He’d gone to the cottage with a rough sketch of Cat’s life, but the long conversations on the splintered gray dock, the dreamy postcoital confessions, allowed him to start filling in the lines with color. She was the daughter of a high school guidance counselor and a Joyce scholar whose monograph on micturition in Irish literature had been shortlisted for the James Russell Lowell Prize, a big deal in certain small circles. She’d told Benji in their first days together that her parents had “died in a plane crash,” but it wasn’t until she was half asleep in a lounge chair by the lake, offering her back to be slathered in sunscreen, that she admitted that rescue workers had discovered her father, still strapped to his seat, in an old woman’s garden. Her mother’s body had never been found.
Cat, who was only a year old at the time, remembered nothing of her parents or their tragic end, but Molly, her older sister and self-appointed surrogate mom, provided a store of painful memories for Cat’s most private monologues. She talked about her mother’s struggle with depression and her father’s rigorously managed drinking problem, but most of Cat’s memories focused on Molly or their brother, Dennis, or the decent but unpalatably Republican aunt and uncle who dutifully stepped in to raise them. Cat was less inclined to shine the spotlight on herself — an odd trait, Benji noted, for an actor — but he listened attentively to the tales she felt like telling, waiting for the moments when Cat appeared, when she, the secondary character in so many of her tales, stepped to the front of the stage. Then he caught a glimpse of the girl he was beginning to love.
And then there was the sex.
He’d imagined their days away from Palmer Street and the chaperoning eyes of his parents would be a time of discovery. And they were. They were, first, a lesson in what could and couldn’t be done with two of four extremities in casts. Without both arms to support his weight, the missionary position was out. As was anything that required standing for too long. He couldn’t cup her firm, young ass and pin her to the wall or take her in a handstand, holding on to her legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow. He tried standing behind her, his good hand braced on her back as she planted forward into downward dog, but soon the pain elbowed in like a bothersome third who wanted a piece of the action, and he had to lie down. He was best sitting or on his back, with Cat riding his lap or rising above him with calisthenic abandon or holding on to the headboard with a grip wide enough for motorcycle handlebars and lowering herself — ever so teasingly — onto his face.
It had been years since he’d paid attention to the subtle emotional tremors that attended sex, since he had cared enough for his partner to see her so vulnerably exposed, but the aftershocks of their lovemaking registered once again on the heart’s delicate apparatus. He saw the ways in which Cat could be generous or selfish or self-conscious or scared. He saw the peaks of her happiness. Shadows of a remoter grief. And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the first one to let go, roll to the other side of the bed, and fall asleep.
He might have been thirteen again, for the frequency and firmness of his hard-ons. Now, letting his mind wander across the pages of their compromised Kama Sutra, he slipped his hand under the tented sheet to treat himself to a few vigorous tugs. He trained an ear on Cat in the shower, trying to gauge when the water might shut off, if he could finish before she did, and had fallen halfway into a serious rhythm when the phone rang. The smooth glass face of Cat’s phone lit up. It chirped like a cricket atop the neatly stacked books on her nightstand. Benji fumbled for it. He’d never seen a picture of Molly, but the one displayed beneath her caller ID fit well enough with his preconception. Her curly, shoulder-length red hair, riotous freckles, and severe mirrored sunglasses squared with her willingness to meddle and, on occasion, make Cat cry. His fingers, two mischievous steps ahead of his brain, swiped across the screen and brought the phone to his ear.
“Molly?”
There was a pause. “Who’s this?” she asked, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing.
“It’s Benji,” he said, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of having to say more.
“Is my sister there?”
“She is, but she’s in the shower.”
Another pause. “What’s wrong with her voice mail?”
“Nothing,” he said cheerfully. “I just wanted to say hi. Introduce myself.”
“Oh. Hi.” She sounded deflated, as if the pleasantry, insincere though it was, had punched a hole in her peevish mood. But she recovered in no time. “Actually, now that we’re talking, I want to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s going on up there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, in Xanadu. You do know she was supposed to be in New York a week ago, don’t you?” She had the thick, sinusy voice of an unrepentant smoker and cleared her throat from time to time with a rough, bronchial bark. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. But, honestly, I’m at a loss.”
“She doesn’t have to be in New York until the end of the month.”
“I mean, who passes up an opportunity like that?” Molly asked, barreling over Benji’s protest like a professional linebacker taking on the JV team. “A Broadway play.”
Benji scoffed. “Where’d you get Broadway?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Molly sighed, softening toward the philosophical. “A thousand actors would kill for a chance like that. To be invited to an audition in New York City. By. A. Director.” She nailed his ignorance to a cross with each hammered word. “He saw Hamlet and asked to hear her read. She didn’t mention that either, hunh? I told her things like that don’t happen every day. She forgets how lucky she is. She doesn’t have to wait tables or tend bar or do half the unappealing things most actors have to do. You know what I’m talking about. Am I wrong? She rents a three-bedroom house on a lake while the rest of the cast is sleeping three to a room in some sad motel. I just hate to think of her passing up the opportunity of a lifetime to make sure the Civil War dead get their due. Or to play house. Or whatever it is she’s doing up there.”
Cat turned off the water and pulled back the shower curtain, brass rings zipping across the rod with the clarity of little bells. Benji, not knowing what else to say, said, “Revolutionary War.”
“Sorry?”
“The dead. Compton’s Mound? Revolutionary War, not Civil War.”
Molly managed to condense her skepticism, her utter lack of interest, into a single syllable, a hard little pellet of sound dropped displeasingly between them. “Hmph.” Then: “Tell her I called.”
Benji tossed the phone into the dunes of the down comforter without a good-bye and waited for Cat to open the door.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as soon as she saw his face. She stood in the doorway wrapping a towel tightly around her as the surrounding cloak of steam tattered into the room and disappeared.