All the Lasting Things (14 page)

“The qualifications.”

“I don’t need to make qualifications. It’s private land. There are thirty graves here, total. A few of them soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War.”

“And you want to dig them up? Maybe you are Hitler.”

“Just because you fight in a war doesn’t make you a hero. Even if it did—heroes get forgotten.
History
gets forgotten. The last burial here happened in 1860, and nobody’s delivered a daisy since. Going in should have been.” He bulldozed one palm across the other to illustrate the simple, satisfyingly boyish transaction he’d been denied.

“Haven’t you seen
Poltergeist
?” Claudia couldn’t refrain from asking. “Bad things happen when you build on a cemetery.”

They passed fallen trees and little ponds gone acid green with algae.

“We don’t want to build
over
the bodies. What kind of monstrosity-maker do you take me for? We’re going to move them. To Glenlawn. My parents are buried in Glenlawn.”

“That’s where my parents are going,” Claudia said, as if naming the destination of their next vacation.

“It has fountains. And weeping willows. It’s lovely.”

“So displacing the dead from their eternal resting ground really makes you a humanist.”

“But then come the historical societies,” said Nick, ignoring the jab. “Saratoga. Bemis Heights. Even Alluvia has one. They’re all over this part of the state, protecting every last log George Washington ever peed on. ‘There are soldiers buried there!’” His imitations were, as she remembered them, passionate but limited: everyone sounded like Jerry Lewis with a cold. “‘This is hollow ground.’ One of them actually said that to me. ‘Hollow ground.’ Maybe it was Benji’s girlfriend. Is she dumb?”

“I don’t think so.”

“These people,” he mused venomously. “The women would be happy churning their own butter while the men spend their weekends reenacting the Battle of Freeman’s Farm. It’s all spinsters and Second Amendment wackadoos.”

“A humanist and a patriot,” Claudia said, her hand finding its way to the console between them, her fingers, as if drawn by a magnet, tantalizingly close to his leg.

And Max, on the porch.

“Why do you care? If it’s your property? It is your property, right?”

“It’s mine. But contrary to popular belief, not all publicity is good publicity. The average resident of your high-end housing community wants to live outside the shadow of death and desecration.” He changed tack and said, wounded, “You know what those T-shirts say? ‘Amato & Sons Need to Develop . . . a Conscience.’” He shifted the Escalade into park and turned to face her. “I have a conscience.”

“I know you do, but
. . .
”

“But. What? I
don’t
have a conscience?”

“Not that. I was going to say the kind of developments you’re talking about? If you think about it? They’re the opposite of communities, Nick. People living like that wave to the neighbors across their half acre of lawn, and that’s it. There’s no interaction. Maybe a Halloween block party, but no public life to speak of. People are more likely to get in the car and drive to buy sugar than borrow a cup from the neighbor next door.”

“Who still borrows sugar? You sound like you might like to churn some butter yourself.”

“Are you calling me a spinster?”

He stared down at the rings on her left hand.

They turned to look out the window at the view afforded by the noonday sun: the clustered cemetery with headstones like broken teeth, the distant trees, a stretch of purplish mountain painted across the horizon.

“It’s beautiful,” said Claudia, “in a tumbledown sort of way.”

He gave a quick, devilish smile and asked, “So what would you do, Madam Architect? You’ve got a hundred acres. No cemetery. No redcoats.”

“No budget?”

“Let’s not get crazy.”

“You don’t want cute little houses. What do you want?”

Nick bowed to her, as if ceding the floor. His eyelashes were as long and lovely as she remembered them.

“I’d build apartments.”

“Apartments.”

“Or row houses. Compact, sustainable residences surrounding a public lawn or garden. Pedestrian-friendly sidewalks. A community center. You know, a playground, a pool. Maybe some retail space. I know it’s a sacrilege in these parts, but something to encourage people to get out and walk.”

“Nobody likes to walk,” Nick said with a philosophic shake of his head. “And nobody likes to rent.”

“I rent.”

“You live in the city. Up here, nobody lives in apartments.”

Her face crumpled in amused disbelief.

“The poor and the elderly, okay. But no one else.”

“And we wouldn’t want them on our hands, would we?”

“People think it’s a punishment to live in an apartment. They want the American dream. With a nice big lawn for their neighbors to keep off of.”

They were twenty-two years old. How could he have expected more from her, at twenty-two?

“This is Alluvia,” Claudia said with fresh focus. “You can’t drive ten miles in any direction without hitting a trailer park or a meth lab. You talk about high end, but it’s not exactly the Hamptons set.”

“You’re still a snob.” Then: “The demographic is changing.”

“Well then, so can what the demographic wants.” Claudia willed a shift into lecture mode, tucked a strand of stray hair behind her ear, and began. “Nakagin Capsule Tower. Ever heard of it? It’s one of the first buildings I ask my students to study. Not because it’s flawless architecture. It’s not. The apartments are straight-up Stanley Kubrick. Lacquered white walls, built-in reel-to-reels. Very Tokyo. Very
2001: A Space Odyssey
. But it’s significant. It was built in the early seventies to house Japanese salarymen. Google it. You’ll see, it points to a completely different concept of living. A completely different set of values. It says you can cook, sleep, eat, shower, even bop along to your reel-to-reel, and you don’t need more than one hundred square feet to do it. You can live life in a—I called it an apartment, but really it’s a pod, a, well, a capsule, an eight-by-twelve—”

“Eight by twelve.” Nick exploded with a guttural laugh.

“See? It’s unimaginable to us.”

“It’s not unimaginable. People do it all the time. In Attica. In Sing Sing.”

“It was an experiment. A failed experiment,” Claudia confessed. “But the idea is compelling.”

“Among Japanese businessmen, maybe. You’re insane, Claude.”

“I’m not talking about building actual pods.”

“Americans,” Nick continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “don’t like identical. I don’t want my pod to look like your pod. I know what you’re going to say: then why do they live in cookie cutter subdivisions. True. But they like the illusion—”

“The myth.”

“The myth.” Nick nodded. “My house is different from yours. My house, my couch, my car—even if they’re exactly the same—are better than yours. It’s
why
we have ninety-five brands of toilet paper. I’m Charmin. You’re Cottonelle. It’s what makes me me.”

“Ah, the Individual! Let Lady Gaga decide she wants to live in a pod, and you’ll see how many people really want to be an individual. You wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough.”

“So you want me to build the Nagako?”

“Nakagin Capsule Tower.”

“In Alluvia, New York?”

“No. But architecture that questions our use of space is possible. What are we leaving behind? Is it propitious or poisonous? We have the right—the duty, actually—to ask those things. Even here. Even in Alluvia.”

The two of them, facing each other, struck a pose of serious consideration, both sober and unsmiling, until their eyes met and laughter, like water topping a levee, burst forth.

“Propitious,” Nick said as soon as he’d caught his breath.
“Propitious!”

“What’s the matter with propitious?”

“All I’ll say is people around here don’t want their houses asking them questions.”

She felt his hand before she saw it move. The heavy warmth of it on her cheek startled her, and before she could stop herself, she pulled away. Stung, Nick no sooner opened his mouth to apologize than Claudia, straining against her seat belt, leapt forward. She clasped his face, the satisfyingly rough plains of silver-flecked stubble, and pulled him into a crude but fervent kiss. Nick fumbled to free himself from his own seat belt without letting his lips leave hers. Loose, he shocked her again by squeezing improbably through the narrow space between the front seats, pawing, like a swimmer reaching for shore, toward the space he called the “way back.” Tumbling over the backseat with a theatrical groan, he hurriedly lowered the seat backs, twice hitting his head, and crawled toward Claudia across the now flat expanse of coarse black carpet. Again, drawn like a magnet, she shot through the same soft leather chasm, pulling Nick with her as she inched her way toward the tailgate, flat on her back, staring into his eyes as he positioned himself over her, helping his fingers move from one button to the next.

Later, the world rushed back to her in the caw of a bird. They lay curled together in the back of the Escalade, slicked in cool sweat.

Claudia stared at the ceiling. Benji would be comforting him by now. Or perhaps Max, beyond comforting, had left. Perhaps he was gone for good.

The harsh, hoarse cry of the bird sounded again, offending her. She made a failing effort to rise to see where it came from. “What
is
that?” she asked.

“A crow.”

“Awful.”

Nick extended an arm under Claudia’s head, making her a pillow of his sizeable biceps. She cozied up, ignoring the crow, which in most books had to be a bad omen, and breathed in the sweet drugstore spice of cheap soap and a musky something, something long forgotten but rushing back to her now, something fundamentally Nick, that crept (almost imperceptibly) beneath it. “Grab that blanket,” he said.

“What is that?” she asked, not moving, except to bring her foot against the hard, oddly shaped form that the blanket covered. “A body?”

“Not quite.”

“For a second I thought I was in for a threesome.”

“Why? Would you be into that?” Nick asked sleepily. He squeezed her tighter, then said, “It’s Stan.”

Claudia sat up quickly, hitting her own head—“Motherfucker!”—and pulled the blanket from the guitar case. She popped the latches and opened the lid to reveal the battered, honey-brown dreadnought that had sung her to sleep many a night. “Stan.”

They’d had a language all their own that was coming back to them. Shared sounds, tonic endearments, words laced with private meaning that returned to her after all these years.

“Sing me something.”

Without so much as a raised eyebrow, Nick shifted obediently into sitting position, pulled the blanket round Claudia’s shoulders, and took the guitar from her hands. “What’s the lady’s pleasure?” he asked, plucking a few notes to bring the instrument in tune.

“Do you have to ask?”

“Yusuf?” said Nick. “Always Yusuf.” He played a teasing medley of the opening bars of a song that now seemed ineludible.

“Trouble,” he sang.

She was the worst person in the world, the absolute worst. She hadn’t sold missiles to the Taliban or pushed through Tea Party legislation to slam shut the borders. She wasn’t an assassin or serial killer or Ponzi schemer, but as she sat in the parking lot of the Guilderland Travel Plaza, she racked up a list of crimes that seemed to her comparable:

1. She’d driven three hours not to meet the son she’d never met before—as planned, as promised—but to crack open a chapter of ancient history and fuck his father.
   
2. She’d fled from Nick as fast as a coward could without so much as a word about said son.
   
3. She’d sliced her mother and perhaps, if he was lucid enough, her father with the knife of a decades-old decision she had always intended to keep sheathed.
   
4. And worst of all, she’d let down the boy who knew her only as the woman who’d let him down.
   

Her selfishness astounded her. After Nick dropped her at his office, she began the drive back to the city, rocketing along as if chasing a line that, if crossed, would return her to the time before she picked up the phone to find Max on the other end. She wanted normalcy. The world didn’t need to be simple or happy, so long as it wasn’t completely upside down.

Under a long, shadowing range of perfect cumulus clouds, Claudia made it safely through Mechanicville and Clifton Park, but by the time she reached Halfmoon, her hands started to shake. The more she drove, the more distance she tried to put between her and the problem twiddling his proverbial thumbs on her parents’ front porch, the more she felt like she was wrestling another person for control of the wheel. One pair of hands fought to steer the car straight ahead, while another, with its equally implacable grip, struggled to turn it around. The warring led Claudia to drift between lanes, a deviation met with a wee but rousing horn blast from the tiny silver Smart car behind her. Shaking herself as if waking from a dream, she eased into the right lane and took the exit for the next rest stop.

She sat in the parking lot with the squeals of car-dodging, sugar-shocked children ricocheting around her. Listening to Benji’s livid voice mails or responding to Oliver’s backlog of frantic texts still proved beyond her, but she pulled her phone from her bag and put it on her lap. Of course it was only a matter of time before the thing rang, and when it did, Claudia kept her eyes shut against it. If asked, she couldn’t point to the road that bypassed her maternal—
maternal?—
responsibilities so completely and led instead to the shabby cemetery where she stumbled out of Nick’s Escalade with her panties in her hand. How, she wondered, did she get here?