The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  “—Ed.” The interruption shocks him silent. “I need to talk to you about something.” I said the same thing when I told him I was leaving, though he clearly doesn’t remember.

  He returns to his initial warmth, the staggering charisma that has always disarmed me. I am the center of his attention. All he sees is me. It was all I wanted for so long.

  “I knew this would happen, Laura.” He reaches under the table, his fingers brushing my thigh in their search for my hand. His blindness makes him ugly, and I draw my hand away to reach for my beer.

  “If you knew that the man I’ve been seeing would accidentally knock me up, then you’re exactly right, Ed. I’m amazed at your powers of intuition.” The moment it leaves my mouth, I know it’s too mean. But it’s the only defense I have.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Everything about him changes. His shoulders shoot back, ready to fight, all his natural ease gone. “What?”

  “I’m pregnant, Ed. And I’m going to marry Tim. Just a small wedding. We’re doing it at the courthouse next week.”

  I told Tim I had to tell Ed in person. “I can’t have him read about it in the paper. I just can’t. He’s Benjy’s dad.”

  “You’re not going to lunch with him for Ben.” And that is true. I have told myself I’m doing this to prove I can leave Ed—permanently. But the meanness? I don’t know what it’s proving.

  He gulps his beer, shoots his whiskey, wipes his mouth. His eyes bounce—to the photo of the Marlow Theatre, to the bar, to the wait station, to me, away again. They are watery in the dull light. Edmund Malinowski is not a man who can be hurt, and seeing that pain in him was the hardest part of leaving. Ed is not made for sadness.

  He blinks and pastes on a smile I can barely stand to look at.

  “Well, my love, I confess I was not expecting that.” He raises his second shot, nodding to me to do the same. “To you,” he says, “and your bright future.”

  It is the worst thing he’s ever said to me, and the kindest. I excuse myself to the bathroom, where I heave into the toilet. It’s only liquid, hopefully enough of the booze to sober me a little. Afterward, I sit on the wide ledge of the window that reaches nearly to the ground and nearly to the ceiling, its glass painted over with a panel of Renoir’s Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, a painting I was surprised to see here, in this saloon bathroom in the middle of Montana.

  There is a tentative knock on the door.

  “One minute,” I shout, relieved by the distraction. I am monopolizing the women’s bathroom—there is only one. I rinse out my mouth with cold water, pat my face with a towel.

  “Laura?” Ed’s voice is soft, hesitant.

  Without thinking, I let him in, and he is closing and locking the door behind him, and our bodies are so close, and his hands are on my face, and I should go, but all I can glean of my own desire is the want of his strength and comfort and attention, which I have—his full attention—and when he kisses me, it’s with all the history and regret of our life together, all the warmth and tenderness, the humor and bravado, the songs, the food, the drinks, the sex. My hands are on the buttons of his shirt and then his belt and his pants. These are my hands doing these things, though his are mirroring them now, and he lifts me easily, my legs around his waist, my back against the wall, his body against mine, our mouths together. I want to stay in this bathroom with him forever, Renoir’s dancers smiling out over us. We will drink from the tap and turn our backs when the other one needs the toilet.

  He is done, and still, he holds me. Maybe I want this instead—to ride around on his chest like a baby, legs and arms locked around his torso, all the strength of Ed right there to protect me.

  He whispers, “I’m so sorry, Laura.”

  He said the same thing the last time he left the Third Street house when it was still ours.

  I said the same thing, too.

  He lowers me slowly to my feet and we clothe ourselves, stand side by side in the mirror, wipe our faces. I look at him, that thick politician’s hair, those blue eyes he gave our son.

  “I can’t stop loving you,” he says, and I nod. He smiles sadly. “Ben will be happy to have a brother.”

  “You’re predicting the sex of this one, too?”

  “You grow boys.” He says it with absolute authority.

  There is a knock on the door that makes us both jump and then laugh.

  “One minute!” Ed hollers, and then in a whisper to me, “I’ll go first and tell her there’s a plumbing issue. Count to sixty, then meet me at the table.”

  The hall is clear when I emerge, and Ed is at our table, calm and settled. Our food has arrived, and I’m able to eat half my sandwich, and somehow we switch back to regular conversation—Ed’s work, the new series of paintings I’m working on, Benjy, shared dog custody, which Ed refuses. “Dogs don’t understand that level of nuance, Laura. Beau’s staying with me.” I let it go. If Ed needs the dog, I can let him have the dog. Lynn is even pricklier when she brings our bill, suspicious of our extended absence, but Ed leaves an extraordinary tip, and we walk outside together. I have to fight myself not to take his hand. He looks at the sky, big and brilliant and blue, takes a deep breath.

  “This is a beautiful place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  He’s looking at me now. “I can’t regret moving us here.”

  I shake my head. “No, Ed. You can’t regret that.”

  He pulls me into a final embrace and says into my hair, “I want only good things for you, Laura,” and then he is walking away.

  Chapter 24

  Ed stayed away from Penelope while she was recovering in Great Falls, but he hasn’t been able to stop himself from keeping tabs on her. He tells himself it’s for data collection as he watches her from a distance through reports from one of her therapists, an old buddy of his, Russel Dougherty.

  “Still doing great,” Russel says. “Working at the library now.”

  Ed made himself stay away during his separation from Laura. He’d known, even through the fog of that time, that if he’d been given a scene like the one by the river, he would have returned Penelope’s advances tenfold.

  But Laura is pregnant with her new husband’s baby.

  And Penelope is an adult now.

  Still, it takes him an hour of drinking at Dorothy’s to work up the nerve to go in the first time. Everything he needs is at the state library, so he never comes to this one. In his imaginings, he walks in and she is right there at the front desk, perfectly whole.

  Instead, an ugly, yellow-toothed man says, “Help you?”

  “Is Penelope Gatson working, by chance?” Ed’s voice is too high.

  “Out in the stacks somewhere. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Ed goes to the fiction first. He walks up and down the aisles, A–Z, running his fingers along the books’ spines. No Pen.

  He goes through the nonfiction chronologically, pausing in the psychology section to flip through part two of Skinner’s recent autobiography. Ed has skimmed part one but found it ultimately no more insightful than any other case study.

  He is stalling.

  He looks at a few pages in an oversize book about elephants in the 500s, a book on classical guitars in the 700s, then he turns down an aisle of 800s, and there she is, in the poetry section. Ed watches her for a few seconds before she lifts her eyes from the book in her hands. Her hair is longer, and if he didn’t know where to look, her scars would go unnoticed. There are the faintest starts of lines at the corners of her eyes. Penelope shouldn’t be capable of aging. He often wanted her to be older, but he never thought she’d show it.

  “Dr. Ed?”

  “Hi, Pen.”

  He is older, too, and he sees her see it. The gray threads above his ears, the salt through his beard, the deeper lines along his nose.

  “Where have you been?” she asks.

  “Your parents wouldn’t let me visit. They banned me from your care.”

  “I�
��ve been away from my parents for years.”

  Ed looks at the books level with him, all these collections of poetry. Penelope’s world. She’s clearly landed well.

  “I had to focus on the institution. And my marriage. My son.”

  “You have a son?”

  “He was born when you were in the hospital in Great Falls.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t come?”

  He steps toward her, just the book between them. “I was there, Pen. The second I heard. And then Ben was born, and I had to go.”

  “Ben.”

  “Benjamin Edmund Malinowski.”

  She touches her head where Ed knows a puckered scar runs. “So, he’s three and a half now?” She will always know Benjamin’s age, Ed realizes. “And Laura?” she asks. “How’s Laura?”

  “Pregnant with her new husband’s baby.”

  “Oh,” she says, surprised. “Are you all right?”

  “All right enough.” Ed nods to the book in her hand. “What are you reading these days?”

  “Thomas. I took a class on Eliot, Auden, and Thomas at Carroll, and I’ve fallen in love with all of them. Thomas is my favorite, though, and this is my favorite of his right now. ‘Before I Knocked.’ It would’ve been too complex for my group in Boulder, but I could’ve used parts of it. Like these lines.” She reads: “ ‘I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither / A ghost nor a man, but mortal ghost.’ ”

  “What do they mean?”

  “You have to figure it out yourself.”

  “But you’re the poetry teacher.”

  Ed can feel the same energy that pulled them together in Boulder, he’s sure of it. He will invite her to have a drink with him, and if more comes of it, that will be all right. There are worse starts out there, worse improprieties.

  “Pen,” he is starting to say, “come out with me tonight—”

  Another voice bellows from the end of the aisle. “There she is!”

  And then Ed feels her transfer the book to his hands and move away.

  “Billy!” She turns and accepts an embrace from the tall young man who’s suddenly arrived. They kiss quickly, and then Penelope smiles back at Ed, her face radiant. “Dr. Ed, this is my boyfriend, Billy. Billy, you remember me telling you about my amazing doctor out in Boulder? This is him. The one and only Edmund Malinowski.”

  Ed doesn’t know whether her words are genuine or feigned, doesn’t know what she’s chosen to tell Billy of their past, but Billy is shaking his hand and rambling. “Oh, sir, what an honor. Man, I can’t thank you enough for all you did for my girl. From what she tells me, she wouldn’t be here if not for you, so I’m indebted. Really.”

  All Ed hears is my girl. Again he is too late.

  “Great to meet you, Billy.” He holds up the book to Penelope. “May I check this out?”

  She smiles at him. “Of course, Dr. Ed. You can study that poem and let me know what you come up with next time you’re in. Bring your son. I’d love to meet him.”

  He is her former doctor with a young son she’d love to meet. A man who helped her once. A relic.

  He walks to the circulation desk and fills out the paperwork to get a library card so he can take this collection of poems home. This book Penelope held and shared with him. He knows he should be happy for her. This is the life he imagined when he discharged her from the institution. The life he told himself she should have. She is his poster child, after all—his life’s work incarnate. And that is more important than taking her to bed. More important than sharing his own life with her.

  But he hates the cruelty of their timing. He hates Laura for leaving him when she did. He hates himself for not allowing one full indiscretion with Penelope. He hates Penelope for falling in love with Billy. He hates Billy for existing.

  He misses—for just a moment—the complicated days when he had both Laura and Penelope. Wife at home. Patient at work. Yes, it was that very situation that led him to this place, but there had been a surplus of affection then, at least. Two women to love and adore (if he loved Penelope in some way, so be it; what did it matter?). But now they are both gone, their arms linked with Tim and Billy, while Ed walks back to Dorothy’s with only a collection of poems in his hand.

  Chapter 25

  The Boulder River School and Hospital is receiving attention for its system of deinstitutionalization—which Ed designed—and the legislature will soon implement the system statewide.

  Ed is often quoted in the paper, eloquent lines from his many speeches and letters: “The goal of deinstitutionalization is simple—remove citizens from institutions if they don’t belong there.”

  He thinks of Penelope, there at the library, there with Billy.

  In another article: “The principles of our plan assume a developmental approach to individuals, as opposed to the common medical approach used by most institutions. The medical model overemphasizes pathology, which makes people view mental retardation and developmental disability as static and hopeless conditions. In contrast, the developmental model places emphasis on potential rather than limitations; individuals are recognized for their capacity to grow and learn.”

  In the midst of it all, Dean pulls him away from the institution for a meeting at the capitol complex. Dean’s office is all windows on one wall, the valley spilling out wide and open. Like all of them, the man is starting to show his age. Ed still considers him an asshole, but they’ve long since found their rhythm, and Ed wouldn’t have accomplished half the things he has without Dean’s help.

  “I’ll cut to the chase. The state hospitals are being moved from the Department of Institutions to a new department, Health and Human Services. Folks seem to think it’s a more fitting place, get them away from the prisons. Suppose I agree. I’ve put your name forward as director of the new department.”

  “What about Boulder?”

  “Jesus, Malinowski, that’s your first thought? I know you love your patients, but you’ll be doing them more good on the policy end than you’ll ever do out in the field. Real change has to come from within these buildings. It’s got to be written into law. This is the job where you have the power to do all the damn things you want to do instead of wasting your time kissing the asses of government pricks like myself. You’ve done great things out in Boulder, and we’ll get someone in there to keep up the momentum. But it’s time to move up. You’ll be the youngest director this state has ever seen.” Dean turns his attention to the papers on his desk. “I want your answer tomorrow.”

  Ed stands and leaves, slightly dazed. He waits for the sense of accomplishment to flood him, the warmth of hard work recognized. He should be rushing out to a bar to celebrate with his pals.

  I am deeply suspicious of the word should.

  For the first time, he truly understands his mother’s words. Should hides is. Should indicates fantasy, something wanted and not attained, a plan never embodied. It implies what is not. For Ed to acknowledge what he should be thinking and feeling, he must also acknowledge the absence of those things. He should be, and he isn’t. He wants to talk to his mother. She will slap him awake with her prudence and discipline, just like she did after the separation.

  He calls her when he gets home.

  “Congratulations, Eddy,” she says, then hollers back to his father, “It’s Eddy. He got the better job! See, Eddy? This shows you’re learning. You will do things better now.” As though this job is another marriage.

  He says his goodbyes and looks around his messy kitchen—dishes in the sink, a dirty pan on the stove, crumbs on the counter, a cold half-pot of coffee. He’s taken over the dining room table as his home office, and it’s piled with files and papers from Boulder. The living room is disheveled, sofa cushions skewed under the pillow and blanket that have taken up residence there. He sleeps on the sofa most nights, letting the television lull him to sleep, the narrow shelf of the couch more comforting than the wide expanse of his empty mattress.

  He should clean the house.

&
nbsp; He should celebrate his new job.

  He should decide between the two women he’s dating.

  “Only two?” Pete chided the last time they were out. “Down from what—eight?” The other guys at the bar laughed, and Ed laughed along with them, letting them exaggerate his conquests, just as they let him romanticize their marriages and kids and family vacations. He is the only divorced man among them, the errant gander who discarded monogamy for dabbling. He doesn’t tell them how dirty his house is, or how much he misses Laura’s hair in his brush, the two degrees warmer she kept the house, a painted nail clipping on the bathroom floor. Nor does he tell them that ever since he saw Penelope at the library, he finds himself missing her, too. How he would take the conflict of those years over the emptiness of these.

  He tells his married friends that he’s about to make a decision about a woman, but he knows he’ll never remarry. He had one wife, and she is gone. He prefers to think of Laura that way—gone—rather than see her with Tim, her belly big with his goddamned child.

  She’s moved across town, into Tim’s big house on Jerome Place, a stupidly named street. It hurts to drop Benjamin there after his days with him, hurts to see his small son walk into another man’s big ugly house, hurts to know his wife is in there cooking another man’s meals.

  He knows he shouldn’t call her, but he does, present actions overwhelming that well-intentioned future. He hears the line connect, then a fumbling, a small crash. “Benjy, stop,” Laura’s firm voice says, and “Sorry, one minute,” and then, “You will go to your room, young man, and not come out again until I tell you.”

  He wants to be there, wants to be part of the scene, whatever trouble Benjamin is getting into, whatever mess he’s made. Ed would go for the broom and dustpan, sweep up the broken plate as Laura counted to sixty and then went to Benjamin’s room, where she’d soothe his tears, because Benjamin would be crying. He always cries after he does something wrong.

  “Sorry about that—hello?”