Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  Zach passed. Marcus raised the bid to four spades, adding, for Paddy's information, that that was a cutoff bid. "And game," he tacked on after Rachel had passed and while Paddy sat considering what to do.

  "Pass?" he said.

  "Doy," said Marcus, scratching his head in annoyance.

  "Marcus," Rachel warned.

  "And he's playing it," the boy complained. Paddy laughed self-consciously, perhaps drunkenly. Zach led an ace of diamonds and Marcus laid out his hand, snapping five spades down one at a time. "Pretty good support, eh?" Marcus said, pleased.

  Rachel could hear Ev in the boy's inflection, though what was gently ironic in her husband came out like arrogance in her son. She felt sorry for him for a second; somebody was going to squelch that tone sometime soon. And she also missed Ev—sharply, angrily. He had bred this personality, but where was he when it needed cultivating?

  "Great support," Paddy said absently, "just super-duper."

  Of course Rachel didn't mind that Paddy didn't seem to play bridge. She wished he did, but ... Zach certainly didn't care; after his lead, he'd gone for Cheerios and milk, prepared a bowlful to eat while he threw cards on tricks. But to Marcus the game mattered, and now Marcus's father, who was the superior player, was gone. Paddy was here in his place; Rachel felt his fidgety desire to do well.

  "Get the boys off the streets," Marcus chanted in an undertone, leaning over the dummy hand.

  Paddy looked at Rachel after she scooped up the first trick. She was waiting for Zach to lead again. Zach glanced over his cereal at the board and then led a club. There was an ace from Marcus's dummy hand, so Paddy pulled it out and laid it on top of Zach's three. Marcus sighed again. "No finesse," he muttered.

  Paddy shrugged sheepishly. "That's what all the women say," he said. Rachel tried to chuckle. He tapped the trick closed and set it before him, glancing up at her and grinning again. His eyes, she thought, were quite arresting, blue where Ev's were brown. If he had been standing with the clear blue sky behind him, it might look as if he had two holes in his head. Again Marcus was chanting about the boys on the street.

  "Stop it!" Rachel suddenly said, addressing both the game and her own fantasizing. The three males fell silent. A drop of milk slid down Zach's chin.

  Paddy tried to lighten the moment, leading with his ace of spades, saying, "What the heck."

  "You're on the board!" Marcus screamed. In a flash he was out of his chair and down the hall to his bedroom. Since he was dummy, there was no reason for the game to stop except general shock.

  Rachel sighed. "Well, he misses his dad."

  "Me, too," Zach said, perfectly cheerfully. "But I don't go crying out the door about it."

  "No," Rachel confirmed. "No, you don't."

  "The 'boys' are the trumps," Zach told Paddy agreeably. "When you get them off the street, it means you try to gather them up."

  "Oh-ho," Paddy said. They finished the hand, Paddy going down one. When Zach had had enough to eat, he asked if he could go play with his computer. Rachel excused herself, leaving Paddy at the table shuffling cards.

  At Marcus's door she hesitated, listening the way she sometimes had at her husband's study door. When she rapped, Marcus said, "I'm sorry, O.K.?" in an aggrieved voice.

  "You all right?"

  "Just super-duper."

  "What are you doing?"

  He sighed loudly. "Reading. A book."

  When she closed her eyes, Rachel could feel the gentle spin of her inebriation. It was her birthday, and she didn't want to pursue her son's unhappiness. She hadn't the patience. She was weary of appeasement. "Goodnight, son," she said, laying her hand on the door as she might once have laid it on his back, and then she returned to her guest.

  Paddy had moved to the couch in front of the coffee table, the only real furniture in the living room. His gift rested on the open palm of the coffee-table girl, teetering, barely balanced there.

  "I need a present," Rachel told Paddy, smiling.

  He nodded toward the wrapped box, seeming as eager as she to get rid of the cheery paper and chaotic ribbons. She opened it to discover something purple, velour. A long shirt, heavy and with the odd pliant warmth of an animal in her hands.

  "You like it?" Paddy asked.

  "Yes," she said, trying to remember the last time she'd worn something velour. Or purple, the shade of which made her think of crayon manufacturers, desperate for more variations. Eggplant, they would have named this. Aubergine.

  "I thought you'd look good in a short dress."

  Rachel held the bulky garment up again. Now she saw the gathered waist, the slight flare of the skirt. She turned it around, measuring with her eyes the narrow width of its hips, the clingy aspect of its bodice, the little size 8 tag.

  "Try it on," Paddy urged.

  Rachel took the dress into her bathroom and shut the door. In the mirror she told herself, "This is ridiculous." She made a dead-fish sort of face, stupid and flabby, her neck and shoulders defeated. "Who does he think I am?" she asked her dour mouth, grateful for her tipsiness.

  Though she knew the dress would never fit, Rachel wished it would slide over her like a magic spell, make her beautiful. She wanted Paddy to have that talent. But the purple dress would not go over her hips. The top half was nice, actually, the neckline a daring and successful sweetheart dip, beneath which Rachel's breasts buoyed nicely, but just below her waist the thing wouldn't budge. A lumpy inner tube, it felt alive. Now she had to decide how intimate she felt toward Paddy. Or, more precisely, how intimate she wanted him to think she felt.

  Leaving the dress bunched at her waist, she pulled her black pants back on and returned to the living room. "I do busts best," she said heartily.

  Paddy stood. "Oh." He winced. "Wrong size?"

  "Way small."

  "I described you to the saleswoman, and she said this was your size."

  "What did you say about me?"

  "Well, I don't know." He was close enough to touch her, and did, at the hips, where the trouble was. "There's the second zipper," he said hopefully. "Did you try the second zipper?"

  "I wasn't aware of a second one," Rachel said. She felt her heart pumping blood to the surface of her skin. Paddy found the zipper and opened it, the backs of his fingers for a moment next to her flesh, his warm knuckles the texture of brown paper bag. Then he eased the skirt down over her hips and pulled the zipper shut with a satisfied zzzz.

  "Perfect," he said, relieved. "Take your pants off." He covered his mouth as if she would reprimand him for naughtiness, a gesture Rachel ignored.

  She pulled her pants off while he watched. Her legs looked pale and gelatinous to her, like something left too long in cold water. She fled once more to the bathroom, to stand again before the mirror. Her face was splotchy with her sudden desire for Paddy. Perhaps Ev had been gone so long she would fall for any man who seemed to like her. How could she know, when she'd had so little practice? From the drawer beside the sink she pulled black pantyhose. She yanked them on impatiently.

  "Rachel?" She heard him at her bedroom door and opened the bathroom door so he wouldn't alert the boys, whose understanding of this scene would be thoroughly certain: another man where their father ought to be.

  "You look great," he told her, steadying himself with a bedpost.

  "I like it," she admitted, happier than she could explain. She had no idea what might happen next, a condition she'd inhabited without pleasure all fall, but one that suddenly appeared to be edgier and more exciting. Though the dress was snug, it was not unflattering, at least from the front.

  Paddy ran his hand over the wooden ball on the bedpost and stared at her. He asked, "How come you don't wear makeup?"

  She shrugged. "My mother wouldn't let us look at mirrors when I was young. We had no mirrors in the whole house. She thought mirrors made you vain. Same with makeup. For a while I wore it, in college, but I just quit, I don't remember why." Of course Ev objected to makeup. She quit because Ev found it repre
hensible. He had seemed to believe she ought to admire his thinking on this issue, and she supposed she did. "Plus," she confided to Paddy, "I keep thinking teenagers will point and laugh. I was never very good at putting it on. I think you have to learn it young, at your mother's knee, for it to take."

  "I'll make you up," Paddy said. His palm rolled over the bedpost. "I used to do makeup for all the plays at my high school. I was good at it."

  Rachel raised her eyebrows. "Oh, go ahead," she finally said. "Make me over, I dare you."

  In the bathroom, she switched on the panel of lights over the mirror and drew the clothes hamper to the sink to sit on, shaking her hair from her eyes. Paddy stood behind her, blinking in the sudden brightness. She did not want to contemplate their reflections together him with his sky-blue eyes and corn-yellow hair, his youth and her own agedness. When she had been thirty, she might have looked twenty-five; now that she was forty, she could look thirty-five, but he would still appear to be younger. When people commented on her looks, they most often told Rachel she looked healthy, a word she had decided was simply a euphemism for plain.

  She opened a drawer and let Paddy handle the slim, mint-green, pristine containers of pore minimizer and blush and the wine-colored eyeliner, bought long ago during a shopping trip with Zoë, who purchased makeup with insatiable optimism about its transfigura-tive powers.

  He bent over her upturned face, beginning with coverup, spreading it in circles, his lips open until Rachel smiled at him, imitating his slack-mouthed expression. Her chin was aimed at his jeans zipper. Next he brushed highlighter beneath her cheekbones, then lined her eyes, holding the corner of one lid while stroking over it dexterously with the crayon. His hand trembled near her eyes, but he smoothed the snaky line with his thumbtip, creating a smudgy shadow like smoke on each eyelid.

  "Open your mouth," he told her, once more opening his. He flicked mascara up and down, over and under the lashes. "I lied," he said softly. "I never did makeup in high school. I just used to watch Didi." His hands were warm and uniformly callused, like leather. He had a physical confidence with her that Rachel both liked and was wary of. He was not good at bridge, but he was good at this, he seemed to be telling her—he was good at touching her.

  "I would hate that name, Didi," Rachel said, just to introduce a spouse into the events. "How can she stand it?"

  "Her real name's Deirdre. She prefers Didi. Says it's friendlier."

  "Oy." She watched him as he worked, moving her features accommodatingly. When he finished tamping her lips with a liver-colored lipstick, she stared at her reflection unselfconsciously. She didn't begin crying, but she began feeling like she ought to. Something pathetic was invading her life, something foolish—this makeup job had just enough of the clown in it to make her see that. There were dots of lipstick on her teeth, circles of cheery red on her cheeks. She was not the kind of woman who would lean onto a friendly man's shoulder and sob. She was just barely the kind of woman who would spontaneously invite a man to dinner and bridge, and because Paddy seemed to understand this, he moved timidly into a position that would appear neither too forward nor too remote, squatting beside the little vanity they'd rigged. "Here's my shoulder," he said into the mirror. He still held the bullety lewd lipstick in the fingers of one hand; in the other, he waved a pink bandanna.

  Rachel sighed and lifted her head, tilting her chin to tighten the throat. Her features stood out now that Paddy had emphasized them; her pores had been minimized, as promised by the bottle. How would she ever have predicted this was the way she'd spend her fortieth birthday?

  "All vamped up and nowhere to go," she said. "You want another drink?"

  They left the bathroom as if suddenly realizing its intimate dimensions (small) and furnishings (toilet and tub and scales, places for naked flesh to rest itself) and returned to the big public living room. Rachel brought out brandy in glasses the boys had made, employing a kit they'd found in the storeroom when Rachel redecorated it.

  "I used to buy Didi clothes," Paddy said. "I don't think I ever got her size right either, come to think of it."

  "She's a single-digit gal, I have a feeling," Rachel said.

  "Beg pardon?"

  "I like this dress," Rachel told him. "It was really too kind of you to get it." When he smiled at her, relieved, she saw that his upper lip was bleeding.

  "Oh Paddy, I'm so sorry," she said, stopping herself from reaching forward to touch the small cut. "The boys have been recycling jars into drinking glasses. They like to pretend we're so disadvantaged here with no man in the house, surviving by our wits and our Swiss Army knives. What can I do for you?" It would have been possible—so neatly parallel—for her to take her turn at kissing his wounded lip. But she didn't. Though he had given her permission to fall in love with him, she did not yet want to accept the offer. She would have to stare out her window and think it over.

  "More brandy," Paddy said, wiping his mouth in a manly manner with the back of his hand, then wiping his hand on his bandanna. "There seems to be blood in this drink."

  He wouldn't accept a new tumbler.

  "Broken glass has always terrified me," she said, pouring him more of the aromatic liquor, then sitting back on her section of the couch and pulling her legs beneath her. She ran her index finger around the rim of her own glass.

  He turned his glass so that he could continue to drink, letting the brandy burn his cut each time he took a sip.

  "The boys think our life is falling apart since Ev left. They cope by circling the wagons—isn't that the expression? Pulling everything in tight, taking five-minute showers and clipping coupons." She laughed. "And sometimes I wake up with an empty wineglass beside the bed, and I'm sure I'm turning into an alcoholic—my teeth all furry from forgetting to brush, a half-drunk drink waiting where there ought to be a water glass..." Rachel filled her mouth with brandy, let it seep down her throat. "I like to drink."

  "I figured that out about you."

  "You think I should worry?"

  "Nah. How old are you today, anyway?"

  She frowned. "Forty. It's dispiriting."

  "Forty," Paddy said. "You're older than me."

  "You sound surprised. Didn't you know that?"

  "Well, no."

  Rachel suddenly felt the full bulk of her foolishness: sitting in a tight purple minidress on her fortieth birthday. Flirting with her husband's friend, a man she hadn't even particularly liked until he brought her a gift. Would the future ever offer up sophisticated surprises instead of demeaning ones? At sixty, would she be seducing one of her sons' friends, piercing outrageous body parts, investing money according to zodiac counsel?

  Rachel could feel herself slipping into a bitter associative mode that had nothing to do with Paddy, one that would make her miss her husband, who would have known how to pursue a conversation through its peculiar unspoken maze, coming up with a tidbit in five minutes that resulted from following her silently on his own, something that would raise the evening's tone to a more acceptable level. To bring herself back, to rise from the subterranean territory they appeared to be in, she asked, "What are we up to?" She had arrived at a tired bluntness that was not joyfully drunk but simply pre-hung-over.

  Paddy scooted over closer on the couch. He put his arm around her, and almost against her will, as if her ear or neck were doing its own thinking, her head lowered itself onto his shoulder. He smelled of some cheap aftershave, a quaint aroma Rachel recalled from her adolescence. "Happy birthday," he said, squeezing her.

  She lifted her head, leaving a flesh-toned smear on his white shirt. He'd said "Happy birthday" in such a way that she knew he meant "Goodbye for now." He meant they were going to take things slowly, if at all, which was prudent, and disappointing, and exhilarating.

  Ten

  LUELLEN PALMER canceled her sessions with Evan before he had a chance to suggest closure. This was like her, he thought: wanting to be in charge, wanting to reject him before he rejected her. He recognized her beh
avior from his own, the need to preempt, to protect. He reassured himself he'd advised her properly before they parted ways: against having a baby, against one-night stands, against guilt and self-hatred.

  But he missed her. He missed the way she cursed, the way she snorted in laughter the anecdotes she told him, the merciless way she berated her mother and sisters, her colleagues at the photo studio, herself, and especially the men who loved her. Was there any disdain more vicious than that of the self-loather toward her fans?

  Instead of filling her weekly time slot, Ev took walks during it. He could have used the money—he was maintaining two homes now—but the urge to escape the office early and get out into the air overruled financial concerns.

  His need to walk had grown since leaving his family. Before, he'd taken time over lunch or during a cancellation to walk the streets near his office: under the Loop tracks, down South Michigan, alongside the river, occasionally into a building and up its stairs or elevator. Now he often walked home—over an hour's trip on foot—and sometimes wandered from his new apartment after dinner. The evenings were long and dead, his attention span shrunken. The light bulbs in his apartment bothered him; his neighbors made too much noise and odor. He had no patience for books or music, not even for marijuana, which he'd bought optimistically but found disappointing. It did not cut through his impatience the way it once had; it did not make him able to live happily in a present moment. Life in his apartment should have been as soothing as disappearing into his study had once been; but his family wasn't waiting on the other side of the door, and that made all the difference.

  On the other side of this door was the world, unbuffered, unmitigated. He began to feel as if this move away from home were senseless, as if he were staying away not because he wanted to but because he was too humiliated to move back. Stubbornness was dishonest, in his opinion. And so was moving home because he found his own company lacking. Hadn't he always insisted that he was someone who enjoyed being alone? Instead, he walked to bars, and he occasionally had more than one drink. Drinking made him guilty; guilt felt like an emotion he wanted to suffer. But then he was walking again, vaguely drunk, improperly guilty.