David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Did you eat? Are you hungry? Did my mom give you breakfast?”

Max patted his stomach and made a sour face. “Let’s give your mom a break. Besides, I’d hurl. My nerves this morning? I’m a Chihuahua.”

Benji said there was nothing to be nervous about, returning to yesterday’s mantra that everything would be fine, but his assurance sounded halfhearted, his mind clearly elsewhere. Parting the robe, he freed a crushed scroll of paper from the elastic waistband of his pants and flattened it on his lap. “Speaking of concerts,” he said with a sudden turn toward solemnity, “I see you’ve given quite a few.”

Max laughed, angling for a look. “That’s not a mystery, Encyclopedia Brown. I told you yesterday I started performing when I was twelve.”

“You did. You said you gave your first concert when you were twelve. What you didn’t say”—Benji spoke with the rising passion of a prosecutor unveiling his key piece of evidence—“was that your first concert was at Carnegie Hall .”

“What is that? A dossier?”

Benji flipped through pages of curling biography he’d cherry-picked from the web, past a radiant profile from the New York Times Magazine and an Annie Leibovitz photo in which one of Max’s eyes was obscured by the question mark of his cello’s scroll. “ Wikipedia, mostly. Some Facebook. This thing with Terry Gross.”

“I told you about Terry Gross.”

“You never said Terry Gross. You said you were on the radio. I was thinking WKRP in Cincinnati. Not NPR.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Did you know that fifty-two thousand people like you on Facebook? Fifty-two thousand,” Benji repeated, fully committed to this new way of measuring his own misery. “Guess how many people like me? Six hundred fifty-eight. I’ve got twenty years on you, and I still can’t break a thousand.”

“There’s a video on YouTube of a dog nursing a kitten. That’s been liked, like, two million times. We’re both in line behind that. Way behind.” Max wanted to talk more about Claudia — not about himself, not about his Facebook followers — but he could see no way of reaching that station without first meandering along whatever tracks pleased his host.

Benji shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re fucking Mozart.”

“ Fucking him? I don’t even know him.” He waited for the joke to land, as only a bad, borscht belt joke can, but the smile on Benji’s face remained spiritless and wan. “First,” Max said, “I’m not Mozart.” He snatched the papers out of Benji’s hand and, shuffling through the patchwork of printed web pages—“Max Davis at Disney Hall” (timeout.com/los-angeles); “Max Davis at the White House” (whitehouse.gov); “Marvelous Max Conquers Kodály” (npr.org) — added, “I can’t stand when people say that.”

“But people do say it. What does that tell you?”

“That they have no idea what they’re talking about.” He waited for the simple truth of this to sink in, eyes wide, as if he’d just explained to a child that two plus two is four or yellow and blue make green. “What did you think I meant by professional?”

“I thought you were doing what everybody does: exaggerating. I thought maybe you picked up a few bucks playing wedding receptions or bar mitzvahs.”

“Because nothing gets thirteen-year-old boys going like a cello solo.”

“Carnegie Hall? The New York Philharmonic. The Berlin Philharmonic. The Leningrad Philharmonic.” Benji ticked off as many global symphonies and concert halls as he had fingers to count them on. “We talked for hours last night and you never — you just let me go on and on, talking about myself like an idiot. Talking about Prodigy and Little House on the goddamn Prairie . And you never? I don’t get it. How do you sit there and not, not—”

Max reached delicately into the tangled knot of Benji’s rant and tried to pull free a coherent thread. “Not what?”

“Brag!” Benji pounced. “My God, you won a motherfucking Grammy. Talk about burying the lede. A Grammy!”

Max demurred with a lopsided smile. “So did Milli Vanilli.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t be self-effacing. It’s annoying to those of us who have no hope of winning a Grammy. Or anything else, for that matter.”

Max could practically see the circuits of Benji’s mind light up with the accomplishments of a boy half his age, with what Benji took to be a real and glitteringly incomprehensible lack of vainglory, surging with data that didn’t compute. Benji closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if fending off a headache. “Do you know what I’d do if I won a Grammy? I’d solder a pin to it and wear it as a brooch. Who leaves that out?”

“Should I have said that before or after, ‘Hey, we’ve never met, but guess what? I’m your nephew!’? You’d think what a douche bag.”

“Are you kidding? You come out of the gates on a Thoroughbred, you don’t run the race like you’re riding a donkey. Trust me: I have the opposite problem. I’ve spent my life riding a donkey like it’s Secretariat.” Benji scratched his head as his own metaphor sunk in. “Now I see why your mother got so worked up.”

The night before, with Evelyn finally calmed, if still undone by her “spiteful, hateful, lying children,” Max painted a portrait of Jim and Amanda Davis that was as vivid as it was unflattering. Jim, an inventor by trade whose greatest contribution to date — a coffee mug that displays the temperature of the liquid inside it — had yet to find a public wider than SkyMall shoppers, spent the bulk of his days in the family’s basement, waiting for inspiration to pave the way to an idea as necessary and immortal as the light bulb. Amanda, on the other hand, made her name as the most exacting violin teacher between Buffalo and Syracuse. She had all the pedagogical subtlety of a Russian figure skating coach who had been forced off the ice in recent years by an ever-worsening case of rheumatoid arthritis. Where Jim was scattered and removed, Amanda was focused as a despot. Ever since Max could remember, his mother-cum-manager had set her son’s priorities, apportioned his time, ruled his life with all the rigor of a totalitarian regime. Until finally, at the age of twenty-two, he packed up his cello and said, “Enough.”

The Fishers were sympathetic when he revealed that Amanda had not only kicked him out of the house but also thrown gravel at his car as he drove away.

“Because you wanted to come here?” Evelyn asked.

“Because I wanted to come here. Because of a lot of things. Because I’m taking a break from playing for a while. Because I said I’m gay in a national magazine. Because I took her Mercedes. I don’t know what she found more unforgiveable. My career suicide, as she calls it, or her stolen car.”

A whining Nissan turned onto Palmer Street, breaking the morning quiet and putting past in a plume of toxic exhaust. Max and Benji looked up. It was the color of dried blood, beat up and toaster shaped, with illegally dark windows and a decal of a delinquent Calvin peeing on the rear windshield.

“I don’t suppose that’s her?” Max asked.

“She’ll be here,” Benji answered.

“What were you saying? About my mother?”

“I can see, I said. Now that I know everything you’re giving up, I can see why she’s having a fit.”

“I’m not giving up anything. I get to keep the Grammy,” Max said, but Benji, who had seemed so game over guacamole and virgin margaritas the night before, was no longer in a kidding mood. “I’m giving up being a bear on a unicycle,” Max added more pointedly. “That’s what I’m giving up.”