“But all this bickering,” said Benji, unafraid to ring the same bell more than once. “It isn’t good for either of us.”
“So stop bickering.”
“Easy for you to say. He’s not on you all the time.”
But Henry’s being on him wasn’t the problem. He’d had forty years to get used to the taste of his father’s vinegary disposition, and he had. More than the arid plains of his father’s foul moods, it was the march over the peaks and valleys of Henry’s illness that scared and exhausted Benji, that made him long for the Motel 6. He had no interest in watching the slow, disconcerting descent or measuring the degrees by which illness reduced the literary lion to a shadow of his former self.
Maybe Claudia was right: he had no right to complain. Evelyn made Benji’s lemonade and picked up the potato chip bags he left in his wake. With a few generous checks, she kept his creditors at bay. He didn’t have to worry about evading his roommates on rent day or making his share of the electric bill. His thankless run as Hamlet’s dead father had come to an early end. And perhaps best of all, he’d won the sudden interest of a girl who, before his fall, barely gave him the time of day. He had no clue why, but falling from the bridge had set a flame dancing over his head, and Cat, quick as a moth, headed straight for it. Maybe it made him tragic in a sexy sort of way. Maybe it reminded her of her brother, who, a few years after their parents’ awful death (airplane crash), finished a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and (accidentally or not) drove himself into a highway divider. Maybe she wanted someone to rescue.
Whatever the case, she showed up daily to take him on the short walks he could manage in his big black boot cast or lull him to sleep with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy or, lately, late at night after his parents had gone to bed, gently jerk him off while riding the fingers of his one good hand. He was thirty-nine; she was twenty-five; and they were, out of fear of being discovered or uncertainty over what they were doing or perhaps merely in deference to the immobilizing silicone and plaster encasing two of Benji’s limbs, having sex like unschooled pubescent teens, but these sweet, relatively chaste tumblings were unexpectedly taking root, touching Benji in ways countless other carnal encounters had not. Nothing in his life became him like almost leaving it.
He hesitated to use the word love. Where, except in the great, shattering romances of Britain and Russia and France, did anyone fall in love so fast? Still, toying with the idea, Benji thought I love you, I love you as he kissed Cat’s fluttering eyelids and practiced an increasingly deft, one-handed maneuver to unfasten her bra. Twice a week, Benji reported to Ernest Salter, whose parades down some of psychotherapy’s mustier corridors were a condition of the patient’s release, and agreed with the good doctor’s diagnosis: a budding romance would be… improvident. The idea of submitting to any therapist had terrified Benji, who doubted his ability to play before a professional the part of the emotionally unhinged bridge jumper. How to sustain the illusion that he’d meant to do what he’d done for anyone beyond his family (who, with the exception of Claudia, was only too happy to let him forget it)? But Salter’s inquisitive stare proved more kindly than penetrating, and soon Benji relaxed the need to temper his enthusiasm. “I think I love her,” he offered one day as an astonished non sequitur to a dream about a drowning elephant. To which Dr. Salter replied, in an unapologetic moment of Freudian devotion, “What does your mother make of this?”—this being the love, not the elephant.
Evelyn, six years her husband’s senior, congratulated herself for overlooking the couple’s considerable difference in age, unwilling to deprive her son the happiness that recent events convinced her he so seriously needed. Henry also approved, volubly and wholeheartedly, though his endorsement had little to do with Benji’s happiness. His radio had never really tuned to that channel, but he was glad to see Benji smitten with someone whose future promised more than a starring role in an exercise video.
“Don’t muck it up,” Henry said one morning, stabbing a piece of toast into an egg yolk and leveling the dripping point at his son. “I know you’re used to women with a higher nonsense-to-substance ratio, but this one has something to offer.”
“And what’s that?” Benji asked, glib but genuinely curious.
“She reads beyond the ingredient list on a Luna bar, for starters.”
“She’s an actor, Dad. You don’t like actors.”
“I don’t like disillusionment. There’s a difference.” He rapped his fork on the rim of his plate like a judge bringing his court to order. “We’re not starting down that road. I’m done with career counseling. I said she’s a keeper.”
Benji had the distinct impression that Cat could cut out his kidneys, sell them on eBay, and (as long as she could quote from Ulysses) remain a keeper in Henry’s book. Not that it mattered. Cat was a keeper, though Benji’s reason for thinking so had nothing to do with Joyce.
He loved Cat’s passion. The way she’d swoon for a tulip but took lilies as a personal affront. Or how, in one breath, she’d condemn the “incarceration of the underclass” and then, in the next, devise cruel, practically medieval punishments for anyone caught answering his cell phone in a restaurant or wearing sunglasses indoors. “Unless you’re blind,” she reasoned, “or just coming from the ophthalmologist, there’s no excuse.” He loved her weakness for buttermilk biscuits, the diplomatic ease with which she handled his parents, and how, before kissing him good-bye, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and ungently pulled. He loved that she hated words that ended in y, that she made exceptions for adverbs but refused to say tasty even when something was. He loved her eyes. And the line of Whitman tattooed in typewriter font on the inside of her wrist. And the sudden, shocking devotion he’d won by false means.
She’d rented all four seasons of Prodigy while he was in the hospital, all five of his films, even A Hamster for Hannah, and discussed them without mockery, seriously, as a body of (her word) work that might one day have him thanking Uta Hagen from the dais. He plugged her into his Oscar speech, his Tony speech, his Vague but Meaningful Lifetime Achievement Award speech — the monologues he should have stopped rehearsing in his twenties but hadn’t — and she fit. I’d like to thank the members of the academy and all the people who helped put me here. Mom and, ahem, Dad and Blah and Blah and Blah. And Cat. My beautiful Cat. Ma chère Catherine. My Catchenka. No matter how he said it, she fit perfectly.
Part of Claudia’s refusal to play ATM and provide him with funds for a stay at the Motel 6 was her disapproval of how he’d spend his time.
“Vicodin and Voluptuous Vixens,” she quipped.
She wasn’t wrong. (He’d once left the third installment of his favorite XXX franchise on a laptop he borrowed from her.) But Benji’s dream of making off to a hotel had as much to do with hoarding Cat for himself as it did with painkillers and porn. There, he imagined, they’d lie on a quilted coverlet and, day passing into night passing into day, float far beyond a sex life suitable for airing on a moderately racy Afterschool Special. If they didn’t have to worry about a sundowning Henry calling Cat by the name of his sixth-grade teacher, they might finally lose themselves and, carried away by something stronger than the polite little eddies of frottage and finger banging, discover one another. They’d be two explorers on a great, unsinkable raft, and nothing, not his incapacitating casts or the germiness and decidedly French fry smell of the bedspread, would hold them back.