Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  Knowing Tanner as I had, then, when I saw him that night, sitting outside in the sweater weather of early April, it took me by surprise to find him looking a bit unkempt. His blond hair had grown out and darkened, a greasy mess atop hollow features. He seemed thin, his clothes hardly fit him. And although I had gotten to the café early, he was there when I arrived, fiddling with the silverware. I watched him for a minute before he spotted me. “Jonah,” he said when he had. He smiled, rising, extending a hand, and then in a rush of unexpected warmth he pulled me in for one of those one-armed hugs that pass for affection among men my age.

  “Tanner,” I said, more stiffly than I meant to. His appearance set off a faint alarm in me. A subtle impression, I don’t mean to overstate it. He seemed distracted, unmoored. And yet if I am being fully honest, alongside this apprehension I felt the opposite, a quiet triumph at seeing Tanner like this, for he had always struck me as a person destined for a luck he hadn’t earned, the sort of person who inhabits the world so effortlessly that good fortune can’t help but attach to him, and because of this I had at times taken his life as a measuring stick against my own, which was by comparison the life of an outsider, someone without Tanner’s social grace or ease, without his ability to fold seamlessly into the currents around him. I felt vindicated seeing Tanner like this, even if knowing what I do now, having heard his story, it is a feeling I would rather disown. I am ashamed of it, and still, undeniably, it is what I felt.

  “So,” I said, breaking under his gaze, “long time. I heard you’d left the country.”

  “I did, I did,” he agreed. “I only just got back.”

  “When was that?” I motioned to the waiter, who ignored us with a kind of élan.

  “Oh, two or three weeks ago.” He waved away precision with a hand, as though weeks were hardly a thing to keep track of. “Look—” He smiled, suddenly self-conscious. “I hope this isn’t odd, my calling you, asking you to see me. It’s been forever, I know. My sense of what’s odd and normal is a bit off these days … But see, the thing is, you were my first thought when I got back. I thought, If anyone will understand what I’ve been through, it’s Jonah. I can’t say why. An intuition, I guess.”

  Privately, at this point, I was thinking something along the lines of “Oh, great.” I am a person who has been taught to listen, to ask questions, and to respond appropriately. It is amazing how few people do any of these things, and I often feel, as a consequence, that my attention is taken advantage of. I didn’t think of Tanner as a particularly bad offender, but I assumed this was what he meant: that I of all people would sit there and listen to him.

  Our waiter had finally come and taken our order with—what else to call it?—stoic disgust. I asked for a Carménère and Tanner said, “Make it a bottle,” waving away my objection and assuring me that he was buying. “Thank you,” I said, meaning surely something closer to the opposite and wondering a bit vertiginously what we had to discuss that would take us an entire bottle.

  “Well, here I am,” I said. “You’ve got me.”

  “Got you…,” Tanner said vaguely, but it appeared to be the prompting he needed, because he asked me then whether I was reasonably au fait with his time in film school—his phrase—and I said yes, I supposed I was. “Well,” he said, “it turned out I was too restless to make films. You remember how I was, hardly able to sit still. I liked films. I had ideas. Who doesn’t, right? But you get the stray idea and think, Fuck, what an idea! I’m going to do this. And then you get down to it and it’s a shit-ton of work. And you’re on to the next idea before you’ve even roughed out the first. And pretty soon it dawns on you that everyone has ideas, and we’re all just jerking off, mourning the falsehoods of youth or whatever. Because we’ve all been taught, right, every last one of us, that we have some unique something to offer up to the world. But c’mon. Let’s be real.”

  His eyes brightened as he spoke, the gleam, I thought, of restless people who find refuge in the moment, the exigency of its impermanence, if I can say that. And while I noted the dirt under his fingernails and the grease at his temples, building a case for my initial impression, in his words the old Tanner showed through, a person whose wry and crude honesty, I had always thought, betrayed a longing for things a bit nobler or more serious than he permitted himself.

  Our wine had come, but Tanner seemed not to have noticed. “So what was I doing in film school?” he was saying. “I’ve asked myself quite a few times. Some people aren’t searching for anything, I think, but for the rest there’s an emptiness, isn’t there, and we’re all looking for things with that particular shape to fill it. Before I met Rhea I’m not sure I even recognized any—what do I mean to say?—lacuna. I thought I had things in hand, more or less. I thought a certain brand of, I don’t know, urbanity would see me through.”

  I felt then, drinking my wine too quickly, a brief stab of recognition in my gut, the way you do on hearing someone begin a sentence and knowing instantly what he will say. I do not mean I anticipated Tanner’s words or point, exactly, but I could see certain lines of inquiry begin to braid, I felt an intimacy in the pattern, I understood, however reluctantly, why Tanner had sought me out—because without our quite saying it we do somehow communicate a receptivity, or else impatience, when it comes to matters of the spirit. Questions of the heart in crisis, dark nights of the soul—that sort of thing. I remembered at an exhibition once seeing Tanner turn from Bacon’s Pope Innocent X with a strange, faraway look in his eye. I had taken it for preoccupation at the time, but I wondered now whether I might not have had the true pretense in Tanner, the priority of his allegiance, backward from the beginning.

  “Rhea?” I said, perhaps a bit weakly.

  “Oh, yeah, right. Rhea. Rhea Magnusson. This girl in film school with me,” Tanner explained. “I didn’t know her at first. I’d seen her around and hadn’t paid her much mind. I didn’t find her pretty and she had this revolutionary-garb thing going that put me off. You know, patriarchy this, hegemony that. How utterly compromised we all are by Western culture. Not that it’s wrong, you know, just so fucking humorless, so exhausting. All those little right sentiments to offer up in worthless atonement for our dreary privilege … That’s the vibe I got anyway, and I kept my distance. Then we were assigned this project together—we had to make a short. Well, we met for coffee, and coffee turned into a walk, and the walk into dinner. I was spellbound. It wasn’t so much Rhea as the manner of our conversation. Its honesty. Its sweetness, even. I had her pegged all wrong. She had this quality—I’d never met someone quite like her before—it was like she’d never been exposed to a single idea. Not that she was stupid, not at all. But like every idea we stumbled on had the force of revelation, a kind of joy almost. I mean, can you imagine, coming from the world we do, what a—you know—baptism it is to be treated as a source of mystery and insight? I didn’t care if it was all a complicit delusion. Let’s pretend we’re special and all that. I didn’t care! By the end of the night Rhea had come to seem beautiful to me. And I don’t mean her soul was beautiful or some crap like that.”

  They made the short, Tanner told me. It was Rhea’s story. She had it all worked out the next time they met: script, actors, shooting locations. The plot was incoherent—this was my impression—something tiresome and postmodern about an architect who designs the world’s most beautiful skyscraper, or so some magazine calls it, finds he can’t handle the success, and begins wandering the city at night. Later he’s unable to locate his apartment building, or finds it’s been destroyed—this isn’t clear—and he winds up at the harbor, where a ship is waiting for him. He boards the ship, which soon departs for lands unknown. Tanner described the final shot in unnecessary detail (I’m skipping over a great deal) and said “To black” loudly, chopping a hand down to end the scene. He took a sip of wine, his first, and I said something uninspired about exile and anonymity.

  “No, no.” He waved me off. “Don’t get the impression I think this is some great fi
lm. It’s just … Rhea. She had an actor ready to play the architect, a ship lined up for us to film on. We got the project on, like, a Tuesday and by Thursday she was ready to shoot. You can’t believe what an amazing person she is. I was just starting to realize it myself. She knew people everywhere, had friends all over town. People willing, eager, to do her favors. I thought it was a put-on, this—what do I mean?—innocence, this blithe … capability. So I introduced her to a few friends, Reece and Scooby, you know, people so oppressively hip there are about four square blocks in the world where they can exist, and she just melted them.” He shook his head. “You had to see it.”

  This predictably annoyed me. So Tanner had a new girlfriend. Great. He would have a different one next week. And I was disposed against the curatorial approach to human beings, besides, strewing them about your life like oddments or knickknacks. This was Tanner’s bag if it was anyone’s, and people are not jokes or curiosities, not in my view anyway, although I don’t mean to say we are ever very good at investing ourselves in another person’s reality. That might be why, after all, I hadn’t realized that this was a different Tanner, why I still felt the need to bring him down a notch when I said, “Well, how did this Rhea wind up in film school? Where did she come from? Who was paying the bills?”

  I sounded peevish to myself, I admit, brimming with the sort of pedantry I loathe at least as much as our mythologizing impulse. Tess has said that if we didn’t snag on ourselves from time to time she has no idea what a self really is, and I grant this notion a certain truth. It takes on a mise-en-abyme quality if you look at it too long, but yes, maybe there are times to forgive ourselves our inveterate pettinesses, those dead limbs of personality we’re always hoisting about into their awkward, casual poses.

  “Oh, didn’t I say?” Tanner grinned. “But you’re the storyteller, after all.”

  I wasn’t, I hadn’t been for many years, but Tanner had a charming faith, I think, that underneath everything we were all artists manqués. And maybe he was right, maybe the soil below the placid lawns of everyday life was always rich and black, rife with a chaos of growth and rot that called out for acknowledgment or cultivation. Nonetheless, I had done what I could to let the question alone, to tend the lawn, see the books bound, and gaze out from the safe distance of the museum floor. And now I could feel Tanner dragging me gently but insistently from the safety of this firm shore. I wasn’t even sure he knew.

  “Rhea was Danish, see, or half Danish. Their mother was Chilean,” he said. “Rhea and her sister were born in Demark, then moved here as girls. Their father got some big fucking appointment. The Neue Galerie, I’m pretty sure it was. Arts administration. You should have seen their place: just off Lex, modern, minimalist, all white impenetrable surfaces, you know, but then Groszes and Kirchners on the wall. They had a Schiele too, I think.

  “I first saw it when Rhea brought me by one afternoon. We were wandering around town and she needed to change. We were in her room. She didn’t send me out or ask if I minded, just started changing—her pants, her shirt—and almost out of habit, I guess, I went over and kissed her. She didn’t move away. She seemed to go along with the kiss, but when I pulled back, her look was ambiguous, something between surprise and amusement, like she didn’t know what I was doing or else knew so well that it amused her. The predictability of it maybe. But then I’m not sure Rhea expected or anticipated a single thing in her life. That was her charm. She took things as they were, without apparent judgment, so much so that it didn’t seem strange when we had sex right then and there. Or if anything was strange it was only the look of baffled amusement on her face, like I was taking her on a long detour and hadn’t told her the reason. Well, we finished, and I got dressed, and she got dressed, and as I left the room I turned to say something and almost walked right into a young woman sort of loitering where the hall turned.

  “I collected myself enough to say hello. I’d thought we were alone, I don’t know why, and in any case the look the woman was giving me was—I don’t know. Horror? Disgust? Rhea came around from behind me, smiling.

  “‘Elena,’ she said. ‘Tanner, this is my sister, Elena. Elena, Tanner.’

  “‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, putting out a hand which she regarded briefly as if I’d offered her a piece of rotting fruit.

  “Elena turned to Rhea. ‘I have to run down to the pharmacy.’

  “‘Do you want Tanner to take you?’ Rhea asked.

  “She looked me up and down with a more moderated disgust. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  “Well, sometimes you don’t ask questions, you know. You want to think of yourself as someone who can say yes without asking why, who can take a break from living under the sovereignty of clear intentions, and this must have been one of those times because soon we were riding the elevator down together in silence. I was wondering how two sisters managed to look so unalike, Rhea with her sunken, strung-out mien, her messy gold hair, and Elena, very fresh looking, with drum-tight skin over wide, gently tented features, her jet-black hair cut short.

  “I was on the verge of saying something dull to make conversation when Elena asked whether Rhea had told me about the time they ran away as girls. I said she hadn’t, no. ‘Well, we weren’t girls exactly,’ Elena said. ‘Teenagers, I suppose, or I was on the cusp. We used to summer way out on Long Island. “Land of the insufferables,” Rhea called it. It really was awful. Papa used to make us wear these little dresses and stand around at cocktail parties listening to adults act like the most enormous children. God, we hated it, smiling at these little factoids about ourselves that weren’t even true—“Elena just loves Satie!”—while old men sort of pawed at us. It gives me chills just … But anyway, this particular summer Rhea had befriended a fisherman she thought would ferry us to Block Island in the middle of the night.

  “‘A ridiculous plan, but very Rhea if you know her. She’s been my sister my entire life and I don’t begin to, but she’s also the most amazing person I’ve ever met. Well, the day came. We packed a small duffel and struck out in the dead of night. Two small girls in flip-flops and shorts that didn’t reach mid-thigh. Can you imagine! It was a steamy night. We walked along Umbrella Beach, watching the waves roll in under the moon. Leave it to Rhea to read the lunar calendar and leave the rest to fate. Of course her friend never came. After waiting ages, we finally trekked back to town, where we found the streets covered in mist.

  “‘I was so expecting it to happen, I saw later, expecting it while also not entertaining the possibility, that when the truck pulled over in front of us my first thought was that I was in a dream. Only a dream could so perfectly bring forth the object of an unconscious fear. But what I think now is that dreams may simply be preparation for those moments we have to float away from ourselves. A man got out of the truck, a thin man, not quite old, unshaven. Greasy. I remember him glistening in the faint light. He smiled at us, a sneering smile, and I glanced at Rhea, expecting to see my own dread mirrored on her face. I was shocked instead to find her smiling, a smile that today I would call coy but that then I experienced as a kind of annihilation. It’s difficult to explain … There was no place for me in that smile. “John,” she said. “Hello there, girlie,” the man said. He grinned and reached out his hand for Rhea’s, which she gave him, and he helped her up into the truck. He turned to me. “We want company?” he asked, at which point Rhea, in really the most bored voice you can imagine, said, “C’mon, I’m thirsty. Let’s go.”

  “‘The man gave me a last look, laughed, and turned to leave. It was only once the truck had pulled away that I realized I’d peed myself—just everywhere, pee soaking my shorts, running down my leg … The night had turned cold and I was shivering as I started to walk, stumbling along. I felt, not terror, but something beyond terror, a numbness or stiffness—that even if the kindest stranger stopped I would be unable to speak. I had the sudden strange jealous thought, which I’ve never understood, that trucks would always stop for Rhea and never for me. I wan
ted—it’s an ugly feeling, but true—I wanted to be at one of Papa’s cocktail parties, to stand around and smile and have nothing to do. I thought this the whole way home, shivering. I will wear the prissy dresses, I thought. Anything you ask me to.

  “‘I have never known how to act, you see. I lack the gift of pretense and am incapable of lying, even those little half-truths with which we affix a story to our lives. Papa says I can be literal-minded to the point of idiocy, and the next morning when they asked me where Rhea was I said I didn’t know. Which was true, but hardly comprehensive. I was terribly sick. God, was I sick. For weeks. I soaked through the bedding constantly. I had visions of my mother singing to me, stroking my hair. Only very gradually did I get better.

  “‘One day, quite a while after, Rhea came into my room. I hadn’t seen her since the night we’d run away and I was surprised to find her looking so happy and well. She had a nasty-looking scar on her arm—quite long, perhaps you’ve seen it. I ran my finger over it, but I didn’t ask. Later she said to me, or maybe she said it in a dream, or who knows, but I’ve always connected the two things, she said, “Someone is always afraid. So just make sure it’s never you.” Honestly, there are days when I think an alien ship must have come down and put Rhea in Mother’s belly because any other explanation seems less likely.’

  “We were in Duane Reade by then, paying for what Elena called ‘Mother’s pills.’ I walked her home and when we got there she said, ‘Here,’ took out a notecard and pen, and wrote her name and phone number against the wall of the building. ‘I don’t get out much,’ she said, ‘but you can call me.’

  “Well, the weeks went by. I had coursework to do, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was following Rhea around. She was always heading off to neighborhoods I’d never been to, reading books to old women, running intake at free clinics, helping set up stalls for street fairs. I hung around like some mooning poet on the foreshore. I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew there was something essential here, something I had to keep exploring. Rhea and I were sleeping together, but it wasn’t love. No. I kept sleeping with her, I think, to reassure myself that I still could. I feared terribly that one day she would say we had to stop or say something crushingly banal like Where is this going? or Would you say we’re a couple now? but she never did.