Butterfly Stories Part 16

1.

One night his wife did come into bed with him, in the middle of night, when the attentions of his dreams had already been fixed on pink flowers at the tips of outspread fronds, like some Pat Pong beauty's painted fingertips; waking, rolling away from her even as he woke, he found his eyes flying open in the darkness as fast as someone falling, and his chest already ached with dread of this woman whom he considered his old wife. Not yet having the courage to tell her that he was leaving her (well, perhaps that's unfair; let's say he just didn't want to be hasty), but meanwhile knowing that he probably would leave her, he hesitated to transmit any signals of intimacy; he couldn't! - but he couldn't stand to be cruel, either, so he found himself adopting a position of polite distance; when she came into bed the next night he gave her a pillow without saying anything; when she thrashed sleeplessly he said: If you wake me up one more time I'm going to ask you to leave. -

Thank G.o.d there was no mirror to terrify him with his own harsh mask. - For a long time he lay beside her, listening to what he construed to be her bitter breathing. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she were trying to suppress a tremendous anger. Had he been less eager to establish his own doctrine, he might have admitted that she could equally well have been terrified. He lay rigid with his own heart thumping hatefully. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes, trying to get back among the fresh wet air, the unpreaching leafy stalks straining and drinking with all the greed of shortlived things. There had been jungle like that in Battam-bang, but only in patches. It thickened, he supposed, beyond the tame battlefield. When he got up to go to the bathroom she got up, too, thinking that she'd failed and he was moving to the other bedroom; his mouth was full of mouthwash so he couldn't explain it to her right away, so he put his hand on her shoulder and held her until he could spit the mouthwash out. She did not try to pull away. It felt very strange to be touching this woman. His emotion was not loathing, but something less familiar. - It's OK, he said to her at last. You can stay, if you want to. - He led her back to the bedroom and he deduced from her quick submissive steps that she was very happy and grateful not to be sent away, and he felt revolted at himself, that he couldn't be nicer; and it made him sad but also grimly triumphant that before their discussion she would hardly have been grateful; she needed him and had only now realized it after so many years; she'd never been so sweet to him before! Needless to say, if he gave in and decided to stay, she'd go back to being herself. She'd have to!

In the night she woke up and said: I had a nightmare.

He stroked her face. - What was it about? he said wearily.

They - they were trying to chase me in a car, when I was driving . . .

OK, he said. Go to sleep.

In her sleep she started whimpering, and he wanted to kill himself.

2.

He called all the magazines and newspapers he knew. - I've got to get back to Cambodia fast! he said desperately. Things are changing there; now's the time to see it all happen . . .

In the last two years we've done three pieces on Cambodia, an editor said. Our foreign desk is overbooked. It won't go through; I can't even try. I'm afraid I'll have to steer you elsewhere.

I just don't think it'll wash, an editor said. So you were the first American journalist to interview Pol Pot's brother. Big deal. So I was the first American journalist to p.i.s.s green.

3.

He had a dream that his wife was in charge of a ma.s.sive jumping-off-skysc.r.a.pers compet.i.tion. Lofty as some saint of parthenogenesis, she bustled about smiling. Unlike many dreams, this one was entirely accurate in its characterization: his wife loved to tell others what to do. In the dream she didn't jump off buildings herself, but yelled and pushed the contestants until they did. She was an MC. The contest was being conducted on the roof of a broad tower level with many other towers. Representatives of each television station were there; and crowds watched from other highrises. The first two contestants were led by his wife to the edge and they leaped into the shaft of shade between buildings. Let it be said that they were PROFESSIONALS in brightly colored technical jumping gear; they didn't have to be forced! He stood beside his wife watching them dwindle speedily into darkness, and then they vanished forever. They'd won. Now his wife was digging her fingernails into his arm, screaming at him. He was on the edge, and then he saw a way to let himself down gently by his fingertips into a carpeted hallway between offices. Once he'd done that he felt guilty that he hadn't jumped. She couldn't see him. If she had, she would certainly have screeched. - Maybe I'll jump from the next floor down, he said to himself. - He took the elevator. At the next floor he still didn't feel ready, so he took the stairs. That was how he eased his way safely down. May I inform you that his wife caught up with him breathlessly? She approved of him now. All the ones who jumped had never been heard from again. So he was the winner after all, the men after him emulating his sane descent . . .

4.

Now that the l.u.s.t for a new wife had spread through him like viremia, we can't really call him the journalist anymore, so we'll call him the husband. As soon as he had the money he'd be back in Cambodia to claim his prost.i.tute bride in some happy morning of green leaves all around the windows, although the English teacher who couldn't speak English had said to him, in a sudden amazing gush which had obviously cost him dictionary hours: Do you want to get marry? Or you want to be still single forever? I think you are old enough to get marry. Or you want to be taxi boy? Carefully, please! You know AID? It's a bad kind of sickness. You can die by it. I'm afraid it. Therefore I never sleep with a girl at all. So I only want to get marry with a pretty girl. But I'm poor and she's rich ... - Too bad, thought the husband. Through all his a.s.signments Cambodia lurked and waited, moistening in his memories like a fungus, like an obscene orange orchid-bowl rotting between compound leaves that tapered like paintbrushes; and thinking of Vanna (whose face he could no longer see quite as readily as if she'd been tattooed on the insides of his eyelids) his heart b.u.t.terflied as it did when he waited to go on studio, the second hand of left clock and right clock clicking like synchronized eyelashes, the green nipple on the wooden breast not yet glowing so that the husband could ignore life's tests yet a little longer, afloat and irrelevant like his styrofoam cup on the blue felt. - Do not consider what you may do (thus Claudius Claudia.n.u.s), but what it will become you to have done, and let the sense of honor subdue your mind. - But the grammar of his particular shoulds and oughts was beyond him. Not finding answers, he asked himself the same questions; no need to know whether he lived on the left clock or the right; being in either case a second hand, he clicked round fruitlessly. Life's dreary stretch and trickle was making him forget Vanna month by month; sometimes it seemed that he remembered far more vividly the Chinese porcelain-faced girl with her head down in the darkness offering her round maggot-pale cheek so dreamily to her gla.s.s, as if she were listening, while another pallid lady who wore an ice-blue b.u.t.terfly bow elongated her silver braceleted arm out toward the Chinese porcelain-faced girl in the darkness; a lady with an ice-pink artificial flower in her hair got to the husband first, grinning cautiously downward with her lip lifted from her upper teeth. - Vanna, Vanna! he shouted.

5.

He dreamed that he was cutting his wife up with a saw, and she never cried out, not when he cut her ankles off, not when he severed her knees; but when he began to saw her heart out she wept very very quietly.

6.

Why should we send you to Cambodia? yawned the editor. You've already been, right? And you didn't get what you went for?

Well, it's just that it's such an exciting time there, the husband blabbered, they're just now getting reliable electricity again, and soon the import-export businesses will be going; history's being made and I want to be there when it happens . . .

You know what? said the editor. I really don't think I'm interested.

7.

There was a famous writer named Ned who had been invited to read at what is called an "event" because nothing happens there; they permitted the husband to be the warmup act. The whole time he made his appeal, he thought he saw Prince Sihanouk smiling at him from the back row. Everyone else was yawning. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and two or three people clapped politely; Ned leaped up on the stage and began to crow and snort and fart while everyone shouted for laughter, and when he was through the audience was on its feet shouting madly: NED! NED! NED! NED! and Ned came back and gave them another raspberry.

No, I just don't see how we can send you to Cambodia, said the editor, a magnificent lady who was very vague. - If we made money off you it would be one thing, but you know that hardly a soul reads you. And then there are the budget cuts. That office is a minefield right now. It just wouldn't be safe to bring you up. If I did, you might lose everything . . .

Well, but what should I do? asked the husband with such pathos that she couldn't duck him with brightness.

There's always Ned, she replied. You might learn a little about writing from Ned. Ned's very generous with lesser writers.

The next time he was on stage with Ned, the husband watched his act very carefully. The husband was up next. His attention hovered like a b.u.t.terfly over a pool. Doing what Ned did would be pulling down his pants in public. It would be giving head. It would be doing what Vanna did.

His turn came. Tentatively, into the horn of the audience's deepening embarra.s.sed silence, the husband began to crow.

8.

h.e.l.lo, Sien?

Yes.

This is the journalist. Any news?

No news. Not yet.

That's not too good. You think anything is wrong?

I think maybe I wait one two more week, then I send another letter. Early next month. I have backup copy.

I can see you know how to do business, the husband flattered him.

Sir, I do my best.

You think everything's OK with her?

I think maybe I send a letter soon.

9.

He'd heard that every now and then, capriciously, the government cracked down, and the prost.i.tutes were put in a place where there wasn't enough to eat.

His worry about her was no less than anguish; he loved her, his dear new wife as narrow-waisted as a fresh-tied bundle of light-green rice . . .

After two weeks he called Sien, who said: I learn nothing sir no news of her I try again maybe one week.

10.

(Sien, like Ned, was only doing his job; the husband reminded himself of this. Sien was doing his job as the clerks did theirs in the post office on that street in Bangkok where gems and fossils and hill tribe silverwork were sold, the placid postal clerks stamping rows and rows of little papers, and on the walls white reliefs of unknown grand gentlemen, serration-bordered like stamps. They'd done their jobs, too.)

11.

Finally he got some post-Hungarian magazine to send him to the Arctic for a couple of weeks - lots of work and morose nose-blowing and maybe eight hundred bucks at the end of it; well, her pa.s.sport out of Cambodia alone would cost two grand so he'd better start somewhere. - It's the recession, you see, the editor said. We just don't have the advertising. All the magazines are skinnier these days.

The ice's b.u.mpy snow ma.s.saged his feet through the kamik-soles with tiny tingles, the orange sun one sun's length above the blue. Dogs wagged tails over old polar bear tracks. The low cliff-sweep of Signal Hill was already waiting for the darkness to get darker, the hill-edge closer to night than the sky, everything going storm-blue or death-blue; and the lights of the village only increased the dreariness. Thinking about his new wife, he had the usual feeling of anxious despair; hour by hour the bond between them was dissolving. She was getting AIDS. She was moving to another disco. She was in the re-education camp. She was giving up prost.i.tution. She would never give up prost.i.tution. She was forgetting him. The way he should have felt was exultant, because the eight hundred dollars was the first step back to her. Instead, it seemed to him that everywhere he went just got him more lost.

There was a children's Halloween party. Probably the post-Hungarians would want him to cover it. But who knew what they wanted? Children were always good for a paragraph. Honking their noisemakers, faces corpsened with pale paint, wearing tinsel on their skeleton-heads, they dashed about, their parents lurking shy. Paper and plastic pumpkins hung orange and absurd from the ceiling; what the h.e.l.l were pumpkins doing in the Arctic? Swirly white paper bones and skeletons kissed their hair. They danced and ate treats loaded on styrofoam plates. Ladies with faces painted pink and green and white flounced around in Arctic boots, sneakers, kamiks. The princ.i.p.al wore a black witch's gown and a pointed hat covered with orange stars. A lady trudged, her baby quietly eating a cupcake in the armauti. The husband thought: Nothing belongs anywhere anymore. All the cats have been let out of all the bags, and they've gotten mixed up.

12.

The husband did not illuminate himself in the same harsh checkpoint light that other minds would have cast. Oh, he deprecated himself, all right, but only for the highest reasons. He wouldn't have graduated from the College of National Smiles! His somberness was sometimes misunderstood; they thought him harder on himself than he actually was. To his thinking, the sin (now fortunately no more present than an echo) had been the vacillation between two wives. It had reflected badly on his self-knowledge, impaired his efficiency, and, worst of all, made the opposed women into playthings (he remembered a hairdresser's sign in Phnom Penh: two curly permed ladies like in the movies) - not even his playthings, since he wasn't in command of himself, but the playthings of his impulses, which in turn were controlled by random happenings. When he made the decisive break with his old wife, he continued to feel guilty, of course; now he'd hurt her more than ever, probably for life. (If you believe you've done a kindness, you've probably done an injury. If you believe you've done an injury, you've probably done an injury.) Yes, the husband was quite sorry about that. On the other hand, if he'd stayed with her he would have been as unhappy as he'd made her (so he reasoned), and Vanna of course would have been waiting and wondering. It was true that he'd been married for eleven years, and had known Vanna for less than two weeks, but the patent truth which gleamed before him like a gold-painted gate with gold lions was that he'd been miserable for eleven years. He'd only been miserable with Vanna for two weeks - much more promising. As for all the whoring he'd done, before and after meeting Vanna, if someone had raised that as a character flaw he wouldn't have been surprised, since prost.i.tution was so generally disapproved of that one could take it for granted that the questioner was probably infected with the usual prejudices, enough said! If, however, the interlocutor could have been skilful enough to thrust past the husband's guard, persuading him that in fact the issue was one of fidelity, then he might have faltered for a moment, but he had the answer there, too: Fidelity was another very relative and hence misunderstood term. (He scarcely thought about Oy, Noi, Nan, Marina and Pukki anymore.) There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives. -But how much can you really love them (our interlocutor might have said) if one is as good as another? More to the point, are you happy and are they happy? - As it happened, there was an answer for that, too. The husband loved Vanna the best. He'd keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn't need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a wh.o.r.e would be used to it.

13.