David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Behind them, Cat walked the three witches through the brewing of their potion, encouraging them not to cackle, to deliver the lines any way they wanted except with that awful, overused, Wicked Witch of the West cackle, bidding them softer rather than louder, until the room hissed with their chilling intent. Benji turned for a moment to watch her work, to see her dancing round the children who swayed round the pot. He smiled. He said to Brandon, “Did you ever read Death of a Salesman ?”

“Last semester,” answered Brandon, confused by but not averse to a random change of course. “In Ms. Arnold’s.”

“Ms. Arnold?” Benji’s brows rose in amused disbelief. “She’s still here?” By here he meant alive, though he kept his calculation of her improbable age to himself. “Do you know what Arthur Miller said Willy’s masterpiece was?”

“What’s this got to do with Macbeth?”

“Trust me.”

Brandon guessed. “I don’t know. His work?”

“You’d think so, right? But no, it’s Biff. It’s Willy’s son, Biff. That’s Willy’s masterpiece.” Benji remembered reading an interview years ago in which Miller said that his bedraggled salesman was writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day. Not in stone, but in melting ice. Benji offered the thought to Brandon, but the boy was barely sixteen: he hadn’t begun to worry whether monuments would be erected to him or if they’d stand or fall in the heat of the rising sun; he wasn’t considering his own mortality or totaling the ledger that sooner or later every man felt tempted to total — the work he’d done, the children he’d fathered, all that he would leave behind — and coming up with zero. Benji said, “Do you know what I mean?”

Brandon gave a polite but half-hearted nod. Cat had released the other students for a ten-minute break, and Brandon, looking like a caged bird that watched his brothers and sisters fly free, marked their escape, rebel smokers filing out the stage door into the frosty March dusk, everyone else skipping off to the vending machines singing, Fair is foul, and foul is fair . Benji heard the rehearsal spiraling apart, the noise dissipating into the auditorium’s eerie, canister-lit silence, but he couldn’t let Brandon go. He didn’t want to be alone with his ledger, with the roundly melancholy thoughts that waited for him at the bottom of so many columns. Zero, zero, zero.

One day he would have to accept it: he wasn’t a king or a father to them. He wasn’t Henry, whose eight published books already proved more resilient than their author. He wasn’t Max, with his trumpeted recordings of Haydn and Bach and the finished first act of a promising new opera. He certainly wasn’t Cat, who had no desire to live life on a throne of celebrity and acclaim, who seemed perfectly happy saving the graves of a few forgotten soldiers and directing a nothing school play that no one — no one, Benji couldn’t help think, who mattered — would see. He shouldn’t call it nothing; it wasn’t nothing. After all, people who had neither fame nor recognition, men and women who made their sixty-, seventy-, eighty-year journeys from cradle to grave without rousing the attention of anyone but the few equally anonymous souls who marched by their side, filled the earth. But the notion of a common lot, Cat’s annoying habit of reminding him that the good of the world depended on those who “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs,” offered Benji little comfort. Why couldn’t he hold on to the thought that what he was doing here, now, with Cat and these kids, counted for something? It mattered. He tried to believe, even in some small way, that it mattered. But sooner or later, every happy bubble popped on the sharp, bristling quills of doubts that he should (at this very minute) be shilling a new topical cream for treating red patches of dead skin. He wanted more. Even if he tallied his involvement in the play as a positive, the new sum didn’t erase the sadness that came from the old equations or the resentment Benji felt at having to feel that sadness alone. Brandon, who didn’t have the first clue how or why they’d leapt from Scottish king to Brooklyn salesman, would leave Benji sitting with his failures by himself. Which was exactly what Benji couldn’t let him do.

Benji picked up his script. He wanted — part of him needed — Brandon to see Macbeth’s utterly understandable wish to be the spring from which his name would forever flow into the future. It was, of course, why the Scot lashed out so savagely at Macduff’s children, but paradoxically, if you thought about it, it was also what saved Macbeth from being the simple monster everyone made him out to be. It’s what made him human. Benji scanned the page for proof he could pull from it. He didn’t want to live a hidden life. He didn’t want to lie in an unvisited tomb. He hated to think that his only route away from such a fate involved an ointment called Humira. But before he could find a thread that his hostage might pick up and follow, Cat snuck up behind him. She unfolded a squeaky seat and kneeled facing the two of them.

“Guys,” she said, “it isn’t work camp. Take a break.”

Brandon jolted to attention in his seat. “Can I, Mr. Fisher?”

Benji looked from his watch to the empty stage and laughed, as if he hadn’t noticed the room emptying around them. “Yeah. Sure. Sorry, pal.”

With the boy gone, Cat turned Benji’s back to her and reached out to knead his neck. In her cowgirl work shirt and torn-at-the-knee jeans, she looked like the women he dated in college, the grunge chicks who swayed to Siouxsie and the Banshees and appreciated a good game of beer pong. Her fingers found a knot of corded muscle and pressed hard against it. “So tense.”

Benji winced, grateful for the pain. He turned toward her, took her hand, and pulled her to him. She let her body go limp, leaning over the back of the seat as if she didn’t mind him dragging her onto his lap, before she stiffened, snickered, pulled back. “What do you want?” She eyed his crotch openly, expecting to find a visible sign to explain his sudden need to hold her, but no, he wasn’t asking for that.

“Come here,” he said reassuringly.

Cat hesitated. Hard-ons aside, eleven twittering teenagers were due back at any moment. As she stood, Benji rose to release her hand. A flourish. She might have been his waltz partner, aimed at the end of one row, spinning gracefully into another.

“Come here,” he repeated, reaching again for her hand.

She stood before him, slightly remote, until he repeated himself. With that she went, put a hand in his hair, and asked what was wrong. No answer came. What he wanted to say stood in the middle of a maze Benji had entered by way of Macbeth and theater’s most fantastic failure of a salesman; it had something to do with his father and nephew, with his mother’s disposable paintings and his sister’s buildings, which Benji thought of as impermeable to time as the stone and steel that made them; it had something to do with Cat and with Benji himself. He tried pulling a single articulate thought from the ferment of his mind, but whatever he hoped to say about what is bound to last and what is doomed to fade, whatever distinction he meant to make between the two, slipped away. The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Max, especially, agitated. Much as Benji loved him, he remained a cause of great confusion, at once the sting and the salve. For the kind of acclaim Benji hoped for, the accomplishments that bring us closest to some small reachable realm of immortality, already belonged to Max. What lit up Max’s sky like a sun shone in Benji’s as a mere star: forever distant, forever remote, a cold knifepoint of light (hardly enough to see by) in the nighttime sky. Funny: though Benji had spent a lifetime following fame, he stood as far away from it now as ever. Only recently, only since Cat and Max had come into his life (bright as beacons in their own right) had that original lodestar begun to fade. It was there, of course. It would always be there. But Benji no longer had to set his course by it, if he didn’t want to. There were other destinations now, other ways. He was Max’s uncle. He was Cat’s lover. Six months ago, these places didn’t exist, but suddenly they rose before him like warm, habitable planets in the inhospitable sea of space. They were home. Or becoming home. Some days, Benji wanted to give up trying to grab whatever crude, slippery tool would allow him to carve his name in a block more lasting than Willy’s ice and instead do the things he told Cat he’d do as they curled on the couch and opened a second bottle of wine. He would finish his bachelor’s degree, get a teaching certificate, join forces with Cat to lead Alluvia’s thankless youth to that elevated plane where everyone speaks in iambs.