Talking in Bed (13 page)

Evan, also looking up, pointed at the birds. "Look at that."

"Can't tell what kind they are," Paddy said, squinting at the brilliant haze.

"No, not birds," Evan said. "Charred stuff. There must have been a fire—this is debris." He knelt to pick up a burned paper. "Chinese restaurant. See the menu?"

Paddy studied the piece of paper—the crinkled plastic lamination, prices still legible, $5.95, $6.95—then the sky. The flock was gone; now there were just bits of ash floating downward, right in front of him. He'd imagined the birds, seen them as if they were swooping far above the buildings, an optical illusion, the dissipation of which left him feeling oppressed by the city, as if it had won, as if the atmosphere had squeezed him, as if Ev had laughed at him.

"I liked them better as birds," Paddy said glumly.

Ev smiled at him and clapped him on the shoulder. "That's what I like about you."

They shook hands, then Ev stepped off the curb and thrust his fist in the air; a taxi swerved expertly beside him. "See you soon," he called, and disappeared downtown.

Paddy turned around and ambled distractedly north, passing the beggar again without seeing him, heading toward his office, though it was more than three miles and as usual the sky threatened some form of precipitation, either hail or rain.

Didi had said of Paddy's friendship with Ev, "Friends don't make you feel stupid. Friends accept you for who you are." All the way to his business, along the busy streets, Paddy replayed the conversation in the bar, the way Ev had nodded, then seemed to dismiss him, then disabused him of his vision of birds, then grasped his shoulder. He was as unreadable as a woman, Paddy decided. Then he frowned, wondering if his affection for Ev had any effeminate undertone to it. Maybe Ev was a homosexual emerging from the closet, attracted to Paddy, who had, he admitted, often been described as good-looking.

He watched himself in store windows for a hundred yards, his long legs and his blond hair. That dopey expression on his face he had worked at to change, but he couldn't help it, and maybe other people didn't concentrate so much on it. He'd heard it took fewer muscles to smile than to frown, which probably explained his incessant grin: laziness. He practiced keeping his mouth closed.

For over an hour Paddy walked, making plans to return to college—nothing vo-tech, something impractical like Italian art—to call up Ev and ask him how he was doing in a few days, to think of a thoughtful problem to lay at Ev's feet, one that he might actually need help with, like the one with Melanie a few months ago. He walked, not realizing until he'd pulled the glass door behind him at Limbach Roofing that he was soaking wet, that water was dripping from his forelock onto his flushed face. Jim, the flashing guy, was waiting and laughed at him when he shook off, saying, "Say, boy, you'd think you were born yesterday or something, going off without your umbrella."

***

Evan considered the taxi ride back to his office an indulgence; he should have taken the bus. He was thinking of his secret life once more, of two deaths sitting in his conscience like an ethics test. There was a sinking ship and a confusing mob of passengers: who would he save? The old man he'd clearly sacrificed; the woman he'd have wanted to save, but how? And did he flatter himself with this sense of control? Wasn't he on the ship as well, the one going down?

He deeply regretted having drunk the scotch; he'd regretted it before he asked for the drinks. He'd drunk them in order to feel regret. He'd confided in Paddy in order to feel regret, too. He'd lost Joni, but he'd gained the confidence of Paddy. Or, more accurately, he'd handed over the confidence. Paddy was a questionable vessel for its storage, Evan thought, but the mere fact of sharing it, of opening the door to his private heart and giving Paddy a peek inside, brought on a heady dizziness that Ev associated with losing control: a not entirely unpleasant sensation, a guilty joy like alcohol singing in his system. He'd sent part of himself—a vulnerable part, like a robin's egg, like a lit candle—with Paddy to the regions of the blue-collar class, to the purely imaginary roofing business that Evan had constructed in his mind for Paddy to toil at, and later to the tastelessly decorated bungalow in Oak Park, perhaps even to the dumbbell Didi.

"Dee, dee, duh-dee," he said aloud as the cab jerked to a stop outside his building. He sincerely hoped Paddy would not say anything about Joni to Didi. Ev could not bear to have Joni's name, that fragile egg, that flickering flame, uttered anywhere near Didi Limbach.

He waved to the hairdressers at the Clip Joint and rode upstairs. In his office he sat at his desk and laid his dizzy head on his green blotter, which smelled of grade school. He'd thrown away all Joni's letters but the one he'd shown Paddy, one that he now covered with the letter he'd written to her, the smudged returned envelope. Two pieces of correspondence lying together, his words and hers. All his other letters to her he'd erased from his computer as soon as he'd written them. There was nothing left to show he'd known her but these envelopes, their two names pressed together here the way a child might press together Ken and Barbie dolls, a chaste burlesque of sex. Their names also sat near each other on the APA mailing list; her address, in her square, no-capital-letters handwriting, was on one of Ev's Rolodex cards. He understood suddenly the desire to pilgrimage to hallowed sites, the penitent's urge to occupy the space where his savior had last stood; these words before him were so incomplete, so flimsy. He felt the vast stretch of the plains separating him from where Joni had once been, vaster now in her absence, an emptiness without end, inhabited by unknown species, pitiless animals without names. She'd been there once like a goal, like an emblem of the future, a touchstone, a secret and a promise. As if she were the place he intended to someday go.

He pulled open a desk drawer and retrieved pain reliever, preparing for a headache. The container was a prescription bottle of Rachel's, and seeing her name—Cole, Rachel Eliz—made him summon her image for the first time that day. He had not been tempted to phone her, was not planning to tell her about Joni, alive or dead. In fact—he took his emotional temperature—he felt an odd anger at Rachel, at her healthiness, at her love of laughter at her being alive right now in their apartment, sitting in her sloppy little room off the kitchen, that phony floral shrine to femininity, unaware of her husband's unhappiness. She indulged herself, he thought angrily. Then he turned his anger over in his mind—pandered to it, knowing that he would not bestow it on Rachel; studied it, wondering what it meant. The longer his anger circled, wearing itself out, the less potency it had. Soon he was merely confused, curious about the strength of his love for his wife, the dissatisfaction that characterized him. Did he love her, or was it merely habit that made him return to her night after night? Did he take her for granted? Was he simply afraid of being alone, like his father? Was his relationship with Rachel becoming one of those endurance tests, the marriage marathon, the fifty-year hurdle?

Was his secret life looming larger than his other one? Was he going to have other drinks, now that he'd had these? Was he going to turn Joni into a missed opportunity, into tragedy, into longing?

His anger, his frustration, reignited and flared up, but he recognized its source now. Would he take out his rage at Joni Breyer on Rachel? Was it Joni, off in unknown New Mexico with the cold-blooded lizards, who'd safeguarded his love, who'd made him choose every year, who'd kept him married?

After his last session—a disaster a distracted parody of psychological methods, with a wintergreen Life Saver clicking around in his mouth to hide the odor of scotch—he picked up his phone and dialed Paddy Limbach at work. "I think I'm going to move out," he told him, sure of his words only as they emerged from his mouth, only as he saw the ease with which he constructed a plan. He needed to be alone; it was all he could think, all he could want. If he was breaking—bottoming, crashing, flying or falling apart—he wanted the asylum of solitude. "Can I borrow your truck?"

There was a long silence on Paddy's end. In that silence, Ev felt his leverage in their friendship slide; he felt himself allow it to slide, the way he had allowed himself to discuss Joni this afternoon. He had let Paddy in on his weaknesses, let him touch the soft, creaturely spot. He had asked Paddy for a favor. He was going with a flow that included Paddy Limbach.

"You want some help?" Paddy finally asked. "I got access to a dolly."

"M
OVE YOUR FAT BUTT
," Marcus told his big little brother Zach.

They shoved and rolled and heaved and half carried their father's cumbersome futon from his study to the front door of the condominium, knocking against paintings, wroggling the rugs, then flopped it through the hall to the elevator, clipping light fixtures, barely avoiding the belled glass of the fire alarm. There they had to punch and kick it inside while the doors bumped against it every few seconds, like a mouth gumming the ungainly stuffed thing. They were sweating on the way down the sixteen floors, Zach riding on top of the bundle, Marcus pinned between it and the metal doors. Marcus said, "
Now
will you consider using deodorant?"

Neither of them had moved enough furniture to know that the futon was one of the most difficult pieces to manage. Marcus assumed that he was not strong or clever enough, that he'd failed—as he often failed in endeavors—to discover the secret of easy transportation; Zach, by contrast, assumed all activities such as this, grownup work, were simply backbreaking, another adult fact to assimilate in his cheery trudging way.

Marcus, who was too old to cry, had been doing so all week. Zach, who wouldn't have minded crying, did not feel the urge.

"Move your fat butt," Marcus repeated tiredly when the doors opened on the ground floor. The older brother was accustomed to blaming the younger unjustly for their shared problems, and the younger was accustomed to accepting it. He rolled off and they began the disgorging into the lobby.

Outside, beyond the glass vestibule doors, double-parked, sat their father's friend's Bronco with the emergency lights flashing. "Of course it's a black car," said Marcus sourly.

"I like black cars." Zach gave up and let loose his grip on the hefty futon. It fell, free at last, into its full thudding sprawl. "What's wrong with black cars?"

"
Heat,
" hissed his brother. "Pick up your end, idiot."

"Why are you crying?" asked Zach as they bumbled through the foyer doors and into the muggy daylight.

"I'm not. Can you believe he left it locked? He's such a moron." Marcus pronounced
moron
the way their father did; Zach liked to say
maroon,
like their mother. Although it was usually Marcus who took the wily route in evaluating situations, Zach sometimes displayed his own scheming personality, the one that today made him not altogether unhappy about his parents' separation. He imagined his mother would allow the boys privileges that their father did not. He thought he might get to spend the night in her warm bed now and then, for example. And he liked his father's apartment over by Wrigley Field; he'd been told he could ride the el there from school on occasion, and he liked to envision himself marching up the three flights of stairs to his father's new front door.

"Marcus," he said now, once more dropping the awkward bulk of futon, "we're going to have to carry this up all those stairs at Dad's!"

"No duh, dipshit."

"Whew," said Zach, shaking his head.

"It's so stupid," Marcus declared, tears in his eyes.

But unlike Marcus, Zach did not want to cry over his parents' separation. He knew they would return to each other. He asked himself, plopping on the crudely folded futon, what made him sure they would unseparate, what made him think there wouldn't be a divorce and some custody arrangements in the offing. (For a moment he digressed, trying to decide which parent he would choose to live with if they divorced. His mother's inclinations were like his: lazy. Food and television and driving instead of walking. But his father could be very funny and frequently took the boys places children weren't supposed to go, like R-rated movies and pool halls. Marcus would definitely choose their father, and that alone could push Zach into his mother's camp...)

"We cannot just sit here," Marcus was saying. "Move. Your. Fat. Butt."

"Where are we going to go?" Zach answered, rolling off the bulk. They'd dropped the futon on the sidewalk and now a parade of ants was mostly circumnavigating it, though a few had strayed onto the brilliant white canvas surface. Zach watched as they meandered along. His brother snuffled, and Zach resisted the temptation to remind him of what their father had said about letting tears come out, about how dangerous it was to hold back crying when you felt like crying. He claimed you could get a sickness from letting sadness stay inside. Zach imagined his grandfather sneering at this theory, naming the tears of boys baby behavior. In the year since his grandfather's death, Zach had not once missed him; had, in fact, been quite delighted to celebrate his tenth birthday without the old man's vulturelike presence at the festive dining room table. His grandfather had put out his cigarettes in his piece of cake.

Marcus threw himself onto the futon beside Zach and said "Ow," rubbing his elbow and pretending to have hurt himself. This was so he could gracefully explain his crying. Zach knew all about it. He would have liked to tell his brother he didn't think any less of him for crying. He really didn't, but Marcus had a suspicious nature and wouldn't have believed him. In fact, Marcus would most likely have tried to hurt Zach for suggesting such a pathetic deception. They waited quietly in the heat.

Soon Paddy Limbach, their father's baffling new best friend, emerged from the building behind them with a load of books.

"Keys," Marcus said to him with disgust.

"Right," said Paddy. "Good job with the futron, boys."

"Fu
ton,
" said Marcus, rising from the mattress. "Fu
ton,
not fu
tron.
"