The Bigness of the World (16 page)

My parents owned the only eating establishment in town, The Trout Café, and were thus acquainted with Mrs. Carlstrom, who occasionally came in after school and drank several cups of coffee while grading our homework, a process that often involved little more than drawing an angry red line diagonally across a page, which meant that the work was, as she put it, unacceptable. My father told me once that she had a “caustic wit,” which, he said, was something that most people did not appreciate. I did not know this word
caustic
and, until I bothered to look it up, mistakenly assumed it had something to do with
cause
, though what I thought it caused, I cannot say — shame and uneasiness, I suppose, judging from my classmates’ reactions. When I finally did check its meaning, I found that
caustic wit
had actually to do with bitterness and that bitterness (this also from the dictionary, for I was too young to have learned these things in any other way) had much to do with disappointment.

During that year in Malaysia, I realized that I had had enough of teaching, which I had been doing for fifteen years with a fair amount of success and, it must be said, an increasing sense of bitterness. We both felt this way, I think, Georgia to the lesser degree and I to the much greater, though we spoke of it only in small, petty complaints. The day that my classroom epiphany occurred was my forty-fourth birthday, no milestone event but significant nonetheless, for that
was Mrs. Carlstrom’s age when I was her pupil. We had been in Malaysia for six months by then, but I had told no one at the college that it was my birthday, certainly not my students, who would have stared at me awkwardly, wondering what they were to do with the information. However, when we awoke that morning, Georgia made no mention of it either, though we had celebrated the occasion together fourteen times. Throughout the day, when we met in the hallway at school or sat together in the cramped teachers’ room, I looked for signs that she was pretending, perhaps to heighten the pleasure of a planned surprise, but as the day wore on, surpriseless, I knew that she truly had forgotten, and I consoled myself by blaming the tropics, which did not provide the usual seasonal markers, turning leaves and shortening days, that keep us attuned to weeks and months and the passing of time.

Late that afternoon, as we sat together grading papers at our only table, Georgia threw down her pen with a startled look and blurted out, “Happy Birthday.”

“Thank you,” I answered cordially.

She looked around wildly for a moment, as though she had misplaced something of importance. “I thought that we might go out for noodles,” she said at last, and though this was something we did at least twice a week, I replied, “That sounds nice.”

That night after we had eaten our noodles and raised our Tiger beers in a toast, after we were back home and in bed, lying far apart in the darkness (presumably because of the heat) and speaking of trivial matters, I found myself overcome with desire, a yearning so strong that it was like a presence there in the bed between us, something separate from me, outside my control. In the early days of our relationship, we had often lain awake all night, not making love but talking, as though only by forfeiting sleep could we tell each other all of the things we wanted to say. Of course, we had sex also, but sex was secondary, an act that we engaged in at dawn, when the
sky began to lighten, making us too shy for words. In fact, sex for us then was like the cigarette that other people smoke
after
sex, a way to separate into two discrete beings. I do not recall now when our days started to fill with events deemed unworthy of discussion, but they did, and as silence or, even worse, inconsequential chatter followed us to bed, sex took on a cathartic role, becoming a constant toward which we could turn to find any number of things — pleasure, comfort, and even reconciliation.

The desire I felt that night was not sexual however — that is, I knew that the simple act of sex would do nothing to alleviate it. Rather, what I felt was nothing less than a desperate need to pass the long hours of the night telling Georgia about my day: how, as I unlocked the classroom door that morning and faced my tardy students, I had watched myself as though watching a stranger, noting the way that the students regarded me, with a mixture of pity and awe and resentment, and how all of this had left me feeling deeply disoriented and alone. I saw then that my desire was not a presence between us but a void, a deep pit that we both turned instinctively away from, rolling toward our opposite sides of the bed, Georgia snorting as she often did just before falling into a quiet, motionless sleep.

In Malaysia at that time, the midnineties, everyone was engaged in the making of money, and though Georgia and I had never fared well at this, largely through lack of trying, we allowed ourselves to be wooed by the ease with which students and colleagues alike engaged in various sorts of entrepreneurial maneuvering, doing so without any of the soul-searching or shame that often accompanied such things back home. We lived in Malacca, an old port city known for its antique shops, which we took to perusing on the weekends. It was there that we met Jackson, a portly Chinese man several years our junior who owned a shop specializing in sea salvage, pottery mainly, scavenged from sunken trading ships along the coast. Jackson was
an expert in any number of things, and as we spent more and more time in his shop, he became like a mentor to us, teaching us practical skills such as how to determine what tools had been used in a chest’s construction and whether a textile had been stitched by hand; most important, Jackson treated our newfound interest in business as something normal, even desirable.

One Saturday, as we drank tea in the back of Jackson’s shop, a partially enclosed courtyard overgrown with lush tropical plants, a man came back to where we sat and opened a suitcase on the table in front of us. Inside, beneath a stack of sweaters and trousers, unlikely tropical wear, lay twelve lumpy socks, which he picked up by the toes one at a time, letting the contents of each spill into his hand. “Fossilized red coral,” Jackson explained as we held the carvings, which were smooth and surprisingly cool. “From Tibet.”

Then, lulled not just by the tactile sensation but also by the soothing staccato of Chinese as Jackson and the man bargained, disagreeing and then — their tones unchanged — agreeing, I felt, for the first time in weeks, fully relaxed. And though this was indeed pleasant, the significance of that afternoon lay in what happened next. After the man departed, we admired Jackson’s purchases while he proudly recounted the details of his bargaining, in doing so referring repeatedly to this man with whom we had just been sitting as
the smuggler
. He did so casually, as though smugglers were a daily part of life, not just his own but ours as well. How to explain the overwhelming gratitude I felt at that moment, the sheer giddiness at being treated like somebody accustomed to the company of smugglers?

And so, shortly thereafter, during a two-week visit to Java, Georgia and I decided to become proprietresses, traders in Asian furniture and antiques, announcing our decision via a letter that we sent to family and friends back home and receiving, in return, letters of surprise and, in the case of Georgia’s grandmother, disapproval at
what she disdainfully termed our “foray into commerce.” I soon began waking up most nights in a panic, unable to imagine the shift from a professional life that revolved around instructing others in the rules of grammar, interactions I regarded as pure, to one in which conversations about furniture would dominate — conversations, moreover, that would be aimed at nudging my audience toward the purchase of a piece of said furniture: a teak daybed, a dowry chest or, my favorite, a
dingklik
.

A
dingklik
is a primitive bench, innocuous in and of itself, though the word, which was like two dueling interjections —
Ding! Klik!
— delighted me with its exotic dissonance. Later, I fretted that it was my pleasure in speaking the word that had led us to purchase seven of them, along with fifty-three other pieces of furniture, during our visit to Java, for the trip, our first period of sustained relaxation in several years, had done what such things often do: it had acted as a referendum on our lives, allowing us the opportunity to assess our situation, to find it lacking, and, through the purchase of a container of furniture that represented our combined life savings, to, in effect, vote for change.

Georgia had cheated on me. The high school in Albuquerque where she taught had arranged an overnight camping retreat in an attempt to get the faculty to bond, a goal that they had apparently achieved, for when she returned the next day, Georgia immediately confessed that she had been placed with a much younger colleague in what she ridiculously referred to as a “tent-cabin” and that, during the night, they had spoken openly and intimately about many things. “Something happened,” she whispered, and then she began to sob.

“She’s twenty-six,” I said. “You were twenty when she was born. You could be friends with her mother.” I did not say that she could
be
her mother because I found such a statement too dramatic. Nor do I know why I chose to make the discussion about age, as though
it were the woman’s age that I objected to, as though I would have been perfectly happy had Georgia cheated on me in a “tent-cabin” with a woman in her forties. Beyond this, we had decided not to discuss the details, or, in fairness, I should say that I had decided this for us, and in order to make my wishes perfectly clear, I ended what was to be our only discussion of the topic with the most flippant comment that I could muster on such short notice. “A younger woman,” I said. “Since when did we begin engaging in heterosexual clichés?”

After several weeks of moping around the house, Georgia suggested that we needed “a challenge” and broached the idea of going overseas. I understood that she was making a gesture, and so we went, abandoning established lives involving jobs and friends and a house, choosing Malaysia for no other reason than that it seemed an ignored country, the one that tourists leapt over as they passed from Thailand to Indonesia. The move, however, had solved nothing, and so we had taken this more dramatic step, binding ourselves to one another by using every cent we had to buy
dingkliks
and
palungans
and
gerebogs
, to buy a whole new vocabulary in order to avoid the ordinary words that one uses to discuss such an ordinary event as cheating.

This was how we came to be standing on the steps of Gerard Tung’s antique textile shop that morning, waiting for it to open. As we waited, a bird in the eaves above us, knowing nothing of the events that had brought us there, defecated down the front of my blouse and, for good measure, onto my skirt. The bird’s waste hit with the force of a water balloon, giving the impression of an intentional blow rather than what it was, a by-product of nature that I had unwittingly placed myself in the path of. In fact, I believe that it was this — the randomness coupled with the utter absence of malice — that triggered my highly uncharacteristic response: under the
strain of attempting to suppress my tears, my chin began to quiver, dimpling like a golf ball.

Georgia fumbled around in her backpack. “Don’t cry,” she said.

There are, I have learned, numerous ways to make this statement. There is the
Don’t cry
that is issued as a demonstration of solidarity and sympathy and that is succeeded, most often, by the words,
Or you’ll get me started
. There is the more detached and perhaps reflective
Don’t cry
, one suggesting that the situation, and often life in general, does not merit tears, a tone that I generally find both reassuring and persuasive. Then, there is the
Don’t cry
that is pure threat, that warns,
Do not start because I am not in a position to think about you or your needs, and if you do start, you will see this and most surely be disappointed
.

This latter was the “Don’t cry” that came from Georgia’s mouth the morning that I was defecated upon for the third time in my life. By the time that Gerard Tung appeared with his key and his attitude, I was sitting on the step outside his textile store, crying and swiping at the eggy mess on my skirt.

“Where is your friend today?” he asked, making no mention of my state.

“My friend?” I replied, though it was none of his business. “My friend is gone.”

II. THE PENULTIMATE

The second time occurred when I was twenty-nine, in Madrid, where the woman who was to become my lover (yes, Georgia) had not yet become my lover, despite the fact that we had moved to Spain in order to bring such a thing to fruition, a motivation that neither of us had acknowledged, not even to ourselves. We had met some months earlier in Albuquerque, but our courtship had seemed impossible there, for neither of us could bear the thought of others watching it
unfold, offering comments that would make us more self-conscious, particularly given our mutual tendency toward shyness, mine of the midwestern sort, a reticence that was like a dog holding fast to a bone, Georgia’s an easily misread shyness that manifested itself in a steady stream of words.

When we met, Georgia was dating Lisa, a perfectly nice woman who took her lesbianism seriously, despite having not informed her parents of its existence. This she blamed on the fact that she was Korean. “When I visit my parents, I am still expected to greet my father at the door when he returns from work each night,” she told us one evening over beers, by way of explaining just how difficult it would be to tell them.

“But you don’t even speak Korean,” Georgia observed, for the sake of understanding as well as arguing, which were two equally compelling tendencies in her personality, though I knew that her point lay in the latter camp.

“Exactly,” replied Lisa. “So how could I tell them?”

Lisa was in medical school and though I liked her and enjoyed our weekly tennis matches, cordial yet competitive affairs, I referred to her, disparagingly, as
the Medic
because I could not get over the fact that she did not like poetry and thought nothing of blurting out, “I don’t get poetry at all,” by which she meant that she not only didn’t understand it but even questioned its value.