- •Table of Contents
- •80 Strand, London wc2r 0rl, England
- •I should add here that my fixation with men also extended into my private life. Often this brought complications.
- •Marriage and Surprises
- •I can't wait to go back to Philly."
- •I sleep? ")
- •In retrospect, it does seem unbelievable that this proposition could possibly have taken me by surprise. Had I never heard of a green card marriage before, for heaven's sake?
- •I had not yet realized that these two were on a first-name basis, though I suppose that's bound to happen during a six-hour interrogation session. Especially when the interrogatee is Felipe.
- •Marriage and Expectation
- •I backed up and tried a different tack: "I mean, when did you first meet your husband?"
- •I'm going to go way out on a limb here and state: Hmong women don't seem to do that.
- •Marriage and History
- •Marriage and Infatuation
- •In love with many inappropriate men? And weren't the beautiful young "spiritual" ones the most alluring of all?
- •I'm dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance.
- •I call it "my twenties."
- •It's dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase "God forbid."
- •Instead, our dissimilarities and our faults hover between us always, like a shadowy wave.
- •Marriage and Women
- •In fact, you will give him back a tiny bit more money than he gave you, as interest.
- •I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.
- •I didn't.
- •I duly adjusted the picture in my mind. Now I imagined a friendly stallion galloping wildly across the plains.
- •I don't know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.
- •I started laughing ( Gee--thanks, Mom! ) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency.
- •Marriage and Autonomy
- •I deplore this.
- •In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?
- •It was a miracle that our recent spat on the bus had been the only serious conflict so far.
- •It took Felipe a few moments to catch the drift of what I was saying, but when the penny finally dropped, he put down his toast and stared at me in frank puzzlement.
- •Marriage and Subversion
- •I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.
- •I committed to no such thing.
- •I hugged Mimi. "Satisfied?"
- •Indeed, subversion was the topic of this book, but not at all in the manner I'd expected.
- •In the end, the couples tend to win.
- •Marriage and Ceremony
- •Acknowledgments
Marriage and Subversion
OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF A MAN'S LIFE, HIS MARRIAGE
DOES LEAST CONCERN OTHER PEOPLE; YET OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF
OUR LIFE, 'TIS THE MOST MEDDLED WITH BY OTHER PEOPLE.
--John Selden, 1689
By late October 2006, we had returned to Bali and settled back into Felipe's old house in the rice fields. There, we planned to wait out the rest of his immigration process quietly, with our heads down, inciting no more stress or conflict. It felt good to be in a more familiar place, good to stop moving. This was the house where, almost three years earlier, we had first fallen in love. This was the house that Felipe had given up only one year earlier in order to move in with me "permanently" in Philadelphia. This house was the closest thing to a real home that we could find right now, and man, were we happy to see it.
I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say, seduced me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me.
There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor's friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called "Roger"), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.
There was even a coffeepot.
Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe's fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months--
something like our friend Keo's meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.
Here's something you wouldn't necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody loud. I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sail-boat's rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.
One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange stories with each other--to literally trade in personal intimacies.
The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like "sister," or "wolf," or "buried treasure." Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that's when the men discover that their memories really have been traded--that, as Calvino wrote, "their sister had been exchanged for another's sister, their wolf for another's wolf."
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow. Felipe's private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes--at three o'clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali--feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more--of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions . . .