First You Try Everything (6 page)

(He told the therapist that he too was fairly
troubled, that he and Evvie had always recognized and respected that trouble in
one another, but the therapist had only said, “Hmmm.”)

“The only therapist I'm interested in, Ben, is God,
and unfortunately I don't believe in God.”

“And that makes no sense!”

“Exactly.”

“Just because one therapist screwed up with you
nine hundred years ago doesn't mean they're all bad, Evvie.”

“I agree. It's not
them
that can't be good at therapy, it's me. I blame myself. I'm afraid of
assigning words to feelings. I'm afraid I'll just make up my memories. I do it
all the time, even without a therapist. I've told you this a hundred times.”

But it was like she was proud of being bad at
therapy. That was it. She was full of pride, and it had her cornered.

He was home now. The bricks, the blue door, the
statue of Francis of Assisi that Evvie, the proclaimed nonbeliever, insisted on
having in the tiny garden, shining in the moonlight. Years ago, when they'd
lived in Boston for a year so he could study piano, she'd wanted a whole flock
of saints. She used to believe the spirits of the saints literally inhabited the
statues, that the saints were powerless to resist the need people had for their
presence. “Otherwise they couldn't be saints. It's what separates them from us
regular humans—they can't resist love, and we can.” Her Irish grandmother had
told her that. In the old days, the remnants of Evvie's childhood faith had
enchanted him, had almost been contagious. But when he'd looked around at the
world without the lens of that initial blissful love, whatever faith he'd known
vanished.

I
t was
home but it no longer looked like home. It looked like a memory of a place he
had already left behind. The strangeness of this was exhilarating even as it
stabbed him hard in the chest. He was headed for what some Buddhist writer
called
the great longed-for catastrophe
. When he'd
read that phrase he'd understood immediately how the sheer tedium of having to
walk around in your own skin could fill you with the desire to burn it all down
and start again. He'd tried to share that understanding with Evvie one night,
and she'd bristled. “I'd prefer to dodge catastrophe for the rest of my life.
Nothing in me longs for a catastrophe. The fact that everyone I know will die is
catastrophe enough.”

End of conversation.

The bright moon, almost full, shone on the bedroom
window of this rented house where he'd slept for years. If Evvie was awake,
she'd be under the covers with a flashlight, reading a book or writing her
letters, Ruth beside her with her head between her paws.

Evvie wrote to politicians as if they actually gave
a shit about the burden of animals. One letter he happened to see began like
this: “Dear Senator, How are you? I'm OK, though it's been raining for eight
days here.” Like a kid at summer camp writing home to Mom and Dad. The letters
always a barrage of agonized description about the lives of various brutalized
farm animals. Or most recently, she wrote long letters to local politicians
about cracking down on dogfights. He found a letter that Evvie had signed:

Blessings,

Evangeline
Muldoone

Who the hell was she to give blessings? It would
have been so much more honest if she'd sign off,

I'm fucking
nuts,

Evangeline
Muldoone

He walked upstairs and into their room. She was
sleeping, with Ruth beside her, the dog's head on the pillow Evvie had made.
Ruth was the most amazing dog on earth, half pit bull, half retriever, with pink
spots on her neck and a sleek brown and gray coat, and a big, square,
intelligent head, and eyes that revealed wisdom. Evvie had rescued Ruth from the
shelter. He'd once told her that even if that was the only thing she'd ever done
in her life, her life would've been worth it. If he were to leave, he'd need
joint custody. He couldn't leave. Ruth would hate it. He wouldn't leave. He'd
get through this. People got through times like this. He looked down at Evvie
and softened. She was childlike when she slept. Her long black hair pulled back
in a single braid that hung down her back, her mouth slightly open, her profile
beautiful and so deeply familiar his chest tightened.

He steeled himself against the sorrow rising in his
chest.

It was easy to freeze whatever feeling might have
shattered him. Hardening his heart had become a habit. He took off his clothes
and got into bed beside her, crossed his arms on his chest, and stared into the
darkness. He let himself fill with sympathy for himself, for all the lonely
nights he'd known in this house.

The bed split in half, a dark river ran between the
two sides. He floated downstream.

Lauren.

He felt a yearning for her rise out of his chest
and hover in the air above him, the great bold spirit of his future. Lauren wore
an ankle bracelet; it sparkled in his mind, and he imagined running his finger
down her long, smooth leg, then tugging on the bracelet.

He floated on down the river in his bed, his hands
clenched together, his eyes wide open in the dark, sleepless.

“Is that you?” Evvie mumbled on the far bank,
sitting up.

He looked over at her. “Hey.”

“I just had the most beautiful dream.”

“That's nice.” Please let her drop back to
sleep.

“I dreamed the Dalai Lama was sitting at our
kitchen table in the middle of the night, quietly drinking a glass of water in
the dark.”

“That's a nice dream.”

“In the dream I didn't even have to get out of bed
to see him. It was enough that he was down there in our kitchen. I could feel he
was filling up the whole house with love. Isn't that strange?”

She got out of bed and walked to the window. “Not
ordinary love, Ben, but real love. It was the best dream I've ever had in my
life.” She was deeply moved, holding back tears. He wanted to put a pillow over
his head. Not the Dalai Lama!

She turned away from the moon and looked at him.
“Everything is going to be beautiful with us,” she said. She walked over and
petted the sleeping dog, her eyes downcast, waiting, perhaps for him to say
something. But he could think of nothing he wanted to say. She went into the
bathroom for some water. “We have to get back in touch with the everyday
miracles,” she said, back in their room, holding up a glass of water next to the
window. “It's like we have to stop taking stuff for granted. Like water. Water's
an everyday miracle, right?”

“I don't take anything for granted,” he said.

“So maybe I'm talking to myself.” Her voice
trembled. “Maybe I'm just talking to myself. But that's all right. Sometimes in
marriage, a person ends up talking to their self for a little while. While the
other person maybe talks to his self. And then, some time passes, and they're
talking to each other again.”

She left the room. She was going downstairs. “I
have to hear this song,” she called. Of course she did.

If she goes downstairs and puts on any song other
than “Fake Plastic Trees” (last week's insistent redundancy), or the song about
the old couple driving to the beach, or
Purple Rain
,
which she'd blared nine hundred times on Wednesday, I will cling to some final
straw of hope, Ben told himself. He waited in the dark.

The music blared. Guitar. His heart surged.

The Replacements.

He hadn't heard them for years.

“Unsatisfied.”

The song they'd loved together when they were first
together. He remembered a summer evening. They'd gone swimming in the city pool,
then drove down the highway toward the land's last drive-in theater, their
dreams intact, the two of them so relieved to have found one another, their joy
was nearly unbearable. Certainly it seemed more than enough to fuel their whole
lives. He saw Evvie as she'd been that night, barefoot in some oversize Goodwill
dress from the 1950s covered with birds. The memory was a splintering ache in
his chest. He closed his eyes and listened. Evvie once said the song's
expression of despair was so pure it almost became hope. A crying out so
unmediated and necessary, it suggested the presence of a God who was
listening.

He didn't want this last straw of hope. It didn't
even feel like hope, it felt like pain, but there it was, shining in the
darkness.

This song had played on a mix-tape years ago at a
birthday party she'd thrown for him, in rooms she'd filled with hundreds of
fresh flowers. She'd cooked excellent chili for two days and invited neighbors,
friends, customers, and his family. His mother had come with her dogs, and his
brother, Russell, from Chicago with a girl, Gina, who'd tried to kill herself a
week before and had the scars to show for it. Gina was small and angular with
haunted eyes whose expressions had traveled like dark streams underneath the
surface of the party. When this song played, she'd stood by the window, looking
into the dark backyard, and soon Evvie had gone to stand next to her,
protective, compassionate, and unafraid. She didn't have to say a word; the girl
had ended up laying her head against Evvie's shoulder. It seemed like a long
time ago, even as the image came to him with surprising clarity and
resonance.

He sat on the bed now, his head in his hands,
listening.

The voice was a raw cry of the heart that became
his own. “Come down!” Evvie cried now. “This song is as good as we thought it
was! It's killing me!”

Evvie

I
t was
Cedric's day off, and Evvie decided to call in sick at the Frame Shop so she
could hang out with him in the attic and watch movies (sci-fi flicks with robots
she didn't care for) while eating banana muffins and chips and thinking about
how she might change her life. For something was seriously wrong. In moments it
seemed that someone's cold hands were suddenly clutching her throat.

Maybe the house was haunted. She didn't normally
believe in haunted houses, but the atmosphere of every room seemed to be holding
its breath.

And yesterday evening, rearranging sweaters in her
closet, listening to a horrific radio show about women in the Congo, she'd felt
a presence behind her. But it was nothing. Nothing visible. Still, Evvie had
gotten under the covers and hid after that. What am I doing? she'd wondered,
eyes shut.

And then, ten minutes later, Ben and Ruth were
back. When she heard them come in she sprang up and walked back to the closet
and began folding sweaters again, humming loudly. “Have a nice walk?” she called
down. He didn't answer; she shouted again. “Nice walk?” and then he clomped up
the steps, Ruth following behind him on nails they really needed to cut. Click,
click, click went Ruth and thump went Ben, his step unusually heavy, she
thought, and then he stood in the doorway, saying he'd seen their friend Kline
out there, and Kline had told him he'd been diagnosed with lymphoma. In the
doorway Ben's pale face seemed to float. He looked down.

“Oh no!” Evvie said. “That's so awful. Was he with
Nora?” Evvie's heart slammed against her chest.

“Nora was home with the kids. Kline was alone. Just
walking alone in the dark.”

“Prognosis?”

“He's got a good shot at recovery, or so they told
him. Chemo, radiation. I just want to go to bed,” Ben said, his eyes still
lowered. “If that's OK.”

“To bed?” For a moment she imagined—though nothing
told her so—that this was an invitation.

“To sleep. If that's OK.”

“Of course. Ben, are you—”

“Tired and sad. About Kline. Obviously. OK?”

“Did Kline look—”

“He's already lost weight he didn't have to
lose.”

“He must have looked like—oh man. This is
terrible.”

Ben was in bed, on his side, and had turned away
from her. He still had his shoes on, under the covers, and she had to bite her
tongue to stop herself from asking him to take them off. Not because she cared
the sheets would get dirty. She just didn't like the idea of it. He'd never done
anything like this before.

“Kline will get some good treatment,” Evvie said.
“It's not like we're in the Belgian Congo.”

“What?”

“I mean, it's not like—”

“It's not even called the
Belgian
Congo anymore, Evvie,” he said.

“Oh. Excuse me.”

“Sorry. I'm just—”

“It's OK.”

Kline and Ben had gone to high school together.
Kline's wife was an architect and the mother of two small children. She also
volunteered for Amnesty International, and earlier in the year Evvie had stopped
wanting to go over there (she did not dare confess this) because Ben seemed to
like Kline's wife a little too much, guffawing over her jokes, which were poorly
delivered and which he'd heard before, and once even asking if he could hold the
baby while she checked on the dinner, and always complimenting her on whatever
she was wearing—some aggressively ordinary shirt—so that the compliment took
Kline's wife by surprise and lit up her face before she dug them into a talk
about Indonesian child labor abuses. Evvie worried Kline would die and Ben would
move into the house with his auburn-haired beautiful widow and two adorable
children, both of whom wore overalls, had big, startled eyes, and could sing
Spanish folk songs learned at their nursery school immersion program. Evvie felt
sick imagining Ben driving those toddlers and their high self-esteem to school,
allowing them animal crackers in Kline's blue van, which had a TV suspended from
the ceiling so the kids wouldn't have to be bored for one second.

She saw Kline's wife naked, spread out on a red
bedspread, grief giving a poignant and irrefutable depth to her beauty.

E
vvie
tried dislodging all of this, but the images only brightened in the sickening
carnival of her mind.

The alcove window framed another snowfall. She was
on her brother's bed, a quilt gathered around her shoulders, and Cedric was
seated on the floor in worn green sweatpants, his curly gold hair a wild frame
for his sleepy face. He was engaged in his routine, but not wholly oblivious to
his sister's emotional state. He didn't understand much about why people seemed
so devoted to making life so unnecessarily complex, but his heart was the most
reliably tender a person could hope to encounter. Not that this compassion could
budge him out of his routine.

“Yeah, I'm all right, but I need you to come with
me to the foie gras protest this afternoon. If you're with me it'll be easier to
leave the house.”

“What the heck's the big deal in leaving the house,
yo?”

“I don't know. I'm on this superstitious kick. Like
if I leave, when I come back it will be completely empty. Or burned down.”

“Evvie, I hate to tell you this, but that's
something a schizoid would say.”

“I know. But I feel like there's a phantom in
here.”

“What time this protest start and where it be at,
yo?” Cedric worked with some black guys; sometimes he drifted into black
dialect.

“Uh, down on Bryant Street, yo. At five in the
evening, so we can catch rush hour traffic along with early-bird diners.”

“I watch
my show
at
five, son.”

“So skip it one day, son.”

“I think not.”

“Skip it one day for me, please? I need you to skip
one stupid
television show for me today and I
won't ask you for anything else for the next ten years!”

Cedric looked at her. Her fear had registered.

“So you'll come with me?”

“Yeah?”

“And what about the Latvian shoe repair guy? The
cobbler? Did you call him back?”

“Yeah. He changed his mind. He wants to work
alone.”

“I'm sorry about that, Ced.” She wasn't at all.
Only Cedric would think that a career in shoe repair in 2004 was the way to
go.

“Don't be sorry! Be sorry for people who starve or
get their legs blown off in Iraq, or get shut up in asylums! Don't be sorry for
me!”

This was his usual response to anyone's pity,
including any trace of self-pity he noticed in himself. Sometimes when he
showered he lectured himself at the top of his lungs. This had been hard to
explain to Ben early on. “I guess it's a Catholic guilt thing or something,”
she'd tried.

Evvie smiled. Cedric was right. They were both so
lucky, brother and sister, warm in an attic while it snowed, neither of them
suffering terminal illness, hunger, unemployment, or even the ordinary abuses
that every other person you met seemed to be enduring. She had to learn to
breathe deep and calm down, and stop her brain from running amok.

“Let's go.”

S
now
danced in the pitch-black of five o'clock, and the usual duck liberators were
already gathered on the corner before La Foret, peacefully picketing. The air of
these protests was always charged with a distinct sense of purpose, a practical
solemnity, and the confidence that came with knowing they'd already convinced
two other restaurants to stop serving foie gras. Evvie and Cedric walked up to
the little crowd of five and were warmly greeted. It was a real act of love for
Cedric to accompany her; he didn't like crowds, even small crowds; he didn't
like the cold, and he didn't get many days off where he could stay in the attic
with the TV. Plus, he hated thinking about the ducks and geese with the metal
pipes jammed down their throats, the two pounds of grain gunned into their guts,
their livers so enlarged they couldn't even walk, much less care for their
plumage and their families. Evvie could feel Cedric trying to block all of this
out as she spoke with a tall woman in a blue coat about boycotting the
restaurant. “You can go home now, Ced. I'm all right.” Cedric didn't hesitate to
run down the street. He could be a graceful runner, but tonight he ran like
Forrest Gump, and Evvie stared after him in wonder.

T
he
woman in the blue coat said, “Isn't the so-called
delicacy
of despair
really big in France?”

“It is.”

“And aren't the French like heads and tails above
us in terms of cuisine?”

“In some respects, that's true, but—”

“I'm sorry, but I won't apologize for being here at
the top of the food chain.” Evvie felt for the millionth time that she would
really like to get out of the world immediately, then remembered that she
actually loved the world, and drew in a deep breath. “We don't need you to
apologize
for anything of the sort, but you might want
to consider what our responsibility is to those who have no voice.”

Now a balding man in a long tweed coat stood beside
her. They made a handsome pair, but handsome in a way that was so dependent on
money it just looked depressingly ephemeral.

“I do admire your conviction,” the woman said.
“Really.”

And she had such a sincere expression in her
eyes.

The man said, with probable tongue in cheek, “We
really appreciate you educating us”—steering the woman inside the
restaurant—“but maybe you should care about all the starving people first,
huh?”

“But we're all connected, everything and everyone,”
Evvie said, but quietly. “Best thing you can do for starving people is stop
eating meat,” she added, almost whispering. She knew when to give up. She knew
when to stand still and take a deep breath.

“H
ey,
Evvie?”

Ben was standing across the street in his long dark
coat with a newspaper tucked under his arm. For a moment the image of him seemed
like something she'd conjured up. She almost felt shy, seeing his beautiful
singularity, his form so intensely and deeply known it was painful. She'd been
missing him all day and hadn't even known it.

“Evvie?” he called again.

“Ben!” Happiness flooded her body with warmth. She
saw him as she sometimes did, especially in autumn or winter, when his memories
were with him like ghosts, watching as his father married the fourth-grade
phonics teacher, Miss Burns, whom Ben and his siblings had been required to call
Mom, even before the divorce was legal. “Mom's no dummy,” Ben's father had liked
to say about her. “She wears a lot of hats.”

And that was literally true too, Ben told Evvie.
His new “mom” wore berets, and sometimes a cowboy hat, smoked clove cigarettes,
and said things like “If I have to teach phonics to fourth-grade dwarves for the
rest of my life, can someone please shoot me now?” He'd preferred his mother's
house next to the old-age home, where once he and June had sung Christmas
carols, all by themselves, since their friends had not shown up.

Evvie froze for a moment—she wanted to rush across
the street and embrace Ben the man and Ben the boy, even if he did, as he moved
a few steps closer, look like an impatient boss with a bone to pick. Had she
left the stove on or something? She finally walked over to him, crossing the dim
street. The few remaining duck liberators agreed it was almost time to call it a
night, and she bid them farewell.

“Hi!” She threw her arms around Ben, nuzzled her
head into his collarbone, and then stopped. His body was rigid.

“What's wrong? Did I do something?”

“We have to talk.”

“Did something happen? Did someone die?”

“No. I have to talk—”

“Something about Kline?”

“No, no.”

He steered her down the street, with what she began
to perceive as a terrifying mixture of sadness and distance. She had a feeling
in her spine now, electric with ineffable presentiment. But she walked beside
him.

“I have to leave you, Evvie.”

“Where are you going? Stupid business trip?”

“I need to be out of this marriage.”

A wild hiccup of a laugh escaped her and the
landscape tilted. She placed her hand over her mouth for a moment. Then she
began to talk loudly with great enthusiasm.

“This fat man tonight got about
two
inches from my face and started
shouting
at me that if I
loved
geese I should go clean up the
shit
they leave all over the park near his house, and then I should
have sex with them if I think they're as important as humans. He goes, ‘Why
don't you just
fuck
those geese, lady? You know
that's what you want!' This guy was amazing, Ben. The worst I've seen since Mr.
Personality last year. Cedric couldn't take it, he just walked home alone.
That's because Cedric has good sense. Remember how you loved those imitations of
Mr. Personality I used to do? Back then? Remember how ballistic I—?” She was out
of breath.

She stopped and sat down on the curb, her head
bowed down into her hands. She had told him a lie. No man had done that tonight.
A man had done that last week to another duck liberator in Omaha, and she'd read
about it on the Internet.

He sat beside her in his fine woolen coat. She
despised that coat. She missed his old parka. Green, dill green, with an orange
lining, and big pockets twice repaired (by her) where once he'd loved to hold
things for her—keys, books, the old lists she used to make, with all those
exclamation points.