Eleven Twenty-Three (7 page)

“
Building
toward something, Tara?
Jesus Christ. How about building toward people having an education
in English? How about the fact that we’re providing a service to
their country—and to the world, when you think about it politically
and economically—by teaching there? Why isn’t the work we’re doing
enough on its own?”

“Oh, don’t even give me that sanctimonious
teacher crap of yours, Layne. Just don’t do it. If it weren’t for
Olivia Glatz, then you’d still be at Kennedy High School right now.
And let’s just say it: we’re
both
doing a half-ass job in
Suzhou and you know it. Those students speak English about as well
as we speak Mandarin, which is
criminal
.”

“Please don’t do this, Tara,” I almost
whisper, inspecting the photos on the corkboard. I barely recognize
any of the faces in them anymore. They look gray to me.

“Doesn’t it bother you at least a little bit
how easily we fit into the expat ABC?” she asks.

“What? Alcoholic, broke, and criminal? No,
not really. At least we’re in good company.”

“This is absolutely fucking
hopeless
—”

“Look,” I say, glancing at my watch, “I’ve
got to go to dinner. I’m going to be late. So are you. Can we
continue this conversation later?”

“Later
when
, Layne? Later—when?”

“Just…later. Not now. In the future. May we
talk about marriage then?”

“There won’t be many more ‘later’
conversations for us, Layne,” she says ominously. “I’m about
through with ‘later,’ to be honest.”

I slip on my shoes and tie them. Then I stand
up and check my eyes in the mirror over her shoulder. I drape my
arms around her shoulders. I gently rub her skin, a gesture that
used to comfort her but now just makes Tara feel cold and fishlike
in my spectral grip.

“Sunshine,” I say carefully, already certain
that I shouldn’t say what I am about to and yet powerless to stop
myself. “Do you really want to get married right
now
, when
our Burmese brothers and sisters out there still suffer so much? I
mean, doesn’t it make you feel kind of guilty to want this American
dream of yours when so many of these innocent people are dying
around the world?”

Tara takes in a deep breath.

“Layne,” she says. “You. Are. An asshole. In
fact, you may be the biggest asshole I’ve ever met in my life. Get
your commitment-less hands off of me right now. I’ve got to
go.”

At this, she wriggles free of my bodily
shroud, butts me out of her way and leaves her bedroom. She turns
the light off behind her, and I stand in the dark, not sure if I am
breathing.

07:11:49 PM

“Mitsuko?”

“Oh shit. Hold on a second… Um, okay.
Layne?”

“Um, yeah. It’s Layne. I, um, just got back
into town today.”

“Yeah, that’s what my brother told me. You
have your phone back on?”

“For the next four hundred minutes, yes, I
have my phone back on.”

“I see. So, how was your time in the Orient?
Good?”

“By far the most beautiful place I’ve ever
seen. I have great students, I love the people I’m working with,
the people in Suzhou and Shanghai are all super-nice, and the club
scene there is pretty neat—”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome. I’m glad you and Tara are
happy over there.”

“Well, I am pretty much, but Tara is probably
not going to be going back with me in a few—oh wow, that’s weird. I
just passed these three Asian guys at the corner of Massachusetts
wearing surgical masks—”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Actually, Layne, um—I was
kind of in the middle of something when you called, so could we
talk later?”

“Later
when
, Mitsuko?”

“I don’t know, Layne. Just…later. I’ve got to
go right now though, so I’ll spare you having to give me any of the
mundane details from your trip. You can save that for the group
tonight.”

“You’re going to
spare
me? Is that
what you said? Yeah, you’ve spared me all right, Mitsuko—”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean,
Layne? Oh, time for a psychic moment: um, you want to talk to me
right now about
us,
right? Well look, I really don’t want to
talk to you about that ever again, to be honest—”

“Oh, I see. So basically you just call upon
me, get me drunk—”

“Just stop it with the histrionics and
‘I’m-the-victim’ bullshit. You’re acting like these kinds of things
don’t just happen. This is America. From what I’ve observed these
many years here, things like what happened between us happen all
the time. And then it’s over and they move on. Am I right?”

“You’ve been here in America way too long,
I’m afraid.”

“Look, seriously, I really was busy, so if
this is all you want to talk about, then I need to go—”

“No, Mitsuko, please listen. I seriously do
need to talk to you.”

“Unless you’re standing over the bleeding
corpse of my freshly dead brother, I see no reason whatsoever why
we should continue this conversation.”

“Well, Hajime’s not dead, but my father is.
Did you hear?”

“Yeah, I heard, and I’m sorry about that. I
am deeply sad for your loss, Layne. I truly am. But I just don’t
think it’s appropriate that we talk or hang out anymore. I mean,
you have your girlfriend, and I’m married to Mark now.”

“Look, I’m on my way to my mother’s for
dinner, I just got done having this big fight with Tara, and to top
it off, I had the weirdest plane ride of my entire life last night.
I just wanted to, like, tell you about it. That’s all.”

“But we
can’t
, Layne. It’s just not a
good idea. We can’t talk anymore, and I really don’t want to
anyway.”

“Okay then. No problem, Mitsuko. I adore how
diplomatic and sensitive you’ve been about this. After all, it’s
not
devastating
or anything to hear an ex-girlfriend tell
you she could give a shit less about you and doesn’t want to hear
your voice ever again. That’s just fine—”

“I’m not your ex-girlfriend, Layne.”

“Well whatever. I just don’t understand why
you feel the need to tell everyone how much you don’t care for me
and tell me that we shouldn’t talk, when the truth is that—at one
point, anyway—you cared for me plenty.”

“It’s better than the alternative, wherein I
tell Hajime the truth and he has a conniption fit and fills our
parents in on the news that I’m not in school anymore, or that I
was engaged and yet still had sex with some other guy while
drinking heavily at some seedy bar downtown last July.”

“Look, Mitsuko, I’ve hinted to Hajime about
it several times, and I’m really pretty sure that he’d be totally
okay with it if we—”

“Oh Christ, Layne, are you retarded? I mean,
seriously.
Are
you retarded? Listen very carefully to me: I
am
married
. Do you understand? I. Am. Married. What we did
was a mistake. You have Tara. I have Mark, who I adore and would
die over if he ever did to me what I did to him. Got it? It was all
a drunken mistake, Layne. That’s what it was. Stop making an epic
romance novels out of scribbles on a bar napkin.”

“
Mistakes
, Mitsuko. There’s a plural
in there. We met up two more times after that first night at the
beach and the bar. So tell me another one.”

“Am I really having this conversation? Am I
now arguing with you over how many times I got depressed and fucked
you? Layne, it was over six months ago that it happened. It was
before I married Mark and he and I had just had a big fight, and I
felt bad about your job and everything, so it was just a—”

“A
what
, Mitsuko? A pity fuck? A
well-moved chess piece? What?”

“Look, it was just one of those rare things
that happens and then never repeats itself. It’s over with. So why
don’t we just appreciate the time we
did have
and leave it
at that? Okay?”

“I was just hoping that maybe we could go out
sometime soon and talk about it. Maybe we could go back to the
beach. Is that so out of the question?”

“Yes, Layne, it
is
out of the
question. It is
absolutely
out of the question. What you’re
asking me to do is endanger my marriage so that I can sit next to
you on some wet sand and deflect all of your clumsy attempts to get
my pants off again. Sorry if I am not that interested.”

“Mitsuko, you’re being a
bitch
.”

“And you’re being hung up on. Our beach is
officially
closed
, Layne. Goodbye.”

“No, Mitsuko, I’m sorry, wait, I just called
to tell you how you really did save my life that night, and I
just—
fuck!
”

07:18:54 PM

For the past seven years, my mother has lived
in an upstairs two-bedroom crypt situated in an apartment complex
named after a tiny gorgeous shell but intended for grotesque and
swollen old people. She moved there not long after our father left
and the house was sold. I never did meet the people who moved into
our old home on the other side of town, but according to my mother,
they were unsavory specters.

My mother did not take to Dad’s frantic
escape very well. I quickly grew accustomed to it, as if I had
never had a father to begin with. We all but stopped talking after
the divorce, and I usually only received updates on his new life
out in Portland on Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday in March,
and a week or so after his own birthday in June. And this was only
because he called me repeatedly or was visiting his parents in New
Smyrna and would swing by Lilly’s End on his way to the airport. He
insisted each time that he had not forgotten about his son down in
Florida. I got risqué greeting cards with gift certificates to
Barnes & Noble or Macy’s on holidays, and sent the same
unsigned Hallmark card and twenty-five dollar vouchers for Outback
or Chili’s on the same occasions. This was, except for the few days
that led up to my departure, the extent to which my father and I
communicated. It never seemed to matter much. Not after Cindy,
who’s only three years older than I am and slightly more attractive
but much dumber than Tara, was married to him four months after the
divorce from Mom was final. That was just under eight years
ago.

But for my mother, the experience was
permanently devastating. It drained everything from her: the
non-cat-related positive words from her vocabulary, twenty pounds,
the house I grew up in, her laid-back sense of calm, her tenure at
the college, her self-assurance, the wine shelves, her once
staggering physical beauty, and her will to find anything but
impending disaster and furtive glances in the world around her.

It was a domino effect: younger women
appeared, the kind who enjoyed the company of a suited man that
lights their cigarettes with flaming twenty dollar bills; he walks
out of his aging wife and grown son’s life; she goes into the
throes of despair; the son’s college years and rocky adulthood are
permanently jaded thereafter. Nothing was the same for either of us
after he left, and every time I stared into the sagging, dead gray
oceans that were once my mother’s vivacious blue eyes, I was
reminded that I would never, ever forgive my father for leaving
us.

And I never did. Even now, as his body rests
comfortably in the plush surroundings of what I am sure is a very
expensive coffin, I hope for the worst tomorrow, such as his corpse
falling out of the casket or his soul being damned to wander
listlessly around a very boring Purgatory with no dinner
reservations.

I head up to my mother’s second floor
apartment carrying my usual dinner Cabernet. I stare at the sticker
she placed on her door, the one that says IN CASE OF FIRE, PLEASE
RESCUE CATS. TWO INSIDE. Mom answers the door wearing old jeans and
a blouse. Her brunette hair is disheveled and spotted with more
gray strands than I remember there being four months ago. She is
already drinking her first glass of dark wine, which means I will
be listening to her drunken rants about Dad by eight-thirty or
nine.

“You're fifteen minutes late,” she says. “I
was getting worried. You sounded pretty groggy on the phone this
morning when you got in.”

“Long flight,” I say, giving her a sincere
hug. My mother always smells of sullen perfume and forlorn coconut
shampoo, of the black Persian and bitchy tabby cat, of deep
grudge-inducing loss and too much sleep. “Dinner smells good.”

“I made a roast. I hope that’s okay. It
should be ready in just a few minutes.”

“Sounds splendid, Mom.”

“Okay, back up,” she says. “Let me take a
good look at you.”

She gently nudges me to an arm’s length and
looks me up and down. I feel like I am being sold into slavery. She
grimaces when I grimace, and then we fall back into a hug.

“You look thin, son.”

“I eat steamed dumplings and don’t have a car
there, Mom. It happens.”

“I am so glad to see you home safe, Layne. I
don’t know what I’d do if I flipped on the news one morning and saw
your face on the screen, involved in some kind of terrible
international incident.”

“I really don’t think you have to worry,” I
say, actually quite amused with the thought of starting some major
capitalist travesty when I go back, especially with the Olympics
coming in a few months. The Chinese don’t want any trouble from us
pale-face runaways, after all.

“I love you, baby boy.”

And I love my mother; I always will. But I
tend to love her with more conviction when I remember her giving
off the fragrance of notebook paper and sports cars while standing
next to my father, a wide smile beaming down on me from both of
them.

I slip past her into the apartment, taking in
the cat smell, the orange and black and white hairs scattered
across the armrests of the couch and recliner, and the thick smoky
air already reeking of another overdone pot roast. The apartment is
how I remember it: under-lit, well manicured, and full of nothing
but appliances and furniture that imply a lonely woman lives here.
I wipe away some of the cat dander from the firm, unused sofa and
sit down, watching my mother move haphazardly from the living room
down the hallway and into the bedroom, and then back into the
living room again. She looms over me, inspecting my black t-shirt,
my wrinkly blue jeans, my deteriorating sneakers, my overgrown
black hair, and mendacious hazel eyes. I quickly look away, ashamed
of being ashamed.