All the Lasting Things (16 page)

“You didn’t tell him, did you?”

Again, nothing.

“You saw him, and you didn’t tell him? Your judgment is incredible. Unbelievable!” Benji said, “Not a word? I’m looking more level-headed and responsible the longer we sit here.”

“How could I not think of him? But I didn’t come here to see him, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t even know he was here. I thought he was three thousand miles away, but then I googled him.”

“You googled him,” he repeated flatly.

“I didn’t plan it, Benji. I didn’t. But then I saw Max, and I started driving, and the next thing I knew I was in front of the Anselmans’ place.” Benji’s head fell into the palm of his hand as he muttered some unintelligible curse, but Claudia went on. “I wanted to tell him. I actually thought telling him would make it easier. That I’d be able to go back and meet, you know—”

“Max!” Benji shouted.

“What do you want me to say? I’m a coward? Fine, I’m a coward. But I thought maybe if we went to see him together, Nick and I, that I’d be able to get through it. But then we started talking.”

“About what?” Benji pressed. “I’m dying to know.”

“Ridiculous things. I don’t even remember. The supermarket he’s building. And Compton’s Mound.”

“Max is in tears because you’re a no-show, and you’re out there talking real estate development.”

“It wasn’t like that. He asked me what I’d do with the property and—.”

“And?”

“He asked me to draw up some plans.” She sounded like a little girl lost.

“Even better. It was a job interview.”

“It was comforting, you ass. I may be in the wrong here, but I’m not beyond needing that.”

Benji’s eyes widened with disbelief as he grabbed her hand and hissed, “Did you fuck him?”

She pulled away to show the depth of the offense, but the prickle of heat dancing up her cheeks betrayed her.

“You did.”

With that, Evelyn slapped Benji out of the booth, heaved herself up, and with an admonishment that she didn’t have to listen to this anymore, limped away.

Claudia glanced with horror after her. She turned back to Benji. “Thank you for that.”

“You
fucked
him?” Benji asked again, bringing the volume down to his inside voice.

Claudia leaned in close and whispered, “I didn’t go there to fuck him. We were talking, and somehow—”

“It just happened.”

“Somehow. Besides. It’s none of your business who I fuck.”

“You’re right. It’s not. It’s not my business. Is it Oliver’s? I’m pretty sure it is his business. Who, by the way, is convinced that you’re dead in a ditch somewhere. Have you called him?”

Oliver. Certainly worse than any vow she’d broken was that she hadn’t given him a serious second thought.

“I texted. He’s fine.”

“Oh? You found time to text your husband between fucking your ex-boyfriend and your job interview?” Benji pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed a few steadying breaths. “Is this your plan?” he asked. “To go off the rails?”

“You, whose train hasn’t seen a track in twenty years. Don’t lecture me about going off the rails.”

“But here’s the thing: we’re not talking about me right now. We’re talking about you. And a kid, a
kid
, who is handling this situation with a level of maturity and grace that seems beyond you.”

“I didn’t ask for this, Benji. I never asked for him to find me.” The conviction that she lived in a universe careless enough to send meteors crashing through the roof of her home unleashed a wild tremor in Claudia’s voice. “He wasn’t supposed to find me!”

Benji folded his arms across his chest, unmoved. “But he did. And now you have to deal with it. You’re his mother.”

Claudia stood.

“Mother. Son. What other words aren’t you ready for?” After a moment, he wrestled his phone from his back pocket and, after a few swipes, handed over a picture of himself and Max, arms around each other on the Fishers’ front porch.

Claudia looked at it for a long time.

Benji kept his mouth closed, watching to see if the mirrored eyes and mouth would work their magic.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, putting the phone on the table. Her eyes fell on her brother like he was a stranger, a salesman trying to sell her something she didn’t need, couldn’t afford.

“Then come home,” he pleaded.

“I can’t,” she said, turned, and walked away.

I come home with sawdust in my hair and find the women sitting on the porch. Evelyn waves, but averts her eyes. Jane raises her cigarette and watches me through the twisting vines of smoke. They have sweating glasses of tea on the arms of their chairs, a bowl of cherries on the table between them. Jane presses the little black book she carries everywhere to her stomach, as if transmitting her poems through her skin, into the dark, solitary cell where the baby flutters and kicks. Flippy, she calls it.
You want to take my hands. You want to take my tongue.
It is a topic between us: whether Flippy can hear these things, whether Flippy should hear these things, but asking the question again isn’t worth the storm it would bring. Evelyn invited us for dinner, Jane says. Without Evelyn, all we would eat is SpaghettiOs. Jane writing, me writing, nothing more to wash than a saucepan and two plates. Evelyn says what she always says: It’s no trouble. Jane stubs her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe. She fans herself with her little book, puts a cherry in her mouth, and chews.
You bloom and thorn. But I’m the one who bleeds.

9.

M
ax made introductions. Evelyn. Benji. Arnav. Arnav’s best friend (and Thanksgiving Day orphan), Paul. The group cinched together for handshakes, embraces, the passing of a foil-wrapped casserole from guests to hosts, then drifted apart on separate streams. The Fishers headed for the kitchen after directing Max and his friends into the living room, where Cat, looking cozy in a fawn-colored cowl-neck, offered them drinks. Paul announced his sobriety without footnotes or fuss, but Max and Arnav jumped at the chance for whatever amber concoction bathed the tinkling cubes and orange twist at the bottom of Cat’s glass.

“Max,” Arnav said. His head tilted warningly, judgmentally at the sight of the bourbon bottle.

Max pretended not to notice. He didn’t want to be bothered about the medications Arnav insisted on bothering him about. Despite his boyfriend’s doubts to the contrary, despite the drugs’ ruinous effect on Max’s creative impulses, Max continued to pop the complicated cocktail of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers twice a day, like a good boy, according to the rules. As he took the drink from Cat, he registered Navi’s concern as a stack of kindling registers a spark. He fumed but didn’t, for the time being, flare.

Soon, the seven of them—Evelyn shepherding Henry into the mix—sat around the fragrant fire that danced in the fireplace as the rich scent of browning turkey crept in to overpower it.

“Mm!” Paul said. A dilettante makeup artist and taxidermy student, Paul made the better part of his living singing in New York City cabarets. His voice sounded like a Nina Simone song, honeyed and resonant. “Mrs. Fisher, that smells dee-vine.”

Max had spent two of the last five weekends with what he called his “famiglia presto.” Not including Claudia. How many withholding mothers did one boy need? But it mattered less that Claudia had given him the cold shoulder when his uncle, quite literally, had given him a warm one to cry on. And maybe this was all Max needed. All he had a right to ask for. Maybe Navi knew what he was talking about after all: maybe this was enough.

“You’ve gotten farther than most people ever get,” Navi reasoned one night, head resting on Max’s chest.

“You mean adopted people?”

“I mean people. In life. At some point, you have to be satisfied with what you have.”

Max didn’t agree. “You don’t get to the top of the mountain if you’re satisfied with life at base camp.”

“You sound like one of those inspirational posters with an eagle on it.” He kissed Max lightly then rolled onto his back, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “Base camp is pretty high. Not everyone is made to get to the top of the mountain.”

“Exactly. Some people are meant to go higher.”

Navi laughed. “My winged boy.”

Evelyn had hosted two parties in Max’s honor, intimate family affairs where she unholstered her bring-out-the-big-guns meals—slow-cooked short ribs, fish stew—dinners that required full days of preparation that she’d tired of making for her husband and children (thankless all), but for which she happily slaved away for the sake of her grandson.
My
grandson.
My
nephew. The possessives Max heard ringing through their sentences soothed him better than the benzos that had the maddening tendency to make the simplest of songs dry up the second his pen touched paper. (Of course, he was already someone else’s grandson. Someone else’s nephew. Someone else’s son. But the Fishers held out the possibility of belonging in a way Max never felt he had. Benji and Evelyn and even the specter of Claudia, whose absence haunted their time together and united them as one, had Max saying more
.
More!
Who—sorry, Navi—could really be happy with
enough
?) And so, the two words Max longed to hear, the two words he would not rest until Claudia spoke them:
my son
.

Nick had said as much. On his last trip to town, Max met Nick, whose arms had opened to him as wide as Benji’s. They spent an afternoon tossing a football, despite the all-too-evident fact that neither of them especially enjoyed it, but hearing Nick utter that incantation? For whatever reason, it wasn’t the same. Max wanted to hear Claudia say it. Needed (despite all his claims to the contrary) to hear it from her. But on the mother front all had been quiet: Amanda hadn’t called; Claudia hadn’t shown up. She did, however, concede to a longer, if no less awkward, phone call, during which she confessed her own shortcomings with a martyr’s enthusiasm and said
I’m sorry
so many times he thought someone had left a Brenda Lee album skipping in the background. She asked for more time, and Max, who saw no other path to glory, told her to take as much as she needed.

“Max?” Evelyn roused him from his reverie and asked him to pass a plate of bacon-wrapped dates. She took a little jewel of glistening fat stabbed through with a toothpick and sank, satisfied, into her chair.

When the plate reached Henry, he regarded it as part of a custom he couldn’t possibly participate in, as if Max had asked him to do a rain dance. He turned to Paul and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Tall, slender, with a skull-tight buzz cut and black almond-shaped eyes two shades darker than his skin, Paul cultivated a sleek androgyny not unlike Grace Jones and seemed no less unflappable.

Evelyn reached over to where Henry sat and shook his knee. “You’re scaring people,” she said, hipping out of her chair and leading Henry down the hall.

Cat offered to refresh drinks. Max held his glass aloft.

“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Arnav said. Here he sat, beating the same tired drum, louder, more boldly now that he had the buffer of an audience.

Cat, at the ready to pour more cocktails from a silver shaker, froze in midair until Max reached up with a light touch and tipped her hand.

Arnav turned from Max and addressed the group, bolder still. “Some of his medications,” he said, “they don’t mix well with drinks.”

Max loved Arnav. Except on the occasions, like now, when he didn’t. Looking across the room at his partner of three years, a blinding anger ignited in him with such speed he had to pour back his drink in a single gulp to extinguish it. What did Navi know? Thirty years old and second violin with the Dallas Symphony. Not that second violin of the Dallas Symphony was anything to sneeze at, but really, where did he get off telling Max anything about anything? Arnav was a first-generation Indian American from Plano, Texas. His parents, who, shortly after Arnav’s graduation from conservatory, returned to Chandigarh, got him out of bed every Tuesday morning at a ridiculous hour for the family Skype session. Their good boy. Their
chhaila
. He woke at six each morning to submit to a punishing workout regimen, favored a tightly trimmed beard that he believed camouflaged an unflatteringly weak chin, and, in his button-down shirt and bright-blue V-neck sweater, dressed like a Southeast Asian Hardy boy.
Such a priss,
Max thought.
Such a prude
.

“I’m the youngest in the room, but I’m good without a babysitter.”

“Ar-naaav,” Paul sang under his breath. “Later,” he mouthed. “La-ter.”

When the red plastic thermometer popped on the turkey, Evelyn, as promptly as if a bell had rung, steered the group past these choppy waters and delivered them to the safe harbor of the table. Burgundy cloth. Gold-trimmed dishes. A small store of wine glasses that caught and shattered the light from two tiered candlesticks. They filled their plates from the mahogany sideboard—turkey, dressing, braised butternut squash, and Navi’s scalloped potatoes with coriander and coconut milk, which soon had everyone asking how they could have lived with plain mashed potatoes for so long.

Paul said, “Wait.” He stood over his plate with hands held like a conductor’s, staying raised forks and open mouths, then ran to the foyer for his bag. A moment later, he reappeared very proudly with his contribution to the festivities.

“Paulina,” Max marveled as Paul placed the strange centerpiece on the table. “You have outdone yourself.”

“Paul,” Evelyn said, bemused, “you shouldn’t have.”

“Know your strengths,” he answered sagely. “Some people do a potato. I do this. Know your strengths.”

Shifting in their seats, they each craned for a 360-degree view of the taxidermied tableaux. On a small wooden pedestal covered with hand-cut autumn leaves, miniature pinecones, and a painted, animal-hide tepee, a stuffed ash-gray squirrel stood on its hind legs. Its front legs were bent to its hips in a pose of diva-ish defiance, as if it meant to flaunt the fierceness of its outfit: an immaculately beaded white breastplate; a leather-tasseled white loincloth and boots; and a headdress of flowing white feathers that trailed to its tiny clawed feet. “I’m very into taxidermy right now,” Paul explained. “I just finished a tribute to Joan Crawford done entirely in mice. But this is my first squirrel. It’s Walter Potter meets Cher’s half-breed.”

“Is this politically correct?” Arnav asked.

“What kind of gay man are you?” Paul answered. “Cher transcends.”

“What she needs,” Max said, “is a spread in
Vogue
. She’s fabulous.”

“Sacasquirrelea. What she really needs is her Captain John Smith.”

“Sacagawea was Lewis and Clark,” Arnav corrected.

Paul widened his eyes with queenly hauteur. “Are you sure?”

Henry forked a potato into his mouth and said, “Pocahontas was Captain John Smith.”

The table looked to him, nonplussed.

“To Squirrelahontas, then.”

Up went the glasses, clinking under the echoing cheer: “Squirrelahontas.”

A delicious stream of Château Mont-Redon (thanks to Max) carried dinner nicely along, and everyone said a prayer of private thanks for the distraction provided by Squirrel Cher, who offered endless opportunity for conversation and occupied the place in the room where, otherwise, a giant elephant would have stood. The obvious and insistent topic that nobody wanted to face—Claudia’s absence—a fact that Max more or less accepted, Benji ignored, and Evelyn fought the constant desire to apologize for fell into the shadow of Paul’s discussion of the odd and unsettling triumphs of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter and the methods by which one acquires enough dead mice to restage key scenes from
Mommie Dearest
.

“Is there a class for that?” Evelyn asked.

“There’s a class for everything,” Paul answered.

“Cat’s going to teach a class,” Benji offered. “Next semester. At the high school.”

“Are you a taxidermist?” Paul joked.

Evelyn touched a napkin to the corner of her mouth with a look of happy surprise. “What kind of class?”

Benji nudged her. “Tell them.”

“It’s not really a class. And technically, I’m not a teacher. I’m more like a facilitator. They’re dusting off the drama club—”

“She’s being modest,” Benji interrupted.

“I’m not. They haven’t had a drama club in ten years. We’re not sure there’s going to be any interest is what I mean. It may be a very short job.”

Benji drained the last of his lemon-wheeled water. “She’s going to be great.”

The group made their lively way through a conversational labyrinth; topics followed until they dead ended, from Squirrelahontas to Cat’s teaching gig to Evelyn’s painting (the merits of which Cat said Evelyn underestimated) to Paul’s boyhood love of paint-by-numbers and his crazy love for his twin toddler nieces.

“Do you guys want kids?” Max asked Cat.

Now it was his turn for the nonplussed stares.

“We’ve been together three months,” said Cat. She raised a hand to her throat, as if to keep herself from choking.

As they talked, a powerful grip of anxiety suddenly seized Max’s heart. He couldn’t point to its source, but felt a tightening fist grab hold of his insides. He tried talking, about anything, about whatever, to keep his mind from the pain of it. “I’d adopt a kid,” he said. “We’ve talked about adopting a kid.”

“Not at twenty-two, I hope,” Evelyn said ominously.

“We’re not quite ready to talk about babies yet,” Cat assured the group. “Adopted or otherwise.”

“Hold on a sec,” said Benji.

“Hold on? You mean we
are
ready to talk about babies?”

“I’m not saying we’re ready. I’m saying I understand the desire. To have a kid.”

“I hear you,” said Paul. “Men have their biological clocks too.”

Max crossed his knife and fork on his plate and leaned back to rub his stomach. Let nausea look like gluttony. The more normal he acted, the more normal he’d feel. If only things worked that way.

“I couldn’t adopt,” Paul said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with adoption.” He tipped an invisible hat to Max. “But I’m too vain to settle for a stranger’s genes. No, when I send little Antoinette to bed without supper, I want to see this face, in all its tragic beauty, staring back at me.”

“Antoinette?” Evelyn asked.

“Paul thinks all children, boys or girls, should be named Antoinette.”

“What else am I going to call them?” came Paul’s dry response. “Joe?”

Before anyone could answer, the sound of the front door opening fell over the table like a cage. Everyone knew who it was. Everyone looked trapped. Even before the voice called out with a tentative “hello?”

In that moment, Max’s body seemed especially prescient: his organs like a seismograph having traced some infinitesimal shift in the bedrock before the glasses and plates started to dance. According to Benji, neither he nor Evelyn had seen Claudia since she fled the rest stop, and the few subsequent conversations they’d had with her were as strained and useless as a clothesline trying to hoist a car. Max played the role of the more forgiving one. Perhaps because he had fewer expectations. She did strike him as a failure on some elemental level, but how, really, could he judge? He didn’t know her. And though he seemed to be collecting samples of her limitations, those, while dispiriting, seemed utterly, utterly human.

After slipping a clerk two hundred dollars for his birth mother’s address, Max had left the windowless records office with the knowledge that his search might end in a blind alley. He had readied himself to find the meth head. Or the rape victim. Or the woman too poor, too ill, too taxed, too privileged, too ambivalent, too ambitious, too pampered, too preoccupied to raise a child. What he’d found was a woman who was not much more than apologetic. Sorry she’d been too young. Sorry she’d wanted something else. Sorry she’d run from her first opportunity for reunion and flubbed every opportunity since. Sorry that the pace with which her acceptance moved was so very glacial. Sorry, so sorry for everything.