Prodigals (12 page)

“Start at the beginning,” I said. She played along. “This is where I come from,” she said and spread her hands to include the scene before us.

“You were born in an oil refinery. Continue.”

“Don't be
crude
,” she said, and when I didn't respond she said, “Oh, that was bad, wasn't it?”

“Pretty bad,” I said. But it made me happy—the silliness, the lapse.

“No, a little farther down the turnpike and to the west. One of those nice suburbs without any ‘urb' to really do the whole sub-dom thing with.”

“That was a little better.”

“I guess I've said that before.”

I switched lanes and the lane I'd abandoned, of course, pulled forward. “Shit,” I said.

“Do you really want me to do this?” she asked.

I said I did. She was my age or thereabouts. It had been a long time since I'd really investigated my choice in her, but her being my age and a woman surely mattered. I didn't need someone who would explain me to myself. I wasn't in the market for psychological insight, really. I may have wanted a little mothering. A sense of stability, attention, a place to be heard. I am not too old as a man approaching forty to admit it. I wanted the warmth and understanding a mother teaches you, wrongly, to expect.

“I come from a big family,” Susan said. “There are four of us kids, I'm the oldest and—let's see—my mother's kind of this all-American mom. Soccer practice, dinner on the table at seven. Dad's a real guy's guy, owns a drilling company. Wells, abandonment, pumps, irrigation … I guess he's doing exploration for gas companies now too, the whole fracking thing.”

“I saw that family in a truck commercial.”

“It
was
a little like that.” She smiled at the memory. “When we were little, Dad used to say he could drill through anything—rock, metal, you name it. We'd ask him if he could drill to the center of the earth and he'd say, ‘With enough pipe, sure.' Silly.” She shook her head. “He was Jersey Italian, you know. I told someone at school once that he worked for the mob. Maybe he did.”

I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen Susan this way, lighthearted, gushing a little. It gave me a warm feeling even if her father's machismo got on my nerves. I seemed to remember having once read about a Soviet attempt to see how deep they could drill into the earth, how around seven or eight miles down the pressure, or maybe the heat, had become too great to continue, but that nonetheless it had confirmed how little we know about what lies even a short way underfoot.

“We were a close family,” Susan went on. “We did everything together, as this big family unit. Our house had this huge communal room and meanwhile our bedrooms were like closets. Our parents wanted to
see
us, you know?”

I said that it must have been hard—omertà, the lack of privacy. I was joking, but Susan didn't laugh.

“We liked it,” she said. She looked out the window, retreating, I felt, a small way into herself. The traffic had eased a little, the clouds growing thicker, the sky darker. The car listed in the wind.

“Well, I come from a
traditional
American family,” I said. “Broken.” She knew this, of course, but I was trying to make amends. “We children of divorce, we're used to thinking there's something creepy about marriages that last, a Mayberry fanaticism or something. Probably we've just confused creepy with healthy.”

“I don't know,” she said. “Sometimes it's healthy to split up, right?
Healthy
.” She shook her head. “God, what do we even mean?”

And who are we talking about now? I thought, but I held my tongue. I said the no-privacy thing must have given her a terrible time with boys.

“Oh, boys! I had to wait until college, really. Dad was Catholic, you know, and owned guns.”

“Fathers with guns,” I said and hypothesized that we'd never get around to fixing the gun problem in this country with so much teenage pussy to protect. I wasn't really thinking when I said it, but Susan laughed, a real laugh, not the polite one she used in our talks to let me know she understood I'd made a joke. “I guess so,” she said after a minute. But as the laughter faded we found ourselves left with the idea, and behind the idea the image—of Susan's teenage pussy—and I scrambled to move us along so that we wouldn't have to consider the other considering Susan's teenage pussy and the awkwardness of our shared understanding of what we were both simultaneously considering.

“I don't think I ever had a gun in one of my films,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. “Are you hungry?” I said, because what I'd said before had been so stupid.

“Actually, I'm starving.”

The traffic wasn't too bad and it seemed like a decent time to get off the highway, fuel up, and eat. It wasn't yet noon but I was hungry too, looking forward to the junk you permit yourself on the road, when the trial of the day overtakes and obscures any thought of the future. I was worried Susan would want to find a Starbucks and I'd be stuck with a cheese plate with like two red grapes, but when we pulled off into the clutter of roadside chains there wasn't a Starbucks in sight, and Susan suggested Denny's, which made me want to kiss her, and so Denny's it was.

Over breakfast Susan asked about my current projects and I told her. One involved filming violent criminals remembering happy moments from their childhoods. For another I was following around a trucker I'd met who liked to dress in drag. Susan asked what interested me about these projects and I said it was difficult to talk about them that way; it was the fact that you couldn't summarize them that made them art and to try to capture their effect in words would only lead to my sounding pretentious and evasive. She said that all sounded pretty pretentious and evasive so why didn't I just try, and I said, Fine. I was interested in our response to seeing people in situations that seemed to run directly counter to their public identities. Imagine a group of Fortune 500 CEOs at a petting zoo, I said. Imagine leaving them there too long. If I could get Fortune 500 CEOs to give me an afternoon, that's what I'd have them do.

“Interesting.”

“Do you think so? When people say ‘interesting' they usually mean ‘
not
interesting' or ‘I'd like to stop talking about this immediately.'”

“No, it is interesting,” she said. “Just, how do you make sure it's not gimmicky?”

I told her this was always the worry. It was why these projects took so long. You had to film for a long time before people got so used to the scrutiny that they stopped playing to the camera, before authentic moments of self-discovery could occur. “You can always tell an authentic moment,” I said. “I don't know how, but at some point you can see that a person has stopped trying to manage your perception of them. The true self peeks through.”

“I wonder if I believe in such a thing,” she said.

“Well, forget the word ‘true,' if that seems problematic. I mean the self that's not an actor. The self we are in private and with our best friends, our spouses. The effortless self, let's call it.”

She looked at me, but past me, to the point in space where the truth of words is judged against reality. She was quiet. The look on her face, as she gazed off, passed from caught-up to sad and then, I thought, to something like a premonitory glimpse of the possibilities and limits of a life. It was brief, this terror—if that's what it was—and I longed and dreaded to know what she was thinking. In another second, though, she had returned to the moment and to picking the crusts of her chicken sandwich, which I had found and continued to find a strange order.

It was raining when we left the restaurant, light, sparse drops shuttled about by the wind, a pleasant rain that seemed to be cleaning you rather than getting you wet. The lights of restaurants and gas stations shone wetly all around, and it was lovely, in the rain, at a Denny's, in New Jersey.

“You don't have to like my films,” I said when we were back in the car.

“It's not that…” I could feel her on the edge of an admission, having second thoughts but caught in her point's momentum. “It's … just my boyfriend in college, he was a filmmaker. He was always telling me about his projects. At first I liked it, I thought he was brave. But the intensity, you know, it kind of wore me down. I think I'm not smart or edgy enough for experimental film.”

I didn't say anything. I stared straight ahead. I wanted to give Susan the impression that she had hurt me, which she had a little, but that I was going to ride the hurt out stoically. It wasn't that I needed Susan to like my work, although for what if not pockets of intensity were we in the business of living? But I was jealous of that young man, a man who now of course would be my age, but who in memory preserved something of what is lost to time. What had he done to capture her affection that I could not? And what had Susan been like all those years ago, before intensity came to seem a burden and discretion led her to hide away the treasure of herself, discovered and buried some day long ago under a soil of rotting youth? I wanted, pointlessly, to return to college, to
that
Susan, excitable and unformed, spilling slightly beyond herself as people when they are most beautiful do.

“I'm sorry,” she said after a minute. “I'm distracted. The storm, the kids … I know your films are very good. You've had a lot of success, right? They matter to people.”

“Why did you become a therapist?” I said, ignoring the dubious logic of her last remark. I remembered sitting in therapy with her, week after week, wondering if she always believed the things she said, the terse, careful words she committed to, waiting for what I thought of as her true self to peek through.

“I guess the idea just grew on me,” she said. “I like listening to people, hearing their stories. I wanted to do something that helped people. I believe in the therapeutic space.”

“But how do you know you are? Helping people, I mean.”

She did that thing again of retreating a degree or two into herself. “I don't,” she said. “I do my best. I trust the process.” I may have snorted. “What happened to listening to music?” she said.

It was really raining now. I had the wipers on their continuous setting, not the really fast one, which by the time it's raining hard enough for you to need is kind of impotent anyway. The clouds had charcoaled and thickened so that, although it was early afternoon, it was as dark as evening. The weather felt obscurely punitive, and though I knew the storm would cause extraordinary damage and harm many people, part of me longed for it to come, for it to get worse, for it to be as bad, or worse, than they said. I wanted to see it curdling the ocean and bringing waves and wind over the coast, over cities and towns, ripping up sidewalks and porches, downing power lines, traffic lights, trees. I wanted the chaos, to feel the power of something powerful, and then the still aftermath of chaos in which we get to be our better selves and rebuild. In which the challenges are simple and communal and vast. I thought somewhere in this mess of longings and contradictory impulses was a film, and then I knew why I'd taken 95 instead of heading inland to 81. I wanted to encounter the storm. I wanted to film it.

“It's really coming down,” Susan said. “Oh, there's my exit!”

“Your exit…”

“If we were going to my house, I mean. Where I grew up.”

“Ah, the panopticon.”

“You're making too much of this.”

“No,” I said. “Let me see if I understand.” A tangle of lightning flashed on the retina of the sky. “There's no outward privacy in the panopticon—everything can be seen, right?—but inward privacy exists too, the privacy of the mind. All you really need for inward privacy is to keep quiet, to shut up. So you learn to keep quiet, keep your thoughts to yourself, not betray your emotions. That seems safe. And by the same token the idea of being open, really open, with another person seems terrifying. Yes? Tell me if I'm missing anything.”

We didn't speak for a while after this. I knew I had gone too far, as no doubt I had at other times when I thought I saw the shadow of an emotion cross her face. I had the unpleasant feeling of seeing myself act in a way I didn't approve of and would reproach myself for later. But it was a hard moment for me. Cracks shivered out through my marriage, threatening at any moment its collapse. And had I married my wife out of much more, really, than my own aggrieved inner plea for stability? When I thought about her, a woman I had dated in college and parted ways with only to meet again seven years ago, I supposed I had married her because I was tired of thinking about that side of life, because she was smart and self-sufficient and maternal, in her way, and because I
did
love her. I loved her honestly, in a reasonable way, a way in touch with her flaws, and so sober and quiet, this love, that it seemed far truer than the fevered infatuations I'd been used to as a younger man. But I also think I had the idea that we would grow together over time, that our differences would soften, and that we would erosively remake each other in the gentle spaces of domesticity and parenthood. And so I was haunted, when this didn't happen, to see, and even more to feel, that there were parts of her I still had never gained access to and probably, therefore, never would. I wondered achingly what these parts were, because I never doubted that she was honest with me, and she could be warm too. It was not so much
information
that lay beyond my reach, I felt, as a sort of presence, of shared and consummate openness, a kind of psychic nudity.

And then Celeste, this past weekend, my friend Mark's wife, whom I had dated for two years before Mark and had almost asked to marry me but instead dumped—because we were young and I thought we should part to reconnect later (maybe), because I had my first solo show (at twenty-six!) and felt powerful and important and suddenly bored with Celeste. We live with our mistakes. We regret them, we move away from them in time, and later we tell ourselves that they were necessary to create the person we have become. In time we grow to love our mistakes because we are inseparable from them and they comprise our belief in ourselves as people with access to wisdom. But all this retrospection never confronts the counterfactual mood, which of course it is beyond us to confront, though still, at times, there are mistakes that so resist our revisionary impulse that we are left wondering, When this path branched, what really
did
I decide? And Celeste is such a mistake for me.