“Twelve,” she almost shouts.
“OK. That dude who works in there,” says the boy. “I seen him throwing bottles against a wall one night. Dude dresses like a frackin’ freak.”
Ranjeev wants to leave his position against the wall and defend himself. The boy is wrong. He never threw bottles. And he doesn’t dress like a frackin’ freak. The boy’s the one who dresses like a freak.
“I don’t think so” is all the woman, Evvie, the director, can say.
The boy laughs. He has great presence. He throws his shoulders back. His upper body does a sinuous, subtle dance as he speaks. “Dude’s a Hindu or a Muslim. You hear all that music he plays? That be some Hindu shit or some Muslim shit. Put that in your movie.”
The boy winks. Nods. Walks off.
“Where were you breaking bottles against a wall?” Evvie calls, and looks over at him with a smile. She is sometimes beautiful, and stops time.
“He is mistaken.”
“I believe you.”
Ranjeev laughs. “You believe me. That’s good.”
“Why is that funny?”
He doesn’t know why it’s funny. He doesn’t know why she’d inspired him to come out and lean against the wall, or why for one moment he thinks of holding her head in his hands like a lover in spring. It is spring.
“I am going back inside,” he says.
Many have come to know Evvie as the strange woman with the video camera. Some have started avoiding her, taking wide circles so they don’t have to pass by her. Ranjeev sees this. But always he’ll talk with her. Something is irresistible in her face. Maybe it’s just how happy she looks when she sees him.
“How you doing tonight, Ranjeev?”
It’s late. She wears a Steelers cap. Her eyes are sleepy black beneath the rim. Almost as dark as his sister’s eyes. His mother’s. But her skin looks ghost white. She is too thin, and she looks exhausted.
She repeats the question. “How are you tonight, Counter Man?” Her long fingers cover her mouth.
“Happy.” He could add “to see you,” but no. He mulls this over for a moment, rocking back on his heels, but now must attend to a very hungry customer who wants to know what the fuck Evvie has a movie camera in here for. She doesn’t answer him because she can’t see his eyes; he’s wearing sunglasses. She slinks out the glass door and sits in her car over by pump 8. Ranjeev tells the man, “She is professional.” His heart is pounding. He can see Evvie is looking up at what he assumes is a good bright moon.
“So, do you know the man behind the counter?”
The woman Evvie’s approached is middle-aged in thick glasses and drinking a large coffee on her way back to her car. Ranjeev again is spying on a slow, gray-skied evening at the end of April. Someone in the distance is slamming on the brakes, screeching to a halt.
“He’s a beautiful fellow. For insomniacs such as myself, he’s someone to count on.”
“Why is it you have insomnia?”
“I don’t know, but if I did, I wouldn’t tell it to a stranger with a camera. I don’t even know who you are.”
“I work for a cable TV station and I’m making a film called The Man Behind the Counter. Are you an artist? Not to pry, but you look—”
“Honey, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”
Ranjeev shakes his head. People were always in such a fucking hurry. And not so very nice to the director.
“Sir, I’m making a movie about convenience store clerks. Would you mind telling me what you think of the man behind the counter?”
The young man shrugs, eyes downcast.
“Does he seem especially kind to you?”
Shrugs again, staring into the camera. His white face is scarred with acne, his hair hangs down like a dude in an old-time rock band. He emits the don’t-come-near-me spirit that Evvie ignores. Ranjeev wants to call out, Leave him alone.
“Anyhow, any words about the man behind the counter?”
“He’s from Islam.”
“He’s from Islam? Where’s Islam?”
“Fuck you.”
Ok, sorry to bother you.
“Evvie,” Ranjeev calls, “come over here.”
She pretends she is surprised to see him outside. He pretends, to himself, that he isn’t worried about her, and mystified by his own deepening affection.
“You should ask only the friendly people,” he says.
She laughs. “Hard to tell who’s friendly until you talk to them.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
His words hover in the air.
Ben
Early 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.”
Sometimes 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.
Lauren, 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.”
She 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.
“Let’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.”
Ramona 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.
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