All the Lasting Things (19 page)

XO,

C.

From: Max Davis

Sent: December 13, 2012

To: Claudia Fisher

Subject: Save me!

Navi is working all this week because the DSO is doing a 5-day marathon of Handel’s
Messiah
. Blah. So rather than having the apartment to myself all day & really getting down to work, I decided to spend the week visiting my parents. Seal the peace deal, I thought. It’s been one day! One day & I’ve pulled half my hair out. Give her a topic, any topic, it’s like her arrows are aimed at it before I open my mouth. I’m living in Dallas. I’m living with Navi. I’m gay. I’m broke (which, by the way, I’m not). I’m a walking target. Why didn’t I go to Alluvia? Or to visit you? It’s my own fault for coming here. I’ve made my bed, now I pluck myself bald in it. Hope the papers are off your desk—or on their way . . .

Love,

Max

From: Claudia Fisher

Sent: December 16, 2012

To: Max Davis

Subject: It’s complicated

Max:

I never did answer your question about Nick. You probably thought not answering was my answer. If I’m going to be honest with you—and I want to be honest with you—I’ll say that things between Nick and me are complicated. I know better than to burden you with too many details. Barriers exist between parents and their children—at least they should—and though I can’t claim I know where they are, I do know that I want to respect them. Nick is my client. He’s paying me to do a job for him. But Nick was my first love. We were together for 7 years, which at the time seemed like forever. But forever means one thing when you’re 15, and something else entirely when you’re 42. For all I know Nick’s already told you this and more while you were out riding ATVs . . . the birds and the bees talk must be on the checklist.

Claudia

From: Max Davis

Sent: December 18, 2012

To: Claudia Fisher

Subject: Do you realize . . .

. . . in your last message you referred to yourself as my parent for the first time? I’m writing from Plano, Texas. Navi & I decided to make a quick visit to his parents, who just moved back to the States to be closer to him. They’re good parents. Plano has one of the largest populations of Indians in the country, though don’t ask me why they picked Plano. I’ve seen more of Texas than I ever wanted to. I tell Navi why don’t we pack up & go to New York. We could have an apartment there & I could write & we’d be close to so much music. Think of the music! It would be a world better than being stuck in Dallas, but then he says that’s fine for me, but what would he do, he can’t transfer into the philharmonic like he’s switching offices at AT&T. I’ve nearly finished the first act of my opera—I told you I was moving fast. I worry maybe too fast, but I’m not about to stop to see if I’m right. Another thing Beethoven said: “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets.” All I want to do is wall up with a case of Red Bull & write, write, write—you know that feeling when everything & everyone that’s not your work is a bother? But you can’t say fuck off, especially at Xmas, no matter how much you want to. Oh & before I forget, don’t worry about Nick—it’s too cold to ride ATVs & he doesn’t really talk about you. Much.

Your son,

Max

From: Claudia Fisher

Sent: December 20, 2012

To: Max Davis

Subject: Keep working!

Max:

That’s too bad about Plano. But I know what you mean. We’re at Oliver’s parents, and, yes, I understand the compulsion to tell them all to fuck off so I can get back to my work. The thing is they absolutely would fuck off if I told them to. Oliver’s not exactly a doormat, but if you mistake him for one, sometimes you don’t have to look far to see where he gets it from. His parents are warm, harmless people, but what does it say when the nicest thing you can say about someone is that she’s harmless? They treat me like I’m queen of the castle, but even the queen gets sick of being the queen.

I’m sorry this is so short today. But the troops are off shopping and I have a rare moment to work uninterrupted. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can see a pair of flannel pajamas in my future.

XO,

Claudia

From: Max Davis

Sent: December 22, 2012

To: Claudia Fisher

Subject: Alive in VT?

Happy (almost) Xmas to you & Oliver & Mr. & Mrs. Harmless. I talked to Benji yesterday. I’m sure he did, but did he tell you that he passed up the chance for an audition? I was, like, what about your career & he said what career? Do you think he’s okay? He’s going to stay with Cat & help her with her teaching. I probably shouldn’t say it, but I have this fantasy that one day you & Benji & I will live in NYC together. Don’t worry. Not in the same apartment. Lol.

From: Claudia Davis

Sent: December 25, 2012

To: Max Davis

Subject: Merry, merry

Here I am—alive—in my Land’s End pajamas, thinking of you. Merry, merry, sweet boy. And a wonderful new year.

She’s lovely, Jane says. Her father was always good to me. George. He paid twice what other contractors were willing to for the same work. Gave me a place to stay. All I had to do, he used to tell me, is dedicate a novel to him. A single star, livid as a shard of glass, bites down as Jane and I stroll across the grass. It is Jane’s first night in the little apartment on the side of the garage. I take her hand and kiss it. He was a little conservative, though. He wouldn’t have liked us “living in sin” in his own backyard.
He
wouldn’t have liked it? Jane laughs. What about
her
? Evelyn? I ask what she means. What happened to the seer of everything? Jane asks. She takes her hand back and, though it is a warm July night, hugs herself as if she has a chill. I never said I was the seer of everything. You are. A writer like you sees everything. Everything except this. Jesus, Henry, the girl’s in love. Girl? She’s ten years older than you. That’s beside the point. She barely looks at me, I say. And what does that prove? She’d do anything you asked her. I don’t plan on asking for anything, except maybe supper from time to time: the woman knows how to cook. I’m serious, Jane says, staring up at the star. You have to be careful with people who can’t say no. You should never ask too much.

11.

B
ut what does he want?” Benji asked. He slung an elbow over the back of his seat and looked expectantly at the ball-capped boy slouched in the row of seats behind him. Brandon, who had received his learner’s permit the week before, was, by his own admission, prone to taking an occasional detour from considering Macbeth’s desires in order to imagine a well-plotted course over country roads in his father’s Celica. He stared dreamily at the front of the auditorium, but his focus seemed farther off than Cat, who sat cross-legged under the floodlights of the stage, or any of the eleven cast members who surrounded her. Benji waved a hand in front of Brandon’s eyes, a flagman at the finish line effectively bringing the race to an end.

“Yo, Mario Andretti. Where’d you go?”

“Have you ever spun donuts?”

“Your father’s going to want you to parallel park before he teaches you to spin donuts.”

A sheepish, “Right.”

“So tell me: What does he want?”

“He wants to be king.”

“Is that all?”

Brandon’s heavy-lidded blue eyes narrowed as they met Benji’s. He was a smart kid, but he didn’t appreciate trick questions. If a trick question it was. “That’s pretty much what he wants.”

“But if being king were all he wanted, the play would be over in act three, wouldn’t it?”

This line of argument piqued the boy’s interest. He took in Alluvia High’s musty little auditorium, with a stage too small to accommodate its marching band, and closed his eyes, considering the character he’d been charged with breathing life into. Benji and Cat had gone so far as to suggest that everyone treat his or her character, from the bloody but guilt-wracked queen to poor, taciturn Fleance, like a body he or she’d discovered on the beach. Limp. Lifeless. What did the body need to be revived?

On the first day of rehearsals, Ashley DiPetro, the mayor’s daughter, whose general sense of entitlement Cat believed would serve her well as Lady Macbeth, raised her hand and, as if pointing out for the benefit of everyone that she, Ashley DiPetro, was sitting on a floor in a room in Alluvia High School in Alluvia, New York, in the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere of the planet Earth, stated the obvious: “Um. The script? You say the words in the script?” The fact that her tone bent her sentences into questions did nothing to diminish her confidence in them as answers.

“But reviving a character from the page,” Cat explained, “isn’t about recitation. It’s about
resuscitation
.” The fourteen students looked at her as if she’d grown a second head, but eleven stalwarts returned the next day (undeterred by the doubts that Ashley voiced on the way out of the auditorium: “They’re not even real teachers. They’re like my grandmother teaching prisoners how to read. They’re not even being paid!”), and it was with these eleven that Cat and Benji began to unpack the “Scottish play.”

Those first weeks of rehearsal were a time of challenge and (unexpected) joy for Benji. At first, he thought he’d made a mistake rejecting his agent’s plea to take an audition for a new corticosteroid—a
national
commercial, she stressed, that could lead to bigger, better things—but pretending he had plaque psoriasis, much to his surprise, didn’t outweigh his desire to be with Cat or to help her where she needed help, even if it involved a dozen teens who sometimes made him itch as badly as the fake ailment he’d turned down. Not knowing how to redirect their more annoying habits, Benji allowed the trains of their pubescent scandals, their brittle and silly love affairs, to barrel through the middle of their two-hour rehearsals. He tolerated their tears, their shrill and hormonal voices, their labored decisions over the best way to respond to an unfollowed friend’s libelous tweets. He bit his tongue against the profanities he sometimes longed to hurl at them. He expected all of this, the mortification, the grandstanding, the giggling, the endless interruptions for
selfies
! What he hadn’t foreseen was the satisfaction, an unheralded but trumpeting sense of accomplishment that came, say, when Josh Cooper’s drunken Porter, taking Benji’s note, stumbled onstage with his pants around his ankles.
#whowouldhaveguessedit?

Agreeing to join Cat in the enterprise that she and the superintendent of schools had hatched at a protest at Compton’s Mound, Benji quickly found himself moving from observer to line reader to mentor. Once he and Cat had walked the cast through the basic fundamentals of plot, after they relaxed into a drum circle where they sat pounding out the complexities of the script, Benji found himself accompanying Brandon Wright on strolls to the back of the auditorium, pacing up and down the deserted rows like counsel to the ambitious young thane.

Brandon’s eyes, despite the heavy lids that always made them appear half closed, possessed an electrifying spark. At first glance he seemed little more than a solid B student, a second-string tight end for the Alluvia Warriors, an avid builder of model planes from World War II, who, outside of drama club, lived as a happy (or at least untormented) loner. But Brandon liked what he liked and took an exhilarating passion in it. His position on the football team earned him the currency a boy needed in a small-minded town to take up theater without being teased to death about it. He wasn’t prone to bullying or easily swept away by the currents of adolescent fads. He didn’t listen to Pitbull or Lil Wayne or really care for
Street Fighter IV
. In some respects, his classmates found him hopelessly out of touch. Who else but Brandon Wright came away from Mrs. Martin’s ninth-grade English class actually liking Shakespeare?

“Think about the witches,” Benji said. Lately, he found himself bringing the boy to the cave where the weird sisters brewed their brew, unveiling their apparitions, in the hopes that there, in the cauldron’s steam, Brandon would see what made the brutal Scot’s heart beat. “What do they show him?”

Brandon named the rival Macduff. And the bloody child. And the child holding the tree.

“Is he worried about Macduff?” Benji asked, taking them one at a time.

“Not really.” Brandon ripped his cap from his head, as if it were a hindrance to thinking, and put it on his knee. “He just kills him.”

“Then what does he see?”

Brandon described the next prophecies, the visions that Macbeth dismisses as impossibilities that circle back in the final act like snakes to deliver their deadly stings. This was where the boy got caught, where he, like most of the audience, became too entangled in Macbeth’s comeuppance, in the satisfying fall of a rabid king. Macduff was
not
of woman born, Birnam Wood
did
march to Dunsinane, but Macbeth was undone by a desire that curled inside the heart of almost every man.

“What else does he see?”

The kings. Brandon always forgot the kings. Benji gave the boy his script and, tap, tap, tapping his finger on the page, told him to read. When the boy finished, Benji pointed down the aisle, as if the descendants of Banquo stood there in a line, gold-bound brows and treble scepters glinting terrifically in the light.
What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

Brandon pulled his hair back in studied thought, exposing a crop of small pink pimples on his forehead, while Benji, taking back the script, nudged him along. “Who are they?”

“Kings,” Brandon answered.

“Past kings?”

“Future kings.”

“‘For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me,’” Benji read, “‘and points at them for his.’ They’re the children of Banquo. The sons of Banquo’s sons. Macbeth has no sons. So who is going to survive?”

Behind them, Cat walked the three witches through the brewing of their potion, encouraging them not to cackle, to deliver the lines any way they wanted except with that awful, overused, Wicked Witch of the West cackle, bidding them softer rather than louder, until the room hissed with their chilling intent. Benji turned for a moment to watch her work, to see her dancing round the children who swayed round the pot. He smiled. He said to Brandon, “Did you ever read
Death of a Salesman
?”

“Last semester,” answered Brandon, confused by but not averse to a random change of course. “In Ms. Arnold’s.”

“Ms. Arnold?” Benji’s brows rose in amused disbelief. “She’s still here?” By
here
he meant alive, though he kept his calculation of her improbable age to himself. “Do you know what Arthur Miller said Willy’s masterpiece was?”

“What’s this got to do with Macbeth?”

“Trust me.”

Brandon guessed. “I don’t know. His work?”

“You’d think so, right? But no, it’s Biff. It’s Willy’s son, Biff. That’s Willy’s masterpiece.” Benji remembered reading an interview years ago in which Miller said that his bedraggled salesman was writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day. Not in stone, but in melting ice. Benji offered the thought to Brandon, but the boy was barely sixteen: he hadn’t begun to worry whether monuments would be erected to him or if they’d stand or fall in the heat of the rising sun; he wasn’t considering his own mortality or totaling the ledger that sooner or later every man felt tempted to total—the work he’d done, the children he’d fathered, all that he would leave behind—and coming up with zero. Benji said, “Do you know what I mean?”

Brandon gave a polite but half-hearted nod. Cat had released the other students for a ten-minute break, and Brandon, looking like a caged bird that watched his brothers and sisters fly free, marked their escape, rebel smokers filing out the stage door into the frosty March dusk, everyone else skipping off to the vending machines singing,
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
. Benji heard the rehearsal spiraling apart, the noise dissipating into the auditorium’s eerie, canister-lit silence, but he couldn’t let Brandon go. He didn’t want to be alone with his ledger, with the roundly melancholy thoughts that waited for him at the bottom of so many columns. Zero, zero, zero.

One day he would have to accept it: he wasn’t a king or a father to them. He wasn’t Henry, whose eight published books already proved more resilient than their author. He wasn’t Max, with his trumpeted recordings of Haydn and Bach and the finished first act of a promising new opera. He certainly wasn’t Cat, who had no desire to live life on a throne of celebrity and acclaim, who seemed perfectly happy saving the graves of a few forgotten soldiers and directing a nothing school play that no one—no one, Benji couldn’t help think, who mattered—would see. He shouldn’t call it nothing; it wasn’t nothing. After all, people who had neither fame nor recognition, men and women who made their sixty-, seventy-, eighty-year journeys from cradle to grave without rousing the attention of anyone but the few equally anonymous souls who marched by their side, filled the earth. But the notion of a common lot, Cat’s annoying habit of reminding him that the good of the world depended on those who “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs,” offered Benji little comfort. Why couldn’t he hold on to the thought that what he was doing here, now, with Cat and these kids, counted for something? It mattered. He tried to believe, even in some small way, that it mattered. But sooner or later, every happy bubble popped on the sharp, bristling quills of doubts that he should (at this very minute) be shilling a new topical cream for treating red patches of dead skin. He wanted more. Even if he tallied his involvement in the play as a positive, the new sum didn’t erase the sadness that came from the old equations or the resentment Benji felt at having to feel that sadness alone. Brandon, who didn’t have the first clue how or why they’d leapt from Scottish king to Brooklyn salesman, would leave Benji sitting with his failures by himself. Which was exactly what Benji couldn’t let him do.

Benji picked up his script. He wanted—part of him needed—Brandon to see Macbeth’s utterly understandable wish to be the spring from which his name would forever flow into the future. It was, of course, why the Scot lashed out so savagely at Macduff’s children, but paradoxically, if you thought about it, it was also what saved Macbeth from being the simple monster everyone made him out to be. It’s what made him human. Benji scanned the page for proof he could pull from it. He didn’t want to live a hidden life. He didn’t want to lie in an unvisited tomb. He hated to think that his only route away from such a fate involved an ointment called Humira. But before he could find a thread that his hostage might pick up and follow, Cat snuck up behind him. She unfolded a squeaky seat and kneeled facing the two of them.

“Guys,” she said, “it isn’t work camp. Take a break.”

Brandon jolted to attention in his seat. “Can I, Mr. Fisher?”

Benji looked from his watch to the empty stage and laughed, as if he hadn’t noticed the room emptying around them. “Yeah. Sure. Sorry, pal.”

With the boy gone, Cat turned Benji’s back to her and reached out to knead his neck. In her cowgirl work shirt and torn-at-the-knee jeans, she looked like the women he dated in college, the grunge chicks who swayed to Siouxsie and the Banshees and appreciated a good game of beer pong. Her fingers found a knot of corded muscle and pressed hard against it. “So tense.”

Benji winced, grateful for the pain. He turned toward her, took her hand, and pulled her to him. She let her body go limp, leaning over the back of the seat as if she didn’t mind him dragging her onto his lap, before she stiffened, snickered, pulled back. “What do you want?” She eyed his crotch openly, expecting to find a visible sign to explain his sudden need to hold her, but no, he wasn’t asking for that.

“Come here,” he said reassuringly.

Cat hesitated. Hard-ons aside, eleven twittering teenagers were due back at any moment. As she stood, Benji rose to release her hand. A flourish. She might have been his waltz partner, aimed at the end of one row, spinning gracefully into another.

“Come here,” he repeated, reaching again for her hand.

She stood before him, slightly remote, until he repeated himself. With that she went, put a hand in his hair, and asked what was wrong. No answer came. What he wanted to say stood in the middle of a maze Benji had entered by way of Macbeth and theater’s most fantastic failure of a salesman; it had something to do with his father and nephew, with his mother’s disposable paintings and his sister’s buildings, which Benji thought of as impermeable to time as the stone and steel that made them; it had something to do with Cat and with Benji himself. He tried pulling a single articulate thought from the ferment of his mind, but whatever he hoped to say about what is bound to last and what is doomed to fade, whatever distinction he meant to make between the two, slipped away.
The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.