Read Everyone but You for Free Online

disagreeable to Sylvia, but neither of which she would want as a husband, either.
    As she pulls at the cushions, Sylvia traces, for the umpteenth time, the path of Raulp’s midlife crisis and subsequent lunacy: First, there was the layoff from the bank, recent downturns, the housing-industry debacle and ensuing credit mayhem, followed by his prolonged use of the word
undervalued
, and his rather bizarre idea that fate had somehow saved him, at age thirty-nine, from a life of mediocrity and pushing through loan applications for newlyweds and pregnant couples. Then there came his decision to cash in stocks, take an evening class at the college, and paint again. Sometimes now when the mood strikes him he even speaks in French, talking about his
tour de force
and his
succès d’estime
.
    It’s all sheer and utter madness. Sylvia misses the times when she could practically chart Raulp’s moods in accordance with the Dow Jones and the near sorcery-like predictions of Warren Buffett, but after years of marriage it is no longer so easy to figureout Raulp. She watches as Raulp tucks a wisp of graying hair behind his ear and runs his hands over the blank canvas. A mercurial expression spreads across his face, and Sylvia becomes aware, once again, of the changeability of his moods.
    “Oh, look,” she says, picking up the classified section of the paper. “Job listings.”
    “Sylv,” he says distractedly. “You have your job at the bookstore, and I have a job doing this.”
    “You have unemployment benefits, a retirement fund, and a hobby,” she tells him gently. Then, when he frowns, she adds, “Just kidding! Of course you have a job, sweetie. Of course!” She says all this in an animated, too-bright way, because, Jesus Christ, she reasons, she should at least try to be cheerful. Raulp is her husband, the man she loves, after all. And he’s dedicated himself to his art again. He has! She has watched his formal considerations change over the course of class, marked how his field of vision, once bent on abject realism, has grown to add new weight and shape, more irregular patterns, less repetition. She’s commended him on his earnest study because, she reasons, she should be supportive. And mostly she has been.
    She stares out the window to fields lined with rickety fences and sagging wires. A familiar uneasiness settles in her, a familiar boredom. They live in Lancaster County, next to a dairy farm. “All that grass,” she once told Raulp, after he was transferred from the city to work as manager at the local bank in town. “Who needs so much lawn unless you have twenty children?” It’s the openness of the landscape that often leaves her strangely somber—a feeling she attributes to the region as a whole—but today, considering the unmowed grass shot through with dandelions and milkweed, she feels a crusty annoyance as well.
    “Our yard looks like
Wild Kingdom
,” she says. “I know you’re busy with your art and everything, but I feel I’m waiting for the cows to come and graze.”
    Raulp opens a tube of burnt sienna and smears it over his palette. He dips a camel-hair brush into the paint and makes a solitary stroke that looks to Sylvia like the start of a landscape, the jagged line of earth as it hits the sky.
    “Hey,” she says. “I’ve got an idea. Maybe you could paint cows mowing the grass.”
    Raulp swirls his paintbrush in deft, short strokes. “Sure,” he says absently. “Why not.”
    O N WEDNESDAY EVENING , Raulp comes home from art class and stands in the kitchen, his yellow slicker still dripping rain. He announces that for his final portfolio he has decided to paint a nude. “I think it’ll really stretch my imagination,” he says. “I mean, what’s more complicated than the human form?”
    A slight alarm shoots through Sylvia as she scrapes the last bits of lo mein from her dinner plate and into the trash. “What happened to the landscapes?” she ventures. “You know, cows,