Wreck and Order Read online

  I would touch myself after Brian left for work, trying not to think of the sound he made just before I gave him the release for which I could not forgive him—a quickly escalating growl. Often the sound refused to leave my head and I came with little pleasure thinking of it and afterward resented Brian even more for the straightforward sound of his straightforward climax, which forced me to be always in relation to him, even when I felt most alone. We do not get what we want, biologically speaking.

  —

  After one morning like this, I got a letter from Suriya. She was now taking exams to become an English teacher, so our letters and occasional phone conversations were very important to her success, as she put it. The most uncomplicated happiness I felt in those days came from editing her letters; along with my brief, safe descriptions of life in New York (the tall buildings! the celebrities! the pizza!), I would send a list of grammatical errors she’d made and their corrections (“I have not time for fun” to: I don’t have time for fun; “I miss my brother in whole my soul” to: I miss him with all my soul; “You are helpful me” to: You help me).

  This letter began: “In these days, I face so many problems. Yet I still alive.” (“Am still alive,” I wrote at the top of my list of corrections.) In her boardinghouse, she had been assigned to share a room with a classmate who was not as smart as Suriya and jealous of her success. She hid Suriya’s books and assignments just before the bus came in the morning, so Suriya had to go to school unprepared. Suriya complained to the boardinghouse owner and requested a different room so that she could keep her belongings safe. The owner scolded Suriya for being proud and thinking she deserved better than the other girls and said other bad things that Suriya did not wish to record, she wanted them out of her head so they would not harm her personality as an adult woman. Suriya decided to leave that bad place. She packed up her things in a box and left it in the corner of her room and then took the long bus ride home to her parents’ house, where she lived for one week until she could find a new boardinghouse, missing classes and getting far behind in school. After she settled into a new boardinghouse and returned to the old one to fetch her belongings, the box was gone. She asked the landlady for her lost things and the lady hit her and told her to stop making problems in her house. So Suriya had to move into the new boardinghouse with only the clothes on her back. She lost her one pair of socks and one good skirt and one good pair of shoes, and she had to wear dirty sandals and dirty pants to school and the boys all laughed. She did not have books to participate in class and had to stay in the classroom during the lunch period, to study the books then. She felt as if she lost everything in a strange and outside area from her home. (“Outside area from my home” to “foreign place” or “place far away from my home,” I wrote.) She called her brother, who was working in the army, also far away. He said, “Think what you have and do not think what you don’t have. Once I have money, I will bring you new garments.” (“Think OF,” I wrote. “And we usually say clothes, not garments.”) After speaking to her brother, Suriya made up her mind and hid her sadness. She studied hard and was first in all of her exams. The girl who stole her belongings made poor marks and will never have success. The boardinghouse owner who hit her has no friends because she is mean. So Suriya does not mind that they treat her poorly. They do not hurt her life. I put the letter down and was quiet and still. If I were going to concoct an inspirational tale about overcoming adversity, Suriya would probably be the star. But I didn’t have to concoct anything; Suriya was real.

  I made the mistake of reading the letter to Brian when he got home that night, wanting to share Suriya’s sweetness and wisdom. “Sounds kind of suspicious,” he said. “That’s, like, a classic sob story. Seems like she’s trying to get money out of you.” I hadn’t even considered sending Suriya money, I so rarely thought of practical solutions to anything. Partly to spite Brian’s cynicism, I wired her one hundred bucks. A few weeks later, she mailed me a dozen handmade greeting cards, decorated with pressed flowers and stickers, each with a different message: Happy New Year! Happy Birthday! Merry Christmas! God Bless You! “I wish to return your money in the future,” she wrote, “once I be a real teacher.” (“Once I am,” I wrote back.) “But until that day, you can sell these cards in a shop in New York City. They will be expensive in your country, no?”

  I showed the cards to Brian, hoping he’d be as moved as I was. “Good for you,” he said, as if I’d passed a test.

  —

  I started seeing Jared regularly after Brian presented me with a ring at the top of Bear Mountain and listed reasons he wanted to marry me in French, a language he didn’t speak. My present recklessness was justified by the severity of the future limits I promised the sunny, windy mountaintop I would respect. Every few weeks, Jared would fly to New York and stay at a motel near our apartment. Brian worked ten-hour days. Jared and I had so much time to ourselves that I often forgot we were doing anything wrong.

  I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me my fear of marriage was the result of my parents’ romantic misery. So I tried to ignore it. I was afraid of most normal things—talking to people, for instance. Brian was a stable, successful, attractive, loyal man who wanted to marry me. Saying yes was not an emotional question. It was a question of not ruining my life.

  —

  I took another shift at the bookstore to punish myself for neglecting Fifi. My favorite coworker was a gaunt older woman with spiky white hair and huge gray eyes. We sometimes got beers at the bar next door to Barnes and Noble, and she’d tell me about the sex she had in high school. She never wanted a boyfriend and she never wanted to kiss on the mouth. “No kissing!” she commanded the boys she brought home and screwed (her word) under the kitchen table while her mother snored upstairs, too muted by codeine to hear anything. She’d grip the wooden legs and close her eyes tightly and focus only on the sensation between her legs. I pictured her turning her face away when it was over, refusing to meet the boy’s eyes as she told him to be sure the lock was pushed in when he let himself out. Now she was almost sixty and lived alone. She was all fucked out by the end of high school. Anyway, it wasn’t worth risking AIDS and she’d rather not screw at all than get screwed by Saran wrap. While she stocked books, she sang softly to herself. She always had several novels going at the same time, one from every aisle, bookmarked and restored to their rightful place in the alphabet whenever the boss came by. She loved her morning bagel and her afternoon espresso. She wore loose, solid-colored dresses that swished around her athletic frame. No breasts. Cancer, she told me. I wondered who had cared for her. She never talked to her parents and her brother was in rehab in Colorado. I looked for signs that she was unhappy, that her ostensible ease in the world was actually resignation to loneliness. But I never saw a chink in her social self, no glimpse of a private life hidden at great cost. So why was I scared of becoming her? I enjoyed her company, but there was always this voice in my ear—the calm, reasonable male voice—warning me that her life was empty, an embarrassment, that it was all right for me to stock books and work the register at thirty, but that a middle-aged, solitary salesclerk led a life of shame.

  —

  At Brian’s office Christmas party, men and women alike congratulated me on my catch, told me how lucky I was, Brian was such a great guy. Of course they didn’t have to spend a weekend with him when he was withdrawn and self-absorbed, barely registering my presence, exhausted from giving his best self to his coworkers and clients. I had these thoughts consciously—I even wrote them down in a notebook I kept hidden at the back of my desk drawer. But this thinking didn’t seem like an indication that I shouldn’t be with Brian specifically. Rather, the distance between the good impression Brian made on acquaintances and the disappointment he caused me at home seemed a confirmation of my belief that marriage was a secret so painful you had to keep the secret even from yourself.

  Brian loved the fact that two of his friends got engaged the same month he did. I didn’t like his
sly pride in conforming, but it was relaxing to know he understood the business of living. And I would break down his defenses over time. He would stop protecting himself from me the way he protected himself from the world by hiding behind its rules. I would be so grateful to be the sole trustee of his full self that I would no longer desire Jared or anyone else.

  —

  When Brian and I were walking in Central Park one evening, a little girl stopped dead in her tracks in front of us. She pulled on her mother’s hand and stamped one foot. “But I’m serious!” she said. The father scowled. “You’re five. You’re not serious about anything. You don’t understand how anything works yet.”

  Brian chuckled as we scooted around the crying girl. “What a relief to hear a parent with some balls,” he said. I swung the hand he was holding, looking at the sky, turning away from his harsh pronouncement just as I turned away from my body in the presence of his polite, hardworking mother and quietly dignified (Brian’s phrase) father. I knew Brian would want kids and I hoped I would, too, someday. I liked the idea of being needed. But I could already imagine myself cringing when Brian called me “the mother of his children” with pride and bitterness, the same pride and bitterness he would feel for forgoing the chance to fuck his female underlings at work, consigning himself for life to the bombed-out ruin of my vagina and saggy, stretch-mark-riddled stomach and nipples sucked into long, inflamed, livid daggers. I begged my brain to shut up when I had thoughts like this. Brian was going to be a good husband. He put his hand on my lower back and steered us out of the park.

  Since getting engaged, I’d become serious about Fifi again, in my way. I wanted something that was mine. On the days I wasn’t working at the bookstore, I would set myself up at my desk—coffee, notebooks, giant Larousse dictionary—before Brian headed out to the office. But as soon as he closed the door behind him, I often got back in bed with a novel, giddy with the ease of being alone. An hour before he was due home from work, I would drag myself back to the desk, plow through French words without feeling them, just so I could tell my fiancé that I’d done my five hundred words for the day, and he would believe in me, in my project.

  —

  I met my friend Laney for coffee and told her I was scared of getting married. We’d gone to high school together and reconnected through Facebook. She wore crimson lipstick and platform boots that laced up to her knees. A helmet of black hair framed her taut, bluish skin. Her ripped T-shirt ended just below her pointy breasts. Sipping her large mocha soy latte with an extra shot, she told me about the guy she’d met at a party the night before. “He had this rape-and-pillage vibe going on,” she said. “I knew he would be all—” She pumped her hips in the air and then made a circular tossing motion with her hands, like a sailor throwing a bag of spoiled rice overboard. “I don’t think we even spoke before we got in a cab together. I just stared at him across the room and told him with my eyes: I am totally buying what you’re selling.” She took a long swig of her coffee and told me with her eyes that she had totally bought what he sold. Then she looked away, sighing so loudly that the sound was offensive rather than poignant. “I don’t think anyone else hates men and fucks them as much as I do. Marriage couldn’t be worse than that, right?”

  “Yes it could,” I said. “It could be that, just with less fucking.”

  “Oh, darling, every lady needs a husband,” Laney said, affecting a British accent and smoking an imaginary cigarette. “It’s our cross to bear.” We played rich Brits for the rest of the morning.

  —

  Laney was always inviting me to dance parties in warehouses or burlesque shows on roofs. Brian had tried to be nice, but after we got engaged, he told me frankly that he never wanted to see her again. “She seems really damaged,” he said.

  “Anyone who’s made it to thirty without getting damaged is barely alive,” I said. “And besides, damaged people are funnier than other people.” I told him that Laney had recently said to me, “I’m pretty sure the only reason I’ve never been date-raped is because I was always willing to do whatever the guy wanted.”

  “That’s sad,” he said.

  “But it’s also funny.”

  Brian and I started fighting nearly every weekend because I wanted to go to some concert or beer garden or friend’s party, and he was working or tired from working. I liked being alone on the nights he worked late. But if I was going to be forced to be around another person, unable to lose myself in daydreams or loud music or books, I wanted to at least have fun. I erupted at him one night when he canceled our plans to go to an all-night dance party on a boat. I’d gotten us tickets weeks earlier. “I’ll pay you back,” he said.

  “You are willfully boring,” I said. We were walking home from dinner. We paused in front of the Brooklyn Museum and screamed at each other on the majestic steps. He called me vitriolic. I felt a quiver of excitement at his word choice. We exhausted ourselves and started walking toward our apartment.

  “This is the same fight my parents have been having for forty years,” he said as he hung up our coats.

  “I don’t want to have this fight for forty years.”

  “So let’s not.” He took my hand and led me to our IKEA couch. We sat side by side in the dark. The sky was pretty through our bay windows. Fluid black shapes swam through a still-blacker canvas. Brian wrapped his arm around my shoulder. He tilted my chin back with his index finger. My mouth kissed his mouth. My shoes sat beside the couch, side by side, empty, the insoles coming loose at the heels. I’d bought them for four dollars at a stoop sale one Sunday afternoon. I was so glad when I spotted them, gladder still when I asked the price. Now they stared up at me, alive with need, animals waiting to be fed. I buried my face in Brian’s arm.

  The next weekend, he canceled a series of Friday meetings to take me to Cape Cod. We slept a lot and drank a lot of not bad wine and walked on the beach. No one could say we were not having a nice weekend. It was April, far too cold for swimming. One night at sunset, I pulled off my clothes, ran and dove, emerged shrieking. “You’re crazy,” Brian said, grinning at my blue, goose-pimpled flesh in a way that looked physically taxing.

  —

  Brian didn’t want to know I was cheating on him. But he was often cold to me after Jared’s visits, perhaps sensing my inaccessibility as I caught up on sleep and readapted to calmer days. His coldness felt only right to me, until he failed to invite me to a party for Obama’s inauguration. I learned about it on Facebook, where he posted a photo of his coworkers standing before an enormous projection of Obama’s face, each raising a glass of champagne.

  “You didn’t tell me your office was having a party today,” I said when he got home from work. “I had to watch the inauguration all alone.”

  Brian shook his head and dropped his bag on the couch. “Please don’t start. I’m starving.” I followed him into the kitchen. “What, you didn’t get your fill of the champagne and hors d’oeuvres at the party? It looked really fun. Judging from all the bragging you did on Facebook.”

  He took a bag of Tostitos out of the cupboard and started eating from the bag. “It was really fun. Mostly because we finally have a president who cares about things that matter. But it was an office party.”

  “There were spouses in the photos. And you knew I wasn’t working today. I even asked you last night if you thought you could come home early to watch the—”

  “Get off my back. Today was a big day for everyone in the world. Can we please just celebrate that? All you ever think about are your own feelings.” This was Brian’s classic response if I complained too much about something he found trivial. It never failed to unhinge me.

  “We are not fucking talking about Obama right now. Don’t you fucking hide behind the first-black-president bullshit. He is half white! And if you think he’s really going to change anything, you’re just naïve.”

  This wasn’t exactly what I meant to say. I was excited about seeing a black family in the White House; I was excited to
have a president who spoke in eloquent paragraphs. But I was cautious. What I meant was that power shifted continually back and forth between the two parties without society changing in any concrete way, that political battles were just a distraction from actual problems facing actual humans, so that people who really wanted to be a force for good became activists, not president. I had been awash in thoughts like this all day. I would have liked someone to discuss them with.

  “You are unbelievably negative,” Brian said. “Finally something good happens in our country and you can’t just let me be happy about it.”

  “I am not negative! You just don’t want to accept basic facts about reality.”

  “I guess now you’re going to tell me I could die at any time.” This had become a (minor, I’d thought) point of contention between us, how frequently I urged Brian to make decisions based on the fact that this could be the last day of his life. The words were theatrical, but I was genuinely encouraging him to move away from materialist evaluations of good and bad. Which may have been just a touch self-righteous. But I wasn’t evaluating myself right then; I was expressing myself.