All the Lasting Things (20 page)

Max, especially, agitated. Much as Benji loved him, he remained a cause of great confusion, at once the sting and the salve. For the kind of acclaim Benji hoped for, the accomplishments that bring us closest to some small reachable realm of immortality, already belonged to Max. What lit up Max’s sky like a sun shone in Benji’s as a mere star: forever distant, forever remote, a cold knifepoint of light (hardly enough to see by) in the nighttime sky. Funny: though Benji had spent a lifetime following fame, he stood as far away from it now as ever. Only recently, only since Cat and Max had come into his life (bright as beacons in their own right) had that original lodestar begun to fade. It was there, of course. It would always be there. But Benji no longer had to set his course by it, if he didn’t want to. There were other destinations now, other ways. He was Max’s uncle. He was Cat’s lover. Six months ago, these places didn’t exist, but suddenly they rose before him like warm, habitable planets in the inhospitable sea of space. They were home. Or becoming home. Some days, Benji wanted to give up trying to grab whatever crude, slippery tool would allow him to carve his name in a block more lasting than Willy’s ice and instead do the things he told Cat he’d do as they curled on the couch and opened a second bottle of wine. He would finish his bachelor’s degree, get a teaching certificate, join forces with Cat to lead Alluvia’s thankless youth to that elevated plane where everyone speaks in iambs.

Benji turned and turned in the maze, but without a string to lead him out of it, all he could do was hold Cat closer. He placed a hand on her belly—a not entirely absent gesture—and thought,
Do I even want kids?
If his sister could turn into a halfway decent parent (or “parental figure”), couldn’t he? He said nothing. He felt a wave of melancholy rise through him and crash into Cat, who registered it by clinging to him more tightly.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, turning his face to hers so she could see into his eyes.

In their first days together, Benji spent the whole of his time hiding from her. Lying about his injuries and how he sustained them, it turned out, lifted him to new heights as an actor. Daily, he rehearsed a roundelay of depression and self-harm for her, for his doctor, for his sister and parents and Max, for himself, and thought, with more than a little self-satisfaction, that not only was all the world a stage, but that he, Benjamin Fisher—mocked, maligned, underestimated at every turn—was as good as any actor on it.

But time passed, and so, too, did Benji’s feelings of fraudulence. The sharp outlines of his own mendacity softened and blurred as he himself began to believe the story he so carefully constructed for others. These days, when he listened to Max describe the harrowing hours leading up to his own hospitalization—testing the shower rod to see if it would hold his weight, cinching the belt around his neck, debating whether or not to answer housekeeping’s terribly, miraculously, fatefully timed knock at the door—Benji felt a surge of empathy, of fraternity that nearly made him weep. Walking these last five months in the shoes of a desperate man who stumbled out of a theater one warm August night with every intention of jumping to his death no longer underscored the distance Benji measured between the reality of his experience and his fantastical account of it. It erased it. The mighty engine of the brain burned through his fabrications and falsehoods as though they were fuel and, by some marvelous neurometabolic process, produced a conviction with all the weight and carriage of unshakeable truth: we come to believe that Mother washed our mouths out with soap even when she wasn’t there to hear us swear. To Benji’s mind, he was no longer lying. No longer acting. He’d shown Cat a truth, and Cat stayed. He held Cat on his lap. She couldn’t have been closer. And yet she hadn’t the first clue that Benji wandered so much of the time wondering at his own desires, asking if he was satisfied, fearful that all they were in the process of building wasn’t nearly enough.

“I—” he said, having no words to follow that one, when a swarm of freshly caffeinated students interrupted him. They could be such a nuisance, these kids, and, if he were being completely honest, such a relief. Jason Carmichael, the oldest and easily the most childish member of the cast, led the others in an uproarious catcall, a construction worker’s whistle that echoed through the room.
First comes love, then comes marriage.
Both Cat and Benji hated him.

Cat stood, slow to let go of Benji’s hand but ready to face her hecklers—especially Jason, her clueless King Duncan, on whom she lowered a sublimely regal stare. It took Benji a moment, but soon he joined her. Grabbing on to the seat in front of him, he stood, a nearly drowned body getting up on his feet, coming back to himself and delivering the only words he could possibly speak. “Okay, you clowns. Back to work.”

Welcome to the governor’s suite, George says. The rooms are stuffy and small, but nothing an open window won’t fix. It’s not the most deluxe accommodation, but it’s yours if you want it. Thanks, Mr. Newland. And I’ll pay whatever—He cuts me off with a sour face. Don’t worry about that. I can keep a few dollars out of your pay, if it comes to that. But things aren’t so bad yet. He looks at my little pile of things. That’s all you’ve got? I travel light, sir. George, he says. A suitcase and a typewriter. And I’ll bet the suitcase is filled with books, he says. Half filled, I laugh. Well, you won’t need a suit for the work you’ll be doing for me. He looks at my T-shirt and dungarees. Suppose what you’ve got on is just fine. But if you need something to wear to church. I don’t tell him I don’t go to church. If you need something for church, there’s plenty at the back of my closet. No need, sir. He gives me a look. George. George, you’ve already done too much. In a world as mean as this one, he says philosophically, is there such a thing? Besides, no great kindness in giving a man a suit you don’t wear. There’s a rap at the door, and a woman comes in. She has gray eyes and smiles shyly. She puts a basket of sheets and blankets down on the floor. Her skirt whispers as she stands. Henry Fisher, George says, my daughter, Evelyn. She offers me her hand. Evie, you go on up and grab Henry here one of my old suits. Something he’ll get a lot of wear out of. Black or blue. Yes, Daddy. George, I try, but Evelyn breaks in. She is her father’s daughter. It’s no trouble, she says, meaning this to be the end of the conversation. No trouble at all.

12.

S
ince Oliver left, Claudia couldn’t move fast enough. She woke an hour later than usual simply to drain the morning of its leisurely pace and stayed in her office, drafting plans for Compton’s Mound over a carton of Chinese takeout, until she could barely keep her eyes open. Racing between the coffeepot and the shower, between the front door and the bed saved her from considering the giant hole in the closet where Oliver’s stuff used to be. Or the beat-up Eames chair. Or the rug they’d gotten on that trip to Nepal. Or the gritty, black-and-white photo—in Claudia’s opinion, his best—of a young Dominican boy leaping with balletic grace into the summery spray of an open hydrant. These newly bare places stressed her like thin spots on the ice: if she didn’t skate over them as quickly as possible, she feared she’d fall in.

She had nobody to blame but herself. Making a monthly trek north to see Nick about “work,” stealing an afternoon here or there to meet for “drinks” at the Bowery Hotel—all under the auspices of developing a hundred acres of land that weren’t trivial so much as tangential—this was crime enough. But leaving evidence of their trysts on her phone, there, on the bedside table, where Oliver could do nothing but find it—how could she forgive herself that? She wanted to be caught—she accepted that—but she couldn’t have devised a more cruel or cowardly way of announcing her betrayal than to let him stumble upon the photos that she and Nick exchanged with the hormonal indiscretion of the millennials she taught. Her breast here. His cock there. Some employing a well-draped sheet to artistic effect. Some with all the pretense of amateur porn.

Guilt bit into her viciously, but probably not as viciously as it should. Its grip lacked that grab-you-by-the-throat-and-shake-you-till-you’re-dead quality of a pit bull attack, leaving her in the clutches of something closer to a cocker spaniel: pain latched on, but eventually, she knew, she’d shake it off. She’d live. Dare she think it: she’d thrive. Whenever her mind drifted toward the calm blue waters of freedom, of satisfaction, of newly refurbished love and the late-blooming family she always considered herself too ambivalent to embrace, Claudia felt a sudden stab of happiness against which she once thought herself impenetrable.

Nick, with no grander gesture than taking her hand, buttressed her change of mind. When she warned him that she’d sooner move to Staten Island than Alluvia, he replied that certain people depended on distance for the closeness in their relationships. She’d heard that somewhere before. But couldn’t say whether it was true; for there was more than one type of distance, and Claudia charted figurative miles as well as literal ones. She and Oliver had lived in the same 1,200 square feet for the last ten years, and yet on some very real level their love seemed transatlantic: Oliver on one shore, she on the other. Occasionally they met for happy and passionate reunions, but those times of togetherness were brief and separated (at least for Claudia) by long weeks of ambivalence and abstemiousness and anemic wants that Oliver decided to accept. She withheld sex. She blunted her affections. He sat like a dog at the table, waiting for scraps; they lived as if this was the way life should be. But with the reappearance of Nick and their nomadic son, Claudia’s compulsion for this sort of emotional distance collapsed under the weight of desires she used to think herself too evolved or too philosophically sophisticated to feel. She loved Nick. She loved Max. She wanted them. She wanted them near.

She graded papers on the train uptown. At 116th Street, she got off and had the handsome Armenian from the corner cart refill her thermos with strong black coffee before hurrying up Broadway to the main gates. In April, Barnard’s campus radiated like a veritable oasis of green, the patina’d statue of the torchbearer, the yellow and green and blue banners flapping along the mullioned face of the library, the lovely expanse of lawn bordered with hedges and trees. As she made her way across the flagstone walk, Claudia took in the magnolia, its riotous blooms of dark and pale pink as beautiful as they were brief, an otherworldly confection balanced against a china-blue sky, whose petals were already letting go, tips curling with brown and wheeling through the air to make a shaggy carpet at the base of the trunk. She considered it for a moment, the sad beauty of the tree that proved if you looked at something long enough, you were bound to see its end in it, coiled, perhaps remote, but there. Amused by her own moroseness, she walked on, slipping into the steel-and-glass wedge named not only for the donor whose millions had made the building possible but also for the virgin goddess of the hunt, the Romans’ protector of women. Her office nestled in the architecture department on the fifth floor.

She took the stairs, expecting perhaps to find her favorite grade grubber, the only student who turned Claudia’s office hours into an occasion for weekly pilgrimage, who took up residence outside her door like it was the entrance to Lourdes, but Dylan (née Emily) Speck had yet to appear. In his place, sturdy and attractive as some particularly robust weed, stood Jennie Halvorsen, scribbling on a Post-it note she’d stuck to Claudia’s door. Claudia, having no idea the frustration that co-chairing a committee with Jennie would cause, had agreed to oversee two other faculty members, a handful of students, and selected staff on the Campus Beautification Council. Because the primary task of the council—reviewing the design and installation of campus way finding—had stretched from a two- to four- to eight-month commitment, Claudia and company had been recruited to offer their opinion on a number of smaller (supposedly simpler) improvements, from the color and weave of rain mats meant to spruce up the lobby of campus buildings to the placement of a tree to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (the planting of which now lagged eighteen months behind schedule), jobs that, in Claudia’s opinion, required due consideration and a quick rubber stamp of approval, but that, thanks to the likes of Jennie, seemed doomed to languish in a swamp of academic inertia. Claudia had witnessed this phenomenon before. She’d seen the launch of the college’s refreshed website, the adoption of its visual identity system, the delivery of stationery and business cards specially designed for faculty (because the suite of materials designed for administrators didn’t quite pass muster) derailed by professors whose criticisms flowed as endlessly as the minutia they focused on. Ready with an angry tirade against a “childish” shade of blue or the Oxford comma, one could always rely on a Jennie Halvorsen or Jack Yu or Linda Garcia-Silvestre to steer a project into the bog.

Jennie, hearing the decelerating approach of Claudia’s heels, looked up with a sour expression (her default) that immediately turned sweet. Her angular, deeply lined face brightened as she said, “Claudia! I was hoping to catch you.”

“Jennie.”

“Do you have a second?” she asked, not waiting for an answer but following Claudia into the cool white hush of her glass-fronted office. “I’d like to run something by you before tomorrow’s meeting.”

Claudia dropped her bag on the floor, shrugged out of her jacket, and, indicating a lime-green plastic chair for Jennie, sat herself.

“It’s this tunnel project,” Jennie began, digging into the folder in which she collected notes on the photo exhibition to be hung in the underground tunnel that ran from one end of campus to the other and allowed students to attend classes, even during the coldest months, in their pajamas. She pulled a photo from the stack of papers and slid it across Claudia’s desk like some ominous classified document. “I think we need to revisit some of these images.”

Claudia pried her attention away from Jennie’s preferred hairdo, a thin, perpetually damp ponytail that made her look like a woman who’d just been pushed into a pool, and gave the printout a long, quizzical look. She couldn’t immediately see why a photo of a slender Asian girl striding across the quad with a college tote bag under her arm had been condemned with a question mark scrawled on one of Jennie’s infamous purple Post-its. Perhaps the girl’s boots were too militaristic? Her blazer too businesslike? Claudia apologized, opening a desk drawer to find her reading glasses, but Jennie rushed in to provide a clue.

“It’s the bag. Look at the bag.”

Claudia did.

“It looks like a shopping bag, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not really. It looks like a tote. It says Barnard on it.”

“If you’re looking closely, yes. But most people in a rush see only a bag. A bag that looks very much like a shopping bag, I think. It strikes me as somewhat classist. And, well, frivolous. As if our students came here simply to buy shoes.” Jennie, an associate professor in the English department, who had signage consultants tearing their hair out to find a sans serif font with more “oomph,” fed herself on lecturing more than debate. Claudia couldn’t say how so many of her colleagues, whose minds were supposedly engaged with the highest concerns, with the most sophisticated and enduring questions, came to be so hopelessly humorless and petty. Just as she couldn’t say how a woman who dressed in loafish brown flats and lumpy sweater sets felt so comfortable posing as an authority on questions of style, but here Jennie sat, outraged once again, ready to do battle in a cardigan the color of canned peas over the semiotics of a tote bag.

“But students selected these photos,” argued Claudia. “It’s their campus, Jennie. They should feel invested in the renovations being done on it.”

Claudia’s mind drifted as Jennie raised the rafters of a rebuttal—
vendability, elasticity, metaphoricalness:
she rattled off these and a half dozen other nominalizations and set to weaving her languorous intellectual web between them. With great effort, as if turning a car without power steering, Jennie drove the conversation toward Marcuse and the dehumanizing effects of capitalism (all from a shopping bag that wasn’t one!), when out of the corner of her eye, Claudia noticed an approaching shadow slide across the outside wall. At first, she thought the shade moving like a piece of charcoal smudged across paper announced Dylan’s approach, but the charcoal turned out not to be her FTM overachiever but her brother.

Benji looked good. Surprisingly good. With his eight-month-old sobriety, his new work going well enough for Alluvia High to consider paying him for it, and his commitment to a four-days-a-week running schedule, he looked fifteen pounds lighter, several years younger, and walked perhaps a little taller. His arrival came a day before she expected it. The visit, something of a mystery, involved a bit of uncharacteristically vague “business” to attend to, after which he’d promised, very uncharacteristically, to take her to dinner.

Not noticing Claudia’s distraction or the happy journey her eyes made to Benji on the other side of the door, Jennie kept driving square pegs into round holes, until Claudia raised a hand like a traffic cop and brought her to a stop. “Jennie,” she broke in, “I hate to cut you short, but my brother is here.” She nodded at Benji, whom Jennie turned to scrutinize with all the enthusiasm of Inspector No. 25 stamping her approval on a cheap pair of underwear. “I need to speak with him.”

Jennie rolled over the interruption like a tire hitting a nail. Deflated, she nevertheless insisted on finishing an untenably long sentence as she pulled a sheaf of problematic photos from her folder and pressed them to Claudia’s desk. “Give these a look,” she said portentously. “Get back to me.” When she was gone, Claudia cocked her fingers like a gun and shot herself in the head before gesturing for Benji to come in.

He held open the door with a “hell-o!” so jovial it sounded more like a magician’s “ta-da!”

“What are you doing here?” Claudia asked.

“It’s nice to see you too.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, standing. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“I have a surprise that couldn’t wait.” Sticking his head into the hallway, he motioned his not entirely surprising surprise forward. Max. Claudia stood clear of her desk and held out her arms. The boy paused before moving past his uncle, taking stock of Claudia’s reaction with a small, worried smile on his face. He may have triumphed on some of the world’s biggest stages, but around Claudia he still tended to move like a kid caught in the spotlight at the high school talent show. Despite the easiness of their e-mails, even with a hug waiting for him, he looked like he wasn’t sure how to begin or that he belonged here. Like he might, if he didn’t take care, be met with a big, fat boo.

He and Claudia had met several times since January, but each time Claudia sensed the slightest apprehension in him. The visits themselves went fine, better than fine, she thought, with both of them eventually settling into a rhythm and harmony, but neither the rhythm nor the harmony seemed to last, so that seeing Max now left Claudia with the impression that she could register the smallest of irregularities in an otherwise strong pulse, an aberrant heartbeat that was probably nothing to be alarmed about but which alarmed her all the same.

Max stepped up for his hug and then, like a student delivered to the principal’s office, slouched into a chair across from her. He’d taken to wearing black nail polish on his thumbs, which he proceeded to peel. Benji sat down next to him.

“This is a nice surprise,” Claudia said, returning to her own chair and folding her hands on the repurposed lumber she’d turned into a desk. “Though someone looks unhappy.” Could she be more passive? Could she sound more like her mother?
Someone looks unhappy?!

Benji waited for Max to answer. “Max?” Then, to Claudia: “He’s nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” said Max petulantly.

“Nervous about what?”

Benji nudged gently with his elbow. “Show her.”

With an actorly display of exasperation, Max pulled a battered postcard from the pocket of his hoodie and handed it over. Claudia looked. On the front, the image of a turbulent blue-black sea and, in fat white letters (just the sort in which Jennie might find the “oomph” she’d been looking for), the word LIGHTHOUSE. On the back, an invitation to a workshop concert of Max’s opera, tomorrow night at eight. “It isn’t a real performance,” Max rushed to explain, his fingers moving from his nails to the silver barbell stabbed through his ear. He pulled on it with an intensity that made Claudia squirm. “It’s not finished. The first and third parts basically are, but the second is still a sketch. A mess. But I need to hear what it sounds like so I know, you know, what works. I shouldn’t have even told you about it.” He reached across the desk and snatched the postcard back.