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you?“ ”
    “That’s terrible,” Susan said.
    “But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself it just wasn’t good enough, that’s all. So I thought, well, what else is there that matters to him?
    “He had a woodworking shop in the basement. We were that kind of family, the Formica counters in the kitchen, Sunday at the Presbyterian church every once in a while, the neighbors coming over to play bridge, the woodwork shop downstairs. But he had quality tools, Dremel and Black and Decker and so on, and he took a tremendous amount of pride in the work he did. He built a guitar once, some cousin paid him a hundred dollars for it, and he must have put in three times that in raw materials, and when it was finished it was a work of art, bookmatched hardwood, polished and veneered—it took him months. When I saw it, I wanted it. But it had been bought and paid for, and he had to send it away. I wanted him to make another one, but he was already involved in some other project, and that was when I saw my opportunity—I said,
”I’ll
build it.“
    “I was nearly thirteen years old. I had never so much as touched his woodworking tools. ”Show me,“ I said. He said, ”You’ll never manage it. It’s not a beginner’s project.“ I said, ”Let me try.“ And I think now he saw it as
his
big opportunity … maybe this would teach me a lesson. So he agreed. He showed me how to work the tools and he gave me some books on luthiery. He even took me to lumberyards, helped me pick out decent woods.”
    John paused to sip his cappucino. “I worked on the guitar that summer whenever he was out of the house. Because it was an experiment—you understand? This would be the communication, he would see this and love me for doing it, and if he didn’t—all bets were off. So I took it very seriously. I cut and sanded, I routed the neck, I installed the fretwire and the tuning machinery. I was possessed by that guitar. There was not a weekday afternoon through July or August I was out of the house. I was dizzy with lacquer fumes half the time. And when he came home I would hide the project… I didn’t want him to see it until it was ready. I cleaned the tools and the workshop every day; I was meticulous. I think he forgot about it. Thought I’d given up. Until I showed it to him.”
    Susan said, “Oh, no.”
    “It was perfect, of course. Max probably told you what his research had suggested, long before it was fashionable science—that the neocortical functions aren’t just ”intelligence.“ It’s also dexterity, timing, the attention span, the sense of pitch, eye-hand coordination—things as pertinent to music or luthiery as they are to, say, mathematics. Jim Woodward thought he’d found a task that was beyond me. In fact, he could hardly have picked one I was better suited to. Maybe that guitar wasn’t flawless, but it was close. It was a work of art.”
    Susan said, “He hated it.”
    John smiled his humorless, raw smile. “He took it personally. I showed him the guitar. The last varnish was barely dry. I strummed a G chord. I handed it to him… the final evidence that I was worthy of him. To him it must have been, I don’t know, a slap in the face, a gesture of contempt. He took the guitar, checked it out. He sighted down the neck. He inspected the frets. Then he broke it over his knee.”
    Susan looked at her hands.
    John said, “I don’t want sympathy. You asked about symptoms. This is relevant. For years I had thought of myself as ”John‘ while the Woodwards were calling me “Benjamin.” After that day… for them, I
was
Benjamin. I became what they wanted. Normal, adequate, pliant, and wholly unimpressive. You understand, it was an act. They noticed it, this change, but they never questioned it. They didn’t want to. They welcomed it. I worked my body the way a puppeteer works a marionette. I
made up
Benjamin. He was my invention. In a way, he was as meticulous a piece of work as that guitar. I made him out