Knowing Tanner as I had, then, when I saw him that night, sitting outside in the sweater weather of early April, it took me by surprise to find him looking a bit unkempt. His blond hair had grown out and darkened, a greasy mess atop hollow features. He seemed thin, his clothes hardly fit him. And although I had gotten to the café early, he was there when I arrived, fiddling with the silverware. I watched him for a minute before he spotted me. “Jonah,” he said when he had. He smiled, rising, extending a hand, and then in a rush of unexpected warmth he pulled me in for one of those one-armed hugs that pass for affection among men my age.
“Tanner,” I said, more stiffly than I meant to. His appearance set off a faint alarm in me. A subtle impression, I don’t mean to overstate it. He seemed distracted, unmoored. And yet if I am being fully honest, alongside this apprehension I felt the opposite, a quiet triumph at seeing Tanner like this, for he had always struck me as a person destined for a luck he hadn’t earned, the sort of person who inhabits the world so effortlessly that good fortune can’t help but attach to him, and because of this I had at times taken his life as a measuring stick against my own, which was by comparison the life of an outsider, someone without Tanner’s social grace or ease, without his ability to fold seamlessly into the currents around him. I felt vindicated seeing Tanner like this, even if knowing what I do now, having heard his story, it is a feeling I would rather disown. I am ashamed of it, and still, undeniably, it is what I felt.
“So,” I said, breaking under his gaze, “long time. I heard you’d left the country.”
“I did, I did,” he agreed. “I only just got back.”
“When was that?” I motioned to the waiter, who ignored us with a kind of élan.
“Oh, two or three weeks ago.” He waved away precision with a hand, as though weeks were hardly a thing to keep track of. “Look—” He smiled, suddenly self-conscious. “I hope this isn’t odd, my calling you, asking you to see me. It’s been forever, I know. My sense of what’s odd and normal is a bit off these days … But see, the thing is, you were my first thought when I got back. I thought, If anyone will understand what I’ve been through, it’s Jonah. I can’t say why. An intuition, I guess.”
Privately, at this point, I was thinking something along the lines of “Oh, great.” I am a person who has been taught to listen, to ask questions, and to respond appropriately. It is amazing how few people do any of these things, and I often feel, as a consequence, that my attention is taken advantage of. I didn’t think of Tanner as a particularly bad offender, but I assumed this was what he meant: that I of all people would sit there and listen to him.
Our waiter had finally come and taken our order with — what else to call it? — stoic disgust. I asked for a Carménère and Tanner said, “Make it a bottle,” waving away my objection and assuring me that he was buying. “Thank you,” I said, meaning surely something closer to the opposite and wondering a bit vertiginously what we had to discuss that would take us an entire bottle.
“Well, here I am,” I said. “You’ve got me.”
“Got you…,” Tanner said vaguely, but it appeared to be the prompting he needed, because he asked me then whether I was reasonably au fait with his time in film school — his phrase — and I said yes, I supposed I was. “Well,” he said, “it turned out I was too restless to make films. You remember how I was, hardly able to sit still. I liked films. I had ideas. Who doesn’t, right? But you get the stray idea and think, Fuck, what an idea! I’m going to do this. And then you get down to it and it’s a shit-ton of work. And you’re on to the next idea before you’ve even roughed out the first. And pretty soon it dawns on you that everyone has ideas, and we’re all just jerking off, mourning the falsehoods of youth or whatever. Because we’ve all been taught, right, every last one of us, that we have some unique something to offer up to the world. But c’mon. Let’s be real.”
His eyes brightened as he spoke, the gleam, I thought, of restless people who find refuge in the moment, the exigency of its impermanence, if I can say that. And while I noted the dirt under his fingernails and the grease at his temples, building a case for my initial impression, in his words the old Tanner showed through, a person whose wry and crude honesty, I had always thought, betrayed a longing for things a bit nobler or more serious than he permitted himself.
Our wine had come, but Tanner seemed not to have noticed. “So what was I doing in film school?” he was saying. “I’ve asked myself quite a few times. Some people aren’t searching for anything, I think, but for the rest there’s an emptiness, isn’t there, and we’re all looking for things with that particular shape to fill it. Before I met Rhea I’m not sure I even recognized any — what do I mean to say? — lacuna. I thought I had things in hand, more or less. I thought a certain brand of, I don’t know, urbanity would see me through.”
I felt then, drinking my wine too quickly, a brief stab of recognition in my gut, the way you do on hearing someone begin a sentence and knowing instantly what he will say. I do not mean I anticipated Tanner’s words or point, exactly, but I could see certain lines of inquiry begin to braid, I felt an intimacy in the pattern, I understood, however reluctantly, why Tanner had sought me out — because without our quite saying it we do somehow communicate a receptivity, or else impatience, when it comes to matters of the spirit. Questions of the heart in crisis, dark nights of the soul — that sort of thing. I remembered at an exhibition once seeing Tanner turn from Bacon’s Pope Innocent X with a strange, faraway look in his eye. I had taken it for preoccupation at the time, but I wondered now whether I might not have had the true pretense in Tanner, the priority of his allegiance, backward from the beginning.
“Rhea?” I said, perhaps a bit weakly.
“Oh, yeah, right. Rhea. Rhea Magnusson. This girl in film school with me,” Tanner explained. “I didn’t know her at first. I’d seen her around and hadn’t paid her much mind. I didn’t find her pretty and she had this revolutionary-garb thing going that put me off. You know, patriarchy this, hegemony that. How utterly compromised we all are by Western culture. Not that it’s wrong, you know, just so fucking humorless, so exhausting. All those little right sentiments to offer up in worthless atonement for our dreary privilege … That’s the vibe I got anyway, and I kept my distance. Then we were assigned this project together — we had to make a short. Well, we met for coffee, and coffee turned into a walk, and the walk into dinner. I was spellbound. It wasn’t so much Rhea as the manner of our conversation. Its honesty. Its sweetness, even. I had her pegged all wrong. She had this quality — I’d never met someone quite like her before — it was like she’d never been exposed to a single idea. Not that she was stupid, not at all. But like every idea we stumbled on had the force of revelation, a kind of joy almost. I mean, can you imagine, coming from the world we do, what a — you know—baptism it is to be treated as a source of mystery and insight? I didn’t care if it was all a complicit delusion. Let’s pretend we’re special and all that. I didn’t care! By the end of the night Rhea had come to seem beautiful to me. And I don’t mean her soul was beautiful or some crap like that.”