What Lies Between Us

by Nayomi Munaweera

  “What?”

  “Your mom asked about what you’re painting now and you snapped at her. What was that?”

  He’s lying on his back, hands behind his neck as if we are outside and he is gazing into the sky. His eyes are closed, but I can see them flit under the lids. Then he must have decided to tell me because it comes out in a rush.

  “Okay, here it is. In New York a few years after graduation, I was in a group show at a very serious gallery. The kind of gallery that kicks off major careers. The owner was this really great guy. He had sunk all his own money into the gallery because he believed in it. Somehow, through some miracle, it was doing extremely well. He called and offered me a solo show and I was over the moon. It meant I was done struggling, that I was about to get discovered. Be a real artist. I could quit the day job and just paint. It was all I wanted to do. As we got closer I got more and more elated. This was going to be it. My life would change.”

  He pauses and I wait, my palm on his chest, feeling his heart thudding under the skin. He takes a deep breath, says, “And then a few weeks before the show, someone called me. The owner had been hit by a car. He died on arrival in the hospital. His wife was devastated. She sold the gallery immediately, and there went all my grand dreams in a puff of smoke.” He opens his eyes to look at me. “I was crushed. I felt like someone had wadded up all my freedom, all my possible talent, thrown it in the toilet and flushed. I saw that … all my life being flushed away. I was gutted.”

  I nod in the dim light, our faces near each other. He says, “I stopped painting. I drank a lot. I smoked nonstop. I didn’t eat or shower. I lost my handling job. I just closed up like a book. Withdrew into my apartment, into myself. I didn’t want anyone around me. It was the worst time of my life. My folks finally came and found me and dragged me back here. That felt like death, but they probably saved my life. It was the worst humiliation. Having to move back to my parents like a kid. I lived with them here for about six months. In this room. I felt so guilty, I had gone to this great art school, done well, almost made it big. And then back here. And for those six months everything went dead. I didn’t care. But then slowly it came back. My fingers would ache and I realized they missed the feel of a brush. My mother left out my old art books, things I thought I had outgrown. A book of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. I used to look at his weird backward writing and those tremendous faces he loved, those craggy profiles, those massive rumps of horses, until I couldn’t help getting paper and pencil and trying for myself. Then it all came back in a fever. I moved straight out to San Francisco. Got a crap job. And painted. God, did I paint. But this time just the sensation of the pencil on paper, the drag of the brush and the turpentine in the air, the working out of the ideas in my head, that was everything. This time I didn’t give a fuck about the galleries or sales or numbers. This time it belonged just to me. This time it felt pure.” He leans forward and kisses me. He says, “So that’s why I get annoyed when they ask about painting. It’s stupid of me. But it reminds me of that time when I felt like an absolute loser. I almost died. Then I came back to life.”

  Later when he falls asleep I lie there thinking about everything he has revealed. What must it mean to love something the way he loves painting? What must it be like to have your soul claimed by something in this way? I don’t have this. It is the difference between him and me. The only thing I love in this way is him.

  * * *

  We drive away, his parents waving at the door. We go back to our beautiful city and resume our life together. The trip and all that bland food has made me long for simmering curries in creamy coconut milk. I start to cook, remembering how Amma had learned in those early years in America, when for the first time she was without Sita. I cook eggplant moju, chicken curry, pol sambol, and he loves it all. At first when we sit down together, I eat with a fork and knife in deference to a long-ago social studies teacher.

  But one day, annoyed by the inability to form perfect mouthfuls, I put my fork down, put my fingers in the food, mix, and eat. I say, “Oh god, that’s so much better.” He stares and I feel like I have dropped my clothes in the middle of the street. But then he lays his fork aside too, tents his own fingers, and mimics my movements. He tries to make neat balls of rice and curry like mine, tries to keep his fingers clean past the first knuckle, makes a mess until we are both laughing.

  He says, “Is this how you’re supposed to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. You’re American. You might not like it.”

  He smiles, says, “It does taste better.” Then, “How do you do it so easily?”

  “Like this, like making a ball.” I push the food against my tented fingers with my thumb, make a ball, and hold it up to show him.

  He says, “Mine doesn’t looks like that.”

  I shake my head, sassy. “Then use a fork, white boy.”

  “But this is the right way, right? I want to do it the right way.”

  A hardness in my chest, held since I was a child, new in this country and told how to be, crumbles away.

  * * *

  My mother calls and makes small talk for a long time. I’m saying goodbye when she finally can’t stand it anymore and says, “You’re still seeing that foreigner?”

  I want to say, “I’m doing a lot more than seeing.” Instead I say, “He’s not a foreigner, Amma. We are the foreigners.”

  She says, “You know what I mean—foreigner, white person, same thing.”

  “Yes, Amma. I’m still seeing him.”

  “Is it … you know … serious?”

  “What?”

  “Because you know … these people. They have different ideas. They’re not serious like we are. He might use you and then leave you high and dry. It happened to my friend Vishanthi’s daughter. She ‘dated’ one for years and then he just up and left her. Poor girl. She was such a mess. And then the mother. My god, what a long time it took for her to get over it. Now, of course, the girl is happily settled with a boy from home. So all I’m saying is be careful, okay?”

  “Okay, Amma, I’ll be careful.” As if falling in love is a disease I can protect myself from. I picture a giant condom, stretched all the way around my body and tied off neatly at the top with a bow. I fight the giggles.

  She senses this and changes the subject. She has just gotten back from Los Angeles. She and Aunty Mallini had gone because there had been a memorial service for a young girl a few years older than me who had gone back to the island to teach art to war orphans. She had gotten on a bus and there had been a suicide bomber on it. The girl had died in the explosion along with scores of others. Amma tells me about the chaos of the house, the weeping parents. She says there had been a picture of the dead girl—pretty, laughing, her arm around a grouping of kids with big smiles and amputated limbs. The girl had had an older sister who had been there with her. They had made the sister identify the body. My mother uses the word shattered to describe her, this returned, shell-shocked sister.

  I don’t care. None of this has anything to do with me. I feel a stab of sorrow when she describes the sister’s face, but these events, these people, feel far away. Their lives have nothing to do with my own. I wish she wouldn’t tell me these stories about other Lankans. I wish she’d pay attention to my life and what I’m telling her about it instead.

  * * *

  Later when Daniel and I have been together for years and it is clear the “foreigner” is going nowhere, Amma asks, “How is your friend?”

  I know what she means, but I always ask, “Friend?”

  She’s awkward, embarrassed. She says, “You know, that boy you see. That ‘artist.’” The word artist pronounced with as much disdain as if she were saying prostitute. It makes her crazy that I’ve chosen this man whom she sees as a boy for daring to imagine his preoccupation with color and line is anything more than a hobby. “Why can’t he get a real job and do this painting thing on t
he weekends?” she has grumbled to me more times than I can remember.

  I pick a different battle today. “Amma, he’s my boyfriend. Not my friend. You know that.”

  But boyfriend is an impossible word for her. Her mouth cannot form its syllables in relation to me. There are boys, fiancés, and husbands. Not boyfriends. Yet she says it often enough in the context of other people’s wayward, rebellious, slut-whore Americanized daughters. Those girls have “boyfriends.” I have a “friend” who is also a “foreigner.”

  * * *

  These are the pleasures of love. They pour into every crevice of my life until they flood and overflow. I am on a train, thundering through the tunnel toward Oakland. I look around at this momentary gathering of strangers: the father with his baby daughter strapped to his chest. He shows her the pages of a soft book and she reaches out with her chubby infant hand to pat at the animals. There are tourists shivering in sweatshirts they have bought on Fisherman’s Wharf because “who the hell thought California in July would be cold!” In the corner seat, a homeless man covered up to his eyes in newspaper. They are all luminous; they are all beautiful. I could grab any one of them and love them. I could sweep the homeless man into my arms, I could dance with the new father and his babe; even the tourists I could kiss. I have to contain myself, hide my aching, flooded heart behind my smile. I am vibrating with the fact of love.

  * * *

  I take Daniel to the park and stand with him in front of the dahlias. I have not told him about this obsession. He considers them silently, taking in the riotous, tumbling profusion of colors and shapes, the mini explosions of petals like the wheeling birthing of galaxies. He says, “Jesus, they’re incredible. I’ve never seen flowers like this. They’re like aliens.” He points out the mighty scarlet ones, which look like spiky insects, the ones I have always held as my secret favorites, and I grip his hand harder. It feels like a secret sign. One more way our souls are made of the same substance.

  We walk into the Conservatory of Flowers and our skins instantly drip sweat. I exclaim, “This is what home feels like! This is how hot and wet it is.” He says, “I’d love to see it.” I think about him there, in that place that was my home. It’s a dream I almost cannot let myself have. These two parts of my life, can they be seamed together? It would be miraculous.

  We sit on the lush and spreading greens. He reaches for me and the picnic is forgotten; we are kissing and rolling about and lost entirely in each other. We hear shouting, pop up, and see a group of cyclists riding by, wildly cheering us on. I hide my face in his neck. Embarrassed but also elated.

  * * *

  He wants to hike and camp. Things that brown people decidedly do not do. “Sleep outside? In a tent? Why?” I ask when he first suggests it.

  He’s astounded by the question. “I don’t know … I can’t believe you’ve never been camping.”

  I narrow my eyes and say, “But why would anyone do that? We can sleep in a hotel and go out for food, no? We can hike and that kind of thing in the day.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Really? There are bugs, right? And weird people in the woods. I’ve watched all the movies, I know what happens out there.”

  “You’ll love it. I promise.” A kiss by the corner of my eye.

  I’m skeptical. The idea of being outside for no reason, of “communing with nature”—these are new ideas. We used to go on trips all over the island in rented minibuses full of cousins and aunties and uncles. But we always stayed in hotels or guesthouses. In those places there was no question of sleeping outside where a wild elephant or a boar could find you. I remember singing loudly as the bus careened along graphite mountainsides or followed the curve of the southern coast. We sang baila, but often everyone’s choice was “Hotel California.” As if there was a yearning for a view completely at odds with what was around us then. This is a song about an arid landscape, a place that sucks you in and doesn’t let go (and drugs, of course, but we didn’t know that then). We sang “Hotel California,” but never once did I think that one day I would be in the landscape of the song. Now he wants to show me what it really means to be in California.

  I protest, but he is persistent, and weeks later we are out in the woods, walking deep into redwood groves. At a certain point he pulls a sketchbook and pencils out of his backpack. He wants to study how the moss clings to the bark, he says. He wants to capture the various permutations and textures of green. He says he’ll be quick, but I know he’ll be lost for hours. I kiss him and walk off on my own. The ground is rough beneath the new sneakers he has insisted I buy. I walk along, sweaty and slightly annoyed. There are noises I cannot identify. What creatures live in this place? Are they dangerous? I don’t even know. Then the wind rises and ruffles my hair. A short way from my feet there is a great drop and the valley spread out beneath. In the distance a silver river snakes through the lush growth. I drop on the ground cross-legged and study the valley, the smooth velvet slopes, the craggy mountain edges. It feels like I am drinking beauty. An intoxicating beauty that rises in waves stills my breath. I lie back on the bed of the earth. It cradles me, soft as down. Far above, birds wheel, small in the distance, carried on the current. I lift my arms and am carried high into the sparkling air.

  Later that night, when we are lying side by side in sleeping bags, staring into the exuberance of redwoods far above, I say to him, “It’s like being a child at a party. The grown-ups are so much bigger than us. They’ve been here so much longer. We can see only their calves.” I point my chin up at the trees. He laughs. I say, “No, really. Think about how old they are. We’re like infants to them.” He falls asleep and I lie there in the magic grove, being hummed at by trees with ancient memories, lulled by their stately breath, held in the embrace of their roots. I feel the sway and pull of the planet, the curve of it under my flesh, that gorgeous, voluptuous roundness. The stars spin circles overhead until I too, lost in this darkness, fall asleep.

  * * *

  He takes me to Lake Tahoe on a certain specific weekend in October. He wants to show me something, he says, and is as gleeful as a child. We stay in a small hotel because now it is too cold to sleep under the stars. We head out in the morning, walk through a parking lot into the woods. It’s pretty, with meadows and, just off the path, squelchy wetlands, signs set up here and there to illustrate the life cycles of frogs and water birds. He stops to read each one, and I am bored but humoring him. I don’t see why we have made this trip in a month when the sunshine is watery, but then he takes my hand and we round a corner and I gasp at the sight.

  Almost at our feet: a creek, narrow and tumbling over rocks, and in the water, hundreds, thousands of flame-colored fish. So many they push into one another, each of them pointed upstream, swimming against the water’s flow. I go closer so the fish are directly beneath me, oblivious of my presence, fighting the water to get up, up, up. The stream is narrow but deep, and there are layers and layers of fish. The living flash bright red, and under them, the dead, silver fleshed, flaking, blind eyed. Konakee salmon, he says. They spawn only here in this creek. They come from Tahoe and then swim upstream.

  I wonder about this, the obsession with home, with finding their way back to the place they were born. “They aren’t native,” he says. “They escaped here from the fisheries.” So this is their adopted home, I think. This place they are fighting to recover, it is not their native place, but still beloved, still worth fighting for, dying for.

  * * *

  We walk around the rim of Lake Tahoe, its cold, perfect blue bowl of water reflecting the sky. A silver line at the horizon. The depth of this lake is unfathomable, leagues and leagues of water, down to the unknowable depths. We hold hands and walk in step, our motion rhythmic and in synch. We walk out onto a pier that stretches long and narrow over the frigid water. At the end of it I lie longways on my stomach, my head dropped over the side so that my entire vision is taken up by blue. He sits cross-legged next to me, talking to my droppe
d-over head so that his voice comes to me as if it belongs to the lake itself.

  He says, “Do you know the story about Jacques Cousteau coming here?” I shake my head, just feet over liquid, the tips of my hair almost piercing the surface. He says, “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they say that Cousteau came here in the seventies and dove down in one of his submersibles. When he came out hours later, he was terribly shaken. He said, ‘The world is not ready to see what I have seen.’ He left the country and never said what he had saw.”

  I say at the water, “What was it?”

  “He didn’t talk about it till years later. Then he said that it was the scariest thing he had ever seen. The cold, it preserves everything, and so he saw bodies, lots of them. Native Indians, Mafia hits, drowned swimmers. All of them jumbled together, as perfectly preserved as on the day they died.”

  I scramble on my knees, leap to my feet, and start walking fast down the pier. He runs behind me, says, “What’s wrong? You’re shaking. It’s just a story. Something people say. I’m not even sure it’s true.” But I can’t shake the image. Those layers of bodies, just like the salmon, all held unmoving in water, the sins of this land held in perpetual silence like the layers of a grotesque cake. All water is connected, and my father’s body was pulled from a river. I remember his closed coffin. Samson, who might be captured in water or not. Nothing is forgotten or finished. All of history is lodged in the earth, in the water, in the strata of our flesh.

  * * *

  We drive to other places. Gorgeous high vistas opening onto unreal views, pine ridges, the lake like an emerald cut askew, shimmering far below. We see silent-footed deer deep in the woods, wild turkeys so large and regal I vow never to eat their domesticated brethren trussed and carved on the Thanksgiving table again. But I’m quiet through it all. A certain cold came up from the lake and dipped a finger into my jugular, and all his talking, all these beautiful sights cannot melt the icy shards in my veins.