Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  Rachel was assessing her life because apparently it had changed, veered around a corner and aimed itself elsewhere. She and Ev had modeled their life on nutrition—for the body, the mind, the soul. The bookshelves were cluttered with books on vegetarianism, nonviolent child-rearing, nonsexist lovemaking, socially conscious consumerism. Two thirds of the daily mail was always dismal left-wing solicitation. Ev's obsessiveness with doing the right thing had taken over their lives like a weed: it couldn't be killed.

  Now Rachel felt furtive when she went to the grocery store, purchasing everything legitimately but slinking about like a shoplifter. Ev had left her, and it seemed he took their healthy lifestyle when he went. Gone were the brewer's yeast and organic apples, the wobbly tofu bricks and fat-free cereals; gone were the opaque bottles of viscous carrot drink. Hello, white baguette and boycotted green grapes. Welcome, processed smoked cheese spread, sitting arrogantly on a shelf, defying refrigeration. At home, Zach and Marcus would perch on the other side of the kitchen bar eyeing their mother with something like pity, tainted by suspicion, crowned with simple glee: food they coveted! It was as if they'd gone shopping themselves in a guilty miracle dream. There were even forbidden plastic Baggies—goodbye forever, embarrassing wax-paper-wrapped crumbling whole wheat gritty organic peanut butter and home-canned jam sandwiches! So long, celery sticks! Rachel unloaded what felt like contraband, thinking, Their father has left them; what possible difference can a single-serving-size ripple potato chip sack make?

  Last she would unsheath three bottles of champagne and a six-pack of orange soda. She not only kept champagne on hand but found herself purchasing saltines and soda to combat hangovers. Was it pathetic? It reminded her of another time in her past, before Ev and the children, when she'd wanted to be thin, dark, and European and poetically undernourished, and had bought food she'd intended merely to rent: eat and then disgorge. This buying of hangover remedies struck her as similar: planning her bad behavior. It was wasteful and indulgent and, she supposed, sick. But she also supposed, when she looked over the stages of her life leading to now—happy childhood, grim college, happy marriage—that it was only momentarily grim. She may have veered down an alley, but at the end was virtue once more, sometime in the future. She would haul her cloth Save-the-World bag out shopping with her, she would purchase little baskets of weightless sprouts once more. In the meantime, she would look forward to having a drink in the evening and ibuprofen and Crush in the morning. Perhaps a sweet Danish or candy bar to go with.

  She'd taken to watching television, too, thinking that if she had to have a new, single life, why not adopt a whole new country as well? Sitting in the quiet living room reading, as they used to do as a family, now made Rachel anxious—the turning pages, the militant mantel clock. Zach and Marcus were fascinated and dismayed when she cozied up to the commercial networks; previously they had been allowed to watch only what Marcus called the whale channel, PBS. Rachel was weary of public broadcasting, tired of the British narrators on TV, tired of their stepchildren, the sonorous, self-important radio announcers with their tongue-twisting classical composers. Bleak, she thought.

  In the late evenings, after her sons had wound down and fallen asleep, when the standup cable comedians were through, when the Chicago street beneath her window was empty of bundled neighbors, Rachel would consider her plight sentimentally, drinking champagne. The bottle's silhouette on the coffee table pleased her. She felt like a has-been beauty from a 1940s movie, tossed and wry. Champagne, contrary to what she'd been led to believe, kept well. You could cork it and have perfectly drinkable wine the next day. Mostly she felt warm sipping by herself in the dark (she'd twisted the thermostat far above Ev's conservative sixty-eight degrees). The windows were beginning to freeze, giving the outside lights a fuzzy aureole-like effect that signaled the onset of winter, and the street sixteen floors down appeared hushed and melancholy, like a village. Outside her study window, the slate roof over the elevator held a light snow in a quilt pattern, the little house in the forest blanketed overnight. She could invest herself in her sadness, she felt so wholly of it.

  And it wasn't as though Ev were any happier. He was having a crisis, perhaps what would have to be his own idiosyncratic version of the one all men were supposed to pass through in middle life. But he hadn't purchased a hairpiece or a sports car or a rowing machine. As far as she knew, he hadn't fallen in love with some young thing, either male or female. His was a mess of a different color, less personal—impersonal, as far as Rachel could tell—but still messy. She understood it, though only at dark honest moments she tried to avoid. For those moments, it was as if she were he, so well did she know him. And she worried then that he wouldn't be back, not in any sense, that she had lost him, that he had lost himself.

  Her husband required perfection—and that was the good news. From her, from the boys, from himself. It always came back to that single simple premise. He demanded perfection. If he could imagine it, then it was possible. This same philosophy guided his appalling imagination for disaster: any grotesque monstrous act he could envision had undoubtedly been committed, was being committed that very instant. That was the bad news. Certainly the world could bear him out on this supposition; he was corroborated daily.

  For herself, Rachel had often thought he was trying to extract something essential from her something undeveloped or dormant, as if she were a flower he might coerce into bloom. His habit was to test or teach her, as if her soul, like the typical human brain, went ninety-one percent unused.

  Her children looked like Ev's parents, Marcus dense and critical like Mr. Cole, Zach big and impervious like Mrs. The personalities that had kept Ev's parents married to each other for forty-three years seemed to sustain the boys' love/hate relationship, too. Marcus would badger and berate; Zach would absorb like a pudgy sponge until he'd had enough, then either cry—fat tears sliding quietly down his cheeks—or casually wallop Marcus across the chest. Rachel had yet to figure her role in their lives; they seemed Cole clones who'd leased her womb for compulsory spawning purposes. Her sons liked her; until they were three years old, they'd thought she was flawless, indispensable. Now, prepubescent and pubescent—such an awful word—and with Ev suddenly AWOL, they'd come to feel a bit protective toward her giving each other glances. She wanted to slap their faces when they exchanged these worried superior looks. But they didn't get her. "You're nice," Zach had tried to explain, "but Dad is fun."

  This made Rachel remember the morbid bedtime stories Ev had told the boys about Hot Frank, the wiener dog with an unlighted sparkler for a tail whose life was an epic search for the cook who'd cleaved him, or about the Little Leper a man whose purpose in the world was literally to scare people to death, by pulling off his own digits and limbs, leaving himself strewn across the countryside.

  Fun?

  But Rachel had married Evan because he was capable of facing darkness, capable of not being shocked in its presence. He knew humanity could improve itself, but he also knew the depths of its depravation. Rachel appreciated that about him. And his interest in human potential focused so exclusively on her. It was almost parental, not unlike her childhood experience, living in the midst of teachers, people whose inclination was to instruct. Except that her parents had been unnaturally hopeful, optimistic. One Catholic, one Quaker, they'd crafted an odd, seemingly contradictory philosophy of bodily shame and group fellowship. Rachel could explain only by illustration: during her entire childhood, there had always been people living with her family; one or two bedrooms had been occupied by needy friends or students or relatives, a revolving group, their troubles brought to Rachel's parents for resolution. Rachel enjoyed some of them, resented others, occasionally felt neglected, later was proud of her parents' compassion.

  At the same time, the house was completely devoid of mirrors. Her parents claimed that mirrors caused vanity, a simple unyielding equation. As a teenager, Rachel had purchased compacts and checked herself in a silver coffee service kept on
the dining room buffet. At school she frequently requested bathroom passes so that she could jump up before the sinks and take stock of her flying plaid uniform as quickly as possible in the dingy mirrors, never being sure about anything below her knees. She resented the absence of mirrors. In desperation she'd glued a brand-new cookie sheet to her inner closet door, which presented her with a warbled tinny approximation of herself, like something from the funhouse—though in college it became an anecdote that set her apart from the other women in her dorm at Northwestern. There, under heavy wet skies and suicidal anxiety over grades, a lack of mirrors seemed to give Rachel an edge her classmates envied. They viewed her as someone with a serious destiny. Late at night Rachel might secretly enter the empty fourth-floor bathroom and stand naked before a full-length mirror, touching herself and watching, fascinated with self-pity. It was something she should have been allowed long ago.

  When she and Ev met at the university counseling office, Ev had also been interested in her unusual image problems. He was seven years older than she, studying affluent undergraduate women who were depressed. Rachel had been recommended for counseling by her Victorian novels professor, who found her themes on literature "disquieting." Ev, a graduate student at the time, considered her a therapist's dream—bright, forthright, self-effacing. Even then, though, Rachel had felt herself playing a kind of role in which those traits were mandatory. She would sit in his small office and stare out at the enormous squirrels dashing about the campus lawn, relating her life, omitting nothing. "Don't lie to me," Evan had requested, and she didn't.

  It was liberating and made her mind race—she wanted to be better than she was, she wanted to behave with integrity, she had high ideals. Ev listened to her, allowed her her elliptical excited style, followed agreeably, and she sensed his pleasure—not judgment but curiosity; not pity but esteem. She fell in love with him. Their sessions ceased—his stubborn ethics would not allow him to date a patient—and became conversations, moving away from his TA office to the cafeteria and student union, their subject matter turning reciprocal, Ev revealing his father's high and insurmountable ambitions for him: he would never be enough. Yet he did not chafe under that ambition, did not complain about it, either.

  They were married in the spring of 1977 in a windowless justice of the peace's office. There was no honeymoon; even the word made them scoff. They left the courthouse and took the train down to the city, to Diversey, to Ev's family's duplex. Just an hour earlier, perhaps at precisely the same moment they had been exchanging vows, Ev's father had suffered his first stroke. He was not expected to live more than a few months.

  "Let him do what he wants," the doctor told the family. "He gets pleasure from smoking—I can't see any reason to deny him."

  It was terrible advice. Ev's father continued to live, on and on, less and less able to do anything except smoke. Ev could still rage over that doctor's flagrantly negligent words. He did not let go of his fury, over this or any other mistake. He held people responsible. He believed in culpability.

  Ev. She missed him so thoroughly it was as if he were always just on the other side of the wall, behind a door, disappearing in the mirrors when she entered a room. She could see him that clearly, in his bright T-shirts and black leather jacket, his tidy chinos and round-toed suede shoes. He kept his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. He didn't mind staring at people. He was a tense-seeming type, as if he were a man hanging by his feet—his eyes slightly bulged, his face red, the vein in his temple a distinct ripple in his skin, his hair on end. Yet he was right side up.

  "You exaggerate," Ev would say, sighing, twisting the tip of his pinky in his ear. His gestures were so constant that Rachel found herself imitating them, twitching while she stood in line at the bank machine, tapping the steering wheel when she drove, flipping from one radio station to another, manic AM, depressive FM. He was not nervous but impatient, worried, highly aware of the waste around him. One of his favorite motifs for conversation was the uselessness of things. At the grocery he would lift a box of Constant Comment teabags and start in. "First, the plastic wrap around the box," he'd say, trailing behind Rachel as she pulled things off the shelves, all the fragile joy of shopping gone. "Then the box, never mind the plastic bag they'll pop this in at the checkout line. Inside are the individually wrapped foil packets, inside that the teabag itself with its paper tag, and finally the tea. About a half a teaspoon. You get home, you have a pile of paper and wrapper and plastic the size of a small bush and a lousy handful of tea. Waste. Unbelievable." This was what Marcus referred to as Ev's Ralph Nader mode.

  Rachel smiled, keeping her son in mind as she turned now toward sleep, just a little drunk. She sprawled in the bed. Her husband slept lightly, muttering, curled always tight as a fetus, cold yet producing sweat. His odor Rachel could still manufacture when she lay here by herself; she could smell him despite the fact that she'd laundered the sheets many times by now.

  ***

  Five months after Ev moved away to what Rachel had begun thinking of as the Ballpark, the phone rang one afternoon while she napped. Groggy, vaguely hung over, recovering from a sleepless, anxious night before, she listened to Paddy Limbach inquire about Ev's tardiness at the racquetball court.

  "You know Ev doesn't live here anymore," she said flatly. Her voice was froggy with exhaustion. Maybe Paddy would find it exotic; that had, after all, been his only appeal for Rachel, that he might flatter her with a cornpone's reverence.

  "Well, he wasn't answering his phone. I thought maybe you..."

  "We separated," Rachel said. The more often she said it, the colder she felt toward the news herself. "I'm not taking Ev's messages. He's got an office and a secretary for that." She frowned; wouldn't Paddy have logically called there in the first place? "Did you try his office?"

  "He left already. I figured he was coming to the court, but he's late. I'm really sorry."

  Rachel wished he would say "Oh my heck," the way he sometimes did. That was her favorite of his reputed vernacular expressions. According to the boys, he was also known to declare, "Holy catfish!" She yawned, tasting in her breath the dry horror of too much champagne the night before. "Thanks," she told him on the end of the yawn. "I'm surprised Ev didn't cancel your game if he couldn't make it. Actually, I'm surprised he didn't show up. The boys claim he really likes the sport."

  Paddy said nothing; Rachel could hear his breathing, as if he were huffing. Then he said, "Well, guess I'll go," as if hoping Rachel would keep him on the line.

  "O.K.," she said. Okey-dokey, she thought. They hung up.

  Rachel looked down at her wrinkled clothes and wondered whether she would bathe today. What was the point of bathing when it was as late as one-thirty? She focused on the wall calendar, relieved to see today's big blank square: no place to go, no one to call. In front of her on the kitchen table were the boys' cereal bowls; the bloated floating Cheerios made her want to fall back in bed.

  The phone rang again.

  "Rachel?" said Paddy Limbach, as if there were more than one croaky-voiced woman who might pick up the telephone at her apartment. "Rachel?" She couldn't recall having heard her name on his lips before.

  "Yes?"

  "This is Paddy again."

  "Yes, I recognized your voice."

  "Well, I was wondering if you wanted to play racquetball?"

  "Me?" she said, wondering if she should say I. "I don't know how," she said. "I have never even held a racquetball. Maybe I've never seen one."

  "It would be blue," he said. "The ball. I can teach you. I've been teaching Ev. It's a good sport."

  "Are you feeling sorry for me? Is that why you're asking me?"

  "Oh my heck, no," Paddy said. "I just thought since it's nearby, and I've got another hour on the meter here, and I brought all my stuff..." His voice faded, as if he were looking down to inventory all the stuff he'd brought. "And it seems like Ev's a no-show..." He cleared his throat. "Want to?"

  Rachel stood up and then p
romptly sat back down; she was dizzy, her dehydrated brain shrunk in the casing of her skull like a peach pit. She would have to get her act together or she would become, at the very least, fat and slovenly, and at the worst, an unfit mother. "What should I wear?"

  She hung up and promptly drank four glasses of water, swallowing ibuprofen with the last. She put on an approximation of what Paddy had told her: sweatpants and a T-shirt, some paint-splattered tennis shoes. It felt liberating to be costumed as an athlete, something Rachel had never been. On occasion she'd hauled herself on a whirl around Lincoln Park, just to feel her heart pound and her lungs ache. She could picture herself being wholesome, but she couldn't quite endure the daily tedium of it.

  Paddy's club was a public Y, cavernous and drippy with the inevitable stench of generations of men exerting themselves. She wondered what Ev made of the place—Ev, who had ridiculed competition and teams, male jocularity, jockstraps, sweat.

  "Teach me," she said to Paddy, who was nearly unrecognizable in goggles and gear, a bug-eyed exterminator. He led her through a dwarf door into an echo chamber. When the door slammed with a prisonlike, fatalistic boom, the lights flashed on above.

  Paddy said, "The basic rule is hit hard and hope. I use the same one for pool."

  "Hit hard and hope."

  Racquetball, Rachel discovered, was a very forgiving sport. One simply had to smack the ball—it had nowhere to disappear to—with all one's might. It was oddly therapeutic. One could vent a lot of anger here, in this big white box. One could sweat out a lot of alcohol. She watched Paddy crouching in front of her and could imagine Ev there, waiting pessimistically to be smashed from behind by a ball. Of course Ev would fret about this, about being whapped on the head with a well-placed shot. She laughed at the image—Ev's cringing hunched shoulders, his anticipation of disaster. Running and slamming the ball made her happy, and Paddy didn't seem to mind her beginner's ineptitude, her sporadic whoops and curses, her missed swings and erratic charges.