by Lily Tuck
“Listen to this.” Karen had stopped in front of a barrel. “It says here that a schoolteacher went over the Falls in this one. The schoolteacher was holding a cat, a black cat. When they reached the bottom, the black cat had turned white. Snow white. Can you believe that!”
Wrapped in the plastic sheets that were handed to them, Karen and Richard took the elevator down and walked through a tunnel out to the Falls—part of the tunnel forked off and went behind the Falls, only Karen said she was claustrophobic. Instead, Karen and Richard went and stood on a concrete platform that overlooked the torrents of water that foamed and rushed and swirled down into a pale wet rising mist.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Richard yelled above the noise of the Falls. “The power of water!”
Karen shook her head. “Can’t hear you.”
Holding Richard’s hand, Karen licked the spray off her lips liking the coolness of it. She thought about how easy it would be to climb over the railing and…
A niece who had never met Herbert Mirsky was the next of kin was how Karen pictured it. The niece lived in some place like Minneapolis and was not about to spend good money on a trip East. Anyway, for what? The niece’s father, Herbert Mirsky’s younger brother—younger by twelve years so that the two brothers barely knew each other growing up—had lost touch. Also, the niece thought she remembered that the two brothers had had a falling out—Karen tried to imagine over what? A bunch of worthless bonds? their mother’s wedding silver? the family cat that had suddenly turned white?
Karen and Richard had hardly slept the night before—or Karen hardly slept—she had drunk too much champagne and the loud beat of her pulse inside her stomach kept her awake. That and the tap of the venetian blind against the window. Richard fell asleep instantly only to wake up around three o’clock in the morning, just as Karen was, at last, starting to fall asleep, wanting to make love to her.
“My Aunt Joan, you haven’t met her, she lives in England and is married to a Brit,” Richard was saying to Karen as they walked back to where their car was parked—they were both still wearing the plastic sheets—“tells the story of how Uncle Lucian—Uncle Lucian is her husband—went to Niagara Falls once, and a Japanese man asked Uncle Lucian if he would take a picture of him and his wife standing in front of the Falls, and Uncle Lucian, who had been a colonel or something during the war, said no.”
“The poor Japanese,” Karen started to say.
“Who knows, maybe the Japanese couple wasn’t married.” Richard made a grab for Karen, ripping the plastic sheet. “Maybe the Japanese couple were cross-dressers or transvestites.”
Moving out of reach of Richard’s hand, Karen said, “That’s not funny and look what you’ve done now.”
Maybe Herbert Mirsky and his wife had gone to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. Maybe Herbert Mirsky and his wife had stood in the same spot and looked at the same falling water she and Richard had, Karen imagined. Herbert Mirsky was young and strong, his wife, too, was young, pretty; she was wearing a short-sleeved print dress. The print dress was soaking wet from the spray. With one hand, Herbert Mirsky was holding on to his hat, with the other hand, he was holding his wife’s plump butt.
Her head on his shoulder, Karen fell asleep in the car while Richard was driving. When she woke up, they were entering the city of Toronto, and Richard, with his free hand, was stroking her breasts.
“You know the photograph I found in Herbert Mirsky’s wallet?” After a while, Richard asked Karen.
“A photograph of what? A naked woman?”
“Two babies. Twins, I think.”
The drive from Toronto to the lodge on the lake where they had a reservation took two hours. The land they drove through was farm country and the highway had narrowed into a two-lane road.
“It looks like Pennsylvania, doesn’t it?” Karen said, at the same time as she wondered why she always had to make comparisons. On the radio, Carly Simon was singing a song about two lovers who had made the mistake of telling each other everything—the same mistake Carly might have made with James Taylor.
“So, how many women do you think you’ve slept with in your life?” Karen could not resist asking Richard.
“A million. A billion. I don’t know. I’m still a virgin.”
Karen had slept with about ten men. Twelve men to be exact—she kept track. Sometimes in bed if she could not sleep, Karen would count the men in her head—like counting sheep. She would begin by listing them in the order that she had made love to them—the first man, a French waiter named Jean-Pierre, she met in Grenoble the summer she turned eighteen and went abroad. Then she would list them alphabetically—starting with a Ben and ending with a Vint. Then, if she was still awake, she would do it by age—the oldest was her college roommate’s father who arrived unexpectedly one morning while his daughter, Karen’s roommate, was in class—she also made a list—that list was easy—according to nationality: there were only Jean-Pierre the Frenchman and Enrique from Honduras, all the others were Americans; the last way Karen listed the men was according to how good they were in bed. She did not like to do this. Partly because she thought it was crude, mostly because she was ashamed and did not like to think about the man whose name she did not catch exactly—the name sounded like Sandy—and who snapped gum in her ear during the two minutes it took him to—well—fuck her.
Richard was the thirteenth. For some people, thirteen was a lucky number. Richard was also the only man Karen had slept with who had a mustache.
“I don’t know why this reminds me,” Richard said to Karen then, “but my first date was with a girl whose brother had just died in a fire. A fire in a lodge, a fishing lodge. I was about sixteen and she was maybe fifteen. She was pretty, a blond, and her name was Lela—I’ll never forget that. Lela.”
“Did you sleep with her?’
“Wait,” Richard said. “What I was going to tell you is that every time I opened my mouth to say something to Lela, I said something with the word burn or flame or fire. I just couldn’t help it. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Like Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“Who?”
Lela. Or more likely Leah. Leah Mirsky, Karen imagined. Only Leah was not blond. Leah had thick dark hair. Hair all over the place—hair on her legs, on her arms, a large bunch under her arms, a darker thicker mass on her pubis. The hair did not bother Leah, even in the summers during the early years of her marriage when she and Herb went to the beach on Sundays, and the hair stuck out of her bathing suit. Leah did not swim but she liked to walk out and stand up to her waist in the surf, her sturdy legs spread wide for balance. She laughed out loud when the waves broke against her belly. The bigger the wave, the better.
Richard and Karen spent the rest of their honeymoon in a cabin overlooking a large blue lake. All the furniture in their cabin was made from logs—the head and footboard as well as the legs of their king-size bed, the bureau, the dressing table, the chairs, even the hangers in the closet were made in the shape of little logs. Over the fireplace, on the mantelpiece, there was a pair of moose antlers.
The first evening, Richard balled up and tossed Karen’s underpants at the antlers and, all night, her underpants hung there.
Except for running into a few other couples along the paths in the woods when they went jogging in the morning and nodding hello, Karen and Richard did not talk to or meet any of the other guests staying at the lodge. In the dining room at mealtimes, Karen was satisfied just to observe them: most of the guests were vacationing couples; a few, like Richard and herself, Karen guessed, were on their honeymoon. The only exception was an older woman who was very thin and who wore a turban on her head; she sat with a younger man—her son? her companion? her lover?
Again Karen could not help making comparisons. “The couple over by the window,” she whispered to Richard. “The woman looks like my high school science teacher, Miss Buttrick. We were all convinced that Miss Buttrick was having an affair with Mrs. Frazier, the principal.” Or Karen said, “See the guy i
n the corner—no, don’t look now, Richard—the one sitting with the older woman wearing a turban, he looks like Moira’s brother. He’s the one who made a lot of money designing a software program for pilots and stewardesses.”
“I always fall for stewardesses. It’s the uniform.” Richard reached under the table and squeezed Karen’s knee.
The woman in the turban reminded Karen of Isak Dinesen—except that, of course, she had never met her. “You know—‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills—’”
“Yeah, Meryl Streep played her,” Richard said. “Isn’t she dead?”
“Everyone always mistakes Moira’s brother for what’s-his-name John Cusack,” Karen also said.
“Oh, yeah? Well, someone stopped me in the street the other day and asked me for my autograph.”
“You’re lying, Richard—who did they think you were?”
“I don’t know. Tom Cruise probably.”
When Richard and Karen were getting ready to take a canoe out on the lake, they spoke to the boy in charge of putting the boats in the water. Standing on the dock, the boy gave them a lecture on boating safety.
“I’ve been canoeing all my life, since I could walk,” Richard told him.
“Sure, man. I’m just doing my job,” the boy answered. He was short and blond and he smiled at Karen.
Karen smiled back. “Canoes are awfully tippy, aren’t they?”
“Come on,” Richard said to her.
While Richard paddled, Karen trailed one hand in the lake. “The water is freezing. Too cold to swim,” she said.
“You thought he was cute?”
“I thought he looked a little like—”
Richard splashed water at Karen with the canoe paddle.
“Hey!”
Karen ducked and the canoe rocked wildly to one side.
“Karen, keep still, will you!”
We could have been killed!
But the lake was flat calm. A gray-blue color. The shore was a solid mass of pines, evergreens. Karen imagined moose, deer, bear, hidden behind the trees. Richard paddled steadily, evenly, effortlessly; each time he brought the paddle out of the water, he flicked his wrist to feather it, before putting the paddle back in. Maybe Richard paddled an hour, maybe two, in the canoe, sitting up front, Karen lost track of time. She shut her eyes, she let herself go with the sliding motion of the boat in the water. For the first time since she was married, she felt protected, safe—even out in the middle of the lake.
“You know what I’m thinking?” she asked as Richard paddled the canoe back to shore.
“No, what?”
“I’m thinking this is the life.”
“When I was growing up, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to live outdoors close to nature and be a ranger or a forestry—”
“Live by yourself, you mean?” Karen interrupted.
“My father—you saw how he was—wanted me to grow up to be a typical American boy, not like him, I guess. I spent a couple summers at one of those Outward Bound camps,” Richard went on, “you know where they drop you off in a boat by yourself on an island in Maine somewhere, and you have to survive for two or three days on just clams and berries. A lot of the kids hated that part. Not me, I loved it. Always, when it was time to leave and the boat came to pick me up, I wanted to hide in the woods, I wanted to stay on the island longer.”
One afternoon while it was raining and Richard was asleep in the king-size bed made from logs, Karen went for a swim in the lodge’s indoor heated pool. Every time she had gone by the pool, it was empty. This time the woman who wore a turban—except that now she was wearing a bathing cap—was swimming in the pool, she was swimming on her back. The woman’s thin pale arms moved in and out slowly but rhythmically; a heavy gold bracelet sparkled when she raised one arm out of the water. Karen got into the water and began swimming the crawl, she swam much faster than the woman.
The young man—the son? companion? lover?—arrived carrying a robe and something else that Karen did not right away identify. From the other end of the pool, Karen watched as the woman in the bathing cap swam to the aluminum ladder and as the young man reached down and took the woman in the bathing cap under the arms and lifted her out of the pool. Only then, did Karen recognize what he was carrying. When the young man had strapped on the prosthesis and after he had helped the woman put on her robe, the woman raised her arm—again the gold bracelet on her arm sparkled in the light—and took off her bathing cap with a flourish. To Karen, the flourish looked like a kind of salute and she raised her own hand out of the water and waved back.
After the babies, the twins, died, again Karen imagined, Leah Mirsky became bitter and sad. She no longer went to the beach on Sundays in summer, she no longer stood with her legs spread wide apart in the surf, letting the waves break on her belly. It no longer gave her pleasure. Few things gave her pleasure—Herb didn’t. Food did—a little. And she got fat. Truly fat. So fat she had to be helped into the car—not the light blue Honda Accord but Herbert Mirsky’s previous car, a dark green Oldsmobile with a matching interior. Fat, then blind, then helpless. Every morning before he left for work, Herb had to help her dress, in the evening he had to help her undress; to save trouble, Leah stopped wearing stockings, underwear. Soon after, they had to amputate one toe, then two more. There was talk of amputating a leg.
“I wonder where they went,” Karen said, looking around at dinner that night.
“Went where? Who?” Richard asked.
“The older woman who looked like Isak Dinesen.”
Richard shrugged. “A rich lady on a little spree.”
“No way. She had no hair, she had one leg.”
“No hair? One leg?” Richard started to laugh. “Karen, what the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s true. She must be very sick. I saw her in the pool. Everything’s a joke to you, Richard.” Karen was suddenly close to tears. “The Japanese couple at Niagara Falls. Leah, no Lela—”
“Lela, who?”
“The blond girl whose brother was killed in a fire. You think everything is funny.”
“You, on the other hand, think everything is tragic.” Richard put a forkful of poached salmon in his mouth.
“What about Herbert Mirsky? Have you forgotten about him already? I suppose you think his nearly running us down was hilarious—a barrel of laughs.” Karen was crying. “Not to mention his dying afterward. Ha, ha, ha.” Knocking over her chair, Karen got up and left the table.
“We have to make a plan,” Karen told Richard on their last night in the king-size bed inside the log cabin overlooking the blue Canadian lake. “A serious plan.”
“A serious plan about what?”
“About marriage.”
“Right,” Richard answered, sitting up.
Then he began to sing—“Who can explain it? / Who can tell you why?” Richard’s voice was not as deep or as strong as his father’s and at first Karen thought he was mocking her; “Fools give you reasons—/ Wise men never try”—Richard was singing softly and off-key, and bending over to listen more closely, Karen realized he was serious.
Karen also thought about Herbert Mirsky. Chances were Herbert Mirsky was not a widower and he did not live alone in a shabby house; instead, at this very moment, a lot of people—his friends and family, all his kin, including the two babies, the twins, whose photograph he carried with him inside the cheap wallet made out of nylon and Velcro, and who now were a grown man and woman—were gathered together to pray and sing for him.
Hotter
Already it is ninety humid degrees in the shade of the mango trees that border each side of the road to Angkor Wat. Overhead, the sky is bleached white from the heat. I feel a drop of sweat slide down the inside of my arm, and my cotton skirt is stuck to the plastic seat of the pedicab. The pedicab driver, his narrow back hunched over the handlebars, is pedaling his bicycle rapidly down the dirt road; the muscles in his calves look like the banyan-tree roots that twine
and twist in the jungle here. I turn my head slightly to look back at my husband, who is sitting in another pedicab, trailing three or four yards behind us. The drivers are racing each other.
In his high-school French, Peter, my husband, explained how he would pay the pedicab driver who won the race twice the fare. Payer double. He also gestured with his hands. Now, I can hear him yelling encouragement to his driver: Allez-y, man! Go vite!
I speak better French than Peter. I spent my junior year abroad in France, in Paris, and French literature was my major in college. I wrote my thesis on the poet Rimbaud. When I told Peter, he thought I said “Rambo.”
Before we came here, I told Peter I was afraid that Angkor might be dangerous. I told him that I had read how tourists were robbed at gunpoint; that two tourists were shot. Peter answered that those tourists went to visit out-of-the-way sites, sites half-buried in the jungle. We, on the other hand, would visit only the larger sites, the restored sites.
Peter also said, Who knows what will happen next in Southeast Asia? We have to take advantage of this window of opportunity.
Besides our two pedicabs, there is no other traffic on the road to Angkor Wat. Only a woman dressed in a printed sarong is walking down the road; she is carrying two baskets on a long pole balanced across her shoulders. The baskets look heavy and bounce up and down as she walks. The woman stops and watches us go by.
Bonjour, Madame!
Without thinking about it, childishly, I cross my fingers. I hope that my pedicab driver wins. He is older and thinner and looks more deserving than my husband’s pedicab driver. His shirt and shorts, although clean, are patched and worn. I imagine that he has a wife who squats all day fanning the coal flames, and too many children who have nothing to eat but rice.
My pedicab driver turns his head slightly and looks back. Despite his strenuous efforts, he is grinning. I sit very straight and very still. I also keep my legs that are damp with sweat tightly together. If I move them apart, my legs make an ugly smacking noise.
I think about what I might jettison out of the pedicab to lighten our load: mes souliers? But my sandals don’t weigh much and my feet are not as tough as those of the Buddhist monks dressed in their saffron robes whom I see walking around barefoot all day. Mes bijoux? My wedding ring is just a thin band of gold and probably weighs less than an ounce. The only thing worth throwing out, I think, is the guidebook, which I hold tightly in my lap and must weigh nearly a pound.
