by Jill Malone
“It’s a story of hope.”
“It’s a story about dead rabbits.”
“It’s a story about a boy who saves a rabbit.”
“No way, that rabbit doesn’t live.”
“He’s alive at the end of the story.”
“You don’t know that. The kid might have been cradling a corpse home. You know how hard it is for humans to feed bunnies? The little dropper and everything.”
“You’re outside the context of the story. In the story, the boy returns home with the last living rabbit.”
“You poor sucker. You can’t really believe that rabbit lives. It was twitching strangely, for Christ sake.”
“You can’t read into every story.”
“I’m not reading into the story. ‘Twitching strangely’ was your line, remember?”
“I’m saying that stories aren’t necessarily art. That story is about hope and rescue. The last rabbit lives according to the story.”
“According to you it lives. The story isn’t specific.”
“About that single event. It’s specific about the rest of the deaths.”
“Yeah.”
“So you see my point.”
We pulled into the parking lot at the Pali Lookout, where three tour buses had already unloaded their groups. Grey groaned. Japanese couples were climbing all over the Lookout, taking photos of each other perched above the sprawling valley below this vantage from the Koolau Mountain Range.
“Is it true the winds here can support a human body—keep you from falling from the ledge?”
“Emily never told you that story?”
We locked the car, and skirted past the throng around the altar, through the curved courtyard to the wall on the right by the iron gates. The sheer cliff rushed to the valley below, which was covered in dense greenery. Kamehameha and his soldiers had pushed a rival army from this cliff, thereby securing victory in that particular war. Such a tumble against sharp rock—or worse, a plunge straight to the ground 70 meters below—raised the battle to mythic proportions.
“What story?”
“We were dating then and sometimes a bunch of us would come up here to make out, yeah? So this one night we come and Emily’s amped up—hopping out of her skin. We’re just hanging out in the dark, trying to freak each other out, and she runs to the ledge and leans toward the valley—fucking just hovers there like a kite—the wind rushes up her shirt and kicks her hair into a cyclone. It was a mad scene; we were all screaming and running to pull her down. I thought for a second, that second I was rushing her—so far past panic, adrenaline screamed through my body—I thought she’d vanish before I could grab her; I had this vision of her body shooting straight off the ledge into the sky like an egret. Wigged everybody out; we stopped coming here.”
I looked to the valley below with a new fear now. What if that rabbit didn’t live?
Emily had taken me to Tantalus one summer afternoon before we’d started sleeping together. The road up Tantalus wound in sickening curves and sharp bends that stretched the talent of many drivers (and cyclists) and the will of many vehicles. Emily pulled to the side of the road at one bend and told me about Driver’s Ed her sophomore year in high school.
She’d been paired with this geeky haole boy who happened to be the bane of the instructor’s existence. For their final training exercise, Emily drove the first half of Tantalus and then switched with the geek. When he’d closed the door and readjusted the mirrors, he asked the instructor which pedal was the clutch and which was the brake. The instructor lost his patience, reminded the geek that the car was an automatic, and threatened that another such question would mean failure of Driver’s Ed. The geek drove straight into the rock wall after rounding his first curve. Emily said all she remembered was screaming and the orange fingerlike petals of a trumpet vine. Exhilarated from the crash, she’d started laughing, even when she saw the geek’s head bleeding so profusely blood poured down his shirt.
We’d climbed from the car so she could show me the mark on the rock that the car had left all those years before. It all seemed like bullshit to me; even the orange trumpet vine that grew just to the left of the impact mark felt staged in its brilliance. When we switched places so I could drive home, I took the bends as fast as her Miata would curl.
XXIV.
In Venice, Nick and I might have been flawless forever and lived in the deteriorating city of waterways, sending postcards to the jealous bastards too cowardly to live in Europe, who knew gondolas only as romantic clichés from obscure foreign films. We’d scoured the city each day—the cathedrals and exhibits, the tiny bistros and tenements, the gaudy shops—and returned to the same café each evening for olive bread and cheap red wine. The bread round and brown and warm in our mouths like forgetfulness, we were glamorous ex-patriots deconstructing the Salvador Dali exhibit we’d spent two days devouring. I thought of Reflections of Narcissus—the whole landscape melting and Narcissus forming two creatures from two perspectives—and wasn’t it like that for us? The shape of the known world distorted in the landscape beyond us while we stood unharmed at the epicenter, radiating a bold self-reflexive light. Only later would I understand this light was happiness.
What if I had lived like that for twenty years? Forty years? What if I had finally outrun my unfathomable capacity for rage, dissatisfied girlfriends, and thwarted sexual relationships? What if we’d learned Italian, grown old eating olive bread, vanished from our lives? Could that happiness have been sustained?
In our hotel room, Nick stood on the threshold to the balcony and stared at the edge of city. He wore boxer shorts and looked terribly lean—shockingly lean—with his arm raised, hand resting on the top of his head, smoking Marlboro Reds. For the first time, he’d noticed my insomnia. Determined to stay up with me each night, he suffered in a way that I had outgrown, in an effort to—I wasn’t sure why—to ease my loneliness? It was fruitless, of course: to go without sleep for a week is an irritant; to go without for years, a lifestyle. But the gesture moved me. I thought then, watching him on the balcony that night, struggling to keep pace with my sleeplessness that I could forgive him for anything.
At the end of the second week, he put me on the train to Rome and kissed me in the tender, tongueless style of old movies. I kept waiting for the fade to black as my train pulled away: girl looks wistfully out window; sound of laughter from the back of the compartment; hum of train; girl smiles; dissolve.
I didn’t smile, though. Something ached in me for the whole of the train ride. Though I tried to read, I kept staring instead at the random world across the window, unable even to organize my mind into a single stream. Maybe I already sensed that dissolve had more than a single context.
When we left that skin in Venice and came back to our jobs, my ex, his mother, the titles on our bookshelves, meat jhun with kim chee, everything ordinary and familiar, did we forfeit that other self, that other life? That fall, I couldn’t come when we had sex. The obvious solution was to try harder, more frequently, and we worked away: Nick shifting my body around like a sack of grain, purring, coaxing, teasing until the inevitable moment where he lay in exhausted fulfillment and I felt shredded. We fucked in his office, his Impala, posh hotels, the beach; me on top, him behind, sprawled on tables, standing in the shower. We role-played; we talked dirty. We became tired porn stars striving for some semblance of realism, anything to make it feel less staged and predictable. Oh right, here’s the moment where she doesn’t have an orgasm. And here’s that moment again—failure on instant replay. Somehow my insomnia had infiltrated my sex life—the acute sense of dislocation permeating my brain and nervous system—leaving my body hollowed, restless.
And I thought again of Nick on the threshold in Venice as if he had been sculpted there. His hair crumpled and disheveled, his back bare, pale, hairless. How was it that the memory of him slouched against the doorframe held so much hope for me? The circumstance of his posture, was it, the fact that my insomnia had kept him u
p as well? Wasn’t his carelessness part of his appeal, the slovenly unkempt sexiness of him at that moment in that ruined city where the two of us would always be young and symptom-free? I might have loved him there. Maybe it was as simple as that.
Work was supposed to be my outlet, the simplified, professional part of my life where sleep and orgasm had no effect. But anxiety about the strike swept like a brush fire through the university—rumors from the administration about slashed budgets, antiquated departments, and staff downsizing weren’t encouraging, either—a mounting hysteria, worrying staff and students alike.
Chanda Prader, a Chinese girl with a journalism major, dropped by my office, fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, and talking randomly about her trip to Canada over the summer.
“Actually, I really came to ask you about the strike. Is it true? They’re saying this might mean a six-month delay to graduating. Can that happen? Should I transfer to a school on the Mainland? I don’t know what to do.”
I didn’t know what to do either, so I certainly couldn’t advise my students. I’d spent the previous spring reading all the graduate course textbooks and plotting my teaching strategy, only to be told I’d stay where I was put. If layoffs became necessary, I’d be the first to go from our department despite the popularity of Latin courses.
Delvo, shaken by the rumors, had taken a part-time teaching position with the women’s prison several evenings a week and had encouraged me to do the same before the job market flooded with teachers.
“A contingency plan, Elliot, that’s all. Not a panic situation yet, but these meetings have become dire, quite dire—I don’t mean to alarm you—but it might be advisable …”
Grey, in an effort to distract me, advised a night of drinking at Fat Tuesday’s—an open-air bar in Aloha Tower Marketplace. He’d spent the previous two weeks in San Francisco with his family and was sporting a new prep-school shirt.
“So your wife showed?”
“Noticed the shirt, eh?”
“Obviously you like it.”
“It’s expensive and trendy. She could purchase for Banana Republic if she ever leaves politics. She came the last weekend.”
“How’d she look?”
“She looked good. She always looks good. If seeing my wife a couple of weeks during the year were enough for me, I’d have the perfect girl. What’s going on with you? You look frantic tonight.”
“I’m light years beyond frantic. Honestly.”
“Is your officemate giving you more cheery news about the strike?”
“If we strike, how will I pay rent?”
“You could live with Nick.”
“Yeah, so there’s that.”
Grey flagged the waitress and ordered vodka shots. He pulled my shirt sleeve to drag me around to his side of the table.
“OK,” he said. “What’s happened?
“God, I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s get drunk and forget everything.”
“Sure, since that’s the sensible thing to do.”
We slung back the drinks, round after round, until the giggles set in. Some horrible alternative band played on the short stage to a crowd of moshing college kids. A breeze blew in from the pier, but both Grey and I were sweating.
“OK,” I said, “so I can’t come.”
“Where?”
“In bed.”
Grey grinned at me and leaned closer. Oh, the delicious failings of our friends.
“Ever?”
“Of course not, just this fall. I have no idea what the fuck’s going on.”
“Is he … does he suck?”
“No. God no, it used to be amazing. It’s me. Something’s wrong with me.”
“Maybe you’re a lesbian.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Why would I say that? Hmm, because you recently broke up with a girl you were crazy about and had been seeing for months. And we’ve never talked about it, but I assume Emily wasn’t your first.”
“I’m not a lesbian.”
“You say that like I accused you of being a leper.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I took a drink. What the hell did I mean? The spins had set in. I drank half my glass of water and focused on the mosh pit. Did that girl have green dreadlocks? Freaks crawled all over the bar, bobbing around as if the floor were a trampoline. The drums thundered in my head in the room, drowning out even the squeal of the guitar … focus, focus.
“How do you know you’re not a lesbian?”
“What?”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m attracted to men, too, Grey.”
“Attraction is all well and good, but if you don’t enjoy the sex, that’s problematic.”
“It’s a phase.”
“Are you sure?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a litmus test.”
“How many women have you dated?”
I gulped the rest of my water. Seven, eight, who remembers exactly?
“Eight, I think.”
“How many men?”
“Twenty or so.”
“Really?”
He looked puzzled, in complete contradiction to his confident prep-school shirt. As if the numbers had anything to do with it. I wasn’t even sure they were accurate. Ultimately, I saw myself as bisexual, and how I saw myself was definitive, wasn’t it?
“This band sucks, Grey. Let’s take a walk on the docks.”
We settled the tab and floated, though the music crowded us all the way to the water’s edge. Against the piles, the black lapped and rolled like a great dog.
There was a girl once who would shed her skin and disappear into the night, formless. She crept among the trees like a leopard on the hunt until the night weakened, then she’d climb into the highest branches to watch for daylight. Leaving your skin is dangerous, but the girl continued her wanderings for many years, terrifying her neighbors and living among the dark predators. Late one night, she returned to the spot where she had hidden her skin and found nothing. Panicked, she tried to track the thief, but could smell only her own scent. She raced through the forest into the village and scoured for any sign of disturbance while in the east a faint glow shimmered. Suddenly dawn poured over her and her spirit vaporized. This is the risk when you leave yourself.
XXV.
Every Sunday morning, the Belfast dentist and I would drive to a stretch of beach to walk along the shoreline. White stone littered the ground where dozens of gulls swooped and hopped as the wind tore through the place, coaxing swirls into the dunes as the water swallowed our footprints, covering any trace of us, any memory. Occasionally someone ran along the beach, but most Sundays we had the sprawl to ourselves, especially in the late fall and winter when the horribly arctic wind blasted through our coats and sweaters through our very substance.
On the drive home with the heater roaring, we’d stop at a farm for duck and chicken eggs to make omelets of fresh mushrooms and tomatoes while we read the Sunday paper at the wooden table in the light-soaked kitchen. She would bake coarse brown bread in her T-shirt and panties or scurry around the flat, murmuring to the plants as she watered them, gently massaging their leaves.
She’d brought me to Christmas at her parents’ home our first year together, having announced to her family beforehand that she was bringing her significant other. I didn’t realize she’d told them anything until the shock on their faces registered. They were angels to make me feel welcome despite their grief, and their kindness made it easier for us with the two boys, Kieran and Thomas. Catholic and rigorous, her parents prayed, I have no doubt, hourly for our immortal souls, but we sat down to goose dinner quite merrily as the wine and whiskey loosed all awkwardness until we sang together a number of tunes I had never heard before, though the verses went on so long it was a simple matter to memorize the chorus.
Honestly, I’m still dismayed by her family’s welcome, by the effort they put into accepting our relation
ship, into accepting me. I hadn’t told any of my mates from school, or any of my colleagues from work, not even my father or Therese. I wasn’t brave like her; I wasn’t strong enough to love her fearlessly. And I left while she was in Greece on holiday with a group of her friends from dental school, packing my things hurriedly like any scoundrel, though I’d already interviewed with Dr. Adams by phone and had known for some weeks that I was leaving—had the one-way plane ticket to Honolulu and the cash from my bank accounts stuffed into my backpack.
That last Sunday in Belfast, I followed our routine, driving to the beach for a solitary walk along the channel, stopping for two duck eggs; I even watered her plants, stroking them like she did. Instead of reading the paper while the bread baked, I sat at the table and tried to write her a note, hoping not to justify my actions so much as elucidate my motives, but in the end I wrote only what allowed me to leave—what would make it impossible to return:
Gone home for good.
My best,
j
XXVI .
When I woke that Saturday morning, I heard grunting and thuds coming from the back corner of the garden; the sounds one expects during a murder or a birthing. I threw a shirt on and scurried through the French doors to find Emily’s aged gardener, Hiromi, trying to break her body in half. A supplier had dropped two truckloads of red rock the previous day, and Hiromi now threw heaping shovelfuls from the rock mound into three wheelbarrows that were staggered along the pathway just at the edge of my studio.
“So sorry,” she said as soon as she saw me emerge into the mist of the morning. She gestured to the pile by way of explanation.
I nodded, turned back into the cottage, and threw on a pair of boots before returning to take the shovel from her.
“I’ll shovel the rocks in and out of the wheelbarrows if you’ll clear the areas where you want them laid.”
She scowled at me and tried to take the shovel back.
“I’ll shovel the rocks into the wheelbarrows; we’ll both take them to the area where you want them laid, and you can scatter them. Yeah, we’ll split the work—be done in half the time.”