by Peter Ferry
“You know,” I said, “I didn’t know her, and I never will, but ‘P’ did, and he may have loved her, and I’d like to find out who he is and give him this letter. That’s all. I just thought maybe you’d be able to help me . . .” I started to get up.
“Hang on,” she said. “Listen, this stuff is not about love. It’s not about Peter Carey. What it’s about, it’s about drugs . . .” She was watching me like that again.
“Drugs?”
“It’s about heroin. It’s all in code. ‘Our little friend.’ Get it? Thanksgiving is a euphemism for the rush you feel. That shit about music; when you’re high it’s like singing a song, holding a note.”
“Are you telling me that Lisa Kim was a heroin addict?”
“Don’t be so Katie Couric. The trick with heroin—the real thrill—is to control it and not be controlled by it. And people do. Katie doesn’t want you to know that. People use it for years, decades, their whole lives.”
I looked up at her. “Do you use it?”
“We all use it,” she said, defining a group, as if to point out that I wasn’t and would never be part of it.
“Well,” I said, “it doesn’t sound as if Lisa was very much in control of it.”
“No,” she said.
“You’re amused. Wasn’t Lisa your friend?”
“My friend? I knew her a long time. We spent time together. But if you mean were we blood sisters, did we pledge our fidelity—she caught the waitress’s eye as she passed and ordered another glass of wine—did we promise to always be there for each other? I’ll tell you what we promised. We promised to do whatever we could to feel the most alive. If that was being ‘true’ to each other, so be it. If it was being untrue, fucking each other, betraying the other person, okay, too. We don’t believe in friendship in the cheesy, conventional meaning of the word,” she said a little proudly. “Let me put it this way: Lisa and I were part of each other’s experience. In that sense, we were part of each other.”
“Then I suppose you don’t believe in love, either?” She just stared at me. “And my trying to track down this ‘P’ is just silly. Or maybe he doesn’t even exist.”
“Oh, he exists, all right. He’s a drug dealer. That’s who ‘P’ is. That’s who Peter Carey is.”
Annie Pritchard disgusted me, drinking my wine while holding me in contempt like a teenager to a parent or that certain type of late-century wife who resented the hell out of her husband while maxing out his charge cards. Her story sounded as if she were making it up as she went along. She managed to order one more glass of wine before I paid for the drinks. Leaving the bar, I thought about dropping the whole thing, and I crumpled the letter and tossed it in a garbage can on the street, got in my car, drove around the block, and plucked it out again.
It wasn’t going to be that easy. Besides, I didn’t want to drop it. It had somehow become too important to me (I ignored the creeping fear that that was because nothing else was), but again I didn’t know what to do next, so again I waited. Then one blustery Saturday morning a couple of weeks later, between the hardware store and the grocery store, I bought a paper and stopped at Café Express to read it and put something warm into myself. Other people had the same idea, and there were no empty tables. I was waiting for one to open when I saw Tanya Kim, and she saw me. Perhaps I was looking for her; we both lived in Evanston, only a few blocks apart, and Café Express was exactly the kind of place she’d hang out. At any rate, she had an extra chair, so she beckoned and I sat down. She seemed pleased to see me, as I was always pleased to run into my older brother’s friends or girlfriends. And even though I was neither one of those things, I was happy to see her; we had a funny little bond, the two of us, that wasn’t based on friendship or affection but rather on shared trauma, and it invited us to be confidential with each other, if shyly, even though we were strangers.
“How you doing?” I tried to sound as if she didn’t have to answer if she didn’t want to.
“Better,” she said. “It gets easier.” I studied her face; you would have picked them out as sisters anywhere. Tanya had all of Lisa’s features, but they were put together a little differently. She wasn’t nearly as pretty. Whatever the intangible thing is that defines beauty, she just didn’t have it.
“And your parents?”
She said her father was permanently sad, but her mother was “being more Asian about it.” When she asked about me, I had a chance to tell her the truth, but I didn’t. “I’m okay,” I said.
Then she asked unexpectedly, “You know what the worst part of it is? Now they’re afraid of losing me. I have absolutely no freedom. For years they were too busy to even notice me; now they’re all over my ass. And once a week I have to go up there and worship at the shrine of the sainted Lisa. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re catching me at a bad moment.” She got up to go to work, pointing through the plate-glass window at a camping-and-hiking store called Outfitters across the street.
“I thought you were still in school,” I said.
“I work weekends. Look, I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just that they’ve turned her into something she wasn’t. I’m sorry; I know you say you loved her, but to me she was a selfish bitch. She never remembered a birthday. She never called unless she wanted something. She was a bitch who slept around—I’m sorry—did drugs, a fact we have conveniently completely blocked out, and didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself.”
“Did Lisa do a lot of drugs?” I asked.
She cocked her head. “Why are you asking me? I rarely saw her. None of us saw her, really. If anyone should know, you should. Did she do drugs?”
“Not with me.”
“Well, she did with someone. You really didn’t do drugs with her? See, we were right about you. Honest to God, I think you could have saved her.”
“Oh, don’t say that.” I could just imagine Lydia and Steve cringing. “No one can save anyone,” I said, and if I believed that, I also believed that I was somehow involved in something that was inevitable. “And what do you mean, ‘someone did’? Did you ever see her doing drugs? Do you know this for sure?”
“Yes,” she said finally, firmly.
“If you didn’t see her much, may I ask how you know?”
“No. I don’t know. I gotta go.” She stood up.
“Tanya, you’re really leaving me hanging. I mean, it’s not as if I asked. You kinda brought it up. Can’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. What’s your phone number?” She punched it into her phone.
It saddens me that with virtually everyone in this world looking for someone to love, so many of us can’t find anyone, or find the wrong person, or find too many people. Love is so damn hard. Falling in love isn’t. Falling in love is easy, but being in love is hard, and staying in love is harder.
Falling in love is easy and fun. I do it all the time and always have. As soon as I sit down on a plane or in a ball game or restaurant, I look for someone to fall in love with. And every year I fall a little bit in love with one or two high school girls. Sometimes they are in my class, sometimes they are just kids in the hallway, but every day I look forward to seeing them. They are like lovely watercolors or wistful little tunes you can’t get out of your head. Life is more interesting when you have a little crush on someone.
But being in love. Perhaps the only thing harder than being in love is not being in love. I saw somewhere the other day that a crab boat was missing in the far north Pacific, and I thought of Bobby Quinn. He was a terribly shy, terribly lonely boy I met in Thailand at Christmastime who worked on one of those boats and had come halfway around the world looking for a girl to take back to Unalaska Island with him, to take to sea with him. He had found her, too, he thought. Her name was Sahli, and she was as shy and desperate as he was. She would have to have been.
Sahli was a prostitute. I often wonder if she went back with him. For some reason, I picture her squatting on her haunches as Thai women do on the deck of a ship co
oking something over a burner. The images are as incongruous as was their odd little love. I hope they weren’t on that ship that was lost.
After seeing her sister, I had a second dream about Lisa Kim. This one was an erotic dream. Actually it was a wet dream. In it Lisa’s hair ran through my fingers over and over like cool water. I touched her cheek with the back of my forefinger. It was as soft as a breeze. She was squirming toward me. Squirming and squirming. I couldn’t get hold of her.
When I woke up, Lydia was lying on her side looking right at me. She rolled onto her other side turning her back toward me. I started to touch her shoulder, but I didn’t know what to do or what to say, so I didn’t do or say anything.
“Why don’t you want us to write stories about love?” asks the girl whose hair has turned purple.
“It is just that they are hard to write, that’s all. Hemingway said to write about what you know; write about events, things happening, things you’ve seen happen. A fight. An argument.”
“Are you saying that we don’t know about love?” asks someone else.
“I’m saying love is an enormously complex thing. I’m not sure that anyone who is eighteen knows enough about it to write about it very well.”
“I suppose you do?” says the purple-haired girl. “I mean, who in this room fell in love with a fictional dead woman? Raise your hand.”
“I did not fall in love with Lisa Kim,” I say, “but your point is well taken, and in a way it’s what I’m saying. Love is a tough nut. You can write about lust. You can certainly write about infatuation.”
“Aren’t those aspects of love?” asks Nick.
“Sure.”
“Why are you patronizing us?” he continues.
“Am I? I guess I am, so I’ll stop. You can write about anything you want. Here’s what I’m saying: Most successful pieces are about things the writer understands well, and love is hard to understand at any age, including eighteen, maybe especially eighteen. I know I knew little about it at that age. And I don’t mean to insult you, though I probably have, but most teenage stories about love just aren’t very good, so I would gently steer you toward topics you are expert about: parents, families, friends, school, brothers and sisters, adult hypocrisy, the uses and misuses of power and authority, bad teachers. Kids often write great stories about topics like these. Kids less often write great stories about love. That’s all I mean.”
“What’s so hard about love?” asks the dog-faced boy.
“Oh, please!” says a girl. “As if you know the slightest thing about it.”
“Then tell me: What’s so hard about it?”
“It hurts,” says the girl.
“Always?”
“It can hurt,” says the girl. “It has great potential to hurt. When you don’t have it, all you can think about is getting it. When you get it, all you can think about is losing it.”
“And when you lose it . . .” The girl with purple hair shakes her head. “My parents divorced when my brother and I were very young. I hardly remember them together. He remembers a little better. Neither one remarried; well, my dad did, but briefly. It didn’t work. My mom never did. Now all these years later, they can barely talk to each other. They can barely stand to be in the same room.” She goes on to tell us a quite amazing story. Recently her father had handed her a box of photographs he was about to throw out saying, offhandedly, that maybe she’d like them. She sat cross-legged on her bed and looked at every one, studied them. They were from the early years: her parents dating, her parents dancing and on vacation in Mexico with long hair and bell-bottoms, arms around each other, the wedding, feeding each other cake and of course they were photographs, so most of them are posed. But there was one in particular that wasn’t: Her dad was telling a joke. He was standing up with a party hat on, arms spread and everyone in the picture was laughing, and no one harder than her mother who had tears in her eyes and one hand to her chest; she was so proud of him and in love with him, the purple-haired girl could see it in her face. “I couldn’t stop looking at that picture,” she says. “I’d never seen them in love. I never knew that they ever had been. But in that picture and some of the others, they clearly were. I kept that one and used it as a bookmark; I would take it out when I was in a boring class—never yours, Mr. Ferry—”
“Of course not.”
“—and look at it, because I don’t know why. I just would. I think it was important to me to discover that I was conceived in love, something I never knew, something I’d never even considered a possibility. Finally I framed that picture and put it by my bed.” Then one day the purple-haired girl noticed that it was gone. She asked her mother what had happened to it. Her mother said she had thrown it away. The girl flipped out. She said what right did her mother have to touch her personal property? “She said it wasn’t mine, it was hers. She said she didn’t want me to look at it because it distorted the truth; it was a lie. I think she didn’t want to look at it because it contained a truth, one it’s too hard for her to face.”
“Write that,” I say.
“What?”
“There’s your story. Write that.”
“Yeah,” says the dog-faced boy, “write it just like you told it.”
“If you do, it will contain a truth, too,” I say.
“What truth?” asks the purple-haired girl.
“You tell me.”
“That love sucks,” says someone.
“That love is a lot like hate.”
“That love can turn into hate.”
“Easily,” I say.
“How about that love is not eternal. That love is fleeting,” says Nick. “That for all our wishing it would, love doesn’t last.”
“How about we say, ‘Love is not necessarily eternal’?” I say.
“Now you’re equivocating,” says Nick.
“Big word,” says someone.
“From Macbeth,” says Nick.
“I don’t think—” I start.
“Sure you do,” says Nick. “I mean, ‘love is not necessarily eternal’ is obvious, right? I mean, look at Hollywood; look at her parents. Duh. But ‘love is not eternal’ is news. ‘Love is not eternal’ is Truth with a capital T.”
“I’m just not sure that it is true,” I say.
“Oh, Mr. Ferry, you’re a romantic,” someone says.
“No—”
“Sure you are. You fell in love with the girl in the car, a character you made up, or say you made up, at least.”
“Well—”
“Is that it?” asks Nick. “Are only the romantics allowed to write about love?”
“That’s not at all what I meant,” I say.
“Oh, Mr. Ferry,” says the girl with purple hair, “you’re a love Nazi. Yes you are; you’re the Nazi of love.”
5
…
Travel Writing
Dateline: Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand
by Pete Ferry
While neither Thai nor American officials like to talk about it, prostitution is a major industry in Thailand. It is in small part a legacy of the Vietnam War, during which Bangkok was an important center for American soldiers on R and R, but more a product of ancient cultural and very modern economic factors. Whatever its origins and explanations, prostitution in Thailand is a phenomenon that the visitor can neither ignore nor escape.
“WHEN I CAME to Thailand, I wasn’t looking for a woman,” said Bobby Quinn. “I had no intention of, ah, hiring a prostitute. And now look at me; I’ve got two of them.” One was sitting next to him and across from me at the big table of Westerners, all of us eating and drinking. Her name was Sahli. She was a slender girl with feline features, light brown skin and long black hair. She seemed very shy, and neither of us thought that she spoke English. As we poured ourselves another beer, she quietly nursed a Green Spot orange soda.
The other one was back in Bangkok. “I gave her a vacation when I came here to Chiang Mai,” said Bobby.
“How did
you find the one in Bangkok?”
“Well, the first cab I got in, the driver asked if I wanted a woman. I said no, and he said, ‘Why not take a look? No obligation. It doesn’t cost anything to look.’ So there I was in this massage parlor with maybe thirty, forty girls, and, you know, then I’m walking out with one, and I’ve bought her for two weeks.”
“How much?”
“Thirty bucks a day, but I know I got taken. I could have had her for twenty. I got this one for twenty.” He nodded toward Sahli. She got up quickly, left the table, and hurried out the door of the restaurant.
“My God, Bobby,” I said. “I think she understood what we were saying.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you should go after her?”
“She’ll be all right.”
“Would you mind if I went, then?” I asked him. I found her standing by the river with her back to me. I approached her, but not too close. I spoke softly. I decided to speak in English, just as if she understood. “Sahli, what we said was very thoughtless. We have hurt your feelings and we are very sorry. We all feel very bad.” I stood beside her, but not too close. I talked about the beauty of the river, Chiang Mai, and northern Thailand. After a bit, I smiled at her and motioned with my hand: “Would you like to go back in?”
She hesitated, but came, her arms still crossed on her chest. We sat side by side at the table, and neither of us took part in the conversation.
Bobby Quinn made his living fishing for Alaska king crab. He shipped out of Unalaska Island in the Aleutians. His work was very lucrative, but very dangerous. He was twenty-eight years old and had been crabbing for seven years. The year before he had gone to sea just twice: once for thirty days, once for forty-two. On these two trips he had made enough to live well and travel around the world. Still, “Ships always go down, people always get washed over.” He felt sometimes that he was living on borrowed time. His brother, who lured him to Alaska to begin with, wouldn’t go out anymore. Bobby said simply, “I am looking for another line of work,” but one sensed that it would be tough for him to give up the money and the freedom.
