I smiled and remembered that my own first kiss was also in the green vinyl seat of a yellow school bus. Tommy Miller’s mouth had tasted like the Doritos that had gotten stuck in the spaces between his braces. He darted his tongue in and out of my mouth like a lizard trying to catch a fly. Four years later I would actually lose my virginity to Tommy Miller’s brother Ryan, who was two years older than us and in his freshman year at the local community college. Ryan was one of those impossibly good-looking guys who you start to hate after talking to them for more than five minutes. But I wanted to lose my virginity before I left for college. I was convinced I had to lose my virginity before I left for college or else.
I don’t know why, but the consequences of not doing it seemed dire in my mind. Ryan was lifeguarding at the community pool with me that summer. I invited him down to my parents’ finished basement under the guise of listening to the new Alanis Morissette CD. He awkwardly shoved his hand down the front of my pants during the chorus to “You Oughta Know.”
He blushed at “go down on you in a theater” . . . and then I went down on him in my parents’ rec room before we moved on to the awkward and fumbling sex.
I remember thinking, when he was on top of me, that his penis did the exact thing his little brother’s tongue had done years earlier. He screwed with a perfunctory in-and-out motion not unlike the tongue of a lizard.
Afterward we watched The Breakfast Club, but only up until the scene where Emilio Estevez admits to taping Larry Lester’s buns together. I always cry a little at that scene and that freaked Ryan out, so he decided to go home. We high-fived good-bye.
Derek kept talking in the way that guys in their twenties do about a girl they really like, maybe even love. “After that Zoe and I were going steady. Then we both went to uni. I ended up at UNSW and she went to Queensland. They were a short plane ride or a long drive away, but we stayed together during freshman and sophomore years.” He paused then.
“What happened?”
“Then I fucked up.”
“What’d you do?”
“I was just a stupid kid. I got drunk and kissed someone else. Then I got drunk and had sex with someone else. Then I got drunk and told Zoe about it. I thought I was doing the right thing. She told me to fuck off.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Six years.” His breath was shaky.
“So what’s happening now?”
“Now she lives back home, doing her training to be a farm-animal vet. When I went back to help out my dad we met up again at the bar and we got to hanging out. First just one night a week and then two and finally she let me call her my girlfriend again. But then I left.”
I turned to him and rolled my eyes, now exasperated by his story. “Why’d you leave?”
“I got scared.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“No. I told her I wanted to ride a motorcycle through the Thai jungle.”
“Very mature.”
He flipped his palms over in surrender. “I’m a sad sack. I got spooked. If someone had asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be back living in my hometown, sleeping in my childhood bed, making my dad breakfast every morning and trying to win back my high school sweetheart, I’d have said fuck no. But life is ridiculous.”
I agreed with him: life was ridiculous. “Do you want my advice?” I asked.
“No.” He chuckled when he said it. “I get enough of it from Mia, doing the big-sis thing. I just want to think it through myself, you know?”
Before my friendship with Derek, it had been years since I’d been alone for longer than a few minutes with a man who wasn’t Karl or my doctor. Men and women back home were never this intimate unless they were sleeping together. The unspoken boundaries of how the sexes interacted on the Upper East Side were downright Victorian.
“Want to come with me to a rave in Lombok on Friday?” he asked as though the idea just occurred to him and as though I was absolutely the kind of person who would enjoy going to a rave. I thought back to the molly on the beach in California. And then I thought about the brutal hangover.
“No. I think I’m good. But thanks for asking.”
Sometimes, when Derek looked at me, despite what he’d told me about Zoe, I knew without a shadow of a doubt I could fuck him if I gave the right signals. I knew it the same way I’d known I could sleep with Karl the second he bumped into me in that bookstore. I thought about what it would be like to be with another man after all these years. Would I even enjoy it? I tried to imagine it once—his huge hands with their neatly clipped fingernails gripping my breasts as I pushed myself down onto his lap.
The thoughts didn’t turn me on. Instead I felt an intense wave of shame as I remembered the anguish I’d felt at seeing Lois Delancey’s e-mail, those moments when I thought Karl had moved on. The sad truth was that I couldn’t blame him if he did. I’d given him every reason. What was a man supposed to do when his wife left and refused to come home?
“Come home, Katie,” he had begged the last time we spoke on the phone. “It’s time. We need you. We miss you.” It was rare for Karl to show this kind of emotion. I’d craved it for so long, but now its intensity frightened me. There were so many reasons to go back. I was a mother. My place was with my children. I was a wife. My place was with my husband. And yet . . . and yet . . . my time here still felt unfinished.
“I’m not ready,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I can’t come home yet.”
Chapter Eight
* * *
In my dream I wandered through our house on Eighty-Second Street. I peeled open doors to find rooms I hadn’t known existed. At first I felt a burst of delight at each undiscovered space. Eventually, it became a terrifying labyrinth. Rooms vanished inside new rooms. My heart filled with dread every time I turned a corner or opened a door. There was one final door. I knew it was the last. I don’t know how I knew that but I did. I clutched the brass handle and tried to turn it but it wouldn’t move. It glowed bright in my hand, burned my skin. I couldn’t stop touching it. I turned back the way I came and realized there was no longer any other way out. I was trapped.
My heart thumped furiously against my ribs when I woke, dripping in sweat. There was a heavy weight on my chest.
I opened my eyes and realized I wasn’t alone.
A straggly gray monkey squatted on my sternum. To his credit, he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He released a bloodcurdling shriek that echoed off the valley walls below my room. He flailed his arms and pounded his chest, but made no attempt to get off me. I recognized him from the pack of macaques that patrolled the perimeter of the property like furry foot soldiers.
It was always fun to watch the new guests turn into giddy children when they saw a monkey. They stuck out their tongues and crouched on the ground to make clicking sounds with their mouths like they were calling a dog. The creatures’ utter disinterest in them only served to make the humans love them more, the schlubby guy who never returns your phone calls. Sometimes one member of the pack would steal a baseball cap or a pack of cigarettes while the guests took pictures with their iPhones. I could imagine their cheesy Facebook status updates: “Just Monkeying Around in Thailand. LOL.”
“They bite, they have fleas, and they’re smarter than some people,” Kevin warned me one day early on. “Don’t touch them. But I get it. They’re cute bastards.”
I wouldn’t call the one crushing my chest cute. He was mangy and beaten up. When he opened his mouth his lengthy yellow fangs dripped with drool. A gash covered over in white scar tissue turned his mouth into a sneer.
Don’t move. He’ll scratch off your face. I slowed my own breathing and widened my eyes. We began a staring contest. The pronounced ridge over his soft brown eyes furrowed, like he was trying to figure out what to make of me. After a few minutes that felt like an hour he blinked twice, stood, and leaped out to my railing and into a nearby tree where he turned away from me. I was already forgotten.
My k
nees wobbled as I got out of bed, yanked the curtains shut, and fell back onto the bed. I bent over and hung my head down below my knees to slow my heart rate. I could still smell the monkey’s rancid breath as I tried to shake the feeling of how close I’d come to having my face disfigured. I was nauseated and frazzled as I pulled on a bathing suit and a pair of jean shorts for a day trip to Chiang Mai.
Rappelling down the side of a three-hundred-foot waterfall was Derek’s idea. “It’s the most fun we can have with our clothes on,” he’d said flirtatiously. Everything Derek said sounded flirtatious. He couldn’t help it. I really should have said no. I had writing to do. I wanted to go to New Beginnings. I didn’t come here to leap off waterfalls.
But there was a part of me that wanted to be the kind of woman who said yes to things like rappelling down a towering cliff over a torrent of rushing water. I wanted to be brave and open-minded. It was the kind of thing Nina would say yes to without batting an eye. Goddamn Nina. Her leading me here felt like a dream. It felt like yesterday and a dozen years ago at the same time. I’d heard nothing from her since that single e-mail about running off to Lamu. A petty part of me hoped she’d get herpes.
Mia had a rare day off, so the three of us piled into her beat-up Camry and drove north toward the Doi Inthanon National Park in the foothills of the Himalayan range. We sang along to some eighties anthem rock songs I’d forgotten I knew all of the lyrics to. Then “Kokomo” came on the radio. We giggled and turned the volume even louder.
“My first sex dream was Tom Cruise in Cocktail,” Mia said. “I wanted to go to Kokomo, wherever that is . . . get there faster, take it slow, have him go down on me for hours.”
“There was no one sexier than pre-Scientology Tom Cruise,” I agreed. I smiled to myself. Before Izzy was born Karl and I spent a long weekend in Aruba. We hardly got out of bed except to have dinner at the Dutch karaoke bar on a pier that stretched into the ocean. Our out-of-tune version of “Kokomo” had gotten the crowd clapping on their feet.
“I still wouldn’t kick Tom Cruise out of bed now,” Mia said.
“I think he’s too short for you. He’d come up to your boobs.”
“Who knows. I might like that. It could be quite useful.”
I was so happy as we drove, with the windows down, the wind whipping my ponytail into my face.
We pulled off on the side of the road to have lunch at a no-frills café and ate BBQ pork skewers and laab, a mincemeat, offal, and blood salad that I never would have dared to order at home. I had two helpings.
“Thanks for helping Htet with her girls,” Mia remarked as she slurped down a mug of boiled deep-fried noodles.
“I’m happy to do it,” I replied to Mia. Her praise made me feel good. “It makes me miss my girls less.” Derek and Mia both got quiet. They never probed. Both of them had their own stories they didn’t want dissected and analyzed.
I leaned back into my seat and watched the two of them pick food off one another’s plates. I pushed the bloody mess in my bowl around with my fork and thought about the time my well-meaning father took us to visit the famous Usinger’s sausage factory, thinking it would be something his daughters would appreciate. “Important stuff, seeing how the sausage gets made,” he joked. My sister threw up on the cement factory floor. But I loved my father for taking us there. My takeaway from that day was that life and death were messy in very different ways.
I finally asked Mia the question I had been avoiding. “Do you think Htet’s husband is alive?”
She sighed loudly. “I wish I could say yes, but . . .” She got quiet.
“What will she do? What will happen to her if he really is dead? If he wasn’t able to get any money to help their family?”
“She’ll stay. Or she’ll go back to Myanmar and try to find work. Where she’s from women aren’t valued much more than domestic animals. When they’re here we try to train them to sew, to do hair, to repair small electronics, things that can get them a job if they go back. Too many of the women are scared to ask for those kinds of jobs. Many end up forced into sex work, or worse.”
I shuddered to imagine what was worse.
• • •
Three hours later I was wearing a thick nylon harness that felt like a chunky diaper and looking out over a steep drop below. I’d been clipped to a rope, secured at the top of the waterfall by a competent-enough-looking man named Bo who chain-smoked the entire time he gave us his safety demonstration. He was slightly bowlegged and had a shock of black hair that stuck up straight in the back. He was Thai, but his English came out with a slight Southern drawl.
What we were doing was scary, but not dangerous. I couldn’t imagine Mia scared of anything, but tears rolled off her cheeks when she contemplated the twenty-seven-story drop below us.
“Tiny children do this,” Bo teased Mia. “You’re too old to be scared.”
I took a step closer to the ledge. I was ready to do this. Maybe that morning’s encounter with the macaque had made me more fearless than I would have been on any other day. Without turning back, I let slack into the line and stepped into the abyss. For a few seconds I was weightless. I closed my eyes and allowed my body to hurtle down the falls. Cool water poured over my head and down the back of my neck. I turned my face into the stream and let it massage my eyes and lips. I was blinded.
For a beat I was blessedly alone. All by myself in the middle of a waterfall, and it felt the way people who were more religious than I was might describe a slice of heaven.
“Keep it moving, Carmichael!” I heard Derek first, then looked and saw my friends beginning their descent above me. Their harnesses were clipped together at the hip. They were making a tandem drop. Derek held tightly to the rope with one hand and clutched his sister around the waist with the other. I could see him whispering words of encouragement into her ear. I bent my knees and pushed off the rock wall, letting myself drop another ten feet, then another, then another.
A sharp rock jutted out from the wall. Someone—presumably a lovesick kid—had spray-painted it: I LOVE YOU D. It reminded me of how Karl had once carved C+K beneath his mother’s grand mahogany dining room table when I teased him about being such a mama’s boy at age thirty-seven.
As I looked down to see how far I had to reach the water the sun caught the fine blond hair covering my legs. I’d given up on shaving in the complicated outdoor shower. Looking at my legs now made me laugh and think about the thousands of dollars I’d spent in the past decade to make most of my body as bald and smooth as Bruce Willis’s head. I’d never been much for waxing until I spent time in locker rooms after expensive workout classes du jour. I didn’t wax for my husband. Karl liked a little bush. He said it reminded him of the first sticky-paged Playboys he stole from his next-door neighbor Erik Epstein in the eighties. I’d always maintained that women waxed for other women or if they were trying to have sex with another woman’s husband.
My eyebrows had begun to fill in too. I noticed them in the rearview mirror on that morning’s drive. I’d forgotten how unruly they could be without regular shaping, but I liked the way they gave my face an unfinished look, or as Kasey in Karl’s office would say: I now had a strong eyebrow game.
My feet dipped into the chilly pool. I wore a bright orange life jacket so I wouldn’t be yanked to the bottom. I held fast to my rope anyway as I paddled away from the fury of the falls.
Adrenaline surged through my veins as I contemplated where I had begun at the top of the cliff and I felt a wild sense of accomplishment.
• • •
It was late when we set back out, so we grabbed a bunk room in a hostel about ten miles from the falls. Yes, a hostel. I was a woman who had almost exclusively stayed in the Four Seasons for the past ten years and now I was excited about sleeping in a bunk bed in a ten-dollar-a-night rat trap. This is what happens when you live on a mattress on the floor for months—your expectations are drastically lowered in a way that a single bunk bed in a hostel feels like the Four Season
s.
The hostel had a bar, as most hostels do, that served one Thai lager on tap and tequila shots for less than a dollar. The special of the night was a cocktail called a “Sticky Sex on the Beach,” despite the fact that we were miles from the ocean. A fun and little-known fact is that the Thais love karaoke. They’re terrible at it, but they love it just the same. Even the ones who don’t speak any English will belt out an enthusiastic, if off-key, rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” any night of the week, and most bars and even restaurants had invested in some kind of cheap karaoke machine.
I got us a round of Sticky Sexes—when in Thai, as they say—and returned to the table where Derek and Mia had settled themselves with some fellow Aussies. They’d never met, but within minutes they were best friends, throwing around slang like bogan (a redneck) and fair dinkum (genuine) and stubbie holder (those foam things you put around beer cans).
“You don’t see many American ladies traveling on their own at your age, mate,” remarked a young guy named Noah with curly white-blond hair and equally pale eyebrows and eyelashes. He puffed on an electronic cigarette, which reminded me that fake smoking was never going to be as sexy as real smoking.
“You don’t know my age. How old do you think I am?” I teased him.
“You’re at least thirty,” he said with actual conviction.
“Thirty-one, actually,” I said.
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