"Why do people have to match? Why can't they just love each other and appreciate their differences?" She said this while knowing that finding a perfect match for herself might be impossible and that in her present mood any man was better than none. Now with her youth waning she knew that sexual liaisons with beautiful forms would become more and more like hunting for mushrooms in an area with a worsening annual rainfall. "I don't know if you have a new girlfriend now but — "
"I don't have one."
He blew more smoke into her face. "So what are you wanting?"
"Let's do it now, Sweetheart. Let's just get married — no fancy, pretentious stuff, just a quick run to the justice of the peace …maybe today or tomorrow…the sooner the better."
They were married in the early afternoon and a day later he moved many of his things back into her home. Since the wedding had been as bland as she had requested it (a justice of the peace and a couple of Michael's employees who acted the part of witnesses), she told herself that a permanently delayed honeymoon would be a matchingly dull complement. To her this honey and moon composed a word that was no misnomer: it implied a bee addicted to a nectar-induced high and she knew that even a minute of that unreality would have cloyed her sanity. Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women reached for sanitary napkins. Still the human goddess who once dressed Barbie dolls for imaginary weddings couldn't help but yearn for a honeymoon all the same. She was mystified why Michael did not move Rick's belongings with his own; and yet partly assuming that this would happen after the honeymoon and partly from a desire to not know, she did not ask. Then the saturnine groom took her to the airport to watch the airplanes come and go. They looked through the glass cages at these volant pterosaurs with American Airlines branded on their skins. At first she thought that he who was so parsimonious about the amount of water that could flow from a tap had decided upon this watching of the airplanes as the honeymoon but then he left and came back with something worse than nothing: tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had no luggage but he told her that they would pick up some clothes in the capital city and she smiled. She told him that it had been a long time since she had flown in a plane as if Jakarta had been nothing but a dream.
The first day after their arrival they took a small plane to Bentonville, Arkansas and then walked through the Wal-Mart museum witnessing different possessions of Sam Walton's humble beginnings and listening to the story of his ambition to become a multimillionaire. She disparaged her disparaging thoughts. She blocked the formulation of negative ideas and smiled at each new exhibit.
"To think that he addressed the first consumer inquiries on a manual typewriter like this," she said at the typewriter exhibit.
"Isn't that the truth," he told her. "A man who in later life could have bought a factory to manufacture the most sophisticated supercomputers used by the government and here he was in younger days pecking on that old thing."
They spent the second day of the honeymoon in a rented car going up snowy, mountainous hills through forests of dangling icicles as thick as stalactites and as lush as its lost verdant facade, traveling by the most winding and treacherous roads until they were at last in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
On the third day of Christmas he gave to her the reverberating cacophony of country music, torturing an already queasy stomach that had just experienced car-sickness earlier that afternoon. From the front row of the concert she managed to smile without wincing noticeably from this howling through nostrils via song. The discomfort from her own disingenuousness in maintaining this coerced smile was as reprehensible as the sound; and yet it was nothing to her who had seen a decapitation in early girlhood and spoke of it like an inquisitive little scholar. The bombardment of senseless noise was the stuff migraines were made of; although fortunately for her none ensued.
On the fourth day of Christmas they were at this new business "of his." There was a ribbon cutting for this international gourmet supermarket which would soon be replicated in Japan. He showed her through the aisles and pointed out every item on the shelves as if the stuff one crammed down his or her gullet needed such elaboration.
On the fifth day it was Christmas and so they decided to travel around the area of Eureka Springs. They drove up and down the niveous and tortuous hills in and out of the town. Tree gazing from the more scenic back roads was his truth beyond the corporeal greed and ambition of financial enterprises (this world) and unempirical religion (the make believe world), and she was pleased that he had it. As his woman, she wanted to nurture a greater purpose in him. As a somewhat solipsistic being she wanted to stake a purpose in being with him beyond more intense pleasures of shared experiences which she knew were erroneously pinned on mutable others instead of the constancy of self. During this car-bound time she held her loose stomach successfully, stifling its rebellion through the exertion of will. She again smiled: It was a complaisant facade of any common soldier.
Then he took her to the town's shoddy replica of the statue of Jesus that was meant to duplicate the one that stood over Rio de Janeiro. The diminished Christ didn't have the efficacy of the original since it lacked omnipotent and sturdy immutability over the natural world and beauty. Still, with a hand pressed into his, she couldn't help but feel that specious illusion of God being up there in the sky caring about the ethical decisions of her little life. Of course, it was all conditioning: the warmth and strength of a man's hand being transmitted into her own, the sun upon her skin, and, from them, a glazed, ethereal staring at the statue as if it were radiating blessings upon her.
Side by side with her man in their warm winter coats, both like little furry animals against the kneecaps of this stone or fiberglass man-god, she did not mind succumbing to religious delusions. She was married now and all other suppositions and attempts to make her stance, her sense of the world, were nothing. All ideas that went contrary to his expectations were dust that her mind needed to sweep away. Marriage was reality. It was the psychological and physiological completeness of two people, and as such there was a necessity for compromise no differently than the appetites of the body being catered to by the brain that developed pleasure receptors to tolerate this incompatible coexistence. She argued to herself that it was an incontrovertible truth that a man's bedtime dominion transferred to all else. A woman, by getting married, either gave her tacit approval of this natural inclination or gained enjoyment from the ongoing challenge to minimize it.
An idea trespassed through the meadows of her mind that he had taken her here to force upon her a spiritual awakening and to test her obsequiousness to him and his god in action if not thought (she who, when logic domineered over all else was a lone, frigid polar bear who didn't even care that much for the sexual awakenings). Then another idea encroached upon her. She wondered whether having been awakened so often sexually had put her in a coma to all other forms of awakening. She disparaged the fleeting thought. It was a mere caprice, she argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her experience, and only this. Heretofore she had been impervious to the intensity of the hot sandstorms of raw emotion and the blizzards of refined emotion, thought.
But now all was different. She, an American, had knocked off her insular American shell (the little she had possessed) while in Jakarta. She had gone there thinking, according to her culture, that Moslems were extremists who hated Americans; but never believing the ideas that she was brought up with or the ones spewing out of this invisible mouth, society, she had disregarded the idiocy of fear and bias for the splendor of reviving truth. There she had met a gentle people; there she had been naked with easily torn skin; and there she had felt the hurt and the injustice of the masses, compassion and enlightenment seeming a great and insufferable travail. Then and now she needed to go to him in the hope of forgetting life's injustices within the softness of his skin massaging her own.
Since, subtly within her compromises, she was now emulating him for an "understanding" of religion and was now beginning to reflect upon her Aunt Peggy as a paragon of marital sustainability, somehow following the herd seemed less reprehensible. A being was born, grew up to reproduce, and then died. How could she, the maverick that she might be, add more purpose to the state of mankind than this? Could she be so supercilious as to think that the common experiences of those normal or normal acting people counted for nothing? These actions existed since the beginning of time so who was she to disabuse pragmatic, time-tested ideas that were passed down through the generations?
She maintained her glazed, ethereal stare at the statue; wanted to rapture herself from discomfort equivalent to those pews in a chapel; felt the mistake of being here with him bury her in the fragments of herself like the rubble of the Afghan Buddha; and yet feigned a glowing ember of yearning within this contrived display of contentment. She played the part well enough to believe it herself. She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and spinsters. She argued that marriage was a union built on incessant compromise and flexibility and that she wanted to be as adroit at it as she was in spitting chewing tobacco. She could have gone through a ceremony of marrying herself as the more outlandish Dutch women did. She could have rented out a large area for the ceremony and paid for a lavish, catered banquet, a wedding dress, and confetti. The recurrent idea of it was tantalizing. Even if marriage to oneself would lack some sexual exhilaration it would be a singular form of epiphany. The publicity would have been good for the sales of her art and there were days, upon her return from Jakarta that she taunted herself with this possibility as a viable way to keep herself from showing up onto the doorstep at the home of Michael's parents. But she ended up telling herself that she wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments.
And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles.
In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same recurrent life themes of this man.
She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and urinate as she was applying makeup in front of a mirror) had much legitimacy. Love was a commitment toward compromise and sacrifice.
So, while the thick cloud of his flatulent odor was beginning to dissipate and a steak sauce commercial was interrupting the Tonight Show, she became drowsy. At one moment she heard him say, "That steak sure looks good on the TV, doesn't it Honey?" and then in the next she fell off a precipice into a vacuum of wind that made up dreams. Like women who when experiencing prenuptial jitters have nightmares of their wedding ceremonies being interrupted by dark revelations, she dreamed something similar to this belatedly. She dreamed that she and Michael were at a diner in the John F Kennedy International Airport. They were getting married there before departing to Tokyo. Suddenly the airport security guards, all of whom were Japanese, interrupted the ceremony, whispered something to the potential groom, and gave Polaroid photographs to the Catholic priest. She wasn't sure what they said but she did hear the words "airport bathroom graffiti" which made her grimace not for the ignorance of those who were part of this consensus (she didn't "give a flying fuck" about what they thought in the slightest) but that these bereft hollow heads epitomized what the droves of men would think. It didn't depress or upset her: it was just like being a sole life form on Mars. It was uncomfortable as hell but she was quite used to it. MF, after being shown the photographs, asked the priest if he should go through with a marriage to a woman who had drawn such unregenerate images on the doors of the women's toilet but the priest ignored his maudlin whining as if annoyed by any distraction that would delay his inquisition. Gabriele could sense this priest's yearning to put his fangs into her for she knew that the taste of blood was sweet and that the blood of a unique being would be envisaged by such savages as the sweetest yet. "Tell me, did you do this?" he asked the dark veiled woman but he did not give her time to respond. "Who is this black man that makes up the face and body of a savage God in this grotesque and blasphemous mural?" demanded the priest.
Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers, neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one wishes the larger image to be, I suppose."
"What I want it to be?" mocked the priest acrimoniously. So, I suppose, if I want it to be the Virgin, Mary — "
"Then it is Mary."
"Mary sure has a lot of naked images of black men with grotesquely large genitalia running through her head," said the priest.
She smiled. "Of course she does, as all women do. Have you never heard ofMasters and Johnson? Surely Kinsey could not have eluded a person of your type.If I were to dig up the foundation under that hairy grandfatherly veneer ofyours who knows what I'd find."
"Aren't you smart? To think that we could have naively put your name in holy matrimony. But do tell me, now that God is generously revealing all of your perverted ideas, what you think is in my heart!"
"I wouldn't know. I don't read minds or hearts. I imagine it is the same stinky muck that is in all men's cravings. If you pay me money, I wouldn't oppose letting you confess your sins to me. Now the price to absolve sins and blowjobs are both the same: 500 dollars — US, of course. With handsome Adonises, it is a packaged set but not with old goats like you."
He shook his head. "To think that I would have married this fine gentleman to such a blasphemous whore."
"Maybe I can read minds, hearts, or what-not. I'm reading big breasted women there washing each other's bodies as they do onstage in makeshift showers at Go-go bars in Bangkok; but only because you are too scared of burning in hell for your homosexual inclinations. Rivers run both ways, you know, but socialization on a teenager can alter how it flows. For old goats like you, nobody built your dam when you were young so now there is only cobbled will. Your will tries to redirect the flow since. You know that you cannot stop it entirely. Say 100 Haila Gabrielas and pay me my money."
The priest shook his head at the foul fiend and turned away. "Bangkok?" asked the priest. He was directing his question to Michael.
"She went there once," he told the priest. "She is always making contrasts ofThailand to Western civilization."
"Did she meet this black man there?"
"Who knows?" said Michael.
Gabriele guffawed. "Why not address me?" she asked.
"Then answer for yourself, you disgusting tramp," said Michael.
"Maybe I did or didn't," she prevaricated. "Maybe I don't need to meet anyone or do anything. I witness life. If I read something or see something that is happening in my world (even if from a distance) it touches me and I'm inspired by it. I'm not afraid of it no matter what it is."
"She's your betrothed," said the priest. "What do you want done."
"Let His will be done. She hides her profanity, promiscuity, and obscenities behind art. She never admits anything," he whined sobbingly. "I don't know what to do with her."
"Apple her?" asked the security guards.
"Apple her!" reiterated the priest.
The cooking staff, under their burkas, began to fire apples and soon everyone within the room appled her skull.
"Why couldn't you have just drawn still-life or landscapes?" whined Michael.
"Join your Turkish friend from long ago!" shouted the Ayatollah- garbed priest.
Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song. "You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody— you thought it was a thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking—it is your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."
Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. There, in her home on the day of the party, she noticed that blonde-headed, frosty-pigmented man with the unmemorable name sitting there in his own separate space within her living room. He had large, thoughtful, eyes; and to her he was exotic and unpretentiously wholesome like latent mushrooms in a vast field. He was silent in the noise; and she loved this superhuman trait as she had loved it of her father—he who used to part from her on the beach and pursue the silent wading of his nothingness into the vastness of the entity, he who had been her Parmenides despite having long ago abandoned her as one who had indifferently tossed out grass seed. Having fought in war and having foolishly devoted his life to contrived ideals of patriotism, these life scatterings nonetheless made her father into the pensive German that he was. She had silently abhorred him all these years for his neglect and for severing her innocence in the coerced witnessing of the Turk's execution; and yet everyday she was grateful to him. Not only had her time in Turkey made her a snug albeit hurting occupant of self- containment within Fort Gabriele but his hard high browed arrogance had inspired the high stain glass windows of her facade from which she observed all earthly creatures below. Also it was from him that these sanguine characteristics had been hers. As she looked over the guests to that serene bit of nature within the smoke and voices, she saw eccentric greatness within him. She knew that his philosophy was hers: for those individuals who could accept silence and not cling to others they would never be lost from themselves; and that whoever gained the bliss that was there in solitude, descending within one's own fathoms without inordinate hungers and movement, he or she would be one of the savants who moved perception. An insect moving on an ambulatory man in ignorance of his movements; a moving universe that does not jolt the self-centered movement of its ignorant beings—so the savants seemed not to move while they carried all these insectual entities with them.
She dreamed that because of the potential inaccuracy of first impressions, she was reluctant to instantly accept her own favorable preliminary conclusions and yet the frosty man with the unmemorable name seemed to her as so ingenuous. Within the cigarette smoke, the wine, and the smiles, he was not eager to take his turn in the continual sallies of one monkey-man attempting to conquer another one by being the wittiest of all Neanderthals. He just smiled a contrived smile onto the games that these barbarians played with each other. He smiled the way all brilliant people had to do.
While she was stripping a head of lettuce he escaped to the kitchen and got some fresh air on the balcony. She pulled him in to chop carrots. She asked where he was from initially. He told her that he was from everywhere. She probed this concept of an everywhere man in German but then changed to Spanish. In both languages he told her that everywhere was a concept that wasn't necessarily linked to a place. Later on in the evening when everyone had gone she found a note on top of a stack of dishes that he had washed for her. She looked at the scribble of a telephone number. "Please, my Miss, call my mobile or send me an SMS." She did, and then they met at the zoo in front of the spider monkeys. From there they went to the ballet. At the ballet he spoke to her in Russian. She thought of it as the preferred world language because it was nonsense to her. Had it been sensible it no doubt would have reflected a language of ordinary minds and so she preferred languages of the nonsensical variety.
Then she dreamed that she and Michael had never been linked together, and as such neither union nor separation with and from each other was engraved indelibly upon either of their brains. As such, she was an enlarging puddle being fed the rain. She was an innocent girl in goulashes feeling the vibrations of ripples and stir caused by her feet, and watching the ambulatory movements of birds feeding in the respites of a shower. She was all of these birds scavenging in the dirt for their prey for she herself had scavenged in demeaning mental and physical prostitution before becoming one of the rare goddesses of men whose novel ideas were a commodity.
The dream became one of a Gabriele who was an even younger girl. Enthralled with the rain, the rainbow, and the reflections of branches in the puddles, she was nonetheless distraught over not finding the cracks of ant corridors in what was once the parched earth. It did not occur to her that avalanche and drowning were the natural order imposed by merciless creation against these superfluous breeders. She kept looking for the cracks within the dirt but it was to no avail.
Since she did not know many words, she didn't have any critical judgments and, inept at linking words together, she was not thrust on that one-way track of probable outcomes for the future. Still free from being socialized and not having sexual drive that equated being with others as appetites, she was more inclined to mourn a few days of not climbing trees than someone's absence from her life. Cared for, she was not fixated on survival so she stayed in the present moment where smallness percolated through the orifices and oracles of the senses. Scavenging on pink and yellow-stick legs like the birds, and flooded out with stunned worms and insects, she was these things. She was a Piaget child. Then she was as an adult form. The man with the unmemorable name was posing nude for her paintings; and when she was ready to pack up the canvas and paints one evening, he brooded charmingly. "When will I see you again?" he asked like a pensive and hurt child at the thought of her leaving him.
She felt irritated that he could ask such a question even if the female within her coruscated within a man's neediness for a woman no differently than it would within the light of flattery.
"When?" he asked again.
"When Russia becomes a member of NATO or returns into the Soviet Union."
"Why don't you stay?"
"Why? It is a loaded question. Why?" and she kissed him and sucked in his breath as if it were needed more than her own. Then she pulled away. She thought, "To never know how to marry oneself in ideas and endeavors that bring new ideas into existence, to just claim another person's rotting flesh to not wander around lost and vertiginous—no I'm not one of the sorry herd!"
"You really won't stay?" he asked.
She was tempted. She thought about staying like a fat woman would chocolate in a grocery store. She rejoiced in the fact that she did not need to be any man's woman. Sex could be obtained without actually living with someone. Matter of fact it could be obtained all alone and she would have opted for it done in this solitary manner within her own privacy if fantasies could be developed for oneself and a fuller pleasure could be gained in masturbation.
"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. I want to think of things other than you.Besides, I sleep better alone. After all, sleep is a solo activity."
"Other men?"
"Probably," she chortled. I'll see you tomorrow," she said.
"Meet me at the zoo and then we will walk over here—Meet me in front of the cage of the spider monkeys like before. Be prepared to know every obscure zoo animal by its scientific jargon in the Russian language," he told her.
And then the dream had her meeting him the next day near a baboons' cage. She could tell that her profound buffoon had only feigned this drowning in a sensitive abyss. There were no complaints, there was no rehashing of insignificant past events, and no attempt to demand more from her within a jealous male atavism that was instinct. They just touched each other's bodies like children the feel of their grandmothers' panty hose.
She woke up, startled to find herself with Michael in a strange bed. She propped up her pillow and sat up. She thought about where she was at: here in this poorly paved state of Arkansas a little south of the middle of nowhere, the yodeling of bluegrass and country music reverberating off the Ozark mountains. Ensconced with her man in a blanket that had southern flowers on it, she still felt cold; and part of the blanket was wrapped about her like a southern damsel's dress. "Good lord," she thought as she looked at her thick makeshift dress, "aren't I the Great Motel Lady, Belle Gaw-brE- el." She picked up her purse from the end table, took out some snuff, and lodged it into a cheek. "Belle Gabriele," she mumbled aloud, "the motel Belle."
"What'd you say?" he asked.
"Are you awake?" she prevaricated.
"Sort of," he said. "What time is it?"
"Five."
"You said something?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, it was nothing. Sorry, I guess I woke you—mumbling aloud as I was like an old woman."
"Wake me in a half hour. I forgot to set my alarm."
"PLEASE wake me up, don't you mean?"
He chuckled sleepily on the border of wakefulness. "Don't go back to sleep and forget." He rolled onto his side in a solitary departure, and now it was just a back that was before her. It didn't even seem to be his. It was just a man's back and it didn't have an owner.
She pushed back the curtains of the window and watched the heavy traffic moving along a narrow stretch of road. She knew that she was also just one of the horde moving up and down the streets searching for something while, in arrant foolishness or within august foibles, claiming others and being claimed by them.
She deliberated on sleep and dreams, that mysterious enigma which she had wondered about so often. It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of subconscious fuel—it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might prevail.
She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys. She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey—the one that had been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept herself at a distance in the social world. But she did not abuse her offspring like the misfit monkey. No, she had given to her child adequate enough touch even though touch, in her younger days had been so repugnant when imposed upon her without payment. She took a shower and went to work like all other mental prostitutes.
It was her sixth day as a replacement for a cashier in the foreign food store. The other cashier had been fired because of three consecutive days in which she had attended to a sick child instead of coming to work. Gabriele did this for 12 hours and then around 9:30 p.m. as she began to close down her cash register in the habitual manner of ringing up all sales Michael began to engage in small talk to pacify the other cashiers. He thanked them for their hard work. He told them that as indispensable as they were to the Arkansas mother company they were always welcome to be with the sprawling newborn in Sapporo. He said that the store in Sapporo would never shut down and it would eventually become triple the size of this one.
After the store was closed he and Gabriele were driving back to the hotel room when they stopped for a few minutes in a McDonald's Drive- thru. There, waiting at the window for their Big Macs, Michael asked her if she could mortgage her house and sell "that nude thing" in the garage to "offset" the expenses of the new business. For some seconds she was discomfited if not dumbfounded, and then she scowled at the thought of having been dumb enough to marry him.
For a moment, the consternation was incommunicable. All that she could do was to turn her high head away from him, and allow her neck to remain stiffly turned. She smiled contortedly in nominal pain before releasing it in a guffaw. She faced him directly. His absurdity as a being seemed to exist for her insolent jeering and only this.
"What are you laughing that way for?" he asked. She stared into his eyes rudely and laughed contemptuously at the absurd monkey that was sitting next to her. She knew: every relationship was a self-interested transaction. There was nothing new to her in this assessment. She had known it since early childhood when she found out that her aunt was being paid by her parents, and that this was the impetus for the love and generosity of letting her stay with this second family. Maybe recently she had pretended to not know. For a while there had been that repudiation, that obfuscation of self, so that she might fit into a wedding dress as well as marriage. But now she was back home within the real perceptions of her brain.
She again deigned the hard plastic eyes of her stuffed polar bear countenance down upon him. They glittered a hardness that was like those of sapphires. "When is this Sapporo thing going to happen?" she spitefully abraded the contumacious Earthling coldly.
"Well, soon," he said mildly. He feigned a diffident smile as if he should not be asking for such a favor but would do it nonetheless. She, the new wife, took notice of this. He almost seemed contrite and she wondered if his bashfulness was less contrived than what she might suppose. Soon her insular hubris of indomitability began to thaw like Arctic permafrost. Then he went on. "There won't be any difficulty in expediting this from what I see. I mean an agent could sell your paintings. One of my assistants could have power of attorney to go to the bank and try to obtain a mortgage—I mean if you want to help in that way. I know it is a lot to ask. Of course it is your choice. The way I see it we'll need that money as living expenses for a short while until everything starts moving. The cost of living in Honshu is notorious but it is worse on the northern Japanese islands like Hokkaido."
"Well, I'll give it some thought. I'll decide when Nathaniel gets back." She stressed "I'll decide" obdurately but she had in principle made up her mind. She had in theory (there was nothing but theory in this interrelating) decided that if she were to go with him she could sell off her Jakarta paintings as well as the huge one in the garage but this would be all. There was an institution called a bank and to her it should not be a spouse no matter what self-interested gunk was naturally in a man's calculative logic of advantageous maneuvers when proposing to a woman — in this case an interest free loan to which even the capital amount might well be neglected; and in this case she had made the proposal.
"I was thinking that we might fly from Little Rock to San Francisco and then over that way." His hand pointed to the McDonalds arch and she smiled good-humoredly, careful not to insult the phlegmatic one by laughing at him because he just might scowl at her. "I mean without going back. Betty of course would pick up Nathaniel from the airport and she could help take care of both boys at my sister's estate. It might be better this way."
"Not see Nathaniel and Rick?" she roared incredulously.
"Good byes are messy," he said.
She thought for a moment. What did she know: Rick was well mannered and Nathaniel was restive if not intractable. Maybe Michael with his quick draw of the belt and his willingness to take his son on trips abroad was a better parent. A caring albeit phlegmatic male disciplinarian seemed to play the notes of fear and respect in male children with a greater sense of harmony if obedience to adult might were that one important anthem. She had to admit to herself that a sudden departure wasn't nonsense for she was ready to listen to the proposals of abandonment by a father of a well brought up boy when her own experiments in child rearing seemed effete and unsuccessful. She did not, for all her education, know anything much more than the average parent and what little she knew was theoretical. Ideas of child psychologists like Piaget were mere abstractions, premises like ghosts without flesh. Maybe, she thought to herself, Nathaniel needed a different influence since she was apparently not much of a role model. Maybe pursuing a floundering maternal role for the sake of a child, who would in a short space of years be engaged fully in instinctual and hedonistic pursuits, was foolishly myopic at best. At worst it might stunt her from any form of enlightenment and she would appear foolishly gauche and inept to herself. Was her reasoning so fallible? She knew that it was. She wondered whether she was just trying to justify the desire to jump on a tank with her mate and roll off into the sunset. Maybe she would be running over her child no differently than her craven and neglectful parents except that their rationale was to fulfill duties whereas hers would be less definable.
"But Rick is with your parents."
"They got fed up with him. Now he is with my sis."
"Fed up with gentle Rick?"
"Kids are dirty."
"We should take them with us." Her thought was of rescuing her favorite from such in-laws to her and laws to him.
"Honey, we can't afford them initially. Do you know how much international schools cost?" She at last saw his point. She felt apologetic. Maybe his reason for this marriage had not been to get her money after all. "Besides," she thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.
"Go by yourself then. I'll stay with the boys. When I sell what I have painted — I can pull in 20,000 more or less—I'll send it to you. However, regarding the mortgage of my house you can get that out of your thoughts! The day I'm expected to mortgage my house is the day I file the divorce papers." She smiled malevolently.
"Of course. I shouldn't have asked that. Please come to Sapporo with me. It might be your only time to actually live outside America."
He was putting the taste for new experiences back within her palate, and to her the taste of it was uniquely tactile and sweet like a wad of chewing tobacco. The possibility of going elsewhere potentially out of the reach of America's long shadow made her soar as invincibly as an archaeopteryx departing from a tyrannosaurus, if indeed these two creatures were coeval.
Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to immerse itself whole in a pool of water. America exported greed and violence in cinematography, had sovereignty in technological exports, dictated world affairs, overthrew leaders, craved for energy to give to its race horse economy despite its havoc on the environment, and believed with certainty that God gave hegemony in this superpower status to they who relentlessly pursued gluttonous freedoms in a world of misery ridden masses. If she were to live elsewhere experiencing other cultures fully she felt that the inhabitants would be a "totally different fish;" and being exposed to a different fish would be her mutation into something higher.
The idea kept reoccurring to her that children were temporary objects in her domain but experiences of this kind were transformational. For so long she had wistful thoughts of departing from America in a more permanent way than one could do as a mere tourist. She yearned to abscond from this country of sensationalized serial killers, child abductors, murderers in school yards, random shooters, Al Queida and Timothy McVeigh car bombers, and America's obsession with those of fame and power who lusted for more and more until plunging so fully in their passionate energies fell into jealous fits, white color crimes, or murder related to that above. Already the enemies were gathered outside the American gates and at any moment they would storm the Bastille. A war with such poor masses would siphon away the coffers of the US treasury to the point where the superpower status would be gone. There would just be mountainous rubble of debt on the great debtor country.
There came a day somewhere in the middle part of January when she called the man with the unmemorable name from Arkansas. She did not tell him of her marriage but she did tell him that Michael had asked her to go to Japan with him. He told her to go. He said that one should always use any opportunity that came along to be exposed to a new culture although both of them knew that there was little else in the world but America's capitalistic shadow and that little enlightenment could be gained from any other source than stagnant words and pages of the books written by the dead masters. He said this with such conviction that she almost loved him for not holding onto her.
Tijuana, Mexico September 17, 2001
It would be 90 degrees later that day and she had come to do her laundry earlier than usual. Her mind swished like her frothy socks that foamed and compressed, were locked in and were often lost. Somewhere, on one continent or another, something severed within her. She told herself that she would not blame Atsushi Kato, and especially at this late date. She tried not to think of this matter by watching the diving dances of her laundry, but it was not at all helpful. She imagined two men's socks of different colors and sizes intertwining within the fast movements of her wash. No, she again reminded herself as if needing to reiterate a truth so that feelings did not overtake her with their mendacities, Kato was not the source of her disconnection. He had merely been a stock boy for the foreign food store that was partially owned by her husband. Perhaps he was that still. Certainly he was more than that role.
His face always smiled widely when he saw her or her husband. He had an affinity for foreigners and she, in particular, needed his friendship. His English was excellent; and he finally brought life to their stagnation by getting them involved in an understanding of Oriental antiquities.
The weather was inordinately cold, and the city was so large and congested; but they nonetheless needed their outings, and he took them to museums and Japanese theatres within the inner city of Sapporo. He was so eager to use his English. He translated the signs under the artifacts and became aware of the styles of Japanese calligraphy. When they pelted snow from the soles of their shoes before entering the theaters, he seemed grateful that such experiences were resuscitating him from the continual repetition of counting and stocking inventory. From these invitations to escort the couple he began to see a newness within his ancient and isolated people on this one of myriad islands. He said that he studied the English language and had kept it within himself for so long; but it was really perceiving his race and culture anew that seemed to revive him with a real personality. Michael was not inclined to befriend a Buddhist this lifelessly innocuous and bereft of money and status so she pushed on her husband's association with him, this "subordinate. " She asked Kato to accompany her husband in the barroom business meetings. He would just be a human speck in these overcrowded places. His shyness with those of his own race made them not pay attention to him. He would understand the implications to the meetings that her husband found opaque. She would not blame Kato. He might even be doing Michael's laundry right now as she pursued her own, but he was not her disconnection — not really.
What did her disconnection matter at all in the scheme of things, anyway? When she asked this question she was not able to concoct a truthful answer that was at all savory. In the scheme of things her disconnection was just more worthless tripe as insignificant as a gum wrapper blowing on a sidewalk. As intangible as a "state of mind" was, she knew that for all its intricate and fascinating complexity it was less significant to the outside world than a gum wrapper.
Thousands had lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers in New York City just days earlier. No one could ever know the panic and hopelessness that they felt at the travail of being cognizant and on fire or seeing someone else who was ablaze and being unable to do anything. If there were any continual evidence of those who had become a gas it would be the sounds of their panicked utterances of love and farewell or the light that made visible those horrified countenances leaning their ears as hard as they could into their cellular telephones. By this time, she supposed, those sights and sounds would be at the edges of the Milky Way before moving further into deeper space, the gray matter of this black god. She still thought about September Eleventh every few minutes: those repeating images of the two jets flying into the skyscrapers and people jumping from the upper stories. What did her disconnection matter to the gods, who if they existed at all, despised life?
She remembered: on the Eleventh (9-11) she sat on the bed in her little room. A bowl of vegetable soup from her crockpot was on an end table and a tofu taco was on a plate that was on her lap. She was just about ready to put some food in her mouth when she used the remote control to turn on the television. For a few moments she was incredulous and just stared motionlessly aghast. Then she suddenly stood up from the precipice of the mattress and rushed to the telephone to call Michael's sister. The line was disconnected as it had been the past few times she tried to call. She tried email but again her letters to her son came back to her. Nathaniel ("Adagio") still had too much email clogged into his Yahoo account—no doubt all the unopened letters she had emailed to him from Sapporo.
Somewhere something had severed. Was it here in Tijuana, in Tokyo or Hong Kong, Seoul or Sapporo, or a mezcla (mixture)? It was a gradual harvest of disconnection invisibly sewn and its fulfillment placed in her hands. She had accepted her divorce stunned and numb, but not disbelieving. She had been there throughout his travels. Her mind had been scrambled in different languages and her environment splintered like Kanji, Hirigana, and Katakana.
She was lost then, and she was lost now. People were temporary entities flitting around in her imagination as solid substance but it had been an illusion. Why she had come to Tijuana was even more difficult to isolate. It had less shape and size than even the divorce of intimate parties. It was a shirt of a distorted form. Here, she could more easily stretch the money that she had fully withdrawn from the "grocery and household account" which Michael had put in her name at Daiko Ginko (Daiko Bank). It was around 3000 dollars. Within Albany she had her real money and property but she had not seriously thought about those resources for nearly a year. The passbook and ATM were lost to her now and she could never access those resources from here.
It was a most mortifying fact that upon telling her he had filed for divorce and his reason for doing such that she just stood there so numbly like a driver witnessing a falling bridge. She had not laughed or accepted it with a smile, which would have been her typical reaction—a reaction she had toward all absurd caprices of a human race that she still believed was beneath her. But within the daily work at managing the store and fighting along with him to secure a profit, she had unwittingly married him in her heart; and all those outings with Kato sealed the three in work and pleasure. It was her first time of really feeling as if she belonged to a group and the explosion of it wounded her in shrapnel.
Upon entering the states she was too fragile and too mortified by all that she had abandoned to go back to her son in New York State. She spent a few days in Los Angeles and a few more in San Diego. Then she pushed the rotating gate in San Ysidro and found herself in Tijuana. She had always wanted the chance to recall her college Spanish and to somehow use it. American cities seemed so large and so full of violent accosting figures; but she did not reason that this large south-of-the- border city that she had chosen to reside in, which had its toddler days as American military barrooms, had the crime level of LA and Chicago combined. She didn't really have a reason for her inability to acclimate. She told herself that Ithaca was too cold but Sapporo had been colder yet. The bench at the zoo before the spider monkeys had been her favorite spot in San Diego but the monkeys reminded her of the man with the unmemorable name.
For a few moments she hypnotically watched her towels and clothes through the window of the double-load machine. Washing clothes was a dollar and sixty-five cents per load. Most of the customers paid in dollars, but not all of them; so the machines needed special tokens to fall into the slots. To her knowledge doing laundry here was the only thing that was more expensive than in the states. A teenager was seated in a laundry cart. Her hand leaned on the lever of the dryer and she pulled and pushed herself in a gentle swinging movement as if it were a hammock. Two children on roller skates created a roller derby for themselves but they walked and stumbled more than they rolled and the force in which they ran into people was nominal.
Just as she was glad that her ex-lover, Candyman, had not been allowed into her body during one of her more fertile dates and had been kept as syrup on her tongue, she was glad that throughout the time of living together with Michael as lovers and then as husband and wife, that no daughter or son was concieved (for once concieved the embryo never would have been aborted since her principle of being humane would have been the overriding consideration at the expense of all else). She was also glad that she and her husband had not amassed any common property within their nine months of marriage. She liked a disconnection—a dismembering—that was made neatly in one quick motion of the knife. She felt that it was good even when the knife was not sterile.
She thought of the salient, life-changing conversation that she should have laughed off with the frivolity worthy of all human considerations. At the door of their room in the lodge Michael said to her, "Yesterday while we were snow skiing and Kato broke his foot, I lifted it and touched him in front of you without wanting to hide anything. Do you remember? You stood above us. You were wearing a cap and your bangs were in your eyes; still I could see that you understood fully. I knew that you had known all along. Can you really say that you haven't known anything all these months?" He asked her this as if she were the one who was culpable. He asked her this as if she were the one who made him feel guilty by this contrived performance of consternation and shattered innocence.
The stoic that she was, she had not created a dramatic or melodramatic spectacle unless an ingenuous sense of confusion was a spectacle. There, in the hallway outside their rooms at the lodge, he condemned her, the victim. That which preceded it had been Michael rummaging through his pockets, handing her their key, and then announcing that he would stay with Kato. Naturally, she had been disconcerted; her feelings had been dominant and ineffable; and the scenario of them talking like this with their friend on his crutches gazing at them both in a horrified expression had been so surreal. Her true self would have laughed and relinquished him. She would have even bought the gay couple a housewarming gift of his and her bathrobes (maybe just his and his) with minimal bitterness that would have animated her in light-hearted mischief-making. Instead a bomb detonated.
Time moved by like a shell-shocked soldier and it dragged her along as a war prisoner tripping recklessly over landmines. She was battered in shrapnel but she knew that her wounds were figments of the imagination since they were merely psychological ones. With the right idea she knew that she could wedge herself from the microcosm of being a casualty of an imaginary war, escape from its hatch, and be herself once again. If she were just to open the hatch she would be out of jealous instincts and the pettiness of a personal life.
Whenever she got bored with reading Mexican newspapers and memorizing new Spanish vocabulary she would go into San Diego and take bus #9 from Broadway Avenue until she was in Old Town. Her favorite building was Casa De Miguel Pedona y Maria Antonia Estudillo. Maybe it had been restored long ago, but now it retained its tattered walls once again and no refurbished items cluttered the dense emptiness. It was time: empty and tattering. She felt less alone seeing it exhibit that, which in an abstract way, was in her own heart. To her the dilapidated structure was good.
She could easily enough replace a husband. When she was in Asia she had often sent e-mail to some of those whom she met in chat rooms. There were lonely males out there just as there were lonely females. She might find an exceptionally attractive man with responsibility, status, and initiative who would infatuate her and, if she were lucky, seem like a comfortable friend. Perhaps they would have a rapport even if their hobbies were different and the degree of seriousness that she gave her art disconcerted the domineering male who could not understand the independent fullness of self in ideas. She could find a man just as she could get rid of her old clothes and replace them with new ones.
She hadn't bought many new clothes for some time. Her budget wouldn't permit such purchases now—not even here. She could, however, give some English classes and with a few hundred dollars each month she could have been one of those common consumers in outdoor markets, the real people. However, it all, seemed as if it were clutter (tangible things like clothes and the intangible things of the mind like relationships).
Once, a musical group from Ecuador was playing in Old Town in front of the historic buildings, where inside them everything was sold from candles to homemade fudge. Three old ladies ran up to them before leaving. They stood beside the musicians who were dressed in red and blue ponchos so that someone could take their photographs with them. They did not stay for here was proof that they had encountered another culture in passing. The picture was solid: more solid than months of experiences in a culture.
Two days before she left Sapparo, she spent hours in an exhausting search for her son, Nathaniel, the best one could from a distant continent. She called Michael's sister, Janet, several times but that line was disconnected. A couple of operators reaffirmed this fact. She went through people search engines for her ex-sister-in-law whom she never met but whom she believed to be keeping her son. Still these attempts were futile. She called the numbers of myriad businesses owned by Michael's parents in the hope that the managers and directors there might link her to these unlisted, affluent proprietors; but once she got the directors or operational managers of these organizations on the phone with trying effort, they would never disclose any information on the owners who had been her in-laws. She used email search engines in the hope that Nathaniel had a second account but all those individuals with his name lived in states other than New York and Kansas. At last she called her Aunt Peggy.
"Peggy, this is Gabriele. How are you?"
"What? Where have you been? We haven't been able to reach you for nearly a year."
"I have been living in Japan but I'm coming back home soon."
"How long have you been over there?"
"For nine months or so."
"Doing what?"
"Painting."
"Is Nathaniel with you?"
"No." Gabriele was disappointed.
"You haven't contacted that boy in all this time?"
"No. I've tried so many times but it gets me nowhere. I was hoping he would contact me on his own. Obviously he is not there with you, but maybe he has given you Janet's number."
"Janet?"
"It's a long story." This call was another dead end.
"He set fire to the house. We sent him back two weeks after he came. We don't want to see him back here again. I don't know where he is at—Janet or whoever he is with. No wonder he hates everybody with a mother abandoning him."
"I didn't abandon him; but since when were you so worried about condemning abandonment. My parents just went on a working trip forever and to you they are remarkable people; I was shipped off to you, and your old fart of a husband."
"What did you call him?"
Gabriele laughed. "Let's forget the past. It shapes us but doesn't behead us, so to speak. You clothed me, sheltered me, and gave me food."
"That's right. We bothered with you when no one else would so how dare you call your uncle a bad name. We loved you."
"Your love for me, your niece, was to approach me like a servant girl. I dare because it is my telephone call at my expense and I'll call anyone I want and remind him, her, or them that they are old farts if they are indeed old farts." Gabriele chuckled. So easily did she amuse herself and how little did anyone else move her. "And if anyone tries to finger my clit the way your husband did they should be happy to be called old farts."
"Shut up! Shut up now! Shut that wicked mouth! This is my telephone and you talk to me respectfully or I'll hang up on you right now. Your son hates you, you know. Always talks of hating you everyday — sickening but probably for good reason; and we got the effects of your unwed mothering experiment — a kitchen in flames and one wall in the living room —"
Gabriele hung up the phone and paced the floors like a mad woman. She was infuriated and yet ecstatic to have at last treated her aunt to the contempt of words. Virtually all other times had merely been cold and supercilious looks. Still it was a hollow victory so she set about destroying all of her photographs—those that she had with her and those that she pulled out of a lock box at Daiko Ginko. She stripped away each plastic sheet that contained them — relating to Michael and Nathaniel or not — and threw them away. She did that for all but one. The exception was a close-up of herself and her mother. Her mother's eyes were sparkling and, within the middle-aged face, decades earlier could be seen. Gabriele, who was three, was standing next to her near their home in Bucyrus, Missouri. It was a link. It was a connection. It didn't exist any longer but she couldn't release it any more than if she had been an immortal proprietor of the heavens.
The washer began to spin and kick like a drowning animal caught and fighting to get out. Its squeaking was wild with its vibration but in tone alone it was similar to the calm, mechanical chirping sounds of pedestrian streetlights in Sapporo.
She had a child and yet a whole realm of connectedness had escaped her. There were only failed possibilities now. Nathaniel hated her throughout most of the year before she "abandoned" him. She had felt it. Now, he had all the reason in the world to hate her. She looked out to the distant machines—the medley of Mexican people folding dry clothes; putting wet ones in their carts, seated and bored; reading newspapers; watching the television that beamed over their heads or falling into the rhythms of dives that their clothes made in the dryers; and those purchasing the tokens, soap, and bleach that they would put into their washers. How human and divine they were! She felt cheered and soothed to see their distinct faces. They wandered around lost, too. They yearned for something more, as she did, if only an empty dryer. They yearned to hear the morning buses that would excrete their dark toxins and take them to their agendas. They yearned to see the morning sun and the little barefoot boy in one of the distant colonias staring as the calafia (mini-bus) and the water truck with its men yelling "El Vagon!" moved up a gigantic hill in a pueblo of polvo and desert. They yearned for the exchange of ideas that would pull them out of the sense of being vanquished to the misery that was part of one's fate. But they were also, in their own limited ways, capable of being Bin Ladens responsible and exuberant about killing thousands of Americans. Maybe in just a thousand angry looks toward gringos who purportedly had better lives than themselves there might be something destructively vile in them. They, like all perfidious males, no doubt followed feelings of love (homosexual or heterosexual bliss) abandoning earlier partners who were no longer exotic dopamine inducers. Maybe, she thought, the vile was inside herself. If the English language had a word for hating men she felt it now and she knew it was vile.
She tried the best that she could to pull out of herself but the self needed to burn away both the past and the pain. Still she tried to ameliorate these feelings in reason. "So, my Ex has a gay lover…So I am dismissed…What of it?…The marriage wasn't real anyway; and Michael does not belong less to Kato just because I once had a signature on a marriage certificate." She couldn't see how anyone belonged to anyone else, anyhow; and recalled that throughout most of her life she had been glad it was that way. She tried to let the morning grace her with its fullness of life. She thought of Tijuana's tamale and hot chocolate vendors of early morning, the restaurant workers and the newsstand operators, the pharmacy managers and the street salesmen. They did not insatiably yearn for more to make themselves happy. They accepted reality's mandate that there would be no aspirations, no prosperity, and no urgency. There would just be standing alone seven days a week allowing the stimulus of sights, sounds, and smells to fill the senses and rescue the mind that tortured itself from the knowledge that there was deterioration and death, brutality and natural disasters, apathy and injustice, personal defects that were both mental and physical, and yearnings for closeness and permanency in the midst of void. She did not want to think of her husband—her ex-husband, the fact that she did not feel as if she had a last name (Quest or Sangfroid no longer suiting her, and "Bassete," the surname of Michael's family before his legal change of it for himself, not doing anything for her either), and that she was now ripped from the life of Kato and the imagery of the Orient.
She put her clothes in a cart; and then following her feelings of hunger, she pushed the cart in front of the row of stools that were near a counter. She ordered a quesadilla and glanced at the cylindrical twisting carcass on a spit that would be used for tacos. She listened to the sizzling savagery of pieces of meat dying a second death within their own grease and slow Mexican music that moved her like the blowing fronds of palms.
Still her redundant thoughts reeled across the screen of her brain like the repeated broadcasts of the two jets crashing into the towers. She had gone with him to Japan on the assumption that the boys would soon follow. She even made up her mind numerous times that she would obtain them regardless of Michael's objections and put them in an international school. She was planning to contact Rick's sister but the months went by so fast. It wasn't much of an excuse. She had to admit that. Had the two of them really neglected to contact the boys all this time —she with hers and he with his? They had; for they wanted to find a part of themselves not linked to them. For him it was the success of this business enterprise and obviously to engage in the taunting of his untapped homosexual fantasies toward these boyish Asians. Such was done within this nice ostensible marriage and partnership with his wife. And for her it was the specious believability of that rush of energy that was the suppliant groping of love and to find a less lonely version of happiness in a group which together were humanity's greatest bondage. Such abandonment was done under the ostensible label of "demonstrating a creative and independent existence" to her son.
Seated at the counter she felt a contentedness in being near a beautiful woman around her age. She even found a contentedness in hearing the meat crackle as if behind the apparent truth of the injustice of the powerful overtaking the less-abled in the slaughtering of its life there was another truth that this was the design and essence of life with a cryptic purpose that perhaps she would know with a little bit more age and maturity.
The warmth of her mother's kitchen when she was a child as snow pelted against the windows; the smell of bacon in the skillet; the smell of coffee and the sight of her mother in a thin nightgown before the stove while her father coughed away, distant and withdrawn behind a newspaper—how beautiful her mother was in so many ways in that short time together. Her eyes watered slightly, and then she had control and the present moment. She excoriated her maudlin, womanly tendencies and worried that her refusal to fall apart in front of Michael was catching up with her now. Could the cold tacit hubris that she superciliously blasted onto Michael a day after the shock dissipated have just been the facade of a woman ready for a nervous breakdown?
She avoided such thoughts by telling the woman drinking coffee at the counter some jovial comment of how at this corner of the room the scent was a combination of soap and bleach blended with those of tortas and tacos. It was an introductory comment of the environment similar to parties experiencing it, and as she wished it, it invited a smile of that one individual. Certainly a conversation beginning with "Hello; how are you?" might die at the first moment of life. The woman responded with a trivial comment that such smells might help in digesting the barely digestible.
"I am a bit surprised by the amount of meat that is part of the Mexican diet. One torta has more meat than I could think of eating for a full month, although I have to admit I do have a grease addiction for the quesadillas." Aware that, in bits, her conversation was like an American snob who could not stand anything other than her own quick, thoughtless tripe of a culture, she wished that she had said something that was different than this. Then a minute later she didn't care quite as much. She told herself that having spoken her partial gripe in Spanish instead of English might have ameliorated any negative interpretation of her critique to some degree. As she was thinking this she suddenly realized that she had just taken a glimpse of this woman's larger breasts that bounced around in a V-neck shirt. She had done this in a subconscious but still intentional manner the way Kato might in the comparison of his penis size to that of his new husband whenever they were side by side at urinals in a public bathroom. Then she looked down at a plate with some leftover food on it from a previous customer. She scooted it away and then did not look up for some moments. She was amused and a little embarrassed by her earlier action. She tried to hide her latent grin. Had her repugnance for men caused this? She would not be surprised if it were true: sexuality was just a river of energy that would move in areas where it was less impeded.
A minute later she was still concerned that she had come across as another snobbish American passing through one of the few cultures left that, for the most part, retained its essence despite being so near the superpower. She didn't give a damn what this stranger thought of her but the last thing that Americans needed were more people hating them.
"What does the H.E. Stand for?" Gabriele continued on to rectify what might have been a negative impression. She was making reference to the initials on the woman's blouse.
"Hilda Estrella." The stranger said her last name like she was a glamorous movie star.
"Are you a star?"
"In everything I do in my small way."
"In a family of stars or with a husband who is a star?"
"My husband is a fizzled firecracker with no bang. It is his name though. I robbed it from him. It should only belong to me. Don't you think so?" Gabriele laughed.
"American?"
"No, Gringo," said Gabriele.
Hilda laughed. "Your Spanish is excellent, as it is my English," said the woman in the world language that had been tossed from American hands out onto the denizens of the world like a net so as to pull all in one direction. She spoke in English because, although Gabriele's Spanish was functional, her vocabulary was callow with a thick American accent.
Gabriele introduced herself as Gabriela and the Mexican lady introduced herself as Hilda…de da la de Estrella. The whole name flashed before Gabriele like a Japanese bullet train (or Shinkansen). She couldn't catch much of it.
"Mucho gusto," said Gabriela.
"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Hilda.
"You are the first person in T.J. to speak to me in English.
"They don't know it very well. Most of them are poor so they don't go to universities none and English isn't taught so often in high schools—not well and nobody wants to learn it none. They want to know it and not know it. They don't want to lose their ways. Culture is language and they don't want Spanish to collapse like a pi-ata. In their ideas of things, the Gringos took away enough of their land—they don't want the culture to go—out would go mariachi, bull fights, Juarez Day with children in Indian feathers, Cinco de Mayo celebrations, and traditional Mexican ballads. In would come George Bush Jr. signs and the American navy ships. It is a choice like the people in Paris, France." Gabriele didn't think that there was much of a similarity between the urbane Parisians and the dust city dwellers of Tijuana but what did she know? There might be some truth to it so she kept her opinion sealed.
Hilda explained the education which allowed for her fluency in a second language. Her father, a poorly paid public defender, didn't have the money to send the youngest to college so he paid for her to study at a language school.
"Did you resent your sister getting what you couldn't have?"
"No, I was very muy muy glad for her. She felt more bad than I did about it so she introduced me to her boss's bear friend—an old bear who was a friend of her boss—how ever you say it. That is another story. Where did you study Spanish?" Gabriele just said that she had dabbled in a few Spanish classes long ago in school but that she was now living here to give the language a try.
"An American living in Tijuana, asked Hilda.
"Stranger things have rocked the planet, I'm sure," said Gabriele coldly. She then ordered two quesadillas and two cokes for herself and her friend.