Prodigals (19 page)

“‘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 wanted—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.

“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
b
s. 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?'