Prodigals (10 page)

Lyric demurred, rolling a papier-mâché pomegranate across the table so Hara had to catch it before it pattered lightly over the edge.

When Lyric left her, nights, Hara would retrieve a bottle of Zeke's expensive wine from the cellar and scatter the family photos she kept in shoeboxes on the living room rug. It was not clear to her if a clean line could be drawn from the hipshot young girl in a bathing suit on the beach in Goa to the self-pitying wretch she saw gazing back at her in the glass of the French doors. Rather a lot had intervened, and yet certain patterns and casts of mind endured. If Hara wanted Lyric to stay, and she did, there were complexities within the impulse that did not submit to easy or entirely comforting explanation. The presentiment of abandonment, for instance, an understanding that the girl
would
leave, that Hara had nothing to make her stay, and a dread of this prospect that so upstaged the matter's why as to eclipse it. As in,
why
was Hara so anxious that Lyric stay? In the way of one disinclined to look square at a thing, Hara nonetheless
sensed
the connection between her fury and her hurt, her feelings toward Lyric, toward Robert, and then of course toward Zeke; or, further still, saw the netting of connection cast out to embrace that girl on the beach in Goa, out alone at night, with her parents sleeping and Daeva holed up in their room calling some boy, that girl wandering the white bow of sand where diminutive waves fizzed through the night and the sounds from bars garlanded in lights were lush and ugly with the mysteries of adult happiness. And as she drifted in the furling breeze, even then she had tended the implausible hope that someone might know to come out and find her and lead her inside, not to a bar, not to any one room, but to the sanctum of shared reality where a mind took its form in another.

When Lyric had gone to Robert's, Hara removed pieces from the puzzle. Not so many the girl would notice, but a few here and there. On the nights Lyric stayed in, they might replace exactly these. Sometimes Hara would trace the composition of the girl's tattoos. She knew them by now, the sinewy thicket of green tangles on the girl's shoulder, bursting here and there in a red corolla, the ox-eyed nymph washing fruit in a brook; the brook that flowed beneath the flowers, ran out into a river and shimmering ocean, crossed Lyric's back and washed up below a fishing village, an outpost of sand and stilted huts. Above the village a city rose into the ocher sky, sunlight spilling onto the clouds, where a pair of naked angels embraced and an amazon warrior with one breast and a sword occupied a throne. Then on the girl's neck errant rays of sunshine fed a painted vasculature, turned from gold to red, merging back into the flowers and carrying crimson blood along green stems to the calyxes where the roses bloomed.

Sometimes it seemed to Hara that if she looked hard enough she might find herself there, a timeless fixture in the fretwork prophecy, and then she would know that this life was all a joke, subject to an extraneous order, and that her suffering and happiness, by implication, had meaning. Other times she thought, Enough of that. You could measure the line between craziness and isolation on a day's shed eyelashes. The flakes of an early snow fell softly on the ocean, dissolving into it, and Hara thought, Maybe I can live here and dissolve into the ocean myself.

“You feel like real life is going on somewhere else,” she told Lyric. “You're young. You think if you keep looking you'll find the place you're meant to be.”

“I
don't
think that,” Lyric said. “I've been to Morocco.”

Oh, sometimes Hara wished Lyric
would
leave. The girl's presence, having become the very augury of its absence, could seem at times the worse of the two. It wasn't only the pleasure you took in a person's company that made you covet it, Hara knew. Just as often it was the compulsion to ensnare something elusive, fleeting, the urge to establish a state of permanence, if not of happiness, and then too the fear of what solitude permitted, the flights and phantasms of inner life, of unuttered thought, and the terrifying possibility, absent the correlative of another person, that you were not at all the composite of your past, but merely the confused nerves of the present, ever-supplanting moment.

And it was this fear, this possibility, when you got down to it, that Lyric did without.

*   *   *

Hara begged off the night of Robert's party. She begged off, and she implored Lyric to stay in with her, a demand as reckless, it seemed, as a straight last-dollar bet on a roulette game, and she might have bared her soul, she thought, if she knew how to do that and where a person began. The party sounded ghastly, though. The idea of hearing Robert's band play made her expectantly ill. And she had less than zero desire, really, to rummage around for fellow feeling with locals, mutual curiosities, feeling old while Lyric made friends easily.

They drank in joyless fashion, sorting puzzle pieces, until Hara asked Lyric whether she hadn't given it more thought.

“Given what more thought?”

“The Church's views on women,” Hara said. “What do you think? About staying on.”

Was it possible Lyric was pouting? Hara wouldn't have believed it, but she had never seen this reticence in the girl, her lower lip thrust ostentatiously forward. It was hard to remember sometimes that the girl was just that, a child, subject to emotions all her own and yet emotions she could not have lived with long enough to understand in all their unoriginality and predictable rhythm, their mendacity, their worthless force.

“What about Robert?” Hara said, hating herself a little as she said it.

“Robert and I are
friends
,” Lyric said. “I've told you that.”

“Okay, God. Did you ever hear about the lady who protested too much? But let's go to the party if it's going to be like this.”

“Don't you think it's strange,” Lyric said, “you've had the house, what, six years and you don't know anyone who lives here?”

“I know Gerry. Now I know Robert,” Hara said. “I know people who come here in the summer.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“I'm not an adorable sprite like you. I don't like people nearly so much. What do you want from me?”

“A minute ago you didn't want to go to the party because you said someone named Dwayne was going to sneeze type-two herpes in your cornea.”

“I don't think I said that, and anyway,” said Hara, “I can't be held responsible for every dreadful remark that escapes my mouth.” She affixed a puzzle piece and sensed a bit of humor stealing back into the girl. “Look, I'll take the risk.”

“It's late,” Lyric said.

“Oh, it's barely ten. I'll bet we're just in time for some chip detritus or whatever they eat.”

“They?”

“I'm
joking
. The Morlocks.”

Perhaps Hara had misunderstood. Perhaps Lyric merely wanted to bring her two worlds together. Perhaps she wanted to help Hara make friends. She seemed to have enough of them, Lyric did. And the girl was right, the party
was
outside, although why Hara had disbelieved her she couldn't quite say. It was next to the site of a new house going up. There was a fire at least, a faint hint of rippling heat coming from the crowd dancing at the foot of a platform on which a few underdressed young men were trying to damage some instruments. Hara shivered and pulled her jacket around her.

“I told you,” Lyric said.

“All right, you don't have to gloat.” Hara took a shot of bourbon, then filled her plastic cup. “What? Oh Lord.” She drifted away from Lyric, toward the fire, catching in its sweet odor a second scent, bodily and intimate. A man pressed a small pipe to his lips.

“Excuse me,” Hara said with her most obliging look. “Hi, would it be a terrible bother…”

“Be my guest,” the man said through a held breath.

He was a few years older than her, she guessed, his face leathered and ruddy. She took the pipe from him and sucked the flame over the embers while he gazed off at the stage.

“Shit that passes for music these days,” he said.

“They said the same thing about Schoenberg, though, didn't they?” said Hara.

What on earth was she talking about? How old did this man think she
was
? She was, come to think of it, exactly the age Zeke had been when they married. She tried to hold the thought still, to explore it for the deeper meaning it seemed to promise, but her attention was turning molten. The lights around her, blazing at points along their catenaries, edged into a sharper dazzle.

“Don't believe I know you,” the man said.

“No, it's unlikely,” Hara agreed. His hand in her smaller, softer hand felt like clay, the hand of a golem. “Where, um— Do we pee in the bushes then?”

He laughed. “Probably your best bet. There's a porta-potty down the road. Plumbing won't go in for another month or two.”

“Oh, is it your house?” Of course it wasn't.

“No, no. House like this? Summer folk, you know. All the new construction, really.”

It was Hara's turn to laugh. “An invasion then! How terrible! No doubt you just want to be left in peace to pursue your venerable folkways.”

He looked at her, his mouth seeming to flicker between uncertainty and something else, but he left whatever it was unsaid.

Of course. She was hated. They all were, seasonal invaders, self-important snobs from their effete enclaves, bringing the entire
economy
with them but full of prissy needs and ideas, their impossible diets, their fussy attachments to foreign wine and East Asian calisthenics. So peculiar and helpless, weren't they, babes in the woods when it came to anything practical, but not above affecting a chummy tone and shedding grammar to mingle with the brutes who cleared their lawns and fixed their toilets. Well, Hara would love to see them try the contract law on a corporate merger. Ha! Or— She tripped on a root and righted herself, just.

“Easy,” Lyric said. “You okay?”

“I am, thank you,” said Hara. “And I don't need to be babysat.”

The girl was silent.

And how Hara
loathed
her just then, loathed all of it—her simplicity and openness, the opacity of her openness, the light, flitting quality of her affection, her quiet restraint.

“You think it's so easy,” she said, “traipsing about without a plan or care in the world, with no job or money. But not to worry! Just throw yourself on the mercy of fate! How magical life is—fa la la!”

Lyric toed a twig. “I never said it was easy.”

“No. But you don't buy the groceries, do you? Or the gas for the car that takes you to and from what's-his-name's house? Or the heat that keeps us from freezing? Or the electricity, et cetera, et cetera.”

“So?” Lyric said. She said it as an actual question and so simply that Hara lost her point. What was her point? Something stupid, clearly.

“Right.
So
. So what? So
what
? Let's just wear flannel and mosh to Nirvana and say ‘So what?' when life gets, like, totally annoying.”

Lyric laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“I don't know,” Hara said. “I don't know, and now I have to pee. So excuse me.”

She pushed past Lyric down a path in the woods. When she had finished, she followed the path the rest of the way to the water, to the shoreline strip of dark rocks where a downed tree shone a ghostly color in the moonlight. She sat and lit a cigarette.

“You missed us play.”

Hara started but didn't turn.

“Alas, alas,” she said. The feel of his presence behind her set a tingle at the base of her neck. When he didn't respond she said, “I heard a different band play. If you sounded anything like them, never might be too soon.”

He snorted. She looked up to see him shaking his head, lighting his own cigarette, face yellowed in the flame.

“Strange thing, you and Lyric,” he said.

“Yes. Well. My husband's a twat.” She could just make out the islands in the distance. She should have built the house there, hidden in the woods, with embrasures to fire arrows through. “It worked out well enough though.”

He nodded in a ruminative way. “Maybe, maybe.”

“Or, strange that I let her stay, do you mean? Strange that we got on so well?”

His laugh rang false in Hara's ear. “Do you know anything about her?”

She stood and stretched. She hugged herself. “Oh, enlighten me, Robert. What is it you're just dying to tell me.”

“Jesus,” he said. It thrilled Hara to hear even the faint note of exasperation in his voice. “The way you treat people—”

“People, Robert, let themselves be treated this way or that. Or did they not teach you that in clam school?” A warmth was passing through her, a taste as charged as blood. He looked her in the eye and she wanted to laugh. “Are we fighting, Robert? Over Lyric or what exactly?” Her expression was all concerned incomprehension and nothing else.

He dragged on his cigarette until he had the tempo back. “Her parents didn't win any charity auction, you know.”

Her lip twitched. “Well, somebody did.”

“Yeah, I guess she overheard—”

“Are you her savior, I don't understand? Do you imagine you're protecting her from me, her knight in armor, that little trip?”

They were standing rather close.

“You never owe anyone anything, huh?”

“
Owe?
I think you have economics there backwards, Robert.”

“People like you…” He flicked his cigarette away.

“Yes, people like me. Go on.”

“You—” Oh, he did seem childish, didn't he, struggling to find his words? “People aren't there for your amusement.”

Hara laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, very good, Robert.
Thank you
. Thanks for letting me
know
. Is it quite disorienting to get a woman of my age and not a mother's selfless charity in the bargain? Not that you'll ever know, but that is what the world seems to expect.” She had closed the remaining ground between them, a glorious ringing pressure in her head. “But, ah, is it that you feel
you're
owed something? For your honesty, perhaps? Your masculinity? Your stern good looks? Does the world owe you something because you're awfully handsome?” She felt the destructive element swim into the night, as beautiful and wild as the surf below. “Or for the clams, how could I forget? And clearing the yard, and stacking fruit in the market, there's that…” She thought he was looking at her like a windup toy whose program had simply to be endured. She forced her voice to a hush and straightened a lock of hair on his forehead. “Does it take an awful lot of restraint? And now you have to listen to some spoiled bitch. Because that's what I am, isn't it? Some spoiled bitch tossing about handfuls of glitter, expecting everyone to be grateful. But you have to clean it up, don't you? That's your job. Sweeping up all the glitter spoiled bitches leave around.” She looked at him with sympathy. She felt herself partway enwrapped in her own words, the tightening ligature of silk, but she was tempted to laugh at herself in the same instant, her ridiculousness, the ongoing and self-regarding performance of her desperation. It was his look that stopped her. Her hand had found its way to his cheek. And now she saw uncertainty there on his face, the utter absence of the irony that opened channels in one's own seriousness, and this absence seemed to her, in précis, the very gross vulnerability of youth. Children, always thrilling to an adult business with no ability to follow through. Flinching at the moment of consequence because they had gotten only as far as its pantomime. It was uncertainty, hesitance, that was ugly. And youth thought beauty was a matter of looks! She shivered and turned in to him against the cold. “Oh, Robert,” she said consolingly, and it might have been no more than instinct that made him hold her, instinct, habit, or the confusion of seeing tenderness offer to replace contempt, attention lavished in hatred suddenly as a permutation of ardor. “Brr,” she murmured, no longer cold but simply intent on the tide of uncertainty in him, on not letting it settle, the warring impulses that cleft men, so eager to possess, to protect, and to get away. Her cheek brushed his. When she turned her eyes to him, open wide and faintly imploring, she might have set a clock, she thought, by how long it took their lips to touch.