David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Henry shrugged. “What do I need with more than one copy?”

“Flood. Fire. Theft.”

“You sound like an insurance salesman, Leo. What do you think the safe is for?”

Jane said never ask too much. But I’m not thinking of this as I stand on the porch. It’s Christmas Eve. When I find Jane gone, I stand on the porch and ask Evelyn to watch the baby. She calls the police. Each morning, I leave to join the men in padded navy jackets and fur hats from which their badges shine. We trudge deep into the snow-buried woods, climbing fallen branches and cracking through the ice-jagged streams. Maybe she ran away, they say. Maybe the baby was too much. But I know. I know. I go out before the sun is up, and Evelyn is at the door, waiting for me to put the baby in her arms. Claudia, washed and fed by the time I get home, snuggles in a pink blanket and smells softly of soap. There isn’t a day she isn’t ready for me. And then it’s spring. And then it’s the day I go to the door to find Evelyn waiting in the bright, early light. She wears a white dress with cherries on it, and there’s the smell of grass that already needs cutting, but instead of handing Claudia to her, I reach out and take her hand, but the words won’t come. She doesn’t let go of my hand. When I can speak, I say, Will you? But my tongue is a weight, and the rest of the sentence is trapped under it. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need anything more. Yes, she says, yes.

Because the widow couldn’t bear to sell the house, she rented it out. It was a grand cottage, situated on a superior stretch of lakefront, Adirondack chairs as red as candied apples and a lawn just large enough for croquet. Her husband had been a photographer who’d done a residency at Yaddo as a young man and found at the nearby racetrack the subject that established his name. There wasn’t a room that wasn’t filled with large black-and-white photos of mud-spattered jockeys and thundering horses, that wasn’t decorated to suggest the artful artlessness of equestrian chic. The worn leather club chairs, the tartan wallpaper and silver candlestick lamps, the shelves and shelves of leather-bound books that only the dourest of summer renters would dare pick up. Gargantua and Pantagruel? The Wealth of Nations? Benji limped through his first tour in a state of consumerist wonder. “Ralph Lauren had a wet dream,” he said, fingering the camel-colored cashmere blanket draped casually over the foot of the bed.

But after three blissful days of residency, he had proven himself a perfect specimen of human adaptability. He put aside all envy and derision and met the morning like a king, propped against a mountain of jacquard pillows in the gigantic sleigh bed, ready to receive his breakfast on a tray, if only he could find someone to bring it. He listened to Cat in the shower — the beat of falling water, a snippet of song — and felt, finally, at peace. He had a view of the lake, the sky, the flawless blue of a mid-September morning that seemed to mirror the clarity of his mind. Keeping what his friends in recovery called a “day count” had always made him feel more like an alcoholic than falling asleep holding the bourbon bottle, but secretly scarcely an hour passed when he didn’t add up the time since his last drink. Three days. Seventeen. Thirty-six. The only chemicals to pass his lips now were prescribed by his general practitioner, and every milligram he took he took according to the letter. His respect for Dr. Gratin’s dosing requirements may have started with Evelyn, with a worried mother’s silent pledge to be the Percocet bottle’s childproof top, but as the weeks passed, with Cat more and more by his side, Benji felt the weight, the responsibility of his sobriety shift to his own shoulders. He ticked off the days like mileposts on a marathon, with the swelling pride of a challenge met.

Of course Cat McCarthy wasn’t the first girl to inspire Benji to cork the wine. He’d dried out for Marisol Alvarez and her macrobiotic diet. And Daphne Chu, whose own commitment to conquering step seven spurred her to fill two notebooks with the names of people she once wronged. And Angelica Tottencourt, self-professed psychic, whose inner spiritual guide failed to inform her that Benji’s teetotaling, like their relationship, had an expiration date. But to compare Cat to Angelica or Daphne or Marisol or anyone else who came before her was to hold a birthday candle to a bonfire. Others simply vanished in the heat.

Benji didn’t want to spend his mornings barely conscious or let another afternoon pass in a blear, not when he could open his eyes to the easterly sun and see Cat sleeping beside him. Before Hank, an ex — competitive rower and neighbor to the north, zipped across the square of placid pewter lake framed by the bedroom window, Benji’s arm had journeyed across the mattress, reaching for the sweet, warm hillocks that Cat made under the sheet. He moved more like an old man than the svelte, steel-shouldered, septuagenarian neighbor — still slow and sore, encumbered — but closer he came, closer, until he fit himself to Cat’s curved and slumbering shape like a puzzle piece. His hand found her hip. His lips brushed the downy fringe on the back of her neck. He practically vibrated with the competing urges to wake her up and let her sleep. As he nestled against her he felt her swim up from the depths, pause before surfacing completely. She let him suffer. But the louder his breath sounded in her ear, the harder he grew against the small of her back, the dearer, he could tell, she found his agony. She’d roll over and look up at him, laughing through a yawn. There was no sour breath. No crust sealing shut the corners of her eyes. No cowlicked hair. In time, the faults that made her human would assert themselves, but in the poetically sealed vault of their three-day tryst, Benji sensed only her perfection.

He’d gone to the cottage with a rough sketch of Cat’s life, but the long conversations on the splintered gray dock, the dreamy postcoital confessions, allowed him to start filling in the lines with color. She was the daughter of a high school guidance counselor and a Joyce scholar whose monograph on micturition in Irish literature had been shortlisted for the James Russell Lowell Prize, a big deal in certain small circles. She’d told Benji in their first days together that her parents had “died in a plane crash,” but it wasn’t until she was half asleep in a lounge chair by the lake, offering her back to be slathered in sunscreen, that she admitted that rescue workers had discovered her father, still strapped to his seat, in an old woman’s garden. Her mother’s body had never been found.

Cat, who was only a year old at the time, remembered nothing of her parents or their tragic end, but Molly, her older sister and self-appointed surrogate mom, provided a store of painful memories for Cat’s most private monologues. She talked about her mother’s struggle with depression and her father’s rigorously managed drinking problem, but most of Cat’s memories focused on Molly or their brother, Dennis, or the decent but unpalatably Republican aunt and uncle who dutifully stepped in to raise them. Cat was less inclined to shine the spotlight on herself — an odd trait, Benji noted, for an actor — but he listened attentively to the tales she felt like telling, waiting for the moments when Cat appeared, when she, the secondary character in so many of her tales, stepped to the front of the stage. Then he caught a glimpse of the girl he was beginning to love.

And then there was the sex.

He’d imagined their days away from Palmer Street and the chaperoning eyes of his parents would be a time of discovery. And they were. They were, first, a lesson in what could and couldn’t be done with two of four extremities in casts. Without both arms to support his weight, the missionary position was out. As was anything that required standing for too long. He couldn’t cup her firm, young ass and pin her to the wall or take her in a handstand, holding on to her legs like the handles of a wheelbarrow. He tried standing behind her, his good hand braced on her back as she planted forward into downward dog, but soon the pain elbowed in like a bothersome third who wanted a piece of the action, and he had to lie down. He was best sitting or on his back, with Cat riding his lap or rising above him with calisthenic abandon or holding on to the headboard with a grip wide enough for motorcycle handlebars and lowering herself — ever so teasingly — onto his face.