All the Lasting Things (13 page)

“Tell me more about her.”

Benji began retreading the same ground they’d covered the night before when they crowded on the sofa with the old photo albums. For Max, a portrait of Claudia had come together, perceptibly, pointillistically, as Benji connected the dots between the third-grade field trip to Howe Caverns, the junior-year term abroad in Rome, the ribbon cutting celebrating her first building.

This morning, though, Max had his own agenda. “Am I the only one?” he suddenly wanted to know.

Benji stopped for a moment to take in his meaning. “Yes. God, yes.”

“And I was a mistake?”

“You were—unplanned.”

“She was my age?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t she just end it?”

Silence. “She tried.”

Silence. “At least you’re honest. What happened?”

“She couldn’t do it.”

“You told me she was tough.”

“She is.”

“What about Nick?”

“What about him?”

“Would they have gotten married, you think? If it wasn’t for me?”

Benji shrugged. “What do you want to write?”

“An opera,” Max offered. “I think.”

“Opera’s good. I’ve never seen an opera. But I know that everybody throws roses at the end.” Benji crumpled a piece of paper into a mangled flower and tossed it at Max’s feet. “Roses. Roses. More roses!”

Max pushed himself off the steps, a gust of exasperation that carried him into the wet grass. “Jesus, Benji. Give it a rest with the roses.”

“Joke,” Benji said soothingly. “I’m joking. Come on, sit back down.”

But Max thrust his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and stood his ground. “Why are you being a dick? The concerts and the Grammys and the fucking king of Demark. You’ve been up my ass with that shit since you woke up.”

“There’s an image.” Benji tried lightening the mood. He picked up his makeshift rose, stuffing it, with a hangdog look, into the folds of his robe. “You’re right. I’m a dick.”

“What’s your problem?” Max pleaded.

“Forget it.”

“No. We’re starting a—a thing here. I want it to be honest. I want it to be right. I hate weirdness.”

“Okay. Okay.” Benji held his hands up to show he had no intention of fighting as he fished in a pond of murky emotions. He found only two words sluggish enough to be caught.
“I’m jealous.”
Max looked taken aback, and Benji rushed to say, “It’s not you. It’s me. It’s all about me. But you’re like this lens. You shouldn’t be, I know. But I can’t help it: I look at you, and it’s like I see more clearly all the things I haven’t done.”

Max opened his mouth to answer, but Benji cut him off. “I keep thinking of this book my father gave me. Every year, on my birthday, Henry gives me a book. Gave me a book. He’s way past remembering birthdays. But I used to think these books were his way of talking to me. He had so little to say, or so little I wanted to hear, I took each one like a message in a bottle. Like his only way of sending word across the shark-infested sea of his personality.”

“Nice metaphor.”

“Thanks. Took forever to come up with it. Anyway. Sometimes the message seemed clear enough. Like the year I left college, he gave me
Jude the Obscure
. Which is like the worst book for a college dropout. But other years? I still don’t know what he was trying to tell me with
Beloved
. He wished my mom had killed me in a woodshed? When I was thirty, he gave me
Oblomov
.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s Russian. I forget who wrote it, but it’s called
Oblomov
, and it’s all about this guy.”

“Oblomov?”

Benji winked. “This thirty-year-old guy who—wait for it—lays around in his robe all day thinking about all the great things he should be doing. Which of course he never does. He just gets fatter and lazier and more useless. And he knows it. That’s the tragic part. He knows. ‘He was painfully aware that entombed within him there was this precious radiant essence, moribund perhaps by now, like a gold deposit lying buried deep in the rock that should long ago have been minted into coin and put into circulation.’”

Max raised his hands in soft applause. “Impressive.”

“Not really,” Benji answered, giving his own robe a savage little flick. “Even bad actors can memorize. But that’s how I feel. Like the best of myself is still down in the mines. Uncoined. And nobody’s ever going to see it.”

“That’s not true. Cat sees it. I can tell by the way she looks at you that she sees something.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what Cat sees in me,” Benji admitted, sadness softening his voice. “But you’re right. I have Cat.”

They were quiet a long time.

“What about Arvin?”

“Arnav,” Max corrected. “What about him?”

“You didn’t say much last night, which I’ve learned doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be said. Where did you meet?”

“We played in the Dallas Symphony together,” Max answered. But the words had barely left his mouth before he started backtracking. “Wait. That’s a lie.” He cleared his throat. “No weirdness.”

“No weirdness,” Benji repeated, as if swearing to a pact.

“We met in the hospital.”

Slightly thrown, Benji said, “I thought you were going to say online. Doesn’t it seem like everybody meets online now? Especially gay guys. Did you know there’s an app that shows you how far you are from other guys who are looking to hook up? Oh, look, there’s a blow job, and it’s only one hundred feet away. I know most of them say they’re on there to network, but who networks with his shirt off?”

“What are you doing on Grindr?” Max laughed.

“That’s it: Grindr!” Benji said with a snap. “My friend Marshall showed me. I’m telling you, the gays have got it figured out. What were you doing in the hospital?”

“Same thing as you,” he said. He watched as his meaning sank in, as the weight of it dragged down the corners of Benji’s mouth. “Not a bridge,” he added, as if this detail somehow lessened the gravity of the act. “But. Yeah.”

“What? What did you do? When? Why?”

Max returned to his spot by Benji on the stairs. He kept his eyes on his feet, occasionally pulling a piece of wet grass from between his toes as he spoke. “Some of those questions are easier to answer than others. When? Two years ago. I was in Dallas, which I tell Arnav was reason enough.” Here, Max smiled, but his smile failed to smooth the creases that concern left on his uncle’s face. He went back to grooming the grass from his feet and kept his voice low. “I flew down a few days before this big Haydn festival I was scheduled to play. It was a Monday. I remember because it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I was supposed to rehearse with the symphony at, like, two o’clock, but as soon as I got to the hotel, I pulled the curtains and got into bed and knew I wasn’t going anywhere. It was like the door disappeared as soon as I shut it: no way out. I’d been having a rough time for a while. A long while, but I kept going and going, traveling and playing, traveling and playing, doing it all like I was on a conveyor belt, but for whatever reason that day, the minute I laid down, I turned to lead.”

“You were depressed?” Benji asked.

“Depression and I, we’re on familiar terms, yes. When I was a kid, I didn’t know it was depression. It usually looked more like anger than sadness. Does Claudia? Does she get depressed?”

Benji wondered at this. “Not more than your average overeducated city dweller. Sometimes, I guess. Claudia plays her emotional cards pretty close to the vest.”

“Not me. I used to fly into these rages. Cursing my parents, throwing shit, wishing them dead.”

“Claudia wished our mother dead every day when we were kids,” Benji said, as if offering this genetic link might explain some aspect of Max’s diagnosis. Then, with his nose crinkled, he whispered, “You threw shit?”

“Jesus, Benji, don’t be so literal. I threw whatever I could get my hands on. My music stand. Plates. A ficus once, but no feces.” Max took a moment to recover from the scatological digression before picking up where he left off. “My parents bore the brunt of it. Strangers were safe. I never went off on Phillip Glass.” He laughed. “Or a fan or any of my mother’s awful, stuffy friends who she made me serve drinks to, play
and
serve drinks, but whatever was left when I was done with my parents got aimed at me.”

“What, like cutting?” Benji had seen a documentary.

“Except I wasn’t a cutter. I can’t stomach blood. I was a basher. I’d stand in front of the mirror and punch myself in the face until I had a black eye. I knocked a tooth loose once. Broke my ankle with a bat.”

“When you were how old?”

“Eight.”

“Your parents knew you were doing this?”

“I had excuses. I fell off my bike. I took a football in the face. But on some level they knew. I never played football in my life.”

“And they didn’t take you to a doctor?”

“Not right away. Amanda didn’t put two and two together. Or didn’t want to. Honestly, I think the tantrums thrilled her on some level. Convinced her I was the crazy genius she always wanted.”

“Like Mozart.”

Max made a gesture of concession. “My father used to say it takes a genius or a fool to pee in the punch bowl, but only the genius gets away with it. But then I started slamming my fingers in doors, and we couldn’t have that. You can get by on the cello with a busted leg, but not with a broken finger. That’s when she took me to the doctor.”

“What did he do?”

“She. Dr. Haze. Seriously. I had a psychopharmacologist called Dr. Haze. She put me on lithium, which did wonders for my vibrato.” Max simulated a severe tremor with his right hand. “I called her a few days before I flew to Dallas. Left a message that I felt like I was going to—you know.” Here, Max held an invisible noose with one hand and let his head drop. “She never called me back. Said she never got the call. Right. Do you think she was trying to tell me something?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Why did you?” Max returned. “Why does anybody? You lose sight of the reasons not to, I guess.”

They looked into the sky to see a thread of contrail unraveling in the wake of a jet, their eyes settling on the line of rooftops once it was gone.

“She’s not coming, is she?”

“Okay, my friend. Let’s put you out of your misery.” Benji rose with a show of various aches and headed into the house. “I’m going to call her.”

After he disappeared, Max opened his chat with Arnav and typed,

What if this was a mistake?

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

It was a challenge, a distraction, a hand lovingly extended.

Max typed,

You can’t unring a bell.

A watched pot never boils.

Easier said than done.

It’s Christmas Eve. I walk through the door, blinded by a pyramid of packages, and call her name. The only response is the baby’s cry. Claudia is there, not in her bassinet, but in the middle of the bed, packed round with pillows to keep her from falling. I say Jane’s name. I walk through the rooms, saying her name in every one. I pick up the baby for a second pass. She quiets at the tree, jamming a fat little fist in her mouth at the sight of the twinkling lights, the mirrory pink balls on the silver boughs. She smells like pee. I smell like snow. The kitchen sink is full of broken eggshells, nesting measuring cups caked with flour paste, dishes skimmed with suds. I look out at George’s house, thinking she’s there. She must be with Evelyn, borrowing sugar, unburdening her heart. A bowl of vanilla-sweet batter sits on the kitchen table next to a greased cake pan. The oven light, but not the oven, is on. I dip my finger in the bowl and put it in Claudia’s toothless mouth. Then I see it. Not the box, but the space where the box should be. The empty space on top of the refrigerator, between the Yellow Pages and the wall, a puzzle missing its piece. I go to the bedroom and put the baby down, making her cry all over again. The box. I storm the apartment looking for it. I dive under the bed, tear apart the closet, flip the couch cushions onto the floor before I see it, tossed in the folds of the tree skirt like a forgotten present. An army-green metal box with its latches sprung. I know before I open it. I know by the weight that the gun is gone. The gun with one round in the chamber is gone. The box of bullets, untouched. It is a joke between us: you only need one bullet, unless you plan to miss.

8.

T
he phone woke her. Benji’s face, warped into its best imitation of Marlon Brando yelling “Stella!”,
lit up the screen. It was eleven o’clock, and Claudia was late. Unaccountably late. She offered a short secular prayer of thanks that the phone call came from Benji rather than her mother, whose four-minute, thirty-five-second reaction to this titanic news Claudia couldn’t bring herself to listen to. It sat among her waiting voice mails, ready to sink her with glacial tides the second she pushed the “Play” button. But Claudia couldn’t type
alive
—five lousy letters!—to allay Oliver’s fears that she’d taken a deadly nap behind the wheel on the interstate. Who could expect her to open her mouth, let alone speak in sentences, let alone defend herself?

Did you get there?

Hello?

Just tried calling. Call me back.

Getting worried.

Officially worried.

???

Babe?

She tossed her phone onto the seat beside her and was about to start the car when, cued, it seemed, from on high, an enormous red SUV with windows smoky and chrome gleaming pulled up alongside. The engine idled for a moment before dying, leaving the parking lot in a quiet gray stupor under low-hanging clouds. When the driver’s door slammed shut, Claudia closed her eyes, terrified that it was him, terrified that it wasn’t, until the scuff of footsteps stopped at the rental car’s side. A rap on the glass touched her like a live wire. She jumped. Nick leaned down and offered an apologetic wave. Time, in its ineluctable way, had transformed a familiar body into a strange one, replacing her lithe young love with this rugged and sturdier counterpart, no different than an Ovidian nymph turned into a towering and formidable tree. The blue of his eyes had softened toward gray. The self-consciousness that once stiffened his smile—she never did convince him that his crooked canine made him hotter—had been massaged away by time. He was as handsome as she remembered him, perhaps even more so with the signs of age ornamenting him like a patina: he now looked like he’d earned his beauty.

In Hollywood, Claudia would have rolled the window down for a game of cat and mouse, toying with him until he recognized her and his ancient grudges dissolved in a magical, amorous reunion—but Alluvia couldn’t have been farther from Hollywood. And Claudia wasn’t in a toying mood.

As soon as she was out of the car, standing before him, Nick took a polite step back, as if she worked in a department store and stood ready to spritz him with cologne. “If this is about my wife,” he said, “you should really speak to my lawyers.”

Claudia shifted under the weight of his scrutiny, willing him to recognize her, telepathically broadcasting her name like a distress signal tuned to his receiver. Eventually she said, “Nick.”

Only then did the calm waters of his composure break. He stared. “Claude?”

She nodded.

“What? What are you doing here?”

A sudden tremor seized her throat, but she pushed the words out anyway. “Visiting Benji.” She felt like glass, like her skin had gone translucent as a jellyfish, exposing her essential spinelessness, her secrets. She’d come all this way, it occurred to her, and she wasn’t going to tell him why.

“I heard. How’s he doing?”

“Better. Better. Word gets around.”

“In a town of twenty-three people? Of course word gets around.”

He invited her inside, listening to a version of Benji’s recovery she’d broken into bullet points, and poured fresh water into the coffeepot.

“But enough about him,” Claudia said. “My God, Nick. How are you?”

“I’m getting divorced. In case you didn’t figure that out. I thought you were one of my wife’s lawyers.”

“I caught that. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We aren’t.” He laughed in his easy, effortless way, as if Claudia was in on the joke.

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Yeah. Let’s not.” He set her coffee on one of four plastic folding tables arranged in the center of the room to make a larger one. “Milk? Sugar?”

Claudia shook her head.

“So,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Of all the people I expected to see.”

“I know. Is this okay?”

“Sure. Yeah. You might have given a guy notice.” Nick winked. “But sure.”

“Believe it or not, I didn’t know I was coming here.”

“I believe it. I was in New York last week. I was this close to looking you up.” He pinched two inches between forefinger and thumb. “Okay. Maybe this close,” he added, doubling the space.

Claudia noticed his wedding ring. “How did you know I’m in New York?”

“How did you know I’m here?”

She clinked her coffee mug to his and took a sip.

They’d walked countless miles through deep, deeply intimate, conversational territory, having been confidants, confessors, striders with the same stride, up until the day they weren’t, so it felt exceedingly strange to skitter along the safe path of small talk—Claudia’s current commission for Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, Nick’s leaving a lucrative law practice to move back east and build things—when not far away, winding through the thorniest of thickets, ran the discussion they should have been having.

“And you don’t miss it?”

“The law? Going on seven years and not a single tear.”

“How could I not know you’ve been back for seven years? My mother—”

“How would she know?”

“In a town of twenty-three people.”

“Not all of them follow local real estate development.”

Casting a curious eye around the room, she surveyed the unfurled architectural plans spread out between them. If she looked interested enough, perhaps he wouldn’t notice she’d run out of things to say.

“Hey, those aren’t for show.”

“I—I—” she stuttered.

“Claudia. Relax. I’m kidding. You don’t need security clearance to be in here.”

In actuality, the plans hadn’t interested her, but now she felt obliged to give them more than their due. She stood to study them. “What is it?”

“Supermarket.”

“The one they’re building—” She pointed out the window, in the direction of the skeleton of steel and rebar she’d passed fifteen miles back, on the way into town.

“That’s the one.”

She’d gleaned enough about Amato & Sons on her previous night’s web search to know that the company had long ago traded house painting for larger construction and contracting jobs across the Capital Region. Nick stood at the helm of the development of countless subdivisions, a college dance theater in Schenectady, a glittering glass office park in Troy, and, most recently, a shopping plaza on the outskirts of Alluvia that housed a dry cleaner, a tanning salon, a Chinese restaurant, and a gargantuan, all-purpose supermarket.

“Wow.”

“Is that a good wow? Or a bad wow?”

“It’s a wow wow. This is enormous.”

“Forty thousand square feet.” Looking up from the drawings, he stood and took in the room with mock pride. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh?”

“He’s building forty-thousand-square-foot supermarkets, and his office looks like the inside of the Elks Lodge.”

She couldn’t disagree. The stained industrial carpet, the Stars and Stripes fastened to blond pressboard paneling, the dusty plastic spider plants struck her as the original set piece of sadness, but her mind at the moment was far away, on her parents’ porch, with the boy in the black hoodie.

“I wasn’t.”

“You’re a lousy liar, Claudia.”

Wrong.
She silently corrected him.
I’m an excellent liar.

“It’s okay. I’d tear it down tomorrow if I didn’t see my dad everywhere I look. For years he did all of his work out of our kitchen, so it was a big deal for him to have an office. A real office. Even if it is the ugliest place on earth.”

“It’s not the ugliest.”

“It’s close.” He laughed.

“And you’re preserving it in perpetuity.”

“Carrying the torch of unsightliness.”

“Generation to generation.”

“Father to son.”

Her laughter fell dead, as if he’d pulled out a gun and fired it. Claudia opened her mouth to say—what? What could she possibly say? But Nick raised his hand in beneficent appeal. “My bad. I told myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. Which, I’m sure, is exactly why I found a way to bring it up. Pesky unconscious.”

Claudia smiled uncertainly. She was aware of her hands, hanging heavily, stupidly at her sides. She suddenly felt the need for them to have something to do.

“Do you have kids?” Nick paused. “Other kids?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

She cleared her throat and, twisting her engagement ring around so that the diamond dug into her palm, said, “How can you not hate me?”

“Who said I don’t?” He stepped up and hugged her before she could respond, laughing mischievously, and held her close. “Don’t get me wrong. I did. For a long, long time. But who wants to carry that around for a lifetime? We were babies.”

When he let her go, she stayed close for a moment, waiting, as if he might reach out again. He breathed deeply then stepped away.

“I drove past this on the way into town,” she said, returning to the table, the plans.

“You said.”

“So much for Herrick’s,” she answered, aware that the little mom-and-pop venture where she and Nick used to buy paper bags full of Swedish Fish had closed long before the Amatos graduated from house painting. She espoused a theory of the world that would always favor Herrick’s, the two-thousand-square-foot family-owned general store over the refrigerated, cheaply built goliath twenty times its size. In fact, it was precisely these “cathedrals of gluttony,” as she’d called them in an article she’d soon inflict on a roomful of Barnard urban studies majors, that illustrated all that was wrong with Americans’ sense of public space: 1) it was endless, 2) it was theirs for the taking, 3) anything and everything—rape of the land, depletion of natural resources, turning the planet into an unlivable oven—was excusable in the name of convenience. Give her a green market any day! She was an ardent, if not bullying, supporter of sustainable farming and found herself in Union Square twice a week filling her reusable canvas totes with a premium of local bounty. Preferring to patronize the sort of small bodegas and specialty shops that, shining like neighborhood beacons, made Jane Jacobs wax poetic, Claudia shared that vision of a well-functioning city and dreamed of designing dense, vital, suburban developments, with plenty of parks and pedestrian-friendly streets, that would lure the zeitgeist
away from its isolating and egotistical fascination with the two-car garage and single-family home. She imagined building her own Winter Park or Seaside—though in no place as tacky or politically inept as Florida—and in this way hoped to make her mark by helping human beings make a smaller, less sprawling one.

“This is the problem with America.” She tapped the tabletop, grateful for a digression to take them away from the past, away from even an hour into the future. “Here”—she indicated the Price Chopper with a perfectly polished nail—“you get ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But I don’t need ninety-five brands of toilet paper. Nobody
needs
ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But we expect it. We’re Americans: we’re entitled to it! But we don’t
need
it. But we think we
do
need it, so we build these, these behemoths—no offense—”

“Behemoth is better than a lot of other things you could have said.”

“Like monstrosity.”

“For example.”

“These behemoths that are so big they have to be built where nobody lives. You have to drive ten, fifteen, twenty minutes to get to them. Then your family of four buys enough for four families because you drive a tank and live in a house the size of a tennis court. You have all this room, so why not fill it?” She could have cried for joy at the absurdity of the debate: not a word in twenty years, and within an hour, as intuitively as retired lab rats remembering their way through the old maze, they began the course of playful bickering. No matter the obstacles in their way.

“Claudia?”

“Hm?”

“Yoo-hoo. Where did you go?”

“Oh. Just that the carbon footprint of these kinds of construction is astonishing.”

Nick, who’d stopped by the office merely to grab a set of plans on his way to the site of his newest monstrosity, admitted that the hundred-acre development he’d envisioned as a slam dunk—two hundred half-acre lots, two- to four-bedroom colonials each, yes, with a two-car garage—had become a burden, a blight.

“A behemoth,” he said, “right up the ass.”

It haunted his days, kept him up at night. The announcement hardly qualified as an invitation, but somehow not ten minutes later, Claudia found herself bouncing along beside him as the big red Escalade turned off the paved road and, like a needle lowered onto a record, followed a well-worn groove through the weeds.

The tall, dry grass that grew along the ruts brushed against the car with a drawn-out
shussssssh
as Nick talked excitedly about what he had in store. He asked if she’d heard of Compton’s Mound. “Rust-eaten iron gates. Rubbled headstones. It’s straight out of
Scooby-Doo
. All that’s missing is a groundskeeper dressed like the Swamp Thing.”

“I
have
heard of it. Benji’s girlfriend is one of your rust-eaten iron-gate crashers.”

“You mean those ‘Save Compton’s Mound’ crazies?”

Tell him,
Claudia ordered herself.
Tell him,
but shook off the idea like a shawl in the summer heat. “She thinks you’re Hitler.”

“Was she one of the ones who chained herself to the gravestones to keep the backhoes from leveling them?”

“I don’t know if she’s that devoted. She seems devoted. She has a T-shirt and everything.”

“From the shit I’ve been getting, you’d think I was trying to tear up Arlington. This, by the way, was a family plot. For the most part.”