by Paul Theroux
Because of complications, I spent only a few days there. The town had changed a lot. Rich gays had put up big houses. Many more people, but they looked nice, even outrageous in a nice way. They liked showing off. I heard one man say approvingly, “Look, billions of queens.” The butch gays had muscles. The lesbians looked pretty to me. I was happy, but those years in Vermont made me an unsocial type. I am shy in large groups. And I don’t drink alcohol.
“I’ll have a soda water with lemon,” I said at the Atlantic House. The upstairs bar was full of butch gays in cowboy outfits drinking beer out of the bottle. One was chanting, “Fudge till Tuesday!”—whatever that meant.
There was dancing in the downstairs bar. I just watched. One man on the floor was alone. He wore a fireman’s helmet and yellow rubber fireman’s trousers and rubber boots, but other than that he was naked. The rubber trousers were held up by suspenders. This man fascinated me. I had never seen anyone like him in my life. He danced so energetically he was covered in sweat. I loved watching him.
He must have noticed me. When the music stopped he came over to the bar. I was very worried, frightened that he’d talk to me, because I didn’t know what to say. He looked me up and down and smiled. He said, “Very nice.”
That’s all. That was the moment. Ever since, I have thought about him constantly, especially when life is hard for me or I’m lonely. I think of him, how he was dressed, what he said to me, and I am happy.
My Old Flame
I was trying to think of a way of breaking up with my girlfriend, Paula, who was uncommunicative, always saying, “I’m not verbal like you.” In spite of this, she often corrected me. When I referred to a woman’s sex, she said, “You mean gender.” And she sometimes talked about her “goals.” I am suggesting that she could be rather irritating. Or was it me? She was gentle and very kind to me and good company in a quiet, listening-type way. She was passive, and I think I was looking for someone to take the initiative. She liked torch songs—that’s what she called certain love songs.
To break the news to her gently, I took her to an expensive club where a black woman sang these love songs. I thought I would offer Paula a good time, an expensive meal, the whole business, and later it would be easier for me to say, “We’re not really suited to each other.”
She loved the club. She loved the music. She sat transfixed, drank a little more than usual, and said that it was one of the most pleasant nights of her life. Back at her apartment, she interrupted me before I could tell her what was on my mind. She said, “Let’s make love.”
Not only was that unusual in this normally passive woman, but while we were making love, she said, “Can I tell you a secret?”
I must have said something. I was dazed. I hadn’t planned to be making love, but the evening had swept us up.
“I wanted to go home with her,” she said.
That was Paula’s secret, spoken in the darkness of her bedroom. I was overwhelmed. It became our secret. We talked about it all the time. I could not leave her. In the end she left me, and I was heartbroken.
First Love
Everyone was pretty much the same at my junior college, but after I dropped out to get a job, and started night school, everyone seemed different: it was the real world, much harder for me and much more complex. I was living with my meek old grandmother in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. I felt like such a failure—working in an art supply store, living with my grandmother, going to night school. I was eighteen years old, the youngest student in the class. One man was over sixty. Many were quite old, one or two were middle-aged men, some older women, some housewives. “I deliver bakery goods,” the man sitting next to me said. “I guess I eat them,” the woman in front of him said. The class was Economics for Small Businesses. Everyone was aiming to start their own business, but somehow I knew we were all doomed to failure.
The woman who had said “I guess I eat them” saw me standing at the bus stop and offered me a ride home. This happened a few times, until one night she stopped at a house and said, “I live here. Want to come in?”
The way she screamed at her child, who was upstairs, scared me and made me obedient. She put the light out, unbuttoned my shirt, and said, “Let me, let me.” It was the first sex of my life. It was heaven. Night school was three times a week—I couldn’t wait to go. After every class she drove me to her house and we made love. And after a few weeks she met me outside the art supply store. I saw her sitting in her car and I was joyous.
Some days I had errands to run and couldn’t see her, but even so, she stalked me and asked me to come with her. “I can’t, I can’t,” I’d say, though I wanted to. Another day Grandma was sick and I had to stay home. The woman came to Grandma’s house and banged on the door and begged to see me. Although she was sick, Grandma yelled at her, while I hid. Grandma won, the woman went away, and Grandma said, “No more night school for you.” So I went to New York, where I became successful in real estate. That was my first love, and I suspect hers, too.
Episode in Bangkok
As a sculptor and welder of large metal pieces I was always invited to the unveilings, especially when a big company was involved as the sponsor or patron. My Bangkok gallery sold one of my pieces to a bank for its courtyard’s inaugural, and I flew there for the opening. My translator was a lovely young woman, very slender and pale. Hardworking and sleep-deprived, she was attractive to me: her weary fortitude made her seem waif-like and aroused me. Yet she was strong—stronger than me. I tended to fade in the evening while she was still alert. She was always early at the hotel in the morning to pick me up. She said, “Call me Pom. My real name too hard.”
She grew lovelier to me each day, and I found myself desiring her. In the taxis I would sit close to her. Sometimes I’d put my hand on her warm receptive hand. I asked where she lived. Far, she said. I suggested getting a room for her at my hotel. She said, “Not necessary.” What did that mean? I tried to be as polite as possible, knowing how manners are so important in Thai culture. I thought my extreme politeness might work magic on her, but it didn’t.
One day she was late. It was the only time she’d ever been late. She was apologetic but had an explanation. Her explanation took almost an hour of nonstop monologue. To summarize: after leaving me the night before, she had been accosted by two men who’d taken her in a car to a remote place and raped her, over and over. She spared me no detail, and her English was perfect, which made it all worse. It was a harrowing story of violent sexual assault.
“We must go to the police,” I said when she’d finished.
She said no. “We will say no more about this.” I could not read the expression on her face. It was not a smile. It was something so enigmatic it seemed akin to either ecstasy or anguish.
Soon after this, my sculpture was unveiled. I left Bangkok. It was only later that I realized she must have invented the story as a way of attracting me, but of course by then I was home with my wife, who is the love of my life.
Sweet Tooth
Traveling around Japan, especially in the smaller provincial towns, I’d always stop in convenience stores for candy or a chocolate bar or cookies. I had a sweet tooth. Maybe it was the bland Japanese food I’d been eating that exacerbated my craving.
Invariably, the cashier at the convenience store was a girl in her late teens—slender, pale, with flawless skin, delicate hands, fine-boned, smiling, submissive, sweet, and obliging. I would linger over the transaction, often ask a question just to detain her, and if no one else was around I would ask her name, her age, and what sort of music she liked. She was always delightful. I am not talking about one or two girls like this, but twenty or more. It was like a whole social class of delightful teenage cashiers, smiling at me while they went about their dreary job. I always thought, If I were not married, I’d move to Japan and marry one of these beauties.
A year after my trip, back in my small town in Massachusetts, I wanted to have a desk built and went to a local cabinetmaker. The man, A
rthur, showed me pictures of some of the work he’d done—in Japan. I got to know him better. He had lived in Japan for fifteen years.
I told him my fantasy of the cashier.
He laughed and said, “I married her.”
He had fallen in love with the very sort of girl, nineteen, beautiful, a cashier in the convenience store in a small town near Nagoya. He too had a sweet tooth.
“It was horrible almost from the beginning,” Arthur said. “Yes, she was submissive and sweet at the store, but most of these girls are the opposite privately from the way they are in public. As if to compensate for that public role of being obliging and deferential, at home they’re nagging and dominant, hypercritical, unhelpful, frigid, and unpleasant. Mean with money—mine took charge of all my money. Her mother was the same. We ended it.” He thought a moment, then said, “Maybe they’re not all like that, but . . .”
Guesthouse Voices
Our son and his wife and their small baby visited one summer. I had to put off our old friends the Butlers, saying, “If it weren’t for my son’s visit, we’d be glad to have you on the Fourth of July. Come after that—the guesthouse will be free.”
The Butlers said they’d visit the following weekend. I looked forward to their visit, because they were a happy couple and liked us and, frankly, Joe and I were going through a rough patch.
I should also add that my son and his wife were model parents, extremely attentive to their little six-month-old son, Freddy, who never gave a moment of trouble—usually slept through the night. And if he was fussed, they seemed to know it instantly, even when we were eating in the main house, kind of like parental extrasensory perception. I was amazed at how prescient they were to this infant’s needs—changes of diaper, wakefulness, teething, whatever.
I said to my husband, “That’s a lesson to us. They’re on the kid’s wavelength in a way we never were.” We were sorry to see them go.
The Butlers came. Wonderful couple, no kids, devoted to each other. Ron Butler had been the best man at our wedding, one of our oldest friends. We had felt an emptiness when our son and his family left, but the Butlers perked us up. They’d driven a long way and said they were tired. I said, “Have a nap. Everything’s informal. We have no plans. Let’s do something tomorrow.”
They went to the guesthouse and shut the door.
I poured myself a glass of wine and settled in front of the TV, but before I turned it on I heard, I told you they’re pissed off. It was Ron Butler’s voice. My husband came into the room and made a face. We heard from a corner bookshelf, You’re such an asshole. This is the last goddamned time. Did you see how they looked at us. They don’t want us here. And then the wife, Oh, shut up, you queer.
We sat, horrified, until at last we found the baby monitor my son had left behind, the apparatus under the bed, the receiver in our TV room, to hear whether the baby was crying.
That night my husband embraced me tenderly and said, “You are so precious to me.”
The Butlers were their delightful selves, but we were not surprised when they said they’d have to leave earlier than they’d expected.
The Furies
“I NOW BELONG TO an incredibly exclusive club,” Ray Testa had said in his speech at his wedding reception. He savored the moment, then winked and added, “There are not many men who can say they’re older than their father-in-law.”
He was fifty-eight, his new wife, Shelby, thirty-one; his father-in-law was fifty-six and seemingly at ease with this older man marrying his daughter. He said, “She’s an old soul.”
Ray Testa was a dentist, and for seven years Shelby had been his hygienist. But “I’m thinking of leaving,” Shelby said one day. Ray urged her to stay and finally pleaded, “You can’t leave. I love you.” She didn’t smile. She swallowed air and said that she had feelings for him, too. Then, “What about Angie?”
He confessed everything to his wife, adding that he wanted to marry Shelby.
Angie took it badly, as he guessed she might, but unexpectedly she said, “Why didn’t you leave me years ago, when I might have met someone who really cared for me?”
He hadn’t imagined she’d object in this peevish way, for such a coldly practical reason, because his timing was inconvenient for her. He thought she’d tell him how she’d miss him and be miserable without him, not that she might have been better off with someone else.
Staring at him, her eyes went black and depthless and she seemed physically to swell, as though with malevolence. Ray expected a shout, but her voice was the confident whisper of a killer whose victim is helpless. “I know I should say I wish you well, but I wish you ill with all my heart. I’ve made it easy for you. I hope you suffer now with that woman who’s taken you from me. These women that carry on with married men are demons.”
She sounded like her mother, Gilda—Ermenegilda—sour, mustached, habitually in black, pedantically superstitious, Sicilian, always threatening the evil eye. He told himself that Angie was bitter, cruel for being grief-stricken, demented by the breakup, she didn’t mean this. They had no children; they divided their assets in half, the proceeds of his more than thirty years of dentistry. Angie got the family house, the dog, a lump sum; Ray the vacation house on the South Shore—he’d commute to his office from there, Shelby by his side. Shelby wasn’t greedy. She said she’d never been happier. Ray did not divulge to Shelby the vindictive curse Angie had uttered. He now had what he wanted, a new life with Shelby.
She was a treasure, unconventionally beautiful, not the fleshy new graduate she’d been when he first hired her but with the lean feline good health of the jogger she now was, tall and sharp-featured. Her mouth was almost severe—she hardly parted her lips when she spoke, and then always in a low certain voice that got his attention, as in, “What about Angie?”
With the unwavering judgment of someone untested, someone innocent and upright, Shelby was young, alert to the obvious. Her eyes were gray, blinkless, cat-like. Ray had desired her from the first, but thought that his feeling would diminish as he got to know her better. Time passed and his desire to possess her became a physical set of symptoms, like hunger, a swollen tongue, a droning in his head, a tingling in his hands.
Now she was his. He could not believe his luck, how she had come into his life, to lead him confidently into a future he’d hated to contemplate. He sometimes eavesdropped on her working on a patient in her concentrated way and he was almost tearful with gratitude that she was his wife. People said how a second wife was often a younger version of the first one, but she was in every way the opposite of Angie.
They had never argued, and so their first argument, a few months after their marriage, came as a shock to Ray. It concerned his high school reunion, the fortieth. Ray wanted to take Shelby. She protested that she’d feel out of place. Everyone knew a high school reunion was hell for a spouse. She said, “I think you’ll regret it.”
But Ray became a big smiling boy with a boast, and Shelby agreed, even to their staying the night at the hotel in his hometown, where the reunion would be held in the ballroom.
Medford had changed: it was denser and now divided by the interstate, much busier, but still full of memories, as he told Shelby on their tour through the place, the two brick façades that had once been the entrances to single-screen movie theaters, the National Guard armory that bulked like a granite citadel, the basement stairs that had led to Joe’s poolroom, the Italian cobbler, the Chinese laundry, the post office with the old murals of shipbuilding in its lobby. Now Medford had a new hotel, with a ballroom large enough to accommodate the high school reunion.
“One night, nonsmoking, king-size bed,” the clerk said at the reception counter, tapping the check-in card with her pen, but she kept glancing at Shelby, uneasily, almost with pity, as though suspecting an abduction.
They drew stares later, too, as they searched the table for their name labels.
“I don’t really need one. It’s your night,” Shelby said.
But as she said it, Ray peeled the paper backing from Shelby Testa and stuck the label to her beaded jacket.
A woman in a black shawl approached them as Ray was patting the label flat. The woman flourished a large yellow envelope and drew a black-and-white photograph from it, saying, “Miss Balsam’s class. Third grade. Do you recognize yourself?”
“That’s me, third row,” Ray said. “And that’s you in the front with your hands in your lap. Maura Dedrick, you were so cute!”
“Aren’t I still cute?” the woman said.
Twisting her fingers together over the old photo, she was small and thin and deeply lined, with weary eyes. No makeup, with a trace of hair on her cheeks, fretful lips, her open mouth like a grommet in canvas.
“Of course you are,” Ray said.
Smiling sadly, as though he had satirized her with his sudden answer, appearing to dare him, wanting something more, she seemed to go dark with defiance. And she turned, because two other women had come to greet her.
“You remember Roberta and Annie,” Maura said.
Ray said “You married Larry” to Roberta.
“He left me,” Roberta said.
“I’m divorced too,” Annie said.
All this time, Ray was aware that while they were talking to him they were eyeing Shelby. Annie was bigger than he remembered, not just plump and full-faced but taller—probably her shoes—and she was carrying a handbag as big as a valise. Roberta was heavily made up, wearing ropes of green beads, Gypsy-like. Ray had known them as girls. They were old women now—older than him, he felt, for their look of abandonment tinged with anger. When they became aware of his gaze they recoiled in a way that made him feel intrusive. They were fifty-eight, everyone in the room was that age, though when he surveyed the growing crowd he could see that some had fared better than others.
