David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Another car, a serviceable white sedan, approached the house and passed it by. Max watched it coast to a stop at the end of the street, disappointed, relieved.

“Why a bear on a—”

“The main attraction at the circus,” Max answered absently, his attention still fixed on the taillights burning like the red eyes of some mythical and retreating beast. “I’m tired.”

“Tired of the king of Denmark throwing roses at your feet?”

This Max ignored. “I’d like to see my boyfriend for more than three days a month. I’d like to conduct. I want to do something that’s my own. Like write music of my own. That’s what I’d like to do. Write music of my own instead of spending my entire life playing somebody else’s.”

“As if that’s the worst thing in the world.”

The warming sun wrung the smell of last night’s rain from the air. The eaves, dripping loudly, pit-a-patted into beds of hostas that bordered the front of the house, while across the beaded lawn, like a scarf dropped during the storm, a ragged knit of fallen orange leaves. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time,” Benji said, throwing an arm around his nephew and pulling him close. “It’s just hard for me to imagine walking away from anything I was so good at. I can’t walk away from acting, and I’m not very good at it at all.”

“I’m not giving up music.” As Benji loosened his grip, Max rocked back into his own sovereign space and said, “Maybe she changed her mind?”

“She’ll be here. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I don’t know. She didn’t sound too happy about the whole thing. And by ‘the whole thing’ I mean me.”

“Sounding happy has never been Claudia’s strong suit. She gets it from our father. You can’t take it personally.”

“I don’t. I read this book called Birthright about, you know, adopted people looking for their birth parents. I knew she might want nothing to do with me before I got into this.” He held up a hand to stall Benji’s interruption. “And you don’t need to tell me everything’s going to be fine.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

Benji zipped two fingers across his lips and let Max go on.

“Whatever happens with Claudia, even if she gets here and tells me to go away, I’m glad I came.” His voice snagged on a need he couldn’t name, deepened with emotion. “I’m glad I met you,” he said. “And your mom. Though she doesn’t know what to make of me either.”

“Are you kidding? The closest she thought she’d ever get to having a grandchild is complaining she didn’t have one. You’re like Christmas to her.”

“I don’t think a twenty-two-year-old is what she had in mind.”

“Give her time. Give them both time.”

“You didn’t need time.”

Benji shrugged. “I’m like a dog: one sniff and my heart is yours.”

“Your basic emotional whore?”

“Pretty much. Besides, being an uncle is easier than being a parent. Uncles buy cotton candy. Parents have to make sure you eat your peas.”

“Those days are over.”

“You’re never too old for cotton candy. And you may not need to hear it, but it is going to be fine. Claudia’s going to love you. I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours and I love you.”

“You don’t know me well enough to love me,” Max said. “I could be a grifter for all you know.”

“Are you a grifter?”

“No.”

“Even if you were. She’s your mother. How can she not love you?”

Max was awed and shaken as another self — one with a different parentage, a different provenance — began to take shape before him. He wanted to believe what his uncle said was that simple: mothers love their sons. Benji’s philosophy on this point may have been as nuanced as a tenth-grade biology book, but Max hoped to throw a switch deep within Claudia, at the level of her genes, and watch maternal devotion blaze forth, unwavering and immediate. It should have been that simple, but darkness hung at the end of the path, a shadowy bend around which he could not see.

“Tell me more about her.”

Benji began retreading the same ground they’d covered the night before when they crowded on the sofa with the old photo albums. For Max, a portrait of Claudia had come together, perceptibly, pointillistically, as Benji connected the dots between the third-grade field trip to Howe Caverns, the junior-year term abroad in Rome, the ribbon cutting celebrating her first building.

This morning, though, Max had his own agenda. “Am I the only one?” he suddenly wanted to know.

Benji stopped for a moment to take in his meaning. “Yes. God, yes.”

“And I was a mistake?”

“You were — unplanned.”

“She was my age?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t she just end it?”

Silence. “She tried.”

Silence. “At least you’re honest. What happened?”

“She couldn’t do it.”

“You told me she was tough.”

“She is.”

“What about Nick?”

“What about him?”

“Would they have gotten married, you think? If it wasn’t for me?”

Benji shrugged. “What do you want to write?”

“An opera,” Max offered. “I think.”

“Opera’s good. I’ve never seen an opera. But I know that everybody throws roses at the end.” Benji crumpled a piece of paper into a mangled flower and tossed it at Max’s feet. “Roses. Roses. More roses!”

Max pushed himself off the steps, a gust of exasperation that carried him into the wet grass. “Jesus, Benji. Give it a rest with the roses.”

“Joke,” Benji said soothingly. “I’m joking. Come on, sit back down.”

But Max thrust his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and stood his ground. “Why are you being a dick? The concerts and the Grammys and the fucking king of Demark. You’ve been up my ass with that shit since you woke up.”

“There’s an image.” Benji tried lightening the mood. He picked up his makeshift rose, stuffing it, with a hangdog look, into the folds of his robe. “You’re right. I’m a dick.”

“What’s your problem?” Max pleaded.

“Forget it.”

“No. We’re starting a — a thing here. I want it to be honest. I want it to be right. I hate weirdness.”

“Okay. Okay.” Benji held his hands up to show he had no intention of fighting as he fished in a pond of murky emotions. He found only two words sluggish enough to be caught. “I’m jealous.” Max looked taken aback, and Benji rushed to say, “It’s not you. It’s me. It’s all about me. But you’re like this lens. You shouldn’t be, I know. But I can’t help it: I look at you, and it’s like I see more clearly all the things I haven’t done.”

Max opened his mouth to answer, but Benji cut him off. “I keep thinking of this book my father gave me. Every year, on my birthday, Henry gives me a book. Gave me a book. He’s way past remembering birthdays. But I used to think these books were his way of talking to me. He had so little to say, or so little I wanted to hear, I took each one like a message in a bottle. Like his only way of sending word across the shark-infested sea of his personality.”

“Nice metaphor.”

“Thanks. Took forever to come up with it. Anyway. Sometimes the message seemed clear enough. Like the year I left college, he gave me Jude the Obscure . Which is like the worst book for a college dropout. But other years? I still don’t know what he was trying to tell me with Beloved . He wished my mom had killed me in a woodshed? When I was thirty, he gave me Oblomov .”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s Russian. I forget who wrote it, but it’s called Oblomov , and it’s all about this guy.”