All the Lasting Things (8 page)

“Did my father know you were coming?” Benji asked.

“You know me, Benji. I don’t leave the fortress unless I’m summoned.”

“Yeah, but does he remember summoning you?”

“He remembers fine,” Henry said, suddenly behind them, surprisingly stealthy on his stocking feet.

“There’s nothing wrong with his hearing.” Roger winked before walking off to clasp his old friend’s hand.

The buzz finally drew Evelyn out of the kitchen. She hurried down the hallway, wiping dish suds on her flowered robe. “Roger? What on earth?” She opened her mouth and laughed, somewhere between charmed and offended by the surprise. “Henry didn’t,” she began, then, reconsidering, leaned in for a conspirative hug. “I could kill him. Look at this place. Look at my hair.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her and sourly cinched the belt.

“He’s not here to check if the pillows are fluffed,” Henry said, starting back toward the kitchen. “Let’s go, Leo.”

Roger offered Evelyn his arm and followed along. “Don’t worry about your hair, Ev,” he said, polishing his shining head like Aladdin’s lamp. “Look at mine.”

Evelyn carved the babka and set it on the table with a stack of small plates, while the men poured the morning’s leftover coffee—Roger insisted that Evelyn go to no trouble—and settled into opposite chairs. Benji, more curious than hungry, lingered in the doorway, picking lazily at a slab of sugar-tarred dough.

“You’re wondering why I called you here.”

Roger spread a napkin over his knee and smiled at the lack of grace he’d come to see as the larger part of Henry’s appeal. “Nary a hello,” he said, laughing. “Henry, my friend, nowadays doctors would place you on a spectrum of some sort. Is it a mild form of Asperger’s or a signature brand of cantankerousness that makes small talk so unthinkable?”

“Well, tell your doctors to get in line behind mine, who have plenty of diagnoses of their own.”

“Which you’re absolutely going to tell me all about,” Roger answered. “But first”—he turned an empty chair in Benji’s direction and motioned for Benji to sit—“I want to hear from this one.”

“Benji?” Henry balked. “Benji’s fine.” But Roger’s level stare proved too much for even Henry’s obdurate nature, and he waved his agent on like a man who’d ignored his sound warning and insisted on driving down a dead-end street.

They waded into the conversation slowly, between sips of coffee and observations about a Republican senator’s crush on Ayn Rand, but as soon as Leo asked the inevitable question—“What was going through your mind?”—Benji’s monologue started up. It now played like a song from a jukebox, easily, automatically, drop a quarter in the slot and out it came. In the constant retelling, he’d worked the blur of that strange August night into a finely focused tale of drunken desperation, the climax of which had been years in coming. He fashioned himself as more determined than mere accident allowed, showing them his damage but also something that he himself had lost sight of long ago: his depth. What else was he hiding if he could hide such despair? Each retelling of the story poured like molten steel into this new mold, into a new Benji, whose form was more impressive, whose qualities—the despondency that pulled him down, the strength of will that lifted him up—gave rise to a more monumental man.

Evelyn, still unable to contemplate the state of mind that led her son to attempt a suicidal leap, turned back to busy herself with the dishes while Henry sat quietly by. At the end of Benji’s monologue, Roger reached for his godson’s hand and squeezed.

“Life will always be disappointing,” he said with pressing emotion. “Even if everything looked exactly as you thought it would, even then, there would be disappointments. Deep, even ruinous disappointments. Compromises we think we can’t possibly live with. But we do. We do because we must. It’s the contract we sign for being here. We have to treat life like it’s precious. Even when we think it’s not. Especially then. Because then we see how easily it can be thrown away. Do you understand? We can’t have you doing anything like that ever again, Benji. Ever.” The few quiet tears that rolled down his face as he spoke surprised everyone, which was perhaps why he was in no hurry to wipe them away. They made a point that, in this family, whose silences and evasions Roger knew so well, needed making.

Benji felt a dull throb of remorse, but he’d padded himself well against the knowledge that his lie was often a source of great pain, and the shame at causing it failed to reach him where he lived. He sat like a statue, unmoving.

“We all have our to-be-or-not-to-be moment at one point or another,” Henry interrupted irascibly.

“Henry,” Roger warned.

“He’s here! Look, Leo, he’s sitting right here. With no complaints, except for me. Can we move on now?” Henry looked from his son to his wife to his oldest friend imploringly, as abashed as his character allowed him to be, which wasn’t very abashed at all. “Give me a break,” he said. “My watch is ticking twice as fast as everyone else’s; I don’t have the luxury of navel gazing.” But when no one answered, when no one so much as blinked, the sound of his fist coming down on the table rang out like cannon fire.

“It’s done!” he shouted. There was a salvaged air of lordliness in the pronouncement, the imperious brevity of it, the missing antecedent, the pause. “It’s done. It’s done, and I want you to read it.”

The stoical mask fell from Roger’s face first to reveal eyes ignited by the news, mouth agape. Neither he nor Evelyn nor Benji needed to be told what
it
was.
It
had lived among them, between them, sometimes on top of them, for the last eight years. “You said you’d given up on it.”

“And it was true. True enough: I never thought I’d finish. This last year, I’ve been lucky to get an hour a day when I feel sharp enough. When my mind feels like mine. One, maybe two hours a day. I couldn’t spend it listening to you claw at the door. I worked better when everyone thought I wasn’t working. No offense.”

Roger toasted Henry with his coffee mug.

“I had to finish. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the thought that you’d find three different drafts after I died and cobble them together with one of those awful forewords. The book he might have written, if only he had more time.”

“You know me better than that.”

“I would have haunted you if you did.”

“You finished the book, Henry. Christ!”

“Said the Jewish atheist.”

Roger clapped his hands together and bubbled over. “I’m thrilled. I couldn’t be happier. I’ll have it read by tomorrow. We’ll get Fanton on the phone. We’ll take care of the book. But, my God, man. I haven’t heard from you in months. I want to know how you are.”

“I just told you how I am.”

“You told me how the book is, Henry. You understand those are two different things? I’m asking about
you
.”

“Me.” Henry nodded gamely. “I’m in what they call ‘moderately severe cognitive decline.’ I love that ‘moderately severe.’ Like ‘passionately indifferent’ or ‘blithely miserable.’ My long, last march into the dark. What this means exactly varies with the hour. The other day the doctor asked me to count backward from twenty by twos. I looked at him like he wanted proof of Planck’s constant. I might lose track of the days of the week. Maybe I’ve forgotten my address. I can quote George Eliot but a minute later turn around and forget the word for ‘fork.’ Meaning ‘moderately severe.’ Meaning I’ve pissed myself, but I don’t need help wiping my ass. Yet. But that day’s coming. Is that what you had in mind?”

Roger’s eyes widened at the challenge as he sipped from his mug.

“And I never said anything about Bill Fanton. We’re not publishing it. Not while I’m here. Not now,” Henry continued. “I want you to read it. You, Leo. It goes no further than that.”

Roger leaned in with his left ear, as if he’d heard wrong. “You’ve lost me.”

“I need you to read it, to make it real. You. It goes no further than that.”

“Henry,” Roger began.

But Henry cut him off. “Publish it when I’m dead. Publish it
as is
when I’m dead. I can’t edit it. I don’t
want
to edit it. Or get drawn into which goddamn picture they pick for the cover. Or wake up even once in the night and wonder what the hell they’re saying about it.”

“You’ve never cared what critics have to say.”

“I’m not talking about critics.”

“Who then?”

Henry’s hand made a circle describing the room, the house, everything beyond. “How much time do I have, Leo? A few months? A year?”

“He still has his good days,” Evelyn interjected from the sink, where she scoured a skillet with renewed vigor.

“Only because she keeps lowering the bar,” Henry said coolly. “If I remember my phone number, it’s a banner day. No, Leo. The sun is going down. I feel it. Every day is a little bit hazier than the last. Soon there won’t be anything left to burn off the fog. Life in a cloud. I don’t get any say about that. But how I spend the few moments of clarity I have left, the scenery I opt to take in on my moderately severe descent,
that
I get to choose.” He shook his head and lowered his eyes. “I’m done, Leo. I’ve spent enough time wondering if this or that book is the one I was meant to write. Is this the one that will last, the one that will outlast me, or is it just another blip? The awards, the reviews, all the crap that every writer says he doesn’t care about? Well, we care. I care. And now I want a break.” At this, Henry reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a stack of index cards. Some were blank. Some were filled with his tight, cramped script. He set off shuffling through them.

“What are those?” Leo asked.

When Henry didn’t answer, Evelyn did. “The death of me. He writes on them so he doesn’t forget. They’re like petals off the cherry tree. Everywhere you look. The other day, I slipped on one and nearly fell down the stairs.”

“Nobody fell down the stairs,” Henry reported, flipping through the cards with failing restraint. “Damn it. I know I put it in here.” Midway through his second pass, he found what he was looking for: a scrap of torn paper, ruled with thin blue lines and ragged on one side from the wire rings of a notebook. Henry trapped it between two fingers and held it out to Roger, shaking it like bait.

It read:
11-8-21-9
.

“What’s this?” Roger asked.

“The combination.”

“For the
safe
? Henry. You promised me.”

“I never did.”

“What about the computer I bought you?”

“For my birthday,” Henry said, visibly proud of the memory.

“You told me you were using it.”

“I do use it. It’s a very nice place to tape my notes.”

“Dad likes being the only middle-class American without an e-mail address,” Benji chimed in. “It’s a point of honor.”

“You’re telling me you have one copy of the book?”

“Which you’ll read. And put back. And retrieve sometime in the not too distant future. When I’m gone.”

“I’m sorry, Henry, but you do know how stupid that is? In this day and age? Forget about the ease of writing. Forget that you can edit without blackening your fingers on typewriter ribbon.
Typewriter
ribbon!
It’s plain reckless. You’re honestly telling me you have one copy of eight years’ work?”

Henry shrugged. “What do I need with more than one copy?”

“Flood. Fire. Theft.”

“You sound like an insurance salesman, Leo. What do you think the safe is for?”

Jane said never ask too much. But I’m not thinking of this as I stand on the porch. It’s Christmas Eve. When I find Jane gone, I stand on the porch and ask Evelyn to watch the baby. She calls the police. Each morning, I leave to join the men in padded navy jackets and fur hats from which their badges shine. We trudge deep into the snow-buried woods, climbing fallen branches and cracking through the ice-jagged streams. Maybe she ran away, they say. Maybe the baby was too much. But I know. I know. I go out before the sun is up, and Evelyn is at the door, waiting for me to put the baby in her arms. Claudia, washed and fed by the time I get home, snuggles in a pink blanket and smells softly of soap. There isn’t a day she isn’t ready for me. And then it’s spring. And then it’s the day I go to the door to find Evelyn waiting in the bright, early light. She wears a white dress with cherries on it, and there’s the smell of grass that already needs cutting, but instead of handing Claudia to her, I reach out and take her hand, but the words won’t come. She doesn’t let go of my hand. When I can speak, I say, Will you? But my tongue is a weight, and the rest of the sentence is trapped under it. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need anything more. Yes, she says, yes.

5.

B
ecause the widow couldn’t bear to sell the house, she rented it out. It was a grand cottage, situated on a superior stretch of lakefront, Adirondack chairs as red as candied apples and a lawn just large enough for croquet. Her husband had been a photographer who’d done a residency at Yaddo as a young man and found at the nearby racetrack the subject that established his name. There wasn’t a room that wasn’t filled with large black-and-white photos of mud-spattered jockeys and thundering horses, that wasn’t decorated to suggest the artful artlessness of equestrian chic. The worn leather club chairs, the tartan wallpaper and silver candlestick lamps, the shelves and shelves of leather-bound books that only the dourest of summer renters would dare pick up.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
?
The Wealth of Nations?
Benji limped through his first tour in a state of consumerist wonder. “Ralph Lauren had a wet dream,” he said, fingering the camel-colored cashmere blanket draped casually over the foot of the bed.

But after three blissful days of residency, he had proven himself a perfect specimen of human adaptability. He put aside all envy and derision and met the morning like a king, propped against a mountain of jacquard pillows in the gigantic sleigh bed, ready to receive his breakfast on a tray, if only he could find someone to bring it. He listened to Cat in the shower—the beat of falling water, a snippet of song—and felt, finally, at peace. He had a view of the lake, the sky, the flawless blue of a mid-September morning that seemed to mirror the clarity of his mind. Keeping what his friends in recovery called a “day count” had always made him feel more like an alcoholic than falling asleep holding the bourbon bottle, but secretly scarcely an hour passed when he didn’t add up the time since his last drink. Three days. Seventeen. Thirty-six. The only chemicals to pass his lips now were prescribed by his general practitioner, and every milligram he took he took according to the letter. His respect for Dr. Gratin’s dosing requirements may have started with Evelyn, with a worried mother’s silent pledge to be the Percocet bottle’s childproof top, but as the weeks passed, with Cat more and more by his side, Benji felt the weight, the responsibility of his sobriety shift to his own shoulders. He ticked off the days like mileposts on a marathon, with the swelling pride of a challenge met.

Of course Cat McCarthy wasn’t the first girl to inspire Benji to cork the wine. He’d dried out for Marisol Alvarez and her macrobiotic diet. And Daphne Chu, whose own commitment to conquering step seven spurred her to fill two notebooks with the names of people she once wronged. And Angelica Tottencourt, self-professed psychic, whose inner spiritual guide failed to inform her that Benji’s teetotaling, like their relationship, had an expiration date. But to compare Cat to Angelica or Daphne or Marisol or anyone else who came before her was to hold a birthday candle to a bonfire. Others simply vanished in the heat.

Benji didn’t want to spend his mornings barely conscious or let another afternoon pass in a blear, not when he could open his eyes to the easterly sun and see Cat sleeping beside him. Before Hank, an ex–competitive rower and neighbor to the north, zipped across the square of placid pewter lake framed by the bedroom window, Benji’s arm had journeyed across the mattress, reaching for the sweet, warm hillocks that Cat made under the sheet. He moved more like an old man than the svelte, steel-shouldered, septuagenarian neighbor—still slow and sore, encumbered—but closer he came, closer, until he fit himself to Cat’s curved and slumbering shape like a puzzle piece. His hand found her hip. His lips brushed the downy fringe on the back of her neck. He practically vibrated with the competing urges to wake her up and let her sleep. As he nestled against her he felt her swim up from the depths, pause before surfacing completely. She let him suffer. But the louder his breath sounded in her ear, the harder he grew against the small of her back, the dearer, he could tell, she found his agony. She’d roll over and look up at him, laughing through a yawn. There was no sour breath. No crust sealing shut the corners of her eyes. No cowlicked hair. In time, the faults that made her human would assert themselves, but in the poetically sealed vault of their three-day tryst, Benji sensed only her perfection.

He’d gone to the cottage with a rough sketch of Cat’s life, but the long conversations on the splintered gray dock, the dreamy postcoital confessions, allowed him to start filling in the lines with color. She was the daughter of a high school guidance counselor and a Joyce scholar whose monograph on micturition in Irish literature had been shortlisted for the James Russell Lowell Prize, a big deal in certain small circles. She’d told Benji in their first days together that her parents had “died in a plane crash,” but it wasn’t until she was half asleep in a lounge chair by the lake, offering her back to be slathered in sunscreen, that she admitted that rescue workers had discovered her father, still strapped to his seat, in an old woman’s garden. Her mother’s body had never been found.

Cat, who was only a year old at the time, remembered nothing of her parents or their tragic end, but Molly, her older sister and self-appointed surrogate mom, provided a store of painful memories for Cat’s most private monologues. She talked about her mother’s struggle with depression and her father’s rigorously managed drinking problem, but most of Cat’s memories focused on Molly or their brother, Dennis, or the decent but unpalatably Republican aunt and uncle who dutifully stepped in to raise them. Cat was less inclined to shine the spotlight on herself—an odd trait, Benji noted, for an actor—but he listened attentively to the tales she felt like telling, waiting for the moments when Cat appeared, when she, the secondary character in so many of her tales, stepped to the front of the stage. Then he caught a glimpse of the girl he was beginning to love.

And then there was the sex.

He’d imagined their days away from Palmer Street and the chaperoning eyes of his parents would be a time of discovery. And they were. They were, first, a lesson in what could and couldn’t be done with two of four extremities in casts. Without both arms to support his weight, the missionary position was out. As was anything that required standing for too long. He couldn’t cup her firm, young ass and pin her to the wall or take her in a handstand, holding on to her legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow. He tried standing behind her, his good hand braced on her back as she planted forward into downward dog, but soon the pain elbowed in like a bothersome third who wanted a piece of the action, and he had to lie down. He was best sitting or on his back, with Cat riding his lap or rising above him with calisthenic abandon or holding on to the headboard with a grip wide enough for motorcycle handlebars and lowering herself—ever so teasingly—onto his face.

It had been years since he’d paid attention to the subtle emotional tremors that attended sex, since he had cared enough for his partner to see her so vulnerably exposed, but the aftershocks of their lovemaking registered once again on the heart’s delicate apparatus. He saw the ways in which Cat could be generous or selfish or self-conscious or scared. He saw the peaks of her happiness. Shadows of a remoter grief. And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the first one to let go, roll to the other side of the bed, and fall asleep.

He might have been thirteen again, for the frequency and firmness of his hard-ons. Now, letting his mind wander across the pages of their compromised
Kama Sutra
, he slipped his hand under the tented sheet to treat himself to a few vigorous tugs. He trained an ear on Cat in the shower, trying to gauge when the water might shut off, if he could finish before she did, and had fallen halfway into a serious rhythm when the phone rang. The smooth glass face of Cat’s phone lit up. It chirped like a cricket atop the neatly stacked books on her nightstand. Benji fumbled for it. He’d never seen a picture of Molly, but the one displayed beneath her caller ID fit well enough with his preconception. Her curly, shoulder-length red hair, riotous freckles, and severe mirrored sunglasses squared with her willingness to meddle and, on occasion, make Cat cry. His fingers, two mischievous steps ahead of his brain, swiped across the screen and brought the phone to his ear.

“Molly?”

There was a pause. “Who’s this?” she asked, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing.

“It’s Benji,” he said, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of having to say more.

“Is my sister there?”

“She is, but she’s in the shower.”

Another pause. “What’s wrong with her voice mail?”

“Nothing,” he said cheerfully. “I just wanted to say hi. Introduce myself.”

“Oh. Hi.” She sounded deflated, as if the pleasantry, insincere though it was, had punched a hole in her peevish mood. But she recovered in no time. “Actually, now that we’re talking, I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“What’s going on up there?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in Xanadu. You
do
know she was supposed to be in New York a week ago, don’t you?” She had the thick, sinusy voice of an unrepentant smoker and cleared her throat from time to time with a rough, bronchial bark. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. But, honestly, I’m at a loss.”

“She doesn’t have to be in New York until the end of the month.”

“I mean, who passes up an opportunity like that?” Molly asked, barreling over Benji’s protest like a professional linebacker taking on the JV team. “A Broadway play.”

Benji scoffed. “Where’d you get Broadway?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Molly sighed, softening toward the philosophical. “A thousand actors would kill for a chance like that. To be invited to an audition in New York City. By. A. Director.” She nailed his ignorance to a cross with each hammered word. “He saw
Hamlet
and asked to hear her read. She didn’t mention that either, hunh? I told her things like that don’t happen every day. She forgets how lucky she is. She doesn’t have to wait tables or tend bar or do half the unappealing things most actors have to do. You know what I’m talking about. Am I wrong? She rents a three-bedroom house on a lake while the rest of the cast is sleeping three to a room in some sad motel. I just hate to think of her passing up the opportunity of a lifetime to make sure the Civil War dead get their due. Or to play house. Or whatever it is she’s doing up there.”

Cat turned off the water and pulled back the shower curtain, brass rings zipping across the rod with the clarity of little bells. Benji, not knowing what else to say, said, “Revolutionary War.”

“Sorry?”

“The dead. Compton’s Mound? Revolutionary War, not Civil War.”

Molly managed to condense her skepticism, her utter lack of interest, into a single syllable, a hard little pellet of sound dropped displeasingly between them. “Hmph.” Then: “Tell her I called.”

Benji tossed the phone into the dunes of the down comforter without a good-bye and waited for Cat to open the door.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as soon as she saw his face. She stood in the doorway wrapping a towel tightly around her as the surrounding cloak of steam tattered into the room and disappeared.

“Your sister called.”

“And by the look of it worked her charms on you. I could have told you that was going to happen. Why did you answer the phone?”

“To piss her off, I guess.”

“Mission accomplished?”

“You didn’t say anything about Broadway,” Benji said, hurt. “Or needing to be in New York last week. You said you weren’t due there for another—”

“Molly.” She said the name apprehensively, as though it were a curse best not spoken, then explained, “I left that whole thing very open-ended. And it wasn’t Broadway. I don’t know where she gets half the—Broadway by way of Weehawken, maybe.”

“Opportunity of a lifetime. That’s what she said.”

Cat sat on the side of the bed and pumped a few pearls of lotion onto her water-beaded legs. “
Oleanna
in a church basement is hardly the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said flatly, rubbing the skin to a high, fragrant sheen.

“So why didn’t you go?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t like David Mamet.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

She questioned his certainty with a wry grin before returning to her moisturizer. “Okay. Maybe I like what I’m doing here more,” she said.

The idea that he himself might be the reason beneath this vague answer broke like sunrays into a recess of dim hope. He’d been so occupied with whether he was falling in love with Cat that he hadn’t stopped to consider whether she might be falling in love with him. “And what’s that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

She turned to indulge the other leg while Benji, prick stiffening anew, further indulged this fantasy of reciprocation. As if the thought of Cat’s devotion weren’t alluring enough, he found the performance of her morning skin care ritual hopelessly erotic.

“I’m fighting evil robber barons,” she said.

Benji sighed. This wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Not only because it had nothing to do with him but because he’d already gone to considerable lengths to clear an old acquaintance’s name. “I told you. Nick Amato is not a robber baron. He’s a real estate developer.”

“Who happens to be developing what should be historically protected land. It’s a cemetery, Benji. For war heroes.”

“Who no one has visited in a hundred years.”

“So that means we should go and dig them up? Who digs up a cemetery?”

“That doesn’t make him an evil robber baron,” Benji repeated.

“What does it make him then?”

It was a lure, playfully dangled, but Benji gave it a serious snap. “He was my sister’s boyfriend,” he said. “They probably would have gotten married.”

“Probably? Intriguing. What stopped them?”

He could have started down that bump-riddled road to a pretty good story, but the sight of Cat, gilded by the light that shimmered off the lake, had him sinking into the pillows with dreamy satisfaction. She looked like one of Degas’ bathers, all golds and irresistible pinks. He retrieved Cat’s phone from the jumbled bedding and snapped a quick photo. She turned at the sound of the old-fashioned shutter click and, with a clowning moue, held out her palm. Unapproved photos were not part of her contract. With a frown of his own, Benji surrendered the phone and said, “Your sister thinks we’re playing house.”