All the Lasting Things by David Hopson Page A

writers nobody at Curtis Brown thought to miss. The first was E. Pritchett Moon; the second, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker who’d written his first novel in a tiny apartment alongside his boss’s garage. Edwin, author of what turned out to be an endlessly proliferating saga of randy warlocks, earned him money, vast sums of it. Henry, who continued hanging drywall until his third novel won him the National Book Critics Circle Award, earned him respect.
    “Did my father know you were coming?” Benji asked.
    “You know me, Benji. I don’t leave the fortress unless I’m summoned.”
    “Yeah, but does he remember summoning you?”
    “He remembers fine,” Henry said, suddenly behind them, surprisingly stealthy on his stocking feet.
    “There’s nothing wrong with his hearing.” Roger winked before walking off to clasp his old friend’s hand.
    The buzz finally drew Evelyn out of the kitchen. She hurried down the hallway, wiping dish suds on her flowered robe. “Roger? What on earth?” She opened her mouth and laughed, somewhere between charmed and offended by the surprise. “Henry didn’t,” she began, then, reconsidering, leaned in for a conspirative hug. “I could kill him. Look at this place. Look at my hair.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her and sourly cinched the belt.
    “He’s not here to check if the pillows are fluffed,” Henry said, starting back toward the kitchen. “Let’s go, Leo.”
    Roger offered Evelyn his arm and followed along. “Don’t worry about your hair, Ev,” he said, polishing his shining head like Aladdin’s lamp. “Look at mine.”
    Evelyn carved the babka and set it on the table with a stack of small plates, while the men poured the morning’s leftover coffee—Roger insisted that Evelyn go to no trouble—and settled into opposite chairs. Benji, more curious than hungry, lingered in the doorway, picking lazily at a slab of sugar-tarred dough.
    “You’re wondering why I called you here.”
    Roger spread a napkin over his knee and smiled at the lack of grace he’d come to see as the larger part of Henry’s appeal. “Nary a hello,” he said, laughing. “Henry, my friend, nowadays doctors would place you on a spectrum of some sort. Is it a mild form of Asperger’s or a signature brand of cantankerousness that makes small talk so unthinkable?”
    “Well, tell your doctors to get in line behind mine, who have plenty of diagnoses of their own.”
    “Which you’re absolutely going to tell me all about,” Roger answered. “But first”—he turned an empty chair in Benji’s direction and motioned for Benji to sit—“I want to hear from this one.”
    “Benji?” Henry balked. “Benji’s fine.” But Roger’s level stare proved too much for even Henry’s obdurate nature, and he waved his agent on like a man who’d ignored his sound warning and insisted on driving down a dead-end street.
    They waded into the conversation slowly, between sips of coffee and observations about a Republican senator’s crush on Ayn Rand, but as soon as Leo asked the inevitable question—“What was going through your mind?”—Benji’s monologue started up. It now played like a song from a jukebox, easily, automatically, drop a quarter in the slot and out it came. In the constant retelling, he’d worked the blur of that strange August night into a finely focused tale of drunken desperation, the climax of which had been years in coming. He fashioned himself as more determined than mere accident allowed, showing them his damage but also something that he himself had lost sight of long ago: his depth. What else was he hiding if he could hide such despair? Each retelling of the story poured like molten steel into this new mold, into a new Benji, whose form was more impressive, whose qualities—the despondency that pulled him down, the strength of will that lifted him up—gave rise to a more monumental man.
    Evelyn, still unable to contemplate the state of