Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  “If we were going to my house, I mean. Where I grew up.”

  “Ah, the panopticon.”

  “You’re making too much of this.”

  “No,” I said. “Let me see if I understand.” A tangle of lightning flashed on the retina of the sky. “There’s no outward privacy in the panopticon—everything can be seen, right?—but inward privacy exists too, the privacy of the mind. All you really need for inward privacy is to keep quiet, to shut up. So you learn to keep quiet, keep your thoughts to yourself, not betray your emotions. That seems safe. And by the same token the idea of being open, really open, with another person seems terrifying. Yes? Tell me if I’m missing anything.”

  We didn’t speak for a while after this. I knew I had gone too far, as no doubt I had at other times when I thought I saw the shadow of an emotion cross her face. I had the unpleasant feeling of seeing myself act in a way I didn’t approve of and would reproach myself for later. But it was a hard moment for me. Cracks shivered out through my marriage, threatening at any moment its collapse. And had I married my wife out of much more, really, than my own aggrieved inner plea for stability? When I thought about her, a woman I had dated in college and parted ways with only to meet again seven years ago, I supposed I had married her because I was tired of thinking about that side of life, because she was smart and self-sufficient and maternal, in her way, and because I did love her. I loved her honestly, in a reasonable way, a way in touch with her flaws, and so sober and quiet, this love, that it seemed far truer than the fevered infatuations I’d been used to as a younger man. But I also think I had the idea that we would grow together over time, that our differences would soften, and that we would erosively remake each other in the gentle spaces of domesticity and parenthood. And so I was haunted, when this didn’t happen, to see, and even more to feel, that there were parts of her I still had never gained access to and probably, therefore, never would. I wondered achingly what these parts were, because I never doubted that she was honest with me, and she could be warm too. It was not so much information that lay beyond my reach, I felt, as a sort of presence, of shared and consummate openness, a kind of psychic nudity.

  And then Celeste, this past weekend, my friend Mark’s wife, whom I had dated for two years before Mark and had almost asked to marry me but instead dumped—because we were young and I thought we should part to reconnect later (maybe), because I had my first solo show (at twenty-six!) and felt powerful and important and suddenly bored with Celeste. We live with our mistakes. We regret them, we move away from them in time, and later we tell ourselves that they were necessary to create the person we have become. In time we grow to love our mistakes because we are inseparable from them and they comprise our belief in ourselves as people with access to wisdom. But all this retrospection never confronts the counterfactual mood, which of course it is beyond us to confront, though still, at times, there are mistakes that so resist our revisionary impulse that we are left wondering, When this path branched, what really did I decide? And Celeste is such a mistake for me.

  An example. This past weekend Mark was called into the office on Sunday and Celeste and I went out to walk the High Line. It was cold and we cupped espresso drinks in our hands. Celeste’s cheeks burned with a rosy blush. She’d cut her hair short and it was tousled prettily. I was telling her about my problems at home, that although I dreaded the ending, dreaded admitting defeat and losing my wife, there were days when part of me longed for it to happen, longed at least to have it out, because I was sure my wife and I were both, in private, looking at the same decaying structure, and I no longer knew which was worse, the collapse of our marriage or the tacit consensus in our silence.

  “I know what you mean, Ben.” She had taken my arm and turned to me. “I have days too when I look at my life, at Mark, the kids, and think, What the hell? When did this happen? And it feels almost like panic. Like, how did I get in this deep? And I want it all to disappear. I have this fantasy where I just walk off into another life and nobody comes looking. How terrible is that?”

  “It isn’t terrible,” I said. “But what do we do with that feeling?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Be open to it. Feel it. Let that openness wash over you. Refuse to be ashamed of the things we feel.”

  The buildings ensconced us, the hotel above, the path below with its brown vegetation and little branchings. The wind ran against us like metal, and in that moment, feeling understood, feeling her response against me like the naked flesh of a sibling soul, I had the urge to take Celeste’s hand and lead her away into that other life, to start over, the two of us. And just as I thought this, at that moment, we ran into someone I knew, a gallery owner in Chelsea who wanted to know all about my recent work and what I thought of Rist’s and what was I up to, and it was so nice to meet Celeste, she said, although she mostly ignored Celeste, and by the time she left I had more or less transformed back into the Ben who is a little crasser and more abrasive than he feels, because you have to talk to these art world assholes like you give even less of a fuck than they do, and I don’t mean to say I’m not one of these art world assholes myself, just that I left New York and decided to teach because I wanted to rope off a few spaces in my life where I could be genuine, or what I felt to be genuine, and where I could give a fuck.

  And Celeste is one of those spaces. And I’d let her marry Mark, who is a wonderful man and surely a steadier soul than I. I no longer remember why I let Celeste go, except that I probably thought we understood each other too easily and would therefore exhaust each other quickly, whereas my wife kept me at a remove from the central space that I believed constituted her her-ness, which for no clear reason I believed existed, and which I longed to get to the way you only long for things you can’t possess.

  “We have kids, though,” Celeste said. “That helps a little. Our lives aren’t just our own.”

  “Yes,” I said, “except I took them to be the cement of our family, my marriage, and they turn out to be kids and not building materials.”

  “You’re a wonderful father, Ben.”

  I could, and perhaps should, have stopped to wonder what evidence she was drawing on, but I didn’t. I could have lain down and made a bed in no more than the tone of her voice. She said it so warmly that I felt the prelude to tears gather at my eyes and wished briefly that she were the mother of my kids. We sat by the Hudson and watched evening come over it, lurid and grandiose in the fall cold, then we walked back to Mark and Celeste’s to relieve the sitter. Soon Mark came home. And there I watched Celeste as she melted back into her family and away from me, watched her laugh with love at the not-funny jokes of her small children and put a hand on Mark’s shoulder, until she was gone from me, back into her real life, where I didn’t exist.

  That was all the day before.

  The rain was heavy now, heavy enough that I was having trouble seeing in front of us. I had slowed to 45 and was hunched over partway, as if my posture could affect the visibility.

  “I was playing basketball the other day,” I said. We had been driving in silence for maybe half an hour. “There were these kids in the park with me, high school kids, I think. Kind of the weirdos, the freaks. It was just me and them.” I was shooting by myself, I told Susan, and they were being loud, joking around a little crudely, and at first I was annoyed. But this one kid kept looking over. A big kid, awkward, with shaggy hair and a black leather trench coat. “At first I thought maybe he was gay and that was why he was looking over. He kept stealing glances, giving me this shy smile. But no, I realized, no, that wasn’t it. He was trying to find his place. Do you know what I mean?” I looked at Susan. “He was trying to find his place in the world, and this wasn’t it. This was the best he could do just now, but it wasn’t it. And it made me feel tenderly toward him. He looked at me and thought I was at home in the world because I’m grown, because I can shoot baskets by myself and don’t really get embarrassed by things anymore. He thought I was at home in the world, and
I’m not. Do you see? I felt protective of him but also nauseated—by his mistake, by the innocence of his mistake—and part of me wanted to step into his life and make it better, and part of me felt helpless and sick because I couldn’t, because you can never do that for someone. You only have time to live your own life, and mine was falling apart.”

  “You’re a caretaker, Ben,” Susan said.

  “You say that—” I wiped the windshield with the back of my hand. I didn’t mean to sound so bitter. “But tell me, am I really grieving other people’s loneliness and suffering, or my own?”

  “Are you lonely? Are you suffering?”

  Don’t you know? I wanted to say, but it seemed indulgent of me to insist. I am, after all, a white American man with a toehold in the upper middle class, with a good job, a wife, and two kids—someone the world has licensed to express himself. A heartbeat of hope raps within my suffering, and while I am thankful for this, truly thankful, I have had to wonder at points whether the hope and the suffering were really two different things.

  “What about you?” I said. “Are you so happy? Are you never lonely?”

  “I don’t know.” Susan ran her fingers through the condensation on her window. “Maybe I don’t expect to be unlonely.”

  I pulled to the side of the road, unable, in any case, to see. The clouds had opened up, the rain no longer seeming to fall so much as to be, there, beyond us, everywhere—a matrix suffusing the air. All we could see through the windows was a wild silver tide dashing itself on the glass.

  “That boy in college,” I said, “the filmmaker. It sounds like he wanted to be unlonely with you.”

  Even in the half-light I could see that Susan’s face had paled. She had a way of looking stricken and distant, wounded but unwilling to name the hurt, to let you in to soothe it. The shadows of raindrops ran down her face.

  “I couldn’t be close in that way.”

  “Because of your family.”

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Your whole family?”

  “What’s the use, Ben?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. I was being cruel, and I’m not proud of it, I’m rarely cruel, but I was being cruel, and I’m sorry, Susan, darling, I am. “It was your father, wasn’t it? The guy’s guy. You were his favorite. There was a sense, in this family that was so close, that things were maybe a little too close.”

  “Stop.”

  “So you turned inward. Closed yourself off.”

  “Ben.”

  “That poor boy in college.”

  Susan was quiet. The rain tapered abruptly, bronze light cutting through the clouds. Drops still fell, more the afterthought of rain than rain itself, glistening in the ocher ashes of the sky. How was your mood to keep up with a day like this?

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right.” She had composed herself and it terrified me, her ability to compose herself like this. “It’s not that simple, Ben.”

  “No, of course. It’s just your job, right? Inventing these plausible little stories. Anyway, you’re too strong for me. I keep trying to break through, but I should probably just accept that you’re too tough.”

  She smiled. It was not a smile of compassion or tenderness, I saw, but a broad smile of unfeigned delight. She beamed and I thought—it came to me powerfully, dizzyingly—my God, this woman is a child. She wants to be praised. Well, goddamn it, I can praise her if that’s what she wants.

  The light painted her face gold, her hair, her eyes. The sky parted in flaxen sheaves, and I began with the ridiculous story, the one we have all, with each year, loosened our grip on a little more, about how we came to our parents in woven baskets, gifted from the second world, the world behind this one: how we are all sacred children.

  “Ben,” she murmured. “Please. I’m just a flawed, selfish person, like everyone.”

  But do you really think that? I wanted to say. Does anyone—but especially you? Her eyes were closed. Are we not all born with wings we take out only in private? Except the beauty scared you, Susan. She was still smiling. She had laid a hand in mine, those delicate fingers, leaned into me, breathing slowly. We are all failed imagoes, earthbound under each other’s weight. I could hear the doves in the dripping trees. We are all scared, Susan, I told her. All scared no one else will find them as beautiful.

  She kissed me so I had to stop talking, a kiss at first contained, but that gave in to itself until our mouths pressed together, made a seal, and our tongues sought out the depths or sought to show themselves in pursuit of the depths. We can argue forever about the meaning of a kiss. After a minute she pulled back, a hand on my chest. We looked into each other’s eyes. I wanted to see longing in hers, sorrow, any sign that she needed me, or anything, but she looked only happy, held once again gently within herself, brimming with the seraphic light of some perverse joy.

  “I fell in love with you once,” she said. “You must have known.”

  “I did,” I said. “It was a dirty trick. It made me love you, and now I’m stuck loving you and you’ve moved on.”

  She stopped smiling and the sun passed behind a cloud. It was cold in the car. I started the ignition and pulled us back onto the highway. In no time at all warm air flooded the cabin. And it seemed almost sad to me, that warm air could flood in just like that.

  On the radio we heard reports of the storm. It was flirting with a Category 4 off Delaware, gale-force winds with flooding deep into the coast. Millions of people were without power now, states of emergency had been declared everywhere, National Guards called up. The coast guard had suspended rescue operations north of Point Pleasant. A Fujiwara interaction was possible. In my mind I saw the rainbands of the storm, the falcate concentric arms, reach out across a thousand miles to embrace the coast.

  The rain had picked up again, a hard, steady downfall. The wind too. On the side of the road it forced the trees together like lousy drunks. I suggested we get gas—although the tank was more than half full—and load up on provisions in case we passed through a large area without power.

  “Do you think that’s a worry?” Susan asked.

  I said I didn’t know, but not knowing meant it was possible and if it was possible it was a worry. Susan said she meant likely and I said that’s what I didn’t know when I said I didn’t know. We were near Philadelphia. We had missed the 295 bypass in the rain, but when we took the next exit the world we pulled off into was deserted and it was impossible to imagine a city anywhere nearby. The lights were off at the first gas station and the whole strip had an unearthly feel. The gallon prices on the sign were out of date, as though the station had been closed for months, maybe years.

  “Maybe we should get back on the highway,” Susan said.

  I said let’s go a little farther, how far could a gas station be? The road was empty, narrow, and surveyor-straight, with no more than a bleak-looking house every mile or so. The vegetation had a stunted, marshy look, like we were near brackish water, and then, out of nowhere, we were climbing a bridge, a vast suspension bridge rising up over a river—the Delaware, surely—an immense gray bridge lit at intervals along its cables and frame, where a bright fizz seemed to clothe the steel. The air was alive with water. So much water! Tons no doubt, millions of tons. The forms things take amaze me. Water in the river as waves, in the air as moisture, falling as rain; in my blood, against my skin, dissolving and colluding with salt shorn of rocks, catching light from glowing wires and breaking it into strands and shards of colored light, collecting as clouds above us blotting out the sun; water in the milk my children drank from my wife’s breasts, in the cooling systems of reactors, the turbines of dams, and the forensic patterns of rock on Mars, the afterthought of water, stagnant pools in the waning moon, and then all around us, everywhere, except the bubble of our car. We were the only car on the bridge. At the high point of its arcing roadway I pulled us over and put on the hazard lights.

  “What are you doing?” Susan said. I was r
ummaging around in back for my camera and its waterproof case. “Really, Ben, I’m not sure this is the best idea.”

  But I was out of the car as she said it, out and filming into the raging storm. The river rolled heavily below, seething with a whitish foam in which new life, for all I knew, was in the process of constituting itself.

  She came out and stood beside me.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.

  She stared out into the storm. “It’s strange,” she said, “how terrible things are beautiful when you’re safe from them.”

  “Safety first.”

  “Ben.” I could hear in her tone that she was tired of this, tired of these conversations. “There’s a pitch you live at, Ben. It’s not a pitch I can live at all the time.”

  I can come down! I wanted to shout. I can come down, just ask. But it was a little late in the day for that. And what was I proving out here, chasing the storm, but the opposite? And yet who knows his own capacity to change, her own, or the capacity of two people to change together? Who can ever say where the line falls between I can’t and I won’t?

  We saw headlights in the distance coming our way. I turned the camera from the river to Susan.

  “I was wrong before, so tell me,” I said. “Why couldn’t you be close?”

  I filmed her in profile, watching the car approach over the long, straight road. “There aren’t easy answers, Ben.” She looked so beautiful with the rain streaking her face and hair. “Sometimes you have to grow tough or never leave. Sometimes comfort and independence seem to be at odds. Or maybe you get scared of your own desire to fall in too deep, what would happen if you gave in to it.”

  I put the camera down. I couldn’t look at her. “What a stupid way to live,” I said. The car, highway patrol, flashed its lights and pulled up behind us. A trooper got out.

  “Sir, ma’am. What’s the trouble?”

  I told the officer everything was fine, that we’d been on the bridge and decided to get out for a second to look at the storm.