—You’re thorough, Siobhán says.
—I’m obsessive, I say, and try to smile.
We sit in silence. A minute hand is ticking, but I can’t find the clock.
—My mother’s sculpture in the gallery, where did you get it? I ask, Ella’s voice making me bold.
Siobhán inclines her head, pleased.
—Ida sent it to me. It was the last sculpture she made before leaving to join your father in the United States. She was pregnant with you. A good-bye gift.
—Were you studying curation at the Slade? I ask.
Siobhán’s laugh is terse and dry.
—I was painting. But I wasn’t sure of it, not the way Ida was.
She is quiet a moment, then energized.
—Ida and I shared a studio. We used to sing. Ida could harmonize to anything. When Ella was born—it was difficult—I hid away from everyone. Ida found me. Here, in France.
Siobhán smiles, then stumbles—a dry root in the path of memory. Her face loses expression. The past closes up.
—The pages are fine, she says. Be in touch in two weeks. We’ll keep track of your progress.
On the walk home, I wonder how I violated one of Siobhán’s boundaries in air.
In the flat, to distract myself from thinking about my mother and Siobhán, I open the blue journal. Scenes gather against the dull afternoon: Soraya, Anthony, Sebastian, a young man called Mr. Koi, a Frenchwoman in a batik dress. The scenes are there, and I’ve only to hang on, taking minutes like a scribe, reconstructing without knowing (like Ella) how it’s going to end.
9
LULL, THEN RUSH. RHYTHM OF THINGS. In the lull, Muay took me to her tailor in a nearby village to have a suit made. I chose a smart gray fabric that looked great on the roll but felt scratchy against my skin. The suit had been made to measure but fit me poorly, too square.
—You’ll have to square yourself to fill it, Muay said.
I was thinking of this, of squaring myself into suits, and into the terra-cotta tiles of the walkway as I waited for the Welcome Dinner for New Faculty to begin. I had so little to do that I’d begun arriving early to things, a parody of a professor in my square skirt suit.
Ahead on the walkway, the vice president appeared with a Western man with shock white hair making animated gestures. It felt good to see someone who looked like me—not a feeling I was proud of, but I’d been Muay’s constant companion since I arrived, and was beginning to feel like her like her indolent pet—mute, save for when a friend of hers would trot out his rusty English, out of pity, since I couldn’t speak his language.
Anthony, from England, had been in Thailand fifteen years, mostly Bangkok, which he pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. With him, I didn’t have to be ashamed or apologetic or grateful. He proposed refreshment to bide our time, time that felt heavy. For the first time in my life, there was too much of it.
In the refectory pavilion, over Thai iced tea—which Anthony drank with relish—I learned about cow and chicken traffic in Ban Du village and the bloody cocks crowing at all hours. My suite at the university felt sterile by comparison (plastic wrap still in the creases of the sofa). When Anthony asked why I’d come to Thailand, the story of my adoption seemed far away, almost unimportant, so I said adventure.
—Alas, said Anthony, sighing dramatically, most English faculty here are like myself, archaic. You’ll be petrified with boredom until you meet Sebastian. He’ll return from his travels soon.
Then Anthony remembered he was supposed to be interviewed for Thai television, of all the abject horrors, so we returned to the banquet hall, where guests were milling by the bar or sitting on tatami mats. By the entrance, a woman was pacing in little circles, agitated, her hair twisted in a braid around her head, her Lanna dress, teal and silver, wrapping like a mermaid’s tail. She hurried toward us, encumbered by her dress. She was even more elegant up close, mouth drawn in, cheeks dark and smooth. It seemed only natural that she should be trailed by TV cameras, though Muay told me later she’d contracted them herself to cover the event. Laying a jasmine necklace around my shoulders, she asked if I would like to be on Bangkok TV. She would interview Anthony first; then it would be my turn. Her name was Soraya.
The next day, I asked Muay about her, and my friend’s mouth twisted as if she’d tasted something sour.
—In Bangkok, Muay said, pausing for effect, Soraya lives with her husband and children. In Chiang Rai, she lives with the administrator from the university.
She left the room to retrieve a handout from the printer.
—No story is too small for Soraya, Muay continued, pausing in the doorway. Student buys fruit drink at campus store. Ooooh, Muay touched the back of her hand to her forehead, It’s local Chiang Rai saparot—let’s go interview the pineapple growers! She thinks she’s so important with her camera going everywhere. It’s not important. She should just go back to Bangkok.
—Also, Muay said spitefully, Soraya gave herself that nickname. Goddess-empress or something. It’s not even Thai. She thinks falang will like it. She is always with falang.
—Why is she always with falang?
—Thinks they are better, can help her more. It’s how she is.
At the Welcome Dinner, Soraya had seemed more comfortable with Westerners, choosing to sit with me, Anthony, and the other English faculty rather than with the Thai professors. She’d drawn me out with her questions, both attentive and distracted, stealing glances at the administrators’ table.
AFTER THE WELCOME DINNER, the rush began. The new semester was so hectic that I didn’t pay much attention when both Muay and Anthony announced the arrival of Sebastian, back from his travels. Did they think I needed a companion, because I was young, female, and alone? I was not vulnerable, so I resented Sebastian steadily for trotting in like my savior in the imaginations of others.
Teaching was a minor disaster. Sensing my inexperience, my students informed me that speaking practice would help them more than reading literature, so the readings on the syllabus could be simply optional. Incensed, I launched into a monologue about the value of literature, about the need to escape the strangleholds of our own experience. The students listened in silence, patient and polite but shaking their heads as they left.
I was at my desk digesting the debacle when Sebastian came by to ask how it went. I told him I’d been a parody, and he laughed.
—The authority role takes getting used to, he said kindly. It did for me at least.
He said there would be a dinner in his village to celebrate the first day of classes. If I wanted to come, Anthony could give me a ride in his truck. Seb, of course, would follow on his motorbike.
I recognized Ban Du Market from outings with Muay, but it seemed tired and dusty so late in the day. Anthony swerved onto a dirt road, waving to villagers selling candy and tires by the roadside, then pulled into a quiet drive lined with bougainvillea next to a yard with papaya trees. Men’s dress shirts ballooned on clotheslines at the end of the drive.
We entered through the kitchen, and Anthony set about fixing gin and tonics. A young man, statuelike, watched us from an alcove, then stretched his arms and yawned.
—Mr. Koi! Exhausted after a day of napping, I presume? Anthony said.
Koi made a few flicks of his wrist, gesturing to the shirts drying.
—Thank you, Koi. I saw.
Later, Seb whispered that Anthony employed Koi as live-in help. Seb himself could never do such a thing, having been a Marxist in his late teens.
We took our drinks to the veranda. Anthony offered more gin to keep the mosquitoes away.
—Not many mosquitoes, Koi called disdainfully from the kitchen.
We were joined by a Frenchwoman who lived across the street, Béa. I admired her dress—it was batik and colorful. She said they were fifty baht at the night bazaar in town. She’d show me. Béa was only six years older than I was, but she seemed so at home in her world—full of humor and practical wisdom.
—Koi? Are you eating?
—Pork sticky rice.
—We’re going for dinner, he called. Moo Kata in the village.
Moo Kata: metal domes over hot coals where slivers of raw meat cook, dripping juices to make a flavorful broth. Rounds of Singhas came in buckets of ice. We talked, laughed. Béa described a dessert from the Basque country, where she was from: cherry jam and cheese. Seb stuck out his tongue in disgust. She spoke Basque, to our applause. During that first dinner in the village, I felt scooped out of my troubles, held together by bands of light. In a strange country, in motley company, I felt utterly, entirely at home.
After dinner, Seb offered to drive me back to the university. It was a nice night, he said, and he was still breaking in the new motorbike. He didn’t seem affected by the rounds of Singha with our meal or the gin and tonics at Anthony’s, but I was light-headed, drinking drafts of jasmine, mouthfuls of mist as we drove. We sat for a moment on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, blood returning to our cheeks, cold from the wind on the ride.
We sat close, our shoulders touching.
—Hey, Seb said, getting up from the curb, want to see how to drive?
—Now? I asked, feeling drunk.
—It’s pretty easy.
He started the engine and showed me where the kick-start was. He told me to watch the muffler; a lot of girls had scars from where they’d burned bare calves. He held the handlebars, bending close as I practiced steering, until I sped off, unsteady, then gaining momentum. I circled the parking lot, once, twice, exhilarated by the night air.
I sat down on the curb again, breathless, hoping Seb would join me. But he was leaning against the motorbike, letting its engine idle. He told me he had plans to rent a car and drive to X, where he lived last year. To pick up his stuff. There would be a costume party. Halloween. I’d meet younger expats, more our age, different from those in Chiang Rai. His smell: cloves, hints of sweat.
His taillights grew smaller, until the landscape swallowed them. Inside, I put on music, letting impressions from the day filter down. Songs swelled, and I had the urge to compose something, a story or a poem. But I was too much in the valleys. Instead, I opened the book I was reading and copied a line from it into my journal.
October 20
“down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards … in dense and maddening fumes and passed away … until at last the air was clear and cold again.” Resist self-portraiture. Unless ironic. Beyond the parking lot, dark hills are sine curves. Night mist settles on the rice fields, clamping the earth. Music plays. Hands in the dim. Can’t write anything but this. Am too much in the valleys. Tangled desire in the dark. Now, just happening. Living is enough. Some other my-self will give an account, from a peak above mind-maddening mists where all is clear and cold. Words like amber to trap sensations, so they’ll live again in a body other than my own.
10
NOTES COVER THE WRITING DESK, character notes for Seb half-mooned by coffee stains. Idealization. It smells the way jasmine must smell in the heat, cloying. Saint Seb.
What would a writer do with a saint? To be fair, Ella resists idolatry at first, insisting that Seb is a friend, a big brother figure, pi-Seb. He is three years older than Ella, twenty-four when the story begins. He doesn’t talk much, but he thinks deeply, and he writes. Ella sees his leather-bound journals in their regular haunts and when they travel. Is she tempted to read them?
If the lives of saints are told in passionaries, accounts of their sufferings on Earth, why not have a little fun? A passionary—a Sebastianaria—will reveal the true Seb, not the animal AntiChrist he was in his own eyes, nor the saint-idol he became in hers, but an ordinary blend of animal desire and the sentient divine.
Sebastianaria
Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and educated in progressive Toronto, Seb strives to be unpredictable, pathless, beyond good and evil, with a disdain for bourgeois morality that he views as ideologically constructed. Antibourgeois sentiment means that he relishes shocks to the expectations. Terrified of boredom, he reroutes the ruts of habit. Is this what Ella loves, craves?
An avid sensualist, Seb loves bodies freed from gravity’s vice-grip by movement (travel), sex, and drugs. His passionary, therefore, will be in motion, in cars he rents with Ella to explore some bit of nature: a waterfall, the brown expanse of the Mekong, the poppy fields of the Golden Triangle, or the tea plantations that terrace the hills and the Chinese villages at their summits. As for Ella, she was always willing to travel. It was all so new.
With Seb driving, in cars or on the motorbike, shielded by his body from the wind, she could slip from the heat of her center and become more free.
Their tradition of motion began just after the first day of classes, when Seb took Ella to the elephant sanctuary where he’d volunteered when he first arrived in Thailand. It was a hospice for elephants who were no longer useful because they’d been injured in logging accidents or were old. Seb had bandaged their wounds and watched their unhurried gaits. The mahouts recognized Seb and spoke to him in Thai. Seb let Ella hold sugarcane and bananas so that the elephants could swoop them up in their trunks. On the drive home:
Seb (making up lyrics to a Thai pop song on the radio): Bella Ella cerebella.
Ella (cautious): I don’t get it.
Seb: No ground to be found, Ella cerebella, darling.
Darling is what Seb calls nearly everyone. Ella knows this but can’t help heat spreading though her body at the word. But she interprets the rhyme based on what she knows about Seb’s view of intelligence—corporeal—and is insulted. More reason in your body than your best wisdom, he would say. For Seb, intelligence is moving into turns as he steers around bends.
I GET UP. POUR A THIRD CUP OF COFFEE. Sun flashes. Gray settles again.
ELLA AND SEB ROUND A BEND. Mountains come into view.
Seb: What do animals have that humans don’t?
Ella: Sharper instincts.
Seb (nodding): Smells so strong, they rip you open, and they can move without maps—
Ella: They can still sense the magnetism of the Earth.
Seb: In human animals, instincts are weakened. Through disuse. (Grinning, he leans into a turn: Ella knocks against the side of the car.) The human eats away the animal in us. But we still have it. … It’s like (He looks at Ella, his eyes almost white in the sun) … fucking someone in a rainstorm, where you feel the electricity, just bodies and nothing but … sensation. Wait for the monsoons. (He rocks into a turn, a switchback down the hillside.)
She felt his presence even in his absence, she wrote, the way the rocking of a boat at sea recurs in the body hours after you’ve been on solid ground.
November 4
Traces in the sky seem like slits in atmosphere. Like you can look through them to another world. Wait ten minutes. The traces fray, the passageway is gone.
One night, when the little group had gathered over market dishes on Anthony’s veranda, Seb tucked chopsticks from a noodle vendor into his upper lip and became a walrus, clapping his arms together. It went on for several minutes. Later, Ella asked him why he’d come to Thailand.
—I’m molting, he said. I was tired of the old ways. You?
—I’m destroying myself, she said, giving her most charming smile.
—Good luck. Let me know if I can help.
A ROUTINE HAS GROWN AROUND ME IN PARIS. Mornings I work on the journals. The hours fly. Afternoons I spend in the national library, and in the coolness of its space I think of Ella. There are doctoral students who stay in the library all day, busy. Sometimes, after closing, we go for drinks on one of the péniches. When they hear I am taking time off, they grow uncomfortable. They tell me to be careful. I’ll lose momentum. Soon they’ll go home and begin teaching, as I would have, too.
Today, I leave the library early a
nd bike along the river to one of the small cinemas by Saint-Michel. It is one of the hottest days of summer. I’m almost to Île de la Cité when I see him, a man with hints of copper in his hair and a way of dressing and walking that is Seb’s. I stop. He passes. I park the bike and follow him on foot.
He crosses the river and turns right, continuing along the lower quai. Then he sits on the stones and takes out a leather-bound notebook. I watch him a moment, sweating in the meager shade, then ask:
—Sebastian?
It’s so hot, I can’t think. It can’t be Sebastian. It’s too unlikely. But if it were him and I missed it, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Sometimes, as a reward for being on the right path, uncanny luck will strike.
—No. Sorry, he says, turning toward me.
He tells me a name that isn’t Sebastian. I stare at the river, green in the sun.
—I thought you were someone I’m looking for.
—Sorry, I’m not him.
His answer unnerves me. I sit apart, pretending to wait for someone. Even his accent is Seb’s—soft, polite, faintly British. I ask what he’s doing.
—Sketching, he says. I do it to relax. Reminds me to be in my body. Otherwise, you’re in your head all the time.
He speaks matter-of-factly, the way Seb would. With a slow thrill, I tell myself it doesn’t matter whether this man is or isn’t the Seb Ella knew. He’ll be a prototype: Seb and not Seb. The city seems to waver in the heat. Trees dip their long boughs along the quai.
—Are you on vacation? he asks, jerking me out of my thoughts.
—No. I’m a student. I study French cinema.
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