[Part I]
Growing up, my family rarely lived in a single house — let alone a
single town or state — for longer than about four years. Throughout my
childhood and adolescence, my older brother and I skipped along the surface
of the geography of the United States like stones on a gigantic pond,
touching down for only moments at a time, propelled onward by the force
of our parents’ ambition. They wanted a good life for us — what most
Americans want: comfort, security, a well-built home and the money to
fill it with nice things. I don’t begrudge them that. But for better or
worse, the constantly shifting settings, characters, and plot-lines of
my childhood made my sense of identity fairly fluid. With each move, I
felt that I could wipe the slate clean and recreate myself, erase my
mistakes and pains and regrets utterly, and be reborn.
And so it makes a kind of sense that at this juncture I decided the
best thing to do was to leave the man and move to Egypt for the summer.
My father was a diplomat at the American Embassy in Cairo at the
time, and both he and my mother welcomed my extended stay, making all
the necessary arrangements and, perhaps most importantly for someone riding the edge of destitution as I was, paying for the thousand
dollar airline ticket. They lived, as many of my father’s coworkers
did, in an enormous government-subsidized apartment in Cairo’s World
Trade Center set alongside the banks of the Nile, and on the rare morning
that the city sky wasn’t disastrously gray with smog, I could look to the horizon and see the
Great Pyramid of Giza from their twenty-sixth floor balcony. After a
few weeks in-country I took a low-level clerical job at the Fulbright
Commission, and thereafter spent a few days each week in their office
typing up visa documents for Egyptian teachers attending a training program the States. I typed in a trance for hours, absentmindedly read The Brothers Karamazov
during my lunch hour, and tried very hard not to think or feel or
interact with my office mates. At the end of the day I would walk
several blocks back to the Embassy alone, and as I did the teeming
streets would become still and quiet and watchful. I was a pale,
golden-haired oddity in the eyes of the Egyptian locals, a green-eyed
cipher-like Other whose physique alone demanded that they stop and gape. Ultimately this was
a strange sort of blessing: for hours at a time I could safely escape
myself and inhabit versions of the Other — tourist, ex-pat, diplomat’s
daughter, porcelain-skinned anomaly, public spectacle — and during
those times come close to achieving something akin to the serene
emptiness of forgetting. Still, a few times a week I’d unearth from my suitcase the one
photograph of the man that I’d unwisely brought with me, and as my eyes
once again traced his features I would, for just those few moments,
allow myself to feel the crushing despair geographical distance
had failed to erase.
In August, at the close of my three month Egyptian tour — during
which I’d walked the Valley Of The Kings, swam in the Red
Sea, and been exorcised by witches (all stories for another day) — I
returned to Michigan, just a few short weeks before I was to start
graduate school. The man picked me up at the airport, and when I first
laid eyes on his blushing, broadly grinning face, my gut feeling was
that I wanted more than anything to punch him in the head. I’d spent
eight months torturing myself over him, and absent a resolution it felt
as though great chunks of my heart once devoted to loving him had
started to sour and atrophy. Later that day, while eating dinner
together at a run-of-the-mill Chinese joint, we finally had our
reckoning. While I was away he’d gone into therapy, and his therapist
thought he should see if he could salvage his marriage, he said. After
all, I’d be living less than an hour away — it wasn’t like I was going
to drop off the face of the planet or something — and if things
didn’t work out with his wife we could reconnect, right? I bowed my
head into the steam rising from the plate of food before me, and
watched as droplets of tears splashed down on my fried rice. "But you
don’t love her… you don’t love her like you love me," I sobbed. Looking
up I saw his face tighten with something like terror, as though I’d just
pointed out the fatal flaw in his argument that he’d been unable or
unwilling to face. It sickened me. "Coward," I spat. And it was as if by
saying the word I’d struck a match inside myself that set alight any
remaining scraps of hope I’d held onto, turning them instantly into
smoldering ash. I stood and glared down at him, my chest heavy with
what felt like an anvil’s weight. "Fine. Go back to your wife," I
muttered at last.
Two years passed.
I’d already completed my Master’s degree and was preparing to move
into my university’s English Doctoral program when, one unremarkable
evening of one uneventful day, he called me. I was surprised that I
felt genuinely happy to hear from him, glad to hear the sound of his
voice again, despite everything. For several minutes we sputtered
aimlessly through small talk, until he blurted out that he was getting
a divorce. His wife, it turned out, had been having an affair with one
of her coworkers during the entire time he and I had been struggling to
resist the same. They had been fucking in his bed, he snarled.
It was an odd moment for me, hearing that. On the one hand it was
terrible to think of what we’d given up trying to be honorable for the
sake of a marriage that so clearly didn’t deserve to be honored. On the
other hand, a rotten, still angry part of me relished hearing that
after hurting me as much as he had, he’d been hurt, too.
He wanted to see me of course, so I arranged a dinner out with him
and some of my grad school friends later that week, unsure that I
wanted to be alone with him again. At the dinner he was quiet but
friendly, and I was surprised to discover that we could still read each others expressions and body language as a separate sub-conversation,
exchanging subtle cues all night that felt like a kind of telepathy, a
shared secret language. As we walked through campus after dinner, he
took my hand and that old electric twinge rocketed between us again.
But despite all of this, it felt as though I was drifting off in the
ether above us somewhere, watching the night unfold from a great
distance. Something in me felt utterly disconnected, gone.
We ended up at my apartment, eventually drunk, inching toward what
had all night seemed somehow inevitable. Finally, he knelt before me as
I sat on my lumpy, second-hand graduate student quality couch, and took
my face in his hands. Through tears, he said he loved me, and that he
was sorry, so sorry, that he’d given me up. He kissed me, and I could
feel the truth of his words radiating through his breath and flesh into
mine. In his eyes I saw that this night was, for him, the redemption of
three years of suffering and loss and forced estrangement. In his eyes
I saw what he wanted, and I gave it to him, willingly.
For a month after, he called constantly. I stopped picking up the
phone. Sometimes when my answering machine kicked in he would leave
messages — increasingly pleading in tone — asking me to call him. For the most part, I tried not to listen to them. Finally, he
called late one night and talked to my machine until it ran out of
tape. A final message, bearing the accumulated weight and gravity of all our shared
pain. He wouldn’t call again, he said, but still hoped that I would
call him back. After the recording cut off, I stood in front of the machine
with my head in my hands, watching the slow blinking of its red message
indicator light for what felt like hours. It was, it seemed to me, a
beacon of memory pulsing to the heartbeat of that other, earlier life: the life in which I’d have gladly given up everything for this imperfect
man and our imperfect love, a life he chose to forfeit.
I erased the message.
