by Pam Houston
19. Davis, California
Jude and I are having our weekly meal together, this time at Zen Toro Sushi. We order a roll called palette of fire, and it is the hottest thing I have ever tasted anywhere in the world, including Chengdu, China; including that time I was teaching in Minneapolis and had such a bad head cold I could hardly see out of my eyes, and I dragged myself across the street from the hip hotel which was built inside an old flour mill to Sawatdee Thai and told the waitress, “Please make it as hot as you possibly can.”
Each piece of the palette of pain comes with a slice of jalapeño on top, and after barely living through the first bite, I remove the jalapeño from the second slice before I give it a try. It seems to make no difference whatsoever, and hot tears spring again to my eyes.
I look across the table at Jude, who is also suffering. The water, of course, only makes it worse; there is no chance we will taste anything we put in our mouths from here on in.
“I can’t eat anymore,” I say. “I’m worried about doing myself permanent damage.”
That night in Minneapolis, delirious with fever, I ate every bite of what was served to me, the kind of hot that hurts so much you can’t actually stop eating but have to keep shoveling in bite after bite just to stay a few seconds ahead of the pain.
I had been to the Walker Museum that afternoon, and in the basement there was an exhibit that featured a table set for a large family’s Sunday dinner, and off in the corner a book of Braille, under glass—unreadable—and an extremely androgynous voice reading what I thought was Latin over loudspeakers in stereo sound. Every five minutes it snowed flour onto the table from several small holes along a pipe in the ceiling, which was, over the course of the exhibit, creating a giant mountain range of flour running the length of the table. I had found the exhibit profound and unnerving and incomprehensible—my fever was already starting to spike—and that night, whenever someone spoke to me, including the Thai waitress, the words kind of fell apart around their Latinate roots in midair and I couldn’t make sense of anything.
When I tell Jude, who has just eaten another piece of the roll of death, that Ethan said he missed the country of Costa Rica with a ferocity he had never felt for anything before, not even a woman, but that he couldn’t ever take me to his place there no matter how long we stayed together because it was, after all, Fatimah’s town, Jude says, “San Ramón is a town full of spoiled-brat trustafarians from places like Pittsburgh. If it’s Fatimah’s town, she sure shares it with a lot of dolts.”
Jude eats five of the six remaining pieces of the ream job roll, though he’s in considerable pain the whole time. When he gets to the last bite I pick up my rejected jalapeño slice and place it on top of the slice that is already on there. He puts the whole thing in his mouth and chews, smiling. He says, “You know once you put it on there, I didn’t really have any choice.”
20. Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dolores, the lady whose job it is to take me from the airport to the hotel, can’t understand why they’ve put me in the Marriott. “It’s on the wrong side of town for all of your events,” she says, “and besides, nobody important ever stays there.” I remind her that by any objective definition, I am not anybody important either. Ethan and I stayed at that Marriott on our drive across the country, so it has sentimental value for me.
As we turn onto the access road that leads to the hotel we see a hundred motorcycle cops, twenty-five mounted policemen, forty cruisers, three fire engines, and two tanks. A guy in an expensive suit steps into the road in front of Dolores’s car. His tie is flapping in the desert wind and he actually appears to be speaking into something attached to the edge of his lapel.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says to Dolores, “but if you want to go any farther, your car will have to be swept.”
“Swept?” she says.
“By the dogs,” he says, and sure enough, to our right there is a small parking lot where German shepherds are leaping into and out of Honda Accords, Chrysler SUVs, Ford pickups.
“I can get out here and walk,” I say.
“Are you staying at the hotel?” the man asks.
“I’m trying to check in,” I say.
“What is your room number?” he asks.
“Trick question,” I say. “Right?”
A motorcycle cop revs up to the window as I wedge my rolling carry-on out of Dolores’s backseat. There is some kind of comic gleam in his eye when he says, “You can tell all your friends you stayed at the same hotel as the president.”
“The president of what?” I say, and he just winks.
The man in the suit asks his lapel if they should take possession of my suitcase.
In the lobby there are a lot of clean-cut young people in suits standing around waiting for something to happen. The women at the front desk all have smirks plastered onto their faces.
“All the hotels in the world,” a woman whose name tag reads Montavia says to me, “and he had to walk into mine.”
When the security guard gets finished laying all my silky underwear out on the card table next to the elevator and I am thanking God and whatever oversight has caused me to leave my rabbit-pearl vibrator at home, he says, “You’re clear, ma’am,” which I understand is my signal to repack my bag.
I am in room 801, on the corner, overlooking all the activity. The motorcycle cops taking pictures of each other with their camera phones, the mounted police taking turns picking up horseshit, and eventually, a line of ten limousines emerge from some hidden underbelly of the building and speed away. About half the motorcycle cops follow the limos and the other half stay behind. On each of the three overpasses in my line of sight, a sharpshooter stands at the ready, his long-range rifle pointed at the highway.
I call Ethan’s answering machine and leave him this riddle. “It is completely amazing who is staying at my hotel with me. But I am not excited at all.”
When we were in Lubbock last month, Ethan came out of the hotel room bathroom naked and tried to get my attention by slapping his butt repeatedly, hard and loud. I was busy answering email and didn’t look up, and eventually he felt so ridiculous he had to stop.
“He is so sick, Pam,” Janine said last week, at acupuncture, “and you are so very nearly well.”
The next morning at the Marriott, a huge African-American man with kind eyes delivers my oatmeal and says, “Well, dear, I can tell you this much. Your oatmeal is perfectly safe.”
21. New Orleans, Louisiana
The first place Devon takes me when I get off the plane is Drago’s, for oysters, because that is the first place we went when I came to visit the year before. “Wow, look at that,” I say, when we pull up in front, because the giant sign over the restaurant has been blown out from the center. All that remains is the top of the big black D and part of what looks like the apostrophe.
Devon looks at me blankly, a PTSD glint in her eye that says, I hadn’t particularly noticed, or That is so inconsequential it doesn’t even register, or There are absolutely no conditions under which I will ever feel safe again.
What she says is, “You know Drago’s was one of the few places that never closed its doors. They fired up their propane heaters and started cooking. They served more than forty thousand meals to the volunteers, all of it free for the taking.”
After lunch she takes me to see her new paintings, huge canvases with big words scrawled across them in pencil, painted over and over in shades of white until there is only the slightest hint of what they might have said. In one painting, a final wash of bright yellow begins in the upper left-hand corner and falls diagonally almost all the way across the canvas, as if Devon has hurled a bucket of paint at it, leaving only the ghost of the words leave or stay and a question mark, exposed at the bottom right.
She drives me through the West End in Orleans Parrish. Every house has a big X on the front in black, or fluorescent orange, or sometimes green, giving the National Guardsman who inspected the house when the water began t
o recede four divided spaces to record his findings. In the left-hand space there is a multi-digit number identifying his unit. In the top of the X is the date—often as late as a month after the levee broke—that the guardsmen finally got to the house and went inside. In the bottom of the X there is another number, usually zero, though sometimes 2 or 3, or once, on the outside of a public library, 5. This is the number of bodies that were found. The right space is reserved for additional information: Two tabby cats found DOA in bathroom, or one dog found alive, taken to SPCA. On another, all in big block letters, NO REPTILE FOUND.
Whenever I am in New Orleans, I think of the story “No Place For You, My Love,” which makes me think of me and Henry, always in some car with the top down driving and driving to the end of somewhere, though Henry and I liked each other a whole lot more than that couple in the story did.
Every telephone pole in the city bears advertisements: WE DEMOLISH HOUSES. Another with one word, GUTTING, and a phone number below. Near the breach in the levee speedboats and sailboats up to forty feet in length are tossed around a parking lot like kid’s toys, some of them still upside down. There is a house that looks like it was made of Play-Doh, then stepped on by a giant. Someone has hung a banner from what is left of the porch: FEMA paid $10,321 for this house. At the end of a block where all of the houses’ insides seemed to be piled up on the outside is a big white door propped up sideways against a twisted newspaper dispenser, LAME CAT MISSING scrawled in huge black letters across the six-foot door.
22. Santa Cruz Province, Argentina
La Delfina is a place right out of a Katherine Mansfield story, an English formal garden ringed all around by the ubiquitous Lombardi poplars—beautiful and green on the inside, dry flat wasted land on the outside—lace curtains on the clapboard windows, a dog in the yard chained to nothing, a windmill pulling up the water that keeps it all intact.
Today, the gardens at La Delfina contain white peonies stained with red, peach, and pink roses, purple tulips, silvery lupine, strawberries, rhubarb, peas, lettuce, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, apples, and pears, and Tatjana prepares a lunch for me using a little of everything, that is as delicious a meal as I have had in my life.
Ethan always says the fruit in America doesn’t have any taste, even the organics. He says once you have eaten a Costa Rican mango, an American mango tastes like shit.
In 1913, there was a meeting of the governors of the three southernmost provinces of Argentina—Santa Cruz, Chubut, and Tierra del Fuego—to discuss, seriously, if they could pull off a mass Patagonian emigration without involving women at all, but it was decided that women were necessary for sewing, ironing, and washing. That is when they started taking women out of European and British prisons and sending them to Patagonia—women like the bandit Elana Greenhill, who, when forty men tried to capture her, single-handedly kidnapped two of them, held them for ransom, and made them spend three days tied up in their underwear.
Tatjana came to La Delfina from Yugoslavia more than half a century ago. Now, because of overgrazing, most of her land can’t produce. Tatjana and Luis, her Chilean caretaker, live here all winter together, no phone, no mailbox. They make jams and jellies and sell them in town to help make ends meet. Tatjana is trying to get a loan to buy a few cows.
Luis tries to keep Tatjana’s spirits up by working hard to make beautiful things for her, but he’s letting her down, he says, because all the roses in the world can’t make this better. She’s letting him down, she says, because there are no cows for him to work anymore, and he was born to live the beautiful life of the gaucho. If she has to sell the place or dies, she says, “he’ll be with a bag on the side of the road.” Luis has tears in his eyes when he asks me if I know anyone who can help them. He says he can no longer remember how young or old he is.
23. Denver, Colorado
A short list, in chronological order, of suicides I have known:
1. My father’s friend, let’s call him Charles, who ate rat poison and then threw himself in front of a train. What my father could never get over was the fact that Charles was a millionaire, as though rich guys, by definition, ought to be exempt from psychic pain.
2. The girl in the first writing class I ever taught whose boyfriend left her in a campground in the desert. She walked for fifteen miles to the nearest highway, hitched to Grand Junction, borrowed the cash for a bus ticket to Denver, walked ten blocks from the bus station to their apartment, turned the key in the lock, and hung herself from the rafters. Following her death, I heard that the boy who really loved her, who had been watching her canaries for her while she went to the desert with the other boy, wrapped the small birds in cellophane and shot them with a BB gun so he would not have to hear the flapping of their wings.
3. My mother, more or less unintentionally, with a combination of vodka, Vioxx, and anorexia-induced pulmonary stress.
4. The writer Michael Dorris.
5. My dentist Grayson, who shot himself through the heart in the Denver airport parking lot, with a note pinned to his shirt that said Please call my wife.
At our first therapy session in over a year Patrick said, “Pam! Don’t you get it? If Ethan spends every minute he’s eating your mango, longing for the old mango, he doesn’t have any brain space to worry about losing the mango he’s got right now.”
24. Bumthang Valley, Kingdom of Bhutan
When we show back up at the monastery on what is our Christmas morning (just another Wednesday to the monks) with forty blankets and forty pairs of shoes, the Master looks mostly bemused. We stand quietly while Karma explains the piles of gear in front of him, his ancient Dzonka so peppered with absorbed English words we can almost understand everything he says.
“In Pam and Ethan’s country today is Christmas. If they were at home they would make food for the poor. They were so happy to be allowed to hear the evening prayers. A token of their gratitude. They noticed that the smallest boys seemed a little cold.”
The Master’s reaction to it all is a crash course in Buddhism for Dummies, a tilt of the head, the slightest frown between his eyebrows, a thoughtful series of nods and grunts. In a nonattached universe, his face seems to say, the arrival of forty blankets and eighty shoes is neither good news nor bad news, but simply the thing that makes yesterday different from today.
Last winter, in Chicago, I accidentally found myself at the first playdate of my life. I was supposed to meet my journalist friend Patricia for lunch, but when I called her from the restaurant she said she had forgotten she was hosting the kids that day and invited me to come on up. Up was to a thirty-seventh-floor penthouse on the edge of Lake Michigan, 5,000 square feet, all glass, chrome, and angles, the floor crawling with toddlers who were being tailed by Serbian nannies who were overseen by the mothers who drank Diet Coke on the couch. Two of nine babies had Down’s syndrome. Every mother was or had been a major player: architect, litigator, politician, chef.
“Do you have children, Pam?” asked the architect responsible for two art museums and a symphony hall. It was hard to look anywhere except out at the sun-splashed surface of the lake.
“I have twenty graduate students,” I said, “and a very childlike boyfriend.”
“That,” said the architect, “sounds like a very well-thought-out plan.”
“It may have been,” I said.
“What brought this group together,” said the lawyer, “the thing we all have in common, is that we love our children very very much, and if we had to do it over again, we wouldn’t.”
Here in Bhutan, the Master calls out some words in Dzonka, the kitchen jumps to life and we are served tea and biscuits. One boy at a time comes in and bows to us, is allowed to select either a blanket or a pair of shoes. It takes an hour for each boy either to get the right shoe size or to change around with another boy for a blanket. Ethan weeps quietly through the entire thing.
When all is said and done four boys still need bigger sizes, but we have made the shop lady in town promise she wi
ll exchange them. Our last view of the young monks is of the whole gaggle of them descending the hillside into town behind their Master, testing their new shoes on the rocky outcrops, their robes billowing behind them in the wind.
#N814DW
CLIMBING OFF THE TARMAC up into the bright red and orange four-seater owned by Wrangell Mountain Air. There are just enough clouds, I know, of the big white puffy variety, to create shadows that will make these most spectacular of all mountains even more spectacular.
I have had the good fortune to circle Denali in a small plane, to fly into and out of the Himalayas, riding in the cockpit both directions, but these mountains, the Wrangells and the Chugach and the St. Elias, rising from sea level all the way to the peak of Mount St. Elias at 18,008 feet in ten short miles—glacier after glacier after mountain after mountain—make them, in my opinion, the most dramatic in all the world.
This plane will take me to the other side of the Wrangells, north of the Chugach, close to the Yukon border, by anybody’s measuring stick, one of the world’s most remote locations. There I will ride reluctant horses through boggy tundra, listen to eager hunting guides play the washtub and the spoons around the fire, keep my eyes and ears peeled for brown bears, and try to teach six Alaskan women, and one man from Nova Scotia, how to write.
William—from Halifax—and I drove the long road from Chitna into McCarthy together. He is tall, handsome, moderately literary, towheaded, and still very much hung up on his ex-wife. Something about the way our conversation turned us inevitably back to her six or seven thousand times in three hours has thrown me deep into abject loneliness, which lately has been a pretty short trip.
When I left on this monthlong adventure, Ethan gave me a Mike Schmidt baseball card, and dangling poet earrings, black on black. Now the woman who lives in his cell phone says, “Ethan is not available,” with just a hint of impatience in her voice.
