“Max,” Arnav said. His head tilted warningly, judgmentally at the sight of the bourbon bottle.
Max pretended not to notice. He didn’t want to be bothered about the medications Arnav insisted on bothering him about. Despite his boyfriend’s doubts to the contrary, despite the drugs’ ruinous effect on Max’s creative impulses, Max continued to pop the complicated cocktail of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers twice a day, like a good boy, according to the rules. As he took the drink from Cat, he registered Navi’s concern as a stack of kindling registers a spark. He fumed but didn’t, for the time being, flare.
Soon, the seven of them — Evelyn shepherding Henry into the mix — sat around the fragrant fire that danced in the fireplace as the rich scent of browning turkey crept in to overpower it.
“Mm!” Paul said. A dilettante makeup artist and taxidermy student, Paul made the better part of his living singing in New York City cabarets. His voice sounded like a Nina Simone song, honeyed and resonant. “Mrs. Fisher, that smells dee-vine.”
Max had spent two of the last five weekends with what he called his “famiglia presto.” Not including Claudia. How many withholding mothers did one boy need? But it mattered less that Claudia had given him the cold shoulder when his uncle, quite literally, had given him a warm one to cry on. And maybe this was all Max needed. All he had a right to ask for. Maybe Navi knew what he was talking about after alclass="underline" maybe this was enough.
“You’ve gotten farther than most people ever get,” Navi reasoned one night, head resting on Max’s chest.
“You mean adopted people?”
“I mean people. In life. At some point, you have to be satisfied with what you have.”
Max didn’t agree. “You don’t get to the top of the mountain if you’re satisfied with life at base camp.”
“You sound like one of those inspirational posters with an eagle on it.” He kissed Max lightly then rolled onto his back, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “Base camp is pretty high. Not everyone is made to get to the top of the mountain.”
“Exactly. Some people are meant to go higher.”
Navi laughed. “My winged boy.”
Evelyn had hosted two parties in Max’s honor, intimate family affairs where she unholstered her bring-out-the-big-guns meals — slow-cooked short ribs, fish stew — dinners that required full days of preparation that she’d tired of making for her husband and children (thankless all), but for which she happily slaved away for the sake of her grandson. My grandson. My nephew. The possessives Max heard ringing through their sentences soothed him better than the benzos that had the maddening tendency to make the simplest of songs dry up the second his pen touched paper. (Of course, he was already someone else’s grandson. Someone else’s nephew. Someone else’s son. But the Fishers held out the possibility of belonging in a way Max never felt he had. Benji and Evelyn and even the specter of Claudia, whose absence haunted their time together and united them as one, had Max saying more. More! Who — sorry, Navi — could really be happy with enough?) And so, the two words Max longed to hear, the two words he would not rest until Claudia spoke them: my son.
Nick had said as much. On his last trip to town, Max met Nick, whose arms had opened to him as wide as Benji’s. They spent an afternoon tossing a football, despite the all-too-evident fact that neither of them especially enjoyed it, but hearing Nick utter that incantation? For whatever reason, it wasn’t the same. Max wanted to hear Claudia say it. Needed (despite all his claims to the contrary) to hear it from her. But on the mother front all had been quiet: Amanda hadn’t called; Claudia hadn’t shown up. She did, however, concede to a longer, if no less awkward, phone call, during which she confessed her own shortcomings with a martyr’s enthusiasm and said I’m sorry so many times he thought someone had left a Brenda Lee album skipping in the background. She asked for more time, and Max, who saw no other path to glory, told her to take as much as she needed.
“Max?” Evelyn roused him from his reverie and asked him to pass a plate of bacon-wrapped dates. She took a little jewel of glistening fat stabbed through with a toothpick and sank, satisfied, into her chair.
When the plate reached Henry, he regarded it as part of a custom he couldn’t possibly participate in, as if Max had asked him to do a rain dance. He turned to Paul and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Tall, slender, with a skull-tight buzz cut and black almond-shaped eyes two shades darker than his skin, Paul cultivated a sleek androgyny not unlike Grace Jones and seemed no less unflappable.
Evelyn reached over to where Henry sat and shook his knee. “You’re scaring people,” she said, hipping out of her chair and leading Henry down the hall.
Cat offered to refresh drinks. Max held his glass aloft.
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Arnav said. Here he sat, beating the same tired drum, louder, more boldly now that he had the buffer of an audience.
Cat, at the ready to pour more cocktails from a silver shaker, froze in midair until Max reached up with a light touch and tipped her hand.
Arnav turned from Max and addressed the group, bolder still. “Some of his medications,” he said, “they don’t mix well with drinks.”
Max loved Arnav. Except on the occasions, like now, when he didn’t. Looking across the room at his partner of three years, a blinding anger ignited in him with such speed he had to pour back his drink in a single gulp to extinguish it. What did Navi know? Thirty years old and second violin with the Dallas Symphony. Not that second violin of the Dallas Symphony was anything to sneeze at, but really, where did he get off telling Max anything about anything? Arnav was a first-generation Indian American from Plano, Texas. His parents, who, shortly after Arnav’s graduation from conservatory, returned to Chandigarh, got him out of bed every Tuesday morning at a ridiculous hour for the family Skype session. Their good boy. Their chhaila. He woke at six each morning to submit to a punishing workout regimen, favored a tightly trimmed beard that he believed camouflaged an unflatteringly weak chin, and, in his button-down shirt and bright-blue V-neck sweater, dressed like a Southeast Asian Hardy boy. Such a priss, Max thought. Such a prude.
“I’m the youngest in the room, but I’m good without a babysitter.”
“Ar-naaav,” Paul sang under his breath. “Later,” he mouthed. “La-ter.”
When the red plastic thermometer popped on the turkey, Evelyn, as promptly as if a bell had rung, steered the group past these choppy waters and delivered them to the safe harbor of the table. Burgundy cloth. Gold-trimmed dishes. A small store of wine glasses that caught and shattered the light from two tiered candlesticks. They filled their plates from the mahogany sideboard — turkey, dressing, braised butternut squash, and Navi’s scalloped potatoes with coriander and coconut milk, which soon had everyone asking how they could have lived with plain mashed potatoes for so long.
Paul said, “Wait.” He stood over his plate with hands held like a conductor’s, staying raised forks and open mouths, then ran to the foyer for his bag. A moment later, he reappeared very proudly with his contribution to the festivities.
“Paulina,” Max marveled as Paul placed the strange centerpiece on the table. “You have outdone yourself.”
“Paul,” Evelyn said, bemused, “you shouldn’t have.”
“Know your strengths,” he answered sagely. “Some people do a potato. I do this. Know your strengths.”