Shifting in their seats, they each craned for a 360-degree view of the taxidermied tableaux. On a small wooden pedestal covered with hand-cut autumn leaves, miniature pinecones, and a painted, animal-hide tepee, a stuffed ash-gray squirrel stood on its hind legs. Its front legs were bent to its hips in a pose of diva-ish defiance, as if it meant to flaunt the fierceness of its outfit: an immaculately beaded white breastplate; a leather-tasseled white loincloth and boots; and a headdress of flowing white feathers that trailed to its tiny clawed feet. “I’m very into taxidermy right now,” Paul explained. “I just finished a tribute to Joan Crawford done entirely in mice. But this is my first squirrel. It’s Walter Potter meets Cher’s half-breed.”
“Is this politically correct?” Arnav asked.
“What kind of gay man are you?” Paul answered. “Cher transcends.”
“What she needs,” Max said, “is a spread in Vogue. She’s fabulous.”
“Sacasquirrelea. What she really needs is her Captain John Smith.”
“Sacagawea was Lewis and Clark,” Arnav corrected.
Paul widened his eyes with queenly hauteur. “Are you sure?”
Henry forked a potato into his mouth and said, “Pocahontas was Captain John Smith.”
The table looked to him, nonplussed.
“To Squirrelahontas, then.”
Up went the glasses, clinking under the echoing cheer: “Squirrelahontas.”
A delicious stream of Château Mont-Redon (thanks to Max) carried dinner nicely along, and everyone said a prayer of private thanks for the distraction provided by Squirrel Cher, who offered endless opportunity for conversation and occupied the place in the room where, otherwise, a giant elephant would have stood. The obvious and insistent topic that nobody wanted to face — Claudia’s absence — a fact that Max more or less accepted, Benji ignored, and Evelyn fought the constant desire to apologize for fell into the shadow of Paul’s discussion of the odd and unsettling triumphs of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter and the methods by which one acquires enough dead mice to restage key scenes from Mommie Dearest.
“Is there a class for that?” Evelyn asked.
“There’s a class for everything,” Paul answered.
“Cat’s going to teach a class,” Benji offered. “Next semester. At the high school.”
“Are you a taxidermist?” Paul joked.
Evelyn touched a napkin to the corner of her mouth with a look of happy surprise. “What kind of class?”
Benji nudged her. “Tell them.”
“It’s not really a class. And technically, I’m not a teacher. I’m more like a facilitator. They’re dusting off the drama club—”
“She’s being modest,” Benji interrupted.
“I’m not. They haven’t had a drama club in ten years. We’re not sure there’s going to be any interest is what I mean. It may be a very short job.”
Benji drained the last of his lemon-wheeled water. “She’s going to be great.”
The group made their lively way through a conversational labyrinth; topics followed until they dead ended, from Squirrelahontas to Cat’s teaching gig to Evelyn’s painting (the merits of which Cat said Evelyn underestimated) to Paul’s boyhood love of paint-by-numbers and his crazy love for his twin toddler nieces.
“Do you guys want kids?” Max asked Cat.
Now it was his turn for the nonplussed stares.
“We’ve been together three months,” said Cat. She raised a hand to her throat, as if to keep herself from choking.
As they talked, a powerful grip of anxiety suddenly seized Max’s heart. He couldn’t point to its source, but felt a tightening fist grab hold of his insides. He tried talking, about anything, about whatever, to keep his mind from the pain of it. “I’d adopt a kid,” he said. “We’ve talked about adopting a kid.”
“Not at twenty-two, I hope,” Evelyn said ominously.
“We’re not quite ready to talk about babies yet,” Cat assured the group. “Adopted or otherwise.”
“Hold on a sec,” said Benji.
“Hold on? You mean we are ready to talk about babies?”
“I’m not saying we’re ready. I’m saying I understand the desire. To have a kid.”
“I hear you,” said Paul. “Men have their biological clocks too.”
Max crossed his knife and fork on his plate and leaned back to rub his stomach. Let nausea look like gluttony. The more normal he acted, the more normal he’d feel. If only things worked that way.
“I couldn’t adopt,” Paul said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with adoption.” He tipped an invisible hat to Max. “But I’m too vain to settle for a stranger’s genes. No, when I send little Antoinette to bed without supper, I want to see this face, in all its tragic beauty, staring back at me.”
“Antoinette?” Evelyn asked.
“Paul thinks all children, boys or girls, should be named Antoinette.”
“What else am I going to call them?” came Paul’s dry response. “Joe?”
Before anyone could answer, the sound of the front door opening fell over the table like a cage. Everyone knew who it was. Everyone looked trapped. Even before the voice called out with a tentative “hello?”
In that moment, Max’s body seemed especially prescient: his organs like a seismograph having traced some infinitesimal shift in the bedrock before the glasses and plates started to dance. According to Benji, neither he nor Evelyn had seen Claudia since she fled the rest stop, and the few subsequent conversations they’d had with her were as strained and useless as a clothesline trying to hoist a car. Max played the role of the more forgiving one. Perhaps because he had fewer expectations. She did strike him as a failure on some elemental level, but how, really, could he judge? He didn’t know her. And though he seemed to be collecting samples of her limitations, those, while dispiriting, seemed utterly, utterly human.
After slipping a clerk two hundred dollars for his birth mother’s address, Max had left the windowless records office with the knowledge that his search might end in a blind alley. He had readied himself to find the meth head. Or the rape victim. Or the woman too poor, too ill, too taxed, too privileged, too ambivalent, too ambitious, too pampered, too preoccupied to raise a child. What he’d found was a woman who was not much more than apologetic. Sorry she’d been too young. Sorry she’d wanted something else. Sorry she’d run from her first opportunity for reunion and flubbed every opportunity since. Sorry that the pace with which her acceptance moved was so very glacial. Sorry, so sorry for everything.
On another level, one deep below the surface of compassion and understanding, Claudia simply disappointed him. She pissed him off. She needed, he thought, to get over herself. But Max wasn’t entirely paying lip service to his uncle when he said that Claudia’s reaction was beside the point. His fledgling connections to Benji and Evelyn and even Henry, who more often than not had no idea who he was, sent his spirits soaring higher than anything he’d felt toward the Davises in a very long time.
Claudia. Evelyn sprang from her chair with the vigor of a much younger woman and rushed to intercept her in the front hall. Arnav reached across the table and took Max’s hand, while Benji excused himself and followed his mother out of the room. Max heard the fierce whispering that rose to a crescendo then dissolved into silence. Into the troubling calm he felt himself fall. His face flushed. His heart felt ready to burst. And then she was there.
Claudia entered with exaggerated lightness, stifling the sound of her heels on the floor as if she were coming late to a concert and feared disturbing the players. Oliver, hanging behind her like a shadow, gave a tentative wave. Cat and Arnav and Paul rose to greet them, while Max, standing at the back of the group, might have been moving in a procession of mourners, waiting for a private audience with the woman in the stylish black dress, the last person in line who knows he has the most to say. They stood face to face. The room fell away and left the two of them together, alone. Not knowing what else to do, he extended his hand.