It had been two years since I’d last seen Tanner, when he called out of the blue to say he was back in town and wanted to get together. I was busy at the time. I’d just been made editor at the publishing house where I worked, and my girlfriend, Tess, and I had moved in together. It was a pleasant one-bedroom with a cutaway view of the river, and with everything going on I fancied myself in what we term, with equal parts self-satisfaction and error, a period of growth. Was it more than acquiescence, really? Gracious defeat? A sort of buying in or selling out? This line of thinking no doubt typifies someone with a child’s idea of purity, and maybe I am such a person, but at the time of Tanner’s return I was enjoying with some complacent satisfaction how my life looked to adult eyes. I did not want Tanner disrupting things, that is. We had never been such close friends, besides. But he was insistent and didn’t even sound put off when I suggested an evening two weeks later. That was when we met, in the early spring at an outdoor café, and that was when Tanner told me this remarkable story.
I had first come to know him because we had the same therapist, Dr. Kirithra, a moonfaced Jungian with a sad smile who worked out of a church in the East Seventies. Tanner was leaving one day just as I was ducking in, or perhaps the other way around, and we said the awkward hello you do at the shrink’s. It turned out later that he knew Travis and Clea, and my old friend Marilena—that Tanner knew everyone—and we met again at a dinner party and made a big joke of the whole thing at our expense. How typical, how neurotic, how this city. Tanner, loud, witty, and personable, struck me as exactly the sort of person who doesn’t need a shrink but gets one anyway, because he can, because it seems like what an interesting, theoretically tormented person does. He had a job at a reputable bank and he came from money too. He spent lavishly and indifferently. Everything he did had an air of worldly apathy about it, the sort that shelters under a melancholic idea of itself, and I mistrusted the seriousness of people like this and so kept Tanner at arm’s length.
But this is not to say he was without earnestness or charm. Tanner referred to his firm as “the well-represented conspiracy” and once memorably described their business model as “light-footprint imperialism.” He wasn’t dumb, he liked to talk this way, and if he didn’t quit his job for whatever truth lay behind his words he owned up to his complicity grandly. In the evening, after hours, when work got out and the long city night buzzed to life, you would find Tanner at gallery openings and literary events, dressed in the hip tatters of the set, trying to work Agamben and Deleuze into his small talk. I joked that he only slept at night secure in the notion that he was deepening the contradictions of capitalism, but what was truer, no doubt, was that it took a certain and ironic consequence before anyone much cared what you had to say about homo sacer or your own moral implication. Such are the true contradictions we drown in, like grapplers in the ocean at each other’s throats. Then, maybe a year after I met him, Tanner left his job to enroll in film school, and while I would hardly have called this a risky departure for Tanner, it did seem to validate some of the dreaminess and fitful integrity that had always appeared in him to swim just beneath the surface, fighting up for air.
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.”
They made the short, Tanner told me. It was Rhea’s story. She had it all worked out the next time they met: script, actors, shooting locations. The plot was incoherent—this was my impression—something tiresome and postmodern about an architect who designs the world’s most beautiful skyscraper, or so some magazine calls it, finds he can’t handle the success, and begins wandering the city at night. Later he’s unable to locate his apartment building, or finds it’s been destroyed—this isn’t clear—and he winds up at the harbor, where a ship is waiting for him. He boards the ship, which soon departs for lands unknown. Tanner described the final shot in unnecessary detail (I’m skipping over a great deal) and said “To black” loudly, chopping a hand down to end the scene. He took a sip of wine, his first, and I said something uninspired about exile and anonymity.
“No, no.” He waved me off. “Don’t get the impression I think this is some great film. It’s just … Rhea. She had an actor ready to play the architect, a ship lined up for us to film on. We got the project on, like, a Tuesday and by Thursday she was ready to shoot. You can’t believe what an amazing person she is. I was just starting to realize it myself. She knew people everywhere, had friends all over town. People willing, eager, to do her favors. I thought it was a put-on, this—what do I mean?—innocence, this blithe … capability. So I introduced her to a few friends, Reece and Scooby, you know, people so oppressively hip there are about four square blocks in the world where they can exist, and she just melted them.” He shook his head. “You had to see it.”
This predictably annoyed me. So Tanner had a new girlfriend. Great. He would have a different one next week. And I was disposed against the curatorial approach to human beings, besides, strewing them about your life like oddments or knickknacks. This was Tanner’s bag if it was anyone’s, and people are not jokes or curiosities, not in my view anyway, although I don’t mean to say we are ever very good at investing ourselves in another person’s reality. That might be why, after all, I hadn’t realized that this was a different Tanner, why I still felt the need to bring him down a notch when I said, “Well, how did this Rhea wind up in film school? Where did she come from? Who was paying the bills?”
I sounded peevish to myself, I admit, brimming with the sort of pedantry I loathe at least as much as our mythologizing impulse. Tess has said that if we didn’t snag on ourselves from time to time she has no idea what a self really is, and I grant this notion a certain truth. It takes on a mise-en-abyme quality if you look at it too long, but yes, maybe there are times to forgive ourselves our inveterate pettinesses, those dead limbs of personality we’re always hoisting about into their awkward, casual poses.
“Oh, didn’t I say?” Tanner grinned. “But you’re the storyteller, after all.”
I wasn’t, I hadn’t been for many years, but Tanner had a charming faith, I think, that underneath everything we were all artists manqués. And maybe he was right, maybe the soil below the placid lawns of everyday life was always rich and black, rife with a chaos of growth and rot that called out for acknowledgment or cultivation. Nonetheless, I had done what I could to let the question alone, to tend the lawn, see the books bound, and gaze out from the safe distance of the museum floor. And now I could feel Tanner dragging me gently but insistently from the safety of this firm shore. I wasn’t even sure he knew.
“Rhea was Danish, see, or half Danish. Their mother was Chilean,” he said. “Rhea and her sister were born in Demark, then moved here as girls. Their father got some big fucking appointment. The Neue Galerie, I’m pretty sure it was. Arts administration. You should have seen their place: just off Lex, modern, minimalist, all white impenetrable surfaces, you know, but then Groszes and Kirchners on the wall. They had a Schiele too, I think.
“I first saw it when Rhea brought me by one afternoon. We were wandering around town and she needed to change. We were in her room. She didn’t send me out or ask if I minded, just started changing—her pants, her shirt—and almost out of habit, I guess, I went over and kissed her. She didn’t move away. She seemed to go along with the kiss, but when I pulled back, her look was ambiguous, something between surprise and amusement, like she didn’t know what I was doing or else knew so well that it amused her. The predictability of it maybe. But then I’m not sure Rhea expected or anticipated a single thing in her life. That was her charm. She took things as they were, without apparent judgment, so much so that it didn’t seem strange when we had sex right then and there. Or if anything was strange it was only the look of baffled amusement on her face, like I was taking her on a long detour and hadn’t told her the reason. Well, we finished, and I got dressed, and she got dressed, and as I left the room I turned to say something and almost walked right into a young woman sort of loitering where the hall turned.
“I collected myself enough to say hello. I’d thought we were alone, I don’t know why, and in any case the look the woman was giving me was—I don’t know. Horror? Disgust? Rhea came around from behind me, smiling.
“‘Elena,’ she said. ‘Tanner, this is my sister, Elena. Elena, Tanner.’
“‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, putting out a hand which she regarded briefly as if I’d offered her a piece of rotting fruit.
“Elena turned to Rhea. ‘I have to run down to the pharmacy.’
“‘Do you want Tanner to take you?’ Rhea asked.
“She looked me up and down with a more moderated disgust. ‘Fine,’ she said.
“Well, sometimes you don’t ask questions, you know. You want to think of yourself as someone who can say yes without asking why, who can take a break from living under the sovereignty of clear intentions, and this must have been one of those times because soon we were riding the elevator down together in silence. I was wondering how two sisters managed to look so unalike, Rhea with her sunken, strung-out mien, her messy gold hair, and Elena, very fresh looking, with drum-tight skin over wide, gently tented features, her jet-black hair cut short.
“I was on the verge of saying something dull to make conversation when Elena asked whether Rhea had told me about the time they ran away as girls. I said she hadn’t, no. ‘Well, we weren’t girls exactly,’ Elena said. ‘Teenagers, I suppose, or I was on the cusp. We used to summer way out on Long Island. “Land of the insufferables,” Rhea called it. It really was awful. Papa used to make us wear these little dresses and stand around at cocktail parties listening to adults act like the most enormous children. God, we hated it, smiling at these little factoids about ourselves that weren’t even true—“Elena just loves Satie!”—while old men sort of pawed at us. It gives me chills just … But anyway, this particular summer Rhea had befriended a fisherman she thought would ferry us to Block Island in the middle of the night.
“‘A ridiculous plan, but very Rhea if you know her. She’s been my sister my entire life and I don’t begin to, but she’s also the most amazing person I’ve ever met. Well, the day came. We packed a small duffel and struck out in the dead of night. Two small girls in flip-flops and shorts that didn’t reach mid-thigh. Can you imagine! It was a steamy night. We walked along Umbrella Beach, watching the waves roll in under the moon. Leave it to Rhea to read the lunar calendar and leave the rest to fate. Of course her friend never came. After waiting ages, we finally trekked back to town, where we found the streets covered in mist.
“‘I was so expecting it to happen, I saw later, expecting it while also not entertaining the possibility, that when the truck pulled over in front of us my first thought was that I was in a dream. Only a dream could so perfectly bring forth the object of an unconscious fear. But what I think now is that dreams may simply be preparation for those moments we have to float away from ourselves. A man got out of the truck, a thin man, not quite old, unshaven. Greasy. I remember him glistening in the faint light. He smiled at us, a sneering smile, and I glanced at Rhea, expecting to see my own dread mirrored on her face. I was shocked instead to find her smiling, a smile that today I would call coy but that then I experienced as a kind of annihilation. It’s difficult to explain … There was no place for me in that smile. “John,” she said. “Hello there, girlie,” the man said. He grinned and reached out his hand for Rhea’s, which she gave him, and he helped her up into the truck. He turned to me. “We want company?” he asked, at which point Rhea, in really the most bored voice you can imagine, said, “C’mon, I’m thirsty. Let’s go.”
“‘The man gave me a last look, laughed, and turned to leave. It was only once the truck had pulled away that I realized I’d peed myself—just everywhere, pee soaking my shorts, running down my leg … The night had turned cold and I was shivering as I started to walk, stumbling along. I felt, not terror, but something beyond terror, a numbness or stiffness—that even if the kindest stranger stopped I would be unable to speak. I had the sudden strange jealous thought, which I’ve never understood, that trucks would always stop for Rhea and never for me. I wanted—it’s an ugly feeling, but true—I wanted to be at one of Papa’s cocktail parties, to stand around and smile and have nothing to do. I thought this the whole way home, shivering. I will wear the prissy dresses, I thought. Anything you ask me to.
“‘I have never known how to act, you see. I lack the gift of pretense and am incapable of lying, even those little half-truths with which we affix a story to our lives. Papa says I can be literal-minded to the point of idiocy, and the next morning when they asked me where Rhea was I said I didn’t know. Which was true, but hardly comprehensive. I was terribly sick. God, was I sick. For weeks. I soaked through the bedding constantly. I had visions of my mother singing to me, stroking my hair. Only very gradually did I get better.
“‘One day, quite a while after, Rhea came into my room. I hadn’t seen her since the night we’d run away and I was surprised to find her looking so happy and well. She had a nasty-looking scar on her arm—quite long, perhaps you’ve seen it. I ran my finger over it, but I didn’t ask. Later she said to me, or maybe she said it in a dream, or who knows, but I’ve always connected the two things, she said, “Someone is always afraid. So just make sure it’s never you.” Honestly, there are days when I think an alien ship must have come down and put Rhea in Mother’s belly because any other explanation seems less likely.’
“We were in Duane Reade by then, paying for what Elena called ‘Mother’s pills.’ I walked her home and when we got there she said, ‘Here,’ took out a notecard and pen, and wrote her name and phone number against the wall of the building. ‘I don’t get out much,’ she said, ‘but you can call me.’
“Well, the weeks went by. I had coursework to do, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was following Rhea around. She was always heading off to neighborhoods I’d never been to, reading books to old women, running intake at free clinics, helping set up stalls for street fairs. I hung around like some mooning poet on the foreshore. I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew there was something essential here, something I had to keep exploring. Rhea and I were sleeping together, but it wasn’t love. No. I kept sleeping with her, I think, to reassure myself that I still could. I feared terribly that one day she would say we had to stop or say something crushingly banal like Where is this going? or Would you say we’re a couple now? but she never did.
“So I felt stable—just—felt perversely that this held me together when the rest of my life was fraying at the seams. A ludicrous feeling, this security, and if I’d known then who Rhea was I wouldn’t have managed it. Because of course I still believed, on some shadow level, that sex was a ritual of possession, a covenant, as insane as that is … And why Rhea? Your guess is as good as mine. I had never felt this compulsion about anything. I had been a person drifting across the surface of life without realizing that at some point you fall in. And Rhea was my plunge, I suppose. Maybe because she was my opposite—someone who didn’t believe life had any surface, for whom each person and every moment was an alluring depth. I don’t know. All I can say is that in her ingenuousness I saw, I felt I saw, that everything I had been before had been some fraction of a lie.
“Not long after, Rhea told me Elena was hurt that I never called. So I did. She had her own line and picked up every time at the end of the second ring. ‘Hello?’ she’d say, like it might be anyone calling. And she was never busy, never had to do something or get off the phone. She told me stories about her family, mostly, vaguely fantastical things set in Denmark, which I came to imagine full of bright painted buildings by the water, caught in the low, slanted light of suns that took all day to set.
“‘Mother and Papa should never have happened,’ she said. ‘They were like ridiculous proud beasts who encounter each other on a path: each is still waiting, I think, for the other to step aside. But then it’s also true that it was Papa’s foundation that brought Mother over from Chile. She was an artist, see—a good one, I don’t know. Papa says she hasn’t worked in all the time he’s known her, and what she did during her fellowship is a mystery to all. She stayed on in Copenhagen afterward, that we know.
“‘Papa would see her around, sitting in parks, staring out to sea. One day he went up to her and asked how she was and where she was staying. She shrugged, and to make himself clear, because they had only broken English in common, he said, “Where do you go at night?” She shook her head in incomprehension. “Where do you go?” she said.
“‘When he realized what she was saying he decided to take her in. I doubt he could have said why. Frankly, the idea of my parents even speaking to each other is beyond me, but somehow, over the weeks, a romance developed. They really couldn’t have been less alike. Papa was always ambitious, successful. Mother is like a lost creature from the spirit world. Nevertheless, in two months’ time, Papa had stopped showing up to work, quit his job, and the two moved to a cottage in the north overlooking the sea. To hear Papa tell it he spent the years up there writing poems. That’s where they had Rhea and me.
“‘Who can say what finally made Mother go crazy. Maybe she was always crazy, or maybe crazy is just the simplest word for something else. We moved back to Copenhagen when we were young. Papa returned to work and Mother went away for a time, then came back to us very different. She had her own room, which she never left, and after dinner Rhea and I would play there for an hour or so, on a thick rug with gold tasseling, while she sang to us. Chilean folk songs or so I’ve had to assume. Neither of us speaks the language.
“‘Our parents’ relationship remained a mystery. Papa ignored Mother so completely that I sometimes thought only Rhea and I could see her. Then one night we mysteriously awoke together with the same premonition to creep through the apartment to Mother’s room. The door was ajar when we got there, and I’ll never forget what I saw. Papa was crying in Mother’s lap. She had his head on her knees and was stroking his hair, humming something soothing, staring out the window at the moon. We watched for a while, transfixed, before finally tiptoeing back to our room. In the morning it was as if none of it had happened. Papa continued to ignore Mother and to tease the help in his airy, caustic way. We moved to the States not long after.’
“The stories came out over many weeks of talking. I would sleep with Rhea, wake to find her gone, and call Elena from Rhea’s room. Elena was just down the hall, but it never occurred to us to talk in person. One evening, eating dinner with their father, it came to me that I no longer remembered the last time I had left the apartment. It was a big place by this city’s standards, and it struck me that there was no longer anything outside that required my attention. No friends to meet up with. No courses to attend. My parents had written me off long ago, I figured. My life, it seemed, had shrunk down to the dimensions of this place, this family, these strange sisters.
“We were eating a butterflied lamb prepared by the Magnussons’ cook, Margarite. Their father, who always showed up to dinner very soigné, in a tailored suit, his tie knot undone just so, ate in a brisk, formal manner and seemed to accept me at the table without surprise. ‘Tanner,’ he might say, ‘tell me. Are you a man of the world or a poet?’ I probably told him I didn’t know, that I had always wondered and often felt myself in a sort of purgatory between the two, because he said, ‘Ah, yes. There is a fifth column inside us all, nicht wahr?’
“I didn’t know what he meant, but I asked, if such neat divisions could be made, what he considered himself.
“‘I am a man of the world, Tanner. For now at least,’ he said. ‘I must believe in all of its things … Broccolini. Bushwick. Bikram yoga. And that’s just the bs. It’s breathtaking, really, the things one is expected to take seriously these days.’
“I must have ventured that he felt inauthentic, because without hesitation he added, ‘Yes, yes, I am a fraud through and through. I don’t deny it, I celebrate it! A buggy-whip maker in the age of SUV limousines. What is one to do, what can one do, but embrace the gross anachronistic fiction of one’s own existence? Smile in public, put on a good show. Fine and good. But at the end of the day a gentleman is not a hero to his valet, isn’t it so, Tanner?’
“I wanted him to say more, but just then Margarite came in to ask how we were enjoying the meal.
“‘What shall I tell you, my dear,’ he said. ‘You surpass yourself. You are the progeny of gods—and no minor divinity but the sort that springs fully formed from the skulls of monsters! What is left to say? What are words next to the unknowable thing itself? Oh, they will sing songs of you when you are dead.’
“‘I know what I’ll do when you’re dead,’ Margarite said under her breath.
“‘Very good.’ He laughed. ‘Very good.’ When she had gone he turned back to me. ‘And so, Tanner,’ he said, ‘you enjoy the company of my daughters, do you?’
“‘I do,’ I said. ‘They’re remarkable.’
“‘Ha, yes. “Remarkable,” was it?’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and sat back in thought. ‘Well, you have my blessing,’ he said, ‘but I will not do you the generosity of my warning.’ He checked his watch, a practiced move to free it from his sleeve, out of no more than habit perhaps, a certain rhythm of preoccupation. He smiled and said, ‘Margarite really did outdo herself tonight, don’t you think?’
“That was the first night that Rhea did not return. I lay on her bed, ill at ease. Feeling restless, at last I got up to walk around. The apartment was more expansive than I had realized. Tight staircases I hadn’t known were there, doors opening onto skinny branching halls. I was absently inspecting little objets, decorative curios on the shelves and coffee tables, when at the end of a desk I came across a manuscript, neatly stacked and bound in string. It must have been hundreds of pages in all, although it wasn’t numbered. I undid the string and settled down at the foot of a recamier to read. This is how it began: ‘Imagine you speak to fallen angels in a dead language invented by living statues. You are an adding machine woven from blades of grass; this explains your friendlessness, and your comfort with high-caliber handguns. If I told you the dimensions of our lives were one greater or one fewer than you suppose, would you cancel your package vacation to the Dutch Antilles? Would it matter that I lived in bogus clouds of cast-off aerosols, teaching birds to dismantle power lines?’
“It went on like this for pages, mesmerizing, impenetrable. At some point I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Elena was standing over me. She took the pages from my lap, set them aside, and undressed in the deliberate way of someone alone, folding her clothes as she took them off. I hadn’t seen her since that first day. Maybe I had forgotten her sad beauty, or maybe our conversations had led me to invest greater allure and poignancy in her body, the thin swayback figure, its marble skin untouched by sun. She hadn’t a hint of muscle, the breasts of a boy, a fatiguing melancholy in her sloe-eyed gaze, but she was beautiful, I thought, and we made love, or whatever you care to call it, right there on the carpet, in that corner of the apartment I’d never seen.
“Rhea woke me with a finger over her lips a few hours later. I was at first confused to see Elena dozing next to me, then I remembered what had happened and searched Rhea’s face for any clue to her state of mind. It was its typical mask of amusement. She seemed herself but just to be sure, thinking, you know, I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying, I asked if she wasn’t upset.
“‘About what?’ she said. Only then did I notice she had a heavy jacket on and a duffel bag over her shoulder.
“‘Quo vadis?’
“She laughed. ‘Denmark?’ She said it like we’d discussed it all before.
“I was stunned. ‘When did that happen? Does anyone know?’
“‘Of course,’ she said and looked at me sweetly. ‘Take care of Elena, won’t you? She’s a little directionless at the moment.’
“Time began passing more quickly after that. Elena stayed indoors all day, but I began to venture out through the city. I walked the same streets I had since childhood and hardly recognized them. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve spent my entire life here and, as you no doubt know, this place teaches you nothing if not a profound blindness to the strangeness and horror of people’s lives. We live to validate for one another the insane pretext that this is normal and right, and what are we all searching for but some moment when the world’s gaze falls on our gross, petty lives and says, How special. How hiply thrown together. How baroquely casual. I don’t know … I felt crushed, just crushed, by the profligacy of a single block, the effort of it, the florid misfortune and exhausting Kabuki of other people’s lives. I could scarcely pass someone on the street—young, old, men, women—without falling neck-deep into the idea that at that very moment, like me, they were taking some internal stock of their frustration and misery, of where they stood next to their most extravagant and private dreams. And what were their dreams? Or the trials of their daily lives? Was it presumptuous and condescending to think myself happier than them? But I didn’t. I didn’t. I was not happy. I was just young, vital, credentialed, moneyed … I am not the first person to think these things, clearly, but if it’s patronizing to pretend to understand the trials and miseries of other people’s lives, it is no doubt worse to use this as an excuse never to try. And the greater misery seemed, suddenly, the soulless disregard of people like me—anyone really—and not for other people’s sakes, but for our own. We had reached an inflection point, I thought, the contradictions we had to live with were too great, and in the interest of obscuring them we had abused language to the point that we could no longer speak to one another. We could scarcely leave our tribes.
“What does this have to do with Rhea and Elena? I don’t know. I really don’t. Except they began to seem a refuge, a corrective of some sort. Was this crazy? I mean, you’ve been listening. What had they done but make me unfit to live? Unable to countenance the petty, impoverished, glib, bankrupt, unfeeling, and passionless world that stalked our streets and invaded our hearts? And still they felt like some faint hope amid the spires verging up into the sky, some forgotten possibility under the soles of our feet.”
I was listening, of course. I had been. I thought I knew the hope Tanner meant and the peril that lived inside it. Had I found a voice to speak just then I might have reminded him that it is the nature of a refuge to leave us less fit to live and that we do not blinker ourselves for the fun of it. It is out of necessity, rather—the necessity of living within ourselves, feeding our hungers, crediting the worthless strength of our emotions. In the days before I gave up my artistic ambitions there were moments, I thought, when I had caught a glimpse around the blinders, and what I saw was the landless gray expanse of a northern sea, that emptiness of pewter ribbed in wind and sun. There was no channel marker I could find. No shore to crawl up on. I simply could not concede my life anymore, my centrality to it, nor the privilege I gave to the insular language in which we invented ourselves, the endless stories that, if each were only a degree off true north, put end to end added up to a world turned upside down. It seemed to me my only choice was between complicity in this boundless small perjury and the sort of honesty that becomes self-negating.
“I couldn’t help thinking of Rhea’s smile in the weeks that followed,” Tanner continued. “How had she given me to Elena so peaceably? Of course maybe she cared for me little in that way or cared for Elena in a superlative sense, loving her sister’s happiness more than her own. But I thought there was something more here too, that perhaps this augured a new relationship to the world of things, a correction to the awful harm embedded in our idea of possession.
“But I didn’t have it in me to go as far as the sisters. After a month Elena said to me, ‘You miss her. Go.’
“‘I’m happy with you,’ I said, although this wasn’t exactly true.
“‘Look,’ Elena said a little sadly. ‘Rhea and I made a trade-off early on, not explicitly, but in the way siblings do, and perhaps especially sisters. I agreed to see what was in front of me, see things for what they were, so that Rhea wouldn’t have to. So that for her, meaning and motive never split, if you understand what I mean. So that language stayed intact. But it means she doesn’t keep some part of herself for her alone, do you see, the way the rest of us do. And for my part I am too disabused to believe a lie, even a small one, and I would rather you leave than start telling me falsehoods. In the end you can’t fool me anyhow.”
“So I did go. I left. I went to Copenhagen. I got a studio in Nørrebro, across the canal from the center of town. I started painting. I lived on almost nothing, coffee, bread, a little herring. I walked the city and painted. Rhea was shooting a new film, documentary, soundless. She followed foreigners through the city filming them, immigrants, men smoking in bead-curtain cafés, professors at chalkboards, cannery workers, roustabouts on the docks. I spent my nights with her, watching the footage she had shot. I found it mesmerizing, the neutrality of its attention, and although it was always silent I often thought I heard a sound running through it all the same, an expectancy at the edge of silence, the pregnancy of a fermata, a sound like wind passing through apertures in the distance.
“I was painting color fields during the day, gradients of bleeding hue tinged with washes and drizzles. Derivative, amateur AbEx, but I enjoyed it. I walked through Strøget at dusk, a ghost among the waves of purpose. I had a vague notion that I could fade slowly into the latticework of the world, like an image dissolving in the evening light. And I might have, had a disarming thing not occurred.
“I was settling down to paint one day when I realized I’d left a book of mine at Rhea’s. Blake’s engravings. I wanted to steal a color arrangement of his for the piece I was working on, so I hiked back across town and let myself into her apartment. I was wiping my feet in the foyer when it came to me that something was wrong. I don’t know whether it was more than an intuition, but I felt compelled to creep through the apartment to Rhea’s room, where I found the door ajar, a soft, plangent music issuing from inside. I peeked in. There were Rhea and a young woman, naked in bed. The woman was ugly—truly hideous, I realized later—but all that I remarked on in that moment was the look of earnest hope on her face, a look I recognized, that stopped me cold. I froze, or rather I saw the part of me supposed to feel anger freeze, like a person at the periphery of a black hole, and moving away from that person, floating away to a different vantage, I felt instead a kind of joy, a sense of possibility embodied in the act, written on her face, and ferrying them beyond the jealousies of time. Just then Rhea caught my eye. She smiled at me, and I … smiled back. It’s strange to tell you, but it’s the truth. Before that figure posed at the edge of eternity recalled me, I smiled. Before the suspension broke, before the bardo state collapsed, for a few seconds Rhea and I grinned at each other. I don’t think I’ve ever been present with another person as deeply as I was in that moment. And then, like a plunging anchor that finally consumes its rope, the childish hurt and anger I had been expecting returned to me, tugged suddenly at my stomach, and I shut the door and left quickly, feeling very stupid and weak.
“For a long time I walked. I walked to the edge of the Øresund, to the water, where I watched for hours as the day moved to completion, a coarse gray sheet shaken out in a motion so slow you didn’t notice when it settled over you, entombing the light beyond. I thought many things. I thought I had heard the Sirens’ call, driven bereft against the rocks, drunk on beauty and madness—or, fuck beauty—drunk on the kaleidoscope of involuted moods, the infinite divisions within everything, the moods within their song for which we have no name. I had been crippled in the deepest way, I felt—past the point of wanting to be healed. But then not entirely, for within me still was some corrupted anger, of righteousness or me-ness, some ridiculous self-importance. And sure enough, when I got home that night, I found I hadn’t thrown out my credit cards or passport. I still had an old phone with friends’ numbers on it, my parents’ numbers. My hair was a disaster, but none of it was hopeless. I had never committed, see, never stepped out with both feet. I had been playacting. I could get on a plane and come back. And now that I’m back, confused, adrift, in some sense unviable as a person, I have this one thing, I know this one thing about myself: I am a playactor and will never be anything more.”
Tanner fell silent. My bladder was going to burst, I feared, but I was past the point of interrupting and hadn’t signaled to our waiter in forty-five minutes. Our wine was gone, as was the water in my glass, and although the evening had grown cold I noticed that my back, pressed against the iron chair frame, was coated in sweat. It is not hard to say what I felt, although in another sense it is hard to say it in fewer words than it took Tanner to tell. I had the familiar feeling of being a cracked vessel refilled by blind servants. And although this was not a pleasant self-knowledge to possess, I reconciled myself, to carry the metaphor further still, with the notion that all this water was being gathered to drown a prisoner who was free to leave. Which is all to say better cracked than whole.
But maybe I am just more oblique than Tanner because I have more cause for self-protection. Or maybe I have lived longer in the jeopardy he describes. Or. Sometimes I think we might define ourselves by such simple words—“and,” “or”—and that I merely side with paralysis over fabrication.
“So you’re back,” I said.
Tanner looked at me sadly, seeing, I guess, that I did not understand or couldn’t say aloud how much I did, that this is what it meant to playact, to have bought in or sold out—never acknowledging how much you understood.
“I’m not back,” he said.
He got up, laid some amount of money on the table. I didn’t count. I didn’t offer to chip in.
“What, is that it?” I said.
“I’m tired.” He looked away. “Another time.”
“Soon though,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Soon.”
When I returned from the bathroom Tanner was gone. I wouldn’t see him again for many months.
When I did see Tanner next he had begun to fill back in. His hair was clean, his scruff shorn to a handsome stubble. The clothes he wore looked expensive and fit. He joked about our previous meeting, saying how he’d been in a state. “Overwrought” was the word he used, I think, and he described the intervening months as a rappel à l’ordre. We were at some insignificant party, on the roof, drinking cocktails out of Mexican glasses and gazing across the river at the city that loomed above. I watched Tanner as he laughed and made his way through the crowd, watched as he leaned in to make a joke or bent to catch a private word whispered in his ear. He seemed his old self and so I was surprised, later, when I saw him gazing at a print—Ruggiero Freeing Angelica, I believe—to catch a far-off look in his eye, a look he didn’t mask right away on registering my glance but shared with me, letting it settle briefly in the wry despair of officers who, without a word, tell each other they know their city will fall. It was too much for me, this brief window on the shoreless sea we carry around inside us. I said my goodbyes hurriedly and went home, settling in the living room as voices in the dark around me wove a thin fabric from the tatters of what we have been taught to call our lives.
Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn—perhaps it is already clear—that Tanner and I had ceased to be different people. We are different in the sense that we look different, have different Social Security numbers and addresses, and that I never met the Magnusson sisters. But in another, and the more important, sense, of course I did, I have met them, and it has been the great joy and misfortune of my life.
My memory is not perfect, nor would I hope it to be, for if my perception isn’t either this would simply be the faithful transcription of a mistake. But I can still hear the voices that spoke to me in the dark living room that night saying, “Once, when you thought she was caring for you, your mother was walking the fault lines of a perilous terrain. When you see the spires fall, you will know we are singing to you. It is a melody constructed from the martyrdom of a swimming pool filled with drowned cowards. The earth was ripped open so that you could fall in. It is we, the sisters, come. Come join us at the bottom, and sing!”