“Yes, of course,” I said, not even sure how to do it. This was before cell phones, before the Internet. Plus, there was the whole time-difference thing. I didn’t want to admit that I’d never called him. Usually I waited for Gee to call me so that it would be on the company dime. In the beginning, he called every day. Then every other day. Then, as our phone conversations went from “I miss you” to “This is so hard” to “When are you coming home?” to “I’m so fucking exhausted I could scream,” their frequency decreased until pretty much, he only checked in once a week. Like how some people always call their parents on Sunday, I had become an obligation. The less he called, the angrier I got, or maybe it was the other way around.
The number for Gee’s hotel was stuck to the back of a takeout menu on the fridge and took me a few panicky minutes to find. They barely spoke English at the Hotel Osaka, but it sounded like there was no answer in Gee’s room.
“Please have him call his wife,” I told the desk clerk. It was Friday morning. I still had to blow-dry my hair, put on my makeup, dress Ruby, and now we were running late. Ruby clutched her toy phone, babbling “Dada” contentedly. “Yes, baby,” I cooed, “you can take Dada to daycare.” To Ruby, Daddy was a plastic telephone from Toys “R” Us.
I was so swamped, it was midmorning before I realized I hadn’t heard from Gee. That’s when I called his office in LA and asked the project assistant to get in touch with him.
“It’s three a.m. in Osaka,” Mina said. “Can it wait until morning in Japan?”
For his birthday, I gave Gee a watch that kept track of two time zones. I should have gotten one for myself. It’s confusing to me how you can lose or gain a day, like you’re traveling backward or forward in time. Crossing the international date line seemed like such an abstract concept until that moment. Thank you, Mina, for clarifying the time difference, for putting it in concrete terms: It was 3:00 a.m. on Saturday in Osaka, and I had no idea how to reach my husband.
I got another call from Milly, this time clearly agitated. “I know you are so very busy at your publishing job, dear,” she said, dripping with honey, “and I would never dream of bothering you at work, but Gregory’s grandfather is gravely ill.”
“Of course,” I said. “I understand. It’s just that it’s the middle of the night in Osaka and Gee’s probably asleep.”
“Can’t you wake him up, dear?”
This time, the “dear” was curt.
“I’m doing my best,” I told her.
The next time I called Mina, the receptionist said she was in a meeting. So I ran downstairs to the cafeteria, grabbed a sandwich to eat at my desk, and returned to a stack of messages, pink “while you were out” notes impaled on a spindle: one from Andra, two from Tower Records, and another from Milly, marked “urgent.” Nothing from Mina. By midafternoon, everyone was dodging everyone’s calls. I knew how this game worked. I never took a call if the client wanted to confirm the back cover and I didn’t know if it was available, the client didn’t pick up if I was trying to confirm space and they didn’t have the budget, and Mina would not return my call if she couldn’t find my husband. As for Milly, I was not inclined to return her call, because she always found a way to blame me for anything having to do with Gee.
When we were first married, Milly wanted to throw Gee a party for his birthday, not trusting that I would mark the occasion sufficiently. She made arrangements to ship lobs—that’s what she calls lobsters—from Maine to Los Angeles.
“All you have to do, sweetie”—this was before I was promoted to “dear”—“is invite the guests and provide the fixings: coleslaw, corn on the cob, a baguette (make sure it’s crusty). Oh, and some blueberry pie.”
As if the apartment would clean itself while I was at work, but sure, I’d throw Gee a party for her, I promised.
Us, she corrected me.
Yeah. Us.
On the day of the party, when the lobsters didn’t arrive by noon, like Milly said they would, I went to the office.
“If you had stayed home and waited for them,” she quipped, in her most unveiled accusatory tone to date, dropping the sugar, no “sweetie” or “dear,” “this wouldn’t have happened. Of course someone stole the lobs off your front porch! You can’t just leave a box marked ‘Seafood’ out in the open. It’s too much temptation.” Her party was ruined, and it was all my fault.
Only it wasn’t ruined. At the last minute, I ran out and got a bucket of fried chicken, and our guests dined on greasy food and crazy mother-in-law stories. Milly never apologized, not even after Gee tracked the package and discovered that those lobsters never made it past Chicago. She was right about one thing, though: the temptation factor. No way was I going to tell her that I had lost her son in Japan.
Just before five, Mina called to say that the crew in Japan had pulled an all-nighter. Up against deadlines, she explained. It crossed my mind to drop the baby off at HQ with her Toys “R” Us telephone and a note pinned to her bib that said, “Call my daddy” and keep right on going to LAX, then grab the next flight home to Detroit. Instead, I picked up Ruby and stopped at the market on the way home, like I always did. The phone was ringing off the hook when we walked in the door to our apartment: first Milly, then Gee. And he was testy.
“We’ve been pulling all-nighters,” he said. “This show is such a fucking mess, you would not believe. I’m dead tired; that’s why I put ‘do not disturb’ on my hotel-room phone.”
That was the story. It was totally conceivable. It might even have been true. If you loved your husband, if you’d had a test run at being a single mom and didn’t want your life to be an endless stream of diapers and deadlines, rushing to daycare so you could get to work by nine, eating at your desk so you could skip out early enough to pick up the baby before six, dragging her with you everywhere because your coparent was never around—and if you didn’t want to be this bone-tired mad all the time—this was a story you could cling to.
“I got five messages from Mina, Em. What’s so damn important?”
“Your grandfather died. Call your mother.”
LIGHTBULBS
I must have been around ten years old when I walked into my mom’s bedroom and found her sewing up the crotch of my dad’s cotton underwear, the old-fashioned kind, white like sheeting. Packing his suitcase and sewing his boxers shut. I’d never seen my mother sew before. It wasn’t the type of thing she did. She wasn’t crafty or kitchen-y; she had a master’s degree in social work, although she didn’t practice anymore. She was more of a professional volunteer. My dad traveled a lot on business. Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Pit stops, really. When my husband travels, it’s usually France or Japan. Sounds so much more glamorous. I mentioned this story to my mother near the end of her life, the sewing of the boxers.
“You remember that?” she responded, her voice weak, eyes distant, like she had already left the world. She was sitting on the fake Eames chair; next to her on the table was a shot of vodka and an egg timer to remind her to get up and move every twenty minutes.
“Why did you sew Daddy’s boxers shut?”
“That was so long ago, dear.”
And that was it—the whole conversation. She had nothing to add. This was a story she would take to the grave. It’s like women of her generation took a vow of secrecy. She was always covering for my dad. He’d been dead for years, and she was still covering for him.
I thought it was time to visit Gee in Japan, so I took a week off work and flew all the way to Osaka for a conjugal visit. That’s how I thought of it. That’s how I negotiated extra vacation time when my husband moved to Japan. “I’m going to need conjugal visits,” I told my boss. And he gave them to me—plus flexible hours and a raise too. I was becoming a superstar at the magazine. And they didn’t want to lose me.
We were in Gee’s office, if you could call it that; it was really a trailer on a construction site. There was this Hello Kitty card tacked to the bulletin board above his desk. A black-and-white o
utline of a kitten head adorned with a big pink bow. The kind of card a young girl would send her BFF or high school crush. We were talking about where Ruby and I should go for lunch. Never mind that I had just burned up my own vacation time, flown twenty-five hours halfway across the world, cramped in economy, holding a fussy baby on my lap, just to see him; he was too busy to eat with us. He drew a map to show me where I could find a bowl of ramen.
It’s hard to read signs in Japan, so directions are all in landmarks: go two blocks; turn left at the gas station; walk one block past the supermarket; it’ll be on your right, next to the massage parlor. “It looks more confusing than it is,” he said, handing me the map. I was thinking, Who does this? Who takes a job in a foreign country and leaves his wife at home with a full-time job and the baby for a whole year?
“It’s only eleven months,” Gee said, as if he could read my mind.
What if I dumped the baby on him and moved to Spain? Living in Spain is my alternate-universe fantasy; I did a summer abroad at the Universidad de Salamanca and fell in love with the city—the food, the people, strolling the Plaza Mayor. I could brush up on my Spanish and get a job there. Maybe. But I wouldn’t. Women don’t do things like that. We turn down jobs that don’t fit into the whole work-life-balance thing. I would never take a job that has more than a half-hour commute. And not just because of a what-if scenario: What if there’s an emergency and I have to fetch the baby in a hurry? It’s also that time spent in traffic is a black hole; it’s time lost. Commuting eats into parenting, and when you’re a working mother, every minute counts.
By this point, Ruby was crying and Gee dropped his pencil on the floor. She with the jet-black bangs, the girl he was banging, the green card–grabbing J-girl in a polka-dot dress, size 0, bent over to pick it up, caught that pencil almost before it even touched the ground. She was that fast.
“Here’s your pencil, Mr. Gee-san.”
To be honest, I didn’t know for sure if he was banging this girl or not; I was just taking notes. I’m good at that.
Freshman year in college, I took this class called Alternate Reality; we had to simulate a Miskito Indian diet and keep a journal about it. For two whole weeks, all I was allowed to consume was black coffee, white rice, canned tuna, and hard-boiled eggs. Friends tried to tempt me with a late-night run to the Halfway Café. No, thanks, I’d say, grabbing my journal and writing two more pages about how eating is connected to community, observing also that dietary restrictions can cause isolation, noting that temptation lurked everywhere and that this project was making me simultaneously hungry, lonely, and filled with desire. My entire journal was about food, how it smelled and what I missed most: the whipped-creamy texture of cafeteria soft-serve; the greasy smell of melted cheese on a slice of pepperoni pizza; french fries dipped in mayo; milk in my coffee. When you can’t have something, that’s all you can think about. That’s how much I missed my husband—two weeks of starvation multiplied by all the weeks we’d been apart.
Gee had picked me up at the airport two days earlier. I had baby spit all over my top and was sweaty and smelly from traveling halfway around the world; he was clean and pressed, sitting next to me in the taxi, Ruby heavy on my lap. I was also loaded with stuff, things he’d asked me to bring him from home: his favorite toothpaste and pretzels, brands he couldn’t get in Japan, the things he couldn’t live without. Not like Ruby and me—us, he could live without.
I set the diaper bag on the floor by his feet next to his briefcase, and he moved it to my side of the car, complaining that it bothered his legs, like we were cramping his style with all our baggage. And it’s not like he’s tall, either. Not that long legs would have been any kind of excuse for his complaining about being uncomfortable while I was doing everything, holding up both our ends as parents. All Gee had to do was go to work. Every other Friday night, I had to take Ruby to work with me. After Gee moved to Osaka, during deadlines I’d pick up Ruby from daycare and take her back to the office with me to hang out. Sometimes deadlining the magazine lasted past midnight. Ruby was a trouper. And a responsibility.
“Can you please hold the baby?” I asked. “She’s been on my lap for two days.” I was pretty sure there’d be a permanent imprint of her bum on my thighs after this trip.
“It’s not two days, Em. It just seems that way because you crossed the date line.”
I was still just taking notes. I missed him so much, it was like I was starved for that man. That night, I had this dream that I was at a sushi bar. There was a ton of sushi on display—salmon roll; yellowtail sashimi; and toro, the good stuff, the belly of the fish—and I was staring at it all, salivating, but they wouldn’t serve me, not one piece of sushi, until Gee arrived. Where’s Gee? I wondered, getting impatient. Then, all of a sudden, I was in a hotel room and there was Gee, with his shirt off, and the place was filled with Japanese girls, all young and thin, hair perfectly straight, bangs like fringe on a flapper dress, like curtains drawn across the forehead, peekaboo eyes, each girl more delicate, more beautiful than the last, and I was standing there, all baby fat and messy wild hair, ancient female rage seeping from my pores, and I lunged at him, clawing at him, pounding my fists into his chest. I woke up and shook it off like it was just a bad dream.
A year is a long time. It’s his birthday and mine; it’s Valentine’s Day and our anniversary. Or, if you measure it in lights gone out, it’s about five bulbs. When Gee came home for Christmas, loaded with gifts for Ruby and me, that’s when I knew. I took the porcelain geisha doll in the silk kimono he brought for Ruby, ripped her head off, and hung her decapitated body upside down from the mantel like a stocking. Merry Christmas, Mr. Gee-san. My mother woulda just sewn up his boxers and been done with it.
You wanna know how I knew?
When he walked in the door and didn’t hug me first thing, saying it had been a long flight and he needed a shower, and then passed out in bed. Nope, I was still just taking notes.
The next morning, we were making love, the sun coming in through the window slats. I was scratching at him, trying to reintroduce myself to every part of his body, rubbing my cheek, catlike, across his stubble; he was changing positions, like he couldn’t get comfortable, moving through the Kama Sutra, pressing my knee into my armpit, flipping me over.
He was taking too much time—that’s what he was doing.
That’s when I knew. His lack of urgency stabbed me, like a body blow, and I knew that he was not hungry, had not spent his time in Osaka journaling about what he missed in Los Angeles. And me dumb enough to ask. Sometimes a guy should lie. Some lies are okay, and this is one of them. But Gee was all George Washington, when he should have been Bill Clinton. And now I was Hillary. Hateful, haggard, pants-wearing Hillary, the first First Lady not to pretend to love baking. I threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed the car keys, and drove aimlessly up Los Feliz Boulevard, into Griffith Park, past the pony rides and the cowboy museum, past the zoo and the choo-choo train, listening to Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” on repeat, tears flooding my eyes, so wet I had to turn on the windshield wipers. It’s been eleven months and ten days since he took his love away. Since he’s been gone, I do most everything. I pay the bills and kiss the boo-boos, I work all day and sleep alone, spend Saturday nights at a restaurant, me and the baby, put Ruby in a booster with a sippy cup and crackers, order pasta and a single glass of chardonnay. Since he’s been gone, my love has been on hold, waiting for him to come home.
Only he didn’t come home. Another version of him did.
The one thing—the only thing—that I did not do was change the lightbulbs. It started with the ceiling light in the kitchen, and I figured I’d just use the one over the stove instead. As months went by and more lights went out, I switched to candles. Vanilla grapefruit. Lavender. There were candles in the bathroom, in the bedroom, candles on the dining room table. I thought it was a romantic gesture. Marking time.
Gee came home, opened the front door, flippe
d the light switch in the hall, and the first thing out of his mouth was, “Jesus, Em, can’t you even change a fucking lightbulb?”
He did not think it was romantic. He took it like a dig, like I was throwing it in his face that he hadn’t been around to do household chores. Like I was pointing out how long he had been gone. What he didn’t understand was that I was holding space for him. Because yeah, sure, I could change a lightbulb—I could do everything, all of it: take care of the baby, hold down a job, touch myself before I fell asleep—but if I went to Home Depot, came back with a bag of bulbs, got the ladder out of the garage, carried it into the apartment, and changed the lightbulbs, too, how would I know I was still married?
Somehow I wound up in the hot tub with Andra, who was house-sitting in the hills. She was wearing oversize shades, hair pulled up and falling around her face, twisting every which way, olive skin glistening. She looked Hollywood Regency. Like a hip Grecian goddess. Andra the Great. Which makes sense—her full name is Alexandra. Everything about Andra’s appearance was polished except for her hair, which could be coarse and unruly. Good thing, too—it gave her character; otherwise, she’d be way too perfect. We smoked a joint. I didn’t even like pot, but Andra said to think of it as medicine. We’d been best friends since our Detroit radio days. A year after I quit my job and moved to California to marry Gee, she divorced the doctor and followed me out here. Chain migration.
“Do you ever regret splitting with Sam?” I asked her.
“Sometimes,” she said. “But if it weren’t for my marriage breaking up, I would never have moved to LA. Now look at us: We’re in the canyons; we’re sitting in a fucking hot tub in the hills with a view of the Hollywood sign. In the middle of December. I’m never going back, Em.” Then she launched into a few bars from our favorite bad music video, “It’s So Cold in the D.” So bad it made us howl. Normally I would have joined in, but I was lost in thought. Andra stopped singing.
Em's Awful Good Fortune Page 3