I agreed to go with her, but while we walked down the aisles of the market, she didn’t say much. I asked about how it was going with the assistant, though what I really wanted to know was why the idea of me being a surrogate had made her so angry. She just shrugged.
Her husband saw us at the market. Lilah introduced us. His eyes flickered with interest, curiosity, fear, mostly interest. He told us he was going to surprise Lilah with an exotic spice. It was his lunch break. I was touched he thought of her at work, something couples only did in the first few years of their relationship. He was more handsome, taller, and broader than I expected. Her deceit had diminished him in my imagination.
She had called me her good friend, yet he’d never met me before. He seemed perched on his toes, filled with excitement. Here was something about his wife that he didn’t know. I imagined it was pleasant for him to learn Lilah would keep something to herself. Something that was merely private. He watched my every blink, smile, gesture toward him and his wife, so I took care to not be overly talkative or reserved. I could tell how much of a relief it was to confront something akin to his worst nightmare and to be reassured of the safety of his marriage. He was right about me, at least about that I wasn’t going to wreck his nest of comfort myself.
The three of us left the market without the exotic spice Lilah’s husband had come for. Out in the open air, he looked more relaxed like he’d gained back his sense of gravity. He touched Lilah frequently and spontaneously, now affectionately belittling her as his “little woman,” then asking me to watch over her since she tended to be passionate, to lose herself in small things. Next to him, her masculine charm was ebbing away, replaced by a practiced humility. He talked about her in the third person as if she wasn’t there. He said women knew better how to be there for each other than he ever could.
I felt flattered even though his attention to me was really directed at Lilah. She cast glances at me, a chagrined smile on her face. “Stop it,” “Don’t tease me,” “Oh, don’t listen to him,” she would say. She was skillful. She knew how to fill the air with words around those who cannot bear silence. For a split second, I was insecure about our friendship, about why she never rushed herself or spoke of mundane things to me. Maybe it was for my sake. I watched her transform and was fascinated.
He insisted the three of us have lunch together.
“Don’t you have to get back to the office?” Lilah asked.
“It’s not so busy right now. Plus, you never let me meet your friends.”
We decided on a Japanese restaurant nearby. I ordered sake and asked them if they wanted to share a bottle.
“I’ll drink with you, but my wife can’t. We’re trying to get pregnant. Alcohol can inhibit your fertility.”
Lilah avoided my gaze so I tried not to look at her. She always drank around me. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time we were together without having a glass or two.
“Oh, you didn’t know,” he said. A little smirk flicked across his face. Perhaps he thought his wife and I weren’t so close after all. “This is our second time trying. It’s not easy for anybody to go through a thing like that. For Lilah especially.” He squeezed her hand. “After our first was stillborn, she didn’t sleep for weeks.”
Just like that he had minimized all of Lilah’s eccentricities. Her infidelities spiraled down to a single grief. Any woman would stray after giving birth to a corpse. I thought that perhaps he was trying to tell her, and maybe me too, that nothing escaped him, that he knew and all was forgiven.
“What about you? Are you seeing anyone? Kids?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Why not? Children are wonderful!”
“Not everybody thinks like you,” Lilah interrupted.
“To raise children, you have to know who you are,” I said.
“Of course you know who you are. You’re you,” he exclaimed. “You’re overthinking it.”
I laughed.
“Please,” Lilah said to her husband and turned to me. “You don’t have to.”
“I wouldn’t know how to raise kids. I couldn’t decide which to give them: the Vietnamese or American experience.” I surprised myself.
“Does it matter? You just choose one and run with it.”
“It would be dishonest.”
The three of us tensed at the sudden appearance of honesty. I cleared my throat, poured the warm liquid down it.
“Maybe, someday.” I said. “For now, I’ve decided I’m going to be a surrogate mother.” I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to see how Lilah would react this time, if she would show the same anger as before. She didn’t meet my eyes, instead exchanged a look with her husband.
“Ah,” Jon said. “I see.”
The day after, Lilah was supposed to come to my apartment, but she hadn’t contacted me. After lunch with Jon, the three of us each had gone our separate ways. I panicked. It had taken so long to find her. I used to think it was impossible to reconstruct the past, but slabs of memories were stacking up around me like bricks. I was a willing prisoner. Was meeting Lilah a coincidence? No, it couldn’t be. I was drawn to her because she was my walking memory, because she radiated an inevitable tragedy, because she made me devoted to her, and because I was going to abandon her.
What I learned over the years—abandonment was love’s destiny.
Maybe Lilah could sense what I wanted from her was impossible. In the beginning, my fascination had tilted all the power to her side. Now, she was used to being admired and listened to with wholesome and genuine interest. Everyone needed someone to love him unconditionally. Marriage was, from the beginning, doomed to fail because its contractual stipulation removed love’s greatest ambition—for people to be bound together only by their love and nothing else. I was not bound to Lilah by law. I was still able to extend my unconditional loyalty. She needed me and I was going to undo her, pull out the pieces, reshuffle them, and put them back the way I’d found her in Montauk, alone, desperate to bare her grief, in need of a friend. I wanted her to stay weak so we could be strong together.
My phone alerted of a new message. It was from Lilah—a picture of her bare feet on the ground covered in snow. She’d painted one toe red so it peeped out like a cherry. She would sometimes send me snapshots of things. I liked the pictures, glimpses of her private world. Slowly, they formed a map of her mind.
Are you home? The text read. Before I could respond, a second one blinked on the screen.
I’m coming over.
Ten minutes later, the bell rang. Lilah came in, apologizing for not contacting me sooner after our unexpected run-in with her husband.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she stood on the floor mat, brushing snow off her hair.
I didn’t answer. I wanted her to feel a little bad.
“I’m sorry about Jon. He isn’t usually like that,” she said.
“He was fine. He was nice,” I said.
“I’ve never seen him like that with my girl friends. I think he was intimidated,” she said. “When he asked me about you, I realized I don’t know any of the facts. Isn’t that strange?”
“Hm,” I said, squirming inside my own skin. “Do you have lots of girl friends?” I tried to find my way out.
“I used to. Of course after my mother died, I became unbearable to be around.”
“Is that why you want to stay with Jon? Your mother hung herself and left you so you think love means staying with someone even if you’re miserable.” I heard myself and it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t Lilah who resembled the little girl but myself. I was bullying my only friend out of a desperate need to see how I affected her. Lilah’s facial muscles contorted painfully like she was trying not to bare her teeth and roar at me.
“You’ve never been married,” she murmured so quietly that my shame grew large.
I stared at her, feeling
both tender and violent. She looked tiny sitting on the floor and hugging her knees, tears dripping down her cheeks. Crying—one of the few things in life that really stops time. Each sound that escaped her throat was razor sharp against my skin. I offered her no word of comfort. Her always seeming on the verge of tears had attracted me from the first moment we spoke. It was there no matter what she was doing, feeling, thinking. Her tragedy was her single source of power. The more she cried, the more I saw how strength hid behind what was so easily mistaken for weakness. It was comfortable for me to enter that sphere, where our identities ceased to be defined by geographical boundaries and became simpler, truer—our trauma.
I sat down next to her and told her I was sorry.
We learned not to want what we could not have. By some accidental or cosmic determinacy, Lilah’s daughter died as soon as she came into the world. In the human brain, such a life-changing event could not stand alone as meaningful or meaningless, but inevitably got rolled in with other autobiographical moments to produce an explanation that was linear, without frays. Lilah told me she didn’t want to try getting pregnant again. She failed to imagine a successful outcome. She concluded briskly that she was not meant to be a mother. Actually, it was a relief, like the universe was giving her a chance to step backward in time. She said her mother shouldn’t have had children, though Lilah didn’t blame her. In her time, women didn’t have so many painful choices to make. A woman was not a picture of possibilities, but a vessel to fulfill humanity’s deepest anxiety—the desire to be survived by children, to let others know we’ve been there.
“There are other ways to live now,” Lilah said.
I nodded, too aware of my own biological impulse to produce a stranger, to be a continuation of history instead of its outlier. “I don’t want children either,” I lied.
We were just two friends, holding hands, convinced that we had conviction. At least, it consoled us to pretend we did.
5
Lilah asked me to come with her to Crater Lake for a work trip. A client had insisted that Lilah see the lake before they could continue making his eyes. He had grown up going there and was convinced that its image was burned into his corneas. The man had offered to pay for Lilah’s ticket to Oregon. She told me that he was a peculiar man, a musical prodigy who had damaged both his eyes in a performance that included four natural elements: water, lightning, metal, and earth. Since it would only take the weekend, I agreed to go.
On the plane, Lilah told the stewardess that we were on our honeymoon.
“What did you do that for?” I said.
“Free booze.” She exaggerated a wink.
She was right. We got one whiskey after another during the long duration of the flight. The stewardess kept glancing our way, her face full of awe. Encouraged, Lilah interlaced her fingers into mine. She whispered, “See? It pays to be two attractive lesbians.” I giggled, happy to be drunk.
At the Portland airport, we rented a car. I did all I could to hold myself together; my chest was like fireworks, threatening to burst with laughter. At first, I’d had some doubts about the trip, thinking that it was easy for two people to get sick of each other if they spent uninterrupted time together. Walking to the car, her hand still not letting go of mine, I realized I hadn’t had so much fun in a long time. We decided that I was more sober, so I got into the driver’s seat.
The drive seemed to calm us both. Lilah preoccupied herself with the radio, changing stations. We listened to pop, country, classic rock, and even Christian songs for a good half-hour. Then Lilah fell asleep. I rolled down the window on my side, let in the fresh snowy air. On both sides of the road, the trees were getting thicker. I imagined that we were inside a looping video with the road, the sky, and trees stretching on forever, religious hymns droning from the car speakers, our destination not a place on the map.
The inn was made up of several adjoining cabins, ornamented with stalactites dripping from the edges of roofs. Our room was simply furnished, a queen bed, a round table with mismatched chairs, a small lamp, and pine cones everywhere, on the windowsill, next to the bathroom sink, in a small basket by the door. On the bed, I picked up a folded handwritten greeting card that said Congratulations! I hope you enjoy your stay with us. Apparently Lilah had also used the honeymoon tactic when she booked the place.
“Should we go for a hike?” I was ready to stretch out my legs after the drive.
Lilah took out her phone, looked at it, and then buried it at the bottom of her suitcase. “I turned my phone off. Not going to talk to Jon for the rest of the trip.”
I sensed that she wanted me to ask her why, so I did.
“I want him to miss me. He should miss me,” she said. She lifted the comforter and slipped under. I went to the window and looked out. It was beautiful here.
“Do you want to walk around? We leave early tomorrow, so maybe we should try to see the lake—” I tried again.
“Do you think I care about seeing some stupid lake?”
“Your client—”
“What kind of a request is that anyway? I seriously don’t get it. If I could, I would paint them neon yellow, something bright and self-absorbed, because that’s what he is. A self-absorbed asshole. You know what? I should do it. He wouldn’t know it himself and I sort of doubt anyone would dare tell him. People don’t talk to the blind.”
“It’s not so strange. I mean, whatever it is he saw here, it probably influenced his music.” I didn’t understand why I was defending someone I’d never met, knowing it would further irritate Lilah.
“Jesus, you’ve been in hippie country for five minutes,” she said.
I reddened. “Fine. Stay here if you want.”
I took a trail map from the information booth and started uphill. After about half a mile, I realized my shoes weren’t suited for this kind of hike. The path was rocky, narrow, and made even more difficult by the frozen snow. My feet were soon cold and wet from stepping in snowmelt puddles. Leaving in a hurry, I also forgot to bring water. Even though I was still frustrated with Lilah, I enjoyed the scenery. From up high, I could see the lake, a thin and colorful sheet of ice on its surface. While I walked, I contemplated what I would say to Lilah later.
The sky got dark quickly and suddenly. I hurried back. I was walking too fast and tripped, puncturing my knee on a sharp rock. Blood, bright and thick, oozed from the wound. I cursed, ripped up a piece of my scarf and wrapped it around my knee. The cabins were visible from the distance so I limped on. As I got closer, I saw billows of smoke and—immediately forgetting about my injury—I ran toward it.
I saw the bonfire before I spotted her amongst a group of people, young and old. The women were attractive, their clothes threadbare, their jewelry tarnished. They seemed to draw strength from their physical body, lithe from movement and fresh air. They were completely different from the many women I was used to seeing in New York City, whose pants and coats were pressed and ironed, jewelry always sparkling. The men looked ruddy, their cheeks flushed from being close to the fire. Lilah’s hair was braided in two pigtails, which made her look like a girl. Her puffy white jacket with white fur rim also stood out amid more earthy tones. My arms felt redundant by my side. I didn’t know if I should pretend not to see her and go straight to our room or head toward the fire. As though she could hear my thoughts, Lilah looked up at the hill where I stood and waved for me to come over.
She introduced me to everyone as if I was late to a party she had thrown. I politely shook a few hands, perfunctorily nodded and smiled. I sat down on the ground. A young woman, blonde, with two nose piercings that somehow looked elegant, sat next to me.
“I’m Carly. Lilah told me you’re on your honeymoon. I’ve always wanted a winter wedding. It’s just so romantic.”
“We’re not really married,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
“Well, the best couples always start as fr
iends,” she said.
I sighed, decided it was no use to convince anyone not to believe whatever tale Lilah had spent the last few hours spinning.
“Do you want to dance?” Carly said.
I shook my head. “To what? There’s no music.” I felt uncomfortable and was planning to make an exit back to my room. “I also cut myself.” I pointed to the makeshift bandage.
“Just a slow dance. It won’t hurt.” She took my hand and we both stood up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lilah watching us.
Carly had soft hands and her features were more handsome than Lilah’s. Even striking. Her hair was thin and brittle, but it suited her small face and angular jawline. As we moved awkwardly away from the group, me trying to guess at the silent tunes she was dancing to, Carly told me about herself. She studied graphic design at University of Portland; she had a Siamese cat; her parents were farmers. For a moment, I let myself be swayed by her brimming youth, her spontaneity of emotions that only those with most of their lives still ahead of them would have.
“I feel like kissing you,” she said “Is that okay?” I looked over my shoulder at Lilah and laughed at myself for getting so used to her honeymoon joke that I felt guilty being with Carly.
“Lilah might be upset,” I said, half jokingly.
“Aren’t you just friends?” She emphasized the last two syllables. It was skillful how women could choose the story that best suited their design. I was sure that if the pursuit was reversed and she hadn’t found me attractive, I would seem all the sudden too married for her taste. My silence didn’t deter her. “Don’t you like me? Do I seem too straight? Not alluring enough? What is it?” she said.
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