Free All the Lasting Things by David Hopson Page B

Prodigy while he was in the hospital, all five of his films, even A Hamster for Hannah , and discussed them without mockery, seriously, as a body of (her word) work that might one day have him thanking Uta Hagen from the dais. He plugged her into his Oscar speech, his Tony speech, his Vague but Meaningful Lifetime Achievement Award speech—the monologues he should have stopped rehearsing in his twenties but hadn’t—and she fit. I’d like to thank the members of the academy and all the people who helped put me here. Mom and, ahem, Dad and Blah and Blah and Blah. And Cat. My beautiful Cat. Ma chère Catherine. My Catchenka. No matter how he said it, she fit perfectly.
    Part of Claudia’s refusal to play ATM and provide him with funds for a stay at the Motel 6 was her disapproval of how he’d spend his time.
    “Vicodin and Voluptuous Vixens ,” she quipped.
    She wasn’t wrong. (He’d once left the third installment of his favorite XXX franchise on a laptop he borrowed from her.) But Benji’s dream of making off to a hotel had as much to do with hoarding Cat for himself as it did with painkillers and porn. There, he imagined, they’d lie on a quilted coverlet and, day passing into night passing into day, float far beyond a sex life suitable for airing on a moderately racy Afterschool Special . If they didn’t have to worry about a sundowning Henry calling Cat by the name of his sixth-grade teacher, they might finally lose themselves and, carried away by something stronger than the polite little eddies of frottage and finger banging, discover one another. They’d be two explorers on a great, unsinkable raft, and nothing, not his incapacitating casts or the germiness and decidedly French fry smell of the bedspread, would hold them back.
    But the dream of the hotel had evaporated with Claudia’s unequivocal “Forget it!” and every increasingly emphatic “No!” since. Benji withheld his disappointment from Cat, concerned that what he could only describe as his sister’s selfishness would glaringly expose his own, but he held out hope on another front: she’d leased the cottage on Saratoga Lake through the end of September, and although Benji had never stepped foot in it, her tour through the “Summer 2012” album on her smartphone convinced him that here was the perfect place to wall up with Ophelia and finally get down to “country matters.”
    “We have two weeks before you have to be in New York. Two weeks without my parents hanging around.”
    “Hanging around? Benji, it’s their house.” She moved her hand from his zipper and rapped a knuckle on the hard plastic casing that covered his leg. “Besides. You’re supposed to stay put.”
    He stopped short of insisting. Already he’d sailed further with Cat than he once thought possible. Why press his luck and risk running aground the ambivalence that kept her from making an invitation in the first place? But the time for pressing his luck had come. It was Monday. If Benji wanted to play lord of Cat’s castle, he had to stop behaving as if rejection were a virus he feared catching and simply ask if he could move in.
    He stood at the living room window, waiting for her to come. Now that the trial of lunch was over, now that Henry had convicted him of wearing his hair too long or never having read Montaigne, he could take up his afternoon post. He parted the curtain and looked out at the street. One of the prettiest Alluvia had to offer, the tall maples and gently sagging Queen Annes of the town’s forefathers, but quiet on a morning like this, everything still as a painted backdrop. Benji waited, watched. His mind lingered over the sight of a silver Mercedes parked across the street, a rare curbside flower not indigenous to these parts, but before he could bother to guess its origins, Judge Judy called him away. He hobbled back to the couch. The copy of To the Lighthouse that Cat had given him lay butterflied on the armrest. He tried ignoring “The