The Island Dwellers Read online

I thought of Ancash, then. The way he’d looked in the mirror right after that fight, his mouth tight and his eyes luminous. The thought struck me that he’d looked the same way in my bed, and I wondered how do we bear this. We’re born at the top of a cliff, the moment we leave the womb the tigers come, there’s nothing before us but a vine that won’t hold, and I wondered right then how we can endure any of it, this inevitable, prolonged, graceless fall.

  Praveen murmured something, I didn’t catch it. I took his hand. It was cold.

  “She’s lucky,” I said. “In this crazy city, to have somebody notice she’s gone. I’d pay real money for that.”

  I didn’t think Praveen was listening to me, he seemed so far away. But after a few minutes, his fingers tightened around mine. “How is the Mexican?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, not bothering to correct him. “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Oh Maria,” Praveen said, with a gentleness I hadn’t expected from him. “Poor bad Maria.”

  * * *

  —

  I HELPED PRAVEEN PACK. HE didn’t want to take much. Clothes, some books, nothing that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase and a duffel bag. He tried to give the rest to me, especially after I bought his one-way ticket to Delhi, but I didn’t know what I would do with chairs and bookshelves and potted plants, so in the end we sold it all to the next occupant, a blue-eyed German kid who’d come to Tokyo after too many years of watching anime.

  “I’m so excited to haf come here!” the German told us, his eyes whisking around the apartment. “You haf no idea, maybe in a past life I am a Japanese, I feel so at home!”

  “Good luck,” Praveen had the grace to say.

  “Welcome to the jungle,” I added, with less grace.

  The German thought Praveen and I were married. He wanted to know why we were leaving.

  “Someday something happens and you realize you’ve been drifting too long,” I answered before Praveen could correct him. “Got to go home and get serious if you want a life. You’re welcome to all the dishes for an extra go-sen.”

  “How much is that?” the German asked.

  “Fifty American dollars,” I said. “Up front, cold cash.”

  I helped Praveen carry his two bags downstairs, and called him a taxi. He gave me the go-sen, even though I protested, and asked me not to come to the airport with him. “I will remember you here,” he said, “in the sun.” He hugged me. “Maria, be careful.”

  I waved until the taxi swerved around the corner and was gone. And then, in the first flush of evening, I caught the subway home.

  * * *

  —

  I DON’T KNOW WHEN I decided to leave. Maybe it was the moment in which I first lost sight of Praveen waving to me from inside the taxi. Maybe it was before that, when I walked out of my job in that ridiculous gold dress. Or maybe it was before that, even—when Ancash slipped out of my bed and was gone.

  Rocking with the motion of the subway, I realized that there was a gnawing feeling in my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten in weeks. But back in my apartment, the smell of my dinner cooking made me sick. Praveen was the last thing to ground me to this life, and now he too was gone. I opened the windows so that I wouldn’t have to smell the food I’d made, and instead I started smelling all the dinners that my neighbors around me were cooking. I imagined them all as I had that first night with Ancash—sitting down together, clusters of families all across the city, saying whatever version they had of grace. I leaned out the window, both nauseated and painfully empty, and I thought, Where’s my family? Where are they right now?

  So maybe that was when I decided to go back. After that, everything was a blur. Details, really, that passed by me. The minute I finished something, it was done and there was a new detail waiting to be taken care of. Booking a one-way ticket. The landlord. The bills. The last thing—and the hardest—I left for the end. I began to think I couldn’t do it at all. And then, the evening before I was to fly out, on my last full day in Tokyo, I sat down and wrote Ancash a letter. I had to start over twice, but the third time I managed to finish.

  Ancash. It’s been so long. There’s so much I want to tell you, but I don’t know what I would say. I’m sorry. I’m leaving Tokyo. Maybe you don’t want to hear from me now. I would understand if you didn’t. But if you get this today, and if you want to see me, come to Shinjuku Station, the southwest exit. I’ll wait there until the last train. Maria.

  The letter was brief, and I didn’t reread it because I was afraid I would tear it up. I folded it in half, then in half again. I stopped by Ancash’s host club, although I knew he wouldn’t be there yet. I gave the letter to another host, a thin Japanese boy with a torrent of bleach-blond hair, and told him to deliver it to Ancash, that it was important. He looked at me curiously but promised that he would. As I walked away from the host club, I thought: Peace at the last. Let this be peace at the last. I wasn’t praying, I don’t believe in that. I was just asking nicely.

  * * *

  —

  THE WHOLE WAY TO SHINJUKU, I considered just catching a train or a cab directly to Narita. Waiting the night in the airport for my flight so that I couldn’t change my mind. Never knowing if Ancash showed up or not. But I couldn’t do it. I’d already betrayed Ancash once. Twice, if you counted sleeping with him. I couldn’t do it a third time.

  And so I waited for him outside Shinjuku Station’s southwest exit.

  I don’t know how much time passed. People moved steadily around, past, below. Japanese kids skateboarding. Hosts on their way to work. Then, later, salarymen leaving work in a rush of black suits, like a mob of penguins. Street musicians. Tourists. The tinny high clang of bike bells, negotiating carefully around and through the gathered masses of the crowds.

  And while the city beat time all around me like a vast heart, I told myself the beginning of a story: Once upon a time there were two runaways in a jungle—neon tigers all around, so beautiful, every sharp tooth another TV screen, fluorescent tongues, grapes for the plucking, fat bunches of grapes for the bold, a night without darkness, a fall without end.

  When our marriage ended, I told Seth it was because we had too many White People conversations. He pretended not to know what that meant—“But we are white, Cynthia, we happen to be white”—but I knew he did. To drive the point home, I read aloud the last string of texts we’d exchanged: Pea soup for dinner? / NO too wintry. / Asparagus then? / Asparagus is overplayed. / Well you stop by Chelsea Market yourself and see what you’d prefer to eat, Seth. We’re even fighting like white people, I said, and again Seth protested anemically that white people don’t fight any differently from other people. But we both knew they do. White people fight in very low voices, in public, while smiling. My parents did it. His parents did it. And this was something I didn’t want to do anymore.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I MET ELIAS, I knew that he was the kind of man that Seth would feel threatened by, but I wouldn’t say that was what made me like him. I think we had a real connection, and if Elias happened to be Venezuelan, if he happened to have tattoos up the corded muscle of his right arm, if he happened to be a modern dancer who specialized in a “physical and metaphysical silent dialogue about race” (his words), well those things were just points of interest over which we connected. Points of interest that Seth and I had unfortunately never shared.

  “I didn’t know you had any interest in modern dance,” Seth said pointedly over what we were calling a Divorce Dinner. We were having Divorce Dinners once a week, to amicably discuss how to be amicable, and also to divvy up shared possessions—who wanted the record player, who needed the hooked rug from Morocco, who got to keep which friends. It was at one of these Divorce Dinners that Seth told me he’d started seeing a twenty-one-year-old Women’s Studies major at Barnard named Macey. I ground some pepper in a light sprinkle over my hand-raised
quail, and then expressed that I was very happy for him, that I had myself actually almost been a Women’s Studies major, although quite possibly he didn’t know that about me despite our six-year marriage, and that I had, myself, started “seeing” a twenty-seven-year-old Venezuelan modern dancer named Elias.

  Seth didn’t sprinkle pepper over his own hand-raised quail. He just stared across the restaurant table at me, his blue eyes narrow. And then he questioned my interest in modern dance. I expressed to him that I quite liked modern dance, that Merce Cunningham was very inspirational for me, and that I had once read the biography of a German modern dancer whose name I couldn’t, in the moment, recall. Seth expressed that he thought my interest in modern dance was a crock of shit. I expressed that I thought Seth was an asshole with a tiny flaccid cock. We ate our mutual hand-raised quail silently, with ferocity, for a few minutes. Then Seth pointed out that I did not seem like myself. That kind of crass language was childish, and I was actually a very rational and mature person, with whom he could usually have rational and mature conversations, and this whole thing wasn’t like me at all.

  No, I said, it isn’t. And that felt good. To be unlike myself. So then I ordered dessert.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I TOLD ELIAS THAT I was still married but in the process of extricating myself, he just said, “Oh,” and kept stretching. He was developing what he called a “portfolio of gestures” for his upcoming dance-meditation at Judson Church, and I was trying to help. Watching Elias work inspired me. It made me imagine the life I could have had, if I hadn’t married Seth, in which I wore paint-spattered denim and had two full tattoo-sleeves, and also muscles, and also a portfolio of my own gestures that people wanted to watch me perform.

  I asked if Elias had any feelings or questions about Seth, but he just looked at me a little oddly, said “No,” and kept stretching. Seth would have had a lot of questions. Seth would have wanted to measure himself against this other guy and make sure that he was better in some way. Elias’s quiet confidence and lack of curiosity were almost as inspiring to me as his portfolio of gestures. And then it occurred to me: passive jealous probing wasn’t in his cultural heritage. That was a white thing, and Elias was Venezuelan. I wanted to tell Elias how grateful I was to be able to learn from him, but he’d already turned his back on me.

  The first set of gestures in his portfolio involved tucking one foot behind his knee and tilting, without falling. Every time he appeared about to fall, he would take a tiny hop, and rebalance himself. If you thought about this as a political metaphor, it was clearly about self-rescue, and not waiting for a higher power to step in. I started to imagine Elias as a small boy in Venezuela. We’d never discussed his past, which I assumed meant that it must have been a hard one. I imagined him barefoot, walking along a dirt road. Goats somewhere, grazing off meager grass, their small noses brushing chewed-bare earth. Elias, mouth dry, liquid brown eyes squinting into an unforgiving sun. Where was his mother? Maybe a nanny, already in the U.S., maybe working to send money back to his grandmother who was looking after all of her children. Motherless and neglected, Elias would wander out into nature and spend hours communing with the wind and the sun, the soil beneath his bare feet. No wonder he spoke so little. No wonder he needed nothing from anyone. He’d brought himself up this way, as his only alternative to privation.

  I found that my eyes were full of tears. I brushed them away, before Elias turned back around. Hop-tilt-hop. Hop-tilt-hop. He never fell, and he never turned around.

  * * *

  —

  IT BECAME CLEAR TO ME as time passed that, despite our lack of discussion about it, Elias understood my multitude of conflicting feelings about Seth. Elias’s lack of curiosity about all of these things was a manifestation of his understanding, and his eyes, which were very large and dark, held a lot of unspoken compassion.

  “Everybody runs around chattering all day long,” I remarked to Seth at our next Divorce Dinner, after he’d spent half an hour telling me about a panel on gender violence that he’d attended at Barnard. “Everybody just can’t shut up. Elias practices a sort of intentional silence, which is refreshing and yet also communicative.”

  “Intentional silence,” Seth repeated. “You mean he’s a mute?”

  I was very surprised that Seth would use ableist hate-language, and I expressed that.

  “Listen,” said Seth, “I think intentionality of any kind is admirable because this is a world in which people just sort of go around doing whatever they feel like, like breaking up their marriages just on a whim if they feel like it, so I appreciate people who have any sort of, uh, responsibility and collective intention. So I really do want to express that I feel admiration for Elias, if that’s something that he practices. But I also think it’s very easy to confuse practice with lack of ability to execute. So.”

  I was very surprised that Seth was quick to assume inability from a person of color, and I expressed that.

  “You don’t get to play that card,” Seth said. “Dating a brown guy doesn’t make you brown.” And then he walked out of the restaurant. I thought about following him, but Elias would never follow anybody out of a restaurant, following is reactionary behavior, and Elias is all about living in the moment from a place of self-directed truth. So I finished my hand-raised bison burger, and then I finished Seth’s, and I was eating the last of his fries when he came back in and sat down.

  “You ate my dinner,” said Seth.

  “You left your dinner,” I said. And we stared at each other across the table, warily, like two adventurers in a dark country who had come face-to-face in the shadows. We searched each other’s faces for any clues as to our whereabouts.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE I STARTED SLEEPING AT Elias’s, I started journaling. I’d never kept a journal before, but it seemed to be a thing that creative and self-actualized people did, and these days, I felt like both. I woke up in the mornings and sat at the small wooden table in his kitchen, across which he’d arranged bleach-white seashells, and I wrote for twenty minutes without stopping. I always started with the date and the time, so that I knew exactly where I was, and then I tried to “walk inward from there,” which was advice that I’d recently read in an article about people who journaled. My process of walking inward was describing how my body felt (shoulders tight, chest tight, face slightly congested), and then my heart (I used words like big and spacious and synonyms for rebirth), and then I talked a little bit about where Elias and I were in our relationship. We hadn’t really discussed this in such terms, so I went off context clues, which I recorded in lists that I could consult later when I felt insecure.

  Context clue one: we were spending most nights together. We hadn’t discussed monogamy, but then: back to context clue one. And, if monogamy was implied, then other things must be implied as well, such as commitment and shared values and a shared future life. I imagined a life in which our practices were intertwined. His modern dance and my writing. I might become a writer. Context clue two: I was suddenly writing.

  I imagined a life in which we lived together, maybe in Portland, and we’d wake up and he would stretch while I wrote, and later we would work in the garden and then cook together, and then take our two dogs for a walk. I imagined Elias’s mother coming to visit, from Venezuela. She might be wary of me at first, and I would understand that—perhaps the only white people she knows have been her employers. But I would be so warm and so welcoming that eventually she really would feel that mi casa was su casa. And she would say to Elias, “What a woman you’ve found!” She would say, “She’s like one of us.”

  The other thing I wrote about in the mornings was Seth. He hadn’t officially moved out of our apartment, but he was spending most of his time sleeping with the Barnard student, which I thought was strange and a little unfortunate, to be Seth’s age and sleeping over in a dorm. To me it smacked
of a midlife crisis more than a love affair between equals and fellow artists. I didn’t see Seth ending up in Portland. I saw him ending up in jail. It was helpful to work through these concerns in my journal, and I earmarked the passages that I thought might make their way into a first novel, someday.

  When Elias came downstairs in his running shorts, groggy and focused on making coffee, I would ask him if he wanted me to read to him from my journal. But he usually just looked at me blearily, shook his hair out of his eyes, and said, “No thanks.” And then he’d drink his coffee in a kind of elongated gulp and go out for a run, letting the screen door slam behind him. I always appreciated the importance he placed on individual privacy, on the value of an artist exploring her inner life in a safe and protected space, and I saw this as yet another way in which he anticipated needs that I hadn’t even known I had. But all the same, I sometimes felt a twinge of desire to have my privacy intruded on. And I found this, too, indicative of something in myself that I had never fully explored, and so after Elias left on his runs, I would end my writing practice for the day by journaling about this.

  One morning, as Elias was out running and I was journaling, there was a knock at the door. I answered it, and found a girl standing there—tousled black hair, spandex, skin the color of olives. She had a mug of coffee in one hand, mail in the other. Her fingernails were gel-red and chipped. She must be an artist, maybe an Iranian poet. I was suddenly aware of the ratty bathrobe I was wearing, the same beige color as me.

  “3B,” she said, by way of introduction. “I think I’ve been getting your mail?” She thrust the mail at me, and then turned to go back up the stairs.

  “Thanks,” I said, and then felt the need to add, “this isn’t my mail, this is for Elias.”