David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Five-year plan? He never said. He probably thinks I’d make fun of him.”

“You probably would.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows, as if Cat had her there. “Independent of Benji — you have no idea?”

“So many things. I like teaching. And I’d like to get back to acting. Did I tell you I got a call for an audition?”

“Congrats.”

“Yeah. It’s only the Saratoga Rep, but—”

“No buts.”

“And kids. Maybe. At some point, kids.”

“With my brother?” Claudia burst out.

“You can’t see him as a father?”

“I think he’d be a good father. If he could stay out of his own way.”

They rubbed their eyes against a rolling wave of barbecue smoke, the char of burgers, and, beneath it, the druggy, satisfying singe of lighter fluid.

“So you’ll be here.” Cat coughed. “Cutting your ribbon.”

Claudia waited.

“With Nick?”

“I used to think I was too much of a feminist to have a family.”

“Whatever,” Cat countered with a roll of the eyes. “Feminists can’t have families? It’s not the seventies.”

“Maybe it’s too late. I chose my work.”

“Again: whatever.”

Benji stayed a fair distance from the crowd that lined up on the far side of the field waiting for free lemonade and hotdogs. He’d come straight from a four-mile run and walked up and down the patch of scrubby grass designated for parking, rewardingly wet in his wicking gear, looking for Cat’s car. In the course of the last year, he’d dropped fifteen pounds. He felt firmer, stronger, more capable than he could remember feeling, and he nursed a fledgling fantasy of entering the lottery for next November’s marathon. But Benji’s plans for self-improvement didn’t end with Alluvia High’s drama club or the abs he was just beginning to coax into view. No less than Cat or Claudia, he had committed himself to unveiling a creation of substance and pride. He meant to redesign himself, to focus less on the glittering Vegas hotel he’d always thought he wanted to be and more on something truly habitable. If this meant trading lights and the promise of a gaudy but scintillating existence for life on a humbler, more human scale, then that’s what he would do. He had Cat. He had Max. He had his students. He had his no-longer-quite-so-shaky sobriety. But there was more. More than racing Cat from their shaggy gray dock to the diving platform in the middle of the lake. More than continuing to shave seconds off his nine-minute-mile pace.

Finding Cat’s black Volvo, the rear window decoupaged with stickers from Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood and Obama 2012, Benji opened the passenger’s side door to retrieve the glossy college folder he’d left on the seat. He stood sixty credits shy of a bachelor’s degree, two short years, and then a door he thought forever shut would swing open on a teaching certificate, on a classroom of his very own. SUNY Albany was not Princeton or Yale; it wasn’t even Skidmore, where he’d started out, but he was learning to look at life with a lower wattage bulb, less glitz, less glamour. It’s enough, he had to keep telling himself. It’s enough.

He leaned against the sunbaked side of the car and flipped open the course catalog to pages Cat had helped him dog-ear the night before. He leapt between this description and that — Topics in Contemporary Drama. Play Analysis. Acting III (for certainly he could bypass I and II) — as the festivities, in their official capacity, got under way. Someone from Nick’s office tapped on a microphone and tentatively began, “Hello? Ladies and gentlemen? Hello?” while a man who looked like he rode a Harley made adjustments to the sound.

As Nick took the stage to scattered applause, the crowd still more intent on free barbecue than canned speeches, Benji scanned the mob for Cat. Separated from the few remaining protesters who stood on the unsociable side of a single sawhorse police barricade, who looked about as revved up now as a shed full of unplugged power tools, Cat stood at the foot of the stage, awaiting her moment. When Benji looked at her, his mind, like a leashed dog racing round a tree, tended to make tighter and tighter circles around thoughts of diamond rings (how could he afford one?) and proposals (what would he say?), but he willfully pushed his attentions in another direction, turning back to his catalog to read a description of Shakespeare after 1600.

“Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but you’re Benji Fisher.”

Benji looked up to find a man of medium build with a trim waist and a salesman’s smile. He had a formal, old-fashioned style of casual dress, as if he’d come straight from the set of Mad Men : white polo, tan slacks, navy blazer, tasseled shoes. His short blond hair thinned at the crown. And the heat of the day splashed large pink roses on his pale white cheeks. Sweating indecorously, he mopped his forehead and neck with a patterned pocket square and said, “You’re a hard man to find.”

Autograph? Gun? Benji’s mind no longer stayed there very long. “Sorry. Have we—? Who are you?”

The man reached into his blazer pocket and produced a thin silver case from which he pulled a business card of considerable tooth. “Sam Palin. Bravo TV.”

“Palin?” Benji repeated, dubious.

“No relation.” Sam laughed heartily, a show of hands in surrender mode. “I can’t see Alaska from my backyard.”

From the stage, Nick’s voice came deep and resonant as he explained to the crowd the experiment that was the Village, a new model of sustainable suburban living, a true community, words Benji heard echoing across the huge wooded lot without truly listening to them. For all he knew Nick was up there selling toxic waste, transfixed as he was by the logo on Sam’s card, blue letters bold in a black talk bubble.

“I’m in a field in the middle of nowhere,” Benji mused. “How did you find me?”

Sam held up his hands again with the same hearty laugh. “I’m not a stalker, I swear. I got your address from Nina Schweitzer. You remember her — your agent.”

Benji let go a laugh of his own. He didn’t need to be told who Nina Schweitzer was, though he did feel obliged to correct Sam and point out that Nina was no longer his agent.

“I don’t know about that. She seemed very interested in the two of us talking.”

“She didn’t think to give you my phone number?”

“Oh, she did,” Sam said, indicating Benji’s pocketless attire, “but it doesn’t look like you have your phone on you.”

“And you — what? Just happened to be passing by?”

“Actually, I am. I try to make it to Saratoga two, three times a summer. What can I say? I like the horsies.”

“Great, but how did you know I’d be here ?”

“Nina gave me your number, but I thought it better if we talk in person. So I wound up at your parents’. That’s the address Nina had for you. And your mother said you’d be out here for the day. The rest is GPS.”

This, Benji thought, explained the recent, still-unlistened-to voice mails from Nina, who shortly after he turned down the lucrative offer to sell itch cream had told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have what it took to make it in this business. As difficult as it was, Benji took pride in not listening to what she had to say. The last big opportunity to which Nina paved the way had landed him in the toolshed of the director of a piddling regional rep. Through silence Benji meant to transmit the message: Fuck off. Not interested. He wanted her to have proof that, professionally speaking, he had turned a corner. Moved on. He no longer lived to be a joke for hire. He lived, quite literally now, in a different zip code.