Kevin helped us organize our travel. It would be easiest to fly to Myanmar through Chiang Mai. Americans were no longer allowed to cross the Thai-Myanmar border on foot. Even with a guide, entry was only valid through one of the three international airports. The good news was that it took less than twenty-four hours to apply for a visa online. We got the process started before we left the retreat center.
“Do we have any idea where the hell in Myanmar we’re going? It’s a big country,” Derek asked as we drove to Chiang Mai, a lopsided smile forming on his face.
“Well, we have an address for this man named Nanda, Htet’s brother-in-law, in the city of Bagan. He’s a taxi driver.”
“Should we hire a guide once we’re there?”
“Actually, we already have one.”
I ended up trying Kasem again. This time he answered. I expected he would recommend a local guide in Bagan. Instead he insisted his girlfriend, Naw, accompany us. He was planning to stay home to be with their kids anyway. He swore she was the very best guide for tourists looking to go from Thailand to Myanmar and began to tick off her many awards and accolades. I told him he didn’t have to convince me.
Naw wasn’t what I was expecting when we met her in the lobby of a hotel close to the airport. Kasem was a small man, you might even call him puny. His girlfriend, meanwhile, must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. She had a black bowl cut and dimples that puckered her round cheeks when she smiled. She ran through everything we needed to know about the next few days of travel. Naw would fly with us from Chiang Mai to Mandalay. We’d drive to Bagan and track down Htet’s brother-in-law and be back in Thailand in a few days. From there I’d continue to Bangkok en route to New York.
The hotel was less than fifty bucks a night. I’d booked just one room for Derek and me in an attempt to be as frugal as possible. I’d stopped using my credit cards, the ones that belonged to both Karl and me, after I bought my first plane ticket to Thailand.
I hadn’t thought about it in years, the fact that Karl was the only person in our house making any of the money. The independent feminist version of myself in my twenties would have been horrified to learn that the forty-year-old me had no income to speak of. I did have a little money of my own. When my dad passed away, he’d left a modest inheritance, including our childhood home, to my sister and me. By then I didn’t need the money, but I took my half and put it in a small savings account in my name. It was mine and mine alone. Why had I done that? Did I have a premonition, just a couple years into my marriage, that at some point I’d need a safety net? I didn’t think so. I think the amount just seemed paltry compared to the accounts with so many zeros under Karl’s name. I didn’t think my little savings mattered. At the time I thought I would maybe use the money to surprise Karl with a trip. I had never imagined that I would one day use that account to fund a life in Thailand or a journey across the Myanmar border to search for a near-stranger’s husband.
Once we settled into the hotel, I stayed in the shower for almost an hour, turning the water as hot as it would go until my skin turned a ruddy pink. I used an entire miniature bottle of conditioner in my hair, rinsed it out, and then used another. I lathered my legs, from the ankle up to my ass, in thick coconut-scented lotion.
I stared into the mirror at my naked body. My stomach, thighs, and butt were newly lean from walking everywhere and several bouts with what the locals called Thai Tummy, excruciating diarrhea every visitor gets at least once. My stomach wasn’t exactly flat, but it was flatter than before. My breasts still resembled floppy pancakes. I used to love my boobs. I grabbed them now from below and lifted them back into place, pulling the skin on the sides tight toward my back. They really did used to be wonderful boobs, the kind men stared at through a tight white T-shirt, bright perky globes impervious to gravity. That was before they were ravaged by breast-feeding and pumping, before the nipples became elongated like an old cow’s or a street dog past her prime. When I let them go they wilted unceremoniously back toward my stomach. Most women in our social circle had their breasts and stomachs taken care of after their last child. I knew a few who had it done on the same day as their scheduled C-section. They called it the triple-crown. If I’d stayed I probably would have gotten around to fixing things eventually. Now I stared at my limp breasts, strange nipples, my tributaries of fading stretch marks, and appreciated the work my body had done to birth and feed my children. My postpartum body repulsed me at first. Suddenly I was fiercely proud of it.
I emerged from the bathroom still rubbing my hair with a towel.
“Should we order room service? I’ll pay for it?” Derek asked in a childish voice, as if he were asking his mother for an ice cream.
“Sure. I’m too tired to go out to get anything. What do they have?”
“We definitely need a cheeseburger and french fries.”
He was right.
The cheeseburger came on a hard little bun with a shiny yellow square of melted American cheese, a soggy piece of iceberg lettuce, and a sweaty tomato. The ketchup was too sweet, the meat overcooked, and yet it was the best burger I had ever tasted. The room service burger reminded me of my second date with Karl. He’d flown back to Paris and booked a room at the George V off the Champs-Élysées. He was definitely trying to impress me. I tried to keep my cool as I carried my ratty overnight bag into the grand gilded entryway of the most expensive hotel in Paris. I’d googled the rooms and knew the flower arrangements alone cost more than my rent. Three bellhops in adorably absurd outfits rushed to relieve me of my pack. They called me Madame Carmichael like I was already Karl’s wife.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” I shot him a sly smile.
He blushed. “I’ll tell them your last name. I’m sorry. I should have . . . already . . . done that.”
I placed my hand on his arm. “It’s OK. It’s funny.”
“Do you like the hotel?” he asked stiffly as we rode together in the elevator to the room.
“It’s lovely. I come here all the time,” I lied.
By then Karl and I had been e-mailing and texting for nearly a month, some short and sweet, others long and earnest about our lives and our families. We talked enough that it didn’t seem strange to pack a backpack, leave my attic studio, and spend a weekend in a hotel across the city with him. We weren’t children. I was about to turn thirty. It didn’t seem crazy until we were in the elevator of a fancy hotel and he was frowning at me.
I could see the hurt in his eyes so I grabbed his hand then. “I’m just kidding.” The smile returned to his face. It gave me a sharp thrill in my belly to have that power over him.
We got out of the elevator on the top floor. Once we reached our room, a suite with a balcony and magnificent views of the Eiffel Tower, I could no longer keep my cool.
“Jesus Christ. Does your publishing house put all the editors up like this?”
He shook his head and looked bashful again. “I paid for the room. I thought you would like it.”
That was the first time I realized that Karl had money, real money, and that even though he was frugal and sensible by nature, he was also used to being surrounded by very nice things. At night, we lay naked on the floor of the balcony, watching the tower twinkle on the hour. Their room service menu had every delicacy from every corner of the globe, yet I chose to order burgers and fries. I wanted Karl to know that was the kind of girl I was, a girl with simple tastes. For a long time, those were the best burgers I had ever tasted.
I felt Derek’s eyes on me as I ate and I purposely didn’t turn to look at him. When I booked the room I didn’t think twice about the close quarters, but sitting here, my hair still wet on my shoulders, wearing nothing but a thin terry cloth bathrobe, I wondered if perhaps I had given him the wrong impression.
“How does Zoe feel about this trip?” I tucked my legs beneath me. I could hear Derek inhale and think about what he wanted to tell me. He didn’t have to. I knew.
“You didn’t tell her
you were coming, did you?”
He took a swig from an amber-colored bottle of beer and began fiddling with the remote control.
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
“I called her a few days ago. I told her I was coming back soon.” Derek and I had that in common. We both kept telling the person we loved that we would be home soon. We both kept disappointing them.
“What did she say?”
“She told me not to bother and hung up the phone.” He smiled a melancholy smile and folded his long arms across his chest. “She deserves better than me. Now I’ve buggered off on her twice.”
“What are you going to do when you go back? Do you want to be with her?”
“She’s the only girl I’ve ever wanted to be with. I’m just a stupid ass is all. I’d ask her to marry me tomorrow if I thought she’d say yes.” Humility radiated out of him. Derek was one of the good ones. I had no doubt about that. Men in their twenties were still children. It was one of the reasons I always counted my blessings that I got Karl at thirty-five. He was fully cooked at that point.
He shrugged. “I’m doing a metric shitload of positive thinking. Part of me wishes we were keeping the farm. Then Zoe and I could run it together. She could take care of the animals. I could do the business. I never wanted that before, but I think I want it now. I wish you could come see the farm before it’s all gone. We’ll be out of it by the end of the summer, but it’s a place I think you’d love. It’s beautiful in a different way from here. When the sun sets in the red desert it looks like the entire earth is about to ignite in a big ball of flames. Then you go to sleep and it’s all still there in the morning, prettier than you remembered it.”
“Where will your dad go?” I pictured an old man puttering around a big empty farmhouse, packing up his belongings to prepare to spend the rest of his days in a retirement community, one of the nice ones with tennis courts and uncomplicated yoga classes.
“He has a few irons in the fire. He can’t sit still very long. I’m not worried about him. He’ll be fine. Maybe he’ll get laid a lot.”
“Gross.” I threw a pillow across the room at him, and it hit him in the side of the face with a comical thud.
Derek got up and went into the bathroom. I heard him brush his teeth and wash his face. When he came back it was clear he’d been thinking about something else.
“Maybe I do just need to suck it up and propose. It’s going to take a grand gesture to get her back. How did Karl propose?”
Talking about Karl was painful now, but this was one of my favorite stories to tell, and I couldn’t resist having a fresh audience for it. There was something so affirming about recounting your own happy memories to someone new. I glanced for a second at my bare ring finger, at the thin white line where my rings had been. I’d removed them both and left them with Mia for safekeeping before we left for Myanmar.
“He proposed in Paris.”
“That’s romantic.” Derek’s voice was becoming slow and hazy with sleep.
“It is. Do you want to hear the rest?”
“Of course I do.”
“So, he proposed in Paris. I was living there at the time. I woke up one morning in my little apartment in the Marais. It was tiny. Picture the kind of apartment a kid straight out of college can afford and then cut it in half and take away the kitchen and add a bidet and that was my Paris apartment. I loved it even though I could reach the hot plate where I boiled coffee from my bed. I woke up because I heard a swift knock on my door and looked over to see a thin white envelope slip below the crack.”
“What was it?”
“It was a riddle.”
“Karl proposed with a riddle?”
“No. He proposed with a scavenger hunt. A literary scavenger hunt that took me all over Paris. It sent me to Oscar Wilde’s grave, George Sand’s adorable little cottage in Montmartre, and then to Dingo Bar, where Hemingway met Fitzgerald for the first time. There was a clue inside a copy of From Paris to the Moon at the American Library on rue du Général Camou. He even convinced a guard to let me climb under Marcel Proust’s bed at Musée Carnavalet. At the end he was down on one knee in the very obvious Bar Hemingway at the Paris Ritz.”
“It sounds like something out of a movie,” Derek murmured with awe in his sweet young voice.
“It does,” I agreed. “But movies usually have happy endings . . .” I let my voice fade into an awkward silence.
Had I said that on purpose to end the conversation? I wanted to explain everything—that I still loved Karl, that I couldn’t imagine being with any man other than Karl, that I wanted to lock the two of us in a room and force us to say all of the things we’d been too exhausted to say to one another over the last few years.
Derek wanted more. “Why’d you leave him? He sounds like a great guy.”
“You left Zoe,” I reminded him, perhaps too quickly.
He wasn’t about to let me off the hook. “Yes, but I’m young and stupid. And we aren’t even engaged, much less married. And we don’t have kids.”
I didn’t have the energy to explain what made me leave.
I was in a yoga class once back home that was being taught by a celebrity yogi. She had perfect hair, glossy lips, millions of Instagram followers, and her own line of moisture-wicking yoga bras. She wore a T-shirt that said MY HORMONES MADE ME DO IT. For the rest of the class I made a lengthy list of all the things I thought my hormones had made me do over the past twenty years. I’d never thought that Run away from your family and live in a jungle hut would be one of them.
“I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” I said instead with a rueful laugh.
“Aren’t you just supposed to buy a Ferrari and start shagging men half your age?” he asked.
“Why do you think you’re here?” I laughed, then he tossed my pillow back to me, and I turned out the light. “Good night, Derek.”
He scooted down beneath his own comforter and flicked on the television to an American cable news network. After months without a television I was startled by the brassy voice of a female anchor with too-pink lipstick and false eyelashes that resembled miniature Chinese fans. She cataloged the day of terrible news in a sharp staccato. A plane stuck on a tarmac for nine hours leads to a passenger revolt. Millions of Americans will be out of a job by next summer. Mother dies while saving daughter from stabbing. Man kills eight in mass shooting at mall in Minneapolis.
“It’s hard to go back to reality,” Derek remarked.
I unwrapped the foil on a bar of sea salt chocolate I bought in the hotel lobby and bit off the corner. “Turn it off and keep the world at bay just a little longer.” I crawled deeper beneath the crisp white hotel sheets, which still smelled faintly of bleach, and put my cheek against the cool pillow. “We need to try to get some sleep. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.”
Chapter Eleven
* * *
We gave Naw the aisle seat and I cringed for her when the thin young flight attendant with her hair in a perfect high bun fastened together with blue chopsticks brought her one of those seat belt extenders for extra-large people.
Naw must have seen me wince because she grabbed her belly roll with both hands and shook it up and down. “More of me to love.” She laughed and the flight attendant laughed with her, and I felt silly for being embarrassed for her in the first place.
The flight was just over an hour, faster than the shuttle from New York to D.C. Derek fell asleep before we even took off. Now he snored next to me, his head dangling from his neck and a thin line of drool dripping onto his T-shirt. Naw finished an entire crossword puzzle in English and I scribbled in a notebook. I hadn’t touched the story for Zoetrope since I’d gotten the e-mail from Karl’s lawyers. I’d managed to conflate the two events in my head, souring the excitement and acceptance with dread and failure. I hadn’t even responded to Ben Hirsch.
I cataloged things based on before and after I read the e-mail where my husband asked for a divorce. Ben Hir
sch’s kind note about my writing and the possibility that I could be a real writer was a Before. Htet asking me to find her husband—that was an After. Right now I could only focus on the things that came After. Before, I was a wife and mother, a woman with a family. After . . . what was I?
Everything that happened from the moment we landed in Mandalay felt like a dream, or something that happened to someone else, recounted to me in colorful detail. In hindsight it’s hard to imagine it happened to me at all.
Pasty tourists swarmed the airport. “Dutch and German,” Naw explained. “The Germans wear the packs around their middle. The Dutch are taller and better-looking. Neither of them smile much. You’ll see some Americans. As soon as the junta relaxed its grip, the American tourists trickled in. They’re loud and constantly on their phones.”
Naw swiftly fetched our rental car. No one at the airport rental counter batted an eye as she flashed an official-looking tour-operator badge issued by the Thai government and approved by the Myanmar authorities. We pulled onto a modern toll road with sparse traffic and after about thirty minutes found our way into downtown Mandalay proper.
Child monks in crimson robes, their heads shaved nearly bald, strolled the streets next to men in neat suits talking on Bluetooth earpieces and women wearing American-style skinny jeans and tight sweaters. A line of nuns in bright pink caftans over saffron pants begged for food near a bus stop.
The neat grid of numbered roads surprised me.
“Most of the modern city was built after the British took over. They made it very orderly and proper,” Naw said, wrinkling her nose at the word proper and the memory of colonial conquest. “The British love their rules. I once dated a British backpacker who folded my panties into little triangles for me while I slept.” She rolled her large brown eyes with a smirk.
Marriage Vacation Page 18