by YZ Chin
I hung back, surprised. Somehow I had not allowed myself to believe that the answer was really so simple, that Marlin had been at Eamon’s all along. The magnitude of loss had felt so much bigger than the solution; it didn’t fit. I realized I was in fact expecting Marlin to have hitchhiked to the Appalachians, or be holed up in some elaborate underground labyrinth, which I would have to Mission Impossible my way through. But no, he was here. I looked helplessly at Eamon until he guided me in by my elbow.
Inside, the house was not the neat, if drab, space I remembered. Clothes sagged everywhere, draped over arms and backs of couches and chairs. I recognized a pair of joggers by a tear in its crotch. In the kitchen, a sock crowned a microwave. The abundance of clothing gave the house an oppressive padded feel, like the inside of an asylum cell.
“Excuse the mess,” Eamon said. He was frowning, looking like he was struggling to contain his anger. A dot of hope smeared in me. Maybe he had now seen for himself how different Marlin had become. We understood each other, Eamon and I. We’d both been abandoned by the ones we loved. He would help me chip away at Marlin’s unreasonable stubbornness.
“This way.” Eamon gestured.
I followed him down the short hallway to the back of the house, where the master bedroom and guest room were laid out perpendicular to a small half bathroom. The doors on all three rooms were closed. A narrow bar of light marked the bottom of the guest-room door, making it look like a battery icon that was almost out of juice.
Eamon indicated the guest room with a finger. I stood at the mouth of the hallway, arrested by the strip of glow.
“Is he all right?” I whispered.
“See for yourself,” Eamon said, shadows rendering his face harsh. Don’t be so hard on Marlin, I wanted to say. He’s been through something difficult. Maybe he’s not well. I silently made plans to ask for Eamon’s help with Marlin. If Eamon could convince him to answer just one email, or read one text . . .
Eamon swung the door inward. Some kind of chronostasis must have kicked in. I looked at the doorknob, then into the room, locating the human body seated on the bed. When I crossed the threshold, I twisted my body back to find the doorknob, a strange instinct to make sure I wasn’t being locked in with my own husband. When I turned again to face Marlin on the bed, it appeared to be entire minutes before he moved to confirm my presence. A trick of the mind, neural antedating, my brain trying to be kind and magicking away unbearable images, for example the naked hatred in Marlin’s eyes.
“Marlin, I just want to talk.”
As soon as I said the words, he went from glaring round-eyed to pivoting his entire body away, shoulders hunched up. I stared at the back of his head, holding back tears.
“I’m glad to see you’re okay. I was worried.”
Nothing. No heaving, no trembling. Why was I saying such trite things? Couldn’t I do better?
“Marlin, please talk to me.”
I strode toward the head of the bed, which he was facing. I wanted to clench him by the shoulders like a UFO catcher and lift him up out of his funk.
Marlin sensed my approach and rotated so he could keep his back to me. Like a sunflower. No, like the reverse of one. My body irrationally followed what it saw as an imperative: dodge Marlin’s back, chase his face, perform fake-outs like a basketball player to trick him into meeting my eyes. We were playing a schoolyard game like children.
“Marlin, this is ridiculous. Why can’t we talk like two adults?”
No word, no sign. How funny. I’d found my husband, but we were deadlocked in a standoff that would bore nine-year-olds in ten seconds.
What could I do? I wasn’t really The Rock. I couldn’t drag Marlin out the door by his hair. He was physically stronger. Nothing I could do would compel him to acknowledge me, much less love me. Adulting 101: When someone doesn’t love you anymore, you’re supposed to walk away graciously and leave them alone. To do otherwise would be creepy, stalkerish.
I thought to bring up the banana tree spirit story, trying to get a rise out of him. Anything was better than him willing me into nonexistence.
“You want to talk about Ah Gu?” I cried. “My lover? Well, let’s talk, then!”
“Lover? It’s true?”
I’d forgotten Eamon was perched by the door. I whirled around.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked in a kind of fascinated horror.
“Go away, Eamon,” I hissed. “This is none of your business.”
“He told me you cheated on him.” He stared, eyes boring into the mounded heap of fat on my stomach.
“That’s not true,” I said. “Well, maybe, in a past life, just according to him—”
I found myself unable to make the choice between falsely implicating myself and painting a picture of my husband as mentally unstable. I took a last look at Marlin’s head, focusing on the whorl from which all his hair seemed to be flung out in circles the pattern of a galaxy. If only it were a portal into his mind.
“You should leave,” Eamon said. I looked at his grim face and realized, finally, that he had not been on my side at all. His sympathies were with Marlin. I was the cheater, the wayward lying woman here to beg for forgiveness.
More than anything, I felt foolish. I’d propelled myself here out of fear that Marlin had stepped onto darker, possibly suicidal paths, and he’d proven to me that it was all in my head. His pain was directed outward, at me. My concern for his well-being made me seem like the one unbalanced and hysterical.
“He’s the one who left me!” I choked out to Eamon before hurrying down his cement pathway, as quickly as I could manage.
After
Day Three (Friday)
There was a lot of crying. At first I did it on the living room couch, but then my nose became too clogged. I went to the bathroom, blew my nose, and talked to the mirror. “Crying is easy. Anyone can do it. Crying means you’re not trying hard enough. You’re not trying at all.”
When my stomach grumbled, I plodded to the fridge and dug out the pack of prosciutto, its streaks of pink and white reminding me of scar tissue. I parted them gently from one another, lifting a slice at a time, the way I used to strip a flower bald petal by petal as a child. Alone, each prosciutto piece was filmy and suggestive, like a swatch of skin for a custom-tailored new body. I splayed one out across my knee, then another over my belly button. I tried my best to believe I was shedding skin, growing into a better being.
A fable told to me at Buddhist camp: An inquisitive python wanders into a carpenter’s shop. The carpenter screams and dashes out, dropping a hand saw on the floor in his haste. The python, curious, slithers up to the saw. One of the saw’s teeth snags on the snake and cuts it. Alarmed, the python goes on the offensive and binds itself around the threat. The harder the snake squeezes, the more pain it feels, and so the tighter it tries to choke the saw, desperate to extinguish its enemy. In the end, the python dies from its wounds.
I plucked the prosciutto off my stomach and chewed it. The Marlin I’d married had no use for fables. He scoffed at studies showing that most people responded more to emotional appeals than to logical presentation of facts.
“Too bad for humanity,” he’d say. “We’d be far better off if everyone could reason without emotions clouding their judgment.”
I used to wish Marlin would change, just a little, into someone who was half as moved as I was by fairy tales and parables. Now I just wanted him back, in whatever form.
I had another bout of intimacy with the toilet after eating the prosciutto, and then I couldn’t sleep. I woke my laptop and looked up facts, hard data about things that were abstract and things that were untrue.
Datum: about 8 percent of American adults are vegetarian or vegan. Datum: one in three Americans believe in ghosts. I experienced a nonsensical flash of hope. Now that I was no longer vegetarian, I belonged to the 92 percent, far outnumbering Marlin’s sect of ghost believers. That meant the country was on my side, didn’t it?
I know, th
at logic makes no sense. I’m recounting it to you so you get a sense of my mental state at the time.
My belly button itched, and I scratched it. I’d undergone a drastic change to become an omnivore, but I still wanted Marlin back. Whereas Marlin had also undergone a drastic change, except in his case I was dead to him. Didn’t this indicate that there was something wrong with Marlin’s newfound belief itself, rather than with his transformation?
But then my mother believed devoutly in past lives, and I still saw her as sane. I had to assume, too, that the majority of the one-third of Americans who believed in ghosts were interpreted by society as well-functioning. That seemed to rule out mental illness when it came to Marlin’s behavior. Yet—another hairpin turn—perhaps it was what one did with those beliefs that marked off the territory of illness? My mother nagged me with her past life stories, trying through them to influence my lifestyle. If she one day declared our mother-daughter relationship over because of some insight gleaned from a past life regression, then wouldn’t I be entirely justified in assuming she was unwell? Similarly, if Marlin communicated with his spirits in a, I don’t know, positive way, I could see myself eventually tolerating this strange practice. Why couldn’t these spirits have my husband hold me closer, instead of telling him to leave me?
One final piece of prosciutto. I used it to wipe away a streak of tears. Was Marlin still vegan? I had no reason to suspect he’d given it up, but Marlin was now completely different than when he’d first converted to veganism. In his old, unfailingly logical way, he’d done the research—read The China Study front to back, could rattle off on-demand statistics about industrial farming’s wasteful land and water usage. Whereas I’d become vegetarian at fifteen because I thought my neighbor’s chickens were cute, and because I harbored some wishful thinking that the diet would make me skinny.
About a year after I became vegetarian, my mother asked me why I was still “off meat,” as she put it, even though it didn’t help me lose weight. In fact, didn’t I look fatter? She didn’t know that I had secretly been wavering, enticed by the heady, herbal scent of bak kut teh she ostentatiously ate in the house. Her challenge was what cemented my resolve to be vegetarian. I’d keep it up, if only to defy her.
As if I’d summoned her, she called. I pressed that last piece of prosciutto over my laptop camera before answering, not wanting her to see my face made even more unpresentable by crying.
“I can’t see you,” she complained.
“I think there’s something wrong with my camera.”
“How’s Marlin?”
“He’s . . . he’s in bed.” Technically true as of the last time I saw him.
“Oh, you’re not joining him?”
“I was just about to.”
“It’s so early.”
“I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired! You still have that mole on your cheek? It’s like this: it’s blocking your energy. I told you before. Okay, can you call me when you have some time?”
“Why?”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What is it?”
But she wouldn’t say. “You have to be in the right mood first,” she insisted, almost saucily. “I’ll tell you after you fix your sleep.”
After hanging up I sat blankly for a few minutes, and then I lifted the prosciutto off my laptop camera and put it into my mouth.
Marlin had tried to help me lose weight once, at my behest. At first he cajoled me to join him at the rock-climbing gym, but I found it too nerve-racking. Then he settled into his familiar rhythm, reading tons of weight-loss forum posts and weeding out the fads to eventually devise a food-and-exercise plan.
“It’s simple,” he said. “Calories in, calories out. Just math.”
“I was never good at math.”
“Okay, visualize a scale with weights on two ends. One is food, and one is exercise. You just have to balance them.”
I grimaced at the word scale.
“Just write down everything you eat,” he said encouragingly. “That’ll be a start. You like writing, right?”
He pinched his thumb and index finger together and waved them erratically in the air, miming writing. I had to laugh at that.
I did indeed do well with the documenting of food. There were a lot of noodles, pasta, and tofu rice bowls during that period, followed by a brief obsession with avocado atop fried plantains. Exercise-wise, I did my best with a set of dumbbells purchased off the internet.
It was the math part that broke down. I was staying late multiple times a week at AInstein, trying to impress Lucas enough that he’d be open to a green card discussion. Marlin was doing the equivalent at Cachi I/O. Neither of us had time or energy to cook by the time we left our respective offices. That meant takeout, which was hard to quantify in precise caloric terms. It was difficult, too, to derive neat numbers from my dumbbell exercises. The formula Marlin gave me required that I plug in an “Activity level (METS)” on a scale of 1 to 12, with 1 being “Sitting and watching Netflix” and 12 being “Firefighter, general.” I was at a loss when it came to interpreting that last phrase. Was 12 the activity level of a generic, basic firefighter, as opposed to an elite one? Or did “general” there mean the army title?
I brought this problem to Marlin.
“Hmm,” he said. “I doubt an army general burns as many calories as a firefighter. In movies at least, the most exercise they get is crossing and uncrossing their arms behind their back.”
I lost interest when my weight remained steady after a couple of months. Marlin let it go; he was dissatisfied with the fuzziness of the numbers involved. It wasn’t how he liked to do things.
WHEN I FELT MORE TEARS COMING ON, I PLAYED ANOTHER DOCUMENTARY Marlin had watched. This one was about cats. How much control does a cat have over her tail? According to the narrator, the swaying and hooking of a cat’s tail offer insight into the animal’s emotions. Based on observations, researchers concluded that while a cat’s tail may mirror her agitation, excitement, or wariness, she seems to have no control over it. Which is to say, the tail betrays.
What if there was an analogy here to Marlin’s newfound spiritual beliefs? The tail moves when the creature is stimulated, whether into desire, unease, or something else. His abrupt spirituality could simply be a reflection of his inner turmoil, an unseen appendage lashing back and forth, appearing to take on a life of its own. Maybe his father’s death was so enormous a psychic hit that Marlin had to develop new beliefs to manage it.
I sat on the couch, my mind churning. I knew none of this speculation was helpful. It was insulting, even, to compare my husband to ants and cats. But my brain was starved for an explanation, a story. I kept scrolling through documentary videos. What if whatever afflicted Marlin was contagious? What if, even as I was having these thoughts, my reasoning was suspect?
Just before I slumped into sleep, something Eamon said came back to me. “Are you pregnant?” He’d said that out of nowhere. It was true I wasn’t thin to begin with, and my new meat-gorging habits might have made me more bloated than usual. Still, it had been a jarring comment. I wondered if Marlin believed I was pregnant for some reason. Maybe the spirits had told him so. Paranoia set in, and I felt a sudden urge to buy a pregnancy test from a 24/7 drugstore. But I was too tired. I kept my eyes closed instead, telling myself I was being ridiculous. Marlin didn’t even want kids. He’d made that clear from the start.
We had a perfectly chaste first date, Marlin and I, possibly because we’d already kissed at the Chinese New Year gathering before he even asked for my number. I was the one to arrive first at the restaurant. I loitered outside in snappy winter air, eyeing the Michelin Bib Gourmand sign with the tire man and his provocative tongue. I contemplated waiting inside, but the chandeliers and the hostess’s prominent YSL belt dissuaded me. Years after living in New York, I could still feel like an impostor, unwelcome in the city’s fancier spaces.
When Marlin arrived, we smiled and mo
ved toward the entrance without once touching each other. We leaned on the heavy doors until they yielded, and I could feel my heart lifting straight up like a hot air balloon.
The food was, to be honest, unremarkable, some vegetarian afterthought by a meat-centric chef. Marlin was diffident and cautious, asking my approval before ordering anything. When he finally cleared his throat and said “There’s something you should know,” it was in a tone of confession.
“I don’t know if I want kids,” he said. In fact, he’d once brashly declared that he would never have children in front of his whole extended family at a mid-autumn festival party.
“I was young and foolish back then, maybe.” He played with his napkin. “But still, I thought you should know.”
“Thank you,” I said, unsure how to reply. “I don’t know what I want, to be honest.”
Marlin nodded solemnly. “Which is worse? To be too sure of something, or to be unsure of everything?”
“Why did you tell me? I mean, why now?” I tried to be subtle about glancing left and right, to make sure the smartly dressed couples sandwiching us were not listening in, bemused.
“I don’t want to waste your time. In case it becomes serious. Between us.”
After the date, as I walked away from him past the underground subway turnstiles, I smiled a private smile. I was thinking about how I wanted nothing more than to waste my time with him. I wanted our coming together to be everything a responsibility or a deadline was not—frivolous because unproductive, full of meandering delights. He would be the mirror in which I was reflected as a person who existed outside rules and regulations.
So I was the one who dragged him along to modern art museums and poetry readings that took place in churches while an AA meeting went on in the next room. I bit my lip when he commented, as I predicted he would, that he could easily paint half of the “masterpieces” in the galleries we visited. It was endearing to me that everything seemed a competition to him. There he was, gauging his engineer self against an airy hall of abstract artists. We were the opposite; whereas the new and unfamiliar paralyzed me, he took everything he knew to bear against the unknown, always asking: What can I do with this?
