David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

It had been years since he’d paid attention to the subtle emotional tremors that attended sex, since he had cared enough for his partner to see her so vulnerably exposed, but the aftershocks of their lovemaking registered once again on the heart’s delicate apparatus. He saw the ways in which Cat could be generous or selfish or self-conscious or scared. He saw the peaks of her happiness. Shadows of a remoter grief. And for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t the first one to let go, roll to the other side of the bed, and fall asleep.

He might have been thirteen again, for the frequency and firmness of his hard-ons. Now, letting his mind wander across the pages of their compromised Kama Sutra , he slipped his hand under the tented sheet to treat himself to a few vigorous tugs. He trained an ear on Cat in the shower, trying to gauge when the water might shut off, if he could finish before she did, and had fallen halfway into a serious rhythm when the phone rang. The smooth glass face of Cat’s phone lit up. It chirped like a cricket atop the neatly stacked books on her nightstand. Benji fumbled for it. He’d never seen a picture of Molly, but the one displayed beneath her caller ID fit well enough with his preconception. Her curly, shoulder-length red hair, riotous freckles, and severe mirrored sunglasses squared with her willingness to meddle and, on occasion, make Cat cry. His fingers, two mischievous steps ahead of his brain, swiped across the screen and brought the phone to his ear.

“Molly?”

There was a pause. “Who’s this?” she asked, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing.

“It’s Benji,” he said, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of having to say more.

“Is my sister there?”

“She is, but she’s in the shower.”

Another pause. “What’s wrong with her voice mail?”

“Nothing,” he said cheerfully. “I just wanted to say hi. Introduce myself.”

“Oh. Hi.” She sounded deflated, as if the pleasantry, insincere though it was, had punched a hole in her peevish mood. But she recovered in no time. “Actually, now that we’re talking, I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“What’s going on up there?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in Xanadu. You do know she was supposed to be in New York a week ago, don’t you?” She had the thick, sinusy voice of an unrepentant smoker and cleared her throat from time to time with a rough, bronchial bark. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. But, honestly, I’m at a loss.”

“She doesn’t have to be in New York until the end of the month.”

“I mean, who passes up an opportunity like that?” Molly asked, barreling over Benji’s protest like a professional linebacker taking on the JV team. “A Broadway play.”

Benji scoffed. “Where’d you get Broadway?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Molly sighed, softening toward the philosophical. “A thousand actors would kill for a chance like that. To be invited to an audition in New York City. By. A. Director.” She nailed his ignorance to a cross with each hammered word. “He saw Hamlet and asked to hear her read. She didn’t mention that either, hunh? I told her things like that don’t happen every day. She forgets how lucky she is. She doesn’t have to wait tables or tend bar or do half the unappealing things most actors have to do. You know what I’m talking about. Am I wrong? She rents a three-bedroom house on a lake while the rest of the cast is sleeping three to a room in some sad motel. I just hate to think of her passing up the opportunity of a lifetime to make sure the Civil War dead get their due. Or to play house. Or whatever it is she’s doing up there.”

Cat turned off the water and pulled back the shower curtain, brass rings zipping across the rod with the clarity of little bells. Benji, not knowing what else to say, said, “Revolutionary War.”

“Sorry?”

“The dead. Compton’s Mound? Revolutionary War, not Civil War.”

Molly managed to condense her skepticism, her utter lack of interest, into a single syllable, a hard little pellet of sound dropped displeasingly between them. “Hmph.” Then: “Tell her I called.”

Benji tossed the phone into the dunes of the down comforter without a good-bye and waited for Cat to open the door.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as soon as she saw his face. She stood in the doorway wrapping a towel tightly around her as the surrounding cloak of steam tattered into the room and disappeared.

“Your sister called.”

“And by the look of it worked her charms on you. I could have told you that was going to happen. Why did you answer the phone?”

“To piss her off, I guess.”

“Mission accomplished?”

“You didn’t say anything about Broadway,” Benji said, hurt. “Or needing to be in New York last week. You said you weren’t due there for another—”

“Molly.” She said the name apprehensively, as though it were a curse best not spoken, then explained, “I left that whole thing very open-ended. And it wasn’t Broadway. I don’t know where she gets half the — Broadway by way of Weehawken, maybe.”

“Opportunity of a lifetime. That’s what she said.”

Cat sat on the side of the bed and pumped a few pearls of lotion onto her water-beaded legs. “ Oleanna in a church basement is hardly the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said flatly, rubbing the skin to a high, fragrant sheen.

“So why didn’t you go?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t like David Mamet.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

She questioned his certainty with a wry grin before returning to her moisturizer. “Okay. Maybe I like what I’m doing here more,” she said.

The idea that he himself might be the reason beneath this vague answer broke like sunrays into a recess of dim hope. He’d been so occupied with whether he was falling in love with Cat that he hadn’t stopped to consider whether she might be falling in love with him. “And what’s that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

She turned to indulge the other leg while Benji, prick stiffening anew, further indulged this fantasy of reciprocation. As if the thought of Cat’s devotion weren’t alluring enough, he found the performance of her morning skin care ritual hopelessly erotic.

“I’m fighting evil robber barons,” she said.

Benji sighed. This wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. Not only because it had nothing to do with him but because he’d already gone to considerable lengths to clear an old acquaintance’s name. “I told you. Nick Amato is not a robber baron. He’s a real estate developer.”

“Who happens to be developing what should be historically protected land. It’s a cemetery, Benji. For war heroes.”

“Who no one has visited in a hundred years.”

“So that means we should go and dig them up? Who digs up a cemetery?”

“That doesn’t make him an evil robber baron,” Benji repeated.

“What does it make him then?”

It was a lure, playfully dangled, but Benji gave it a serious snap. “He was my sister’s boyfriend,” he said. “They probably would have gotten married.”

“Probably? Intriguing. What stopped them?”

He could have started down that bump-riddled road to a pretty good story, but the sight of Cat, gilded by the light that shimmered off the lake, had him sinking into the pillows with dreamy satisfaction. She looked like one of Degas’ bathers, all golds and irresistible pinks. He retrieved Cat’s phone from the jumbled bedding and snapped a quick photo. She turned at the sound of the old-fashioned shutter click and, with a clowning moue, held out her palm. Unapproved photos were not part of her contract. With a frown of his own, Benji surrendered the phone and said, “Your sister thinks we’re playing house.”