A Thousand Benjamins Read online

  A THOUSAND BENJAMINS

  a novel by Michael Kun

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-882-4

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  via United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Originally published by:

  Lawson Library

  A division of MacAdam/Cage Publishing

  155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.MacAdamCage.com

  Copyright ©2006 by Michael Kun

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kun, Michael.

  A thousand Benjamins : a novel / by Michael Kun.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59692-103-0 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-59692-103-X (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3561.U446T48 2007

  813’.54–dc22

  2006029649

  Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

  Hardcover edition published by The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the Class of 1988 of the University of Virginia School of Law

  Yes, the entire class

  A THOUSAND BENJAMINS

  A Novel by Michael Kun

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1 THE PINKISH CREEK

  Chapter 2 YOU-ME

  Chapter 3 I’D HATE TO BE YOU IN THE RAIN

  Chapter 4 A WOMAN IN HERE

  Chapter 5 BIG SISTER

  Chapter 6 PARADISE

  Chapter 7 BENJAMIN, BENJAMIN

  Chapter 8 THE MAN WITH THE STAR

  Chapter 9 HELLO, I’M JAPANESE

  Chapter 10 TELL GOD I’M HERE

  Chapter 11 GOING DOWN DRAINS

  Chapter 12 THE TRUTH ABOUT FATNESS

  Chapter 13 STRAWBERRY PILLS

  Chapter 14 TWINS

  Chapter 15 MRS. SACKS

  Chapter 16 THE ADVANTAGE OF LOVE

  Chapter 17 THE NIGHT IT RAINED FOREVER

  Chapter 18 DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED

  Chapter 19 BASKETBALL

  Chapter 20 BENJAMIN SANK

  Chapter 21 WE DON'T NEED A WELL

  Preface

  I’m sorry, but I don’t remember writing this book.

  I’m not saying that I didn’t write it. I’m sure that I did. I just don’t remember writing it, that’s all.

  I wrote A Thousand Benjamins during my third year of law school, between (and, occasionally, during) classes. I don’t remember those classes, either. According to the registrar of the University of Virginia School of Law, I passed all of those classes, which explains the diploma on my wall. I’m looking at it right now. It is impressively large and austere, which ought to scare the bejesus out of any lawyer who dares to walk into my office.

  I was a very young man when I wrote this book (or when I must have written it because, again, I don’t remember doing so). I was twenty-four years old, which is far too young for anyone to be allowed to put anything into print, at least not anything with a hard cover and a fairly hefty price tag. After some delay and a change of publishing houses, the book was published when I was twenty-seven. When I meet twenty-seven-year-olds now, my first thought is, “I wasn’t that naïve and full of myself when I was twenty-seven, was I?” I’m sure I was.

  The book had an excellent editor (hello, Anne, wherever you may be now), and, as you may know, the book received some very generous reviews, some of which I’m certain my publisher has slapped on the back of this edition. You can take a moment to look now, if you would like. The book sales were moderate—not a bestseller, but enough to make everyone involved pleased.

  A bizarre series of events involving the film rights ensued. Someone was shopping a movie script based on the book to Hollywood studios. In fact, I had never heard of the woman. And while I make every effort to be a generous man and am well known for leaving my extra pennies in the “extra penny” tray at the convenience store, I assure you that I had not given the film rights to this book to a complete stranger.

  In any event, time passed. Imagine the pages of a calendar flying as they used to do in old movies. Imagine me getting older, heavier, less hirsute. Unbeknownst to me, the book had gathered a small following. And, as I would learn from a concerned friend, customers on amazon.com were speculating that I had died. I had not. I was merely practicing law. I will leave it to you to fill in an appropriate punchline here.

  When I finally published my second novel, The Locklear Letters, thirteen years later in 2003, my editor and I discussed re-releasing this book. As you no doubt concluded, we decided to do so.

  My editor did not want me to edit the book at all. His reasoning, if I recall, was that the book was complete long ago, and nothing good could come of changing it now. Because my editor is frequently wrong, and terribly so, I insisted on editing it to try to make it a better book.

  Reading it for the first time in nearly fifteen years, I did not recognize a single sentence other than the one that provides the book with its title. Ultimately, I could not get myself to revise the book, other than to make a few minor changes here or there to tidy up matters that appeared glaring. The reason I did not revise the book has nothing to do with its quality: of course it could be improved upon, perhaps substantially so. No, the problem is that the book was written by someone far more interesting than I am now. The book he wrote was complete long ago, and nothing good can come of changing it now. So, on that subject, my editor is correct.

  Michael Kun

  December 2006

  Chapter 1

  The Pinkish Creek

  The cows aren’t cows, they’re more like lambs the way they follow the sweeps of her arms, unafraid and bemused.

  “Come here. Go there. Come with us to St. Louis,” she orders. The mother sheep. The cowherd. “No, wait,” she says. “I think we’re already past St. Louis.”

  They’re well past St. Louis, almost two hundred miles west now. St. Louis is where they had lunch yesterday.

  “Ben,” she calls. “Sweetheart, are we past St. Louis?”

  “Mm hmm,” Benjamin says, and he nods. “Remember, that’s where we had frozen custard.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “Thanks.” She turns back to the cows. “We’re past St. Louis, ladies,” she tells them, “although if you’re ever passing through yourselves, I have a frozen custard stand I’d like to recommend.”

  Kim is gentle, thin at the waist and hips, but solid still, orchestrating the movements of a field full of cows with a confidence that belies her city upbringing. She was born and reared in Baltimore. Benjamin was born there, too, a full eighteen years before her. Bluefield is where he grew up, though, fifty miles out and farther from the water.

  A truck passes by, and it startles Kim. She shakes. She’s standing on the bottom rail of the fence, leaning onto it, her body a bow as she rummages through her shoulder bag until she finds a candy bar among her tissues and makeup.

  “Come here, C18,” she says, calling the closest by the heavy yellow tag clipped to its ear, “and have some chocolate.”

  Soon the bar is gone, and Kim is laughing. She puts the wrapper in her shoulder bag, and she rubs C18’s head and picks dirt from its marbled hide in the same way she pulls lint from her skirts, pinching it, then rubbing her thumb and index finger together to drop the tiny specks to the ground.

  “Do we have anything else for her?” Kim calls.

  Benjamin is sitting on the hood of his car, a red Mustang parked in the gravel fifteen feet off. He’s watching her in a detached sort of way. At home, she looks less at home. Now he’s rediscovered her, this Kim perched on the rail, some country girl in a red-and-white Coca-Cola T-shirt and khaki shorts.

  In western Maryland, this same Kim had thrown a baseball with him in a field beside the highway, slinging the ball faster and more accurately than he did, making his mitt pop like a drum, keeping time like a slow heartbeat. “Look,” she beamed. “I’m Frank Robinson. I’m Johnny Bench. I’m Tom Seaver.”

  This Kim, in Ohio, waved at truck drivers and, later, pointing first to her flat stomach and then thumping Benjamin’s chest, told the cashier at a fast-food restaurant, “I’m carrying his baby. At least I think it’s his. I mean, how can a girl be certain these days?” Benjamin blushed and shook his head, no, no, no. She wasn’t carrying his baby.

  This Kim. The new Kim isn’t new at all. The new Kim is the old Kim, really, and Benjamin understands that. This is the Kim who’d worked at Yumi’s restaurant, waiting tables in a black kimono, her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, her face painted. This is the Kim who baked him chocolate-chip cookies and took pictures of him while he slept, the comforter twisted around him like a toga. This is the Kim who surprises him. She’s funny, but he never expects her to be. This Kim. This
is the Kim he missed. Or this is the Kim he remembers. Missing and remembering, Benjamin’s always had a problem telling the difference between the two. Sometime he missed Mary Jude, sometimes he remembers her, and sometimes he can’t tell what it is he’s doing. He just knows that he’s in Baltimore, with Kim, and Mary Jude is in New York with her new husband.

  From where he sits, Benjamin can see Kim and the cows, numbered as high as L22 and separated into groups of threes and fours like guests at a cocktail party. A small brown farmhouse squats between waves of hills as if hiding. A breeze hits him, and he feels omniscient and young.

  Benjamin hops off the car and climbs into the passenger seat. He holds the cooler on his lap and pushes his way through what’s left of lunch: a spoonful or two of potato salad in an orange plastic bowl, half a container of blueberry yogurt—Kim’s—his second hero sandwich, which he hadn’t the appetite to start, a package of Fig Newtons, two diet sodas and a banana. He’s still worried about Kim. She won’t take her shirt off, but he’s happy nonetheless. He isn’t sure he wants her to remove her shirt. He isn’t sure how he’d react. He’s resolved to think less about the scar today, to put it out of his mind.

  “Benjamin?”

  Benjamin closes the lid of the cooler and walks to the fence. “How do you think she feels about yogurt?” he asks, and he hands Kim the container and a white plastic spoon from the glove compartment, hesitating before putting a hand on her waist to help her keep her balance.

  “I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t like yogurt. It’s something peculiar to our gender,” she says, “like Fig Newtons are to yours.” Kim pulls the cap off and stirs the yogurt with the spoon, bringing pieces of blueberry to the top. “Don’t look at me that way. I wasn’t going to cheat you out of the blueberries.”

  Her voice floats.

  And Benjamin grins absently. It’s a good sign, Kim joking. He watches as she cups C18’s chin in one hand and carries the spoon to its mouth as if she were feeding a baby. The cow won’t open her mouth this time. Kim tries to encourage it by cooing and whistling. Nothing. Finally she sets the open container on top of one of the posts and climbs down. She wipes her palms on her shorts as she walks to the car.

  “She’ll have it when she’s hungry,” she says. Then she surprises Benjamin. She throws her arms around his waist and kisses his neck. Her bag slips and catches in the crook of her arm. She jerks it back to her shoulder.

  “You’re getting a rash.” She frowns, running a hand over his jaw with its two days’ growth of beard. “Poor Benjamin, all sad and cracking up. Maybe you should shave. Shave the stupid thing right off.”

  Benjamin nods. “Maybe so.” He follows her to the car, a patch of his skin still cool from her lips. The air strikes him differently here. It preserves the kiss, while in Baltimore her kisses evaporate quickly.

  Benjamin closes the door for her, then walks around to the driver’s side, drumming his fingers on the hood, then the vinyl roof.

  The gas gauge in the car is broken. It has been for years—it always says full. Benjamin and Kim have been stopping every two hundred miles for gas. The air-conditioning is broken, too, and they’ve been driving with their windows half-opened to catch the breeze. “It’s a million degrees in here,” Kim had said somewhere in Ohio, “Celsius, not Fahrenheit,” and all Benjamin could do was shrug.

  Now, he rolls his window down to the bottom before he starts the car and says, “Want to open yours?” He makes a fist in the air and turns his wrist in small circles, pantomiming the motion.

  “It is open.” The window on her side is halfway down.

  “I mean all the way.”

  She looks at him suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Well,” he says, “because one of us smells like a farm right now. I won’t say which one.”

  Kim pokes his shoulder with a finger then rolls down the window. Several miles along, she brings her hands to her nose, as she would to catch a sneeze, and says, “Oh, God, do you think it’ll come off?”

  “Maybe with gasoline.” He cracks a smile to let Kim know he’s kidding. “No, it’ll come off,” he reassures her. “Everything washes off.”

  His mind wanders as he drives. He thinks about goodness. Everything good he can think of.

  Steak sandwiches.

  He thinks of the smell of his mother’s bureau, all perfumes and powders.

  The Orioles.

  His wedding day, with Mary Jude in ivory satin, pearls and bubble beads on the bodice.

  The Charles Theatre.

  The elephant ride at the fair, he and Phinney sitting on their father’s knees.

  Fig Newtons.

  Trips to Ocean City.

  Chief Thunderthud on “Howdy Doody,” calling out, “Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob!”

  Kim, in a T-shirt, pulling on her kimono before going to the restaurant.

  Phinney reading books in the tree behind the garage.

  Truman Capote, especially Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  The last of these occurs to Benjamin as he looks at Kim. She’s reading his paperback copy of the book as he drives, her knees pulled up to her chest, her head tipped toward Benjamin and away from the open window. She puts two fingers to her forehead at one point, and Benjamin thinks she must have reached Holly Golightly’s description of her relationship with Sally Tomato.

  It’s the first book Benjamin’s seen her read since his birthday. She had been reading his copy of Franny and Zooey then and, as far as he knew, had never finished it. She just left her bookmark in there and the book on top of the nightstand in the bedroom, each time he turned off the lamp a reminder of how much she wasn’t in the room.

  It was his birthday, and it was as wide as his thumbnail. It was smooth like plastic and pinkish-gray, a scar running from the notch of her throat, between her breasts like a fat creek, coming to a pointed halt just above her ribs, turning back into perfect flesh there, and Benjamin ran his fingers along it, and pressed it and forgot it was a part of her until she woke.

  “Jesus Christ!” she shouted, finding her T-shirt rolled to her armpits and Benjamin applying pressure to the crooked line on her chest. She tried to speak. At first, she couldn’t. Then speech came like a flood, the words pouring into the room and over him. “I told you not to do that. I mean, I asked you not to do that. How many times did I ask?”

  Benjamin didn’t try to count them. There had been too many to count. As she hadn’t stopped talking, he didn’t think really she wanted an answer. In nine months he’d never seen her with her shirt off, not once, though he’d tugged at her shirts like a baby and pouted, curling a lip—she always wore those T-shirts of hers—but now he had, and Kim was out of bed quickly, her shirt back down, the shirt that read THE PEP BOYS across the front, three men with oversized heads dancing among the letters.

  Standing beside the bed, the light from the liquor store sign across the street slipping through the curtains as it always did, Kim looked small and pale, her skin the color of cooked fish. She started toward Benjamin, to strike him. On his birthday, his forty-first one. Then she fell back on her heels, her forearms tight, her face, too, and when she cursed him something small fell out of her mouth. A piece of food, a drop of saliva, Benjamin didn’t know, but it fell to the sheet, and he studied it as it lay there, a piece of her on the bed, the rest of her standing barelegged on the carpet, clutching a pillow to her chest, hollering like a bad neighbor and just as indecipherable.

  The words came and went.

  “When we first started dating, I said, ‘Benjamin, there’s something I have to ask you,’ and you were such…you don’t know what it’s like…trying out for the softball team…what else is…a hole the size of a marble…”

  He didn’t want to look at her, and he was barely listening. He watched the piece on the sheet and ignored the rest, feeling neither good nor bad, but puzzled. His birthday had revealed a fat, pinkish creek. A creek that started and stopped. A creek that ran nowhere.

  “Bathing suits and light,” Kim was saying now. “What could’ve happened…a doctor from Towson said it was the only way. Dr. Plessy…or maybe…the heart is something…why is it that for men it’s a sign of strength, but for women it’s…heaven…like having a window inside me big enough for people to pass through…a sailor fell from his lookout, and he was dead when he landed…my father didn’t…they gave it to me, and the doctors wouldn’t give me…like it’s a movie or something…whatever happens, there’s always a chance…circulation…Yumi was right about men…a happy child isn’t always…Kevin Purcell never came to see me, not…if you were a man…beauty isn’t…Benjamin…”