What had happened is this, it’s very simple. After years of being to friends and family a writer in no more than name — indulged, in the best-case scenario, as a romantic layabout — I had begun publishing work and as a consequence I’d sold a book. Two books, in fact — it looked like I might make a go of it. I was by no means moneyed; it was not an immoderate amount of success, but it was enough given the fecklessness and apparent neoteny of my life before, enough to rob me of the ritual dissatisfaction and single-minded struggle that had been my story, and in a way my comfort, enough for the people in my life to begin treating me oddly, tentatively, or so I felt, like I were a lunatic man living on an island of bridges, carrying dynamite with him everywhere, enough that my grandfather in our phone chats had taken to saying, “I start to think it was all worth it,” where the respective “it”s seemed to refer (troublingly) to his life and (hyperbolically) to this business of living. So in a thought no doubt as perverse as it was self-important, in addition to everything else, I feared that I might have given my grandfather permission to die.
After wandering the wedding grounds the next morning and settling on a small dock by the pond, I did call Misty.
“So now you’re famous,” she said by way of answering.
“I’m not famous.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Caterers dressed in black hurried across the lawn behind me, arranging champagne flutes in neat formations on card tables draped in cream-colored cloths.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” I said. “Are you there?”
“I was already there. It’s called ‘here’ where I am.”
“What happened to grad school?” I said. “Actually, never mind.”
Misty was Cynthia’s daughter, my favorite cousin. Although we had traditionally kept track of each other’s goings-on, in recent years we’d drifted into the drab adult preoccupation of paying rent and fallen out of touch. Or maybe I just mean that I had. I’d lost track, at any rate, of just how many master’s programs she’d abandoned and what it was, again, she’d left art school for. Urban planning, I thought.
“The question is,” she said, “where are you?”
“I’m at a wedding.”
“And geographically?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Of course I did know, or I knew where I would catch the red-eye from that night, but not knowing seemed closer to the way I felt.
“Are you on drugs?” Misty said. “Don’t start doing drugs just because you’re still a fuck-up but can afford them now.”
“I think I did meth the other day by accident.” I said this a bit distractedly, the noises and movements of the pond, the burble and chatter of water and insects, briefly claiming my attention. A turtle stretched its head into the chalky summer air.
“Only you.” I could all but hear her shaking her head and it made me miss her.
“I was with Gabrielle. I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“Hurry up. There are bats everywhere.”
“Bats?” I said, but Misty had hung up.
The wedding was very pretty and sweet. I watched, standing off to the side, beset by a sun that seemed to want a confession from me. I tried to stay in the moment, a moment that was rightly not my own, tried not to worry about what time it was or whether the cab would find me so many miles from the city: whether I would make my flight. The groom was a college buddy. We hadn’t seen much of each other since he’d moved to the West Coast, and now we wouldn’t have even this. I was a ghost, a visible form that would come and go without explaining its presence; and as I watched the couple kiss to seal their undying love, at least a stirring faith in it, as I understood just how different my day’s narrative was from my old friend’s, a sense of my ineluctable subjectivity came over me, a sense I had been on increasingly intimate terms with that summer, a vertigo of disconnection. It didn’t help, good fortune aside, that my life stretched before me with little more than routine and new worries to enliven it, as though I were the medium of my success rather than its claimant. I saw my friend deplaning on some South Pacific island with his bride and embarking on the adventure of mutual life — and I was jealous. Not of his love so much as the novelty of this togetherness. I was stuck, it seemed, at the opposite pole of human experience, for in feeling estranged from the world around me I had ceased to believe myself quite a thing placed inside it. The spheres, inner and outer, had come unnested.
I thought about Gabrielle on the flight east, trying for a time to represent the long years of our friendship and our closeness, our conversation, and the delight we took in each other as a patterning of love as yet misunderstood, as yet unrecognized by the two of us, as though that sense of comfort, of someone getting you and you her, that sense of home, were love in all its modest glory and the rest we asked of it no more than the bullwhip of hormones, the gluttony of surfeit. She was one of my oldest friends. We had known each other half our lives, the half that counts, and the precise quality of our time together took something meaningful from the restraint we had shown in never dating or hooking up. She was an architect and she’d visited me a few weeks before on her way back from Rome. I’d been very glad she’d come. I wasn’t getting much done and I needed a better excuse. But I was also just happy to see her. We had that rare capacity for mudita, I think it’s called, the ability to take unadulterated pleasure in each other’s triumphs, when with so many people, it seems, the unreserved love you want demands that you come to them in weakness, offering up that weakness in your hands. Something profound and harrowing had also happened during Gaby’s visit, and no doubt sharing this, and then experiencing a deep aloneness after she left, had muddled my feelings. And still in my bones I knew that what I wanted from love right then was answers, and love is not in the business of answers.
There was another flight and a long ride in a hired car and then a ferry crossing before I saw Misty at the terminal, leaning against the dock’s weathered wood and smoking a cigarette while she waited. She didn’t move or wave as I walked over to her. Our eyes merely met, and I smiled at the struck pose, which was her way of joking and of telling me we would always pick up just where we’d left off.
“You missed it,” she said when we’d hugged.
My heart skipped a beat. “Missed what?”
She tossed her cigarette in the ocean. “Game night last night. I taught everyone Celebrity.”
“Jesus, Misty.” I threw my bags in the backseat. The fishing boats in the cove shimmied in an echo of the ferry’s wake. “How’s the old guy doing?”
“Better, we think.” She started the Subaru, gunning the engine needlessly. “He’s quoting poetry — in Latin.”