First You Try Everything (5 page)

“Hi, Ramona.”

“Hi, Mister.” Somehow she'd gotten stuck on calling
him
Mister
. He didn't really mind.

She was a gangly tomboy, in red cowboy boots and a
too-small nightgown. She lived nearly half the time with Carter, her father. Ben
had no idea what that meant, since the only thing Lauren had ever said about
Carter was “Carter's a bit of a dolt.”

“What show is this?” He'd taken a seat on the
flowered armchair.

“
Full House
, I told you
ten times.”

“I haven't even
seen
you ten times.” He kept his voice jovial.

“Ramona's exhausted,” Lauren said.

“I am not.”

“Children never know when they're exhausted.”

“She looks fine to me,” Ben said.

“Well, I'm not fine,” said the girl, wanting no
alignment with him.

He couldn't resist. “OK, I get it. You're not fine.
There's nothing fine about you.”

Finally the girl smiled. The smile was brilliant
and soft, and a little shy, and made him glad he'd brought her a Clark bar,
which he now presented.

“Thank you, Mister!”

“T
his
is a work of art,” he told Lauren. Rosemary chicken, sweet potatoes, salad,
everything arranged on a simple yellow cloth, candles, flowers; this was just
the way she liked to live. She created a
sanctuary
.

“It's like you're a landscape architect of the
kitchen table,” he said.

“I freak out like every night's the last supper.”
She looked amused with herself, but a little uncertain.

“That's the way to live,” he said.

Ramona said, “Maybe this is the last supper. Nobody
knows when they're going to die.”

Lauren smiled. “That's right, babe.”

“A boy in my class drowned,” Ramona said, and her
eyes were wide and accusatory.

“That's terrible,” Ben said. “Was he your
friend?”

“I sat at his table at lunch.”

“He had a twin brother,” Lauren said. “The family
up and moved to North Dakota to live on a farm with grandparents. I guess they
believe in the landscape cure, but I kept thinking how if you move, you lose
everything. Every familiar face, and room, and banister, and light switch, and
window view. I don't even like to think of that boy out there in North
Dakota.”

“And that's why I think God is mean,” said
Ramona.

Lauren shrugged and let out a sigh.

S
he'd
mashed the sweet potatoes, then stuck them back in their skins. They were so
good he ate slowly, noticing everything. Lauren's attention to detail helped him
understand what he'd been missing so long with Evvie, who often ate a banana for
dinner, dunking it in a jar of peanut butter, or some dark chocolate and a bowl
of noodles next to a stack of books or newspapers. Evvie who felt so overwhelmed
by material objects that she had sometimes taken the broom to cluttered surfaces
and swept everything into the trash with a vengeance. “Evil elves are hauling
this shit in when we're asleep! Nobody can tell me they aren't!”

When she got depressed she'd hold the sides of her
head and clench her eyes shut. “I can't take it.” She'd sit with a cup of coffee
at the kitchen table, saying she should've been a monk because monks had no
things.
He wondered lately if maybe that's
exactly
what she should've been. But what monastery
would take her? She'd flown out of a thirty-foot tree into a lake and broken her
leg just because she was feeling good one day. That had terrified him, and the
weeks he'd spent having to wait on her had been exhausting; she needed not only
food delivered, but assurance. “No, Evvie, you're not crazy. You were just a
little ecstatic. It can happen to anyone.”

And it could. Not to him, maybe, but he'd known
other people prone to proverbial ecstatic leaps. “You're just impulsive
sometimes,” he'd told her. “That's no crime.” In fact, for years he'd envied her
spontaneity. She'd always wanted to jump in the car and head somewhere. She was
at her best in a car, soothed by motion and music, her eyes open to the world
and shining, as if she saw an unraveling, ineffable secret.

But that Evvie was gone. Two years had passed since
she'd broken her leg. Had that somehow marked the beginning of his detachment?
Or had it happened even earlier, in the middle of all that effort that went into
trying to conceive a baby he hadn't been sure he'd even wanted? Those had been
an exhausting couple of years, watching Evvie inflate with hope and shatter with
disappointment again and again. A great relief when they'd finally given up.
They'd gone out to celebrate the freedom they would have lost had they
conceived, in a restaurant they couldn't afford, got hammered, then walked
through the empty streets of downtown Pittsburgh and down to the fountain where
the three rivers met. Under dim stars they talked about beginning again. All the
traveling they could do. That was what they'd wanted all along! They were free
now. Still time to see the entire world if they got lucky.

He'd soon after quit the pushcart and gotten a
so-called real job, both for the money and because he'd started to think too
much togetherness was bad for them. Maybe, on some level, he'd been angry at
her. Or maybe nothing had been quite the same for him since she'd flown out of a
tree he'd begged her not to climb. If she did that, what else would she do?

And yet, wasn't it better to watch her fly from a
tree than to see her as anxious as she was these days, as if stepping out the
front door was a significant challenge? She was somehow turning into someone
whose greatest desire was to shrink the world or at the very least keep it from
expanding.

A
fter
Ramona was in bed (Lauren had read to her, sung to her, joked with her, told her
a story), he sat at the round kitchen table and drank some tea with Lauren, who
was telling a story about one of her customers at the bank. “He looks like
Brawny, the paper towel guy. But also like a robot. Like I seriously think he
might be a
robot
.” As she spoke he felt he was
looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope; she faded, she became tiny
in the great distance, her beauty miniaturized and less disturbing.

“So, Lauren, for now, for now I think I have to
take a break from our friendship.”

“You a robot too?” she said. She smiled. He thought
he saw a quick flash of anger on her face. But then that vanished and she looked
almost relieved.

“You're a married man, Ben. I'm not stupid!” She
looked down.

“Yeah, but you know the story. Look at me.”

She looked up at him for a brief moment; her cheeks
flushed.

“Doesn't change the fact that you're married,” she
said, looking down, and for an instant he saw her as a child, a girl who'd had
to be brave. Is that why he loved her? She'd shown him a picture of herself with
her towering foster mother. He wanted that picture. She'd been six years old,
with no front teeth, a fake smile, and a plaid dress with a lizard pin on the
wide white collar.

“Look. You've been a good friend to me, and I'm
grateful for that, but I could feel this coming. I'm not a dolt.”

“This is hard.”

“It's OK. It's not that huge a thing. It's
life.”

She knew how to skate on this thin ice with grace
even if she'd had the wind knocked out of her. She stood up and said she'd see
him to the door, that she'd been waiting for this moment, and it was a relief,
in a strange way, to have it finally arrive. But her face was red, as if she was
humiliated, and he couldn't bear it.

“But I love you,” he said. “I'm in
love
with you. Really.”

This stopped her. And a powerful sense of regret
surged through his body, even as he'd spoken the truth.

She looked at him. She was not a romantic, but she
didn't have expectations of her own love life ending in complex pools of secret
grief and infidelities, despite a broken first marriage. She'd told him once she
believed in love as a state where everyone deserved to live. It was a practical
thing with her. If you fell out of love, if you found you were with the wrong
person, that was a big problem.

“You're
in love
with
me?”

“Come on.” He wasn't sure what he meant by
this.

“I guess I maybe did know on some level.” Still,
she looked shocked, transported. And delicate. She held her blue eyes wide,
blinking

“I'm sorry. I'm confused,” he said, looking off to
the side. “I had no idea how confused until now.”

Lauren smiled boldly and took a deep breath. “Ben.
If you love me like
that
, you better deep-six your
plan to ditch me for six months”—she had sudden tears in her eyes and was
smiling—“because it's not
realistic
, Ben. And you
need to ask yourself, is it fair to stay married to your wife if that love's
gone?”

Gone? The word was hard. He wasn't ready for it.
Not at all. But of course it wasn't fair! Evvie
deserved
someone who could really love her in return. They'd turned
out to be a mismatch was all; this past year they'd sat across from each other
in restaurants like old couples who've run out of things to say.
The Dining Dead
, as Evvie herself used to call
them.

He kissed Lauren for the first time.

“I don't know where I am.” He hated himself for a
moment.

“You're right here.”

“I can't sleep!” Ramona stood behind them, barefoot
in SpongeBob pajamas, thumb in mouth like a much younger child, eyes wide and
accusatory.

Lauren turned to her. “Well, you can go try your
best. Go on.”

She didn't budge. “I'm afraid I'll have another
nightmare,” she said. Ramona's eyes were filling up with tears.

“I'll talk to you soon,” Ben said, and slipped out
the door.

H
e sat
in the dark car now, on the edge of a tree-lined street in the park, and called
his best friend, Paul. Paul lived in Chicago. He was an actor and musician
barely getting by. He was also an unlapsed Catholic (having been lapsed for
years), a recovering alcoholic, and a guy who had started a choir in a maximum
security prison. Ben had known him since college.

“If Evvie wants to spend her life trying to save
animals, being constantly freaked out about the world, she should
do
that, but I can't,” he told Paul. “She's great, but
I don't think I can stay. I need something else. I don't even know if I love her
anymore.”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but have you prayed
about it?”

Ben bristled. It was an absurd question, and
passive-aggressive too. These newly sober people could drive you crazy, even if
they were Paul.

“I've been the most prayerful atheist in town.”

“What is it you want, Ben?”

“It's not what I want. It's what I need. I need to
live with a grown-up.”

“Evvie's not a grown-up?”

“I don't know.”

“I mean, isn't she? As grown up as anyone else?
Just because she procrastinates doesn't mean—”

“I don't know, Paul. I think she's turning into an
agoraphobic. She barely goes anywhere, and she's always staying up late writing
letters to senators she somehow imagines she can convince to stop the factory
farms, or to huge companies like Merck or Johnson and Johnson. I mean, if I read
you one of her letters, you might understand. It's like she has no idea who
she's writing to. No idea what planet she landed on.”

“I always liked Evvie,” Paul said, simply. “Maybe
she's trying to hold on to integrity or something. She knows the letters are
futile, but why give in to futility? I just always liked Evvie.”

“I like her too!” he protested. “Jesus, Paul. It's
not about not
liking
her!”

“Maybe she needs therapy.”

“She won't go. She had a bad therapist once and now
she distrusts them all.”

“Well, that's understandable, I guess.”

Ben's temper flared. “Hey, bud, whose friend are
you here? I need a little support!”

Paul was quiet for a moment. “You have my support.
I'm just a little sad. You guys have been together for so long. And you're just
following this trend I see where nobody believes in loyalty anymore. I'm just
feeling a little bad for Evvie.”

“Feel bad for me!” Ben shouted. “I'm in hell, Paul!
Feel bad for me.”

“OK,” Paul said. “I feel bad for you!”

H
e
drove home filled with a simmering rage. Evvie had so skillfully manipulated him
with her magnificent vulnerability that he felt like one of her beloved hogs or
chickens who could hardly move in their cage. She had made him feel so
indispensable, so responsible for her happiness!
I can tell
you anything. I don't trust anyone in the world but you.

Early on, when they'd been young enough to believe
their alienation was unique—when Evvie had been recovering from childhood and a
year in a punk band whose drummer had been killed in a car accident, when he'd
only wanted to hole up with her and make his own music and outsize metal
sculptures—he'd loved those declarations. Now, as his therapist explained, “If
someone told me I was the only person in the world they could
trust
, I'd take that as my first warning sign that I
was with a fairly troubled person.”