All the Lasting Things (12 page)

Claudia clasped her hands together and laughed. Astonished and a little spooked, as if the figurines might twitch alive at any moment and come bounding toward her, she said, “I did a report on rabbits in fifth grade.”

“Who did you have?”

“Mrs. Vonstitina.”

“Native American Week?”

“You had her too?”

“My brother did. He chose a hedgehog. Not a lion or a wolf or even a deer. His spirit guide was a hedgehog.” He tapped his forehead sharply and said, “That should have been our first clue.”

“Rabbits symbolize luck. Obviously. And longevity, because they have a million babies. You know, like a long family line. And rebirth.”

Nick tightened the sharklike circle he made around her. “I don’t believe in rebirth,” he said. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. But I do believe in longevity. In a long family line. And I definitely believe in what gets you there.” He was close enough to her now that she could smell the day’s work on him, paint and sun and sweet, oniony sweat.

“Predictable,” she muttered.

Zeroing in from behind, he grabbed her tightly around the waist, put his lips to her ear, and asked, “What was that?”

“I said you’re predictable.”

His dick, hard again, was the only response he offered, rocking her back and forth against it as if their bodies were sticks that might catch fire.

“Just like a rabbit.”

He pulled back the sizeable mass of her hair and kissed her neck, then moved his hands, a bit mechanically, as if he were rehearsing each move in his head before he made it, to her breasts. Their lovemaking was more academic than passionate in those early days, as if they were trying to please Monsieur Prendergast with their conjugation of French verbs, but they were committed students and seized almost any opportunity to practice.

“What if they come home?” she whispered, realizing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she’d made her concession.

“Lake George is fifty miles away,” Nick crooned. “Mr. Anselman drives, like, fifteen miles an hour.”

Claudia turned to face him, her mouth declaring that no matter how slowly he drove, Mr. Anselman would eagle eye their every fingerprint, even while her hand was plunging past the elastic band of his underwear to grab hold of what stabbed her. Luckily, Nick didn’t mind mixed signals. As he got down on his knees on the wine-colored floral rug, Claudia followed. They were out of their clothes in minutes, rolling back and forth across a field of finely woven gold primrose with a hundred inscrutable rabbits silently looking on.

Claudia shook herself back into the idling car. She slipped into gear and drove on, trailing behind her the memory of that afternoon—rutting among the glass menagerie—until she hit the main thoroughfare out of town. The road followed the great, iron-colored vein of the river, where houses that had seen better days looked as though they might at any moment abandon their foundations and slide into the water. Eventually, as the houses grew more derelict and the yards more dirt than grass, Claudia came to Alluvia’s only stoplight. Here the village proper, which was not without its charm, met the more sprawling town, in which one was hard pressed to find anything like it. To travelers on Route 4, the light was a Cyclops’ eye forever blinking yellow, a warning to those passing through, Claudia and Benji joked, not to stop, to keep going no matter what, but on this morning, Claudia stopped. Ahead was Saratoga and Bemis Heights, the sites of bloody historical interest her teachers had taught her to revere as a child. To the left, across a camelback bridge painted an apocalyptic shade of gray, lay open country. Dairy farms, an abandoned drive-in theater now used to store fireworks, and, beyond that, the offices of Amato & Sons.

She made the turn. Fifteen minutes later, oblivious to the paint-by-numbers beauty of green fields rolling gently under a pink, post-storm sky, she turned into a large paved lot. A low, unassuming building marked “Office” stood surrounded by a compound of garages and warehouses enclosed by a chain-link fence. Other than the sign that sat atop the roof, the
A
in Amato topped with a jaunty hard hat, the place had all the appeal of a military barracks: dreary, anonymous, beige. The puddled lot was empty, but she chose a space close to the front door and turned off the car. At rest at last, a safe distance away from Max and her uncertain but unshakable responsibility to him, she felt the tension that had seized her over the last day suddenly release. A giant cable that ran through her body and pulled every muscle to the point of snapping suddenly went slack. She sensed the relief, but the relief was too much to bear, and she startled herself with a terrible, shaking sob. But crying inside the car proved impossible. How could she cry when she couldn’t breathe?

Shouldering open the door, Claudia jumped out and paced the blacktop, up and down, restoring herself to order with a few greedy mouthfuls of air. There was time to turn back. She could do so now, and Nick would be none the wiser. Wiping the tears from her face, she took her place behind the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition but couldn’t bring herself to shut the door. The alarm, a vexing ding, ding, ding, that drill, drill, drilled its way into her brain’s last reserve of equanimity, let loose a torrent of anger and enmity that swept her poise, her polish away. Grabbing the door handle as though she meant to strangle it, she pulled the door shut with such force she thought the window might break, an idea that held a certain and sudden appeal. To feel it shattered by her hands! Claudia opened the door and slammed it again. She smashed it shut as quickly and forcefully as she could, again and again, like a woman caught in some malign meme, like a woman gone mad, until an unignorable pop in her shoulder made her stop. She whimpered, rubbing the knot with a pathetic gaze into the rearview mirror. “Ow!” she cried.

The reverend doesn’t know what to make of it. He stands before us in the modest luxury of George Newland’s living room, looking at the woman who one day long ago he held over the baptismal font. He has watched her childhood pass in the patent leathers and pastels of Easter. He has pinned the confirmation cross to her dress. Though she is thirty-five, to him she will always be a child of God, and though God had not yet made manifest what she should be, the reverend cannot imagine that this is it. She is too old to be a hippie, to stand before him in a ragtag dress with flowers in her hair and a new, self-selected name. But the road she travels seems to have led to the same place, the very place it would have if she’d christened herself Starshine or China Rose, to the side of a man six years her junior and a baby that (Evelyn admitted to him in confidence) belongs to a woman who’s disappeared. He looks on her with his sad, worried eyes and sees that she loves me as if I’m the only man left to love. He sees that she loves me though I love another. That she loves me out of all proportion to what I deserve. He sees it, as I see it. Though, for this, he alone is inclined to forgive.

7.

M
ax sat on the top step of the porch, peeling paint from the board beneath his feet. He told himself to stop, but no sooner had he flicked away the evidence of his petty vandalism than his jangly and sleep-deprived nerves sent him back for another. And another. At this rate, he’d have the porch picked clean as bone by the time Evelyn appeared to refill his coffee. He took a deep breath and dug his phone from the pocket of his hoodie to check the time. Ten o’clock. She was, according to the schedule that she laid out, an hour late. But the thought of dialing her, of bothering her with his “where-are-yous,” withered under the memory of yesterday’s call. He had the feeling he’d offered her a prize to a sweepstakes she hadn’t entered.

He unlocked his touch screen with a laughably simple code and tapped a hasty message to Arnav.

She’s latte
.
Then:
Late
.

Patience
came the immediate reply. A pale white talk bubble blossomed silently under Max’s apple-green one. He couldn’t stand the packaged noises that alerted him to incoming calls or, with the sound of a speeding jet, escorted outgoing e-mail, but he appreciated the tiny vibration, the heartbeat, that pulsed in his palm as Navi’s words appeared.
She’ll be there
.

Behind him the screen door croaked open, and out stepped Benji, debuting an ivory-handled cane he’d rescued from a box intended for the church tag sale. He wore gray sweatpants and a torn Radiohead T-shirt, over which he’d pulled a silk robe of navy-and-gold paisley raided from his father’s closet. If the robe, an ancient gift from Roger that Henry would neither wear nor throw away, made an absurd statement, the cane was its exclamation mark. “G’morning, Nephew,” he said, aiming with his best British accent for upstairs
Downton Abbey
but landing somewhere closer to Eliza Doolittle.

“G’morning, Uncle,” answered Max.

Benji planted the cane’s rubber tip and lowered himself gingerly, as if by lever, onto the step next to Max. “How did you sleep?” he asked.

It seemed more polite than deceitful to lie, to not mention how he’d tossed and turned, running a finger over the blistered minutes of conversation with Claudia. Like pulling teeth, he’d told Arnav, who enjoyed trumping one clichéd phrase with another. Like getting blood from a stone. Like rolling a rock uphill. Unsettled first by Benji’s insistence that everything would be fine, then by Evelyn’s endless shock and weeping, then by the rising din of a confounded Henry being chased through the house, Max had whispered a play-by-play into Arnav’s ear, until, finally, at three, he’d taken a pill to fall asleep. Three hours later, he’d taken another to wake up. Along with the lithium, Neurontin, Zyban, and quarter tab of Klonopin. “Fine,” he said.

“Did you eat? Are you hungry? Did my mom give you breakfast?”

Max patted his stomach and made a sour face. “Let’s give your mom a break. Besides, I’d hurl. My nerves this morning? I’m a Chihuahua.”

Benji said there was nothing to be nervous about, returning to yesterday’s mantra that everything would be fine, but his assurance sounded halfhearted, his mind clearly elsewhere. Parting the robe, he freed a crushed scroll of paper from the elastic waistband of his pants and flattened it on his lap. “Speaking of concerts,” he said with a sudden turn toward solemnity, “I see you’ve given quite a few.”

Max laughed, angling for a look. “That’s not a mystery, Encyclopedia Brown. I told you yesterday I started performing when I was twelve.”

“You did. You said you gave your first concert when you were twelve. What you didn’t say”—Benji spoke with the rising passion of a prosecutor unveiling his key piece of evidence—“was that your first concert was at
Carnegie Hall
.”

“What is that? A dossier?”

Benji flipped through pages of curling biography he’d cherry-picked from the web, past a radiant profile from the
New York Times Magazine
and an Annie Leibovitz photo in which one of Max’s eyes was obscured by the question mark of his cello’s scroll. “
Wikipedia,
mostly. Some Facebook. This thing with Terry Gross.”

“I told you about Terry Gross.”

“You never said Terry Gross. You said you were on the radio. I was thinking WKRP in Cincinnati. Not NPR.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Did you know that fifty-two thousand people like you on Facebook? Fifty-two thousand,” Benji repeated, fully committed to this new way of measuring his own misery. “Guess how many people like me? Six hundred fifty-eight. I’ve got twenty years on you, and I still can’t break a thousand.”

“There’s a video on YouTube of a dog nursing a kitten. That’s been liked, like, two million times. We’re both in line behind that. Way behind.” Max wanted to talk more about Claudia—not about himself, not about his Facebook followers—but he could see no way of reaching that station without first meandering along whatever tracks pleased his host.

Benji shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re fucking Mozart.”

“
Fucking
him? I don’t even
know
him.” He waited for the joke to land, as only a bad, borscht belt joke can, but the smile on Benji’s face remained spiritless and wan. “First,” Max said, “I’m not Mozart.” He snatched the papers out of Benji’s hand and, shuffling through the patchwork of printed web pages—“Max Davis at Disney Hall” (timeout.com/los-angeles); “Max Davis at the White House” (whitehouse.gov); “Marvelous Max Conquers Kodály” (npr.org)—added, “I can’t stand when people say that.”

“But people
do
say it. What does that tell you?”

“That they have no idea what they’re talking about.” He waited for the simple truth of this to sink in, eyes wide, as if he’d just explained to a child that two plus two is four or yellow and blue make green. “What did you think I meant by professional?”

“I thought you were doing what everybody does: exaggerating. I thought maybe you picked up a few bucks playing wedding receptions or bar mitzvahs.”

“Because nothing gets thirteen-year-old boys going like a cello solo.”

“Carnegie Hall? The New York Philharmonic. The Berlin Philharmonic. The Leningrad Philharmonic.” Benji ticked off as many global symphonies and concert halls as he had fingers to count them on. “We talked for hours last night and you never—you just let me go on and on, talking about myself like an idiot. Talking about
Prodigy
and
Little House
on the
goddamn
Prairie
. And you never? I don’t get it. How do you sit there and not, not—”

Max reached delicately into the tangled knot of Benji’s rant and tried to pull free a coherent thread. “Not what?”

“Brag!” Benji pounced. “My God, you won a motherfucking Grammy. Talk about burying the lede. A Grammy!”

Max demurred with a lopsided smile. “So did Milli Vanilli.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t be self-effacing. It’s annoying to those of us who have no hope of winning a Grammy. Or anything else, for that matter.”

Max could practically see the circuits of Benji’s mind light up with the accomplishments of a boy half his age, with what Benji took to be a real and glitteringly incomprehensible lack of vainglory, surging with data that didn’t compute. Benji closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if fending off a headache. “Do you know what I’d do if I won a Grammy? I’d solder a pin to it and wear it as a brooch. Who leaves that out?”

“Should I have said that before or after, ‘Hey, we’ve never met, but guess what? I’m your nephew!’? You’d think what a douche bag.”

“Are you kidding? You come out of the gates on a Thoroughbred, you don’t run the race like you’re riding a donkey. Trust me: I have the opposite problem. I’ve spent my life riding a donkey like it’s Secretariat.” Benji scratched his head as his own metaphor sunk in. “Now I see why your mother got so worked up.”

The night before, with Evelyn finally calmed, if still undone by her “spiteful, hateful, lying children,” Max painted a portrait of Jim and Amanda Davis that was as vivid as it was unflattering. Jim, an inventor by trade whose greatest contribution to date—a coffee mug that displays the temperature of the liquid inside it—had yet to find a public wider than SkyMall shoppers, spent the bulk of his days in the family’s basement, waiting for inspiration to pave the way to an idea as necessary and immortal as the light bulb. Amanda, on the other hand, made her name as the most exacting violin teacher between Buffalo and Syracuse. She had all the pedagogical subtlety of a Russian figure skating coach who had been forced off the ice in recent years by an ever-worsening case of rheumatoid arthritis. Where Jim was scattered and removed, Amanda was focused as a despot. Ever since Max could remember, his mother-cum-manager had set her son’s priorities, apportioned his time, ruled his life with all the rigor of a totalitarian regime. Until finally, at the age of twenty-two, he packed up his cello and said, “Enough.”

The Fishers were sympathetic when he revealed that Amanda had not only kicked him out of the house but also thrown gravel at his car as he drove away.

“Because you wanted to come here?” Evelyn asked.

“Because I wanted to come here. Because of a lot of things. Because I’m taking a break from playing for a while. Because I said I’m gay in a national magazine. Because I took her Mercedes. I don’t know what she found more unforgiveable. My career suicide, as she calls it, or her stolen car.”

A whining Nissan turned onto Palmer Street, breaking the morning quiet and putting past in a plume of toxic exhaust. Max and Benji looked up. It was the color of dried blood, beat up and toaster shaped, with illegally dark windows and a decal of a delinquent Calvin peeing on the rear windshield.

“I don’t suppose that’s her?” Max asked.

“She’ll be here,” Benji answered.

“What were you saying? About my mother?”

“I can see, I said. Now that I know everything you’re giving up, I can see why she’s having a fit.”

“I’m not giving up anything. I get to keep the Grammy,” Max said, but Benji, who had seemed so game over guacamole and virgin margaritas the night before, was no longer in a kidding mood. “I’m giving up being a bear on a unicycle,” Max added more pointedly. “That’s what I’m giving up.”

Another car, a serviceable white sedan, approached the house and passed it by. Max watched it coast to a stop at the end of the street, disappointed, relieved.

“Why a bear on a—”

“The main attraction at the circus,” Max answered absently, his attention still fixed on the taillights burning like the red eyes of some mythical and retreating beast. “I’m tired.”

“Tired of the king of Denmark throwing roses at your feet?”

This Max ignored. “I’d like to see my boyfriend for more than three days a month. I’d like to conduct. I want to do something that’s my own. Like write music of my own. That’s what I’d like to do. Write music of my own instead of spending my entire life playing somebody else’s.”

“As if that’s the worst thing in the world.”

The warming sun wrung the smell of last night’s rain from the air. The eaves, dripping loudly, pit-a-patted into beds of hostas that bordered the front of the house, while across the beaded lawn, like a scarf dropped during the storm, a ragged knit of fallen orange leaves. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time,” Benji said, throwing an arm around his nephew and pulling him close. “It’s just hard for me to imagine walking away from anything I was so good at. I can’t walk away from acting, and I’m not very good at it at all.”

“I’m not giving up music.” As Benji loosened his grip, Max rocked back into his own sovereign space and said, “Maybe she changed her mind?”

“She’ll be here. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I don’t know. She didn’t sound too happy about the whole thing. And by ‘the whole thing’ I mean me.”

“Sounding happy has never been Claudia’s strong suit. She gets it from our father. You can’t take it personally.”

“I don’t. I read this book called
Birthright
about, you know, adopted people looking for their birth parents
.
I knew she might want nothing to do with me before I got into this.” He held up a hand to stall Benji’s interruption. “And you don’t need to tell me everything’s going to be fine.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

Benji zipped two fingers across his lips and let Max go on.

“Whatever happens with Claudia, even if she gets here and tells me to go away, I’m glad I came.” His voice snagged on a need he couldn’t name, deepened with emotion. “I’m glad I met you,” he said. “And your mom. Though she doesn’t know what to make of me either.”

“Are you kidding? The closest she thought she’d ever get to having a grandchild is complaining she didn’t have one. You’re like Christmas to her.”

“I don’t think a twenty-two-year-old is what she had in mind.”

“Give her time. Give them both time.”

“You didn’t need time.”

Benji shrugged. “I’m like a dog: one sniff and my heart is yours.”

“Your basic emotional whore?”

“Pretty much. Besides, being an uncle is easier than being a parent. Uncles buy cotton candy. Parents have to make sure you eat your peas.”

“Those days are over.”

“You’re never too old for cotton candy. And you may not need to hear it, but it
is
going to be fine. Claudia’s going to love you. I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours and I love you.”

“You don’t know me well enough to love me,” Max said. “I could be a grifter for all you know.”

“Are you a grifter?”

“No.”

“Even if you were. She’s your mother. How can she not love you?”

Max was awed and shaken as another self—one with a different parentage, a different provenance—began to take shape before him. He wanted to believe what his uncle said was that simple: mothers love their sons. Benji’s philosophy on this point may have been as nuanced as a tenth-grade biology book, but Max hoped to throw a switch deep within Claudia, at the level of her genes, and watch maternal devotion blaze forth, unwavering and immediate. It should have been that simple, but darkness hung at the end of the path, a shadowy bend around which he could not see.