Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  “I hate to be a bother, Robert, but I’m sort of fond of that very expensive rug your dog is mauling.”

  “Banjo.” Robert spoke sharply to the dog. He finished rinsing the clams and shook the water from his hands, drying them on a dishcloth Hara gave him. “You’ve got a nice house.”

  “Do you like it? I like it too.”

  “I’ve been here before,” he said. “Not inside. I helped Gerry clear the yard this past spring.”

  “Ah, you know Gerry.”

  He nodded. “Lot of downed branches after the storms. We cleared the field and the beech grove you got.”

  “Yes, Gerry said. You did a bang-up job. It looked lovely when I got up this summer.”

  Hara saw Robert glance past her and felt Lyric there in his look.

  “So you work with Gerry? Look after houses?” she said.

  “Some. Work where I can. Preston’s in the off season”—he pointed his chin at Lyric—“where I met this one. Clam, lobster. Odd repair job … Steamer?”

  “Oh, someplace.” Hara opened the nearest cabinet and closed it. “My husband was the chef, see. Or when it suited him.”

  Robert looked at his palm. “The director.”

  “Producer,” Hara said, “which can only be worse.” She held up a flopping armature she imagined to be a steamer. What pretentious nonsense cooking had become! “So you’re quite a jack of trades then?”

  Lyric tongued an olive from its pit in her mouth. “Robert’s in a band,” she said.

  “Ah, right. So day jobs to support the artistic habit.”

  “Don’t know about that,” he said.

  “Well, I think it’s perfect,” Hara said. “Lyric here wanders the earth like—like—some sublime nomad and stumbles on, oh, I don’t know, a Yankee handyman or some such. ‘The Townie Dreamer and the Vagrant Muse.’” She cleared a space in the air for the title. “It’s like a fable.”

  Lyric didn’t look up from the joint she was rolling. She licked and sealed the paper and tapped it on the table. She lit up. Hara finished the vodka nestled among the ice shards in her glass.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m going through a divorce that has turned me into an absolute monster.”

  “One thing for that,” said Lyric. She handed Hara the joint and Hara dragged on it twice before passing it to Robert, thinking how tiresome the courtships of young people were.

  At dinner they were good and stoned. They left the dishes when they were finished and took a bottle of whiskey down to the shore. Hara and Zeke had done this when they had guests up, gathering driftwood for a bonfire and sitting up late into the night drinking and smoking. The groups were always the same, people Zeke knew from the industry and a few old friends, putative adults who because they ate mushrooms once in a while and bore the tattoos of some lapsed rebellion thought they deserved medals of nonconformity or abiding hipness. Well, Hara got it. It was a pleasing notion to entertain and simple enough to encourage when you were drunk and high, tuned in, or so it seemed, to the deeper channel of communication that bound your life to the mantling commerce of heaven and earth. Possible, for instance, to see the sparks the driftwood sent up answering a call, passing up, up, and out of sight to cool and settle as the irony points high above. Possible, if you cared to, to see yourself outlined in their grid. Really though, no one was passing out medals in the end. People knew this, didn’t they?

  “So who gets the house?” Robert said.

  Hara laughed. “Robert,” she said, a hand to her chest. “My!” Not that she of all people minded a little bluntness. “Oh, who knows. I hope I do. My husband’s such a shit.” She took a sip from the bottle and passed it along. “I feel like some shrill hausfrau complaining, but you know the distance you travel—I mean, mentally—it just kind of shocks you. You spend so long assuming it will all just fall into place, successful doting husband, kids, the whole tableau.” She gazed out at the sea, the furnace of the sky taupe and livid with moon. “And when it doesn’t just happen you start to compromise—a little here, a little there—and slowly, bit by bit, any sense you had of what was supposed to happen falls away, just slides off into the ocean, until there you are, alone, on the tiny island called your life.”

  They stared at the fire for a minute, then Robert knocked his head back toward the cottage. “Nice island.”

  Right, Hara was spoiled, dreadfully spoiled, not that it made a bit of difference.

  “It’s like the frog,” Lyric said. “You know, put it in boiling water and it jumps out. But heat the water ever so slowly…”

  “Yes, people are always saying that,” Hara said. “But how do they know? Who has all these frogs and pots and no lids and, like, this pressing need to boil frogs alive?”

  “I guess I’ve known some people,” Robert said.

  “Perhaps you have met my husband,” Hara said.

  Banjo barked to be petted and Hara saw Robert catch Lyric’s eye. She should leave them, she knew, that was the decent thing to do. Only she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to go to bed and wake up and have it be tomorrow, and then the next day. She didn’t want to go inside and be alone. If she ever had to be alone again she thought she might disembowel herself with a reciprocating saw. When had she become like this? Or, that was euphemistic, wasn’t it? The question was when had she become this? It was very easy to blame Zeke or the divorce, but hers was a condition, was it not? This desperate need for people, all of whom she loathed. Even the ones she liked she loathed. And that was the maddening thing about people. Yes, she had her friends from college, a few, and her law school friends, four or five women spread around the country and globe, busy with their jobs and children, and yes, they could speak to one another like sentient creatures and every so often wash up together for an hour on the shores of lucidity. But only a lunatic would call that companionship. Or the fifty-minute phone sessions with her therapist, because Lord knew she was too busy to physically go there, and drinks with colleagues that ended at 6:45 after chattering on with the absentmindedness of watering a garden, waiting your turn to offer some idiotic little discourse on the numbing fiction of your public life. Marc and I just started kitesurfing. Oh, you don’t say. Yes, we picked it up in Mauritius over the holidays. How remarkable—I can’t think of a single thing I give less of a fuck about! And Zeke or the equivalent threading some conversational déjà vu with that rote inattentive teasing, his mind clearly elsewhere, until you managed to get upset enough to exact maybe twenty minutes’ careful listening to expressions of how things make you feel and apologies roughly as nourishing as swine flu, and those twenty minutes, it turned out, for a surprisingly long time, were just enough to build back the hollowed little Jenga tower of your collapsing marriage.

  No thank you, really. Hara would do without if it came to that. She was proud enough to prefer suffering to fooling herself, which was only a less dignified form of suffering in the end. The phone in the house, on some perverse cue, rose shrilly above the quiet, startling her. Zeke, no doubt. Well, she needed to excuse herself.

  “All right, you’ve got me. What is it you want?”

  There was a pause. “Is Boris, I call from Russia.”

  “Zeke.”

  “Boris,” Zeke said. “Anyway, there you are. I left you a thousand messages.”

  “The thousandth must have done the trick.” She picked up a framed picture from the desk. She and Zeke at a wedding on Skiathos. They looked, well—formidable.

  “You’re not back in New York.”

  “Oh my God, what a master sleuth you’ve become!”

  “Hara.”

  “Are you having me followed? Is there a man with binoculars in the hedges?”

  “I wanted to see how you were, make sure you weren’t hacked to bits by your houseguest or whatever.” Hara was silent. “Okay, it was stupid prank, I know. You don’t have to say it. But she’s gone now anyway.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Really.”

  Oh, how
she hated that crystallizing attention in Zeke’s voice, the typical distraction it laid bare.

  “It’s been more than a week,” he said.

  “Oh, has it been? Oops, silly me. I’ll go kick Lyric out right now.” She glanced at herself in the glass of a framed movie poster. It acted as a mirror in the dim light.

  “Lyric?”

  “You were right,” she said. She felt she were speaking in a dream. “I made a new friend. She’s fun.”

  “You sound odd, Hara.”

  “Well, I’m drunk. And stoned. And I’m hosting two young people tonight, if you must know, and I need to hang up in a minute so we can all go make love in front of the fire.”

  “Hara.”

  “Hmm? Or does that sound like you, Zeke? Now really, don’t you have some cardboard Tanya to escort around Bel Air or what are we talking about?”

  She felt her mood strobe gently within her, but with the act of speaking, stringing these words together and feeling them hum in her chest, she found herself brought into momentary focus. How strange it was to be talking just like this, the two of them, alive in each other’s ears, invisible pinpoints in the black immensity of night. Zeke was here in the phone. But he was also out there somewhere, in some city, in some unknowable room. It was absurd. It was a cruel joke.

  “I don’t know when you’re being serious anymore,” he said.

  “That’s funny,” Hara said, “because now I’m racking my brain for when you were ever serious.”

  “I’m worried about you. Should I be worried?”

  “The thing is”—her voice had fallen, the spite deserting her that quickly—“you don’t have to be worried about me anymore. More to the point, I’m not sure you get to be.” How tired she was. “Don’t call unless it’s important, ’kay? I’m hanging up now.”

  She lay on the window seat and closed her eyes, careering for a minute on the tide of intoxication that bore her. She was further gone than she’d realized, good and stewed, but what use was that when no one would rise to her bait? Why were people so horribly decent only just after they had knifed you in the Theatre of Pompey? I come to praise Hara, not to marry her! And what had she been thinking, really, when Zeke had come to marry her? Well, it wasn’t hard to remember, just hard now to account for the feeling of possibility that crept in to scatter her prudent doubts. She would blame it on the beauty of that wind-bitten day, the fragrant hills above Sorrento, the high clouds trailing out to sea. The sort of day that for its very clarity startled you into an unarmored sense of your own vital heart. She had known so clearly in that moment that life gave its fruit to the bold, the unhesitant. And beneath her apprehension, her judicious dread, her understanding that toughness was no more than the scarring on sites of a more vulnerable and immediate contact, beneath it all her heart beat its silly hollow yeses. It made her want to throw up, it did now, for if the reasonableness of her objections would be borne out—that Zeke was not a person who came to rest and perhaps neither was she—all she could think just then was that it was happening to her, the thing you wait for, telling yourself you aren’t waiting, sure someday it will come, and sure just the same it won’t, that you will be the one passed over while all the repellent millions walk hand in hand into the insipid lava of a setting sun. But she would be one of them, she saw. She felt the dull embrace of that contentment tumble about her like curtains from the wings. And as she adjusted to the weight of the ring on her finger over the next few days, she marveled that without this anchor, for so many years, she hadn’t floated up, up, and out of sight, to that point far above where the things you could once see right in front of you disappear.

  * * *

  When Hara woke it was morning. Out the windows in the study a gray sky lingered at the treetops. She had a blanket around her she didn’t recall getting.

  Lyric was in the living room reading when she emerged. “Morning,” the girl said, her voice as sweet and languorous as honey. “We thought we’d let you sleep.”

  “Oh. Is Robert—”

  “No, but he says thanks.”

  Hara doubted that very much, but the room was neat, the trace remains of a fire in the fireplace.

  “He seems nice,” Hara said, lying on the sofa, watching as Lyric rose to fetch her water. “A little surly, maybe, the strong, silent type, but to each her own.”

  They worked diligently on the puzzle that week. The evidence of their progress, so slow in the moment, was undeniable in sum. The field had begun to form in emerald swatches floating within the forest. The wolves galloped at the center, shabby specters unmoored. What heart Hara once had taken in the irremediable mess began to desert her as order emerged.

  “What if you stayed on?” she asked Lyric. “When I go back, I mean. You could look after the house. You’d be near Robert.” Lyric had taken to visiting Robert in the evenings, asking whether Hara minded if she used the car—as though Hara might suddenly have made plans and neglected to tell her! “I’d see you when I came up,” she said. “I’d pay you, of course.”

  Lyric demurred, rolling a papier-mâché pomegranate across the table so Hara had to catch it before it pattered lightly over the edge.

  When Lyric left her, nights, Hara would retrieve a bottle of Zeke’s expensive wine from the cellar and scatter the family photos she kept in shoeboxes on the living room rug. It was not clear to her if a clean line could be drawn from the hipshot young girl in a bathing suit on the beach in Goa to the self-pitying wretch she saw gazing back at her in the glass of the French doors. Rather a lot had intervened, and yet certain patterns and casts of mind endured. If Hara wanted Lyric to stay, and she did, there were complexities within the impulse that did not submit to easy or entirely comforting explanation. The presentiment of abandonment, for instance, an understanding that the girl would leave, that Hara had nothing to make her stay, and a dread of this prospect that so upstaged the matter’s why as to eclipse it. As in, why was Hara so anxious that Lyric stay? In the way of one disinclined to look square at a thing, Hara nonetheless sensed the connection between her fury and her hurt, her feelings toward Lyric, toward Robert, and then of course toward Zeke; or, further still, saw the netting of connection cast out to embrace that girl on the beach in Goa, out alone at night, with her parents sleeping and Daeva holed up in their room calling some boy, that girl wandering the white bow of sand where diminutive waves fizzed through the night and the sounds from bars garlanded in lights were lush and ugly with the mysteries of adult happiness. And as she drifted in the furling breeze, even then she had tended the implausible hope that someone might know to come out and find her and lead her inside, not to a bar, not to any one room, but to the sanctum of shared reality where a mind took its form in another.

  When Lyric had gone to Robert’s, Hara removed pieces from the puzzle. Not so many the girl would notice, but a few here and there. On the nights Lyric stayed in, they might replace exactly these. Sometimes Hara would trace the composition of the girl’s tattoos. She knew them by now, the sinewy thicket of green tangles on the girl’s shoulder, bursting here and there in a red corolla, the ox-eyed nymph washing fruit in a brook; the brook that flowed beneath the flowers, ran out into a river and shimmering ocean, crossed Lyric’s back and washed up below a fishing village, an outpost of sand and stilted huts. Above the village a city rose into the ocher sky, sunlight spilling onto the clouds, where a pair of naked angels embraced and an amazon warrior with one breast and a sword occupied a throne. Then on the girl’s neck errant rays of sunshine fed a painted vasculature, turned from gold to red, merging back into the flowers and carrying crimson blood along green stems to the calyxes where the roses bloomed.

  Sometimes it seemed to Hara that if she looked hard enough she might find herself there, a timeless fixture in the fretwork prophecy, and then she would know that this life was all a joke, subject to an extraneous order, and that her suffering and happiness, by implication, had meaning. Other times she thought, Enough of that. You could measure the line
between craziness and isolation on a day’s shed eyelashes. The flakes of an early snow fell softly on the ocean, dissolving into it, and Hara thought, Maybe I can live here and dissolve into the ocean myself.

  “You feel like real life is going on somewhere else,” she told Lyric. “You’re young. You think if you keep looking you’ll find the place you’re meant to be.”

  “I don’t think that,” Lyric said. “I’ve been to Morocco.”

  Oh, sometimes Hara wished Lyric would leave. The girl’s presence, having become the very augury of its absence, could seem at times the worse of the two. It wasn’t only the pleasure you took in a person’s company that made you covet it, Hara knew. Just as often it was the compulsion to ensnare something elusive, fleeting, the urge to establish a state of permanence, if not of happiness, and then too the fear of what solitude permitted, the flights and phantasms of inner life, of unuttered thought, and the terrifying possibility, absent the correlative of another person, that you were not at all the composite of your past, but merely the confused nerves of the present, ever-supplanting moment.

  And it was this fear, this possibility, when you got down to it, that Lyric did without.

  * * *

  Hara begged off the night of Robert’s party. She begged off, and she implored Lyric to stay in with her, a demand as reckless, it seemed, as a straight last-dollar bet on a roulette game, and she might have bared her soul, she thought, if she knew how to do that and where a person began. The party sounded ghastly, though. The idea of hearing Robert’s band play made her expectantly ill. And she had less than zero desire, really, to rummage around for fellow feeling with locals, mutual curiosities, feeling old while Lyric made friends easily.

  They drank in joyless fashion, sorting puzzle pieces, until Hara asked Lyric whether she hadn’t given it more thought.

  “Given what more thought?”

  “The Church’s views on women,” Hara said. “What do you think? About staying on.”