Talking in Bed Read Online Free PDF

pass the buck. That was Ev's fate in the world: being responsible. His only living relative, his brother Gerry, who literally had no. home, couldn't be reached. Rachel had been forced to imagine sad, woolly Gerry, wandering around downtown from heat grate to heat grate in his coats and hats. Many winters past, he had lived on the roof of their very own building.
    "I'm tempted to let my father try to make it on the streets," Ev had told her, perhaps also thinking of Gerry, or of how he would like to question what everyone assumed was self-evident, dispute what was perceived as indisputable: namely, that family had to open the door when you knocked. This was on the night the nursing home staff called. He'd been given thirty days to get the old man out. Two different caretakers told Ev stories: his father was peeing in drawers and trash cans, smoking in no-smoking lounges, making harassing phone calls (Rachel herself could attest to those; she had listened and seethed as her father-in-law swore about her husband), upbraiding his black roommate, announcing obscene intentions to the women nurses, and spitting whenever the urge came over him—on the floor of his room, on the wheels of his chair, on the perennial towel-bib that, tucked into his ratty shirt, covered his chest. In the past, it had been his scathing words alone he wouldn't control; now, more literal bile spewed forth.
    "If I simply didn't respond," Ev went on, "what could they do? They'd have to either keep him or throw him out on his ass."
    "I'd like to see them try," Rachel said, picturing her father-in-law with his heavy wooden cane, swinging at orderlies from his wheelchair as they shoved him through halls.
    But despite the subject matter, Rachel enjoyed that conversation with Ev. They sat at their kitchen table, Rachel with a glass of wine, Ev with hot tea. She liked to talk to Ev in the kitchen, at night, after the boys were asleep. She liked to stare over his head at their cabinets full of pretty pottery and china; she liked the look of their appliances after the dishes had been done, in the warm haze of what Ev called her evening toddy. Although he did not drink, he liked her to. Her husband liked to feel he was openminded and accommodating, a big strong umbrella under which others' weaknesses were sheltered. Superior to them, evolved beyond them.
    Rachel was pleased with the kitchen's black windows, the way everything in the world was shut away from her and Ev, as if they sat in a lighted box, alone. These conversations occurred late, after the time when one of the boys would rouse himself to demand a parent's steady presence beside him, after Ev's crazy client Dr. Head's nightly call. Dr. Head phoned every evening to review the day with Evan, always after the boys were in bed: a brief conversation to calm him, to permit him to sleep, a kind of prayer-and-absolution combo. From Rachel's occasional exchange of pleasantries with Dr. Head—he never failed to ask a few polite questions of her—she would never have guessed his paranoid delusions. He would extend his cordial greetings; she would pass the phone to Ev. Then Dr. Head would notify Ev that his downstairs neighbors planned to murder him in his sleep. Or that the newspaper had buried in its articles a code designed exclusively for the discerning readership, one that would tell them where to meet on the day of apocalypse. For the duration of her marriage, Rachel had never gotten familiar with more of Dr. Head than his educated voice and impeccable manners. Often Ev argued with him, but they always ended their calls civilly, ritualistically agreeing to disagree. Dr. Head had a notion that the planet would die when he did; he'd once been convinced that Dutch elm disease would include him as it made its way up his neighborhood street. At night he phoned to put himself, and the world, to bed.
    And after that, there was nothing in the apartment but Rachel and Ev, their reflections cast back at them