Now, he beelined for the hall closet, dragged his suitcase into the bedroom, and flung it open on the bed. If there was a benefit to having accomplished so little in life, certainly it was having so little to pack. His shirts and pants and shoes tumbled in. Sweaters and winter jackets he left behind. He doubted he’d need them, although the desert, he knew, could be cold at night. He walked through the entire house, from the dock she’d soon hire somebody else to draw up for the season, through the bedrooms and dining room and kitchen and baths. Ghosts everywhere. He closed his ears to them and, before leaving, stopped in the downstairs office where Cat paid their bills. It was a task she hated, and usually Benji stood in the kitchen making up pet names to distract her. Can I call you Boobaker Soufflé? Can I call you McGee McGrutter?
He stole a clean sheet of paper from the printer and wrote, Cat— His mind, working like a bellows for the last few weeks, tried to stoke the fire wherein an acceptable good-bye could be forged. A list of reasons, tight as a suit of armor, that Cat would have no choice but to find ironclad, unassailable, no matter how she battled against it. He was a murderer. He was a waste. He tried six times, his pen trembling so much the words looked more like Arabic than English, and wadded his failures into the wire basket beneath the desk. C— (he finally wrote) I don’t belong here. I never did. I love you. —B. He left it on the counter with his key.
He called Sam Palin on the way to the airport, who laughingly reassured him that “no” and “yes” often lead to the same place. Sometimes you take La Cienega. Sometimes you take the 405. “A little LA humor,” Sam joked. “Don’t worry, you’ll catch on.”
Benji bought his ticket at the counter (and, with his credit card balance reset to zero and $600 calling to him from his new savings account, opted for the upgrade). Ubiquitous white buds planted firmly in his ears, he sat at the gate, stuffing noise into the cracks of every door that he had, in just the last few hours, slammed shut. He didn’t want to see reason shining like a light through the crevices. He wanted oblivion and darkness and mind-blotting sound.
A jowly woman with thinning hair jabbed an angry finger in her ear, a gesture that carried with it an urgent need for a state closer to silence, as universally understood as a hand pressed to the throat means I’m choking! “It’s not a library,” he gruffed, turning the volume down as much as he dared. Radiohead sang of being crushed like a bug, of growing wings, and Benji mouthed the words with them. He boarded the plane not when the flight attendant called for first class but when the dwindling herd of passengers made it clear that the plane was leaving. He took his seat, pulled down his sunglasses, which Cat would have found unforgivable — Really? Are you that cool, Mr. Mover and Shaker? — and sank back into the unyielding cushions, the closest thing to an embrace he had allowed himself all day.
Eyes closed, music blaring, he felt gratitude for the slight movement of the plane beneath him, the extended foreplay of a long taxi before the climax (delayed once for traffic; delayed twice for a passenger in need of the restroom) of takeoff. His sigh of relief left him nauseous, as if he’d robbed a bank and the getaway car was actually getting away. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face. Then: the tap of a hand.
Benji ignored it at first, pretending to be asleep, but when it came again, insistent and unwelcome as room service when you’re flat out and jerking off on the hotel bed, he ripped the Wayfarers from his face and turned to his seatmate like a lion ready to feed. The kid beside him — eighteen, twenty — smiled without apology. She was a California beauty who wore her looks loosely, as if she didn’t even know they were there, with pale blue eyes that looked out on the world with casual interest, and a lax bun of sun-streaked hair knotted at the top of her head. She finished a sentence Benji couldn’t hear. He plucked a bud out of his ear.
“You okay?” She laughed.
“Fine,” Benji deadpanned.
“Because you’ve got ahold of the seat arms like you’re trying to rip them off.” Again no response. “Nervous flier?”
Benji loosened his grip, put his hands dumbly in his lap. “I guess.”
“Want a drink?” The girl toggled her head at the flight attendant in the process of delivering a gin and tonic two rows ahead. “They’re free.”
“I’m fine.”
“Cool.”
He went back to his music, aware that denying himself a wee bottle of Tanqueray meant nothing with a small pill-shaped plastic case in his bag in which rattled three Percocets. The magic beans he’d kept all this time, in case the day came when he needed a stalk to climb away on. No, he told himself. No. But why then had he brought them? Why had he kept them? Why make a miserable day all the more miserable?
He hitched himself to the steely riff of Radiohead and let it carry him where it would. He stood on a bridge. The railing would either hold him or it wouldn’t.
Sometimes you take La Cienega. Sometimes you take the 405.
EPILOGUE
The woman is five months along. The farthest she’s ever been. The first, she lost at eight weeks; the second, at four. Fleetingly she thinks, I’m thirty-eight. How many more chances do I get? The old fear — familiar but still startling — tugs at her, but she finds she can hold on to it now. It’s balanced against a strength rooted deep inside her, a sense of possibility, of — dare she even think it? — invincibility that comes with her swelling belly. She arrived early with her blanket, with her bag of cheese and crackers and grapes, a bottle of wine and two stemmed cups made from recyclable plastic. She is celebrating. They are celebrating. A promotion is cause to celebrate. A promotion is also, she realizes, cause to be late. She searches the crowd, looking across the dusky field of the Village for the bald black head she knows so well, held tall and (when heels are involved) high above the crowd, the white dress with the giant navy dots, the killer yellow shoes. (Who, she asked earlier that morning, wears pumps to the park?) She taps the face of her watch as though it’s betraying her.
It is an uncommonly cool summer night on the outskirts of Alluvia, New York. The lawn is filled with couples, with families, with groups of gathering friends who’ve driven from Albany, Schenectady, Saratoga, beyond. They stretch out on tasseled blankets, batik tapestries, on grass-stained sheets set aside for such occasions. They talk. They argue over the news. They eat. The sky darkens like a glass of water in which someone’s dipped an inky brush, from violet to blue to almost black. There are fireflies. There are, for a moment, birds diving to feast on them.
Everyone watches the birds until someone says those aren’t birds, they’re bats, and a ripple of panic and delight moves through the crowd. Bats! People flat on their backs, hands covering their faces, laughing and cringing and crying, Bats! But soon enough the bats are gone, and the musicians and singers take the stage, which rides above the grass like a barge of light, a radiant yellow boat with women in black gowns and men in tuxedos slowly taking their seats on deck. They tune their instruments. The crowd’s attention, braided together for a single second by the strange tentative sounds, unravels again. They mistake it for the start, and a surge of enthusiasm, frayed at the edges with impatience, with uncertainty—Should I be somewhere else? Doing something else? — travels across the field as through a snapped elastic band.