Max leveled his eyes and, meeting his own dare, said, “You can’t stand it when I’m successful.”
Arnav lifted his glasses and rubbed the weariness from his eyes. “That’s it, Max. You got me. Because up until now I’ve been holding you back. Watching you wither away in obscurity.”
“It’s good that I’m going,” Max answered. Stuffed as his bag now was, he had to lie on top of it to wrestle the zipper shut. “It’s good I’m getting out of here.”
“Because Evelyn is so much more supportive than I am. You honestly think you’re going to write there with everything that’s going on?”
Max did. He may have been kidding himself, but he did. In fact, it sounded to him like the perfect plan. Later that afternoon, he and Benji, Cat, and Claudia would descend on the house on Palmer Street, filling it one last weekend before they admitted his grandfather to Saratoga’s best geriatric nursing facility and Evelyn began her search for a smaller, more manageable home.
By Monday, after delivering Henry to St. Anthony’s Home for the Aged, after his mother and uncle (and, by all accounts, almost aunt) had returned to their lives, he would find himself with two precious weeks of writing time in an undisturbed room. A room of his own, where he could rest assured that Evelyn wouldn’t come poking at him in the middle of the night with maddening accusations. She had no designs on shoving even a single, solitary, dulling pill down his throat. Instead, she’d offered him time, a room, nothing more (what else was there?), all in exchange for keeping her company over dinner. “Evelyn’s excited about my writing,” Max said as he stepped into a pair of underwear, pulled a striped purple tank top over his head. “She didn’t invite me there so she could sit at my bedside with a notebook. She invited me there to work.”
“She invited you there because she’s going to be lonely. Understandably lonely, rattling around in that house all by herself. She’s going to want you to sit in her lap all day.”
“She married a porcupine. You don’t think she learned how to step away from Henry when he was working? How to give him space?”
“I think she doesn’t know you well enough to know when not to step away. That’s the problem.”
“I don’t need a social worker, Arnav. Or a sleep therapist. Or another fucking psychopharmacologist. The only thing I need right now is a cheerleader.”
“And the Fishers are going to do that for you?”
“Better than you, looks like.”
“You’ve known these people for less than a year, and suddenly they’re your family. They’re the de Medicis. They’re the patrons of your art, not those of us who have lived with your bull—”
“Bullshit,” Max practically spit the word out for him. “Stop being so churchy! You can’t even say ‘bullshit,’ for fuck’s sake.” Max wheeled his suitcase to the door and stopped. “And they’re not my patrons. I don’t need their money. Unless you’re talking about their love and support.”
Navi let this pass with a roll of the eyes.
“And what does knowing them for a year—”
“Less than a year.”
“Have to do with it? I knew you four months before we moved in together.”
“And you probably agreed to that because you were manic.”
Max turned off the light. Two dark silhouettes stared across the cold blue of a shadowy, starlit space. “They are supportive and loving,” he said to break the impasse. “And if you can’t be? Do me a favor: stay out of my way.”
Four banged-up baggage carousels spread across the lower level of the airport. The digital display signs that hung over each to indicate the arriving flight numbers were uniformly dark, which left Benji to guess which whining silver daisy wheel serviced Flight 2732 from Dallas/Fort Worth. He’d chosen the fourth, based entirely on a towering hulk who reminded him of Johnny Cash, a face carved, he imagined, by the unforgiving Texas sun, dressed from head to toe in black, a Stetson tipped down over his eyes. Trying to locate Max according to the costumes of potential copassengers was uncertain business. There was no telling where these people hailed from. But Max, who twenty minutes ago had sent a text that simply read Landed!, had been unresponsive since. Johnny Cash seemed the best bet.
A sizeable crowd formed around carousel no. 4. Women in overly snug, jelly bean — colored sweatpants claimed their animal print suitcases and rolled them through the shushing automatic doors, and still no sign of Max. Benji texted him again, and a moment later, as if in answer, from the opposite end of the terminal, he heard the deep, sonorous cry of a cello. He walked toward the sound, toward a small group of people who had suspended their hurrying and gathered around the tip of carousel no. 1 to watch Max, sitting on its edge, bent over his instrument as if caught in the most intimate of conversations with it. Eyes closed, head sawing from side to side, Max’s entire body moved as the bow cut across the strings to sound a phrase that repeated and repeated and then ever so slightly changed, deepening, shifting onto another plane before continuing its stately march.
Benji worked his way to the front of the crowd. He wanted to be the first person Max saw. But then, before Max could lift the bow from those fine, final, attenuated notes, the boy jumped up as if an electric charge had touched the metal ledge on which he sat. He let go of his cello, which Benji, leaping forward, saved from clattering to the ground, and with lightning speed picked up two coins that had fallen to his feet. He parted the crowed with two bounding steps after the man who’d tossed them and, reeling his arm back like a major league pitcher, sent them flying at the back of the man’s head.
Flinching, the man turned. When he realized what had happened, it took only a second for confusion to boil over into anger. “What’s the matter with you?” The man was well into his fifties, thickly built with a mad scientist shock of untamed white hair. This appreciative (if stingy) patron of the arts took a menacing step toward Max and asked the question again.
“Do I look like I’m begging for change?” Max yelled. “Do you know who I am? I don’t need your fucking fifty cents.”
The man, muttering loudly about ungrateful assholes, let himself be led away by his more quietly unnerved wife, though the well-being of his manhood required him to turn several times during his retreat and, like a dog jerking its chain, demonstrate his continued willingness to fight.
Benji didn’t know what to do. He laid the cello in its case and, stepping cautiously forward, put his hands on his nephew’s shoulders. Max spun around, ready for further battle, but shifted with disquieting ease into a mode of joyful reunion. He threw his arms around Benji’s neck, ignoring the crowd lingering awkwardly around them, including a little girl with tight, ribboned pigtails and a missing front tooth who asked her mother, “What’s wrong with that man?”
“How’s it going, champ?” Benji spoke softly into Max’s ear. “You okay?”
Max pulled back and laughed. “Great. Great. I’m great. Why do you ask?”
He let Evelyn set him up in Henry’s study. The pullout couch wasn’t nearly as comfortable as a proper bed, but Max preferred the study. He wanted to be planted in ground made fertile by his grandfather’s work. As she always did, Evelyn mentioned that the master bedroom, quiet on the unused third floor, would make for a better studio, but she also wanted him to see that she took his work seriously, that she respected it and would let him wring from Henry’s old workspace whatever artistic miracles might be left there. After all, it was, as Henry used to call it, the “Cave of Making.” “So make,” she said to Max as she left him to unpack his bag. “Make.”