The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  I wanted a dog back when I was alone all day in Michigan, working at the shop. But Ed refused—too much work, too much mess, too much need. He chooses this moment to change his mind? He’s trying to distract me, a magic trick, a sleight of hand: Look over here! Ta-da! The rabbit that was just in my hat is gone!

  I am trying to feel something, but nothing comes. Instead, I am objective, a scientist studying a subject. My subject is Edmund Malinowski, age thirty-six, behavioral psychiatrist, superintendent of the Boulder River School and Hospital. He is a man devoted to his work. He can listen with great focus. He can shine the light of his whole mind and heart on any given recipient at any given time, and that person glows under the power of his gaze. He does not share his own life. He does not engage in intimacy. The flow is one-way. He absorbs, and he feeds back what he’s taken in, but he does not offer up his own thoughts, his own reflections. This makes him a brilliant doctor, and it might make him a brilliant father. But it makes him a terrible husband.

  I think of a line Bonnie said the other day, the two of us talking about our men out there in Boulder, all those drinks at the Tavern after work, all those late nights home. I told her how Ed had been getting home earlier for a few days. “In time for dinner, even.”

  “No.”

  “And he takes the baby and helps me cook.”

  Bonnie laughed and said, “All I can say is enjoy it while it lasts. Because it’s damn hard for men to change. They pretend to. They try. But it’s like asking a dog to walk like a cat—it’s just not in their nature.”

  Like asking a dog to walk like a cat. Who would ask that?

  But maybe that’s what I’ve been asking of Ed, to walk like a husband when he’s really a bachelor.

  Bonnie seems to have accepted Pete for the dog he is. “They’re good men,” she reminds me.

  “He missed his son’s birth because he was with another woman,” I remind her back.

  — —

  Miranda says my job at the store is there whenever I’m ready to come back, but I can’t justify getting a babysitter. It’s amazing to me that I’ve now worked and left a job with Ed never knowing. The bank account sits there quietly, too.

  Bonnie watches Benjy on Tuesdays for my class out in Boulder, and now on Wednesdays so I can go for long runs in the mountains.

  “You don’t need to lose any more weight,” Bonnie says.

  “I’m not trying.”

  “Are you eating?”

  “Some.”

  Bonnie pours us each a tall glass of wine; Benjy and Hank are both napping. “How’s sex?”

  I laugh through my shudder. “We haven’t had sex since before Benjy was born.” I think about telling her I’m pretty sure we’re done, Ed and I, that I’m just an observer and he’s just a man to be observed. I say, “Benjy’s touching me all day, touching and nursing, and it’s wonderful, but I’m so damn tired of being touched.” This is what women say after they have babies.

  I am just about to tell her about Tim, whom I’ve had a couple more drinks with, when she says, “You have to have sex with Ed. Tonight. I won’t watch Benjy again until you do.”

  “Jesus, Bonnie.”

  She shrugs and knocks back her wine, refills. “You’ve got to break the dry spell. It’ll be easier after that. You want to keep teaching your class and getting your workouts in, you better report some good news Tuesday morning.”

  I am a scientist. Scientists conduct experiments.

  I finish my wine and accept another pour. If I am drunk enough, maybe I can do it. If I am drunk enough and Ed is home before I’m asleep. It will be part of my study of him. How does the bachelor react when asked to sleep with his wife? I will take notes, add them to the file in my head marked Malinowski, Edmund.

  — —

  Ed is late but not atrociously. Dinner is still on the stove, lukewarm. I’ve eaten a bit, nursed Benjy, and put him to bed in his nursery, surrounded by all those paintings by my students. It’s a rarity for him to spend the night in there. Mostly, he sleeps next to me in bed or in the cradle in our room.

  I’ve finished off a bottle of wine, and I find myself a sloppy mess that throws herself at Ed as soon as he walks in, briefcase falling from his hand. His body responds immediately to mine. He lifts me easily, my legs surrounding his waist, and he walks blind toward our bedroom, stumbling against the counter, the doorframe, the footboard of the bed. It is hungry and primal, and we tear the clothes from each other, even my bra. My milk is depleted, my breasts just breasts again if only for the little while it takes them to refill.

  “Oh, baby.” Ed’s face presses against my flat belly, and there is pain like the first time, that very first time so long ago in high school with Tommy Baxter (when did I last think of him?) in his basement room while his parents were gone. Not the pain of childbirth but of capture.

  I force my way on top, my fingers digging into Ed’s chest, the catch of his breath loud in my ears. “Tell me you see me,” I whisper, the bones of my hips sharp and piercing, his fingers tight.

  “Oh, baby.” A gasp of words, gutted.

  “Tell me I’m real.”

  He pulls me against him, presses back, his thumbs digging into skin, muscle, bone, pushing it away. All-consuming and all-consumed, he is here alone, and I am writing my notes. Sex with wife is just sex, all physical, as one would expect from a bachelor. Wife is invisible. Wife disappears.

  — —

  Afterward, we smoke together in bed, my head on his chest, his hand in my hair, and I think about adding a footnote, but there is nothing really to add. A head on a chest is not intimacy.

  “Goddamn, baby. That was perfect.”

  It was good. Sex with Ed is always good.

  I rise for the shower. Moments after I get in, Ed’s face appears around the curtain. “Room in there for two?”

  “Give me a minute in the water.” I kiss him, payment for a little more time alone.

  Change

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 1974–JUNE 1975

  Chapter 18

  Time has sped up since Benjamin’s birth—something everyone said would happen, but Ed couldn’t understand until he felt the days moving so quickly. Benjamin is somehow a year old now, and Bonnie has delivered her and Pete’s second son.

  Ed and Laura arrive at the hospital in separate cars—Ed coming from the institution, Laura from home. Bonnie has given birth to an enormous baby, eleven pounds, four ounces. “See?” she crows. “That weight wasn’t all going to my ass.”

  They name him Justin Edmund Pearson, in honor of Ed, and so their boys can share a name. “Like brothers,” Pete says, his arm slung around Ed’s shoulder. They raise shots of whiskey around the hospital bed, and Bonnie shoots hers while the infant nurses. Benjamin sits at her feet, jangling Laura’s keys; Hank plays with his action figures in a corner.

  “Good job, Mama,” Ed says. He fits his arm around Laura’s waist, his mouth in her ear: “We better get to work on our second one.”

  She leans her head against his chest but says nothing.

  Ed’s sure they’re knitting themselves back together, that their intimacy has remained strong ever since that night she ambushed him. He isn’t getting home as early as he promised, but he makes it back before dinner at least once a week—in time to put Benjamin to bed in his own room, to have a drink or two, and to go to their own bed together. Sometimes she’s still awake when he arrives home late, propped up in bed reading, or sitting out on the sofa, or painting at her easel, and they lie together those nights, too, all the anxiety of his day fleeing. Penelope surfaces in his thoughts occasionally—he’s heard that she’s made a full recovery—but he pushes her away quickly. He is focused on Laura. And Benjamin. His family.

  Pete and Bonnie are still in their own world, eyes only for each other and the new baby.

  “Bonnie won’t be able to watch Ben for a while,” Ed whispers to Laura. “Think it might be time to take a break from the art class?”

&n
bsp; He feels her stiffen. “Fine,” she says. “You win. You can finally get rid of me.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” he says, though he feels a wash of relief. To separate Laura from Boulder seems like the final piece of this repair. “You should be painting your own masterpieces,” he says. “Not helping my patients.”

  “Of course you know what I should be doing.”

  He hears his own mother say: “I am deeply suspicious of the word should.” Ed and his brothers learned never to use it in their reasoning or explanations. “There is nothing that should be done, Eddy. There is only what is.” She has the same rhythm and tone of his grandmother, just a different set of words.

  “Sweetheart.” He squeezes her hip, noting her newly sharpened edges, bones jutting out where there used to be flesh. “You’ve got to stop running so much. If you don’t, you’re going to disappear completely.”

  He can’t place the look she gives him. “You can see it?” she asks.

  “See what?” Bonnie hollers, attention back on the greater room, eyes on them. “What are we looking at?”

  “How skinny Laura is.” Ed knows it’s the wrong thing to say, just as he knows his gesture is the wrong thing to do—hand out like a game show host, up and down Laura’s body as though indicating a prize—and yet he doesn’t stop. “All skin and bones these days, don’t you think? Always off running.” Stop talking. Reroute. Redirect. “That’s just what we need, right? A health nut on our hands. Next thing we know, she’ll be telling us to stop drinking.” He reaches for the bottle in an effort to deflect, holds it high as evidence of—what? He doesn’t know. Evidence of the life they should have? Whiskey and babies and curvy bodies?

  “Are you kidding?” Bonnie laughs. “The Laura I know would never quit drinking, isn’t that right, lady?”

  Ed looks at Laura’s face, stuck somewhere between sadness and disgust. He watches it transform itself into levity for her friend—for Bonnie, not for him. “Never.” She smiles and refills everyone’s glasses, shooting her own quickly and refilling even quicker.

  He should know how to fix this.

  There shouldn’t be anything to fix.

  Ed looks at their son there at Bonnie’s feet. The boy stares at the keys in his hands, his inquisitive eyes boring into them. Ed tries to bring Laura back, but she dodges his touch, slips away to the bed, perches on its side. She lifts and rattles the keys, and Benjamin smiles at the noise, makes a noise like the word keys.

  The new babe has fallen asleep, mouth lolling under Bonnie’s exposed breast. God, they’re beautiful, women—especially when they transform into mothers, the full breasts, the ferocious strength, the powerful sense of protection. It shouldn’t be sexy, but it is, and Ed is suddenly viciously aroused.

  “Could you guys watch Ben a minute?” he asks, grabbing Laura’s hand, his hold too hard for her to escape. “I just need to talk to my wife for a minute.”

  “Stop it, Ed. We’ll talk later.”

  “Real quick,” he presses, pulling her up.

  “Go,” Pete says. “Take your time. We’ve got the little guy.”

  Laura is a dull weight behind him, but he drags her from the room, out into the stark hospital hallway, eerily abandoned in its cold light. There are voices from the nurses’ station, the beep of monitors, the squeak of shoes somewhere nearby. The bathrooms are to the right. He remembers seeing them—private rooms with toilets and sinks and showers for the new mothers, a place to clean themselves after the mess of birthing children. He barely hears Laura’s voice, resisting: “Ed, come on. Let me go.”

  He ducks into the first open door, pulls Laura in behind him, closes them in.

  “Ed, what are you doing?”

  He takes her face in his hands and kisses her like a starving man. He can feel her refusal at first, but he moves a hand down to her collarbone and then her waist, fingers tugging at the button of her pants, finding a way inside—a flash of Penelope, quick and then gone—and Laura loosens under him. He pulls the pants from her hips, turns her around, presses her against the sink, both hands on her breasts now. He removes none of his clothing, and when he presses inside her, she gasps.

  He can see them both in the mirror, hair falling in Laura’s face, her eyes closed. She is every lover he could want—mysterious stranger, trashy whore, stunning waitress. Beautiful patient? He closes his eyes to the fantasy rising in his mind. Penelope in the grass by the river, Penelope against his desk, Penelope here under his hands, whispered breaths growing deeper, the two of them finishing together.

  Laura is looking at him in the mirror when he opens his eyes. She returns his smile, but he sees the suspicion behind it, and he fears what she might have seen before he returned to her, the details of his mind writing themselves across his face. She would’ve seen only your passion for her. But still, he feels the breach, and he feels Laura feeling it, too.

  Laura extricates herself, tugging tissues from the box to wipe herself clean. She buttons her pants, smooths her clothes and hair in the mirror. He’s still behind her, and he makes himself start the same motions, tucking away what happened with the tails of his shirt, fastening his belt. He meets Laura’s eyes in the mirror again. She says, “You’re a good lover, Edmund Malinowski. I’ll give you that.”

  He turns her and kisses her, gently this time, an attentive husband’s kiss.

  She pulls away and pats his cheek like a child. “You’re making love to yourself, though. You know that, right?”

  She closes the door behind her, forbidding him a response.

  You’re making love to yourself. What did she see in his face? What did she feel? He wants to assure her that she’s the spark that starts his desire. Her beauty drives him, every way she wears it, the different shapes—artist, drinker, wife. Everyone’s thoughts stray. Humans are primal, carnal beings. She knows that. And the thoughts are a quick picture show across his mind. She is real, and no fantasy can compete with that.

  Thoughts are covert behaviors.

  He believes this in the world of his patients and work, but he can’t apply it now. His actions, his visible behaviors—those are what matter. Yes, he’s slept with prostitutes when he couldn’t have Laura, but those actions aren’t betrayals; they’re fulfillments of physical need. It’s the emotional connection with Penelope that would make physical connection with her so dangerous to his marriage, but except for one momentary lapse (that could be argued away; he didn’t return her advances, after all), he is clean. He has kept his thoughts covert.

  He will take Laura to dinner, focus all his attention on her, ask about her latest paintings, about her lessons in Boulder. He’ll insist she keep teaching. A stupid idea for her to stop.

  He smooths his beard and hair, checks his teeth as though he’s just eaten, practices a winning smile. They will be fine, he and Laura. All is well. He makes sure his shirt is fully tucked, his fly zipped. In the hallway, he smiles broadly at a sweet young nurse, who smiles back nervously. He can make all kinds of women smile, can please all kinds of women, but he is focused on Laura. Only Laura. This strong, brilliant woman he convinced to be his wife, funny and sharp and talented. Biting. You’re making love to yourself. He laughs at the words now, in love again with Laura’s honesty. She’s never fawned over him.

  “Dinner!” he shouts as he enters Bonnie’s room.

  He’s met by Pete’s voice. “You buying?”

  He hears Bonnie laugh. “I don’t think I’m getting out of here tonight. You boys go grab a bite, though. Take Hank and Benjy. I’ll join this guy in his nap.” She’s staring down at the baby, still asleep in her arms.

  Ed scans the room—Hank playing quietly in the corner, Benjamin fascinated by the keys, Pete standing next to the bed, Bonnie and the baby. “Where’s Laura?”

  He watches the look exchanged between his friends. He’s supposed to know where she is. Their faces make that clear.

  Uncomfortably, Pete says, “She popped in to say goodbye. Said you were going to give h
er a little break to get some painting done.”

  “That’s right,” Ed says after another moment’s hesitation. “I thought we were going to meet back in here real quick to exchange car keys, since Ben’s seat is in her car.”

  Bonnie perks up. “Already done! Laura fished yours out of your coat pocket.” She points at Benjy. “And those are her keys.”

  Bonnie and Pete smile at each other, calm again, focused on their new son, not their wayward friends.

  Ed feels fear rising, a nervous energy in his stomach. He pictures Laura’s face as she walked out of the bathroom—resolved—and he realizes she could leave him. She really could. He’s feared it often, but he’s never actually believed it. They could fail. The fantasy could never materialize. Is this how she’ll do it? Pat his cheek, tell him he’s making love to himself, and then disappear? He sees her racing to their house, throwing clothes into a bag, grabbing a few toiletries, her box easel and paints. Will she take the dog? Beau, come on, buddy. Load up. She is driving west, his car carrying her up MacDonald Pass, then down into Elliston and Avon, Garrison, and the interstate that will take her all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

  He picks up Benjamin, holds him to his chest. She could never leave her baby. This is his solace, his only comfort, and he won’t let himself read behind it, the words that float just out of focus. She could leave you, though.

  Chapter 19

  — Laura —

  I dream about climbing a rickety staircase that spills me into a large room—a cross between an arcade and a gym, machine/game hybrids. A young woman rows a boat that tips and capsizes over a simulated pond—an exercise in balance. A man heaves a basketball into a net over his head, his feet constantly jumping, the ground burning hot. His is an exercise in motivation. I walk to an enormous fish, knowing it’s for me. I lie down and slide my legs into its open mouth. My body disappears from the hips down as its lips close tight around my stomach. An attendant ties my hands over my head with rope and flips a switch. The fish flicks and shakes, its mouth squeezing. My exercise is in escape.