Talking in Bed (7 page)

And although these services were useful, it was true they weren't exactly tapping his expertise. The poor did not have as much idle time as the middle class to worry over parental favoritism, over marital peccadilloes, over general philosophical angst. Of course, the poor did not concern themselves with the care of their corgis, either. Their problems did not usually involve the question of
whether
or
how
to be; they involved more immediate issues, like custody and rehabilitation and recovery. He could appreciate this, the fact that they did not seem to be whining. But they also had a curiously fierce hold on their problems, an especially difficult time in abandoning them, which made his work harder. He did not like to be bored by them as they pursued the same stubborn path week in and week out; it occurred to him that his boredom had to do with their simple bullheaded dishonesty. They were not often interested in arriving at the truth—the truth was too frightening, too abstract. They were not interested, and not skilled in the imaginative pyrotechnics it might require to get there. If a man beat his wife, she did not possess the luxury of contemplating her own complicity; first, she simply had to get out of the range of his angry fist.

And then return, tearful, loyal to an innocent and fundamental lie: he needed her, she him.

Yet Ev's favorite client was one who could not really afford his services. This was Luellen Palmer, assistant to a fashion photographer. Today, during the ten-minute break before Luellen's hour, the time he usually spent making himself a cup of tea or glancing over last week's notes, he sat perfectly still at his little desk in the corner, pinching the inner flesh of his elbow. Why couldn't he feel this? He pinched his forearm, which hurt, then moved back to the place inside his elbow, the soft fold. No pain, no matter how hard he pinched. In fact, when he released the spot, a bit of his skin came away beneath his thumbnail. Horrifying. "I'm numb," he told himself out loud, then snorted. He quickly dialed his home phone. When Rachel answered, he said, "Do me a favor."

"O.K."

"Roll up your sleeve and pinch the fold of your elbow."

"What?"

"Inside your arm, the other side of your elbow, the anti-elbow. Pinch it for me."

"Yeah, and what?"

"Are you doing it?"

"Sure."

"And can you feel it?"

"Of course I can feel it. I'm pinching my arm. What is your story, Ev?"

"I can't feel it." He was doing it again, phone tucked between ear and shoulder, pinching the other arm with all his might. "It's weird, but I've done both sides now, and I can't feel a thing. My skin appears to be completely insensitive here. Why would that be?"

"It's your big brain," Rachel said. "Sapping your feelings. Most unyusular."

Evan smiled. Until Zach was seven, he'd completely jumbled the pronunciation of many words. Ev missed the
hambgubers
and
hostipals
and things that happened
sunnedly
or that
goed
instead of
went.
It was difficult to remember the boys as toddlers, difficult to reconcile their apparently grownup characteristics with their former naive selves. Ev missed their naivete; he thought of Paddy Limbach's daughter, her little hand in his as they wandered around the Shedd. Maybe he and Rachel should have another baby. Maybe his father's death had made room for another family member, the way Ev's mother's death had made way for his two sons.

And maybe his numbness had to do with the circumstances of his father's death, his questionable expediting role. Perhaps he'd turned himself into a man without feelings. It wasn't his big brain but his tiny heart that explained the lapse.

Rachel said, "You've discovered a new evolutionary trick. You're being selected for something."

"Such as what? Intravenous feedings?"

"Show me when you get home," she said. "Show me where you don't hurt, and I'll fix it."

"Stop my crying or you'll give me something to cry about?" he asked. And wasn't he whining, anyway, just like his most irksome clients, dishonest and dull?

"You O.K.?" Rachel asked.

"Just numb."

Why, he wondered, did he not want to tell her what really bothered him, the other places he'd found where he was also numb? Ev had begun wondering about the deepening malaise he seemed to be suffering. He was unwilling simply to attach it to his father's death, disappointed to think of it as standard male midlife crisis. Some days he didn't have sufficient energy to stand up straight; he just slumped through those days. His life had been a persistent inquiry into the nature of humans, into their various motives and rationales, their checks and balances, their quirks and quarks. He thought he'd even felt suicidal before, but probably only as melodramatic entertainment for himself, thrilling himself with the possibility while understanding his true inability to follow through. Since having children, he'd no longer considered that an option. Now he felt more seriously frightened of the prospect, unable to hold his sons' bereft faces before him as adequate deterrent. He knew himself to be depressed. Shades of paranoia and apathy were afflicting him, lethargy and distraction, regret and anxiety, periods of time that genuinely disappeared without his knowing where.

He'd been out walking just yesterday and suddenly discovered himself literally miles from his office—say, three—late for his next appointment, going through a neighborhood he shouldn't have been anywhere near. How had he wandered so far? Thinking and, more alarming, not thinking. It was the not-thinking that worried him, the lapse of consciousness—as if he'd taken a nap on his feet, to wake way down on Wabash, transported deep into the South Side. He'd come to with a squawk, reversed himself like a soldier, located the defaced street sign, and then hastened north until he could hail a taxi. He felt like a befuddled old man, exclaiming to his indifferent driver over the startling terrain.

The last thing he'd had consciousness of was the word
bound.
Two of its meanings, he'd realized, were opposite: to progress and to be restrained. His legs had trekked forward while his mind went spiraling around an etymological corkscrew.

Shouldn't a man wonder, after such an event, if he was qualified to oversee the mental health of others, even those whom society has deemed economically unfit and therefore expendable? Maybe all he should ever do was build wheelchair ramps and babysit preschoolers.

Less disturbing was his current new habit of testing his emotional state, asking himself in many different daily situations how he felt. Angry? Happy? Contented? He found himself annoyed not only by the heightened consciousness this imposed on each and every moment of his day—as if he were his own biographer, narrating his life in order to find its point—but by the fact that most often he answered himself with
Nothing. The man walked aimlessly,
he told himself.
The man felt blank.
As if sedated. As if that scrim of significance that had previously sheltered him had been lifted, leaving him flat, without affect. As if the backdrop to his drama had disappeared. He'd wakened down in a neighborhood that had always scared him, one that he'd prohibited his sons from even thinking about entering, but, disallowing his anxiety about how he'd gotten there, he discovered himself not very concerned about actually standing there. His fear of getting shot or mugged or even heckled had evaporated.

The man was asking for it,
he thought.

"I don't care," Marcus had repeated like a mantra between the ages of three and four, to which Rachel had always responded: "You know what happens to boys who don't care? A lion eats them."

Ev envisioned the open mouth, the big cat's ring of teeth like a sparkling ivory cage. Did the man care?

Was it the fact of his father's death that left the man without meaning? Had he needed the example of his father's unhappiness to see the scale of his own happiness? Had his life been a sort of taunt directed at his father? Or was he imagining his own death, the point at which his sons would be glad to see the man go, would gladly press a pillow over his face? The probability profoundly depressed him. He felt the cycle of the generations, how his own place in the great turning wheel had been nudged that much closer to oblivion. His living was not giving him much pleasure—nor much pain, it had to be granted—and aside from the grief his demise would cause his sons and wife, he had little to keep him from simply lying in the street and letting something large and diesel-powered crush him, put him out of his not-misery.

Was it his father's dark cruelty that had kept Ev a kind person? Had he lost his barometer? Had calibration so surprisingly left his life? And why didn't he want to tell Rachel about it? What preposterous self was he indulging, safeguarding?

Thus Ev entertained himself between clients ail day this late spring Wednesday. Outside it thundered; the electricity kept trying to snuff itself. Lights flickered; the signal buzzer sounded erroneously and halfheartedly, like a misfiring synapse. His office was as familiar to him as his home; it held plenty of amenities for making him comfortable, for padding his behind, for soothing his senses, for bathing him in restful light. He had a stereo and a hotpot, a Persian rug and an ashtray. He took little naps on his sofa. He'd once offered to let Gerry live here, at least stay here on the coldest Chicago nights. But Gerry preferred being outside, preferred camping out on the floors of friends' homes or on roofs or in parks. And to be realistic, Gerry could never have figured out the office alarm system.

Luellen was Ev's last client today. Her problems weren't new, but the peculiar slant on them interested Ev. She hated her father—nothing fresh in that, something decidedly stale, in fact, in that—but hated him because he
hadn't
abused her. He had molested the other three daughters in the family—prepubescent intercourse—but not her. Why didn't he do it to her? This was her unanswerable question. She wasn't the oldest, she wasn't the youngest, but she was, probably, the least attractive of the children. When she'd begun to trust Ev, she'd brought in a photograph of herself with her siblings. The other daughters were blondes, big-toothed tan girls. Luellen was simply less pretty, a brown-haired girl whose ears stuck out. She most resembled the father, in the photo, and it was her ironic human quandary to feel competitive for abuse.

But her likableness as a client had more to do with her intelligence and quickness, her ardent honesty, than with her unusual spin on her family molestation drama. For example, she had noticed right away when Ev brought in the metal box containing his father's ashes—the only one of his clients who ever commented on its presence. The ashes had been placed discreetly on a bookshelf behind where his clients generally sat, but Luellen had enough curiosity about settings to be always aware of the one she inhabited.

"New box," she'd said.

"Ashes," Ev had answered, coming the nearest to intimacy he would ever achieve with her or any of his clients.

"Your father?"

He nodded. She had begun therapy only a few months before Ev's father had died. Her own father had died recently, too, which may also have explained his liking her, feeling comfortable with her. Ev imagined a club, the Dead Fathers, he and Luellen and Paddy Limbach as three of its charter members. Also, Luellen had the unusual distinction of being someone whose dislike of her father surpassed Ev's. Her darkness was bigger, her father's darkness was bigger, and together they had the charm of subsuming Ev's and
his
father's.

"Did I tell you what I did with
my
father's ashes?" she had asked, sitting down and tilting her head at its familiar confidential angle.

"No."

"My sisters and I each got a portion of them, just like in some dumb fairy tale. The first daughter took hers to the lake, on a sailboat, and scattered them to the wind. The second daughter keeps hers in a safe-deposit box. The third daughter buried them in her back yard and planted a tree—which died, by the way. But the fourth daughter took hers into the mortuary bathroom, poured them in the toilet, pissed on them, then flushed." Her eyebrows jumped in the way they did to punctuate statements. "You could do that."

Ev nodded. "I could."

"But you wouldn't?"

"Probably not." In truth, he could imagine doing it if his anger hadn't already been served by his suffocating his father, if the itch hadn't already been scratched. He didn't find Luellen's gesture that of somebody lacking sense or reason, just that of somebody seeking justice. Long ago he'd understood that the crux of his business, the slogan he would have to live by, would be
It's not fair.

But Ev was not the kind of therapist who described his own experiences as a way of eliciting client trust or confidence. He did not want to bring more than his intelligence and sensitivity into the relationship. His clients frequently sickened him with their weakness, their victimization, their victimizing, their boring deceptions. He didn't like imagining the enormous normal-looking infrastructure that kept all the grossness hidden. Their secrets occasionally disgusted him, and he didn't want to touch them, or their problems. He didn't want to be so constantly steeped in suicidal or homicidal thinking. He was tired of the sameness of their complaints, the fundamentally flawed basis of his relationship with them. He was a make-believe friend, a paid listener, a bottomless pit, a pet, a basically blind confessional. It disturbed him that his clients might feel genuinely absolved; after all, he was praised for
not
judging the scrupulousness of their morals. They were safe with him, like harbored criminals; he did not report their corruption, merely took it from them, gave it shelter and them relief.

A
real
secret, though, must not be spoken, must never be confessed. Must worm its way around inside a person until it meant something. A person could tolerate more secrecy, he thought. A society could benefit from some repression.

He tormented himself on this subject for a minute or two, then welcomed Luellen, who always liked to begin her time with anecdotes from her job. She worked in a photo studio as a lowly set designer, which meant she painted props, moved scenery, sometimes posed as a stand-in for what she jeeringly called the talent. She always had a funny story to entertain him with before they launched into the familiar but abiding enigma of her family. Perhaps this was intended to make her feel less like a client and more like a friend, or perhaps it was merely a part of her character her desire to please him, as if there ought to be something in their sessions for him. Ev liked to hear about other people's jobs—and maybe she'd figured that out about him. He liked to pretend, even to himself, that his clients' jobs had something to do with their problems. And sometimes they did. Luellen, for example, had wanted to be a photographer. But she'd ended up as an underling, running errands, taking 'roids, sometimes being in modest ways creative. Luellen would oblige Ev's interest in her work; she was very sane at work, very talented and appreciated, something that cheered Ev. Her personal life, however away from the photo studio, both saddened and repelled him. She slept with a lot of men. She had a kind of death-wish sexuality, picking up strangers, allowing them into her home, then not using condoms. It was a practice she kept trying to quit—"Yes, I remember
Mr. Goodbar,
" she'd told him early on, "that old chestnut"—treating herself to just one picked-up man a week, or occasionally agreeing to go out with the same guy more than once, forcing herself to suffer through the motions of standard dating practices.