“He looks like an aging Ken doll.”
Janet looked shocked that Regina had spoken so meanly. But not as shocked as Regina was herself. “Oh, god, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She knew exactly what was wrong with her. She closed her eyes. She had to let Janet go. She had to bear her grief alone. Everyone does.
Janet thought Regina was jealous. This made her angry. After all, Clayton could have happened to Regina. Janet had tried to step aside. But her sister preferred taking bracing walks alone, sucking in the frigid air. That was her choice. And this was Janet’s. She wanted this. Whatever it was. She said, “You have nerve judging me. I know about Maury.”
Regina could barely contain her welling sorrow. It washed right over her surprise at Janet’s knowing. She felt as if she were drowning.
“At least Clayton’s available,” Janet said quietly. “At least I’m not lying to anyone.”
Regina nodded again and held her sister’s hot gaze. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say and then stood. Of course Janet had known. There are no secrets; our lives are as plain as biology. She longed to fill her lungs with that cold salt air. She left Janet in the cabin.
At the end of the following day, they glimpsed the continent for the first time. The entire group of passengers stood shivering at the bow, their eyes straining for the ice-crusted landmass. Regina stayed on deck half the night as they chugged south, that wall of ice getting closer and closer. Around midnight, they came upon their first iceberg, soon followed by many others, and Regina went to get Janet, thinking she really should see this. She wasn’t in the cabin, so Regina checked the bar, and found that room dark and empty. A mirror ball swayed with the motion of the ship, glinting.
Janet felt no fear or even ambivalence. Going with Clayton to his cabin, after checking to make sure his cabin mate was on deck with the rest of the passengers, felt straightforward and beautifully simple. She did wonder how she might justify the liaison to her sister. She was a beast, she’d tell Regina, a hundred percent animal. The thought made Janet laugh, which made Clayton laugh, and then they were both holding their stomachs in a giant release of mirth. A man who saw the humor in sex! And she hadn’t even shared her beastly thoughts out loud. She liked Clayton very much. In any case, by the time her shirt was off, Janet didn’t care one whit what her sister would think. Clayton was tender and kind, his eyes expressing the same gratitude she felt. She didn’t think she’d ever love him, but oh she loved this moment. The next one, too, and then the one after that. The ship rocked the small cabin, her insides going liquid like the sea, Clayton’s hands fearless.
The next morning, Regina got up and left the cabin very early, not wanting to be there when Janet returned. They were scheduled to make their first landfall today and the zodiacs were leaving at eight. Regina planned to stay onboard, but she wanted to watch the launch. At breakfast, the four women who were celebrating their breakups invited her to join their boat, and Regina surprised herself by saying yes.
A few minutes later, she bumped along in the front spot of the zodiac, the rubber bow riding high on the crests of sea chop and slamming down in the troughs, jarring her bones. Pixie looked as frightened as Regina felt, and the bright blue-eyed woman looked simply startled, but the twins were hollering with laughter once again. Sisters can make you feel brave, Regina thought. She swallowed hard and willed this day over soon.
The young blond-bearded guide at the helm of the zodiac searched the sea ahead, a scowl squeezing his brow. He eased the motor down to a quiet purr and shouted, “Don’t think we’re going to make it!”
Regina’s heart plummeted to the pit of her stomach. Death by a quick lethal injection was one thing. Dog-paddling in the Southern Ocean until one lost strength, or simply got too cold and sunk, was quite another. Even the twins sobered up.
Then the young man shut off the motor altogether. “It’s just too choppy to go ashore,” he said, and Regina realized that that was all he had meant about not making it. “We’ll try again later today. But it looks like we have a pretty nice consolation prize for you.” He nodded to a spot in the sea beyond Regina’s head. She didn’t bother turning. Her neck hurt. But everyone else strained to see, the twins actually standing in the boat until the guide told them to sit.
Then the pixie gasped. Instinct took over, and Regina pivoted on the hard bench to look at the rough sea. Not thirty yards away, the glistening black tail of a humpback whale sunk into the water, a spray flying off the tips. Then, not much farther out, another gleaming black hide, studded with barnacles, arched out of the water. And another and yet another. They were surrounded by humpback whales. One swam right for their small rubber boat, its back barely breaking the surface of the water. When it was merely feet away, it raised its massive head and looked at her. Looked at Regina. Yes, the humpback whale made eye contact and held her gaze. Cool and easy. Curious.
The whale dove right under the zodiac, without disturbing the boat’s stability, and was gone, leaving Regina with an overwhelming feeling of peace.
The sisters found each other in the dining room at lunch and sat at a table by themselves. They didn’t need to say a word. Janet was phosphorescent and Regina was a deep blue-green.
My Beautiful Awakening
Jurek looks mean. Sinewy and red faced. Squinty eyed, as if he’s perennially suspicious. That scraggly blond ponytail. I can only imagine that Dong Mei wanted to flee from the first moment she laid eyes on him.
But then neither of their looks were a secret. She would have seen his picture on the website, just as he’d seen hers. I have no idea how the process works or the deals are made, but I do know she accepted his offer, including the paid plane tickets for not only herself but her two sons.
Jurek bought Dong Mei. That part is not debatable.
But nothing else about our story is simple. I knew Jurek first by the sound of his labor, long before meeting him, and this permanently colored my impression of the man.
I moved to central Alaska in September and for the first few days I was overwhelmed by the extremity of what I’d done. I’d traded in my urban life, full of friends and amenities, for a one-room cabin a mile outside a small town in the arctic. During the first week, as I unpacked kitchen utensils, cleaned windows, and looked for a job, any job, I felt like the world’s biggest fool. I was a thorough and unadulterated cliché. Middle-aged and heartbroken, I thought I could find solace in the coldest, darkest, most remote place I could get to. Some friend of a friend had a teaching gig for the academic year in New York and I had thought the coincidence—his need for a cabin-sitter and my need for retreat—breathtakingly serendipitous. When in fact it was a random coincidence that would undoubtedly plunge me into a despair from which I would never return.
That’s the state toward which I was hurtling when I first noticed Jurek. After a few days of constant activity, I finally sat outside, on the porch of my cabin, and looked around. The surrounding birch trees were an inferno of gold, and the sky a contrasting harsh blue. Late autumn roared in my ears. I was afraid to breathe, as if the air would scour my lungs.
I had moved as far away from Lindsay as I could get and even so, I found myself looking down the dirt road leading to my cabin as if she might come walking toward me with her long limbs and toothy grin. Over and over again, I imagined the whole scenario, how she would learn my whereabouts from a mutual friend, how she’d buy a plane ticket, how she’d find me. It was a childish fantasy, unbecoming to a woman of my age. But then the entire love affair had been a shock, and for all the reasons it couldn’t continue, my one vow to myself was that I’d hold onto that wild astonishment of love. I would let her go, but not the tenderness she’d inspired.
Sitting on my porch that afternoon, I realized that I’d heard the sound of chopping wood ever since I arrived. It had been incessant, beginning early in the mornings and going late into the nights. It was the sound of impending winter—whoosh, thunk, zip—and seemed to be in cahoots with the moltin
g leaves and frigid sky.
I have always been deathly afraid of chopping wood. The way you have to swing the axe over your head and bring it flying, with force, in a great arc back toward your own body. The only way to prevent hacking yourself in half is to accurately hit the chunk of wood on the chopping block. I can’t imagine possessing that kind of confidence in precision.
The longer I listened, the more Jurek’s wood chopping became a kind of mantra. Whoosh, thunk, zip. It was a sound of danger, but also of potential warmth. It began to resonate with my sorrow, touch me too intimately. Before long, I’d eroticized that axe swinging and wood splitting. The danger, rhythm, and comfort.
When he arrived with the first offering of firewood, I felt as if I had willed him. I worried that he saw my attraction to his labor. His ugliness intrigued me.
“Welcome, neighbor,” he said without a smile. “What brings you?”
The directness of his question threw me off. But I saw his point. You didn’t just happen to get to a small town in central Alaska, say, because your company transferred you. You decide. You have a reason.
“Broken heart,” I said.
He nodded and stepped across my threshold uninvited. I put on water for coffee and watched him inspect my things. He continued nodding as he did, as if he were gathering information, making an inventory. Then he sat in my one chair, a wooden rocker, and said, “I’ll bring you a full supply of firewood later. I’m clearing my land for a cabin, so I have a surplus.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind.” I was relieved to have my fuel problem solved, but also already worried about payback.
“I heard the guy is just renting his cabin.”
“He has a teaching gig in New York. I have the cabin until June.”
“Winter.”
“Yes.”
“You like darkness.”
Not particularly, I thought, but only shrugged.
“And then?”
He asked too many questions, but this landscape didn’t allow any fat, so I answered them. “I gave up my apartment and job. So I don’t know.”
I handed him his coffee and sat cross-legged on my bed. He said, “My wife will be arriving in a few weeks. Her name is Dong Mei and she has two sons, Roger and Seth, nine and seven.”
“Where are they now?”
“China.”
“You’ve . . . uh . . . been to China?”
“No. I ordered her.” He raised his eyes to mine and challenged me to object. He was right: I heartily disapproved. The practice, I’d heard, was rife with abuse.
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his thighs, held the coffee cup with two hands in front of his pointy knees. “Life is about work. Getting things done. Food on the table and a fire in the stove. Love isn’t a meal. It’s a brown bear shaking you in its jaws and tossing you aside.”
I meant to sound sarcastic, at least ironic, when I said, “Your heart’s been broken, too.”
“Nope,” he lied. “Love is one big fucking vortex. A man just has to work.” He paused, shifted, and then added, “I guess a woman has to work, too, but I don’t know nothing about that.”
“So you’re going for a business arrangement.”
“Yep.”
I was curious what that arrangement looked like. Sex for food? Housecleaning for wood chopping? When I thought of the eroticism in the sounds of his work, my distaste at his buying a mail-order bride withered a bit. Up here, beyond the reach of everyday civility, it was difficult to hold onto common judgments.
“What about the sons?” I asked.
“I see them as collateral. She’s not going anywhere with two young sons, right? She’ll be grateful for my support.” Jurek reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. He withdrew a photograph and handed it to me.
Dong Mei was beautiful. She smiled with her mouth closed, her lips plump and moist, as if she sucked on a secret. Her hair flew off to the right, giving the impression that her image had been captured on a windy day, and yet the purplish-gray background was obviously that of a studio shot. The model girl details put me off, made me distrustful, but her gaze was surprisingly direct, especially for someone as young as she was, at least half my and Jurek’s age. What struck me the hardest were her thick eyebrows. They reminded me of Lindsay’s. I had loved the furry vulnerability of them.
I handed the picture back and stood up. “I better get back to work.”
Jurek laughed. “You were sitting on your porch doing nothing.” He didn’t make any move to get up from my rocking chair. When I didn’t move either, he said, “I know what you’re thinking. What’s a beautiful woman like Dong Mei going to do with a man like me. I’ll tell you what. We’re going to have a family.”
“She has two sons,” I found myself saying, defending her already.
“I want a bunch more.”
“Does she?”
“Sure.”
That week I got a job in the Java Luv Café making cappuccinos and heating up muffins and bowls of soup in the microwave. I wiped down tables and answered the phone, too. The café had a public computer and that’s where Jurek communicated with Dong Mei. He liked to read me her emails, translated by Google, which he found rich and inviting and I thought were chilly and enterprising. She detailed her needs—clothes, food, and school for her two boys—and asked questions about his job and housing. She mentioned once that she had a choice of men and that she was still deciding. Jurek laughed at that one and said he doubted it, not with two young children.
A couple of times, when Jurek wasn’t in the café, I thought of looking at the computer’s browser history, finding the site where he’d met Dong Mei, logging on, and warning her. There was no cabin. Jurek lived in a tent. He had a compulsion for chopping wood. And Alaska was a place soon to be snuffed out by snow. But it was none of my business, and anyway, who was I to judge anyone by how they bargained with loneliness?
The weeks passed and Jurek kept chopping wood. By November when it began snowing in earnest, he’d built a wood stack next to my cabin that would carry me through three winters.
Each day brought only a few short hours of murky daylight, but I tried to adapt, venturing out in the dark to explore my new territory. A small and already frozen river passed between my cabin and town, and this made a nice winter thoroughfare. I could ski for as long as I liked along its course and not worry about route finding or getting lost. After work and supper, I would click into my backcountry skis, snap a headlamp around my fleece cap, and head out the road, turning either north or south to ski up or down the river. On the northern route, about a mile out, there was a tall spruce, spindly with a spiked top. The entire tree tipped slightly toward the river—a crisply black silhouette—and as I skied toward it I could see the night sky through the sparse layers of branches.
Lindsay had said, when we were deciding to part, that she didn’t know if she could do love—she’d said intimacy, not love, but what’s the difference?—because she needed to preserve her own view of the sky. Relationships, for her, were like storms that blew dark and billowy clouds across her aerial landscape. They blinded her.
I named this spruce the Grief Tree. For her. And because of its proud height and short, drooping branches. I always paused there and reconfirmed my vow of tenderness. In spite of my painful longing, I wished her well.
Then, back in my cabin, I’d make tea and open a novel. If the book was satisfying, my life felt full enough, doable. If the story was poorly told, everything seemed wrong—the café, my cabin, the cold and ceaseless snow. Yet I never put a book down until I finished the last page.
On occasional nights, rather late, there would be a knock at my door. I never failed to start, be jolted by a quick fleeting stab of hope. But of course it was never her. It was always Jurek, who would enter wordlessly and take his place in the rocking chair. I thought I should mind, but I didn’t. I liked the way that he was so cruelly not her. I tried to see his visits as corrective measures, minor surgeries to cu
t away my longing. I liked the unpleasant way he would squint around my cabin and never quite look at me. I would make coffee, and we would talk until the silences between topics became too long even for him. Then he would push up from the rocker, rinse his mug in the sink, and walk out my door without saying goodbye.
One night, I found myself telling him about Lindsay. I told him everything. Her full name. Where she lived. Where and what she taught. Her stride and smile. Her fears. He stared at a spot on the floor in front of my feet as I spoke, showing no sign of understanding, as if he were merely waiting for me to finish so he could speak again of Dong Mei. I persisted anyway, my need to talk about her driving me to tell him even how I sometimes looked for her on the road and listened for her knock on the door. My vulnerability, alongside his apparent indifference, made me feel testy. I finished by saying, “I don’t know which of us is more delusional, you or me.”
He looked up then and at last made eye contact. He paused, maybe considering my feelings, but his direct honesty won out and he said, “You are.” Then he rinsed his mug and left.
Not long after this conversation, at three o’clock one morning, a hollow rapping woke me from a deep sleep. I swung my feet to the floor and sat still for a moment, listening, and there it was again, insistent and growing louder. Knocking. It was not a dream. I was trembling as I opened the door.
Jurek stood on my porch, with his broad-legged stance, grinning hard. I nearly hit him.
He said, “I have a surprise.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
He turned toward the darkness behind him and said, “Come. Come. Come!” He gestured exaggeratedly, and out of the northern night came a woman and behind her, like two cubs, a pair of boys.
“Dong Mei,” Jurek said. “Roger and Seth.”
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