Claudia did.
“It looks like a shopping bag, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not really. It looks like a tote. It says Barnard on it.”
“If you’re looking closely, yes. But most people in a rush see only a bag. A bag that looks very much like a shopping bag, I think. It strikes me as somewhat classist. And, well, frivolous. As if our students came here simply to buy shoes.” Jennie, an associate professor in the English department, who had signage consultants tearing their hair out to find a sans serif font with more “oomph,” fed herself on lecturing more than debate. Claudia couldn’t say how so many of her colleagues, whose minds were supposedly engaged with the highest concerns, with the most sophisticated and enduring questions, came to be so hopelessly humorless and petty. Just as she couldn’t say how a woman who dressed in loafish brown flats and lumpy sweater sets felt so comfortable posing as an authority on questions of style, but here Jennie sat, outraged once again, ready to do battle in a cardigan the color of canned peas over the semiotics of a tote bag.
“But students selected these photos,” argued Claudia. “It’s their campus, Jennie. They should feel invested in the renovations being done on it.”
Claudia’s mind drifted as Jennie raised the rafters of a rebuttal—vendability, elasticity, metaphoricalness: she rattled off these and a half dozen other nominalizations and set to weaving her languorous intellectual web between them. With great effort, as if turning a car without power steering, Jennie drove the conversation toward Marcuse and the dehumanizing effects of capitalism (all from a shopping bag that wasn’t one!), when out of the corner of her eye, Claudia noticed an approaching shadow slide across the outside wall. At first, she thought the shade moving like a piece of charcoal smudged across paper announced Dylan’s approach, but the charcoal turned out not to be her FTM overachiever but her brother.
Benji looked good. Surprisingly good. With his eight-month-old sobriety, his new work going well enough for Alluvia High to consider paying him for it, and his commitment to a four-days-a-week running schedule, he looked fifteen pounds lighter, several years younger, and walked perhaps a little taller. His arrival came a day before she expected it. The visit, something of a mystery, involved a bit of uncharacteristically vague “business” to attend to, after which he’d promised, very uncharacteristically, to take her to dinner.
Not noticing Claudia’s distraction or the happy journey her eyes made to Benji on the other side of the door, Jennie kept driving square pegs into round holes, until Claudia raised a hand like a traffic cop and brought her to a stop. “Jennie,” she broke in, “I hate to cut you short, but my brother is here.” She nodded at Benji, whom Jennie turned to scrutinize with all the enthusiasm of Inspector No. 25 stamping her approval on a cheap pair of underwear. “I need to speak with him.”
Jennie rolled over the interruption like a tire hitting a nail. Deflated, she nevertheless insisted on finishing an untenably long sentence as she pulled a sheaf of problematic photos from her folder and pressed them to Claudia’s desk. “Give these a look,” she said portentously. “Get back to me.” When she was gone, Claudia cocked her fingers like a gun and shot herself in the head before gesturing for Benji to come in.
He held open the door with a “hell-o!” so jovial it sounded more like a magician’s “ta-da!”
“What are you doing here?” Claudia asked.
“It’s nice to see you too.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said, standing. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“I have a surprise that couldn’t wait.” Sticking his head into the hallway, he motioned his not entirely surprising surprise forward. Max. Claudia stood clear of her desk and held out her arms. The boy paused before moving past his uncle, taking stock of Claudia’s reaction with a small, worried smile on his face. He may have triumphed on some of the world’s biggest stages, but around Claudia he still tended to move like a kid caught in the spotlight at the high school talent show. Despite the easiness of their e-mails, even with a hug waiting for him, he looked like he wasn’t sure how to begin or that he belonged here. Like he might, if he didn’t take care, be met with a big, fat boo.
He and Claudia had met several times since January, but each time Claudia sensed the slightest apprehension in him. The visits themselves went fine, better than fine, she thought, with both of them eventually settling into a rhythm and harmony, but neither the rhythm nor the harmony seemed to last, so that seeing Max now left Claudia with the impression that she could register the smallest of irregularities in an otherwise strong pulse, an aberrant heartbeat that was probably nothing to be alarmed about but which alarmed her all the same.
Max stepped up for his hug and then, like a student delivered to the principal’s office, slouched into a chair across from her. He’d taken to wearing black nail polish on his thumbs, which he proceeded to peel. Benji sat down next to him.
“This is a nice surprise,” Claudia said, returning to her own chair and folding her hands on the repurposed lumber she’d turned into a desk. “Though someone looks unhappy.” Could she be more passive? Could she sound more like her mother? Someone looks unhappy?!
Benji waited for Max to answer. “Max?” Then, to Claudia: “He’s nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” said Max petulantly.
“Nervous about what?”
Benji nudged gently with his elbow. “Show her.”
With an actorly display of exasperation, Max pulled a battered postcard from the pocket of his hoodie and handed it over. Claudia looked. On the front, the image of a turbulent blue-black sea and, in fat white letters (just the sort in which Jennie might find the “oomph” she’d been looking for), the word LIGHTHOUSE. On the back, an invitation to a workshop concert of Max’s opera, tomorrow night at eight. “It isn’t a real performance,” Max rushed to explain, his fingers moving from his nails to the silver barbell stabbed through his ear. He pulled on it with an intensity that made Claudia squirm. “It’s not finished. The first and third parts basically are, but the second is still a sketch. A mess. But I need to hear what it sounds like so I know, you know, what works. I shouldn’t have even told you about it.” He reached across the desk and snatched the postcard back.
“Stop it,” Claudia said. “Can I see, please?”
When Max didn’t move, Benji took the card from him. He handed it back to Claudia, who pored over the words more closely.
If she submitted herself to the same eagle-eyed study she made of Max, she could admit that his arrhythmic heart wasn’t alone. She recognized that initial pinprick of uneasiness. She felt it too. No matter how close their relationship became, part of her still sat in that Guilderland rest stop, hard and refusing, unable to imagine a son entering her life. Like husband or wife, the word wasn’t, even after ten years of marriage, part of her vocabulary. (She referred to Oliver as her “legally wedded boyfriend” until the day he left.) And although she and Nick and Max lived in a very different place now — on banks separated by a stream rather than a wide, uncrossable sea — she still worried whether they could ever completely close the distance between them. Would she ever truly make amends?
She placed the postcard down on her desk and turned to Benji. “Is this the work you had to be in the city for?”
He winked.
“Well, what better reason?”
“What does that mean?” Max asked.
“It means I can’t wait to see it.”
“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “I told you: it isn’t staged. It’s just a concert. It’s not even that. It’s a workshop. Seriously, neither of you have to come.”