The Beautiful Anthology (3 page)

The black pierce appeared to me a portal to a different world. I looked at this guy’s foot for what seemed like forever, and I finally pulled back enough to look at him. He had thick black hair cut in a stylish boy-bob, smooth wide cheeks, dense black eyelashes, and black eyes, which I met. I’m sure my desire was absolutely naked, because he looked at me back, and I could almost hear the click of recognition:
low-hanging fruit
.

I’m someone who pays attention to appearances. I stare at people too long. I’m a writer, and I like to deconstruct faces and clothing and the arrangements of limbs, but I also just flat out like pretty ones. Always have. In kindergarten, I wanted to befriend a girl because she had long, inky hair. My earliest memory of visiting the big city of Pittsburgh is sitting in the backseat of our whooshing station wagon and swiveling my head so I could keep the gigantic, billboard- splashed face of a lovely model in sight.

Late to develop in other ways, I was early in discovering my eye for boys. After living elsewhere for a year, I returned to my hometown the summer before sixth grade and studied the yearbook, picking whom I wanted as a boyfriend: Brian Olah, tall and handsome, but distinctively so. I didn’t fall for checklist beauty; I had to decide it on my own terms. My relationship with female attractiveness became complicated – I’m unclear whether my concerns led me to or resulted from a feminist consciousness – and I had mixed feelings about my desire to be a pretty girl, how it felt to be treated as one, how concerned the world was with categorizing and policing female appearance. But this never interfered with my appreciation of form. When, catching up, I told a friend about a new beau and slipped in a mention of how good he looked to me, she said, “You always date handsome men. You’ll probably marry someone who’s not handsome.”

“Do you think so?” I said, as if it were an open question.
No way
, I thought. And I was right. Years later, I married that boyfriend. Closing in on two decades together, mired in domestic drudgery, I might be lying if I said not a day goes by, but I’m sure not a week goes by, when his appearance doesn’t elicit an almost objective appreciation from me that’s distinct from the affection that arises from the familiarity of his features.

But handsome is different than beautiful. Pretty is different than beautiful. Certainly it is in terms of my reaction. I respond to beauty more from a place of helplessness, my ego melting in its beam. It’s not like eyes meeting across a room for an exchange of understanding, of human connection; the recognition is not the first move in a game.

A bloom of a foot. A flower. A sunset. The consummation is already past. My response is violent but impersonal. It’s not about me. Or I don’t want it to be.

The man with the maimed foot was named Ghan. A fledgling trek guide, he lived in one of the bungalows and worked as sort of a houseboy around the place when he was not leading tourists on overnight hikes to hill-tribe villages. Meals were eaten communally at the lodge, and Ghan helped with every step: going to the market, chopping, cooking, serving. Then he sat down to eat with the guests, explaining night after night what was in the jar of sauce being passed: fish sauce, vinegar, chilies; and what to do if the food was too hot: eat plain rice to absorb the oils, don’t gulp water that will spread them around.

Of course, I wanted to look at him more, but his presence at dinner pained me. I felt the opposite of flirtatious. I felt shy, so embarrassed by my regard of his person that I wanted to hide my head. Several months earlier, my long-term boyfriend and I had broken up, and I spent the span before I went to Asia doing some rebound gallivanting. I outfitted and paraded myself. Put on red lipstick, red hot pants, shiny vinyl go-go boots. Men responded. But how many of the finer sentiments can you trust when you’ve waved a red flag at a bull? My trip was supposed to strip away all that. I dressed like an urchin boy. I hacked off my hair. I carried no makeup. I felt ungainly, and although that was part of the point, at that table in Pai I felt almost ashamed by the inequality between Ghan’s grace and mine.

But he had my number. It was almost obligatory, the way he tossed lines to me at dinner. The effort felt forced. “Chicago,” he called out to me across the table once my hometown had been divulged, “How you like Thai spicy food?” “Chicago, do you want some more?” Or sometimes just: “Chicago!” So I’d look at him and blush. Was he mocking me and my open lust? “Chicago! We’re going dancing. You can come.”

Ghan, the Belgian expat, and about six of the lodge’s guests piled on three motorbikes and buzzed along twisting dark roads to a village festival. Loudspeakers were rigged up to posts surrounding a field, and Thai pop blared to the point of distortion. Ghan politely tried to make conversation with me, leaving me flattered but in agony. We could barely hear each other, and our foreign accents and frames of reference limited even the little we could discern. “Do you want to dance?” he finally shouted at me. “But your foot!” I shouted back. “Sorry. Cannot hear. Better to dance.” He hobbled out to the field, and I followed. Then he turned to me and started hopping on one foot, his hair flopping and his trousers shaking to the beat. My own foot pulsed with sympathy for what the movement must be doing to his. “It’s okay,” I wanted to say. “We don’t have to talk. We don’t have to dance. It’s nice of you to pretend to try, but obviously I’ll go to bed with you either way.”

But there was no bed in sight. The night was not over. The village festival’s offerings neither quaint nor sophisticated enough for backpackers habituated to the cacophony of India and the worldclass deejays found down south, we ended up back on the motorbikes, driving farther into the hilly countryside to score some opium.

We pulled up to a small bamboo hut distinguished from those we were renting mostly by the mounds of garlic piled round it. After Ghan and the Belgian muttered negotiations with an awakened resident, we all filed in and a woman emerged from the second room to stoke the fire and hack into it. The man of the house slipped out the door. “To get the opium man,” Ghan said. “We wait.” The woman didn’t meet our eyes. She obviously would have preferred to be sleeping; she obviously hated our presence under her roof. I shriveled. I wondered,
Whose idea was it to come?

The opium man looked the part: blackened teeth, black fingers, clothes like moss and bark. We took turns depositing money on a pile and lying down face to face with him, our heads resting on pillows of garlic as we accepted the stem of a long pipe whose bowl he tended. He packed it, poked it, kept it lit while we inhaled. At first, it was awkwardness upon the awkwardness, my white bull of a self making the floor shake as I moved toward the pipe, my greedy but unskilled sucking performed within six inches from a face that never met a bar of soap nor tube of Crest.

But, you know, it’s opium. It’s a great high. And pretty soon there was nothing awkward or uncomfortable at all. There was no need for dancing or repartee and no shame in desire, and when Ghan said, simply, softly, “Zoo, come here and lie with me,” I leaped like a gazelle across the room and into his spoon. In between pipes, we kissed. Cushioned, blossoming kisses that lasted – literally, I believe – for hours. People left. The fire went out. I was unaware. When I opened my eyes at dawn, his lashes, against his cheek, were covered with white ash. The curve of the burnished cheek, the echoed curve of the lash, the gentleness of the ash: again with the symphony. The gray light of day only accentuated it. Beauty. And this time I could kiss it. There was more hacking around the fire as others awakened; there was open incivility between the Belgian and the hostess, but it didn’t touch me, and somehow Ghan and I were granted our own motorbike. I wrapped my arms around his waist and off we floated through the fog.

We were coupled for the remainder of my time in Pai. We went to the market together, ran errands for the lodge, took scenic motorbike rides, drank banana milkshakes at cafés. We went to his friends’ homes. We spent a lot of time rolling around in my bungalow. It was all so sweet.

But sexy is different than beautiful. Or it can be. It was in this case. One of the things we did together was drive out to the methadone clinic, where Ghan got his daily supply and where the clinicians also tended to his foot.

Pretty much every young man in Pai – or at least every young man a grungy backpacker sleeping with one of them is likely to meet – was on either heroin or methadone. Pai is in poppy country, and this was back when Thailand was still a major producer. Around there, heroin cost practically nothing. Around there, tourism was the only growth industry. Many of the guys worked with backpackers for whom visiting the opium man and smoking white powder out of bamboo bongs was part of the package. And then, of course, we went away, to the beaches or the ruins or the Bangkok sex clubs, to the pot or the X or the mushrooms or the hashish that was the specialty of the next locale. While there the Pai-landers stayed.

Ghan blamed his frequent impotence on the condoms I insisted on, but I suspected otherwise. While his erratic erections would have made me crazy in the past, would have driven me away in a fury of dissatisfaction and self-doubt, it didn’t bother me much with him. Nothing did. It was as if I were still high. We cuddled and lounged and explored each other. I loved to look at him. The way his hair swung when he stepped out of his sandals before crossing a threshold, the graceful wrap of his masculine muscles over his delicate frame. Sometimes I held his foot, feigning concern for its injury, wondering at how it could be continually exposed to the elements but remain so plump and fine. Of course, part of it was his youth. He was a tender shoot, bamboo that I could almost see grow. While I was there, he traded the embroidered hill-tribe sash with which he tied his trousers to a Frenchman in return for a logo tee from a windsurfing company, and without his plain white cotton and the smooth fold of fabric around his hips that the sash had allowed him to make, his beauty was shorn just a sliver.

He’d been in Pai for less than a year. Before that, he had been at a monastery, where he had learned English. His family farmed rice. They lived in the jungle, he said. Not close to Pai; somewhere no tourists went. He wanted to take me there to see them. He planned the itinerary: first to Chiang Mai, then on another bus to the closest town, then three days walking. We would have to wait until his foot was healed. And then we would have to wait while he led a tourist trek, so that he’d have some money.

In the meantime, he told me the story of the worst moment of his life. I feel it would be an invasion to offer it here, but it involved guarding over a rice field from a platform in the trees on a night with no moon. I know he gave it to me, the way lovers do, as a gift. “Not beautiful, but cute, and a very nice person,” he told me drifting off to sleep one night. He sounded like a man who had recently revaluated his priorities and was pleased with the new order. Or maybe he was impressed at his ability to achieve accuracy in English. He repeated himself: “Not beautiful, but cute, and a very nice person.” He kissed me.

I accepted this description easily. Unlike compliments earned in my show-horse stage, it felt like it would last. If he didn’t think I was beautiful, that no longer mattered.

He seemed to me so sweet, so pure: the foot, the heroin, the methadone, the moonlit rice fields, the Mercurochrome, the monastery. A picturesque vista.

And I thought he was a very nice, too, above-average decent. But really, how could I know? Upon first acquaintance with a beautiful person, the existence of any virtue besides it seems such a bounteous gift. Kindness! Wow! And she’s so down-to-
earth
! And he’s really
funny
. And then there’s the way beauty affects the taste buds, makes things seem deliriously sweet even if around the core is bitterness.

Or, at least, it creates delirium for a while. It’s the shock of discovery that gives beauty such power. You can reveal it again and again, of course; it’s a living thing, ever changing, moving into something new. But you can also become accustomed. The balance between Ghan and I shifted. Having started out ashamed, I became almost proud of, certainly I drew confidence from, not being the beautiful one in our pair.

I stayed in Pai longer than I would have otherwise, but not long enough for Ghan’s foot to heal completely. Given the offer, I decided to leave with an Australian girl named Vanessa for a less-discovered little town on the Mekong River farther east. Ghan was crestfallen the day I departed. Pouty. He met my eyes only when I roughed out my travel plans and estimated that I might be able to come back around Easter, a word that meant nothing to him. “The beginning of the hot season,” I translated. I saw hope flicker.

I did think of him around then. I was in Bangkok. But I didn’t have time to get all the way up to Pai before heading off to Kathmandu. I’ve thought of him many times since, but I spent Easter in Nepal.

M. J. FIEVRE

THE OTHER PAPA

Jeweled chopsticks and flowered pins lie scattered on
the vanity top. Mother’s hair is up in an elaborate bun with languorous permed curls dangling along the sides of her face. Sitting on the bed, Papa watches her as she clasps her pearl necklace closed.