1.
Adam’s mom warned him not to marry Renuka. His mother always surprised him
with her capricious San Francisco Nob Hill politics, same sensibility that
supported gay marriage, deplored the mass incarceration of black men, had
Asian-American best friends with whom she’d been in a book club for twenty
years, was effusive about the enchilada recipe given to her by Mexican
neighbors, thought Mississippi Burning and Biko were
simplistic and inadequate stories about race, decried the mandatory minimum
in drug sentencing, voted for reparations for Native Americans as well as
former slaves. And yet Mom remained, one might say, cautious about
the challenges of long-term interracial couplings, when it came to her son.
“Darling, she’s never really going to let you in,” his mother said. “They
can’t.” Adam didn’t mind her. Mom was polite enough before their honeymoon
and during visits after that. Not only courteous but specific, personal.
Asking about the long-ago death of Renuka’s parents, the fragile health of
her grandmother. Though Renuka did not want to answer his mother’s
questions. Renuka’s abiding wish for privacy didn’t make Adam’s mother
rude, or intrusive, or any of the words that he could read on Renuka’s
face. Not that Renuka down-talked his own mother to him. It wasn’t even
that she talked about his mother in a bad way to her friends. More like her
mind was fully occupied elsewhere. Now, without his wife, Adam lets himself
into the empty and stale-smelling apartment, puts down his things, goes to
the balcony, looks down. Remembers the first time he was ever inside a work
of art, when he was eight and wandered into a two-by-two installation by a
New England artist his parents had bought and reassembled, near the huge
kidney-shaped pool at the family’s Hollywood, Florida estate, and how his
mother ordered him promptly to get out. Remembers how much being inside the
installation, on his parents’ bespoke, landfilled property, had felt like
being on this balcony. The installation was a mock kitchen, complete with
walls that had windows, making him feel free and caged in, at the same
time.

Restless, he picks up his phone and looks at the number he tracked down
from their carrier by calling Verizon when Renuka stopped answering her
phone. He’d told them his wife was missing and might have gotten lost.
They’d given him the last number she’d called. Then Adam tracked down the
address that went with the number, a motel number in the New South, that
Renuka had called while on the road. This morning he’d flown from Miami to
Charleston, South Carolina, where Renuka had stopped to rest on her way to
Miami, where Adam had flown out for a job interview, two days ago. She’d
followed him to Florida. He knew she’d had to stop in South Carolina,
because she’d left him messages. She’d dropped everything in Baltimore to
drive a thousand miles, just to meet him by the ocean. But when he called
her back, early morning yesterday, just after three am when he was drunk,
Adam blurted out that he’d been having the affair.

Then yesterday, all day, he’d pulled himself out of the clutches of a
gruesome hangover, calling Renuka perhaps a hundred times, realizing he had
to come find her. In the meantime, his wife evaded him. Taken the day to
disappear, reverse her course from Miami and for whatever reason, drive
back to that tiny town, Santee, with its ridiculous hydroelectric
reservoir, as if to mock him and his fear of power plants. Leaving from
Santee without finding her, then driving to Charleston, Adam came back here
finally, back to Baltimore, taking a one-stop, efficient flight, clocking
the hour and a half with impatience, convinced that Renuka might even be
waiting for him with a silly sign at BWI airport. A reward for his pursuit
of her.

The South Carolina motel was, Adam supposes, charming in its way. The
dark-haired, brown-skinned guy with the ponytail who was cleaning out the
pool when he drove up – polite enough. But there was something about the
native man, a hint of insolence in the smile he gave Adam when he showed
him the photograph of Renuka. The man confirmed she’d stayed there twice.

Once on her way to Miami, then for a second time on her way back, was all
he’d say, and yet implying something more. Renuka hadn’t told that man
either, where she was going.

“But she looked fine, man. Hundred percent fine.”

“Oh, fuck it, fine,” Adam mutters now, back in Baltimore remembering,
wishing that his own last-minute mistress was at least more adventurous,
more capable, in bed. He’d screwed up his marriage at age forty-one, first
by the cheating, then, by confessing his affair to Renuka, making her stray
too– and all for what? Guatemalan Indio Adelina was a woman he met
working in a kitchen, during his part-time job as a sous chef in
three-Michelin star restaurant on Lancaster near the Baltimore harbor. The
girl often looked nervous at the sight of him naked. She’d never lost
herself to pleasuring him. Her eyes remained wide open and startled even
long after the first time, during which she had taken him by surprise too,
since she’d been a virgin. She’d been eager to lose her virginity, but that
hadn’t made her a natural. Adam’s sure that Renuka slept with that Cherokee
guy working in the motel, cleaning the pool, that proud smile on his lips.
Many generations descended from warriors but humbled and ordinary now, by
casino lucre, by having nowhere else to build and nothing else to gloat
over. It’s not without excitement that Adam pictures Renuka with the dark
indigenous man. Like an erotic novel Adam had read once, the title of which
he cannot remember, where wealthy American men could pay to see tableaus of
young brown Southeast Asian men and women – really, boys and girls –
bringing each other to climax with poise and surety. Renuka sleeping with
someone else means the thing with Adelina must have hurt her, and if she
can be hurt by Adam’s affair and confession, she’s not indifferent. When
she called that Indian man, she’d been on her way to Miami, to reunite with
Adam, before he blurted out the things he’d done. She hasn’t called him
since, but hasn’t for certain shut him out. The money’s all still there, in
their one joint account, and by tomorrow, Renuka will have to report again
to her job as a resident at the hospital. And there is a beauty to
it, isn’t there? His wife with the stranger. Adam contemplates it now, like
art – Renuka’s compact, exquisite, nude body alive, coated with sweat,
moving on the muscular brown man with excitement, the two of them
ecstatically immersed in the moment. If she did that, she must still be a
creature of desire, and Adam, confident, remembering that he is taller, in
better shape, more educated and elsewhere more impressive than that guy who
works in the motel, smiles now remembering Renuka’s libido on their
honeymoon. If sex can still pull her like that, all the way out of
medicine, at last out of her preoccupation with responsibilities – well,
Adam has got this contest in the bag. For a moment, the simplicity, the
crudeness, of these emotional – calculations, for lack of a better word –
shames him a bit. But not for long. “It is simple,” he mutters,
the same words he’d used some seven years ago to his mother, over the
phone, by way of explaining why he was going to marry Renuka and no other.
Most of it is simple, but not all, he thinks now, drawing the balcony
screen door shut tightly behind him, so that cool air could enter through
the mesh; opening up the windows in the kitchen and living room and airing
out the place, another part of his mind pleasantly pondering what feasting
dishes he might cook, what delicate morsels to tempt her, so when his wife
comes home, as she has to, there’s food in the freezer and fridge for her
to eat, for her to even take to the hospital with her for lunch when she
goes to work, so that he touches her body in that one trustworthy way,
through food, without Renuka swallowing her pride and asking him. Adam had
first wooed her using food. Not his own food – he’d played modest at first
saying his chef skills were still “under development.” Like waterfront real
estate still being developed, ha. No, he had taken her out for expensive
dinners. There at a cramped, but upscale table, he exulted in feeding
Renuka. Spooned creamy sour cream sorbet into her mouth, not telling her
that he had helped the chef invent the recipe. Renuka’s dark lips had been
free of lipstick. Now Adam wishes he could remember more details from the
early nights of their lives as lovers. All that was left was an image here,
there another, sometimes the two colliding when they came, preventing him
from savoring either one. Making Renuka elusive even in his mind. The flash
of her hair under the light. A thick blur of primitive silver at her wrist.
Or just the brownness of her skin, which by surfing and sleeping in the
sun, Adam has tried for years to match or at least come closer to being,
but hasn’t yet.

2.

Adam’s plan for restoring the Everglades is this: take the ecosystem back
to the way it was not just before the 1940s floods, but before the attempts
to drain the watershed in the first place. Before the earliest disasters,
when what was plentiful was left to grow, riotous. When ways of living were
developed in order to bend to the chaos. In the 1830s, Confederate soldiers
stumbled on the Everglades while tracking Seminole warriors. Sawgrass and
limestone bloodied the white Southern soldiers’ feet, even as they hunted
the Seminoles without remorse and killed them or forced them to clear out
of the land. To whites the Everglades were as impenetrable and unsettling
as the unsettled Congo. The long, rigid, exposed roots of mangrove trees,
clawing at swampland through the murky water, were portents to young white
prospectors in precarious canoes gliding through the Everglades. The hard
roots looked like skeletal hands that promised punishment for all the
Indians they’d killed. Gunfire, even canon-fire, in response to threats
that might be sensed more easily than being seen, in all that overgrown
gloom, could be muffled by the swamp sounds. Haste and fear propelled
southern Americans’ promises, to convert the torrid landscape to temperate
farmlands. American soldiers who hated everything about the Everglades,
according to letters Adam read out loud to Renuka, copying passages from
the originals in the Hopkins libraries, moved thousands of Seminoles by
force. They bore down on Seminole chiefs, sometimes failing to force their
people out. But soon enough their most determined chiefs, like Aripeka,
whom Adam’s grandfather’s dog was named after, were mostly defeated, and
eventually brown faces occupied the blank space marked on maps as Indian Territory. Rice paddies, sugarcane plantations followed
soon in Florida. Florida with its Asian heat still used American slaves to
work its plantations. Adam was convinced that a real restoration would be
to go back to before sugar was king. Go back to the crops that the land
knew. Corn, squash, beans, but also fragrances, flavors, that Adam could
imagine using in dishes he’d help to invent – pumpkins, sumpweed,
chenopodium, pigweed, knotweed, giant ragweed, canary grass, amaranth, and
melons. Bean vines winding themselves around corn stocks. At the restaurant
where Adam worked as a part-time, amaranth grain was cooked so it resembled
caviar and tasted like wheat berry, fresh-baked bread. Chenopodium was just
quinoa, now mainly from California but capable of feeding the region,
supplying both upscale and chain restaurants, if it was planted on the
elevations alongside the Tamiami Trail, a faux-“native American” name that
just mashed up Tampa and Miami. And canary grass, the meals for thousands
upon thousands of birds, who disgusted the white settlers for how abundant
they stayed, even when the settlers brought down entire skies of those dark
birds. The money to pay for the whole Everglades Recovery project was
there, a straight two billion that Adam’s parents had connections to. His
grandfather had donated to Jeb Bush’s campaign; his parents, to make up for
it, donated to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 budget. But Adam physically
resembled his grandfather very much, and so was a favorite of the golfing
man, who used the words “land development” to vow prosperity to his
descendants. A land developer himself, a robber baron of wet soil, with no
trace of shame, no hesitation despite the evidence, not even disputed by
most Republicans, the Teddy Roosevelt variety, that straightening out the
Kissimmee River with canals destroyed it in the 1970s. When his grandfather
died earlier this year, Adam dropped everything, begged Renuka to come with
him to Florida for the funeral. Five months ago. Adam had flown alone to
Miami then too. He hadn’t cheated on his wife till he returned. But that
was when it started, his dream of Miami, a dream that excited and scared
him, because it had no place for Renuka, who hadn’t gotten accepted to any
residency training programs outside Baltimore. In Miami, Adam found heat
and life and families. People pushing at each other for space, talking
excitedly, aggressive gestures turning into fast, laughing dances Adam knew
from going out salsa dancing after work sometimes with kitchen workers from
the restaurant he was interviewing at down there. It didn’t matter that
Miami’s people were overwhelmingly brown and he wasn’t. Renuka didn’t speak
a word of Spanish, versus Adam who was fluent, from the uniquely-effective
combination of his junior year abroad in Costa Rica and the tender way of
talking that his Guatemalan nanny, Marta, had. Marta, the descendant of
Mayan lords, hadn’t been able to have children of her own, despite her
generous hips and ham-hock hands. Secretly sometimes, Adam was glad that
Renuka’s body hadn’t gone through the changes of childbirth, and so didn’t
resemble Marta’s pillowed, used-up body yet. Renuka hadn’t come to the
funeral either. But Marta’s family was there, the vital branch of it that
worked for his grandfather, ten or so women and men who did the gardening,
cleaning, cooking, upkeep of Grandpop’s entire mansion in Palm Beach and
also of the much smaller bungalow in Wynnwood, Miami, where Adam’s father
used to live, before he married Mom, and while still in his twenties,
settled out West in SF. In Wynnwood, his dad used his trust fund to support
himself as assistant curator at a gallery, buying up barrio art, using the
Spanish he’d learned too, in undergrad, Harvard, to learn about the edgiest
Cuban and Dominican expatriate work long before any of it got bought at Art
Basel. The walls in Wynnwood exploded with candy colors. Their murals
contained huge dominating black-rimmed images like sanctioned graffiti.
Walking in Wynnwood late at night, eating fish tacos and drinking Coronas,
to escape the solemnity of the funeral and to not dwell on the money he’d
receive, Adam knew, rather than made a decision, to come back to
Florida where his inheritance had first been built. To stake a kind of
settler’s claim in Everglades Recovery: to leverage wealth and workers,
science and faith, budgets and visions of a splendid past. Of course, he’d
never talk in those kinds of phrases. “It’s a cool thing to do,” is the
only thing Adam says, when asked ‘why eco-restoration? Why on earth
paleo-geology?’ “A way to support life on this planet.” He talks
about “collectives to restore the Everglades” when what he yearns for is
power. Only a power that will be exerted justly. An artist’s autonomy, able
to shape chert and canary grass and water full of sludge from the river
into a functioning, undamaged whole. Able to reverse shameful results of
developers who were blind, greedy and blind to the life that teemed,
ensnared and enchanted. The ancient life they thought they could drain from
the Glades, without understanding how to harness its power.

3.

Back in his element, washing fresh shrimp in the kitchen, then dicing
onions on reflex, never once needing to look at his own hands while they’re
working, Adam feels calm, methodical, so much so that the idea of
compromise doesn’t even come up. When Renuka comes home, for he has no
doubt that she will, if she agrees to restore their marriage, he thinks
that yeah, they should, they definitely should, because they’re in love and
should be together. Except she’ll have to move to Miami. Camp with him at
the Everglades project. Go to ECOMB and Sierra Club meetings in the city.
There is no way around it. And that will mean Renuka won’t have time to be
a surgeon, fine. But would that be so bad? She can take a year off, come
back and finish residency in a less exhausting field that will be better
for her sleep than surgery.

That will be better for both their lives, and the planet. Because what
surgery could be for her, Adam’s convinced, is a distortion, even a
corruption, of her original feelings for medicine. At first, when she got
into medical school, Renuka was all about “milk of kindness.” A certain
tenderness persisted through all odds – the overbearing surgery resident,
the bullying Oncology fellow. She loved patients. Loved being with
them as healer. Adam is convinced she loves them still, beneath the regimes
of surgery. When she was a student, there wasn’t a poem about death and
dying, a diagram of human anatomy, even the crystallography images of DNA
or the bold swirling, shocking pink of the dye-stained cells of different
types of tissue composing the body, that she explained she had to memorize
– there wasn’t a particle of medical training she didn’t want to absorb
whole-heartedly. In fact, at times her devotion was quite breathtaking,
especially when they had first met. The naps she’d steal when he’d drive
her and her alone at night out to Half Moon Bay, so she would be fresh for
class the next morning. The way she stared at dunes of sand in the
darkness, whispering to him that in her mind she could see the slides of
cells invisible in the ocean. All the cells sloughed off by swimmers,
thoughtless and proud, by surfers guided by an invisible discipline. Now
pasta is boiling, shrimp scampi simmering, the smell of his potion so
lingering and delectable, Adam’s own mouth is watering. He stirs the pot,
tense, waiting for Renuka to walk through the door. Glossy pamphlets
printed on recycled paper, his folders, his little glasses and the black
notebook he carries, along with a silver pen – these lie ready on the
coffee table he built for this apartment, when they had moved in a year
ago, when they came here so Renuka could work at the hospital, to finish
her transitional year and apply to become a surgeon. When all they talked
of were her plans. When the food is completely ready, he’ll set
the table the way he does at the restaurant where he used to work, though
he won’t go to that restaurant again, because it’s where he began cheating
on his wife. Temptation is there, the touch of others too easy.

Instead he will wait here for her, working from here on his part of the
plan for bringing back the glorious Everglades, staying here as long as it
takes to persuade her. From the pamphlets, Adam will read to Renuka like
poetry:

The geologic secrets of the earth are visible to all who learn to
recognize them. It is impossible to consider the geology of the
Everglades without also considering the hydrology. Primarily consisting
of limestone, the bedrock geology of Everglades National Park has
responded over time to the ongoing processes of weathering, erosion,
compaction of organic sediments…

Weathering, erosion – these won’t affect what they have built, he and his
wife. Adam has swum through marshes, fisted limestone rocks rich with
coral. Collected shells once used to ornament the hair of the Calusas,
those who lived in the Everglades aware of its submerged, prehistoric
monsters, making monuments to them. Alert to alligators who could drag him
to the treacherous deep, Adam crunched booted feet on long grasses that
once had hidden Tequestas, hunters who lived on sea-wolves and manatees
lassoed from the sea, stoic warriors who worshipped a god of the graveyard.
All of those other Indians ghosts now, but Renuka his Indian, living,
beautiful wife. Jubilant, Adam calls her again on her cell phone. It goes
to voice mail. But that’s because she’s flying back to Baltimore, he tells
himself.

In the bathroom taking a shower, preparing for her return, the moment Adam
pauses at the mirror is when he sees it. A cluster of white plastic handles
of some kind, on closer inspection, pregnancy tests, lined up, obscured
under a neatly-folded, surgical-looking towel. Adam yanks the towel off and
sees a line of what he knows are negative results, only one line, from TV
ads.

Renuka, seeking and not finding pregnancy. Searching out silt, formed by
quartz crystals splitting, like two cells joining and cleaving together,
then apart, creating self-sufficient, invisible life. Silt like the Rock
Glades of the Everglades, covered arctic flour made from glaciers grinding
noiselessly and ceaselessly, bony, ecstatic hips joining.

But she’s alone now. He can feel it. She could be searching. Almost like a
scar that burns, the way that he is trembling now, and how much Adam fears
for her.

The way she’d been so nervous, so solemn, first day of anatomy class, only
the morning after they’d first met, when he had waited, patient, while she
decided about his kissing her.

Instead of that kiss, he’d rested his whole body around her. His long arms
like branches. The two of them drawing unaccountable solace from the
difference in their height, build, even from the color of their skin. In
much the way a tree could offer solace to a leaf. He recalls her shaking
quieted then. Then in the dark, their skin had no color.

He goes back to sit in the living room, on the same sofa where he can tell
from her scarf draped over the arm, from the perfume and powdered smell of
the cushions, that Renuka herself had slept upon, exhausted, after call.

Before she’d driven those long hours, seeking and eventually finding him.
Hearing from him that he’d had an affair.

He’ll wait, no matter what it takes, he thinks. She’s coming home,
returning to their lives, to him. She has to be. She must.