“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.