First You Try Everything (13 page)

Ben

E
arly May,
and with it an explosion of blossoming trees, clouds of pink and white lining
the streets, and the sun shining in the blue. Ben stood at his window, talking
on the phone, eyes closed to the light streaming in. Four months had gone by,
and Evvie still thought he was unattached. She'd requested that they keep
wearing their wedding rings as “friendship rings,” and Ben had complied. But
soon he'd take the simple gold band off, put it in a box, and close the lid for
good. Or toss it. He should have never agreed to keep it on anyway. How
willfully naive he'd been, imagining you could smoothly transition from husband
and wife to friends. That she could be appeased, slowly but surely, by empty
little gestures.

“You should tell her the truth soon,” said his
cousin Murphy, his one confidant these days outside of Lauren and occasionally
Paul. (He couldn't talk to Kline—Kline was doing chemo and radiation. That put
things into a perspective Ben could only imagine. Twice Ben had dropped off
meals that Lauren made, leaving them on the step, saying he was there if they
needed him.)

Murphy lived in Philly with his second wife, Neeni,
and several kids—his, hers, and theirs. He was a man who regularly hid in his
own bathroom. He had no discernible wisdom, but at least he had been through
hell and back a few times.

“I don't want Evvie to feel like Lauren is to blame
for it all. That will only confuse the issue.”

“Right,” Murphy said. “I remember thinking that
way.”

“And?”

“I'm not sure it matters. When you break a heart,
you break a heart. Might as well be honest.”

“But it's not Lauren that's the problem. It really
isn't. I don't want Evvie imagining it is.”

Yes, he loved Lauren. Yes, he was moved by her
smile, her low expectations of others that lent her a strange peace, and how
beauty seemed to follow her around so that any room she entered looked brighter.
Yes, it was great to make love to Lauren and then listen to her talk, even as
the room was still occasionally haunted, and his dreams were surreal; one night
Evvie's head fell through the window and onto the floor. He hadn't slept at all
after that. Even when he was awake, there were moments when her face seemed to
float in the darkness just beyond the window.

But even before Lauren, he reminded himself, he'd
looked across the table that last year with Evvie, as if she were light-years
away. He'd been dying of loneliness and now said as much to Murphy.

“I know the feeling,” Murphy said. “But don't think
you can cure that with another woman. Not gonna happen.”

Ben started to pace in protest. “I think I
absolutely
can
cure that with another woman. I
happen to be in the process of doing so.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you telling me you're lonely in your marriage
to Neeni too?”

“Let's just say I feel like most of me is shelved
away at least half of the time. Maybe more. But that's life! We got kids.
They're demanding as hell! Even when I was with Danielle, before kids, we had
the stress of shitty jobs. Basically what happens, unless you're rich as hell,
is you just pour yourself into making it through the days. The days zap you, and
you can't expect to come home to some kind of love nest, since the days are
zapping her too.”

“Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Murph. I really
am. And by the way, people who are rich as hell don't look so happy to me,
either.”

“Let's just say I feel like we all have to be who
we are, no matter who we're with. That it doesn't much matter in the end. You
get zapped. You think one woman's not the right one, so you go shopping for
another, and for a while she'll seem like a lucky charm. You get a lot of
action, you get some sweet talk over coffee in the morning. But then it goes
back to just getting by. And one day you say to yourself, whether I'm here or
there, whether it's this woman or that woman, my balls will eventually be
kicked, and I'll still be the man in the mirror.”

“Sorry you see it that way.”

“Talk to me in a few years.”

Ben considered saying good-bye and hanging up.
Instead he took a deep breath, waited, then said, “Murphy, you should really
talk to Neeni about this. You shouldn't just go through the years feeling
lonely.”

Murphy laughed. “Who said? Who said that wasn't
exactly what most people do, whether they're married or not? Ever hear of the
human condition?”

“This is where romanticizing your pain gets you,
Murph. You're a guy who hides in your bathroom.”

“I love my bathroom. It has everything I need.”
Murphy laughed. “When we hang up, I get to sit on my throne with
Calvin and Hobbes
. The door is locked. This is the
secret to happiness, brother.”

Ben laughed, with a sinking sensation, since part
of him suspected this might be true. “Later, Murph.”

S
ometimes being with Lauren was like being on a mountain. He could look
down and survey the life he'd left behind. A combination of sadness and
exhilaration would overtake him. He could almost see Evvie down there, walking
around in a strange town without him. She would find her way. It all made him
want to write some music, something he hadn't wanted to do in a long time.

You just left so you could
have a festival with your feelings!
Evvie had said once. And in part,
that was true. Somehow marriage had domesticated his feelings out of existence,
and now they were back with a vengeance.

He knew a wild, almost frightening joy, at times.
Like when he looked across the table at Lauren in a restaurant and thought,
We have years. We have years together. You're my
traveling companion.
Lauren wanted to go to Spain sometime, and they
were saving up. She was collecting Barcelona information. He would lean across
the table and kiss her.

Other times, alone in his apartment, his stomach
hurt, as if his guts had been taken out, mixed up, then put back inside of
him.

He hated to keep lying to Evvie, but someday he
wanted to be
friends
with her, and if Evvie knew
that he and Lauren had been together for months now, she would be in the
position of having to hate Lauren, and any friendship would be impossible. He
had to protect their future.

L
auren, who tasted like sweetened cinnamon. It wasn't just Ben who
thought so. Her ex-husband and several guys before that had all commented on
this. Ben was vaguely jealous of her past and did not enjoy how often she
mentioned some of her ex-lovers, but at forty-three, he knew how to curb
emotions that had once nearly sabotaged him, including with Evvie, whose
ex-boyfriend had played minor league baseball and had shown up in Ben's dreams
for years, shirtless in the sun, even though he'd never laid eyes on the guy.
Maybe that guy was someone Evvie would eventually look up, Ben thought. The
faintest tinge of jealousy came and went like a sneeze. He tried to believe that
after this transition, Evvie would find someone who would make her truly happy.
Someone who shared her vision of things. Maybe an animal rights person. Or was
she going to end up a woman surrounded by cats in a crumbling house? She'd told
him years ago she'd always feared that.

She'd sent him poems in the mail recently. The
latest was the last stanza of Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach.”

Ah, love, let us be
true

To one another! For the
world, which seems

To lie before us like a
land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful,
so new,

Hath really neither joy,
nor love, nor light

Nor certitude, nor peace,
nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a
darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms
of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies
clash by night.

He wanted to write back, “
We
are the ignorant armies clashing by night, Evvie.”

S
he
sent a long letter explaining to him that
love played
hide-and-seek
, that when it was hiding you didn't just
quit
playing the game, and that she was already
changing and that she missed his mother. The letter's tone was restrained (for
Evvie) but had a PS saying she'd give years of her life just to have one more
night with him. Didn't she recognize this as a brand of insanity? He'd read once
that a certain kind of grief
was
insanity. She sent
him a poem every day, for two weeks. Pablo Neruda. Dickinson. Shakespeare.

He dreaded putting his hand into the mailbox, but
one small part of him—he was barely conscious of this—remained fascinated and
oddly grateful for her persistence.

“L
et's
take a break,” Lauren said. “Let's walk over there by the flowers.”

Lauren wore short faded red gym shorts with white
blouses on the tennis court, where he couldn't stop watching her. Her brand of
compact grace and coordination had eluded him all his life—not just in his own
body, but also in the bodies of those he'd loved. For years Evvie had tried to
teach herself to do a simple cartwheel. Finally she gave up. She was the sort of
person who fell down steps at least once a year, walked into tree branches, and
bumped her head on doors. “I can't help it if I was born with impaired
proprioception!” She'd been on crutches three times in sixteen years. A mere
transient in her body—a neon
JUST VISITING
sign
might easily have flashed across her chest—whereas Lauren truly inhabited her
skin, as if long ago she had decided to settle there for the duration. This, he
imagined, was the source of her happiness.

They took a break. In the shade he noticed her
sky-colored eyes. “We have to pick up Ramona from Scouts in twenty minutes.”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“She's starting to get attached to you.”

“I don't know about that.”

“She's always asking if you'll be coming over!”

“That's nice. But maybe she's just asking so she
can be prepared.”

Lauren looked at him, thinking. She never had a
knee-jerk response. She listened to others, mulled over their words, and then
spoke her answer, simply, rarely stumbling. The more he was with her, the
greater his respect for this quality grew.

“Maybe she
is
trying to
prepare herself. I hadn't thought of that.” She smiled, meaning to compliment
him, and he received it like warm water down his spine, and loved her
heart-shaped face as it turned away toward the whoosh of wind in the shuddering
tree beside them, all the leaves turning over, their shimmering undersides
silver in the light. “I love spring,” she said. She put on some glamorous
sunglasses; smiling, she managed to look like a kid playing dress-up.

“I do too.”

R
amona
got into the backseat in her Brownie uniform, carrying a yellow seat cushion
she'd made herself. She had a milk mustache. In the car she complained that a
Brownie named Brenda Kehoe had said, “Move your
a-s-s
.”

Lauren, driving, looked at her in the rearview.
“She spelled it?”

“No, she said it. I'm spelling it.”

“Good.”

“And she also took five cookies and we're only
supposed to take two. And when I tried to tell Mrs. Kasper she said, ‘Brownies
don't tattle on their neighbors.' ”

“Mrs. Kasper's a little overwhelmed. Her husband
rides a motorcycle.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I don't want to be a
Brownie.”

Lauren turned from the wheel to look at Ben. “She
says this every week. Then she's always dying to go back.”

Ramona hung her head out the window like a dog and
screamed something. Lauren explained to Ben that Ramona loved how the rushing
air shredded her words. “It's a little science experiment. Sometimes I think
she'll go
in
to science, the way she always
investigates stuff. When she was little, she'd hang out with the plumber when he
worked in our bathroom. She wanted to know about the pipes!”

Ben smiled. “Cool.” But she'd told him this before.
It surprised him. He knew he was incapable of repeating himself to Lauren at
this point; he was still too cautious, weighing his words and delivery, wanting
to impress and taking nothing about her for granted, remembering and savoring
all she said and all her responses to what he said.

“And she loved bugs. I'd take her and this little
friend of hers to the Natural History museum when they were tiny, and Ramona
would sit and look at bugs under the microscope, and talk to them like they were
old friends. It was almost impossible to get her to leave that place.” He hadn't
heard about this before.

“Wow. Does she still like bugs?”

Ramona still had her head out the window but was no
longer howling. The car in front of them, an SUV, sported a bumper sticker:
IF YOU BURN THE FLAG, MAKE SURE TO WRAP YOURSELF IN
IT FIRST.
The country had lost its mind.

“Look at that bumper sticker!” Ben said.

“I've seen those before.”

“It's embarrassing.”

“Well, yeah, it is. Anyhow, then when she was only
four, she went on this kick where she got really interested in natural
disasters, and we had to read tornado and tsunami books constantly.”

“Were you like that?”

“I don't remember. Like I've said, early
childhood's a blur for me.”