Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  I noticed Chang was feeling the same as I was. We stopped playing.

  “Don’t stop,” our wives said, holding their toques.

  It was agreed by the flip of a buffalo-head nickel that Chang and Adelaide would have that first honeymoon night together in the three-person bedroom. As we decided to turn in, I said good night to Sarah and leaned toward her, pulling Chang with me, and I kissed her. I had given my lips to my wife before, at the wedding, with similar enthusiasm, but now it felt more familiar, and I found myself importing visions of our future life together into the feelings of this first good-night kiss. I divined the laughter of our unborn children, and the warmth of a thousand kisses to come, each to be more familiar than the last.

  I kissed her lips once, twice, and then simply kept my mouth pressed—tenderly, softly—against hers, not moving, and a crowd surged in my chest. My bride pulled away, blinking. “Tomorrow,” she said, wiping her lips on her forearm, turning to walk to her bedroom, swaying in a way that hit me physically. And then Chang, his wife, and I went to the main bedroom and the riddles therein.

  Adelaide went to freshen herself in the little washbasin next to the main bedroom, while Chang and I remained in the bedchamber and got into our usual rose pajamas, which we unbuttoned at our torsos to allow the band freedom and exposure. Chang wore his nightcap.

  When Adelaide entered the room, lit by the single candle she carried with her and by the radiance of her nervous smile, Chang and I faced each other on our sides atop the bed—the comfortable way for us to lie down. Chang fidgeted more than I. Adelaide placed the candle on the night table and picked up a big hand mirror. She gazed into it while troubling with her hair, unable to disguise an aspect keenly curious and nearly panicked.

  Chang’s head trespassed on my pillow. His nose nearly touched mine; I felt the hurry of his heart.

  “I’ve often wondered what this moment would be like,” my brother’s wife was saying softly to her reflection. Eventually she placed the mirror facedown on the dresser and shuffled toward us. “Maybe I’m wicked,” she said. “Ever since I was a girl I’ve been wondering....”

  My brother’s wife glanced at me, then her eyes darted away. She seemed to be talking to both of us through the anxious disappearance and reappearance of her smile.

  Adelaide looked to Chang, and she let out a laugh she did not seem to trust. She tucked her blond hair behind her ears, but wisps fell about her cheeks and forehead. Falteringly, she crawled onto his side of the bed, and kneeling over her husband, she kissed his temple—not gently, or with any ease, but like a chicken bobbing after some feed.

  Chang blinked his eyes. He said something, but his lips were too taut to shape the sound into a recognizable word.

  “Maybe I’m wicked.” She reached for him.

  I closed my eyes—the method Chang and I had decided upon—to become “mindless” for the next hour. But with each bounce or jolt or kick of Adelaide’s leg, my eyes opened instinctively, as if against my will.

  Eyes closed tight again, hoping to find innocent thoughts, I couldn’t ignore the substance that exists in men only to hasten the flow of blood at the sound of a woman giving herself for the first time. Her scent was light and poignant.

  Adelaide’s fingertips accidentally swiped my groin. I found myself looking at Chang as he lifted her white frilled dressing gown, and when my eyes were unfortunately opened again, he was taking off her white cotton undershorts and pulling her, naked, to him. We were on our backs, stretching the band. After another trespass, I think a poke to my shinbone, I saw her sitting crosslegged over Chang, unbuttoning the top of his pajamas and frowning. She had small breasts, very pale. The hair in the place where her lower body divided into her thighs looked like a furry valentine.

  Her skin was lacking muscle, almost hairless; she was thin. I had not expected the naked female body to look like that, but it seemed perfect in its femininity, its weakness and oddity. After trying to close my eyes again, I felt a third unintentional brush of her hand—along my chest this time—as she fumbled with Chang’s buttons, and again as she struggled to remove his red cloth pajamas. For a moment she stared directly at me, with soft eyes, just as scared as I was. Adelaide touched our connecting band hesitatingly, almost caressing it, a strange novelty.

  She has pale breasts, I thought, very small.

  I shut my eyes tight. The sensation of her leg touching mine was faint and natural. Her throat was flecked with talcum powder.

  Adelaide didn’t look Chang in the face; she touched his chest, though, rubbed his skin, and let loose a snort when she uncovered his manhood—she was shocked, likely, by the hair of Chang’s pubis, which was (like mine) half black and half gray, divided vertically. And then my brother and his wife began to have relations.

  Chang stirred me yet again as he climbed on top of his wife and me. He was touching her breasts at the nipples as if he feared he’d never get the chance again. My arm was wrapped around my brother’s shoulder, and to make this positioning possible, our band extended farther than it should go. The inopportune logistics meant I had no choice but to curl against Adelaide, to cover her body partially—at the curve of her hip—and move along her leg as my brother rocked back and forth. Chang saw my eyes were opened; he turned away quickly, and I closed them. As tightly as I could.

  After some rolling of the three of us, Adelaide’s soft blond hair came tickling across my neck, simultaneously gift and ordeal. I strained to keep my eyes shut as knees, elbows, fingers poked or bounced off me. Our band ached. Though my eyes were closed, I knew she was still on top of my brother because her hair gladdened my neck once again. I let my stare glide over her coloring face, following the swerve of bone in her exquisite cheek. Another accident, her fingers ran involuntarily against my palms before she could withdraw her embarrassed hand. She was alarmed and self-conscious and nearly crying. I felt alone and exposed.

  Meanwhile, Chang, eyes closed, perspired, bit his lip, and then began triumphantly to smile. I felt something, too, like a feather dragged lightly across the length of my body, chin to feet, and I shivered. I began gradually, instinctually, I hoped imperceptibly, to approach the cheeks of my brother’s bride with my own lips opened in an O. I cut their journey short at the last moment. The wind made a shrill noise through the magnolias outside, and the mattress sounded its own creaky song.

  That was it. Yes, I eyed my brother’s bride now, and I hoped to see in her a new knowledge. I assumed that by seeing her unclothed I would be able somehow to comprehend everything about this woman—to locate the secret that made her an individual, and to draw out what was essential about her from the inessential, like a box within boxes. But of course I could not contain anything at all about this person, just the opposite. It might as well have been ten Adelaides I saw now. The one sister-in-law as ten-headed mystery.

  When she and my brother were finished, it took Chang a moment to separate himself from his wife. He was panting like a mackerel plucked into the air. And then Adelaide, smiling, was covering Chang’s mouth with her tiny hand, resting her head on his breast, and staring back at me.

  In our pajamas and bare feet the next morning, Chang and I waked alone in bed. Seeping into the edge of my dream, the smell of the fat and the meat of breakfast sausage told us it was time to rise and enjoy the first full day of our marriage. Chang and I put on our matching suits and entered the dining room to find Sarah in a simple blue dress, and Adelaide in a gray one. We went directly to the long rectangular table to eat, and Thom began serving us the tomato-onion omelet and the sausage he and our wives had prepared. Our wicker double-chair creaked as we eased into it. The girls came to sit stiffly at either side of us with their eyes downcast.

  The dining room itself, with its heavy mahogany furniture and its big window looking onto the dusty junction of two forgotten trails that now formed our backyard, did not yet have the familiarity of a home; that would take time, if not other things as well. Beyond the back fence, dark bushes separat
ed our strip of lawn from the highroad.

  “Did you sleep?” I asked my bride, daubing wet egg from my lips with a napkin.

  Sarah put down her fork and sat for a while, chewing in a hurry so that she could answer. “Yes,” she said, swallowing. “Very well.” She nodded her head, and then stopped. She looked around the room. Then she picked up her silverware again.

  After my wife resumed eating, she asked softly: “And did you’all sleep?” She was sawing at her eggs with her knife and looking shyly into her plate.

  My sister-in-law shot a look at Chang, then lowered her eyes. The look was directed at my brother, I was fairly sure, but for an instant I believed she had stolen a peek at me.

  My wife, meanwhile, waited for my answer. It was my turn to set down my silverware. “I slept fine, my dear,” I said.

  Chang said, “This going to be beautiful.” He smiled. “Marriage.”

  After breakfast it was a slow day. Though we were planning to begin a life of less frequent touring, Chang and I practiced our routine in the yard, playing our flutes, somersaulting across our dusty plot, doing handstands, breaking twigs over our ligament, improvising banter with an imagined audience. The girls arranged the house and knit and did needlepoint, and waved from the window from time to time. In the evening, we ate the chicken and rice Thom had prepared. Then, as the four of us strolled under the trees and aimlessly up and down the deserted stretch of Milburry Lane that met our yard, I was thankful for the feel of Sarah’s soft hand, which I managed despite my nervousness to bring to my lips.

  That night it was my turn in the bedroom with my wife.

  As I waited for Sarah to join us in the bedroom, my brother whispered in my ear, “Do not be nervous.”

  “Thank you, Chang. I am not nervous.” We were on the bed, anticipating Sarah’s arrival.

  “Do you have questions for me?” He was cheery.

  I took a breath. “No, brother.” I wiped the sweat from my lip and tried to calm myself. “Thank you.”

  “Ready, then?”

  “I am ready, Chang, yes.”

  “You are prepared?”

  I was thinking about my wife, and how things would be in twenty years.

  “I think you might have questions.” Chang made a long face. “Because you never done this before.”

  “I do not, but I’m sure I will be less—obtrusive than you were.”

  The time came, and when it did Chang and I lay facing one another on the mattress. I wore my most reassuring smile, but my heart pounded as I watched Sarah undress. I had not realized how difficult it is for a woman to undress. She struggled with the hook-and-eye clasps of her corset, and no doubt it was now, before I had even begun to touch her skin, that I felt the greatest pleasure. The delicious mystery stretched each second, and raised my expectations in the direction of the limitless. My wife’s hair was fastened in a precise twist atop her head.

  Chang closed his eyes, and I hoped he would not speak and shatter the rare and fragile impression.

  My wife, however, talked and talked as her dress fell to her feet: “Mother said it would be an odd experience, you‘all. ‘It’s quare enough when there’s just one of them,’ Mother said. Not that she meant, I mean . . .” Sarah stammered. “I don’t intend any offense to you, to either of you’all—”

  To avoid hearing her chatter, I focused instead on the sounds of her undressing, her hands fumbling with countless fasteners, catches, strops, and stays. It reminded me of my months on the Sachem: if I closed my eyes, there I was, among moaning cord, buffeted sails, and—as the cotton of her underthings rubbed whispering against the softness of her flesh—the sound of waves lapping up to the prow. I rolled us onto my back, distending our band as I wiggled my arm beneath Chang’s head. He opened his eyes for a twinkling, then closed them tight.

  Sarah reached the foot of the bed, stopped in her tracks, and scrutinized us with a confused sad look across her face. She was tall, and her body seemed more corpulent when naked. She raised her arms and freed her blond hair to cascade down her cheeks, framing her light eyes. Her chest grew taut as her raised arms lifted her breasts so that they resembled pale oranges with pink tips. My brother’s eyes were closed, but he wore an inexplicable and bothersome smile.

  Sarah climbed onto the bed and shuffled to me on all fours. And she kissed me. I savored it with my entire body. A spasm fired in my lower half, my stomach filled with thunder and lightning, my head was in a spin, and I swore my ribs were cheering like the court of King Rama. I kissed my wife.

  Lest I should do something wrong, I considered my own body of no importance aside from hers. But at the same time I realized that what I was feeling bore little resemblance to the bliss I had hoped for—it held not enough magic, and an excess of wheezing and melancholy.

  Sarah was expending so much energy that when I opened my eyes to the sight of her reddening jowls, I grew alarmed she’d grow faint from overwork. She bit my bottom lip—by design?—and as I flipped all of us over, my brother moaned as if he’d been kicked or slapped inadvertently. But Chang could not have been, because all of Sarah’s hands and feet were touching me.

  My wife’s eyes were open and linked with mine as I coupled with her. We moved together, in cadence. I was on top of her, with my brother bouncing to my side, straining the bond. The tight round globes of her breasts had widened into soft flat saucers.

  I felt my wife had become a strange part of me, not integrated fully—but not fully only because this new part of me was experiencing its own pleasure. In my hand, her hand, trembling and weak, her fingers hooked around mine—and the only way to describe what I experienced is as a new-sprung void in my chest, sucking out a solitary life’s worth of loneliness and wanting now to be filled with something new. I tried hungrily to fill it with the images around me: her throat arched as if yielding to the hangman, the curve of her naked hip, the shape of her open mouth (all my life, I told myself, I will remember her open shuddering mouth), the urgency and the tears welling in her eyes.

  And then, without warning, this new outgrowth of my body that was Sarah lost all tenderness, even as she was contriving to bring across her face a dramatic expression showing not only passion but something even more significant. I felt cold suddenly.

  A jolt, a sigh, and it was over, almost as soon as it had begun.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At Sea

  1825–1826

  On the Sachem, Bound for New York

  The sun was bright, flickering on the water, white at the sky’s apex, and the heat had come. We were fourteen years old and had begun our journey to a place called New York, but in the distance behind us, a lone Siamese trinket vendor could still be heard yelling, his calls traveling across the water, and I imagined he was summoning all the junks, all the houseboats, every last one, and the coastline and the sky, and Mother, to come after us, and the Mekong, too—that would be our rescue. From the moment we stepped on the forward deck of the Sachem, our new life at sea was difficult and lonely.

  Our ship rolled sluggishly through the sea. The trade winds whispered us away from our home, and by the ship’s main rigging there must have stood forty crewmen in a row, all white-skinned, all at attention; each held his hands behind his back—the same position in which Captain Coffin had been standing when we arrived. The Captain addressed the crew in what sounded like gibberish, then turned quickly to Chang and me. “I will introduce you to the finest seamen in the world,” he said in his unnatural Siamese.

  The crew raised a collective eyebrow at the sight of us.

  I looked in their faces for some future to weigh against my past. The crew did not see this, they did not understand the vanishing monuments of my life: the gray rocking Siamese houseboats that seemed to bleed into black mud under the rain; the sunshine reflecting hotly off the golden skin of one of Rama’s palace domes; a flying fish shaking off the current to twitch in the air, sunlit, before falling into the next Mekong wavelet; Mother’s eyes, filling with tears b
efore we left to meet King Rama. I did not see anything to match these in the odd white faces of the crew of the Sachem.

  But eventually my insides settled. The decks had their curiosities, and my brother and I were allowed to roam freely under the cloudless sky.

  At first Chang and I kept to ourselves, crossing the decks uneasily, like men dreaming of walking on clouds, certain they’ll fall through with each hesitant step.

  A day passed in silence. We had just about given up eating the first night for fear of sitting down with the crew. We stopped communicating altogether. Before this, whenever we’d encountered people unaccustomed to our uniqueness, we’d had only to stay among the gawkers for a short while before either walking away or fighting. On a ship a double-boy is under scrutiny at all hours.

  Eventually, though, we had to eat, and on the second day we sat down to dinner with the crew. The dining cabin was fairly large, and lit by silver lamps. We sat at the Captain’s table—the longest. The opened wooden shutters ushered in the sea breeze and the smell of salt tides. The lamps threw the shadow of the wall crucifix across the white cloth of our table, where it curled around the bottle of wine and the platter of roasted duck that stood at the center of the spread.

  Coffin sat at my side. He held up a saltshaker, poured some salt into his hand, presented his open palm and its contents to Chang and me, whispering in English, “Salt.”

  We were silent. The room was silent; the whole world was silent. Except our duck In, who quacked from his seat on my lap.

  “Salt.” Coffin scrunched his brow and spoke more loudly, ignoring the duck sounds, splaying the fingers of his open hand as if showing us a grand diamond. He brought his palm toward his monocle and pretended to examine it. “Salt. ”