Chapter One
Eva

The one who finally said “yes” must have had some sort of intuitive foresight, or an astrologer’s sense of days which were to be important, because she scheduled herself to get her first hearing aid on her fifty-ninth birthday.  Her name was Eva Durrant, nee Eva Carruthers.  She had not it made a point to do anything in particular on her birthdays for over three decades, let alone something mundane and, she thought, rather inconvenient.  In truth, while she did harbor expectations for the hearing aid, they did not go so far as to divide the world into before and after, a vista before and a blur behind, and indeed she felt the actual acquisition of the device would be an annoyance.  So why, when she was asked by the audiology receptionist what day she was free, did she name the 15th?

Her birth in 1974 had been a hectic affair, but not overly strenuous on the one whose burden mattered most, her mother, and were her life ever subject to scrutiny by astrologers or other mystics who trust in a connection between one’s circumstances of birth and one’s circumstances for the rest of one’s life, they would not be without confirming material.  Her life to date had been exciting, but without great emotional mileposts, good or bad.  Her birthdays during childhood were portents of this, being both in their preparation and their execution lavishly wrapped bundles of fine ado about what was, essentially, nothing.  She grew up grateful to her parents for giving her nice, tasteful birthdays, and never really wondered why they bothered.  She was more grateful for other blessings they gave her.  She was grateful to be enrolled in a private elementary school with an emphasis on the arts, because everything else seemed to her to lead toward business, and she could not fathom spending her life in the business world.  She was grateful to her parents for having another baby when she was seven years old, as she might otherwise have been killed with attention.  And she was grateful that they waited until she was in college before getting divorced.  That was the big one.  She knew most marriages didn’t last so long, unless they were destined to last forever, and in the world Eva grew up in that never even seemed like a possibility.

Eva loved her parents, and that was why she never complained after they stopped throwing her parties.  She didn’t like the fact that her birthday had engendered an argument or two between them, but aside from that, she didn’t miss it.  Life had moved on by then anyway; its location had moved to New Hampshire, and its finacial state had moved to poverty.  As a child Eva never saw this as a move down, no more than she saw New Hampshire as a move up, although in hindsight she recognized it as such and saw that it was fortunate the two moves had canceled each other out.  Eva loved the social scene in New Hampshire.  Her parents loved the work opportunities; it was only later that they hated the housing costs, and the poverty, and the fact that making friends was no longer as easier as it had used to be.  Once again, one thing canceled out another, and even after she had to leave her private school, Eva found her friendships far more adaptable and rewarding than she ever had in West Virgina.  Even as their lives fell into a lower-middle class squalor, Eva was developing herself for adventure.  She therefore spent her birthday with the friends she’d made in school, and sometimes elsewhere.  If she remembered that it was her birthday, they would make it a point to do something they would not otherwise have done.  It didn’t matter what, or whether it was allowed, as long as it was new.  And if she didn’t remember, no matter—there were worse ways to spend a summer day than bumming around with people who liked you.

It continued this way well into high school, and even after the second move came—this time to Boston.  Here her family lived in genuine squalor—you can keep your inauthenticity.  Her parents seemed to have a knack for changing residence at the worst possible time for Eva and her brother, socially speaking, and when they could least afford it.  But this, you might say, is the sign of dynamic people—not the sort who move when luxury affords it and social status calls for it, but rather when trouble’s shadow is coming and a major change just may be the way to escape.  That they failed to escape did not dim the importance of this lesson for Eva.

She herself made it a point to issue change for herself whenever she sensed an approaching rut, whether or not it seemed advisable from the point of view of her schooling, her budget, or her later career.  And so, when her parents started asking her, now a senior in high school, to find a night job and help pay the bills, she recognized the warning signs.  Instead of obliging them, she found a night job and moved out of home.  She stayed with her boyfriend, an arrangement soon to be replaced with her boyfriend and his new girlfriend, to which Eva’s own new boyfriend arrived just in time to keep jealousy and hard feelings from smashing everything apart.  There were then four of them sharing the rent for a two-bedroom apartment, but as always, what monetary burden this relieved became all the heavier domestically.  Eva and her ex-boyfriend remained close by necessity.  Eva’s new boyfriend got her old boyfriend’s girlfriend a job at the outlet store where he worked, and eventually suspicion began to fall in their direction as well.  Once this stage of the drama arrived, Eva knew she was headed for depravity and had to get out.  So it was that at the age of twenty, Eva moved back in with her parents.

Her twenty-first birthday was a fine affair.  Not one to rock the boat either by over- or under-celebrating, Eva went out and got good and drunk with all her favorite acquaintances.  This alone would have been innocuous, except that Eva had, moreover, the additional responsibility of celebrating her admission into the Boston Conservatory, which had been finalized after hearing back re her theatrical audition only days before.  At her best friend’s urging, she decided to organize a musical play with all her friends on the instant; she took all those who could be enticed up to the apartment over the bar, owned by a bartender who happened to be present in her birthday party, and picked out selections from classical drama for each person to sing.  Twenty minutes of sotted collaboration later, she and her dramatically inclined friends had established a loose plot connecting all these selections, and the whole group went downstairs and treated the patrons of the bar to an unrehearsed rendition.  Thus ruffled many collars, but rather than take a roomful of hints, Eva led her team of performers out to what she deemed a culturally superior venue: Central Square.  There, they got through about two thirds of the numbers before being forced to stop by police, and it was only Eva’s self-induced return to sobriety that saved her and her friends from being detained for the night: her instincts to duck out of trouble having kicked in appropriately yet again.

Eva did not celebrate her birthdays after that.  She was at the conservatory, for one thing, and for another she did not trust herself.  She saw her mildly rebellious childhood birthdays as all having led up to that drunken caberet in the Square, and did not wish to take that trend any further.  She recieved gifts on her birthday for a few years, but as her issuance of reciprocal gifts to her acquaintances was sporadic at best, these eventually stopped coming, and Eva’s birthday was forgotten.  This did not disturb Eva, who felt no less a person for having no birthday to speak of.  She was in fact rather too busy dealing with reality to worry about temporal constructs.  In addition to having a rather heavy financial burden to bear, what with putting herself through school without parental support, Eva was devoted to an onerous chore of her own devising: discovering her true artistic nature.  When it came to light that perhaps she didn’t really have one, she left the conservatory, moved into the bottom floor of a three-decker house with some of her friends in the theater scene, and tried to get them to hook her up with work, deciding that if she was not destined to be a performance artist, at least she was well suited to be part of their culture.  This phase of her life was awkward and largely unrewarding, although it did lead to a romance or two that she couldn’t honestly regret having.  Eventually, upon finding herself in a whole new kind of rut, she decided to move once again, and settled down in Toronto.

Once there, Eva had to start over at assembling a group of friends, and found it harder than before.  Her social scene transformed; formerly a social butterfly all too willing to flit from place to place and engage anyone who happened to be around in conversation, she became more reserved and more dependent on the few people she knew in the Toronto area.  Oddly enough, as this happened she began getting better acting jobs.  Eva was used to aspects of her life balancing out, so she made no effort to return to her old self and instead threw herself into serious acting.  She no longer associated with musical theater.  None of her friends in Toronto even knew her birthday, and she never asked them theirs.  She eventually became an assistant house manager, and it was through the public functions associated with this that she met Donnell Cassoway, the man she would marry three years later.  Before they could get around to that, though, Donnell insisted that they move to a more reputable part of the country.  Eva was once more confronted with her familiar balancing effect; she accepted gracefully, applied for and received Canadian citizenship, and moved to Vancouver.

Because the theatrical scene was not so active in Vancouver as in Toronto, Eva was forced to compete to remain in her chosen vocation.  She accepted this reality grimly.  Her male friend (she had outgrown the term “boyfriend” only twelve years after outgrowing the term “girl”) was comfortable in this, his city of choice where he was employed as an investment banker.  (His initial forays into investment had been infusions into small theaters.)  She was not so comfortable, but this, naturally, was the trade-off for success, and in three more years she was the perpetually uncomfortable house manager for a decently lucrative theater.

There she remained, now married, until she began to feel the pangs of danger once again.  Boredom was about to set in, for the first time in Eva’s life.  She didn’t really know how to react.  It was not just complacency in her job; it was the fact that she did not fit in on the West Coast.  She had lived near the Atlantic all her life and while she would not claim to have felt its briny spray, she felt that the people here were different.  She was having trouble finding friends.  She was finding herself with nothing to do on Friday nights—nothing unproductive, anyway.  She was in fact guilty of blaming the wrong change for this; it wasn’t the West Coast that was boring her.  It was the fact that she was now thirty-four.  If she had remembered her birthday and how it used to jog her out of her routines, she might have taken some temporary remedy from it, but that was far from her mind.  Eva saw only two choices.  One was to move yet again, but she felt guilty for taking that road so many times, even if the first two times had been her parents’ doing.  The other was to get out of managing and into owning.  Eva asked her husband in decreasingly subtle ways to help her out in this endeavor.  He was reluctant to stick his neck out but of course could not remain in the house with someone continually asking for help without giving in eventually.  Since Donnell Cassoway was not the abandoning type, that is what he did.  And when Eva was finally in charge of her own theater, heavily into debt, she discovered that there had been a third possibility all along, and she sold the theater and got out of the business in preparation for having a baby.

Donnell was a loving father and he was happy to pay off his wife’s debts and take care of her for a while.  However, he was not a compassionate businessman and he was not willing to go himself into debt.  The Cassoways had a fine house, a classy car, and fine trimmings in most corners of their lives, and all of these continued to cost money.  None of them had anything on the baby, however.  This child, one Robert Bertrand Cassoway, was born with a cardiovascular condition that drained what remained of the happy couple’s pocketbooks more quickly than anything they had previously possessed.  Eva was distressed.  On the one hand, she had a child, and who could put a figure on that?  On the other hand, she was out of a job and approaching ruin, and in truth such a thing not only similarly evaded valuation, but affected her son’s potential upbringing.  There was a danger of actual misery on the horizon, with no compensating growth.

Another husband might have pointed out that getting to know little Robert, educating him and caring for him would be a growth experience in the most literal sense—for Robert, anyway.  Donnell Cassoway had a more serious bent to his ponderings.  The eventual result of all this worry was the sale of the house and car and trimmings, and a journey across Western Europe, little Robbie in tow.  Not the result one would have expected?  Perhaps not, but Eva was used to the mildly unexpected controlling her life, so it was only natural that she took it upon herself to hand the unexpected the reins now that it seemed to have left her alone.

They had a rough time.  France was cruel and confusing, even for a couple that thought themselves savvy.  In Belgium Eva had her purse stolen.  In the Netherlands she found work, despite the conditions of her visa, and ran into trouble collecting.  In Poland Donnell contracted the Polish flu (about the same as any flu Eva had ever run across, but still a major pain to any traveler with a child).  In the Czech Republic they made new friends, enjoyed the antiquated atmosphere, and feel behind what little schedule they had.  In Romania they ran out of money.  Stumbling back through the intervening countries, they retreated, browbeaten and wondering in an anxious way whether they had broken the law at some point, to their friends’ home in Kladno.  They were able to make an arrangement at that point, whereafter they holed up in the basement of that residence, the main body of which was shared by six other people, and did clerical work for their keep.  It was enough of a step down that Eva stopped even thinking of her life as a progression, at least in terms of careers.  Her whole mind was dedicated to worrying about the health of her son, and trying to arrange a way to get enough income to move elsewhere—she didn’t even have enough room to regret coming there in the first place, and neither is it clear that she would have if she did.

With all this to occupy her, it should be no great surprise that she did not realize Donnell was at his breaking point.  He informed her that they would return to Canada at once, or would return separately.  Eva fell into something she had never known, depression.  She lasted there for only a week, and then managed to pull herself together and arrange transport back to Vancouver, but this intervening time of despair clouded long and heavy on the married couple’s relationship.  Donnell told her more than once during that week that it was over.  He was going to leave her and start anew.  Neither of the two believed it, but to their surprise, seven weeks after their humble return home, it turned out to be true.  Donnell would have nothing for himself but a fine home with all the trimmings, while Eva was not interested in trying to rebuild.  Her way was utterly antithetical to slipping back in life and taking the very same route by which to return.  She was a woman who would typically slip one way and another, always striving for something new and unlooked-for to come out of every little setback, always expecting to break even, but at least to break new ground.  And so he left her.  And she was not slow to find her silver linings.

Eva moved back to Boston, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2012.  She was humbled to retrace her steps in this instance, so soon after doing so in Europe had led to stagnation, but she remembered fondly the character of the great city, and more importantly her parents still lived there, and were surprisingly willing to take care of their grandson.  They did not resent the way Eva had left them all those years ago; in fact they had been secretly hoping for it.  Eva had a grander time back in Beantown than she ever had expected.  Her reunion with her parents was not awkward—they actually had pleasant afternoons together, and shared the same taste in wine.  Eva was glad to find that some of her friends still lived in town, and even some of her parents’ old friends from the era were still around to tutor her on her advance into middle age.  Boston was colored anew by Eva’s experience, and of course by her child, who was growing up tough and surly but smart, and whom Eva considered a healthy challenge.

She went back into not managing but acting, and found it a splendid renaissance for herself.  What she had lacked in her youth, she found, was not artistic inclination, but the salt of the earth.  It was her added age and experience that made acting easy and enriching for her.  Auditions were something she no longer took personally, unless she was feeling personable enough that day that even rejections would be fruit for conversation.  When she landed roles the directors were often impressed to hear that she had managed and owned, and wondered why they were hiring her instead of the other way around.  She shrugged and said “Life is a rollercoaster.”  But the way she said it made them doubt she meant it, and of course she didn’t.  For her, a more apt metaphor would be a tour bus, always on the level, never particularly high or low, but never stopping except when there were attractions to be had.

By the age of forty-five, Eva was a well-known actor in the Boston scene.  She had traveled in spurts, around the coast and once back to Europe, although she was much more prepared and her son stayed at home.  Unsurprisingly, this trip ended up being far less memorable.  Eva never joined a touring company, but she did travel to places like Philadelphia and New York to make appearances and occasionally to act.  She followed a simple rule: when she was in high demand, she made high demands of those around her.  When she was not, she handled her own business just fine.  While this made certain of her friends call her unpredictable, the fact was that she was more predictable than most, and she felt her way of living made life go smoothly.  It went so smoothly, in fact, that when she met the man who was to be her second husband, they courted for only two months before tying the knot.  And amazingly, everybody came.

Eva’s life was transformed by her marriage to Michel Durrant, but in no way was this transformation domesticating.  She would say to her friends that she had been amazingly domestic before without realizing it.  After Michel entered her life, she was constantly throwing parties, attending parties whether or not she was invited, overspending, angling for more money, and depending on friends who had once depended on her.  If she had not been inspired by some higher force in how to conduct such indecencies with perfect decorum, her popularity would surely have gone down.  Eva somehow managed to remain the master of her realm, though, the pillar of her social circle.  She became an accepted source of moral decline in the lives of those who knew who, for whom she had once been a source of personal character.  She had a way of making them not care one way or the other.  In the middle of all this, trouble developed between Eva and her son, and it led, over the course of many confusing months, to Robbie’s going back to Vancouver to live with his father.  Eva developed a way of saying that it was all for the best, because no sane person would wish her life on a child.

These changes took place, tragically as you might look at it, because her husband irritated her.  Although she loved him dearly, he wore on her nerves much more than placid Donnell had, driving her at times across the city or beyond with his insistent opinions or nattering, half-drunken behavior.  Those who knew her and retained some sensibility whispered that they would be apart within a year.

They were on the right track, but underestimated Eva’s high threshold of degeneracy.  She lasted three years with Michel, and they were years filled with countless dramas best forgotten.  Nothing in her life was new for that time; as an adult she had ceased to grow, and seemingly happiness seemed no longer important for Eva—but the truth, which she would not discover until years later, was that her relationship with Michel Durrant and all the chaos it potentialized was merely a long, messy train ride to the next phase of her life, one she could not have obtained without getting a gory look at the scenery in between.  Eva separated from Michel when she was forty-eight.  Their separation unexpectedly became a long-distance one when Michel moved back to Lyon, his home for the first thirty years of his life.  In competition with a city like that, Eva didn’t even feel the heart for a divorce.  Instead she moved forward.

She set her own standards of success and set about achieving them, and in so doing left her old facade of success behind.  Living a semi-decadent life in which her appearance was tarnished and transformed into all there was of her had made Eva sick of appearances altogether.  She gained an enlightened perspective on make-up.  She started applying for a new class of roles in the theater; that of the mature, wisened, lovelorn but strikingly realistic woman whom it wasn’t possible to play one-dimensionally.  Eva had her secret, though: she wasn’t lovelorn.  She never had been.  Eva had gone through life’s highs and lows without having to really experience them on full blast; she was educated, but not scarred.  She was everything it took to be an exemplary actor.  And so she did the unexpected; she left what limelight she enjoyed, finding it artificial, moved to the suburbs, and began, at last, being a genuine, fulfilled person.

And this is what she was still doing when she turned fifty-nine.  Reasonably content, Eva was still landing roles now and then, still had a list of personal contacts which was, if no longer long, at least still strong, and owned a number of things which made her happy.  Not least was her single-floor house, which made up in class what it lacked in spaciousness.  She possessed a cabinet of crystal diningware, a baby grand piano, a backyard with a gazebo over which she had grown vines—and the pride of her collection, a round, rotating bookcase, made of thick mahogany, that sat in the corner of her living room and shelved all the plays and works on acting and theater she had ever been moved by.  On those uncommon occasions when she felt encumbered by the world’s constant company even while alone in her home, she would stand in the snug little corner behind her bookcase, spin a new compartment of it toward her, and hide.  Others of her station had their favorite comfortable chairs, but Eva had a strong back for her age, and she most loved to read while standing up in her little literary refuge—leaning, perhaps, against a joining of two walls covered lovingly in reproduced Victorian tapestries.  To her home she brought her coworkers for cast parties, when no better venue was available, and they would perform ludicrously transmutated versions of their scenes in the gazebo, weather permitting.  And at times she had over her close friends, whose numbers were still quite respectable, and her brother, who lived in town, and the occasional gentleman who solicited her company and managed to do it in a respectful way.

Eva still spoke with Michel now and then on the telephone.  She had a face-to-face international calling plan, but didn’t feel like letting that much of him back into her life.  He was for those moments when she needed whimsy, like a old favorite drug now taken in medical doses.  She also had her mother for a good, solid kind of therapy, the kind none of her friends could give her without the veneer of humor or sarcasm.  Her father had passed away during her “profligate period,” and indeed this had contributed to the trouble of the times.  Eva’s mother, however, was a fast stanchion at the age of eighty-three, a shining example of how to accept changing times gracefully without altering one’s real character.  She was living off securities her husband had invested in and was still trading stocks by day.  She claimed to love Boston more than anything, with Eva identified as a very close second whenever she dared to inquire.  Eva felt a link to the past when she was with her mother.  Only while she was at her mother’s house did she understand how important having that link to the past was in anchoring her life.

It was her mother who had recommended the hearing aid.  Eva’s hearing was not poor, but it had degenerated over the course of a lifetime spent amid noise, and her genes did work somewhat against her.  For a strong back and a healthy heart, she said, she would not hold a little hearing loss against her mother.  Still, her mother insisted that she look into it.  She had a favorite brand; they made it with a special coil that enhanced the signals from telephones and headphones, which would help Eva out greatly in her work.  Eva made the time to shop around that summer, during a lull in her career, and when her decision was made and it came time to schedule her fitting, the date August 15th popped up in her mind; she happened to recall that it was her birthday, and on a whim she went with it.  Eva intuitively felt it would be rejuvenating, in a way, to experience a renaissance in one of her five senses on her birthday, to have the hearing of a twenty-nine-year-old at the age of fifty-nine.  She had not celebrated her birthday in thirty-four years, but now, in the last year of her fifties, the thought struck her that it was imperative to do so once again.  Soon, all claim to being middle-aged would be gone from her.  Despite the fact that both men and women were living longer, the numeral six at the beginning of a person’s age still marked her in an uncompromising way.  Like it or not, Eva’s age was about to become a venerable figure, so she might as well celebrate it in that last year of freedom and take a little pride in being fifty-nine.  Maybe if it went well enough, she would make herself a pin to read “59 and Holding.”

These thoughts only skimmed, however, in the briefest way through Eva’s mind as she walked through the streets of downtown Boston for the first time with her hearing aid in place, hints of a vibrant social scene she’d once known wafting back to her from blocks away.  Just as it was easy to forget what a city was like in the old days, it was easy to forget what it sounded like when sound was plentiful.  Eva stood a moment to appreciate the memory.

And it was then that her intuition paid off.

Chapter 2

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