Wreck and Order (25 page)

The rest of my inbox is filled with Jared's name, offering email after mercifully distracting email of pornographic yearning (“i love how you're this smart and well read and independent woman and then i get you in bed and you become my trembling fawn. come back, beautiful girl. i need your pussy around my cock”), words Jared created by jamming down computer keys with his index fingers, typing as he walked and ate and spoke: with ludicrous insistence, a hedge against the suspicion of weakness.

“got in some trouble baby,” Jared wrote me seven hours ago. “some assholes from the city of angels my face is pitch fucking black it hurts so bad i feel like such a loser gonna give this work up for real a buddy says he can hook me up with a job at the firehouse don't even have to take the emt test come back i'll be good for you if you come back you're my dream girl i need you.” I run my fingers over my lips. Longing rears. Anger strangles it. How has this become my life? That my most appealing future prospect is to live with a philandering, alcoholic drug dealer-cum-fraudulent fireman?

The phrase would make Jared laugh. It would be so good to hear his laugh right now.

I ask the Internet owner if I can use his phone to make an international call. He rises from his desk, gestures to the giant phone atop it, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. I punch digits. The phone rings against my ear. How easy it is to reach him, all the way from here.

“Mornin'. Jared Desiderius Hart speaking.” This is his given name, spoken in his social voice, surrounded by the din of many disparate conversations.

“Jared. It's me.”

“Well, hell. Say that again, beautiful girl.”

“Jared. It's me.”

“Damn. That sounds good.”

“Are you okay? You sound like you've been crying.”

“Nah. Been too busy. I was up 'til dawn this morning talking to this dude about super-massive black holes, which I'm now a follower of. Because they have such a strong gravitational force. I don't
really
want to have this conversation all over again, to be perfectly honest. Coffee and a Mexican omelet, please, darlin'. Extra jalapeños. If you would.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little bit I guess.”

“What time is it there?”

“Morning. So the black hole at the center of our galaxy is our physical god. It means we have a chance to know we exist. Which is all we can hope for, right? The super-massive black hole is not going to grant wishes. It doesn't give a fuck.”

“You wrote me that you were going to stop drinking.”

“I will. I've been really pretty good. And you're not giving me much incentive to follow the straight and narrow, being in a different hemisphere and all.” His old-fashioned expressions, gleaned from the crate of paperback classics he keeps by his bed—they surprise me still, soften me. He slurps coffee. “What are you doing there anyway? You're safe, right? You're not calling because you're in any trouble?”

“No, I'm not in trouble. I love it here.”

“You sure you're all right, beautiful girl? You sound sad.”

Something in need of unhinging comes unhinged. I speak quickly, about Suriya and Manuela, the violence of the waves, the purity test on wedding nights, the endless fucking curries. Jared exclaims and laughs. I see his open mouth—craggy tongue, crooked front tooth.

“I miss you crazy much,” he says. “Thank you kindly, gorgeous. Just some hot sauce, if you would. Mind if I eat?”

“I should go anyway. This is getting expensive. But I need to ask you something.”

“You have my undivided,” he says through a full mouth.

“I think I want to move back to California. Maybe we could live together. I want to try living with you.”

“You're not shitting me?” He swallows, clears his throat. “You wanna move in together?”

“I think so. Are you still going to get a new job? That thing at the firehouse?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm trying. Why didn't you write me earlier? You said you would write me when you got there. You said you would email me a lot.”

It's always a relief when Jared identifies something I've done wrong, some clear way I've been inconsiderate. We're both screwed up, we've both let each other down, we're both trying. I guess it's the same relief that makes all those girls in books and TV shows and movies eager confessors of their own faults. They date guys who mistreat them, sure, but that's only to be expected, given that the girls are, like, total wrecks themselves. They drink too much and sleep around and probably deep down they're afraid of commitment and they have no friggin' clue how to cook anything but spaghetti. But if they can just get it together, then maybe the boys will get it together, too, and stop treating them badly, and they'll all live happily ever after, except that they don't even want to live happily ever after, they just want to have sex with the same dude a few times a week, you know?

“I'm calling you now,” I say, hopeful as the well-dressed girls on TV. “I want to live with you.”

“I want to live with you, too. Get your perfect ass back here. We'll figure it all out.” Jared smacks his lips against the receiver.

When I hang up, I email Joe at
Carp Weekly
and remind him of our conversation in the parking lot on my last day of work, how he said that he wished I'd spoken to him before I left, he would have argued for a promotion for me. I barely notice the words I write, only the eagerness of the keys rising back after I press them, happy to be the same letter again and again.

Manuela has been busy getting Emil's cottage ready for his stay. Although she doesn't say so, I know it's time for me to leave, give her some time alone before her son arrives. I feel good about moving on. I feel good in general, a little light-headed when I remember Jared's voice on the phone and think about being near him again soon. He's been the one constant, the one thing that's held my interest all these years. Time to accept that. When I was younger, I didn't want to be the one who was strong enough to be steadily open, even when he hurt me, even when all I wanted was to be left alone. I wanted to be the damaged one who was healed. But I've been trying to get what I want for so long now, steering my life away from this image, manipulating it into that shape, and it has felt mostly like mitigating failure all alone. If I give myself to this relationship completely—I don't know. But something different will have to happen.

The bus is fast, airy, almost empty. A garland of fake magenta flowers jiggles over the rearview window. My feet rest on my backpack, divested of the Larousse, which sits now on Manuela's bookshelf. She laughed for a long time over my lugging it around as if it were the guarantor of my days. Two girls in white school uniforms get on the bus. They stare at me, whispering and giggling.

A gap in the trees lining the road contains a girl in a bikini walking along a wide beach. She's tall and thin and tan, a fine brown slice through the white air, a sure sign that the next stop on the bus belongs to me: a town of private cabanas equipped with boogie boards and outdoor showers and hammocks slung between palm trees, where white girls can walk in bikinis without getting harassed by gawking boys and have cocktails in hollowed-out coconuts delivered to their lounge chairs. On my first trip to Sri Lanka, I stayed on the beach for only two days. The paradise was like a math formula with no conceivable application. I could plug in the numbers and get the right answer, but I didn't know what it meant. Now, though, even the metaphor irritates me. I am a person going to a place. End of story.

I check into a large motel on the beach. A group of twentysomethings chat on the sand out front, bottles of arrack scattered around their chairs. I change into my bathing suit and take high-kneed hops across the scorched sand to the water's edge. A wave rears up before me. I raise my arms and dive into its ferocious tunnel, frightened and happy.

When I return to the beach, a Sri Lankan man wearing basketball shorts and several gold necklaces is standing next to my towel. He looks like a skinny man wearing a fat suit for comedic effect—preternaturally round belly, twiggy limbs. He smiles as I hurry to cover myself with my towel, glaring just past his face. “Welcome,” he says. “You just arrived?”

“Hm-hum.”

“You picked a good hotel. Have you tried the rum punch here yet?”

I turn my back to him.

“Let me order you one.” His accent is barely discernible.

“I came here to read and relax and I just want to be left alone.”

“Sure. No problem.” But he stands nearby until his phone rings. He answers in Sinhala, and his loud voice retreats down the beach.

I stretch out on the sand and close my eyes. The sun is so bright I can see the backs of my eyelids, a mess of slithering red threads.

“Take my chair if you want. I'm not using it.” A young man with sandy curls and bright eyes is standing over me. His large aureoles sag agreeably.

Lievin is from Holland, traveling around on PhD money while he supposedly works on his dissertation. He introduces me to the rest of his group. A Belgian girl—dyed-orange halo of curls, Minnie Mouse T-shirt—is reading on a lounge chair. The Israeli boy is as lovely and boring as an ad in a glossy magazine—green eyes, thick lashes, dark silk skin snuggled against small muscles. “Your rings are good,” he says, looking at my fingers. “This one means: I'm pretty. This one means: I'm weird.” He sits down cross-legged on the sand, his chin resting in his hands. “I'm glad you're here.”

“I'm glad I'm here, too.”

“Do you want a rum and coconut water? I'm going to get another one.” The yellow flecks in his eyes flash out a code that grants access to nothing.

I surprise myself by declining. I don't want to turn the beach into a wavering backdrop for my somersaulting thoughts. “I'll take one,” says the girl from Wales, drawing circles in the sand with her unpainted toe. She's attractive in the way I normally envy—tall and large-breasted with uncomplicated, well-defined facial features. But right now I have blood in my veins and organs carrying out their discrete functions without complaint and muscles that carry me wherever I want to go. There is no problem with my body.

The Belgian girl puts down her book—a novel by a French writer I like—and asks me what I think of my president.

Confidence is the most important component to mastering a language, and now would be a fun time to have some. But I am far too shy to address the French-speaking girl in French. Like everyone else here, she speaks nearly flawless English. I feel cheated to be from the one country whose language, culture, and politics everyone else knows. Even after spending thirty hours alone on a plane, I cannot escape the place I grew up. Except when I was with Suriya. Her village is the only place I've ever felt truly displaced, free of context.

A group of Sinhalese teenage boys comes running down the sand and the Israeli jogs out to meet them. They laugh and high-five and do handstands and backflips in the shallow water. Nearby, local women dip their toes in the waves' frothy wake, wetting the ends of their carefully pleated saris.

I spend the afternoon under the fan in my room, reading a pleasant food memoir borrowed from the guesthouse library—a lonely white girl, a wise black maid, biscuit dough and blackberry cobbler. At sunset, I return to the beach, empty now of families. Blue-green waves froth and crest like a whale's open mouth, inhaling the sea and spitting it back out. Vigorous winds lift the saltwater into a tickly mist. I walk past the tourist strip, where couples sit with beers and surfers rinse off their boards. Around the bend past the surf break, the wind demands all the space in my head. The beach stretches endlessly, beige sand the wind has whipped into hundreds of small peaks topped by tiny, opalesque seashells. Sea grass clings to the steep slopes of the dunes and the waves are murderously huge and broad strokes of mauve and fuchsia are smeared across the high, flat sky. I want to walk on and on and on. But I don't know if it's safe. I turn back toward the surf break. I can just make out a tourist couple sitting on a towel. A man in a dhoti is walking in my direction, a brown smudge on blue air. I begin to walk back toward the tourists, taking my sarong out of my bag to cover up my bathing suit. The wind and waves are so loud that I must not really matter, there must not be any hurry. The wind whips the sarong above my head and plasters it against my face. I pull it back down and tie it around my chest. When I look up, the man is walking so quickly and purposefully toward me that I am suddenly running, my eyes fixed on the tourists, trying not to see the man who is growing larger and larger. I feel small and warm, not quite afraid. I reach the couple and plant my feet in the sand in front of them and feel the man behind me disappear.

Later, I ask an Australian woman who's lived in this town for years if it's safe to walk alone past the surf break.

“Definitely not.”

“Even during the day?”

“Never go there alone.”

“Have bad things happened?”

“I've heard of men trying stuff, yes. They hide in the dunes and watch for women walking alone. It's not that they are bad men necessarily. It's—our Western ways. Our insistence on always being so free.”

Silly woman, romanticizing the East, villainizing the West. But how lazy I felt as I wrestled with my sarong in the wind, and how good, and how free.

Lievin invites me to join his group for dinner. We fill up a long table at an outdoor café, ebullient with the nonsense of strangers pretending to be family. A young boy runs back and forth from our table to the kitchen, carrying copper pots so large we have to stand up to fill our plates. Whenever a curry is nearly depleted, the boy exclaims, “No more! All finished!,” explodes into laughter, runs back to the kitchen to fetch another steaming pot. We tell the boy again and again how delicious everything is, we just can't stop eating, please can we have a little more chili paste. We're proud of our hunger for a world not our own.

After dinner, we walk to a café that has promised dancing. My Kingfisher beer comes in a twenty-two-ounce bottle. The waiters are teenage boys with red eyes, saggy grins, Bob Marley sweatbands. Lievin points out some cloth signs tied to masts of driftwood and spray-painted with the words “Dance! Drums! Fire! Beer!”—remnants of last weekend's festival.

The Welsh girl tells me I was lucky to have missed it. “It was hell. The whole point of the festival was for Sri Lankan boys to grab white girls' butts. The second we tried to dance, we were surrounded and accosted.”

“It was pretty gross,” Lievin agrees. “There was something in the boys' eyes. Like they were crazed. Compelled by some demon to grab the girls' butts.” I look more closely at Lievin as he continues. He has a little sympathy for the boys. Most of them had probably never gone to a real party before, let alone seen girls in short skirts. Lievin has been coming here for years and he's never heard of a festival like this one; the locals' idea of a crazy party typically involves ice cream cones and human-powered roller coasters, like the festival that came to Suriya's village. But there will probably be a lot more drunken debauchery, now that the country has been rebuilt and tourism is picking up so much. The Welsh girl pulls me out of my chair. She's singing along with Michael Jackson. My limbs are loose from the beer. I kick off my sandals and dance in my tiptoed, buoyant way, like I'm trying to take off and fly, as Brian once said. The Welsh girl rolls her body like an upright snake. “Let's swim,” she says in my ear. We sprint down the beach until the tiki torch flames are orange sparks, pull off our clothes, and dive into liquid blackness. Ocean skinny-dipping: I've become just another drunken, debauched tourist. Shards of lightning gouge open a tiny purple wound of sky. Don't worry; just be grateful.

We dry ourselves by jumping and flapping our arms, get dressed and walk back to the party. A large-bellied Sri Lankan man is standing next to our table, legs wide and knees bent as if preparing to lift something heavy. It takes me a minute to place him as the man who offered me a rum punch earlier. Avoiding his eyes, I take my bag off the back of the chair, where I've stupidly left it, and join the mess of bodies flinging themselves about with self-forgetful exuberance.

My friends for the evening get tired and decide to go back to the motel. I shout good night over the music, still hopping. Lievin lets his smile linger on me. I wave and turn into the music. Once the other tourists begin to wander off, I pick up my bag and shoes, bow to the orange moon being slowly flattened between two panes of endless darkness, and head off down the beach. The round man with the bling runs after me.

“Already leaving?”

“Yes.” I walk without looking up. He follows a few steps behind.

“Can I buy you a drink before you go?”

“No.”

“Good night then.” When I'm several yards away, he calls out, “Attendez, vous êtes belge?”

I stop and turn. The music is wordless now, a tinny hum over the murmur of low waves. “Non, je suis américaine. Mais je parle français
.
”

He thought there was something French about me the first time he saw me. His smile is palpable in the darkness, now that I've relaxed toward him. But I'm too preoccupied with the fact that he's speaking French and that I understand it to worry about his lewd hopes.

One day during my senior year of high school, Mr. Samuels came up to me in the hall to tell me that my French essay on Louise Labé was so brilliant he wished he had written it himself. He made copies of my essay and distributed them to his classes. This was the last thing I'd done that I was really proud of. In the fifteen years since, reading Proust or Flaubert or Stendhal has been the only thing I could rely on to make me feel okay with myself. Yet I have avoided speaking French since Paris, where my one clear sense of worthiness was scrutinized and scorned by unsmiling waiters and clerks who insisted on addressing me in clipped, rote English as soon as they heard my accent. Strange, but I long to speak French even more now that I've given up on
Fifi
. I want to feel that I still have the language as a friend, a source of enjoyment, that it hasn't all been a waste.

“Et vous?” I ask, happy now and a little drunk and utterly free of concern about what this stranger thinks of me. “Vous habitez en Belgique?”

No, he lives in Paris. He motions back to the café. “Juste un verre?”

He pulls out a chair for me at the first table we come to. I suggest we sit closer to the café, where two white girls sway to no music. One wears a spandex skirt that ends a few inches below her ass. “Comme vous voulez,” Claude says, and follows me to a table caught in a cone of mustardy light cast by a bulb hanging from the café ceiling.

Claude was born in Colombo, but his father is French. He orders us two glasses of arrack. He went to university in Paris and decided to stay. He comes back to Sri Lanka a few times a year for business. He buys and sells hotels, here and in southern France. He asks me if I like Sri Lanka, saying “my country” in English with an overdone Sinhalese accent. Yes, I adore his country.

I try to tell him about my first trip here, how I met Suriya and then came back to stay with her family. The neglected French sounds cling to my tongue, piling up inside my mouth. I push them out into the warm, dark air, where they hover close to my face, needy and insecure. I hear everything I'm saying too clearly—the way my mouth refuses to form the right shapes, the pauses between phrases, the emptiness of their meaning. In English, I can hide behind hurried, excessive phraseology. But there is sufficient difficulty in speaking and understanding French that I'm forced to notice how traumatized I am by the simple act of talking. Inside the space between how I experience life alone and how I experience it among others are the vital mysteries of myself, impervious to cynicism or jokes or plans, unable to handle the external world even in its gentlest form. I'm sitting squarely in that space now, giddy with vulnerability.

Claude finishes half his drink in two swallows. His upper body is backlit by the café lights, a snowman's silhouette: one smaller lump atop a larger one. He thinks Sri Lanka is a good place for a vacation. But he couldn't stand living here. He got out as soon as he could. Because of the war? I wonder.