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.
“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.”
“You don’t remember anything?”
“No. Not like that. I remember stuff that doesn’t mean much. Like I remember this lady in a red dress sitting at a table by herself in a restaurant.”
“Odd.”
“She comes into my mind, and I’m like, oh, you again. You can leave now, miss! Because I have no idea why she’s there! Freaks me out!”
“Maybe she was beautiful and she smiled at you?”
“No. I was a few tables away. She didn’t even know I existed. And meanwhile, I don’t even know who was sitting at the table with me! Probably good ole Mom and Dad.”
He gave her leg a squeeze. “That’s the way it goes sometimes.” She rarely mentioned Good ole Mom and Dad. He took this as an opportunity to ask for more.
“So tell me about how you—”
“Ole Dad was a heroin addict who left me in a King’s Family Restaurant one day.” She turned from the wheel and smiled at him, but her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses. “But he’s cool now. He’s in Seattle trying to stop smoking.”
“Left you?”
“Strapped in to one of those booster seats, the story goes. By that time my mom was already out of the picture. The manager of King’s had to call the cops.”
Ramona had gone back to shredding her words in the wind.
“I think she gets high on this,” Lauren said, and laughed a little.
Ben sat quiet, a feeling of sorrow and reverence colliding in his chest. Lauren fiddled with the radio, found a song, turned it up. “Please don’t think too hard about all that stuff,” she told him. “It was a long, long time ago. Dad lives in Seattle with a woman who looks just like Carol Burnett.”
Somehow, imagining Lauren as a child abandoned in a family restaurant set him wondering if he and Lauren would ever have a child, a girl who might look just like Lauren. He remembered shooting Evvie with needles of something called Pergonal—was it made from horse piss or did he make that up?—shooting her in the hip years ago with long sharp needles that supposedly would make it easier to get pregnant. Nobody could find anything wrong with Evvie, or with him. It was an unsolved mystery. And he’d not really minded; it had been Evvie who had wanted a baby.
“You know what’s weird?” Lauren said. She had beads of sweat glistening on the top of her forehead.
“What’s weird?”
“Ramona looks more like you than she does her father.”
He was surprised to feel happy about this, and when Ramona stopped screaming her words into the shredding wind, and ducked back into the car for good, flushed and bright eyed, he turned all the way around in his seat and told her, “I used to do that when I was your age,” which was a lie.
She flashed him an unguarded smile. She had pigtails sticking out of the sides of her head. And around her neck, a plastic magnifying glass.
She was a great kid. She could be a great big sister. Suddenly he wanted that.
How would he push a baby in a stroller and risk running into Evvie in the park? What would he say, “Hi, how are you?”
Anger cut through his body like a single strike of lightning. He was tired of the prison of his old affection. The guilt. He would not live beholden. He turned up the radio. He would not be paralyzed by memory. Fuck that! If he was supposed to have a baby, he would have one, with Lauren, and if they needed to move to another city, they could do that too. He squeezed Lauren’s thigh.
He imagined opening his head and hosing out his brain.
“Can we go to Taco Bell?” Ramona said.
“My treat,” Ben said.
“Yay,” Ramona finally said. “Yay Ben!”
“Yay Ben!” said Lauren.
Evvie’s mother had called him on the phone two nights ago. “Ben?”
He loved his mother-in-law, despite or because of her brokenness.
“Hi, Mom.” Could he still call her that?
“What do you think about Evvie?”
“Not sure what you mean, Mom.” The last he knew, Evvie hadn’t told her anything.
“I mean, do you think she’s going to be OK?”
“I do.”
“Cedric told me there’s trouble in paradise.”
“Well—”
“I’m sure it’s temporary, Ben.”
He took a breath. “How are you?”
“I was thinking you should come for a backyard picnic in June. Like last year. Not to push anything. But we did miss you two at Easter. Next Door came over and cut the ham, then invited himself to the table. What was I going to say? Cut the ham and go home?” She laughed, and so did Ben. Next Door was the neighbor, Charlie, an old-school Italian man who still said things like “I don’t believe in the women’s lib.” He tried courting Evvie’s aunt after his wife died, but she’d understood that what he wanted was a maid. Next Door missed home-cooked meals, clean sheets, sparkling linoleum. Those things were like his wife’s attributes, he’d explained to Ben one day. “After some long years you can’t distinguish between what the person does and who the person is.”
That narrowing of what one was to what one did was something Ben had always resisted, wanting to believe in a self that could hang back, like a hovering soul, intact, with qualities that had nothing to do with its action in the world. Suddenly he’d seen that was absurd.
“So will you come? For a picnic? You know who would love to see you is Berenice.”
Evvie’s morbidly obese aunt with the eyes like raisins in dough and the bright schnauzer named Hackie, whom she liked to introduce as her husband. A sweet woman with a good sense of humor, but it hurt to watch her try to get out of a chair.
“I’d like to see her too.” He would. Evvie’s extended family had been his own. “And Uncle Carl,” he added. Uncle Carl had a dummy named Augustine.
“I’m afraid he’s on my s-h-i-t list right now.”
“Oh.”
“Not that I don’t feel bad for him. But he and that dummy of his gambled away Sissy’s inheritance, then apologized with roses, and Sissy wouldn’t forgive him. So Carl says, or rather Augustine says, ‘Fine, then you won’t get the car I bought you either.’ And he drives off into the distance like he’s never even worked the steps.”
“God. That’s crazy.”
“That’s Carl. He’ll be back too. That’s the real problem.”
Ben laughed. It was easier to laugh, now that he was free of a lifetime of obligations to them.
“Anyhow, maybe some Saturday in June, you’ll come. Just a family thing. I’ll make you a steak. And Evvie can eat her oats and hay like a pony, and we can all have ice cream and toast marshmallows on the grill. Just come say hello. Because boy, did we miss you at Easter.”
“I missed you too.” He winced. He didn’t, couldn’t add, I can’t come in June. This isn’t temporary. I’m in love with somebody else.
“So with any luck, we’ll see you in June.”
“I’ll definitely try my best.”
The next day he sat through two long meetings in a windowless room. The lights buzzed and turned everyone green. At least he had lunch breaks where he could walk on Carson Street, listening to music on his CD player. He had been listening to Erik Satie, the mystery of simplicity, glancing at the faces of passersby, amazed to see how each face seemed completely deserving of their own feature-length film. Each face was the center of the world. He understood that this perception was a cliché, but that didn’t matter. He’d been moved.
He wanted to call Evvie on the phone after that walk, to tell her this. It was the first time he’d felt an irresistible urge to do so. But no. He shouldn’t. He really should be telling her about his need for a divorce.
He’d called Lauren instead, to tell her how each face had looked like the center of the world. She’d listened carefully, as was her way.
“That’s so cool,” she said, yet he felt vaguely that she hadn’t understood.
“I love you,” he told Lauren, missing Evvie, looking at the sky. It was the end of spring, but the purple clouds looked autumnal, the kind of weather that sent him back to the pushcart days, and suddenly he sensed all their old customers, regulars who’d required nicknames. The Freelance Mortician, Miss Informed, The Man Who Required You Love His Dog as Much as He Did, Our Lady of the Terrible News, To Sir with Love, Peppermint Patty, The Laughing Poet, all the customers lining up, waiting for their hummus and tabbouleh in the autumn, Evvie making the change in her old blue sweater. . . .
“I love you too,” Lauren said.
Evvie had named one phlegmatic old woman Bubbles, blurting out, “Thanks, Bubbles,” one day as she handed over her change, and the old woman walked away in the cloud of knowing there was no explanation for this moniker, but a smile played upon her lips nonetheless. They called her Bubbles all the time after that and watched her personality change, as if the name had called forth hidden joy beneath the surface of her dour face, and eventually she’d shown up wearing kid sneakers with blinking lights in the soles.
“More each day,” Lauren added.
“We’re going to have a lot of good years together,” he said, a pressure in his chest rising into his throat. “A lot of good years.” He wished they would hurry up, those years, and get behind him and Lauren. A history to lean on. Filled with memories of rooms where they’d made love, or cried, or laughed until they cried. They hadn’t done that yet—laughed until they cried. They needed more rooms.