Free Talking in Bed by Antonya Nelson Page B

client.
"And?"
    "Well, in the morning I have a lot of willpower, but in the evening I'm a disaster."
    Ev sighed, recognizing his own tendency to lose enthusiasm during the day. Perhaps he would start canceling his afternoon sessions, going home and taking a nap with Rachel. He remembered to ask Luellen if the nights she had class were better.
    "Well, until class is over, they are. Then I stop at Friendly's. And I don't think avoiding the bar is the best idea, although I know that's what you recommended."
    "I asked you if
you
would recommend it to yourself."
    "Right, well, I don't. I recommend to myself that I just
straighten up,
for God's sake, and stop fucking strangers. Stop feeling like I have to." She sighed pleasantly. Her frustration with the gap between what she knew and what she felt was large but familiar to her. She had a partner to call when she was feeling especially bad, another woman obsessed with sex. This woman was in deeper trouble than Luellen; she was a woman with two children she'd sexually abused, though she was now trying to stop. It was good for Luellen to have a partner in worse straits, good for her to feel
not that bad.
Like Ev's father, whose badness kept Ev's in perspective, Luellen's partner could be counted on to offend more gloriously.
    Luellen said, "Isn't that what you'd like to tell all of us, your fucked-up clients—
straighten up?
When Meredith calls me, that's what I want to say.
Just don't do it.
What could be so difficult? And she could say to me,
Physician, heal thyself,
or something like that. We talk and talk and talk, and then we go out and do and do and do, as if the two things weren't related."
    "It's very human."
    "Like that's a good reason?"
    "No." Ev nodded; she was smart, and she made him feel less bland. If she was lucky, Luellen would survive. And perhaps something about the men she chose illustrated her own self-protectiveness in operation. Perhaps they were nice men, or at least healthy and with some moral sense intact. But he doubted it. Luellen had told him she was afraid of being tested for AIDS.
    "It's funny, but I'm realizing how angry I am at my mother all of a sudden. This visit makes me furious. I don't want to see her. I don't want to hear her tell me how bad she feels about our past. I'd like to have been born without her. Why can't I just live like I never knew them, either parent?"
    "Same problem as before—head and heart in opposition. But simply naming the discrepancy is useful, don't you think?"
    "What discrepancy?"
    "Between what you want intellectually and what you feel emotionally."
    "Intellectually, I'm fine. Emotionally, I suck. And I'm a big coward, too, because I won't just tell her how miserable she makes me, she and my sisters, all chatting long-distance on the phone about how I still haven't broken through, haven't unrepressed. They probably think you're a lousy therapist."
    Ev agreed. They probably did. He wouldn't have exactly denied it, today.
    "But," she continued, "you should be grateful not to deal with my sisters or mother."
    He shared with Luellen a big skepticism about the literature her mother and sisters continued to send her, bestselling books that simplified matters to the point of pablum, that encouraged wallowing in victimization, the whining manuals of crybabies. Ev didn't want to talk about Luellen's sisters or mother; it was unfortunate she was at the mercy of clods, but why dedicate time to them? He had conflicting feelings about family, similar to his outlook on organized religion: had it done more harm than good, historically speaking? Had blind faith more sustained lives or crushed them? Was coping with bad family a test of character or an unnecessary expenditure of energy? In Luellen's case, Ev couldn't help thinking reconciliation with the family was a nearly hopeless prospect. There were too many of them; they seemed allied unfairly against her. He didn't want to talk about them today.
    He said instead, "Tell me about