Talking in Bed (36 page)

Zach liked the image of his father and Gerry sitting on a train platform together. He realized he liked the idea of his father happy, because Ev didn't ordinarily seem very happy at all. "I'll try it," he told Gerry now. He wanted to tell Marcus later that he'd gotten drunk with his uncle, that their father had once done the same, to propose that perhaps that the two of them, Zach and Marcus, might later in life also drink together in or around trains, maintaining a family tradition. But Gerry's beer, warm from being held between his legs, tasted ghastly, sour and fizzy, like carbonated vinegar. With difficulty, Zach swallowed a mouthful, positive he would never be able to talk Marcus into it.

"You know what I love?" his uncle asked him.

"What?" Zach handed the bottle back, fighting the urge to spit.

"I love it when somebody just walks along belting out a song. That happens sometimes. I rode behind a guy on the escalator the other day just wailing opera—perfectly normal guy, singing his heart out."

Much as he enjoyed Gerry, Zach still hoped he wouldn't burst into song on the el. Around his own brain circled the single line he'd heard downtown—
Darling, yooooouuuu send me, honest you do.

The train was hot, although the evening outside was windy and cold. Inside the car; the Friday night festive feel had increased, the prom group had grown livelier. Their sweet perfume wafted forward. "We're slumming," they called out. "Going to the top of the cock!" They screamed with laughter, contagious, outrageous.

"What's that?" Zach asked his uncle. "What's the top of the cock?"

"Hancock building," Gerry said. "I go there, too, sometimes, look at the lights. Doesn't cost a thing to look. You've been there, right?"

"Oh sure." Zach summoned the knee-quaking elevator ride up, his popping ears and the feel of floating. When his uncle gave him the bottle, he took another mouthful of beer. It wasn't as bad as the first; perhaps each swallow would be less difficult to manage, until he was successfully silly, like Gerry.

"Look there," Gerry said, grabbing Zach's thigh, his hand on the window glass. "See that sign? That's Yolanda, my girl." The platform flashed by; the bench ad was for a show, somebody in costume.

"That was a man," Zach said, giggling.

His uncle joined him. "That'd be something to get your dad riled up about, me with a man. He
thinks
he could handle it, but we know better, don't we?" They laughed together for a moment. "No, not the person, just the club. Yolanda warms up the club with her troupe."

"Troupe," Zach said. It was his turn with the bottle, so he took a big glug and swallowed a burp afterward. Already he could feel a slackening, the relaxation of his face muscles, contentment swimming into his system as in the moment before sleep.

Gerry said, "There are two different ways to spell
troupe,
but I think they're both about groups."

"Boy Scouts," said Zach. "Monkeys."

"Troop of drunks," Gerry said, meaning the prom kids. They clung to each other and rocked from side to side, their gestures broad, their volume loud. "And her" his uncle went on, "what do you think her name is?" The girl he meant was a thick-haired blonde wearing a lot of makeup. Her friends were skinny and dark, but she was large and pale.

"Jennifer" Zach said promptly.

"And what do you think it'd be like to kiss Jennifer?"

Everything was making Jennifer laugh so hard she had to bend forward. Her dress was tiny, green velvet, and she was stuffed into it like a bundle of cozy, clean pillows.

"I don't know," Zach said. She leaned over her boyfriend again to laugh, exposing her big soft breasts.

"I think it'd be sublime," his uncle said beside him, tipping the bottle to drink, then handing it to Zach. "Absolutely sublime."

Sublime
sounded like something vaguely sewer-related to Zach, which reminded him of the taste of this beer. But he drank as much as he could manage before the Addison stop, convinced that his lightheaded joy was the beginning of drunkenness, and then left his uncle on the train, waving. Gerry let Zach go off alone because he didn't want to have to buy another ticket; Zach understood.

His uncle's word accompanied him home to his father's apartment, floating along in his blood like the sour beer, like the song lyric:
sublime, sublime, sublime.

"What does
sublime
mean?" he asked his mother after Gerry had died. She was trimming his hair; he wore a towel, and his neck itched.

"Heavenly," his mother said, snipping above his ear. She thought of her afternoon with Paddy at the Raphael, their last encounter. "Grand."

"Oh," her son said, and suddenly bowed his head, which made her cut him, a little nick at his temple.

***

Rachel told her friend Zoë about her affair after it appeared to be over.

"You
what
?" Zoë cried. She could not believe Rachel had slept with another man.

Rachel decided to tell her other shocking things. "Ev knows all about it," she said. "It was with his friend Paddy. I could be pregnant." This last part was not true, but could have been true, which was almost as good. Rachel had had unprotected sex, had tempted fate.

"The
roofer?
" Zoë said. "That dope?"

They wandered around the botanical garden, their pace slow, their faces damp. "Not a dope," Rachel said, less excited to discuss Paddy now. Now she remembered how she'd characterized him in the past; for a second she held both views, her old one and her new one, enjoying the contrast. "He's sweet," she said lamely, missing him suddenly. He would enjoy mispronouncing all the flora names.

"Who's the father?" Zoë asked.

"I'm not sure I'm pregnant."

"Who would be the father?"

"I'm pretty sure I'm not pregnant, but it would be Evan."

"If it was the roofer then you'd have a real problem," Zoë said. Zoë had had four abortions in her life, two of them of pregnancies with unclear paternity; Rachel hadn't had any abortions and always knew who'd caused what. This was the first time in their friendship that Rachel's life appeared the more muddled and preposterous, but after the initial thrill of shocking her friend, Rachel found she didn't enjoy the attention very much. Zoë made it seem both sordid and trivial instead of sad and crucial, and she wouldn't let it go. They finished with the garden and then ate lunch, discussing Paddy the whole afternoon. By the time Rachel got home, she had nearly forgotten what Paddy was really like. The person Zoë had constructed was different, reduced by speculation, enhanced by romanticism, a kind of lewd little boy, the sort of man Zoë herself frequently brought home.

Her affair had been better when it was secret, Rachel concluded. Her love had been purer when she had held it only in her own heart.

***

At the mall, Didi Limbach found the You're a Star! studio. Inside on glass tables sat plates of cookies and pickles, Dixie cups of Coke—the same fare one received after donating blood. The receptionist, who was notably unattractive, asked if Didi had an appointment. Didi admitted she did. The receptionist sent her to wardrobe, where two young men tried to help her pick out clothing.

Paddy had moved away, leaving Didi stunned; she'd heard on Christian radio that women were doing it more than men these days, abandoning their kids and spouses six times as often as men. It was supposed to be her leaving. Adding insult to injury, Paddy had told her that he was having an affair with Rachel Cole. "No, you're not," Didi said. The idea was ludicrous; Rachel Cole was a snot, for one thing, and older than Paddy, for another. "She's older than you," Didi cried. "How could you be having an affair with her?"

He did not elaborate on how, just said that he couldn't live with Didi anymore. Only after he packed up and left did he reveal that his affair was actually over.

"You idiot!" Didi wailed. "Those two have messed up your life! And you let them do it, you let them make you a big fat fool."
Let him suffer
was her thought then. Then, she'd wanted to disassociate herself from something so humiliating as her husband's being duped by Evan and Rachel Cole. But after a few weeks she realized it was she who was suffering, she and Melanie, who asked daily when her dad was coming back.

"How about this?" one of the You're a Star! assistants asked her now, holding what looked like a torn wedding veil. He danced it in his hands, teasing her. Once rearranged, it was merely a white bathing suit, high cut, with lace where there should have been material.

"Just this?" Didi asked, fingering the garment skeptically, noting a smear of pink foundation on what was probably the shoulder. The other young man pointed to a picture on the dressing room wall: a young woman with enormous breasts lay on a beach in precisely this outfit. Her knee was raised, her blond hair spilled over her shoulder, her white teeth shone like the sun. Surely Paddy would have found her alluring. She bore no resemblance whatsoever to Rachel Cole.

"It's you, girlfriend," said the first young man.

"Definitely," said the other.

They left the room the way nurses did at the doctor's office, promising to return when she'd changed clothes. Didi undressed quickly, as if they might pop back in unexpectedly. Her face felt hot; her actions felt furtive. Also like the doctor's office was the fear that something unpleasant would be revealed by the examination to come. The costume looked awful, sagging at her chest, stretched tight at her hips. Her skin was pale, her thighs dotted with some little bumps that had come with adolescence and never gone away. She sucked in her tummy and turned before the mirror as if she simply hadn't found the right angle yet. The young men rapped at her door and then entered.

Didi grabbed her own dress to hold over herself. But they behaved professionally, clearing a seat for her to have makeup applied, yanking bottles of hairspray and mousse from the shelf, getting down to the business of her beauty.

"This doesn't fit," she said timidly.

"We'll pad it up a bit, then you'll be great." Two bladder-shaped balloons were produced, each with the weight and heft of breast matter like Baggies filled with oil. She was directed to insert them below her own small warm breasts, where they filled the costume helpfully. Like shoulder pads, they gave balance. She liked the effect. In the swivel seat, she was made up and her hair teased. The more the men touched her, the less shy she felt. Her body became an objective subject for all three of them; they argued its assets and liabilities as if they were three cooks discussing a cake. The men pretended they couldn't believe she'd had a baby. They—Todd and Scott—both told her she had wonderful skin. What did she do to keep her skin so beautiful?

They covered Didi with a white smock, as if she were a piece of art, and walked her across the hall to the studio. There, too, food was sitting out, this time deviled eggs and more cookies, more Cokes in Dixie cups. The air smelled of onion; the photographer, a fat woman, was eating a submarine sandwich.

"Gorgeous!" she yelled through her full mouth. "Oh, give me a blue background, it's got to be blue." Todd pulled down a screen like the sky; the floor was covered with a white cloth speckled with glitter. Didi was to lie on a lawn chair as if at the beach.

"This doesn't seem very realistic," she said to Scott as he fussed with her hair.

"Understatement of the century," he responded under his breath.

"Leave that to us," said Todd. "You're going to be so pleased." He arranged her sideways on the chair, then stood behind her and pulled her bathing suit tight, tying the rear straps back with a shoelace. Didi's breasts, pushed from below, pulled from behind, plumped over the top of the suit.

"Warm Caribbean breeze," the fat woman called, and Todd hurried away to switch on a fan.

After all, Didi told herself as the fat woman took pictures, Paddy had always claimed to love her body. She'd made a mistake to turn away when he wanted to have sex. He'd started an affair because she wasn't being a good wife.

"You wax your bikini line, don't you?" the fat photographer asked. "I can always tell."

***

The pictures were ready a week later, contained in a professional-looking folder; each one with a little embossed You're a Star! in the corner, a five-pointed star containing the words. Scott had taken Polaroids at the time, so Didi knew more or less what to expect. But still the photos frightened her. She'd returned to the studio to pick them up, and sat in the lounge area eating cookies, flipping through the images cautiously, staring entranced and terrified. Her legs had been lengthened, her rash of bumps erased, her skin given a nice tan glow instead of its current pasty tone. Her teeth sparkled like the model's in the dressing room. Instead of a glittering dropcloth, white sand now rose in dunes around her lounge chair; and the blue backdrop was the clear sky, with a few clouds floating above, riding the same wind that lifted her hair from her neck.

As if she could be a lingerie model. Or, more accurately, as if she could look like one that simply. She began her campaign to regain Paddy's affection that afternoon, by putting one of the five-by-seven pictures in an envelope and addressing it to Limbach Roofing. Let his coworkers see what he'd given up, what waited at home for him like Victoria's Secret. Let everyone know what a fool he'd become.

She had no other audience, so Didi showed Melanie the pictures of herself. "What do you think?"

"You look pretty," Melanie said. "Like a rabbit princess." She studied the picture, then asked to keep a copy for herself. "I can see your lumps," Melanie said slyly, meaning Didi's breasts.

***

The pictures arrived at Limbach Roofing the same day that Paddy purchased
Anna Karenina
from the seedy used-book store across the street. The bookstore had been invisible to him until he realized he was in the market for books.
This
book he'd seen at Rachel's, resting among many others on her shelves; he chose it for its weight, for its page count, for its foreboding black cover, and for its familiarity. Lying on Rachel's bed, he'd run his eyes over the spine a hundred times, mentally tripping as he tried to pronounce
Karenina
—either Karen Ina or Kara Nina. He wanted to know what Rachel read. Now that he couldn't see her or touch her, his attachment to her was becoming more scholarly. If he read what she read, he might think what she thought, feel what she felt, know what she knew. It was the intimacy he would have to settle for. It was as if his education had formally begun, and this was its first text, the pages of which felt warm to him, as if recently turned by other hands.