by David Adjmi
“I’m David.”
I shook hands with him and we both kind of laughed.
“Are you traveling alone, or are you with someone?” I asked.
“Well . . . I’m not alone exactly. A priest from my college brought me with him.”
I’d never heard of a priest taking college students on cruises. “Are you sleeping with the priest?” I asked, not very delicately.
“No . . . no, he’s just nice.”
“Nice?”
“I know it sounds weird,” he said. “But he’s very straight. We’re just friends.”
The boy was so unscarred and young. I’d never been young in that way. His innocence was boring but it gave him any appeal he had.
“What do you do?” he asked.
He was compulsively biting slits of fingernails already chewed to the base.
“I’m a playwright,” I said. “I’m starting grad school in the fall. I’m going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” I kept trying to bleed whatever prestige I could from my Iowa acceptance, but he didn’t seem to have the vaguest idea what it was.
“What kind of plays do you write?”
“Huh? Oh. Well—they’re all different.”
“But do you have, like, one main theme or style?”
The truth was I had no idea what my plays were about. I had no comprehensive vision for the kind of writer I wanted to be. “They’re sort of comedies,” I said, trying to sound like I had it all together but wanted to downplay it.
“That’s cool. What made you become a writer?”
I didn’t like being interrogated about my as yet undeveloped writer self; the boy made me nervous. I’d been trying whenever I had a free moment to rest on laurels that weren’t yet mine; I told anyone who would listen I was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but the truth was I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten in. I wasn’t sure I had any talent and was terrified of being found out. I was driven to be an artist, but I wasn’t exactly sure what art was or what it was for.
I knew, from books I read, and weekend classes I’d taken at St. Mark’s Church with Irene Fornés—who was a very famous playwright—that when you wrote a play you were meant to connect to something inside yourself, and that whatever it was you connected to would lead to characters speaking. This never happened to me. When Irene gave us an in-class exercise I tried opening the channel to let the characters speak, but it was eerily silent. That day I became so panicked by my lack of creativity I left the class and never returned. My life consisted of borrowing and discarding identities from books and films: what was inside of me? I had no idea, and was terrified to find out. And now the conversation with the young man who was likely having sex with his priest made me feel intensely nervous—and like my mother, I couldn’t rid myself of the nervous feeling. So I parted ways with the boy. I went to the bar and had a drink. And with my drink, my terrors started to dissipate, and I was able to relax.
The midwestern couple asked to be transferred to another table after that first night, and we were moved away from the noisy silverware station to a banquette on the other side of the dining room, which pleased my mother. The waiter appeared with her one glass of wine poured from the bottle they had stored for her “in the back” and she thanked him—calmly—her manners now surfacing again. The dinners were pleasant. We ate from china plates and drank from crystal goblets. My mother and Arlene got along for the most part. And while Arlene couldn’t fully enjoy the kitsch aspects of the cruise, and while the salmon wasn’t as good as that place she’d been to in Soho, she accepted it for what it was. After dinner we’d retire to the Fortunes casino, or to a rock concert in the Stratosphere lounge—there was an Air Supply tribute band. Or we went to karaoke, or to the movie theatre, midnight breakfast, dancing in the discotheque. The salt air gave my mother’s hair a helmet-like frizz, and she wobbled from port to starboard in groggy disequilibrium, wrapped in sarongs and cover-ups. It had been almost two months since she’d smoked. “I don’t even want a cigarette,” she’d declaim with an almost drugged incredulity as she spooned bananas Foster or sipped wine and breathed in the dustless air of the stateroom. She boasted about her own comfort. “Well, I’m relaxed,” she’d rejoin to no one if her velvety enthusiasms went unacknowledged. The pleasure she took in her relaxation made her a little smug, even if it was unintentional; she’d simply achieved a kind of Zen state, a parochial enlightenment, that made her more moral than nervous people.
She was up early, usually at the crack of dawn, to get a head start at relaxing. I’d find her at eight or eight thirty on her shaded deck chair, supine in nautical enjoyment, slathered in 100 SPF and perusing with diffuse, gentle concentration the information booklets and quarterly newsletter from the Acoustic Neuroma Association she’d gotten in the mail a few weeks earlier. When she saw me approach, she’d lower her sunglasses, her expression hinging ineffably between stated and catatonic. “Isn’t this relaxing?” she’d coo from her pelagic pulpit, caressing each syllable of each word as she spoke it as though it were a glistening jewel. She felt safe in the hermetic envelope of luxury the cruise ship provided. She felt protected by its splendors. Being on the cruise inspired in my mother a sudden, fleeting duty to teach her children how to live—not just survive, but really live. She kept offering us things, plying us with comestibles and gifts: “This drink is unreal, Dave. You want me to get you a drink?” She wanted to show us that luxury was the extension of a greater overarching philosophy, that there was a secret nested in it, a spiritual mystery—and that she would bestow upon us, her children, its precious gift. It reminded me of when I was a little boy and she walked me through the hallowed atriums of the Met and the Guggenheim to expose me to Culture. My mother wanted my sister and me to taste expensive liqueurs and eat caviar. She wanted us to absorb copious amounts of vitamin D, which you got by lying in the sun.
She made appointments for us to get shiatsu massages in the spa. I had never gotten a massage before and I wasn’t particularly interested in it: I didn’t need to relax, and in fact prized my agitation as a kind of survivalist wakefulness—I didn’t want to be lulled into the seductive slumber of calm and repose—but my mother insisted. “Massages are very important,” she told me. “You’re supposed to get a massage once a month. Otherwise you could have real problems.” I liked the slightly regressed feeling I got when she talked to me this way; my mother knew best, I had to listen to her for my own good.
Arlene and I walked over to the spa together for our massages and they separated us. I went into the men’s side. They had me prepare for the massage with a shower. The locker room was luxuriously outfitted with soft towels and liquid soaps and fragrant lotions. The showers were pebbled with glittering stones, seafoam and celadon. After my shower, I put on a plush white robe and was ushered into a small twilit room studded with small candles. I disrobed and got under the sheet, and the masseur told me to put my head into an upholstered oval slot on the table. I felt the blood pool in my face as he worked the tension out of my back and neck and legs. My mother was right: it was relaxing, and the luxury was edifying. And there was something nice about someone touching you and unknotting your tension, something almost holy about the intimate connection between strangers. I forgot all about Kurt and my despair about relationships. After my massage, it was like the sound had been turned off and I was floating through a silent world with vivid colors. I felt like a ghost hovering over the decks and starboards. I felt like a baby gently rocked by small waves lapping against the boat’s hull. I felt the inexplicable joy I imagined the dead might feel once they were unchained from their bodies. I passed the frozen yogurt bar, and saw my sister on a nearby bench staring out at the horizon. I was excited to compare massage stories and took my seat beside her. “God,” I said, “I feel so relaxed.”
“I don’t!” said my sister, who launched into a litany of complaints about my mother. They ran into each other after my sister’s massage—which she enjoyed, it relaxed her, just like my mother said
—and she tried to thank my mother, but my mother intercepted her thanks and started in on one of her rants: Did Arlene want to be alone for the rest of her life? Did she want to be poor and suffer? Didn’t she want to lose a few pounds? And why did she change her hair, didn’t she think it looked better with layers? My mother continued to batter her with small, needling complaints, reminding Arlene that this was on her mother’s dime so her mother got to call the shots—that was a perk she gave herself, a gratuity. She could give or withhold gifts like massages. She could decide when they’d wake up, who got to shower first. Arlene was the little girl and my mother was the grown-up, and that dynamic would always give my mother a little boost and would always make Arlene feel like shit.
When my sister turned forty-nine she went to the Landmark Forum because her friend Danielle said it changed her life. The Landmark Forum counselors gave everyone tasks and during the break between sessions people had to call someone to confront them about something painful. The Landmark Forum participants filed out of the main auditorium toward the bank of pay phones. Arlene decided to call my mother. And when my mother picked up the phone Arlene said, “Why don’t you love me?” My mother was, of course, taken off guard. She said, “What are you talking about?” She tried laughing it off, but my sister was sobbing audibly on the other end. My mother maintained over her sobs and shudders that she did love Arlene, to stop being ridiculous, to stop crying. But Arlene couldn’t stop crying and kept repeating over and over, “Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you love me?” When my mother found she couldn’t stifle Arlene’s cries she became glacial and hard, the way she’d been when Arlene cried as a girl. She commanded her to STOP CRYING ALREADY. She hammered into her that she loved her and that Arlene was being ridiculous.
I knew my sister felt unloved. I tried to be there for her as films of salt from the ocean air condensed around our lips and cheeks and we were rocked by waves. We walked back in silence to the cabin. That night Arlene didn’t speak very much at dinner; she left for the room before dessert. My mother admitted they’d had an argument and I pretended not to know anything. I didn’t want to take sides because I didn’t want to get triangulated into their argument because there was no winning. By the time we got back to the cabin Arlene was asleep. The following morning we had breakfast and she barely spoke. She gazed expressionlessly at ceilings and empty skies. When she left, my mother cracked open a packet of Sweet’N Low and emptied it into her cappuccino.
“That girl is too sensitive.”
“You could be a little bit nicer to her,” I said, breaking my silent vow not to get involved.
“Honey, she knows how I am. Why does she have to wear that outfit in front of me?”
“Because she’s a grown woman and she can wear whatever she wants, that’s why.”
She picked up a tiny silver spoon and stirred her cappuccino. “Well, you didn’t see what she was wearing.”
“I did see it, and I thought it was fine but that’s not the point—”
“And then she walks off, no goodbye, no nothing?”
“Because she’s mad at you! She doesn’t want to be critiqued all the time.”
“Is this how I raised her? No. I raised her to have class, not to wear shit outfits.”
My mother’s aggressive superficiality was starting to drive me nuts.
“Why do you care so much about people’s outfits?”
“Honey,” she replied, “this isn’t some garbage cruise. This is a very elegant ship.”
“Arlene is broke. She can’t afford expensive outfits. She’s a single mother, she’s been through hell—you know what she’s been through!”
She repositioned herself in her seat and lifted her head slightly. “She can still put some effort into her appearance.” Her face had an oily sheen; her forehead was so shiny, it gave off almost a reflective glare.
“I know you don’t see it,” I said, “but sometimes you can be really harsh.”
“Oh please.” She lightly rolled her eyes.
“All Arlene wants is to be loved, so why can’t you just give her that?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“It costs you nothing.”
“I’m going back to the cabin.”
“Don’t you want a real relationship with your own kid? Doesn’t that matter more than her outfits?”
My mother took another sip of her drink.
She looked out through the tiny port window. Her eyes were milky and distant. “Honey. I am who I am,” she said. “I’m never going to change.”
The ship landed in Barbados the following morning and we took a shore excursion for the day. Arlene lagged behind my mother and me. I could hear her parlous sighs, the punishing clomp of her sandals as she followed us from place to place. Barbados was steeped in poverty; the sidewalks were unattractively pitted and pebbled, they were lined with Barbadians begging for money. Their destitution contrasted harshly with the kitsch and artifice of the cruise and broke the illusion we were collectively trying to engender of unimpeded luxury. There was a Hilton down the road, but when we got there it seemed abandoned. Calypso Muzak played in the elevator. Indoor wooden footbridges took you from one quiet, deserted area to another. The beach we found behind the hotel was rocky and inhospitable but we found a small lounge area, and lounged in abutting identical plastic lounge chairs. The sky was dull blue and dotted with wispy cirruses. My mother slathered zinc oxide on her nose and ordered drinks. Women combed the empty beach like minesweepers, selling their beaded necklaces and rings. My mother bought one necklace for herself and one for Arlene—who was still not speaking to her but wore the necklace anyway. No one was very relaxed. My mother made conversational gambits with my sister, she hazarded a compliment or two, doctored her criticisms so that they seemed like encouragement, but Arlene just sipped her drink and rolled her eyes. Maybe Arlene might want to play shuffleboard later on the ship, my mother opined. “I’m not in the mood,” replied my sister, burnishing her disillusionment into a kind of chamber opera. My sister could squeeze with remarkable economy whole epochs of rage into a single sentence; I felt the intense magnification of her unhappiness as though it were being projected onto a giant screen. But then she was laughing at something, and before I knew it the two of them were laughing and talking as if nothing had happened.
The next day the ship debarked in Antigua—which Howie used to talk about all the time. He’d been there in seventh grade, and detailed his exploits in those long notes he passed to me between classes. His family stayed at a beautiful and somewhat secret place called the Half Moon Bay Hotel, and I decided we should go there on our day excursion. Just outside the ship a bunch of aggressive cabdrivers were jockeying for customers. I made arrangements with one, and we started walking to his cab when another cabdriver started yelling at my mother, who’d evidently made some kind of loose arrangement with him, and now he felt she was reneging. I didn’t like how he spoke to her and told him to back off. But my manliness was not sufficiently intimidating. “What are you going to do about it, faggot?” he said. I had been called a faggot before, but never in front of my mother and sister, who just stood there, horrified—probably, I assumed, because they didn’t want to be affiliated with a faggot, they wanted a man, a man to protect them and negotiate aggressively with cabdrivers. All the other cabdrivers had momentarily been intercepted by the threat of potential imminent violence and I felt their eyes on me. “You gonna fight me, faggot? Huh, faggot?”
Everybody knew I was gay by then; my sexuality was treated like a dirty secret we felt obliged to keep buried. A few months before her operation, when I was dating Kurt, I tried to introduce her to him—it seemed like something grown people might do. I knocked on her bedroom door one morning, and when I suggested we all have dinner together my mother looked shocked, as though she’d been plunged very suddenly into a bath of ice water. She stared at me for a moment, tightening the belt on her sateen bathrobe, the one with the birds and mint-hued sunsets. The
lines in her face all tightened. Then she flashed a very unexpected look of defiance, to let me know she had some mysterious upper hand in the situation. A hint of a smile pushed through her pursed lips. “No, thank you,” she said, her voice deepened by all her endless smoking, “I don’t want to meet your boyfriend. I don’t want to meet any of your boyfriends, so don’t bother introducing them to me.”* I felt her loathing in the diacritical emphasis she gave the word “boyfriend.” Instinctively, I tried to match her rejection with indifference. I said something like “Fine by me” and, before I knew it, she’d slammed the door in my face. Though it wasn’t terribly violent, and people did things like slam doors in other people’s faces, it hurt me. But I had to compromise if I wanted some sort of relationship with her—and I genuinely did. I couldn’t discuss my breakup with her; she couldn’t alleviate my pain and would probably never really know or see me, but I still loved my mother.
