The doctor who reminded him of this was a young black man named Malek with a perfectly bald head, a square face, and an overall stiffness that would have served him well in saluting. Accusingly, he’d asked if Benji knew the best defense in a car accident. “Better than a seat belt. Better than an air bag. Give up? Being drunk. It never fails. Drunk driver runs into Mom in her minivan. Who walks away? Not Mom. She sees it coming. She tenses up. That’s when bones break. But the drunk guy, he’s relaxed. He’s a rag doll. Did you ever try to break a rag doll? You know where he ends up? Sitting on the curb scratching his head. Give the jerk a Band-Aid and call it a night.”
But once this sour exchange was over, Benji’s prospects turned unexpectedly sweet. He clearly saw that the drunken state in which he’d been found might easily be read as the final flourish of a desperate man, and there were perks to being a desperate man, undeniable and welcome perks that, perkless as his life had been lately, he had no intention of surrendering so soon. His perceived psychological trauma required a longer stay at St. Anthony’s than anything he’d done to his body, but even these slight physical impairments lay beyond the psych ward’s parameters of care. His immobilized elbow and leg pardoned him from a frightful stay on the fifth floor, where his imagination, fed by visions of Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, furnished a frightening cast of cuckoo characters, loud and volatile and charismatically crazy. Instead, the nurses assigned him to a comfortable room among the generally infirm where they served up an adjustable bed, cable television, and a steady supply of pills that would have been murder to procure from Seth. Excepting his wheezing and annoyingly tight-lipped roommate, he might have been in an indulgent, if not terribly well-appointed, hotel.
Of course, Benji could have corrected them by now. Whatever happened on the bridge lacked the unambiguous intent of Madame Bovary gobbling up her arsenic or Inspector Javert flinging himself into the Seine. Benji’s recklessness may have bordered on a death wish, but he knew he’d been enjoying the fruits of a lie, as if he’d been feasting on a basket of sympathy and concern addressed to someone with a much more serious illness. Even with his tongue stitched and swollen, he could have scribbled on the pad his nurses provided him and told Claudia or his tearful and tiptoeing mother or the nice doughy social worker who looked in on him every other morning that they had it all wrong. But he’d spent two weeks tucked in a warm nest of communal misunderstanding, and, corrupt as it may have been, that, for the moment, was where he wanted to stay.
Which isn’t to say Benji didn’t feel guilty. How could he not? But whatever guilt his deceit stirred up, his store of ancient resentments quickly helped to settle. There were his father’s magniloquent speeches about the virtues of holding a job, a real job, a job that, unlike pet or apartment sitting, required the payment of taxes. The wan, worn admonition to “leave Benji alone” that counted as his mother’s primary defense, the eye-rolling impatience with which Claudia dismissed his career: he resented these things almost as much as he resented the career itself. A Hamster for Hannah, for God’s sake!
He took the D-list movies and bit roles in crappy regional reps in stride, with the sort of self-mocking humor common to men whose failures may in fact be their greatest success, but he hated the substantial scripts that passed him by. His greatest achievement (or at least the one with the most gravitas) — the miniseries in which he played Rimbaud’s brother — had had its plug pulled and sat collecting dust in some cryptlike vault under PBS, never to be seen. He hated the agents and directors who failed to see in him what he occasionally saw in himself. He hated the audiences who’d never heard of him or, worse, treating him like a trained monkey they happened upon in their favorite restaurants, bullied him into putting down his salad fork and saying the only four words they thought he knew—That’s what you think! The more slights Benji counted, the more forgivable, even justified, his lie seemed. To right a cosmic imbalance didn’t necessarily square with committing a great wrong.
Besides, his distress brought out Claudia’s kinder side, and he liked Claudia’s kinder side. The hospital allowed him, like the rest of the patients under psychiatric care, two one-hour visits of no more than two people per day, and he sank more comfortably into his stiff, pancake-thin pillows knowing that Claudia would be one of them. She brought him frozen fruit bars and thick, cold smoothies, the only forms of nourishment his poor tongue could take, and refreshed with tabloid and fashion industry trash the pile of mindless magazines that grew to teetering heights on his nightstand. And though she, too, wasn’t above urging him to take a job waiting tables or giving him a hard time for the few hundred dollars he borrowed here or there, she would quietly make sure that his uninsured fingers never touched a bill.
That all this eventually had to end came as no surprise to Benji. Who knew better than a childhood star the proverbial fate of all good things?
“We have a problem,” Claudia said, stepping into the room with a look that told him somehow, overnight, the honeyed spring that so satisfyingly flowed his way had run dry. No more magazines. No more smoothies. “They’re not willing to release you on your own.” She pushed a high-backed vinyl chair closer to the bed but stayed standing behind it, the coming pronouncements apparently wanting the severity of a podium, even a makeshift one. “I spoke with Dr. Malek. Agreeing to see a therapist isn’t enough. He’s not convinced you’re not a danger to yourself. He wants you supervised.”
The day before, the same Dr. Malek had dangled the promise of freedom like a hypnotist’s charm, so to have the spell broken now, with such callous sibling economy, brought an angry flush to Benji’s face. He reached for the pad he used to keep up his side of the conversation and wrote, Supervised?!
“That’s what he said.”
Benji grimaced. Of course, the only thing better than being in the hospital would be getting out of it, and he’d been looking forward to doing just that. He considered this unexpected twist in the road, trying to figure the best way around it. I’ll stay w/u, he wrote.
“And do what?” Claudia asked impatiently. “Wander off to find the next bridge?” She sat down in the chair as if suddenly very tired. “He’s right. We can’t let you hobble on back to the toolshed like nothing happened. Things don’t snap back to normal like that. I don’t know why I thought they would.”
He hadn’t planned beyond the toolshed — she had him there — but the thought of prolonging their afternoons together, of milking every last drop of Claudia’s kindness, brought the curl of a selfish smile to his lips. To spend the day drifting in the shallows of reality TV, sipping berry blasts on his sister’s calfskin couch: an unemployed actor could find worse ways to recuperate.
“Damn it, Benji.” She covered her eyes with her hands and rocked forward, elbows on knees. He watched a shudder move along her back and grinned against the pain in his mouth. He was such a problem, wasn’t he? What trouble would he get into next? He was ready to have a good laugh with her. Even if he ended up being the punch line, he’d laugh his way onto that calfskin couch.