First You Try Everything (3 page)

Evvie wanted to go home. She missed her husband as
if he were on a large ship in the Baltic. She would remember this whole day as
filled with surrealistic omens, a million miniature crows with human faces
filling the air. This was the sky inside her too. Probably she was just getting
the flu.

“Can I borrow your cell?” she said to a
kindly-looking thin man whose jaw was wrapped in a red scarf.

She walked a few steps toward the church wall and
called her husband. “I'm protesting,” she said. “Down at the church. Wanna join
me?”

“I'm still doing bills.”

“Really? Oh. Wow. Well, I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Do you still love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Is something wrong? You're so distant.”

“No. Just come home.”

“I miss the old days,” she said, and clenched her
eyes shut, turning away from the crowd. “I miss our pushcart and the house on
Rosewood and even being broke. I miss our old customers and how we used to be.”
The words brought with them a gut-roiling torrent of longing.

“Yeah,” he said, and let go a sigh.

“Do you too?”

“I don't miss being broke. But yeah, maybe
sometimes I miss the pushcart.”

“And all those crazy customers we loved! They were
a part of our life for all those years, and just like that they all vanish. We
don't even mention them anymore!”

“Evvie, come home.”

“My heart's going a mile a minute. I think it's
about to explode. Something's wrong. It isn't normal.”

“Don't be scared. Just come home. You're
just—everything will be all right.”

“It will?”

“Yes, I promise, just come home, Ev.”

She explained to the Bush impersonator that she had
to go. He nodded, and she saw some hopeful light flicker in his face that told
her all was not lost, he would maybe each day find someone in the world who
would befriend him for a little while, and his loneliness would be alleviated
occasionally, in small spurts, and his strangeness—whatever it was at his core
that made him one of life's impenetrable outcasts—that too would be pacified
little by little, she hoped.

On the way back she walked to the convenience
store, but the saintly clerk (she'd started thinking of him that way) was not
working today. The hefty clerk with a crew cut and a Russian accent and small
blue eyes told her he usually worked nights, and that his name was Ranjeev. “But
we never call him that.” And then the Russian man shook his head, unsmiling.
Evvie wasn't sure what he was attempting to communicate. That Ranjeev was a
problem of some kind? A joke? Her face must have looked puzzled, because the
Russian man stopped shaking his head, crossed his big arms, and signaled with
his eyes that their interaction was over.

“What do you call him?” she tried.

The Russian man peered at her. “We call him
Apu.”

“Apu? Like the guy on
The
Simpsons
?” Evvie smiled.

The Russian man nodded, arms still crossed. “Apu
like
The Simpsons
.”

Evvie smiled. She wanted the man to smile back. She
was fascinated by his tremendous ability to refrain from smiling, and by her own
perverse need to stand there smiling at him in spite of this. “Good night,” she
finally sang. “Tell Apu I said hello!”

Ben

B
itterly
cold mornings in Pittsburgh sometimes resemble evenings. People get themselves
into cars and go to work, or stand on corners and wait for buses, and just below
the surface of their complaints about the brutal cold, they learn to covet their
weather, and feel superior to people in sunnier, sillier climates.

Ben was tired of all that. Not Evvie. She loved
Pittsburgh the way the natives did. This after years of wanting out. If Ben
complained about the weather, Evvie liked to remind him that an architecture
critic from the
New Yorker
named Pittsburgh, Saint
Petersburg, and Paris the three most beautiful cities in the world.

But he'd grown up in Erie, and these days felt
tired of Western Pennsylvania, architecture and all.

This morning Ben was grateful for Cedric's sleepy
silence in the car. His brother-in-law was almost always quiet in a car, as long
as there was sports talk on the radio. The talk show host rattled on about the
coming Steelers game. The low sky looked like a bruise, and Ben drove fast
against the feeling that nothing was right.

“I'm not looking forward to this game,” Cedric
mumbled when a commercial came on.

“Baltimore's overrated,” Ben answered.

“I don't know about that.” Cedric cared so much
about his team he had to take nothing for granted and assume they'd be beaten,
so as not to be crushed by the possible disappointment.

Ben pulled the car into the lot of the Aspinwall
Giant Eagle.

“Thanks, man,” Cedric said, before getting out. He
looked at Ben with his usual mix of innocence and apprehension. “You all right?
You seem a little tense.”

“It's my job, I guess.”

“Being tense is your job?”

“Seems that way.” He gripped the steering wheel,
leaned forward, blew out a stream of air.

“No real pressure here at the old Giant Eagle. You
would make an acceptable cashier. Or you could choose to be a low-rung loser and
unload trucks in the back with me.”

“I just might, someday.”

Cedric nodded his encouragement, smiled, and got
out of the car. Ben watched his brother-in-law head across the parking lot.
Cedric had dropped out of college, where he'd been studying electrical
engineering, had chosen to work at the Giant Vulture (Evvie's nickname for the
supermarket megastore) because it was low pressure, involved little interaction
with a boss or customers, and because, according to Evvie, he had depended on
such stores since his childhood in Philadelphia. (Evvie had told Ben so many
vivid stories about Cedric as a child that sometimes it seemed he'd been there
as witness, an invisible sibling who'd seen Cedric walking on his toes toward
Pantry Pride, where apparently every day for years he'd bought red licorice and
bottles of iced tea.) Those shopping ventures had been distractions from home
life (where nothing was predictable) and school life (where peers considered him
the freak to torment). A popular girl had once stuck a dead rodent in his Batman
lunch box, for instance. When he was ten, a teacher kept him after class and
told him he would never amount to anything if he didn't find a way to stop
being so weird
. Did he think it was “cool” to be
weird
? the teacher had said. Was he looking for
attention? Did he practice being weird at home? No doubt Cedric had stared at
her, unblinking, able to see her ineptitude but too stunned to name it or know
it was cruel. (Ben and Evvie both wished they could walk back into the past and
deck the woman.) And then, when Cedric was thirteen, he'd been given a
concussion by a boy in gym class, the same boy who, the year before, had started
a rumor that Cedric regularly gave the janitor, a portly guy who smoked cigars,
blow jobs.

And yet, according to Evvie, the Pantry Pride
checkers in those days had greeted Cedric as if he were a celebrity.
Ceddy! Where you been?
And his presence—something so
golden and pure about Cedric, and he was beautiful too—had unified them.
According to Evvie, his presence had rendered the checkers in an impersonal
grocery store as momentarily intimate as the mom-and-pop shop people two blocks
down.

Evvie's loyalty to her brother was something he'd
fallen in love with. He'd absorbed all her stories about Cedric, the ones she'd
told when the two of them were holed up in that first tiny third-floor apartment
where the fire escape led to the back entrance of a bar where Evvie's old band
had played when she was twenty. Maybe he would drive by that old place later
today, look up at the old white door, or even climb those steps and peer in at
the kitchen. Maybe whatever devastating love had been born there could be felt
like a reviving tonic. He needed some kind of tonic badly.

Ben watched Cedric walk through the glass doors and
disappear for another day. Sometimes Cedric was his favorite person in the
world. He did not get involved with others but regarded them from a natural
distance made of his sincere inability to comprehend what all the fuss was
about. Though he was highly intelligent, he possessed the gift of simplicity
that seemed rooted in a radical innocence.

Sometimes Ben wished this innocence was something
he could contract himself. To walk through the world that way seemed a worthy,
if unachievable, goal. Other days Ben thought of Cedric as a compulsive and
self-absorbed filthy squatter, teetering on the edge of eviction, oblivious to
the needs of others. He'd said he needed a place to stay, and they'd said sure,
but that was five years ago. He'd slowly trashed their attic. “What does it
matter?” Evvie said. “Like we ever go up there.” But Ben felt the chaos over his
head like something that itched. “If someone else had made that mess, you'd hate
it,” he told Evvie. “Maybe,” she'd admitted. On certain days, the relationship
between Evvie and Cedric struck Ben as pathological. She loved his dependence.
He loved the routines he'd developed, the crappy little nest he'd made in the
attic, the way she made him buttered muffins and gave him money she didn't have,
and called him
Cedrico.
Lately every time she called
him
Cedrico
, Ben wanted to say,
His name is Cedric.

The attic was probably infested. Evvie said it was
a good sign if spiders and mice wanted to hunker down with you. It meant you
weren't too toxic yet. She actually whispered, when she found webs in their
cabinets, “Spiders, you're good. You're very good.” She refused to kill the
moths that overtook their kitchen twice a year. She didn't mind kitchen moths.
“They're so harmless.” She'd try to cup the moths in her hands and set them
free, but after a few egg-hatchings, the kitchen would fill up with great
swarming clouds of the white, winged creatures (a neighbor had come in one
night, unexpectedly, and seen Evvie eating a plate of noodles as if in blissful
ignorance of what the neighbor told Ben “had to be a good hundred of the little
bastards”). Finally Ben won the battle of the moths, setting up little cardboard
tents that lured them in with sticky black stripes of pheromones that promised
sex to the males and instead trapped them in place, their wings protesting until
they died. “Imagine that,” Evvie said. One of Ben's darkest thoughts regarding
Evvie was that she was a pheromone trap. That he'd entered the trap fifteen
years ago and some part of him had slowly died because of it.

T
his
morning, out of nowhere, Evvie had given him one of her old hugs, lifting him
off his feet though he was fifty pounds heavier than she was, and four inches
taller. She'd done that a lot when they were first married, proud of her
strength, which seemed to issue forth from a sporadic mania. Now she was doing
it again. After years of not doing it. Couldn't she sense that he wasn't in the
mood?

He'd broken free.

He'd turned away, walked to the sink. She'd
followed him, putting her arms around his waist, then leaped back, as if he'd
burned her.

“I'm really in a hurry,” he'd explained, and he ran
out.

T
raffic was heavy. The sky still dark, clouds packed with snow sailing
in from the West, moving slowly across the sky. He put in Keith Jarrett's
Koln Concert
, something he'd loved in college, and
turned it up, driving down the gray highway for work; he worked testing and
selling medical equipment now, a job he'd had for almost two years. A friend had
recruited him, and it was a decent salaried job, and he found himself enjoying
the way it felt to glide down the street in a coat and tie. He looked
surprisingly good and sometimes didn't recognize his reflection when he passed
by glass storefronts. A man in his prime with dark wavy hair, his long stride
more confident than he felt. He passed others on the street dressed like him,
headed to offices, and felt affiliated in a way he'd never imagined possible
when he and Evvie had set themselves apart from all this, working the pushcart
four hours a day, proud to be out of the mainstream. They'd been like travelers,
even though they'd never gone anywhere.

Now, when he walked down the street in his coat and
tie, he was a person among people, fortunate people going to work, accepting the
limitations of their jobs, accepting the world and its demands and limits, and
none of them, Ben imagined, cultivating the idea that they were somehow special
and deserved something other than this. None of them pretending to rage against
the machine that fed them.

For years he and Evvie had lived without much
money, thought they didn't care about money, and suddenly, there it was—nothing
compared to his friends in law or computers, but enough that now he could
entertain thoughts of vacations to places other than New Jersey. He'd paid off
their credit card debts, and the last of their college loans. He'd bought a
decent guitar. He wanted to go to Greece.

“You think you'll do this job forever?” Evvie asked
last year.

“Don't be judgmental,” he'd snapped. They were
walking the dog, but now they stopped. “This money allows you to defend your
pigs and ducks.”

She'd blinked, silenced, reddening.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm really sorry.”

“I wasn't even being judgmental,” she said, then
called the dog. “Really. I was just being curious.” Her voice was soft, stunned.
She pet Ruth and looked down.

He'd been frightened of himself then, unable to
understand why she'd called forth such anger. It was something harder to
pinpoint that filled him with restlessness he'd never known before; he just
couldn't admit to himself that his infatuation with a woman who worked in an
office across the street from him had anything to do with it.

They headed down a long street, letting Ruth sniff
the world, and Evvie had started telling him a story about an old friend of
hers, and he made all the right sounds. Everything in the landscape—ordinary
road signs, a white metal chair on someone's front porch, pigeons on a wire
lined up against the blue—seemed to be charged with a strange light, beckoning
him. All of it interesting in contrast to the woman who walked beside him, his
wife, his best friend.

To battle this, he'd stopped her in the middle of
the street, folded her into his arms, and kissed her hard on the mouth. Then
stepped back and told her, “Someday we'll travel around the world together.” Her
dark eyes flashed up at him, beautiful, and for one second, strange again—he
could remember in that moment the first time he'd seen her, and his body flooded
with love born of all their history.

N
ow he
called Lauren.

“Ben!” she said, unfurling the name, stretching it
out like a warm blanket. The voice was a little hoarse, always, and he loved
it.

“Look at the sky,” he told her. “It looks like day
is done.”

“I kind of like that day-is-done look.”

He laughed and she started singing. “Day is done,
gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well, safely
rest, God is nigh.”

He'd never heard her sing. She was a little
off-key. “You have a good voice.”

“Learned that one in Girl Scout camp. Also learned
to hate Girl Scout camp.”

“So what are you doing now?”

“Soaking in the bath.” He tried not to imagine
this. She was the type to get up extra early in order to start the day with a
hot bath. She'd have her coffee in the tub while the sun rose and her daughter
slept in the next room. She highly recommended hot morning baths, the tub filled
to the brim.

Evvie would have a problem with that. All that
wasted water a crime.

“I might try it,” he said.

“I'm getting out now.”

“OK, you do that.”

He knew she had a soft white robe with
L
AUREN
on the
pocket. He imagined her flushed body, stepping into the robe after the bath, and
slammed on the brakes, just avoiding a collision. If he didn't watch it, he'd
start to become the kind of driver he'd always hated.

“You all right?” Lauren said.

“Yeah.”

“So last night I dreamed we were hiking in a
foreign country and found a cave in the side of a mountain, Ben. It was so
beautiful.”

“Stalactites, stalagmites?” Ben said.

“No. It was really strange. It was like van Gogh's
bedroom in there!”

Ben pulled over to the side of the road. Van Gogh's
bedroom had been Evvie's dream of the perfect space. Once she'd said, “If you
ever left me, I'd go rent a room and turn it into van Gogh's bedroom. I'd be a
hermit with a dog.”