by Joan Silber
IN THE SUMMER I had them for a month—Annabel was a bit too glad to be free of them—and I took them to see my parents. “August in Hoboken,” Nicholas said, “where the elite meet.” Aaron, usually the whiner, developed a blissful crush on an enticing five-year-old he met in day camp. Rosa this, Rosa that. She wore fetching red overalls and pink sneakers and it so happened, according to my brother Pete, that her mother was Viana.
Viana? How could that be? “She’s back living at home,” my mother said. “A sad story.” Her marriage had busted up? After all that sacrifice? “No,” my mother said. “Will you listen?” Viana had been very happy with her husband. “I told you he was a nice fellow,” my mother said. They lived in Bangkok, which she loved—who could like that hot weather?—where he doctored poor people. She helped in his clinic. She learned the language, which was not an easy language, but she was a bright girl, wasn’t she? She even cooked the food whatever way they eat there. She had a lovely, healthy baby who grew into a cute, cute girl. Her parents never wrote her when she sent pictures. One night Viana and her husband and Rosa were in a car driving back from the countryside when a drunk driver came out of nowhere and ran right into them on the highway. The husband was killed at once, Viana blacked out, the little girl wasn’t hurt. While Viana was in the hospital, her parents came and took care of Rosa. Then they all went back to the U.S. together. “End of story,” my mother said.
It was only a few days later that I saw Viana herself, at a show put on by the campers. She had always been a soft, bosomy girl and she had thickened some, but what struck me was the freshness still in her face. When I saw her in the audience, she was laughing at a child in a caterpillar costume—a pure, wide-mouthed laugh. I found her afterward, and we hugged as if it were a great joke to see each other. “You’re the parent of the astounding Aaron superboy,” she said. Aaron was busy ripping off his bee antennae.
Two of my other kids were around me, and I introduced them. When Viana spoke, I could see the sorrow lodged around her chin, the downward tilt of defeat. I suggested a playdate between Aaron and the enthralling Rosa. Rosa crowed and squealed something like, “Dee mak!” in what I assumed was Thai and she jumped for joy. “Okay, okay,” Viana said, and there were more words between them in that secret language from her other life. She had only been a widow for a few months. I wasn’t the sort of asshole to come on to her right then, but I thought she could get used to me again.
So I had a nice August. Viana and I took the kids to the park and hung around our parents’ tiny urban yards. We discussed my teaching and the book that I might, who knew, someday write. Viana thought she might go to a school nearby to study nursing. “So you’ll stay here?” I said. “Where else do I have to go?” she said. I hated the irony of her being stuck with her family again. “You could go anywhere,” I said. “Not me,” she said. “Not anymore.”
One night I thought she needed cheering up, and I took her—don’t ask me why I did this—to a Thai restaurant in the yuppified part of town. The waiters, once they heard her speak Thai, could hardly keep from hovering around our table to beam and banter, and they brought us amazing food (though not, Viana said, as good as in Thailand). One of the waiters wore a little white embroidered Muslim prayer cap and was from Pattani, near where her husband’s family lived, a disclosure that made both of them cry out in gleeful amazement. Over the dessert of mango and coconut sticky rice, Viana said, “Oh, well. I shouldn’t complain, should I? At least I was happy once.” What was so awful to me in this sudden bit of bathos was that it showed her trying with all the resolve in her character to have a good attitude.
WE HAD TO ASK our parents to be sitters when we went out, and this caused massive interest on both sides. I was just what her parents had in mind in the first place, and my mother had always liked Viana. I didn’t want anyone badgering Viana—hadn’t she been pressured enough in her life? And I didn’t want to be talked up as the sensible choice. Never a sexy job.
And once I got back to Bloomington, I did no more than send her chatty e-mail messages. Aaron has learned to stand on his head. If he can get Alex to hold his feet. Love, Mike.
Am getting through the days okay, Viana answered. Rosa misses the ferry we took every day on the Chao Phraya and wants to know when we’re going back. I could see I would have to be patient. All fall I wrote my breezy notes, and for Christmas, which I spent in Indiana, I sent Rosa a ballerina outfit and Viana an expensive book on Italian painting through the ages. She sent me a plaid wool muffler, not exciting, but I wore it for months with a nice, itchy feeling of hope.
I was, of course, haunted by hope. I went to bed with hope every night, with its ghostly brightness settled against my delighted self, and I waited every minute for it to turn and show its teeth. Some men are fools many times over, and maybe I was one of them. I was almost sorry I was bothering with any of this.
The next August, when I came back with the boys, my mother invited Viana and Rosa for the first dinner home. Viana acted slightly embarrassed to see me and I wondered if she had someone else. It was not until the last week of that humid and highly fraught August that I got a certain vibe while we were shopping for picnic supplies, and I snuck us down to her family’s furnished basement while the kids were at my parents’. She giggled as I led her to an ancient leatherette sofa, and with the most straightforward of moves, we became lovers. I got us across that line.
We had slept together when we were teenagers, and though time had gouged and battered and scourged us since, all the nakedness of sex was much easier than it would have been with anyone newly met. Later I wondered if she was very different from when she was seventeen, but I found I could not exactly remember the details from then. Several times I noticed extra things she’d learned, later-formed preferences. But mostly I did not have to think.
It was not really possible to hide our changed status from our families. “Better than that last one,” my mother said. “I never liked her being Jewish.” Annabel was the most secular of Jews, a post-Marxist atheist who’d hardly been inside a synagogue. “What kind of rotten thing is that to say?” I said. “Viana’s a Muslim, if you want to get that way about it.” Viana had converted (a simple process, she claimed) to please her husband’s parents and have the ceremony they wanted. “He didn’t care,” she said. “He was very modern, very spiritual in a general way. You know what I mean.”
My mother decided the conversion didn’t count here, much as Viana’s parents apparently gave me a familial dispensation for my divorce. I had to be careful around Viana—in the last days of the summer and in our phone calls after—not to rush her but not to seem less than eager. I was truly eager. My mind was flooded with pictures of Viana. Viana was the view out my window, Viana was the water I drank. I had not thought I would fall into such a haze of pure hunger. I didn’t want to be desperate or grabby or too cloyingly grateful, though I was all those things. A corner of me could not imagine starting again, and the rest of me did nothing but imagine it every second.
I became a commuter dater; every month I’d fly out. Since Viana was still living with her family, they were unusual dates for adults, blandly chaste or hotly furtive. Sometimes my parents tried to give us some space—this was a bit hilarious to us. “Let them pick a really long movie,” Viana said, “and stay to watch it twice.” Part of her was happy, I did feel that. I could bring her along slowly, if only the others didn’t press her. But they did press. Once she phoned me at my school office in tears because her father had told her a husbandless mother was being unfair to her child; her indignation at her father led her to split up with me for a week. I hated her father then, bullying her in his growled Sicilian, evoking a hinterland of fifty years ago, the village he’d gotten the hell out of, as if it were some scriptural landscape.
Not until late spring did I suggest that Viana come to Bloomington for a visit. And then her fleshly presence in the town where I lived, where I’d undergone my whole fucked-up adult history, was almost more tha
n I could bear, and I was a rattled host, hoarse and nervous and all over her. The one thing I could not have expected was that Viana was moved by this. The sight of me unmoored pled my case. She wanted to help, how could she not help? By the end of the weekend, we were engaged.
WE WERE MARRIED in June, in Viana’s parents’ yard. That first summer felt like endless bounty to me; I lived with a woman who laughed with pleasure when she brought me anything I liked—a tiny pale green frog from under the shrubs, an early cup of coffee, a spontaneous bit of lavish invention in bed. She cooked meals so stunning that even Matthew, a real pain about food, decided he liked fish. I thought of this time as Paradise Regained. When I said this, she brought me dates—one of the named fruits in the Garden of Heaven, she said, in the Islamic afterlife—and fed me a few from her fingers. It was an odd feeling to eat them, to chew the dark, sugary fibers and wonder about her old life, what she ate, what she did, though I did not want to be sour or jealous.
She often got e-mail from a woman who’d been her best friend in Bangkok, a nurse from the clinic with the odd name of Toon. Every so often the message came through in Thai letters that spelled (Viana said) nonsense. “You’d be better off with Morse code,” I said. “Dit dit dit dot dot.” Rosa, of course, didn’t know what a telegram was. I thought of all the dead technologies—pneumatic mail whooshed through Paris in tubes puffed with air, mechanical typewriters, pigeons—and always the dream of mind speaking to mind.
Viana still nattered in Thai to Rosa, though she told me Rosa was starting to forget words. Once Rosa said, “Hold me upside down, I want to swing over the floor,” and Viana said, “Niwet used to do that.” Niwet was her husband—her first husband. Viana could not say Niwet—on the rare occasions she did—without softening her voice. Rosa had grown in weight since he’d lifted her up to hang like a bat, but I did my best.
ON THE DRESSER in our bedroom was a hammered silver box that Viana used for her earrings, a gift from her husband’s grandfather Zain. The design was in Arabic script, which was used for writing Malay in that corner of Thailand, and only there. What a great fact, I went around repeating it to everyone I knew—I was trying to get more interested in Thailand. And tidbits like this always pleased me, I was one of those historians who gets high on details. I planned to bring Zain’s box in to show my students. The silver lid worked in repoussé, the curled and dotted letters. I was trying to like Thailand more.
THAT FIRST SUMMER of my second marriage, I found myself once again working on what I hoped would be my book. It was odd to be deep inside post-Fascist Italy, reading about partigiani in the Appennines, while thinking always about Viana, who was so linked to Thailand, and with Rosa, my half-Thai girl, in the house. And maybe I too could become an adept in things Thai. I knew a woman from Bloomington who learned Hungarian (Hungarian!) so her kids could speak what her husband spoke.
Rosa still hated the way Americans wore their dirty outside shoes in the house and she was always crawling under the table to pull off my sneakers. And Viana’s mother, I happened to know, automatically put her stocking on the left leg first, to keep the mal’occhio at bay, even after five decades out of Sicily. How careful people were, all over. From my desk it was clear that each separate corner of the world was obsessed with its own set of the familiar, the mass of fine points its residents were sure every human had to know. The whole fucking globe was populated by idiots savants, who knew what they knew very well and not all that much else. I was an idiot too, but at the moment I was a happy one. From my desk, I could hear Viana listening to music—the Pretenders and then Howlin’ Wolf—while I worked. Howlin’ Wolf was vowing to pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.
WHEN THE SUMMER ENDED, I went back to teaching, and Viana leafed through nursing school catalogues, still dawdling over what to do. I was in my office eating a terrible midwestern bagel when a student ran in with the nutso, hyped-up story that planes had hit the World Trade Center towers on purpose. I was arguing him down when the department secretary came in, and we all spent the next hour looking at the TV set in the lounge. Over and over the two buildings, one by one, spewed black smoke and sank straight down on the screen. I had considerable trouble believing my eyes. Some of the students were crying, and this made me worry about my own kids, and I called their schools (Annabel never liked me to call their schools). I remembered I had a wife at home—shouldn’t we be comforting each other?—and I drove back. When I came in, Viana was on the telephone speaking Thai. For a second I was sure that her husband was not really dead at all, on this day of the dead, and she was talking to him. She had her hand on her heart when she said goodbye.
It was her brother-in-law, who had just called the house in Hoboken to make sure she was all right. “Oh,” she said when she got off the phone and threw her arms around me, “it’s just so hard, it’s too much. I hadn’t spoken to Winai since I lived there.”
Afterward, this was what I always remembered about that day, though I didn’t tell it when all the people I knew were telling their where-I-was stories. After that morning, Viana began sending e-mail to her ex-brother-in-law, who could read English just fine—and through him to the rest of her “old” family, as she called them, especially his mother, who mostly spoke Yawi, the Malay dialect written in Arabic. I am thinking of you in these terrible times, Viana wrote at her laptop in the kitchen. An entirely harmless sentiment, and I didn’t try to read her incoming e-mail either. Though I thought of trying.
Meanwhile, my mother told me over the phone that I should make sure I didn’t tell anyone Viana was some kind of Muslim because she wasn’t really. “We’re both wearing giant neon crosses around our necks,” I said. “But my kids have to wear half-crosses-half-Stars-of-David.”
“You can joke,” my mother said. “But people are afraid for a reason.” People were always afraid for a reason—that was what I taught my classes about.
“I couldn’t believe it when Niwet’s brother called,” Viana said, more often than I liked. “Winai was always kind of stiff-necked, a little too fond of himself.” Now he was the proud recipient of digital photos of Rosa in tap shoes.
How could I resent someone like Viana writing to her ex-in-laws? The news was full of features about how 9/11 made everyone value old bonds of affection. An attachment is not the same as an allegiance. She could be mine and write a few notes overseas. I had a sweet wife; I had no reason to be a grouchy, possessive jerk.
For my birthday in November she put rows of candles all along the walkway of our building, she held out a torta di ricotta with my initials in strawberries, and in the doorway Rosa did a special dance for me in her pink tutu. I bragged to everyone at school, I was an unstoppable moron of contentment.
A few weeks later, Viana said to me, “I always like this time of year. When I was in Thailand, we used to go visit the relatives then, when the rains were over. Zain, the grandfather, had an amazing old house. After Ramadan too there’s a big thing of everybody visiting.”
I said I wasn’t sure long family visits were my idea of a good time.
“It’s very beautiful in Pattani,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“You’d have to see it,” she said. “I can’t explain.”
“Fine,” I said.
OKAY, IT WAS VIANA’S business if she liked some city on a bilgey river where it was always hot and rainy. In Italian, homesickness was nostalgia—if you longed for a place, you longed for another time. Could my wife miss the golden continent of her lost decade and still be okay with where she washed up? Could she have a few different kinds of longing at once? I certainly hoped so.
And this was a good year for us. Viana knocked herself out for my boys, who were sporadically nice to her. That spring she heard that she’d gotten into nursing school, and the two older boys actually brought home a pizza to congratulate her. Viana herself did a handspring on the lawn. Feet in the air, hair streaming on the grass. Who knew she could do that? “That’s just somethin
g I do when I’m happy,” she said. I didn’t say I’d never seen her do it before.
SHE WAS NERVOUS about going back to school. “Piece of cake,” I said. “You’ll ace it.” I teased her about being the sexy nurse, every boy’s dream of the med exam from heaven. “Right,” she said. And once school started, she was frantic and frustrated. “Why do I want to do this?” she’d say, pushing away some fat expensive textbook. She had to learn long Latinate terms for the unspeakable processes of the body, its rot and secretions and monstrous attempts at self-correction. I gave her pep talks about how smart she was, I made my old bachelor Boyardee meals for the kids. She was noticeably less interested in what the rest of us were doing. “Tell me later,” she’d say.
Alex said, “You have time for your e-mail.”
“She can do what she wants,” I said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Viana said.
“Are the people you write to Muslims?” Alex said. “Are they?”
“Viana’s a Muslim,” Nicholas said. “She is, I’m not kidding.”
Aaron said, “No! She can’t be!”
“She’s a Muslim who doesn’t do any of the things,” Nicholas said.
Viana put her head down with her hands over it, the gesture that meant, Let me alone, for Christ’s sake. For a Muslim she had committed the worst of sins, rejection of the precious gift of faith, grave enough to be technically punishable by death. I didn’t think this was the moment to cite that fact.