Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

“Wagner’s here,” he said.

“Where?”

“Fuck if I know. This place is a catacomb.”

I asked whether we should go looking.

“In a minute,” he said. “Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.”

I followed him to one of the living room’s conversation pits — there were several — where we settled into the deep embrace of leather armchairs, resting our ankles on our knees, and had the following conversation while the seven or twelve other versions of us that appeared in the intricately mirrored wall had it too.

Me: So.

Eli ( after a beat ): Are people happy ?

M: Like, spiritually ? Like, which people?

E: Our friends, our group.

M: Like would Maslow—

E: Am I being a good host?

M: You’re making me sleep on an air mattress.

E: I’m serious.

M: It sort of deflates every—

E: Is there more I could be doing?

M: I’m not sure I know what we’re talking about. Are you happy?

E ( pausing for effect ): I am so happy.

M: Okay, now pretend you’re not on tons of coke.

E: It’s Marta, though. I mean, is this it? If we have kids, it’s going to change everything, her life more than mine. I just want her to feel like she’s done all the things she wanted to do.

M: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the way it works.

E: Meaning?

M: The bucket-list thing. I don’t buy it. There’s a hole in the bucket list!

E: What hole?

M: Life, tomorrow, the astonishing insufficiency of memory …

E: I don’t want her to have any regrets.

M: Jesus, don’t be insane. And look, it’s not like there’s some perfect moment of some perfect evening when you go: That . That was it. That was living, and it doesn’t get any better, and now I can die. Or have kids.

E ( a little peevishly ): I know.

I was pretty out of it, but still it wasn’t lost on me that what I had just denied the truth of was exactly the fantasy I had let myself entertain throughout the trip. And I felt, realizing this, neither wise nor duplicitous but tired — tired of all the things that were equally true and not true, which seemed to be just about everything right then.

“C’mon, let’s go find Marta and Lily,” Eli said, because we hadn’t seen them for a while and that could mean only one thing. And sure enough, in the third bathroom we checked, there was Lily speaking without punctuation, lining up lacy filaments of blow on the porcelain tank of the toilet, while Marta did smoothing or plumping things to her eyelashes that only girls understand. And somehow the four of us squeezed into that bathroom, which was the size of a telephone booth, and did our lines and got most of the excess into our teeth, and Eli scraped what was left very carefully over the beveled edge and into a bag the size of one Cheez-It.

The good feeling rose in me with the gentle inexorable certainty of a tide. “We’re going to go find Wagner,” Eli announced. And Lily and I looked at each other, or our eyes met in the wall of mirror before us, and we both made a motion to speak before realizing there was nothing we meant to say. And realizing this, we smiled, because maybe we weren’t in love, and maybe love is a chemical sickness anyway, one that blinds us to who the person we love really is, but we were committed to each other, committed somehow to forgiving each other every stupid, careless, needy, and unpleasant thing we did or said that week. And forgiveness is a kind of love, I think.

It didn’t take us long to find Wagner, although time had grown a bit fishy at this point. We scrabbled through doors and rooms — I don’t know why we checked so many closets — and when we got to the library a voice said, “Come in, come in,” as if it had been expecting us. The voice belonged to a man of perhaps seventy who was sitting low behind a desk, sipping from a snifter of what looked like corrupted urine and talking on a large phone that for an instant I took to be a kitten. He made such a striking figure that I almost missed the Amazonian woman standing to the side in a studded black leather bra and garters. I did a double take, but she didn’t seem to register my gaze, just looked off glassily with impassive disgust and worked the tassels on her riding crop like a rosary.

“Satellite,” Wagner said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Then: “Yeah, yeah, go fuck yourself, Fred. Ten a.m.”

“Mustique,” he said, putting the phone down, “I’m supposed to fly out tonight.”

“Frank,” Eli said and took a few larger-than-normal steps toward Wagner, putting out his hand and smiling like they were old war buddies.

“Do I know you?” Wagner said. “I don’t think I know you.”

Eli laughed his public laugh. “Eli. Eli Geller-Frucht,” he said. “I’m the writer on the Hirschman film. Philosopher’s Whetstone ? Actually that title sucks, but Marley Jones at Buzzard told me her people talked to your people, said you had a personal connection to the story. Tell me if I’m making this up. Your wife’s family? Right. So we’re thinking sort of a John Nash in The Good Shepherd thing, but without all the schizophrenia, of course, and David’s got this big fucking man-crush on Louis Malle, so we’re doing kind of an Au Revoir les Enfants open, very faithful to the spirit of Hirschman’s story, you know, but we think we can play up the Varian Fry angle—”

Wagner held up a hand as though in some vague pain. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I talked to David — no, not Levinson, Gould. Look, I’m on board. I don’t give a fuck about Hirschman, but my wife, Lydia? She won’t shut up about ‘Nana would have wanted to see her Albie as Zac Efron’ or whatever. It’s fucking ridiculous, but, well, you get to the point of certain understandings”—Wagner inclined his head to the half-dressed woman in the corner—“and so, yeah, you get the picture.” He put his hands on the desk and raised himself, and he must have been sitting in a comically small chair, because when he stood, far from being the wizened troll I’d come to imagine, he loomed over both of us, six-four easy, with an elegant and gawky grace.

“Here,” he said, “give me some of that blow you’re on and I’ll let you in on a secret.” Eli reached into his pocket without taking his eyes off Wagner and passed him the bag. The man looked at us like we had to be joking, then produced a two-inch piece of straw from the breast pocket of his jacket and snorted everything that was left, right from the plastic. He thumbed his nose and sniffed a few times, gave a small shrug of disdain, and settled, half sitting, on the front of the desk. “That coke sucks, but I’ll tell you anyway,” he said. “Here’s what I was going to say: Stop giving a shit.”

We blinked at him. “What do you mean?” I said. I love that you can ask people what they mean right after they’ve said the most obvious things and almost invariably they’ll think they are the ones who’ve failed to be clear and go to elaborate lengths to make themselves understood.

Wagner looked at me, then turned to Eli. “Is your friend retarded?” he said. “What I mean is, look, if you care about something, like horses, go raise horses. Go ride them and fuck them, or whatever people do with horses. Sell them to Arabs, I’d guess. But if you’re going to stay in this crappy business, and they’re all crappy, stop giving a shit. Because you’re here for one reason and you should know what that reason is. Do you?”

He looked from one of us to the other, then barked “Sonia!” and we jumped, but Sonia didn’t. She just walked over and spanked us each insanely hard on the ass with the riding crop.