All the Lasting Things (22 page)

“Oh, she did,” Sam said, indicating Benji’s pocketless attire, “but it doesn’t look like you have your phone on you.”

“And you—what? Just happened to be passing by?”

“Actually, I am. I try to make it to Saratoga two, three times a summer. What can I say? I like the horsies.”

“Great, but how did you know I’d be
here
?”

“Nina gave me your number, but I thought it better if we talk in person. So I wound up at your parents’. That’s the address Nina had for you. And your mother said you’d be out here for the day. The rest is GPS.”

This, Benji thought, explained the recent, still-unlistened-to voice mails from Nina, who shortly after he turned down the lucrative offer to sell itch cream had told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have what it took to make it in this business. As difficult as it was, Benji took pride in not listening to what she had to say. The last big opportunity to which Nina paved the way had landed him in the toolshed of the director of a piddling regional rep. Through silence Benji meant to transmit the message: Fuck off. Not interested. He wanted her to have proof that, professionally speaking, he had turned a corner. Moved on. He no longer lived to be a joke for hire. He lived, quite literally now, in a different zip code.

“So you must be what Nina keeps calling about?”

“She said you never got back to her, but I didn’t want you to miss out on an opportunity.”

“A big opportunity,” said Benji. He’d heard it all before.

“You know what they say: it’s not the size of the opportunity.” Sam winked. “I kid. I kid. But yes. Hell, yes, I have a big opportunity.” He clapped his hands together like a vacuum cleaner salesman revealing his latest wonder.

“I’m not looking for an opportunity. I like what I’m doing here,” Benji answered without elaborating.

“I can appreciate that,” Sam said, his eyes roving the grounds as if taking in the landscape of an inferior planet. The predominance of domestic cars and elastic pants. “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Just give me that.”

Benji looked over his shoulder, locating Cat as though touching a talisman, then returned the newsprint catalog to its folder and placed it on the red-hot roof of the car. “Go for it.”

“Okay. No beating around the bush. I’m just going to throw it out there.” He spoke with the smooth, smug arrogance of a world-class chef serving up his pièce de résistance, as if no one (not even those dismal vegans) could possibly turn down the prime cut of steak on offer. “We want you to do a show with us.”

The word exploded in Benji’s ears. Show? Show! He watched Sam’s mouth move, but he could no longer hear the words coming out of it. His ears rang as motes of bright light floated down from heaven.

“Hear me out,” Sam rushed to say. “It’s called
The Comeback Kid
. We originally wanted to go with just
The Comeback
. It’s cleaner, simpler. But Lisa Kudrow beat us to it. The cunt. I kid. I love Lisa. I do. But
The Comeback Kid
isn’t bad either. It may even be better because you were, you know, a kid when you were a star.”

“You want to do a show about me?”

“
About
you.
Starring
you. You
are
the show.” Sam bulldozed Benji with his pitch. In a field ranged with heavy earth-moving equipment, he was the only one in action at the moment, moving ahead as if the only resistance in sight were a man-size bag of marshmallows. “You’re not afraid of being the show. You’ve been the show before. ‘That’s what
you
think’: that was all you. Let’s face it: you did it so well, you basically fucked yourself for life. Nobody could see you doing anything else. Happens all the time to child stars. The machine chews them up and spits them out. I don’t have to tell you. You’ve been hanging on to that horse for dear life since. Am I right? You’re a talented guy, Benji. And I’m not just blowing sunshine up your ass. Your comic timing. But what have you been doing for the last twenty years?
I Love the Eighties
.”

Benji grimaced. “Flatterer.”

Sam pulled the pocket square from his blazer and wiped his face vigorously. His smile was less shepherd than wolf. “I’m not trying to flatter you. I’m talking straight with you. Can we put the bullshit aside? I don’t know you, Benji. I don’t know what makes you tick, or what’s on your bucket list, but I’ll bet money you didn’t want to be doing Hamlet’s dad in a hundred-seat house that, if I had to guess, was never more than half full. You want something bigger. Am I right?” Sam spread his arms like an offering. “Well, it’s Christmas, my man. I’m here to give it to you. You just have to be smart enough to say yes.”

He reminded Benji that just because someone is out of the scene doesn’t mean someone is beyond the grapevine. Sam had heard about the drinking, about the drugs, about the dive from the bridge—“When you fall off a horse, you really fall off a horse!”—but that was the beauty of it. That was the comeback.

“I’m over those things. I’m sober now. Going on a year. So this one-man
Celebrity Rehab
is about eleven months too late.” Benji didn’t like this man. He hated the prep school blazer, the blotchy cheeks, the clear rivulets of sweat running to drip off the end of his pointy chin. But resistance was an act. If Sam had turned and walked away, Benji would have chased him down.

“First of all, no one’s really ever over those things, am I right? I know. I’m in recovery myself. Four years now.” Sam pumped a fist in the air and cheered, “Serenity now. But seriously, let me tell you, not a day goes by I wouldn’t kill my own mother for a dirty martini. But. You go on. It’s what we do. We go on. And we’d like to see you on that journey. Watch you, you know, climb out of that hole.”

“But I’m not in a hole.”

“You didn’t let me finish. We want to see you climb out of that hole and move on to the next great thing. Get back on that horse, so to speak. That’s what I’m talking about, Benji. We don’t just want to see where you’ve been. Although that’s definitely part of it. And we may want to re-create some of that stuff. The bridge, the drinking. Whatever. You know, to get the dramatic arc, but really we want to see where you’re going. What’s next. That’s the whole thrust of the show. Your next move. Your comeback!”

Benji hadn’t the wherewithal to admit that his next project sat on the roof of the car right behind him: sixty course credits heated to 120 degrees.

“We want to pave the way to that.”

“To what?”

“To your name in lights. We want to follow you on auditions. Land you a commercial that doesn’t make everybody think you’re one itchy bastard. Maybe a little stage work. We want to see you in rehearsals, see the process. A real insider’s view. But really it’s about setting you up for an audition with a major director on a major project. The comeback.”

“The comeback.” As Benji repeated it, the lights of the abandoned hotel started flickering back to life, one by one. Welcome to Vegas. “When you say major project? Like a movie?”

“Like a movie. Which is still up in the air. All of this is up in the air until we have you, of course. But—and you didn’t hear this from me—we’re approaching Darren Aronofsky.” Sam paused to let the name sink in, nodding in his smug, self-satisfied way. “Think about what he did for Mickey Rourke. Am I right? He picked him up out of a swamp”—here Sam’s eyes swept the surroundings, widening at the aptness of the metaphor—“and set him down in the Dolby Theatre. P.S., I love Sean Penn. The asshole. I do. But Mickey should have won that Oscar.” He leaned forward and slapped Benji on the shoulder. “Here’s hoping they won’t make that same mistake with you.”

Just then, as if in cosmic agreement with everything Sam had said, the crowd broke into energetic applause. With Cat having praised the obelisk, Claudia laying out the dream of the Village, three hundred hotdogs crammed into three hundred mouths, the people themselves were stuffed, spirited, satisfied. A few hoots and whistles greeted Nick, who, waving victoriously, stepped off the stage into a tiny throng of well-wishers. On cue, the same woman who’d set the festivities in motion untied an enormous plastic bag of red, white, and blue balloons and released them into the hot August sky. They swam upward through the air, this way and that, streaming ribbons beating after them like the tails of sperm as ABBA burst suddenly, joyfully, from a flank of enormous speakers.

“Benj?” Cat, as if teleported to his side, startled him. She rubbed his arm, smiling through a veil that wasn’t entirely victorious.

“Babe,” Benji said. He flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, needing a minute to orient himself before making introductions. “Cat McCarthy. This is.”

“Sam. Sam Palin. No relation. I can’t see Alaska from my backyard.”

“Sam’s an old friend,” Benji said, jumping in to explain, “from high school.”

Sam grinned his grin. “Benji and I go way back. Mr. Hume’s history class, wasn’t it? The times we had.”

Benji, suspecting just how quickly and ecstatically a man like Sam could get carried away with lying, turned back to Cat. “You ready?”

“Whenever you are.”

“Sure.” He smiled, leaning over to kiss her.
Marry me.
To Sam he said, “Good talking to you. Give me a few days to think about it?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely.” He took Benji’s hand and pumped it vigorously. “You’ve got my card. Let me know. Let me know, or I’ll hunt you down.” He pointed his fingers at Benji like two revolvers—
Pow! Pow!
—and walked off into the fray.

“Think about what?” Cat asked, watching him go.

“Oh. Nothing. I told him I was thinking about getting my certification, and he said I might think about doing something with this—”

“With what?”

“Hunh? Oh. This, this summer camp he runs in Lake George.”

“That guy’s from Lake George?” Cat asked, going around to her side of the car. “What kind of camp?”

Benji opened his door, ducked to get in. “Theater camp. What do you think?”

Before climbing into her seat, Cat stood on it, reaching across the roof to retrieve Benji’s folder. “Forgetting something?” she asked, a trace of the schoolmarm tinting her voice as she dropped the hot folder into his lap and started the car. When she turned onto the main road, Compton’s Mound receding in the rearview, she said, “I don’t know any theater camps in Lake George.”

Benji tried to wring the strain of defensiveness from his laugh. “Do you know every theater camp in existence?”

“Um. No, Mr. Attitude, I don’t. What’s the matter? It sounds exciting.”

Benji gave her thigh an apologetic squeeze. He unrolled his window before the gust from the air conditioner finished its climb into the cold and said, “You have no idea.”

Are you going to sit there all day watching us or are you going to help? She isn’t the prettiest girl on the beach, but she’s the one I’ve been watching. I have two choices. Go back to my book, pretend I don’t know what she’s taking about. Or stuff the book in my bag and take the shovel she’s offering me. I get up, brush the sand off my legs. What’s your name? Jane, she says. Then, pointing to her friend, That’s Mary. Mary could sell suntan lotion, but Jane sparks, the dark hair, the fiery-red swimsuit, the barely there tits and overcompensating nose. You need to get the sand wet; that’s why it keeps falling down. Mary, bored, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her rolled towel and lies back to smoke. Jane walks with me to the water’s edge, a bucket between us. You build a castle with this stuff here, the thing won’t ever come down. I hike back up to dry land and turn the bucket over to show her. See how strong? Now you. No, you do it, she says, but not in a helpless, princessy way. I fill the buckets and bring them back. I build up a pyramid of tightly packed sand that Jane, using the stem of her sunglasses, starts to carve. A turret. A window. A curving wall with stairs. Not bad, I say when we’re done. With two fingers, she slices her signature in the sand. Sign it, she says. That’s stupid, I say. You did it, didn’t you? You said yourself it’ll stand forever, so sign it. Your masterpiece. I kneel, my leg hot against hers, and write my name.

14.

A
ct two was finished. Act two would stand. The trouble was, it stood alone. The foundation of the first act stood squarely under the roof of the third, but the act between didn’t align with either, giving the entire structure the precarious feel of a Jenga puzzle. Not only would Max have to circle back to the beginning to shift act one so it supported all that followed, he’d have to smooth the transition between the second and third acts, the passage that led from Lily Briscoe’s return to the Ramsays’ shuttered summer house to her sitting in their dining room ten years after that first failed trip to the lighthouse, where everything was changed, where so much time had passed, where Mrs. Ramsay was dead, where Prue and Andrew were dead, and Lily with her paintbrushes and canvas asked, “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”

Max heard those notes carried by the strings. Sweeping the silence like a beam from the lighthouse would sweep the dark, they came and went. Came and went. A first step, but where to go with it? What next? He hummed the few fledgling bars as he stepped from the shower and toweled dry, his body a darting shadow in the steamed mirror, but none of it seemed right. He brushed his teeth, swiped on his deodorant, and massaged a dollop of moisturizer onto his face, dropping the tubes and creams into his Dopp kit as he finished with them. Next: the pills. Opening the bottles one by one, humming
ba da dum
—no, that wasn’t right either—he placed a colorful array of capsules in his open palm and quickly, before his reflection fully returned (he didn’t like to see himself do it), washed them down the drain.

He opened the door with the stealth of a cat burglar to find Arnav sitting up in bed, waiting. Always a bad sign. Arnav awake in the middle of the night—Arnav, who had proven he could sleep through their westerly neighbor’s porn-star-like attempts to pound his headboard through the wall, who failed to wake to anything but the shrillest, most obnoxious alarms—meant trouble of the sort Max usually (and with pride) thought himself crafty enough to avoid.

“Nav,” Max whispered. A note of atonement sweetened his voice. “I woke you.” He tiptoed forward, as though it wasn’t too late for tiptoes, and dropped his toiletry bag into his suitcase.

“It’s four in the morning,” answered Arnav hoarsely.

Here was the darker side of love, pretending the person who knew you best—the person who brought you aspirin before you said you had a headache, who could sit down at a diner before you arrived and order your eggs just the way you liked them—didn’t know you at all, that he was daft or dumb or had to be reminded of the simplest things. “I don’t like to rush before a flight,” Max said.

“Your flight isn’t for another four hours.”

Max felt himself moving on a conveyor belt, steadily drawn toward an argument he didn’t want to have. The battle was coming. It had been coming for weeks. And it was coming now. Now that Max had one foot out the door, they could lob their respective grenades without having to live with the fallout.

Max dropped his towel, already hard. Sex was the wrench he most enjoyed throwing into the conveyor belt, certainly the most gratifying way of cutting off a confrontation, of jamming the proverbial works. It was hardly fail proof, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. “Which means we have time to say good-bye.” He crawled across the bed, into the warm yellow blanket of light cast by the bedside lamp, and knelt by Navi’s side. Stroking himself with one hand, he ran the other through the fur on Arnav’s chest. He tugged first one nipple, then the other, then traveled south, to the thick, musky nest between Navi’s legs, his fingers combing through the hair, tugging, before wrapping themselves around the stubby shaft of his boyfriend’s slumbering cock. “We have time to say good-bye, like, two or three times.”

Arnav retrieved Max’s hand from under the sheet and said flatly, “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Max collapsed like a puppet on snipped strings. “You’re wrong.” His head lolled to the side in a show of theatric frustration. He gazed at Navi with innocent eyes and said, this time with an air of great solemnity, “Will you stop! Do you want to draw blood and check my lithium levels? Everything’s fine.”

Throwing the covers to one side, Arnav bounded out of bed, stormed into the bathroom, and shut the door. Max wanted to call out, but the loud gush of pee made the silence between them deeper, more rigid and impassable. When Navi emerged, he stood, naked, hands on hips, waiting. “Everything is not fine. You’re averaging three, four hours of sleep a night. Your mood is all over the place. You were a complete jerk to that waiter last night.”

“And I apologized to him.”

“You don’t think I know you by now? You’re swinging like a madman from tree to tree. I’m just waiting for the vine to break.”

“I’m working,” Max explained. With the carnal detour he’d hoped to travel blocked, he sensed that sincerity was the only route open to him. Or rage. He certainly had it in him to throw a tantrum, especially now, with three weeks’ worth of psychotropic drugs dissolving in the drain, but he tried for the gentler, more reasonable path. Hugging his knees to his chest, he went on. “I’m finally working again.”

“What are you talking about
finally
? You’ve been working since you started.”

“Yeah, but now I’m in a groove. I’m almost done. And it’s
good
.” Work: here was his first defense for all misbehavior—insomnia, oversleeping, overeating, forgetting to eat entirely, brooding, neediness, acting like a jerk, jerking off five times a day. The only defense that mattered. “You’d rather have me where I was when the radio wouldn’t tune? When once every third day I might grab a snippet I could work with. Something I could barely hear. Some faint little melody I had to chase down before it sunk back into static or broke into noise. Noise. Or would you rather have me here, where I am now? Where the station’s been playing twenty-four hours a day for—”

“Three weeks. I know how long.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Nearly a month of solid work! I’m supposed to apologize or something? I finished the second act, Navi. That’s a good thing. That impossible fucking act. Why aren’t you excited about that?”

“It’s not a good thing,” Navi countered, “sleeping three hours a night.”

“When music is the first thing I hear in the morning and the last thing I hear at night, and everything else, everything that’s not it, is a fucking distraction, that
is
a good thing.”

Arnav may have been stung, but Max knew he wasn’t fragile enough to crack at being called a distraction. He also knew Arnav wasn’t crazy, though he wasn’t above trying to make him appear so.

“You know I’m happy that you’re working. But what kind of work are you doing on three hours of sleep?”

“Stop saying that. I’m sleeping more than three hours,” answered Max more coolly. He aimed for poise, for the kind of imperturbability that might throw Arnav off his scent, but Arnav’s jaws were locked, and he wasn’t letting go.

Navi walked to his dresser and put on his little oblong spectacles, staring, blinking, as though Max were an exhibit meant to stir up curiosity and concern. “We went to bed at one.”

“And I woke up at four. Fine. Three hours. You know I can’t sleep when I travel,” Max said lamely. Then, with rising heat: “I don’t need you counting sheep for me. Or giving me etiquette lessons. Or anything. I’m fine. Just like I fucking am.”

Arnav returned to his side of the bed. His granny distaste for profanity tightened his mouth into a thin, straight line, but he folded his legs under him and took Max’s hand in his. “You’re flying solo.”

Now it was Max’s turn to bound off the bed. He went to his dresser, retrieved a few more T-shirts (though he’d already packed more than he would possibly need), and dropped them in his bag. “You say I’m not taking my pills. I say I am. Are you counting them?”

“You wouldn’t leave them in the bottles. You’re too smart for that. You’d flush them down the toilet.”

Wrong,
Max thought, diving through the loophole of his lie with this slightest of technicalities. “So you are counting them?”

“I’m worried about you!” It wasn’t often that Max saw anyone as even-keeled as Arnav abandon equanimity. He seldom heard the deep, mellow voice that supported him like bedrock quake with such high emotion. Ready for it (for anything!) as Max thought he was, the sound of Navi approaching tears left him undone. But he could not, would not concede. Now that his mind had a taste of clear, fluid, creative freedom, he refused to slip back into the thick, jellylike waters of lithium and Depakote, where his mood might have been stable but his brain refused to swim at its quickest pace, where the stream was perfectly calm but also silted and slow, and a beach full of radios (there for no other reason than to torture him) refused to tune. Max had music now, and now was the only thing that mattered, no matter the harm, no matter the price.

“I know you,” Arnav finished dismally. “I know when you’re working out of a good place. And I know when you’re high as a kite.”

Max leveled his eyes and, meeting his own dare, said, “You can’t stand it when I’m successful.”

Arnav lifted his glasses and rubbed the weariness from his eyes. “That’s it, Max. You got me. Because up until now I’ve been holding you back. Watching you wither away in obscurity.”

“It’s good that I’m going,” Max answered. Stuffed as his bag now was, he had to lie on top of it to wrestle the zipper shut. “It’s good I’m getting out of here.”

“Because Evelyn is so much more supportive than I am. You honestly think you’re going to write there with everything that’s going on?”

Max did. He may have been kidding himself, but he did. In fact, it sounded to him like the perfect plan. Later that afternoon, he and Benji, Cat, and Claudia would descend on the house on Palmer Street, filling it one last weekend before they admitted his grandfather to Saratoga’s best geriatric nursing facility and Evelyn began her search for a smaller, more manageable home.

By Monday, after delivering Henry to St. Anthony’s Home for the Aged, after his mother and uncle (and, by all accounts, almost aunt) had returned to their lives, he would find himself with two precious weeks of writing time in an undisturbed room. A room of his own, where he could rest assured that Evelyn wouldn’t come poking at him in the middle of the night with maddening accusations. She had no designs on shoving even a single, solitary, dulling pill down his throat. Instead, she’d offered him time, a room, nothing more (what else was there?), all in exchange for keeping her company over dinner. “Evelyn’s excited about my writing,” Max said as he stepped into a pair of underwear, pulled a striped purple tank top over his head. “She didn’t invite me there so she could sit at my bedside with a notebook. She invited me there to work.”

“She invited you there because she’s going to be lonely. Understandably lonely, rattling around in that house all by herself. She’s going to want you to sit in her lap all day.”

“She married a porcupine. You don’t think she learned how to step away from Henry when he was working? How to give him space?”

“I think she doesn’t know you well enough to know when
not
to step away. That’s the problem.”

“I don’t need a social worker, Arnav. Or a sleep therapist. Or another fucking psychopharmacologist. The only thing I need right now is a cheerleader.”

“And the Fishers are going to do that for you?”

“Better than you, looks like.”

“You’ve known these people for less than a year, and suddenly they’re your family. They’re the de Medicis. They’re the patrons of your art, not those of us who have lived with your bull—”

“Bullshit,” Max practically spit the word out for him. “Stop being so churchy! You can’t even say ‘bullshit,’ for fuck’s sake.” Max wheeled his suitcase to the door and stopped. “And they’re not my
patrons
. I don’t need their money. Unless you’re talking about their love and support.”

Navi let this pass with a roll of the eyes.

“And what does knowing them for a year—”

“Less than a year.”

“Have to do with it? I knew you four months before we moved in together.”

“And you probably agreed to that because you were manic.”

Max turned off the light. Two dark silhouettes stared across the cold blue of a shadowy, starlit space. “They
are
supportive and loving,” he said to break the impasse. “And if you can’t be? Do me a favor: stay out of my way.”

Four banged-up baggage carousels spread across the lower level of the airport. The digital display signs that hung over each to indicate the arriving flight numbers were uniformly dark, which left Benji to guess which whining silver daisy wheel serviced Flight 2732 from Dallas/Fort Worth. He’d chosen the fourth, based entirely on a towering hulk who reminded him of Johnny Cash, a face carved, he imagined, by the unforgiving Texas sun, dressed from head to toe in black, a Stetson tipped down over his eyes. Trying to locate Max according to the costumes of potential copassengers was uncertain business. There was no telling where these people hailed from. But Max, who twenty minutes ago had sent a text that simply read
Landed!
, had been unresponsive since. Johnny Cash seemed the best bet.