by Radclyffe
A tuk-tuk separated itself from the pack of traffic. The driver hopped out and bustled Grandmother’s walker and Grandmother herself into the back. But before she drove off, Grandmother squeezed my arm and said what she wanted me to hear. “The song is silent, daughter. Let passion bring it to life.”
Perhaps Chiang Mai wasn’t as insensitive to my being in love as I had thought.
The next tuk-tuk, for Rue and me, dropped us off at the Suan Doi House, hidden in an out-of-the-way soi off Heuy Kau Road on the university side of town. A little slatted bridge crossed from the parking area to the garden for which the hotel was named—gravel walks wending through plants and fountains with koi, a gazebo, and a treetop meeting house—all compacted within the space of an everyday hotel lobby
“Sawadee-kah,” I called into the greenery.
“Sawadee-kah,” a hoarse croak responded, one of the myna birds caged here and there in the garden. Its yellow-ringed eye looked at me, turned ninety degrees and looked again with the candor of a creature not intending to be fooled.
“Sawadee-krap, Ajaan Picara,” Kuhn Witchera, the hotel owner, weied me with a charming unfocused smile that was the Thai ideal of jai yen, cool heart. “Welcome back to my hotel.”
“Kahp-kuhn kah,” I weied in return. “Do you have a room for me and my friend, Rue?”
He disappeared behind the reception desk and reappeared with a heavy key chain with 10 embossed in antique black against the worked tin. We followed him up along the balcony, leaving our shoes on the mat outside room 10.
Once Witchera closed the door behind him, Rue threw herself on the pink-lace canopied bed and patted the sheet next to her.
“How ’bout we take a little nap before we go out?” she asked with a knowing smile.
All my heady excitement crumbled. With awkward self-consciousness, I slid my bottom from the edge of the bed to where her hand lay.
“Here, let me spoon you,” she suggested, and I rolled on my side and pushed the length of my back against her. Her arms folded tightly around me, and she tucked her chin into the hollow of my neck as if we were designed to fit together.
She smelled like Rue—even in the short time we’d been intimate, I came back to her smell as to an old comfort, the warm body smell of sweat and traces of metal, rather than soap or deodorant or toothpaste.
As Rue’s breathing grew more regular and the strength of her grip relaxed, I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Rue is here,” I whispered, ending my conversation with the Chinese grandmother. A month ago I hadn’t known Rue existed, and now an abundance of possibilities beyond anything I could ever have known or imagined opened to me because of her.
But even in the midst of all this abundance, I felt a nagging fear, the part of love no one ever mentions. What had been found could also be lost. I had done nothing to set love in motion and had no experience of how to keep it from slipping away. It was a complete gamble. Everything depended on Rue patting the sheets next to her, on her saying “There’s energy between us,” on her leaning forward and marking my face with her curls.
I’ll take her to Doi Suthep, I bargained with fate as Rue’s soft breath feathered the back of my neck. If this hits a snag, I’ll hightail it to the Karen village and pretend Rue and the train ride never happened.
Doi Suthep has always been a touchstone for me. Familiarity did not stale its charms. I liked everything about the wat, from the way it stood watch on Chiang Mai from the mountaintop to the fireworks blooming in the darkness during Sokran, the water goddess festival. I liked the monks chanting, and seeing the gold of the cheddi against the forest green from my bedroom window.
I even liked the legend of how it came to be. When the Buddha died of food poisoning, he asked that his remains be distributed wherever his teachings were practiced. A bone was sent to the King of the Lanna people in Chiang Mai and when the casket was opened, a miracle happened—two bones where there had been one.
The King vowed to put the second bone on the back of a white elephant and wherever that elephant rested, the King would build a stuppa. The elephant climbed the mountain, breaking through the forest where monkeys and tigers lived and humans seldom ventured, until it reached the site where the wat now stands. There, the elephant turned three times in a circle, a clap of thunder sounding in the cloudless blue sky, and dropped down dead.
So the legend goes.
A red silor, instead of a white elephant, shuttled Rue and me and four other tourists up ten miles of switchbacks to Doi Suthep, to the bottom of the three-hundred-step naga staircase. The water snake, the naga, who so badly wanted to follow the Buddha that he disguised himself as human, undulated up the mountain, green tile scales and multiple heads. At the top of the stairs, plaster archways painted with warrior guardians kept out the demons and allowed the rest of us into the outer, this-worldly ring of the wat. Doi Suthep replicated the universe in its mandala design. Circles and squares inside one another spiraled to the sacred center, which for the wat was the stuppa containing the collarbone of the Buddha and for the universe was Mt. Meru.
“My last girlfriend before Nila—Rachel—told me I was looking for God.” Rue did her version of combing her hair—raking her fingers through the curls, ending in a final upward tug.
“Well, if you can’t find God here, there’s not much hope,” I joked, brushing the line of temple bells to alert the spirits to our presence—or to scare them away, depending on your world view. In this outer ring of the wat, all the faithful’s this-world concerns were addressed: the happy Buddha with fat belly and bag of gold, the gold-leafed statue of the monk who built the road to the wat, the gold-ribboned bodhi tree, a blue-headed Ganesh, a coffeeshop, bikkhanu nuns with shaved heads and white robes renting skirts to cover tourist’s bare arms and legs and selling bundles of lotus buds, yellow candles and joss sticks. Animism, Hinduism, ancestor-worship, consumerism, globalism, and Buddhism all represented.
I exchanged thirty baht for two bundles of lotus buds and joss sticks, earning a smile from the tiny old bikkhanu who’d devoted the end of her life to the Buddha, and led Rue by the hand through the gates and into the inner courtyard.
The cold marble beneath my feet, the smell of incense, the sound of the temple bells hanging from the rafters, each with a prayer written on its clapper to be carried by the wind to the Buddha’s long-lobed ears: every sense was fed by the wat but none as powerfully as the sight of the gold stuppa at the center. The cheddi rose like a giant child’s set of gold-plated blocks, stacked in a pyramid touching the sky.
I dipped the white-and-green lotus bud in the brass cauldron and touched it to my forehead, shoulder, and heart. Then I blessed Rue the same way.
“What’s that line-up all about?” Rue asked, pointing to the corner.
“It’s the monk-blessing where he—or his assistant since he can’t touch women—ties a white string around your wrist to keep all your souls together lest one get lost while traveling and you become estranged from yourself.”
“We’d better do that, don’t you think?” Rue nodded seriously. “No sense in risking losing my soul when I’m already in danger of losing my heart.”
I laughed, knowing I wasn’t allowed to take her words as anything more than a pretty turn of phrase, but my heart skipped.
We got our souls tied together, kneeling in front of the monk as he chanted and sprinkled water on our bowed backs. We wore the strings until, bleached and rotted by sun and sweat and chlorine, they broke. I tucked mine in a box where I kept the poem Rue wrote for me. I don’t know what she did with hers.
“The only thing we haven’t done is to have our fortune told,” I said.
The clatter of bamboo sticks came from across the wat, from a room that was empty save for sticks, a bamboo cup, and a rack on the wall with fortunes printed on newsprint.
We knelt and Rue picked up the cup. She closed her eyes, bowed her head and then peeked at me with one eye. “Okay? Now?”
“Go for it.”
She never told me the question she asked the sticks. I asked one of my own because I needed the sign from Doi Suthep I’d bargained for back in room number 10.
From out of the clump of sticks, one fell as she shook the cup up and down: number eleven. I took a slip of newsprint from number eleven on the cubbyhole rack.
“Number eleven,” I read. “You are the full moon without clouds. Your voice will sing of the moon’s fullness, a song already paid for but not yet sung. Any lawsuit will end in your favor. Avoid all ventures that require new clothes.”
For a few extra baht, the silor took us back down the mountain and dropped us off at the Amari Rincom hotel, where the wealthy people stayed. On the intersection of Huey Kau and Nimmenhamen Road, the Amari was conveniently close to our hotel and the secondhand market where Kuhn Ji cooked some of the best pak boohn in the city. The secondhand market—maybe because of its tattoo-parlor booths and puppies for sale—was a place upwardly mobile Thais—“High-so” in Thai-English slang—forbade their children to hang out. I considered it—and Kuhn Ji’s pak boohn—my insider’s secret.
Kuhn Ji cooked over a butane flame stove he carted in on his motorbike every evening. His wife, Unchalee, took care of everything else—waiting tables, washing dishes, collecting money, and refreshing her signature red lipstick.
When he cooked, Kuhn Ji played to the drama. Flames—ten inches at least—leapt as if through sorcery as he tossed oil into the pan at a vertical angle. Then garlic. Peppers. Morning glory vines. Every ingredient sizzled as it hit the pan, and in less than three minutes, he turned off the gas, poured the pat boohn on a plate of rice Kuhn Unchalee held out to him, and handed me dinner.
“Ajarn Picara! Swadee-krap!” He tipped his invisible hat.
“Wow,” Rue said, eyes wide. “Can he do that again?”
“Oh, yeah,” I bragged with a giddy willingness to make the whole world sparkle in its best dress. “Kuhn Ji can do anything.”
We shared the dinner and a Chang beer Kuhn Unchalee dug from the chipped ice in the cooler. I poured for each of us and, with my finger, traced one of the water beads on the brown bottle to where it pooled into a ring on the red Formica.
“To us.” Rue raised her glass and winked at me.
Tonight was our first real night together, and I was nervous. I couldn’t count on tricks like the magic of Doi Suthep or full moon without clouds or the secondhand market. But I was excited, too. Being with her…tonight, in the canopied bed with its velcroed lace…tonight…our bed…our first real night together.
My mind blanked. We’d run through the basics, the stuff we hadn’t covered in chitchat—she’d sold her business and was giving herself a year to decide on the next part of her life; I taught at a small Midwestern college; she drove a 1979 Volvo, I my grandmother’s red Acclaim; she lived in an urban cabin on Capitol Hill in Seattle, I in a brick salt-box in blue-collar Wisconsin.
Pumped-up music from the other vendors, traffic from Huey Kau Road, and behind all of them, the noise of frogs and insects looking for one another in the dark filled our conversational lull. Rue tried to lock eyes with me as I provoked a second bead to run its jagged course down the bottle.
“Time for bed?” Rue raised her eyebrows and twisted her mouth into a straight line of mock sternness.
I didn’t trust myself to do anything but nod. We pushed back our stools and walked chaste as nuns until we got to the shadows of our own soi, where Rue took my hand. I kissed her with frogs vibrating in the background and the whole world humming with romance.
In our room, despite the heat, I dragged a long nightgown out of my rucksack as Rue showered. All those beers and I was still stone sober. When Rue stepped back into the bedroom, a towel tied around her, drops of water beading on her shoulders and chest and all soft and warm and pink from the shower, I had to force myself to stop staring.
Rue came so close to me I could feel her body’s warmth. She pinched a fold of fabric from my nightgown between her thumb and finger.
“Are you not attracted to me?” she asked in a deep voice. “Or just shy?”
I swallowed. “Shy,” I breathed.
“Ahh,” she sighed, gathering a fistful of my nightgown in her hand and pulling me toward her, “I can take care of that.”
FIRSTS
Hannah Quinn
The first time I met her, it wasn’t like fireworks or thunderbolts or anything, the earth didn’t move, there were no helpful portents to alert me to the momentousness of the occasion. I wanted her, of course I did, and not just because I was going through a frustrating dry spell. There was something about her—a kind of charming, disarming self-awareness; a boyish dashing charm, mischief in her eyes. It was as if you couldn’t tell whether she was just laughing, or laughing at you, but there was nothing cruel about it. Impish, I suppose, but with a maturity that suggested she had a plan, that she knew exactly what she was doing. We flirted that night, exchanged stories of exes, established positions in some unspoken way. I didn’t get her that first time, and of course that made me want her even more.
The first time she contacted me was bewildering. Initially oddly irritating, it beguiled and excited me too. I felt myself being drawn forward into something unknown. Dark water, like I couldn’t see the bottom and I didn’t know if she could either. I wrote back; tried to take control of the exchange, steer myself into the realms of safety, of what I thought I knew—of sex and secrets and sordid affairs. Games I thought I knew the rules of. I knew a bit more about her then, knew she was with someone, and being single, pretended I had the upper hand.
The first time she phoned me I was dazed. It felt like moving forward, like more commitment than I was ready for and at the same time there was something charmingly old-school about it. There was also more potential to slip up, to be seen, to get trapped, than with the well-crafted texts and emails that were my safe zone. She wrong-footed me there, caught me off guard. Made me late too, and made me get on the wrong train. Captivated by her too-soon familiarity, her disregard for the rules of engagement, I was drawn on, drawn in.
The first time she came to see me, the first time she kissed me, was pleasure and pain like I’d never known. She kissed me, she left me, she possessed me. I didn’t know it then, when the door closed, but the dark water was lapping at my knees. That was the first time I fucked myself and thought of her. If I could go back now, taking what I know, that would be the point around which everything revolves, that moment, that instant, that kiss, that kitchen, that hallway, that door. Certainly I didn’t know it then, or at least couldn’t see it, and I wish I had. I continued my smoke-screen dalliances with my single life, drank, talked, smoked, laughed, kissed, fumbled, heady on my own decadence and denial. Denial that it mattered, that she had any bearing on my life, that I even thought about her going home to someone else. Denial of the dark water, of the precipice, of the threat.
The first time she fucked me was filthy and furious and glorious. We’d both snuck out of work and that stolen daytime hour was all the more filthy and sweet for it. We didn’t take our clothes off and I refused to let her in the bedroom. It was all about my boundaries, still pretending I could avoid the dark water, that it hadn’t engulfed me. I carried her with me then though, as I went through my day, scratched and bruised and fucked and elated and astounded. It was physical and necessary and triumphant. It was the appetizer, and it left me wanting; it was as if we both knew it had to be done like that, just there and just then, before we could truly start. And by then, I knew we would, that it was inevitable.
The first time she stayed over, we went to bed. Sure, I tried to play it cool—canceled on her first, then relented; had some drinks, a little bit of weed; talked, reveled in the fact that we had all night, our abundance of stolen time. I couldn’t stand the anticipation, the nerves, the wanting. Just being there, knowing that I was going to be with her, inside her, all over her—that I had her, that the door was locked and neither of us was going anywhere till mornin
g. That was the first time I fucked her, saw her, found her, knew her. Giddy with the sight of her, the smell of her, the taste and feel of her. The silksaltsweetsweat closeness of her. I was intoxicated, addicted, exhilarated but never sated. We didn’t sleep that night.
That first morning I was unrecognizable to myself, I was transformed by her, by the joy, despair, pleasure, pain, filthy sweetness; by the physicality of it all, betrayed by my flesh and hooked. My body dragged me into the world that day, made a convincing pretence of being present, said the right things at the right time to the right people but all the time craving, desperate, thirsty for her, for experience, for touch, for taste. I was reduced, stripped down, naked. I was flesh and need and want with no human finesse. I let my life carry on around me but withdrew, snuck off, allowed myself to wallow, to want, to dream, and to fantasize. She had me. I was broken and there was no going back.
The first days, weeks, months we pushed our bodies to their limits. We tended to our basic needs just to enable ourselves to keep going, to push farther, harder, more, desperately trying to slake our thirst for each other. It was primal, animal, and it was survival. We soon found the answers—how much sleep you actually need to hold down a job, how long you can avoid the world before it pushes back in; how many scratches, bruises and bites you can hide; how far from human you can travel in dedicated, determined pursuit of each other.
The first time we really made love, I died. Looked into her eyes looking into my eyes and fell from orbit. Lost, released, untethered, sobbing, and taken. I admitted it then, that I loved her, and we transformed again, became explorers, discoverers, mapping out paths across each other’s body, learning, knowing, guessing, trying. We charted our lives around each other, points in common, leagues apart. Reveled in the knowing and the not knowing, the discovery of our selves, mirrored in each other. We awoke then, at some unacknowledged point, and rejoined the world a little, finding it changed in our absence, softer and more welcoming. Found that the truths we had long held were merely places to stand and created our own place to stand together.