The Size of the World Page 6

  Toon was afraid I was going to get terrible diseases from being around who knew what microbes; her fussing naturally led to much family kidding about my imminent collapse. Toon would say, “Remembering about washing hands, Toby?” and I’d clutch my throat and do pratfalls at the dinner table. Me! Pratfalls! Billy was amazed. He and Jiap made hilarious shit jokes in Thai, which no one would translate. Certain subtleties of Thai still eluded me. Toon tittered.

  I thought Toon liked me better now. I was less depressed, less hangdog, a livelier husband than I’d been, and our life in bed had a new layer of frankness. Toon was bolder than she’d been when we were younger—her affection often had a surprising audacity. She was more apt to turn away from me too; I was a man who no longer required indulging. Though it made me wince to rethink certain past nights, I was glad we had made our way to this side, this freer, brighter spot.

  ONE OF TOON’S FRIENDS from work was an American, a pretty girl from New Jersey newly married to a Thai. She came by the apartment one day to hang out with Toon, and I heard them in the next room laughing together about the habits of their funny husbands—Toby ate sardines with ketchup, imagine that. The woman, whose name was Viana, was married to a Muslim doctor from southern Thailand. Her husband didn’t drink or eat pork, she said, but his visits to a mosque were mostly just when he went home to his family.

  “So New Jersey’s on the same river as New York?” Billy said. Billy wanted to know from Viana everything about New York—had she ever heard any of the really good neo-punk bands live? Was CBGB still there? He had always been a gentle, sulky, timid boy. Now he couldn’t resist being a nervy teenager in front of an American. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “you actually like Bangkok.”

  “Ah, well,” she said, “I’m here for good. I’m never going back.”

  Billy said, “Maybe you’ll have kids almost as good-looking as we are.” This wasn’t his usual style of talking, and I thought he was flirting with her (the new Billy).

  SO WHO WAS HE? No one could tell yet. He had flashes of temper between moments of unexpected dearness and was nicer to Toon than he was to me. With me he was ruder and more American. In his second year of high school, he somehow got us to buy him a small motorcycle, and he tore around the streets with the tiny fierce motor roaring—Billy, who’d been the only small boy on the planet who liked quiet.

  He called his bike Spike and claimed that Spike made him get speeding tickets and skip school and forget curfew. Spike was a bad crowd in a leaky machine. It wore a fresh jasmine garland on each handlebar, like any divine figure in a shrine. Toon and I wondered if Billy had a girlfriend, since he was away so much. Jiap said, “He’s probably going to marry Spike.”

  WHEN TOON’S FRIEND Viana came back from a family funeral in southern Thailand, Billy wanted to know if Muslims buried like Christians or burned like Buddhists. “Buried,” Viana said. Billy lit a stick of incense for the dead grandfather—I thought this might be an affront, but Viana said that Zain, the grandfather, had been a very hip old guy, very enlightened, and he would have liked it. “He was above stupidity totally,” she said. “In every way.” But what was Billy doing—being nice to Viana or being a morbid little votary? None of us could tell.

  BILLY DID COME HOME for supper one night with a girl on the back of the bike, a Californian from his school with a short gelled haircut and a shy face. Her name was Angela and she stayed for dinner. When Billy gave a lurid explanation of my work in shit management, Angela said, “Well. That’s just part of life, isn’t it?” We all liked her. Billy hardly spoke and took her home right after. He answered our nosy questions about her in irritated murmurs—yes, her parents were divorced, yes, her mother taught art at the school—and he kept company with her all that winter.

  Toon and I, in our nighttime conversations, could not reach a definite guess about whether they were having sex. Toon thought no, but I gave Billy condoms anyway. I was thinking about my old happy days of sneaky sex with Kit, my high school girlfriend. Billy was embarrassed and just said, “Oh, Dad. You are so weird, Dad.”

  In the spring Billy broke up with her, for reasons we never knew. Angela kept calling the house, but he was not moved to relent. The phone rang through dinner. Billy told us not to bother to answer.

  “Plenty fish in the sea,” Uncle Lek said. “Room on the bike for new girl.”

  But I didn’t like Billy’s being so heartless. What phase was he in? He was either out on his motorbike or lighting incense in front of the shrine in the living room. I tried to talk to him about studying engineering or maybe the airier kinds of mathematics. “Physics is possible,” Billy said. “Or agronomy.” Agronomy?

  But it turned out he had something quite other in mind. In the fall of his last year of high school, Billy announced at dinner that he planned to take vows as a novice Buddhist monk. “Very good idea!” Toon said. I didn’t need to be reminded how many young men in Thailand served as monks—just for a spell of a few months, between school and getting a job. The king of Thailand had been a monk of this sort for fifteen days. But Billy was too young—you had to be twenty to ordain—he would be in with the smaller boys with no place else to go, poor kids sent by families with no money to feed or school them. “He has us,” I said.

  “Help him grow up,” Toon said.

  Every day on the street I saw monks in sunglasses, monks smoking cigarettes, monks stepping up to the back door of a bus. But I could not imagine Billy, currently wearing his weekend outfit of baggy jeans and a backward baseball cap, walking through Bangkok with an orange robe draped over one shoulder and his head and eyebrows shaved. Did I know him at all?

  “It might not just be temporary,” Billy said. “It could be a major career move. Like for good.”

  For good did not seem possible. Never to eat after midday, never to be alone with any female, never to let a female so much as touch him, never to handle money, never to drive a motorcycle, never to drive a car? I didn’t think he could have really thought this through. I said this all night, hour after hour, and later in our bedroom.

  Toon thought he might like the life. A boy like Billy.

  “Like what?” I said. “He’s a normal kid. He’s my kid. He’s an American citizen, for Christ’s sake. He doesn’t need to prove how native he is by wandering around with a begging bowl.”

  “Oh, Toby,” Toon said. “Better not to say more.”

  “If we were home, he’d be doing something for money, he wouldn’t be trying to humble himself.”

  “This is home,” Toon said.

  She blanched in outrage. I had the sense to be ashamed—what had I said? I knew what I’d said—but I was still furious at the whole continent of Asia, which seemed to be stealing my son from me, as surely as if a wave of cholera or malaria were dragging him under.

  “And he’d have to chant in Pali!” I said. “A language deader than Latin. He doesn’t know Pali! ”

  “He can do it,” Toon said. “Thai boys can do it. Billy can.”

  Billy chanting! I wouldn’t understand a word either.

  “Don’t we want him to have a family?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course, Toby.”

  I understood nothing. How had I lived here so long?

  “Maybe he likes it,” Toon said, “but then in a while he gets lonely and then he comes out. Then later he wants to go back—he could go.”

  “He could?”

  “Oh, yes. Only not too many times. Can only leave and go back seven times.”

  “Seven is a lot,” I said.

  Seven, back and forth, in and out of the world. It seemed like a perfect life.

  “You know, in the Catholic Church priests used to be able to marry,” I said. I started to talk about shifts in the doctrine of celibacy, but I could see she wasn’t so interested. Nothing I said held much fascination for her that night.

  WE DID A LITTLE BETTER as the weeks went on. The other relatives were pleased, even Lek. “The merit is given to the p
arents!” he said, as if I’d just cut a good business deal. My mother in Florida, of all people, was excited and proud. “See?” Billy said.

  Jiap said, “I don’t know why everybody’s talking about it so much, like it’s anything so weird. It’s not weird.” I was looking at the hard knob of flesh Jiap had for a hand and thinking about the merit Billy was about to accrue for me, the payments against karmic debt. Like a farmer’s son settling the mortgage. How much to offset the precepts I’d broken in the war, the rules against lies, greed, murder? Too much probably for even Billy. Toon would say he was doing his part. I was thinking of the phrase “forgiveness of debt.”

  ON THE STREET ONE NIGHT Toon and I passed a store window stocked with monks’ buckets—in the old days I’d thought they were for the beach—orange plastic pails filled with flashlights, soap, sweet drinks, toothpaste, tied with cellophane bows—gifts to bring to the temple, offerings to the monks. Did Billy think he was going off to camp?

  Toon and I stopped to look at the items. Could these be enough for anyone? The goods in each bucket (orange soda, liquid detergent, toilet paper, a black umbrella) were packed to overflowing, gestures of plenty. How much did anyone need?

  An ache of jealousy rose up in me—how did Billy get to do this? I was sorry for myself that I wasn’t him. Toon said, “Have to have a big party before he goes. Big fuss.” She was only repeating what she’d said before, but the breathy emphasis now—the light, enchanted stress—made me hear something more. She was gazing tenderly at a window display she’d seen a million times before, touched, it would seem, to imagine Billy secluded with the monks, for however long, his days undistracted by us. It should not have surprised me that I nursed some envy for Billy. What I had not understood (hadn’t I?) was how much Toon would envy him too.

  We were not in a hurry to get home and we stood at the window of the store for a while, lost in looking. We were each trying to see as far we could, farther, into that glassy space of the other life—with its freedoms and its sufficiencies, the unled life—perhaps not better than this life either, but always longed for.

  Anyone on the street probably thought we were just window-shopping for alms, deciding which buckets to buy for the monks. I thought of my first days in Bangkok, when I knew nothing about anything and I felt sorry for the monks for being so skinny. I had no idea at all I’d become who I was now—settled, enveloped, private. How could I know?—a hulk of a boy loose in the world, a foreigner washed up here once by war.

  INDEPENDENCE

  Kit

  FOR A WHILE AFTER I was married, my old boyfriend from high school used to send me letters from Vietnam. Dear Kit, he’d write. It’s hot here and a little more exciting than I’d planned. I guess you’re just sitting in the sun in that little white two-piece of yours. His letters were cheerful in a fairly petrified way. He wasn’t even in the army, he was there as a civilian engineer doing something to help the planes fly right. My husband didn’t like my getting letters from Toby, although they were by no means love letters. Well, some had tinges. I hope you are putting lots of suntan lotion on the tender skin under your butt that used to burn so easily.

  I liked the letters. But I was glad now that I had failed to talk Toby into marrying me right after high school. What had I been thinking? He was decent enough but secretly arrogant and frozen with everyday fears; I had always been a little too much for him. He thought I was crafty but I was really just faster, in every sense. He was the sort of boy who seemed startled when having sex. At the time his awe and confusion were endearing.

  I knew I was much better matched with Doug, my husband. He was more of a bad-boy type. He came into a diner in Miami where I was waitressing the summer between my last years of college, and he flirted in a sly, half-smiling way that got me appropriately reckless. By the middle of the summer he was showing up after the lunch rush and we’d go fool around in the walk-in icebox (a sexier spot than you’d think, in that weather) just to get us both through the long dull day. He was almost done with school and already working in a Chevrolet dealership his uncle owned.

  I lived with him during my last year of college, while my parents chose to think I was still in the dorm. This was the year I was tutoring in a neighborhood my dad said I’d get mugged in, and all their warnings to carry Mace in my purse kept my parents from worrying where I was sleeping.

  In the late spring, just before graduation, I found out I was pregnant. How had that happened? It was true we had not been very scrupulous about using protection. But it seemed a great irony of nature that all the nights of heated invention, all the funky animal boldness, all the giggling and wild play, were about to chain me to family life.

  I knew people who’d had abortions, everyone did. Much to my amazement, Doug was for having the baby. “I think we could do it,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.” It was because of the draft—men with kids weren’t getting drafted. I wasn’t wild about this as a reason, but I didn’t want to lose my lock on Doug. I was crazy for Doug.

  MIAMI WAS NOT a bad place to have a baby. When Phoebe was very little, I could take her outside and hang out with the other moms, horsing around and grousing about what work a kid was, and I’d have a pretty sociable day. If I stayed home, I might get a phone call from good old Toby from high school, on his lunch hour in Arizona. “Just calling to say hi. Hidey-hi.”

  “You’re talking to a very busy woman who gets no sleep at all,” I’d say. I was still happy then and it gave me a tiny curl of pleasure to hear the dullness of loneliness in his voice.

  By the time his letters came from Vietnam, I wasn’t doing so well. I wrote, Why did you have to go there? You are brave, I know. Which is more than I can say for me. Not that there is anything interesting to say about me. I frequently hated the way I sounded. It wasn’t that I had become meek—when my husband ordered me around, I shrieked in outrage or I mocked him, and I griped about him to my friends. “Guess what he wants now?” I’d call them and say. But this complaining was nothing, a fake freedom, a vote no one was counting.

  The disorder that a yowling infant brought into the house was a big disappointment to Doug. He’d imagined I would carry off this family thing with more style. “You have to manage the situation,” he said, a sentiment that was a spillover from his lessons in oily competence at his job. He couldn’t really bully me when he sounded so dumb—when was I ever someone who could believe a sanctimonious sharpie? “Thank you, my captain and master,” I’d say. My scorn made him touchier; ours was not a calm household. In bed I made efforts to impersonate my old besotted self. The lying was not good for me either.

  PHOEBE WAS THIRTEEN MONTHS old when I took her to visit my family in Key West for a week. My father was a county judge and my mother’s soft, fatly upholstered house, very beige and sunny, was just what I needed then. “You look positively radiant,” my mother said, which made me feel especially creepy. Phoebe was in a charming phase, teetering around in her new shoes, chirruping her favorite syllables. She looked like me, a pert brunette, if babies can be said to look like adults. We hung out in my parents’ yard under the huge rubber tree, watching the lizards darting around the hibiscus bushes. Key West had been a Navy island when I was growing up, but now the base was starting to phase itself out and parts of town were already run-down and shabby. On Duval Street I saw more sun-beaten, sunken-eyed guys than before—half dressed, half shaved—smugglers out for an airing, old drunks letting their features blear and melt. A few blocks from Mallory Square, near the water, things were a little brisker, with jewelry shops and T-shirt stores and dawdling southern tourists. A sightseeing trolley tootled past, honking its adorable horn. I liked my town.

  I couldn’t take my baby into a bar, not with my parents nearby. “Honey, if you’re bored,” my mother said, “you should go look up what’s-his-name, your old friend.” She meant Toby, who was back from Vietnam and staying with his parents.

  I had a dream that night about fucking Toby; in my dream he’d learned
a few new tricks. As it happened, I ran into him at the supermarket the next day.

  “Here’s the man! Back from his far-flung travels,” I said.

  “Home is the hunter, home from the hill,” he said. He was never afraid of clichés.

  He limped across the aisle to give me a decorous hug. I didn’t want to say anything about his limp, so I said, “You look great!”

  “Lost too much weight,” he said. Not a word about how I looked.

  “Got tanned too,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, they have sun there. They do have that.”

  “Lots of interesting engineering problems?”

  “Too interesting. I could live without that kind of interest for a while.”

  I was against the war, insofar as I thought about anything but myself in those days, but I hadn’t harangued Toby about going. Phoebe, who was sitting very cutely in the grocery cart, began to bang on the metal. Toby patted her and gave her white-shoed foot a little tug. She screeched and burst into tears.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m so sorry. What did I do? I didn’t hurt her.”

  “It’s nothing, it’s her. She gets like that.”

  “I don’t know how to act with babies. I’m so sorry.”

  Phoebe was still crying. I lifted her off the seat and held her.

  “I stopped writing letters, didn’t I?” Toby said. “I got very busy. You don’t want to know with what. I didn’t like doing the work. Well, you know what I mean.”

  He looked haggard and embarrassed then. What could I say? It’s all right, don’t worry? The only merciful thing I could think of doing was to get us away from him, so he wouldn’t be stuck in those same agonized sentences.