“Tell me more about her.”
Benji began retreading the same ground they’d covered the night before when they crowded on the sofa with the old photo albums. For Max, a portrait of Claudia had come together, perceptibly, pointillistically, as Benji connected the dots between the third-grade field trip to Howe Caverns, the junior-year term abroad in Rome, the ribbon cutting celebrating her first building.
This morning, though, Max had his own agenda. “Am I the only one?” he suddenly wanted to know.
Benji stopped for a moment to take in his meaning. “Yes. God, yes.”
“And I was a mistake?”
“You were — unplanned.”
“She was my age?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t she just end it?”
Silence. “She tried.”
Silence. “At least you’re honest. What happened?”
“She couldn’t do it.”
“You told me she was tough.”
“She is.”
“What about Nick?”
“What about him?”
“Would they have gotten married, you think? If it wasn’t for me?”
Benji shrugged. “What do you want to write?”
“An opera,” Max offered. “I think.”
“Opera’s good. I’ve never seen an opera. But I know that everybody throws roses at the end.” Benji crumpled a piece of paper into a mangled flower and tossed it at Max’s feet. “Roses. Roses. More roses!”
Max pushed himself off the steps, a gust of exasperation that carried him into the wet grass. “Jesus, Benji. Give it a rest with the roses.”
“Joke,” Benji said soothingly. “I’m joking. Come on, sit back down.”
But Max thrust his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and stood his ground. “Why are you being a dick? The concerts and the Grammys and the fucking king of Demark. You’ve been up my ass with that shit since you woke up.”
“There’s an image.” Benji tried lightening the mood. He picked up his makeshift rose, stuffing it, with a hangdog look, into the folds of his robe. “You’re right. I’m a dick.”
“What’s your problem?” Max pleaded.
“Forget it.”
“No. We’re starting a — a thing here. I want it to be honest. I want it to be right. I hate weirdness.”
“Okay. Okay.” Benji held his hands up to show he had no intention of fighting as he fished in a pond of murky emotions. He found only two words sluggish enough to be caught. “I’m jealous.” Max looked taken aback, and Benji rushed to say, “It’s not you. It’s me. It’s all about me. But you’re like this lens. You shouldn’t be, I know. But I can’t help it: I look at you, and it’s like I see more clearly all the things I haven’t done.”
Max opened his mouth to answer, but Benji cut him off. “I keep thinking of this book my father gave me. Every year, on my birthday, Henry gives me a book. Gave me a book. He’s way past remembering birthdays. But I used to think these books were his way of talking to me. He had so little to say, or so little I wanted to hear, I took each one like a message in a bottle. Like his only way of sending word across the shark-infested sea of his personality.”
“Nice metaphor.”
“Thanks. Took forever to come up with it. Anyway. Sometimes the message seemed clear enough. Like the year I left college, he gave me Jude the Obscure. Which is like the worst book for a college dropout. But other years? I still don’t know what he was trying to tell me with Beloved. He wished my mom had killed me in a woodshed? When I was thirty, he gave me Oblomov.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s Russian. I forget who wrote it, but it’s called Oblomov, and it’s all about this guy.”
“Oblomov?”
Benji winked. “This thirty-year-old guy who — wait for it — lays around in his robe all day thinking about all the great things he should be doing. Which of course he never does. He just gets fatter and lazier and more useless. And he knows it. That’s the tragic part. He knows. ‘He was painfully aware that entombed within him there was this precious radiant essence, moribund perhaps by now, like a gold deposit lying buried deep in the rock that should long ago have been minted into coin and put into circulation.’”
Max raised his hands in soft applause. “Impressive.”
“Not really,” Benji answered, giving his own robe a savage little flick. “Even bad actors can memorize. But that’s how I feel. Like the best of myself is still down in the mines. Uncoined. And nobody’s ever going to see it.”
“That’s not true. Cat sees it. I can tell by the way she looks at you that she sees something.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what Cat sees in me,” Benji admitted, sadness softening his voice. “But you’re right. I have Cat.”
They were quiet a long time.
“What about Arvin?”
“Arnav,” Max corrected. “What about him?”
“You didn’t say much last night, which I’ve learned doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be said. Where did you meet?”
“We played in the Dallas Symphony together,” Max answered. But the words had barely left his mouth before he started backtracking. “Wait. That’s a lie.” He cleared his throat. “No weirdness.”
“No weirdness,” Benji repeated, as if swearing to a pact.
“We met in the hospital.”
Slightly thrown, Benji said, “I thought you were going to say online. Doesn’t it seem like everybody meets online now? Especially gay guys. Did you know there’s an app that shows you how far you are from other guys who are looking to hook up? Oh, look, there’s a blow job, and it’s only one hundred feet away. I know most of them say they’re on there to network, but who networks with his shirt off?”
“What are you doing on Grindr?” Max laughed.
“That’s it: Grindr!” Benji said with a snap. “My friend Marshall showed me. I’m telling you, the gays have got it figured out. What were you doing in the hospital?”
“Same thing as you,” he said. He watched as his meaning sank in, as the weight of it dragged down the corners of Benji’s mouth. “Not a bridge,” he added, as if this detail somehow lessened the gravity of the act. “But. Yeah.”
“What? What did you do? When? Why?”
Max returned to his spot by Benji on the stairs. He kept his eyes on his feet, occasionally pulling a piece of wet grass from between his toes as he spoke. “Some of those questions are easier to answer than others. When? Two years ago. I was in Dallas, which I tell Arnav was reason enough.” Here, Max smiled, but his smile failed to smooth the creases that concern left on his uncle’s face. He went back to grooming the grass from his feet and kept his voice low. “I flew down a few days before this big Haydn festival I was scheduled to play. It was a Monday. I remember because it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I was supposed to rehearse with the symphony at, like, two o’clock, but as soon as I got to the hotel, I pulled the curtains and got into bed and knew I wasn’t going anywhere. It was like the door disappeared as soon as I shut it: no way out. I’d been having a rough time for a while. A long while, but I kept going and going, traveling and playing, traveling and playing, doing it all like I was on a conveyor belt, but for whatever reason that day, the minute I laid down, I turned to lead.”
“You were depressed?” Benji asked.
“Depression and I, we’re on familiar terms, yes. When I was a kid, I didn’t know it was depression. It usually looked more like anger than sadness. Does Claudia? Does she get depressed?”
Benji wondered at this. “Not more than your average overeducated city dweller. Sometimes, I guess. Claudia plays her emotional cards pretty close to the vest.”
“Not me. I used to fly into these rages. Cursing my parents, throwing shit, wishing them dead.”