All the Lasting Things (7 page)

“You didn’t what?” She wagged a finger at him as if to say he couldn’t get away with anything, not on her watch. “See?” she said confidentially, taking his hand. “Some of us still remember around here.”

Held by his mother, watched by his father in an attitude of strange and attendant warmth, Benji took a head-clearing breath and shook his head. His fingers fluttered at his temples to show that the thought, whatever it was, had flown away, before picking up his pen.
I forget.

Evelyn is afraid. It’s her first time, though no one can know it’s her first time. This is important to her. The neighbors are one thing, there’s no getting around what they’ve seen, but the doctors, the nurses: it’s none of their business, she says. She has to pray the neighbors will keep their mouths shut. And remarkably they do. Forty years later, somehow, miraculously, Claudia does not know. But at this moment, Claudia is barely four. She is in my arms. She wears a green gingham dress and wants to climb onto the gurney with her. I stoop to where she can reach and say, Give Mama a kiss. Claudia fidgets and cries; she doesn’t want her mama to go. Evelyn puts her hand in mine. I give it a squeeze before they wheel her off. It’s morning. By the time they come back, it’s night. She’s in the recovery room, they tell me, asleep. We go to the nursery. Claudia passes out on my shoulder on the elevator ride up. There are other fathers at the window, men in loosened ties with their hands pressed against the glass, staring. The nurse waves to me in her starched whites, then wheels a glass bassinet to where I can see. A boy, says the man next to me. He claps me on the back like it’s the best thing in the world. A boy, he says. What do you know about that?

4.

T
hree weeks on Palmer Street put Benji in a mood. He liked the nubbled blue blanket from his boyhood bed and the almost arctic setting of the air conditioner he favored even in mild mid-September. He liked the season’s last tomatoes pulled warm and dusty from his mother’s garden and the sweating, fat-bellied pitcher from which she poured a heavenly homemade lemonade squeezed especially for him. After nearly a month, though, even these pleasantries had lost their charm, dulled by repetition, tarnished by daily tussles with Henry. And every time he complained to Claudia, trying to convince her that a modestly priced hotel was a better place to stage his recuperation, if only he could borrow a little cash, she said, “Forget it.”

“But all this bickering,” said Benji, unafraid to ring the same bell more than once. “It isn’t good for either of us.”

“So stop bickering.”

“Easy for you to say. He’s not on you all the time.”

But Henry’s being on him wasn’t the problem. He’d had forty years to get used to the taste of his father’s vinegary disposition, and he had. More than the arid plains of his father’s foul moods, it was the march over the peaks and valleys of Henry’s illness that scared and exhausted Benji, that made him long for the Motel 6. He had no interest in watching the slow, disconcerting descent or measuring the degrees by which illness reduced the literary lion to a shadow of his former self.

Maybe Claudia was right: he had no right to complain. Evelyn made Benji’s lemonade and picked up the potato chip bags he left in his wake. With a few generous checks, she kept his creditors at bay. He didn’t have to worry about evading his roommates on rent day or making his share of the electric bill. His thankless run as Hamlet’s dead father had come to an early end. And perhaps best of all, he’d won the sudden interest of a girl who, before his fall, barely gave him the time of day. He had no clue why, but falling from the bridge had set a flame dancing over his head, and Cat, quick as a moth, headed straight for it. Maybe it made him tragic in a sexy sort of way. Maybe it reminded her of her brother, who, a few years after their parents’ awful death (airplane crash), finished a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and (accidentally or not) drove himself into a highway divider. Maybe she wanted someone to rescue.

Whatever the case, she showed up daily to take him on the short walks he could manage in his big black boot cast or lull him to sleep with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy or, lately, late at night after his parents had gone to bed, gently jerk him off while riding the fingers of his one good hand. He was thirty-nine; she was twenty-five; and they were, out of fear of being discovered or uncertainty over what they were doing or perhaps merely in deference to the immobilizing silicone and plaster encasing two of Benji’s limbs, having sex like unschooled pubescent teens, but these sweet, relatively chaste tumblings were unexpectedly taking root, touching Benji in ways countless other carnal encounters had not. Nothing in his life became him like almost leaving it.

He hesitated to use the word
love
. Where, except in the great, shattering romances of Britain and Russia and France, did anyone fall in love so fast? Still, toying with the idea, Benji thought
I love you, I love you
as he kissed Cat’s fluttering eyelids and practiced an increasingly deft, one-handed maneuver to unfasten her bra. Twice a week, Benji reported to Ernest Salter, whose parades down some of psychotherapy’s mustier corridors were a condition of the patient’s release, and agreed with the good doctor’s diagnosis: a budding romance would be . . . improvident. The idea of submitting to any therapist had terrified Benji, who doubted his ability to play before a professional the part of the emotionally unhinged bridge jumper. How to sustain the illusion that he’d meant to do what he’d done for anyone beyond his family (who, with the exception of Claudia, was only too happy to let him forget it)? But Salter’s inquisitive stare proved more kindly than penetrating, and soon Benji relaxed the need to temper his enthusiasm. “I think I love her,” he offered one day as an astonished non sequitur to a dream about a drowning elephant. To which Dr. Salter replied, in an unapologetic moment of Freudian devotion, “What does your mother make of this?”—
this
being the love, not the elephant.

Evelyn, six years her husband’s senior, congratulated herself for overlooking the couple’s considerable difference in age, unwilling to deprive her son the happiness that recent events convinced her he so seriously needed. Henry also approved, volubly and wholeheartedly, though his endorsement had little to do with Benji’s happiness. His radio had never really tuned to that channel, but he was glad to see Benji smitten with someone whose future promised more than a starring role in an exercise video.

“Don’t muck it up,” Henry said one morning, stabbing a piece of toast into an egg yolk and leveling the dripping point at his son. “I know you’re used to women with a higher nonsense-to-substance ratio, but this one has something to offer.”

“And what’s that?” Benji asked, glib but genuinely curious.

“She reads beyond the ingredient list on a Luna bar, for starters.”

“She’s an actor, Dad. You don’t like actors.”

“I don’t like disillusionment. There’s a difference.” He rapped his fork on the rim of his plate like a judge bringing his court to order. “We’re not starting down that road. I’m done with career counseling. I said she’s a keeper.”

Benji had the distinct impression that Cat could cut out his kidneys, sell them on eBay, and (as long as she could quote from
Ulysses
) remain a keeper in Henry’s book. Not that it mattered. Cat
was
a keeper, though Benji’s reason for thinking so had nothing to do with Joyce.

He loved Cat’s passion. The way she’d swoon for a tulip but took lilies as a personal affront. Or how, in one breath, she’d condemn the “incarceration of the underclass” and then, in the next, devise cruel, practically medieval punishments for anyone caught answering his cell phone in a restaurant or wearing sunglasses indoors. “Unless you’re blind,” she reasoned, “or just coming from the ophthalmologist, there’s no excuse.” He loved her weakness for buttermilk biscuits, the diplomatic ease with which she handled his parents, and how, before kissing him good-bye, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and ungently pulled. He loved that she hated words that ended in
y
, that she made exceptions for adverbs but refused to say
tasty
even when something was. He loved her eyes. And the line of Whitman tattooed in typewriter font on the inside of her wrist. And the sudden, shocking devotion he’d won by false means.

She’d rented all four seasons of
Prodigy
while he was in the hospital, all five of his films, even
A Hamster for Hannah
, and discussed them without mockery, seriously, as a body of (her word)
work
that might one day have him thanking Uta Hagen from the dais. He plugged her into his Oscar speech, his Tony speech, his Vague but Meaningful Lifetime Achievement Award speech—the monologues he should have stopped rehearsing in his twenties but hadn’t—and she fit.
I’d like to thank the members of the academy and all the people who helped put me here. Mom and, ahem, Dad and Blah and Blah and Blah. And Cat. My beautiful Cat. Ma chère Catherine. My Catchenka.
No matter how he said it, she fit perfectly.

Part of Claudia’s refusal to play ATM and provide him with funds for a stay at the Motel 6 was her disapproval of how he’d spend his time.

“Vicodin and
Voluptuous Vixens
,” she quipped.

She wasn’t wrong. (He’d once left the third installment of his favorite XXX franchise on a laptop he borrowed from her.) But Benji’s dream of making off to a hotel had as much to do with hoarding Cat for himself as it did with painkillers and porn. There, he imagined, they’d lie on a quilted coverlet and, day passing into night passing into day, float far beyond a sex life suitable for airing on a moderately racy
Afterschool Special
. If they didn’t have to worry about a sundowning Henry calling Cat by the name of his sixth-grade teacher, they might finally lose themselves and, carried away by something stronger than the polite little eddies of frottage and finger banging, discover one another. They’d be two explorers on a great, unsinkable raft, and nothing, not his incapacitating casts or the germiness and decidedly French fry smell of the bedspread, would hold them back.

But the dream of the hotel had evaporated with Claudia’s unequivocal “Forget it!” and every increasingly emphatic “No!” since. Benji withheld his disappointment from Cat, concerned that what he could only describe as his sister’s selfishness would glaringly expose his own, but he held out hope on another front: she’d leased the cottage on Saratoga Lake through the end of September, and although Benji had never stepped foot in it, her tour through the “Summer 2012” album on her smartphone convinced him that here was the perfect place to wall up with Ophelia and finally get down to “country matters.”

“We have two weeks before you have to be in New York. Two weeks without my parents hanging around.”

“Hanging around? Benji, it’s their house.” She moved her hand from his zipper and rapped a knuckle on the hard plastic casing that covered his leg. “Besides. You’re supposed to stay put.”

He stopped short of insisting. Already he’d sailed further with Cat than he once thought possible. Why press his luck and risk running aground the ambivalence that kept her from making an invitation in the first place? But the time for pressing his luck had come. It was Monday. If Benji wanted to play lord of Cat’s castle, he had to stop behaving as if rejection were a virus he feared catching and simply ask if he could move in.

He stood at the living room window, waiting for her to come. Now that the trial of lunch was over, now that Henry had convicted him of wearing his hair too long or never having read Montaigne, he could take up his afternoon post. He parted the curtain and looked out at the street. One of the prettiest Alluvia had to offer, the tall maples and gently sagging Queen Annes of the town’s forefathers, but quiet on a morning like this, everything still as a painted backdrop. Benji waited, watched. His mind lingered over the sight of a silver Mercedes parked across the street, a rare curbside flower not indigenous to these parts, but before he could bother to guess its origins,
Judge Judy
called him away. He hobbled back to the couch. The copy of
To the Lighthouse
that Cat had given him lay butterflied on the armrest. He tried ignoring “The Case of the Dented Bumper” and opened it to where he’d left off: Mr. Ramsay stalked across the lawn with the notion that a truly splendid mind could tackle the range of human thought, from A to Z, while his own mind, splendid enough but nevertheless limited, would never get farther than Q. Benji read,

How many men in a thousand million . . . reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, ‘One perhaps.’ One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how man will speak of him hereafter.

But reading, at least in front of the doily-collared Judge Sheindlin, was a losing battle. He watched two more cases with a vacant stare, as pleasantly glazed-eyed as fledgling sobriety allowed, and made it halfway through a third—inept wedding planner, deplorable bride—when the doorbell rang. From the kitchen, Evelyn called out that she’d get it, but Benji shouted back, thunking across the tasseled carpet as quickly as he could and throwing open the door. The man standing on the mat lunged forward without so much as a hello and took Benji into his arms.

“Roger?” Benji croaked.

Roger Fitch held on to his godson for a good minute, too grateful (to judge from the crush of his embrace) that Benji was actually there to hold on to. When the hug wound down, he stepped back, taking Benji by the shoulders, assessing him. “Benji, my boy,” he said brightly, “you look like I popped your balloon.”

Roger was a small man, daintily built, with a pronounced gap between his front teeth and ears that stuck out from his immaculately shorn head with elfin prominence. Physically, he looked less suited to building the careers of literary giants than to cobbling their shoes or tinkering with their watches, but Henry (and, according to Henry’s math, at least five other decorated scribblers) would have been digging ditches without him. His writers called him Leo or, when they felt like driving the point home, Napoleon, for though he stood barely tall enough to ride most roller coasters, there was something undeniably magisterial about this son of a grocer from Canarsie, the product of public schools and city colleges, who, despite (or maybe because of) his humble origins, understood the appeal of world domination. To see Roger hammering out the details of a subrights contract or poaching an author from an agency twice the size of his own was to watch him grow a foot before your eyes.

“You were expecting someone prettier,” Roger said, cutting off Benji’s apology with a solid, avuncular pat on the back. At least once a year, in the heyday of Henry Fisher’s career, Roger could be counted on to materialize at this very door, contracts for Henry in one hand, Zabars for the rest of the Fishers in the other. He made it known that it wasn’t a trip he enjoyed making—the few charms of upstate New York that he could name (camping, cow tipping) held no appeal for him—but Benji, who used to race to his car like a bounding dog, ranked high among its consolations. He dropped his bags at his feet and gave his godson another hug.

Roger was, like many a well-heeled Manhattanite, hopelessly provincial; everything he could ever want ranged on an island thirteen miles long. Should he ever need a face-to-face with one of the few non–New York–based writers he represented, he insisted they bring their business to him, the indignities of traveling beyond Brooklyn being a form of penance for living in Eugene or Princeton or some other godforsaken land. To this rule, he made two exceptions. In 1965, at the age of thirty, Roger Fitch packed up his desk at one of the country’s leading literary agencies and took with him two young writers nobody at Curtis Brown thought to miss. The first was E. Pritchett Moon; the second, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker who’d written his first novel in a tiny apartment alongside his boss’s garage. Edwin, author of what turned out to be an endlessly proliferating saga of randy warlocks, earned him money, vast sums of it. Henry, who continued hanging drywall until his third novel won him the National Book Critics Circle Award, earned him respect.