Wreck and Order (7 page)

“No, no, no,” I said. “I only want to be friends with you, Dhit. Just friends.” A porch light flicked on. My guesthouse owner walked out and glared in the direction of our voices.

“Maybe we can still be together. Just as friends.” Dhit tried to smile but it only forced tears out of the corners of his eyes. I looked away and again offered to pay him for his translating. “No.” The word was fierce, almost angry. Could he at least have a hug? I queasily submitted. He pulled me too close and pressed his mouth so firmly against my cheek that his inner lips wet my skin. I pulled back, but his grip was firm on my lower back. I pushed against Dhit's shoulders to disengage, turned my back to him and started walking away. “I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed getting to know you and your family,” I said. “Please tell them thank you and goodbye.” I forced myself not to run up the stairs to my rented room.

Before bed, I looked through the random collection of strangers' sorrow and rage that filled up my notebook. I told myself the fragments were meaningful.

I was elated to be back at Rose Land, drinking tea in the courtyard, listening to the chanting at sunset, buying king coconuts and pineapples from the vendors in town. A young woman approached me as I was sitting on a bench one morning, enjoying the steady stream of families with ice cream cones and monks talking on mobile phones under the shade of umbrellas. “Oh, hi, hello. How do you do?” she said. “Can I practice English with you?” She grimaced against her nervousness. She was wide-faced and petite in too-big clothes—washed-out jeans and a pink T-shirt that said
TRUE LOVE FOREVER
. After weeks of being harassed by rickshaw drivers and trailed by unknown men, the relief of a girl's face close to mine made me laugh as I said “yes” and “please” too many times. “Thank you,” she said. “I never risk to speak with a foreigner before.” She told me her name and placed her hand around my wrist to lead me across the street. We went to an underground bakery, where Suriya ordered us chocolate ice cream and neon sugar water advertised as orange juice. She insisted on paying, even though she was only eighteen and her parents had health problems that made them unable to work and her brother, a soldier in the Sri Lankan army, used almost all of his earnings to pay for Suriya's college classes and boardinghouse rent.

I stiffened at the end of her tale of woe, waiting for her to ask me for money. Instead she leaned forward and said, “Can I do something?” Her wide cheeks were dotted with blackheads the size of freckles. She wiped ice cream off the tip of my nose and then sat back, her small breasts shaking under her loose T-shirt in time with her long, loud, illogical giggle. “My mother and father will be so happy I am speaking English with you,” she said when we finished our ice cream. “I think I have the strength to talk to you because—I must change my life. It is boring.”

I felt a crass almost-embarrassment for Rilke, as if he'd stolen the most famous line of his most famous sonnet from a twenty-year-old chatting with a stranger in a language she barely knew.

“What is your life like?” I asked Suriya, circling the bottom of my glass with my straw.

An endless succession of schoolwork and chores at her secluded boardinghouse, where she shared a room with the stern owner's ten-year-old daughter. In fact, she had to be going or the owner would be angry. “When you come to my parents' home, I dress you in a sari,” she said as we left the restaurant. “You are so pretty, like doll.” Her pupils were huge, like the perfectly circular eyes of a teddy bear. Maybe it was that openness that made her so relaxing to look at. When we said goodbye, Suriya had me write out my email three times and my phone number and my address in the United States.

Waves of cold fear made me dizzy as I waited at the baggage claim for my filthy backpack filled with filthy clothes. Everyone around me was beautiful in a way that looked expensive and tiresome. I was immediately desperate for Jared to take me away from how much I did not want to be home.

“Baby, baby, baby,” he said when I showed up at his door. We had loud, fast sex and then got drunk at our favorite bar, sharing a stool and laughing so loudly people shot us dirty looks. On the walk home, he grabbed my wrists and pulled me into the shadow of an awning. “Turn around,” he said in the voice of sexual command that I never thought to disobey. Reflexive generosity, I suppose, in response to a clearly stated need. Freedom from the pause, the self-conscious gap between thought and action. Which was exactly what Shirmani had given me. Not that I was thinking about any of this at the time. I just turned around and leaned my forehead against the display window. Mannequins with spindly legs and sunken tummies grinned out of the darkness on the other side of the glass. Jared put his sweatshirt over my head and tied it at the nape of my neck, tight enough to leave a ring around my throat. My eyelashes caught against the fabric when I blinked. “This is what you get for making me miss you so much,” he said. Blood rushed to my groin.

He walked me home that way, holding my wrists tightly at my back, jerking me down one silent street after another. A minivan started following us, and Jared released my hands so I could lift the sweatshirt off my head, smile, and wave to show this was all just a game. I was a child making herself invisible by covering her face with her hands. As soon as the van was gone, we started playing again.

By the time we got to his apartment, the air under the sweatshirt was hot and thin. My wrists hurt. Jared kept murmuring words I couldn't hear, ignoring my protests, fishing through his pocket for his keys with his free hand, until I cried out for him to let me go. He released my wrist and then brought his fist down on my left shoulder. As he unlocked the door to his apartment, I stuck my index finger through a hole in my panty hose and traced a tiny circle against my thigh. I had chosen wrongly in a way that made me interesting to myself. I felt I could handle the wrong choices better now, that I could live the old life in a new way.

In the morning, when I told Jared that my shoulder felt bruised where he had hit me, he said he hadn't hit me that hard, he would never hit me that hard, oh my god, he had missed me so much, was I really here, would I stay forever, did I want to hike to that swimming hole and go skinny-dipping today?

“Yes, please. But let's not bring beer.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

The sun-warm stone on my water-cold butt, toasting each other raunchily with cold cans of tingly beer, getting relaxed and giggly…“Or just two beers. One each. No more.”

“Sri Lanka turned you into quite the Buddhist, huh?”

“The reason I need Buddhism is because I am a horrible Buddhist.”

I tried going to a meditation group in Carpinteria. One of the girls there was wearing a halter top with no bra and a glittery bindhi stuck to her forehead. The group leader had a Buddha tattooed on the back of his neck. While we were supposed to be meditating, he would say stuff like, “Our Western culture tells us that happiness comes from material things. But all material things are impermanent. So true happiness comes from relinquishing desire. Stop thinking, stop wanting. Sit. Feel the peace.” His desperation to feel the peace made it pretty hard for me to stop thinking about how much I wanted him to shut up.

I tried a yoga class called Moving Meditation. It was nice in a physical way. The teacher ended every class with the affirmation “Enlightenment is possible in this very lifetime!” A lovely idea, but one requiring a commitment—giving up everything except sitting—that neither I nor the other people who had driven to yoga for a little exercise seemed likely to pursue. It required the kind of faith, or maybe just circumstantial desperation, that made the long-term meditators at Shirmani stay there for twenty years, that made the man in white sit perfectly still for two days straight. In its classes, posters, and bookstore, the yoga studio encouraged people to love life, to honor their bodies as sacred, not to worry about the past or future. There was nothing wrong with these ideas, but I resented the grandiosity that was attached to them, the implication that feeling good led to enlightenment—as if enlightenment was just being the exact same person you were today except that you were constantly happy, as if no difficult sacrifices were required to change that profoundly. It's not as if I was making these sacrifices myself. But I didn't believe I was just one mind-blowing yoga class away from enlightenment. I just knew that meditation helped.

So I tried to sit on my own. But just assuming the posture—crossed legs, straight back, palms upturned on my lap—overwhelmed me, and I'd quickly jump up to check my phone or make a cup of coffee. Jared tried to meditate with me a few times. But it felt like one more pose—the two of us hungover, wearing only our underwear, hopped up on coffee, sneaking peeks at the clock, desperate for the fifteen minutes to be up so we could eat and talk and laugh away our shame at the money and time and energy we'd wasted the previous night. To walk away from something that has taken so much and given so little is to accept monstrous, murderous failure. It's easier to remain caught up in the unworthiness, telling oneself this is just the way life happens to be.

I got an occasional letter from Suriya, a reminder that there were other ways I could be spending my time. She took our friendship seriously, as if it were based on much more than one afternoon. In a particularly desperate mood, I bought a phone card and called her mobile phone. I couldn't understand much of what she said in her broken English over the bad connection, but the sound of her voice comforted me. I had a link, however tenuous, to something far away.

My other source of comfort was that Donnie had agreed to run my Jaffna story as a cover. It made me like myself more to think I was publishing an article about Tamil oppression, even if it was disjointed and a touch overwrought. But, week after week, my piece kept getting pushed down the line by something Donnie considered more “time-sensitive.” The week before Christmas, a writer failed to turn in a story that was slated for the back of the book, and they needed something to fill the slot. The editor cut my piece in half in a matter of hours, while I argued with Donnie to make it the cover story, since the current one—“This Year, Give the Gift of Experience,” which included suggestions like gift certificates to spas or movie theaters—was already short enough to run at the back of the book. “I'm sure your piece is brilliant,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and looking me in the eye. “But people just don't want to read about depressing stuff like that during the holidays. Have a little compassion.” He lowered his voice. “Don't spread this around, but I'm willing to pay you for the original word count.”

I have never had a lot of gumption when faced with obstacles that feel to me unjust. Paris taught me that. I was so fragile that I'd let a few bored waiters chase me out of my potential future. And now I resolved to give up journalism for good. Poor Dhit. I had exploited his affection for nothing. After the skeleton of my original article was published, crammed between a review of a Britney Spears record and a new sushi bar, Jared comforted me with whiskey and sex. “Don't worry,” he said, “one person can't make a difference.”

The same week my Sri Lanka story was butchered, Jared left his email open on my computer. I read one suggestive message after another from a girl named Calypso, breathing so quickly and forcefully that my lips and hands went numb. I'd gone with Jared to a couple of drop-offs at Calypso's place. She had silicon lips and pockmarked skin caked in foundation. She worked as a pinup girl, mainly doing car ads. She was sexy in a way that made sex seem depraved and dumb. After I read her emails telling Jared she couldn't stop laughing about such-and-such a thing he said and she'd been having naughty dreams about him and missed his adorable face and would he please pretty please meet her at this party tonight, I downed three beers and texted Jared to come over after the show. His band was playing at a dive bar in Ventura. I'd decided to stay in, supposedly to work on
Fifi.

I wasn't planning to tell Jared I'd read his email; I'd bring up fidelity some other way, open a real conversation about our future. But when we started having sex, my mind assailed me with images of his hands on other larger breasts, his mouth on other fuller lips. I pushed him off me and demanded he never see Calypso again, I knew what he was up to, that girl was such a loser, did he have any self-respect? Jared got out of bed and stepped into his pants. I jumped up and placed myself between him and the door. I felt myself yelling words I didn't hear. “Knock it off,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “You're boring the shit out of me.” I didn't mind what he said, as long as he was still in front of me. I wrapped myself around his legs. His leather boots were cold against my butt. Gripping his jeans, I told him Calypso was an ugly slut and I'd never see him again if he walked out the door. “You were away for months. You think I just sat around waiting for you to get back?” He peeled me from his calves and slammed the front door.

I stayed up 'til dawn looking at rooms for rent in Brooklyn, Houston, Seattle, Boston, gripping my breasts so hard I left handprints on them. I needed to be anywhere but here, anyone but me.

New York seemed like the best place to go because it was far away and close-but-not-too-close to my dad and supposedly artsy. Becoming a translator felt increasingly like my only acceptable option. I had no interest in trying to write books or stories of my own, although that would seem to be a logical vocation for me, if only a dream one, what with all my devouring of books and obsessive jotting down of thoughts. I refuse to use the word
journal
, since people started using it as a verb, as in, “Why don't you journal about your colon cancer?” Whatever it is I do in my little notebooks is more an effort to purge myself of thoughts than it is a hope to make use of them. Which is why I needed to be a translator, to use words in a way that would take me outside of myself, exploit my brain as a vehicle of someone else's expression.

I googled the name of every translator listed on my books, convincing myself that it was possible to make a living translating from home. Once I published my first book, I could reach out to museums, university presses, businesses in need of translators. It was even possible I would become one of those rare translators who made a name for herself, and I would be commissioned to translate all the works of some well-known contemporary French writer and the writer and I would become close friends and I would get one of those awards the French government likes to give foreigners whose contribution to Francophone literature is little known in their own countries. These were my actual thoughts. I found a room for rent on Craigslist and emailed applications to bookstores. That seemed like a good place to meet the right kind of people.

There were cupcakes in the conference room on my last day at
Carp Weekly
. Donnie gave me a hug that lasted too long. Sally made a speech congratulating herself for recognizing my potential. Joe approached me in the parking lot afterward. “Listen, if this is about the money,” he said, “I wish you'da talked to me. Donnie is a cheap fuck but I know how to force his hand.” I was embarrassed to have to shake my head no. When I told my dad I was moving to New York to become a translator, he mailed me a check for $4,000. “So that you can afford a nice apartment, not just slum it with a dozen roommates.” My father didn't understand anything about New York rents, but the money would pay for my trip across the country and give me a few months to settle down.

I knew that I couldn't tell Jared I was leaving or I would never leave. So I waited until hours before my planned departure to pack up my belongings. I convinced my roommate that he was lucky to have my IKEA furniture, so he could now advertise the room as furnished. I merged onto 84 East in a Corolla filled with nothing but clothes and books.

Only when I was two-thirds of the way across country did I let myself call Jared. He started crying as soon as he heard my voice. We said almost nothing, just sobbed into our respective phones for close to an hour, when Jared finally dragged himself away. I knew exactly where he was going.