Robin’s brother died in a rainstorm coming back from a Police concert his senior year in high school. Five other people, including the driver, who’d fallen asleep, walked away from the wreck. He’d played the violin better than Robin did, had long, elegant hands, aced AP physics, was the editor of his high school yearbook. He was nice. He’d been admitted to an Ivy League school for the fall, and had already written back to say he was coming. When their parents had split, a year or two earlier, he’d accepted the sudden promotion to man of the house and stopped bullying his little sisters, seemingly overnight. It was a Saturday in early spring, and later that night, their family doctor went down to the morgue to identify the body. In the morning, a neighborhood boy knocked on the door, and brought them flowers, and swept their steps, and raked their yard.
And who can say what happens to a family when events occur beyond their control? If this could happen, what was to stop anything else from happening? If this could happen, why did it happen only to them? And how would it be for you, the younger sibling, next in line behind the boy with nice hands, if you didn’t have his smile or easygoing charm? For the rest of your life, whatever you accomplished, you’d have to wonder—or you didn’t wonder, but everyone else did—what if he’d lived? It would drive you insane.
We met twelve years later. She didn’t talk about it. The driver was still a friend of the family’s. He sent them cards at Christmas: “All best wishes.” What did he want? What did any of it mean? She dealt with Eddie’s death by forgetting him and putting it out of her mind.
After her dad moved out, after her brother was killed, after her trip to France with her sister and the dad’s new Turkish floozy, she came home to find a student of massage therapy in Eddie’s bedroom. Thanks to her dad’s lawyer, her mom had to take in boarders for extra cash. She went to her dad’s house on weekends, and sometimes snuck out at night, unchaperoned, fourteen years old, in a green suede miniskirt and purple cowboy boots. And while her sister went to live in a psych unit for eating disorders and their mom accompanied her there, Robin camped out at her father’s, and got arrested for shoplifting, and borrowed his keys, and totaled his Jeep. She had rock ’n’ roll predilections, and more than once she had to be picked up by bouncers and carried out and deposited on the sidewalk. She was tough, or the family traumas did it, inoculated her against fear, hesitation, whatever. She figured she’d be dead by age thirty.
In high school she loved a lot of skinny boys with curly brown hair who were roughly Eddie’s height. She did it on staircases and in tree houses and hammocks and swimming pools and on the hoods of cars. She went to a big university, then switched to an all-girls college, then dropped out. At her father’s urging, she attended some kind of archaeological summer camp, in Colorado, set among beautiful Native American ruins, and worked on a film there, or assisted some visiting TV crew, and thought this might be an interesting way to make a living.
Five years later she moved into our group house in Hampden. I was cocky and terrified and twenty-nine, working as an art director at an ad agency with forty employees and a monthly nut of a half million dollars. I ran focus groups of homeless men as they discussed their favorite fast food sandwiches. I designed billboards to trick poor people into getting on a bus to throw away their money at a casino in Atlantic City. Eric had founded the agency but now spent most days in his office screaming at Republicans on TV. In lean times he’d call in whoever it was and hand them the benefits folder, then fire them and let them out the side door. We lived under the constant threat of annihilation.
Robin and I started dating, although I hadn’t loved anyone with a straight face for any sustained period except for family dogs, and wasn’t too sure what I thought. I thought many things—I thought she was pretty nice, and that I was pretty smart. During our first winter together, the symptoms of her concussion gradually faded. I was so relieved to have found someone. And yet, even an idiot could see this was mostly lust. For a long time I’d just wanted to kiss her, and thought that would be enough, and then I wanted to screw her three hundred times and be done with it.
There was nothing weird or nasty about it. It wasn’t new, although it wasn’t old, either. It worked every way we tried it; it was amazingly filthy yet absolutely clean. I thought she was powerless to see this kind of doubleness and subterfuge; I thought she was weirdly innocent or blindly trusting, and vulnerable to this kind of deceit. Maybe she didn’t have the skill to identify a swindler like me. Her trust left me feeling mortified, and somehow responsible for her, and then miserably stuck. I loved her, in defiance of the sniggering little joker I pretended to be.
Complicating the problem of our personal life was another small detail. I was having my moment. What had begun in a free local alternative paper now ran in syndication in several other college-town papers. My ego ballooned. Within a year of our getting engaged, I’d signed on to do my own freestanding comic. The writing overwhelmed me. For a single twenty-four-page issue, the artwork alone was equivalent to a year’s worth of strips. I ditched my job and drained my savings, which left me shaky and nocturnal and chained to my drawing table, which, as you can imagine, made me a real joy to live with.
By then Robin had spent almost two years writing puppet dialogue in Spanish and English and was slowly going nuts. We were still living in Baltimore, in a small beige house in Lauraville that cost almost nothing, with solid oak six-panel doors, louvered transom windows, a claw-foot tub, blah blah, overlooking a massive cemetery that had been featured in Homicide and The Wire. Seventeen minutes from the Inner Harbor, ten minutes from the interstate, with a new Giant supermarket, a car wash, a Korean barbecue, an AutoZone, and an all-black elementary school under heavy renovation. And sometimes guys standing on the corner with their pants sagging down, selling drugs into car windows and yelling, “You look at me? Keep driving, faggot!” In our own small yard, under big old shade trees, maples and oaks, there were flower beds of irises that smelled like root beer, and a long row of peonies, big white ones flecked with pink.