Prodigals Read online

  And I came just then, for the first time in my life, before even getting hard.

  * * *

  At dinner that night I gave a drunken toast that couldn’t have made much sense. After dinner we sat in front of the glass fire. To get it lit you had to open two separate valves, and even then it wasn’t clear where the gas emerged from, so when the flame finally took, the whole fireplace, which by then had filled with gas, came alive suddenly with the whoosh or whoomp of a fireball combusting. I had learned at the expense of a great deal of forearm hair to be careful with the ghostly blaze, which finally settled to dance above its moraine of shattered glass, as though a flame could be entranced by a hearth of ice.

  It was the night before New Year’s Eve and we were playing games, full from another exquisite meal, sipping Sazeracs and eighteen-year-old single malts, looking for just that elusive shade of irony or absurdity to surprise even ourselves in laughter. We played Cards Against Humanity. “______. Betcha can’t have just one!” the prompt read, and Eli answered “Geese,” which made me laugh, and my thoughts ran to Mary Oliver, as they always do when geese are mentioned, and I wondered why we couldn’t just let the soft animals of our bodies love what they loved. Then I remembered that we were too busy being witty to have any idea what we loved. And if you closed one eye and found yourself in a moment of some perspective, I thought, maybe within the yet-uncracked genetics of the witticism, you could hear a hollow and performative laughter echoing down the swept streets, floating into Sammy’s and out, tripping down the decades, the stone-wrinkled valleys of the San Jacinto, a sound constructed and dispersed on the Santa Ana wind, cleft by giant windmills turning in the lowlands, coming through on radios in Calipatria, in the kitchens of trailers and rusted-out meth labs, sparkling like the Salton Sea—that bright veneer happiness as flat and shimmering as the scales on a dead fish.

  This was not a human landscape. None of California is, but this place especially, with mountains as bare and rubbled as Mars, days identical to one another and so bright they washed out. The wind farms blinked red through the light-spoiled nights. It was that particular California melancholy that is the perfect absence of the sacred.

  * * *

  I awoke on the morning of New Year’s Eve on a deflated air mattress without any memory of having gone to sleep. It turned out I was not licking Julie Delpy, but holding Lyle in a kind of Pietà. When he saw I was awake he began chewing on my hair, and I thought about going and getting into bed with Lily, then decided to conserve goodwill. I don’t mean to give the impression that sex is all I think about, but I am goal-oriented. I need goals. And I felt cheated out of something. Lily’s car kept breaking, and so did her toilet, and she needed water and grapes like several dozen times a day. I was getting all the bad boyfriend jobs, I felt, and none of the good.

  But in retrospect I know it wasn’t really about Lily, this sense of being cheated. I needed something to happen. Something new and totalizing to push forward a dithering life or to put a seal on the departing year like an intaglio in wax. I needed to remember what it was to live. And drugs were not just handmaiden or enabler but part and parcel of the same impossible quest, which you could say was the search for the mythical point of most vivid existence, the El Dorado of aliveness, which I did not believe in but which tantalized me nonetheless, a point of mastering the moment in some perfect way, seeing all the power inside you rise up and coincide with itself, suspending life’s give-and-take until you were only taking, claiming every last thing you ever needed or wanted—love, fear, kinship, respect—and experiencing it all at the very instant that every appetite within you was satisfied.

  It is a stupid dream, but there it is. And not a bad agenda for a day, as agendas go, as days go.

  Lily turned out to be up already. She was sitting in the patio sun, reading the latest New York Review of Books, which we talked about over my first smoke. It had articles about our bad Mideast policy and a pretty obscure seventeenth-century Italian painter and the comparative merits of Czesław Miłosz translations and a book that said technology was isolating us as it seemed to be connecting us, replacing the passions with wan counterparts, so that loving became liking, happiness fun, and friend ceased to refer to a person but to a thing you did to a person, the noun “friend” retired for a cultlike horde called “followers.” Even a few years later, recalling this, I feel just how tired the complaints have become, but at the time it all seemed more poignant, not the conclusions, exactly, which were even then proto-clichés, but that The New York Review of Books existed at all, that it continued to devote such good minds and scholarship to what after five minutes in the desert sun, driving with the top down by imitation-adobe strip malls full of nail salons and smoothie shops and physical therapy outlets, was almost painfully irrelevant. And then I wondered, What is our fucking obsessions with relevancy?

  I didn’t follow this line of thinking quite so far until we were on our way to the hike that afternoon. It was another perfect day—each one was—and we had mobilized early, nearly two hours before the closing time, which by that point had been embossed forever on our psyches. The sun hung in the southern sky at the height of a double off the left-field wall, hot and pleasant and a whitish color, slipping at its edges into a pale powdered blue that had the particulate quality of noise in a photograph. I was glad we were going for the hike. It felt almost moral in the context, and even if it was a relatively level hike and only about an hour round-trip, and there was a waterfall at the end hidden among the sere folds of rock, I thought at least we will have to put something in, something of ourselves, to get whatever out.

  Our friend the ranger was waiting for us at the gate, and this time we approached him with an air of triumph, as though he had doubted our resolve, but we had persevered and now things would be different.

  “Hey,” we said.

  “Hello,” he said, perhaps smiling a little.

  We looked at one another for a minute.

  “Trail’s closed,” he said. “Closes early today, on account of the holiday.”

  “Oh, come on,” Eli said. “You realize we’ve been here every day this week.”

  The ranger actually had his hands on his hips, as if posing for a catalogue. The olive-green uniform hung on him so perfectly that I wondered whether he wasn’t perhaps the fit model for the entire clothing line.

  “Park reopens January second,” he said. “Eight a.m. sharp.”

  “Is it because we’re Jews?” Marta said.

  The ranger’s gaze, emerging from his tan and handsomely creased face, cast out to the distant escarpments on the far side of the valley.

  “Same rules for everyone,” he said.

  “What if we hike really fast?” said Marta. “You just let that woman with a walker in. We’re definitely going to be faster than her.”

  “Hike takes one hour, thirty minutes. We lock the gate in one hour, twenty minutes. You do the math.”

  “I feel like you’re not getting my point,” Marta said.

  “Same rules for everyone,” he repeated.

  “What is this, Brown versus Board of Education?” Marta said under her breath.

  “Your hike is a piece of shit,” Eli informed the ranger.

  “You can always hike the Sagebrush Trail,” he said, pointing vaguely to a boulder-strewn slope in the distance that seemed to rise, precipitously, toward nothing.

  “And the Sagebrush Trail has a waterfall?” I said.

  “Ha, ha. No.”

  “Such bullshit,” Marta said, laughing lightly, such warm placid annoyance in her tone that it seemed to me suddenly a master class in the management of emotions in a public capacity, the decoupling of an emotion’s expression from its affective consequences. And it came to me then, as we hiked the Sagebrush Trail, just how public most people’s lives were and how unpublic mine was, how unsuited to public acquittal I had become in this modern world of ours, this world of glass fires, where flames hovered over drifts of glass, playing on the
idea that a fire consumes some fuel beneath.

  We hiked the Sagebrush Trail until boredom overtook us. It seemed not to go anyplace or end, and at the top of a ridge, where we finally stopped, a Hasid in black robes stared out across the Coachella Valley, past the lush plot of Palm Springs, which sat in the dun funnel of mountains like a piece of sod on a field of dirt. I wondered what it would take to imagine my way into his mind. I tried to look out at the scene through his eyes and couldn’t. I could only see it through my eyes: the grid of roads, the golf courses twined round their fancy houses, the brassy glow of the sun catching on the mountain faces to the south, the lights of convenience stores blinking on in the dusk. Another mellow California evening, where the idea of Sémillon and a cigarette in the velour air seemed a kind of permission—to be cosmically insignificant, maybe—an evening as lovely and forgiving as longing, as the line where we saw the shadow of the mountains end several miles to the east. I touched Lily to see if she felt it too.

  * * *

  Our steaks—the steaks we ate that night—had been cows that had eaten Lord knows how much grain, grain farmed using heavy machinery and fertilizer and then shipped on trucks, cows that had produced Lord knows how much waste and methane before they were slaughtered, before they were butchered and shipped to us on different trucks. It was a very special dinner, courtesy of the Maldives, Bangladesh, Venice. We were each supposed to say something, something meaningful or thankful, I suppose, that would begin to repay our debt to the cows and the people of Sumatra. I wanted to read a poem that had recently moved me. I had been trying to read it every night, as a prelude to dinner or a coda to dinner, but things kept getting in the way. The mood, for instance. It wasn’t a very poem-y poem, but it was a poem, and I guess it had that against it. Still, it was funny and affecting, and I saw it as a moral Trojan horse, a coy and subtle rebuke to everything that was going on, which would, in the manner of all great art, make its case through no more than the appeal and persuasiveness of its sensibility. The others would hear it and sit there dumbfounded, I imagined, amazed at the shallowness of their lives, their capacity nonetheless to apprehend the sublime, and the fact that I had chosen a life in which I regularly made contact with this mood. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect this state to last more than a minute. But the poem had become meaningful to me as I felt increasingly stifled, or stymied, or something, and I was about to read it when dinner was very suddenly ready, and then when dinner was over dessert appeared, and then there were post-dinner cigarettes, and then we got a call that our cabs were on the way and we had to hurry to clear the table so that we could all do a few lines before the party. We crushed the coke into still finer powder and spread it, thin and beautiful, on the glass coffee table. And by the time we were packed into two cabs any memory that I had been about to read a poem, or that poetry was a thing that existed, had vanished.

  Eli had done a line or two himself and I could feel him growing tense in the way he did, which I had come to know years before when we were roommates in college. It was the tenseness of someone who gets almost everything he wants very easily actually wanting something he’s not sure he can get. The thing Eli wanted, most proximately, was Wagner, who we’d heard was at the party to which we were en route, and yes, Eli wanted Wagner’s money, wanted the financing so that his film about Albert O. Hirschman could be made and play the festival circuit and make a bid to be picked up by Focus or Searchlight or whatever, but more than that, I think, Eli wanted to know he could bag a fish as big as Wagner. To try to get his mind off things, I asked who he liked in the Cotton Bowl, but he must not have heard me because he said, “It’s all the fucking drugs. Drink some water when we get there,” and then I realized that we were shouting across six people from opposite ends of a taxi minivan.

  By the time we got to the party I was compulsively, twitchily, taking hard sniffs through my nose. At the door we were greeted by a contingent of bashful children in party hats who blew party horns and kazoos at us. I crouched down, taking one of the horns, and said something like “Now-aren’t-these-fun-and-who-are-you-don’t-you-look-pretty-where’s-the-bar?” and as I settled on the last word and realized I had addressed it to a six-year-old, it came to me that I probably shouldn’t talk to children for a while. They ran off, in any case, for their own whimsical reasons (I told myself), and I went to the kitchen and poured half a bottle of Aperol into a Solo cup because—well, let’s assume I had a reason at the time. I didn’t know anyone, but I was feeling pretty great when Eli came over to me and whispered in my ear.

  “Wagner’s here,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Fuck if I know. This place is a catacomb.”

  I asked whether we should go looking.

  “In a minute,” he said. “Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  I followed him to one of the living room’s conversation pits—there were several—where we settled into the deep embrace of leather armchairs, resting our ankles on our knees, and had the following conversation while the seven or twelve other versions of us that appeared in the intricately mirrored wall had it too.

  Me: So.

  Eli (after a beat): Are people happy?

  M: Like, spiritually? Like, which people?

  E: Our friends, our group.

  M: Like would Maslow—

  E: Am I being a good host?

  M: You’re making me sleep on an air mattress.

  E: I’m serious.

  M: It sort of deflates every—

  E: Is there more I could be doing?

  M: I’m not sure I know what we’re talking about. Are you happy?

  E (pausing for effect): I am so happy.

  M: Okay, now pretend you’re not on tons of coke.

  E: It’s Marta, though. I mean, is this it? If we have kids, it’s going to change everything, her life more than mine. I just want her to feel like she’s done all the things she wanted to do.

  M: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the way it works.

  E: Meaning?

  M: The bucket-list thing. I don’t buy it. There’s a hole in the bucket list!

  E: What hole?

  M: Life, tomorrow, the astonishing insufficiency of memory …

  E: I don’t want her to have any regrets.

  M: Jesus, don’t be insane. And look, it’s not like there’s some perfect moment of some perfect evening when you go: That. That was it. That was living, and it doesn’t get any better, and now I can die. Or have kids.

  E (a little peevishly): I know.

  I was pretty out of it, but still it wasn’t lost on me that what I had just denied the truth of was exactly the fantasy I had let myself entertain throughout the trip. And I felt, realizing this, neither wise nor duplicitous but tired—tired of all the things that were equally true and not true, which seemed to be just about everything right then.

  “C’mon, let’s go find Marta and Lily,” Eli said, because we hadn’t seen them for a while and that could mean only one thing. And sure enough, in the third bathroom we checked, there was Lily speaking without punctuation, lining up lacy filaments of blow on the porcelain tank of the toilet, while Marta did smoothing or plumping things to her eyelashes that only girls understand. And somehow the four of us squeezed into that bathroom, which was the size of a telephone booth, and did our lines and got most of the excess into our teeth, and Eli scraped what was left very carefully over the beveled edge and into a bag the size of one Cheez-It.

  The good feeling rose in me with the gentle inexorable certainty of a tide. “We’re going to go find Wagner,” Eli announced. And Lily and I looked at each other, or our eyes met in the wall of mirror before us, and we both made a motion to speak before realizing there was nothing we meant to say. And realizing this, we smiled, because maybe we weren’t in love, and maybe love is a chemical sickness anyway, one that blinds us to who the person we love really is, but we were committed to each other, committed somehow to forgiving each other every stupid, carele
ss, needy, and unpleasant thing we did or said that week. And forgiveness is a kind of love, I think.

  It didn’t take us long to find Wagner, although time had grown a bit fishy at this point. We scrabbled through doors and rooms—I don’t know why we checked so many closets—and when we got to the library a voice said, “Come in, come in,” as if it had been expecting us. The voice belonged to a man of perhaps seventy who was sitting low behind a desk, sipping from a snifter of what looked like corrupted urine and talking on a large phone that for an instant I took to be a kitten. He made such a striking figure that I almost missed the Amazonian woman standing to the side in a studded black leather bra and garters. I did a double take, but she didn’t seem to register my gaze, just looked off glassily with impassive disgust and worked the tassels on her riding crop like a rosary.

  “Satellite,” Wagner said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Then: “Yeah, yeah, go fuck yourself, Fred. Ten a.m.”

  “Mustique,” he said, putting the phone down, “I’m supposed to fly out tonight.”

  “Frank,” Eli said and took a few larger-than-normal steps toward Wagner, putting out his hand and smiling like they were old war buddies.

  “Do I know you?” Wagner said. “I don’t think I know you.”