by Lyndsay Faye
instead of doing whatever good, gentle things the good, gentle son of a bitch does in London.
It’s not like Ben demands allegiance. Ben not only detests himself often, he hates the cocksure narcissism favored by red state governors and the front men for shitty bands. It’s just that people sometimes like him now that he’s learned at long last and after intensive study how to speak their language and when he likes them back supposing he’s convincing or barring that even sincere then people feel good around him like it’s a privilege or something, which it kind of is really because most people are pretty dull.
But Ben is hurt that after All The Shit That Went Down a year ago, Horatio had the cajones to run back home to his enchanted little isle and his boring-normal-lovely mom’s curries and his nerdy-glasses-sporting dad’s pipe smoke and have drinks and opinions and boyfriends and all those other things he’s totally entitled to granted but not without Ben.
“All right,” Horatio concludes. “I’m sorry, had to respond to a few of my colleagues, I sort of did a runner there. Er. Not my usual style.”
“It kind of is, though,” Ben notes.
Horatio winces. He looks pretty good, Ben decides. Been hitting the gym as well as the books. The pouches under his eyes make him look anxious, but Ben doesn’t really mind Horatio being worried as long as it’s Ben he’s worried about. This is, Ben knows, outrageously selfish. He doesn’t give a shit. Horatio was born to be concerned about people, he’s like an empathy factory, with those Godiva chocolate eyes of his and his way of squinting at you like you’re an archaeological dig.
“Sorry,” Ben says. “Yeah, how’s London treating you? Still wet?”
“Like living in a damp towel.”
“That must be sort of uncomfortable for you, considering.”
“Considering what? I’m sane?”
“Sure, that, too.”
“Um. I’m brown?”
“Yep. I don’t understand people from tropical climes with killer local food moving to London on purpose. You guys are like Scott Weiland leaving the Stone Temple Pilots. Actually, I could totally see you Patels as a family producing a record titled Happy in Galoshes, too. It’s like you’re on the verge of a Christmas album.”
“Benjamin, are you really so wealthy you don’t comprehend people migrating to metropolitan areas? My grandmum refuses to bin takeaway napkins in case she ever needs them for the loo.”
Ben has so much money that he’s unaware of the exact figure. He’s a prince in denim and sneakers, he’s well aware. That’s why he’s always, always, always trying to give it to people who actually need it, like Horatio. They both know this to be true and settled matters forever after one spectacular brawl over who was paying for street falafel: Ben is allowed to buy things for both of them whenever he wants, and Horatio is allowed to tell him to piss off.
“All right. I’m hopelessly out of touch, and it was a bad joke anyhow. I’m sorry.”
“Benjamin,” Horatio interrupts, a pleading note in his deep voice.
Peeling his eyes from the scenic graveyards of Queens, all that loamy, gut-rich soil growing its concrete-slab underbrush, Ben grants his friend his complete attention.
“I’m sorry. About . . . everything.”
Ben enjoys Horatio fretting over him. It’s a little like being wrapped up in a
great
big
London-fog-grey
flannel blanket
(with a fresh plate of cookies and a hot chai at his fingertips).
But he doesn’t enjoy Horatio in actual pain, like pain-pain, this nose-crinkled, eyes-tearing remorse. Ben detests seeing anybody in pain, he’s had enough of pain to last five fucking lifetimes, and this is HORATIO, so Ben instantly waves a dismissal.
“That was deeply not your fault. Or not just your fault. Nobody’s fault.”
“God, Benjamin, I—”
“Yeah, dude, you decamped, and we didn’t talk for, like, a year and then you missed Dad’s funeral, but you tried calling, I mean my phone only rang twice and I was making arrangements and you didn’t leave any messages. But weddings are super-way more fun anyhow, you know? Not to mention the efficiency. This way, they can take the cold cuts from Dad’s funeral and put them in those pinwheel sandwich thingies for the wedding reception. Reduce, reuse, recycle, am I right?”
“Benjamin—”
“They’re already secretly hitched, but we’re heading into the New World’s Stage yearly benefit gala in, like, a week, so maybe they’ll make some kind of massive announcement. That’d be perfect, come to think of it, since they seem so into keeping a low carbon footprint—there’ll already be champagne, flowers, whatever. I have to add you as my plus-one, I wasn’t sure . . . well.”
When Horatio sighs, Ben hurries on. No more pain. Not for Horatio, not if he can help it.
“But here you are! You’ll make this event much less ravaging to the psyche. Shut up, dude, half of Broadway will be there. We’ll get you a chorus boy with no gag reflex.”
“Um, lovely.”
“Aw, come on, you looooove those bari-tenors, I’ll be your wing—”
“No, I mean—Benjamin, what is going on? I don’t . . . I’ll wag off with you, whatever helps, anything, just . . . What the bloody hell? Your mum married her brother-in-law?”
Ben doesn’t say anything
tries to say something anything
can’t say anything.
Ben’s had issues with insomnia since childhood. Ditto nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks, ADHD, borderline autism, all the mental bells and whistles ring-a-ding-ding-ding-clang-shriek-hiss. So he knows his own mind pretty intimately. When you’re messy between the ears, you have to chart it out, identify your nicer hilltops and your crappier chasms. Currently (in this topographical depiction of his consciousness), he’s been dying of thirst in this boneyard desert that is devoid of answers to the one simple question:
Why would Mom be
fucking
Uncle Claude
in the first place
let alone
in a contractually binding, china pattern way?
“It wasn’t a suicide,” Ben announces out of the blue. “It just . . . my dad, it wasn’t a suicide.”
Horatio shakes his head. “How, um . . . What exactly are you saying? The toxicology report—”
“Oh, you’ve been researching.”
“Well, naturally. God, you’ve every reason to think me a complete wankstain, but of course I have been.”
“Noooo, I do not think that you are a, as you so charmingly term it, wankstain.”
“Good. I wasn’t entirely certain that would be the case. Or whether I quite agree with you.”
“Hey, now.” Ben throws his friend a fond look. “Recall when that cup of cat piss Jules Darden called you an ambassador for impoverished exchange students? I mean, we’re at Columbia, this international vanguard of higher learning, and he whips out ‘exchange students.’ Pretty sure I punched him in the face in that amazing Harlem dive bar, remember? So it makes me super conflicted when you talk shit about yourself. Do I headlock you?”
“Um. No need.”
“The enemy of my friend is my enemy, even if the worst enemy of my best friend is his own worst enemy.”
Horatio smiles, and the cab’s atmosphere warms by a cozy five degrees.
“The toxicology report,” Horatio says gently. “It seemed to have indicated that your father was depressed. Why do you suppose that—”
“Because my dad would never commit suicide.”
“I don’t know quite how to say—”
“Then don’t say it. I know the whole speech.”
People have been telling this to Ben for four long weeks now,
and it always makes him
want to turn
&nbs
p; into a very small extra-fuzzy terrier
and sink sharp little teeth into their soft sweet necks.
His father apparently took antidepressants and benzos (who doesn’t). His father was sad and distant (who isn’t). His father was born to conquer the world and then the solar system and he started with the New York theatre scene because that was the opposite of the family petroleum business and it turned out that mastering the arts was actually harder than vanquishing the Milky Way. Jackson Dane was grasping and critical and always networking with old East Coast wealth, but then again after all, who fucking isn’t.
Ben’s head chirps. With his father’s voice, when Ben was around twelve.
Benny, what are you doing taking that shit? Pull your head out of your ass and learn to deal like a regular guy. You think people respect pill-poppers? Or you think they want to line up behind the man who actually knows what he’s doing?
I only want what’s best for you, son.
Horatio has gone quiet. He’s just following orders, but Ben now regrets those orders.
Ben clears his throat. “Yes, Dad was depressed, but he didn’t commit suicide. I was talking to him just the day before, he sounded exactly the . . . I would have known. You’re going to say that the theatre was getting too much for him, that the drugs could have led to self-destructive tendencies, that it’s always the sure and steady ones who end up pulling their own plugs because the world can’t beat them and only they can beat themselves, but it didn’t happen. Call me crazy, call me not handling the Kübler-Ross model, but I’m still going to prove it was an accident. All right?”
Horatio’s shoulders under the soft blue shirt are stiff from distress and from the plane, and he should drink some serious electrolytes. But he’s Horatio. He’s always so very him that it aches, and so finally he says, “All right.”
“Thank you.” Ben’s head falls against the seat.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Man, I just asked you to fly across the Atlantic at a moment’s notice. Kiiiiinda seems like that could inconvenience a regular person.”
“Oh, well, I’ve already skived off just before finals, so I needn’t go back at any particular time. The teaching element was mainly finished, thankfully. My colleague owes me a good turn after I took her cat when she was shooting a research film. I’ll have a spot of grading to do while we’re, um, conducting inquiries. But otherwise . . . I’m quite at your disposal.”
“Really?”
“Always,” he says simply, and Ben feels something knotted loosen in his chest. “You know that.”
“I do,” Ben admits.
Once, when waiting at home for Lia to arrive back grew impossible, Ben left their apartment to prowl the streets. The August sunrise was a pretty pink-and-grey, the palette of an eighties movie where the girl remakes herself by taking her glasses off but still wears sweatshirts with the neck cut out. And for a guy fretting holes in his stomach, Ben felt strangely fine, like by leaving the house he was also leaving his fiancée’s well-being in the hands of quantum mechanics.
She either was or was not curled up in their bed.
She either was or was not passed out in some community garden like a possum.
He stopped for coffees and two orders of egg and cheddar at the Bernardo Brothers Café by Horatio’s apartment on 155th and Riverside (which had been their apartment before Lia, and would be their apartment again after Lia, and is now Ben’s apartment), used his key, and found his friend sitting at the table under the window with his laptop and a steaming World’s Stage Theatre mug. They had a staggering collection.
“Get dressed,” Ben ordered. “They’re playing Blade Runner in Bryant Park tonight.”
Horatio stared. “Get dressed for Blade Runner? I’ve been up for all of twenty minutes.”
“We could walk the High Line maybe and when we end up at Chelsea Market we could eat, like, something from each continent—including Antarctica because ice counts.”
Horatio rubbed at his morning stubble, cogitating. “Wasn’t Lia at that Alphabet City gallery opening last night?”
Ben pulled a stringy blob of cheese off his sandwich paper. “It was great, she said. It might be a perfect space for her to show.”
Horatio, clearly choosing his words, went to the fridge and returned with a bottle of Sriracha. “Have you seen her, or was she texting you?”
Ben took a bite of fried egg and squishy bread. His heart interfered with its passage down his throat, the traitor.
“Shit, I’m being such a tosser,” Horatio declared, clapping his hands. “Bernardo Brothers coffee is greatly improved with a splash of bourbon. I’ll top us up, pop in the shower, and this article shall be postponed. Please don’t eat my egg on a roll. No, shut it. We’ve been mates for years, I can tell when you’re about to nick my food. Even when you bought it for me.”
And they had a very nice day and Lia texted to say she was home around eleven a.m. and that she was so very sorry and that it would never happen again.
“I had a nightmare about it, before it happened,” Ben admits.
Horatio’s head twists. “About . . . your father?”
“Yeah. It’s sorta grainy, like the satellite feed isn’t quite tuned in. But Lia was there. She saw it, she. Something about Dad’s portrait, the one that burned in the fire all those years ago. It ignited or, or something. Anyway. She told me in the dream he was dead. And then I woke up that morning, and. Ffft.”
The quiet is now a deafening blare of words unspoken and muted traffic noise. Ben worries at the thick black leather cuff around his right wrist.
“I thought you hated wearing jewelry.”
Horatio seems less curious about this than observational, like he’s updating
file: Benjamin Jackson Dane//grooming: accessories.
“This isn’t jewelry.”
“Oh. Is there a ring or a lock I’m not seeing? I hadn’t realized you’d got into kinky sex.”
“Everyone’s into kinky sex, especially people who claim not to be into kinky sex, but no.” Ben grates his nails over the back of his neck. “This is a chunk of Dad’s commemorative belt from the New World’s Stage gala opening. I had it converted.”
The only sounds are the humming of the tires and whatever language Mr. Hamza Farooqui speaks into his Bluetooth. Ben is rabidly jealous of people who get to have boring conversations just now.
“Um.” A line appears above Horatio’s patrician nose. “So you don’t wear jewelry, but you do wear a piece of your late father’s belt.”
“Yep.”
“Do you want to . . . talk about that?”
Ben pulls in a deep breath. He can’t ever seem to get a full breath these days.
“It kinda takes some adjustment, feeling it there, you know? Dunno if I should blame thermoreceptors, mechanoreceptors, or nociceptors, but they’re still, like, hello there, you’re basically wearing a manacle.”
“Why not take it off?” Horatio asks softly.
“Because it’s only an outward manifestation of an inner condition. I’d be feeling it anyway.”
A few seconds later, there is a wide, warm hand inserting itself hesitantly into Ben’s
fingers and
the new fingers
sliding into place feel
so perfect Ben swallows past
what’s choking
him and squeezes them back
for all he’s worth.
“You remember how Dad’s side of the family is all in Texas?” Ben asks, eyes swimming.
Horatio nods.
“When the theatre reopened, Dad kept pushing and pushing and pushing. With the construction and the big donors and whatnot, and he kept saying ‘we just have to pull up our bootstraps.’ ”
Horatio’s eyes crinkle.
“Like, whenever anyone tried to say ‘yo, Jackson, we already just gave you fifty grand last month,’ or Paul tried to say ‘hey, Jackson, the insurance wants to know whether this was arson, again,’ Dad would just tell them the bootstraps, they will not hitch themselves and it was so Texas it hurt.”
This time Horatio does smile.
“They’d sorta shrug, like, yeah, I guess you have a point, and tooled ‘bootstraps’ onto a belt. The part I cut out has the quote on the back. You think it’s nuts, I suppose.”
“I rather think it’s brilliant,” Horatio corrects him.
“Yeah, I don’t know that it’s brilliant to cut up a two-thousand-dollar belt.” Ben laughs as a fat tear slides down his cheek.
“Did Jackson wear it often?”
“To premieres, so the board could see. He thought it was ridiculous.”
The sob is not planned, but it happens anyhow.
please come back I know I wasn’t everything you wanted but if you’ll just come back I can run a business run a marathon run for president run them all down and there you’ll be at the finish line and clapping and—
Then his friend is pulling his hand away no, and that’s to put his arm around him oh, and his friend smells familiar in a way nothing has for ages, yes please, like that black amber-based cologne he always wears and this is incredibly embarrassing.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No,” Horatio says. And then, “No, never that.”
Ben feels the sounds coming from his friend’s chest, waves that wash over his eardrums and pinnae and make meaning out of arbitrary frequencies. Ben finds language the single most remarkable artistic achievement of humankind. The Mona Lisa has nothing on Mandarin. It’s safe here in Horatio’s neck, and even his friend’s lungs are talking. Horatio shifts, but only to pull his bracelet up for closer inspection.
“So what we have here is a memento mori. ‘Let us balance life’s books each day.’ ”
“Remind me?”
“Seneca claimed that if you lived each day to the fullest, that you would never run short of time.”
