Prodigals (23 page)

Well, this.

In the summer of 1984 there are consolations ahead that Michaela can't know about. Five years after Bobby points a gun in her face and says it is always and only
today
that a thing begins or ends, the movement that began as Diretas Já succeeds in bringing democratic elections to Brazil; Joe Moakley, U.S. representative from Massachusetts, the state to which I have just moved at the time, travels to El Salvador to investigate the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter; the history of evil is being disinterred, recorded, and the creeping vines of complicity will stretch from the fine verandas of San Salvador to the banks of the Potomac. There are setbacks too, of course. What comes to light, like everything so terrible and pointless, is destined for a living burial in summaries, figures, and paragraphs. In the way our attention drifts. The acid bath of bald numbers is always the second death in which people, as individuals, melt away. But first the stories will be heard, the people will seen, and that much alone will cost lives.

The harbor town where Michaela and I walk is protected from the sea. Still, it gets quite a lot of wind, waves too. It is winter, so—cold. Wind turbines turn across the bay. Lighthouses mark the points where land juts out. Some sweep through the night and some are just relics now. We pass the breakwater. Michaela is telling me a story, a funny story with bits in it that aren't so funny. We are passing friends in a moment, the sort that lasts a few months. It is odd, I think, how these intimacies happen, how we grow close in circumstances that promise only to abandon us, at first chance, to the estrangement where we began. Meanwhile Michaela might have been my big sister, and why not? I would have liked that, walking together like this, the wind off the ocean meeting us with its parcels of sea spray. And were I a child she might have told me, Once upon a time a ship full of people landed here. They were far from home and they were full of hope. This is how you tell stories to children, of course.
Once upon a time. Full of hope.
And the eyes blinking in the forest? they ask. The thick woods chime with green light.

What about them? you say.

 

Metanarrative Breakdown

As he lay dying, Icarius remembered something that had happened not long before. Dionysus had taught him how to plant the vines and look after them. Icarius watched over their growth with the same love he had for his trees, waiting for the moment when he would be able to squeeze the grapes with his own hands. One day he caught a goat eating some vine leaves. He was overcome by anger and killed the animal on the spot. Now he realized the goat had been himself.

But something else had happened that had to do with that goat. Icarius had skinned it, put on its pelt, and, with some other peasants, improvised a dance around the beast's mangled corpse. Icarius didn't appreciate, as he lay dying, that the gesture had been the origin of tragedy, but he did sense that the death of the goat was connected with what was happening to him, the shepherds circling him, each one hitting him with a different weapon, until he saw the spit that would pierce his heart.

—Robert Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

To begin with, the house. A large house. Shingle style, on an island bluff in a northern American state. A handsome house, my grandparents' house—or so it had been, and that was how I first knew it. Once upon a time they had sailed up the coast. Once upon a time they had packed a summer's worth of books and clothes on their sailboat and set off with no more than a direction in mind. A sense of adventure. A muted good-burgher quixotism. After a month of following the bights and inlets of the shore, tacking upwind to round headlands and capes, from the calm waters of the bay they saw it glinting in the sun: their house. This is the story I was told. I don't question it because I like it. I forgive it dubiety and simplicity because this was a time when stories were easier to tell. When the arcs were cleaner and optimism cast like daylight into the corners of a June afternoon redolent of flowers slaked with rain. Was it on such an afternoon that my grandparents first arrived?

In later years, when they were feeling whimsical, or perhaps extravagant, they would fly a flag bearing our family's coat of arms from a mounting bracket between the second and third stories of the house. It was either a charming or an affected display because we had not the slightest trace of heraldic legacy. Our ancestors had been émigré Jews who arrived in this country penniless and built what they had out of daydreams and hewn wood: furniture makers, shopkeepers, gold rush prospectors, salesmen. They told a better story every year. The house was no different. It was a fantasy, a shoreside idyll. Before a legacy—always—a property, and the dull present.

My grandfather was still alive, but the house now belonged to my aunts. They were his daughters, my mother's sisters, Cynthia and Ruth, and although they all lived together in the summer, they lived apart. My aunts had remodeled the house to accommodate the sense of grievance that lingered between them and their father, a change undetectable from the outside but which divided a building constructed in a style preoccupied with unity into two distinct living spaces, two
houses
, so aesthetically incoherent on the inside that moving between them felt like passing between eras, temporalities, consciousnesses—a seamless entanglement of discontinuity that called to mind nothing so much as exotic species grafted onto each other, a vaguely ouroboric and labyrinthine autophagy, like knotted cities in a China Miéville novel.

It is not for me to say what wounds of childhood, parenthood, or time had scarred over in this prickly intimacy. I don't know. If this were a different story, my mother would be the youngest daughter and the only one to love her father with his due, my aunts would be wicked and conniving, my grandfather gripped by a vital senility, raging against the cruel terms life and love have to offer at their best. Things aren't like that, of course. People aren't often good or evil, and it's no different here. There are no Kents disguised as Caius attending one's madness on the heath. No good father, no bad daughter. There are paid nurses, caretakers from the West Indies. Pricey doctors titrating statins from cities down the coast. There are housekeepers, maids, gardeners, cooks. Because there is money, there are these things.

It was in this house, this summer, that my grandfather was dying. I got the call from Ruth late one night at a wedding I was attending on the West Coast.

“But aren't we all, in a sense, always dying?”

“Don't be smart. We may be talking hours.”

“But if you break the years any of us have left into days, and the days then into—”

“Goodbye,” Ruth said.

Her unwillingness to get philosophical with me put me on alert, and I lay in bed in my hotel room on the far side of the continent wondering where I was, or where I should be, how from here on out I was to
know
, and whether, with no little anxiety, I would get to see my grandfather again alive. In the building across the street a single apartment was illuminated. It glowed the primitive orange-red of the sun osculating the ocean out here. Why had I come? What was I doing at this wedding? I had stumbled on a bit of good fortune that summer, a first nip of success, and between the travel and this ramifying wave carrying into every last recess of my life, I had lost a sense of what affixed me to one reality over another, what my points of contact with the world really were. I no longer felt certain that I knew anyone, or perhaps I no longer felt certain anyone knew me. In the deep sense, I mean, past the flitting projections we cast onto the screens of our bodies. The people in the apartment across the street were just shades in the luminous vermilion, attenuated by some trick of the light so that they resembled Giacometti sculptures. I thought about calling Misty, but it was late on the East Coast, and we hadn't spoken, I remembered, since I'd had my good news.

What had happened is this, it's very simple. After years of being to friends and family a writer in no more than name—indulged, in the best-case scenario, as a romantic layabout—I had begun publishing work and as a consequence I'd sold a book. Two books, in fact—it looked like I might make a go of it. I was by no means moneyed; it was not an immoderate amount of success, but it was enough given the fecklessness and apparent neoteny of my life before, enough to rob me of the ritual dissatisfaction and single-minded struggle that had
been
my story, and in a way my comfort, enough for the people in my life to begin treating me oddly, tentatively, or so I felt, like I were a lunatic man living on an island of bridges, carrying dynamite with him everywhere, enough that my grandfather in our phone chats had taken to saying, “I start to think it was all worth it,” where the respective “it”s seemed to refer (troublingly) to his life and (hyperbolically) to this business of living. So in a thought no doubt as perverse as it was self-important, in addition to everything else, I feared that I might have given my grandfather permission to die.

After wandering the wedding grounds the next morning and settling on a small dock by the pond, I did call Misty.

“So now you're famous,” she said by way of answering.

“I'm not famous.”

“You're an asshole.”

Caterers dressed in black hurried across the lawn behind me, arranging champagne flutes in neat formations on card tables draped in cream-colored cloths.

“It's nice to hear your voice,” I said. “Are you there?”

“I was already there. It's called ‘here' where I am.”

“What happened to grad school?” I said. “Actually, never mind.”

Misty was Cynthia's daughter, my favorite cousin. Although we had traditionally kept track of each other's goings-on, in recent years we'd drifted into the drab adult preoccupation of paying rent and fallen out of touch. Or maybe I just mean that I had. I'd lost track, at any rate, of just how many master's programs she'd abandoned and what it was, again, she'd left art school for. Urban planning, I thought.

“The question is,” she said, “where are
you
?”

“I'm at a wedding.”

“And geographically?”

“I don't know,” I said. Of course I did know, or I knew where I would catch the red-eye from that night, but not knowing seemed closer to the way I felt.

“Are you on drugs?” Misty said. “Don't start doing drugs just because you're still a fuck-up but can afford them now.”

“I think I did meth the other day by accident.” I said this a bit distractedly, the noises and movements of the pond, the burble and chatter of water and insects, briefly claiming my attention. A turtle stretched its head into the chalky summer air.

“Only you.” I could all but hear her shaking her head and it made me miss her.

“I was with Gabrielle. I'll tell you when I see you.”

“Hurry up. There are bats everywhere.”

“Bats?” I said, but Misty had hung up.

The wedding was very pretty and sweet. I watched, standing off to the side, beset by a sun that seemed to want a confession from me. I tried to stay in the moment, a moment that was rightly not my own, tried not to worry about what time it was or whether the cab would find me so many miles from the city: whether I would make my flight. The groom was a college buddy. We hadn't seen much of each other since he'd moved to the West Coast, and now we wouldn't have even this. I was a ghost, a visible form that would come and go without explaining its presence; and as I watched the couple kiss to seal their undying love, at least a stirring faith in it, as I understood just how different my day's narrative was from my old friend's, a sense of my ineluctable subjectivity came over me, a sense I had been on increasingly intimate terms with that summer, a vertigo of disconnection. It didn't help, good fortune aside, that my life stretched before me with little more than routine and new worries to enliven it, as though I were the medium of my success rather than its claimant. I saw my friend deplaning on some South Pacific island with his bride and embarking on the adventure of mutual life—and I was jealous. Not of his love so much as the novelty of this togetherness. I was stuck, it seemed, at the opposite pole of human experience, for in feeling estranged from the world around me I had ceased to believe myself quite a thing placed inside it. The spheres, inner and outer, had come unnested.

I thought about Gabrielle on the flight east, trying for a time to represent the long years of our friendship and our closeness, our conversation, and the delight we took in each other as a patterning of love as yet misunderstood, as yet unrecognized by the two of us, as though that sense of comfort, of someone getting you and you her, that sense of home,
were
love in all its modest glory and the rest we asked of it no more than the bullwhip of hormones, the gluttony of surfeit. She was one of my oldest friends. We had known each other half our lives, the half that counts, and the precise quality of our time together took something meaningful from the restraint we had shown in never dating or hooking up. She was an architect and she'd visited me a few weeks before on her way back from Rome. I'd been very glad she'd come. I wasn't getting much done and I needed a better excuse. But I was also just happy to see her. We had that rare capacity for
mudita
, I think it's called, the ability to take unadulterated pleasure in each other's triumphs, when with so many people, it seems, the unreserved love you want demands that you come to them in weakness, offering up that weakness in your hands. Something profound and harrowing had also happened during Gaby's visit, and no doubt sharing this, and then experiencing a deep aloneness after she left, had muddled my feelings. And still in my bones I knew that what I wanted from love right then was answers, and love is not in the business of answers.