All the Lasting Things by David Hopson Read Free Book Online Page B

stay at St. Anthony’s than anything he’d done to his body, but even these slight physical impairments lay beyond the psych ward’s parameters of care. His immobilized elbow and leg pardoned him from a frightful stay on the fifth floor, where his imagination, fed by visions of Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, furnished a frightening cast of cuckoo characters, loud and volatile and charismatically crazy. Instead, the nurses assigned him to a comfortable room among the generally infirm where they served up an adjustable bed, cable television, and a steady supply of pills that would have been murder to procure from Seth. Excepting his wheezing and annoyingly tight-lipped roommate, he might have been in an indulgent, if not terribly well-appointed, hotel.
    Of course, Benji could have corrected them by now. Whatever happened on the bridge lacked the unambiguous intent of Madame Bovary gobbling up her arsenic or Inspector Javert flinging himself into the Seine. Benji’s recklessness may have bordered on a death wish, but he knew he’d been enjoying the fruits of a lie, as if he’d been feasting on a basket of sympathy and concern addressed to someone with a much more serious illness. Even with his tongue stitched and swollen, he could have scribbled on the pad his nurses provided him and told Claudia or his tearful and tiptoeing mother or the nice doughy social worker who looked in on him every other morning that they had it all wrong. But he’d spent two weeks tucked in a warm nest of communal misunderstanding, and, corrupt as it may have been, that, for the moment, was where he wanted to stay.
    Which isn’t to say Benji didn’t feel guilty. How could he not? But whatever guilt his deceit stirred up, his store of ancient resentments quickly helped to settle. There were his father’s magniloquent speeches about the virtues of holding a job, a real job, a job that, unlike pet or apartment sitting, required the payment of taxes. The wan, worn admonition to “leave Benji alone” that counted as his mother’s primary defense, the eye-rolling impatience with which Claudia dismissed his career: he resented these things almost as much as he resented the career itself. A Hamster for Hannah , for God’s sake!
    He took the D-list movies and bit roles in crappy regional reps in stride, with the sort of self-mocking humor common to men whose failures may in fact be their greatest success, but he hated the substantial scripts that passed him by. His greatest achievement (or at least the one with the most gravitas)—the miniseries in which he played Rimbaud’s brother—had had its plug pulled and sat collecting dust in some cryptlike vault under PBS, never to be seen. He hated the agents and directors who failed to see in him what he occasionally saw in himself. He hated the audiences who’d never heard of him or, worse, treating him like a trained monkey they happened upon in their favorite restaurants, bullied him into putting down his salad fork and saying the only four words they thought he knew— That’s what you think! The more slights Benji counted, the more forgivable, even justified, his lie seemed. To right a cosmic imbalance didn’t necessarily square with committing a great wrong.
    Besides, his distress brought out Claudia’s kinder side, and he liked Claudia’s kinder side. The hospital allowed him, like the rest of the patients under psychiatric care, two one-hour visits of no more than two people per day, and he sank more comfortably into his stiff, pancake-thin pillows knowing that Claudia would be one of them. She brought him frozen fruit bars and thick, cold smoothies, the only forms of nourishment his poor tongue could take, and refreshed with tabloid and fashion industry trash the pile of mindless magazines that grew to teetering heights on his nightstand. And though she, too, wasn’t above urging him to take a job waiting tables or giving him a hard time for the few hundred dollars he borrowed here