Talking in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page A

COLE was wakened that night by her husband's hot naked body curling around her. Bored, she'd drunk too much wine and now felt woozy, cotton-mouthed, and eye-achy. Her hand lay pocketed between her thighs, reminding her that she'd had an idea about masturbating before she had simply plopped into sleep. The digital clock read 2:22—orderly time, as usual. Ev said, "He died."
    She was immediately awake, riveted, un-hung-over, eyes wide. Excited. Her husband's erection bobbed around her backside, his coarse springy hair causing its usual tickling friction. He was excited, too. She rolled over to hold him. "You O.K.?" she asked.
    "I'm good," he said. "Suffering some nonspecific weirdness, otherwise fine. I almost went to a bar—it's just a weird old night. Let's fuck."
    Rachel turned over his words while they had sex. Although she hadn't thought he needed to quit drinking when he did, it still bothered her that he might be tempted now to start up again. He seemed to know himself best, to predict his own lapses, to execute punishment. He was hard on himself, critical and exacting, but perhaps his diligence had kept him from falling into the kind of decline his brother had fallen into. Even after fifteen years, Rachel did not feel qualified to pronounce with any kind of certainty on her husband's dormant character.
    He could not come, although they tried for a long while, the clock's little green slashes clicking and contorting along—horizontal, vertical, Rachel compliant beneath him, active on top of him, adaptable in between. Still, nothing happened for him. Finally Ev flopped exhausted beside her, kissed Rachel's neck, then climbed out of bed. "Go to sleep," he told her, but, not surprisingly, she found herself unable to do so, her drunkenness fuzzing up once more to muddle and woo her unsuccessfully.
    Rachel was not sorry to see the last of her father-in-law. He had on the one hand enraged her and on the other terrified her. The rage came from his meanness; that was easy enough to explain. But the terror was less simple, since it came from his being related to her husband, from the physical resemblance Ev bore to him: the long scaly feet, the disarming squint of his left eye when he concentrated, the mesmerizing vein in his temple. Rachel hadn't known her father-in-law long before he became ill; her entire marriage to Ev had taken place in the shadow of the old man's alleged former personality, gone for good. So wasn't it possible that Ev's progress through this world would mirror his father's? That he would turn from moodily complex to witlessly malicious? Rachel could stare at Ev, the man she loved, blur her eyes in the way one does to generalize impressions, and see her father-in-law. The signs of Ev's aging—graying, sagging, slowing—troubled her.
    Her father-in-law's latest hospitalization had lasted two weeks, but before that he had been living with her and Ev and the boys, staying in the pantrylike space beyond the kitchen at the far end of the apartment, a cozy little nook Rachel had intended to use as a kind of private office for herself, a place to take phone calls, a tax writeoff. She'd enjoyed the bright white walls, the nearly seamless job she herself had done of the sheetrocking and taping, with indentations like thumbprints where she'd pounded in nails. It had taken her months to finish the room; it had still held the optimistic odor of newness when, at the last second, her father-in-law had been evicted from his nursing home. The coincidental timing made Rachel feel tricked, as if all along she'd been preparing a place for him rather than for herself.
    His caretakers at the home were sick of his behavior; they couldn't be paid enough to endure him any longer. Who could? Rachel wondered. Only family was ever expected to tolerate such conduct, to take you in when what you deserved—and sometimes needed—was to be tossed out. The home had called Ev, and Ev had no one to whom he could