by Laura Smith
“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”
The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.
—
We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.
As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything—except P.J.
SIX
While Barbara and Helen sailed the Caribbean and the South Seas, Wilson was living on the coast of Maine, in Penobscot Bay, writing a novel, No More Sea, about seven generations of an adventure-loving seafaring family, also living in Penobscot Bay. Like Barbara, he was toying with his fantasies, letting some of what he put on the page bleed into real life and vice versa.
No More Sea is a story about vanishing men. Abel Teaswith, a sailor, comes to America from England in search of something that he can’t describe but is certain is out there. When he arrives in Penobscot Bay, he sees two spruce-covered headlands “close around him like enfolding arms.” The harbor’s cove is lush with forest, dotted with wooden village houses. A white church steeple peeks through the dense fir and spruce trees. Abel smells the salt spray and feels the warm sunlight on his face. He builds a large house. Is this what happened when Wilson arrived in Penobscot Bay with Margaret? He looked around him and assured himself that yes, now he would finally be satisfied.
In the novel, this satisfaction lasts for seven generations. Abel’s descendants do exactly as he did, setting off on long stints at sea and returning to their patient wives in the house that Abel had built. In this perpetual motion between home and sea, the Teaswith men found the key to lasting satisfaction: “infinite variety within eternal unity.” The variety was the sea. The unity was a beautiful home in a natural place surrounded by family. They had everything.
Yet nearly all the Teaswith men die at sea. This, Wilson writes, is their “inherited doom.” Even though they know the sea will kill them, they prefer danger and certain death to “living by rote” and the “sleepwalker’s trance” of the lawyers, bankers, and civil engineers eyed with scorn at various points in the book. They defend their dangerous lifestyle by arguing that though they might live longer doing something else, what would they be living for? “To let other men make your decisions for you, or worse yet, to be drifted into them by mere chance like a corpse in a tideway—that was to be as good as dead all your life.” It is precisely because of the danger that the Teaswith men are so alive. Only by living on the edge of cataclysm could they feel death’s opposite.
The book can be read as an elaborate justification for Wilson’s abandonment of his family. The Teaswith men are blameless rascals, victims of “a tragic ancestral pattern” that would be futile to resist. After Luella’s husband dies at sea, her grandmother tells her, “He did the only thing there was to do, he being the man he was.” A good Teaswith woman, Wilson writes, is “enduring and steadfast, acquainted with loneliness, grateful for whatever compensations there might be, and silent about all that is asked to be compensated.” In short, a good woman keeps quiet and doesn’t interfere with her husband’s adventuring. In passage after passage, Wilson argues that the women who stand in the way are to blame—not the men who leave.
If Barbara’s novel is occasionally dissatisfying because we don’t understand Eepersip’s motives, Wilson’s suffers from too much logic. He had the abandonment of two families to justify, and No More Sea collapses under the weight of his desire to fit his impulses into a neat rationale. There are moments, though, when he stops moralizing and stares at his impulses nakedly. Flipping through the pages, I began to feel an uncomfortable sensation: recognition. Restlessness may seem at first glance to be a problem of indecision—hopping from one place to the next, one job to the next, one lover to the next. But the restless people in Wilson’s story are actually remarkably decisive, only their decisions tend to be more about what they don’t want than what they do. “He left the places, one after another, with the vague sentiment that they were not just what he was looking for. . . . He had never been aware of seeking for anything in particular except when he came to these moments of instinctive rejection.”
Abel Teaswith roams from town to town because none are quite right and he doesn’t want to become trapped. At one point, in order to get out of a job he doesn’t like, he dives off a boat during a storm and nearly drowns. He is certain that there is somewhere better and he has to get there. Like a skittish animal sniffing out a trap, Abel senses when the jaws will close and leaps out of the way. He is listening, watching, testing the ground, and roving until he experiences instinctive rejection’s opposite: desire.
There is, in this novel anyway, an end to wandering. When the characters find what they are looking for, they seize it with steely certainty. When Abel meets his future wife, he courts her with “fanatical conviction.” They come home for brief periods, comforted the whole time with the knowledge that they will leave again.
Absence, in Wilson’s story, is essential to love. The marriage between a sailor and his wife is ideal because they’re mostly apart. At one point one of the wives realizes that her husband seems real to her only when he’s gone: she’s “nearer to him when waiting.” Reading this reminded me of the Japanese word bitai, which means erotic allure, or getting as close as possible to the object of your affection without actually obtaining it. The word suggests that love is best in the fertile soil of the mind.
Later, when Luella’s husband arrives home early, she is disappointed. She realizes that she enjoys waiting—that, though it pains her, waiting’s “absence was a form of death.” To not wait, to have, is to expect nothing, to be dreamless, desireless, dead. This is one of the dilemmas of marriage: how can you stoke desire for the things you already have? Domesticated love borne out over the years can disappoint with its myriad banalities. The once-prized person fades into the scenery of your life just as a new piece of furniture becomes another object in your living room. The Teaswiths escape this by cycling between separation and reunion. Desire by definition requires not quite having what you want, but the Teaswiths sustain desire even as they’re together because they know they will soon be separated. “What makes them worth marrying,” Luella’s grandmother counsels her, “is the identical thing that has denied so many of them long life in this world.” The women love the men precisely because they’re always about to leave them.
I wondered to what extent Barbara had internalized her father’s worldview. There is no indication that she ever read No More Sea—they still weren’t speaking, and I found no mention of it in her writing—but there are scenes in the book that seem explicitly written to her, or to any one of the three daughters he had so far abandoned. Luella adores her father, though she hardly knows him. But she has a consolation: “She kept having in strict secrecy a deep, sweet, womanly premonition that she and her father would one day mean a great deal to each other and be truly close—closer than most parents and children.” Wilson might be absent now, but all this would be rectified later.
After her husband’s death, Luella decides to thwart her family’s fate by running away, inland. She takes her son, Joseph, and moves two thousand miles to Nettleton, a prairie town. Her subversion of the family’s destiny ends in disaster. She becomes “unfeminine,” “running against the direction of nature.” Luella has “a tyr
ant in her own breast,” and that tyrant is love. Love, which makes her a sympathetic character in the beginning, turns her into a monster by the end. She cuts Joseph off from his family and discourages any discussion of the sea. In college, Joseph has a nervous breakdown after hallucinating that a thief was trying to break into his dorm room, and he decides that he can’t live anywhere that he can’t call out to his mother in the night. She casts out his only worthy lover, a woman strikingly similar to Barbara, who makes the mistake of trying to invite him on a sea voyage. Instead, Luella finds a nice, safe office job for Joseph: a junior partnership at Dowling & Teaswith (a business that Wilson doesn’t explain). But the comfortable life is unnatural for him. He carries himself with a droop and his eyes are lifeless. A character says to him, “Joseph: there isn’t any you!” Luella’s desire to protect her son saps him of all his vibrancy. She realizes that thanks to his nervous breakdown in college, “she had found the way to stultify Joseph’s dream for himself without destroying his respect for her.” Broken, he would choose never to leave her side.
Effectively castrated by his mother, Joseph loses his interest in pursuing women, but Luella wants a grandchild. She selects a pliant schoolteacher who does her the favor of dying in childbirth, but not before she enters a trance and rightly accuses Luella of using her for her womb: “I thought I was going to have a baby of my own once . . . But I was mistaken . . . I do believe he was—yours!”
Luella’s plan fails. Her grandson is killed by a tornado while boating on a lake, and Joseph dies trying to save him. Luella brings their bodies back to Penobscot Bay.
No More Sea is so fierce a polemic that it makes one wonder if Wilson was trying to convince the staunchest of all critics: himself. He was getting older. He had no money, no job prospects, and he felt guilty for not being able to send money to Helen and the girls. One day, Margaret sent an anxious letter to friends about his mental health, intimating that he might commit suicide.
He sat at his typewriter near the craggy shoreline insisting that though restlessness is endemic, he was not a callous, roving maniac, but an idealist. He was brave enough, willing to risk enough to find that fount of fulfillment, while everyone else was either too cowardly or unaware to try. But if there was a way to reconcile wandering with family, why hadn’t he found it?
At the end of the summer, the vacationers shuttered the colorful cottages that dotted the shoreline and left for their winter homes, but he and Margaret remained. Listening to Margaret’s footsteps in the hall, as yet another month passed with no money sent, he must have had flashes of doubt. As he struggled to describe what satisfaction really looks like, he must have felt the inevitable disappointment that every writer feels when the words pale in comparison with the idea in your mind. No, that’s not quite it. But did Wilson wonder if this feeling was more than just frustration at the ordinary limits of language? Perhaps the confident tone of the book was really the sound of a man straining to drown out the chorus of voices in his head telling him that he would never be satisfied.
Wilson dedicated the book to Margaret. This can be read as a placating gesture. Luella’s folly had been to leave Penobscot Bay, and Wilson would not make the same mistake. He may have abandoned his other families, but he would not abandon this one. But from another perspective the dedication can be read as a warning: Don’t strangle me with your love. “There is only one way for a woman to get the good of what has been given her. She has got to stand by her menfolk and help them make the best of themselves the way they were born,” Luella’s grandmother tells her.
No More Sea was published in 1933 to mixed reviews. The Herald Tribune praised it but guessed that it wouldn’t be widely read. A reviewer from the New York Times called the writing “overemotional,” the scenes “exaggerated, far-fetched, overdrawn,” and lamented that the book “is not at all times convincing.”
The book isn’t very good, but it proved to be prescient. The parallels between the Teaswiths and the Folletts are obvious, but the family patterns were only just emerging. For now, Wilson’s and Barbara’s stories were echoing each other. Wilson ran off and then Barbara did. Barbara wrote a book about the call of the wild and then Wilson did. Both father’s and daughter’s hunger for novelty was insatiable. There was always, surely, a better life somewhere else. The coming years would prove that Wilson had missed the essential lesson of his own book: you cannot run away when the thing you are running from is yourself. The sea is inside you.
SEVEN
We flew to Phuket, in southern Thailand, and took a long wooden boat to an isolated peninsula and jumped off with our luggage into knee-deep turquoise water. We stayed in a bungalow where geckos crept on the woven bamboo walls, and fell asleep over dinner because we were so jet-lagged. In the mornings, we listened to monkeys call to each other in the forest while we drank coffee. After a week, we left for Bangkok on an overnight train, where the American in the seat behind us got a blowjob from a prostitute while we tried to sleep.
We stayed for a while in the spare room of a friend who worked for the foreign service. We immediately got nasty stomach bugs. She kindly vacated her apartment to stay with a friend until the vomiting stopped. Then we moved to a cheap hotel called the Romance Inn. It was located at the end of a long alleyway in a busy part of the city.
“For a cheap hotel, this place has a lot of nice cars in the parking lot,” I said to P.J. We hardly ever saw the hotel’s other guests, but when we did, they were always beautiful Thai women in skintight dresses. About three days after we arrived, we saw a trio of these women walking down the alleyway arm in arm.
“Are we staying in a brothel?” I asked P.J.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said.
I liked the Romance Inn. I wanted to see the entire continuum of Bangkok: everything from the glamorous to the sordid. Of course there was something vampiric about this. Like the johns in business suits who parked their BMWs in the shadowy corners of the parking garage, I too wanted to escape the humdrum of domestic life, to find thrills in foreign places, to get away from the worlds I had known, and to satisfy illicit urges. I could observe, take what I wanted, and leave.
—
P.J. and I thought that we would stay in Bangkok for a few days and then move on, but those few days quickly turned into forty. When I imagined my ideal city, I saw running trails, lush greenery, bike lanes, and quaint restaurants. Bangkok is a city of more than eight million swarming with people, motorbikes, and cars. Old ladies cook with boiling vats in little carts on sweltering street corners. Sixty-story skyscrapers spike the downtown skyline. The city has 180 shopping malls, between which flashing screens herald the latest fashion. One day, I saw a woman with a disfigured face begging for money in front of a glowing, two-story Christian Dior ad. The city makes little effort to conceal its contradictions, or perhaps it’s simply impossible to. Pain and pleasure mingle incomprehensibly. A Buddhist shrine where women dance in traditional makeup can be found down the street from a “massage parlor” where women beckon passing men with a “Hello, handsome.” Everywhere we turned there were stands serving ice cream or Chinese bean cakes, street stalls that smelled of tamarind and curry. The next block reeked of sewage. A smiling woman sliced juicy, plump mangoes and placed them on a pearly bed of sticky rice. The sidewalks sizzled and the bank clocks displayed the temperature and the CO2 levels, which were always extremely high.
A friend’s mother who lived in Bangkok invited us to dinner one night. Kerry lived alone in an airy three-bedroom apartment in a posh part of the city, tucked away down a long quiet road. In the grassy courtyard, there were mango trees and sun-bathing cats. She asked where we were staying and we told her about the Romance Inn. “Come stay with me instead,” she said, and so we did.
Every morning, P.J. and I would wake up and work for a few hours in our room. Then around midday, we would go for a jog on the track in Lumphini Park, where five-foot-long monitor lizards lurk by the ponds.
We would run past the old couples speed walking in matching tracksuits and tourists paddling on the lake in swan-shaped boats. After our run, we would make our way, dripping with sweat, to one of the crowded outdoor lunch markets where young Thai office workers gathered for steaming plates of curried vegetables, meat, fish, and noodles.
At night we often ate in the food courts in one of the malls. At home, we hated shopping malls because they were ours. Part of us wanted the clothes, the furniture, the lives they were selling, and we hated ourselves for being tempted. American malls were monuments to the worst part of the country, the worst parts of us—the parts that are empty, willing to exchange the beauty of the natural world for the comfort of the material world.
But in Bangkok, the malls dazzled us. Their bright bodies lined the major thoroughfares. You could reach them on the Skywalk, which ran beneath the immaculate electric commuter train high above the street. A man in a perfectly white, vaguely nautical uniform and cap saluted us and held open the doors, unleashing a blast of air-conditioning, which was a relief from the city’s unrelenting heat. When we stood on the ground floor of one mall and looked up, we saw endless escalators lifting people skyward. The home decor floor was a sea of plush beds, the toy floor a cornucopia of brightly colored Legos, stuffed animals, robots, and playhouses. On the top floor of each mall was a movie theater with enormous ceilings and red velvet carpets. The concession stands sold eight flavors of popcorn. You could get a massage while you watched the latest blockbuster in a recliner in an enormous IMAX theater. We could marvel at Bangkok’s malls and at the city itself because the extravagance and inconsistencies weren’t ours to judge.
The food courts were crowded with families. We never really knew what we were ordering and paid through a complex food ticket system that we didn’t quite understand. The desserts were unrecognizable and we tried them all. One was gelatinous balls that looked like giant fish eyes floating in condensed milk. “What is that?” P.J. asked, poking one of the balls with a fork. “I have no idea,” I would say before gulping it down. We rarely liked them but ate them anyway.