Wreck and Order

by Hannah Tennant-Moore

  As a narrative experience, it sounds like New Age bunk. As an actual experience, it is enough to live for.

  I imagine how my meditating form would appear from the outside—jaw unhinged, tongue wadded against my lower teeth; eyes opened just wide enough to let in shapeless light; lower belly puffed and rounded, as if a baby animal has burrowed into the warmth at my center. Why does it feel obscene to be this relaxed?

  In the hottest part of the day, I sit on the wet sand and bathe in the waves’ runoff, then rinse my salt-crusted legs with the hose in Manuela’s yard and lie in the hammock in wet clothes. During the brief, violent rainstorms, I sit on the rocks and watch the world lose its edges. Suriya is back in her boardinghouse hell, staying up late doing schoolwork, waking up early to sweep the house. I miss her, but I don’t miss sharing her life. There is only one pursuit that could justify the privilege of my remove from society, and there is no word for it that does not make me seem like a woman who drinks a potion of cat urine and wasabi root on harvest moon nights: egolessness, superconsciousness, truth. If I use my freedom for any purpose other than cultivating constant awareness of the reality outside my mind, I should die now. The earth should sneeze while I am atop this boulder and feed me to the roaring, frothing wave mouth below.

  —

  “My son will be here in a few weeks,” Manuela says one night. We’re drinking hot water with ginger. “He spends the summers here.”

  “Where does he live the rest of the time?”

  She stands up and straightens one of his Christmas cards, talking with her back to me. Emil’s father left when he found out Manuela was pregnant. They were crazy about each other but he didn’t want to be a parent and Manuela just could not have an abortion. The blond dog runs onto the patio and flops at Manuela’s feet. She bends down to scratch his ears. Motherhood made her lose her mind. She could not bear the love she felt for Emil, how that one attachment eclipsed all the other ways she used to be a person. It took her hours to decide whether she should put a coat on him before they went out for a walk and months to decide whether he should sleep with his bedroom door opened or closed—stuff like that, every second of every day, all alone obsessing about tiny details. So Emil has lived with his aunt and uncle and their two kids since he was five. He loves his family. He seems okay.

  I fish the ginger out of the bottom of my mug. Before he became the Buddha, Shakyamuni named his son Rahula, meaning fetter. The nun who gave the talk about abandoning hope also said that her family accused her of neglecting her children when she started studying Buddhism. I feel lucky, for a moment, to be unfettered. The only impediments to getting to know myself completely are fear and desire, dragging me toward this and away from that, searching and searching for what can’t be found.

  Manuela stands up and picks a notebook off the table. “Tell me if this is too personal,” I say, “but I just—being here all alone for so many years—has it been hard—I mean—not being with anyone—”

  “You’re wondering about sex?”

  Yes. I’m always wondering about sex. It’s the main question of my life. You could call me shamefully privileged, but my privilege is not the part that I’m ashamed about. I was not born a blind, furry, transsexual orphan. I can accept that about myself. What upsets me is the cliché of my privileged concern. When I was working at Barnes and Noble, it seemed like every other week I was charged with making a conspicuous display of a new book by a woman who claimed to have found a spiritual solution to the problem of sex. Gang bangs heal the wounds of a traumatic childhood! Casual sex is a soul-destroying addiction! Sex is power for women who ignore their emotions! Worship your vagina like the goddess she is! Expert blow jobs are the secret to a happy marriage! Anal sex is the key to women’s liberation! The books reminded me of Sally from Carp Weekly, who would complain when her husband stayed out late. “He is so in the doghouse. No nookie-nookie for him!” As if sex is only a way to get something that has nothing to do with sex.

  “I had beautiful sex with Emil’s father,” Manuela says. “So I’ve had that experience. I don’t feel like I need to keep having it over and over until I die.”

  I wonder aloud what she means by beautiful.

  “I mean that I could relax completely. After we’d been together a little while, of course. I made him feel good; he made me feel good. We didn’t have to talk about it. It was easy.”

  I’ve had sex like that a few times, unhurried pleasure given and received of its own accord, no striving. That kind of sex made it feel like all my other encounters, experiments, fantasies were just consolation for the lack of this basic need simply met. Maybe it would be enough to be able to count on sex like that for a sustained period of time; I’d be free to worry about something else.

  Still, the first few years here were hard sometimes, Manuela tells me. She’s looking through the bookshelf, her crisp, pale ponytail facing me. “This book helped,” she says, and hands me a thick volume with a smiling Indian man in white on the cover, one hand over his heart: The kind of hippie book my mother would own. I Am That, it’s called. Manuela says good night and joins the darkness beyond the patio.

  —

  In bed later, I glimpse my reflection in the window as I reach up to pull the cord of the overhead light. My legs, tan and bare and covered in blond down, seem very far away. I run my hands up my calves, massage the sides of my kneecaps, rest my thumbs in the nook between thigh and groin. I willfully conjure the image of Jared inside me. Part of his body moved in and out of part of my body thousands and thousands of times—probably more times than I’ve done any other activity involving another human being. And yet it seems dizzyingly extreme to think of it now, like jumping off a bridge into a pitch-black lake.

  Jared and I both liked having anal sex. I felt relaxed and protected, lying on my stomach with my face hidden, his mouth so close to my ear that I felt the tiniest shifts of his breath, the sound of his need for me; his movements small and slow, so precise that I could imagine my way into Jared’s experience of them. I was all alone, with someone else. Once we were having sex that way in the early morning, when I was still dreamy and calm. Every time Jared pulled back he left me completely and waited for a few seconds before pushing back inside, so that every time he entered me it was like the first time, and I was counting the first times with animal concentration and there were no worries about what I was giving myself up to. I just gave. It was all right. I pressed my pelvis against the mattress. A groan vibrated in my throat. Jared stopped moving. He raised himself off my back. He jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. I reached behind me and touched between my legs. Very wet, very brown. I felt myself tumbling into a well, the sound of rushing blackness. After I cleaned myself and put on lace panties and a silk nightgown, I lay down on the very edge of the bed, as far as possible from Jared, terrified of his thoughts about my body. I wanted to let the moment disappear, but my voice intruded, dry and loud. “I feel disgusting.”

  Nothing I say aloud is what I really want to be saying.

  What I meant was, Is it necessary for me to feel disgusting? For us to be distant and ashamed because a sex act didn’t go the way we wanted it to? Must we pretend my ass exists solely as an erotic portal?

  In the lady’s sex book about surrendering to anal sex, one chapter was devoted to hygiene, another to attire. It was easy for me to mock the writer as I consumed her small, punchy treatise during my lunch breaks. (So you’re telling me female liberation requires anal douching and silk thongs and stilettos? And why exactly should I hope to liberate womankind with my sex life anyway? I don’t know about you, toots, but I have sex to feel good.) Yet I also eroticize ideas of myself. I never fantasize about receiving pleasure. I always come at the instant of the imagined man’s climax. But I am not a man, so my own orgasm abruptly splits away from the fantasy I’ve been lost in. I want to feel as Jared seemed to during anal sex, so consumed by the actual sensation of the actual moment that he could not help but release. Whereas I can
only come when imagining something different from the current moment, even if the current moment later becomes what I imagine.

  One time was different. Jared was licking me and the usual imagery came to mind—man’s penis, woman’s mouth, he was going to come so hard—and then I was back in the room and it was me, not an imaginary brute, who was going to come so hard. I felt the sensation in my groin pulsing outward through my body, until I was clutching the headboard, every muscle tensed, engaged, ready to release all claims to itself, and then the sensation barreled me down and I was gone for a little while, aware only of the complete release of complete contraction, instead of the sensation just being something that happened to me while I thought about something else. A pure moment. I want it back. I want it now.

  I flip through the book Manuela gave me until I come to an underlined passage, which I read with a shock of recognition, as if someone has made sense of years of thoughts I didn’t realize I was having. “It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Increase and widen your desires until nothing but reality can fulfill them. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy.” Before he became the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha lived in a palace filled with concubines at his beck and call. Some teachers say it was the experience of orgasm that opened him to the possibility of living that freedom in every moment. But he left the palace and sat in a cave for eight years because he understood that the desire to ejaculate inside a different woman every night is the very essence of suffering. He wanted to receive all of life with that openness, that presence. Of course I’m using the Buddha to stand in for my own ideals. I’ve never had an experience of sexual pleasure that compares to the expansiveness I’ve felt at times during meditation. Which does not mean I’m about to give up sex. But it helps to be reminded of what I want more.

  —

  An hour after translating the final sentence of Fifi, I’m sitting in front of a computer at an empty Internet café, shouting nervous nervous nervous in my head. My father once told me that if you know how you feel, your body calms down. He also told me to manifest what I want—picture myself having it, trust that I will get it, feel grateful for having it even before it arrives. So I visualize the content of the publisher’s email before I open it. Dear Ms. Elsie Shore, it will read. We would be honored and delighted to publish your translation of Fifi.

  Deep breath. Click.

  “We greatly appreciate the opportunity to consider your work. We’re afraid Fifi is not a good fit for us…happy to consider more work in the future…best of luck…” I wipe my hands on my skirt, close my eyes until I can feel the pause between heartbeats.

  Well, it’s only one publisher. I should look up other publishers and literary journals, go back to submitting cold, tossing pebbles at a wall in the hope that it might crumble. But how dull Fifi has become to me, in the course of translating it. So then I should translate another book, a better one. But even if I work quickly, that’s a years-long undertaking, and then I’d have to go through the dismal submissions process again and even if by some miracle I were able to get one book translated, what then? I don’t want to spend another decade just hoping to become this particular thing. If I stop imagining the way my life looks from the outside, I don’t even care about being a translator.

  The rest of my inbox is filled with Jared’s name, offering email after mercifully distracting email of pornographic yearning (“i love how you’re this smart and well read and independent woman and then i get you in bed and you become my trembling fawn. come back, beautiful girl. i need your pussy around my cock”), words Jared created by jamming down computer keys with his index fingers, typing as he walked and ate and spoke: with ludicrous insistence, a hedge against the suspicion of weakness.

  “got in some trouble baby,” Jared wrote me seven hours ago. “some assholes from the city of angels my face is pitch fucking black it hurts so bad i feel like such a loser gonna give this work up for real a buddy says he can hook me up with a job at the firehouse don’t even have to take the emt test come back i’ll be good for you if you come back you’re my dream girl i need you.” I run my fingers over my lips. Longing rears. Anger strangles it. How has this become my life? That my most appealing future prospect is to live with a philandering, alcoholic drug dealer-cum-fraudulent fireman?

  The phrase would make Jared laugh. It would be so good to hear his laugh right now.

  I ask the Internet owner if I can use his phone to make an international call. He rises from his desk, gestures to the giant phone atop it, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. I punch digits. The phone rings against my ear. How easy it is to reach him, all the way from here.

  “Mornin’. Jared Desiderius Hart speaking.” This is his given name, spoken in his social voice, surrounded by the din of many disparate conversations.

  “Jared. It’s me.”

  “Well, hell. Say that again, beautiful girl.”

  “Jared. It’s me.”

  “Damn. That sounds good.”

  “Are you okay? You sound like you’ve been crying.”

  “Nah. Been too busy. I was up ’til dawn this morning talking to this dude about super-massive black holes, which I’m now a follower of. Because they have such a strong gravitational force. I don’t really want to have this conversation all over again, to be perfectly honest. Coffee and a Mexican omelet, please, darlin’. Extra jalapeños. If you would.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “A little bit I guess.”

  “What time is it there?”

  “Morning. So the black hole at the center of our galaxy is our physical god. It means we have a chance to know we exist. Which is all we can hope for, right? The super-massive black hole is not going to grant wishes. It doesn’t give a fuck.”

  “You wrote me that you were going to stop drinking.”

  “I will. I’ve been really pretty good. And you’re not giving me much incentive to follow the straight and narrow, being in a different hemisphere and all.” His old-fashioned expressions, gleaned from the crate of paperback classics he keeps by his bed—they surprise me still, soften me. He slurps coffee. “What are you doing there anyway? You’re safe, right? You’re not calling because you’re in any trouble?”

  “No, I’m not in trouble. I love it here.”

  “You sure you’re all right, beautiful girl? You sound sad.”

  Something in need of unhinging comes unhinged. I speak quickly, about Suriya and Manuela, the violence of the waves, the purity test on wedding nights, the endless fucking curries. Jared exclaims and laughs. I see his open mouth—craggy tongue, crooked front tooth.

  “I miss you crazy much,” he says. “Thank you kindly, gorgeous. Just some hot sauce, if you would. Mind if I eat?”

  “I should go anyway. This is getting expensive. But I need to ask you something.”

  “You have my undivided,” he says through a full mouth.

  “I think I want to move back to California. Maybe we could live together. I want to try living with you.”

  “You’re not shitting me?” He swallows, clears his throat. “You wanna move in together?”

  “I think so. Are you still going to get a new job? That thing at the firehouse?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m trying. Why didn’t you write me earlier? You said you would write me when you got there. You said you would email me a lot.”

  It’s always a relief when Jared identifies something I’ve done wrong, some clear way I’ve been inconsiderate. We’re both screwed up, we’ve both let each other down, we’re both trying. I guess it’s the same relief that makes all those girls in books and TV shows and movies eager confessors of their own faults. They date guys who mistreat them, sure, but that’s only to be expected, given that the girls are, like, total wrecks themselves. They drink too much and sleep around and probably deep down they’re afraid of commitment and they have no friggin’ clue how to cook anything but spaghetti. But if they can just get it together, then maybe the boys will
get it together, too, and stop treating them badly, and they’ll all live happily ever after, except that they don’t even want to live happily ever after, they just want to have sex with the same dude a few times a week, you know?

  “I’m calling you now,” I say, hopeful as the well-dressed girls on TV. “I want to live with you.”

  “I want to live with you, too. Get your perfect ass back here. We’ll figure it all out.” Jared smacks his lips against the receiver.

  When I hang up, I email Joe at Carp Weekly and remind him of our conversation in the parking lot on my last day of work, how he said that he wished I’d spoken to him before I left, he would have argued for a promotion for me. I barely notice the words I write, only the eagerness of the keys rising back after I press them, happy to be the same letter again and again.