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.
He 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.
“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!”
“This 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.
She’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.
After 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.
He 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.”
First You Try Everything Page 4