All the Lasting Things (23 page)

A sizeable crowd formed around carousel no. 4. Women in overly snug, jelly bean–colored sweatpants claimed their animal print suitcases and rolled them through the shushing automatic doors, and still no sign of Max. Benji texted him again, and a moment later, as if in answer, from the opposite end of the terminal, he heard the deep, sonorous cry of a cello. He walked toward the sound, toward a small group of people who had suspended their hurrying and gathered around the tip of carousel no. 1 to watch Max, sitting on its edge, bent over his instrument as if caught in the most intimate of conversations with it. Eyes closed, head sawing from side to side, Max’s entire body moved as the bow cut across the strings to sound a phrase that repeated and repeated and then ever so slightly changed, deepening, shifting onto another plane before continuing its stately march.

Benji worked his way to the front of the crowd. He wanted to be the first person Max saw. But then, before Max could lift the bow from those fine, final, attenuated notes, the boy jumped up as if an electric charge had touched the metal ledge on which he sat. He let go of his cello, which Benji, leaping forward, saved from clattering to the ground, and with lightning speed picked up two coins that had fallen to his feet. He parted the crowed with two bounding steps after the man who’d tossed them and, reeling his arm back like a major league pitcher, sent them flying at the back of the man’s head.

Flinching, the man turned. When he realized what had happened, it took only a second for confusion to boil over into anger. “What’s the matter with you?” The man was well into his fifties, thickly built with a mad scientist shock of untamed white hair. This appreciative (if stingy) patron of the arts took a menacing step toward Max and asked the question again.

“Do I look like I’m begging for change?” Max yelled. “Do you know who I am? I don’t need your fucking fifty cents.”

The man, muttering loudly about ungrateful assholes, let himself be led away by his more quietly unnerved wife, though the well-being of his manhood required him to turn several times during his retreat and, like a dog jerking its chain, demonstrate his continued willingness to fight.

Benji didn’t know what to do. He laid the cello in its case and, stepping cautiously forward, put his hands on his nephew’s shoulders. Max spun around, ready for further battle, but shifted with disquieting ease into a mode of joyful reunion. He threw his arms around Benji’s neck, ignoring the crowd lingering awkwardly around them, including a little girl with tight, ribboned pigtails and a missing front tooth who asked her mother, “What’s wrong with that man?”

“How’s it going, champ?” Benji spoke softly into Max’s ear. “You okay?”

Max pulled back and laughed. “Great. Great. I’m great. Why do you ask?”

He let Evelyn set him up in Henry’s study. The pullout couch wasn’t nearly as comfortable as a proper bed, but Max preferred the study. He wanted to be planted in ground made fertile by his grandfather’s work. As she always did, Evelyn mentioned that the master bedroom, quiet on the unused third floor, would make for a better studio, but she also wanted him to see that she took his work seriously, that she respected it and would let him wring from Henry’s old workspace whatever artistic miracles might be left there. After all, it was, as Henry used to call it, the “Cave of Making.” “So make,” she said to Max as she left him to unpack his bag. “Make.”

But there was, even with his radio playing nonstop, only so much he could make in a day. He had worked on orchestrations on both legs of his flight (from takeoff to landing), stolen a few hours in between lunch and dinner, stolen a few more before bed. He was exhausted. Not tired, nowhere near ready for sleep, but exhausted all the same. It was eleven o’clock. Max retired with Evelyn, thinking he might stumble upon the melody he needed for act three, a phrase mined from act one, but timeworn, changed, the sound whereby Lily returned to the Ramsays’ summer home, set her easel down on the grass, and made ready to finish the painting she’d started ten years before.

Max captured something close to it on a scrap of paper and, alone in his room, played it on the rollaway keyboard connected to his computer. It was rough as a block of clay hauled up from the earth; he was happy to have it, but lacked the energy to trim it or shape it or make it flow like the rhythm of Lily’s brush as it danced across the canvas with its flashes of blue and green. He played the notes again but preferred to write on paper, the intimacy of penciling the notes on neatly inked staffs, and turned now to the tidy sheaf of 213 pages that comprised his almost finished opera. He leafed through act two, the section called “Time Passes,” and reviewed the closing bars. It really was sturdy. It really would stand. It played in his head, a cord of intertwined themes that unraveled and, one by one, like the characters themselves, died out. Silence encroached upon the music, washed over it like waves swallowing an island, until silence was all there was.

A knock at the door. Max was cross but also, somewhere beneath the irritation, relieved.

Claudia stood at the threshold. Benji would have twisted the knob and barged in like a golden retriever, but not Claudia. She waited in the hallway, patient, uncertain, softly saying his name.

He slid the papers aside and answered the door.

She smiled tentatively, looking lovely changed into the drapey cotton clothes she slept in; her long brown hair fell lightly over her shoulders, her face scrubbed pink. “Care for a nightcap? Well, I’m having a nightcap. Benji’s having tea.”

He turned back into the room and picked up his score to show her.

“Is this it?” she said, placing a reverent hand on it.

“This is it.”

“And you’re almost done?”

“I’m working on the transitions between acts.”

“We should leave you alone then.”

“No.” He grabbed her sleeve as she turned to leave and asked her to sit down. “I could use a break.”

Claudia took a seat on the couch, considering the hieroglyphics on the pages Max had left with her. “I always wished I’d learned how to read music.”

“It’s not too late. I could teach you.”

“You have better things to do. Like working on your transitions.” She looked around the room, the ghost of her father battering away at his Olivetti, ransacking his bookshelves for the one and only epigraph that made sense.

“What’s wrong?” Max asked.

Claudia shook her head. “A little sad. My dad’s study.”

“It brings me luck to work in here.” Max collected the sheets from her and, adding them to his half of the score, tapped the edges into one neat sheaf, which he carefully laid on Henry’s desk. “He wrote eight books in here. At this desk. I figure if I can pick up a little of that magic.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that.” A look of sorrow landed on her face, which she quickly shooed away, half amused, as if to say it didn’t matter now what Henry heard. “He always said writing was work. Not magic. He hated when other writers said they were channeling voices from another realm. He said writing had more in common with ditch digging than sitting around like a clairvoyant waiting for Aunt Gladys to tell you a story. You show up every day and you work.”

“He’s right. But there’s always a little magic, I think.”

“And it’s not eight books. It’s nine.”

“
Nuisance
,
Open Ground
,
The Skirmishes
,
Nostomania
—that’s my favorite.” Max ticked off the titles he’d read since last September on his fingers. Five. Six. Seven. “I’m forgetting the essays.”

“
Imponderable Needs
.”

“Right. Eight.”

“See that safe right behind you? That’s nine.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. No one’s read it. Except my uncle Roger, and he has reservations about publishing it.”

“Why? Isn’t it any good?”

“Roger says it’s his best. But he thinks publishing it could be—messy.”

“What does that mean?”

Claudia shrugged. “He won’t say.”

“And you haven’t read it?”

“Nope.”

Max turned to look at the safe. “He keeps it in there?”

“He’s never written on a computer.”

“I get that,” Max said.

“I don’t,” Claudia answered. “It’s dumb.”

They went downstairs, and two hours later, after three neat pours of bourbon (after which, Claudia, with an uneasy sense of parental duty, cut him off), he returned. The room, with all its lamps burning, seemed violently lit. He turned off all but the task lamp on Henry’s desk. It threw barely enough light to see by, but Max wasn’t deterred from taking a slow, bobbing stroll around the room. Swaying lightly, he studied the spines of Henry’s books, pulled one volume and then another from the tightly packed shelves. His fingers found the collection of Henry’s awards, feeling them like a blind man, trailing over the smooth etched crystal, the cool etched bronze. He examined the trinkets that had little value, he supposed, to anyone but Henry—and now that Henry had forgotten them? What was the worth of this toy soldier? Of that heavy brass urn and whatever was inside it? Sooner or later it would all be swept away. Everything, everything goes. Finally, he came to sit at Henry’s tank of a desk, a large gray metal antique with silver-handled drawers buffed by a thousand openings. Max peeked into these, disappointed to find a pack of unopened cigarettes and a box of large wooden matches, dusty manila folders stuffed with ancient contracts, a faded photo of Benji and Claudia, thrilled and frightened, being locked in the shiny red seat of a Ferris wheel.

He spun round in the chair. He spun round and round like a game show wheel, not knowing where he’d land. As the room slowed, the objects in it separated from the smear that speed and drink had made of them. Here was the desk lamp. The couch. The fancy flat-screen computer shagged like a bulletin board with taped notes and newspaper clippings. The score. The safe sitting atop a waist-high bookcase. When he stopped, his eyes were level with the squat cube of black metal with a combination lock fitted into its hefty handle. He rapped his knuckles on the top, waiting, as if something inside might rap back, then tested the door. It swung open heavily on its hinges. Max looked around like an amateur thief who expects the hand of the law to clamp down on him. He angled the desk lamp so he could see the fat stack of typed pages tied with a length of butcher’s twine inside. The last book. The messy one. The only copy of whatever it was in the world. With care, Max removed the bundle and placed it on the desk. He slipped the knot from the string and, boosted by a vaguely stimulating sense of criminality, started to read.

The title page: EVERY WAND’RING BARK.

Max wasn’t 100 percent sure he liked that, but he turned the page and read what followed:
I am minutes away from meeting the woman I think I’ll be with for the rest of my life and years and years away from the one who will make the rest of my life livable.

In the morning, he woke to an old analog clock whose face glowed green. He sat humped in the chair. Stiff neck. Sore back. Head throbbing from three belts of Blanton’s. The pages of Henry’s book lay in a chaotic nest around his feet. What had he read? The realization hurt his head as much as the bourbon. He gathered the papers on the floor, determined to return them to the right order later, and stuffed the rumpled pile back into the safe, afraid he’d be caught and made to lock it away before he could return to it.

It was six o’clock. Soon Evelyn would rouse the troops with coffee and eggs. Max felt, in that moment, as if his legs had been swept out from under him, a churn of emotions pulling him out to sea, an unwanted knowledge threatening to take him under. What had Henry been thinking? And Evelyn? And was it true? His heart ached for them and for the ghost of the woman who had always stood between them and, most of all, for Claudia, who hadn’t a clue that her mother had wandered into the woods so long ago and ended herself in a pile of snow. He felt love for his grandparents and their attempt to weave a web to protect their daughter as much as he felt contempt for their duplicity. How could they do it? How could they think they’d get away with it? And they were getting away with it were it not for the four-hundred-page confession Henry planned on dropping only after he’d escaped from the fallout. They were saints, sparing Claudia the cross of a painful secret, and they were cowards, protecting themselves for keeping it.

The question was: now that Max knew, what would he do? To continue to hide the secret from Claudia was, in effect, to relegate her to the same realm of ignorance from which he himself had fought to break free. Sure, she was blissfully ignorant of her ignorance, but did that excuse confining her to the dark? Wouldn’t she want to know her place, her origin? She was strong: if he exposed to her the cracks in her foundation, who better than she to fix them? Then again, what if he brought the entire house down? His mind slowed at this thought as if he’d drilled past all the dirt and muck and finally hit bedrock. Did he
want
to bring her house down? If his immediate impulse was to rescue Claudia from a lifelong lie, to deliver her closer to the truth of her own story, he had to admit that beneath this lay the obdurate wish to see her suffer as he had. Tit for motherfucking tat.