Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  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 m
uddled 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.

  There was another flight and a long ride in a hired car and then a ferry crossing before I saw Misty at the terminal, leaning against the dock’s weathered wood and smoking a cigarette while she waited. She didn’t move or wave as I walked over to her. Our eyes merely met, and I smiled at the struck pose, which was her way of joking and of telling me we would always pick up just where we’d left off.

  “You missed it,” she said when we’d hugged.

  My heart skipped a beat. “Missed what?”

  She tossed her cigarette in the ocean. “Game night last night. I taught everyone Celebrity.”

  “Jesus, Misty.” I threw my bags in the backseat. The fishing boats in the cove shimmied in an echo of the ferry’s wake. “How’s the old guy doing?”

  “Better, we think.” She started the Subaru, gunning the engine needlessly. “He’s quoting poetry—in Latin.”

  “He knows Latin?”

  She honked a greeting at someone on foot I didn’t know. “Are you listening to me? Look, prepare yourself. The house is a zoo.”

  I don’t know why, but I had been expecting to find the house draped in a somber pall, the days drifting melancholically between the unplaceable moment an afternoon becomes sad and the cobalt fullness at dusk’s last breath. What I walked into, however, more closely resembled a Great War hospital established in some British country manor. There were maids and nurses and respect payers and well-wishers. It took me a long time to get everyone straight. For a while I had to approach each conversation with the ecumenical delicacy of a store clerk. I failed—wildly, you might say—to calibrate my answers to the questions I got about who I was and what I did and where I lived, questions to which I had no good answers anyway. After half an hour, and asking after the family of a man who turned out just to be making a delivery, I found my way to the bayside veranda where my grandfather was set up looking out to sea.

  I bent to kiss him.

  “You made it,” he said in a voice that somehow, at once, conveyed both boyish gratitude and a faint sense of betrayal.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it.”

  My grandfather ignored the innuendo in this, the sort I am helpless to make, wincing all the while. Perhaps he didn’t catch it. He raised a quivering finger to point out a passing schooner making its way up the bay on a reach. An osprey scrutinized the stretch of coast a few hundred yards out, and at the foot of the porch flowers in the parterre had the full lavish beauty of their high summer bloom.

  “Not too shabby,” I said. And because I had been here every year since my birth, it was simply not possible to say how deep an impression this one bit of extravagant and stern beauty had made on my psyche, my longings, my fury, my hope.

  It took my grandfather a while to collect the words on his tongue, but he managed finally, shrugging with a feigned cool. “If you like that sort of thing,” he said.

  Misty and I had the third floor to ourselves, a suite of seaward garrets out whose windows we smoked, monitoring the comings and goings below. There was a rotation of nurses, daily shifts and weekly substitutions; as we were on an island, they stayed with us and slept in the house. The stream of visitors my grandfather received was unending, social acquaintances from half a century of summers here, people committed to making an appearance but with little idea, finally, what you said to a ninety-seven-year-old widower in manifest pain, for whom speech had become an unpleasant game of recollective hide-and-seek. Cynthia had set up her easel on the back lawn, painting for hours with the imperious, imperturbable air of a cultist. Ruth, as far as I could tell, spent her days with a cordless phone wedged in the crook of her neck on calls to New York, holding up an index finger and walking away from anyone who talked to her. I loved my aunts, and beyond that I liked them, but I did not at heart understand what had come between them and their father, the irritations that had grown with age and then mapped themselves onto dynamics of grievance, of insufficient or misapplied love, rooted somewhere deep in the past. Perhaps nobody can respond to you exactly the way you want. Family is no doubt a pier glass for one’s own self-contempt. But for all my regret that this should happen now, for all my frustration and incomprehension, those feelings, I knew, had to be set next to my own meager participation in these lives, the implicit idea that it was enough for me to show up now and again for a few days and assume the unencumbered neutrality that may, in fact, have been no different from my habitual absence.

  “Do you like what we’ve done with the place?” Cynthia asked.

  I had wandered over to her easel barefoot with a mug of coffee.

  “I like that you’ve found a way to live together under one roof,” I said politically.

  “I wish your mother were here.”

  “She wishes that too, I’m sure.”

  We looked at the bestrewn islands of the bay, the mainland hills beyond, which at twilight took on the glaucous sheen that gave them their name. Although it was morning Cynthia was painting a night scene, bright buoys and ship lights overexposed on a dark sea.

  “Do you know why I paint facing east?” she said.

  “Because it’s the direction with the view?”

  She looked at me until every last bit of levity had drained from my remark. “Because that is the direction the Vedas designate for the gods.”

  “Ah.”

  “Where the sun comes from. Dawn Land. That’s what indigenous tribes called this region.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Ancient people all over the world knew that everything begins in the east. I find myself wanting to focus on beginnings.”

  I had dealt with death before, of course, but I had been younger then—more certain, that is, that the important experience being undergone was my own. I couldn’t and wouldn’t have wanted to summon this illusion now, and still I had only my own subjectivity to refer to. If I tried to imagine my grandfather’s first-person experience of his own enfeeblement, helplessness, and mortality, I could do this only through an awareness of myself making the effort, choosing to make the effort, and so with a trace of self-congratulation spoiling the act. Nor was I even certain that this kind of transpersonal projection made up a worthy or compassionate goal. It verged on pity, and pity looked an awful lot like just the displaced fear of the same happening to you. My grandfather and I were separated by the impregnability of two skulls. I had taken to kissing him, more than I had ever kissed any relation of mine, his balding head, his sallow, sunken cheeks, but even I knew this was no more than symbolic pretense to the notion that we were of the same flesh and that nothing would undo this. He was my last living grandparent; I watched daily as he shrank into himself, able only to wonder, from my remove, at the indignity and terror of having your body desert you, of finding yourself trapped in the play and apperception of a still-lively mind while the words that gave thought form floated beyond your reach. I read to him mornings and evenings about Galileo and Janet Yellen, the plump little gibbous moon where our spheres of interest overlapped. He tired quickly following the movement and subordination of the written word. He tired when we spoke too. And through it all he groaned as waves of a great, unnameable pain came over him, saying merely “I’m fine, I’m fine” when we asked, bouncing a hand to shush us, like we’d grown histrionic.

  The worst was at night. My bedroom was right above his, and he seemed no longer to sleep but to drift in states of an unpleasant semiconsciousness, moaning with a periodicity just irregular enough to keep me on edge. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I wandered into Misty’s room to drink her vodka out of a red-wine glass and share a smoke above the moonlit sea.

  “Denise’s husband is dying,” Misty said. She made a fishlike face, letting the smoke float out of her mouth. “I don’t know if you knew.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. Denise was the chummiest of the nurses and had a way of sp
eaking, a delicate soprano whisper, that after having spent a good portion of the afternoon just fucking rapt as she described the uses and pitfalls of a medication called Coumadin I had begun to worry she was giving me ASMR.

  “He has cancer,” Misty said. “Lung that spread to the brain.”

  “Christ, and she’s looking after Granddad.”

  “And we’re smoking.”

  “Same guilt,” I said, hating myself for smoking and smoking mostly out of self-hatred. “Thumbing our nose at the metanarrative, you know. The stupid tax we pay on how loathsomely important our privilege asks us to take ourselves.”

  Misty explored the offensive possibilities of literal nose thumbing. “What’s the metanarrative?”

  “Oh, this thing Gaby and I were throwing around. The narrative logic that sits behind a story, I guess. Whatever distinguishes narrative from, like, litany. Or accident.”

  Misty ashed out the window. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “You are too young, my dear. I shall tell you when you’re older.”

  She looked at a make-believe watch on her wrist for a few seconds. “There,” she said. “I’m older.”

  When I had asked Misty whether she was all right, the two of us drinking on my first night up, she said she was, why did I ask? I don’t know, I said, the grad-school thing. First of all, it was summer, she explained, and her apparent listlessness was an insufficient ground to assume she’d dropped out of school; but yes, as a matter of fact, in the second place, she had left urban planning behind because, well, it was your typical M.A. utopianism, without the faintest hope of meaningful praxis, preparing you for little more than the enviable future of fighting starved pit bulls for jobs in municipal administrations that amounted to years of testing a brick wall’s material durability with your head. I told Misty I’d never known her to let practical considerations get in the way of a rash decision. She sighed. “I guess I’m looking for love,” she said. And I was about to say, Sure, but do you think it’s just going to walk in the door one day? But what did I know. In my own way I was waiting for love too—not an object of love, not an instance of it, but perhaps love itself.