Wreck and Order (24 page)

Every meal at Manuela's is mango and bananas and spicy cashews and dhal and thick slabs of coarse bread. In the afternoons, we drink tea and then read, cocooned inside hammocks. I borrow books from the shelf on the patio. A few are in French, romantic and frivolous. It's good to engage with French besides my translation. I adopt Manuela's easy dress—tank top, loose skirt, no bra. I cover myself when the boys come to clear palm leaves or fix the plumbing in one of the cabanas, but they hardly seem to register my presence. In the late afternoons, I walk on the beach, clambering over rock embankments that separate one cove from the next. The dogs are giddy companions, sprinting and digging and burrowing and wiping their sandy snouts against my skirt. I stand atop the rocks and watch the coming waves. Their whitecaps mist and froth as they gather force and speed until they lose control of their own momentum, hurl themselves against the rocks, explode upward like geysers, spritzing me in saltwater.

There is no point to my life. The sentence appears in my head several times a day. If I said the words out loud, it would sound like a lament. But kept to myself, it's the best thought I've ever had.

I sit on my bed in the mornings and evenings, remaining still for long enough that I become attuned to my body's involuntary movements—abdomen filling and deflating, air rustling my nose hairs, pressure building and easing in my guts, itchy pressure at the center of my chest that gradually grows into the sensation I used to call my annoyment knot. If I can sit still and endure the knot for what seems like a long time, the feeling of agitation gives way to the nearly pleasant pins-and-needles tingling that arises when a numb body part regains sensation, and my heart and groin begin vibrating and floating like those curlicues of light that drift through bright skies, and the only thought I know is a line from a song—
oh my little love
—which plays in the head of a character in one of my favorite stories when he has sex with his wife. The shift is like opening the door to a gas station restroom and finding a deserted beach. Sky sand ocean stop sky sand ocean stop sky…Only after hours of listening to inner monologues—“Can you see the line of my underwear through these pants? Where did I buy these pants again? And when was that exactly? And what was I wearing that day? I am such a loser for never having read Thomas Hardy. I wish Manuela knew that I have no idea how much I weigh. Is this fart going to make a noise? What about this one?”—do I believe that the monk at Shirmani was not just making a cute philosophical metaphor when he compared the mind to a mug with a hole in the bottom. The entire Indian Ocean could never fill the mug. But I do not need to fill the mug. The mind provides exactly what the mind needs. I just sit; I'm free.

As a narrative experience, it sounds like New Age bunk. As an actual experience, it is enough to live for.

I imagine how my meditating form would appear from the outside—jaw unhinged, tongue wadded against my lower teeth; eyes opened just wide enough to let in shapeless light; lower belly puffed and rounded, as if a baby animal has burrowed into the warmth at my center. Why does it feel obscene to be this relaxed?

In the hottest part of the day, I sit on the wet sand and bathe in the waves' runoff, then rinse my salt-crusted legs with the hose in Manuela's yard and lie in the hammock in wet clothes. During the brief, violent rainstorms, I sit on the rocks and watch the world lose its edges. Suriya is back in her boardinghouse hell, staying up late doing schoolwork, waking up early to sweep the house. I miss her, but I don't miss sharing her life. There is only one pursuit that could justify the privilege of my remove from society, and there is no word for it that does not make me seem like a woman who drinks a potion of cat urine and wasabi root on harvest moon nights: egolessness, superconsciousness, truth. If I use my freedom for any purpose other than cultivating constant awareness of the reality outside my mind, I should die now. The earth should sneeze while I am atop this boulder and feed me to the roaring, frothing wave mouth below.

“My son will be here in a few weeks,” Manuela says one night. We're drinking hot water with ginger. “He spends the summers here.”

“Where does he live the rest of the time?”

She stands up and straightens one of his Christmas cards, talking with her back to me. Emil's father left when he found out Manuela was pregnant. They were crazy about each other but he didn't want to be a parent and Manuela just could not have an abortion. The blond dog runs onto the patio and flops at Manuela's feet. She bends down to scratch his ears. Motherhood made her lose her mind. She could not bear the love she felt for Emil, how that one attachment eclipsed all the other ways she used to be a person. It took her hours to decide whether she should put a coat on him before they went out for a walk and months to decide whether he should sleep with his bedroom door opened or closed—stuff like that, every second of every day, all alone obsessing about tiny details. So Emil has lived with his aunt and uncle and their two kids since he was five. He loves his family. He seems okay.

I fish the ginger out of the bottom of my mug. Before he became the Buddha, Shakyamuni named his son Rahula, meaning fetter. The nun who gave the talk about abandoning hope also said that her family accused her of neglecting her children when she started studying Buddhism. I feel lucky, for a moment, to be unfettered. The only impediments to getting to know myself completely are fear and desire, dragging me toward this and away from that, searching and searching for what can't be found.

Manuela stands up and picks a notebook off the table. “Tell me if this is too personal,” I say, “but I just—being here all alone for so many years—has it been hard—I mean—not being with anyone—”

“You're wondering about sex?”

Yes. I'm always wondering about sex. It's the main question of my life. You could call me shamefully privileged, but my privilege is not the part that I'm ashamed about. I was not born a blind, furry, transsexual orphan. I can accept that about myself. What upsets me is the cliché of my privileged concern. When I was working at Barnes and Noble, it seemed like every other week I was charged with making a conspicuous display of a new book by a woman who claimed to have found a spiritual solution to the problem of sex. Gang bangs heal the wounds of a traumatic childhood! Casual sex is a soul-destroying addiction! Sex is power for women who ignore their emotions! Worship your vagina like the goddess she is! Expert blow jobs are the secret to a happy marriage! Anal sex is the key to women's liberation! The books reminded me of Sally from
Carp Weekly,
who would complain when her husband stayed out late. “He is so in the doghouse. No nookie-nookie for him!” As if sex is only a way to get something that has nothing to do with sex.

“I had beautiful sex with Emil's father,” Manuela says. “So I've had that experience. I don't feel like I need to keep having it over and over until I die.”

I wonder aloud what she means by beautiful.

“I mean that I could relax completely. After we'd been together a little while, of course. I made him feel good; he made me feel good. We didn't have to talk about it. It was easy.”

I've had sex like that a few times, unhurried pleasure given and received of its own accord, no striving. That kind of sex made it feel like all my other encounters, experiments, fantasies were just consolation for the lack of this basic need simply met. Maybe it would be enough to be able to count on sex like that for a sustained period of time; I'd be free to worry about something else.

Still, the first few years here were hard sometimes, Manuela tells me. She's looking through the bookshelf, her crisp, pale ponytail facing me. “This book helped,” she says, and hands me a thick volume with a smiling Indian man in white on the cover, one hand over his heart: The kind of hippie book my mother would own.
I Am That
, it's called. Manuela says good night and joins the darkness beyond the patio.

In bed later, I glimpse my reflection in the window as I reach up to pull the cord of the overhead light. My legs, tan and bare and covered in blond down, seem very far away. I run my hands up my calves, massage the sides of my kneecaps, rest my thumbs in the nook between thigh and groin. I willfully conjure the image of Jared inside me. Part of his body moved in and out of part of my body thousands and thousands of times—probably more times than I've done any other activity involving another human being. And yet it seems dizzyingly extreme to think of it now, like jumping off a bridge into a pitch-black lake.

Jared and I both liked having anal sex. I felt relaxed and protected, lying on my stomach with my face hidden, his mouth so close to my ear that I felt the tiniest shifts of his breath, the sound of his need for me; his movements small and slow, so precise that I could imagine my way into Jared's experience of them. I was all alone, with someone else. Once we were having sex that way in the early morning, when I was still dreamy and calm. Every time Jared pulled back he left me completely and waited for a few seconds before pushing back inside, so that every time he entered me it was like the first time, and I was counting the first times with animal concentration and there were no worries about what I was giving myself up to. I just gave. It was all right. I pressed my pelvis against the mattress. A groan vibrated in my throat. Jared stopped moving. He raised himself off my back. He jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I reached behind me and touched between my legs. Very wet, very brown. I felt myself tumbling into a well, the sound of rushing blackness. After I cleaned myself and put on lace panties and a silk nightgown, I lay down on the very edge of the bed, as far as possible from Jared, terrified of his thoughts about my body. I wanted to let the moment disappear, but my voice intruded, dry and loud. “I feel disgusting.”

Nothing I say aloud is what I really want to be saying.

What I meant was, Is it necessary for me to feel disgusting? For us to be distant and ashamed because a sex act didn't go the way we wanted it to? Must we pretend my ass exists solely as an erotic portal?

In the lady's sex book about surrendering to anal sex, one chapter was devoted to hygiene, another to attire. It was easy for me to mock the writer as I consumed her small, punchy treatise during my lunch breaks. (So you're telling me female liberation requires anal douching and silk thongs and stilettos? And why exactly should I hope to liberate womankind with my sex life anyway? I don't know about you, toots, but I have sex to feel good.) Yet I also eroticize ideas of myself. I never fantasize about receiving pleasure. I always come at the instant of the imagined man's climax. But I am not a man, so my own orgasm abruptly splits away from the fantasy I've been lost in. I want to feel as Jared seemed to during anal sex, so consumed by the actual sensation of the actual moment that he could not help but release. Whereas I can only come when imagining something different from the current moment, even if the current moment later becomes what I imagine.

One time was different. Jared was licking me and the usual imagery came to mind—man's penis, woman's mouth, he was going to come so hard—and then I was back in the room and it was me, not an imaginary brute, who was going to come so hard. I felt the sensation in my groin pulsing outward through my body, until I was clutching the headboard, every muscle tensed, engaged, ready to release all claims to itself, and then the sensation barreled me down and I was gone for a little while, aware only of the complete release of complete contraction, instead of the sensation just being something that happened to me while I thought about something else. A pure moment. I want it back. I want it now.

I flip through the book Manuela gave me until I come to an underlined passage, which I read with a shock of recognition, as if someone has made sense of years of thoughts I didn't realize I was having. “It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Increase and widen your desires until nothing but reality can fulfill them. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy.” Before he became the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha lived in a palace filled with concubines at his beck and call. Some teachers say it was the experience of orgasm that opened him to the possibility of living that freedom in every moment. But he left the palace and sat in a cave for eight years because he understood that the desire to ejaculate inside a different woman every night is the very essence of suffering. He wanted to receive all of life with that openness, that presence. Of course I'm using the Buddha to stand in for my own ideals. I've never had an experience of sexual pleasure that compares to the expansiveness I've felt at times during meditation. Which does not mean I'm about to give up sex. But it helps to be reminded of what I want more.

An hour after translating the final sentence of
Fifi,
I'm sitting in front of a computer at an empty Internet café, shouting
nervous nervous nervous
in my head. My father once told me that if you know how you feel, your body calms down. He also told me to manifest what I want—picture myself having it, trust that I will get it, feel grateful for having it even before it arrives. So I visualize the content of the publisher's email before I open it.
Dear Ms. Elsie Shore
, it will read.
We would be honored and delighted to publish your translation of
Fifi
.

Deep breath. Click.

“We greatly appreciate the opportunity to consider your work. We're afraid
Fifi
is not a good fit for us…happy to consider more work in the future…best of luck…” I wipe my hands on my skirt, close my eyes until I can feel the pause between heartbeats.

Well, it's only one publisher. I should look up other publishers and literary journals, go back to submitting cold, tossing pebbles at a wall in the hope that it might crumble. But how dull
Fifi
has become to me, in the course of translating it. So then I should translate another book, a better one. But even if I work quickly, that's a years-long undertaking, and then I'd have to go through the dismal submissions process again and even if by some miracle I were able to get one book translated, what then? I don't want to spend another decade just hoping to become this particular thing. If I stop imagining the way my life looks from the outside, I don't even care about being a translator.