Years after our divorce, my dreams, during an on and off again tryst with a man named Otto, feature X: both of us cleaning out a refrigerator; X climbing into bed with me; showing X my new apartment; revisiting a house I’d owned with X, now enclosed by fish tanks fed by ocean water. If we lived in an aquarium, our better life took place in glass tanks.
The dreams crave meanings, probably because I feel oppressed. Otto wears a sense of doom rather heavily, making piteous reference to being near death in most emails. Perhaps it is only the spirit of flirting that gives me hope.
Nor am I sure why I am attracted to men who push me to consider darkness closely. If Otto strokes my collarbone with just a fingertip, trails two fingers up my thigh, flitting them under my miniskirt, and says, “Tell me what you want,” I don’t answer, not sure how long the offer lasts.
“You don’t have to ask anymore,” I say.
“You don’t want me to?” he asks.
I whisper Otto into his ear as if this will give me direct access to him. If I kiss him, everything starts again. He keeps his hand on my neck, under my hair to lift it. He pulls his belt strap open, unzips his pants. He has memorized the sequence.
“You’re endless,” I tend to say, meaning I don’t know him. Every time I’ve watched him walk out of the house, from my second-floor window, he might disappear forever.
◆
Once, when X had been swimming off the coast of Kaua‘i, he got caught in a rip current that bashed him against a peninsula of black rocks. By the time he cleared the point—well, two things: a fisherman told him, “Swim sideways, dude”; second, X lost his wedding ring, and later wanted to replace it with a $5 ring he’d found in a street market in San Diego.
Neither of these things necessarily characterizes X in my mind, even in retrospect. It would be difficult to map a connection between point A (his swimming parallel to the shore) and point B (the need to replace his wedding ring) except that by the time X lay on the sand on the far beach, a newly born and pale porpoise, his torso looked soft with cuts. He vomited saltwater and asked me not to look at him.
That is, X’s refusal of affection made certain fantasies possible. He could have been reborn per the words of the fisherman, if I had believed the man was a fisher of men, such as Jesus. But in that moment, X did not want me to know him.
My brother-in-law, who had been on the trip with us, captured X’s odyssey on video. It wasn’t until we watched the clip later that it struck me that X really could have died. This made it all the more heartbreaking that he hadn’t wanted me to witness his recovery. Or perhaps in his dying moments, he’d known that I wouldn’t be available.
While X was dying and my brother-in-law (loyal to his idea of a tropical holiday) was filming his near death, I’d been in the rental house at the top of the bluff, savoring a moment alone and eating pasta out of a paper takeaway box. My sister Mary, out of breath because she’d raced up the steep staircase from the beach, found me at the kitchen counter.
“X is hurt,” she said.
“Really?” I said, guessing X would never really put himself in harm’s way. Perhaps X was conceited and didn’t heed warnings. Though the owners of the house never said the water had dangerous rip currents, signs were posted all along the sandy beach, dotted with lava outcroppings. We’d ignored these on previous nights when we’d walked along the break, even as huge waves crashed at our feet.
X was often sure he could save himself from typical dangers. And eventually, he’d tell me that he’d been out there calculating his caloric reserve, so that one day, I could indulge the irony of X leaving leftovers for me while he was running out of calories. The night before, he’d ordered a pasta with cream sauce he was sure I’d like, just because I couldn’t make up my mind between two entrees.
X had been chubby then. We’d been married for five years. Helen was there, too, with Richard and their first child; my sister Mary and Jake (no children so far), my parents and X’s parents, when X’s father was still alive—were all there. The elder generation (four parents) were treated with respect, and then grudging respect, as the week wore on. People fretted about meals and whether sneakers, worn and muddied during a hike, would dry after being scrubbed in time to wear to dinner. Being around family felt like a matter of sharing skin and being denuded or exposed at the same time. Each couple had separate quarters, into which they could retreat after communal meals; Richard staked out the best room for himself, Helen, and the baby; my sister and brother-in-law got the guest cottage.
X and I didn’t have separate quarters. Even if I suggested sleeping in the property’s yurt, X argued that this wasn’t suitable since we wouldn’t be close enough to everyone else.
“You’re not going to be rude about it, are you?” he asked me.
He said, “We have everything in regular life. We don’t need this,” which rang true, but I still didn’t want to sleep on a couch. X and I ended up sleeping in a rather fancy living room, on and under an assortment of blankets around the legs of a grand piano. On mornings, I’d sneak into my parents’ or sister’s rooms to go back to sleep.
◆
Once, after Otto leaves, X enters my dreams—a straightforward correction. I follow X into a clean house that we nevertheless prepare for a Labor Day picnic. In our bedroom, white linens match the bright backdrop of a pool, visible through the window. This isn’t my childhood home.
X and I lay there, his hand on the small of my back, our frantic lead-up to sex distorted because X, who never talked much, talks under a white towel shroud.
“It’s not about you though.” He always says this, and so I feel more myself than ever.
In a nearby fireplace, a small coal burns, anchored by brittle, abandoned antlers. I blow on an ember, and the fire blazes more keenly.
When X turns onto his stomach, I ride his back, using his pelvic bones as stirrups for my knees. I tell him about Otto. If I say so behind X’s back, on X’s back, it is an old story of betrayal.
As for the desiccated, brittle antlers, I find them beautiful, a fretwork of discarded life or absent heads in front of the coal. They are better than skeletons, and brainless.
The dream isn’t a nightmare, only a domestic setting. The room disappears into the coal. Many deer are present—as in, I am just a country girl who has grown up in a certain part of Pennsylvania where young hunters are excused from school on the first day of doe hunting.
X has known me for such a long time. X is my sense of history and home. If X can admit I was in love with someone else, I’ll be in love with someone else.
◆
The whole trip my brain had been caught up in this incredible anger with X about his waking early to make pancakes for everyone—a continuation of how X doted on his family because I didn’t extend enough affection toward them. Privately, as in when I was alone with Helen and X’s mother, they’d say caustic things about my complexion, my clothes, or my smoking habit. This felt like a merciless and conditional trap of confidence. In X’s company, they staged acts of love toward me, asking me to love them and pretending to be baffled about why I would resist or refused to try. X believed I was withholding love in a deliberate act of cruelty, and yet I thought X was being cruel for demanding that I love people I didn’t love.
On our way to the house from the airport, X and I had shopped for the pancake mix. Every morning while I slept in other people’s rooms, I pictured X in the upscale kitchen serving pancakes on clay plates, while his sister offered a selection of cut fruit. They acted out a fantasy of domestic bliss that, conveniently enough, excluded me and Richard, who slept late with the baby. The behavior recalled a childhood of service to their parents which had never quite satisfied their parents who were always at work and otherwise unavailable.
The kitchen was lit by many windows that looked onto a spacious lanai. Birds of paradise and monstera at the edge of the deck were trimmed to frame a gorgeous, wild ocean in its turquoise variations. X’s mother would finish washing breakfast dishes just as everyone, including my parents, sister and brother-in-law, finished eating. Nor was it that I thought my parents, sister and brother-in-law, betrayed me by enjoying the breakfast. Only they had fastened themselves to X’s mother’s birthday trip pretty quick, and I felt—regretted—that I was the worst sort of agent for such travel opportunities. Mary and her husbandhad honeymooned nearby; this made the trip all the more desirable. And if I felt they were opportunists, swooping in to enjoy something I dreaded, it hardly made a difference to them. Every morning, the husband said he wouldn’t say no to another strip of bacon.
That trip, I learned how papayas could look rotten and bruised, and still bear a succulent, refreshing fruit; about the drawing room of someone’s house as a place to buy scones, my favorite being white chocolate, macadamia nut, and mango. I learned about different varieties of poke at a local grocery just north of the airport. And learned—when our rental car tire burst on our way to the airport and home—that bad luck would follow me and X from then on. Our lives weren’t a spoof on the Brady Bunch episode where the family is cursed for taking a sacred object from the beach (much less coral, which my mother wrapped in silk and took away). Rather the images had to do with a mental rupture that took place. The papaya, just as the drawing room bakery, held dark knots of hope, such as seeds or doors to private rooms. And I savored this interior harbor as a map of organic growth.
◆
I said, “Really?” when Mary appeared before me.
I probably meant something like, “Do you mean I should follow you back to the beach?”
When my sister headed back, I folded the paper box back neatly into itself, licked cream off the fork and placed it in the dishwasher.
Even when I walked out onto the patio and across a flat lawn that dropped off abruptly, I didn’t feel X was in danger, or that it’d make one bit of difference if I got to him sooner rather than later.
When I got to the bottom of the rusted staircase, I got the feeling that the others had waited for me to arrive. Thankfully, Helen had been taking a nap with the baby. Otherwise, I’d have met Helen with X on her back, after she’d saved his life.
My father pointed to a far beach where X rested. I should have run. Instead, I carefully climbed a high mound of rocks, hanging onto tree branches and noting that my upper arms were getting stretched. I stepped onto a sandy beach on the far side of the rock mound.
When I got to X’s body and sat down, X turned his head but wouldn’t open his eyes. I pulled his head onto my lap.
What I said was, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” and wiped sand out of his eyes and ears. Sand also came out of his hair, stiff with salt. On his cheek lay uneven briny tracks, like ghosts of seaweed.
He said, “No, don’t be. It’s okay.”
I was relieved that his near drowning had simplified something between us.
◆
When I wake, surrounded by the smell of Otto’s sweat, it’s easy to feel discarded, sleeping in leftover bedding. I strip all the linens and walk a huge load downstairs to the laundry machine to wash everything Otto’s body has touched.
And yet, after the hot water cycle, when I open the washing machine, Otto’s smell rises up into my face. The hot wash water has only steamed his smell further into my linens. I rewash the load, and my sheets won’t dry in time for me to make the bed for the night.
I look for my sleeping bag, called a volcano because of its yellow/black shell and red interior. X took it camping years ago, so I text him right away to get it back. I’d taken it to Nepal during college, on a trip that changed my life. Even if my father had grudgingly agreed to let me go—he hadn’t trusted the tour company—he had said I could go. I made the mistake of writing him an ironic letter from Bangkok, describing how the tour company’s intermediary Pemba, who’d met me during a 36-hour layover in Thailand, had the nerve to ask me to send Patagonia jackets to the trek guides, if I was happy (later) with the trip. It seemed like a lot to ask considering that my father had already paid for everything.
At twenty, I’d been irresponsible and didn’t bother to update my father about how focused and happy I felt when the group got from Kathmandu to Jiri, the end of the paved road, on a bus. A huge cheese sandwich had been grilled under the engine hood. Among other important images: yaks that hauled bags when we started on foot to Everest base camp; the hillside, where we lunched, dotted with cement vaults with backs that opened onto hillsides, for unwanted infant girls.
During part of the ride to Jiri, I sat on the bus with a woman named Pat, a rather embittered real estate agent from Michigan, who spent years saving for her trip to Nepal. During the chat, Pat—perhaps with an eye toward hating me—talked about her impoverished childhood, and how she’d grown up on ketchup sandwiches. She was proud of how far she’d come in the world and would barter for cashmere rugs during the trek.
When I asked Pat where to dispose of tampons, she talked about Nepalese girls exiled to huts while menstruating. I carried the tampon with me until we camped that night and buried it in a cat hole before I slept. Or not really in relation, but on the steep rocky trails winding around a hill that felt like another hill, things spiraled. The river valley made a shadow out of which to climb ahead and away from where I had been previously. It was easy to believe that dark shadows could cast their influence upward. I heard a lip of river current fold over into the water.
◆
Our fights were repetitive. Before the trip to Kaua‘i, I’d go to a dark place, unable to comfort myself with the idea that the marriage would end. We fought about money as if we didn’t have enough or because I didn’t regard it in the same way that X did since he was a breadwinner. And yet the phrase never occurred to me as genuine since we weren’t at risk of starving. Rather, the fight, and the demeaning attitude X had toward me, meant I was forced to live out his fantasy of feeling important in a real world. I might have felt sorry for him, too, except when I saw his face take on the cast of self-importance, I rather hated him.
Before we moved to Seattle, where X would take his first private practice job, we spent time with his parents, who lived in Northern California. On a drive to Carmel, we fought about money again. I spent too much on some running pants. He said we’d have to budget if we wanted a child, but I doubted that having a baby would mean X would stop practicing as a doctor.
X was not a fat man, but even a shift in his slight mass, set in front of the steering wheel, could change the air. He was ready to link something big and problematic to the purchase, which I’d had the nerve to add to our list of expenditures and subtract from our summer budget. I had never understood why we couldn’t appreciate our wealth by simply enjoying our lives.
X sliced at my attitudes easily. He called me spoiled. Honestly, if that were the case, I wouldn’t have agreed to the careful budget in the first place. Still, I’d wanted the pants since I hadn’t bought anything all summer.
I was careful not to demean X’s work ethic. I did so anyway by pretending I didn’t have one. I hadn’t had a job since we’d married. Often, I assumed a ditzy affect. That I was arguing over a pair of running pants made me feel stupid. I was hardly athletic, but I was not above betraying myself to make a point.
The whole time we were fighting, I felt myself sinking, perhaps in an attempt to distance myself from X’s set jaw, his progress into self-worth really. The windshield itself, once supple with light, looked brittle. The effect was delirious, the air a perfect 70 degrees if I wanted to jump out.
We visited the bell tower at the Mission San Juan Bautista, setting the stage for X to throw me out onto the roof as in Vertigo—or at least pretend to throw me out the window. In that case, I would have been two different women, one alive, one already dead. The coincidences were uncannily comforting, even spooky in their reliability. Half dead, half alive, I arrived at the chapel entrance with X. The bell tower was locked that day. We hovered instead in the courtyard, scanning information placards, and walked into one of the stables where the local fire station housed animals before their annual parade. The place smelled like hay. This, too, the humid animal smell versus the view we’d come to witness, spoke volumes about the distortion of our being together; the humility that happened while we aspired for better things. As in the Hitchcock film, with Scotty’s hallucinatory vertigo, our scenes spiraled in black and white, no bottom in sight — and in slow motion. It felt like my husband wanted to kill me. I was complicit; we would both disguise the murder as suicide.
We got back into the car and X drove along the coast until we got to 17-Mile Drive near Carmel. He stopped at a park with a trailhead, set the keys on his seat, and left for a hike. I lingered behind, as I often did, to test how long it would take for him to notice.
A thread of water from the beach made a small, still pond below the path. Plants settled into an intricate pattern on its dark surface, overlaid with shadows and needles from numerous pines, rooted in the rock wall above X’s head. From my place on the path, I might scare X by trying to hurl myself off the ledge. And yet I knew I didn’t have the courage to do it.
X walked toward me. He said, “I’m sorry it’s like this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We should head back.”
I listened for small catches in his voice, a peel curling off his esophagus that might open up to a real, living self. But why would I count on his skinned throat to save us? My indulgence in images was the luxury I went to all the time. And here it was again, contra X’s ‘reality,’ a favorite way of describing the difference between us.
◆
When X parks in the driveway, and drops the bag on front step, my neighbor Ruthie stomps out of the house to tell X to move his car. In his perversity, X stays, long enough so that I’ll walk out to meet him.
Ruthie, a rather categorical thinker, dissects the world into haves v. have-nots, and takes rules rather seriously. In my conversations with her about my divorce, she offers sympathy from her position of relative security, suggesting that Don can make small repairs in the apartment as needed. This morning, she looks to exact some kind of equality, as if X is abusing his privilege as a physician to park in our driveway for five minutes. Ruthie waits, arms crossed, while X backs his car out.
X bothers to say, “I’m going now.”
He hasn’t been baited by Ruthie, but his sense of superiority in being able to escape her pettiness—well, this isn’t worth his trouble. I am equally glad he has escaped something. I can’t help but admire his aversion.
◆
Last, in recalling X: when I hike at Ebey Landing, I imagine throwing my body off the bluff. The long grasses catch me; the bluff’s not steep enough to kill me. If I retreat from the impulse, a snail curled around an iron rod—well, a poem I’m translating, titled “Iron Chair,”suggests a relationship between survival and hunger:
I sit my spine on an iron chair
To eat rice.
The poem can be fanciful:
I peck apart my body to eat
The bells of many tears for dessert.
But should I thank X for my granular vision? Certainly, the waves that break below the bluff wear salt-encrusted rims.
When X had been a resident in Internal Medicine, he had access via his resident friends, to controlled substances in large amounts. One month, I had a bottle of one hundred Ambien tabs. Licking one pill—perhaps it had fallen into the sink—I had the distinct impression that I was battling the wet sink for the grain.
A few times, X supplied me with sleeping pills during flights. The last time we’d flown to Korea—well, when he told me to take one before dinner service, I crushed half a pill in a Ziploc bag with a rock; the powder delivery was immediate. Later, X let me know that I’d fallen asleep with my mouth open. I had been eating dinner when I slumped over the tray table; the attendant had removed my tray before I woke up. X had not stopped me from over-shooting my needs.
Voices of children and scolding parents crept up on me in the plane. For this, I blamed X. Even if I liked matching images—the sky to silky glove of airplane interior, the pills themselves powder blue—I woke feeling mistrustful, not of my surroundings necessarily. The plane was clean enough, but the drug hadn’t rinsed clean.
That visit, X and I stayed at a guesthouse with a communal kitchen, just off the courtyard. X was always the one to wake first. He drank a couple of cups of coffee first thing. When X crawled into the room with a breakfast tray of toast and coffee, he had left the door ajar.
Snow was falling then. But overnight, even under many blankets and bedding heated by the floor matrix of circulating coils, I’d been bitten by mosquitoes. It was the hose’s fault. It had sprung a leak. A thin sheet of ice covered the small puddle by the faucet. By afternoon, sun warmed the puddle and mosquitoes were born.
That was one of the jokes between us, anyway. I got bitten anywhere we went.
As X lit a mosquito coil, he said, “It’s your dream come true.” I had always loved the combination of fresh air and a live spark, or fire.
At dusk, the courtyard sparkled with crisscrossing lines of Christmas lights, hanging there for years. X had been happy about them somehow. He loved snow, he said, and the flakes were large and healthy, bringing to mind grains of snow.
One morning, before a hike, from a small shop that sold picnic lunches, we chose rice balls with a ten-grain blend, the texture sticky, like something steamed. The pungent fish roe was held intact though, dotting the rice next to seaweed flakes. When we visited my eldest aunt, X impressed her by unwrapping and slicing a jelly roll we’d brought from the bakery. He pierced each slice with a toothpick and served everyone in the living room. He had a particular way of anticipating the peckishness of elders as they watched television. X loved fitting in with my family, as if he’d belong with me forever. When my aunt died two years after our visit, her memory of X got buried with her.
Of all the finger food—well, over time, the memory of X provides a feeling:
A bird sits in a thorn bush outside the window! Please don’t go
Let’s eat rice together
Sit a spine on an iron chair
To peck and eat bird rage
—a rejuvenated monster that, with neither feathers nor adhesive, grows off my tongue.
If I rustle up theBible passage now, as then—Jesus tested by Satan at a pinnacle of consciousness—X would entreat me, as he did during the marriage, to prove that God will save me if I jump. He’s taught me this much about conditional love.
* Moon Chung-hee, 카르마의바다 [Return of the Ocean]. Joon Gang Books, 2007.