All the Lasting Things (10 page)

“Yeah. Oh my God.” Max swallowed. “I’m.”

“I know. I know who you are.”

He was, among other things, the reason Nick Amato had proposed, the reason Claudia’s first love had ended in a fit of flames, the reason Benji drove her to the most discreet clinic she could find and then, when she couldn’t go through with it, the reason she refused to show herself to her parents for an entire year.

“What did you say your name is?” the boy eventually asked.

“Mine?” Benji answered from far away. “Benjamin.”

“Benjamin,” the boy repeated, then, through a winsome but not yet certain smile, “Uncle Ben?”

Benji’s laugh started slowly, warming up like a motor on a cold morning. “Benji,” he said.

“Benji.” Only then did Max step forward, ignoring his uncle’s outstretched hand and pulling him into a tight and pleading hug. “Benji,” he said. “I can work with that.”

Moonlight paints the room. I stare out at the rain. The water that streaks the windows is mirrored by mercurial little rivers running over the floor. She is out there. Somewhere, like Lear, Jane is out in the storm. What would she do to find me at this window, her daughter in this bed? Claudia stirs. She cries for her mother, but already Jane is not who she means. If Jane came back now, Claudia would not know her. What are you doing up? Evelyn asks, as if she, too, has been up for some time. She tucks the blanket round the girl and struggles to prop herself with a pillow. She isn’t yet used to her new size and puts a hand on her round belly as she tells me to come back to bed. She doesn’t ask why I’m out of bed in the first place. I climb under the covers and look across at her. We are carved in marble in the moonlight, none of us moving for a long time. Eventually, she reaches out to put her hand on my chest. She’s not coming back, she says. The weight of her hand is impossible, but still I nod. There is a saying about the love of a good woman. And Evelyn is good, but she needs something I carry inside of me to die. There is not enough room for it here. She sees it circling above us like a hawk, casting shadows, never letting us out of its sight.

6.

S
he let the call go to voice mail. Benji. Flying his war flag against their father. Or surrendering his pride to ask for more funds.
Not this morning,
Claudia thought. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the day seemed half over, leached away by one distraction after another. She woke at six, determined to review her designs for the downtown outpost of Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, but already she’d lost two hours to a scrimmage with her contractor who tried unloading on her a shipment of substandard glass. Then there was Oliver. Oliver, retreating to the gym for a cold shower since she turned her back on his morning advances. “It’s been five weeks,” he whined. “I’ll settle for a hand job.” But what made a man less fuckable than settling? And it couldn’t have been five weeks. Could it?

The Selkirks had awarded her the commission because she had no intention of transplanting their safe (read: stale) Upper East Side mortuary to a hipper zip code and instead insisted on a sweeping glass atrium atop a midrise of multimillion-dollar lofts. Strange placement perhaps, but the obscenely rich died south of Fourteenth Street, too, and when they did, Claudia convinced her clients, they’d want a less stuffy stage for their final departure. They would appreciate her soaring chapel of torqued Serra-esque steel, set under a pristine dome of Manhattan sky. Metal and light. Body and air. Permanence and something as ephemeral as a passing cloud. Her drawings spread beneath her on her dining/drafting table; she stood like a sea captain studying her maps, trying to decide the best course, when the phone rang again. Benji’s third call in thirty minutes.

She could turn it off, but why should she have to? Why couldn’t the world simply leave her alone?

“What?” she said, jamming the phone to her ear and tossing off her thick, geometric glasses in defeat.

“Why haven’t you picked up?”

“I don’t know, Benji. I guess I have nothing to do today but annoy you.”

“It’s working,” he snarked before shifting gears. “We have to talk.”

“Now’s really not—”

“There is no good time for this.”

She felt a real pulse of unease under the drama of his pronouncement. And Benji loved a dramatic pronouncement.

“What’s the matter? Is it Mom?”

“They’re fine. They’re them. This isn’t about them.”

“Then what’s it about? I’m working.”

“I’m just going to come out and say it.”

“Good.”

“I mean, it’s nothing I can prepare you for.”

“Benji!”

“It’s him,” he said.

“Who?”

“Him, Claude. It’s him!” He might have been using his voice to punch a hole in the wall, the jabbing fury of that one word.

She stepped backward, hoping a chair was there to meet her, and sat down hard. A silence wove itself between them, hundreds of miles away from each other yet caught in the same stifling cocoon.

“You there?” Benji asked.

She took her hand away from her mouth and asked, “How do you know?”

“Why would he pretend? We’re not Rockefellers. Plus, you’ll see. There’s no mistaking this kid. He looks just like you. Us.”

“Oh, Benji.” She felt as if she’d been slapped awake to find herself in the middle of a daredevil stunt, a sudden circle of fire surrounding her, her terror, her outright inability to jump through it. “What does he want? What am I supposed to do? I can’t.”

“Claudia. Breathe. You have to breathe. Breathe and shut up. Let me talk.”

She sank back in her chair and tried to hear what her brother had to say. It wasn’t much. The kid, as Benji called him, had a name. Max Davis. Max Davis who was a musician, who grew up in Rochester, who’d started looking for her when he was seventeen but who realized his desire was only half the equation, who acknowledged maybe Claudia would rather eat glass than meet him, which would suck but which he realized was a possibility before he began his search.

“I don’t want to be somebody’s mother.”

“He has a mother.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“How about you start with ‘hello’? One step at a time.”

“Where are you? Is he there with you?”

“He’s been sitting outside the house for three days, building up the courage.”

“But where is he?”

“On the porch, with Cat.”

“He’s with you
now
? Has Mom seen him?”

“She’s inside. Probably painting.”

“You have to get him out of there before she sees.”

“Like put him in the trunk and drive away?”

“Do you think this is funny? I’m serious. I can’t handle her hysterics.”

“
Her
hysterics?”

“I swear, Benji. I’ll kill you if you make this worse.”

She remembered waking in the hospital, twenty-two years old, the bright lights and crisp sheets and a pack of ice slowly melting between her legs, Benji asleep in a chair in the corner while the woman in the bed next to her, breasts mapped with arresting blue veins, tried stuffing her nipple into her wailing baby’s mouth. The relief Claudia felt at that moment. The freedom. She had a train of visitors—nurses, her caseworker from the adoption agency, even a priest who didn’t mind shepherding non-Catholic sheep—and registered in their piteous looks what each of them expected her to feel. They believed they would find her crushed, a girl so young, bathed in regretful, Madonna-like tears, perhaps even ready to pull out of the deal and demand that the baby—her baby—be delivered into her arms. But that wasn’t what Claudia felt. If any regret coursed through her blood, it was regret that she
didn’t
feel these things that she was supposedly supposed to feel.

“I want you to talk to him.” She heard Benji on the move, a slight susurration of wind, other voices reaching her ears.

“Absolutely not,” Claudia whispered fiercely.

This, Benji ignored. The voices grew louder, and before she could say more, a strange, unexpectedly deep “hello?” stopped her racing mind in its tracks.

He sounded like he’d stuck his head in a darkened room, uncertain if anyone would answer, while she felt stuck in a child’s game, tagged
It
before she even had the chance to hide. She froze.

“Hello?” the voice repeated.

“Hello,” Claudia echoed.

“Hi. Wow. Claudia?” Silence. “This is so weird.”

“It is.” More silence. “Weird.”

“I’m Max. I guess Benji told you that already.”

“He did.”

“And you’re Claudia.”

The easy relief she’d felt in the weeks after the hospital had long ago hardened into a sense of the rightness of her decision. She lived, protected, in its shell. But sometimes, not often, but sometimes a feeling of dread crept in. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he smart or skinny or perpetually scared? Was he loved? Very occasionally, she walked the city streets fearful that a child on the sidewalk would tug her coat sleeve and call her Mommy. Once, three years after the fact, she bought a birthday card with a baby giraffe on the front, but having no place to send it, fed it to the paper shredder with a stack of canceled checks.

“I’d love the chance to talk to you,” Max said.

“Yes. Yes.”

“In person? Do you think we could meet in person?”

“Mm-hmm. I was about to say.”

“Cool.” A short, satisfied laugh came at her like a siren. He asked her a few other questions, as if trying to make chat at a cocktail party with a committed mute, then said, “When do you think?”

“Soon. I have a few things here,” she said, standing and returning to her sketches. A shaking hand smoothed the paper as if to display the enormity of her task, the real and blameless unlikelihood of making time. “But soon.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” came Benji’s voice. She could have reached through the phone and snuffed him out like a candle, in good conscience.

“Tomorrow?” Claudia repeated, transformed, it seemed, into the most hapless of parrots.

“Cool,” he said smilingly. “Great.”

“Can I talk to Benji?” Claudia asked, applying a steady pressure to her voice to keep the murderousness from seeping into it.

“Sure.”

She heard Max calling him, heard the phone being passed into her brother’s hands, and then the sound of the line going dead.

The call touched a match to Claudia’s fuse. She didn’t know this yet, not fully. In the front office of her mind, her business was simply getting to the boy, but in the back, in the windowless dark, she sat watching a spark dance up to a powder keg, uncertain exactly what part of her life was about to go up in smoke, but too fascinated to pinch it out.

After hanging up, she collapsed on the couch on the eastern side of the apartment and watched what was left of the morning sun spool across the room in a gauzy strip. Fiery, golden, imperative, the light rolled out like a carpet that led to the bedroom, where her suitcase awaited packing. When Oliver got home from his workout, freshly showered but still sulking, she pushed him onto the bed and, tearing his clothes from him, fucked him without fully removing hers. When it was over, she rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and doubled up her pillow.

“I got a phone call,” she said.

He rested his chin on her shoulder as she spoke, listened without interruption, which was Oliver’s virtue as much as his downfall. She couldn’t help wondering if it mattered whether she chose to discuss the child who turned up out of nowhere or the review of the newest restaurant on the block. If he registered the difference.

“Max Davis?” The first words out of his mouth.

“That’s his name.”

“Max Davis, the cellist Max Davis?”

Claudia turned. “Benji said he’s a musician.”

“You know Max Davis.”

“I do not know Max Davis. Did you hear anything I just said?”

He did, he assured her. He did. He pulled her onto her back so she was looking up at him. “The Bach cello suites? The recording I gave you last Christmas? That’s Max Davis! How cool is that?”

“Cool?” Claudia asked.

“I missed seeing him the last time he was in town.”

She kicked herself off the bed and went to the closet to retrieve her bag.

“What? Are you mad?”

“Am I mad?” She posed the question calmly, like a Buddhist sending a quest for insight out into the universe, not expecting an answer.

“I’m so many things at this moment, Oliver. It’s hard to pick just one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I tell you what I just told you and you’re—what?—jonesing for comp tickets to the philharmonic.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Thinking? No, you weren’t.”

“But this isn’t a total shock, is it? I mean, we knew this day might come. It was always a possibility, right?”

“It’s a pretty big fucking shock to me.” She flipped open the top of her weekender and said, “Grab me my gray sweater?”

“Take the big bag,” Oliver said. “I’m coming with you.”

“No. No. I’m doing this alone.”

He said her name as if she were a toddler and he, cowed, afraid of a coming tantrum.

“You stay here and listen to Bach.”

He got up and got the sweater. “Don’t be like that. Let me come. I want to be with you. And not because I want to meet.”

“No.”

She often wondered what formed the foundation of her husband’s reliable cluelessness. He loved her so, and yet could life be that mystifying? Could she? What was she to make of the fact that Oliver had forgotten four of her last ten birthdays or his habit of talking ball scores with the bartender while other men sidled up and offered to buy her a drink? More than once, Benji had assumed the role of his brother-in-law’s apologist. He praised Oliver’s lack of jealousy as a rare and covetable evolutionary step, suggested that addle-mindedness was sometimes nothing more than that, and Claudia took heart. She found it more convenient to let her troops be called back from the battlefront, to let her temper be cooled, even if she never completely lost sight of the red flags that troubled the horizon.

She passed the baton of packing to Oliver, knowing that he could run that leg of the race better than she, and retreated to the other side of the apartment with her laptop. She pulled up the Hertz website, but in that moment rental cars might have been the theory of relativity: they were nowhere on her mind.

Oliver stood over the suitcase, considering its insides like a diagnostician as he shucked a blouse from its hanger and folded it atop the others.

“I’m only staying for a day or two,” Claudia called.

He moved to the dresser for a stack of underwear. “You never know what you’ll need.”

True, she didn’t know what she’d need. But she knew, with arresting clarity, for the first time in a long time, what she wanted. How long had it been since she’d thought his name? She pulled up a new window as her fingers raced ahead of her priorities and typed
Nick Amato
. Google yielded over three million results, with top honors going to a self-styled tween idol filling up YouTube with covers from the Justin Bieber catalog.

As she clicked from page to page, looking for the ghost of the Nick she knew, guilt snaked around her heart like a thorny vine. Why wasn’t Max her first priority? Shouldn’t he be? At some point, didn’t the boy deserve to win out above all else? It pained her to think how disastrously she’d behaved on the phone. Stricken and speechless, she’d done little more than stretch two minutes to their most torturous length, agreeing to meet him simply to get him off the phone. It wasn’t that atonement and tenderness were beyond her, but the apology she felt she needed to make, like a form stepping darkly out of a mist, had its sights set on Nick, not Max.