The Tao of Humiliation

by Lee Upton

  And that was how Shana found herself dragging about in the lower waters of a man-made lake while Rachel was in one of the resort’s satellite buildings getting her second massage of the day.

  The lake was so low that yards ahead of Shana the water didn’t rise above the shoulders of a man there. Yesterday a group of women Shana and Rachel met over brunch had walked halfway across the lake without getting their hair wet.

  The sun lit the man’s back and Shana thought she was seeing Jack. But Jack was a thicker man, with a thick neck. A thick neck to hold up his large head. The unmistakable intelligence of his forehead. No. The man in the lake was slightly built. He could never be Jack.

  Shana wasn’t wearing her contacts, that was part of the problem. She had frightened herself for no reason. And disappointed herself, for why should her former husband terrify her anymore? She had hoped that after undergoing the false alarm she would learn to be stronger and wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past—all that yearning gone awry, all that passivity in the face of a man who at first wanted her so much. She should be grateful, not frightened. She should grasp her life and stride briskly into the future.

  It sounded like a wave was coming in from an outboard motor. The man Shana mistook for Jack disappeared under the water. Such a relief that he wasn’t Jack—Jack, who had been so endlessly disappointed in her. Before she could defend herself, the vision of Jack’s face rose, and in her imagination he looked more disappointed than ever.

  The man in the lake bobbed to the surface. What was he doing? Tai chi? It looked like an aquatic exercise. Jack would never do such a thing, never submit himself to anything so embarrassing-looking.

  Early in the marriage Shana had wanted to become a person of considerable gravity. She read The Divine Comedy and Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Travels of Marco Polo and Pilgrim’s Progress, Moll Flanders and Candide, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Tragedy of Faust, Pride and Prejudice and The Red and the Black, The Three Musketeers and The Scarlet Letter, Camille and Moby Dick, The Return of the Native and The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Way of All Flesh and Oedipus Rex, The Importance of Being Earnest and The World as Will and Idea.

  When at last she did what she thought Jack secretly wanted and asked him for a separation, he looked deeply into her eyes. They were in the living room, and for once the television wasn’t on to keep them company. At that moment it occurred to Shana that Jack wasn’t sympathetic toward her so much as baffled by her. In her turn she was baffled at least as much as he was. She might have been staring into the eyes of a remarkably intelligent garden mole.

  “I think,” he began, with the note of an adult correcting a child’s diction, “you mean a divorce. It’s been a mistake. Think about it.”

  But how could she think when all along the margins of her thoughts lived soft, wounded flesh? At best even now there might be half-healed, half-thickened patches, yet at the center: living, throbbing tissue.

  After she left her husband, Shana began working as an assistant to the cultural director—arranging events that were second rate: the sons and daughters of the famous, recreating their parents’ careers in an act of rage. Or else she booked ingratiating singers with decades-old hits behind them. All of them were impersonators of one kind or another, whether they billed themselves as such or not. Some of the men flirted with her, but it was hopeless, their flirtations, and they could be put off by a moment’s hesitation.

  Anyway, after Jack, how could she trust anyone? When she remembered the way Jack came into her life she could almost find it in her heart to pity the naïve young woman she had been. They first met in a library while he was skipping out on a pharmaceutical conference to read Golf Digest. Even though he was a stranger, he picked up her hand and kissed it. She felt alarm: the act was artificial and out of place. He must have confused her with the sort of women who expected such gestures. Like the French. He acted like he won her. From whom? She didn’t resist him at all.

  The sandy lake bottom sucked at her feet. Shana made herself lie back in the water. She executed a backstroke.

  “It’s been a mistake,” Jack said. “Think about it.”

  She had assumed he had known himself better. If he wanted her, who was she to prove him wrong? Didn’t his experience count for anything? He was so much older than she was. “You’re not the first for him by a long shot,” her father told her only a week before the wedding. “And I’m afraid you won’t be the last by a long shot. He’s been married three times. He ought to grow up.” She cried that night, wishing she had more memories of her mother, who had died when Shana was five. Everyone who had known Shana’s mother said she was an effusive, vibrant woman. At least her mother would have wished her happiness. “You never inherited your mother’s good looks,” her father let Shana know when she was thirteen. He hadn’t spoken disapprovingly.

  The man in the water was swimming away from Shana. There was nothing bulky about his shoulders, nothing about him like Jack at all.

  For one thing, Jack couldn’t swim and never thought of his inability as a failing. He liked dry land and a continual green expanse under bright sun. She never knew how he kept his position in pharmaceuticals, what with all the time he made for golf. Besides, he hated pharmaceuticals. The way he talked you would think drugs were manufactured to create disabilities. Couldn’t he quit? she asked. Couldn’t he try to change things? He told her she was incapable of understanding his position.

  The man in the lake swam toward her. A stream of sunlight lit up his left shoulder before he dove under the water.

  Were she and the man alone? Shana looked behind her. Far down the beach, a smudgy group—a family maybe?—were folding up for the afternoon.

  When she was eleven Shana’s cousins invited her to their cottage on a lake in Michigan. You probably can’t even swim, her oldest cousin told her. The cousin was a pretty girl who disdained Shana. Immediately, Shana pretended she knew how to swim, even climbing the diving board. All she had to do was drop to avoid the contempt of her cousin. After Shana entered the water she instantly bounded upward as if drawn to the surface through a straw. For the rest of the afternoon she managed to keep afloat, although her youngest cousin told Shana that her breathing was so scary and loud that she sounded like she was dying.

  A more recent memory slid open, and again Shana heard Jack say, “It’s been a mistake. Think about it,” and she remembered too well what happened next. Shana went to the kitchen and came back into the living room with a glass of iced tea. She threw the tea into Jack’s face, and he struck her across the jaw. Wake up, wake up, wake up, she told herself at that moment. Jack was almost smiling as if he had made a discovery. She was convinced he discovered that he liked her more after he struck her.

  The man in the lake did a few neck rolls and catapulted. Would he be bothered that Shana was letting herself float closer to him, and that they were alone together?

  The slightest movement she made in the water had repercussions, as if she and the man were in a big bag of jellies. There could be nothing second-rate or shoddy about a man so free with himself and so gentle, yes. He wouldn’t hurt her, and she must stop her memories from harming her. She would not be caught forever in her memories. She was a healthy young woman; the scare she had undergone told her that she was all right, after all. Her body had only made a mistake in giving off the wrong signal.

  A ripple of water and then another struck her. With each paddling movement, the sight of the man ahead of her grew clearer, almost magnified. His dark bangs were cut straight across his forehead. His eyes were dark.

  And then she realized: he couldn’t be more than fifteen years old.

  She made her feet find the sandy bottom of the lake.

  The boy splashily advanced after her.

  “Will you be out here tomorrow?” he asked. He touched her shoulder lightly, as if playing tag. His eyelashes were black and thick as a girl’s. He might be younger than fifteen.

  “My mom and me are stay
ing here for two whole weeks. There’s no other kids around. Not my age. Do you have kids? Not little kids. Somebody my age.”

  He looked into her eyes as if he expected to find boys there.

  He began telling her about his mother and his aunt and how they took him out of summer school and said the experience would be educational. They were going to fit Sea World into the trip. While he spoke, Shana was thinking with shame of how she had made her way toward him through the water so alert to her own potential happiness, so wistful, so ready for life to change in an instant. She’d advanced upon him really. Like a crazed cow moose. How Jack hated her whimsical side.

  “What were you doing in the water?” she asked the boy.

  “Nothing,” he said. He was a good two heads taller than she was.

  “But you were doing something,” she said. She heard her tone—censorious, as if she knew infinitely more than the boy knew about his own capacities and held him accountable for his ignorance.

  The boy’s hands flapped to his chest. And then—it was almost funny—he pounded past her, sending spumes of water into the air.

  She was sickened by herself. In her own eyes she had taken pleasure in making the boy ashamed for what came naturally to him. Of course she knew what the boy was doing. He was playing.

  In the late afternoon Shana and Rachel sat in silence watching the window of their hotel suite stream with rain. None of the scheduled sessions in the main hall or satellite buildings interested them. Rachel blamed their lassitude on what she called “accumulated fatigue” from the plane trip and “that miserable married couple.” Shana believed her own lassitude had something to do with mistaking a child for a man.

  At first they didn’t hear the knock. Later Shana said that it was more like a scratching anyway, as if someone took a small wire brush to the door. Shana wasn’t even sure she would find anyone when she opened the door.

  “We were hoping you might be in the mood for a drink,” Oliver said. Standing before them, the man looked smaller than he had earlier in the day when Shana and Rachel met him and his wife and a party of women who identified themselves as “agents of Social Services” at the breakfast buffet. Shana had noticed Oliver’s astonishing smile first. It seemed to come from some source beyond him, running into his eyes in flashes. She didn’t expect to see him again, and certainly didn’t anticipate that he would find out her suite number. “Connie’s in the room with a bucket of ice,” he said.

  “And gin?” Rachel asked from behind Shana.

  “It’s almost too cold for a drink, isn’t it?” Shana asked tentatively. She was wrapped in a sweater and hugging herself.

  “You must have the air conditioning up too high,” Oliver said with a whistle. “Connie can make you some hot coffee. We’ll even make you some hot Irish coffee. We don’t mean to be a nuisance, but this rain calls for an extreme response.”

  To Shana’s surprise, Rachel was the first to give in. “We could stand getting out of our room,” she said.

  Oliver and Connie’s suite must have been the source for the brochure photograph. There were the same blue and yellow interlocking circles on the decor as in Shana and Rachel’s room, but the circles were a good three times larger. A kitchenette counter doubled as a bar, behind which stood a full-sized refrigerator.

  Oliver fumbled in the refrigerator’s depths. Shana, Rachel, and Connie sat on high stools.

  As he sliced a lemon Oliver said, “Now tell me, old girl, my dear Rachel—”

  Rachel said, “Oliver—may I call you Oliver?—you’re making me feel like a horse.”

  “I’m not capable of it. Now, Shana, however, if you were to tell me that you made me feel like a horse I would take it as a compliment. Wouldn’t I, Connie?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Connie said. “It’s the gin. Everyone knows it’s a hallucinogen.” She looked almost comically nautical, like a diminutive sailor, in her cream-colored blouse with blue piping.

  “Is it really?” Shana asked. “I thought it’s more like an antidepressant.”

  “No, no, no,” Oliver said. “It starts quarrels that last a lifetime or more. Quarrels that are based on fantasy.”

  “It ignites grievances,” Connie said. “Things you didn’t know could bother you start bothering you.”

  “Especially things that shouldn’t bother you,” Oliver added.

  “And what is it that you’re drinking?” Shana asked, turning to Connie. Connie must have been drinking before Shana and Rachel came to the room and now her tall glass was almost empty.

  “Juice of the Ram.”

  “No,” Shana gasped, and regretted her gasp. People often wanted to shock her.

  “It sounds—what—agricultural?” Connie said.

  “At least informed by the rites of animal husbandry,” Oliver answered with a clap of laughter. “Don’t worry. She’s getting me back for earlier calling a concoction I made Fornicating on the Ash Heap. How about this: What if I said that this resort—designed for youth—for maintaining and preserving youth and displaying youth—prematurely ages people?”

  “I’d say that you might be right,” Rachel said. Shana suspected her friend had been holding her tongue. “But why are you here?” Rachel asked. She was spinning slowly on her stool, catching images: the giant semicircular couch, a partially opened door to a bedroom where the bedspread was loaded with yellow and blue circles.

  “I suppose you think that I ought to blather about the reckless consumption that this place mirrors in some strata of our culture,” Oliver said, as if he couldn’t bother to answer Rachel’s question. “Consumption. Reckless, reckless consumption—.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it till now,” Connie broke in. “But consumption is the archaic term for tuberculosis, isn’t it?”

  “Either way it’s a wasting disease,” Oliver answered her.

  No giant waterslides or floating bars were ranged at the side of the pool nearest Shana and Rachel’s suite. No Hawaiian lava rocks. The pool nearly qualified as austere—and Shana liked that. She also liked that the lake itself was near, just across one pathway. She could hear the water lapping, and she could try to forgive herself for freaking out that poor boy. She held out the hope that she wouldn’t run into him again, although she imagined that it would never occur to him that the mistake was all her own. As if she were channeling Jack and preying on a much younger person. It had been instructive too.

  By four o’clock Shana imagined that more people would return to the pool, but except for one small child with an exhausted and whining mother in tow, Shana was alone. The child poked about in the water while her dazed mother watched. Finally, even the child couldn’t resist her mother’s urging that they go to the lounge for lemonades.

  Shana rose from the pool to read her magazine in the shade of shrubs and potted trees. Her arms and legs felt limp, as if the water had somehow gotten under her skin, weakening her.

  She woke to darkness and laughter. She swung her legs from the chaise lounge and scooted forward. Nets of shadow and light reflected from the lit torches.

  She was surprised to see Oliver in the pool. There was so much boiling in the water around him—splashing and laughter. Women were surrounding him but not, apparently, paying attention to him.

  “You bet!” Oliver said too loudly, and Shana winced for him. An older, needy man, incautious enough to reveal himself. There was more commotion in the water. The women were a rowdy bunch, and soon Oliver pulled himself out of the pool. His limbs were short and nearly hairless. He settled onto a low-backed chair.

  One after another, the women rose from the pool, shaking themselves and grabbing towels. The last woman out of the water—a thick blonde with black roots whom Shana had seen the first morning at the brunch—pushed a button at the edge of the pool to turn on the spa while the other women were on their way toward the glass doors that led to the showers. Oliver was motionless, unacknowledged in his chair, his head tipped back. And then the blonde woman wit
h dark roots walked up to Oliver, straddled his chair, and lowered herself over him.

  How could Shana leave without being seen? She would have to back out and walk on the path beside the lake, as if she were the one who should be embarrassed.

  The luau was set up on the grounds of the not-quite-completed Health Top Inn. A cherry picker partially blocked the inn’s front façade, but at the far rear, away from the traffic cones, an ornamental bridge spanned a mock lagoon. Tables were arranged on the flagstones and a stage was erected past the umbrella chairs and potted palms. The boy from the lake was nowhere in evidence.

  “Is this your first luau?” Oliver asked. He put his hand on Shana’s shoulder. She flinched.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Shana apologized in turn. “My nerves,” she said.

  His hand didn’t move. From opposite her, Shana could feel Rachel’s disapproval.

  “I suppose you’ve had your share of luaus,” Oliver said to Rachel.

  “No, it’s actually only my second one ever. I’ve been looking for the luau pig. You wouldn’t know his whereabouts?” Her tone was so withering that Shana froze.

  Oliver took his hand from Shana’s shoulder, excused himself, and headed toward Connie, seated several tables away.

  Shana could feel his hand on her shoulder still. Did Oliver know she had seen him at the pool last night? But what was she supposed to do? Shout out the substance of last night to Connie? And what had she witnessed? Maybe her eyes were fooling her. For all she knew, Oliver dumped the woman on the pool mat after she straddled him.

  “Shana and Rachel must think we’re following them,” Connie said, when the women unavoidably—a small crowd was forming behind them in the buffet line and pressing Shana and Rachel forward—wound up near Connie and Oliver’s table. “I’m not stalking you,” Connie went on. “But apparently Oliver is. Of course he stalks everybody, so none of us can flatter ourselves.”