First You Try Everything (4 page)

“You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound a little funny.”

“No, just wishing I'd had more sleep. Better go. I
have a meeting way up in Cranberry today.”

“Cranberry?”
she'd
said. “OK, have fun up there and don't take any wooden nickels, kid. And call me
later.”

“OK.”

“Or sooner.”

“OK.”

H
e
drove on. Keith Jarrett was too sad. As was silence. Turned on a talk show. Too
manic. News. Worst of all. Went back to silence. It was starting to snow again.
He leaned forward and squinted up into low, dark-bottomed clouds so thick they
looked permanent.

January was a problem. It wasn't just the lack of
sunlight, the oppressive skies, the scraping ice from windshields in the bitter
morning darkness before work, the landlord refusing to turn up their heat,
though all of this was certainly the perfect backdrop of gloom for memories that
seemed to return to him every year at this time. This year they were more
pressing, and a part of him remained compelled and hopeful that through such
memories, a key was being handed over, and all he had to do was take it and open
the door and then he might understand his life. How he'd arrived here.

There were January days when the essence of
childhood returned like thick vapor and he'd feel himself transported, back to a
family room with a picture window, the twins, Russell and June, his cousins
Murphy and Al, who was deaf, and a few neighbor kids, all of them playing army,
climbing on couches, while he stood behind the curtain, peeking out at his
mother. That day she'd stood in her brown tweed coat and slippers, arms crossed,
snow falling down around her, an expression of intense unhappiness on her face,
and he'd slapped the window then, drawing her eye, making a funny face so she'd
laugh, though this was out of character for him and only drew a look of
puzzlement.

M
emories of Erie.
Eerie Erie
, his sister,
June, used to say. Years ago, she and Ben had discovered that both felt that
something bad had happened to them early on that they'd never be able to
identify exactly. They knew that they'd been well taken care of, had gone
fishing in the summer on a beautiful boat owned by their father's boss, had
wonderful dogs, and had run on the beach together holding hands—Ben kept a photo
of that to prove it. Under memory's
assault
, even
innocent things—the time their mother helped them make a kite, the visits to a
pumpkin farm, riding bikes in a yellow-leaf windstorm—seemed undergirded by
darkness.

Ben's father, as it turned out, had enjoyed quite
the string of affairs. Once he'd had the nerve to bring one of his “friends”
home for dinner, a college girl (coed, he'd said) named James—James!—who'd
broken down in tears before she left, embracing Ben's mother at the door and
saying she was so sorry. “For what, James?” Ben's mother asked, taking a step
back but still patting the poor thing's back. “For having sex with your father!”
the girl had practically shrieked, and all of them heard it: June and Russell
and Ben, all of whom had been trying to watch
The
Partridge Family
, and heard too their mother saying
to James, “You had sex with my
father
? He's
dead
!”

“You know what I mean!” the girl cried, as if their
mother was being purposefully dense. And maybe she was. They couldn't have told
the difference.

“Pack your bags,” their mother said to their
father, understanding everything. “Get out!”

James ducked out the door and ran.

Ben had watched all this from a doorway, the
Partridges in the background singing, his father's lips compressed, as if hiding
a smile, as if his mother's show of drawing this line was merely amusing.

“I'll give you three hours,” she said. She was in
green pants and a gray shirt printed with pink flowers. Her face was utterly
calm.

He stepped forward. “I'll give you more than three
hours,” he said, and smiled, as if his charm would save the day again. “I'll
give you the rest of my life.”

“Mom?” Russell cried out. Ben turned. Russell
looked small and paralyzed with fear, like an omen of all that was to come.

H
is
father had stayed in the house. His mother had gone away for two months—an
eternity—to Oregon, where she had a cousin, a woman who nobody had ever met but
who regularly called the house and said, to whoever answered, “Hiya, kiddo, this
is Fat-Cousin-Sue.” His father had confessed the long string of his affairs
(describing, his mother later told Ben, each woman's physicality until it was
like listening to a porn show) and after explaining how he had a healthy sex
drive that “society” (a big word in 1972) couldn't and shouldn't dampen, he
invited her into an open marriage. When she refused, he explained to the kids
(the twins were only six) that “all was not well with their uptight mom.” While
he may have had some academic company in this attitude—he was a great reader of
books—he alone, out of all the known fathers in Erie, had taken this public swan
dive out of his marriage. Nobody in Ben's class had divorced parents.

His mother sent Ben postcards from Oregon that said
she loved him and hoped he was holding down the fort. He'd walked around for
months feeling like food was spoiling inside of him, though nobody but the
closest observer would have known. His aim was to please. He pleased his
teachers, his peers, and even the crossing guard, who'd called him “the
gentleman.”

It was hard work, pleasing, but he was no more
capable of stopping it than he was of flying away. Inside he was trying to make
room for the deep shock of what had become his life—
His
father?
His
mother? He'd loved and feared his
father—whose muscled form was so impressive two kids could hang on his arm at
the same time—who'd been a great baseball player in high school and had trophies
and photographs of himself winding up for the pitch, who'd also been
salutatorian and seemed to know everything about everything. The kind of guy who
quizzed you at the table to see how many presidents you could name. You'd work
hard to memorize them at night, dying to impress him, and he would be impressed.
Who cared if sometimes he was frightening, his eyes turning to ice if you
disagreed, his bizarre habit of pinching June on the ass even when she begged
him not to?

He could call his mother. She could assure him that
falling out of love with Evvie—if that's what this was—did
not
make him a philandering ass, arrogant, deluded, or hard-hearted,
like his father had been, all those years ago.

B
en
was almost in Cranberry. He was trying a new route to the office complex. Some
guy from work had told him he could make new circuits in his brain that way. “We
inscribe these maps in our minds when we drive! We need to burn them up and
start over! We need to create new dendrites!” The guy was like a preacher about
the brain. “Use it or lose it, buddy,” he'd say, twenty-five years old and
already passionate about not getting senile. He distributed little puzzle books.
“Come on now, do us all a favor and stay sharp!” The guy was nuts.

He pulled over to the side of the road. It was
snowing harder now. He called Lauren one more time.

“I miss you,” she said, instead of hello. This
surprised him. They didn't talk like that.

“I know. Me too.” He wanted to be with her,
tumbling in a warm field somewhere.

“When can you come?”

“Tonight. That's why I'm calling. Will you be home
around seven?”

“I'll be there. I'll hold dinner for you.” Lauren
was a great cook—unlike Evvie, she didn't have a perverse need to refuse all
measuring, and she still believed in the custom of sitting down for dinner. He'd
watched Lauren prepare exquisite meals with a pure concentration he found
humbling. He'd been compelled, then swept away, by the purity of that focus,
which seemed a natural offspring of her compact physical form. She was the only
person he knew who didn't seem to be in the grips of some kind of attention
deficit syndrome.

And she loved meat. She'd thrown a fat steak on the
grill the second time he'd visited, and still he salivated when remembering how
together in her tiny backyard they'd eaten piece by piece of that pink filet,
three paper lanterns on the table.

It's not that he didn't agree with Evvie's stance
against factory farming, which any fool could see was a nightmare beyond
imagining. But he understood that there would always be enough injustice and
human suffering to make wrongs done to animals necessarily secondary. Such
realism overwhelmed him, and he was sorry for that—sorry for how it seemed a
product of despair that shot through his heart like a silent, twisted vine. Or
was it despair? Maybe it was just weariness, or disappointment that he wasn't,
and never would be, an empathetic chicken lover. A great wave of futility got in
the way and dulled his heart. (He'd told Evvie this, in just those words, the
hundredth time she stood there asking him to feel outrage that fifteen thousand
chickens were beheaded with every tick of the clock after living lives made
brutal and short by what she called concentration camps.) He had to stop himself
from saying, “So?”

Later, away from her self-righteousness, he'd argue
with himself. What was happening was massive, unsustainable, and wrong. But
people everywhere wanted cheap meat. Meat was history. Meat was
the bloody heart of culture itself
. He himself wanted
cheap meat and wanted it more than he knew was good for him. He craved it, and
this put him in the majority, and why did Evvie go around thinking humans were
so different from other animals in their need for meat? What about that
arrogance? He knew what she'd say to that. Humans didn't
need
meat. Like so much of what they took, they didn't
need
it at all. OK, Evvie, fine. So humans are
terrible and shot full of greed. That's been established for quite some
time.

H
e and
Lauren never took their clothes off or even kissed; it wasn't
an affair
.

The most they did was talk and extend a few quick
hugs. Ben knew what Evvie would say to that.

And she was right. It was their talk that had
created this impossible, intoxicating bond that had the power to lift him right
out of his life as he knew it. Not the kind of talk he'd had with Evvie—not that
soul baring, though there was some of that on his part after a few beers—but a
smaller kind of talk, unusual for its ease. He'd never been good at small talk.
Now, to find he could do it, was like finding a whole other self. They talked
food, football (she loved it), people from work (she had favorite eccentric
customers the way he and Evvie used to have), comedians (like Evvie, she loved
Chris Rock), the women from Lauren's rowing club (they'd go out in kayaks at
four in the morning every Saturday), and Lauren's daughter (a character with a
dark mop of hair, a sharp chin, and her mother's laugh). Sometimes they talked
about work. Lauren was a teller in a bank. She'd described the manager as
a barrel-chested dude named Rob Rooter
. Rob Rooter
made them all convene in the morning for a pep talk about customer relations
(
like they do in Walmart!
) but usually ended up
turning this pep talk into a story about his wife, who was turning into a real
be-atch, he said, and did any of you girls have any advice about shopaholics? He
was the kind of guy who'd strut into the bank in his pinstripes, with the air of
a celebrity whom everyone should recognize, and ask a crowd of strangers who
waited in line, “What do you think, people? Should I learn to ice-skate?”

Ben loved these stories. Loved how Lauren, a deep
amusement in her face, punctuated so much of what she said with “You believe
that?” She had an appreciation for almost everything that came up. She had
People
,
Vogue
, and
Vanity Fair
magazines neatly piled on a table.
Sometimes he flipped through these. Evvie hated magazines. Such a waste of
paper, such a cult of celebrity, such a distraction from what mattered, such a
celebration of all this excess. Yeah, yeah. Well, guess what—Ben was really
happy looking at the crazy clothes the
Vogue
chicks
wore, and why did Evvie hate
Vanity Fair
anyway,
which had excellent journalism, including stories about Iraq, one of which Ben
read on Lauren's couch one night with concentration that he hadn't known in a
while. As if Lauren's concentration was contagious. That night her house with
its turquoise walls and bold red curtains, her vases filled with fresh flowers,
the silence of order, had cast upon him a domestic peace he'd never known.

Sometimes they watched
Lost.
They stayed clear of politics, saying nothing while they
checked the news on CNN. “I don't know.” She'd sigh. “I guess they're all trying
their best.” And change the channel.

Tonight he would break it off with her. That was
the way to progress. He knew it. The right thing was usually the hard thing.

Lauren answered the door with her hair up in a
towel like a goddess. High cheekbones, crooked smile, wide, blue, startled eyes
meeting his, filled with affection and humor.

“I can't stay,” he said.

She hugged him, stepped back, and told him, “Come
in for a bit.” He could tell by her voice that her nine-year-old daughter was at
home. Indeed the girl was sprawled on the couch.