7
Max sat on the top step of the porch, peeling paint from the board beneath his feet. He told himself to stop, but no sooner had he flicked away the evidence of his petty vandalism than his jangly and sleep-deprived nerves sent him back for another. And another. At this rate, he’d have the porch picked clean as bone by the time Evelyn appeared to refill his coffee. He took a deep breath and dug his phone from the pocket of his hoodie to check the time. Ten o’clock. She was, according to the schedule that she laid out, an hour late. But the thought of dialing her, of bothering her with his “where-are-yous,” withered under the memory of yesterday’s call. He had the feeling he’d offered her a prize to a sweepstakes she hadn’t entered.
He unlocked his touch screen with a laughably simple code and tapped a hasty message to Arnav.
She’s latte. Then: Late.
Patience came the immediate reply. A pale white talk bubble blossomed silently under Max’s apple-green one. He couldn’t stand the packaged noises that alerted him to incoming calls or, with the sound of a speeding jet, escorted outgoing e-mail, but he appreciated the tiny vibration, the heartbeat, that pulsed in his palm as Navi’s words appeared. She’ll be there.
Behind him the screen door croaked open, and out stepped Benji, debuting an ivory-handled cane he’d rescued from a box intended for the church tag sale. He wore gray sweatpants and a torn Radiohead T-shirt, over which he’d pulled a silk robe of navy-and-gold paisley raided from his father’s closet. If the robe, an ancient gift from Roger that Henry would neither wear nor throw away, made an absurd statement, the cane was its exclamation mark. “G’morning, Nephew,” he said, aiming with his best British accent for upstairs Downton Abbey but landing somewhere closer to Eliza Doolittle.
“G’morning, Uncle,” answered Max.
Benji planted the cane’s rubber tip and lowered himself gingerly, as if by lever, onto the step next to Max. “How did you sleep?” he asked.
It seemed more polite than deceitful to lie, to not mention how he’d tossed and turned, running a finger over the blistered minutes of conversation with Claudia. Like pulling teeth, he’d told Arnav, who enjoyed trumping one clichéd phrase with another. Like getting blood from a stone. Like rolling a rock uphill. Unsettled first by Benji’s insistence that everything would be fine, then by Evelyn’s endless shock and weeping, then by the rising din of a confounded Henry being chased through the house, Max had whispered a play-by-play into Arnav’s ear, until, finally, at three, he’d taken a pill to fall asleep. Three hours later, he’d taken another to wake up. Along with the lithium, Neurontin, Zyban, and quarter tab of Klonopin. “Fine,” he said.
“Did you eat? Are you hungry? Did my mom give you breakfast?”
Max patted his stomach and made a sour face. “Let’s give your mom a break. Besides, I’d hurl. My nerves this morning? I’m a Chihuahua.”
Benji said there was nothing to be nervous about, returning to yesterday’s mantra that everything would be fine, but his assurance sounded halfhearted, his mind clearly elsewhere. Parting the robe, he freed a crushed scroll of paper from the elastic waistband of his pants and flattened it on his lap. “Speaking of concerts,” he said with a sudden turn toward solemnity, “I see you’ve given quite a few.”
Max laughed, angling for a look. “That’s not a mystery, Encyclopedia Brown. I told you yesterday I started performing when I was twelve.”
“You did. You said you gave your first concert when you were twelve. What you didn’t say”—Benji spoke with the rising passion of a prosecutor unveiling his key piece of evidence—“was that your first concert was at Carnegie Hall.”
“What is that? A dossier?”
Benji flipped through pages of curling biography he’d cherry-picked from the web, past a radiant profile from the New York Times Magazine and an Annie Leibovitz photo in which one of Max’s eyes was obscured by the question mark of his cello’s scroll. “Wikipedia, mostly. Some Facebook. This thing with Terry Gross.”
“I told you about Terry Gross.”
“You never said Terry Gross. You said you were on the radio. I was thinking WKRP in Cincinnati. Not NPR.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Did you know that fifty-two thousand people like you on Facebook? Fifty-two thousand,” Benji repeated, fully committed to this new way of measuring his own misery. “Guess how many people like me? Six hundred fifty-eight. I’ve got twenty years on you, and I still can’t break a thousand.”
“There’s a video on YouTube of a dog nursing a kitten. That’s been liked, like, two million times. We’re both in line behind that. Way behind.” Max wanted to talk more about Claudia — not about himself, not about his Facebook followers — but he could see no way of reaching that station without first meandering along whatever tracks pleased his host.
Benji shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Tell you what?”
“That you’re fucking Mozart.”
“Fucking him? I don’t even know him.” He waited for the joke to land, as only a bad, borscht belt joke can, but the smile on Benji’s face remained spiritless and wan. “First,” Max said, “I’m not Mozart.” He snatched the papers out of Benji’s hand and, shuffling through the patchwork of printed web pages—“Max Davis at Disney Hall” (timeout.com/los-angeles); “Max Davis at the White House” (whitehouse.gov); “Marvelous Max Conquers Kodály” (npr.org) — added, “I can’t stand when people say that.”
“But people do say it. What does that tell you?”
“That they have no idea what they’re talking about.” He waited for the simple truth of this to sink in, eyes wide, as if he’d just explained to a child that two plus two is four or yellow and blue make green. “What did you think I meant by professional?”
“I thought you were doing what everybody does: exaggerating. I thought maybe you picked up a few bucks playing wedding receptions or bar mitzvahs.”
“Because nothing gets thirteen-year-old boys going like a cello solo.”
“Carnegie Hall? The New York Philharmonic. The Berlin Philharmonic. The Leningrad Philharmonic.” Benji ticked off as many global symphonies and concert halls as he had fingers to count them on. “We talked for hours last night and you never — you just let me go on and on, talking about myself like an idiot. Talking about Prodigy and Little House on the goddamn Prairie. And you never? I don’t get it. How do you sit there and not, not—”