Prodigals Read online

  We ate. We said our goodbyes, to the children, to Madame Lévesque, to Marion, to Léo. No one mentioned the demolition, which crashed on all around us. As we went out the door Léo handed me a padded envelope with something rattly inside.

  “For you,” he said. “A surprise.”

  I took it but didn’t open it until Vicky and I were in the hired car on the way to the airport. Inside was an unlabeled black videocassette.

  “What is it?” Vicky asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But I did know! I did.

  After a while Vicky turned to me and said quietly, “You have to do something for me. You have to throw away that tape without watching it. I promise you’ll be happier if you do.”

  I didn’t say anything. We arrived in Rome. I began my explorations, my sightseeing, my note taking. Vicky came with me some days and went off on her own others. I moved around the city. I moved this way and that. I felt my legs move, my arms swing through the Roman air. I ran my fingers along the stones. No one saw any of it. Did I exist?

  Even in those days it was hard to track down a VHS player, but I finally found an outfit that transferred video to DVD and I gave the proprietor my credit card to leave me alone in the room with his equipment. When I got back to the hotel I threw myself on Vicky and we had torrid sex. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d fucked like that and I half expected her to look at me with gratitude when we were done, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “What?” I said.

  “You watched it,” she said.

  “So?”

  I couldn’t lie. I could still see myself in triumph, walking onto the court, clapping my racket with my hand, getting down in a crouch, waiting for the first serve. I only thought later how remarkable that Léon Descoteaux, after all those years, had remembered every shot, every twist and lurch, with such precision. His memory of the match was perfect. By the time I thought this Vicky had flown home and our relationship had begun the rapid crumbling that would leave it scattered at our feet. I would like to say I didn’t watch the video again, or many times after. That others didn’t have to intervene. That I didn’t have to burn the damn thing and spend years finding different ways of describing what it meant to feel “hollowed out.” I wasn’t hollowed out, was the thing. I was brimming to the exclusion of all else with this sickly joy. And even then, when I’d burned the tape and moved on—even now—I wake up at night with the image of camera flashes hot on my retina, the tidal roar of the crowd in my ear, shifting weight lightly from side to side, gazing placidly into the eyes of my tall opponent, listening for the chair umpire to come through on the speakers high above.

  That’s how it begins.

  Epithalamium

  Hara had to think there were better ways to say fuck you, although it did take a certain ballsiness, what he had done, in the middle of their divorce no less, and she could see, in fact she couldn’t not see, that the flip side of this prickishness was the quality she loved in Zeke, loved best in him perhaps, when she did love him, and she did love him—she still did—she just hated him now too. Yes, she would probably laugh about it when she stopped being angry. She was always smiling inconveniently in the throes of anger, like the very notion of fury in lives such as theirs dragged a subterranean absurdity up into daylight. But first she would milk her valid rage for the drops of acid in it, the drops with which it had become her job to dissolve Zeke’s teasing, so that she could have her part in the cruelty, so that they could pretend they were hurting each other and were equal in this.

  Of course she was glad for the company, which made it all a bit awkward. It was rather fun having a companion, another presence to leaven the melancholy of cold gray days. On the hardwood of the living room, below lights dimmed to embers, Hara and Lyric moved through their vinyasa poses. The day at that morning hour was often no more than a charcoal disclosure, the islands rough-hewn ribbons in the fog. On mild afternoons they kayaked out to the smaller islands or explored the rock and shell coves into which the ocean ran. From the beaches they took smooth stones, worn colored glass, and the green and ashen domes of sea urchins, laying them on shelves and window transoms. Lyric did the shopping, for which Hara gave her money. When Lyric returned one day with a jigsaw puzzle, they set it up on a painted table looking out to sea. Then in the evening they would spend an hour or two coaxing forest from piecemeal green, a frame for the puzzle’s meadow, so that finally the wolves had something to run across.

  Lyric made Hara feel girlish. It had surprised her how much she liked the girl. Hara even felt at times that she were the younger of the two, for while it was true what Lyric had said of herself—that she didn’t know anything—the faultless quality of her spirit made Hara feel petty and irascible and about nine years old. And of course what you assumed people traded for such uncomplicated happiness were lives of a certain ambition and regard, but it was Hara, wasn’t it, who was forty-two, childless, performing a job she liked about as much as washing semen from underwear, and getting divorced?

  Maybe she had made an error long ago. Maybe she had profoundly mistaken the terms of the exchange she was making. It wasn’t envy Lyric brought out in her, no. It was more that Hara had stumbled on a kind of play, as if they were sisters left alone by their parents for the first time to explore the different ways a day could be deconstructed. She had never had that with Daeva, of course. The one time she recalled being left under her sister’s capricious administration Daeva had spent the entire weekend shouting at her. Well, God bless her, Daeva now lived half a world away. They hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, not since Daeva had called—typical—to enlist Hara’s help in shipping a metal sculpture to India.

  “It’s very heavy and very fragile,” Daeva had said, as though it took a superior mind to envision such a thing.

  “Imagine this,” said Hara. “I’m very busy and I don’t give a fuck.”

  Daeva had called her a cunt and suggested that she wasn’t even a very grateful cunt. Grateful for what? Hara wanted to know. For having a sister who had made her tough, presumably, who made her give off the impression. She didn’t ask.

  Theirs had never been a family for emotional pleasantries. “Think of it this way, Hara, darling,” her father had said years ago, at the family home in Haryana after they returned from the States for her final year before college. “If you let on too readily how you feel, people will have that over you. They’ll know how to make you feel this way or that.” Well, Hara didn’t agree—not once she got old enough to have her own opinions and hate her father’s, she didn’t. A lousy servant-class idea, she thought, dressing up powerlessness as strength. But parents’ notions got in deeper than you realized and resurfaced when you least expected, least expected to learn you were like them, so that you could feel your bleeding heart spilling across the linen tablecloth at dinner only to hear your husband say how fucking sick he was of this dignified and embittered reserve. Couldn’t you just lose it? Not this stylized sniping anger, but truly undress yourself before him? But if you lived inside me, Hara had wanted to say, you would see I lose it all the time. You make me lose it. You excel at nothing so much as making me feel small. And although she hadn’t said it then, she had remarked to herself how strange were the invitations of dignity and restraint, how when you pretended something didn’t hurt it only encouraged people to push the blade in deeper.

  But so with Lyric: a plausible paradise. The day disassembled into simple tasks, an intimacy that demanded nothing. Hara even felt foolish about how she had acted on first arriving. Well, it had been startling—a shock—to find someone in the house. She had come to get away, after all. Two weeks of peace, of distance from the divorce, the endless briefs to compile at work, her martinet trainer and the sympathy dinners, the endless dinners, and that new awful flat she was renting in Rose Hill. All up the coast she had felt a current of freedom flowing in from the night, a sweet tidal loneliness indistinct from the ocean brine that hung in the air around her as
heavy as cloth.

  But if she had gotten away, made her escape, why then were the lights on in the cottage? Whence this brash, happy music stirring up the millpond of her pacific gloom? Through the window Hara saw a mostly naked stranger perched on a ribbon of tightrope strung between interior posts.

  “Excuse me,” she said, trundling her luggage in behind her. “Hi, hello. Who are you?”

  The girl dropped lightly to the floor and turned down—well, apparently the soundtrack to some poor toy factory’s demolition.

  “Sorry?”

  “No, nothing,” Hara said. “Just, oh, out of curiosity, what on earth are you doing in my house?”

  The girl smiled—as if this were funny, as if she were often surprised, in no more than panties, in the midst of some aerial trespass.

  “So … my parents have this place for the week.”

  “Have this place…” Hara tested the phrase. “Hmm, see the thing is I own this place, and I’m not in the habit of letting it to the parents of circus performers.” The brightness in the girl’s eyes made Hara sleepy. “Don’t tell me they know Zeke.”

  “Zeke…” The girl shook her head. “Something about a charity auction?”

  Hara found she was staring at the girl’s nipples, tiny shallow cones nearly the color of her skin. She had tattoos running across her body too, garish colorful things that were actually rather pretty. She might have been sixteen or twenty-five. Hara hadn’t the slightest idea how old young people were.

  “I’d love it if you put a shirt on,” she said.

  In the study, waiting for Zeke to pick up, she looked out at the ocean. In the dark it was no more than a suggestive absence, an unbroken pane of black beginning where the dock frame showed in a glimmer of light from the house. Of course Zeke would find a way to spoil even this for her.

  “Zeke, how are you,” she said when she heard his voice. “So, funny thing—you’ll like this—there’s a girl in my house.”

  She heard shuffling, a word spoken to someone, then Zeke came back on. “Who is this?”

  “Zeke.”

  “There’s a girl … in your house. Well, these things happen, don’t they. Did you invite her, by chance?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. You’ve hit on just the crux of the thing.”

  “Ah, I see. You mean there’s a girl in the cottage, our cottage, the one we both own. Well, look, it was whoever won the auction. I didn’t know it would be a girl.”

  “Oh fuck you, that’s not the point. You know that’s not the point.”

  “It was for a good cause, if that helps. Children with rabies or something.”

  “You are such an exceptional asshole, do you know?”

  “Just think, think of all the little kiddies who won’t be running around, foaming at their tiny mouths…”

  Hara closed her eyes. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to pound Zeke’s face until she heard bone crack. It was simply maddening how since going ahead with the divorce they had been getting on so well, the way they had at first, years before. They went to coffee and sometimes even an early dinner after meeting with the lawyers, like perennial rivals putting a hard-fought match behind them. And that’s what it was, a game, a farce. Everything with Zeke turned into a sort of game. Hara didn’t even want his shit, very little of it anyhow. But she wanted the cottage, there was that.

  “I can see everyone thinks this is a riot,” she said, “but I’d remind you I’m a licensed attorney. I have no problem evicting Joan Baez.”

  “Joan Baez? Hara, you lost me. But look, there’s paperwork, I’ll have Cliff send it up tomorrow. And in the meantime you have a new friend, who sounds fun.”

  But by the time the papers arrived the next day (lupus, of all things, Hara knew Zeke did not give two shits about lupus) she had decided that maybe she liked the sylphlike girl with her ridiculous name. Maybe she liked having someone around. She always ended up glad for company, even when she felt herself most eager to be alone. And Lyric had a serenity about her that was, well, lovely. An irrational part of Hara entertained the notion that Zeke might have done this for and to her. It didn’t really matter. She kept from probing the arrangement. Happiness was fragile. You named a happiness to doom it. So she bit her tongue, glancing only obliquely to confirm it was there, still there, and still the next day and the next … and so on and perhaps forever if not for Robert.

  * * *

  The day Lyric returned from town with the news she’d met someone, Hara had been busy watching leaves knock about and fall off the trees.

  “It was so funny,” Lyric said. “I asked this guy at the market where I could find something and he didn’t hear me. So I said, ‘Hey, hello, can you understand me?’ and he turned around real casually and just goes, ‘Probably not.’” She followed Hara’s gaze up into the trees. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “Funny,” Hara said experimentally.

  “Oh, and I invited him to dinner. I hope that’s all right.”

  What was Hara going to say? No? She leaned back in her chair and watched Lyric carry the groceries into the house. “Crazy girl,” she murmured, feeling just a pang of envy for the girl’s perfect ease, her way of making herself at home wherever she was.

  What granted a person that capacity? Yes, Lyric’s childhood had been a bohemian mess of, well, money, it seemed, and a kind of inspired heedlessness to round things out. To hear her describe the years she and her siblings had spent under the care of their erratic mother you might think most children moved between communes and expatriate villas, rubbing shoulders with artists and the occasional criminal element, that a certain brand of chic international vagrancy were available to anyone. Hara could all but feel what Lyric left out, the rain-soaked nothing afternoons, the endless downtime of childhood, homework, the necessity of eating, and so on, and still, told in this manner, as outlandish trivia decontextualized for the sake of wonder, the girl’s life seemed otherworldly, as though for her very ingenuousness the treasures of strange accident she blithely enumerated could only flash in the light of your own astonishment.

  What a funny thing talking to this girl! Hara worked a puzzle piece into the border and a tree, given a trunk, came to life. She had her stories too, of course. Maybe less incredible than Lyric’s, but she could tell them how she liked. In the kayaks paddling out to the islands Hara told Lyric how when she and Zeke camped there, summers, they played a game called “sex tag,” stripping to boots and chasing each other across the rocky forested terrain. She felt aroused just recalling it, the peculiar sexiness of nudity above boots; Zeke’s cock flopping about as he ran, like a bodily afterthought; how, caught, she might feel the soft, rough birch bark against her cheek, holding a tree to steady herself, or how she might squat over Zeke in the moss and feel the floral life in the air on every inch of her. And then naked and lit in the alpenglow of fucking, as they waved to passing sailboats from the rock beach, how sure Hara had been that of the lives of women and men hers was among the free.

  But anything could be a prison, it turned out, perhaps most of all the notion that you were free. And once you started to believe in the idea of your life, well, the filaments of a cage had already begun to lattice themselves about you, hadn’t they?

  “But what do you believe?” she asked Lyric.

  “Hmm? What do I believe about what?”

  Their kayaks were close and Lyric dipped her oar gently in the water as the brightening day carried skeins of mist up from the ocean.

  “Do you see your life as a project?”

  Lyric laughed. “God, wouldn’t I be in trouble if I did?”

  “But what then?” Hara persisted. “Atomic chaos?”

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. This, for now?” She gestured with her paddle. The water was vitreous before them in the stillness, as though setting back into a pale solid—nacre, white opal, shell.

  At the island they pulled their kayaks onto the pebble beach.

  “But you’re rather a free spirit, are
n’t you?” Hara said.

  “Why am I the weird thing?” Lyric said. “What are other people? Unfree?”

  “Yes. As a matter of course.” The haze was clearing. The silver sleeve of ocean ran from the fringes of brindled rock to the distant line where it vanished.

  “Then I think everyone should be a free spirit,” Lyric said.

  Hara laughed. “That does sound nice. When you’re older, though, it seems more like a question of having or not having insurance.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “Oh, wow. Thanks.”

  And Hara was about to say yes, but not all moments were like this, not seizures of the day’s latent glory but the dull, poor labor we did to permit moments of grace, though maybe that was a tired point, wasn’t it, and arguing with Lyric was to pretend she had access to some higher knowledge, which of course she didn’t. But Lyric was undressing, Hara saw, her jacket and sweatshirt, her pants, her undershirt, her bra. She slipped off her underwear and stepped back into her boots, and there she was—not an object of desire so much as a torrential immediacy, shallow nipples, pale skin, fawn ravel at her crotch. The wind caught her hair and blew it as thin as silken wheat. She gave Hara a smirk, her flamelike body reveled in tattoos flickering in the wind, and she was off into the woods.

  * * *

  It was that night Robert came to dinner. He arrived, rudely, on time, just a few minutes after seven and before Hara even had a chance to finish her first drink. He had his dog, Banjo, with him and a bag of clams.

  “Thank you,” Hara said. “Am I supposed to know what to do with these?”

  He gave her a look she had encountered before in the town. The look, perhaps, of boys dead set on being men. He hung up his coat, took the clams from her, and put them in the sink to wash. Lyric had flitted off somewhere of course—Hara could have strangled her—and now Banjo, after sniffing around the edge for a minute, was attempting to choke down the tasseling on the living room rug.