First You Try Everything (17 page)

“Is Juicy Fruit your favorite?” he said.

When the girl answered him after a long pause, her
voice had changed dramatically. The accusation in it was gone. It was soft and
musical. “It's not my favorite—it's my mom's favorite.”

“Oh, so you come here and get your mother's
favorite gum, and then take it back home to her.” The way he said this made it
seem like the little favor had its source in a splendid, even heroic
divinity.

“Yeah.”

“That's very good.” Pronounced
veddy
good.

“I also get her favorite chips,” the girl said,
slowly, trying to prolong this contact, the way Evvie noticed so many did.

“And do you get something for yourself?”

“Sometime.”

“That's veddy good too.” The bright smile, soft,
arresting, and strange, as if it didn't quite belong to his face tonight. As if
it might hover there in the air without him were he suddenly to vanish.

The girl stood there, saying nothing. She pulled on
the sleeve of her yellow sweater; she began to hum; she kept looking at him and
looking at him until a customer came up and said, “Excuse me. I'd like three
lottery tickets, please.”

“Three lottery tickets are coming right up, sir,”
he said.

“I like the way you say that,” the old man said.
“Where are you from?”

“I live on Flotilla Way.”

“ Flotilla Way. What country?”

“Right here. Pittsburgh, America.”

“Before that?”

“Goa.”

“Goa?”

“That's right.”

The man nodded.

Just like the girl, the man in the red cap stood
hesitating before the window.

F
lotilla Way
. Twenty years ago, Evvie cleaned a duplex
on Flotilla Way every Thursday for a year. At the end of Flotilla Way sat the
aluminum-sided three-story home of Norm the playboy dentist. She and her
coworker, a girl named Bonnie Rent, who never left town but wanted everything to
be like
On the Road
, had sucked in nitrous oxide
from a tank after making the place shine one day, and the playboy dentist had
come home to find them laughing on the floor.

The Juicy Fruit girl walked outside and Evvie
followed her, not looking at Ranjeev.

“Hey!” she called. “Can I talk to you?”

The girl just looked at her, her chin tucking.

“I'm making a movie. Wanna be in it?”

Still the girl said nothing. She smiled a
little.

“It's about Apu. From the store.” Evvie nodded in
his direction. The girl took a step forward, and Evvie started filming.

“So what do you think of the man who works in the
store back there? The man they call Apu?”

The girl ignored the question and started dancing.
She was really good. No, she was exceptional, an obvious student of Michael
Jackson.

“Come here often?” Evvie tried, filming the great
dance.

“Do I, do I, do I come here often?” the girl sang,
fist a microphone. Evvie zeroed in on her face. She was beautiful.

“Mrs. Lipton call Apu Mister Sweetie Pie Jesus
Face,” the girl said, down on her haunches.

“Who's Mrs. Lipton?”

“She givin' all dis money out. She be here
tonight.”

“Do you think Apu's like Jesus?”

“I don't know,” she sang, walking backward,
smiling, then turning, then galloping on down the street.

E
vvie
was suddenly exhausted. The exhaustion flirted with the edge of nihilism, that
small but sinister part of being alive. Hadn't she always identified with
Dorothy and her three friends lying down in the field of poppies when their
destination loomed so close?

A large woman with red lips and dough-white skin
exited the store whistling Stevie Wonder's “You are the Sunshine of My Life.”
(There it was
again
—Evvie had heard this old song
three times in
one
week and each time was reminded
of her father, who'd never bought records but had bought this one, and played it
late one night, sitting alone, drinking in the dark, and Evvie had come halfway
down the steps and watched him, not wanting to disturb him, not wanting to leave
him alone. She'd been frozen there, watching him listen to the song, light from
the street falling in through the window by his chair, leaving him half lit, so
she could see how he closed his eyes, and how tired and baffled by his life he
seemed. She'd felt a desperate and inexplicable love for him then, and only when
the song ended did she manage to turn and head back up the stairs.)

The woman made her way over to the gas pump in tiny
high heels. She had crammed her feet into the heels, and God only knew how she
was walking; Evvie admired the effort. “Excuse me, miss?” The enormous woman
turned around to face Evvie. Her bright green eyes looked directly into
Evvie's.

“Can I ask you a question?” Evvie said.

“If I can pump gas when I answer.”

“Oh, certainly.”

Evvie offered to pump the woman's gas, and the
woman was charmed and amused by this, and leaned back against her car to apply
some lipstick. “So what's the question?” the woman asked. “What can I help you
with?”

Evvie watched the numbers race by as she filled the
tank. “That man in there, the one behind the glass, do you know him?”

“Nope.”

“Never had any contact?”

“No, I pay here at the pump.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“What is it, honey?” the woman said, already losing
patience.

“Walk in there and buy something from that man,
then come back out and tell me what you think of him. I'm making a movie. And
you might be in it, if that appeals to you.”

The woman barked out a skyward laugh. “A movie,”
she said, narrowing her eyes and turning to Evvie. “How would you ever do a
thing like that?”

“I make movies. It's what I do.” Evvie straightened
her posture and cleared her throat. “I was the writer, director, and producer of
The Urgent Child's Pig.
”

The woman squinted and said it didn't sound
familiar.

“So will you go on in there? Just go in and buy a
candy bar or something. My treat.”

“Don't be silly,” said the woman, and she walked
toward the store. Evvie waited, leaning on the shiny green car, her eye on a
pale moon that floated toward one of the city's many boarded-up churches across
the road.

She would not exploit anyone. People would not be
obscured by irony run amok. The audience would not have their superiority
confirmed. Somehow they would feel like everyone was in it together.

Now the woman was back, arms hanging by her sides.
“Alrighty, he's a mensch,” she said. “Now, what's up with your movie?”

“What do you mean, ‘he's a mensch'?”

“Just what I said. A good guy. A sweetheart. A
genuine person.”

“A mensch.”

“That's what I said! Don't you know any Jews? It's
a Jewish word.”

“I realize that. I just wanted to know what it
means to you.”

“Same as it means to the Jews!”

“So do you think you'd come back here just to see
him?”

“I'd come back here just to pump my gas and see
him.” She winked. “But you better calm down.”

“You'll probably be in my movie.”

“OK, honey,” the woman said, smiling. She left the
station with a great, possibly illegal, gusto, flooring it until she was clean
out of sight.

T
hunder rocked the world. The rain fell hard and fast. The sky was
broken open by great shards of light. Evvie rushed into the store and up to the
counter.

“I'm sorry. No more movie,” Ranjeev told her. His
eyes were sorry, but their expression was fixed. She stood there, stunned.
“Why?” she said, but he had turned his back to her to work on straightening the
cartons of cigarettes under the clock.

She stood there, waiting, but he didn't turn
around. “OK,” she said, “good-bye now,” but turning away to head out the door
felt like falling into a bottomless well.

Evvie

“H
ello?
This is Evvie Muldoone. I met you on a bus a few months back.”

“Hello,” Rocky sang, emphasis on the
hell
. That gravel voice she'd loved on the bus.

“Yes, this is Evvie Muldoone. I'm calling about
your business. The one where you—”

“I got only one business, honey.”

“OK.”

“If you do it right, you only need one.”

Evvie laughed a little. “Well, I've been thinking
maybe I'd—”

“Maybe you were sick of all the heartache? Maybe it
was time to come to a pro and put an end to this tribulation? Time to start
living again and be creative? Get things straight before Christmas rolls
around?” A warm lullaby voice, a starry-night voice that could rock you right
into another world. She tried bracing herself against it.

“Something like that.” She pinched herself. On her
lunch break, she had entered an office building, taken an elevator nineteen
stories into the sky, and walked down a long, severely empty hall that ended in
a glass wall. She stood with her forehead on the glass and watched thick white
clouds breaking apart. Why she had chosen this building, this floor, this window
to make the call, this day, this hour, she couldn't say.

Rocky sneezed several times. “I suffer fall
allergies. Hurricanes stirred things up. Hold on please, miss.”

Now he was back. “So, I don't do business over the
phone. I can meet you later today, anywhere in the city of Pittsburgh, and we
can begin with eyes wide open.”

Evvie remembered his eyes. Dark blue. In her mind
they were spinning like pinwheels at a fair, and heart racing, she almost hung
up.

“I guess it wouldn't hurt to meet for a quick
coffee and get some more information.”

“Where will you be?”

“I'm working. In a shop downtown. I'm out on the
corner now near—”

“Anywhere near the PPG?” Pittsburgh Plate Glass,
the building was a magical castle, like a genius child's creation, all black,
watery glass bordered in silver, rising high into the sky it reflected. Evvie
and Ben used to run through the courtyard fountains in the summer, taking Ben's
little cousins sometimes, and for years they'd gone ice-skating there in the
winter. Evvie loved to skate but often had ended up falling. Ben had been the
leisurely kind of skater who'd put his hands behind his back, a disconcerting
and hilarious (if only to Evvie) imitation of a man from another century.

“I'm two blocks from there.”

“I can meet you by the fountain in front of the
PPG. I find that's a very conducive atmosphere. Very inspiring. Then we go to
Bruno's car.”

“Bruno's car?”

“That's our mobile office. We have various offices.
We work all over the country, miss. In fact, had you called us next week, we'd
have been gone. Our goal is we make it easy on the customer, and we have a good
time too—we play some nice music, the car smells good, and it's the most privacy
you can get in this world. That's important, don't you think? To have a good
time in this life? And a little privacy?”

His speech had the slightest twang, like a
well-educated cowboy. She was smiling. She liked him more than she should
have.

T
he
PPG wasn't just one building, but six, sitting upon six city blocks. It was
topped off with hundreds of luminous spires. If you stood in front of one of the
buildings, it mirrored another, the reflection watery and dreamlike. Bruno and
Rocky stood in front of the black mirror glass looking straight ahead, possibly
watching a reflected cloud swim its way across another of the buildings. Evvie
stopped walking so she could look at them from a distance. She liked that they
were looking up, calm enough to be interested in beauty they must have seen
hundreds of times before. She saw that Bruno wore a red tie under his coat and
stood with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He could almost pass for a
businessman, but something was off. Maybe it was just the shoes—brown–and-white
patent-leather saddle shoes, scuffed up. Rocky, however, was dressed in work
boots, jeans, a faded brown corduroy coat, pretty much exactly what she liked to
see on a man. It was as if he knew that. As if he were trying to speak to her
with those clothes. She waved, approaching them, and Rocky nodded his head.

Bruno was taller than Rocky by a few inches, and
quite a bit heavier, but even from a distance it was clear that Rocky was the
leader. Rocky tapped his foot, looked at his watch, bristled with energy, a
disconcertingly bright smile flashing on his face. It wasn't an easy smile but
one charged with effort, and maybe a little insanity, or maybe she was just
seeing it that way today: a projection. And something about him was so
exceedingly charming—it wasn't just that he was handsome—that her knees felt a
little weak. She herself was probably smiling an equally disconcerting smile as
she moved toward them, the glass building behind her somehow cheering her on.
She had loved it through the years, and now it seemed to be returning some of
that love. She moved slowly, dreamily, and wasn't sure why; she had always been
a fast walker. Was her body trying to hold her back? Or was she somehow
extending these moments, making them last, because Bruno and Rocky made such a
nice picture? Bruno, at least from this distance, looked not just like Father
Joe from childhood, but also a little like her own father. He had an amused
expression on his face as he listened to something Rocky was saying.

It was as if she'd already
had
the meeting and now was approaching them to do it all over again. Her
whole body relaxed as they all shook hands. At times like this, it was easy to
believe in reincarnation, that linear time did not exist at all.

“Yes, it's me again,” she told them, sucking in
some brisk air. She wore sneakers and her black coat and a blue-and-green scarf
around her head that she felt lent her an air of exotic authority. Underneath
the coat was a form-fitting rust-colored sweater and her best jeans, chosen very
carefully, as if for a date. She had stuffed a credit card into the back pocket
of her jeans, along with twenty bucks and a blank check. She had no idea what
this would cost her up front—maybe it would be free to simply sit in the car and
hear how things worked. She wasn't necessarily going to
hire
them, was she? That would be a
very
impractical joke. But they were certainly interesting people, and why else had
their card fallen out of her jacket yesterday into a patch of sunlight on the
green-tiled floor in the bathroom? The day's only patch of sunlight? It might as
well have whispered,
And now you will
pick me up.

They seemed unusually gentle, but still she was
curious to know if they'd reveal themselves as madmen, or legit.
Just ask some questions.
Give them the benefit of the
doubt.

“Like that scarf,” Rocky told her. His blue eyes
actually
twinkled
.

Bruno asked her if she was hungry.

“No, thanks.”

The two of them seemed anything but dangerous. In
fact they offered the atmosphere a surprisingly powerful current of
goodwill.

“She looks different,” Bruno said to Rocky, as if
she weren't standing right in front of them.

“They all do,” Rocky said, then extended his hand.
What did that mean?

“As pretty as you are, you look a little
malnourished, honey, and that's because food doesn't taste good anymore. Am I
right?” Rocky said, and somehow winked without aggression or insinuation. His
face was bright and warm in repose. Then he tilted his head to the side, his
expression one of sincere concern.

“I also walk a lot.”

“So follow us to Bruno's car. We're walking quiet,
we're three people having a meeting, we're not drawing attention to ourselves.
Three fine individuals,” he sang in a high-pitched near whisper.

“That's right.” She felt a streak of exquisite
happiness shoot through her.

The three of them headed up a narrow sidewalk and
around a corner. Bruno's car, parking lights flashing, sat legally parked on the
corner, across from an alley where an old man heaved a trash bag into a
Dumpster. The car was a green sedan, a Buick Electra from the 1980s, or perhaps
even older.

“Nice car, gentlemen. But probably a real
gas-guzzler,” she said, too loudly.

“Correct. We don't drive it much.”

Bruno opened the back door for her and gestured
with his arm. “Madame.” She stood and looked at Rocky.

“We're just going to sit here, right? And have a
meeting? We're not going anywhere?” Evvie looked at Bruno, who smiled at the
ground.

“We're just going to sit here,” Bruno said,
nodding. She saw him look at Rocky, and for a moment was scared.

“Why'd you look at him like that?” she said.

“Because all the ladies ask the same exact
question. They all want to make sure they're not going to be
driving
with us. Always the first thing they say. Some of the
fellas say it too. But
all
of the ladies.”

“Well, you can understand, can't you? I mean, this
isn't all that
normal
.”

“Of course we understand,” said Rocky. “We're not
well acquainted at this point. A smart lady such as yourself does her homework.
Feels the waters. Take it as slow as you want, sweetheart.”

“Thanks.” She actually liked him calling her
sweetheart. Why did that presumptuous condescension feel good?

“And take my keys,” Rocky said, and tossed them
over. She caught them. There were at least twenty of them on a Pittsburgh
Steelers key chain that was just like Ben's.

“Can't go anywhere without my keys,” Rocky said,
and winked.

“Thanks.” She held them in both hands.

Rocky's head dipped down, and he put one hand up in
the air that said,
No need to thank me
.

She slipped into the backseat. Lush olive green
fleece had been stapled over the seats, and two pink-velvet pillows sat against
either door. The interior had been made fanciful with dangling mobiles, like the
space above a baby's crib, and she looked up, dazzled. One of the mobiles was
made of tiny plastic records—Evvie leaned forward to read their labels. Old
stuff. The Four Tops. Elvis. John Lee Hooker. The Beatles. Lead Belly. Smokey
Robinson. These put her somewhat at ease. Especially Smokey Robinson, whose
records her neighbor Donnie had played in those years before he'd gone to
Vietnam. She'd forgotten all about those songs. And John Lee Hooker, whose “I
Cover the Waterfront” she and Ben adored. Another mobile was made of tiny
stuffed animals—rabbits, turkeys, bears, and kittens. Still another mobile
featured pictures of happy couples—no doubt an advertisement, Evvie thought;
they were smiling because it felt so good to be back together.

The two men were in the front seat now, both of
them craning their bodies so they could look at her.

“Well?” Rocky said. “Nice office?”

“Very nice. Are those all people you reunited?”

“Most of them. And if you turn all the way around,
we got talking people too.”

She turned around and saw three framed photos on
the back ledge. “Push those buttons on the frames there, and you'll have a
little fun. But can we ask you what you want us to call you? You need an alias.
We don't want your real name, because then we might slip up and use it during
the operation.”

“OK,” Evvie said, and turned from the smiling
photos on the back ledge. “Give me an alias.”

Bruno laughed a little.

“How 'bout Starshine?”

Bruno laughed again.

Rocky turned to him. “Do you have something
better?”

“No, no, not at all.”

“She looks like a Starshine,” Rocky said. “Look at
those beautiful eyes.”

“I like Starshine,” Evvie said, and Rocky turned
around to give her a nod of approval. Who did he look like? Someone from long
ago. Maybe from a dream. Maybe a movie. She couldn't figure it out. It didn't
matter.

“She's got little stars right in the middle of her
pupils,” Rocky said. For a split second she recoiled from his charm and wanted
out of the car.

She turned back to the photos. One couple was
photographed in bathing suits on the beach. Both were a bit paunchy and pale in
sunglasses, with big smiles and drinks held up to the sunshine. They looked
unpretentious and sturdy, and she liked them instinctively and felt she'd met
people like them before, in Jersey. She wondered if Rocky and Bruno changed
these photos according to who the customer was. She pushed the button and the
woman said, “Rocky, Bruno, I think of you every day! I wish you as much joy as
you brought me!”

“Push it again,” Rocky said.

Evvie pushed the button again, and the woman said,
“So God bless and keep ya!”

“I appreciate that,” Rocky said. “So does Bruno.
Are you a believer?”

Evvie thought about this. “I'm not a hard-core
atheist.”

“That counts,” Rocky said, nodding. “That
counts.”

“Are you a believer?” she asked Rocky.

He reached into his shirt and pulled out a gold
cross.

“And you, Bruno?”

“Without my higher power, I wouldn't be here.”

Evvie was strangely happy to hear this.

She turned around and pushed another button on the
framed picture of a young couple who sat on the steps in front of their nicely
painted blue house. Though their heads were inclined toward each other and their
hands were entwined, Evvie wasn't all that interested in them. They were too
young, too protected by the ignorance of youth, but she pushed the button
anyway. No sound came out. “Must be broken,” Bruno said. “Those two are from
North Carolina.”