Free All the Lasting Things by David Hopson Page A

these sweet, relatively chaste tumblings were unexpectedly taking root, touching Benji in ways countless other carnal encounters had not. Nothing in his life became him like almost leaving it.
    He hesitated to use the word love . Where, except in the great, shattering romances of Britain and Russia and France, did anyone fall in love so fast? Still, toying with the idea, Benji thought I love you, I love you as he kissed Cat’s fluttering eyelids and practiced an increasingly deft, one-handed maneuver to unfasten her bra. Twice a week, Benji reported to Ernest Salter, whose parades down some of psychotherapy’s mustier corridors were a condition of the patient’s release, and agreed with the good doctor’s diagnosis: a budding romance would be . . . improvident. The idea of submitting to any therapist had terrified Benji, who doubted his ability to play before a professional the part of the emotionally unhinged bridge jumper. How to sustain the illusion that he’d meant to do what he’d done for anyone beyond his family (who, with the exception of Claudia, was only too happy to let him forget it)? But Salter’s inquisitive stare proved more kindly than penetrating, and soon Benji relaxed the need to temper his enthusiasm. “I think I love her,” he offered one day as an astonished non sequitur to a dream about a drowning elephant. To which Dr. Salter replied, in an unapologetic moment of Freudian devotion, “What does your mother make of this?”— this being the love, not the elephant.
    Evelyn, six years her husband’s senior, congratulated herself for overlooking the couple’s considerable difference in age, unwilling to deprive her son the happiness that recent events convinced her he so seriously needed. Henry also approved, volubly and wholeheartedly, though his endorsement had little to do with Benji’s happiness. His radio had never really tuned to that channel, but he was glad to see Benji smitten with someone whose future promised more than a starring role in an exercise video.
    “Don’t muck it up,” Henry said one morning, stabbing a piece of toast into an egg yolk and leveling the dripping point at his son. “I know you’re used to women with a higher nonsense-to-substance ratio, but this one has something to offer.”
    “And what’s that?” Benji asked, glib but genuinely curious.
    “She reads beyond the ingredient list on a Luna bar, for starters.”
    “She’s an actor, Dad. You don’t like actors.”
    “I don’t like disillusionment. There’s a difference.” He rapped his fork on the rim of his plate like a judge bringing his court to order. “We’re not starting down that road. I’m done with career counseling. I said she’s a keeper.”
    Benji had the distinct impression that Cat could cut out his kidneys, sell them on eBay, and (as long as she could quote from Ulysses ) remain a keeper in Henry’s book. Not that it mattered. Cat was a keeper, though Benji’s reason for thinking so had nothing to do with Joyce.
    He loved Cat’s passion. The way she’d swoon for a tulip but took lilies as a personal affront. Or how, in one breath, she’d condemn the “incarceration of the underclass” and then, in the next, devise cruel, practically medieval punishments for anyone caught answering his cell phone in a restaurant or wearing sunglasses indoors. “Unless you’re blind,” she reasoned, “or just coming from the ophthalmologist, there’s no excuse.” He loved her weakness for buttermilk biscuits, the diplomatic ease with which she handled his parents, and how, before kissing him good-bye, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and ungently pulled. He loved that she hated words that ended in y , that she made exceptions for adverbs but refused to say tasty even when something was. He loved her eyes. And the line of Whitman tattooed in typewriter font on the inside of her wrist. And the sudden, shocking devotion he’d won by false means.
    She’d rented all four seasons of