Why did you turn the car around when she told you to? Amit had asked me, when I recounted the events. You didn’t do anything wrong.
I didn’t know how to answer her. It hadn’t felt like a choice.
In the conversations with Amaia that followed that day, I had tried all of my tools. I explained over and over the logic of my experience. I used “‘I’ statements” and acknowledged my own insecurities. These methods only seemed to inflame her more.
You are, you are, you are, she said. How could you?
It was like trying to play catch with a wall. It was beating my head against it. So I stopped trying to speak what language of resolution I knew. I could not negotiate with her perspective, so I adopted it.
I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry. I apologized all summer. I stopped calling Amit. I went to work and came home. I waited for Amaia to call me and I always answered. When I mentioned a friend whom she didn’t know and she got quiet, I stopped seeing that friend. It was easier. They were choices that I made.
Of the first summer that she spent in the Southwest, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “There were so few flowers. There was no rain so the flowers didn’t come. Bones were easy to find so I began collecting bones…”
Amaia’s home was all dark wood—the silver steer’s skull mounted on the wall, its tapered horns glowing in the dim like a blue flame, while everything outside blistered. In her desert, you can’t leave a plastic chair outside without it melting. Every wall of her two-car garage was lined with shelves—floor to ceiling rows of plastic bins meticulously labeled in her ex’s schoolteacher hand. Every time I entered it, I stomped my feet, so the snakes who might hide in poisonous coils and the spiders who hung in sticky webs out of sight would know my size. I am here, I stomped, so that all the ghosts would know. So that I would know.
On good mornings, she woke me and we drove through the cotton fields, crop dusters sputtering overhead. We drove across the river, our hands laced below the truck windows where no one we passed could see, the sun a tipped cup bleeding light across a tablecloth. We visited one of her neighbors, an old man who told us stories and sang us songs. We bought mounds of shaved ice drenched in syrup that dyed our mouths brilliant orange and crimson, like sunsets or fresh wounds, still cold when we pressed them together.
We never touched in front of anyone out there. Her nieces and nephews climbed into my arms and fell asleep there, not knowing what to call me, only that I knew how to hold them. When I watched her with those kids my heart nearly burst. She was kind and patient. She had so much to give them in their innocence. That was how she wanted to love, I thought—complete and uncomplicated. That was how she wanted to be loved.
The good days felt like a reward for all the hard. Maybe I had been stubborn, in trying to fight for my version of our story. Colluding with hers let me into her life, and that was what I’d wanted for so long.
Other mornings, I’d walk into the kitchen and she would glower at me. Did you like kissing her? she would ask. What was it like?
In the middle of lovemaking, she would stop, roll away from me.
I’m sorry, I would say. Amaia, please.
I still knew that I had done nothing wrong, at least not of the magnitude she described. I had betrayed only her perfect ideal.
The psychologist Johann Friedrich Herbart proposed the theory of “psychic mechanics,” of which the term “apperceptive mass” was an integral part. Ideas gleaned from experience coalesced, he said. They became a system of logic and function. Ideas that agreed with the mass were assimilated and incompatible ideas were rejected.
There was no room for what I knew in Amaia’s system of logic. Though it frustrated me, there was also an innocence to it. Sometimes, I could see her try—she wanted to hear me, wanted to give me what I needed. But she couldn’t, as if to absorb a different reality would destroy hers.
Amaia had taken care of herself in ways no child should have to. As a grown woman, she took care of her whole family. I knew about self-sufficiency and about the terror of dependence. I knew well the way an early story sticks—how high the stakes can feel so many years later. How hard we hold the things that kept us alive. I saw our similarity, our mutual grasping for something to hold us, something that felt safe.
I stopped saying certain things, because she couldn’t hear them. But they did not go away. I could feel the hardening place where I kept them.
Herbart also suggested that no psychic ideas disappeared. Rejected ideas were repressed, and waited for a compatible mass, or collected until they were strong enough to form their own.
After so many morning visits, her neighbor gave me a name: renacuajo.
What does it mean? I asked.
Tadpole, Amaia said.
Because you are small, her neighbor added, and raised his hands to show the small space in between.
When we were children, my brother and I would wade in the shallows of our pond, hold still as shadows, and let the tadpoles brush our ankles. We scooped them into our cupped hands, admired the dark buds of their bodies, the flutter of their translucent tails.
There were snakes in the desert. The first time I saw one, stretched out dead across the road, its rattle cut off by some earlier passerby, I thought of those snakes in Texas. I thought of the ouroboros, the snake who eats his own tail, in whom, said Jung, “lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process … [The ouroboros] slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites.”
47
The town where I was born was hardly a town. An out of service gas station. A windowless bar with a flickering sign.
There’s the bar, said Jon.
Did you used to go there? I asked.
Oh yeah, he said. I knew that a decade earlier, I would have pulled into that dirt lot and followed him inside. We would have shared the one thing I knew I had always shared with him. But this was not that life. So I kept driving.
Here, he pointed. It’s down here.
The narrow road was dotted with houses, rain-worn toys strewn on their scraggly lawns. Beyond them lay the lake, a bowl of gray sky, its edges smudged with trees’ reflections.
This one, he said, gesturing ahead. That’s where you were born. There was a yellow house, too new to be their old cabin. But he wasn’t pointing at it anyway, he was pointing to a cluster of trees a few yards away, next to which sat a small shed—hardly bigger than a doghouse—like a miniaturized version of the real house, painted the same yellow. They must have torn it down, he said. Because you weren’t born in that shed.
I laughed. It seemed like a joke. A play on the way the giants of our memories appear shrunken to our adult eyes. A tiny house in this tiny town that I’d heard about my whole life. It had always seemed mythic, my dark Atlantis, the place where my lost life had begun and ended. This was it. Had I expected my young mother to step out onto the porch in her sundress, belly swollen with me inside? Had I expected a cemetery? There was nothing. Just a lake that looked like the lake I had loved all my life. Just an empty space, a clutter of leaves like a dress I had shed before stepping into another.
I drove past it and wound down the crooked road to the public entrance of the lake. A wooden dock stretched from the shore out into the water, held up by fat wooden piles splattered with seagull shit. I parked and unbuckled my seatbelt.
Let’s walk out there, I said. He obeyed me and unbuckled his seatbelt, followed me out of the car. Together, we walked to the end of the pier. Hands dug into his pockets, he lumbered next to me. He stared across the lake and pointed at the yellow dot of that shed. I laughed again and this time he laughed with me.
48
Sometimes I couldn’t apologize. My own knowing bucked in me.
I didn’t do anything wrong! I’d shout at her.
Stop saying that! she’d say.
We fought over who was texting so late, why I had let s
ome man stand too close to me, why she never answered the phone or called me back when she said she would—and it had always been the same: a blaze that made my ears hurt and my mind go white. She withdrew and I swelled. I wept in her bed, in the bath, in her truck, craving something she wouldn’t or couldn’t give.
In the beginning, I had wanted her to love me. I had wanted her to be there when I reached for her. I still wanted that. And in pieces, she gave it to me. But now, I wanted her to see me. To listen. She had built a myth of us, a wunderkammer of our love story. And all the rejected parts had collected in me. I let you into my world, she once wrote me, as if it were a gift I had spurned. I had entered her world. I had made her my world. But it was not enough. Of course it wasn’t.
I sat in her closet and called my therapist. Help me, I said. How can I change myself to fix this? My therapist told me to dunk my hands in ice water. She told me to go for a run. When I pulled on my shoes Amaia stopped me.
You can’t go outside like that, she said. You can’t be crying in the street. I live here. We had fought in airports and hotels, in restaurants and bars, on so many streets. Stop it, she would say when I cried. Not here. So I dunked my hands in ice water. I splashed it on my face. I tied a bandana over my nose and mouth to protect me from the wind and swirling dust. I ran up into the desert like a mad bandit, eyes stung red and swollen.
For the alchemists, the ouroboros was a symbol of First Matter, the Prima Materia, and like their similar image of the Dueling Dragons, represented the essential false binary—the clash of opposites that are not opposites, but halves of a whole. Were Amaia and I two halves of a whole? Or were the Dueling Dragons both in me?
I wanted it to work. I wanted the work of it to earn me what I wanted. In Heavenly Creatures, Juliet tells Pauline: “Only the best people fight against all obstacles in pursuit of happiness.” I wanted Amaia to be my happiness. I don’t make you happy, she would say when we fought. I can make you happy, she would say when we made love.
An ancient alchemical text tells us, “Nature rejoices in nature; nature charms nature; nature triumphs over nature; and nature masters nature; and this is not from one nature opposing another, but through the one and same nature, through the alchemical process, with great care and great effort.”
Hummingbirds hovered in her backyard, but there were no flowers, so together we filled a feeder with sugar water and watched them, those bright breasted fairies who drank so gently.
Our words had always clashed, but not our bodies. Her mouth on my breast, my belly, the hum of her between my legs, the hot nectar she pulled from me with her long fingers. Early beekeepers were called honey-pullers—a sensual name, though honey-pullers tore those hives with spears of wood, broke them open so the colony had to start over and build a new world from scratch. Maybe every beginning is such an apocalypse, every new world the end of the one that came before it.
Over time, even in the time before Alice, I noticed something. In a bar, in her truck or my car on the way home, Amaia would kiss my neck. She would bite my palm or slip her finger into my mouth. She would slide her hands over my breasts and between my legs. She would whisper in my ear all the things she wanted to do to me. Wait until we get home, she’d say.
But when we got home she would flop on the bed and stare at her phone. She would brush her teeth and crawl under the blankets. When I reached for her in the dark, she pushed me away. She crossed her arms over her chest. Stop, she’d say. Why do you make everything about sex? I would roll away from her, embarrassed.
In the morning, I would try to talk about it. I felt confused, I’d say. I felt rejected.
Sometimes, she’d say—Well, if you really wanted me, you wouldn’t have stopped. Why did you get so nervous?
Sometimes, she’d say—Stop it! We don’t have any sex problem. You’re inventing a problem for us. Why are you doing that?
Sometimes, on our visits, this would go on for days and days. I would give up, ragged with uncertainty and desire. She accused me of confusing sex with other things, with comfort. And I did conflate the two. But I was not confused. Our sex was the only certain thing between us, and that certainty was a comfort. When she finally reached for me, I would nearly weep with relief.
See? she’d say. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Just natural.
49
Jon and I drove away from that little town in silence. He directed me to his girlfriend’s place, a single story, vinyl-sided house. A set of crumbling brick steps led to the front door, an empty soda bottle on the bottom step. As we stared from the parked car, a human shape darkened the window and disappeared, replaced by the blue flicker of a television.
My girlfriend’s son, said Jon, shaking his head. He’s never had a job, just lies around the house and drinks beer. Lives off of her like he doesn’t even want his own life.
I shook my head in sympathy.
It was nearly dark, that time of day when my loneliness has always grown strongest, slipped out from under trees and cars, riding the shadows like smoke, curling under windows and doors, along the walls, into me. I wanted to go home. I wanted him to get out of my car. I was done, ready to retreat into my own shadows. I had no need to memorialize this moment, and I itched to drive away from it, from this sad house and its sad contents, from him. He just sat there, hands twitching against his thighs.
Thank you, he said, and turned. His gaze searched me. I didn’t know what he wanted. Probably, after the long afternoon, he wanted a beer. Maybe he didn’t want to go into that house. Maybe I looked like a way out, as my mother had looked like a way out.
This is a big step for us, he said.
I grimaced. I’ll see you later, Jon, I said. He nodded and opened the car door. But instead of getting out, he leaned toward me and flung an arm around my shoulder to clasp me in an awkward hug. Then he climbed out and shut the door. Before walking up the driveway, he leaned down to the car window and looked at me one last time. He waved from the other side of the glass and I waved back.
I watched him cross the yard, his gait uneven, his self-conscious hands dangling at his sides. He climbed those broken stairs with knowing feet, shoulders hunched. He disappeared into the house without looking back.
It was tempting to see him as a symbol. Jon, the living embodiment of everything I feared and hated in myself. Jon, the ghost of Christmas future—a warning of what lay at the end of my own compulsions. But driving away from him, I knew none of these were right. Jon was just a man. He was a father with no children. An animal surviving the best way he knew how. I didn’t need to fear him. There was nothing he could take away from me. There was nothing he could give me that wasn’t already mine. I could look away, but I could not erase him, as I could not erase myself.
It rose in me before I reached the end of the street. I made myself drive out of town. At the first gas station off the highway, I pulled over, my chest already heaving. I turned up the radio and yielded to it. This time, I wasn’t crying for her.
I cried for Jon. For his busted body climbing those crumbled steps. His wasted life. I cried for my mother, a child alone in that scrap of a town, trying to build a life with a broken man. I cried for old Pat, for her waking every day to fifty years of love gone. I cried for Mina, chasing and erasing her own history. I cried for Pop, who was once a Real Indian, whom life taught that it was better not to be what he was, and who listened. Who could blame him? He wanted to be the beginning, to leave centuries of breaking behind, just like those goddamn pilgrims. But it was impossible. There was no new world. And I was always coming for him.
50
There was a girl.
I remembered Cristina, whom Amaia had mentioned dining with during our separation, and I noticed when her name started appearing on Amaia’s phone.
In Cristina I saw the sweet glow that tells the work of fifty thousand bees. The kind of beauty built out of desire and reliant on it. She was just the kind of girl to fall for Amaia. She was a lot like me.
The
power of beauty is also a weakness. It is a circus tent propped on slender poles of desire. Most see only the spangled constellation of a girl overhead. Amaia loved a spectacle, but she saw the tent poles, how one kick could collapse the whole show. She couldn’t resist.
She’s pretty, I said.
Really? said Amaia. I’ve never thought about it.
Bullshit, I thought.
Amaia’s phone made the sound of a wave whenever a message delivered. Swoosh, it crashed on the nightstand. It seemed that every time I looked at that screen, I saw Cristina’s name. There is a German word—backpfeifengesicht—that means a face in need of a fist. When I heard the crash of that tiny wave as it carried her name to the surface of Amaia’s screen, I pictured her pretty face and thought, backpfeifengesicht. I had only ever hit three people in the face who hadn’t paid me to and I wanted that girl for my fourth. When I saw her name on Amaia’s screen, my heart spun. My hands drenched. My face flushed.
Stop it, Amaia said, and frowned. She thought I was in no position to accuse her of anything. You can’t act like that.
I tried to stop, but every time I heard that wave, my ears went conch shells. They filled with rushing. Some say it is the ocean we hear in conch shells, though we know that isn’t true. I’ve heard that it is the rush of our own blood, but that’s also wrong. It is the sound of the room we are in, gathered and given back to us.
You’re hearing things, she said. You’re imagining it.
With her, I was jealous. More than I had ever been. But I was not prone to imagining things. My instincts felt true.
There’s something there, I said to her. I know it.
You’re paranoid, she said. There is nothing between us. I thought you wanted me to have more friends?
I tried to believe her. I must be mad, I thought. I hope I am mad.
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