"What do you mean?"
"I don't know what I mean." She lay her head on his tanned chest. "Mr. Chivalry," she said. "The gallant guy."
***
Another time, Rachel told Paddy about her day, thinking she could charm him in the way she used to charm Evan. "I'm getting so nostalgic and sappy," she said as they lay in her bed, an early winter darkness settling outside the window. "Today I turned on Sesame Street just to listen to the theme song. Oh, it was weepy-weepy." She waited for Paddy to hold her, to treasure her female sentimentality, which was so unlike her. This was the way she had flirted with Ev, once upon a time, though he'd become immune to her tender moments as the years passed. He'd quit being moved by them. Beside her, Paddy also seemed untouched. He lay breathing noisily, awake and thoughtful.
She continued, "I never wanted a three-year-old more badly. The boys and I used to watch Sesame together every morning after Ev left for the office."
Suddenly Rachel had a scare, an instant's worth of terror: her boys were never going to be young again, her husband was quite possibly never coming back. Well, she knew that, and even now, a second after, the terror seemed manageable. But for that brief instant she had felt the spin of the uncontrollable, the sucking vortex of mortality.
"Paddy?" she said, as if he might have left her, too.
"Uh-huh."
"What are you thinking?" She wanted to hear how enigmatic she was to him; she wanted to hear him fumble for his feelings.
"Well," he said, lifting himself up on one elbow, facing her, "I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but you always seem to want me to feel sorry for you. And I don't want to feel sorry for you. I mean, I think we're having a good time, besides the sin of it all. Don't you?"
Now it was her turn to fall silent. She cast about for the eager little life vignettes she'd provided him these last few weeks and realized he was correct: she always made herself pitiful. Well. Even Ev, the trained analyst, had not been able to point this out to her. But then, Ev was sometimes oddly ignorant about what Paddy would most likely label the Big Picture. Rachel found herself not hurt by Paddy's observation but in awe of it. It was so astute and smart. And she hadn't thought of him as being smart, that was the real truth, the real thrill—that he might be worthy of her, body and soul.
"When I'm alone I imagine you're watching me," she told him then, which was true. She hadn't been able to sustain that game in a long time, not since her last crush, several years earlier, when the boys were ear-infected toddlers and she loved their pediatrician. She'd let him observe her all day long, bathing the boys, tucking them in, telling them clever tales. How she shone as a model mother when Dr. Nixon was around! And of course nothing had happened between her and Dr. Nixon. Soon the boys quit getting sick; then they started going to Ev's GP. But she liked having Paddy's shadow hovering near her. "I pretend you can see me driving along the freeway, singing songs, talking on the phone, whatever. I like to think you'd like me if you could see me."
"I do like you." Paddy had been about to tell her he loved her. It would be the first time he would have said it before the woman did; despite his capacity for outrageous gestures, that one he withheld, waiting so as not to be humiliated. But he wasn't sure he did love Rachel. Maybe it was age creeping up on him; maybe that thing he used to call love he wanted to name something new, such as affection or friendliness. Well, that was ridiculous, he told himself, he was more than affectionate or friendly in his attitude toward Rachel, but was it love? He knew he would rather be here naked with Rachel Cole than with any other woman he could think of. He knew he thought about her all day, although not in the way she had just described, where he was her audience, but much more about sex, much more about being in bed with her. He postulated to himself that he contemplated sex many more hours of the day than he actually performed it. Perfectly normal thing, he told himself, every man did the same.
Maybe it was having a daughter that made him question calling his feelings for Rachel love. He knew he loved Melanie; she was his gauge. Nobody—not his mother, not his wife, not his mistress—could claim the same sure position in his heart. And given that fact, he told himself he might as well tell Rachel he loved her; certainly he cared what happened to her, he fantasized about her; he wanted to fornicate with her. But if he loved his daughter, he did not love Rachel. It was not the same thing. So he kept this grand gesture to himself, he reserved it guiltily, because it was clear she could use the boost his words would give her.
***
It seemed to Rachel she'd been waiting all her married life for an excuse to have an affair. And since Evan had moved away—chosen to leave her—she felt justified. It was flimsy justification, but it would suffice. She drank too much and she slept with a different man.
She had had very little experience in sleeping around. She could count on one hand the men she'd had sex with. On the other hand she could count the boys she might have had sex with, if she had allowed it. And if there were a third hand, she might number the men in her married life she'd wanted to fall in love with.
It was always a matter of falling in love, for Rachel. She had to be in love before she'd have sex, just as Zoë had said of her. Otherwise, what was the point? Her pleasure was a quality of expectation, enhanced by the man's attraction to her, compounded by the forbiddenness of the relationship, enriched by the hours she spent fabricating his personality, until her love was a marvelous creation of her own imagination.
All Paddy Limbach had to do was put his hand on hers. She almost told him she was in love with him after their first night of lovemaking. It was not an entirely happy emotion for Rachel. She still loved Evan, she knew that, but Paddy was new, his problems were fresh to her, his drawbacks still elusive, his simple humanity still in question: maybe he was not a mere mortal like the other men.
"Everybody poops," she'd told her sons when introducing them to the toilet, then tried to talk herself into believing it was true. Some people—men she idolized—seemed incapable of that act. Her problem in love was just that simple, just that absurdly complicated.
Now she spent her days preparing for her evenings, the way she had in high school and college, making a pathetic attempt at improving her thighs by lying in front of the television in the mornings and lifting her legs along with the women on the screen, bathing in the late afternoons, choosing clothes that best hid her flaws, underwear that might distract from the aging portions of her physique. In fact, she bought new underwear, the unhygienic type that gym teachers always claimed would cause itching infections. It was unthinkable for Rachel to appear before Paddy wearing her usual panties, those flesh-toned cotton items—yes, comfortable, yes, functional, but utterly unfun. Fun underwear reminded you of its presence by sneaking between your legs, its elastic biting in ways and places your friendly cotton briefs simply didn't.
For his part, Paddy wore boxers. Rachel couldn't remember seeing a man in boxer shorts before. She liked them. They were modest yet sexy. They looked easier to want to launder than those white briefs with a blue-and-yellow-striped waistband, their stains of uncertain origin. Like neckties, boxers came in colors and patterns, silk and paisley, cartoon pigs, decoy ducks, plaid.
"I love your underwear" she said to Paddy Limbach. "I love the way you leave them in your jeans, all ready for you to hop back in, like a horse waiting for a cowboy."
Rachel did not care what Didi was like. Rachel already knew she was the superior lover more interesting, more erotic. Her confidence in Didi's inferiority made her indifferent to Paddy's romantic past—surely he'd never known anyone as fascinating as she? But Paddy was curious about Evan, and Rachel didn't mind talking about him. She appraised her husband with complete frankness, not exactly preferring him, but acknowledging his longer claim to her life and affection. She didn't mind noting the differences between him and Paddy; it was like comparing a doughnut to a bagel—same basic shape, but entirely other substance.
One night as they lay in bed, Paddy timidly ask
ed, "Does this happen a lot in your marriage?"
"This what? This sleeping around?" Rachel was flattered: to think, Paddy believed her a veteran! "Of course not."
"Oh."
"And you?" She asked merely to be polite; nothing was clearer to her than Paddy's unpolished infidelity. When the phone had rung earlier he'd bitten his own tongue, nervous to the point of sweating bullets.
"Oh my heck, no." They listened to the elevator motor outside Rachel's apartment. Paddy wanted to know why Rachel would select him over her husband, who was more intelligent, more sophisticated, made more money, and knew better jokes. Was she doing this to get back at Ev? "Listen," he said, "I'm not a pawn, am I?"
"A pawn?" Rachel laughed. She put her dark head on Paddy's shoulder and kissed his chin. She rolled her wide friendly body up against his so that their parts matched. Paddy liked this aspect of her, the fact that she stretched his length, that she seemed capable of utter relaxation beside him. The difference in their weight was maybe twenty pounds. She was unlike little Didi, who always squirmed around during sex worrying about her thighs and stomach, who got distracted by the possibility of becoming fat while Paddy pumped away on top. He used to feel her pinching her own tummy, taking note.
***
In February, Paddy invited Rachel to a basketball game. He'd sold his father's farm to one of the assistant coaches at De Paul; somehow this entitled him to tickets. "The boys would love that!" she exclaimed, realizing after he'd gone that they would, in all probability, not love it.
The stadium stunned her. Zach sat down beside her and looked around at the mob. He said, "It's like Where's Waldo?" Marcus scowled. They knew nothing about basketball. Zach played soccer but the only sport Marcus had ever played was badminton with his uncle on the apartment building's roof, losing birdies over the side. Out on the floor during timeouts, girls flew akimbo into the air and boys caught them in their arms. While in the air, the smiling girls jerked into boomerang-like positions, then folded into sitting on the descent and, finally, landed cradled in their partners' arms. Every time one flew up, Rachel gasped. How could their mothers watch? she wondered. From living for many years with Ev she had grown graphically imaginative about the disasters lurking everywhere. All she could think when she saw a body sailing up into the stadium air was that if it fell, there would be a broken neck, a crumpled blue-and-white form on the floor.
"How many people are here?" Rachel shouted in Paddy's ear. He was eating popcorn, a handful at a time, and little crumbs were falling over him.
"Fifteen thou," he guessed. "I don't know."
She couldn't recall having sat in the same place with fifteen thousand people before in her life. It made her start thinking about snipers.
A beachball sailed by. People stood and sat, stood and sat, raising their arms and lowering them. "Here comes the wave," Paddy shouted to her, standing and sitting with the rest. It was sort of phenomenal that so many grownups could be persuaded to wear blue sweaters and pretend to be a wave. Rachel tried to think of attending a basketball game as an enriching experience, a mother-son bonding event. She tried to believe she was having fun. It seemed to her that having fun was something she'd outgrown, like reading the comics or going dancing. She'd lost the knack. Or maybe she'd never had it.
Unfortunately, her sons looked as baffled as she felt. Zach chewed a licorice whip and Marcus was reading the pamphlet Paddy had bought for them with the players' names and photographs in it. Up and down the court stomped the teams, great big boys, the basketball sailing from hand to hand, the players' faces hermetic and obsessed. Part of Rachel wanted to escort her sons away from here, hustle them to the car and then back to their condo, hide them from such grotesque displays of aggression. She felt extraordinarily exposed: the proximity of everyone, the noise and action. The other part of her welcomed the normality, the prototypical American fun of it all. The thing about fun, she thought, was that you couldn't concentrate on it. Otherwise you saw how absurd it was. Boys trying to poke a ball in a basket, adults avidly following, up and down, up and down, firing off obscenities, howling at the boobish referees wearing zebra shirts.
But Rachel decided to let it fascinate her. She gave herself permission to study Paddy and his world. She let him take her hand when the game was over and lead her through the crowd to his car.
He knew many things Rachel didn't, but what she came to admire in him was the fact that he owned up to what he didn't know, which was substantial. He had a foggy sense of geography, one inferior to Rachel's sons'. He did not, for example, know where Mount Everest was, nor which countries surrounded France. She'd only discovered this because Marcus had a project due; but it successfully opened the possibility that he knew much, much less.
One of Rachel's most debilitating fears was that people would discover how little prepared she was to understand the world: scientifically, politically, organically. With her brainy son Marcus she feigned feigning ignorance, his assumption being that she did so in order to get him to research his own answers. In social circles where she might have to comment on world events or historical facts, she fell back on idiosyncratic anecdotes she'd picked up from television reports or a recently read magazine article. She listened to the news on public radio every day, but her attention to it was purely temporary: she did not have sufficient background to draw conclusions. And when she asked Marcus to help locate a plug-in for a new reading lamp, he said to her with disdain as he crawled under the sideboard, "Could it be called an outlet?" Later, when he sat researching the lifespans of bats, Rachel read a few paragraphs about their feeding habits, their radar and parenting. It was all too much, the world. She could never get an adequate handle on it. Whatever she learned, she seemed to forget: names of painters, philosophies of great thinkers, the temperature at which water boiled, the exchange rate of the British pound, the different types of clouds, the depth of the ocean, the size of the sun, the arrangement of the universe.
Paddy didn't know much of this stuff either, although he read the Old Farmer's Almanac religiously. He had a beaming way of smiling at Rachel when she pointed out his ignorance, a smile that successfully let her know she was the only one who thought it was important. Other people, he implied, did not so fervently worry about what they were revealed not to know. He gave her gifts; he certainly would not judge her deficiencies.
And that felt novel. Her husband, she'd believed, found her lacking.
***
Rachel knew she had fallen solidly in love—had moved from the temporary, suspended falling to the thudding past participle, had fallen —when she delighted in hearing her sons say Paddy's name, illicitly and innocently. "Paddy told me..." Zach would begin, his side of an argument aided by the simple masculine invocation. And Marcus would answer "Paddy" in his scornful, patronizing way. She'd loved to hear them call Ev Papa, to watch them run at him full-tilt when he came home from work.
Paddy, they said now, and her heart bloomed.
Twelve
"PADDY SAYS our pipes are lead," Zach reported to his father. Before Evan could reply, Marcus corrected his brother.
"He said the seams were lead, not the pipes. Idiot," he added scornfully, a tag intended for either Zach or Paddy, Ev wasn't sure which.
"Marcus." Ev sighed, too tired to get upset. The habit of relentless parenting—stalking, catching, punishing—had fizzled inside him; he wasn't in the mood to rekindle it. The combination of a drink and a long walk had made him successfully exhausted. He'd forgotten the boys would be arriving; they were waiting in the liquor store across the street, sucking lollipops the Chinese proprietor had given them. The lollipops were pink, heart-shaped, a pair of nippled breasts. Evan had purchased cigars just to express his gratitude.
Marcus had eyed the cigar package suspiciously. "You gave up smoking," he told his father.
"I'm being friendly," Ev said. Then, because he thought he was lying and he remembered that he didn't lie to his son, he said, "And I might feel like smoking one later.
"
Marcus's face made Ev feel villainous.
"If our seams are lead," Zach went on in the apartment kitchen, hours later, "we could be getting brain damage when we have a drink."
Evan sat with them while they did their homework, Zach dreamily, Marcus furtively. Their scritching pencil noise seemed endless; every few minutes, Ev would leave the room to wander around the apartment as if he were looking for something. He was restless and weary at once. When he got back to the kitchen, everything was as he had left it, flat. Time itself was bored with proceeding.
"All Paddy said," said Marcus, "was that we should run the water for a minute before we fill our glasses. That's all. Then the water that's been sitting in the pipes washes away. You always exaggerate, Zach. You're always getting all excited."
"You're the one who stayed up all night scared for your brain cells," Zach said amiably. "Not me."
"You don't have enough brain cells to worry about."
Evan wondered why his tolerance for their bickering had lessened instead of grown larger. Wouldn't it have made more sense for him to sort of miss it, to feel nostalgic toward it, to indulge it happily, stocking up for the lonesome moment when they'd gone?
"The plumber said it was unlikely our seams were lead," Marcus told his father as if he and Ev were the two adults at the table, as if Ev had expressed concern, which, in a former time, he would have.
"Paddy—" Zach began.
"When did you see Paddy?" Ev asked, hoping to distract them.
They looked up at him simultaneously, their expressions the same, that suddenly regretful, "oh, never mind" face.
That came first.
Talking in Bed Page 19
