David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Sam’s an old friend,” Benji said, jumping in to explain, “from high school.”

Sam grinned his grin. “Benji and I go way back. Mr. Hume’s history class, wasn’t it? The times we had.”

Benji, suspecting just how quickly and ecstatically a man like Sam could get carried away with lying, turned back to Cat. “You ready?”

“Whenever you are.”

“Sure.” He smiled, leaning over to kiss her. Marry me. To Sam he said, “Good talking to you. Give me a few days to think about it?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely.” He took Benji’s hand and pumped it vigorously. “You’ve got my card. Let me know. Let me know, or I’ll hunt you down.” He pointed his fingers at Benji like two revolvers— Pow! Pow! — and walked off into the fray.

“Think about what?” Cat asked, watching him go.

“Oh. Nothing. I told him I was thinking about getting my certification, and he said I might think about doing something with this—”

“With what?”

“Hunh? Oh. This, this summer camp he runs in Lake George.”

“That guy’s from Lake George?” Cat asked, going around to her side of the car. “What kind of camp?”

Benji opened his door, ducked to get in. “Theater camp. What do you think?”

Before climbing into her seat, Cat stood on it, reaching across the roof to retrieve Benji’s folder. “Forgetting something?” she asked, a trace of the schoolmarm tinting her voice as she dropped the hot folder into his lap and started the car. When she turned onto the main road, Compton’s Mound receding in the rearview, she said, “I don’t know any theater camps in Lake George.”

Benji tried to wring the strain of defensiveness from his laugh. “Do you know every theater camp in existence?”

“Um. No, Mr. Attitude, I don’t. What’s the matter? It sounds exciting.”

Benji gave her thigh an apologetic squeeze. He unrolled his window before the gust from the air conditioner finished its climb into the cold and said, “You have no idea.”

Are you going to sit there all day watching us or are you going to help? She isn’t the prettiest girl on the beach, but she’s the one I’ve been watching. I have two choices. Go back to my book, pretend I don’t know what she’s taking about. Or stuff the book in my bag and take the shovel she’s offering me. I get up, brush the sand off my legs. What’s your name? Jane, she says. Then, pointing to her friend, That’s Mary. Mary could sell suntan lotion, but Jane sparks, the dark hair, the fiery-red swimsuit, the barely there tits and overcompensating nose. You need to get the sand wet; that’s why it keeps falling down. Mary, bored, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her rolled towel and lies back to smoke. Jane walks with me to the water’s edge, a bucket between us. You build a castle with this stuff here, the thing won’t ever come down. I hike back up to dry land and turn the bucket over to show her. See how strong? Now you. No, you do it, she says, but not in a helpless, princessy way. I fill the buckets and bring them back. I build up a pyramid of tightly packed sand that Jane, using the stem of her sunglasses, starts to carve. A turret. A window. A curving wall with stairs. Not bad, I say when we’re done. With two fingers, she slices her signature in the sand. Sign it, she says. That’s stupid, I say. You did it, didn’t you? You said yourself it’ll stand forever, so sign it. Your masterpiece. I kneel, my leg hot against hers, and write my name.

Act two was finished. Act two would stand. The trouble was, it stood alone. The foundation of the first act stood squarely under the roof of the third, but the act between didn’t align with either, giving the entire structure the precarious feel of a Jenga puzzle. Not only would Max have to circle back to the beginning to shift act one so it supported all that followed, he’d have to smooth the transition between the second and third acts, the passage that led from Lily Briscoe’s return to the Ramsays’ shuttered summer house to her sitting in their dining room ten years after that first failed trip to the lighthouse, where everything was changed, where so much time had passed, where Mrs. Ramsay was dead, where Prue and Andrew were dead, and Lily with her paintbrushes and canvas asked, “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”

Max heard those notes carried by the strings. Sweeping the silence like a beam from the lighthouse would sweep the dark, they came and went. Came and went. A first step, but where to go with it? What next? He hummed the few fledgling bars as he stepped from the shower and toweled dry, his body a darting shadow in the steamed mirror, but none of it seemed right. He brushed his teeth, swiped on his deodorant, and massaged a dollop of moisturizer onto his face, dropping the tubes and creams into his Dopp kit as he finished with them. Next: the pills. Opening the bottles one by one, humming ba da dum —no, that wasn’t right either — he placed a colorful array of capsules in his open palm and quickly, before his reflection fully returned (he didn’t like to see himself do it), washed them down the drain.

He opened the door with the stealth of a cat burglar to find Arnav sitting up in bed, waiting. Always a bad sign. Arnav awake in the middle of the night — Arnav, who had proven he could sleep through their westerly neighbor’s porn-star-like attempts to pound his headboard through the wall, who failed to wake to anything but the shrillest, most obnoxious alarms — meant trouble of the sort Max usually (and with pride) thought himself crafty enough to avoid.

“Nav,” Max whispered. A note of atonement sweetened his voice. “I woke you.” He tiptoed forward, as though it wasn’t too late for tiptoes, and dropped his toiletry bag into his suitcase.

“It’s four in the morning,” answered Arnav hoarsely.

Here was the darker side of love, pretending the person who knew you best — the person who brought you aspirin before you said you had a headache, who could sit down at a diner before you arrived and order your eggs just the way you liked them — didn’t know you at all, that he was daft or dumb or had to be reminded of the simplest things. “I don’t like to rush before a flight,” Max said.

“Your flight isn’t for another four hours.”

Max felt himself moving on a conveyor belt, steadily drawn toward an argument he didn’t want to have. The battle was coming. It had been coming for weeks. And it was coming now. Now that Max had one foot out the door, they could lob their respective grenades without having to live with the fallout.

Max dropped his towel, already hard. Sex was the wrench he most enjoyed throwing into the conveyor belt, certainly the most gratifying way of cutting off a confrontation, of jamming the proverbial works. It was hardly fail proof, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. “Which means we have time to say good-bye.” He crawled across the bed, into the warm yellow blanket of light cast by the bedside lamp, and knelt by Navi’s side. Stroking himself with one hand, he ran the other through the fur on Arnav’s chest. He tugged first one nipple, then the other, then traveled south, to the thick, musky nest between Navi’s legs, his fingers combing through the hair, tugging, before wrapping themselves around the stubby shaft of his boyfriend’s slumbering cock. “We have time to say good-bye, like, two or three times.”

Arnav retrieved Max’s hand from under the sheet and said flatly, “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Max collapsed like a puppet on snipped strings. “You’re wrong.” His head lolled to the side in a show of theatric frustration. He gazed at Navi with innocent eyes and said, this time with an air of great solemnity, “Will you stop! Do you want to draw blood and check my lithium levels? Everything’s fine.”