Prodigals (17 page)

And still, we make messes at night to have something to do with the day.

Here is what I want, I said, meting out tequila in two glasses. I might have been a child holding a glass statuette—knowing not to drop it, knowing I would to watch it break. You're not going to like it though, I said. And that's how the role-play comes about. We curl Anita's hair with an old iron; it's darker than Amy's and her skin darker too. Outside, the whistling black winter is a banshee train caroming through the streets. The loft's light is bleak against the dark, the room as empty as a stoned mood. Anita sits at the paint-stripped vanity we found on Keswick one afternoon, the two of us out exploring the city in the idle improvisation of early love. We apply makeup, a little to lighten her complexion and return a hint of dewy youth—not that Amy ever wore much. We give her black jeans, a loose sleeveless top, a bra to hold in her tits. She looks, when we've finished, like neither Amy nor herself, but maybe a monster's dream of human beauty, a child's crayon drawing of lurid glamour.

I don't know why you're doing this, she says. There's nothing in the rocks glass when she sets it down.

I don't know. It's exciting to me.

To pretend your girlfriend's someone else.

Christ—she's right of course,
I
am the monster—but
Christ
, aren't we past that? I say. Those ridiculous little stories about identity? I've got
mine
, and you've got
yours
 … It's all such nonsense. What's the point of role-playing anyway?

To play a role, Anita says. Not someone else. When I don't respond she says, Look, just tell me how this isn't demeaning, okay? Just walk me through it.

It's my fucked-upness, isn't it? My perversion? If it's demeaning to anyone, it's demeaning to me.

You are such a fucking sophist, she says and laughs bitterly.

I clear her hair from her face. I'm sorry. Forget it. Forget Amy, I say. Be my high school crush from Bible study, that's all I wanted. And maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but it would be too much to say it is exactly
Amy
I want when I sit Anita down at the desk with the Bible between us, caressing her as she reads, words from a book that says love does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, and keeps no record of wrongs. That says so many ridiculous things it is hard to know what is contradiction and what is just violent longing for a world not our own. With my lips at her shoulders and the floral sweat of her hot skin in my nostrils, I say, Let's study something else. Okay, she says, what? God's image, I say and laugh. We were made in God's image, right?

She lets me lead her to the bed and lay her down. She lies there tremulous, rigid, wide-eyed in the role. And how do you enact the fallen moment? Sneak a finger up her pant leg and under the elastic of a sock. Pull it down. One, then the other. Touch her thigh. Feel her flinch. The waist of her jeans, the button at the fly. Undo, unzip. Take the jeans down around her ass so they come inside out. The skin below crimping to gooseflesh. Hairs rising together and flesh cold where her thighs bulge. Watch a tremor pass through her. Circle her and ease the shirt up over her body. Let your hands brush her sides. Her breathing is an audible wind. Pinch the bra clasp, let it go—let the fabric calve from her, nipples alive, tight. Circle each with a finger. Let her shudder … Underpants last. Take them down so slowly they grip and release each tangle of hair.

She breathes in.

And I stop.

I can't go on.

Something is off.

Or no, that's not right. Something is
gone
. But who can say, really, what founders on the dull thingness of a body? Who has ever been able to say? It is not what Anita says later, that I am in love with Amy and stopped when I saw it wasn't her. That keeps things legible, so that's where Anita goes. But it isn't so simple, not when desire turns in on itself, switches back, burrowing like roots into the hollow cavities of what inside us is hardest to fill. May never be filled. May never
want
to be filled. Or perhaps we make peace with those pockets of wind. Or perhaps we keep costuming strangers in our vain hopes. But either way, right?
Either way
.

Or let us go deeper for a moment because this is a religious story—that is one way to understand it—and every religious story is a love story, and every love story a story about childhood. For how are we to know if the noise we strike on after is more than the echo of our footfalls? Would it be too fanciful to say we are pearl divers in despoiled harbors? Blind archers among wet trees, forever hunting the phantom quarry of our perverse compulsions? The blackbird sits in the cedar-limbs, the arrows in our ribs. I have been single since she left.

This is not a
decision
, exactly, but perhaps the repetition of a choice. I paint. I clock in, out. Walk Peter, paint some more. Sometimes I call my mother, who tells me God is keeping her cancer-free. It's nice he's come around, I say. She is quiet on the other end—the beauty of inflection, or just after.

Hey, do you ever talk to him about me?

Sometimes, she says.

And what does he say?

He says you're stubborn.

Ha. You say that too.

We both know you very well.

Okay, it's not wrong. God is stubborn too. In our battle of wills we at least respect each other. He and I, She and I—whatever. Sometimes it's a blessing, sometimes a curse, this ability to keep to myself, to brook unhappiness before compromise. I don't miss Anita. I wish I missed her and I don't. I miss
missing
, if anything, the belief in the nonabsurdity of your life that seems to be a precondition for valid longing. I spend hours in the studio, watching time spill through the paint-flecked windows. Peter dozes in the geometries of puddled sunlight. And although I spend morning and evening here, those hours when the day reconstitutes itself most radically, not even this secondhand sense of movement can push forward my stone-bound spirit. I drink wine from a water glass, stop leaving the bottle in the kitchen. This is my hermitage, I think, my chrysalis, my penitence.

One day I decide to take a trip. It is a day quite a while later and it happens to be spring. Rather, it is spring the way it is sometimes spring, without warning and just everywhere, mild air charged with that unmistakable damp estrus. The breeze is fragrant against my skin, the day heavy with the prurient scent of flowering trees. Chalkboards line the sidewalks in front of cafés. People shout to one another across the street, flirting. And I feel something steal over me, a happiness so tepid it might be the smell of cut grass. A spiderweb falling across your face. The sense of someone's hand just above your spine. I will visit Berlin. I've always wanted to and now I will. I ask for the time off work, book a ticket, get a friend to watch Peter. And of all the people, on all the days, who do I run into at the airport, but Amy.

No fucking way.

Jesse.

She smiles, startled.

And then we hug. And then we say the things you do.
How crazy is this? How are you? What are you doing here?
She's on a layover, she says, heading home. Nothing serious, I hope. No, no, just a visit, she says. I have an hour. Get a drink? She hesitates, glances at her watch. What the hell
.
And as we walk to the bar and sit down, it might be that we are stepping out of the river of our lives, out of time itself, to watch it flow on without us from the banks.

That's how it feels. Amy pokes the olives in her drink with the little spear. It's so strange going home, she says. Everything's so different. Every
one
. How is her family? They're good, she says. Her sister had a baby. Her mom started a small business arranging flowers. Her father's teaching Greek and Hebrew at the college, if I can believe it.

Well, yes, I can, even if it is nonetheless strange to consider the accidents of history that lead to a man like Pastor Bob, in a town like ours, running his hands daily through the sands of those ancient worlds. But it is really the absence of strangeness in people's lives that with each passing year I have come to suspect. And accident must only be the wide-angle view besides, because here is Amy, and here am I, and it is so easy to pick up after all these years that we cannot be accidents or self-creations, the people we are. For an instant I feel the plunging acceptance of having been there from the beginning, witness to the earnest stupidity of every mistake, of being able to travel back along the violent current of life to the days when as small girls our bare feet slapped the lush, moist earth, when the sound of choirs were ribbons plaiting the air, and on damp tended lawns the voices of adults carried over, the very timbre of what was knowable and known. We remember things differently according to our purposes, of course. When my mother reminded me how as a child I liked to undress and break apart my dolls, she said it like it explained something primal and forbidding in my nature.

It's why I'm a serial killer, Ma.

I could have been more maternal, she says.

Amy wears pearl earrings, wool pants, a cream halter under a black cardigan. Her hair has lost its oxbow curls. Lord knows what she does to stay so thin. But it is less these things, I see, than that she appears to belong here now, flying off on a Tuesday with these businessmen and businesswomen. She
is
in business, she tells me. She works for a textbook publisher and lives in New York. With her partner of two years. She is happy. Life is quiet, manageable.

I thought you were a revolutionary, I say.

She sips her drink. Well, I still think we're fucked if that's what you mean.

No, it isn't.

What then do I want her to say? What happened, I suppose. I want her to tell me what happened.

Life, she says. Exhaustion. I don't know.

Not good enough.

Love?

Please.

I wanted to be happy, Jesse. Isn't that awful? Isn't that just awful? I wanted my
little
happiness, like everyone, and Sundays to read.

But it isn't happiness for which she needs to apologize. It isn't even an apology she's on the hook for. The mood comes to me unbidden, the resurrection of old roles. I've had enough, it seems—two bourbons on an empty stomach—not to care much what I say. That sunburnt feeling is moving inside of me, like light breaking in double time over the crops.

So you're happy, I say. And less tired. And in love.

Yes, she says. I am exactly those things.

And what I would ask her, if I could say it in a way that made any sense, is whether this is one more costume in the pageant or if it's
her
.

In the stillness the airport noises rise up. Shoes ring against the polished floor. Outside, a plane takes off as soft and heavy as a dandelion's seed head. Bye forever.

Amy has collected herself and changes tones. Did you tell me you were going to Germany? she's saying. That sounds
amazing
. It's going to be so fun. A lot better than going home. Ugh. I'm going for a while, actually, did I say? I got promoted and while we're transitioning anyway I thought I'd take a little break. Three weeks. I mean, I won't be home the whole time, but still— She pauses. Isn't it strange how we do that? How we call it home after all these years?

But I'm only half listening. I'm thinking that were I to paint her in this moment I would have her in three-quarter view, looking down, wearing a look that shields her from me, a posture uneasy with the viewer's gaze. That gestures at the things we can't know from the outside, different angles on the impenetrable mapping its armor, nothing more. An écorché would be no help, of course, it is not a matter of anything material can touch. We must let the strange gods come and go. That light in Amy's eyes. Faint doublings in lacquer and liquid. The black rimming shadows of a day that seems already the intimate of its own regrets. And it is not so simple anymore to say who is purer or more stubborn, but what I understand just then is that Amy is
not
happy, and has never been. She is fighting a battle. I am fighting it too.

 

Tanner's Sisters

It had been two years since I'd last seen Tanner, when he called out of the blue to say he was back in town and wanted to get together. I was busy at the time. I'd just been made editor at the publishing house where I worked, and my girlfriend, Tess, and I had moved in together. It was a pleasant one-bedroom with a cutaway view of the river, and with everything going on I fancied myself in what we term, with equal parts self-satisfaction and error, a period of
growth
. Was it more than acquiescence, really? Gracious defeat? A sort of buying in or selling out? This line of thinking no doubt typifies someone with a child's idea of purity, and maybe I am such a person, but at the time of Tanner's return I was enjoying with some complacent satisfaction how my life looked to adult eyes. I did not want Tanner disrupting things, that is. We had never been such close friends, besides. But he was insistent and didn't even sound put off when I suggested an evening two weeks later. That was when we met, in the early spring at an outdoor café, and that was when Tanner told me this remarkable story.

I had first come to know him because we had the same therapist, Dr. Kirithra, a moonfaced Jungian with a sad smile who worked out of a church in the East Seventies. Tanner was leaving one day just as I was ducking in, or perhaps the other way around, and we said the awkward hello you do at the shrink's. It turned out later that he knew Travis and Clea, and my old friend Marilena—that Tanner knew
everyone
—and we met again at a dinner party and made a big joke of the whole thing at our expense. How typical, how neurotic, how
this city
. Tanner, loud, witty, and personable, struck me as exactly the sort of person who doesn't need a shrink but gets one anyway, because he can, because it seems like what an interesting, theoretically tormented person does. He had a job at a reputable bank and he came from money too. He spent lavishly and indifferently. Everything he did had an air of worldly apathy about it, the sort that shelters under a melancholic idea of itself, and I mistrusted the seriousness of people like this and so kept Tanner at arm's length.