"Sure, that's a problem, and I did think of it before we went to my place, but I hadn't seen him before, so why should I see him in the future? Anyway, the sex was only so-so, and I've been avoiding being anywhere near where he might be at the studio. So I'm a big chicken." She sat for a moment; Ev let silence fall. Luellen said quietly, "He was a premature ejaculator."
"Did you like him?"
"No," she said. "I can't like anyone who isn't a shit. And he wasn't a shit, and I didn't like him. And I can make fun of his eager dick, too. You know, sometimes I'm feeling worse instead of better about my problems. I'm starting to sound kind of hard-ass, don't you think?"
"No, I don't think. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to beat this." Ev stared at her suddenly with a frightening clarity: he could see her as a child, an average little girl—not unlike little Melanie Limbach—with three pretty sisters. The conflict would have started so simply, with small remarks about her looks, about her being the brain rather than the beauty, or perhaps they said beast. It all took on hideous proportions, grew like some cancerous cell in the psyche, came to inhabit her at the expense of nearly everything else. A small seed, growing to devour everything else inside her. The fact that she survived at all overwhelmed him for a moment. How did anyone do it? He had an impulse to rush to his own sons, lock the doors, and hold them close.
Luellen had begun crying. "I'm so tired of thinking about this stuff," she said. "I wish I could just stop thinking about it and start thinking about other things."
"What things?"
"I don't know. What do you think about? What does a normal person think about?"
"I think about the exact same things you do," Ev told her. "I think about my father. I blame him and forgive him and blame him and forgive him. I get tired of my problems. I fall asleep hoping I'll have an interesting dream. I look forward to sleep, then can't actually fall asleep. Like that." Ev put his hand to his forehead and swept it over his hair, feeling as he did so his father's head, the surprising way his father's head, in the hospital immediately following death, had felt just like his own. Now he had a curious dislocation when he felt his own head, as if he were touching both his father and himself simultaneously. Every time it gave him a small shock.
"I think about words," he added. "I was thinking about an oxymoron this morning— casual sex." He stopped. Maybe Luellen wouldn't think of this as an oxymoron at all. "And recover, which seems to mean two opposite things—to find, and also to cover again." Nuclear and unclear, he might have continued, just two funny words.
"Uh-huh," Luellen said, uninterested. It was so rare to find someone fascinated by your fascination. That was one thing Evan had always appreciated about Rachel; she pretty cheerfully tried to follow along.
"You like your kids?" Luellen suddenly asked. "I mean, you think having kids is a good idea?"
Evan sighed. This can of worms was a troublesome one, especially in cases of abuse. There were only three kinds of parent to be: good, bad, or good and bad.
"For some people," he said. "It's true children can be thorough distracters from problems. Better than other addictions. They're kind of friendly addictions."
"I was thinking I ought to get pregnant. My sister the anorexic got over her anorexia by getting pregnant. You know, hatched her own higher being. I was thinking I might stop fucking around, stop drinking, all my dirty little habits. Maybe it'd help me get over my dad."
"It might."
"Of course, I'm probably not even fertile anymore, forty-two years old. My uterus probably looks like a saggy saddlebag. But will you do me a favor and think about that? Will you think a lot about my having a baby? So we can talk about it next time? I can tell you're about to cut me off, so I want to have just a few more conversations about what to do next, O.K.?"
"I won't cut you off," Evan assured her.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." She stood abruptly; Ev joined her and walked her out to the waiting area. Clarissa, the office receptionist, had gone home. His partners, Lydia and Jean, had also left. Downstairs, the hairdressers would be sweeping up the clipped curls, the foyer would smell of mousse and shampoo and ammonia. Outside it was growing dark; a spring wind sent eddies of loose trash down the street; cold rain waited in the air. Luellen felt like a friend today. Ev was tempted to tell her she'd be a good mother, because she probably would be. And it would help her to hear it, he knew, in dealing with her own mother, who was coming tomorrow. But she was addicted to a dangerous lifestyle and had sex nearly every night with strangers; he wouldn't accept responsibility for her becoming suddenly pregnant, on the chance that his praise might be understood as advice.
"Take care," he told her at the door.
"Oh, boy, am I bad at that," she said, laughing caustically. "I take almost everything but."
Five
ALTHOUGH RACHEL had agreed eagerly to entertaining Ev's new friends the Limbachs, she regretted that eagerness on the day of the dinner party. She had a habit of dishonest enthusiasm, of leaping into things without looking at them carefully. What made her believe she would feel anything but exhausted at the prospect of meal-making and sociable chitchat? Her sons were unpredictably rude, and sometimes the healthful food she and Ev cooked turned out badly, organic sludge. Besides, her house wasn't clean and she needed to lose eight pounds.
But Ev had been despondent lately, silent and frowning, irritable and silent. He was distracted and unhappy; she asked him one night if he was having an affair. He looked at her with such scornful disappointment that she was embarrassed. Her husband liked to think of her as someone above petty assumptions. "Not every problem is grounded in infidelity," he told her with disgust. "Not everything has to do with you."
"I know," she said, relieved, yet also more deeply frightened. Her initial worry had been that he had fallen in love with someone else—one of his many women clients, somebody whose psychological snafu had become irresistibly infatuating—and though there had been times in their marriage when this wouldn't have particularly hurt her, times when she herself had thought she might want to have a reason to leave, now was not one of them. The death of his overbearing father had created an intimate space, a susceptible pocket in Ev that she'd been certain she could expand into and fill: that dopey optimism again. They could become more and more of each other, interlinked like those twisted DNA ladders, molecular inseparable. Their long marriage had its ebbs and flows; before, they'd seemed to inhabit those fluctuations simultaneously, floating apart, gravitating back. Now Ev was straying off, creating a wholeness through some other source while Rachel felt vaguely untethered. She did not want to go chasing after him, to flounder at his heels. She supposed she should be grateful it was not another woman. But what?
So perhaps he needed new friends. And she would accommodate him. Somehow during the day of the dinner party her hostess confidence came back to her. She hoped Paddy Limbach was charming, because she liked to flirt. She hoped that she herself was more interesting and jollier than Paddy's wife, because she liked to have Ev be reminded of how lucky he was to have married her. And she hoped that Ev would not fall into a sulk during the evening and begin to argue over things that did not deserve argument. He had mostly liberal views that occasionally lapsed into stubborn defenses of the apparently indefensible. Because his father had held a nasty and unfounded antagonism toward blacks, for example, Ev had developed a blanket endorsement of all blacks: they were never guilty, in his book. It was a flaw in his otherwise reasonable consideration of things. It was also something she could never tease him about. Tonight she would miss his drinking personality, the one he'd given up nearly nine years ago, because alcohol had softened him and made him silly and affable. Rachel could remember trusting alcohol to bring out his true character, and in truth he was a goodhearted, sweet-natured man.
In the late afternoon, she changed out of her sweats and into a calf-length black dress with a fat belt. She checked the time—four o'clock; she never drank before four—and then opened a bottle of c
hardonnay and poured herself a big sturdy tumbler of it. The bread dough was rising, the gamehens were marinating—stewing in their own juices, she thought—the salad greens were denuded, tossed, and drying on a pile of paper towels. Little pansy blossoms had been included in this bag of greens, something her sons would find funny. Piñón nuts had left their urinelike odor in the room when she'd roasted them, so she opened the kitchen window wide and switched on the ceiling fan. Her skin instantly broke into goose bumps; outside it was humid and brisk, weather like a fever: one moment you were sweating, the next suffering chills. So far, it was a sopping, blustery June. The lightning storms in the evening gave everything a familiar yellow childhood tint—tornado weather.
Rachel liked being alone in their apartment. She liked especially the fact that her little office space was now hers, precisely the way she'd imagined it, complete with a phone extension. She thought she could move into it and live for a while, as if it were a bomb shelter. Whereas the rest of the apartment was scantily furnished—Ev's preference was to live in a museum, a big empty space—this room was full of flowers and photographs and useless throw pillows. It reminded her of her childhood bedroom, of her college dorm room. Only in it did she realize how compromised her adult taste had become, how overwhelmed by Ev's. His taste hadn't shifted in the sixteen years she'd been married to him; his nature was to winnow away, to cull excess, to reduce everything to its barest essence, its functional minimum. He'd carried that aesthetic into every aspect of his life: food, clothing, conversation, friendship. He was a bone-skinny man with few possessions, little in the way of manners; Rachel pictured herself for a moment as the wife of Jack Sprat, the wife who ate the fat, who collected little useless bottles and dried flowers, whose address book listed people from more than twenty years in her past, the maniac collector compensating for a spouse's asceticism. One side of her room's door was painted the inconspicuous white of the kitchen; its other side, out of view and facing her room, was a sweet periwinkle blue. She kept it closed, the way Ev did in his study, at the other end of the apartment.
Ev arrived home early to help out, and swatted her on the behind as he passed. Rachel was searing the birds; she loved the tender white the pieces turned, like succulent baby skin. Meanwhile, Ev straightened up, throwing away mail and papers. He cleaned house impatiently, because although he insisted on tidiness, he did not think the activity in the least bit gratifying or worthy as a way to spend time. On this point they agreed, Rachel and Ev. The place looked bedraggled, dusty, and tub-ringed. Ev went through with a damp sponge and then with the vacuum, leaving the air filled with unsettled dust. Perhaps it would float around long enough to leave the surfaces clean for the evening.
"What do these people do?" Rachel asked Ev as he passed through the kitchen with a sack of trash.
"Don't know," he said, clattering down the three outside steps to the trash chute on the landing. Returning through, he added, "You're going to think he's a hayseed."
"Really?" She laughed.
"Really," Ev replied, not laughing. "A country bumpkin in a Hee Haw hat."
An hour later, she was tempted to laugh again when Ev's new friend handed her a bouquet of daisies and a six-pack of wine coolers. Bringing wine coolers instead of wine for dinner was the kind of thing Rachel and Ev's other friends might do as a joke, but she saw that Didi and Paddy Limbach were perfectly sincere in their intention of drinking the things, straight from the fruity bottles. Rachel was obliged to join them in sipping at one, a peach-flavored fizzy soda-pop-like drink that didn't carry any kind of punch at all, as far as she could tell. Its taste reminded her of high school, the depressing period of her life when she drank only in order to get drunk, and only things like this, alcohol disguised as Kool-Aid, the worst kind of drink in the world—and accompanied by the worst kind of memories.
"Inauspicious," she told herself in the kitchen, pouring the pink liquid down the drain, washing it guiltily away; from Ev she had learned to hate waste, even to this small degree, and though sometimes she wished for a big chowhound to eat scraps, she considered the wine cooler unfit even for a dog.
Armed with a healthy coffee cupful of stout cabernet, she rejoined the group. Paddy and Didi had brought their little daughter, a scrawny child who clung to her mother's legs and whimpered unintelligibly. Rachel squatted in front of her and asked if she'd like to see Zach's computer games.
"Uh-uh," the child said. Her mother shuffled over to the couch, pulling the girl behind her, and sat.
"Melanie, Mrs. Cole would like you to go play with a computer, wouldn't you like that?"
"She can call me Rachel," Rachel said. "I can't stand being called Mrs. Cole." Then she wondered how she would introduce her sons, who were late home from chess club and soccer practice, to the Limbachs. Was she supposed to say Mrs. and Mr.? Rachel felt slightly displaced, as if returned to her own childhood for a second, to that time before she'd learned the rules.
When Ev held out his hand, Melanie took it, surprising both Rachel and the girl's mother. "Come with me," he said. "We'll find toys." They disappeared down the hall to Zach's room, leaving Rachel with the child's parents.
"Your apartment is beautiful," Didi said cheerfully, sending her gaze on a cursory rove of the room. "Did you just move in?"
"No, we've lived here sixteen years." Rachel tried to see what made the place seem incomplete. The room was arranged like a gallery: walls of paintings with a coffee table in the center, chairs arranged around the table. Track lighting ran around the ceiling and beams of light shone on paintings. The coffee table was a kidney-shaped piece of glass mounted on a brushed steel sculpture. A naked young woman supported herself in a backbend with her feet and one hand, while the other hand rose up through the glass, palm open. Ev's father had once used her hand as an ashtray; there was still a silver smudge between her fingers where his cigarette had burned. He had a talent for finding the thing that enraged people the most; Rachel had pushed him angrily to his room afterward, banging his wheels along the way, tempted to stop short and dump him on the floor. He seemed always to be provoking her, wanting to see her furious, wanting everyone to reveal the very worst of their characters.
Rachel loved this coffee table; it was her favorite piece of furniture in the world. The girl's tense stomach muscles made her sad. She hoped Didi and Paddy weren't going to say anything about the table. There wasn't anything they could say that would make Rachel happy. If they'd loved it, they would have said so immediately, overtaken by its beauty and poignance. But of course they found it disturbing, and now they would have to remark on it, find some halting, compulsory piece of stupidity to utter.
Paddy knocked on the glass with his knuckles and said, "Somebody you know make this?" As if the table were a pinata or a globular lump of clay.
"No," Rachel said. She wondered what his reaction would be if she told him it had cost over four thousand dollars.
"Sixteen years!" Didi exclaimed. "The last place I lived for sixteen years was my parents' farm. Can you imagine living in the same apartment sixteen years?"
"Yes," Rachel said. "I can."
"You own?" Didi asked.
"Yes."
Rachel and Didi were nodding at each other, smiling insincerely, and Paddy was staring at Rachel as her head bobbed, his mouth suggesting a smirk. Why was he smirking? He was handsome in a way Rachel did not trust. His type, the jockish boys who always traveled in boys' groups—football teams, fraternities, Marine platoons, golf foursomes, paramilitary organizations—had always made her suspicious. They were too big for normal furniture; their knees got in the way; they wore their uniform du jour. And what was with that flap of blond hair he kept pushing out of his eyes? Why was his type always so cheery and cocky? What did they discuss when they were alone in their locker rooms and bunkers, wrapped in their towels, urinating in tandem? What did their sneering brainless chivalry hide?
He put his large hand on the sculpture's arm, dwarfing the woman, making her seem suddenly, t
o Rachel, younger. He looked at Rachel and smiled innocently. Probably he had received everything easily in life; handsomeness had a way of working like that. "Pretty," he said, of the girl.
His daughter and Ev returned with armfuls of old stuffed animals, ones Zach had begun to pretend not to need. Melanie said to Ev, "Make them talk." This was his sole child's trick, giving the speechless speech, and Rachel wondered how Melanie already seemed to know it. Although Didi patted her lap for the child to come sit with her, Melanie followed Ev's lead and sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, ratty animals dumped around them.
"Is that a real lady?" Melanie asked, pointing at the coffee table, and Rachel pictured a young model dipped in molten metal, frozen as if she'd fallen holding a tray of hors d'oeuvres in her hand. After Ev explained the art of metalwork, there was an extended silence.
Paddy smiled once more at Rachel. "Evan and I met at the hospital," he announced.
"Yes," she agreed, nodding.
"On a fishing trip, my father suddenly had a heart attack."
"No one could have expected it," Didi added. "So tragic. Peepaw wasn't even sixty yet."
"Peepaw," the little girl said sadly, without looking up.
"I haven't been fishing since," Paddy said. "I miss it."
"I went fishing once with my father," Rachel offered. "A hook flew right into my eyelid, like destiny."
He hissed with horror, the hand he'd laid on the sculpture involuntarily flying to his own eye. "Ouch."
"Yes." She nodded again. The hook had actually lodged itself in her hair, not in her eyelid. But she liked a more dramatic anecdote.
On the floor, Melanie arranged a semicircle of animals, all of them listing sideways. Ev had relaxed his gaze on the middle distance, absorbing rather than participating in the conversation, an irritating practice of his derived, Rachel supposed, from his day job. Rachel found herself still nodding, like someone with a quivering neurological illness, sipping at her wine, wondering what sort of music Didi liked to listen to while she drank her wine coolers. She felt suddenly self-conscious about there being no music on, about being barefooted, about the toenails emerging from Didi's white sandals, all painted a pearly peach, the same color as Didi's blouse and hair ribbon and pants buttons and damned drink, angry for absolutely no good reason that these strangers were in her home. She had enough friends. She should have told Ev that last week, when he'd said he wanted to get to know Paddy better. Making friends irritated her. It was so much work getting to the interesting parts of people, like peeling an artichoke.
Talking in Bed Page 7
