That’s how it feels. Amy pokes the olives in her drink with the little spear. It’s so strange going home, she says. Everything’s so different. Everyone. How is her family? They’re good, she says. Her sister had a baby. Her mom started a small business arranging flowers. Her father’s teaching Greek and Hebrew at the college, if I can believe it.
Well, yes, I can, even if it is nonetheless strange to consider the accidents of history that lead to a man like Pastor Bob, in a town like ours, running his hands daily through the sands of those ancient worlds. But it is really the absence of strangeness in people’s lives that with each passing year I have come to suspect. And accident must only be the wide-angle view besides, because here is Amy, and here am I, and it is so easy to pick up after all these years that we cannot be accidents or self-creations, the people we are. For an instant I feel the plunging acceptance of having been there from the beginning, witness to the earnest stupidity of every mistake, of being able to travel back along the violent current of life to the days when as small girls our bare feet slapped the lush, moist earth, when the sound of choirs were ribbons plaiting the air, and on damp tended lawns the voices of adults carried over, the very timbre of what was knowable and known. We remember things differently according to our purposes, of course. When my mother reminded me how as a child I liked to undress and break apart my dolls, she said it like it explained something primal and forbidding in my nature.
It’s why I’m a serial killer, Ma.
I could have been more maternal, she says.
Amy wears pearl earrings, wool pants, a cream halter under a black cardigan. Her hair has lost its oxbow curls. Lord knows what she does to stay so thin. But it is less these things, I see, than that she appears to belong here now, flying off on a Tuesday with these businessmen and businesswomen. She is in business, she tells me. She works for a textbook publisher and lives in New York. With her partner of two years. She is happy. Life is quiet, manageable.
I thought you were a revolutionary, I say.
She sips her drink. Well, I still think we’re fucked if that’s what you mean.
No, it isn’t.
What then do I want her to say? What happened, I suppose. I want her to tell me what happened.
Life, she says. Exhaustion. I don’t know.
Not good enough.
Love?
Please.
I wanted to be happy, Jesse. Isn’t that awful? Isn’t that just awful? I wanted my little happiness, like everyone, and Sundays to read.
But it isn’t happiness for which she needs to apologize. It isn’t even an apology she’s on the hook for. The mood comes to me unbidden, the resurrection of old roles. I’ve had enough, it seems — two bourbons on an empty stomach — not to care much what I say. That sunburnt feeling is moving inside of me, like light breaking in double time over the crops.
So you’re happy, I say. And less tired. And in love.
Yes, she says. I am exactly those things.
And what I would ask her, if I could say it in a way that made any sense, is whether this is one more costume in the pageant or if it’s her.
In the stillness the airport noises rise up. Shoes ring against the polished floor. Outside, a plane takes off as soft and heavy as a dandelion’s seed head. Bye forever.
Amy has collected herself and changes tones. Did you tell me you were going to Germany? she’s saying. That sounds amazing. It’s going to be so fun. A lot better than going home. Ugh. I’m going for a while, actually, did I say? I got promoted and while we’re transitioning anyway I thought I’d take a little break. Three weeks. I mean, I won’t be home the whole time, but still— She pauses. Isn’t it strange how we do that? How we call it home after all these years?
But I’m only half listening. I’m thinking that were I to paint her in this moment I would have her in three-quarter view, looking down, wearing a look that shields her from me, a posture uneasy with the viewer’s gaze. That gestures at the things we can’t know from the outside, different angles on the impenetrable mapping its armor, nothing more. An écorché would be no help, of course, it is not a matter of anything material can touch. We must let the strange gods come and go. That light in Amy’s eyes. Faint doublings in lacquer and liquid. The black rimming shadows of a day that seems already the intimate of its own regrets. And it is not so simple anymore to say who is purer or more stubborn, but what I understand just then is that Amy is not happy, and has never been. She is fighting a battle. I am fighting it too.
Tanner’s Sisters
It had been two years since I’d last seen Tanner, when he called out of the blue to say he was back in town and wanted to get together. I was busy at the time. I’d just been made editor at the publishing house where I worked, and my girlfriend, Tess, and I had moved in together. It was a pleasant one-bedroom with a cutaway view of the river, and with everything going on I fancied myself in what we term, with equal parts self-satisfaction and error, a period of growth. Was it more than acquiescence, really? Gracious defeat? A sort of buying in or selling out? This line of thinking no doubt typifies someone with a child’s idea of purity, and maybe I am such a person, but at the time of Tanner’s return I was enjoying with some complacent satisfaction how my life looked to adult eyes. I did not want Tanner disrupting things, that is. We had never been such close friends, besides. But he was insistent and didn’t even sound put off when I suggested an evening two weeks later. That was when we met, in the early spring at an outdoor café, and that was when Tanner told me this remarkable story.
I had first come to know him because we had the same therapist, Dr. Kirithra, a moonfaced Jungian with a sad smile who worked out of a church in the East Seventies. Tanner was leaving one day just as I was ducking in, or perhaps the other way around, and we said the awkward hello you do at the shrink’s. It turned out later that he knew Travis and Clea, and my old friend Marilena — that Tanner knew everyone—and we met again at a dinner party and made a big joke of the whole thing at our expense. How typical, how neurotic, how this city. Tanner, loud, witty, and personable, struck me as exactly the sort of person who doesn’t need a shrink but gets one anyway, because he can, because it seems like what an interesting, theoretically tormented person does. He had a job at a reputable bank and he came from money too. He spent lavishly and indifferently. Everything he did had an air of worldly apathy about it, the sort that shelters under a melancholic idea of itself, and I mistrusted the seriousness of people like this and so kept Tanner at arm’s length.
But this is not to say he was without earnestness or charm. Tanner referred to his firm as “the well-represented conspiracy” and once memorably described their business model as “light-footprint imperialism.” He wasn’t dumb, he liked to talk this way, and if he didn’t quit his job for whatever truth lay behind his words he owned up to his complicity grandly. In the evening, after hours, when work got out and the long city night buzzed to life, you would find Tanner at gallery openings and literary events, dressed in the hip tatters of the set, trying to work Agamben and Deleuze into his small talk. I joked that he only slept at night secure in the notion that he was deepening the contradictions of capitalism, but what was truer, no doubt, was that it took a certain and ironic consequence before anyone much cared what you had to say about homo sacer or your own moral implication. Such are the true contradictions we drown in, like grapplers in the ocean at each other’s throats. Then, maybe a year after I met him, Tanner left his job to enroll in film school, and while I would hardly have called this a risky departure for Tanner, it did seem to validate some of the dreaminess and fitful integrity that had always appeared in him to swim just beneath the surface, fighting up for air.