by Tracy Slater
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, we both woke a little giddy. We’d have to head back to the training center soon, and the anonymity of the hotel threw into stark contrast the confinement of the MBA program. Toru threw open the curtain and the sunlight glinting off of Kobe’s skyline tumbled into the room.
I began to recite the opening lines of Nabokov’s Lolita, a little pretentious academic humor that I knew he wouldn’t get anyway, so he wouldn’t be able to call me on my intellectual posturing or challenge me to recall anything beyond the book’s first few lines (a literary fluency I lacked). “Light of my life, fire of my loins,” I called to him from my cross-legged seat on the bed, my arm flung out dramatically, my long hair a tangled mess.
Toru turned from the window to throw me a silent smile, seemingly unconcerned that he couldn’t get my meaning. Then he swiveled back to the view. I felt equally unconcerned, and then surprised, as I suddenly thought how many relationships would benefit from a lack of shared linguistics, from the absence of expectation that our partners would, or even could, understand us most of the time.
A few minutes later, Toru turned toward me once more, his grin huge as he tried to remember and return the quote. “Love of my life, tenderloin of my heart!” he offered proudly.
I threw myself back on the bed in giggles, pounded my hands and feet up and down. “Tenderloin of my heart! That is so great!”
Toru smiled at me, head tipped to one side, looking quizzical. Then he couldn’t help breaking into a full laugh himself as I rolled around in the sheets, hiccupping. “What’s funny?” he asked, diving into the mayhem on the bed.
“Tenderloin is a steak!”
“Oh, terrible. Terrible mistake.” Toru shook his head with mock gravity and plopped himself onto the pillow beside me.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice that his was a proclamation more visceral, touching, and eloquently twisted than any I’d ever read in the entire Western canon.
• • •
ONE NIGHT A few weeks later, we were hidden away again, this time at the Chinese government’s Ministry of Commerce training center in Beijing, where the entire program had moved for the middle leg of our Asia tour. Toru would have to leave in a few hours to creep silently along the dark hallways and make it back to his own room before dawn. We had become less careful in China, since the facility there sprawled with multiple wings, affording privacy to the faculty suites. We still hid our relationship during the day but had lapsed into more frequent late-night sneaking around.
The night was dark and heavy beyond the window, the air-conditioning churning out a constant, guttural hum. I flitted in and out of fitful dreams while Toru lay quietly beside me, his breathing soft and even. I had grown to love the peacefulness of his slumber, so different from my own turbid sleep. He eased softly into the gentlest part of night while I was always wrestling to grab hold of a meager rest, like fistfuls of shadow I had to yank from an unwilling darkness.
I’d always been prone to angst-filled dreams. Sometimes they would hold scraps of films I had seen as the child of first- and second-generation American Jews with a Holocaust fixation. Despite having lost no direct relatives in the camps, my parents enthusiastically promoted our duty to “never forget”—and then extended that to “always be remembering.” In homage to this vigilance, my mother had even initiated her own version of America’s favorite prime-time activity: family Holocaust movie night.
When I was four or five and our temple showed live footage from the genocide in the adult service, my parents yanked us out of the children’s sing-along so we could fulfill our duty to bear witness. Half a decade later, when the network miniseries Holocaust aired, we brought notes to our Protestant private schools explaining that we should be excused from homework while we observed this latest chapter in our history of ethnic calamity, reenacted for network TV. I clutched the thick, lemony yellow notepaper my mother had given me, monogrammed along the top in rich red lettering, FROM THE DESK OF CHARLOTTE SLATER, and proudly handed it to my teacher before recess.
In addition to the mourning and anguish for those who perished in the camps, however, my parents hinted at another theme roiling just below the surface of these images. Or maybe in my confused efforts to grasp the ungraspable I just imagined a deeper message: the fatal naïveté of the victims. For these were the Jews who didn’t get out in time, who somehow failed to recognize or admit the gathering storm. So what I took most clearly from my Holocaust education was not my responsibility as an American Jew to blindly support Israel (my mother’s intended message, reinforced with a collection of window decals proclaiming I AM A ZIONIST! for each of our bedroom windows). Instead, I learned the importance of never being foolishly optimistic, never underestimating the potential for disaster, and never, ever assuming you could leave life up to fate.
Now, in the black of a Beijing night, lying next to a Japanese executive-in-training I had met just six weeks earlier and with whom I could barely converse, I was immersing myself deeper and deeper into a relationship that would eventually require some sort of optimistic stretch—or most likely a wild leap of faith—to sustain itself across two hemispheres. Am I just fooling myself here, I wondered, just inviting some messy, bicontinental breakup?
Then suddenly, Toru began to stir. I turned toward him, ready for him to cry out while I guessed about his own nightmares. The outlines of shapes—a wooden dresser, an aging TV, a book on the nightstand—ghosted softly in the dark. As Toru tossed beside me, then began to murmur quietly, I paused, weighing whether to wake him from his dreams or let them pass.
But then he laughed, a chortle bubbling up through slumber, like a child with a joke. I looked at his face, and the stress I expected there was absent; in its place, a small smile curved his lips, his cheeks peaking above a satisfied grin, almond eyes squeezed shut and crinkling at their corners.
Next he turned over, sighed, and fell back into peaceful rest.
Holy shit, I thought. In the inky black of night, Toru didn’t dream of horror and tragedy, didn’t dwell in fragmented scenes of Nuremberg, Nagasaki, or Nanking. Instead, he chuckled.
Hearing Toru laugh, I was struck with a new thought. Perhaps utter vulnerability and pure peace really could coexist, surrender sometimes culminate in quiet joy, not destruction. And right there, in the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of Commerce training center, in bed with a Japanese businessman I had met less than two months before, I fell further in love than I’d ever thought possible, my heart crashing through a floor I didn’t know existed, revealing a deeper comfort than I ever guessed another human’s presence could embody.
TWO
ONE NIGHT TOWARD THE MIDDLE of our stay in China, almost eight weeks into the MBA program, Toru and I were curled together again. I lay on my side facing him, my head propped on one elbow, my other forearm extended on the sheets between us. He smiled at me, then looked down and passed one finger lightly over my forearm, near the top crease of my wrist bone. He traced two small, faint scars nestled there, little pale parentheses cradling a minor vein. He looked up at me, knit his brows.
“I made them once,” I admitted. “It wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t dangerous or anything.” Toru nodded wordlessly, conceding that they were nowhere near the underside of my wrist, where tender skin separated artery from air.
These were marks made during a particularly confused period of adolescence when I had wanted not so much to destroy myself as render tangible an invisible grief so it might begin somehow to dislodge and recede. “I felt pretty bad then . . . in my late teens and early twenties,” I tried to explain. “I just wanted . . . some way to feel better, and I know it sounds weird, but this was the only way I could really think of.”
I told him my family had been wealthy but “kind of screwed up,” aping the irreverence of Northeast academics discussing shrinks and psychopharmacology, personal pathology, and other upper-
middle-class woes. “Like, not totally okay, you know, between people,” I said, wagging my finger from my chest outward and back again, miming personal connection.
“A-ha,” Toru said, as if starting to see a picture. Then I tried to tell him of my family’s demise, our inability to hold it together even after we had been handed so much. The morning I was eight or nine when we kids woke to a wall of kicked-in kitchen cabinets, their smooth cherry doors splintered and gaping, one in the shape of a mouth caught mid-surprise. The wreckage of a mismatched marriage, how we would hear my parents shut into the wood-paneled library of our house, my mother’s voice rising among the antique leather volumes until it reached a high-pitched scream; my father’s murmurs soft and strained; we four kids ducked low at the top of the staircase or huddled in a silvery guest bathroom while the sound of our parents’ voices would come to us in waves of hisses and low pleads. The one child—my middle sister, Lauren—with whom my mother never seemed to bond and who for years slid deeper into a depression that wouldn’t quit; the other child—me, the baby—crowned my mother’s favorite, the difference so obvious that even my father proclaimed I was her chosen one.
In truth, although I never could quite figure out how I’d gotten pinned a parent’s favorite or why Lauren bore the brunt of such opposing luck, I assumed my status depended on playing the perfect little girl—and while my heart broke for my sister, I grasped on to my own role. It made me feel safe, or maybe it really just held at bay some sense of terror and helplessness I couldn’t understand. Either way, I grew to believe that the more perfectly I behaved, the more fixed my safety and place in the world would be, and the more firmly my family’s cohesiveness would hold.
Of course, I was wrong.
One day when I was ten, Ms. Wing, the headmistress at Lauren’s all-girls school, called to say they had found pills in my sister’s locker. Upon admitting her urge to take the whole bottle, Lauren had been dispatched to Mount Auburn Hospital’s psychiatric ward. My father was somewhere in Texas that night. My mother claims he declined to take her call.
But I remember a friend of my parents’, Mrs. Birnbaum, coming home from the hospital with my mother. Her hair was light brown streaked with ashy blond, piled high in a seventies sweep, and she bent over my bedside in the dark while my mother did something in the kitchen (Cried? Flipped through her Rolodex to find a lawyer? Checked the fax machine for the latest on the Middle East conflict?). Then she tried to explain that Lauren had gone away. Two weeks later, my father moved out.
My parents broke the news of their separation while Lauren was still in Mount Auburn, calling the rest of us into the library. We sat among the plush leather upholstery and burnished bookcases, the glass-shelved bar and Baccarat tumblers, and they said my father was leaving for a while. Then we went to the country club for an afternoon swim and Sunday barbecue, and I, in particular, tried to smile on cue for the other families.
After a few weeks in the hospital, Lauren moved in with her English teacher, an arrangement my parents funded privately: the upper-middle-class version of foster care without the stigma of state involvement. Years later, Lauren would tell me that her new family had been gentle and kind, although she still spent more than a decade going in and out of psychiatric wards. As if her insides had been crushed beyond repair.
Within a few months of Lauren’s first stay in Mount Auburn, my brother, twelve, went to boarding school and my eldest sister moved in with my father, who had now left for good and for a new, Texan wife. Meanwhile, as if frozen into the separate spheres where our family’s roles had flung us, Lauren and I lost touch for years until she went to college and I left home myself for boarding school at fourteen, and then we began to grow close. That was the year our mother remarried, too. Over time, I grew to value greatly the stability both my stepparents brought to their marriages, helping certain jagged family holes to begin to soften, to hold some hope of evening out. But still, sometimes while I was in college, Lauren would call me to her bedside when her hands itched for another bottle of pills, and I’d sit with her in a darkened room and wonder how you stopped someone from wanting to die.
Eventually, despite her crippling depression and the indelible effects of her childhood pain, as an adult Lauren graduated from psychiatric patient to gifted author and psychologist. She earned her doctorate and became renowned for writing lyrical, sometimes controversial essays about mental illness, science, and medication. She married, built her own family, and published books about her raw struggles, her extensive involvement with pharmacopeia, and even her experience seeing patients in the same psych ward where she once lived.
As for myself, I flirted as an adolescent with my own share of suburban angst, though much more modest in nature. I passed with total unoriginality through the requisite self-starvation and attendant crises of my ilk: boarding-school girls from chaotic families who turned their anger and shame inward. In college, I dwelled with indecent relish on existentialism and death, the maudlin English major’s porn: Camus, Kafka, Levi, Arendt. But then I stopped and made myself a promise that at the time seemed wise. I’d never again become dependent on any family unit. Or anyone at all, for that matter. I bought one of those T-shirts that proclaimed A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE. I swore I’d never become marooned in another messy, unpredictable world—especially one that required me to sacrifice all I’d squelched in my childhood efforts to play perfect, or where I was helpless to hold disaster at bay.
I knew I was lucky to be able to make such a promise to myself. I had the money to pay for years of therapy, the insurance to keep my Prozac prescription filled, and the good fortune to find the combination of counseling and psychopharmacology remarkably effective. I eventually took my tribe’s early turmoil and, like in many a bourgeois tragedy, turned it into a career: my doctoral dissertation on violence and power, my jobs teaching gender studies and literature at universities and in men’s lockup, and the business writing work that guaranteed me total financial independence from my family.
Now in Beijing, as I narrated the broad outlines of this story for Toru, he caught enough to understand, at least, what “kind of screwed up” meant. He held my gaze with unblinking eyes. He didn’t ask me how I felt about any of it. He didn’t say a word. He just took my hand and smiled sadly.
Unexpectedly, Toru’s silence comforted me more than any commentary could. I didn’t need to try to explain perfectly (nor would there be a perfect explanation anyway) the vague but persistent mix of embarrassment, guilt, and fear I’d always felt, mocking me through the fabric of my family’s privilege. Toru simply let me know that he sensed both my grief and my numbness, and that his heart hurt for me, and actually that was enough—in fact, it was the only thing that mattered.
Of course, I didn’t know how to tell him that night in Beijing, as he reached out to take both my hands in his so we could lie nose to nose and palm to palm and not say anything, how much his silent embrace meant to me. But even so, as he fell asleep that night, he never let me go.
• • •
BY THE TIME the Beijing module was winding down, Toru and I had begun to talk about what we would do when the MBA program ended, after the entire Asia tour was over and the following nine months in Boston were, too. He was expected to return to his country and company, and climb the corporate ladder, since his firm had funded graduate school. We didn’t make any concrete plans, but I suspected he might consider moving to Boston, at least eventually. He had enough money saved, he told me one day in passing, to pay his company back for his degree. He’d also lived in Malaysia for three years before starting the MBA program, working as head financial officer for one of his firm’s factories there, and now he was doing graduate work through an American university. He must be open to settling outside of Japan, I reasoned.
My moving outside of Boston, however, was inconceivable. I’d lived my whole life in the city’s vicinity, and it represented the only sen
se of rootedness I’d ever really trusted. For me, safety felt cartographical: the familiar, stable contours of a place I knew by heart.
One night during our last week in Beijing, on a couch in my faculty suite, I tried to explain my attachment to Boston, my dread of leaving it, and my fear about what this might mean for us as lovers from opposing corners of the earth. I told him of how, when I was finishing my Ph.D. program seven years earlier, I had turned down the possibility of a few full-time academic jobs outside of New England after realizing I wasn’t willing to move from the Northeast, even for a tenure-track literature position.
Because Toru was less dramatic and more optimistic about everything, he didn’t understand why I felt so sure I could not live far from Boston—but neither was he especially concerned. “It’s okay,” he said, with a small smile. “We don’t need to worry on this now.”
On one hand, I knew logically it was much too early to analyze our long-term future. On the other, rooting out possible disaster was my thing, my unique forte. Moreover, Toru’s lack of angst about sustaining our relationship frustrated me. Does it mean he’s fallen less in love? Perhaps most surprising, he proved strangely unanxious about my anxiety: very different from the other men I had dated, for whom any display of emotion trumping cool rationality hinted at the unseemly and any question over “where this relationship might be going” blinked like an urgent exit sign.
Now in China with Toru, I stared across the faux-opulent faculty apartment, its heavy green curtains framing each window, the sheer white liners underneath hiding the Beijing grime. Then I did something I had never done before. I considered giving Toru and whatever was happening between us the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his lack of concern over our future—and my own related anxiety—meant he didn’t care as much as I. Or maybe he was just optimistic that we could work out our relationship when the time came to do so, and my tendency to believe the opposite didn’t faze him. At first, this idea of seeing the glass half full careened into my mind as merely a novel thought. I prodded it mentally for a moment, as if jutting my tongue into the fresh gap of a lost tooth.