Talking in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the dark glass, their range of topics shared, their understanding rich. Whatever Rachel said, her husband would comprehend. She had no need for carefulness or for taxing explanation, hesitation or premeditation. They were comfortable together. Had she anticipated such a state of comfort when she'd imagined marriage? Such contentedness with the mundane? Not likely.
    But, too, she assumed that her former self would never have conceived of this—a brooding, picky, forty-five-year-old man in a modest kitchen wearing slipper socks—as a fantasy life. Yet she was happy. Or, more exactly, she was not unhappy. She had done what Ev called leveling off, something his manic-depressive clients were encouraged to do, too, those bipolars. They were made to stop that up-and-down stuff, that globe-trotting, to settle for a moderate middle ground. The secret, Rachel deduced, was finding it satisfactory, was naming it lucky or blessed instead of dull.
    Of his father, Ev said, "With our luck, he'd come live on the roof, like Gerry."
    "Our own gargoyle," Rachel said. "Pissing over the sides, making a mess like the pigeons. The neighbors would bring back their plastic owls and fake snakes and rifles. Only this time I wouldn't complain."
    Ev hesitated in finding this funny. Although his feelings about his father seemed kindred to Rachel's (she had learned from him how to hate the man, after all), he did not like to see them so blatantly laid before him. It was a slender little line that Rachel mostly understood, but sometimes she got careless and stepped over. This time, however, Ev relinquished a snort. He was disinclined toward real laughter; a snort was as close as he got. It had once been Rachel's secret goal to make him actually break down and guffaw, become helpless with laughter, but she'd given that up. Apparently his father had driven giddy hilarity out of Ev's character.
    "He'd be bad for business," Rachel went on. "Imagine if your clients discovered that your father
and
your brother were street people."
    "To hell with what my clients think."
    "Uh-huh," she said, well aware of his desire to believe he did not care what people thought. She knew better, and she knew he knew she knew better. A flare of marital love went up inside her; the elaborate, convoluted, knotty way they knew each other still delighted her, made her feel toward Ev as she did toward their sons, full of an irrepressible, absolute affection, not sexual but deeply fond.
    And not always not sexual, Rachel reminded herself. There were times, rare and poignant, when sex with Ev was dramatic and heart-stopping—it was heady and holistic, like loving a long, sad novel, feeling wrung out and nobly wounded when it ended. Something like that. Good novels and married sex were related that way; Rachel filed this away as a topic to broach some other time with Ev, a kernel of smartness to give him like a gift at an unexpected moment.
    "I certainly hope you've inherited his endurance," Rachel told Ev, for the hundredth time. It was the sole silver lining she could unearth. That and the fact that Ev's saintly mother had died early in his father's progress toward Bastard Incarnate.
    Ev said, "I'm afraid he's going to have to come live with us."
    "Ugh," Rachel said. When they were first married, she had sworn to succeed with Ev's father where others had failed. She would be the one to bring him out of his grim stinginess; she would delight him with flattery, listen to his stories without judging their contents. She would flirt with him. She would charm him in the way only a skillful young woman could. This was Rachel's intention, to prove herself superior to any others who might have tried before with Ev's father. Her faith in her own femininity carried her for months, an arrogance derived from her happiness in having found Ev, from her smug youthfulness. She could not envision a greater happiness; she wanted to spread it around like a big pollinating insect fluttering