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If I had lowered myself in my own esteem when I finally relented to his pleas, that certainly was not the case for him, for whom the previous evening had been something he had wanted for so long and had finally found the nerve to pursue. He would be at the museum at 2:00 p.m., if I still felt like going. “Or you can come to my apartment. ;)”
I smiled in spite of myself. How easily one slips into another skin. How easily one becomes – how easilyIbecame – the other woman.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I bought myfirst car just a few weeks before September 11. A bright blue Civic, its gloss like the sheen of a poison dart frog, with a manual transmission. My dad convinced me that despite the fact that I would not need it for a few months, August was the time to buy. He also observed that parking a new car in an open lot that often served as a shortcut for those in varying states of inebriation at 2:00 a.m. would not be my wisest move. Having attended a New Year’s party in the building next door, where the riotously drunk hostess toasted the coming year by hurling dinnerware discus-style from her balcony, I realized my dad was not wrong. So, I kept the car at my parents’ place, just a couple of miles from campus on a leafy side street where it was far less likely to come to harm. I imagined once that things would have unfolded differently if not for that decision. On such small decisions do larger events often hinge, but in this case, it’s unlikely. Although the pressure points may have been different, the facts would have remained immutable.
Nao Kao had not yet seen the big lake, and did not – could not – entirely believe that standing at the edge of Lake Michigan was akin to standing on the shore of the ocean. September was the tail end of the season for going to the beach, but the air still held the warmth of late summer for at least a couple of hours in the afternoon. If we were going to go, the time was now.
“I want you to wear a bikini,” he had said baldly when we hatched the plan a few days earlier. Neither of us had class on Wednesday, which also looked to be the warmest day of the week.
“A bikini?” I questioned, alarmed. “I’ve only owned Speedos for years. I’ve onlywornSpeedos for years!”
“So, buy one. I want to be able to do this.” He kissed my collar bone gently from my right shoulder to my sternum and then up the left side.
How I transitioned from reluctant participant in middle-of-the-night transgressions to a willing participant in a sordid affair defies easy explanation. The obvious answers abound. I liked Nao Kao, my best friend and easiest conversation partner of the past year. My respect and affection for him only grew when I realized this was no torrid one-night stand. I was young and single, with all that entailed; for all my terror of maternal tantrums, I enjoyed the prospect of scandalizing my mother. Above them all, though, hovered the greater truth, the veracity of which left me questioning my entire character. I was energized by the quiet thrill of shattering the good girl mold that had so guided, one might even argue constrained, my life, until the moment I’d allowed myself to be with Nao Kao in every sense of the word. And now, in another first, I was contemplating skimpy swimwear.
Finding a bikini in Michigan in autumn was about as likely as finding a down jacket in Havana in July, but I would try to fulfill Nao Kao’s wish. I spent the night before our trip scouring Briarwood Mall where I turned up what was likely the last bathing suit in the state on a JCPenney’s clearance rack. If a lavender and navy haltered tankini was not exactly the itsy bitsy teenie weenie polka dot bikini of Nao Kao’s dreams, at least it wasn’t a Speedo.
“Where are you off to so early today?” my mom asked when I showed up for my car. My timing was poor. In another ten minutes she would have been safely on her way to work.
“Beach,” I mumbled, willing a sink hole to open under me, new car notwithstanding. Insurance would cover the cost of a replacement.
“The beach? You mean Lake Michigan? And by yourself?” Then ominously, “But who will help you with your sunscreen?”
If her family did not have such a strong history of skin cancer – if my grandfather had not succumbed just a few months prior to a particularly aggressive melanoma – I might have snorted with derision. Or ignored her. Or both. Instead, I attempted a dodge.
“A friend?”
Rachael Zick was not born yesterday. Steely and determined, she had elbowed her way into a field dominated, as all of academia used to be and much of it still is, by an old boys’ club. She turned that intensity on me now, leveling her gaze, remembering too quickly the friend who had tagged along on a couple of occasions when I had come to do laundry, but whom she had not seen for many weeks. I was keeping Nao Kao at a safe distance.
My parents liked him. They had invited him to dinner once or twice, after New Year’s, when he so impressed my mom with his command of the finer points of Laotian history and French colonialism in general. With them he seemed to relax, and would chat contentedly in a way he rarely did in class – or with me.
Only by sitting quietly after the plates had been cleared did I learn when one of his daughters had begun to crawl or walk, or that they had started to babble and coo at him when he called home, this stranger in a faraway land who existed for them only in a photograph. (This past year I asked him why he seemed so much more relaxed with my parents. “You always made me a little nervous,” he admitted. “Sometimes you still do.” Not surprisingly, he would reveal nothing further.)
My mom’s eyes flashed as she settled on the only possible explanation.
“Melissa Claire Miller. He is a married man! A married man, Liss! Do you know what they call women like you? Do you, Liss?”
As if I needed the reminder.
I drove away with her words ringing in my ears. If I had not felt it before, I could feel it now, the scarletAfirmly tattooed on my heart.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
The intercom interruptedmy reverie.
“Is there a doctor on board? Please identify yourself to the cabin crew.”
I was not a doctor, not the kind to help in this kind of emergency, at least, although I am good in crises of the non-medical variety. From missed flights or lost students, to passports left in trains and hotels safes – or simply vanished out of backpacks or pockets or the backseat of a cab – to students who discover belatedly that they have booked airfare for the wrong dates or the wrong cities or even the wrong countries – to vans with blown out tires high up in the Andes, I have handled all of these, I am told, with aplomb.
Earthquakes around the Ring of Fire are run of the mill emergencies. Political protests in Haiti that render impassible the only road to the airport require a bit more ingenuity. If you are the victim of a wild dog attack somewhere outside of Goa, I am available to tell you that the rabies vaccine is your friend – though I will also likely suggest that you should have proceeded directly to the hospital, rather than making me your first call.
Yes, the concrete problems of the world, the kind with actual solutions – appointments at embassies to replace lost passports or intravenous drips to replace lost fluids – problems to be solved, crises to be diverted, normalcy to be restored, at this I am masterful. It is the problems without clear solutions at which I flounder.
The student who learns via text from an aunt that a parent has passed away in Tennessee, while the student is studying in Turkey, that is much harder for me. So, too, the student who drank too much in too many bars and awoke with too many regrets: yes, these are the kinds of problems that leave me feeling at sea.
My own life has followed a similar pattern. The troubles I could name and resolve, I have done so admirably, and with clear eyes and competence. It is the crises that are not so concrete, the ones that build slowly or burn untended too long that have proved my undoing.
