I held Max tighter, telling him I loved him even more than he loved me, and all the while I thought: What’s wrong? and wondered if I had imagined the previous times, when I seemed to leave my body and float through a universe of colored sound. Now, after my subsequent experiences with sex, I am almost positive I am mistaken about the intensity I thought I felt when he slipped inside me, the way all sound and sight spiraled into blackness so that the only thing I knew was the rhythm of our bodies, elemental as the river’s song.
After my mother sliced the air around me, cutting me loose from the demons she thought were holding me, I began to watch Max again. I discovered little things—the way he licked his top teeth before he smiled, the way his head lolled as if unanchored by his spine when he played the drums, the way his jaw slackened, then gaped when he slept—that started to bother me. And I began watching the two of us making love, the way we groped and lunged, as if from another’s eyes. As if from my mother’s eyes.
When I finally told him it was over, I could not bear to look at him; his face, hovering so close to mine, seemed grotesque. “Why, Beccah, why?” he cried, not caring that his nose had begun to run. “What did I do?”
Sickened, I hugged him so I would not have to see his blotchy, swollen face. “Nothing,” I mumbled. “It’s just time to move on.” I held him, letting him cry, and it was like holding a stranger. I felt pity, uncomfortable about the pain I had no connection to, but also I was irritated, as if he were wasting my time.
I heard from someone who knew us as a couple that Max now sells electric guitars and drum sets at Harry’s Music in Kaimuki, that he has a small place in Palolo, a wife, and three children under the age of five. In fact, the person who told me said he had heard a rumor that I was that wife. I laughed, joking, “Me with three kids? God forbid! I can barely take care of myself!” but I clenched my hand, thinking of the dimples on my fist that I once tried to count.
Years ago, I was the one who told Max that it was time to move on, yet it seems he is the one who has done so. He composed his life in steady measures, fulfilling with someone else the plans we made at Aku Ponds. And I am the one who is stuck, envious of the normalcy of his unexceptional life.
Auntie Reno, who has long since given up on pairing me with eligible bachelors, has come to the conclusion that I am “that way.” She has now started hinting that Sweet Mary’s daughter Precious—whom I sometimes baby-sat when we lived at The Shacks—is also “that way.” I laugh, letting her think what she wants, then tell her I’ll find someone on my own when I’m ready.
“Not supposed to live alone,” she scolds me, trying to sound biblical, ominous. “Or die alone.”
My latest lover, Sanford, will not die alone. I am sure that when Saja calls for him, he will be surrounded by his family: his boy and two girls and the tennis-playing wife with the lipo‘ed thighs and Sun-In hair. But he will be looking out the window, waiting for me.
He says he has never loved his wife the way he loves me, but I know he will not leave her. Just as I know that, despite his avowals, his marriage isn’t platonic; I can tell by the way he touches me, looks at me, even the way he E-mails me—quick and businesslike—when he has had sex with his wife. I wonder if I should be hurt, but realize I don’t care. Already he is starting to irritate me. I cannot stand the way he combs his hair forward to disguise his receding hairline, then asks—uncertain and vulnerable—if he looks too old for me.
I resent this vulnerability, his attempts at youth.
When he first interviewed me for the job, Sanford seemed at once self-assured and shy, solidly suited and tied to middle age and family life. I loved to knock timidly at his office door, then enter boldly and stare at him over the desk, across the stacks of clippings and reports, the homemade lunch and framed family photos, until he blinked and blushed. I played with him, testing my sexuality, my attractiveness, yet was surprised—and nattered—when he responded.
Dignified and serious, at least at first, Sanford introduced me to cocktail parties, journalism conferences, black-tie fund-raisers. Though I could not, of course, attend in place of his wife, Sanford always made sure I received an invitation and an escort. And afterward, perhaps the next afternoon, during a “business meeting,” we would discuss the event, then make slow, reverent love. He treated me with what I thought of as respect, as a grown-up.
He, in turn, received youth. Not just mine, but his own. I replaced his ties and long-sleeved pin-striped shirts with Polo and OP. I taught him to appreciate the same music—Boyz II Men and Big Mountain—as his children. And I’m the one who nicknamed him Sandy, after the most dangerous and unpredictable beach on the island. But only because I liked the irony; in his previous incarnation, I could not have imagined him near the water.
Now, when he visits my apartment, he struts in the Jams or OPs that I’ve bought for him, flexes in front of the bathroom mirror, and talks about taking up surfing or body building. “How else can I compete with the young stud you’ll eventually leave me for?” he says, only half joking. If he were completely joking, attractive in his arrogance, I could forgive him. But it is that hint of seriousness, that insecurity in his looks, in the difference in our ages, in himself and me, that makes me know that I will leave him.
I wanted to avoid him when I went in to work the day after I found my mother’s body.
“Why are you here?” the police beat reporter said, drawing attention, when I sat down in my cubicle. Coworkers’ eyes peeked into my compartment, then darted away. I thought I recognized Sanford’s oily forehead bob in hesitation on the other side of the partition.
“Pretend I’m not,” I snapped, and the reporter and the forehead backed away.
“Maybe she needs to work to get her mind off her pain,” yelled Mirabelle Chun, food editor. She never did know how to whisper, when to keep quiet. “Lord knows I would not have the strength to go on like nothing happened if someone I loved died.”
I ignored them and the condolences I received over the terminal—“ We are saddened by your loss,” “My sympathies in your time of grief,” “Go home, have a good cry”—until I read Sandy’s: “Need a shoulder—or anything else—to cry on?”
I typed, “No,” and pressed Return. I can’t stand when he tries to make flippant sexual innuendos, though I am the one who teased Sanford into a hipper, lighter version of his previous self. Into the Sandy who irritates me in direct porportion to how much I miss the old Sanford, the paternal Mr. Dingman.
“I want to see you,” Sandy typed back, and before I could think of something to shut him down: “Let me take you home.”
And suddenly I wanted to be home. Not at my apartment, which after a year had boxes yet to be unpacked stacked in closets and corners. And not back at the Manoa house or The Shacks. I wanted to be with my mother in her garden, when she knew she was my mother. I wanted to be held and comforted in a mother’s arms, tended to the way she tended to her plants. “Sing the river song,” I wanted to tell her, ready to be rocked and sung to sleep amidst the green growing things.
“Okay,” I told Sanford.