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She simply sighed.
The iceberg would sit. My shoulders relaxed with her sigh, freed of the struggle of trying to articulate exactly what it was I felt toward Nao Kao.
“Last question, Liss: what did you decide about the book?”
“I didn’t,” I said, and for the first time, I knew I had lied to my therapist, as well as to myself.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I smelled thebeginnings of breakfast, the coffee just on to brew, the familiar choices of eggs or fried rice warming in their little trays. I did not need to consult the tv screen in front of me; I could tell from the rhythms of the flight crew, their studied and efficient movements as they moved through the cabin delivering trays, pouring coffee, offering a final pour of water, that we were no more than 90 minutes from landing. This was the muscle memory of a frequent flyer kicking back into gear, and again I felt the familiar sensation that I had come home.
One of the lessons my nieces have taught me is exactly how much you can learn from children’s books. One of my favorites wasDog on a Frog?
It begins with a frog telling a dog to “get off,” much to the chagrin of the canine who, the reader learns, likes sitting on squishy amphibians that making croaking sounds. A cat becomes involved, reciting the conveniently rhyming rules of how and where animals rest their weary bones. Cats on mats, frogs on logs, poodles on noodles, and of course, dogs on frogs.
Eventually, the nonsense rhyming leads us to the whales, who, the frog dictates, are to sit on nails. The dog rather reasonably posits that whales may not like this assignment, only to be informed by his amphibious friend that they don’t have to like it – they just have to do it.
So, it was for me in the days before Thanksgiving in that fateful and momentous year of 2001. Any doubt that those little pills in my bathroom had not been beyond reproach fell from my mind with the leaves around campus.
I was pregnant. By a man who was married to a woman on the other side of the planet. Who was home with their twins, nursing them through tropical disease and god knew what else. Whose best chance for a better life had been to send her husband, their father, packing, alone, to the farthest, snowy reaches of the earth. He was her hope for a life beyond what she had dreamed as a refugee, perhaps even what she had dreamed as a young bride, who had herself fallen pregnant almost immediately. And he was legally obligated to return home a few months hence. For the betterment of his country, I reminded myself, as I recited the facts. As long as I kept this all at arm’s length, I could handle it. A problem to be solved.
But now this man, whether he knew of what he spoke or not, was increasingly demanding that I hear out his plans to stay, somehow, someway, in this country a little while longer. Internally, I ticked off the options. An extension on time-to-graduation on his master’s degree. Admission into a doctoral program. Some other visa type about which I knew nothing – and neither had he before the power of the internet showed him the way.
Whether I had hit on a winner, I couldn’t know, for I never asked. Nor did I ask whether America was the appeal – or me. In all cases, it was better not to know.
I had no job, not in early November, and no place to live after December beyond my old childhood bedroom, with its lavender walls lined with the certificates and awards I had accumulated since grade school. There I would be safely again under the watchful eye of my parents, though I was certain my father, at least, was blissfully ignorant of the state of affairs of my personal life. And I had dreams. Personal and professional. Any way I sliced it, my current predicament had all the makings of derailing my entire life.
If I told Nao Kao, I ran the risk that he might dig in his heels further and determine to stay. I could not, would not, be responsible for that. I read once that one cannot simultaneously love and feel guilty. I am still not certain about that, but for me, there was no question. The guilt I had harbored over the past few months had been monstrous enough while I shouldered it. Should he stay, it would consume me, and any burgeoning love we might have.
Years later, that guilt would be one of the first things I tried to explain. Nao Kao had the good grace not to ask whether that guilt only extended toward the wife I never knew, or if I had saved any of it for him, the man who had been both my friend and my lover and so much else besides, before I made my decision. Unilaterally. Without, one could argue, so much as a second thought for what that might mean for him.
For if he was not going to stay – and he was not – I had already ruled that out – then it was best not to allow him to think he should have the least say in what I did. I didn’t actually think he would disagree with me. Anyone could see that it was an impossible situation, and he was not much better at denying me than I was him. He would never deny me the chance at chasing my future, unimpeded by this past. Telling him would be pointless, or so I averred. I was doing him a kindness, or so I convinced myself. Ignorance was bliss, and this way one of us, at least, could continue merrily through life without so much as a hint of the shadow of the other.
More importantly, if I didn’t tell him, if I didn’t tell anyone, I could almost convince myself it simply wasn’t true.
I had already decided the last time I went to his apartment. Once I did this, I would not be able to hide it from him. And I couldn’t keep rebuffing the conversation he wanted to have daily now, sometimes more than once a day, even, this idea of him remaining here.
I went to his apartment for the last time on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, in the afternoon, when the sunlight was weak and watery, the yellow orb already racing toward its lowest arc across the sky. It was windy and the naked branches of the trees scratched against one another as they swayed. Great piles of leaves lie heaped in the gutters waiting to be picked-up. Once they had been small and bright and lacy, then full and lushly green before bursting with the reds and oranges and yellows of fall. In the gutters, they were crumbled and brown, their little circle of life completed.
I remember how slowly he undressed me that afternoon, how everything moved in slow motion, whether in reality or just the reel in my mind, from his fingers hooking into the hair tie that held my ponytail to the line of kisses along my collar bone to our bodies fitting together as though they were made only for one another to the final gentle kiss he placed on the tip of my nose.
“You’re sure you won’t stay? Just a little longer?”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice. We were dressed then and I looked into his eyes, his face, ran my fingers through his hair. With my index finger I made small looping circles on his chest, between the buttons of his shirt.
“Maybe next time?”
I would not let the tears fall. Not here, not yet, not now. I shrugged, noncommittally.
“Liss, la. You ok? What’s wrong?”
Life, la.
But this I could not say. More shrugging.
I gathered my bag and walked to my car. I saw him at the window as I left, the little wave he gave, the furrow to his brow. Whether I lifted my hand in farewell to return the gesture or left it slack at my side is one of the details that defies me still.
I drove to my parents’ and parked before walking to my apartment. I think I drove that day rather than ride the bus just so I would have to make that walk. I had made it many times, but with tears streaming down my cheeks and my entire body heaving, it had never before felt so much like the proverbial walk of shame. For three miles, the late November air braced my heart for the one last task that lay before me that day.
