In Praise of Messy Lives (6 page)

“The Royal Hotel?” He raises his eyebrows. “Expensive taste for a housewife.”

I look out the window. I am filled with rage. I am coated in a layer of dirt from the boat. My luggage is coated in a layer of dirt from the boat. Could I have misheard? Is he actually saying that I can’t choose our hotel because I am a housewife? It is true that I have spent the last year musing on my next book, reading and plotting and taking notes, and he has largely been supporting me. I hadn’t thought of it so starkly, but when it comes down to it he is paying for the trip. The money for the hotel room is his, I realize; he should decide where we stay. I am suddenly overwhelmed by my own helplessness. How have I allowed myself to slip into this maddening, 1950s-style dependence? Why hadn’t I noticed it before? A line from
The Quiet American
comes to mind: “The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride, or to be possessed without humiliation.”

The car weaves through throngs of motorcycles, some of which are piled high with entire families, and stops at a red light. Outside the city menaces. The dusty, saffron-colored buildings have crumbling walls and peeling wooden shutters and wrought-iron terraces spilling over with bougainvillea. Everything looks charming and decrepit and chipped. It looks like Paris, if Paris had sunk to the bottom of the sea for decades.

“What’s wrong?” my husband asks.

I look out the window.

“We can stay there if you want. I was just kidding.”

In fact, he was only referring to my filling in the occupation “housewife” on my visa application so as to avoid the complications that would arise from filling in “writer” or “journalist.” He was not calling me a housewife, though for a moment our relation to each other feels jittery.

The truth is that this exchange would never have happened anywhere else. It involves a way of thinking that is alien to both of us. What is mine. What is his. The misunderstanding surfaces here because of the perpetual marketplace; because female company is so easily, so ubiquitously, for sale.

Our guide in Cambodia is tiny and immaculate, his plaid button-down shirt tucked into black khakis, a belt around his waist. He is so nervous and self-effacing that we pick him out of the crowd of touts who have been waiting on the dock for eleven and a half hours for our boat to arrive. They are all waving signs and shouting, “Taxi! Hotel! Taxi! Hotel!” But our guide seems embarrassed by the idea of having to sell his services. He is wincing with embarrassment. He has the floppy hair of an English schoolboy, and his voice is so soft that we have to lean in close to him to make out what he is saying.

Early the next morning, he takes us to the abandoned high school, once known as Security Prison 21, where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of their own people. It is a low, undistinguished-looking cement structure built around a courtyard and surrounded with barbed wire. There are people
milling around with cameras around their necks. But it is not a museum the way we have museums; it is not polished the way we expect museums to be polished. There are bloodstains on the stone floors, for instance. There are rusting bed frames where prisoners were tortured. There are wooden bars that they were chained to lying down. There is not enough light. Our guide leads us quickly from one room to the next. He goes out of his way to touch everything with his hands. As we make our way through the courtyard, it feels more like a crime scene that has been blocked off with yellow tape than a museum. The tragedy feels fresh, the air disturbed.

Afterward our guide drives us to the Killing Fields. Within blocks the stone edifices of the city dissolve into palm-thatched huts on stilts. The pavement gives way to a rough dirt road embedded with stones. Our driver’s silver Timex looks bulky on his fragile wrist as he steers around the larger rocks and holes. It is impossible to tell how old he is—he could be twenty or forty-five. People here tend to look very, very young until all of a sudden they look very, very old. As the car bounces along, we manage to look out the window at the jackfruit trees. I have never seen jackfruits before. They are green and bumpy and scrunched up: they look like women’s handbags hanging from trees.

The ride takes longer than we expected. We hadn’t really wanted to go to the Killing Fields in the first place. We anticipated the eerie lushness, the indifferent, picnic-ground green common to sites of mass murder. But our guide, in his gentle, unassuming way, was adamant.

When we finally arrive, as we had suspected, there is not much to see. There are ditches and delicate, drooping trees. There are several clusters of tourists murmuring in cemetery tones. Our
guide calls me “Lady,” as he directs me to the best view: “Lady, you stand here.”

He tells us that the Khmer Rouge killed babies by swinging them against a tree. He mimes the gesture and says, “They like for mothers to see.”

At the end of our tour, our guide brings us over to a blossoming frangipani tree and says softly, “Now I will tell you about my family.” The fragrance of the white blossoms fills the air. We lean in closer to hear him. With the wind it is almost impossible to make out what he is saying. It occurs to me that as we were jostled on the dock, with all of the touts trying to shepherd us toward their taxis, our guide had said, “I will tell you about my family’s experiences.”

Our guide tells us that planes circled his village on the border of Vietnam, spraying white napalm onto the thatched roofs. His three-year-old brother and four-year-old sister died of burns as the family fled with all of their belongings through the jungle.

He speaks quietly and without expression in his far-from-perfect English. He mimes the situations he can’t find words for, holding his arms around his stomach to communicate that his other sister was pregnant when she stepped on a land mine, years later, at around the same time that his uncle and cousins were abducted by the Khmer Rouge. “It is still difficult here,” he concludes. “I have to pay money to send my children to school.” He leads us past a monument of skulls piled high in a glass case. Three Cambodian schoolgirls are chatting up a group of Japanese men, their giggles rising to the trees. And as we walk back to the car, I have the feeling we have just paid for something you are not supposed to pay for.

A few days later, we fly home. As soon as we unpack, the trip
recedes into a series of benign and picturesque images: the pink dawn against the pineapple towers of Angkor Wat, the tall, elegant girls in white silk trousers, the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields. But there on our mantel is the chipped stone Buddha from the seventeenth or nineteenth or twenty-first century; the shifting, bought object, plundered, beautiful, faked; it stands there, smiling, in our house.

My memory of Stella, at nineteen, is neither as crisp nor as detailed as it should be. It’s only with a tremendous effort of will that I can bring her into focus at all. She is wearing a complicated black outfit that looks like rags pinned together with safety pins, and black stockings, with deliberate runs laddering her legs. Her skin is translucent, the color of skim milk, and her matted, dyed blond hair looks about as plausibly human as the hair of a much-loved doll. Under her eyes are extravagant circles, plum-colored and deep. She always looks haggard. No one that age looks haggard the way she looked haggard, and yet as one came to know her, that was part of her romance.

Stella was from the South. I remember her being from a trailer park, but it may have been a small town. She had some sort of unspeakable tragedy in her background, which added to the quality of Southern gothic she cultivated. In my picture of her, she is curled up on a mahogany windowsill with a Faulkner novel, but in reality, she was one of those brilliant college students whose minds are clamoring too loudly with their own noise to read much.

On good days, Stella looked as if she were late to the most important meeting of her life; on bad days, she looked if she were being hunted down by organized and insidious forces. She was also one of the most powerful people in our Harvard class. She was monumentally, conspicuously damaged in a way that was, to us then, ineffably chic. She had an entourage of followers and hangers-on, mostly men of ambiguous sexual preference whose mothers had given them exotic, weighty names like Byron and Ulysses. She had an authentically doomed streak that was to the rest of us, future bankers, editors, and lawyers, future parents and mortgage holders, uniquely appealing. And the whole time I knew her she was writing something—a detective story? a play? a thriller?—something with a murder in it, I think, but whatever it was, it added to the impression that she was engaged in more important endeavors than the rest of us. She talked in the cartoon bubbles of comic-book characters: “Oh-ho.” Or “Jumping Juniper.” Or “Iced cold beverage,” or “Eek.” This was part of an elaborate, stylized defense, against the softness associated with sincerity.

And yet, the perfection of her cool was pleasantly undermined by an ambience of frazzled vulnerability. She was overweight, and had a flinching relationship with her own body. If you caught a glimpse of her coming down Plympton Street at dusk, you might mistake her self-deprecating shuffle for that of a homeless person. In retrospect, I can see that she was kind of wonderful-looking, with her fabulous, disheveled gestalt, but at the time being overweight was an enormous, almost insurmountable, taboo. She had a great, pure throaty laugh, which went along with a child’s pleasure in the smallest things. I can see her
face lighting up over a chocolate sundae or a gardenia-scented candle.

She was one of the few girls at school that I could talk to. We would sit on her bed and chatter for hours. She would smoke insane numbers of cigarettes. I would drink insane amounts of coffee. In the background a scratchy Lou Reed song called “Street Hassle” might be playing, a song that for some reason we couldn’t get enough of. It was about a party interrupted by the inconvenient discovery of a girl who has died of an overdose.

Over the years the sting of what happened between us has died down to an anecdote repeated at cocktail parties, where I had found it could be interesting sometimes to reveal something odious about yourself. “Will you listen to how you sound?” I can hear Stella saying. “It’s still all about what a colorful character
you
are, isn’t it?” In my mind her voice is perpetually and sharply sarcastic, which it wasn’t always. There was plenty to Stella besides her considerable satiric gifts. But that is, after all of these years, what remains.

Stella’s one conventionality was that she was in love. The boy in question was very tall and very green-eyed. He wore ripped jeans and fake gas station attendant’s shirts, and was a Buddhist. He had a funny, fluid way of moving his long arms and legs that was attractively effeminate and moderately vain. And he had elegant, sharply arched eyebrows that gave him the aspect of one of the wickeder Greek gods. I won’t bother to say what his name was because he could have been anyone, and his specific personality, which was fairly annoying in a number of specific ways, would only be a sideshow and a distraction. I knew the night I met him and Stella that they both were and weren’t together;
both facts were equally apparent after being around either of them for five minutes. They orbited each other, but anxiously. They spoke the same weird patois, a mixture of baby talk and archness. (“Who was that female person you were talking to?” “I don’t know to whom you are referring, doll.”) They seemed, if anything, like a brother and sister engaged in some kind of incestuous love under the magnolia trees of an old plantation.

The secret was that Stella and the boy sometimes slept together. In retrospect, I can’t think why it was such a secret, unless it was the boy’s vanity that demanded they remain officially unattached. Their spotty, intermittent affair depended on him not seeing a more conventionally pretty girl, and was extremely damaging for Stella, who remained in a state of dramatically heightened jealousy at all times. There was a whiff of scandal to the whole thing, which came, in a world where surfaces were everything, from their being so mismatched in looks.

In other words, it was hardly an ambiguous situation. There was, Stella would later point out, no shortage of boys: there were boys with prettier eyes or a more refined knowledge of Proust; boys with more original neuroses, and less saccharine forms of spirituality. But the fact is that attractions are contagious. I spent hours sitting at Tommy’s Lunch, drinking lime slushies and listening to Stella take apart the peculiarities of his character; hours listening to her fits of jealousy over the irresistible odalisques sprawled across his dorm bed. This is what happens when an overly intelligent woman brings all of her talents to bear on an infatuation: without either of us realizing what was happening, she somehow persuaded me of his attractiveness.

My flirtation with the boy, if you could even call it that, was beyond furtive. The three of us were often together, and he and I
behaved toward each other with an irreproachable mixture of mannerliness and hostility. He came to visit me alone once when I was sick and brought me magazines and orange juice. Our conversation was innocent bordering on banal. I think we talked about the declining quality of the cereal selection at breakfast. Neither one of us told Stella about the visit.

And yet somehow we both knew. It was as abstract and agreed upon as an arranged marriage. I felt it when I stepped into the cool morning air, and gulped down a milky cup of coffee before class. I felt it when I walked next to the slate-colored river, watching the shallow crew boats skim the surface. It was with me, in other words, all the time: a low-grade excitement about this boy I barely knew. From this distance in time, this may be the most foreign and inscrutable part of the story: the attractions that could at any moment flare up and end your life as you knew it.

At this point I may as well offer a slight, very slight, argument in my defense: people didn’t belong as absolutely to other people then. There was a kind of fluidity to our world. The barriers that in adult life seem so solid and fixed, literal walls defining your apartment, your bedroom, did not exist at that age. You listened, for instance, to your roommate having sex; you slept easily and deeply on someone else’s couch; you ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with everyone you knew. And somehow nothing was quite real unless it was shared, talked about, rehashed with friends, fretted about and analyzed, every single thing that happened, every minute gradation of emotion, more high-level gossip in the process of being told than events in and of themselves.