Then there was Paddy himself, oddly sheepish lately, unable to meet Ev's gaze. Zach had reported that Paddy sometimes ate dinner with them, although Paddy had never mentioned it, and Marcus had perfected an imitation of him, a cruel parody of a retarded person, the lolling tongue, the spastic hand gestures. He bulged his jaw and blew hair from his forehead, a move he might have had to study Paddy, maybe for an extended period, in order to acquire.
Paddy and Ev still met for racquetball in the Y, a sweaty warren, a warm haven in the unremitting winter. Ev scrutinized Paddy; Paddy behaved like a man with a guilty conscience and a child with a giddy secret, averting his eyes, demure as if making up for bad behavior yet gleeful as if in love. It surprised Ev how peacefully he accepted the possibility that Paddy and Rachel were sleeping together. Was he just that incredulous, his ego just that big? Did it mean he had truly left his wife? Or did it mean he couldn't take Paddy seriously as a threat? Or did he enjoy thinking of Rachel as attractive to another man? Perhaps this was how he would have to learn about his feelings, by having them tested, one by one.
His reflexive anger, hidden away from himself, surfaced on the racquetball court. He served into the corner eight points in a row, a shot he'd developed and held in check, now gone wild, merciless. Paddy, overconfident, waited in the corner the ninth time while Ev sent a slow lob in the other direction. The game continued in a childish vein, Paddy hustling to keep up with Ev's trickiness, then resorting to his original advantage of simple brute strength, each forgoing the unspoken restraint they'd previously played with. At first Paddy seemed willing to let Ev win the game, but then he seemed to take stock of the situation and decide, in his boyish way, that he wouldn't be losing this third game, never mind whether he'd won the wife.
"Fuck!" Ev shouted when he spun and missed a return. His forehead throbbed; the vein in his temple stood out as if it would burst. Paddy, who'd fallen into the competition easily, recognizing it from high school, from other games with other men, suddenly remembered who he was playing with.
"What's wrong?" he asked, stopping play entirely. The face Ev turned to him—hostile, teeth bared beneath protective prescription glasses, nostrils flaring—startled Paddy and brought him instantly around: he was standing in a locked room with his mistress's husband, who held his racquet like a weapon.
But Ev shook himself. The skin on his upper arms was loose; his white doorknobby knees were decidedly unattractive. Paddy could not help comparing his own muscular arms to Ev's, his own smooth brown back to Ev's skinny flaccid one. He tried to suppress his sense of victory, the surge of pure happiness. Ev might have won two of their three games on the court, but Paddy had Rachel's heart—or if not her heart, her sighs, her teeth at his ears and lips. And having her meant he did not care about racquetball. They finished their game and he lost again, for once not having to pretend to be gracious as a loser. He clapped Ev on the shoulder, feeling for the first time toward him genuine and complete pity.
It was Paddy's smugness, his condescension, that began to convince Ev he was right about an affair. Part of him wanted to shove Paddy onto the floor and beat his mouth until his lips quit looping in a smile around those perfect teeth; another part wanted to quiz Rachel: now did she understand the elusive attraction of Paddy Limbach? Now could they explore his curious appeal?
In the shower, Paddy and Ev stood silently under two steamy spigots, separated by a partial wall, the tops of their heads and their toes visible to each other. All five of the toes on Paddy's left foot were capped by dented purple nails; he'd dropped a tarbucket on them over the summer, and the injury was slowly pushing out of him. He liked his wounds, the signs of labor. Ev's feet resembled his father's, long and pale, the toes nearly prehensile. He had no deformities that weren't inherited. They were both thinking of Rachel as they soaped their hairy parts: heads, armpits, crotches. They were both considering divorce because of Rachel.
Like their fathers' deaths, this parallel milepost struck them differently. Paddy turned his face to the invigorating spray and grinned, letting the water strike his teeth. He was making a case for leaving Didi, feeding himself a theory that she'd grown as unhappy in their marriage as he: hadn't it been Didi who'd quit enjoying sex? As far as he could tell, Didi spent the day moping around the house, playing church music on her organ, dusting her animal figurines. And as for Melanie, wouldn't the presence of two stepbrothers be good for her, with Marcus teaching her calculus, Zach giving her piggyback rides?
In the next stall, Evan felt the merciless stinging pulse on his scalp and imagined it eating him away incrementally like acid rain ate statuary. He was picturing the future, a frightening absence of image in his consciousness, like the blinding aftereffect of a flashbulb, an explosion of dense mercury behind his closed eyelids. He hated the future, the nothingness of it, the fact that he seemed to be inviting it in, or at least doing little to prevent its arrival.
In another time, the two men would have mentioned their thoughts on divorce; in another time, Ev would have encouraged Paddy's, and Paddy would have discouraged Ev's. Now their advice to each other would run exactly counter to that. Their advice would reveal their secret knowledge.
"Same time next week?" Paddy asked in the lobby as they retrieved their cards from the file box.
Ev nodded, slipping a toothpick into his mouth. His eyeglasses still held a breath of fog; he could not have clearly seen Paddy, even if he'd wanted to, as they said goodbye.
***
Rachel admired Ev's running away, despite his leaving her. She'd always wanted to run away herself—didn't everyone?—but hadn't had the courage: not as an adventurous child or rebellious adolescent, not as a bored adult. But Ev had done it, and she admired him, there was no denying it.
Of course she was also angry. And it went without saying, he'd hurt her feelings. These were the ways she'd found to make her affair justifiable, to make her behavior fitting.
After eight months, she went for the first time to visit Ev in his new apartment, a formerly nice place, now brown top to bottom. The building was just east of Wrigley Field, too close to the Addison el stop. In it lived poor hip young people who played loud music and persisted in leaving the vestibule door ajar, so drunks slept under the mailboxes. Rachel sort of liked the atmosphere, in spite of herself. It reminded her of college, of other romances gone bad: the squeaky floors and Escher-like staircase, the comprehensive industrial paint job—brown, brown, brown, banister, wainscoting, floor.
Inside Ev's apartment hung dirty vinyl shades that snapped open when you gave a little pull; through the dormer window cold light shone from the fluorescent streetlamp. Ev had only to walk next door to fetch taquitos or Schlitz malt liquor—not that Rachel could imagine him ingesting such things, but the proximity of them, the odors in the air of foreign food and diesel exhaust, made his existence appear exotic. Because Rachel had gotten the Saab when he moved away, Ev had no choice but to take the el downtown every morning and probably had established a morning ritual at the station newsstand. In his apartment, Rachel felt the ghostly presence of a long line of single men. She tightened her coat around herself, an alleged ambassador from what was supposed to be the good life, hausfrau come to restore her husband's faith in the same.
His door was ajar that dark Saturday morning in late March; he expected her. Ev had his forehead to the floor when she arrived. "Back exercises," he explained.
"I thought you were praying," Rachel said, though what she'd feared was that he was weeping.
"Well," Ev said in his reflective, philosophical, taking-everything-seriously way, "it is a kind of prayer. I'm praying my back won't give out." He rolled gently to his side and then all the way over, rocking, grinding his spine against the floor. "Maybe all gestures are, strictly speaking, prayers?"
"So you got a weak back," Rachel said, overriding the philosophizing. "When'd you get that?" As Ev appeared to be considering an answer, she added, "You're supposed to say, 'Oh, about a week back.'" This was a joke sh
e'd learned from Paddy.
Ev grunted, smiling his small tolerant smile, looking at Rachel the way he looked at their sons, pleased with a grudging pride of her silliness. He sat up, wrapping his arms around his legs, still rocking. Though he ate constantly, he was far too thin. In his maroon sweatpants he looked Third World, with the elastic cuffs loose around his ankles. Skeleton, Rachel thought. It was hard to remember that it was he who'd left her.
"Sit," Ev said. Rachel looked around and selecting a file box beneath a paint-speckled wall mirror. Her view was of four windows that looked out on the brick building next door. She'd come to deliver mail, discuss unavoidable household whatnot—condominium bylaw revision, insurance claims, school dues, summer camp registration—but she couldn't believe the papers in her briefcase were in any way critical. Her husband looked like hell.
"Are you sick?" she asked him.
"In what sense?"
Rachel sighed, shaking her head. She turned to her briefcase, to the stack of papers whose lines required his signature.
For his part, Ev studied her for signs of a new sex life. He looked at her critically. She seemed physically relaxed, as if her joints had been lubricated, giving her flex and grace. Joint oiling, he thought. Rachel's joint oiling with Paddy. One of Paddy's best qualities was his loose limbs, the way he swung them like a marionette when he walked or played racquetball or rested his chin on a fist. Ev pictured those long limber legs and arms around his wife, wondering if it was his incredulity that made the image nearly impossible. He wondered if Paddy would know to pay sufficient attention to Rachel's breasts, which were terrifically erogenous for her. He wondered if he would find the softest stretch of her skin, matching patches inside her thighs. And would they be practicing birth control? Did she worry about disease? Did Rachel have any idea what, say, a dental dam was? His wife seemed a sexual innocent, and Ev found his concern about her possible affair straying toward the custodial.
Rachel leaned forward, and Ev realized she had come without a bra, which made him grieve for his right to touch her.
She said, "You know what, Ev? Statistically speaking, I don't think many couples that have a separation get back together again. I think I read that somewhere."
"That's probably true." He moved his gaze from her chest to her face.
"It makes me sad," she said, and began to cry.
It made her sad in both simple and complicated ways, like weaning her last baby, like watching her grandmother die. Her long marriage to Ev had no single form; its dissolution seemed inevitable and intolerable at the same time. The tenor of her pain kept drifting.
"But we've never been very statistically reliable," Ev said. He scooted toward her on his tailbone, put his hands on her calves, and rubbed the soft muscle.
Rachel let herself cry for a few minutes while he sat patiently on the floor at her feet, rocking sideways, massaging her in a friendly, asexual manner. Then he abruptly moved his thumbs up her legs and rose onto his knees, meeting her mouth with his.
She groaned involuntarily, astonished. He tasted and felt unbearably familiar and right. His hands moved into her hair and she felt herself free-fall, simply relax into his arms as if into the atmosphere from a great height. She loved him best; he knew her better. His tongue roamed her teeth; she reached for the curls at his neck, then slid without thinking off the file box and beneath him, their bodies performing the rites of homecoming as if there had never been any other role to fill.
Ev heard her say, "I love you," her emphasis on you, signifying that there was an alternative. His speculation about her infidelity now came to a shuddering close: she was sleeping with Paddy. He had shut his eyes against the moment, unsure why he'd been so instantaneously drawn to her, whether he was making love to her because he loved her or because he was still competing with Paddy, still on the court swinging for a win.
Rachel was crying again, and Ev understood that her reasons for doing so were at least as enigmatic as his in making love. Sex frequently made her cry, from happiness, but she also could feel guilty, or simply overwhelmed. There might be a thousand things the gesture signified. It upset him profoundly to be so ambiguous about his motives, to know himself, or Rachel, so poorly.
Finally, when he stubbornly would not answer her admission of her love, she said, "I also wanted to talk about Marcus. Do you want to talk about Marcus?" She snuffled, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, sitting up awkwardly on the floor.
"O.K." He would not say that he loved her, although he did love her. But he could not tolerate its being evoked merely as a response to the threat of Paddy Limbach. What sort of love was that? "What about Marcus?"
Rachel was pulling her jeans back over her hips, her sweater over her breasts, ignoring the splash of semen he'd left on her stomach, white mud. She used to roll onto Ev's side of the bed to leave the damp spot for him to sleep on; he could recall a time when he'd fallen asleep on top of her and they had awakened to find themselves glued together at the navel, the red wrenching-apart.
Ev adjusted his sweatpants, sat cross-legged, his knee touching hers until he very gently moved it away.
"Marcus is hostile." She held up her palm to quell his objection. "I know you don't trust that word, but he is. I have no idea how he acts around you, but he's being a jerk to me."
Ev said, "To you?"
"Well, to me and to Zach." And to Paddy, she might have added, but why muddy the waters? She looked into Ev's eyes, into the deep knowledge he had of her. Undoubtedly he could see straight into her confused heart, could see the new affection for Paddy sitting beside her dark knotty love for him, a puppy near the teeth of a dingo. She blinked in order to remember her point. "Marcus won't wait for Zach after school—not that he has to do that, of course."
"I'll get Zach."
Rachel nudged her knee into Ev's again to see if he had intentionally moved away from her touch. He moved away again, and she felt like a fool. Her tears threatened to start up once more. "You'll get Zach, that's good, that's a good solution." Rachel sensed herself launching into a tirade, which she did not want to do. It had to do with a rocking rhythm of anger and despair and humiliation in her mind that somehow began to roll off her tongue. That's good, that's a good solution, the refrain began, but soon it would naturally be followed with Just one solution at a time, is that it, I'll just come here for my solutions one at a time, bring them to you like good King Solomon so that you can decide, you can make judgment, you can decree ... And so on. Why had he put his hands on her calves? Why had he just fucked her when now he wouldn't touch her? It had been too long since high school, too long since Rachel had been competent at these sorts of games, too long since she'd even recognized her incompetence at them. She had no idea how to play. She had no idea Ev knew how to play. She would fumble, she would fail, she would lose Ev forever.
She stood then, enraged. But where was her right to have rage, anyway? Hadn't all that rage been supposed to translate into sexual desire for her husband's friend? Wasn't that what she'd done with it? Why was it leaking out here? Where was the flaw in her displacement?
Evan was saying, "...and then he won't be so angry. He can sleep on the sofa, I'll put him on the train in the morn—"
"What did you say?"
"When?"
"What were you talking about? I lost track."
"I was saying Marcus could come stay with me for a while. Separate the two of you, the three of you."
"The four of us."
Evan stood up, his hand to his lower back. "I don't think that little episode on the floor did anything good for my disk."
Rachel realized that her head hurt. Her husband was giving her a headache. He was too difficult. Maybe it would be best simply to continue with Paddy, who was easy enough. How much simpler it would be to see Paddy if Marcus was gone. Zach slept like a bear. Zach actually liked Paddy.
Rachel's conflicted emotions made her wonder about her own character: was she monstrous? Ev would request the abstract of h
er, a guarantee of high scruples and constant ethical self-scrutiny: she could be better. It was too much for her, too heady and headachey. Before falling into Ev's arms, she'd considered herself to be kind of happily miserable. Maybe in truth she was one of those people who require drama in their lives. Maybe she needed an occasion to rise to.
Evan said, "Do you think I should move home?"
Taken aback, Rachel paused. "Well, yes, but not because Marcus is being a brat. I don't want you home if you don't want to be there. Obviously," she added, when Ev simply aimed his narrowed gaze at her.
He said, "Let him move here, just for a while, just for a week."
She nodded, already envisioning her own apartment late at night, Zach snoring away, Paddy with his hand over her breast. Paddy's teeth were perfect, she thought, not crooked and stained like Ev's. She looked at the floor the scrunched throw rug where she and Ev had just made love. It had felt more wonderful than any sex she'd had for a long time. But it was five minutes gone, and after he'd signed the sheaf of papers she'd brought and handed them back to her, Ev didn't touch her when they said goodbye.
When his door shut, it was as if Rachel had imagined the whole unlikely scene. The stairwell was still brown, the vestibule downstairs still exposed to the freezing elements, the liquor store across the street still advertising six-packs for four dollars.
***
Marcus had no intention of moving in with his father. His arguments against it were carefully whittled away—he could take his computet; his desk, his collections; the door to his room at home would be locked against Zach and Rachel—until only his naked stubbornness remained, a willful refusal that would not be weakened.
"You're hurting your father's feelings," Rachel heard herself say, but she quickly recovered by adding, "If you stay here, you must shape up. No more yelling at Zach, no more sullenness with me."
He nodded defiantly, and Rachel wished she could gather him into her arms. How hateful adolescence was, how full of isolation. Who could he hug? she wondered. Who would he allow to hold him, to comfort him? He had no physical attachment with any other human, a state of existence Rachel could recall well enough to know that there was nothing she, his mother, could do to help. To try to hug him now would be to force him to push her away.
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