Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

The desire I felt that night was not sexual, however — that is, I knew that the simple act of sex would do nothing to alleviate it. Rather, what I felt was nothing less than a desperate need to pass the long hours of the night telling Georgia about my day: how, as I unlocked the classroom door that morning and faced my tardy students, I had watched myself as though watching a stranger, noting the way that the students regarded me, with a mixture of pity and awe and resentment, and how all of this had left me feeling deeply disoriented and alone. I saw then that my desire was not a presence between us but a void, a deep pit that we both turned instinctively away from, rolling toward our opposite sides of the bed, Georgia snorting as she often did just before falling into a quiet, motionless sleep.

* * *

In Malaysia at that time, the mid-nineties, everyone was engaged in the making of money, and though Georgia and I had never fared well at this, largely due to lack of trying, we allowed ourselves to be wooed by the ease with which students and colleagues alike engaged in various sorts of entrepreneurial maneuvering, doing so without any of the soul-searching or shame that often accompanied such things back home. We lived in Malacca, an old port city known for its antique shops, which we took to perusing on the weekends. It was there that we met Jackson, a portly Chinese man several years our junior who owned a shop specializing in sea salvage, pottery mainly, scavenged from sunken trading ships along the coast. Jackson was an expert in any number of things, and as we spent more and more time in his shop, he became like a mentor to us, teaching us practical skills, such as how to determine what tools had been used in a chest’s construction and whether a textile had been stitched by hand; most important, Jackson treated our newfound interest in business as something normal, even desirable.

One Saturday, as we drank tea in the back of Jackson’s shop, a partially enclosed courtyard overgrown with lush tropical plants, a man came back to where we sat and opened a suitcase on the table in front of us. Inside, beneath a stack of sweaters and trousers, unlikely tropical wear, lay twelve lumpy socks, which he picked up by the toes one at a time, letting the contents of each spill into his hand. “Fossilized red coral,” Jackson explained as we held the carvings, which were smooth and surprisingly cool. “From Tibet.”

Then, lulled not just by the tactile sensation but also by the soothing staccato of Chinese as Jackson and the man bargained, disagreeing and then — their tones unchanged — agreeing, I felt, for the first time in weeks, fully relaxed. And though this was indeed pleasant, the significance of that afternoon lay in what happened next. After the man departed, we admired Jackson’s purchases while he proudly recounted the details of his bargaining, in doing so referring repeatedly to this man with whom we had just been sitting as the smuggler . He did so casually, as though smugglers were a daily part of life, not just his own but ours as well. How to explain the overwhelming gratitude I felt at that moment, the sheer giddiness at being treated like somebody accustomed to the company of smugglers?

* * *

And so, shortly thereafter, during a two-week visit to Java, Georgia and I decided to become proprietresses, traders in Asian furniture and antiques, announcing our decision via a letter that we sent to family and friends back home and receiving, in return, letters of surprise and, in the case of Georgia’s grandmother, disapproval at what she disdainfully termed our “foray into commerce.” I soon began waking up most nights in a panic, unable to imagine the shift from a professional life that revolved around instructing others in the rules of grammar, interactions I regarded as pure, to one in which conversations about furniture would dominate — conversations, moreover, that would be aimed at nudging my audience toward the purchase of a piece of said furniture: a teak daybed, a dowry chest, or, my favorite, a dingklik .

A dingklik is a primitive bench, innocuous in and of itself, though the word, which was like two dueling interjections— Ding! Klik! — delighted me with its exotic dissonance. Later, I fretted that it was my pleasure in speaking the word that had led us to purchase seven of them, along with fifty-three other pieces of furniture, during our visit to Java, for the trip, our first period of sustained relaxation in several years, had done what such things often do: it had acted as a referendum on our lives, allowing us the opportunity to assess our situation, to find it lacking, and, through the purchase of a container of furniture that represented our combined life savings, to, in effect, vote for change.

Georgia had cheated on me. The high school in Albuquerque where she taught had arranged an overnight camping retreat in an attempt to get the faculty to bond, a goal that they had apparently achieved, for when she returned the next day, Georgia immediately confessed that she had been placed with a much younger colleague in what she referred to ridiculously as a “tent-cabin” and that, during the night, they had spoken openly and intimately about many things. “Something happened,” she whispered, and then she began to sob.

“She’s twenty-six,” I said. “You were twenty when she was born. You could be friends with her mother.” I did not say that she could be her mother because I found such a statement too dramatic. Nor do I know why I chose to make the discussion about age, as though it were the woman’s age that I objected to, as though I would have been perfectly happy had Georgia cheated on me in a “tent-cabin” with a woman in her forties. Beyond this, we had decided not to discuss the details, or, in fairness, I should say that I had decided this for us, and in order to make my wishes perfectly clear, I ended what was to be our only discussion of the topic with the most flippant comment that I could muster on such short notice. “A younger woman,” I said. “Since when did we begin engaging in heterosexual clichés?”

After several weeks of moping around the house, Georgia suggested that we needed “a challenge” and broached the idea of going overseas. I understood that she was making a gesture, and so we went, abandoning established lives involving jobs and friends and a house, choosing Malaysia for no other reason than that it seemed an ignored country, the one that tourists leapt over as they passed from Thailand to Indonesia. The move, however, had solved nothing, and so we had taken this more dramatic step, binding ourselves to each other by using every cent we had to buy dingkliks and palungans and gereboks, to buy a whole new vocabulary in order to avoid the ordinary words that one uses to discuss such an ordinary event as cheating.

* * *

This was how we came to be standing on the steps of Gerard Tung’s antique textile shop that morning, waiting for it to open. As we waited, a bird in the eaves above us, knowing nothing of the events that had brought us there, defecated down the front of my blouse and, for good measure, onto my skirt. The bird’s waste hit with the force of a water balloon, giving the impression of an intentional blow rather than what it was, a by-product of nature that I had unwittingly placed myself in the path of. In fact, I believe that it was this — the randomness coupled with the utter absence of malice — that triggered my highly uncharacteristic response: under the strain of attempting to suppress my tears, my chin began to quiver, dimpling like a golf ball.

Georgia fumbled around in her backpack. “Don’t cry,” she said.

There are, I have learned, numerous ways to make this statement. There is the Don’t cry that is issued as a demonstration of solidarity and sympathy and that is succeeded, most often, by the words or you’ll get me started . There is the more detached and perhaps reflective Don’t cry, one suggesting that the situation, and often life in general, does not merit tears, a tone that I generally find both reassuring and persuasive. Then there is the Don’t cry that is pure threat, that warns, Do not start because I am not in a position to think about you or your needs, and if you do start, you will see this and most surely be disappointed .