Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  As he told Ev these things, Ev realized how few calls he would have to make: the friends of his father who'd outlived him; Rachel, who would cry, despite her resentment and revulsion concerning her father-in-law; and his sons—Marcus, who'd learned to play chess and bridge from the old man, and Zach, who'd simply tolerated his grandfather's belittling remarks. "Hey pudgy," Ev's father had always said to poor Zach, "you get enough to eat?" Always in a tone that was intended to be understood as teasing, lighthearted, but that was transparently hostile. Even though Ev hated these jibes, he often felt tempted to make them himself, to indulge the same antagonism, the little niggardly desire to feel superior. That was the true aggravation between him and his father: they shared a superiority complex.

  His brother Gerry he would have to wait to hear from; there would be nowhere to call to locate him.

  No one would be sorry; no one would mourn his father's passing, Ev least of all. At night, his dreams had been teaching him how he would react when the old man finally died. His father would die in these dreams, and Ev's reaction in each and every instance was relief, pure relief. Although there'd been one dream, recollected now for the first time, which made Ev jerk and blink, wherein his father had pulled Ev along with him, through a door, over the edge of the universe, into the unknown, away. His father had never wanted to go anywhere alone; death was no exception. And Ev, naturally, understood himself to be the only possible escort.

  "I hate the phone," Paddy muttered beside Ev.

  The simple act of lifting a phone receiver and punching familiar numbers seemed impossible for both men at the time. They'd placed themselves before that remarkable nurses' desk—so serene and unblemished, pink Formica flecked with gray like spilled pepper—and were staring at ordinary objects without registering their identities or uses. They watched the station as if watching television. The hospital drama: Dr. Ono had gone home; Dr. Kneister, one of the golfing good old boys, had come on duty wearing tartan pants and matching cap.

  Paddy rotated his big blond hairy wrist to study the compasslike clock strapped there, a waterproof, indestructible model designed for people who climbed cliffs and overturned kayaks. "Thirty hours ago, Dad and I were fishing on Sugar River," he announced. "Having our dinner beside the fire, shooting the breeze."

  "I'm sorry about your father," Ev told him, recovering composure. "You seem completely unprepared."

  "Who could be prepared? This is the first I ever heard about a heart problem."

  "I know this is going to sound cold, but you're lucky not to have to watch him deteriorate. My father has been dying for years and years. Had," Ev corrected himself. "Had been dying. Now he's dead." These words meant almost nothing to Ev. He felt instantly giddy with meaninglessness, acting his part in the hospital story, the bereft mourner, the grieving actor. He was processing his role, trying to behave the way he would behave if his father had died naturally. So far, guilt had not made much of an appearance. Nor had fear. He felt that dreamy relief.

  Dr. Kneister bustled over to give his generic condolences: he was damned sorry to hear about their losses, damned sorry.

  "I'm relieved," Ev told the doctor. "I'm happy. I've been waiting for years for him to die."

  "Oh, hell yes, your dad was in some bad shape, I know how you must feel."

  Ev recalled Dr. Ono's quiet look at the hall floor and her own small shoes, the way she seemed incapable of manufacturing this ghastly patter. Dr. Kneister spoke too loudly, as if certain he could offend no one in the range of his considerable voice, and had a tendency both to stand too close and to spray. On his hip, he wore a holster and a telephone.

  "I would have smothered him with a pillow years ago," Ev went on, gloriously indiscreet, "except my wife kept telling me someone would find out."

  Dr. Kneister snapped his mouth shut. Paddy moved his hair out of his eyes to get a better look at Ev. His expression was hurt, as if Ev had disappointed him. It was an odd, shaming glance, and Ev's certainty about his own indifference faltered for a second. A little plume of regret came wafting toward him.

  Dr. Kneister rested his hand on his phone, as if it might protect him, and decided to ignore Ev. He said to Paddy, "How old was your dad, son?"

  "Fifty-four," Paddy answered promptly. Ev could not immediately remember his own father's age. Seventy-two? Seventy-three? Had he been born in 1918 or '19? "Just fifty-four," Paddy repeated. "I thought he was middle-aged, you know, only half done with the thing."

  Dr. Kneister gave him a clap on the shoulder, one meaty-pawed mammal to another—"Brings you right up to mortality, doesn't it, son? I know, I know"—and left them at the nurses' station, where the women came and went softly, eyes fixed on the middle distance in disinterest, a state of mind they must have had to cultivate in order to work with continuous death. They murmured to one another in passing. Amy had been flipping papers over the wide metal rings on a clipboard during the exchange among the men, her red hair shining like gold under thè peachy light. On the exposed nape of her neck were the inevitable freckles of a redhead. Her round buxom chest and the small mound of tummy beneath her uniform soothed Ev. She could manage men like Dr. Kneister and Ev, each difficult in his own way, and she could manage Paddy, the grieving jock, the cowlicked cornpone. It was she who delivered their death certificates to them, like report cards to grade-schoolers, she who took instructions on what to do with the bodies, she who dispensed the personal effects of their fathers, in two white plastic bags soft and bulky as trash.

  She could have patted their bottoms and sent them on their way.

  There was nothing to do now but leave.

  "You need a lift?" Ev asked Paddy as they followed the exit signs through the winding halls of St. Michael's, their bags in their hands. Ev offered because he was not yet ready to be alone, not quite yet. His deed required some fraternity for just a little longer.

  The hospital was old, perpetually under renovation, so that they passed through ancient clattering hallways with dangling metal-cased bulbs into hushed low-ceilinged ones lit by recessed fluorescents into ones curiously half and half, with rolls of industrial carpet parked alongside the doorways like sentries, stepladders laid near the walls between rooms, the heady odor of glue in the air. Ev had suggested that his father spend his final days at Northwestern Hospital, but his father had insisted on St. Mike's: the neighborhood institution, the place where Ev had been born, where his mother had died. It was small and hopeless, like the public schools Ev had attended, functional brick structures built optimistically in the 1920s, overloaded and underfunded ten short years later.

  Paddy accepted Ev's insistent offer of a ride home. "I guess so," he said, as if he might agree to anything anybody offered him at this moment, as if he needed a new parent. Ev kept an eye on him as they charged through the corridors. Paddy was like Ev in his quick gait, and together they seemed to be trying to stay ahead of each other; they were practically running when they approached the big glass doors. They burst into the humid evening.

  Ev instantly felt a sweat break on his forehead and chest, and the moist air seemed a forgiving cushion, the doors a gateway to the enormous forgiving world. His pace increased again; he felt curiously nimble. Metaphors filled his mind: he had set down a heavy load, left a great weight behind, the monkey had leapt off his back, from round his neck the millstone had been removed.

  Literally he'd killed his father, but metaphorically his father had been trying to kill him. He let this supposition float around his mind, trying to decide if he could take solace in it.

  The parking garage was catalogued by numbers, letters, and directionals. Ev had parked in 3F West, a confusing trek from the exit, down two flights and all the way through South. He spotted his Saab beside a dripping concrete post and suddenly grabbed Paddy's arm, pointing. "That woman's stealing my car!" he said.

  Paddy lifted his eyes from the oil-spattered deck he'd been watching—his downward gaze had caused him to run directly into a fire lane sign—and said, "What?,"
focusing on Ev's words as if they were a single tree in a vast forest.

  The woman had stopped poking at the keyhole of Ev's car and shuffled around to the car beside it, feeling her way like a blind person. By the time Paddy and Ev reached Ev's car she was yet another one over.

  "Excuse me!" Ev demanded over the car tops. "Should I report you inside?"

  The woman turned. Her face beneath her hat was wide and pale, her mouth caving in on itself, her expression caught. The lights in the parking garage were green, and thousands of bugs fuzzed around them like aureoles. The woman's skin looked unhealthy in this light, but no doubt Ev's did, too. Paddy, beside him, said "Wait" and reached for Ev to shush him, his large hand warm and solid on Ev's forearm.

  "I've lost my car," the woman said.

  "Uh-huh," said Ev. No longer interested in her, he was reaching for his door, shaking loose Paddy's grip, his own keys in his hand. She could be crazy—she was dressed in a hodgepodge of colors, a man's suit jacket and a canvas fishing hat—but was probably harmless, checking for change in unlocked cars. And who was he to judge someone's nefarious nighttime business? Ev slid into his seat and reached for the passenger door lock.

  It was her hat that made Paddy look at her more closely, made him understand she was in shock—a cotton fishing hat just like his father's, just like the one jammed into his effects bag.

  "Let me help you," Paddy said, moving toward her without taking his eyes off her, squeezing in between the bumpers and hoods, his own hat in his hand—the polite gesture of a boy before a woman—then placed on a car hood as he reached her and produced his blue bandanna, still damp from his own tears. She began crying, holding the dangling ring of keys in front of her for explanation.

  She said, sobbing, "I borrowed my neighbor's car to come here with my daughter. I have no idea what kind it is. I can't remember a thing about it."

  "Where's your daughter?" Paddy asked, taking the keys from her and fumbling with them.

  "Oh," she said, her crying too violent to permit her to speak. "Inside," she finally said, covering her face with her hands.

  Paddy turned to Ev, holding up a big key that opened an automobile, and told him they had to find a Toyota. "Her daughter's sick inside there."

  "She's got a fever of a hundred and six," the woman said, re-covering some control. "No one knows what's wrong—it's been hours."

  "She borrowed a car to come here," Paddy explained to Ev, who'd reluctantly joined them. Paddy had straightened up, grown confident in this new wrinkle. His own crippling sorrow he had put on the back burner; the woman's need was more dramatic, distracting.

  "It was like my father was the one who really led her to that Corolla," he told Ev excitedly after they'd helped the woman on her way. Down four lines of parked cars they'd gone, G, H, I, and J, as a trio, trying each Toyota until they found the little white one she'd been looking for. "It was my father," Paddy insisted later, "like an angel of mercy."

  An angel of mercy, Ev noted; precisely the way he would have liked to think of himself. They'd shaken the woman's hand good-night and wished her good luck, Paddy's eyes welling with bothersome tears like those he'd had such trouble shedding earlier.

  The men returned to Ev's car afterward, Ev silent, brooding. Did Paddy understand his embarrassment at being suspicious of the woman? Thinking she was first a thief, then a bag lady? Had Ev been suspicious of her because he'd committed his own crime, never mind that he could justify and qualify it? For an instant, Evan pictured himself in a courtroom, actually having to defend what he'd done, asking Rachel and the boys to corroborate his story.

  Paddy folded himself inside Ev's small car almost happily, as if proud to have come through the episode looking better than his companion. He inhabited the world without guilt. Ev sighed, sorry for himself and his big guilt.

  "Never ridden in one of these," Paddy commented, checking around his seat. "My dad always bought American. Kind of like an egg, isn't it?"

  "Kind of. Where are you from?" Ev asked as they circled the ramp down.

  "Normal," Paddy replied. "Just outside the city limits."

  "Just outside Normal," Ev mused. "I've always thought Normal was the funniest-named place in Illinois."

  "Huh," said his passenger. "I don't guess you ever heard of Goofy Ridge."

  "I guess not."

  A storm was moving in over the lake, reflecting the city's lights from the east. Behind him, clouds hid the Sears Tower and Hancock building goal posts. Ev assumed there were whitecaps on Lake Michigan tonight. He took solace in the presence of Lake Michigan even when he could not see it; it made him feel singularly melancholy and isolated, even in a city peopled with millions of strains of melancholy more severe than his. He knew this—as a psychologist, he listened all day to the various themes of ubiquitous isolation—and yet the lake still offered the absolute promise of uniqueness.

  Paddy said, "Twenty-four hours ago I was casting line up in Wisconsin with my dad." He looked at his cumbersome clock. "Well, actually we were asleep."

  "Change," Ev said, "by definition means quick." He snapped his fingers, felt again his father's face beneath his hand, the still warm forehead.

  "At least it wasn't my daughter," Paddy said, staring out the window at the passing storefronts. "I have a little four-year-old girl."

  "I have boys," Ev said. "Nine and twelve." Zach and Marcus, asleep in their beds, mouths slack. Rachel sitting in her stuffed chair reading a book, drinking wine. They were a comfort, pinned there in Ev's mind, safe, alive.

  By the time they got to Paddy's bungalow in Oak Park, it was after one. Ev had not spoken with Rachel since dinner; these days it was understood that Ev's appearances at home would be sandwiched between work and hospital. A creature of habit, Ev had almost enjoyed the regularity of his time the last few weeks, the predictability of traffic, the instant familiarity of the hospital, the pleasingly lonely drives home down empty streets. He had begun seeking radio phone-in shows, excited and repulsed by the tone of the advice dispensed. Why were all the hosts so angry? The callers so timid and cowed? These forays into average America always stunned Ev; his own insulated life—his family, his practice—allowed him a safe distance from such encounters. They would charm him for a while, then appall and depress him.

  He'd arrive home exhausted, yet lie in bed beside Rachel wakeful, with ridiculous images scrolling inside his eyelids. He seemed to have been having dreams while awake, and they weren't unpleasant. Best of all was his magical ability to put into them whatever he wanted: flights around Europe, unusual sex partners, his lost childhood self.

  Again he recalled that frightening dream of his father pulling him through the door of death, a tall door, a black-and-white, film-noirish dream, the long bright beam of death's light.

  Now his father had died. The routine was over. Ev had hastened the inexorable future and there were arrangements to make (he'd told Nurse Amy to have his father cremated) and debts to settle. People who might genuinely mourn the old man's passing would soon come to Ev expecting cathartic reciprocity. A new era was on its way.

  Beside him, Paddy Limbach said, "Man, my mother's going to take this like a ton of bricks."

  "Mine, thank God, is already dead." He told Paddy that his father had killed her, had driven the life out of her, had made living miserable and dying a salvation. He found he liked Paddy, who listened attentively, although Ev did not typically like his type. Too rugged, too entrenched in the league of the dumb and fit, the ones Rachel called body Nazis. But his pain had shown on his face. There'd been that ridiculous kick, and then that shaming, hurt glance. Paddy had understood the woman in the parking lot, the one Ev had missed completely, and, maybe predominantly, he represented the antithesis of Ev's relationship with his father. Here was genuine grief, completely unlike the vague anxiety that Ev felt creeping toward him, an anxiety that had everything to do with getting caught and nothing to do, as far as Ev could tell, with having pushed forward the end of his father's life.
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  "Thanks for the ride," Paddy said, swinging open the car door. "Hey, you seen my hat?"

  "You left it on the hood of a car, back at the garage."

  "Shoot."

  "And your bandanna, too," Ev told him. "With the woman."

  "I'm always losing my hankies, but I don't usually forget my hat." Paddy looked toward his house, the place thoroughly ablaze except for a softly lighted room on the far side: his daughter's night-lighted room, no doubt. "Lot of sad girls inside there," he said. His instinct was to shut the car door, stay in Ev's passenger seat, avoid his home, suspend the moment. "All praying my dad'll be O.K. I feel like I let them down." Going fishing had been Paddy's idea, and if they hadn't been so far from help, maybe his father's heart wouldn't have had to work so hard in damaged condition. No one was going to blame Paddy except Paddy himself, but just looking at those female faces was going to make him want to die.

  "I'm sorry about your loss," Ev said—the one time in his life he'd uttered the words, the one time he could imagine meaning it.

  "Oh yeah. Ditto," Paddy told him. He shook his hair from his eyes and nodded to Ev, then climbed clumsily from the car and walked up the steps with his hands jammed in his pockets. He rehearsed his entrance: I have some terrible news, he whispered. Peepaw has died.

  Ev listened to his engine idling, the Saab's chirpy thrum, the sound of a machine eager to go places pretty fast. Where he wanted to go was a bar, and what he wanted to drink there was scotch. He hadn't had scotch for eight years, and his sudden desire for it made his heart grow alert and begin thudding. Ev had not had scotch or any other alcohol, hard or fruity, neither for social nor for ritual reasons, in eight years. All of his bad habits he'd been paring away over the years, beginning with smoking, when he was in college, and progressing through all the others, sugar and salt, red meat and dairy, then white meat and fat, always preserving alcohol as an indulgence, until he excised it, too. If he was going to be honest, he would have to let it go. He loved it best, so clearly it would harm him worst.