Benji hadn’t the wherewithal to admit that his next project sat on the roof of the car right behind him: sixty course credits heated to 120 degrees.
“We want to pave the way to that.”
“To what?”
“To your name in lights. We want to follow you on auditions. Land you a commercial that doesn’t make everybody think you’re one itchy bastard. Maybe a little stage work. We want to see you in rehearsals, see the process. A real insider’s view. But really it’s about setting you up for an audition with a major director on a major project. The comeback.”
“The comeback.” As Benji repeated it, the lights of the abandoned hotel started flickering back to life, one by one. Welcome to Vegas. “When you say major project? Like a movie?”
“Like a movie. Which is still up in the air. All of this is up in the air until we have you, of course. But — and you didn’t hear this from me — we’re approaching Darren Aronofsky.” Sam paused to let the name sink in, nodding in his smug, self-satisfied way. “Think about what he did for Mickey Rourke. Am I right? He picked him up out of a swamp”—here Sam’s eyes swept the surroundings, widening at the aptness of the metaphor—“and set him down in the Dolby Theatre. P.S., I love Sean Penn. The asshole. I do. But Mickey should have won that Oscar.” He leaned forward and slapped Benji on the shoulder. “Here’s hoping they won’t make that same mistake with you.”
Just then, as if in cosmic agreement with everything Sam had said, the crowd broke into energetic applause. With Cat having praised the obelisk, Claudia laying out the dream of the Village, three hundred hotdogs crammed into three hundred mouths, the people themselves were stuffed, spirited, satisfied. A few hoots and whistles greeted Nick, who, waving victoriously, stepped off the stage into a tiny throng of well-wishers. On cue, the same woman who’d set the festivities in motion untied an enormous plastic bag of red, white, and blue balloons and released them into the hot August sky. They swam upward through the air, this way and that, streaming ribbons beating after them like the tails of sperm as ABBA burst suddenly, joyfully, from a flank of enormous speakers.
“Benj?” Cat, as if teleported to his side, startled him. She rubbed his arm, smiling through a veil that wasn’t entirely victorious.
“Babe,” Benji said. He flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, needing a minute to orient himself before making introductions. “Cat McCarthy. This is.”
“Sam. Sam Palin. No relation. I can’t see Alaska from my backyard.”
“Sam’s an old friend,” Benji said, jumping in to explain, “from high school.”
Sam grinned his grin. “Benji and I go way back. Mr. Hume’s history class, wasn’t it? The times we had.”
Benji, suspecting just how quickly and ecstatically a man like Sam could get carried away with lying, turned back to Cat. “You ready?”
“Whenever you are.”
“Sure.” He smiled, leaning over to kiss her. Marry me. To Sam he said, “Good talking to you. Give me a few days to think about it?”
“Absolutely. Absolutely.” He took Benji’s hand and pumped it vigorously. “You’ve got my card. Let me know. Let me know, or I’ll hunt you down.” He pointed his fingers at Benji like two revolvers—Pow! Pow! — and walked off into the fray.
“Think about what?” Cat asked, watching him go.
“Oh. Nothing. I told him I was thinking about getting my certification, and he said I might think about doing something with this—”
“With what?”
“Hunh? Oh. This, this summer camp he runs in Lake George.”
“That guy’s from Lake George?” Cat asked, going around to her side of the car. “What kind of camp?”
Benji opened his door, ducked to get in. “Theater camp. What do you think?”
Before climbing into her seat, Cat stood on it, reaching across the roof to retrieve Benji’s folder. “Forgetting something?” she asked, a trace of the schoolmarm tinting her voice as she dropped the hot folder into his lap and started the car. When she turned onto the main road, Compton’s Mound receding in the rearview, she said, “I don’t know any theater camps in Lake George.”
Benji tried to wring the strain of defensiveness from his laugh. “Do you know every theater camp in existence?”
“Um. No, Mr. Attitude, I don’t. What’s the matter? It sounds exciting.”
Benji gave her thigh an apologetic squeeze. He unrolled his window before the gust from the air conditioner finished its climb into the cold and said, “You have no idea.”
~ ~ ~
Are you going to sit there all day watching us or are you going to help? She isn’t the prettiest girl on the beach, but she’s the one I’ve been watching. I have two choices. Go back to my book, pretend I don’t know what she’s taking about. Or stuff the book in my bag and take the shovel she’s offering me. I get up, brush the sand off my legs. What’s your name? Jane, she says. Then, pointing to her friend, That’s Mary. Mary could sell suntan lotion, but Jane sparks, the dark hair, the fiery-red swimsuit, the barely there tits and overcompensating nose. You need to get the sand wet; that’s why it keeps falling down. Mary, bored, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her rolled towel and lies back to smoke. Jane walks with me to the water’s edge, a bucket between us. You build a castle with this stuff here, the thing won’t ever come down. I hike back up to dry land and turn the bucket over to show her. See how strong? Now you. No, you do it, she says, but not in a helpless, princessy way. I fill the buckets and bring them back. I build up a pyramid of tightly packed sand that Jane, using the stem of her sunglasses, starts to carve. A turret. A window. A curving wall with stairs. Not bad, I say when we’re done. With two fingers, she slices her signature in the sand. Sign it, she says. That’s stupid, I say. You did it, didn’t you? You said yourself it’ll stand forever, so sign it. Your masterpiece. I kneel, my leg hot against hers, and write my name.
14
Act two was finished. Act two would stand. The trouble was, it stood alone. The foundation of the first act stood squarely under the roof of the third, but the act between didn’t align with either, giving the entire structure the precarious feel of a Jenga puzzle. Not only would Max have to circle back to the beginning to shift act one so it supported all that followed, he’d have to smooth the transition between the second and third acts, the passage that led from Lily Briscoe’s return to the Ramsays’ shuttered summer house to her sitting in their dining room ten years after that first failed trip to the lighthouse, where everything was changed, where so much time had passed, where Mrs. Ramsay was dead, where Prue and Andrew were dead, and Lily with her paintbrushes and canvas asked, “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”
Max heard those notes carried by the strings. Sweeping the silence like a beam from the lighthouse would sweep the dark, they came and went. Came and went. A first step, but where to go with it? What next? He hummed the few fledgling bars as he stepped from the shower and toweled dry, his body a darting shadow in the steamed mirror, but none of it seemed right. He brushed his teeth, swiped on his deodorant, and massaged a dollop of moisturizer onto his face, dropping the tubes and creams into his Dopp kit as he finished with them. Next: the pills. Opening the bottles one by one, humming ba da dum—no, that wasn’t right either — he placed a colorful array of capsules in his open palm and quickly, before his reflection fully returned (he didn’t like to see himself do it), washed them down the drain.