Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

“The reason you’re here,” Wagner said, “is that you already have the nice cars”—I didn’t, but I went along with the spirit of his admonition—“and girlfriends with that taut skin, and decent rentals in the hills. Or maybe you own?” He looked at us doubtfully. “But you don’t have the good stuff, do you, the really hard-to-come-by shit? You know what I’m talking about: Envy . Grade-A, un-stepped-on, Augusta-green … Serious, irrefutable reasons for people to envy you. And not just any sort of people of course. You need people well enough informed to understand just how enviable you are. And people clever enough to know how to show their envy without being sycophants. And worldly enough to be charming company while they’re envying you … You need courtiers , see? And right now you are courtiers, that’s why we pay you shit to hang around us. But if you play your cards right, one day you’ll have your own. Oh, they’re better and worse than friends. They don’t care about you, sure, but they understand the terms of your success far better than a friend ever could. And so at last, when you forget why you did the shit you did, all you have to do is look at their greedy, envious, unlined faces and say, Ah, yes. That’s why.”

He stared out the sliding glass doors for a minute while Sonia cracked walnuts on a teak coffee table with the blunt end of a bowie knife, then he continued more softly. “And here’s the really fucked-up thing,” he said. “When you’ve bloated yourself on all the envy a person can take and you’re still not satisfied, you’ll see there’s only one place left to go. You have everything that can be bought, all the blow jobs the people who covet your power can give, but what you don’t have, you’ll see, is pain . And that’s where Sonia comes in. Sure, I pay her. But she would hate me just as much if I didn’t. And that’s real.” He sipped his drink contemplatively. “It’s the realest thing in the world.”

He shook his head, as though to clear the cobwebs of this sentimentality, and it must have worked because he started again in a livelier tone. “It reminds me of when Nietzsche and I had our falling-out.”

“Wait,” I said. “Hold on. You’re the real Wagner?”

He looked at me with what I think was hatred. “There is really something wrong with your friend,” he said to Eli. “Of course I’m not the real Wagner. How much fucking blow did you do? I’m talking about David Nietzsche. The exec over at Iscariot?”

Well, I’m not going to dwell on this chapter of the night any longer. We got out as soon as we could. Sonia was bending Wagner over the Louis XV when we left. The change of year, we discovered, had come and gone; we had missed the countdown and the kisses. Marta put a silly hat on Eli, and Lily kissed me pretty chastely. I won’t bore you with the rest: the long unaccountable conversation I had about Gaelic football in which I confused Michael Collins with Charles Parnell, or buying more coke in a bathroom at the Ace, or skinny-dipping at the Ace and getting kicked out, or sneaking back in and waking up among patio furniture, cuddling a metal vase full of flowers, or a strange interaction with someone who seemed to say “Lick my nipple” and “Hey, what are you doing?” in quick succession, though that may have been a dream, or the ghost of Bing Crosby saying something in my ear like, “You’re a real prince of a guy, always were, always will be,” and me saying something back like, “Bing, you always knew what time of day it was,” and then I tried to pet a cactus, which— bad idea , and finally I found Lily asleep in the faux ship-rigging of a window arrangement, and after a while, when I got her untangled, we walked home, her tripping in high heels, me carrying a bag that turned out not to be hers (or a bag), then later carrying her, then climbing a wall to fetch her shoes after she threw them, in either joy or rage, into the koi pond of a meditation center.

At home we each peed while the other showered. Lily removed her contacts while I kissed her shoulders, then she applied three different lotions to her face.

When we finally lay down I said, “Look, we’re here, we’re happy, it’s a new year, let’s just…”

Lily sat up partway and looked at me. Her blemish-free face looked tired and sober all of a sudden, a bit how I picture the Greek Fates when I picture them — handsome, pristine, sadly knowing. “The thing is,” Lily said, “we could and I’m sure it would feel good. And it’s not like sex is any big deal. But we’re old enough now to know some things, to know what happens next, to know that we have sex and then we text and e-mail for a bit, and then you come visit me or I come visit you, and we start to get a little excited and talk about the thing to our friends, and then we get a little bored because our friends don’t really care, and we remember that we live in different places and think, Who the fuck are we kidding? and then we realize that we were always just a little bored, and the e-mails and text messages taper off, and the one of us who’s a bit more invested feels hurt and starts giving the whole thing more weight than it deserves — because these things become referendums on our lives, right? — and so we drift apart and the thought of the other person arouses a slight bitterness or guilt, depending on who’s who at this point, and when the topic of the other person comes up, we grit our teeth and say, ‘Yeah, I know him,’ or, ‘Yeah, I know her’—and all that for a few fucks that aren’t even very good because we’re drunk and hardly know each other and aren’t all that into it anyway.”

“We could get married,” I said.

“Don’t be cute,” Lily said. “I like you better when you’re not cute.”

I may have looked a little hurt because she said, “Hey, but don’t feel bad. I really like you. I don’t want you to feel rejected, that’s not what this is.”

Really? It wasn’t? Well, yes and no. She didn’t want me to feel rejected, but she did want to reject me. Still, Lily’s reasoning was very sensible, and she was right that I was bored, I am often bored, and I felt a strange relief and, behind the relief, a faint sadness. It was sadness about a lot of things, but perhaps, most simply stated, it was regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes.

I left Lily’s room and walked right into Eli and Marta’s because I thought I should tell Eli what I had just understood, him being a screenwriter and all — that our lives had become scripts, that love had become a three-act formula worthy of Robert McKee — but then I saw that he and Marta were going at it, Eli fucking her from behind while they watched themselves in the mirrored doors of the wall closet. When they saw me they paused mid-thrust, and I said, “Oh, God, sorry,” and Marta blinked and said, “It’s fine, sweetie,” and Eli kind of surreptitiously finished the suspended thrust and said, “Yeah, no biggie. What’s up?”

* * *

We all felt amazingly good the next day. This seemed remarkable considering the night’s program, but it’s the truth. The coke had somehow burned off whatever residue encrusts on you throughout the year — free radicals, shame? We felt unashamed. We were done auditioning for one another and could now be friends, or not-friends, but ourselves. I speak for everyone. That’s what you get to do when you’re telling the story.

And here’s a model for a modern story: A prince met a princess but they both agreed they were too busy to explore a meaningful relationship.

Everyone lived not unhappily after.

The end.

But this story doesn’t end quite yet.