“You’re very alluring,” I assured her. “I’m just not in the position.”
“Are you and Lilah really married?”
“No. I was trying to tell you earlier. She has a husband, actually —”
“And you’re still into her. It’s so unfair.”
“I guess a kiss doesn’t hurt.” I closed my eyes, but before I could lean forward, I felt a hand on my arm tilting me away. It was Lilah.
“I’m tired. Let’s go to bed,” Lilah said and dragged me toward the cabin. Carly followed behind us.
In the room, Carly took off her shoes and spread out on the bed. Lilah washed her face at the sink. When she came out, she looked refreshed. It seemed she had reapplied her eye makeup.
“Carly, isn’t it your bedtime? Your parents might be looking for you,” Lilah said.
“I’m twenty-two,” Carly said earnestly.
“You sure seem young,” Lilah said. “If you’ve forgotten, this is our honeymoon and I would like to consummate our marriage.” I wasn’t sure if she was mocking me, Carly, or the joke.
“She told me you two aren’t really married. You’re just an old woman having a midlife crisis,” Carly said.
“Oh my god, get out. Nobody wants you here,” Lilah sneered.
I tried to interject, “It was nice meeting you, Carly. But it’s time—” but no one paid attention to me. They were locked in a private battle.
“Why don’t you get your own room? You’re the third wheel here,” she said to Lilah. Then Carly turned to me, “Come with me.” Everything escalated after that. In a swift motion, Lilah yanked Carly from the bed with surprising force. When her arm slipped from Lilah’s grip, she grabbed her long, blonde hair, pulled and pushed her out the door. On the other side of the door, Carly yelled a few obscenities. Then I heard her stalk away.
“What a maniac. I’m sorry. I should have looked after you. I was having too much fun,” Lilah said. Her back was to me.
“She’s really pretty though, isn’t she?” I said. In the bathroom, I took off my jeans, stood in the bathtub and let water run over my knee. Lilah came in to keep me company.
“Jesus. That looks bad. I really can’t leave you alone, can I?”
I limped to bed afterward, a little exaggeratedly. I couldn’t help but to find Lilah’s attention flattering. In a way, we were both acting. She must have enjoyed her role as the gentle and caring partner too, fluffing my pillow before I lay down, insisting that I should take off my shirt so I could be comfortable. She removed her own shirt, though keeping on her bra, before scooting up against my back.
“I have a cut on my leg. I’m not sick, Lilah,” I said, smiling.
“Shush. I don’t want my wifey to get a cold too,” she said. “What will we do then, huh? What will we do?”
I closed my eyes. I’d always known what-if games were dangerous. Lilah too had gotten caught in its lattice. Fortunately for us, our honeymoon would end the next day.
6
One night, two months after our trip, I came home from work and heard the sound of water sloshing about in the bathtub. The kitchen counter was covered in grocery bags. I suspected Lilah had probably used the emergency key I put under my neighbor’s potted plant in the hall. I opened the door to the bathroom and was wrapped in a wet fog. Lilah’s black hair laid in swirls on her breasts around two erect, crimson nipples.
She was pinching them when I came in. “I don’t get to keep the baby, but I got these mommy nipples. How are they so dark? They’ve never been nursed on. You should have seen me when I was younger,” she said.
“What are the groceries for? Is there something I don’t know?” I wiped a circle on the mirror.
“Jon. He’s coming over for dinner at eight. I told him you asked us to.”
“That’s soon and you’re going to step out of my bathtub to greet your husband. What ideas are you trying to give him, Lilah?” I said.
“I don’t want to keep any more secrets from my husband,” she said.
“What about the assistant?” I said. At this point he felt more like an invention than a real person. I’d only seen him once in Montauk, his narrow and birdlike shoulders, a long back, a small waist. According to Lilah, they were still seeing each other occasionally. An affair, by definition, was full-fledged; otherwise it wouldn’t be worth the effort. I didn’t believe her. She’d been here with me three or four nights out of the week until past midnight. Maybe when she left, she’d go see the assistant, but it didn’t seem likely.
“You know that’s not what I’m hiding.” She stood up inside the tub. She made no effort to get the soap off her body. Tiny soap bubbles encircled her belly button. “Come here.”
I didn’t move, instead she stepped out of the bathtub to stand behind me. We’d never been this close before. The heat from the bath made it difficult for me to breathe. I turned on the cold tap at the sink and washed my face. I pretended I didn’t hear her, which was partly true since my heart was beating so loudly I felt it inside my ears. With one hand, she closed the toilet lid, and with the other she wiggled inside my pants and grabbed my buttocks. She caressed them for a long time, breathing on my neck heavily as if overcome by her own desire, as if she was indifferent to the knowledge that I wanted her too. I felt her fingers slicing up and down my crevice, spreading the slime from my front to back. I steadied myself on the sink.
My body felt ghostly, like it didn’t belong to me, and at the same time I felt more ownership than ever of the hair on my skin, the nails on my toes, the saliva in my mouth. I turned around. Welcomed by her open mouth, I took her tongue and sucked on it hungrily. I was excited, in a hurry to explore the rest of her, but also I didn’t want to stop kissing her. She sensed my hesitance and made a decision for us both. She sat me down on the toilet lid and knelt down to unlace my shoes, pull my pants down to my ankles. I helped her, using one foot to push the other side of the pant leg off me. I hesitated again. I worried about Jon walking in on us. I worried he would think we’d been deceiving him all this time. It wasn’t true, was it? Why wasn’t she afraid? I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t. I was more scared that this, this moment wouldn’t happen again. I felt myself entirely at her disposal. I felt lucky.
With her fingers, she traced the scar that ran from my knee to above my foot, her lips parted, full of questions. Not now. I shook from my mind the image of red and yellow flames twisting like ribbons around the little girl. Let me have this, I begged.
When Lilah’s lips enclosed me, her air of expertise fell away. I realized that she’d never been with another woman before either. She tasted me slowly, confused, hurt, satisfied by what she found there. She licked me shyly at first and then angrily. She moaned as if it were she who was being pleasured. She pushed her tongue as far inside me as she could, greedy to touch every bit of me. Just when I thought I wasn’t going to come from mere childish exploration, I shuddered and held her head against me. I wanted to suffocate her, drown her in my pleasure. The more my body writhed against my control, the more pleased she seemed. She flicked her tongue speedily, informed by the spasms and shivers on my body. I came again and again.
She guided me to bed. I watched as she undid each button on my shirt. She took off my shirt so that I was fully naked. I searched her eyes for some hint, wanting to know, not to know.
“Will you have my baby? Ours?” she said.
I fell asleep while Lilah cooked. When I woke, I was suddenly conscious of my nakedness. I looked through my closet for pajamas, changed my mind, and put on a pair of burgundy, lacy panties instead. Only an hour or two ago, Lilah had taken off my clothes piece by piece and I didn’t think about whether or not she would find me attractive. Her actions in themselves had my full attention. Now I was worried. My right breast seemed outrageously smaller than my left. I felt lopsided. I cupped both breasts in my hands. They were soft, but too small. I stood in fron
t of the mirror and inspected myself. On my right thigh was a mole from which a little black hair grew. I pulled on the hair a little, decided to leave it alone for now. I turned my back to the mirror to look at my butt. I’d had stretch marks there for as long as I remembered. A man once called me a zebra because of how evenly spaced each line was. I thought that was a nice thing to be so I started to think of my own butt as the behind of a zebra.
“How do you like your steak?” Lilah called from the kitchen.
“Blue,” I answered.
I imagined her handling thick, red meat. How much I admired her. We were good friends. I decided to wear a thin, pink cotton shirt without a bra and form-fitting pants. My nipples were lighter colored than Lilah’s. I rubbed them gently so they would show through the shirt.
Lilah had made a beautiful dinner for us. She told me Jon was held at work so maybe we could talk, just us two.
“It’s better this way,” she said. “Can you do it?”
She was referring to the question she’d asked me earlier. I didn’t want to talk about it so soon. My head ached. I bit into the bloody meat and drank the wine. Everything was delicious. I had to remind myself not to eat too quickly, to savor it.
“I just think you’re the right person. I want a child with your smile and Jon’s eyes.”
“Jon. He’s important to you.” I phrased it like a statement, but it really was a question. I had to be careful not to push her away. “Why my smile? What about yours?”
“We’ve tried so many times. I’m exhausted,” she said. “I can’t go through another failed pregnancy. I don’t think my body wants children. It’s what nature intended. I told you about my mother—somebody should have told her not to have kids if she were just going to—I’m not dying to pass on my genes. It’s better that the child comes from two people I care most about. How amazing would that be? ”
“Suicide isn’t genetic—”
She ignored my comment. “But you—you’re still young. You were going to be a surrogate for strangers anyway. Why not do it for me?” She cut her steak into little cubes. “Have more of mine. I’ve made too much food.” She pushed some onto my plate.
While listening to Lilah talk, I cleaned up my plate. If I said no to her, nothing would ever taste so good again. I had no desire to have a family, not in the traditional sense. I had every intention to please Lilah. I couldn’t afford to lose her. Yet I hated her for asking.
“Obviously Jon and I would compensate you . . . ” she said.
“Is this what it’s all about? Earlier? And now?” I pointed to the food, to its staged perfection.
She said she was thirty-eight years old. Realistically, she didn’t have a lot of time left to try again. Jon wanted a family and their relationship might not survive without children. I laughed at that. I did not overestimate her. She was a woman who wasn’t afraid to use her power.
“I didn’t think you were one of those women. You know, the sort who uses kids to keep their marriage,” I said.
“You think it’s pathetic. Just say it.”
“It’s fucking pathetic.”
“What would you do in my place?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“You see, unlike you, I’m willing to make mistakes. That’s how life is. You can’t blame everything on the waves because you got washed up on a shore. You still have some choices.”
“Choices!” I shouted and threw my plate in the sink. It broke in three pieces. “If it were up to me, you would leave that hopeless marriage.”
“It’s not hopeless. Not anymore. Because I have you. Help us.”
I wanted to fall asleep, but I found myself walking outside until the streets became unfamiliar, engulfed in a new darkness. I left Lilah with the broken plate, the aftermath of the dinner she had cooked for us, and an empty bottle of wine. I realized now she’d drunk little and not eaten much. She wasn’t the one who was caressed, touched, pleasured, and I had felt justified to demean her all the same because she’d asked me to carry her child, something I might have felt honored by had the circumstances been different.
It humiliated me that I’d lost my temper. Words fell from my tongue as if down a flight of stairs; bruised, foolish, nonsensical. My face burned with shame, my hands ice-cold. Lilah had stared at me as if hearing me for the first time: someone without borders, someone who had been hiding behind a borrowed language.
What I really wanted was to yell a series of insults carefully chosen and at the same time spontaneous groups of words designed to puncture, to gouge a wound. But I was not allowed to get angry in English. For as long as I had lived in the United States, I had not shown myself to be anything but quiet. Subtle. Controlled. When I tried to yell in my mother tongue, my vocabulary fell short. Instead, I screamed incoherently as if possessed, sharp sounds that belonged to neither language. I was furious at her for peeling me away, layer by layer, as if pulling a shroud off a corpse. We had faced each other in the narrow kitchen and dining area, me as my seven-year-old self, she as a woman stunted by the power she’d had all along, the same power she used to make herself a victim. Perhaps she didn’t know she was doing it, casting that reckless, girlish spell on everything she touched.
When I got home, Lilah had already left. I walked to the bathroom. The fog had evaporated, but the nutty scent of the coconut shampoo she’d used was still there. On the tiled walls were a few long strands of hair. I thought they looked like Lilah’s, darker and thicker than my own gossamer, but I wasn’t sure. I pulled at the end of one strand and spun it around my forefinger. My mother’s hair, coarse and abundant, was the only other woman’s hair I’d pulled off a bathroom wall. As a child, they had been something for me to play with while I showered. Inside the bathtub was also where I’d cried, knowing that the sound of pouring water would drown me out, though I didn’t do that so often. After coming to New York, I hadn’t been able to produce a tear. In the mirror, my nose and eyes were red, but dry. I smeared water and soap on the mirror, squinted my eyes. If I tried hard, I could blur my face and see Mother in my own reflection. “What do I do? What should I do?” I asked her. My life had nothing for me to boast about, nothing I could tell my mother if we ever spoke again, and yet I still held on to this one fact—my inability to metamorphose my feelings into tears, into a navigable sorrow—as if it were something to be proud of.
I had fallen asleep with Lilah’s hair twisted to a nest around my finger. When I woke, most of it had unraveled, lying lifelessly on my chest. The mattress was soaked as though somebody had dumped a gallon of water on it. For a few minutes, I wasn’t sure where I was. Then comprehension set in and I gasped, horrified at what I’d done. Was I seven again or was I an adult woman who had just pissed the bed for no good reason? I curled in a ball and laughed into my knees. I couldn’t stop from shaking, my own laughter like an ice cube lodged in my throat. Then, a hand touched my shoulder, “Morning.” I turned my head, shocked to realize I wasn’t alone. Lilah. She’d come back last night. I couldn’t look at her; couldn’t speak. Her clothes were damp from my urine. She rolled towards me, toward the puddle beneath my body. As she had once done at Crater Lake, she put her arms around my waist and held me tightly against her.
“There’s nothing dirty about piss,” she said.
We cramped our bodies in the tiny bathtub. Lilah squirted half a bottle of shampoo in the water, nearly drowning us in soap bubbles. How hard it was to really look into someone’s eyes without being embarrassed by anything, yet as Lilah stared into mine, I held her gaze, letting her look at me, letting myself be seen without anywhere to hide. Then she asked me the same question I’d asked her when we met in Montauk, the question I would have dreaded had it been any other time.
“Who are you?” she said.
I began with my bedroom wall, tracing in my mind the outline of my mother’s country, one that didn’t exist in any history book or
pictured on any map. I told Lilah of the Vietnam I knew, lost to me forever no matter how many times I might try to return in the future. I talked to her until the water in the tub grew cold; the bubbles dissolved, opened up, and our bodies appeared, naked and submerged. Our skin the same, wrinkled and gray.
It was Saturday; the sun had just come up. I had the morning to myself and decided to go for a walk in the park. Dogwood branches crisscrossed above my path, covering it in a dewy darkness. Needles of sunlight penetrated the thicket, giving me the sensation that I was visible and not alone. I’d walked for nearly a mile when I saw him. He was on a bench, pulling pieces of what looked like a leftover sandwich from a brown bag, crumbling and tossing them at his feet. A few sparrows, a couple of starlings and doves, circled him. Given our situation, he was supposed to be my rival, but it was hard for me to summon such feelings watching him feed the birds.
“Hey, Jon,” I said.
Before answering me, he tossed the brown bag into a trash bin. The birds scattered. “Hey,” he said.
Suddenly I’d the urge to tell him about what had happened with Lilah. I wanted to hear someone say that it was cold of her to combine adultery with a favor. But what was I going to say—that I wanted my first kiss with Lilah to be pure and not ridden with consequences—I could not. She was never mine to begin with.
I sat down next to him. He took a joint from his shirt pocket, lit it, and handed it to me. I inhaled and leaned back on the bench, cold morning dew tingling my arms.
“Sorry I couldn’t come to dinner the other night,” he said.
“It’s alright.”
If I Had Two Lives Page 14