Prodigals (3 page)

Our friend the ranger was waiting for us at the gate, and this time we approached him with an air of triumph, as though he had doubted our resolve, but we had persevered and now things would be different.

“Hey,” we said.

“Hello,” he said, perhaps smiling a little.

We looked at one another for a minute.

“Trail's closed,” he said. “Closes early today, on account of the holiday.”

“Oh, come
on
,” Eli said. “You realize we've been here every day this week.”

The ranger actually had his hands on his hips, as if posing for a catalogue. The olive-green uniform hung on him so perfectly that I wondered whether he wasn't perhaps the fit model for the entire clothing line.

“Park reopens January second,” he said. “Eight a.m. sharp.”

“Is it because we're Jews?” Marta said.

The ranger's gaze, emerging from his tan and handsomely creased face, cast out to the distant escarpments on the far side of the valley.

“Same rules for everyone,” he said.

“What if we hike really fast?” said Marta. “You just let that woman with a walker in. We're definitely going to be faster than her.”

“Hike takes one hour, thirty minutes. We lock the gate in one hour, twenty minutes. You do the math.”

“I feel like you're not getting my point,” Marta said.

“Same rules for everyone,” he repeated.

“What is this,
Brown versus Board of Education
?” Marta said under her breath.

“Your hike is a piece of shit,” Eli informed the ranger.

“You can always hike the Sagebrush Trail,” he said, pointing vaguely to a boulder-strewn slope in the distance that seemed to rise, precipitously, toward nothing.

“And the Sagebrush Trail has a waterfall?” I said.

“Ha, ha. No.”

“Such bullshit,” Marta said, laughing lightly, such warm placid annoyance in her tone that it seemed to me suddenly a master class in the management of emotions in a public capacity, the decoupling of an emotion's expression from its affective consequences. And it came to me then, as we hiked the Sagebrush Trail, just how public most people's lives were and how
un
public mine was, how unsuited to public acquittal I had become in this modern world of ours, this world of glass fires, where flames hovered over drifts of glass, playing on the idea that a fire consumes some fuel beneath.

We hiked the Sagebrush Trail until boredom overtook us. It seemed not to go anyplace or end, and at the top of a ridge, where we finally stopped, a Hasid in black robes stared out across the Coachella Valley, past the lush plot of Palm Springs, which sat in the dun funnel of mountains like a piece of sod on a field of dirt. I wondered what it would take to imagine my way into his mind. I tried to look out at the scene through his eyes and couldn't. I could only see it through my eyes: the grid of roads, the golf courses twined round their fancy houses, the brassy glow of the sun catching on the mountain faces to the south, the lights of convenience stores blinking on in the dusk. Another mellow California evening, where the idea of Sémillon and a cigarette in the velour air seemed a kind of permission—to be cosmically insignificant, maybe—an evening as lovely and forgiving as longing, as the line where we saw the shadow of the mountains end several miles to the east. I touched Lily to see if she felt it too.

*   *   *

Our steaks—the steaks we ate that night—had been cows that had eaten Lord knows how much grain, grain farmed using heavy machinery and fertilizer and then shipped on trucks, cows that had produced Lord knows how much waste and methane before they were slaughtered, before they were butchered and shipped to us on different trucks. It was a very special dinner, courtesy of the Maldives, Bangladesh, Venice. We were each supposed to say something, something meaningful or thankful, I suppose, that would begin to repay our debt to the cows and the people of Sumatra. I wanted to read a poem that had recently moved me. I had been trying to read it every night, as a prelude to dinner or a coda to dinner, but things kept getting in the way. The mood, for instance. It wasn't a very poem-y poem, but it was a poem, and I guess it had that against it. Still, it was funny and affecting, and I saw it as a moral Trojan horse, a coy and subtle rebuke to everything that was going on, which would, in the manner of all great art, make its case through no more than the appeal and persuasiveness of its sensibility. The others would hear it and sit there dumbfounded, I imagined, amazed at the shallowness of their lives, their capacity nonetheless to
apprehend
the sublime, and the fact that I had chosen a life in which I regularly made contact with this mood. Don't get me wrong. I didn't expect this state to last more than a minute. But the poem had become meaningful to me as I felt increasingly stifled, or stymied, or
something
, and I was about to read it when dinner was very suddenly ready, and then when dinner was over dessert appeared, and then there were post-dinner cigarettes, and then we got a call that our cabs were on the way and we had to hurry to clear the table so that we could all do a few lines before the party. We crushed the coke into still finer powder and spread it, thin and beautiful, on the glass coffee table. And by the time we were packed into two cabs any memory that I had been about to read a poem, or that poetry was a thing that existed, had vanished.

Eli had done a line or two himself and I could feel him growing tense in the way he did, which I had come to know years before when we were roommates in college. It was the tenseness of someone who gets almost everything he wants very easily actually wanting something he's not sure he can get. The thing Eli wanted, most proximately, was Wagner, who we'd heard was at the party to which we were en route, and yes, Eli wanted Wagner's money, wanted the financing so that his film about Albert O. Hirschman could be made and play the festival circuit and make a bid to be picked up by Focus or Searchlight or whatever, but more than that, I think, Eli wanted to know he could bag a fish as big as Wagner. To try to get his mind off things, I asked who he liked in the Cotton Bowl, but he must not have heard me because he said, “It's all the fucking drugs. Drink some water when we get there,” and then I realized that we were shouting across six people from opposite ends of a taxi minivan.

By the time we got to the party I was compulsively, twitchily, taking hard sniffs through my nose. At the door we were greeted by a contingent of bashful children in party hats who blew party horns and kazoos at us. I crouched down, taking one of the horns, and said something like “Now-aren't-these-fun-and-who-are-you-don't-you-look-pretty-where's-the-bar?” and as I settled on the last word and realized I had addressed it to a six-year-old, it came to me that I probably shouldn't talk to children for a while. They ran off, in any case, for their own whimsical reasons (I told myself), and I went to the kitchen and poured half a bottle of Aperol into a Solo cup because—well, let's assume I had a reason at the time. I didn't know anyone, but I was feeling pretty great when Eli came over to me and whispered in my ear.

“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.”