The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  The restroom door is under his hand, and he swings it forward, lurching to the closest stall, not quite making it to the toilet but getting near enough to excuse. His stomach heaves—beer and his lunch from the A&W, some breakfast. Everything his stomach can lay hands on comes out, and Ed holds himself up between the stall walls, braced by his thick arms, bent at the hips, his muck sullying his shoes, spattering his pants, covering the toilet seat he hasn’t had time to lift.

  When the fit finally stops, Ed rights himself sorely, his back aching from the effort of heaving and the strain of bending. He stands in his own vomit. It’s too much, he realizes, too far off target, too unpleasant.

  He backs out of the stall and walks to the sinks, disappointed by his reflection. His beard is strewn with the mess, and he ducks his head to try to wash it in the nearest basin.

  The bathroom door squeaks open. “Everything okay in here?” One of the librarians. Ed recognizes his voice. “Oh, man. You all right?”

  Ed lifts his head. “Guess something didn’t agree with me. I’ll get this. It’s all right.”

  “All right.” The man creeps away.

  It can’t be too bad, then, if he’s able to leave like that. Ed stops working on his face and pulls a handful of paper towels out of the dispenser. He returns to the stall and tries to wipe at the toilet seat. Everything moves without becoming cleaner. He knows he’s standing in a mess, and he knows he has to get to the place where the mess is gone, but he doesn’t know the steps. These paper towels have to be part of it, but they aren’t doing their job. They are making things worse. He drops them on the ground and starts moving the wad around with his foot. No, that isn’t it.

  “Edmund?” The voice is a woman’s this time, Penelope.

  “Everything’s fine! This is the men’s room!”

  “Edmund, I’m coming in.”

  He tries to squeeze himself past the door of the stall so he can close himself inside, but Penelope is next to him before he can get himself hidden.

  “Come out of there. Let me help.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Ed.”

  He tries to argue her away, but the words dribble to a stop. He tries to think, but thoughts don’t rise. Everything in his mind has gone wide and blank—a swatch of fabric or a long roll of paper, stretching out into oblivion. There is a current rippling below the blank swatch, but nothing defined, lines strung, cast out wide.

  — —

  He is at the sink when the world refocuses. Penelope is beside him, working at his beard, which is woven with scraps of food. “We’ll get your face cleaned up, and then we’ll throw a coat on you and take you home, get you in the shower. Wash these clothes.” She keeps talking. “Remember when Chip came back from the woods that time? All covered in mud and twigs and leaves. And poor Margaret always wandering down to the river. We had to clean her up all the time.”

  Ed sees Margaret walking away from the yard. He hollers at her to get back here.

  Giggling, furtive glances.

  “And Janet—that time she came back with all those bruises and scratches. And I know you remember how Jenny always squirreled food away in her bed, bringing in all the ants and mice.” Her fingers are combs in Ed’s beard, and something in his brain says, Laura, but he can’t catch hold of it. “I remember braiding Hester’s hair,” she says. “Hester had the thickest hair, and she refused to let anyone cut it. Remember?”

  Penelope is washing Ed’s hands in the sink now. The fingernails are black at their edges, a little long, the skin sallowed by smoke. He doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t help. He is in the yard at Boulder, chasing after Mary. He’s under a building with a deaf-mute boy. They’ve been there for days.

  “Wait here, all right? I’m going to find you a coat.”

  Ed nods, his left hand pulling at a piece of clean cloth on his pants.

  She is back without Ed knowing she was gone. Ed’s gaze casts toward the hand dryer, the half-tiled wall. Penelope slides his arms into the sleeves of an oversize trench coat he doesn’t remember as his own. He lets her fasten the buttons over his belly and dirty chest, the coat so long it sweeps the floor, covering the soiled cuffs of his pants and most of his shoes. Penelope pulls the collar up around his ears and takes hold of his hand, leading him out of the bathroom, through the foyer, out into the parking lot. She counterbalances Ed’s weight as he falls into the passenger seat of her car, a trust fall, the movement controlled for only so long.

  “We going on an adventure?” Ed asks. “You and me and the open road?”

  “That’s right,” she says, but they are in Ed’s driveway, and she is helping him inside. His breathing is erratic suddenly, and his stomach is clenching.

  “Are you going to be sick again?”

  He nods.

  Penelope pushes a mound of garbage from a chair in the kitchen and hauls the chair to the toilet, leading Ed behind her. He can’t move on his own.

  She settles Ed onto the chair and leans him forward. “Just call for me when you’re done, okay?”

  Through his retching, Ed hears the television turn on, loud voices coming to him through the bathroom door. A male voice like Ed’s father. He hears him say, I worry about that beautiful house Are you keeping it clean for Benjamin? You still have a son to think about, Edmund. You must be strong for him. Your mother and I are too old to take care of you, son. You need to take care of yourself. You are the same man inside. The voice becomes written words. A letter from his father he’d been reading. Pete had given him a stack of them. That was it. Letters.

  Another bout hits and he leans forward.

  The phone rings. Ed hears his own voice pick up on the answering machine. “You’ve reached Edmund Malinowski. Sorry I missed you. Leave me a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” The beep lasts too long, the machine full of messages. When did he last listen to them?

  “Hey, buddy. It’s Pete. Just checking in. Wanted to hear how your doctor appointment went yesterday and remind you to get the oil changed in that old clunker of yours. Oh—and you’ll love this—you remember that son of a bitch Taylor Dean? Driving that piece-of-shit Pinto? Well, it finally exploded. Rammed from behind the other day. Dean’s fine—minor injuries—but how’s that for justice, right? Anyway, give me a call when you can.”

  Good old Pete. They’ll go drinking at the Tavern later. Shoot some pool.

  Ed hears sobbing from the television. He is sitting on a chair in front of his toilet, unsure how he got there. Through the door, Penelope’s voice asks, “Has it passed?”

  What is Penelope doing here?

  “I’ll be right out!” he shouts. Penelope is in my house. He will clean himself up and take her to bed, like he has many times before.

  But she has pushed into the bathroom against his objections. She wipes the rim of the toilet and flushes its contents, turns on the fan, starts the water warming for a shower. Then she sets to undressing him, talking through every movement.

  “Eager little one, aren’t you?” he says.

  “Shush.” She playfully slaps his hand. “I was always helping with the other patients out in Boulder. I helped the women in my cottage get dressed and undressed, helped them in the shower. I fed them, you remember. This is nothing. Sit down on the chair again, there you go.” She removes his shirt and pulls his pants down, his boxers with them. He sits naked on the chair, excited. He has wanted this for so long. Here is Penelope. They are in his office. “And I started that reading group you always spied on. I’m pulling your shoes off now, socks. There go the pants. All right, let’s check the water temp. You like it on the hot side or cold?”

  “Hot.”

  “Good. That’ll get you cleaner.”

  Penelope adjusts the faucets and holds out her hand to Ed, helping him stand. He pulls her against him, and she returns his embrace for a moment, then guides him toward the shower.

  “Good idea.” He winks. “It’s more fun in the shower.”

 
She holds on to him as he swings his stiff leg up and over the edge of the tub. She slides the curtain closed behind him. “I’m taking your clothes to the washer. I’ll be right back.”

  “The washer’s in the basement.” He peeks out. “Then you’ll join me, right?”

  “Wash your hair, Ed. And your beard.”

  He laughs and settles in under the spray. Showers feel good. The hot water, the steam. He should take them more often. The water hiccups with the start of the washer, then comes back strong. He hums, then sings. April, come she will / When streams are ripe and swelled with rain / May, she will stay / Resting in my arms again.

  A female voice joins on June: . . . she’ll change her tune / In restless walks she’ll prowl the night.

  They sing July and August and September. The autumn winds blow chilly and cold. He has always loved Laura’s voice.

  Penelope’s face peeks around the curtain. Her eyes are wide, a blend of every amber thing. She is honey and grass and autumn, wax, wheat, a burning sun. “I love that song,” she says.

  “One of my favorites!” Ed bellows, covering his surprise. She was supposed to be Laura.

  Her face disappears, and her voice says, “I got a new job.”

  “Great! A reading group at another institution?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s right, Ed. Another reading group.”

  “We’ll have to make a list of what you’ll teach.”

  “That would be great, Ed.” Her face returns. “Want me to wash your back?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” His regular self is back, this new self, carefree and jovial. He is April, ripe streams filled with rain. He is June, prowling the night. He is July, flying.

  “Feeling better?” Penelope rubs soap on a washcloth, works up a lather.

  Ed guffaws. “Absolutely! Standing in a hot shower with a pretty girl scrubbing my back—how could I not feel better?”

  Penelope passes the washcloth up over his shoulders and along his neck. She scrubs along his hairline. Then she scrubs lower on his back, and lower still, and Ed can feel the cloth on his ass and then between his legs and her other hand coming around, too, and—the touch of a woman!—his palms go to the walls of the shower to keep his balance, and it is over so quickly, rising in a great torrent of spring, a bellow ripping itself from his mouth.

  Her hands vanish.

  “Finish rinsing off. Your robe is out here.”

  “Thank you, Pen.” It is all he can say, and he doesn’t know what has happened or what is real, but he is thankful, so thankful.

  Boulder, Montana

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 1981

  Chapter 40

  — Laura —

  Pete’s voice is tired and defeated when he calls. The tone says, The race is over, and I have lost. The words say, “Ed is missing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He hasn’t returned a call in three days, and I went by his house today. The car’s there, but he’s not. No one’s seen him at Dorothy’s or out at the truck stop. The library staff say he hasn’t been around for a few weeks.” He sighs, an old man. “I’m sorry to get you guys involved, but I don’t know what to do.”

  I am the one to file the missing person report.

  “Last known whereabouts?”

  “His home,” I say, though I’m not sure. “Six-oh-five Third Street.”

  “You sure he didn’t just go for a trip?”

  “His car is in the driveway. I already told you that.”

  I don’t think I’ve raised my voice, but the sheriff on the line says, “Calm down, ma’am.” He asks me to describe Ed, and I adjust the figures I once knew, guessing his new weight the best I can. He is still six-two and broad-shouldered and mostly gray-haired. He still has a beard, gray now, and thicker, longer. “He walks with a limp,” I say, “on the left side. He might be using a cane.”

  The man tells me they’ll let me know if they find him.

  I think of his disappearance those days before Ben was born.

  We hang signs around town. “Missing: Edmund Malinowski. Please contact Laura Cooke or Pete Pearson with information.” There is a photo of him that Benjy took with his new camera, Ed’s big smile through his thick beard.

  — —

  We’re on day ten. Ed has been missing for ten days.

  “Are you worried, Mom?”

  “Yes, baby.” I have to be honest with our son, this boy who’s had to grow up so quickly the past few years. There’s a new hesitancy in his face, clouds in his eyes, a great hole in him somewhere that Ed has left. I worry about the responsibility Benjy will face in adulthood when he takes over for Pete as Ed’s manager, his father’s keeper.

  “Where would he have gone?”

  “I don’t know, Benjy.”

  Pete and Benjy both reported that he acted strange on their last camping trip, loopy, confused. “I think he threw up a couple times,” Benjy said.

  Pete scheduled him an appointment with his neurologist, but then Ed disappeared.

  “Go watch television,” I tell Benjy. “Take your mind off it.” Go forget. Escape.

  He slips downstairs and I listen to his show come back to me, canned laughter and false voices, all pretend. I pour myself a small whiskey and light a cigarette.

  It’s been a month since the reception—the amount of time Penelope told me she’d still be in Helena. I couldn’t help myself from going to the library the other day and asking after her at the information desk.

  “Penelope Gatson? She’s not with us anymore. Is there something I can help you with?”

  I didn’t quite believe she would leave.

  But she is gone. And Ed is, too.

  It makes some kind of cruel sense to me that they’ve disappeared at the same time. I know they’re not together—Ed and his girl—but I can’t help imagining them fleeing Helena hand in hand. I put them in my dream cabin on the Pacific coast, a roaring fire in the woodstove, rain and waves outside. Part of me wishes it true for Ed’s sake, and the other part resents them both for everything they’ve done to allow such thoughts to rise at all.

  The doorbell rings as I crush out my cigarette in the soil of a potted plant, and I open the door to the Baker girls, barely girls anymore. They are young women. “No,” I say before they can speak. They are the same girls who sold Tim all those Girl Scout cookies back when we were hesitant and flirtatious, back when I was still married to Ed. They’re always knocking on our door to offer their dog-walking services or to collect money for their college funds or to sell more cookies or stale chocolates. I deeply dislike the Baker girls.

  “We found that missing guy,” they say in unison. “We’ll take you to him.”

  “Edmund? You found Edmund?”

  “The guy on the posters.” The younger Baker girl holds up one of our signs, pointing. “This guy.”

  I don’t want to bring Benjy wherever these awful young women are taking me, to whatever I am about to find. It feels ominous, these weaselly girls the harbingers of disaster. I leave them on the porch for a minute, leash up the dog, and shout to Benjy, “Sweetie, I’m taking Beau for a walk. Be right back.”

  “Who was at the door?”

  “The Baker girls.”

  “Gross.” It’s our joke. He hates them, too.

  The girls shy away from Beau’s eager sniffs and licks—so much for their dog-walking abilities. They stride with triumph out in front of me, leading me through the neighborhood and down the hill to Lockey Park, along the gravel paths, iced along the edges, then out into the brown grass around the fenced-off wading pool. Snow clings in patches, but the sun is shining, the temperature in the forties, an odd warmth. The younger Baker girl points while her big sister speaks. “We saw him yesterday and thought he was just another one of the hobos, but they had a barbecue earlier and we could see his face.”

  “Then you waited a whole day to tell me?”

  “Is there a reward?” the oldest asks.
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  “Are you kidding?”

  They both shrug and stare at me.

  The chain-link fence around the pool is rusted at its corners. The “No Trespassing” sign on the gate hangs crooked. The city has chosen to keep the pool closed the past four summers. First they said it was a temporary product of the economy—too expensive, paying all those lifeguards to sit in the shade while kids and their parents sat out the heat in a few feet of water—and then they said it was closed for improvements. The latest story from the neighborhood group is that the whole thing is going to be ripped out and replaced with some newfangled concoction of water worms leapfrogging out of holes and buckets on poles filling and spilling on the heads of kids. Whatever it becomes will be better than the empty pool as it stands, its chipped edges, its faded numbers. The shallow end is six inches deep, and I can still make out the “No Diving” warnings, the pitched black body crossed through with red.

  Ed’s cane hangs from the top of the fence, about halfway down, and he is in the far end of the pool, curled like a boy under a blue tarp strung across one of the corners. His back is to me, but I recognize his shape and the suit he’s wearing. He wore it to the reception, and I wonder if he simply got confused and tried to go to the gallery again.

  There are holes in the bottom of his shoes.

  He must be freezing.

  “Edmund,” I say over the chain-link fence. “Ed.” Beau whines. He hasn’t seen his former master in a while.

  “I think he’s sleeping,” the oldest Baker girl says, and then they walk away, their feet crunching gravel, skating ice. A pool length between us, they stop together and turn in tandem for the oldest one to say, “The lock’s broken on the gate. Just push it.”

  I nod and watch them make their way to the playground on the far side of the park. They both sit on swings they’re really too big for, and my hatred toward them dries like the stems of my hollyhocks, tall along the side of the house, hollowed out by cold. It feels dirty to hate them right now.

  I tie Beau’s leash to the fence and tell him to sit, lie down, stay. He whines again but obeys, his original trainer a behaviorist, after all. Beau always obeys.