Talking in Bed

by Antonya Nelson

  "No, babe, that's tomorrow night."

  Now it was Paddy's heart that raced. It was Rachel he'd arranged to meet tomorrow, not Ev. "I can cancel," he said, grateful for an excuse to abandon his plans. He'd been having second thoughts all week. He rolled toward Didi, toward her unusual nakedness. "Wanna fool around?" he murmured in her ear.

  She seemed to want him to hold her, but she did not want to make love. If she let him have sex, he told himself, he would break his plans with Rachel. For a while he tried to save his marriage, bumping his erection against her thigh, covering her neck with kisses, but she turned away, and rose eventually to retrieve her nightgown from Mel's room.

  When she climbed back into bed, she considered telling him that Evan Cole had gotten mugged. She considered it, but did not tell him. She didn't want to be left alone again. Evan Cole could wait and tell him himself tomorrow.

  Eleven

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS, Rachel thought later, that was responsible for her affair. It was the fact of the holiday, of gifts and generosity, that made her succumb to infidelity. It was because Paddy liked to give gifts, and because her birthday fell just a month before Christmas; the combination was deadly. "I find him simple," Ev had said. "I find him kind."

  Rachel and Paddy did not go to bed together until January, at Paddy's bungalow in Oak Park, on a night when the boys were staying at Ev's. School had been canceled a few days because of heavy snows; the wind blew until the streets, deadly serene, shone with ice and the trees and rain gutters and balconies and playground equipment were hung with transitory frozen daggers.

  In the face of this, Paddy's house was too hot. He had turned up his heaters—perhaps he'd gone and bought a new one for each room, big ones for big rooms, little ones for little rooms—in order to keep Rachel comfortable. She was both touched and frightened by this gesture. If it was a gesture.

  "Where's Didi?" Rachel asked, although she already knew; they had already discussed Didi's whereabouts this weekend.

  "In Normal, visiting my mom and aunt. Melanie..." He let his daughter's name trail off as if he were avoiding the mention of something indiscreet, as if he were being polite, giving only a vague nod to his certain infidelity. Rachel was tempted to make him be franker, the way her husband would have. Ev wouldn't tolerate coyness.

  Paddy's home reminded Rachel of a mortuary. She had hoped for something surprising, but Paddy and Didi's taste occupied precisely the space she would have anticipated. They went in for studio photographs, she noticed, a whole wall of smiling faces, and then below, bric-a-brac and conventional furniture, arranged in conventional formations, the groupings little girls learned playing dollhouse and tea party and later had ratified by sitcom and soap opera sets. They owned a large electric organ made of faux wood; all of its rhythm and accompaniment levers were flipped flat like a palette of big plastic fingernails. A television sat enshrined in the center of an elaborate wooden structure placed directly in front of and too close to the sofa, to which Paddy had directed her. Rachel felt herself lean away from the dark screen as if it might tip over and crush her. The two speakers were as tall as the coffins of children.

  Having devoted all their energies to making sure their meeting was safe, Rachel and Paddy had neglected to devise even a flimsy premise for it. Each was too nervous to eat; neither had considered taking in a film or a play. It was too cold to go for a walk, and besides, the neighbors might notice. They sat on the couch with a plush velveteen cushion between them. Paddy had turned on no music; the television sat ominously, like an uninvited guest, waiting for engagement; the only noise was the murmur of the heaters' fans, humming from every room, flaring on and making the lights dim briefly. Rachel had been busy all day denying what she knew she was going to do: allow Paddy Limbach to put his penis inside her.

  Rachel had permitted only a few other men in her life to do the same. There was Evan, of course, and other boyfriends during college, all three of them men she had been in love with. She'd drawn a traditional line, on one side of it every conceivable erotic grope and probe and nuzzle, and on the other irrefutable intercourse. A foolish distinction, she supposed, but related to procreation, to children, to the old-fashioned notion of preserving the consummate act for men with whom she was unquestionably in love. She held on to this outdated idea in spite of her radical politics, in spite of intoxicated arousal. In the center of the cacophony, stimulated by intellectual or alcoholic or carnal overindulgence, Rachel retained a stubborn unbudging sobriety like a pearl.

  Now she could feel the plump swell of her diaphragm, inserted an hour earlier. It had been so long since she'd used it, she'd had to fill it with water and examine it over the sink, looking for leaks. She'd flexed it in and out like a toy, testing its suppleness, then applied the goo and clumsily plunged it into place. Many years ago, Ev had learned to do this for her. Because she'd been away from the diaphragm for a while—she and Ev had relied on rhythm, on withdrawal, on condoms—she had not prepared herself against an attack of nostalgia concerning it. Ev had always liked to immerse himself in the dailyness of her woman's business—he bought tampons without flinching; he didn't care if she used his razor to shave under her arms—and he'd made a nice foreplayish ritual of inserting her diaphragm. Doing it all by herself this evening had almost made Rachel cancel her sleepover with Paddy; she'd had a tearful episode in the bathroom, remembering Ev's dark fingers squeezing the pliable ring of latex, easing it up inside her, then easing himself up the length of her body until his face was beside hers, his sticky fingers between them aiding the subsequent insertion.

  Paddy said, "How about a drink?"

  "Excellent." Rachel nodded. He hurried to the kitchen as if to rehearse his next, forgotten line.

  On the coffee table in front of Rachel lay a tattered Old Farmer's Almanac, pages not only well thumbed but marked. She scanned one of these. It concerned itself with little-known facts, like: the military invented the refrigerator during World War II to cool not food but aircraft engines. Sirius is the brightest star. Mars had once had water on its surface. David Rice Atchison was president of the United States for one day. Distilled strawberry juice will tighten loose teeth. Hippocrates treated his patients with vinegar, and if you soak a sugar cube with vinegar and then suck, your hiccups will go away.

  It was like "Hints from Heloise" meets Paul Harvey.

  "Here you are," Paddy said. "Honey," he added, handing Rachel a huge glass the shape of an upturned sombrero. Pink wine sloshed from the side.

  "Thank you," Rachel said, wiping the spill into the couch. It was a dreadful sweet wine, and it wasn't particularly cold. "Don't you have any sugar you could put in here?" she would have said to Ev later, if Ev had been here with her, if she had had him to talk to later. Those bathroom tears returned, related directly to the ache just below her cervix from the diaphragm. She tried, in vain, to substitute her friend Zoë as her future audience.

  "Cheers," Paddy said miserably, raising his own ridiculous pink drink. Then, "Why are you crying?"

  "I'm scared," she said, twin drops sliding from her eyes and through her makeup, applied clumsily in a moment of self-doubt. Now she would have pale streaks through her blusher she thought. But better that than dark circles from wiping at her mascara. No wonder she'd never gotten the hang of wearing makeup; with it, you had to make minute-by-minute decisions during your crying jags.

  "Don't cry," Paddy said. "I hate it when you cry."

  "You've never seen me cry before."

  "I will hate it," he said. "I hate it now." Her crying reminded him of sex with Didi. And that was maybe the last thing he wanted to be reminded of. Crying had been erotic for Didi, and maybe it was for Rachel, too, but it wasn't for him. He liked his partners happy when he went to bed with them. He liked the image of a woman tearing at his shirt with her teeth, smiling. Not sobbing on his shoulder. Like Rachel, Paddy had an ache in his groin, though of course it wasn't from wearing a diaphragm but from thinking all day of going to bed with Ev's wife.
Now she was crying, not just sniffling but sobbing, her shoulders shaking, her nose running. Paddy scooted over the cushion between them and put his arms around her. She fell against his chest and breathed deeply. Nothing seemed more certain to Paddy than the obvious fact that she needed to be held, and had been needing it for some time. He was relieved; it was a job he had no anxiety performing.

  "It's O.K.," he said into her warm hair. She smelled clean. He liked the idea of her bathing for him, caring what he thought. At her ear there was no earring to avoid with his mouth, there was just lobe, the downy droplet of flesh he could hold between his lips. She had a nice earlobe with fine hairs at the bottom, larger than Didi's because she was older than Didi, a fact about the human body he'd once read in the almanac.

  "Oh," Rachel said. She said it a number of times, very softly. She turned her wide chest toward him, putting one of her breasts right into Paddy's palm, which was the precise size to hold it. He always wondered whether breasts hadn't been designed by God not just to suckle the young but to encourage procreation, the way they swelled beneath the hand, the way they drew the mouth.

  Rachel's breasts, he noted, were not as firm as Didi's. They were larger than his wife's but had lost some tensile strength, as in any animal who'd had young. Paddy covered them with his palms, shaping their softness, accepting their pliability. He could love them, he thought.

  Rachel had worried all day about the order in which she would drop her clothes. She'd come without a bra, wearing a long buttoned sweater over jeans with the intention of leaving the sweater on like a coverup after removing nearly everything else—shoes, socks, pants, panties. And now, apparently, she was to lose the sweater first, as Paddy moved down the buttons, flicking them open one-handed.

  "You're good at that," she told him. "Should that worry me?"

  "Uh-uh," he answered. They were murmuring in each other's ears. Their eyes were closed. At some level, Rachel's brain was taking note of the variation, all the differences between this and loving Ev, the familiar versus the unknown. But some other level continued responding while she thought, kept moving closer to Paddy, tugging her body toward his. Her skin wanted his skin; her parts wanted to match up to his, one by one and without exception, the sole of her foot desiring the sole of his.

  But two adults couldn't have sex on a couch without inconvenience, and there was no reason not to request a move to the bedroom. "Let's lie down," Rachel suggested, since she was confident Paddy wouldn't come up with the idea himself. Besides, she wanted to watch him walk from here to there with an erection. Erections had always delighted her, and Paddy's jeans—so different from Ev's loose chinos in this moment of excitement—made him move gingerly. He blushed, and Rachel did not have to worry anymore about her own body. Whatever inadequacies she felt compelled to cover most of the time were not going to bother her this evening in Paddy's bed. She vowed to think not of how she looked but of how she felt. And she felt chilled, trembling in fear, in her near nudity.

  "It's cold in here," she told Paddy as they walked with their heads bowed into his bedroom.

  "Yeah," he said. "I had to turn on all the heaters."

  ***

  During their second round of sex, Rachel forgot herself at one point and began to have a conversation, as she would have with her husband. "How do they know, those people in the Farmer's Almanac, what the weather is going to be like for the whole year?"

  Paddy stopped, lifting away to stare down at her in the semi-dark. Rachel recalled what they were up to and was embarrassed. And lonely for her husband, who tolerated talking when they made love, who would pause and chat, resume, hesitate again. Ev was uncharacteristically leisurely in bed.

  Paddy said, "My dad was a farmer."

  "Yes, I know. In Normal."

  "Outside Normal."

  For no real reason, Rachel said, "What you might call a fur piece from Normal." She was exhausted from weighing her guilt against her pleasure, and sore and physically worn out as well. Sleepy. Happy. Maybe all the other five dwarfs, too. Dark rooms and warm beds made her tired. The almanac on Paddy's coffee table also reported that one's sex drive shut off in the dark; she could believe it.

  "You want to just go to sleep?" Paddy asked. He'd remained for a while optimistic about their making love again but now curled around her, sweaty and heavy. This Rachel liked. Ev had not permitted contact in sleep; he cramped himself into his fetal ball as far away from her as possible. His scrunched volume made Rachel aware of her own dimensions, as if she didn't have a right to fill space. An insomniac, he protected his sleep and was surly when wakened in the night.

  At Paddy's, when Rachel woke angry with herself and anxious about her sons at three in the morning, Paddy roused himself and told her a story. A story!

  "Once there was a woman with a hat," he began. The woman was beautiful—"Of course," Rachel could hear Ev saying, Ev with his automatic tagging of any stereotype. Paddy's character was very vain about her hats. This particular hat was tangerine-colored and shaped like a ship, a great big ship that sat upon her head. She had a temper, the beauty, and one day in a fit of anger she flung her hat from a high window. Down it floated, passing offices and restaurants and stores, the people inside watching it go by, wondering idly where it had come from, making up anecdotes about it while the hat sailed to the avenue, where it whirled in the auto exhaust and smoke before landing in a puddle, from which a friendly dog took it, shook it in his mouth, then carried it home with him, where his owner, a dogcatcher, rinsed out the mud and hung it on the clothesline, from which a brisk wind sent it flying once more, this time over to the shipyard, where it landed on a freighter bound for Shanghai ... On Paddy went, episodic and steady, the hat story floating in the dark room like the hat itself, Rachel being first amazed, then eventually lulled successfully back to sleep.

  In the morning she thought of Zach, who had all his life despised conflict. "Tell me the three pigs story," he had often said to her when he was very little, "except no bad wolf."

  "I sensed no rising action in your story," Rachel told Paddy when he woke. "No epiphany, no denouement."

  Paddy shrugged. He was the kind of man who did not own up to his nighttime gestures of softness. For breakfast, for example, he served her Grape Nuts and skim milk.

  "Ick," she complained.

  "It's good for you," he said, motioning with his spoon.

  "That's just the problem." They seemed to agree not to mention or even acknowledge that it was Ev who had recommended Grape Nuts to Paddy, Ev who ate them every morning without fail, Ev who extolled their hearty filling nature. Surely Paddy had been a bacon-and-egg man before he met Ev.

  ***

  They got in the habit of spending at least part of the night with each other, most often at Rachel's apartment; Paddy appeared at the door on the late Friday afternoons of the boys' weekends with Ev. Quickly sex, too, became a more habitual act. Rachel would begin cooperative and passionate, though not as excited as she'd been the first time. Soon, however, she would become too thoughtful, too guilty, too distracted. In the middle of things she might say, "You know, your wife never liked me."

  Paddy, growing accustomed to her style, would stop moving and say, "I don't know about never. You only met her once."

  "Still."

  "Well, she said you were a snob."

  "Really?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you think I'm a snob?" She liked the idea of miffing Paddy's wife.

  "No, I think you're a beautiful lady."

  Rachel bristled; Paddy's pillow talk, something he'd grown more confident in using, irritated her. He sounded like a cross between a country-western singer and a Las Vegas pimp when he tried it out on her.

  "Seepy?" Paddy asked, now tender rather than excited.

  "Sl," Rachel corrected, enjoying his caresses in spite of his canned dialogue. "I like you," she admitted. "I think you're nice. What are you doing in bed with a snob like me?"

  "Trying to get in your pants," he said, sl
ipping a hand under her backside.

  "My pants are on the floor," she said flatly. He'd learned his lines from bad movies, maybe bad books. She didn't want him to tell her things he'd read or heard before, especially when they were in bed together, especially then, when it made a great deal of difference that she was not just anyone. She asked him, not for the first time, "Are you particularly attracted to me, or did you just feel like sleeping with someone new?"

  Paddy stopped moving his hand. Rachel felt the mean urge to ask if he couldn't perform the two things, talk and foreplay, at the same time.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "I mean, I get this feeling that men sometimes just want to fuck anything, anybody. Sometimes men seem just like automatic weapons, spraying randomly, hitting whoever happens to be standing there. I want to know that you want me." Her words sounded suddenly absurd to Rachel. What the hell was she talking about, anyway? Wasn't she in bed with him, hadn't he sought out her, only her?

  Paddy lay back on his pillow and crossed his hands chastely over his chest. He was silent for a long while, during which time Rachel reached over to check his penis. It curled, limp and warm, on his testicles.

  "I'm sorry," Rachel whispered, closing her hand over his bundle of genitalia and waiting for it to respond. "Please don't be angry. I'm just nervous."

  "I don't like that word," Paddy said.

  "Which?"

  "The F word. I don't like the way it sounds when you say it."

  "And how does it sound when I say it? How is it different from when you say it?" Rachel was sitting up now, ready to get out of bed altogether.

  "I don't say it," he said simply. "I don't like to hear anyone say it." He scratched his chest, where he still had a tan from last summer, one that ended where his Levi's began. He spent the summer in the sun, crawling around on roofs. He had to be the handsomest man she had ever been intimate with; in fact, his attractiveness played an undeniable role, which was new for Rachel. It had never, in the past, made a particular difference. Once again, Rachel was struck by the ridiculousness of their being together. She was also struck by his apparent code of behavior. He didn't say fuck. The word actually upset him. It was like his believing in God, another character trait Rachel had presumed outdated, if not extinct. "You're in the wrong generation," she told him.