Max, especially, agitated. Much as Benji loved him, he remained a cause of great confusion, at once the sting and the salve. For the kind of acclaim Benji hoped for, the accomplishments that bring us closest to some small reachable realm of immortality, already belonged to Max. What lit up Max’s sky like a sun shone in Benji’s as a mere star: forever distant, forever remote, a cold knifepoint of light (hardly enough to see by) in the nighttime sky. Funny: though Benji had spent a lifetime following fame, he stood as far away from it now as ever. Only recently, only since Cat and Max had come into his life (bright as beacons in their own right) had that original lodestar begun to fade. It was there, of course. It would always be there. But Benji no longer had to set his course by it, if he didn’t want to. There were other destinations now, other ways. He was Max’s uncle. He was Cat’s lover. Six months ago, these places didn’t exist, but suddenly they rose before him like warm, habitable planets in the inhospitable sea of space. They were home. Or becoming home. Some days, Benji wanted to give up trying to grab whatever crude, slippery tool would allow him to carve his name in a block more lasting than Willy’s ice and instead do the things he told Cat he’d do as they curled on the couch and opened a second bottle of wine. He would finish his bachelor’s degree, get a teaching certificate, join forces with Cat to lead Alluvia’s thankless youth to that elevated plane where everyone speaks in iambs.
Benji turned and turned in the maze, but without a string to lead him out of it, all he could do was hold Cat closer. He placed a hand on her belly — a not entirely absent gesture — and thought, Do I even want kids? If his sister could turn into a halfway decent parent (or “parental figure”), couldn’t he? He said nothing. He felt a wave of melancholy rise through him and crash into Cat, who registered it by clinging to him more tightly.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, turning his face to hers so she could see into his eyes.
In their first days together, Benji spent the whole of his time hiding from her. Lying about his injuries and how he sustained them, it turned out, lifted him to new heights as an actor. Daily, he rehearsed a roundelay of depression and self-harm for her, for his doctor, for his sister and parents and Max, for himself, and thought, with more than a little self-satisfaction, that not only was all the world a stage, but that he, Benjamin Fisher — mocked, maligned, underestimated at every turn — was as good as any actor on it.
But time passed, and so, too, did Benji’s feelings of fraudulence. The sharp outlines of his own mendacity softened and blurred as he himself began to believe the story he so carefully constructed for others. These days, when he listened to Max describe the harrowing hours leading up to his own hospitalization — testing the shower rod to see if it would hold his weight, cinching the belt around his neck, debating whether or not to answer housekeeping’s terribly, miraculously, fatefully timed knock at the door — Benji felt a surge of empathy, of fraternity that nearly made him weep. Walking these last five months in the shoes of a desperate man who stumbled out of a theater one warm August night with every intention of jumping to his death no longer underscored the distance Benji measured between the reality of his experience and his fantastical account of it. It erased it. The mighty engine of the brain burned through his fabrications and falsehoods as though they were fuel and, by some marvelous neurometabolic process, produced a conviction with all the weight and carriage of unshakeable truth: we come to believe that Mother washed our mouths out with soap even when she wasn’t there to hear us swear. To Benji’s mind, he was no longer lying. No longer acting. He’d shown Cat a truth, and Cat stayed. He held Cat on his lap. She couldn’t have been closer. And yet she hadn’t the first clue that Benji wandered so much of the time wondering at his own desires, asking if he was satisfied, fearful that all they were in the process of building wasn’t nearly enough.
“I—” he said, having no words to follow that one, when a swarm of freshly caffeinated students interrupted him. They could be such a nuisance, these kids, and, if he were being completely honest, such a relief. Jason Carmichael, the oldest and easily the most childish member of the cast, led the others in an uproarious catcall, a construction worker’s whistle that echoed through the room. First comes love, then comes marriage. Both Cat and Benji hated him.
Cat stood, slow to let go of Benji’s hand but ready to face her hecklers — especially Jason, her clueless King Duncan, on whom she lowered a sublimely regal stare. It took Benji a moment, but soon he joined her. Grabbing on to the seat in front of him, he stood, a nearly drowned body getting up on his feet, coming back to himself and delivering the only words he could possibly speak. “Okay, you clowns. Back to work.”
~ ~ ~
Welcome to the governor’s suite, George says. The rooms are stuffy and small, but nothing an open window won’t fix. It’s not the most deluxe accommodation, but it’s yours if you want it. Thanks, Mr. Newland. And I’ll pay whatever — He cuts me off with a sour face. Don’t worry about that. I can keep a few dollars out of your pay, if it comes to that. But things aren’t so bad yet. He looks at my little pile of things. That’s all you’ve got? I travel light, sir. George, he says. A suitcase and a typewriter. And I’ll bet the suitcase is filled with books, he says. Half filled, I laugh. Well, you won’t need a suit for the work you’ll be doing for me. He looks at my T-shirt and dungarees. Suppose what you’ve got on is just fine. But if you need something to wear to church. I don’t tell him I don’t go to church. If you need something for church, there’s plenty at the back of my closet. No need, sir. He gives me a look. George. George, you’ve already done too much. In a world as mean as this one, he says philosophically, is there such a thing? Besides, no great kindness in giving a man a suit you don’t wear. There’s a rap at the door, and a woman comes in. She has gray eyes and smiles shyly. She puts a basket of sheets and blankets down on the floor. Her skirt whispers as she stands. Henry Fisher, George says, my daughter, Evelyn. She offers me her hand. Evie, you go on up and grab Henry here one of my old suits. Something he’ll get a lot of wear out of. Black or blue. Yes, Daddy. George, I try, but Evelyn breaks in. She is her father’s daughter. It’s no trouble, she says, meaning this to be the end of the conversation. No trouble at all.
12
Since Oliver left, Claudia couldn’t move fast enough. She woke an hour later than usual simply to drain the morning of its leisurely pace and stayed in her office, drafting plans for Compton’s Mound over a carton of Chinese takeout, until she could barely keep her eyes open. Racing between the coffeepot and the shower, between the front door and the bed saved her from considering the giant hole in the closet where Oliver’s stuff used to be. Or the beat-up Eames chair. Or the rug they’d gotten on that trip to Nepal. Or the gritty, black-and-white photo — in Claudia’s opinion, his best — of a young Dominican boy leaping with balletic grace into the summery spray of an open hydrant. These newly bare places stressed her like thin spots on the ice: if she didn’t skate over them as quickly as possible, she feared she’d fall in.