Only walking allowed him to think straight. Only walking permitted a balance that kept him from sinking. Mindless movement and mindful contemplation: he wondered if his brother had discovered something like this years ago, the need to satisfy a pressing present urge.
He was mugged on a Friday night in December as he walked home from a dull Christmas party. A gun was shoved into his spine so firmly he thought he'd already been shot; the picture of a silencer flashed in his mind despite his never, to his knowledge, having seen one.
"Here we go," said his assailant, snapping the fingers of his free hand. "The wallet and the watch, big guy, Mr. Gay Blade."
In fact, Ev had no wallet, was wearing his only suit, and had stuffed a few dollar bills in his jacket pocket (this for one scotch at a bar; he'd been at a holiday party, but his friends could not know that he was drinking again after so long an abstinence, could not be given yet another aspect of his life to pity; his separation from Rachel was fodder enough). Ev found it difficult to convey his meager holdings to his mugger, as if the encounter were happening in a dream and he were sleepily mute. Eventually the man felt for himself the absence of wallet and watch, one fist ramming into Ev's pockets while the other one held the gun against his ribs, the man cursing Ev while Ev wanted to apologize. He knew he was going to suffer some abuse for not being prepared; he received a hard whack on the side of his head.
Pistol-whipping, the police called it, though that sounded exaggerated to Ev, since there'd been only one strike. However, the skin had been broken and a strange vessel had burst, sending a rhythmic spurt of blood from Ev's cheek, a projectile leak onto his nice wool suit, a pewter gray now dashed with the Tabasco red of emergency. He could not get the bleeding to stop; the police didn't want to leave him by himself, as his utter calm was a reaction they did not understand.
In fact, the gun in his back had not made his life fly before his eyes; he had not experienced a sudden desire to reform. It was with profound patience that he'd suffered his mugging, which he viewed as a kind of ironic cap on an tiresome evening. He'd been walking home from his partner Lydia's, taking a distant detour through Bucktown, the neighborhood of Luellen's bar, Friendly's, the place she went to pick up men. The street had been momentarily empty—cars at an intersection behind him, patrons of a restaurant across the street, Christmas lights over the business fronts as if over a tiny sleeping town—and Ev had been wondering if he was making excuses for searching Luellen out, if he had brought along his dollar bills to buy her a gin instead of himself a scotch. He'd been thinking about her worrying that her decision to stop her sessions had to do with him. Perhaps he'd committed some subtle fumbling gesture that made her think he thought she was hopeless. But he did not believe he'd been completely honest about his motives; other clients had halted sessions and he'd not sought them out.
He missed her. It was possible he missed her more because he also was missing his wife. And Joni. All the intelligent women were disappearing from his life. He seemed to be driving them away. And at the party, he'd been missing alcohol, and his children, and randy jokes, all the ingredients of a truly festive evening. They were achingly absent at Lydia's apartment, where everyone was tactful and solicitous, where there was no sexual tension and no drunken behavior, where nothing unexpected was going to happen unless Ev himself provided it. The eggnog hadn't even had eggs in it; Lydia was living low-fat, vegetarian, chemical-free—virtues that had once given Ev something to talk with her about and that now, he'd discovered, he was savagely scathing about.
As if abstinence made you blessed. As if denial gave you celestial credit. When Lydia had told him that she'd finally managed to eliminate all animal products from her life, even the ones the animals gave up willingly, Ev had sourly said, "There'll be another star in your heavenly crown."
"Who can we turn you over to?" his cop asked him when he refused to go to the ER. "Who you want to call?"
It was not fair to phone Rachel; he didn't want to endure her pity, either. She'd been angry with his desertion but now seemed strangely sympathetic when he happened to see or speak to her, as if she were making peace with their separation, getting used to the extra space it must afford. He thought of the small gathering of people he'd left at the party: Lydia and her lesbian lover; his other partner, Jean, and her vulturine writer husband; other business associates, all decent enough but with their own grubby reasons for wanting to see Ev further down. He thought of several friends he hadn't spoken with for a few months, who didn't know he and Rachel had separated, married couples who most likely would opt to remain friendly with Rachel rather than Evan. Rachel had more talent for keeping friends; she kept better track of their lives, of their phone numbers, of their habits. Ev could not stand the thought of these husbands leaving their warm beds, leaving their warm wives, arriving smooth and concerned and still warm themselves to care for him. It was the image of the wives, who would rise to phone Rachel, that irked him.
Only Paddy seemed tolerable, only Paddy Limbach, who would leave Didi in her baby-doll nightgown, amble into the police station, mildly fuzzy, wearing his cowboy hat or maybe a fluorescent-orange hunter's cap with earflaps, now that it was cold. Didi wouldn't call Rachel. Paddy wouldn't give advice or make judgments. Ev could see himself sitting with Paddy in a diner afterward, eating greasy hash browns and drinking scorched coffee, surrounded by drunks, the evening weirdly rehabilitated.
But it was Didi who answered the phone, her childish voice alarmed.
"Paddy said he was going out drinking with you," she told Ev.
Ev, annoyed by the dopey lies of typical marriages, could not think of a satisfactory response.
"When did you last see him?" Didi asked. "Were you at a bar together?"
"Listen, Didi, I've been mugged. I'm calling you from the police station. I'm sure Paddy's fine, but he's not my big concern right now."
"Mugged?" she squeaked.
"Yeah, the whole nine yards, my money or my life, that kind of thing."
"Oh, where is Paddy?"
Evan hung up on her. Although Didi was not entirely unlike a few of his clients, he rarely had much contact with people as thoroughly dishonest with themselves as she appeared to be. Her sincere feelings he imagined encased inside her, a vital little nesting doll held in place by bright lacquered versions of herself. He felt sorry for the daughter, Melanie, recalling the way she'd put her hand in his, the way she simply liked him. It was Melanie's trust in him that he latched on to, because he needed to latch on to something. Melanie, and his own sons, those absent, missed party guests. He could hang up on Didi Limbach and he could move away from the double bed he shared with his wife, but the children would still be there. He had forsaken his father, his brother but he had not left the children. The clarity of this revived Ev.
"You have something for my head?" he asked one of the cops, touching the throbbing blood vessel. A butterfly bandage was located and successfully squelched the messy pulse from his temple. He took a cab to his apartment building and heard his phone ringing as he entered: Dr. Head, who could not sleep until he'd had his nightly chat. Ev had forgotten all about him.
In no particular hurry, Ev situated himself at the kitchen table with a cup of water, removed his glasses and tenderly touched his bandage, then lifted the receiver. Dr. Head, unflustered by the improbable amount of time it had taken Ev to answer asked in his gruff New England voice how Ev's day had been. Ev told him it had been difficult. "I'm sorry to hear that," Dr. Head said, without bothering to ask for details. Then he moved quickly to manholes.
Manholes. Ev let his mind become absorbed by manholes, their comic and civic usefulness, their sudden unpatriotic terrorist potential, enumerated by Dr. Head. Ev sat in the dark, still wearing his ruined suit, waiting for the sky to turn light, listening to Dr. Head, trying to recall where he'd seen a dry cleaner's, anticipating the surprised expression of the person to whom he'd hand his bloody jacket, wondering when the trains would begin to arrive more frequently at
the Addison stop. He asked himself why he tolerated Dr. Head, what he himself gained from this nightly exchange. He'd explained to his colleagues and to his wife that he was the only therapist he knew who would permit the man this necessary eccentric treatment, but that couldn't be the only reason. Ev refused to see himself as some sort of crusading martyr.
It was probably that Dr. Head's paranoia topped Evan's, kept his steadily within the realm of the real. If Dr. Head was a genuine paranoid, then Ev wasn't. Out in the world lived all the extremes, and Ev maintained his own equilibrium by calibration. He wasn't as pessimistic as Dr. Head; he wasn't as uncontrolled as his brother. He wasn't as mean as his father had been; he wasn't as smart as Joni had been. He wasn't as innocent as Paddy Limbach, nor was he as kind.
Tonight Dr. Head claimed he had published a volume of poems, some of which would cause him a great deal of trouble if any of his so-called friends ever read them. That was why, he told Ev, he had used a pseudonym. Ev waited to hear what famous poet Dr. Head had selected as himself. He was betting on a Robert: Frost, Bly, Penn Warren. But Dr. Head said, "Dick Stubbs."
"I've never heard of Dick Stubbs," Ev said.
"Well, of course not," Dr. Head growled. "You don't read poetry, do you?"
Ev admitted he didn't, although he thought he probably should read more of it. Hadn't literature, once upon a time, made him feel saved?
"I'll send you a copy," Dr. Head said. "But you have to promise to send it back."
"I'll do that." He imagined a stapled sheaf of typed pages arriving sometime next week with Dr. Head's monthly check, each poem testimony to the world's wickedness.
"What's your book called?" Ev asked.
"Black Universe," Dr. Head promptly replied. "It's all about bad seeds like my neighbors, family, et al."
Dr. Head had been suspicious of Ev's new phone number; he thought perhaps his family had gotten hold of Ev and persuaded Ev to talk about him. For a few weeks after Ev's move, Dr. Head had called only when truly desperate, when sleeplessness tormented him. He'd said at one point, "You should go back home," but that was all. He didn't have much interest in Ev's personal life, unlike Ev's other clients. This contrary response provoked a contrary one in Ev: he sometimes wished to tell Dr. Head about himself. Their relationship was so unlikely, and their conversations so thoroughly one-sided.
Eventually, the men wished each other a peaceful sleep and hung up. Ev laid his head and arms on the table and drifted off, a small pool of blood forming beneath his face, his dreams involving the black universe under the city, the one you could fall into if you opened a manhole, the one his brother Gerry inhabited every single day of his life.
***
Didi waited up for her husband, who had apparently lied to her. She stared at the telephone as if it were to blame. She resented Evan Cole for waking her, for alerting her to Paddy's deception, and for hanging up on her as if he knew more than he would bother to say to her.
In Melanie's room the vaporizer whistled quietly away. Mel slept with her mouth open, her face seeming oddly large and unattractive. Much of the girl's prettiness had to do with her huge blue eyes, inherited from her father which were of course closed now. She had stringy blond hair with a hint of pink in its underside. Her right arm, which had been broken, was still thinner than the left and now lay draped over a fireman's hat she'd insisted on taking to bed with her. Every week she adopted some new object as her favorite, the thing she couldn't sleep without. Her fingernails were black-rimmed, every one of them, and when Didi leaned over to give her a kiss, the smell of soiled clothes made her wrinkle her nose. Didi wondered if her daughter had remembered to use the bathroom before bed.
Didi replayed the evening, which resembled most evenings: the wheedling and clock watching, the mocking laugh track of television, the annoyingly slow and messy snack Melanie insisted on having before bed. For reasons Didi could not explain, it was imperative that Melanie be folded away in bed by eight o'clock. That didn't happen when Paddy was home. When he played with Melanie, it was in that distracted way of his, the way that involved all the blocks and all the plastic figures, all the sets of toys jumbled together in a displeasing chaos of discordant sizes and shapes: the jumbo rocket beside the frail dollhouse furniture, the life-size and lifelike endangered turtle carrying the plastic firefighter—who had no appendages, nothing but a little fireplug figure and a set of black freckles on his smiling face—on his back. These fusings and shufflings distressed Didi. She preferred to have everyone in his place, among his intended kind, within scale. It was as if the toys might all start occupying the same baskets and boxes, all thrown together in a haphazard fashion that might never permit her to sort them out again, to put them right. But Paddy encouraged this kind of democratic hubbub—everything equal, everyone welcome. He did not care where they all went later, for cleanup, and he did not pay attention to the time. Didi found herself circling his and Melanie's play like a sheepdog, herding them toward bed. Although she had chosen against giving Melanie a bath tonight, Didi was now aware of the girl's stickiness. Perhaps she'd forgotten to point her to the potty as well.
Didi hesitated just a few seconds before lifting Mel out of bed and carrying her to the toilet. Her pajamas were footed and had to be unzippered along her leg, a process that made Didi think of boning fish, of her dead father-in-law's skill with the slim knife. "Go. Potty," Didi enunciated, hoping to penetrate the recesses of her daughter's sleepy mind without actually waking her: a command to appeal to the well-trained child. Melanie slept, propped up by Didi on the toilet. Soon there was a trickle, which went on and on; Didi's concern had been justified, she was pleased to note. Melanie's head lolled as Didi shifted, allowing Didi to see the wrinkle of dirt in the folds of the child's neck. Didi wiped away the moist grunge, only to feel more, a tacky, gritty necklace of filth around Mel's throat.
Didi shook her daughter's shoulders. "Wake up," she said to her face, angry suddenly at the child's ability to sleep so soundly, as if she might be taken advantage of later in life. "Wake up and get in the tub," she ordered, already reaching behind her to swing the old metal faucets on full force.
Melanie woke weeping, roused so unfairly in the middle of the night, so harshly, and for something so thoroughly tumultuous. Her mother landed her in the water and scrubbed her throat, her chest, down between her legs, splashing about as if to drown Melanie; the cloth and the hand it covered were fierce over her small chilled body. Some part of her was still asleep, awash in a new kind of nightmare, crying and crying.
Didi did not lather up her daughter's pink hair decided that that could be tomorrow's project. She carried her wrapped in a towel, still sobbing, back into her bedroom, where she pulled new pajamas over her damp skin and zipped her quickly inside them as if to contain the fleeting perfume of cleanliness. She switched off the light and sat beside Melanie while the child snuffled, wounded by her mother's compulsiveness yet still sleepy, unable to sustain her huff in the face of the warmth and solace of bed, of being stroked on the back.
It was just after Melanie drifted away that Didi heard Paddy come home, closing the front door behind him. On impulse, she slid from Melanie's bed into her closet, a shallow space full of pretty dresses hanging on the bar. She hid, thinking he could have a taste of his own medicine. Let him think she'd left him, abandoned Mel, gone away. She listened as he moved quietly through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen, where the sink tap ran for a moment, then the bathroom, where he peed for a good long while, then spat, then flushed. He would not notice the soggy bathmat or the moist air, the scent of soap. The light switch clicked off; he checked the back door. He opened the refrigerator and moved the condiments around; Didi could hear the clinking, then the soft suction as the door closed. He stumbled leaving the kitchen, catching his foot on the new wooden threshold. In the dark bedroom he was silent—undressing, she supposed. Finally he must have eased into his side of bed, confident of his stealth.
Didi's heart banged the
way it had when she had played games with her siblings, full of the anticipation of being found, the thrill of being hidden where people didn't know to look, of being a hider and a seeker, of waiting. Quickly she shucked her nightgown, letting it fall to the closet floor at her feet, breathing in her own sour odor, shivering in excitement.
"Dee?" she heard. He had padded to Mel's room, and she wondered if he would wake their daughter, if Melanie would have to endure another arousal by one of her foolish parents. The light clicked on; she could see the bright stripe beneath the closet door. Mel's dresses hung on either side of her on their plastic hangers. Her ear was against the cool metal bar; a ruffle was at her bare navel.
She stepped from the closet, naked, to see him, naked, leaning over Melanie, about to shake her. He jumped.
"Oh my hell, honey, you scared..."
Didi walked through the room without stopping, switching off Mel's light as she left. She returned to her side of their bed and waited for him as if she had beat the seeker to base, her heart still banging away in her chest. He would have to come home if she was hidden every night from him in a closet, wearing no clothes. He did not entirely know her, she told herself.
"What's this all about?" he said as he fell in next to her and put his big hands on her hips. She had not lain naked in bed in a long time, although Paddy frequently slept without clothes. He did not smell of liquor. He did not smell of perfume. "I'm sorry I'm late," he said. "I got tangled up in a bid with Jim. Then we went to his house and moved a hot-water tank. I think I hurt my back," he added, looking for sympathy, as if to distract her.
"You said you were going out with Evan," she said. "You said a drink with Evan."
Talking in Bed Page 17
