“Only because she keeps lowering the bar,” Henry said coolly. “If I remember my phone number, it’s a banner day. No, Leo. The sun is going down. I feel it. Every day is a little bit hazier than the last. Soon there won’t be anything left to burn off the fog. Life in a cloud. I don’t get any say about that. But how I spend the few moments of clarity I have left, the scenery I opt to take in on my moderately severe descent, that I get to choose.” He shook his head and lowered his eyes. “I’m done, Leo. I’ve spent enough time wondering if this or that book is the one I was meant to write. Is this the one that will last, the one that will outlast me, or is it just another blip? The awards, the reviews, all the crap that every writer says he doesn’t care about? Well, we care. I care. And now I want a break.” At this, Henry reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a stack of index cards. Some were blank. Some were filled with his tight, cramped script. He set off shuffling through them.
“What are those?” Leo asked.
When Henry didn’t answer, Evelyn did. “The death of me. He writes on them so he doesn’t forget. They’re like petals off the cherry tree. Everywhere you look. The other day, I slipped on one and nearly fell down the stairs.”
“Nobody fell down the stairs,” Henry reported, flipping through the cards with failing restraint. “Damn it. I know I put it in here.” Midway through his second pass, he found what he was looking for: a scrap of torn paper, ruled with thin blue lines and ragged on one side from the wire rings of a notebook. Henry trapped it between two fingers and held it out to Roger, shaking it like bait.
It read: 11-8-21-9.
“What’s this?” Roger asked.
“The combination.”
“For the safe? Henry. You promised me.”
“I never did.”
“What about the computer I bought you?”
“For my birthday,” Henry said, visibly proud of the memory.
“You told me you were using it.”
“I do use it. It’s a very nice place to tape my notes.”
“Dad likes being the only middle-class American without an e-mail address,” Benji chimed in. “It’s a point of honor.”
“You’re telling me you have one copy of the book?”
“Which you’ll read. And put back. And retrieve sometime in the not too distant future. When I’m gone.”
“I’m sorry, Henry, but you do know how stupid that is? In this day and age? Forget about the ease of writing. Forget that you can edit without blackening your fingers on typewriter ribbon. Typewriter ribbon! It’s plain reckless. You’re honestly telling me you have one copy of eight years’ work?”
Henry shrugged. “What do I need with more than one copy?”
“Flood. Fire. Theft.”
“You sound like an insurance salesman, Leo. What do you think the safe is for?”
~ ~ ~
Jane said never ask too much. But I’m not thinking of this as I stand on the porch. It’s Christmas Eve. When I find Jane gone, I stand on the porch and ask Evelyn to watch the baby. She calls the police. Each morning, I leave to join the men in padded navy jackets and fur hats from which their badges shine. We trudge deep into the snow-buried woods, climbing fallen branches and cracking through the ice-jagged streams. Maybe she ran away, they say. Maybe the baby was too much. But I know. I know. I go out before the sun is up, and Evelyn is at the door, waiting for me to put the baby in her arms. Claudia, washed and fed by the time I get home, snuggles in a pink blanket and smells softly of soap. There isn’t a day she isn’t ready for me. And then it’s spring. And then it’s the day I go to the door to find Evelyn waiting in the bright, early light. She wears a white dress with cherries on it, and there’s the smell of grass that already needs cutting, but instead of handing Claudia to her, I reach out and take her hand, but the words won’t come. She doesn’t let go of my hand. When I can speak, I say, Will you? But my tongue is a weight, and the rest of the sentence is trapped under it. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need anything more. Yes, she says, yes.
5
Because the widow couldn’t bear to sell the house, she rented it out. It was a grand cottage, situated on a superior stretch of lakefront, Adirondack chairs as red as candied apples and a lawn just large enough for croquet. Her husband had been a photographer who’d done a residency at Yaddo as a young man and found at the nearby racetrack the subject that established his name. There wasn’t a room that wasn’t filled with large black-and-white photos of mud-spattered jockeys and thundering horses, that wasn’t decorated to suggest the artful artlessness of equestrian chic. The worn leather club chairs, the tartan wallpaper and silver candlestick lamps, the shelves and shelves of leather-bound books that only the dourest of summer renters would dare pick up. Gargantua and Pantagruel? The Wealth of Nations? Benji limped through his first tour in a state of consumerist wonder. “Ralph Lauren had a wet dream,” he said, fingering the camel-colored cashmere blanket draped casually over the foot of the bed.
But after three blissful days of residency, he had proven himself a perfect specimen of human adaptability. He put aside all envy and derision and met the morning like a king, propped against a mountain of jacquard pillows in the gigantic sleigh bed, ready to receive his breakfast on a tray, if only he could find someone to bring it. He listened to Cat in the shower — the beat of falling water, a snippet of song — and felt, finally, at peace. He had a view of the lake, the sky, the flawless blue of a mid-September morning that seemed to mirror the clarity of his mind. Keeping what his friends in recovery called a “day count” had always made him feel more like an alcoholic than falling asleep holding the bourbon bottle, but secretly scarcely an hour passed when he didn’t add up the time since his last drink. Three days. Seventeen. Thirty-six. The only chemicals to pass his lips now were prescribed by his general practitioner, and every milligram he took he took according to the letter. His respect for Dr. Gratin’s dosing requirements may have started with Evelyn, with a worried mother’s silent pledge to be the Percocet bottle’s childproof top, but as the weeks passed, with Cat more and more by his side, Benji felt the weight, the responsibility of his sobriety shift to his own shoulders. He ticked off the days like mileposts on a marathon, with the swelling pride of a challenge met.
Of course Cat McCarthy wasn’t the first girl to inspire Benji to cork the wine. He’d dried out for Marisol Alvarez and her macrobiotic diet. And Daphne Chu, whose own commitment to conquering step seven spurred her to fill two notebooks with the names of people she once wronged. And Angelica Tottencourt, self-professed psychic, whose inner spiritual guide failed to inform her that Benji’s teetotaling, like their relationship, had an expiration date. But to compare Cat to Angelica or Daphne or Marisol or anyone else who came before her was to hold a birthday candle to a bonfire. Others simply vanished in the heat.
Benji didn’t want to spend his mornings barely conscious or let another afternoon pass in a blear, not when he could open his eyes to the easterly sun and see Cat sleeping beside him. Before Hank, an ex — competitive rower and neighbor to the north, zipped across the square of placid pewter lake framed by the bedroom window, Benji’s arm had journeyed across the mattress, reaching for the sweet, warm hillocks that Cat made under the sheet. He moved more like an old man than the svelte, steel-shouldered, septuagenarian neighbor — still slow and sore, encumbered — but closer he came, closer, until he fit himself to Cat’s curved and slumbering shape like a puzzle piece. His hand found her hip. His lips brushed the downy fringe on the back of her neck. He practically vibrated with the competing urges to wake her up and let her sleep. As he nestled against her he felt her swim up from the depths, pause before surfacing completely. She let him suffer. But the louder his breath sounded in her ear, the harder he grew against the small of her back, the dearer, he could tell, she found his agony. She’d roll over and look up at him, laughing through a yawn. There was no sour breath. No crust sealing shut the corners of her eyes. No cowlicked hair. In time, the faults that made her human would assert themselves, but in the poetically sealed vault of their three-day tryst, Benji sensed only her perfection.