Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  “Living with a man like Ethan simply means redefining loyalty,” Hillary said, “which is not the worst thing in the world when you consider how many faithful couples never have sex.”

  Mark was nodding sagely in his chair, aging, I noticed, in a way that was not unlike Fenton the dog, especially around the temples. I went to tell Ethan what Hillary said, but when I got there he had left without me, left my two suitcases near the door.

  One time in real life, after we’d broken up but before he’d moved out, I asked Ethan if he felt like kicking in something for the electric bill, and he said “No.” After a minute’s consideration he added, “Pam, men in third-world countries treat women so badly, those women actually think I’m treating them well.”

  47. Limatour Beach, Marin County, California

  Rori and I head out to the sweeping crescent of Limatour Beach at dawn—frost on the windshield—driving over the last remnants of the coastal range, past a herd of albino fallow deer.

  The Farallon Islands are as crystal clear as jewels in the cold morning, the clearest I have seen them. Fenton the dog chases pelicans and Rori takes a dip because she’s missing Mexico, and also because she’s a total rock star.

  At acupuncture last Wednesday, Janine said, “You are in a time of your life when you need some serious mothering, but mothering in the largest sense,” and I said, “You mean like the ocean?” and she said, “Exactly,” and that’s why we’re here. My conversations with Janine often go like that. It’s not just that I don’t know where the things she says come from, I don’t know where what I say comes from either.

  Another time she said, “By the way, there are a bunch of Native Americans hanging around your navel. They want you to think about origins.”

  Once the sky opens like a mouth and invites you inside it, everything starts to feel like a riddle. On the I-25 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, after midnight, the billboards read like runes. Psychic Mary / Great at Parties comes first, with her blue eye shadow and a red turban and a psychotic twinkle in her eye that makes one fear the kind of party she’d be great at. Next is the A ULT DEO sign, the burnt-out letters turning a porn shop into a Latin prayer. Finally! reads the next one, Holly Holms versus Bobbi Jo Saunders, June 13th at the Isleta Casino. Both women look tough for the camera in their boxing gloves and bunny garb.

  One time on the Big Island, I got to swim next to a giant sea turtle and after I wore myself out trying to keep up with him I sat on the sand and waited for that moment when your skin stops feeling sticky and starts feeling clean, and that voice that talks to me sometimes, not like schizophrenia—but really, how would I know—said, It’s about time you learned how to pray.

  Back on Limatour, Rori is shaking off water like a dog and I think of a different day, on North Beach when a real dog walked up to us, some kind of dachshund, wearing a sign that covered almost all of his back that said, Hi, my name is Baker, and I am enjoying myself on the beach while my dad surfs. If you want to you can throw a rock for me, but please don’t let me run in front of cars in the parking lot.

  I remember the colors of Mackenzie’s kite, backlit against a gray sky, the shimmer on the water, the curling blue waves, the lighthouse flashing its single beam in the distance.

  Today on Limatour I am watching for spouts, thinking about how the size of a blue whale’s tongue is the same size as the largest current land animal, the African elephant; how a blue whale’s heart weighs a thousand pounds and is the size of a Volkswagen; how you could put a small child down its blowhole, if you wanted to; how one scientist bet another that he could walk through a dead blue whale’s aorta, and then he did.

  48. Gyantse, Tibet

  Here are the names of the passes we’ll go over: Kamba La, Karo La, and Simi La; past Yamdrok Yumtso and Nojin Kangtsang; 670 kilometers in total, from Lhasa to Gyantse to Shigatse and back. Here are the three photos I’ll regret not taking: the Om mani padme hum burned into the hillside, the smiling pilgrim monk holding up a tea thermos in the window, the guy wearing what looked like an entire fox on his head.

  In the villages, herds of dazzling dark-eyed kids run up to us and stick out their tongues.

  Patrick says the fact that I only think babies are cute if they live in a third-world country is evidence of deep-seated self-hatred.

  “There was one bad king of Tibet,” Tsering says. “He had horns and a black tongue. So when children approach elders they touch their head to show they don’t have horns, and they stick out their tongue to show it isn’t black.”

  On the drive to Tashilhumpo we talk about the Panchen Lama, but Tsering says we won’t talk about this at Tashilhumpo, because it was there his friend got sent to jail because one of his American clients started handing out pictures of the Dalai Lama.

  I say, “We feel very lucky to have you as a guide,” and he says, “Well, I am lucky to have the two of you too, because with you I can talk about everything.”

  In Gyantse, at the Grand Chorten, Hailey feels sick, so Tsering and I climb up the vertical stairs in pitch blackness without her. We sit together inside the tower, inside those giant eyes, waiting for the monk with the key and access to the light switch, talking in the dark about wanting to see and do everything in the world. While we are up there, Hailey gets propositioned by a Tibetan in an Arlo Guthrie sweatshirt.

  “Yeah,” she says, once we are all safely back in the vehicle, “I came all the way to Tibet just to give you head.”

  On the way to Shigatse, Tsering says, “I think now we will look for a place to make our picnic,” and we stop just below the top of a pass along the side of the road. There probably isn’t a bathroom for a hundred kilometers in any direction so I wander away from the group and when I come back Hailey says, “How did that go?” and I say, “All things considered—thirty-mile-per-hour winds, below zero temperatures, and right off the sheer side of a thousand-foot cliff—pretty well.”

  Tsering says if we want to find a good man we have to ask the Shakyamuni Buddha. He points to a monastery high on the ridgeline and says a crow stole a lama’s hat and where he put it down was where they decided to build the monastery, and I say, “It would have been more convenient if the crow had put it down on the valley floor.”

  “But that is not what happened,” Tsering says, all earnestness.

  I say, “Americans say stupid things all the time, but a lot of us mean well.”

  It is our third to last day in Tibet and even though I have begun lusting after things like a Caesar salad and toilet paper, I am trying not think about how it will be not to see Denzing’s face in the morning, that one beautiful laugh line that curls up around his eyebrow, how it will be not to have Tsering waiting in the lobby saying, “Good morning. And how are you today?”

  At the last acupuncture before Tibet, Janine said, “I’m seeing an octopus with very thin tendrils that come from behind and wrap around to your solar plexus, below your rib cage and around your navel. With your permission I’ll remove those.”

  Back in Lhasa we give Tsering and Denzing our hiking boots and all of our fuzzy outdoor clothes and Tsering says, “I will be reminded of the two of you when I wear your clothes. Pam, looking over one shoulder, and Harry, looking over the other.

  QV #905

  I AM LOOKING OUT THE rounded rectangle of the plane window, at the right-hand tire at the bottom of two triangular struts that descend diagonally from the wing. Laos Air likes these planes with the high wings, I know, because they don’t need much space to take off or land. On the tire I am looking at there is a giant X of duct tape, which on closer examination I see is actually a patch on top of a patch, an older X of duct tape beneath it.

  “Look at that,” I say, to the Laotian beside me. We have already established that he speaks English. In fact, a few minutes ago he told me our flight to Phonsavan is seven hours late because the drug lords up in Chaing Rai needed to borrow the plane. He said it with the type of smile on his face he might have worn if he were telling me his grandm
other had baked him some cookies. Now he nods his head at the tire in a similar kind of affirmation. He is well-dressed and studious-looking, a thick book in his lap, possibly a government official.

  “That,” he says, “is no problem.”

  “It looks like a problem,” I say.

  “No, no,” he says. “The correct way to land this plane is the left side first, then the nose, then the right side. One, two, three,” he says, making his hand into a little airplane. “No problem with that one there.”

  Yesterday, in the relative safety of the teahouse, Xai said, “Lao Aviation has a new director now. The old director is in . . .” He paused for a minute, trying, I assumed, to remember the English word. “Jail?” I offered, but the answer was Bangkok.

  On Laos Air, none of the tray tables stay attached to the back of the seats, and few of the seats stay in a forward locked position. Somewhat more disturbingly, the cabin is not sealed, so soon after takeoff, when we hit some perfect combination of altitude and dew point, clouds of steam come rolling down from the overhead bins and fill the cabin.

  This is the point when the Westerners always scream, because to the untrained eye, the steam looks a lot like smoke, but this is my third flight on Laos Air, which makes me an old hand. Today when the steam starts billowing in, a blond woman in her sixties—German, I think—two rows in front of me, grabs the flight attendant’s arm in alarm.

  “Air-conditioning,” the flight attendant says, as she must every single flight, without so much as cracking a smile.

  “The Chinese have the contract to service these planes,” says the Laotian beside me when we have reached whatever altitude is required to cause the steam to clear, “but our government cannot pay the money, and so they do not service the planes. I think this would not happen in your country.”

  “I think it would not,” I say.

  “Some of these planes have not been serviced probably for three to five years.”

  “Hence the duct tape,” I say, but I don’t think he understands.

  “What do the Chinese care about some dead Laotians?” he asks, and there is that off-to-grandmother’s-house smile again as the plane lurches suddenly forward, and begins its steep descent.

  49. Mallorca, Spain

  Everything is green and soft, there are goats in the hills wearing bells around their necks that I hear all night but never see, and two donkeys, one light, one lighter still, who come to the fence for fresh apricots. In Pollença there is a heavenly old square with a place to get strong coffee and liquid chocolate so thick you can stand a spoon in it.

  Yesterday we went as a class to one of the world’s most perfect beaches and swam far far out—the nice thing about the Mediterranean—and then all the way back and I slept like a rock for the first time in months.

  I’d been reading Ethan’s most recent I’m sorry and I want you back email out loud at breakfast (I’ve forgotten how to be who I am without you . . . La Paz was like the first day of seventh grade when the girl I’d been waiting all summer to see (in that case Ellen Sweeny but in this case YOU) hadn’t shown up . . . Now in photos you seem nothing short of dreamy —and as we often agreed in luxurious late-night conversations, it’s what’s exquisite in the world that breaks our hearts) and all the girls were oohing and aahing and falling for it completely, and then Samantha, who works with military boys in Garmisch, Germany, providing R and R for burned-out soldiers, said, “He sounds like a total narcissist to me.”

  This afternoon we all pile into Ralph’s Land Rover for the Imelda Marcos field trip. Ten women on their way to the Camper shoe outlet: Leah the ultramarathoner who lives on a commune in Santa Cruz where the Master gets to have sex with all the women but the women don’t get to have sex with anybody else; Natalie who looks sixteen and is nevertheless battling what Claire calls mole cancer; Claire herself, with her porcelain skin, Botticelli hair, and her BBC voice; Paige, from Ohio, who’s only lived in London for six years but has nonetheless acquired an English accent (she keeps referring to Washington and Oregon as the Western Terra-trees . . . and I say, “I know you have been away a long time, Paige, but we call those states now”). Then there is funny Peg who writes for the Guardian and calls us all mad as a box of frogs, and Lina, who didn’t want to study writing at all but came over because she had read—perhaps erroneously—on Trip Advisor that Ralph has been known to let a woman who’s signed up for a course have her way with him, and London Karen and New York Karen, and Sloan, who’s written ten cookbooks, and me, all hurtling the wrong way down a one-way because it is a shortcut.

  Ralph’s a smart sweet guy and a damn good cook with the single glaring exception of the skate wing he served last night, doused liberally in ammonia, and so radically undercooked that you would have had to saw it off the bone.

  We had watched the sunset over Cape Formentor and so were late for dinner and already feeling sheepish. Sloan said, “Has there been an accident?” so strong was the chemical smell when we walked into the room, and she took the skate back into the kitchen for a do-over, but even cooked through it was hard to choke down.

  After dinner we discovered that seven out of seven of the American women here this week, including myself, have not only been in a sorority but have held a major office in a sorority, in most cases president, though I had been chaplain of Delta Delta Delta—ostensibly in charge of eighty girls’ spirituality—when I was just a girl myself.

  “In what ways did you advance their spirituality, then?” asked Claire, who had never even thought the word sorority one single time in her mind.

  “Well,” I said, “I blindfolded them and bound their hands with silver, gold, and blue ribbons and told them stories about Poseidon, of course!”

  50. Denver, Colorado

  I get out of the composer’s black-sheeted bed at five-thirty in the morning, get a double latte at Ink! and meet the CEO in the parking lot of the Walmart so he can follow me to the ranch. Tuesday, I have a date in Durango with an ophthalmologist.

  The CEO zips over Kenosha Pass behind me in his Porsche and right near the top I hear Henry’s ghost say What the F? over my shoulder and I think, This is the summer when my life turns into a reality TV show.

  The CEO gives me an antique book called Five in One, or How to Make and Save Money, where all the little pieces of advice are numbered into one thousand mini-chapters, as in #86, “Lice Destroyers,” and #349, “Lemon and Its Value,” and #760, “Butter Making and Marketing,” and #962, “How to Find Out a Girl’s Age Without Asking Her.”

  Long ago, on my thirtieth birthday I took a helicopter ride over Manhattan at sunset. I remember the colored lights of the Chrysler Building, the immovable bulk of the twin towers. I remember feeling like if I wanted to I could reach out and scratch the Statue of Liberty under her chin. I remember the tens of thousands of lighted windows and trying to acknowledge, at least briefly, each life inside that was being illuminated. There were so many individual souls to keep track of, I realized, for anyone who called himself God.

  One night a few years before he died, my father and I were out to dinner and I was offering up the résumé of whatever man I had started to date at the time—let’s say Peter Sawyer—saying I hoped Peter would see we’d make an interesting fit, and my father said, “What the hell’s wrong with you that these guys aren’t falling all over themselves trying to convince you of something?”

  I interpreted him, rightly, I think, as trying to pay me a compliment.

  51. Lhasa, Tibet

  At Drepung the monks are at morning prayer. Mao’s face, ten times bigger than life, is stamped all over the giant stones of the fallen monastery and red writing covers the crumbling walls. Tsering says the Red Guard knocked the stones over because the Buddha on them was smiling. When no one is within listening distance I ask him if they are forced to leave Mao’s picture on the wall and he says, “No, we leave it there to remember.”

  In the Housewives’ Room the lama says, “If you touch this stone you will be
a good housewife,” and Hailey and I both take huge steps back. There is one temple we are not allowed into and when I ask Tsering why he says, “Because women have a month, you understand what I mean?” and I do.

  At the Sera Monastery we get to sit in on the Monks’ Debate where a hundred or so monks pair off, and one asks the question over and over and the other answers just as many times, all the while hitting himself in the arm with his own prayer beads, thereby sending good skyward and evil below.

  Tsering keeps making eye contact with me like, Let’s go, and I pretend not to see him because I want to sit in that courtyard for the rest of my life listening to the sounds of their voices that are really more like hyenas or snow geese, imagining all of the things I could be learning that afternoon if only I spoke Tibetan, could be hearing the questions and answers, could be learning what is big, or how is attachment, or why is the path to a valuable life.

  Yesterday, on the way into town there was an overturned tractor-trailer (which here means a farm tractor hooked to an uncovered diesel engine with a flatbed on the back that hauls everything from people to animals to rocks to tumbleweeds). There was corn scattered all across the road, one man kneeling over another man who had one shoe on and one shoe off and looked dead. The kneeling man had his hands over the dead man’s mouth and I wondered if he was feeling for breath, or holding his face together (literally), or if it was some Buddhist thing, like keeping his soul in there until the proper holy person arrived, and I thought, What happens now? and wondered if it was like Lat said it was in Laos, “You know this life? It is nothing.”

  Later, at the Fill Up the Room with Gold restaurant (for the first half of dinner we think Tsering is saying Fill Up the Room with Goats), eating momos and potato soup with cardamom and yak fifteen ways, Denzing asks Hailey to sing the theme song from Titanic. We teach them to say, Go Broncos, and Tsering says, “I love Michael Jackson until he change his skin.”