Marriage and Infatuation

BE OF LOVE (A LITTLE)/ MORE CAREFUL/ THAN OF EVERYTHING

--e.e. cummings

It was now September 2006.

Felipe and I were still wandering across Southeast Asia. We had nothing but time to kill.

Our immigration case had stalled completely. To be fair, it was not only our immigration case that had stalled, but the cases of every single couple applying for fiance visas to America. The whole system was in lockdown, frozen shut. To our collective misfortune, a new immigration law had just been passed by Congress and now everybody was going to be held up--thousands of couples--for at least another four months or so of bureaucratic limbo. The new law stated that any American citizen who wanted to marry a foreigner now had to be investigated by the FBI, who would search the applicant for evidence of past felonies.

That's right: any American who now wished to marry a foreigner was subject to FBI investigation.

Curiously enough, this law had been passed to protect women--poor foreign women from developing nations, to be precise--from being imported into the United States as brides for convicted rapists, murderers, or known spousal abusers. This had become a grisly problem in recent years. American men were essentially buying brides from the former Soviet Union, Asia, and South America, who--once shipped off to the United States--

often faced horrible new lives as prostitutes or sex slaves, or even ended up murdered by American husbands who may have already had a police record of rape and homicide.

Thus, this new law came into being to prescreen all prospective American spouses, in order to protect their foreign-born brides from marrying a potential monster.

It was a good law. It was a fair law. It was impossible not to approve of such a law. The only problem for Felipe and me was that it was an awfully inconveniently timed law, given that our case would now take at least four extra months to process, as the FBI back home did their due diligence investigations to confirm that I was neither a convicted rapist nor a serial murderer of unfortunate women, despite the fact that I totally matched the profile.

Every few days I would send another e-mail to our immigration lawyer back in Philadelphia, checking in for progress reports, for time-lines, for hope.

"No news," the lawyer would always report. Sometimes he would remind me, just in case I had forgotten: "Make no plans. Nothing is promised."

So while all that played out (or rather, while all that didn't play out) Felipe and I entered the country of Laos. We took a flight out of northern Thailand to the ancient city of Luang Prabang, passing over a continuous emerald expanse of mountains that poked out of the verdant jungle, steep and striking, one after another, like choppy frozen green waves. The local airport looked something like a small-town American post office. We hired a bicycle taxi to carry us into Luang Prabang itself, which turned out to be a treasure of a city, situated beautifully on a delta between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. Luang Prabang is an exquisite place that has somehow managed over the centuries to wedge forty Buddhist temples onto one small slice of real estate. For this reason, one encounters Buddhist monks everywhere there . The monks range in age from about ten years old (the novices) to about ninety years old (the masters), and literally thousands of them live in Luang Prabang at any given time. The monk-to-normal-mortal ratio, therefore, feels something like five to one.

The novices were some of the most beautiful boys I'd ever seen. They dressed in bright orange robes, and had shaved heads and golden skin. Every morning before dawn, they streamed out of the temples in long lines, alms bowls in hand, collecting their daily food from the townspeople, who would kneel in the streets to offer up rice for the monks to eat. Felipe, already weary of traveling, described this ceremony as "an awful lot of fuss for five o'clock in the morning," but I loved it, and I awoke every day before dawn to sneak onto the veranda of our crumbling hotel and watch.

I was captivated by the monks. They were a fascinating distraction for me. I completely fixated on them. In fact, I was so captivated by the monks that, after a few languid days spent doing nothing much in this small Laotian town, I commenced to spying on them.

Okay, spying on monks is probably a very wicked activity (may the Buddha forgive me), but it was difficult to resist. I was dying to know who these boys were, what they felt, what they wanted out of life, but there was a limit to how much information I could find out openly. Notwithstanding the language barrier, women are not even supposed to look at the monks, or even stand near them, much less speak to them. Also, it was difficult to collect any personal information about any particular monk when they all looked exactly the same. It's not an insult or a racist dismissal to say that they all looked exactly the same; sameness is the very intention of the shaved heads and the simple, identical orange robes. The reason their Buddhist masters created this uniform look is to deliberately help the boys diminish their sense of themselves as individuals, to blend them into a collective. Even they are not supposed to distinguish themselves one from the other.

But we stayed there in Luang Prabang for several weeks, and after a great deal of backstreet surveillance I slowly came to recognize individual monks within the crowds of interchangeable orange robes and shaved heads. There were young monks of all sorts, it gradually became clear. There were the flirtatious and daring monks who stood on each other's shoulders to peek over the temple wall at you and call out "Hello, Mrs. Lady!" as you walked by. There were novices who snuck cigarettes at night outside the temple walls, the embers of their smokes glowing as orange as their robes. I saw a buff teenage monk doing push-ups, and I spotted another one with an unexpectedly gangsterish tattoo of a knife emblazoned on one golden shoulder. One night I'd eavesdropped while a handful of monks sang Bob Marley songs to each other underneath a tree in a temple garden, long after they should have been asleep. I'd even seen a knot of barely adolescent novices kickboxing each other--a display of good-natured competition that, like boys'

games all over the world, carried the threat of turning truly violent at a moment's notice.

But I was most surprised by an incident I witnessed one afternoon in the small, dark Internet cafe in Luang Prabang, where Felipe and I would spend several hours a day checking e-mails and communicating with our families and our immigration lawyer. I often came to this Internet cafe alone, too. When Felipe wasn't with me, I would use the computers to scan real estate notices back home, looking at houses around the Philadelphia area. I was feeling--more than I had ever felt in my life, or maybe even for the first time in my life--homesick. As in: sick for a home. I longed like mad for a house, an address, a small private location of our own. I yearned to liberate my books from storage and alphabetize them on shelves. I dreamed of adopting a pet, of eating home-cooked food, of visiting my old shoes, of living close to my sister and her family.

I had recently called my niece to wish her a happy eighth birthday, and she had fallen apart on the phone.

"Why aren't you here?" Mimi demanded. "Why aren't you coming over to my birthday party?"

"I can't come, sweetheart. I'm stuck on the other side of the world."

"Then why don't you come over tomorrow?"

I didn't want to burden Felipe with any of this. My homesickness just made him feel helpless and trapped and somehow responsible for having uprooted us to northern Laos.

But home was a constant distraction for me. Scrolling through real estate listings behind Felipe's back made me feel guilty, as though I were surfing porn, but I did it anyhow.

"Make no plans," our immigration lawyer kept repeating, but still, I could not help myself. I dreamed of plans. Floor plans.

So as I was sitting there alone in the Internet cafe one hot afternoon in Luang Prabang, staring at my flickering computer screen, admiring an image of a stone cottage on the Delaware River (with a small barn that could easily be transformed into a writing studio!), a thin teenage novice monk suddenly sat down at the computer next to me, balancing his skinny bottom lightly on the edge of a hard wooden chair. I'd been seeing monks using computers in this Internet cafe for weeks now, but I had still not gotten over the cultural disconnect of watching shaven-headed, serious boys in saffron robes surfing the Web. Overcome with curiosity about what exactly they were doing on those computers, I would sometimes get up from my seat and casually wander around the room, glancing at everyone's screens as I passed by. Usually the boys were playing video games, though sometimes I found them typing laboriously away at English-language texts, utterly absorbed in their work.

On this day, though, the young monk sat down right beside me. He was so close that I could see the faint hairs on his thin, pale-brown arms. Our workstations were so near to each other that I could also see his computer screen quite clearly. After a spell, I glanced over to get a sense of what he was working on, and realized that the boy was reading a love letter. Actually, he was reading a love e-mail, which I quickly gleaned was from somebody named Carla, who was clearly not Laotian and who wrote in comfortable, colloquial English. So Carla was American, then. Or maybe British. Or Australian. One sentence on the boy's computer screen popped out at me: "I still long for you as my lover."

Which snapped me from my reverie. Dear Lord, what was I doing reading somebody's private correspondence? And over his shoulder, no less? I pulled my eyes away, ashamed of myself. This was none of my business. I returned my attention to Delaware Valley real estate listings. Though naturally I found it a tad difficult to focus on my own tasks anymore, because, come on: Who the hell was Carla?

How had a young Western woman and a teenage Laotian monk met in the first place?

How old was she? And when she wrote, "I still long for you as my lover," had she meant,

"I want you as my lover?"--or had this relationship been consummated, and she was now cherishing a memory of shared physical passion? If Carla and the monk had consummated their love affair--well, how? When? Perhaps Carla had been on vacation in Luang Prabang, and maybe she'd struck up a conversation somehow with this boy, despite the fact that females should not even gaze at the novices? Had he sung out "Hello, Mrs. Lady!" to her, and maybe things had tumbled toward a sexual encounter from there?

What would become of them now? Was this boy going to give up his vows and move to Australia now? (Or Britain, or Canada, or Memphis?) Would Carla relocate to Laos?

Would they ever see each other again? Would he be defrocked if they were caught? (Do you even call it "defrocked" in Buddhism?) Was this love affair going to ruin his life? Or hers? Or both?

The boy stared at his computer in rapt silence, studying his love letter with such concentration that he had no awareness whatsoever of me sitting right there beside him, worrying silently about his future. And I was worried about him--worried that he was in way over his head here, and that this chain of action could only lead to heartache.

Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities. So Carla had the hots for a teenage monk--what of it? How could I judge her for this? Over the course of my own life, hadn't I also fallen