Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  So, brash and foolish, yes, but not quite young. Nor was I well-off. I was okay, I was doing okay. I taught filmmaking and video art at the college in the small southern city where I lived. I had two kids, three and five, and a wife I loved who no longer loved me. I drove an old Nissan Pathfinder that was, like the rest of us, doing okay. It had four-wheel drive and I thought it could handle the trip even if things got wet. That was how, Monday morning, I found myself walking the thirty or so blocks north from Mark and Celeste’s to the cheap lot near Penn Station where I’d left the car. The sky that morning was clear and pretty, a violent, indecisive wind the only sign of the storm to come.

  It was on my way to the lot that I saw Susan. The streets were a mess but I picked her out at once, and then, because it was so improbable to see her, I convinced myself it wasn’t her, couldn’t be, watched for another minute wondering whether she hadn’t said something about a conference, ducking and pushing through the crowd to catch her face (she was in front of me), only to realize, unbelievable as it was, that it was her, and I called out, half in jest, I suppose, “Dr. Duranti,” and when she didn’t respond to that and yelling “Dr. Duranti” sounded ridiculous, I called out “Susan,” which she responded to at once, turning and seeing me, and then we had to acknowledge each other’s existence as people outside the rarefied context in which we habitually encountered each other.

  “Ben,” she said, a bit the way you say hello to an ex you’ve run into on a date. At times she seemed tense around me, I thought, as though worried I might bind her to my distress, but Susan was a therapist and you would have been forgiven for thinking she was prepared for this.

  “Of all the places,” I said.

  “Yeah, this is funny,” she said, like it was maybe the least funny thing ever.

  “You told me you were out of town, I forgot. What was it?”

  “Conference,” she said. “APA, or last week. I saw my sister over the weekend.” People streamed by us, an island with our luggage in the middle of the sidewalk. “Actually, I was supposed to head back yesterday. My flight got canceled.”

  It came back to me then, a conversation the week before, the schedule juggling. I was teaching three classes and trying to keep a few of my own projects afloat. I was preoccupied. Maybe I preoccupied myself to keep from being alone with my thoughts. Susan’s eyes were red, I saw. Her hair unwashed. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think I can get anything,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I’ve been bouncing between Penn Station and Port Authority all morning. It’s a nightmare. People are paying five hundred dollars for bus tickets. Five hundred dollars! I can’t even withdraw more cash from the ATM. I’m just really—”

  She stopped herself. I was so used to telling her things while she listened quietly that this speech surprised me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her string as many sentences together.

  “Well,” I said, knowing it would make her uncomfortable, but still myself, a person who doesn’t believe in rules or in standing on ceremony, life’s too strange, “I’m just on my way to the car. I’m driving back now.”

  We had moved onto Thirty-Fourth Street to stand aside the flow of pedestrians. Susan’s bag kept slipping from her shoulder. She looked small next to the rolling suitcase in her hand.

  “I don’t know, Ben. It’s what, an eleven-hour drive? Do you think that’s such a good idea?”

  “These are pretty exceptional circumstances,” I said. “I think we need to triage the bad ideas.”

  I wouldn’t go so far as say I was invested in her coming with me, but I thought it would be silly of her not to. And I liked her, I liked her company. I thought it would be fun.

  “It’s the kids, though,” she said. “They’re at Karen’s, and I told her I’d be back last night. I told them I’d be back. They were upset on the phone…” She wasn’t saying it to me. “It’s all such a disaster.”

  “Literally,” I said. “Look, this is stupid. I’m driving back right now. We can listen to music the whole way if you like.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She smiled, but her smile seemed mostly to convey that she was too tired to say no.

  We got the car. We braved Hell’s Kitchen and the Lincoln Tunnel, which was clogged many blocks back. At last we dipped beneath the river, lurching forward and stopping, watching the taillights of cars paint crimson streams on the white tile. For a time it seemed that the rest of our lives would take place in that tunnel, but finally we emerged. It took maybe two hours to reach 95, and 95 was a mess too. By then the clouds had begun gathering. A breath of luminosity lit them, but you could tell the thickening would continue, that the sky would turn brown-gray, then gray and darker, that the rain would come. And still it felt okay in the Pathfinder, which was warm and dry, it felt okay to be driving into the storm.

  We were in stop-and-go traffic among the oil refineries of northern New Jersey when I said, “You mentioned that the kids were unhappy on the phone last night?”

  “Yes, well, they’re young—what do you expect? They’ve been at a friend’s place for five days.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Sorry,” she said. She seemed to mean it. She had two kids, a boy and a girl. Alice, the younger, didn’t talk much, which worried her. Like certain other people I know, I thought, realizing how easy it had been at points to take Susan’s inscrutable silence as tacit approval of me, of my life and my decisions, and how in many ways this assumption was the basis of our relationship.

  “Is your husband worried?” I said.

  She looked at me. I thought she almost rolled her eyes. “You’d have to ask him.”

  In the river of cars ahead an ignition of brake lights rolled back to us like a wave. I told her it wasn’t really fair, how I told her such intimate things and she conceded so little. I hardly knew what was fair game to ask.

  Our eyes met and she gave me that look I knew so well, which said that just because I had stopped talking didn’t mean she was obliged to speak.

  “What’s fair game?” I said.

  “Ask,” she said, a hitch of exasperation in her voice. “I can tell you if I don’t feel like discussing something.”

  “Okay, your childhood then. Tell me about your childhood.”

  She laughed. “Now you’re just fucking with me.” It was playful the way she said it, playful and warm, and with this lightness the drive seemed to open out before us as faceted and lovely as a long descent into a twinkling valley. Was Susan pretty? Sort of. Not extravagantly, not at first. But she grew on you. Maybe anyone who listens to you attentively for seven years will.

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. She played along. “This is where I come from,” she said and spread her hands to include the scene before us.

  “You were born in an oil refinery. Continue.”

  “Don’t be crude,” she said, and when I didn’t respond she said, “Oh, that was bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Pretty bad,” I said. But it made me happy—the silliness, the lapse.

  “No, a little farther down the turnpike and to the west. One of those nice suburbs without any ‘urb’ to really do the whole sub-dom thing with.”

  “That was a little better.”

  “I guess I’ve said that before.”

  I switched lanes and the lane I’d abandoned, of course, pulled forward. “Shit,” I said.

  “Do you really want me to do this?” she asked.

  I said I did. She was my age or thereabouts. It had been a long time since I’d really investigated my choice in her, but her being my age and a woman surely mattered. I didn’t need someone who would explain me to myself. I wasn’t in the market for psychological insight, really. I may have wanted a little mothering. A sense of stability, attention, a place to be heard. I am not too old as a man approaching forty to admit it. I wanted the warmth and understanding a mother teaches you, wrongly, to expect
.

  “I come from a big family,” Susan said. “There are four of us kids, I’m the oldest and—let’s see—my mother’s kind of this all-American mom. Soccer practice, dinner on the table at seven. Dad’s a real guy’s guy, owns a drilling company. Wells, abandonment, pumps, irrigation … I guess he’s doing exploration for gas companies now too, the whole fracking thing.”

  “I saw that family in a truck commercial.”

  “It was a little like that.” She smiled at the memory. “When we were little, Dad used to say he could drill through anything—rock, metal, you name it. We’d ask him if he could drill to the center of the earth and he’d say, ‘With enough pipe, sure.’ Silly.” She shook her head. “He was Jersey Italian, you know. I told someone at school once that he worked for the mob. Maybe he did.”

  I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen Susan this way, lighthearted, gushing a little. It gave me a warm feeling even if her father’s machismo got on my nerves. I seemed to remember having once read about a Soviet attempt to see how deep they could drill into the earth, how around seven or eight miles down the pressure, or maybe the heat, had become too great to continue, but that nonetheless it had confirmed how little we know about what lies even a short way underfoot.

  “We were a close family,” Susan went on. “We did everything together, as this big family unit. Our house had this huge communal room and meanwhile our bedrooms were like closets. Our parents wanted to see us, you know?”

  I said that it must have been hard—omertà, the lack of privacy. I was joking, but Susan didn’t laugh.

  “We liked it,” she said. She looked out the window, retreating, I felt, a small way into herself. The traffic had eased a little, the clouds growing thicker, the sky darker. The car listed in the wind.

  “Well, I come from a traditional American family,” I said. “Broken.” She knew this, of course, but I was trying to make amends. “We children of divorce, we’re used to thinking there’s something creepy about marriages that last, a Mayberry fanaticism or something. Probably we’ve just confused creepy with healthy.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes it’s healthy to split up, right? Healthy.” She shook her head. “God, what do we even mean?”

  And who are we talking about now? I thought, but I held my tongue. I said the no-privacy thing must have given her a terrible time with boys.

  “Oh, boys! I had to wait until college, really. Dad was Catholic, you know, and owned guns.”

  “Fathers with guns,” I said and hypothesized that we’d never get around to fixing the gun problem in this country with so much teenage pussy to protect. I wasn’t really thinking when I said it, but Susan laughed, a real laugh, not the polite one she used in our talks to let me know she understood I’d made a joke. “I guess so,” she said after a minute. But as the laughter faded we found ourselves left with the idea, and behind the idea the image—of Susan’s teenage pussy—and I scrambled to move us along so that we wouldn’t have to consider the other considering Susan’s teenage pussy and the awkwardness of our shared understanding of what we were both simultaneously considering.

  “I don’t think I ever had a gun in one of my films,” I said. What a stupid thing to say. “Are you hungry?” I said, because what I’d said before had been so stupid.

  “Actually, I’m starving.”

  The traffic wasn’t too bad and it seemed like a decent time to get off the highway, fuel up, and eat. It wasn’t yet noon but I was hungry too, looking forward to the junk you permit yourself on the road, when the trial of the day overtakes and obscures any thought of the future. I was worried Susan would want to find a Starbucks and I’d be stuck with a cheese plate with like two red grapes, but when we pulled off into the clutter of roadside chains there wasn’t a Starbucks in sight, and Susan suggested Denny’s, which made me want to kiss her, and so Denny’s it was.

  Over breakfast Susan asked about my current projects and I told her. One involved filming violent criminals remembering happy moments from their childhoods. For another I was following around a trucker I’d met who liked to dress in drag. Susan asked what interested me about these projects and I said it was difficult to talk about them that way; it was the fact that you couldn’t summarize them that made them art and to try to capture their effect in words would only lead to my sounding pretentious and evasive. She said that all sounded pretty pretentious and evasive so why didn’t I just try, and I said, Fine. I was interested in our response to seeing people in situations that seemed to run directly counter to their public identities. Imagine a group of Fortune 500 CEOs at a petting zoo, I said. Imagine leaving them there too long. If I could get Fortune 500 CEOs to give me an afternoon, that’s what I’d have them do.

  “Interesting.”

  “Do you think so? When people say ‘interesting’ they usually mean ‘not interesting’ or ‘I’d like to stop talking about this immediately.’”

  “No, it is interesting,” she said. “Just, how do you make sure it’s not gimmicky?”

  I told her this was always the worry. It was why these projects took so long. You had to film for a long time before people got so used to the scrutiny that they stopped playing to the camera, before authentic moments of self-discovery could occur. “You can always tell an authentic moment,” I said. “I don’t know how, but at some point you can see that a person has stopped trying to manage your perception of them. The true self peeks through.”

  “I wonder if I believe in such a thing,” she said.

  “Well, forget the word ‘true,’ if that seems problematic. I mean the self that’s not an actor. The self we are in private and with our best friends, our spouses. The effortless self, let’s call it.”

  She looked at me, but past me, to the point in space where the truth of words is judged against reality. She was quiet. The look on her face, as she gazed off, passed from caught-up to sad and then, I thought, to something like a premonitory glimpse of the possibilities and limits of a life. It was brief, this terror—if that’s what it was—and I longed and dreaded to know what she was thinking. In another second, though, she had returned to the moment and to picking the crusts of her chicken sandwich, which I had found and continued to find a strange order.

  It was raining when we left the restaurant, light, sparse drops shuttled about by the wind, a pleasant rain that seemed to be cleaning you rather than getting you wet. The lights of restaurants and gas stations shone wetly all around, and it was lovely, in the rain, at a Denny’s, in New Jersey.

  “You don’t have to like my films,” I said when we were back in the car.

  “It’s not that…” I could feel her on the edge of an admission, having second thoughts but caught in her point’s momentum. “It’s … just my boyfriend in college, he was a filmmaker. He was always telling me about his projects. At first I liked it, I thought he was brave. But the intensity, you know, it kind of wore me down. I think I’m not smart or edgy enough for experimental film.”

  I didn’t say anything. I stared straight ahead. I wanted to give Susan the impression that she had hurt me, which she had a little, but that I was going to ride the hurt out stoically. It wasn’t that I needed Susan to like my work, although for what if not pockets of intensity were we in the business of living? But I was jealous of that young man, a man who now of course would be my age, but who in memory preserved something of what is lost to time. What had he done to capture her affection that I could not? And what had Susan been like all those years ago, before intensity came to seem a burden and discretion led her to hide away the treasure of herself, discovered and buried some day long ago under a soil of rotting youth? I wanted, pointlessly, to return to college, to that Susan, excitable and unformed, spilling slightly beyond herself as people when they are most beautiful do.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a minute. “I’m distracted. The storm, the kids … I know your films are very good. You’ve had a lot of success, right? They matter to people.”

&nbs
p; “Why did you become a therapist?” I said, ignoring the dubious logic of her last remark. I remembered sitting in therapy with her, week after week, wondering if she always believed the things she said, the terse, careful words she committed to, waiting for what I thought of as her true self to peek through.

  “I guess the idea just grew on me,” she said. “I like listening to people, hearing their stories. I wanted to do something that helped people. I believe in the therapeutic space.”

  “But how do you know you are? Helping people, I mean.”

  She did that thing again of retreating a degree or two into herself. “I don’t,” she said. “I do my best. I trust the process.” I may have snorted. “What happened to listening to music?” she said.

  It was really raining now. I had the wipers on their continuous setting, not the really fast one, which by the time it’s raining hard enough for you to need is kind of impotent anyway. The clouds had charcoaled and thickened so that, although it was early afternoon, it was as dark as evening. The weather felt obscurely punitive, and though I knew the storm would cause extraordinary damage and harm many people, part of me longed for it to come, for it to get worse, for it to be as bad, or worse, than they said. I wanted to see it curdling the ocean and bringing waves and wind over the coast, over cities and towns, ripping up sidewalks and porches, downing power lines, traffic lights, trees. I wanted the chaos, to feel the power of something powerful, and then the still aftermath of chaos in which we get to be our better selves and rebuild. In which the challenges are simple and communal and vast. I thought somewhere in this mess of longings and contradictory impulses was a film, and then I knew why I’d taken 95 instead of heading inland to 81. I wanted to encounter the storm. I wanted to film it.

  “It’s really coming down,” Susan said. “Oh, there’s my exit!”

  “Your exit…”