by Jess Row
How are your legs? Hae Wol asks as they load shopping bags into the back of the temple van.
Do you really have to ask? Lewis says. They hurt like hell.
Hae Wol laughs hoarsely. Good answer, he says. One hundred percent. And how does your heart feel?
Worried. Still worried.
Too much thinking. What are you worried about?
I’m afraid I’ll forget why I’m here. Lewis puts his hands on his hips and bends over backward, trying to work the kinks out of his spine. But I don’t want to dwell on it, either.
So why are you here?
He glares at Hae Wol. The small matter of a divorce, he says. That’s all.
Wrong answer. The monk folds his arms and grins at him. You’re supposed to say, to save all beings from suffering.
I’m supposed to lie?
You’re supposed to let it go. If you’ve already made up your mind, not even the bodhisattva of compassion herself can save you.
But I’m not supposed to want to be saved, am I?
Here, Hae Wol says. Try me. Ask me the question.
I hate these games, Lewis thinks. All right, he says. Why are you here?
The monk puts his hands together and gives him a deep, elaborate bow. Two young girls passing by burst into loud giggles, covering their mouths.
For you, he says.
The retreat was Melinda’s idea, and that was what made him take it seriously. She’d always been suspicious of Eastern religion—her father had left her family for two years, in the late seventies, to live on a commune that practiced Transcendental Meditation—and she mocked him pitilessly when he brought home Buddhism Without Beliefs and Taking the Path of Zen. Then, during their second year in Hong Kong—when the fighting never seemed to end, only ebb and flow—she bought him a cushion and refused to talk to him in the evening until he’d sat for half an hour. This is for my own good, she told him. I don’t know what it does for you, and I don’t really care. I just need the quiet, understand?
He didn’t understand: that was the first and last of it. Hong Kong was supposed to be a temporary posting for her, a two-year stint at PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Asian headquarters, with option to renew, and now it seemed that every month her staff was expanded and her division given a new contract. In Boston she had been a star analyst, famous for her uncanny ability to find errors and gaps in a quarterly report; more than once she’d spotted a looming disaster months before it emerged in the market. But the word was that the American executives were afraid of her because she wasn’t enough of a team player . Expert exile, it was called. If she stayed in Hong Kong, and played her cards right, she finally told him, she would be a division head in five years, and then could transfer herself anywhere—back to Boston, or to New York, London, even Paris. If not, she would have a year of severance pay, and would have to start again at the bottom.
But I can’t work, Lewis said, staring into a plate of pad thai. They were sitting on plastic chairs at an outdoor Thai restaurant downstairs from her office. No one hires American photographers here. In five years my career will be over.
And if I quit now in zero years my career will be.
And in six months our marriage will be.
You’re being stubborn, she said. She lit a cigarette—a habit she’d picked up again in Hong Kong, after quitting six years before —and stared at him, her eyes darting from his forehead to his jaw to his sweater. How many other couples like us live here? she said. Why is it so difficult for you? What’s wrong with not working for a little while?
He sat back in his chair and looked up into the glowing haze that hung over the city, blotting out the sky. If I said that to you, he said, you’d call me a sexist bastard.
That’s not fair, she said. Being a freelancer is different. You’ll always have slow patches.
This isn’t a slow patch, he said, more loudly than he’d intended; an old woman with a basket of hibiscus flowers, who had been approaching their table, turned and hurried away. Haven’t you been listening? If I don’t work, not at all, what good am I to anyone? It isn’t about the money. I don’t want to wake up one of these days and realize I’ve turned into a hobbyist.
So, she said, I guess this is what they call an impasse.
Is it Hong Kong, he wondered, or is it what we’ve known all along, that we’re too different, that our lives will never really match? She had lost weight, even in the last few weeks; in the dim light he could see the faint blue paths of veins along her wrists, and the dark half-moons under her eyes that always reappeared in the evening, no matter how much concealer she used. Things will be all right, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t see how they possibly would be, and there wasn’t any point in lying.
No one could say they hadn’t been warned. An office workday ran from seven until eight, and Saturdays were workdays; an affordableapartment meant living in a series of walk-in closets; the summers were furnacelike, the winters endlessly dreary; there was no such thing as having a social life. And listen, an Australian woman instructed them at a cocktail party, on her third glass of chardonnay, forget this international city claptrap. Hong Kong is one hundred and ten percent Chinese. They may be the richest Chinese in the world, but they still throw their garbage out the window and kill chickens in the bathroom. And you have to accommodate them because, after all, it’s their home, isn’t it? It belongs to them now.
We’re not like her, Melinda said to him, in the taxi, heading back to their hotel. Are we? It’s different if you come here because you want to. We can explore—we’ll make Chinese friends, won’t we? And you’ll study Cantonese.
Right. Of course.
And you can do amazing work. She rested her head against the window and stared up at the Bank of China passing above them, silhouetted against the night sky like the blade of a giant X-Acto knife. I mean, my god, this is the most photogenic city in the world, isn’t it?
I shot fifty rolls yesterday, he said. You should have seen it.
He had wandered the backstreets of Kowloon for hours, a side of the city he’d never imagined: streets like narrow crevasses, the signs stacked one over another overhead, blotting out the sun. Old women bent almost double with age, wearing black pajamas, their fingers dripping with gold. This was what he loved about her, he thought, her absolute certainly about these things, the way she moved instinctively, always knowing that logic would follow.
Now he thinks, I was young. I was so, so young.
The pain is always with him: prickling in his ankles, needles in his knees, a fiery throbbing in the muscles around the groin. In every forty-minute session he waits for the moment when sweat beads on his forehead and his teeth begin to chatter, and then rises and stands behind his cushion until the clapper strikes. Walking, climbing the stairs, squatting on the Korean toilet—a dull ache in his knees registers every effort. He sleeps in its afterglow. Make friends with pain, Hae Wol advised him, then you’ll never be lonely. And he realizes now that he feels a kind of gratitude for it, late in the evening sitting, when it is the only thing that keeps him awake.
Whole days pass in reverie, in waking dreams. A camping trip when he was twelve, along the banks of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. Clay and sand underfoot. Campfire smoke. The rancid smell of clothes soaked in river water and dried stiff in the sun. His best friend, Will Peterson, who insisted on stopping to hunt for some kind of fossil wherever the bank crumbled away. Again he feels the heat of annoyance: the sweat stinging in his eyes, the clouds of mosquitoes that surround them whenever they stop moving. I haven’t changed at all, he thinks, I haven’t grown: it’s all an illusion. Twelve or thirty, it doesn’t make any difference. So what hope is there for me now?
Filling his mug with weak barley tea, he turns to the window, and his eyes become reflecting pools; the blank, paper-white sky, the warm porcelain cradled in his hands.
Twice a week, during afternoon sitting, he descends the stairs and joins a line of students kneeling on mats outside the teacher’
s room, waiting for interviews. The hallway is not heated; he draws his robe tightly about him and tries to focus on his breathing, ignoring the murmur of voices through the wall, the slap of an open palm against the floor.
When the bell rings Lewis opens the door, bows three times, and arranges himself on a cushion in front of the teacher, trying not to wince as he twists his knees into the proper position. The teacher watches him silently, sipping from a cup of tea. He is an American monk, a New Yorker, dark-skinned, with watery green eyes and a boxer’s nose, twisted slightly to one side. According to Hae Wol he’s lived in Korea for twenty years, longer than any other foreigner in the monastery, but he still speaks with traces of a Bronx accent.
Do you have any questions? he asks.
Not exactly.
But there’s something you want to say.
I think I may need to leave, Lewis says. I don’t think any of this is helping me.
The teacher stares straight into his eyes for so long he stiffens his head to keep from looking away.
Your karma’s got a tight hold on you, the teacher says. Like this. He makes a fist and holds it up to the light from the window. Each finger is your situation. Your parents. Your wife. Your job. Your friends. Things that happened to you, things you’ve done. This is how we travel through life, all of us. He punches the air. Karma is your shell.
And now?
He spreads his fingers wide.
You’re sitting still, he says. The hand relaxes. It doesn’t know what to do with itself. The fingers get in the way. All of your natural responses are gone.
That’s a kind of insanity, isn’t it?
Hold on to your center, he says. Pay attention to your breathing. Follow the situation around you. So tell me, what is Zen?
Lewis strikes the floor as hard as he can.
Only that?
Sitting here talking to you.
Keep that mind and you won’t make any new karma for yourself.
It’s not that easy, Lewis says. I came here to make a decision.
The teacher adjusts his robe and takes a sip of tea. I remember, he says. You’re considering getting divorced.
I’m not sure this was the best choice. Coming here, I mean.
Why not?
Well, Lewis says, I’m not supposed to be thinking about anything, am I?
Haven’t you already tried thinking about it? Has that worked?
It hasn’t. Does that mean I should stop?
Sometimes you can’t solve your problems that way, the teacher says. Your thinking-mind pulls you in one direction, then the other. There are too many variables involved. The most important decisions we make are always like that, aren’t they? Should I get married? Should I move to California? You try and try to see all the dimensions of the question, but there’s always something you can’t grasp.
So you’re saying that there’s no way to solve these problems rationally.
Not at all. Your rational mind is very important, but it also has limitations. Ultimately you have to ask yourself, what is my true direction in life? Logic won’t help you answer that question. Any kind of concept or metaphor will fall short. The only way is to try to keep a clear mind. And be patient.
Aren’t you going to tell me that I have to become a monk?
The teacher grins so widely that Lewis can see the gold crowns on his molars. Why would I do that? he asks. Being a monk won’t help you. Do you think we have some magic way of escaping karma? We don’t. Nobody gets away from suffering in this world. All we can do is try to see it for what it is.
Lewis rubs his eyes; he feels a dull headache approaching.
I’ve got a new question for you, the teacher says. Are you ready?
Lewis straightens his back and takes a deep breath.
You say you love your wife, right? What’s her name?
Melinda.
You say you love Melinda. But what is love? Show me love.
Lewis strikes the floor and waits, but no words come. His mind is full of bees, buzzing lazily in the sunlight. Don’t know, he says.
Good, the teacher says. That’s your homework. He rings the bell, and they bow.
The housekeeper’s name was Cristina; she was paid for by Melinda’s company, part of the package that all expatriate employees received. Two days after they moved into their apartment, she arrived with three suitcases and a woven plastic carryall, and occupied the bedroom that Lewis had wanted for his studio. She was polite and efficient, and cooked wonderful food, but the apartment was small even for two people; they took to arguing in whispers, and gave up making love, feeling self-conscious. It took three weeks for Melinda to convince her supervisor that she didn’t want or need an amah, even though every other couple in the firm had one, and the contract had to be broken at extra cost, taken out of her salary. When they told Cristina she wept and begged them not to send her away, and they were at a loss to justify themselves. I’ll be more quiet! she said. Not even any telephone calls! Finally Lewis threatened to call her agency and complain, and she went to the elevator crying and wailing in Tagalog. All along the hallway he heard doors opening and closing, the neighbors talking in low tones.
Afterward Melinda couldn’t sleep for days. She might have been sent back to the Philippines, she said. That’s what she was afraid of. Anytime they’re out of work they risk losing their visas. Maybe we could have kept her on.
What did you want me to do? Not work?
No, she said. I know. But I don’t know how we can live with ourselves.
It isn’t our fault, Lewis said. Who thought that an American couple would be comfortable having a live-in housekeeper in a tiny apartment? Couldn’t they at least have asked?
Everybody else has one.
Well, I’m not interested in having a servant, Lewis said impatiently. I don’t want some kind of colonial fantasy life.
I want my life, he wanted to add, our life, the one we promised each other, the one we had in Boston. He remembered what she’d said to him in the airport, when they were standing in line at the gate, clutching their tickets and carry-on bags and staring out the window at the tarmac, as if seeing America for the last time: she’d turned to him, wide-eyed, and said, no matter what happens, we’ll still be the same, right?
That was how it began, he thinks, staring at the ceiling, on the nights when the throbbing in his knees keeps him awake. The things they couldn’t have predicted, and couldn’t be faulted for. In the first month he visited the offices of a dozen magazines and journals, after sending slides and a portfolio in advance, and found himself talking to assistants and deputy editors who seemed not to have heard of Outside, Condé Nast Traveler, or Architectural Digest, and who regretted to inform him that there was a glut of photographers in Hong Kong at the moment. For the first time in six years he was officially out of work. On the bus, in the subway, in restaurants, he had moments of irrational rage, hating everything and everyone around him: the women who brayed into their mobile phones; the insolent teenagers with dyed-blond hair and purple sunglasses; the old men in stained T-shirts who stared at him balefully when he paid with the wrong coins. Cantonese was an impossible language: even people who’d lived in Hong Kong twenty years couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t master the tones well enough to say thank you.
But I’m not the only one who changed.
Melinda’s cello, which had cost them a thousand dollars to ship, sat in its case in the corner of their bedroom, unopened, growing a faint green tinge of mildew. Her address book hadn’t moved from its slot on the shelf above her desk in months. When he called their friends on the East Coast, waking them up after eleven at night, they asked, what the hell’s happened to her? It wasn’t just the seventy-hour weeks; it wasn’t the new secretaries she had to train every month, or the global trades that could happen at any hour of the day, in Tokyo, or Bombay, or Frankfurt, so that she often had to be on call overnight. She’d always worked hard, and complained about it, and fought Coopers for every bit of time o
ff she was entitled to. Now they never discussed her schedule at all. If he asked her about vacation time, or free weekends, or made a casual remark about never seeing her enough, she would say, that’s the last thing I want to think about. Her face had taken on a kind of slackness, a faint, constant unhappiness, as if no disaster could surprise her. She slept with her knees tucked up to her chest; she was constantly turning off the air conditioner, even when the apartment was stifling, complaining she was cold. Despite the subtropical sun, her skin was becoming paler; she had to throw away all her makeup and start over with lighter shades. And in three months she had gone from two cigarettes to four to half a pack a day.
On a Sunday afternoon in March of that first year he convinced her to come shopping with him at the new underground supermarket in Causeway Bay. She wandered through the aisles like a sleepwalker, picking up items almost at random—a jar of gherkin pickles, a packet of ramen—frowning, and putting them back. Half-joking, he said, I think we’ve become a reverse cliché, don’t you? I’m the bored housewife, and you’re the workaholic businessman. Maybe my mother was right.
She stopped in front of a pyramid of Holland tomatoes and turned to look at him, her lips pressed into a tiny pink oval. Just before the wedding, his mother had said to him wryly, marry a career woman and all you’ll wind up with is a career, and they’d quickly turned it into a joke: when she kissed him, or touched him, she would say, how do you like my career now? But the joke isn’t funny anymore, he thought, and wished he could suck the words out of the air.
Is that what you really think? she asked. Do you think I arranged it all this way? So that you’d be out of work and frustrated and taking it all out on me?
Is this what you call frustrated? he said. Making a joke? Asking an innocent question every now and then?
