All the Lasting Things (17 page)

On another level, one deep below the surface of compassion and understanding, Claudia simply disappointed him. She pissed him off. She needed, he thought, to get over herself. But Max wasn’t entirely paying lip service to his uncle when he said that Claudia’s reaction was beside the point. His fledgling connections to Benji and Evelyn and even Henry, who more often than not had no idea who he was, sent his spirits soaring higher than anything he’d felt toward the Davises in a very long time.

Claudia. Evelyn sprang from her chair with the vigor of a much younger woman and rushed to intercept her in the front hall. Arnav reached across the table and took Max’s hand, while Benji excused himself and followed his mother out of the room. Max heard the fierce whispering that rose to a crescendo then dissolved into silence. Into the troubling calm he felt himself fall. His face flushed. His heart felt ready to burst. And then she was there.

Claudia entered with exaggerated lightness, stifling the sound of her heels on the floor as if she were coming late to a concert and feared disturbing the players. Oliver, hanging behind her like a shadow, gave a tentative wave. Cat and Arnav and Paul rose to greet them, while Max, standing at the back of the group, might have been moving in a procession of mourners, waiting for a private audience with the woman in the stylish black dress, the last person in line who knows he has the most to say. They stood face to face. The room fell away and left the two of them together, alone. Not knowing what else to do, he extended his hand.

Claudia took it with the gentlest touch, as if any more pressure might set off an alarm. “Can I—” she began, but left the question unasked. With an uncertain step she closed the gap between them and hesitantly pulled him to her. Much as Max wanted to, he kept himself from falling into her embrace. He stood straight, spine rigid, for the few short seconds she held him, looking numb but feeling anything but. He might sink into tears. He might break into laughter. A dark, manic wave with no outlet rolled about inside him, tossing his mind like a little boat with no lights to guide it. Oliver needled his way between them, embroidering his introduction with a sycophant’s overstatement and praise, before Evelyn stepped sternly in and asked if they wanted something to eat.

“I’ll get plates,” Claudia said as Benji went for more chairs. “Max?” she asked from the doorway. “Maybe you can help me?”

He had the sensation of blacking out, a dark shroud draped over him in one room then pulled away to reveal him in another. How did he get there? She seemed magical to him. Standing not three feet away, speaking in a language he found beautiful but couldn’t understand, she was the New Possibility—capital
N
, capital
P
—in a life that felt (for all its stunning and remarkable moments, since the day he could hold a cello bow) predictable, predestined, plodding. Amanda Davis had anticipated every step, and Max had puppied along. Violin at three, cello at six, eight hours a day, 365 days a year, music theory, composition, practice, practice, practice, Carnegie Hall at the age of twelve, the Eastman School, Juilliard, one step after the next.

Even with his illness, erratic and havoc wreaking as it could be, his life had seemed an utterly known quantity. Everything was anticipated, every day accounted for. He understood the cycle of it, the ups and downs, the highs and lows. He could tally the weight of all it contained, except the woman before him. The greatest unknown, the biggest unanswered question of his entire life stood just three feet away.

Max stayed where he was, watching as she took plates down from the cabinet and opened a drawer with a clatter of forks. She sat at the kitchen table and waited for him to take a seat across from her. When he did, she looked at him with a practically painted-on Mona Lisa smile, mesmerizing and unreadable. Three pies, an inordinate amount for nine people, lay atop the table. Pumpkin. Pecan. A lattice-topped apple. Claudia took up a knife and sliced, looking in the other room as if they might be caught making the transgression of this private, preemptory dessert, a risk that made the moment that much more precious. She served Max a piece, took one for herself, and raised her fork, waiting for Max to raise his and
clink
, like a toast of champagne. They ate their pie in silence, not comfortable but not entirely unlivable either, until Evelyn came and shooed them away.

By the time Claudia and Oliver had finished their meal, Max was beside himself. He wanted to be back in the kitchen with Claudia, in the quiet of that bright cocoon, patiently awaiting a dawning of wings, but the dining room and its chorus of voices insistently tugged him in other directions.

“Play,” they said. “Play.”

Offering an extemporaneous concert was the furthest thing from his mind, but Benji and Cat and poor, obsequious Oliver swirled into a vortex that slowly sucked him in. Like a prisoner who feels the rope tighten about his hands the more that he struggles, Max gave into the idea that some coveted moment with Claudia would come sooner if he simply gave in and did what they asked. She stood at the other end of a field crossable only by the coaxing of strings. He ran out into the freezing night for his cello.

Claudia lay awake on the pullout couch in her father’s study, Oliver breathing deeply beside her, dead to the world on even the thinnest of mattresses. She faced away from him, only their naked asses touching as was their habit, the closest to cuddling Claudia could bear, especially after their first month of dating when—honeymoon period over—she named her future husband and his body heat “The Furnace” and pushed him to the other side of the bed. That hump-to-hump contact acted as a security blanket of sorts and also a fail-safe GPS, broadcasting any movement Oliver might make that would require her to stow her phone. Now, with him drugged with tryptophan and the soporific satisfactions of star fucking, she could blanket herself in the moony light of a tiny screen and type her texts to Nick with immunity.

Are you awake?

It was after one o’clock, but Nick’s response popped up instantly, as if he had simply been waiting to press “Send.”
Did u survive?

I’m typing, aren’t I? Did you?

Nothing 2 survive at my brother’s. Other than his wife’s cooking. Would rather have been w/ u 2.

Too tired to type your words?

All the kids are doing it.

I thought people our age were beyond that.

OMG. WTF? LMFAO!

No emoticons.

How did it go?

I’m a terrible person.

:-/

!!!!!

Why terrible?

Gutless.

You’re there. That’s not gutless.

All I do is hide. I hid from him. I hid him from you.

U keep beating urself up about that.

Then, before she could answer:
You’re there now.

Here and hiding!

Go easy.

I came to get my mother and brother off my back. And you.

That’s not true. U wanted to see him.

I did.

He wanted to see u.

He needs something.

Who doesn’t?

I don’t know if I have it to give.

U don’t even know what it is.

I’m like a mute around him.

It will get easier.

I wish I’d been better.

Ur expecting Mother of the Year?

No. Not up for that one.

U get to be nervous. And awkward. And confused.

Claudia didn’t answer.

Ambivalent even.

You weren’t. You played football! That’s fatherhood 101. Textbook.

He doesn’t want u 2 b textbook. He wants u 2 b u.

He told you this?

He doesn’t have to.

I think he thinks I hate him
,
Claudia typed.

Why? Bc you didn’t play football?

Because I’m hiding in my father’s study.

Oh. When you said hiding . . .

I meant it. Something crazy?

Shoot.

I was thinking of us as a family.

Who family?

The three of us.

You have a family.

You know what I mean.

You have a husband.

Forget it.

We’re not here to play house. Him or me.

Chastened, Claudia typed,
I don’t want to play house.

What do u want then?

A cry of floorboards from outside her door. Henry? But Henry had never had such a light footfall. He tended to stomp, especially now, raging around the house like an animal trying to get free from its own bafflement. Claudia left Nick’s last question in the folds of the sheets and, pulling on a robe, crept to the door. She cracked it open the tiniest bit, careful of the double-crossing bleat of its hinges, and peered out. She feared finding Max stationed at the opposite end of the hall like a guard on duty, wanting some ineffable thing from her, but discovered Evelyn instead. Claudia had as much cause to fear meeting her mother, maybe even more considering that Evelyn refused to pretend that the cuts Claudia inflicted had healed. To reach out to Evelyn these days was to press an open wound that oozed hostility. Claudia wouldn’t be forgiven until she’d done right, and doing right didn’t include taking refuge in her father’s study as soon as dinner was done, as if she had no other business with Max than the silent sharing of pie.

Regardless, something in Evelyn’s posture concerned her. Her mother looked out the window in the way of people who shrink from being caught looking out of windows. Claudia opened the door, letting the hinges announce her. Evelyn turned and beckoned to her impatiently in a way that said whatever beef she had with her daughter had been put on ice for the time being. When she reached the window, Claudia saw on Evelyn’s face a look of deep worry. A heavy crease trenched across her mother’s forehead, and her eyes narrowed into a squint so troubled she seemed to see something vexing beyond the vexing thing she saw. With one hand Evelyn pushed Claudia behind her to shield her from sight, and the two, like aspiring PIs, looked down on Max (in a jacket far too light for the November night) as he walked in drifting circles across the lawn.

“What’s he doing?” Claudia whispered, though there was no chance of her voice disturbing the party still going on below.

“He’s been out there for an hour,” Evelyn whispered back.

“An hour?! He’ll freeze.”

“Maybe not an hour. But Benji’s been out. Arnav’s been out. Trying to get him back inside.”

Claudia saw what her mother saw. There was, in fact, something troubling in the way Max stalked the lawn: his pace, the flimsiness of his coat, his determination to suffer the cold. She knew better than to ask what she should do.

“You go,” Evelyn said, needing no invitation to intervene. “Arnav is worried that he’s sick.”

“Sick?”

“With the bipolar.”

“I don’t know what that looks like,” Claudia said. “Neither do you.”

“Arnav certainly does. He says he can see Max ramping up.”

“What does ramping up mean?”

Evelyn ignored the question, then asked, “Is it hereditary?”

“Manic depression? I have no idea.” Claudia turned to go back to her room then turned back again. “I’m not bipolar, Mother. If that’s what you mean.”

“I’m not talking about you.”

“And neither is Nick.”

“I’m not talking about him either,” Evelyn answered distractedly.

“Who then? You? Daddy? Are you telling me you’re bipolar?”

“Is there anything you take seriously?” Evelyn asked, returning to her vigil. “Go and get your coat.”