Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  “Dress nice.” That’s all Gee would tell me.

  Gee likes surprises; he doesn’t seem to care that I find them selfish, that I think the person who plans the surprise has all the fun and the other person just gets ambushed. I put on my best night-out-in-Paris gear: black boots, black wrap skirt, and soft, silky top. Just a hint of sexy.

  “Pigalle,” he told the taxi driver.

  Pigalle? Moulin Rouge, burlesque shows, and busloads of tourists? I kept my mouth shut, the silence between us almost weaponized. We were in this awkward place. I thought Gee didn’t take an active role in the relationship; Gee said that when he suggested things, he got shot down. Date night was the marriage counselor’s idea. We alternated planning activities; the only rule was, we had to go with the flow.

  “Ici,” he said, pointing to a strip club sandwiched between an adult-video store and a dirty-lingerie boutique. It must have been early for a place like this—we were the only customers—and the bar smelled like ammonia and lemons, the lingering scent of heavy-duty cleaning products. We ordered drinks and watched the girls do an uninspired, lazy, it’s-a-job, tits-and-ass grind. This was Gee stepping out of his pocket-protector persona; it felt put-on, like he was trying too hard. He was jumpy, too, quaffing cocktails and looking around nervously. He got up to have a word with the proprietor, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and led us into a private room. It was a peep show, without the glass partition. There was only one chair.

  “I imagine they don’t get many couples in here,” I joked.

  Gee sat down and told me to sit on his lap. A cheap red jersey dress walked in, plopped down on an oversize zebra cushion, and spread her legs, no panties.

  The view was almost gynecological and reminded me that I needed to get a pap smear. We had yet to decide when our home leave would be, July or August, so I could schedule everyone’s doctors’ appointments. Probably not a good time to bring this up, I thought, as I felt Gee harden beneath me. He wanted more.

  “En plus,” he said, his voice shaky.

  Red Dress left and came back with a credit card reader. Qu’est-ce que tu veux? She and Gee negotiated something in French. The upgrade required a new room on another floor, up an unlit wooden staircase. Climbing the steps, Kat (that was the dress’s name) got chatty with me.

  “You want we make fun?” she asked. “You want we dominate him, tu et moi, ensemble?”

  Gee said something about a ménage à trois. Clearly, he’d come unhinged. The new room had a beat-up fake-leather couch and a stained mattress on the floor, and I was wondering just how far Gee would take this. Kat left again, this time to get more drinks, and came back with Annabelle, so now there were two girls with long hair, bright lips, and sparkle nails. Kat and Annabelle. Katabelle. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

  Gee asked if I wanted to play. Tu veux jouer?

  There’s a what-happens-in-Vegas aspect to the expat life—drinking, smoking, spending money like water—but this was some seamy shit, some date-night-gone-way-wrong sort of thing. It was like toxic shock syndrome. Doctor, our marriage is sick and dying. Someone please call 911. Someone needed to call “time out.” There were two children at home, not babies but not yet teenagers, two children whose lives were being formed, who needed a mom who was paying attention and a dad who came home before bedtime, parents who would sit together at a piano recital or a school play. Two children who desperately needed their mother and father to behave.

  There had been some sort of misunderstanding with the girls, and Gee seemed agitated. He didn’t like it when people took advantage of him, and Katabelle had yet to deliver a live-action e-ticket experience. Maybe the threesome was supposed to include me, but that wasn’t going to happen. I was planted on the couch, smoking. DeeDee had said to establish clear boundaries. A part of me wouldn’t have minded watching Gee have sex with another woman (or two); maybe it would give me a new perspective on him. He’s very handsome, my husband, in a tan-khakis-and-blue-button-down sort of way. I’d say J. Crew, but he bought his clothes at Costco.

  Gee was on his third drink, I was on my tenth cigarette, the girls were fast-talking in French, nothing made sense. This was so not the kind of role-play scenario they taught at Berlitz. They started a girlie pantomime, one rubbing on Gee, the other reaching out to me. I was stuck like superglue to the vinyl couch, like I was at the movies, minus the popcorn, watching my husband and two French whores talk dirty to me.

  Gee must have been cracking up. My husband was not mushy or emotional; he loved me like a fact. I was the one who brought the party, the joy, the humor, the pissy, or the preachy to our lives; he was the anchor to my mood swings. But here was Gee, in a bordello, swinging. The girls left us alone to figure it out. Gee threw a shocking-pink pillow at his feet and started to unzip his pants.

  “You know what to do,” he said.

  I searched his face for some flicker of humor or humanity but found none. He was like a human vibrator buzzing with sexual rage. I was afraid to reject him. Again. Especially there. Anything could happen in a place like that, and the American embassy would never find out. He kissed me, slid my skirt open, yanked at my stockings, slut-slapped me, calling me salope. This was Gee treating me like the whore he thought I was, but also this was my husband lost in his own head, imagining the wild sex his wife was having while he was at work.

  Maybe he should have come home for dinner once in a while.

  I licked, I sucked, I did the laundry. I was bought and paid for, like Katabelle. And yes, I hung out with the poet. What else was I supposed to do all day with the kids in school, my career on hold—take cooking lessons? I didn’t even like to cook. Gee was the cook, although he hadn’t been in the kitchen since we’d moved to Paris. He was too busy working and, after work, drinking about work. He had his crew, I had our kids; we were leading separate lives. I felt trapped, handcuffed to my husband’s international career. Sure, they were velvet cuffs. Business class on the company dime. But still, cuffed. All I ever wanted was a marriage that looked like what the magazine ads promised: his-and-hers careers, a couple kids, and a pooch in the backyard. We didn’t even have a dog.

  “Em,” Gee wailed, “I don’t know what you want anymore.”

  “Well, it isn’t this,” I said, burying my head in my hands.

  “Please, Em,” he wept. “Don’t shut me out. I need you. I know I fucked things up, but I love you. I’ve always loved you. Please, Emmmeee, look at me.”

  When I opened my eyes, Gee was kneeling on the pillow, his arms outstretched, sobbing. We had become untethered. When you add up the true cost of an overseas post, I always put “date night” on the ledger.

  The next morning, Gee got up and made popovers like it was my birthday or something. The kids were crawling all over me.

  “What did you do last night, Mommy?” they wanted to know.

  “We went to a dance club,” I said. Gee announced that he had a surprise for us after breakfast, smiling at me sheepishly as if to say, This one you’ll like, trust me. So we took a walk on the Quai, along the Seine where all the pet stores were, and the kids chirped, “Please, Mommy,” and Gee’s eyes said, Please, Em, and there was this pooch, this big, funny-looking dog, in the discount bin, a French bulldog. He was huge, so he was no puppy, and his ears were floppy, so he was no prize, but we adopted him on the spot. That dog had every parasite known to man, all sorts of fluids leaking from his eyes, his nose, his bum; he was bleeding and rheumy, but the vet said it was all fixable with a few shots and some take-home meds. I was sure there was something fundamentally wrong with him, though, because he didn’t like to walk, just stood there and dug his paws into the concrete while I pulled on the leash. Têtu—stubborn—the French said, laughing when they saw us on the street. We named him Raymond Chandler Bing, because Raymond Chandler was Gee’s favorite author and Chandler Bing was the kids’ favorite Friends character. There was seemingly nothing of me in that name, just a desire to make them all happy. It wasn’t so bad
a life, when you think about it, tagging along in Paris. It could have been worse, that’s for sure. As the French say, pas mal.

  PLAYING IT SAFE

  I told everyone I was going on a yoga retreat at a dropped-out, laidback resort in Mexico. Blue skies and ocean breezes. Which explains why none of my friends in LA understood my anxiety.

  “I’m going on a yoga retreat,” I said, wincing as if it were a risky medical procedure with slightly better-than-even odds. Maybe, I hoped, if I called it a “retreat,” the experience would be more retreatlike. In truth, I had signed up for life training with a cliff-jumping, charismatic yogi. Think: Survivor: Jungle Yoga, then add a little rehab, a bit of touchy-feely group therapy, throw in some rock and roll kumbaya for atmosphere, and wrap it up pretty with a yoga teacher credential. I figured I would need something to do all day if we moved to China. The “we” was the iffy part. I was still on the fence and hoping ten days in the jungle would provide some clarity.

  To be honest, most yoga studios make me want to scream. Incense and om. Joyous baby. Ferocious being. Innocent heart. It’s like touching velvet—it’s supposed to feel good, but it sends chills up my spine. The thing that drew me to this studio right from the start was the music. Throw-down playlists that rock the house. That, and the patter that seeps in while you’re bent in half. The teachers riff about anything to divert your attention from the pain: about the gym shorts you bought at Target, the ones that shrank the first time you washed them, how the seams don’t line up and they aren’t comfortable anymore but you feel compelled to wear them anyway. You’ll be in some outrageously twisted pose, dripping wet, muscles shaking, two seconds away from total collapse, and the instructor will yell, “Throw them out, already!”

  Flip the switch, and you realize they aren’t talking about your shorts anymore.

  So here I am, in Mexico, baby. Sea-salty infused winds mix with a din of rustling palm fronds that is so relentless, so pervasive, it feels hyperreal. As if the environment itself is streaming live from some amped-up broadcast system in the sky. Radio Bliss. Where the sea meets the sky in the jungle. It’s scary beautiful. Like, really beautiful. And, also really scary.

  Yogaman has been saying a lot of crazy shit on this jungle trek, much of it directed at me, like that I’m too “vanilla” to teach yoga, too old to become a yoga teacher, and too hung up on things that happened in the past. I’ve taken to wearing a hoodie and sunglasses indoors, so no one can see my face. Just trying to get through the training without having a nervous breakdown. Today’s group activity is an afternoon hike, it’s also a trust exercise, one that involves rope and blindfolds. I really want to nail this challenge because I totally blew it the second night here, when we had to climb an eight-foot ladder, cross our arms, tuck our chins, and fall backward into a human safety net.

  Every year, Yogaman said, someone stands on top of the ladder, crying and whining, hooting and hollering, making a big-ass scene. Don’t be that person.

  And I wasn’t, not exactly. I didn’t cry or whine; I just climbed up and then climbed right back down, quietly stating that I’d prefer not to, like Bartleby’s twin sister, hoping they’d run out of time or forget that I hadn’t actually done the fool thing. Instead I stood there, watching everyone in my group—the supersize girl, the guy named Bear, and Lorca—climb and fall. Although Lorca didn’t just climb and fall. No, she got to the top and owned it: the air, the altitude, the freedom, the power. She stood there and claimed the experience.

  Lorca’s my yoga buddy here. We’re about the same age, both professional women. Only she’s way more professional than I am; she’s the woman I always meant to be. She has it all: the husband, a kid, and a corner office. And now she’s standing on the top of the ladder like a lady wrestler. She’s fearless and decisive. I can tell, not just because she’s an executive VP at a global entertainment company, but because she summed up my dilemma in a nanosecond the first time we talked, saying without hesitation: go to China—it will be an amazing experience.

  “What’s to discuss?” she asked.

  “The air,” I said. And left it at that. She would never understand my life; her uncompromising nature gave me an extreme case of tagalong shame. I couldn’t pretend to have a job that was so important I couldn’t walk away from it—she’d see through that—and I couldn’t whine about how I didn’t have that job, because that would be lame, and anyway, “That ship has sailed” would be her response.

  I was standing there, arms enmeshed with the group, catching yogis falling backward, one by one, having a total panic attack, the sound of my heart thumping against my chest amplified for my ears only. Staring at that ladder. When you paint the bathroom, you lean your shins against the ladder while you roll. But if you stand on the absolute tip-top of a stepladder in the middle of a yoga studio, there’s nothing to press against or hold on to.

  “I’m not scared,” I insisted. It just seemed like an unnecessary risk.

  That was two days ago. We’re lined up shoulder to shoulder, the ocean behind us, waves lapping at our heels, air salty. We just snaked through a path in the jungle, blindfolded, a human chain connected by rope, so if one person falls, the whole chain goes down. There are about thirty of us yogis in training, all colors, sizes, and sexes, like a branding advertisement for soft drinks. Yogaman is stalking the line, his voice fading in and out with the wind. I can’t see him, but I know what he looks like: cargo pants, muscle tee, dragon tattoo crawling across his bicep, red bandanna around his forehead, hair bleached and badly in need of a cut or hot-oil conditioning treatment. That’s what he always looks like, except in class he’s mic’d like a rock star.

  “When I tap you on your shoulder,” Yogaman says, “I will give you a message. That’s your signal to drop the rope and run, screaming my words at the top of your lungs. There’s nothing to worry about. The beach is clear. You don’t need to see. Just feel the sand. Be in the moment. Shana will catch you at the other end.”

  Through the rustling palms, I hear yogis chanting:

  “I am love.”

  “I am strong.”

  “I am beautiful.”

  “My body is a temple.”

  Yogaman taps me on the shoulder and whispers, “I will not play it safe.”

  Really? That’s not even a positive statement; that’s like when you offer someone a personal trainer for their birthday because you think they need to lose weight. It’s a commentary, not a gift. But it’s on the money. I did come here with a mission to play it safe; most of the other yogis are half my age, and my personal mantra, the one I gave myself coming into this retreat is Just show up, don’t keep up.

  “Well, that shit’s not gonna fly,” Shana said when I told her my mantra. Shana is the good-cop yoga teacher–studio manager. She looks like the fusion love child of a three-way between Alicia Keys, Bruce Lee, and Chrissie Hynde. Tough but caring. “It’s not a retreat,” she said. “You know that, right? People are gonna crack.”

  What’s really freaking me out, though, more than the cliff-jumping, crazy Yogaman thing, is that when I finish this yoga teacher training, I will be that much closer to China. And I do not want to move to China. With any fiber of my being. The way I see it, not wanting to move to China is like choosing stand-up paddleboarding over surfing. It’s common sense. Also, it’s another exercise I fucked up. Paddleboarding versus surfing.

  “You’re playing it safe again,” Yogaman said.

  “I’ve lived in LA for years,” I replied. “If I haven’t slayed a wave by now, maybe I just don’t want to.” That’s when he pointed two fingers at his eyes and then pivoted them at me, as if to say, I’m watching you.

  I run, screaming, “I will not play it safe.”

  “Louder!” he yells.

  “I will not play it safe!”

  “Faster!” he demands.

  And I’m trying, really I am. I’m running as fast as I can on sand, in trekking sandals, blindfolded.

  “Run!” he yells. “Run
like your life depends on it! Because maybe it does.”

  I’m running, I’m screaming, I’m pushing, I’m giving it my all, but also I’m now laughing, which makes me slow down and pitch forward, my feet clumsy, tripping over each other.

  “You run like an old lady,” he taunts me.

  Yogaman has had it out for me ever since I refused to fall off the ladder. It’s not about the ladder. This is about me not wanting to jump off the cliff with him. This is about me not wanting to go full-on into his jungle journey. This is about me resisting the man in charge. I run too slow, I read too fast, I talk too much. I speak up, I speak out, I talk back. Mouth. Strident—that’s what Gee calls me when I push back. “Don’t scream”—that was the guy in the ski mask and black leather gloves. I will not break; I only cry when the dog dies.

  “Don’t catch her,” Yogaman calls to Shana. “Let her run into a tree. It’ll do her some good.”

  This is insane, possibly even dangerous, closer than I ever thought I’d get to drinking the Kool-Aid. I slow to a full stop and take off my blindfold, inches away from crashing into a palm tree.

  “You weren’t even running fast enough to hurt yourself,” Yogaman says dismissively.

  At night, everybody shares. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, forming one big circle, knee to knee, in our jammies. It’s like summer camp, and I’m the camper who can’t wait to go home. Shana kicks it off saying, “Today was awesome.” And then a chorus of affirmations chant in unison: Aho.