All the Lasting Things (28 page)

A jowly woman with thinning hair jabbed an angry finger in her ear, a gesture that carried with it an urgent need for a state closer to silence, as universally understood as a hand pressed to the throat means
I’m choking!
“It’s not a library,” he gruffed, turning the volume down as much as he dared. Radiohead sang of being crushed like a bug, of growing wings, and Benji mouthed the words with them. He boarded the plane not when the flight attendant called for first class but when the dwindling herd of passengers made it clear that the plane was leaving. He took his seat, pulled down his sunglasses, which Cat would have found unforgivable—Really? Are you that cool, Mr. Mover and Shaker?—and sank back into the unyielding cushions, the closest thing to an embrace he had allowed himself all day.

Eyes closed, music blaring, he felt gratitude for the slight movement of the plane beneath him, the extended foreplay of a long taxi before the climax (delayed once for traffic; delayed twice for a passenger in need of the restroom) of takeoff. His sigh of relief left him nauseous, as if he’d robbed a bank and the getaway car was actually getting away. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face. Then: the tap of a hand.

Benji ignored it at first, pretending to be asleep, but when it came again, insistent and unwelcome as room service when you’re flat out and jerking off on the hotel bed, he ripped the Wayfarers from his face and turned to his seatmate like a lion ready to feed. The kid beside him—eighteen, twenty—smiled without apology. She was a California beauty who wore her looks loosely, as if she didn’t even know they were there, with pale blue eyes that looked out on the world with casual interest, and a lax bun of sun-streaked hair knotted at the top of her head. She finished a sentence Benji couldn’t hear. He plucked a bud out of his ear.

“You okay?” She laughed.

“Fine,” Benji deadpanned.

“Because you’ve got ahold of the seat arms like you’re trying to rip them off.” Again no response. “Nervous flier?”

Benji loosened his grip, put his hands dumbly in his lap. “I guess.”

“Want a drink?” The girl toggled her head at the flight attendant in the process of delivering a gin and tonic two rows ahead. “They’re free.”

“I’m fine.”

“Cool.”

He went back to his music, aware that denying himself a wee bottle of Tanqueray meant nothing with a small pill-shaped plastic case in his bag in which rattled three Percocets. The magic beans he’d kept all this time, in case the day came when he needed a stalk to climb away on. No, he told himself. No. But why then had he brought them? Why had he kept them? Why make a miserable day all the more miserable?

He hitched himself to the steely riff of Radiohead and let it carry him where it would. He stood on a bridge. The railing would either hold him or it wouldn’t.

Sometimes you take La Cienega. Sometimes you take the 405.

EPILOGUE

T
he woman is five months along. The farthest she’s ever been. The first, she lost at eight weeks; the second, at four. Fleetingly she thinks,
I’m thirty-eight. How many more chances do I get?
The old fear—familiar but still startling—tugs at her, but she finds she can hold on to it now. It’s balanced against a strength rooted deep inside her, a sense of possibility, of—dare she even think it?—invincibility that comes with her swelling belly. She arrived early with her blanket, with her bag of cheese and crackers and grapes, a bottle of wine and two stemmed cups made from recyclable plastic. She is celebrating. They are celebrating. A promotion is cause to celebrate. A promotion is also, she realizes, cause to be late. She searches the crowd, looking across the dusky field of the Village for the bald black head she knows so well, held tall and (when heels are involved) high above the crowd, the white dress with the giant navy dots, the killer yellow shoes. (Who, she asked earlier that morning, wears pumps to the park?) She taps the face of her watch as though it’s betraying her.

It is an uncommonly cool summer night on the outskirts of Alluvia, New York. The lawn is filled with couples, with families, with groups of gathering friends who’ve driven from Albany, Schenectady, Saratoga, beyond. They stretch out on tasseled blankets, batik tapestries, on grass-stained sheets set aside for such occasions. They talk. They argue over the news. They eat. The sky darkens like a glass of water in which someone’s dipped an inky brush, from violet to blue to almost black. There are fireflies. There are, for a moment, birds diving to feast on them.

Everyone watches the birds until someone says those aren’t birds, they’re bats, and a ripple of panic and delight moves through the crowd.
Bats!
People flat on their backs, hands covering their faces, laughing and cringing and crying,
Bats!
But soon enough the bats are gone, and the musicians and singers take the stage, which rides above the grass like a barge of light, a radiant yellow boat with women in black gowns and men in tuxedos slowly taking their seats on deck. They tune their instruments. The crowd’s attention, braided together for a single second by the strange tentative sounds, unravels again. They mistake it for the start, and a surge of enthusiasm, frayed at the edges with impatience, with uncertainty—
Should I be somewhere else? Doing something else?
—travels across the field as through a snapped elastic band.

Still, she looks for that head, that dress. Fearing it will soon be too dark to see, that they will miss each other, that she will be left alone with her cheddar and grapes, she feels a hot wind of anger blowing through her. It threatens to sweep her off the blanket, to carry her like a kite, up and out of the park, out of the day she’s so carefully planned, but she manages to stay. She ties herself down with a string of faith, flimsy in the face of her lover’s new ten-hour workdays, but still strong enough to hold. All this is for her. For her.

After all, it’s her wife who insisted they come. It’s she who loves opera. She who owns every CD of the boy who wrote it. Such a sad story. She pops a grape into her mouth and pulls what strands she can from a tale she’s heard a handful of times in the thirteen years they’ve been together. It’s an opera based on
Mrs. Dalloway.
No, that’s not right. She always makes that mistake. It’s not
Mrs. Dalloway
or
A Room of One’s Own
—the only two she’s read—but the other one. The one about the sea. Technically it’s not an opera because it was never finished. Technically, though only a professional might hear its faults, it’s a fragment. But this fragment, her wife believes, is better than most
opéras complets
. Its fragments written fifty years ago (a semicentennial concert, the event listing said) by a boy, or not a boy, but someone who died very young (how did he die, again?), who was twenty? Twenty-one? She forgets how old—if her memory is this bad now!—but it was something terrible. Something sad. Maybe cancer or something about a boat?

She squints her eyes and sweeps the crowd like a lamp from a lighthouse. That’s it! Not the sea, but a lighthouse. She chastises herself: It’s called
Lighthouse
, stupid. And there it is: the dress. She raises her phone, turning on the app that sends color-coded pulses of light, a Morse code of their own making for exactly this purpose, finding one another in a crowd. The music begins just as the two of them settle in. There is no time for talk. No time to ask about the other’s day. The crowd quiets. They kiss quickly as her wife smooths the dotted dress and she herself peels the foil top from the wine, as if nothing were amiss, as if the night wasn’t nearly ruined.

Eight weeks. Four weeks. Twenty-some years. If she thinks about it, it’s all so sad. So terribly heavy, if you let it be. It can leave you stripped and naked and utterly alone. The thoughts dance in her mind, tiny threads hanging from a sweater that she has to choose, deliberately choose,
not
to pull. Satisfying as unraveling can be. Sad as the world sometimes is, she also knows its beauty, its rare and occasionally breathtaking charms. There are days it leaves her helpless, paralyzed with happiness, afraid to move lest she set the clock ticking again and bring it all closer to its end.

She touches her belly. They clink plastic glasses. Five months. Five months. The cello rises in a wave that crashes into silence. Then the violins. Then a boy, barely visible to her, so tiny at this distance under his yellow veil of light, sings in a clear, liquid soprano, “Tomorrow.”

They own everything he ever recorded, but this is the only thing he lived to write. Who knows what he might have done?

“If it’s fine—tomorrow.”

He certainly would have finished his opera, she thinks. He was so close. She feels sure of this. But. But. She wants to say something to him, to speak privately, as if in prayer, to thank him for this moment, this night. She puts one hand on her wife’s leg, on the soft silk of the spotted dress. She eats another grape. Everything seems possible. Everything seems right. She closes her eyes and tries. She tries, but it feels so silly. The words won’t come. But if she does this, she feels the need to do it right. To call his attention, if his attention is there (somewhere out there) for the calling. (There are days she doesn’t know what to believe.) But how to begin?
Her memory!
she laments. How to begin, how to do it right, how to thank him for one incandescent moment, when she cannot, for the life of her, remember his name?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
he following people have my deepest gratitude:

My editor, Carmen Johnson, and my agent, Kate Garrick, both of whom so generously helped me discover a new and better book in the one I’d written;

My friends and family, some of whom read earlier drafts and provided me with encouragement and tremendously insightful critiques, all of whom have offered their love, support, humor, free psychological consults, career counseling, and never-ending wisdom: Adesh Brasse, Liz Budnitz, David Cafiero, Ken Corbett, Christina Crosby, Michael Cunningham, Matt Feldman, Meg Giles, Michelle Hand, Lyle Ashton Harris, Beverly Hopson, Kevin Hopson, Tara Hopson, Janet Jakobsen, Daniel Kaiser, James Lecesne, Leyden Lewis, Debie Lowe, Christian McCulloch, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, Dave Purcell, Seth Pybas, Sal Randolph, and photographer extraordinaire Matthew Sandager;

Ian Holloway, for whom I don’t have enough endearments;

Tyler and Grace Hopson, Bird and Mila Giles-Purcell, and Sophía Holloway Osorno, who are too young to read this book at the moment but belong in this list;

Matthew Rottnek and Joan Swanson, for patching a sometimes leaky ship and keeping it afloat;

And Melvin Galloway. For everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2015 Matthew Sandager

David Hopson earned an MA in American and English literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
All the Lasting Things
is his first novel.