by Greg Jackson
“So I felt stable—just—felt perversely that this held me together when the rest of my life was fraying at the seams. A ludicrous feeling, this security, and if I’d known then who Rhea was I wouldn’t have managed it. Because of course I still believed, on some shadow level, that sex was a ritual of possession, a covenant, as insane as that is … And why Rhea? Your guess is as good as mine. I had never felt this compulsion about anything. I had been a person drifting across the surface of life without realizing that at some point you fall in. And Rhea was my plunge, I suppose. Maybe because she was my opposite—someone who didn’t believe life had any surface, for whom each person and every moment was an alluring depth. I don’t know. All I can say is that in her ingenuousness I saw, I felt I saw, that everything I had been before had been some fraction of a lie.
“Not long after, Rhea told me Elena was hurt that I never called. So I did. She had her own line and picked up every time at the end of the second ring. ‘Hello?’ she’d say, like it might be anyone calling. And she was never busy, never had to do something or get off the phone. She told me stories about her family, mostly, vaguely fantastical things set in Denmark, which I came to imagine full of bright painted buildings by the water, caught in the low, slanted light of suns that took all day to set.
“‘Mother and Papa should never have happened,’ she said. ‘They were like ridiculous proud beasts who encounter each other on a path: each is still waiting, I think, for the other to step aside. But then it’s also true that it was Papa’s foundation that brought Mother over from Chile. She was an artist, see—a good one, I don’t know. Papa says she hasn’t worked in all the time he’s known her, and what she did during her fellowship is a mystery to all. She stayed on in Copenhagen afterward, that we know.
“‘Papa would see her around, sitting in parks, staring out to sea. One day he went up to her and asked how she was and where she was staying. She shrugged, and to make himself clear, because they had only broken English in common, he said, “Where do you go at night?” She shook her head in incomprehension. “Where do you go?” she said.
“‘When he realized what she was saying he decided to take her in. I doubt he could have said why. Frankly, the idea of my parents even speaking to each other is beyond me, but somehow, over the weeks, a romance developed. They really couldn’t have been less alike. Papa was always ambitious, successful. Mother is like a lost creature from the spirit world. Nevertheless, in two months’ time, Papa had stopped showing up to work, quit his job, and the two moved to a cottage in the north overlooking the sea. To hear Papa tell it he spent the years up there writing poems. That’s where they had Rhea and me.
“‘Who can say what finally made Mother go crazy. Maybe she was always crazy, or maybe crazy is just the simplest word for something else. We moved back to Copenhagen when we were young. Papa returned to work and Mother went away for a time, then came back to us very different. She had her own room, which she never left, and after dinner Rhea and I would play there for an hour or so, on a thick rug with gold tasseling, while she sang to us. Chilean folk songs or so I’ve had to assume. Neither of us speaks the language.
“‘Our parents’ relationship remained a mystery. Papa ignored Mother so completely that I sometimes thought only Rhea and I could see her. Then one night we mysteriously awoke together with the same premonition to creep through the apartment to Mother’s room. The door was ajar when we got there, and I’ll never forget what I saw. Papa was crying in Mother’s lap. She had his head on her knees and was stroking his hair, humming something soothing, staring out the window at the moon. We watched for a while, transfixed, before finally tiptoeing back to our room. In the morning it was as if none of it had happened. Papa continued to ignore Mother and to tease the help in his airy, caustic way. We moved to the States not long after.’
“The stories came out over many weeks of talking. I would sleep with Rhea, wake to find her gone, and call Elena from Rhea’s room. Elena was just down the hall, but it never occurred to us to talk in person. One evening, eating dinner with their father, it came to me that I no longer remembered the last time I had left the apartment. It was a big place by this city’s standards, and it struck me that there was no longer anything outside that required my attention. No friends to meet up with. No courses to attend. My parents had written me off long ago, I figured. My life, it seemed, had shrunk down to the dimensions of this place, this family, these strange sisters.
“We were eating a butterflied lamb prepared by the Magnussons’ cook, Margarite. Their father, who always showed up to dinner very soigné, in a tailored suit, his tie knot undone just so, ate in a brisk, formal manner and seemed to accept me at the table without surprise. ‘Tanner,’ he might say, ‘tell me. Are you a man of the world or a poet?’ I probably told him I didn’t know, that I had always wondered and often felt myself in a sort of purgatory between the two, because he said, ‘Ah, yes. There is a fifth column inside us all, nicht wahr?’
“I didn’t know what he meant, but I asked, if such neat divisions could be made, what he considered himself.
“‘I am a man of the world, Tanner. For now at least,’ he said. ‘I must believe in all of its things … Broccolini. Bushwick. Bikram yoga. And that’s just the bs. It’s breathtaking, really, the things one is expected to take seriously these days.’
“I must have ventured that he felt inauthentic, because without hesitation he added, ‘Yes, yes, I am a fraud through and through. I don’t deny it, I celebrate it! A buggy-whip maker in the age of SUV limousines. What is one to do, what can one do, but embrace the gross anachronistic fiction of one’s own existence? Smile in public, put on a good show. Fine and good. But at the end of the day a gentleman is not a hero to his valet, isn’t it so, Tanner?’
“I wanted him to say more, but just then Margarite came in to ask how we were enjoying the meal.
“‘What shall I tell you, my dear,’ he said. ‘You surpass yourself. You are the progeny of gods—and no minor divinity but the sort that springs fully formed from the skulls of monsters! What is left to say? What are words next to the unknowable thing itself? Oh, they will sing songs of you when you are dead.’
“‘I know what I’ll do when you’re dead,’ Margarite said under her breath.
“‘Very good.’ He laughed. ‘Very good.’ When she had gone he turned back to me. ‘And so, Tanner,’ he said, ‘you enjoy the company of my daughters, do you?’
“‘I do,’ I said. ‘They’re remarkable.’
“‘Ha, yes. “Remarkable,” was it?’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and sat back in thought. ‘Well, you have my blessing,’ he said, ‘but I will not do you the generosity of my warning.’ He checked his watch, a practiced move to free it from his sleeve, out of no more than habit perhaps, a certain rhythm of preoccupation. He smiled and said, ‘Margarite really did outdo herself tonight, don’t you think?’
“That was the first night that Rhea did not return. I lay on her bed, ill at ease. Feeling restless, at last I got up to walk around. The apartment was more expansive than I had realized. Tight staircases I hadn’t known were there, doors opening onto skinny branching halls. I was absently inspecting little objets, decorative curios on the shelves and coffee tables, when at the end of a desk I came across a manuscript, neatly stacked and bound in string. It must have been hundreds of pages in all, although it wasn’t numbered. I undid the string and settled down at the foot of a recamier to read. This is how it began: ‘Imagine you speak to fallen angels in a dead language invented by living statues. You are an adding machine woven from blades of grass; this explains your friendlessness, and your comfort with high-caliber handguns. If I told you the dimensions of our lives were one greater or one fewer than you suppose, would you cancel your package vacation to the Dutch Antilles? Would it matter that I lived in bogus clouds of cast-off aerosols, teaching birds to dismantle power lines?’
“It went on like this for pages, mesmerizing, impenetrable. At some point I must
have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Elena was standing over me. She took the pages from my lap, set them aside, and undressed in the deliberate way of someone alone, folding her clothes as she took them off. I hadn’t seen her since that first day. Maybe I had forgotten her sad beauty, or maybe our conversations had led me to invest greater allure and poignancy in her body, the thin swayback figure, its marble skin untouched by sun. She hadn’t a hint of muscle, the breasts of a boy, a fatiguing melancholy in her sloe-eyed gaze, but she was beautiful, I thought, and we made love, or whatever you care to call it, right there on the carpet, in that corner of the apartment I’d never seen.
“Rhea woke me with a finger over her lips a few hours later. I was at first confused to see Elena dozing next to me, then I remembered what had happened and searched Rhea’s face for any clue to her state of mind. It was its typical mask of amusement. She seemed herself but just to be sure, thinking, you know, I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying, I asked if she wasn’t upset.
“‘About what?’ she said. Only then did I notice she had a heavy jacket on and a duffel bag over her shoulder.
“‘Quo vadis?’
“She laughed. ‘Denmark?’ She said it like we’d discussed it all before.
“I was stunned. ‘When did that happen? Does anyone know?’
“‘Of course,’ she said and looked at me sweetly. ‘Take care of Elena, won’t you? She’s a little directionless at the moment.’
“Time began passing more quickly after that. Elena stayed indoors all day, but I began to venture out through the city. I walked the same streets I had since childhood and hardly recognized them. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve spent my entire life here and, as you no doubt know, this place teaches you nothing if not a profound blindness to the strangeness and horror of people’s lives. We live to validate for one another the insane pretext that this is normal and right, and what are we all searching for but some moment when the world’s gaze falls on our gross, petty lives and says, How special. How hiply thrown together. How baroquely casual. I don’t know … I felt crushed, just crushed, by the profligacy of a single block, the effort of it, the florid misfortune and exhausting Kabuki of other people’s lives. I could scarcely pass someone on the street—young, old, men, women—without falling neck-deep into the idea that at that very moment, like me, they were taking some internal stock of their frustration and misery, of where they stood next to their most extravagant and private dreams. And what were their dreams? Or the trials of their daily lives? Was it presumptuous and condescending to think myself happier than them? But I didn’t. I didn’t. I was not happy. I was just young, vital, credentialed, moneyed … I am not the first person to think these things, clearly, but if it’s patronizing to pretend to understand the trials and miseries of other people’s lives, it is no doubt worse to use this as an excuse never to try. And the greater misery seemed, suddenly, the soulless disregard of people like me—anyone really—and not for other people’s sakes, but for our own. We had reached an inflection point, I thought, the contradictions we had to live with were too great, and in the interest of obscuring them we had abused language to the point that we could no longer speak to one another. We could scarcely leave our tribes.
“What does this have to do with Rhea and Elena? I don’t know. I really don’t. Except they began to seem a refuge, a corrective of some sort. Was this crazy? I mean, you’ve been listening. What had they done but make me unfit to live? Unable to countenance the petty, impoverished, glib, bankrupt, unfeeling, and passionless world that stalked our streets and invaded our hearts? And still they felt like some faint hope amid the spires verging up into the sky, some forgotten possibility under the soles of our feet.”
I was listening, of course. I had been. I thought I knew the hope Tanner meant and the peril that lived inside it. Had I found a voice to speak just then I might have reminded him that it is the nature of a refuge to leave us less fit to live and that we do not blinker ourselves for the fun of it. It is out of necessity, rather—the necessity of living within ourselves, feeding our hungers, crediting the worthless strength of our emotions. In the days before I gave up my artistic ambitions there were moments, I thought, when I had caught a glimpse around the blinders, and what I saw was the landless gray expanse of a northern sea, that emptiness of pewter ribbed in wind and sun. There was no channel marker I could find. No shore to crawl up on. I simply could not concede my life anymore, my centrality to it, nor the privilege I gave to the insular language in which we invented ourselves, the endless stories that, if each were only a degree off true north, put end to end added up to a world turned upside down. It seemed to me my only choice was between complicity in this boundless small perjury and the sort of honesty that becomes self-negating.
“I couldn’t help thinking of Rhea’s smile in the weeks that followed,” Tanner continued. “How had she given me to Elena so peaceably? Of course maybe she cared for me little in that way or cared for Elena in a superlative sense, loving her sister’s happiness more than her own. But I thought there was something more here too, that perhaps this augured a new relationship to the world of things, a correction to the awful harm embedded in our idea of possession.
“But I didn’t have it in me to go as far as the sisters. After a month Elena said to me, ‘You miss her. Go.’
“‘I’m happy with you,’ I said, although this wasn’t exactly true.
“‘Look,’ Elena said a little sadly. ‘Rhea and I made a trade-off early on, not explicitly, but in the way siblings do, and perhaps especially sisters. I agreed to see what was in front of me, see things for what they were, so that Rhea wouldn’t have to. So that for her, meaning and motive never split, if you understand what I mean. So that language stayed intact. But it means she doesn’t keep some part of herself for her alone, do you see, the way the rest of us do. And for my part I am too disabused to believe a lie, even a small one, and I would rather you leave than start telling me falsehoods. In the end you can’t fool me anyhow.”
“So I did go. I left. I went to Copenhagen. I got a studio in Nørrebro, across the canal from the center of town. I started painting. I lived on almost nothing, coffee, bread, a little herring. I walked the city and painted. Rhea was shooting a new film, documentary, soundless. She followed foreigners through the city filming them, immigrants, men smoking in bead-curtain cafés, professors at chalkboards, cannery workers, roustabouts on the docks. I spent my nights with her, watching the footage she had shot. I found it mesmerizing, the neutrality of its attention, and although it was always silent I often thought I heard a sound running through it all the same, an expectancy at the edge of silence, the pregnancy of a fermata, a sound like wind passing through apertures in the distance.
“I was painting color fields during the day, gradients of bleeding hue tinged with washes and drizzles. Derivative, amateur AbEx, but I enjoyed it. I walked through Strøget at dusk, a ghost among the waves of purpose. I had a vague notion that I could fade slowly into the latticework of the world, like an image dissolving in the evening light. And I might have, had a disarming thing not occurred.
“I was settling down to paint one day when I realized I’d left a book of mine at Rhea’s. Blake’s engravings. I wanted to steal a color arrangement of his for the piece I was working on, so I hiked back across town and let myself into her apartment. I was wiping my feet in the foyer when it came to me that something was wrong. I don’t know whether it was more than an intuition, but I felt compelled to creep through the apartment to Rhea’s room, where I found the door ajar, a soft, plangent music issuing from inside. I peeked in. There were Rhea and a young woman, naked in bed. The woman was ugly—truly hideous, I realized later—but all that I remarked on in that moment was the look of earnest hope on her face, a look I recognized, that stopped me cold. I froze, or rather I saw the part of me supposed to feel anger freeze, like a person at the periphery of a black hole, and moving away f
rom that person, floating away to a different vantage, I felt instead a kind of joy, a sense of possibility embodied in the act, written on her face, and ferrying them beyond the jealousies of time. Just then Rhea caught my eye. She smiled at me, and I … smiled back. It’s strange to tell you, but it’s the truth. Before that figure posed at the edge of eternity recalled me, I smiled. Before the suspension broke, before the bardo state collapsed, for a few seconds Rhea and I grinned at each other. I don’t think I’ve ever been present with another person as deeply as I was in that moment. And then, like a plunging anchor that finally consumes its rope, the childish hurt and anger I had been expecting returned to me, tugged suddenly at my stomach, and I shut the door and left quickly, feeling very stupid and weak.
“For a long time I walked. I walked to the edge of the Øresund, to the water, where I watched for hours as the day moved to completion, a coarse gray sheet shaken out in a motion so slow you didn’t notice when it settled over you, entombing the light beyond. I thought many things. I thought I had heard the Sirens’ call, driven bereft against the rocks, drunk on beauty and madness—or, fuck beauty—drunk on the kaleidoscope of involuted moods, the infinite divisions within everything, the moods within their song for which we have no name. I had been crippled in the deepest way, I felt—past the point of wanting to be healed. But then not entirely, for within me still was some corrupted anger, of righteousness or me-ness, some ridiculous self-importance. And sure enough, when I got home that night, I found I hadn’t thrown out my credit cards or passport. I still had an old phone with friends’ numbers on it, my parents’ numbers. My hair was a disaster, but none of it was hopeless. I had never committed, see, never stepped out with both feet. I had been playacting. I could get on a plane and come back. And now that I’m back, confused, adrift, in some sense unviable as a person, I have this one thing, I know this one thing about myself: I am a playactor and will never be anything more.”