“I’m signing up with Arthur Murray.”
“I’ll teach you for free,” Fay said.
Sol smiled. “Let me talk to Ben for a minute. Why don’t you and Paulette get something to eat? Like birds. A celery stick, they call it a meal.”
Paulette came over and tapped his nose. “You want me to get fat?” she said fondly.
“Fat.” He smiled at her. “Another pound wouldn’t hurt.”
“We’ll be outside,” Fay said to Ben. She nodded silently to a buzzer on the nightstand. “If you need me-”
“Go eat,” Sol said. He waited until they left. “They’re good girls. You know they go way back?”
Ben nodded. “How are you feeling?” His hand still on the sheet, seeing Otto’s bed again. But there hadn’t been one, no hospital room, a bullet somewhere, no one waiting outside.
“I feel like shit,” Lasner said. “Don’t bother with the pills next time.” He closed his eyes, drifting a little. “You know on the train? The way you were? It reminded me. My first trip out here. Looking at everything. I didn’t know what to expect. A desert. For asthma. Now-” He opened his eyes fully, lifting his head. “I want to talk to you.”
“Minot called off the hearings,” Ben said, heading him away.
“Yeah?” he said, pleased, then sank back against the pillows. “And then who? All these years. We made something great here. From nothing.” He looked out, as if there might be marquee lights, not just dull hospital windows. “It’s all going to fall apart now, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s going to change.”
“At my age, same thing. That union business,” he said, another thought. “On Gower Street, for chrissake. To see something like that on Gower. Clubs.” He was quiet for a minute, thinking. “We had the audience. Now, I don’t know. You know what I think it was? The war. Everything made money. You didn’t have to think about the audience, maybe they want something else. Whatever you gave them. You think they don’t change. But how do you go through something like that and not change? How’s your picture?”
“Done. We’ll put it out after Christmas.”
A weak smile. “First Crosby and the nuns. Then the dead Jews.” He looked at Ben. “So we did that. I want to talk to you,” he said again. “I have to make some decisions.”
“You just have to rest.”
Lasner waved his hand. “I still get tired. I’m tired all the time now. You notice they don’t send me home? I couldn’t have nurses there? So what do they know I don’t know?” He paused. “Nothing,” he said, answering himself. “So maybe the only way I’m getting out of here is in a box.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“You don’t have kids, you have to think about things. Who’s going to take over? Keep things going. You remember on the train? Even then I had an idea. Somebody moves like that. Keeps his mouth shut. You don’t always say what’s up here.” He pointed to his head. “That’s like me. And Otto’s kid. Christ. In the blood.”
“Sol-”
“They even give you a-what’s it? MOS? Even the government, for chrissake. You know what I’m saying to you? What I’m thinking?”
“I can’t, Sol,” Ben said simply.
Lasner waved his hand again. “Fay helps. You’d be surprised what she knows. And maybe I’m not out of here so fast, either, who knows? You pick things up. Me and Fay want it, New York goes along. Believe me, that’s how it works.”
Ben looked away, embarrassed, and reached for the water glass on the table. The way it used to work.
“Here,” he said. “Drink a little.”
Lasner took a sip. “There’s no surprise here,” he said. “Don’t tell me that. I see you watching everything, figuring it out. You know what I’m saying.”
Ben looked at him, feeling suddenly winded, caught. Be my son. Something no one had ever asked him before. Otto and Danny, one life passing to the other. He felt as if he were actually being touched, a stroking along his skin. Chosen. For something already decided, no longer in Sol’s hands. And for a second he wondered if it were possible, Bunny’s hold fragile enough to loosen. Would New York really say no to Fay, would Sam? A dying man’s wishes? A fight he might be able to win, if he really wanted to. But even as he imagined it happening, shuffling people in his head, he knew that things had already been arranged in a new order, any attempt to upset them as futile as Lasner’s grandstanding in the hearing room. Sol had already lost the studio. The point now was to salvage the rest.
“We’ve always been straight with each other, haven’t we?” he said.
“Somebody says that, they’re going to start pulling something,” Sol said.
Ben shook his head. “You want to do the right thing for the studio? Call Bunny. He’ll be good at it.”
“He’s a pansy.”
“No,” Ben said, not flinching. “He’s you. He got everything from you. He can do it.”
“And you can’t?”
“Not like him. It’s all he cares about, pictures. Like you. He’s got the instinct.”
“For pictures, maybe. But look with Minot. Just roll over. So who’s going to fight the next one, him? There’s always somebody coming after the studio. You want somebody’s going to fight. You would. I saw you do it for Hal.”
Ben shook his head again. “I don’t even know who the bad guys are anymore.”
Lasner made a face, impatient. “It’s just this business with your brother. Whatever the hell he was up to. It’s not like that. You don’t know what’s right, something like that happens with family.”
“That’s just it. I think everybody’s like him now. Maybe that was the war, too. I think we’re all in-between. Somewhere gray. Pictures were never good at in-between.”
“What, gray? I’m offering you the studio,” Lasner said, his voice rising, a gift so priceless any hesitation seemed crazy.
“Offer it to Bunny, Sol. He can fight. He’s tougher than I am.”
“You’re tough enough to say no. To this. You don’t want this? What do you want?”
He looked around the hospital room. What did he want? He thought of watching Liesl in the pool, of wearing Danny’s clothes, a life that didn’t belong to him.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Not this.”
“Just like that,” Lasner said, opening his fingers. “The whole goddam world.”
Meaning it, Ben realized, the rest just something vague, east of Gower.
“I want the picture to come out. I want that.”
“There’s some problem with that?” Lasner said, suddenly alert.
“No, no. Bunny wants to give it a big release.” He paused. “Talk to him. He’d appreciate it, I think, coming from you. Personal.”
“Like you did.”
“You know what it means to me? That you asked?” He looked down. “I’ll probably regret it.”
Lasner leaned his head back into the pillow. “That’s what he said, too. Otto. When he took a powder. For Germany, yet. Christ, what a family. If he had stayed here, think where he’d be today.”
At Cedars, Ben thought, the odd transference happening again, listening to the oxygen. Thinking about his credits. Wondering.
Sol closed his eyes.
“I’d better go.”
“Stay a little,” Lasner said, reaching his hand out to anchor Ben’s. Don’t leave me.
Ben felt the hand, still warm but light, as if it were disappearing.
“Think about it,” Lasner said. “You don’t want to decide too quick. Something like this.”
“Okay,” Ben said. Both of them saving face.
He glanced out the window, feeling claustrophobic. Another hospital room. His mother had held on to him, too. Danny. Now SolOtto-whoever he was. One more loss. How many people could you lose before there was no one left?
He stayed like that for a while, watching Sol’s face, almost expecting the shallow breathing to stop, both of them at an end. You could hear the footsteps outside, rubber-soled, nurses answering calls. Just like the ones outside Danny’s room, Dieter waiting in the hall. Picturing it over and over in his head, making the final cut. Not all
