David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“I love my sister,” answered Cat, pausing as one does before equivocating the unequivocal, “but she can be a bitter, bitter pill.”

“She said you don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Because I’m not a waitress, right? I’m so lucky. What she calls luck, I call the death of my parents.” Cat gave Benji a dispirited smile and started on her elbows. “She acts like she doesn’t know where that money comes from. How did I pay for the BFA or the summerhouse or any of the other things she thinks I’m so lucky to have? The same way she paid for a Range Rover and two divorces. A big fucking insurance policy.”

Benji breathed deeply. The perfume of Cat’s soap and body lotion worked its way into his system, rocketing every available drop of blood between his legs. He felt light-headed, ashamed to be fully erect in such close proximity to Cat’s dead parents, but undeniably ready to fuck all the same. He folded his hands over his lap and did his best to look attentive and grave.

“She has dreams for me,” Cat went on. “Mama Rose dreams. Which makes me either June or Gypsy. It’s unclear which. I haven’t tried stripping yet.”

“If ever you want to practice.”

She gave him a quick, teasing kiss and hopped off the bed. Shimmying across the room, she danced an impromptu burlesque behind her towel before dropping it to the floor and stepping into a pair of striped cotton panties.

“Molly wanted to be an actor?”

“No, but she was always the one bound for the spotlight. Or so everyone thought. Or my dad, at least.”

“And what was Molly’s talent?”

“Resentment? She won the science fair one year, and that was it: she was going to be a doctor. Find the cure for cancer. That kind of thing.” Cat pulled on torn jeans and a fitted sweater with flared sleeves while she talked, then sized herself up in the standing mirror.

“She’s a rich biotech researcher. What does she have to complain about?”

“Her money’s pretty much gone. And she tells people she’s a biotech researcher. She’s an assistant, actually. She isn’t curing cancer. She’s watching bacteria bloom.” Cat ran a wand of colorless gloss over her lips and pressed them together, more or less satisfied with the result. “She told me she could have won the Nobel Prize if only my parents hadn’t died.”

“No pressure there.”

“Right? My parents’ dying is all she ever needed to explain why her life has been so — I don’t know what she’d call it. Ordinary.”

Benji understood completely where Molly was coming from but, because this was a fledgling nemesis they were talking about, felt compelled to set his camp on the other side of the fence. “Like winning the Nobel Prize is the only way of making a name for yourself.”

Cat turned to Benji with an arched brow. “Like you never feel that compulsion?”

“What?” he answered innocently. “I don’t want to win a Nobel Prize.”

“No, just all the other ones.” She batted her eyelashes and, with a southern accent, drawled, “If only I were famous.”

Benji supposed she meant to imitate him, but, seeing that he wasn’t gay or Blanche DuBois, he thought she fell short of the mark. “But you — you actually belong in a spotlight.”

“At least my sister thinks so. Which is why I need to be pushed. And punished.”

Benji got out of bed at Cat’s clapping command. He pulled on his clothes, brushed his teeth, readied himself to plunge into the day. A knot of dread tightened in his stomach at the thought of parting ways. He didn’t want to let go. Not even for the few hours Cat needed to run errands and rally to save the graves of the long-forgotten dead. Benji had, for a moment, broken free of time, lost track of the world and his place in it. He delighted in not being certain whether it was Sunday or Monday, and he paused now before opening the door to the wider world. He didn’t want to end this rare honeymoon, to leave his horse-filled hermitage. He didn’t want to step back into time. He didn’t want to step back into himself.

Carefully, Cat eased the car out of a gravel drive with a treacherous blind spot. The first hints of fall dusted the leaves, streaming, moth-eaten banners flecked with red, yellow, and ochre in the bright-blue air. Benji fed his Wilco CD into the stereo slot, flipped to his favorite song. He leaned his head against the window and drummed a finger absently on the door handle. He wanted to say he’d seen some new possibility, that Cat had shown him a new possibility. He wanted to say something about light. About Cat being the light. What he said was, “We should do a sex tape.”

She glanced at him through narrowed eyes before turning back to the road. “Sweet talker.”

“Look what it did for the Kardashians. We’re at least as talented as they are.”

“You think comparing me to a Kardashian is the best way to seduce me?”

They passed a prim white farmhouse with two huge barns and a line of dairy cows chewing drowsily in the muck.

“It could be my comeback,” Benji said. “No pun intended.”

Cat rolled her eyes. “Gross.”

“The guy from Saved by the Bell did one.”

“Mario Lopez?” She perked up.

“The other one. The one you’d least want to see in a sex tape. Whatshisname? At the end, he does a dirty Sanchez.”

“I seriously hope that’s not referring to a person. Actually, I don’t want to know what that is.”

Benji laughed. “If nothing else, it would be another feather in my father’s cap. One more thing to prove him right about me.” He knew how dreary this line of conversation was, how decidedly unappealing self-deprecation could be, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was as painful as scratching a rash but also as satisfying. And besides, leaving the house, bursting that bright little bubble of Edenic seclusion, left him feeling embattled, in want of a target, even if he was the one locked in his sights.

“Crackpot theory?” Cat asked.

It made him smile, the lingo developing between them, their own little dictionary and standing invitation to amateur psychoanalysis. “Please.”

“I think you like proving your father right. You get off on it.” She turned down the music and tightened her grip on the wheel, her shoulders, her entire upper body gone rigid with conviction. “It’s more than just pissing him off. It’s your way of staying connected. The antagonism. The impasse. It’s how you stay close.” He considered her profile, her creased forehead, the straight line of her small nose, the pale down above her upper lip turned to gold by the sun. “Maybe it’s why you take these jobs that. That.”

Benji watched her teeter on a ledge, not knowing how to finish her sentence without falling off. “Suck,” he offered.

“That’s your word. I was going to say that are less than what you’re capable of.”

“How do you know what I’m capable of?”

Cat shrugged. “You act interested when I read to you from Middlemarch . You can be very convincing when you want to be.” She pulled the car to a stop at a deserted intersection and turned onto the pocked rural road that would deposit them in downtown Alluvia. “What would it mean if you were Hamlet?” she asked. “Not the Ghost. Not the understudy for Horatio. Not the butt of your own joke. But Hamlet. You’d have to change your entire worldview.”

“I’d have to memorize a lot more lines.”

“You’d have to live with proving your father wrong. And who would you be then? If you weren’t failing Henry Fisher?”

Benji plucked a bottle of warm, flat soda from the cup holder and took a swig. “It wouldn’t matter. I could be Hamlet. I could be Ralph fucking Fiennes. My father’s totally unimpressed by fame.”