David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Bullshit,” Max practically spit the word out for him. “Stop being so churchy! You can’t even say ‘bullshit,’ for fuck’s sake.” Max wheeled his suitcase to the door and stopped. “And they’re not my patrons . I don’t need their money. Unless you’re talking about their love and support.”

Navi let this pass with a roll of the eyes.

“And what does knowing them for a year—”

“Less than a year.”

“Have to do with it? I knew you four months before we moved in together.”

“And you probably agreed to that because you were manic.”

Max turned off the light. Two dark silhouettes stared across the cold blue of a shadowy, starlit space. “They are supportive and loving,” he said to break the impasse. “And if you can’t be? Do me a favor: stay out of my way.”

Four banged-up baggage carousels spread across the lower level of the airport. The digital display signs that hung over each to indicate the arriving flight numbers were uniformly dark, which left Benji to guess which whining silver daisy wheel serviced Flight 2732 from Dallas/Fort Worth. He’d chosen the fourth, based entirely on a towering hulk who reminded him of Johnny Cash, a face carved, he imagined, by the unforgiving Texas sun, dressed from head to toe in black, a Stetson tipped down over his eyes. Trying to locate Max according to the costumes of potential copassengers was uncertain business. There was no telling where these people hailed from. But Max, who twenty minutes ago had sent a text that simply read Landed! , had been unresponsive since. Johnny Cash seemed the best bet.

A sizeable crowd formed around carousel no. 4. Women in overly snug, jelly bean — colored sweatpants claimed their animal print suitcases and rolled them through the shushing automatic doors, and still no sign of Max. Benji texted him again, and a moment later, as if in answer, from the opposite end of the terminal, he heard the deep, sonorous cry of a cello. He walked toward the sound, toward a small group of people who had suspended their hurrying and gathered around the tip of carousel no. 1 to watch Max, sitting on its edge, bent over his instrument as if caught in the most intimate of conversations with it. Eyes closed, head sawing from side to side, Max’s entire body moved as the bow cut across the strings to sound a phrase that repeated and repeated and then ever so slightly changed, deepening, shifting onto another plane before continuing its stately march.

Benji worked his way to the front of the crowd. He wanted to be the first person Max saw. But then, before Max could lift the bow from those fine, final, attenuated notes, the boy jumped up as if an electric charge had touched the metal ledge on which he sat. He let go of his cello, which Benji, leaping forward, saved from clattering to the ground, and with lightning speed picked up two coins that had fallen to his feet. He parted the crowed with two bounding steps after the man who’d tossed them and, reeling his arm back like a major league pitcher, sent them flying at the back of the man’s head.

Flinching, the man turned. When he realized what had happened, it took only a second for confusion to boil over into anger. “What’s the matter with you?” The man was well into his fifties, thickly built with a mad scientist shock of untamed white hair. This appreciative (if stingy) patron of the arts took a menacing step toward Max and asked the question again.

“Do I look like I’m begging for change?” Max yelled. “Do you know who I am? I don’t need your fucking fifty cents.”

The man, muttering loudly about ungrateful assholes, let himself be led away by his more quietly unnerved wife, though the well-being of his manhood required him to turn several times during his retreat and, like a dog jerking its chain, demonstrate his continued willingness to fight.

Benji didn’t know what to do. He laid the cello in its case and, stepping cautiously forward, put his hands on his nephew’s shoulders. Max spun around, ready for further battle, but shifted with disquieting ease into a mode of joyful reunion. He threw his arms around Benji’s neck, ignoring the crowd lingering awkwardly around them, including a little girl with tight, ribboned pigtails and a missing front tooth who asked her mother, “What’s wrong with that man?”

“How’s it going, champ?” Benji spoke softly into Max’s ear. “You okay?”

Max pulled back and laughed. “Great. Great. I’m great. Why do you ask?”

He let Evelyn set him up in Henry’s study. The pullout couch wasn’t nearly as comfortable as a proper bed, but Max preferred the study. He wanted to be planted in ground made fertile by his grandfather’s work. As she always did, Evelyn mentioned that the master bedroom, quiet on the unused third floor, would make for a better studio, but she also wanted him to see that she took his work seriously, that she respected it and would let him wring from Henry’s old workspace whatever artistic miracles might be left there. After all, it was, as Henry used to call it, the “Cave of Making.” “So make,” she said to Max as she left him to unpack his bag. “Make.”

But there was, even with his radio playing nonstop, only so much he could make in a day. He had worked on orchestrations on both legs of his flight (from takeoff to landing), stolen a few hours in between lunch and dinner, stolen a few more before bed. He was exhausted. Not tired, nowhere near ready for sleep, but exhausted all the same. It was eleven o’clock. Max retired with Evelyn, thinking he might stumble upon the melody he needed for act three, a phrase mined from act one, but timeworn, changed, the sound whereby Lily returned to the Ramsays’ summer home, set her easel down on the grass, and made ready to finish the painting she’d started ten years before.

Max captured something close to it on a scrap of paper and, alone in his room, played it on the rollaway keyboard connected to his computer. It was rough as a block of clay hauled up from the earth; he was happy to have it, but lacked the energy to trim it or shape it or make it flow like the rhythm of Lily’s brush as it danced across the canvas with its flashes of blue and green. He played the notes again but preferred to write on paper, the intimacy of penciling the notes on neatly inked staffs, and turned now to the tidy sheaf of 213 pages that comprised his almost finished opera. He leafed through act two, the section called “Time Passes,” and reviewed the closing bars. It really was sturdy. It really would stand. It played in his head, a cord of intertwined themes that unraveled and, one by one, like the characters themselves, died out. Silence encroached upon the music, washed over it like waves swallowing an island, until silence was all there was.

A knock at the door. Max was cross but also, somewhere beneath the irritation, relieved.

Claudia stood at the threshold. Benji would have twisted the knob and barged in like a golden retriever, but not Claudia. She waited in the hallway, patient, uncertain, softly saying his name.

He slid the papers aside and answered the door.

She smiled tentatively, looking lovely changed into the drapey cotton clothes she slept in; her long brown hair fell lightly over her shoulders, her face scrubbed pink. “Care for a nightcap? Well, I’m having a nightcap. Benji’s having tea.”

He turned back into the room and picked up his score to show her.