“Your sister called.”
“And by the look of it worked her charms on you. I could have told you that was going to happen. Why did you answer the phone?”
“To piss her off, I guess.”
“Mission accomplished?”
“You didn’t say anything about Broadway,” Benji said, hurt. “Or needing to be in New York last week. You said you weren’t due there for another—”
“Molly.” She said the name apprehensively, as though it were a curse best not spoken, then explained, “I left that whole thing very open-ended. And it wasn’t Broadway. I don’t know where she gets half the — Broadway by way of Weehawken, maybe.”
“Opportunity of a lifetime. That’s what she said.”
Cat sat on the side of the bed and pumped a few pearls of lotion onto her water-beaded legs. “Oleanna in a church basement is hardly the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said flatly, rubbing the skin to a high, fragrant sheen.
“So why didn’t you go?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t like David Mamet.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
She questioned his certainty with a wry grin before returning to her moisturizer. “Okay. Maybe I like what I’m doing here more,” she said.
The idea that he himself might be the reason beneath this vague answer broke like sunrays into a recess of dim hope. He’d been so occupied with whether he was falling in love with Cat that he hadn’t stopped to consider whether she might be falling in love with him. “And what’s that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
She turned to indulge the other leg while Benji, prick stiffening anew, further indulged this fantasy of reciprocation. As if the thought of Cat’s devotion weren’t alluring enough, he found the performance of her morning skin care ritual hopelessly erotic.
“I’m fighting evil robber barons,” she said.
Benji sighed. This wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Not only because it had nothing to do with him but because he’d already gone to considerable lengths to clear an old acquaintance’s name. “I told you. Nick Amato is not a robber baron. He’s a real estate developer.”
“Who happens to be developing what should be historically protected land. It’s a cemetery, Benji. For war heroes.”
“Who no one has visited in a hundred years.”
“So that means we should go and dig them up? Who digs up a cemetery?”
“That doesn’t make him an evil robber baron,” Benji repeated.
“What does it make him then?”
It was a lure, playfully dangled, but Benji gave it a serious snap. “He was my sister’s boyfriend,” he said. “They probably would have gotten married.”
“Probably? Intriguing. What stopped them?”
He could have started down that bump-riddled road to a pretty good story, but the sight of Cat, gilded by the light that shimmered off the lake, had him sinking into the pillows with dreamy satisfaction. She looked like one of Degas’ bathers, all golds and irresistible pinks. He retrieved Cat’s phone from the jumbled bedding and snapped a quick photo. She turned at the sound of the old-fashioned shutter click and, with a clowning moue, held out her palm. Unapproved photos were not part of her contract. With a frown of his own, Benji surrendered the phone and said, “Your sister thinks we’re playing house.”
“I love my sister,” answered Cat, pausing as one does before equivocating the unequivocal, “but she can be a bitter, bitter pill.”
“She said you don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Because I’m not a waitress, right? I’m so lucky. What she calls luck, I call the death of my parents.” Cat gave Benji a dispirited smile and started on her elbows. “She acts like she doesn’t know where that money comes from. How did I pay for the BFA or the summerhouse or any of the other things she thinks I’m so lucky to have? The same way she paid for a Range Rover and two divorces. A big fucking insurance policy.”
Benji breathed deeply. The perfume of Cat’s soap and body lotion worked its way into his system, rocketing every available drop of blood between his legs. He felt light-headed, ashamed to be fully erect in such close proximity to Cat’s dead parents, but undeniably ready to fuck all the same. He folded his hands over his lap and did his best to look attentive and grave.
“She has dreams for me,” Cat went on. “Mama Rose dreams. Which makes me either June or Gypsy. It’s unclear which. I haven’t tried stripping yet.”
“If ever you want to practice.”
She gave him a quick, teasing kiss and hopped off the bed. Shimmying across the room, she danced an impromptu burlesque behind her towel before dropping it to the floor and stepping into a pair of striped cotton panties.
“Molly wanted to be an actor?”
“No, but she was always the one bound for the spotlight. Or so everyone thought. Or my dad, at least.”
“And what was Molly’s talent?”
“Resentment? She won the science fair one year, and that was it: she was going to be a doctor. Find the cure for cancer. That kind of thing.” Cat pulled on torn jeans and a fitted sweater with flared sleeves while she talked, then sized herself up in the standing mirror.
“She’s a rich biotech researcher. What does she have to complain about?”
“Her money’s pretty much gone. And she tells people she’s a biotech researcher. She’s an assistant, actually. She isn’t curing cancer. She’s watching bacteria bloom.” Cat ran a wand of colorless gloss over her lips and pressed them together, more or less satisfied with the result. “She told me she could have won the Nobel Prize if only my parents hadn’t died.”
“No pressure there.”
“Right? My parents’ dying is all she ever needed to explain why her life has been so — I don’t know what she’d call it. Ordinary.”
Benji understood completely where Molly was coming from but, because this was a fledgling nemesis they were talking about, felt compelled to set his camp on the other side of the fence. “Like winning the Nobel Prize is the only way of making a name for yourself.”
Cat turned to Benji with an arched brow. “Like you never feel that compulsion?”
“What?” he answered innocently. “I don’t want to win a Nobel Prize.”
“No, just all the other ones.” She batted her eyelashes and, with a southern accent, drawled, “If only I were famous.”
Benji supposed she meant to imitate him, but, seeing that he wasn’t gay or Blanche DuBois, he thought she fell short of the mark. “But you — you actually belong in a spotlight.”
“At least my sister thinks so. Which is why I need to be pushed. And punished.”
Benji got out of bed at Cat’s clapping command. He pulled on his clothes, brushed his teeth, readied himself to plunge into the day. A knot of dread tightened in his stomach at the thought of parting ways. He didn’t want to let go. Not even for the few hours Cat needed to run errands and rally to save the graves of the long-forgotten dead. Benji had, for a moment, broken free of time, lost track of the world and his place in it. He delighted in not being certain whether it was Sunday or Monday, and he paused now before opening the door to the wider world. He didn’t want to end this rare honeymoon, to leave his horse-filled hermitage. He didn’t want to step back into time. He didn’t want to step back into himself.
Carefully, Cat eased the car out of a gravel drive with a treacherous blind spot. The first hints of fall dusted the leaves, streaming, moth-eaten banners flecked with red, yellow, and ochre in the bright-blue air. Benji fed his Wilco CD into the stereo slot, flipped to his favorite song. He leaned his head against the window and drummed a finger absently on the door handle. He wanted to say he’d seen some new possibility, that Cat had shown him a new possibility. He wanted to say something about light. About Cat being the light. What he said was, “We should do a sex tape.”