What Lies Between Us

by Nayomi Munaweera

  I tell him about my father’s death that night. He holds me close in our hotel bed as I shake and cry and tell him what water means to me, what the image of bodies in water does to me. There are other memories I cannot speak of, but now I fall asleep in his arms and feel that I have reached safe harbor.

  Fourteen

  In these early days I wonder if it is possible to be heartbroken with happiness. Yes, a cliché, but in the cavity of my chest, in the embrace of my ribs, my heart unfurls. There had been a whorled shell around it, like a ripple-edged, tightly closed clam. My heart had been a pearl in the center of it. He had slid a knifepoint into a crevice and prized with all his strength, and this covering had cracked open. The heart muscle, freed now, expands and fills as if with tide-pulled liquid. The sound of his voice, the silk of his skin—these are the sum of my treasure. I calibrate my days around his presence; I weave my life around him. This is what he does for me: he breaks my heart with happiness.

  In some far part of myself, I know that it is dangerous to love like this. I know that this love has meant letting him occupy the space of my spirit. But my spirit was a room I had left long ago. Letting him reside there, letting him be the whole of my interior, is to feel my ghosts rise and leave. Pain retires to the far shores; it is a glorious and complete inhabitation.

  * * *

  We have six months in our kingdom of two. It is everything I’ve ever wanted and I could have lived like this the rest of my life, but one weekend morning he says, “We should go out and meet everyone!” I don’t want to. I haven’t returned calls for months, and now my phone barely rings. I have him. Who else do I need? “We need friends,” he says. “You should call yours. I’ll call mine.” I don’t, but he does, and quickly I learn that there are many people who adore him. We go out with them. They hug him tight and ask, “Where the hell have you been?” and he introduces me and they say “Oh!” with surprise in their eyes.

  Now I see the ease with which he fits with these people. I witness their delight in shared memories, the way the conversation rolls off their tongues, the loud laughter. These are folks he has collected throughout his life. There are a few from high school, who escaped the same dreary little hometown and came west; a whole contingent from his art school years; and some other friends he’s made in adulthood. They are mostly American, mostly white. They have a kind of perfect belonging, a knowing of where their earth is, where their roots sink. Next to them I feel like a hydroponic plant, roots exposed and adrift.

  We go to parties, dinners, bars—a whole series of events to make up for the six months they refer to as his “kidnapping.” A term that makes me feel like the kidnapper. As if those first glorious months had not been mutual, as if I were the aggressor and he the taken. I don’t like sharing him; I dread these nights. It never feels easy; there is always some discordant note.

  My English is perfect, but maybe too perfect, because when I say certain words they ask me to repeat myself. I say boot when I’m referring to where to put things in the car, and there are generally puzzled faces until, laughing, he explains, and then I realize he is my interpreter to these people. In their presence, the word dance comes out of my mouth in a way I can’t control, clipped and British, and quickly becomes a running joke. “Say it,” they urge, and I shake my head and find a hundred other ways to refer to what happens in a club. “But we love the way you say it.” They say, “It’s so proper.” They’d mimic it back to me, making me feel tight and self-conscious. It isn’t aggressive, it is perhaps even a sign of affection, but I can’t stand to stick out in this way.

  At a dinner a woman turns to me and asks, “Have you read that book about Sri Lanka?”

  “Which book?”

  “Island something.” She snaps her fingers. “It’ll come to me. It’s about the war there. A Sri Lankan American woman wrote it.”

  I shake my head. As if a Sri Lankan in America could write truthfully about that war, or even understand it from this huge distance. As if this woman talking to me about it could understand anything about where I come from by reading a book. I want to laugh, but instead I smile politely.

  And yet these women are mesmerizing. Like grown-up versions of the girls spraying mists of Aqua Net in the high school bathroom. But instead of those stiff constructions of hair, these women have smooth, flawless ponytails or bobs that skim their perfect cheekbones. I watch them like an anthropologist. The way they sip their drinks, the way they speak to each other, to the men, the way their clothes hang—all of it crucial knowledge because they have known him before me, because they have access to a him I never knew. And this lack of knowledge feels to me like a crippling disadvantage.

  But I am becoming a master of imitation. I have started to pull my hair high into a ponytail just like that girl Marnie. He says they were best friends in art school. Did they “date”? Has he made love to her the way he does to me now? Has he seen her naked? Has she touched his cock? Have they kissed? He says no, no, they were just friends, close friends, but I don’t know. When I see them laughing together, the thought comes splintering into my brain that there was more, that there is more now, that he loves her and feels nothing for me. I smile at her, but on the inside, I am ripping up her face.

  If he knew, he would be disgusted. At a party he bends to talk to her and I walk into the bathroom and lock the door, sit on the toilet shuddering for long moments. I get up and stare at the face revealed in the mirror. It slips and slides. I can’t make the parts reassemble into familiarity. I have to clutch my hands at my sides to keep from smashing the soap dish into the silver surface. If I could just do that, see the blood snake down my wrists, I would slip back into myself, I would calm down, my breath would return. Someone knocks and I dash away the tears, blow my nose, and slip out past the waiting person.

  I smile, I laugh. I do not let them see me. The conversation washes around me, and I know I am the cuckoo in the nest. The mother cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of a different species. When the chick hatches, always earlier than its nest mates, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest. The parent birds feed the one hungry baby they have left. They can’t imagine that it has killed their young. But the cuckoo chick always gives itself away by growing too large, even bigger than its unsuspecting adoptive parents, and one day it will be seen for what it is and thrown out of the sheltering huddle.

  I live with the thudding fear that I will be exposed, that one day one of them will see me watching them, will realize that I am an impostor, will turn to whisper this knowledge into Daniel’s ear. Who will it be? One of the men? Or Marnie with her French-manicured nails. She will whisper in his ear that I am not like them, that I am the overgrown, feathered parasite. What will his eyes look like then? What color will they be when the scales fall from them? I am waiting to be thrown out of the nest. I can feel the long fall to the ground, the impact, the agony of lying on the ground in a twist of bones.

  I can’t lose him. He says, “I love you. I can’t believe you’re mine.” Joy floods through my body. I kiss his skin in a frenzy. He laughs and holds me away, but I squirm until I am right next to him again.

  * * *

  We cross the bridge for a party in Oakland. I had wanted to stay home with him, alone after long, frantic days at the hospital, but he has insisted. He goes to get us drinks and I walk around and lose sight of him and talk to someone else and then look for him and he’s in a corner talking to a woman with striking skin, long, tumbling red hair, and tight black pants. I try to come upon them as if by accident. I try to make it graceful, but still, I see the quick twist of annoyance around his mouth before he says, “Hello, my love, meet Moira. She’s an actress.”

  I say, “Wow really? That’s great.”

  “And she’s invited us to her new play. On Saturday. Can we make it?”

  I shrug. A vague gesture that means maybe yes, maybe no.

  He turns to the woman and says, “Tell her the details.”

  The women opens her mouth, which is
painted scarlet to match her hair, and says, “Well, we’re doing a version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, but here’s the thing: we’re doing it at a bar, so there will be drinks and specials and things. I’m playing a nun.”

  I try to keep the acid out of my voice. “Really?”

  She laughs. “But you know, a sort of sexy nun. A bawdy nun.”

  I say, “But what will you wear? A sexy habit?”

  “No. But it’s long, so you never know what could be under it.”

  I say, “Oh, you should wear black lace panties and nothing else under it.”

  He says, “That’s hot.” They laugh.

  Knives peel my skin, a red mist of rage. I dash my glass at the ground; it shatters, glass and ice everywhere, alcohol pooling on the wood. I spin on my heel, tears coming fast, push past shocked faces to the door, out onto the cold street, fumbling with my car keys. I’m starting the engine when he comes up, bangs his fist against the hood. “What the hell happened? What’s happening? Why did you do that?” And then when he realizes I mean to drive away, “Wait! I’m coming with you.”

  “No!” I shout against the closed window.

  “But what happened? How will I get home?”

  “Maybe your sexy nun can take you.”

  I peel away as his palm slaps against the hood. At the door of the house, a small crowd of shocked mouths, raised eyebrows. I see someone come out to put an arm around him and lead him inside. I don’t care. I leave them all behind, drive over the quiet bridge shaking, silent tears running down, soaking my blouse. At home I lie in bed, curled into a comma, the heart ripped out of me. It lies next to me in a nest of bloody veins like the site of a detonated bomb. I watch it as it bleeds itself out on the sheets, thuds a final time, and starts to turn gray at the edges, and then I fall asleep.

  * * *

  We make up, of course. I cried. He was shaken, but he forgave me. I promised I wouldn’t do that again. We started making jokes about sexy nuns until it entered the language of our relationship and neither of us could remember the details of that party. I was happy again. There is nothing I want more than him. He is the whole of it.

  * * *

  Months later, we are at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley. We are sharing brown rice and broccoli with veggie chicken. I eat the forested tops of the broccoli and he spears the trunks, which I cannot stand, off my plate. This silly synchronicity in our broccoli desires is something that has always felt auspicious to me, another sign that cosmic forces had taken an interest and said “These two will do nicely” and nudged us toward each other that night three years ago. I am talking about my last shift, a particularly daunting patient, the frustrations of conflicting medications and a family that doesn’t trust us.

  He says “Uh-huh” and “Hmmm” as he folds a sheet of paper over and over, making it take the shape of a tiny white crane. I say, “Are you even listening to me?” He says, “Yup, uh-huh, yes,” and slowly, carefully writes something in minuscule letters on the bird. He looks at me with that deep-water gaze and holds the origami out on his palm. I take it and stare at the tiny writing until I understand that it is asking me a question.

  I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

  “Why not? I love you.”

  “My god. Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  I can’t think of a single reason why not, and so we do.

  * * *

  We are married under the golden dome of City Hall at the top of the curving marble staircase on a silver day in May. I wear a long slinky white dress and carry a jumble of dahlias in every shade of red I can find. His parents are here, wearing formal but sensible clothes, looking surprised but happy.

  My mother comes in a worked sari. I know this is not what she had envisioned for me, the bridegroom being a tall white man instead of a dutiful Lankan boy, an artist instead of a doctor, engineer, lawyer, even for god’s sake, a professor. And the wedding too must be a disappointment. What she would have wished for is a hall full of people, a spread of food, a flowered poruwa, young girls in white ruffled half saris singing the proper verses. Without these things, is it even a wedding? She would have wanted everything Dharshi had at her wedding for me. She must feel bad that Aunty Mallini gave her daughter these things, married her the proper way, but that she cannot do the same for me. But if she thinks these things, thankfully, blissfully, she doesn’t say them. A wonderful thing has happened. After we have lived together for years, instead of leaving me as she thinks all white people are prone to do, Daniel is making me a legitimate and lawfully married wife, and for this she is thankful enough to stay quiet.

  Then too she has told me this. Soon, a few months after our wedding, she is moving home. When she told me this, I said, “Where?” before I realized she meant she’s moving back to Sri Lanka. I was incredulous. “Why now?” and she said, “You’re settled now. There isn’t anything to keep me here anymore. Even the cat is dead.” I feel guilty for not asking after Catney Houston, who after hanging on for this ridiculous length of time has finally died. Now there is truly nothing holding her here. She says, “I’ll get a place in Colombo. Or a house in Kandy. In any case you’re settled, so I can go now.” I can hear the determination in her voice. She wants to reclaim what was lost. My wedding will be the last time I will see her for years. I am sad; I am relieved; I am joyous.

  A month before the wedding I open the mail and find a package from her. A sari froths out. A white sari studded with paisley in golden sequins and shining crystals. It’s beautiful. I throw it over my shoulder and am transformed. An instant bride. But then the memory of that other sari glowing in the dark, hanging over the door, and below it two bodies tumbling together in love and desire comes to me. I haven’t seen Dharshi for years. She has been taken into a different life, become a person I don’t know. Our connection has been diluted to seeing pictures of each other on our computer screens. I have seen pictures of her and Roshan, rounder now, and claimed by two children, hanging on to her from all angles. A sort of yearning shoots through me. She had been my first love. I know that now. I put the sari back in its box. I tell my mother it’s hard to wear a sari, I don’t want to stumble on the steps, I don’t want to trip under six yards of floating fabric. The truth is, I want nothing that reminds me of who I was before this man came.

  On my wedding day I wear a clean white dress, a satin dress that spills to the floor. A dress that is not ivory or champagne or any other corruption of white, but is instead stark and startlingly white. A dress that he had bought for me a few weeks before, wrapped and packaged, a huge crimson rose held by a ribbon to the top of the large white box. “Here,” he said, “this will fit you perfectly.” I opened the box and exclaimed, “Oh my god. It’s beautiful.” I pulled the dress, slithery and heavy as an animal skin, out of the box. I could feel how expensive it was, how exquisitely, elaborately one of a kind. I couldn’t imagine how he had paid for it. He must have saved for a long time. I’m touched by his generosity when this money could be going to other, more practical concerns. He said, “Put it on.”

  “But you shouldn’t see me. It’s bad luck.”

  He laughed and said, “What? You’ve turned traditional? Go, put it on.” I went into the bathroom, stepped out of my clothes, and pulled the dress over my head. It sighed against my skin, settled. I came out, shy, the cloth slinky against me, my arms bare, the entirety of my silhouette exposed. He looked rapturous and said, “Yes. Amazing. It’s perfect.” I loved that he said the word perfect. Not a stain or a blemish anywhere on me. He pulled me close, searched my face, touched his thumb to the mark beneath my right eye, high on the cheek. “This is my spot. This I claim,” and put his lips against my skin exactly there, a slight suction. He thought it was a beauty spot, but it was a scar from a childhood cruelty that had faded now into this slightest demarcation.

  The dress is beautiful, a long sleek column of white with silver straps that slide against my shoulders and make them shine. But under this, a thought like a
splinter under the skin. On the island, white like this, unembellished and not lit up with gold embroidery or jeweled sequins, is a symbol of death. This is something my American fiancé cannot know. White was the color I should have worn to my father’s burning. Instead I had worn the slightest shade of pink. Now when I should be as adorned as a goddess, I am wearing the perfect white of mourning.

  * * *

  After City Hall, after the judge has said the solemn words and the rings have been slid onto fingers, after Daniel has been told to kiss the bride and I have acquiesced and after the few assembled friends have whooped and cheered, we go on a pilgrimage to the water. His parents, my mother, the chosen friends. We stand on the cliffs over the Sutro Baths, the churning sea stretched far below us. This is the distant edge of the world. There are apocalyptic clouds above; the red bridge is framed in the distance, the entire world painted in shades of gray, silver, and emerald.

  Someone pops open champagne and it froths over all of us, making us giddy. He pours it into gushing flutes and hands them out. We are toasted in words of love and blessing. The wind flings itself in our faces and we fall silent then, because it is beautiful, and just like that I know I will belong to this man for always. I, who have sailed these seas in storm and peril, who had felt ever wind-tossed, ocean-flung, have come home to dock in these safe and sunny harbors. I throw my bouquet over the cliff down into the rushing waters and the sea takes my offering, unties the silver ribbon that holds the flowers together, tosses them until they are scattered on the waves, tiny as single petals borne away on that salt tide.

  Part Four

  Fifteen

  Three years pass faster than I can imagine. We learn the rules of marriage. It is a closed system with its own weather, politics, and machinations. It is a loyalty constructed out of inside jokes, the sharing of fears, and predawn recounting of dreams. It is a shifting of personality toward each other like two plants in a small pot striving for the same patch of sun and in the process becoming entwined above and below ground. His roots take hold in the earth of my body.