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There was nothing under the skirt except what she was born with.
If I was intrigued, my sixteen-year-old brother was entranced, his eyes going wide as in a slow-motion film. The origins of the word “streetwalker” were now eminently clear to both of us. Our mother, wedged between us, her legs slick with sweat from the hours our bodies had been pressed together, a bit of the mangosteen juice beginning to creep onto her thighs, too, was horrified. Nothing in Rachael Zick’s prim and proper upbringing as a belle of one of the better families of New Orleans had prepared her for this moment. Her arms flew out to either side as she futilely sought to cover our eyes, as though we might unsee this woman and her goods. Years later she told me that this, her first brush with prostitution in the developing world, prostitution that bore no hallmarks of the gloss ofPretty Woman,had imprinted itself as strongly into her worldly mind as it had into the impressionable minds of her children.
When I first told Nao Kao the story, it was not the events themselves that surprised him so much as our reaction to them.
“All over the world you traveled, but none of you ever saw a prostitute before?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes. Or no. I mean, I had seen – and I’m sure my parents, too – plenty of women who were undoubtedly prostitutes. Late at night or early in the morning, in Paris near the Bois de Boulogne or along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Stumbling through London’s squares at sunrise. That kind of thing. But none of us had ever seen a woman so desperate to turn a trick that she was willing to display her wares –allher wares – in the middle of a traffic jam on a Saturday afternoon!”
“But your car was stuck and there were three men inside – if she could entice even one of them for fifteen minutes, I’m sure it would have put rice in her belly.” He spoke without judgment, only a resigned understanding of the realities of life lived on knife’s edge.
The act of putting food on the table was no metaphor here, and Nao Kao understood that as well as anyone. He had arrived in Bangkok to study at Chula just a couple of years later; the National University of Laos would not accept its first class until the year after he began college. Though he could have transferred to the new, national institution to finish his studies, a degree from one of the region’s leading schools would open far more doors for him than one from a brand new and entirely unknown university. Obviously, his gamble had paid off.
In my half-awake, half-asleep state, I catalogued my travels in Asia, the cities and countries I was always urging students to prioritize for their time abroad. I remembered my last trip to Asia. On that trip, I had swung through China, from Hong Kong, where I’d strolled along the Avenue of Stars to see the junks in the harbor and the Star Ferry plying the waters, to Beijing with its endless ring roads and portraits of Mao and finally to Shanghai, a glitzy, gritty, glammy city that manages to be equal parts high tech and highly inefficient. I love Shanghai, that megapolis that’s risen so rapidly alongside the Huangpu River, futuristic skyscrapers jammed next to alleys that once were opium dens. Especially in Asia, I like to wake up early and walk in the morning, to feel the sticky warmth in my lungs before the day’s heat fully bears down on me, to smell the meats roasting, to immerse myself in the routines of a city awakening from its relative quietude, the sounds of millions rising in tandem with the sun. Honking, sweeping, hollering: it is not yet a din, but give it time.
As we bumped along the highway in the sky, the seat belt warning dinging, the captain asking the fight crew to take their seats, Janelle scurrying to do just that, in my mind’s eye I could see Shanghai. It is a city where laundry still hangs from trees next to hotels whose marble lobbies gleam and the scents of incense and cigarette smoke mingle with dumplings and noodles and sweet, sticky sauces. The food is to die for, but it is the water that could literally kill you. Of course, it is the pollution most people think of, and some days it can be thick enough to leave a layer on your tongue, certainly thick enough to create sunsets that set the sky ablaze. Above all, though, when I picture Shanghai, I picture the millions and millions of people living and laughing and loving and also shouting, frequently shouting, cheek by jowl.
My mind drifted to the pajamas, too, as I remembered how Delta used to provide soft, gray pjs on the flight to Shanghai. I wondered whether they would again or whether this, too, would be another business decision, the way they no longer flew the inter-Asia connections, the way that today, it is almost exclusively Korean Air or bust for any traveler in Asia who is lashed to the mast of the Sky Team. Never mind that I count Korean among my least favorite airlines on earth, it was their aircraft that would carry me the next six hours from Seoul to Vientiane. Once I would have considered that but a hop, skip, and a jump away. Now it felt like a year. I could not say, though, whether that was because I was so woefully out of practice or because of the mounting trepidation that churned inside of me. If it is true God hates a coward, I may be in trouble when my time on earth is at an end.
At last the meditative aspect of flying did its work. I drifted off dreaming of gray cotton jammies that clung to me like clouds to trees on a ridgeline.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
What do weknow that we don’t know we know? Of course, it’s not always what we don’t know. Sometimes we’re simply too stupid or too stubborn to acknowledge it. There is comfort and safety in the denseness of a dumb mind that abandons us with terrifying speed once we are forced to recognize that we were not dense, but wallowing in denial. The line between these states – dense at one end of the taut rope and denial pulling valiantly against it – is more ephemeral that I care to admit.
After years of sleeping soundly, I had suddenly begun to have nightmares. For weeks on end, I awoke in a cold sweat, the sensation of drowning – or more frequently suffocating – fresh in my mind, my pajamas and sheets soaked through with the evidence of my terror. It only seems fitting that it was while I was gazing out another airplane window, enjoying my front row seat to God’s hour, that magical moment when the sun cracks the horizon and turns the sky all razzle-dazzle, that my own conscience cracked open.
Almost since the day we had said “I do,” the idea of divorce had rattled through my mind. Scratch that. Since the day we said I do, the literal wedding day, the idea had lodged itself in my mind. Admittedly, though I prefer not to, I almost did not say “I do,” so strong was the voice begging me not to go through with it.
I thought back to the keynote I delivered on literacy and blogging one glittery night in Charleston. I was there to share the origins of my project with an assembled audience of bibliophiles who had earned this stay at the Charleston Place for their efforts promoting literacy in schools around the country.
“What was the impetus behind your journal?” the moderator asked.
“Agatha Christie is great, really,” I began nervously, as though I might offend the great, dead dame, “but let me tell you: all the whodunnits start to run together after a while. Even Ms. Christie only had so much originality. So, my husband suggested a blog. I think he hoped it meant I wouldn’t ask him anymore if he knew whether I’d already readMurder on the Blue Trainor if I was thinking ofMurder on the Orient Express. And, more to the point, once I finished reading my book of the moment, hedearlyhoped he would no longer be the primary audience for my extemporaneous reviews. Maybe others were interested in what I thought ofThe Murder on the Links, but he was not!”
Laughter, slightly uncomfortable, tittering laughter, I later realized, reverberated through the courtyard, dancing between the twinkle lights, sluicing through the fountain.
If I flitted through life as sparkly orange, a trail of glitter dancing in my wake, Jake was gunmetal gray, stolid and, frankly, a little dull. Despite the ambivalence he displayed toward his own studies in college, he taught high school English – and his students adored him. His classrooms were lively, and when the mood struck, his teaching could veer toward performance. He’d write little ditties sometimes, quasi-songs to help students remember the sonnets of Shakespeare or the trials and tribulations of Homer and his men and on the occasions when he shared them with me, I’d allow myself to wander down the rabbit hole of what-ifs that started and ended with what if Jake had had the courage or the ambition to pursue what he’d once been so passionate about? Whether Jake had truly left behind whatever passion he’d once possessed for the rhythms of the spoken word, or merely concealed it from me, I knew his ear for language was finely tuned and keen. Of course, I asked him to help me edit my speech. That it earned a laugh was all the better as far as he was concerned.
I realize now that the audience may have been laughing with me, but at a certain point, one I could not pinpoint, Jake had begun to laugh at me. Eventually, nothing I said was quite right to his ear, and nothing I did was quite right, period. He rolled his eyes at my trials and triumphs and I retreated further inward and out of this life with a man who was happiest when I kept my own counsel – or better yet, when I was on another continent.
I counted my other lives as I drifted off to sleep. Alternate lives I might have lived as Mrs. Ex- This or Ex- That. I had names for these other lives, like books of the Bible – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – or bands – Peter, Paul, and Mary. And I counted them, the way other, saner folks might count sheep. The way Bing Crosby counted his blessings.
Though it percolated for years, once I knew to the depths of my soul that I needed out, it was impossible to think of anything else, to unknow the injury upon my spirit, the death by a thousand paper cuts that I was slowly dying. Once I had realized this, each moment threatened to subsume me in a tide of regret and grief.
What cause, these gales? The winds of the storm lashed my face, my mind, my soul.
And so, as the plane swung low over Dakar, the wide plains of West Africa clearly visible out of the window, the United Nations plane on the runway – the only other one at the entire airport that day – slipping into view, the situation became critical. The realization of what those nightmares meant unmoored me as nothing had. Nothing, that is, since Nao Kao.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I felt thebed sag next to me, rousing me from deep sleep. It took me a moment to get my bearings.
“Nao Kao! What are you doing in here? Go back to the couch!” I squinted at the time. It wasn’t quite one in the morning.
Instinctively I sat up and tugged the covers up to my chin. Nao Kao had seen me in a bathing suit. He had seen me soaked through in the river. In both cases, he had gotten a better eyeful than my oversized YMCA camp t-shirt and I Heart NY boxer shorts offered. Still, this felt different. This was my bedroom. It was the middle of the night. And in a single fluid movement, he was under the covers.
“Liss, please.”
