's lesson plans, sitting through shoe and dress fittings. He'd been predominantly unconscious through Melanie's kindergarten experience; he swore to shape up for the first grade, pledging himself to weekly visits to her classroom, an activity he couldn't help imagining Rachel endorsing, loving him for.

He tried not to think about Rachel. He made love with Didi. Because he had not pressured her about sex since January, she was more eager now. It was better sex than they'd had for years. For a few weeks this pleased Paddy, the part of him that felt guilty toward Didi, the part that wanted to be kind to her, to honor the love she clearly still felt for him. In her eyes he could see fear, in her body he could feel it; his lies had threatened her, his absences had forced her to act at fault. In return, he was careful with her; he did not ask her to do any of the things she did not like to be asked to do. But he could not help imagining Rachel as he slipped inside Didi, heightening his moment of climax by putting Rachel where his wife lay beneath him.

He tried not to think about Rachel. He made plans to visit his mother; he'd not seen her since last Christmas, had woefully neglected his duties to her. He made plans to send her to England, where her family had originated, and to Ireland, where his father's family still lived. He purchased a ticket and took off work to drive to Normal, taking Didi and Melanie along, on the long Labor Day weekend. They rode through the heavy haze of the late summer harvesting weather, the hedges thick on the sides of the road, dead insects blurring the windshield. Evening fell and Paddy could not help imagining Rachel in her kitchen, pouring her evening glass of wine, hesitating to switch on lights, wandering into her study, gazing, relaxed, out the window.

He tried not to think about Rachel. He got up early every morning and helped dress Melanie while Didi made breakfast. They ate together, listening to Christian radio ("Have a good and godly day!"); he dropped Melanie at her school, waiting in the line of idling cars until she entered the big double doors—she always turned to wave, happy to see him there watching, her hand lifted as if she were going off to war, never to see him again—and disappeared. He drove to work drinking Coke, listening to country-western music. He switched on the same music at the office and found that all the lyrics applied to him and his life. His poor heart was breaking, his aches were all aching, riding solo in the saddle again. Rachel would have hated it—he could imagine her scorn, the way she would smile at the foolish twanging and wailing—and still he could seriously weep at the applicability of this music to his life.

He tried not to think about Rachel. He was not thinking of her the day he detoured distractedly north, around Hollywood Ave., and got thrown onto an artery that led him, winding past orange cones and jackhammers, hitting every single red light, to Wrigley Field, and from there down Addison until he was directly in front of Ev's old apartment building. Paddy glanced at the brown double door, the scummy glass, its big crack, and there hung the sign,
APT FOR RENT
, white on red, a phone number Magic Markered beneath. This would be Ev's apartment, the top floor. Paddy swung the Bronco around the next corner, circled back, and parked illegally in a loading zone in front of the liquor store.

The foyer doors were not latched, in fact were breathing in and out with the wind. Paddy stepped in and climbed the steps, which seemed to be leading him to the great unknown. On the fourth floor, Ev's door was open; the air was chalky with the smell of paint. The floor was covered with splattered bedsheets, and a radio played from the kitchen. A fat man and a thin man in white coveralls, black Laurel and black Hardy, stood having coffee over the sink, the fat one shaking milk from his fingers, cursing.

"What?" he demanded of Paddy.

"I..." Paddy had no clue what he wanted. The apartment didn't look significantly changed since Ev had moved out, despite the painters' tarps and the ten-gallon tub of industrial white paint. The windows stood open; the wet air of fall blew through.

"I'm the new tenant," Paddy claimed, hoping they didn't know any better than he who the next tenant was.

"Nice place," the thin guy said. The fat man barked. A laugh? A snort?

"You approva our work?" said the thin man. "We doing a good job?"

"Looks fine," Paddy said, turning to go. He didn't like the feeling he got from these guys; he wondered if they were union. If so, he could report them, but for what? Barking?

At the front door a trim brush rested in one of Ev's broken coffee cups, a Pfizer Pharmaceuticals cup with half the handle gone. Paddy had not realized how much he missed Ev until Rachel, too, had departed from his life. It was as if they'd died.

"This was my friend's," he told the painters as he dumped the brush into a dishpan and poured the milky turpentine after it.

"Fuck you, man," one of them called cheerfully as Paddy rushed down the brown steps, his feet sliding on the smooth surface. Why did he hate that word so much? Maybe these guys had painted the building for years; maybe they were responsible for the shiny diarrhea-brown lacquer on the railing and floor. He burst onto the street, memorizing the phone number on the
APT FOR RENT
sign by various little strategies—his mother's birthdate, the omission of odd numbers. He noticed the liquor store owner's glare before he reached his vehicle and veered that way first to purchase a big jar of olives, a packet of jerky, and a big beer that looked like a can of motor oil, at nine-thirty in the morning.

He told the owner, "I just moved in across the street. In my friend's apartment, did you know him? A psychologist? Looked like Groucho Marx? The eyebrows, glasses?" The owner eventually agreed, nodding nervously; he remembered Ev mostly, Paddy realized, as an attempt to get Paddy out of his store, out of his loading zone.

Paddy phoned from his office; the apartment was vacant, the last tenant's lease didn't run out for another two weeks, Paddy was welcome to wait, there would be new paint, a damage deposit. He wrote a check and addressed the envelope, cutting his lip as he licked the adhesive. When he put his finger to the cut, he thought of Rachel, a hot unbearable flash, her absence something like death, himself like an untethered planet hopelessly at large in the universe. He had to see her again. He told himself he needed only to hold her for a minute, just a little hug, just a quick fix. He told himself he could sleep with her just one more time, that it would be enough to last him, that he could survive if he just had her for a minute. But he needed to see her, he had to see her, he had to put his hand beneath her shirt, had to put his lips to her ear, had to lie with her in bed one more time; he would go crazy if he couldn't watch her walk across her bedroom naked, her rippling buttocks, her lovely skin moving through the room, the whole her.

In most ways, he succeeded in putting mortality out of his mind. He didn't often let inevitable truths and tragedies into his heart. He was distractable; he was optimistic. And though he had worked very hard, had tried diligently and unyieldingly to think of everything in the world except Rachel, there, unfortunately, he had failed.

***

Paddy waited two weeks to try to contact her; she appreciated his tact. Plus she was busy. There was a lot of grief and anger to manage at her house. She had yet to bring up the name Joni, yet to fly that trial balloon and see what fire it drew. Ev had told her about a client, a woman whose sexual addictions led her into mortal danger; Rachel could not understand what made this client different from others, why her squalid situation impinged so dramatically on Ev. In addition, there was his brother's death; he'd run home because he was afraid, exhausted, near the edge of something desperate and dangerous in himself. Rachel had never seen him so whipped, so affectless; his face was slack, as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. The quick emotions that had once characterized him seemed to have disappeared. He approached each day in the methodical, patient way of a drugged person drinking coffee to keep himself awake. Rachel sent him off in the morning like another child, hopeful that the day would spit him back out at the end, that he would return intact.