Want, стр. 36

New York and don’t want, anymore, to be in grad school; grad school seems meant to last a thousand years, and all we talk about is how precarious our lives will still be once we’re done. I sleep with a Victorian literature scholar who asks to hold his hands around my neck while we have sex. I let him because I feel I should be grateful to him for wanting to fuck me. He’s only the third person that I’ve slept with, none of them having stuck around more than a few days or weeks.

She has an extra room in her apartment in Taipei, where she’s gone to learn Mandarin and teach English and have an adventure, because the prestigious fellowship to which she applied did not let her in. She says Come and I have the security deposit from my apartment and want so much to be with her. I think, secretly, that if I go to her, that she’ll make everything okay. I get approval for a semester free of coursework and of teaching, in exchange for not taking a stipend. I imagine that our talking can make everything better, like it used to, that being close to her, watching her live, somehow will teach me how to be as well.

She gets stoned every morning and again at night and we watch The West Wing over and over; when we watch the episode in which there is a crisis between Taiwan and China, it feels as if the threat is real. My mom is shipping me the Wellbutrin that I’ve been prescribed but I don’t take it; I’ve never taken it. I can’t say why except to say it feels like an assertion somehow of control. Sasha cooks large, indulgent meals after her last joint of the day and is desperate that I join. She buys cheap bottles of wine, and I sip my single glass and she downs the rest.

It’s so hot. We think we know hot, coming from Florida, but there’s no breeze from the ocean and all the concrete mixed with all the smog, the air’s not just hot but thick and every time we go outside we’re wet with sweat within blocks. She takes her clothes off as soon as she gets home from work, peeling shirt, then pants, and walks around the apartment in her bra and underwear, gesturing and talking, pulling her hair up off her neck. I sit, fully clothed, on the couch and I stay quiet. She wants, she says, over and over—sex, love, a feeling so intense that it jolts her out of the stasis and the strangeness of our lives in this place; I sit quiet in the corner, wondering why, but also knowing, I can’t be that for her. She misses that specific brand of power that comes from male attention—in Taipei, with her height, her brashness, and her volume, men don’t look at her like they did at home. What she wants, what she misses, is being wanted, which is a thing I’ve never wholly had a hold of. I’m relieved at first, that we’re alike like that here.

I read Anita Brookner on my mattress on the floor in my small room with the less-well-working air conditioner. I read Jean Rhys, D. H. Lawrence, Colm Tóibín, Deborah Eisenberg, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Comyns, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Jane Bowles, more Faulkner and Woolf. I like the tighter, sharper, domestic stories; I prefer Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop to her more famous The Blue Flower, Tóibín’s Nora Webster breaks my heart. I carry pieces of the Eisenberg stories in my head and play them over and over as I ride the subway, as everyone around me says words that I don’t understand, because the time something was happening, of course, you didn’t know what it was like … It really wasn’t like anything—it was just whatever it was, and there was never a place in your mind the right size and shape to put it. But afterwards, the thing fit exactly into your memory as if there had always been a place—just right, just waiting for it. Taiwan feels like this: Southeast Asia. My friend Leah keeps emailing asking how I’m doing in Thailand. Sasha and I have jobs teaching wealthy Taiwanese kids whose parents all have homes in the US. We make more money than I have any need for. Our rent and food is cheap and I keep piles of Taiwan dollars in a box next to my bed. All her friends are other expats teaching English. I mostly only talk to her.

We split a joint and walk out to the night market, where we tong leafy greens and meats into plastic bags and hand them to a man to whom she speaks in stumbling Mandarin. He boils all our food inside a pot, then tongs it back, still steaming, into our plastic bags. We walk, slurping our wet, hot food with chopsticks, and watch a tall, thin man charm a large black snake, beading eyes and shimmering skin; another has itself wrapped around his neck as he works. We pass booths of textiles, meats, and toys and buy loose-fitting linen skirts. One night, we go through a single purple curtain and she cheers and smiles and holds my hand as a small, stout woman pokes a needle through my eyebrow skin. I hold her hand as she gets the cartilage on top of each of her ears poked and filled with small studs and we get shaved ice with sweet fruit juice over the top. All around us words fly out but I can’t understand them. I like not having to parse their meaning; they add texture, engulf our daily life, but I’m not expected to respond. After our piercings and our shaved ice, she buys a third bottle of wine from a twenty-four-hour convenience store and we sit in a park late at night and talk and talk; I think this is exactly why I came.