All the Lasting Things (2 page)

He hadn’t time to ponder the question before the visor flipped open to reveal not Cat and her sweet, pillowy lips but a man Benji knew only as Knuckles, the assistant to the sound engineer, whose purple-ringed, slightly bulging eyes and beakish nose gave him the aspect of a baby bird fallen from its nest. Taken aback, Benji registered the intrusion as if he’d discovered someone peeking into his home through the mail slot. “What do you want, Knuckles?”

Knowing the risk he’d taken in approaching an actor after Kay had called places, the man glanced behind him, taking stock of the stage manager’s proximity and whether, like some fanged forest animal locked on the scent of a defenseless chick, she had spotted him. “I have a favor to ask.” He spoke quickly but quietly, a torrent of words practiced on his approach. “My mom’s sixtieth birthday is coming up, and she’s a huge fan of your father. She used to teach English and has all of his books. I’m not kidding. All of them.”

“That’s not so hard to believe, Knuckles. He isn’t Trollope.”

“Who?” Knuckles asked before shaking off a question he didn’t care to have answered and returning to his script. “Anyway. Could you ask him to sign one? It would be great. Happy birthday, Marge.” Here, he pressed a hardcover edition of Henry’s fourth novel, the seventh book in history to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, into Benji’s hands. If the uninvited game of peekaboo was a violation, this equally uninvited game of hot potato was worse. Benji flicked the novel back to Knuckles, but Knuckles had already turned and, quick as a child who believes his every wish will be granted if only he can outrace the word
no
, scurried away uttering a stage whisper of, “Thanks, Brian.”

Brian?
Benji hammered on the name like a coffin nail as his dulled but not entirely useless reflexes sent him fumbling after the airborne book. He caught it with every intention of hurling it after its owner, but it became, in that instant, heavy as marble. His arm felt like he’d been carrying that stupid book his entire life. Brian. He could die with Brian etched on his tombstone and who—other than his mother and father and sister—would register the mistake?

Benji wilted against the wall in his great metal suit. The lambent red of the exit door shone like a beacon, and his feet, before his mind could tell them to move, ferried him outside. The sudden shot of mid-August air, already crisp and cool as a September night, fueled him past the reeking leviathan of the Dumpster, into which he tossed the birthday present for Knuckles’ poor mom. He had no particular destination in mind, but, in what was technically a stolen suit of armor, he began to run. Or at least move as swiftly as he could encased in fifty pounds of metal and mail. The thrill of escape from the thankless chore of playing King Hamlet, from the crushing, mocking, monolithic successes of his own father, from the indignity of being called Brian—fucking Brian!—spurred him forward. That, and the adrenaline that came from being chased.

As he ran, he made ridiculous music that brought to mind a festoon of tin cans rattling behind the newlyweds’ car, a sound punctuated by the flat footfall of the homelier of two assistant stage managers, who demanded, sotto voce, that he stop, turn around, and get back here right now. With her shiny Elvis hair and oversized lumberjack shirt that essentially rendered her pear shape shapeless, the woman looked not merely like Kay’s assistant but her clone. Even in work boots, she was, compared to Benji, lithe and swift and beginning to gain. Her winded, whispery plea zipped into Benji’s ear at such close range he expected her to grab his shoulder and throw his helplessly stiff body to the ground, but at the edge of the parking lot, like a dog who’s reached the perimeter of an invisible fence, she stopped. It was eight o’clock. Soon, the Alice Stone Memorial Pavilion’s little stage would be aboil with light. The curtain would rise. And Kay No. 1, regardless of the actions of a washed-up child actor and now costume thief, expected outpaced Kay No. 2 to be in her place.

Watching her hurried retreat, Benji stopped running and, hands on knees, struggled to catch his breath. The thought that there would be no ghost, not tonight, curled his mouth into a dark, momentary smile. He hadn’t set out to fuck Kay over, or jam up the night’s machinery with a wrench big enough to cause even the easy-breathing Judge Tornquist to hyperventilate, but if that was the icing on this particular cake, he wasn’t above licking the fork. Then again, maybe fucking them over was exactly the reason he’d run. Imagining the lot of them now, Judge and Delores and sweet, sanctimonious Cat, who one by one had looked across the table on that first day of rehearsal and claimed they’d never heard of him, being either too young to remember any sitcoms older than
Saved by the Bell
or, in Delores’ case, too flatulently theatrical to own a television, Benji savored a backstage scene of contagious panic. The very people who’d left him feeling untalented, unsexy, unsung, whose poisonous mockery still rang in his ears, would, as curtain time came and went, want him,
need
him. They would hate him, all their worst suspicions of him confirmed, but a second before that they’d choke on their own superiority and simply wish he were there.

He dropped his helmet and continued on his way.

A road well-tended by the state parks commission snaked for more than a mile down a gently sloping wooded incline. It descended a hill of significant historical note, a trail of blue-and-white signs, ubiquitous in these parts, explaining the role it played, in 1777, in General Burgoyne’s surrender. Or something. Quicker, though, a path cut through the trees, a straight shot along the ridge of a craggy ravine, across an old, moss-covered bridge, to the entrance of the park, where a rotating cast of rangers, either committedly mute or annoyingly chipper, sat in a booth handing out maps and parking stubs, making change. And, in the one named Seth’s case, selling the surplus from his personal stash of pot, mushrooms, and pain medication.

Over the course of his many pilgrimages, Benji had come to see Seth as the fallen powerhouse of his high school swim team. Seth had had the trophies, the top place on the record boards, the requisite hot swimmer girlfriend and college scholarship, then in about the time it took to tear a rotator cuff, he traded it all, everything he loved in life, for a stiff-brimmed olive-green campaign hat and a drug problem. Good-bye, girlfriend. Good-bye, scholarship. Hello, OxyContin. Ultimately, though, Seth’s biography mattered less than the fact that he was an appreciative
Prodigy
fan and, unlike most drug dealers in Benji’s experience, willing to extend credit.

Shagged with a shifting carpet of pine needles, the path gave under Benji’s feet, and the grade proved steeper than he remembered. Because his time onstage was so brief, the boards he traversed so straight and level, he’d failed to realize the very real difficulties in walking in a metal suit. The more he tried to hurry, the more he moved like he had Parkinson’s. He took small, stuttering steps, sliding and clattering between the trees, ricocheting like a silver pinball, before a sunny ray of the obvious cut through the afternoon’s whiskey haze: why not take the armor off? He began with the gauntlets. One by one, with little grace and a violent twisting motion that would have given onlookers the impression that he meant to use his armpit to rip off his own hand, he shed his metal mittens.

The rest of the suit proved less cooperative. Benji moved with care, knowing he’d be unable to get up, pathetic as an overturned turtle, if he happened to fall. He really did need a dresser, needed Jerry, to unbuckle the fine leather straps that held in place the leg things and the arm things and the shiny, tiered skirt that covered his crotch. The rain gutter–shaped pieces fastened to his forearms relented after ample struggle, but the buckles of the skirt waged a war on his recently trimmed fingernails, and without removing the skirt, he couldn’t get the bend he needed to undo the greave or the cuisse or the little round saucers that covered his knees.

Freed in the end from only a few less cumbersome pieces, Benji left the molted armor on the ground, continuing on through a stand of tall, thin trees that opened, high above, into umbrellas of sparse pine boughs. As he approached the dark bridge, he nearly fell, his feet sliding slapstick style through the dirt and rot of the forest floor. In the light of day, the bridge, built just wide enough for a ranger’s jeep, looked barely capable of supporting a ranger. It was a miracle it hadn’t fallen into the ravine years ago.

His efforts to stay upright had him panting, and a trickle of sweat, fed by the efficient furnace of the cuirass, rolled maddeningly down his unscratchable back. He took a cautious step, ears trained for the first sigh of splitting planks, but heard nothing. No wind. No traffic from nearby Route 4. Nothing but a drunken blood gush pulsing in his own ears. A few stars winked through the broken lattice of branches, and it was under these fair lights that Benji’s stomach staged its revolt. In one great heave, up came what remained of his lunchtime spree. It splashed over the railing and coated with vile chunks the leaves of a small, dry bush.

This was not the life he intended to live.

As quickly as his tuna melt rushed out, a stream of regrets rushed nastily in. Benji had no trouble making himself the subject of his own entertainment television interviews, speaking at length—in the shower, in line at the bank—about the movies he had yet to make, the theater he had yet to do, the awards he had yet to win, the accolades that had yet to be bestowed upon him and that would, by some strange alchemical process associated with fame, be transmuted into contributions to the world that mattered. What would he be remembered for? What would his legacy be? What of him, beyond the movies and performances and awards, would last? Saving the children. Saving the ice caps. Advocating clean, available drinking water across the developing world. Condemning industrial farming. Condemning violence against women. Condemning war. Condemning fossil fuels and marriage inequality and elephant poachers on the Kenyan plains. But here he was—more or less halfway through life’s journey, with what to show for it? The question came in his father’s voice:
What the hell is your plan?

Whenever Henry Fisher accused his only son of aimlessness (or worse), Benji’s mother swept in with the word “unconventional,” brandishing it like a shield to cover him from dragon’s fire—Benji isn’t flighty or feckless or retarded, he’s
unconventional
—but it was exactly the lack of the conventional trappings of adulthood (at least the kind most often clung to by straight, middle-class, white American males) that so often made him feel worthless. He had no wife, no children, no savings account or stock portfolio, no house, no car. He didn’t have a BA. He didn’t even have a cat. His filmography read like a joke. His credit cards should have melted from overuse. And what had his recent forays into theater, into more serious (and, he’d wrongly thought, more easily had) work, earned him besides two DUIs and, outside a small dinner theater in the Catskills, a charge of disorderly conduct? He could forget about Ophelia kissing him.

Now, with the floodgates of self-pity opened wide, he saw the stupidity in abandoning a show in which he’d gotten a (minor!) part only because his doubtful and already fed-up agent had pulled enough strings to make Pinocchio dance. And even though
Hamlet
offered parts that were more minor, it must be said that no one in the cast was more expendable. Even poor Gary Jeffries, whose Bernardo, according to the arts section of the local
Gazette
, seemed no less wooden than the battlements he stood upon, would be missed more than Benji.

There would be no ghost? On the contrary. By this time, Kay and her clones would have grabbed Benji’s concave-chested understudy (a boy half his age and built more like reedy Gertrude than King Hamlet), dusted his face with powder, and, working around the missing armor, cinched him improvisationally into the murdered monarch’s nightshirt from act three. And all this before Gary could mumble, “Who’s there?” Of course there would be a ghost.

No sooner had these thoughts raced in for another round of pummeling than a second seismic heave doubled him over. This one, though dry, brought Benji to his knees. Tears rolled from his eyes as he retched and spat and wondered at the gaping black space on the other side of the railing. To jump or not to jump, that is the question. He pulled himself upright, stood with his hands on the moss-furred rail, and, hanging his head, allowed himself to sink deeper into the darkening thought. But, no. His aversion to diving off a bridge, like his aversion, in 1988, to swallowing more than two of the handful of Valium he’d stolen from (and, as soon as he woke up, returned to) his father’s medicine cabinet, pointed precisely to his capacity for what George Simonson, his former therapist, called self-dramatization. George knew it. Benji knew it. Where was the Hemingway in him? The Freddie Prinze? The Kurt Cobain? He could never check out like a real star, staging a good, old-fashioned, indelible fuck-you of a good-bye.

Maybe the melodrama currently embroiling him made him lift his imploring eyes to heaven; maybe he was merely gauging the time (that is, the likelihood that Seth the Ex-Swimmer would still be manning his drug kiosk) by the dying light. Whatever the cause, Benji looked up. Looked up to see the moon of his most morbid thoughts eclipsed by what appeared to be an apple, hanging just out of reach on the opposite side of the railing. A tree from the right bank of the ravine leaned at a remarkable angle over the gorge, as if stalled in the process of falling. From it dangled a single piece of fruit in silhouette, a black cutout against the darkening sky.

The uncomfortable heat that came from hating himself dissipated in the cool breeze of a gentler memory. It was October. His birthday. 1981. The day before his mother flew him to Los Angeles to play a publicly maligned but essentially loveable humpback opposite young Melissa Gilbert, his father had broken form and proposed a family trip to an apple and pumpkin farm just the other side of the Vermont border. Thanks to Henry Fisher’s inflexible writing schedule and the ill-timed arrival of his sister’s first period, the family got a ridiculously late start, arriving at the orchard just as all the other families were packing their soon-to-be jack-o’-lanterns and paper-handled apple sacks into their cars.