Wreck and Order (10 page)

The night I got home from California, Brian and I went to a German café near our apartment. We dipped hunks of rye bread into creamy tomato soup and sipped strong Manhattans. We didn't know it was movie night until fifteen minutes into our meal, when
The Princess Bride
began, projected onto the wall in front of us. I tried to continue answering Brian's questions about how my father was handling the loss of his brother, but the movie was loud. The boy asked his grandpa, who was reading him a fairy tale, “Wait, is this a kissing book? What about sports and stuff?” Brian chortled. “Sorry,” he said. “I can't concentrate with this movie on.”

I didn't mind. It was nice to sip my strong cocktail and watch Wesley and Buttercup brave the Fire Swamp for the sake of true love.

There was fresh snow on the sidewalk when we left the bar. I didn't notice the white branches gleaming overhead until we were at the door of our apartment, and then I did not want to go in. I wanted to stay outside, a creature walking through the world, not of it. Fortunately, Brian started kissing me as soon as we shut the door behind us. He pulled my chin down with his index finger and ogled the O my lips formed before falling on my open mouth. He led me into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed in front of me. In one motion, he pulled off my T-shirt, sweater, and bra. He cupped my breasts in his hands and bounced them. “I missed your boobs.” He grinned. I kissed his forehead, relaxing into his delight in something that just happened to belong to me.

He yanked off his boxers and rolled my underwear down my hips. What I had done with Jared was a mistake with a clear name and a clear implication. I hadn't let myself name it while I was making the mistake; it just felt like something that was happening to me, the way Brian had happened to me. Only away from Jared could I recall what I'd done in terms of my own agency. So I listened to my boyfriend's pleasure without striving for any of my own. All I deserved was his satisfaction. When it was over, I kept my face burrowed in the pillow next to his head for as long as I could. “You're so still,” he said finally.

“I'm not crying for a bad reason.”

He patted my hair until I quieted.

Although Jared and I had barely slept during the two days we spent together, I was restless that first night back and lay awake for hours, telling myself I should get my book out of my suitcase. “Your breathing is too shallow,” Brian whispered to me once. “Take deeper breaths.” The
S
came out in a harsh lisp, and I rolled away from him, folding my hands across my pounding chest. I awoke in the morning as he shut the door to the bedroom, having quietly dressed for work. I shot upright.

“Brian!” I wondered for one second if I could bear it if he were already gone. I ran out to the hallway, where he was zipping up his coat. “You didn't say goodbye.” His leather jacket was cold against my breasts.

“I didn't want to wake you,” he said. “You seem worn out.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, one hand on the doorknob. So he had sensed my distance. Which meant he would be cold to me for a few days and then fuck me roughly, his eyes clenched, jaw set, nostrils flared. How he would have hated that image of himself. I knew that we should not use sex to release unspoken anger, like one of those stereotypical couples that terrified me so much, who would never know true closeness but would just seesaw between neediness and resentment until they died. But how could I stop him when he was bearing down on me hatefully, all muscle, no confusion? That kind of sex left me uncomfortably horny for days afterward—awful word, horny, with its harsh, adolescent hurriedness, but the misplaced need that arose from makeup sex (another juvenilely crass phrase) was awful indeed. I always wanted just one more orgasm, the one that would make all these unspoken negotiations worthwhile.

Brian wished me a good day, staring at the floor.

I called Jared a few minutes after Brian left. He yawned loudly. “I miss you, beautiful girl,” he said. Just like that, this became an acceptable pattern of feelings.

Brian often had several big projects due around the same time, and in the week or two before the concurrence of deadlines he was empty of himself. He would hug and kiss me, tell me he loved me, bring me flowers. But his affection was a performance he enacted while his mind was elsewhere, so industrious that he forgot to eat or shower or have sex. I took NyQuil before bed during these periods, so as not to be kept awake by desire for a body that stress had traumatized into an unfeeling mass of blood and water and flesh, dumb as a fetus. Sometimes in the early mornings, his cock would remember to need me, and Brian attacked me with a sudden, brief passion that enflamed and then abandoned me like the boys I used to meet at bars. I knew that Brian and I would have close, long-lasting, satisfying sex again as soon as he completed this latest round of websites and that I must therefore remain calm the few times he fucked me hard and fast with no thought to my own enjoyment. But precisely because I found this to be the most erotic of all sex acts—in concept—and because I could never, not once, experience this fast, violent release that I imagined to be the most perfect pleasure, I was never calm. A miniature girl in combat boots and fishnet tights stomped on my chest and shouted to me about the selfishness of all male bodies and the treachery of all female bodies, which give themselves wrongly again and again.

At breakfast—Brian both stiff and jumpy, wide-eyed with anticipation of the workday; me glaring and tense, my chest hardened against the quaking of tiny, helpless feet—I would mutter that I could pour my own cereal when he asked if I wanted Raisin Bran or Puffins, would chew with my mouth open, refuse to wipe the milk out of the corners of my mouth, turn my face away when he tried to kiss me goodbye, tell him that he was not meeting my needs and I was so unhappy and felt abandoned and was going to have a terrible day. I could behave as horribly as I wanted; it would not be long before he would want to take me again and I would want to submit. Brian would say the word “sorry” several times, pat my shoulder, back out the door, pause in the doorway to stare fearfully at my hard jaw and small eyes, tell me he would see me tonight and it would be okay. He was a good animal, plodding along the path in front of him with heavy steps, thoughtlessly following every rule of every preexisting game. And I was a ghost with an enormous belly and a tiny speck of a mouth, unable to consume enough food at one time to fill me up. The more the ghost eats, the more it is reminded of its hunger.

I would touch myself after Brian left for work, trying not to think of the sound he made just before I gave him the release for which I could not forgive him—a quickly escalating growl. Often the sound refused to leave my head and I came with little pleasure thinking of it and afterward resented Brian even more for the straightforward sound of his straightforward climax, which forced me to be always in relation to him, even when I felt most alone. We do not get what we want, biologically speaking.

After one morning like this, I got a letter from Suriya. She was now taking exams to become an English teacher, so our letters and occasional phone conversations were very important to her success, as she put it. The most uncomplicated happiness I felt in those days came from editing her letters; along with my brief, safe descriptions of life in New York (the tall buildings! the celebrities! the pizza!), I would send a list of grammatical errors she'd made and their corrections (“I have not time for fun” to: I don't have time for fun; “I miss my brother in whole my soul” to: I miss him with all my soul; “You are helpful me” to: You help me).

This letter began: “In these days, I face so many problems. Yet I still alive.” (“Am still alive,” I wrote at the top of my list of corrections.) In her boardinghouse, she had been assigned to share a room with a classmate who was not as smart as Suriya and jealous of her success. She hid Suriya's books and assignments just before the bus came in the morning, so Suriya had to go to school unprepared. Suriya complained to the boardinghouse owner and requested a different room so that she could keep her belongings safe. The owner scolded Suriya for being proud and thinking she deserved better than the other girls and said other bad things that Suriya did not wish to record, she wanted them out of her head so they would not harm her personality as an adult woman. Suriya decided to leave that bad place. She packed up her things in a box and left it in the corner of her room and then took the long bus ride home to her parents' house, where she lived for one week until she could find a new boardinghouse, missing classes and getting far behind in school. After she settled into a new boardinghouse and returned to the old one to fetch her belongings, the box was gone. She asked the landlady for her lost things and the lady hit her and told her to stop making problems in her house. So Suriya had to move into the new boardinghouse with only the clothes on her back. She lost her one pair of socks and one good skirt and one good pair of shoes, and she had to wear dirty sandals and dirty pants to school and the boys all laughed. She did not have books to participate in class and had to stay in the classroom during the lunch period, to study the books then. She felt as if she lost everything in a strange and outside area from her home. (“Outside area from my home” to “foreign place” or “place far away from my home,” I wrote.) She called her brother, who was working in the army, also far away. He said, “Think what you have and do not think what you don't have. Once I have money, I will bring you new garments.” (“Think OF,” I wrote. “And we usually say clothes, not garments.”) After speaking to her brother, Suriya made up her mind and hid her sadness. She studied hard and was first in all of her exams. The girl who stole her belongings made poor marks and will never have success. The boardinghouse owner who hit her has no friends because she is mean. So Suriya does not mind that they treat her poorly. They do not hurt her life. I put the letter down and was quiet and still. If I were going to concoct an inspirational tale about overcoming adversity, Suriya would probably be the star. But I didn't have to concoct anything; Suriya was real.

I made the mistake of reading the letter to Brian when he got home that night, wanting to share Suriya's sweetness and wisdom. “Sounds kind of suspicious,” he said. “That's, like, a classic sob story. Seems like she's trying to get money out of you.” I hadn't even considered sending Suriya money, I so rarely thought of practical solutions to anything. Partly to spite Brian's cynicism, I wired her one hundred bucks. A few weeks later, she mailed me a dozen handmade greeting cards, decorated with pressed flowers and stickers, each with a different message: Happy New Year! Happy Birthday! Merry Christmas! God Bless You! “I wish to return your money in the future,” she wrote, “once I be a real teacher.” (“Once I am,” I wrote back.) “But until that day, you can sell these cards in a shop in New York City. They will be expensive in your country, no?”

I showed the cards to Brian, hoping he'd be as moved as I was. “Good for you,” he said, as if I'd passed a test.

I started seeing Jared regularly after Brian presented me with a ring at the top of Bear Mountain and listed reasons he wanted to marry me in French, a language he didn't speak. My present recklessness was justified by the severity of the future limits I promised the sunny, windy mountaintop I would respect. Every few weeks, Jared would fly to New York and stay at a motel near our apartment. Brian worked ten-hour days. Jared and I had so much time to ourselves that I often forgot we were doing anything wrong.

I didn't need a psychologist to tell me my fear of marriage was the result of my parents' romantic misery. So I tried to ignore it. I was afraid of most normal things—talking to people, for instance. Brian was a stable, successful, attractive, loyal man who wanted to marry me. Saying yes was not an emotional question. It was a question of not ruining my life.

I took another shift at the bookstore to punish myself for neglecting
Fifi
. My favorite coworker was a gaunt older woman with spiky white hair and huge gray eyes. We sometimes got beers at the bar next door to Barnes and Noble, and she'd tell me about the sex she had in high school. She never wanted a boyfriend and she never wanted to kiss on the mouth. “No kissing!” she commanded the boys she brought home and screwed (her word) under the kitchen table while her mother snored upstairs, too muted by codeine to hear anything. She'd grip the wooden legs and close her eyes tightly and focus only on the sensation between her legs. I pictured her turning her face away when it was over, refusing to meet the boy's eyes as she told him to be sure the lock was pushed in when he let himself out. Now she was almost sixty and lived alone. She was all fucked out by the end of high school. Anyway, it wasn't worth risking AIDS and she'd rather not screw at all than get screwed by Saran wrap. While she stocked books, she sang softly to herself. She always had several novels going at the same time, one from every aisle, bookmarked and restored to their rightful place in the alphabet whenever the boss came by. She loved her morning bagel and her afternoon espresso. She wore loose, solid-colored dresses that swished around her athletic frame. No breasts. Cancer, she told me. I wondered who had cared for her. She never talked to her parents and her brother was in rehab in Colorado. I looked for signs that she was unhappy, that her ostensible ease in the world was actually resignation to loneliness. But I never saw a chink in her social self, no glimpse of a private life hidden at great cost. So why was I scared of becoming her? I enjoyed her company, but there was always this voice in my ear—the calm, reasonable male voice—warning me that her life was empty, an embarrassment, that it was all right for me to stock books and work the register at thirty, but that a middle-aged, solitary salesclerk led a life of shame.