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Casualty of Truth
The night before Peter leaves, he cuts loose with his real reason
for going. To help our relationship. To fix what’s broken.
What kinda craziness is that? I ask. It’s not crazy, he says,
but it sure sounded crazy. Then he tells me about his theory of
artistic metaphors. Writers need to find a metaphor for their suffering,
and express it through art. Only then can they alleviate their pain.
We’re in our bedroom. By the clock radio, his plane leaves
in eight hours.
And what pain are you exactly suffering? I ask.
He gives me a look that says: It’s the relationship, dear.
I say, Our problems are caused by Colombia, not solved by it.
We’re fighting constantly! he says. Even before I got this
assignment, we’re fighting.
He invites me to flash back seven years. He tells me the same old
crap about his first Latin America assignment. Guatemala changed
his view forever, he says.
At the time, I was barren as the biblical Sarah. We. been trying
for two years, and we began to pass each other in the hallway like
strangers in the night. Was it him? Was it me? The Los Angeles
Times coincidentally dispatches him to Guatemala, land of 10,000
screaming orphans. He does a piece on the orphan-adoption trade.
When he got back—voila!—I’m preggie, and I never
stop hearing the end of it from my journalist-husband. How immersing
oneself in a metaphor for your woes can help solve them. How he
went there at a time when we couldn’t make our own baby, and
now problem solved. Our little Ria screams the truth.
He won an American Press Award for his piece on the orphan trade.
Everyone lives happily ever after. My fact-obsessed husband is hopelessly
superstitious now.
That’s why I’m going to Colombia, he says. The place is
split by civil war. I need to write this story, just like I know
which knuckles of mine are ready to crack.
It’s the same shit, different year? I say, feeling like I was
speaking to a block of wood. I lose my gaze in a blue square of
window. You’re never home! I say. That’s why we’re
always fighting! Every month we fight about this or that assignment.
It’s dangerous. It’s far away. Colombia is the cause,
not the solution. Wake up.
He says, stubbornly, sometimes you have to face your worst fear
to alleviate it.
He relates how, for sixty years now (roughly seven times as long
as our marriage), guerillas had been cutting up the country, paramilitaries
fighting back with violence and drug dealing. The blood spilling
across a nation once considered one of the world.. happiest.
It’s perfect, he says, softly.
Just listen to you! I say.
He reminds me too of his Costa Rica piece! Just after Ria was born,
he flew off to Costa Rica, whose economy was being reborn as a high-tech
and tourist mecca, a rare sweet spot amid Central America’s..
legacy of violence and economic despair.
Another award-winning story, he says, proudly. It celebrated our
daughter’s birth. Another metaphor! Now Ria is a happy five
years old. The truth always smiles, albeit with loose baby teeth.
Enough bullshit, I say. What day you coming back again?
Colombia? Oh. Be back the 30th. A month from now.
Who do you think you are, Ernest fucking Hemingway!
We’ve been through this a hundred times, Liz. Harper’s
was kind with the petty cash. It’s a complicated story to report.
Coincidentally, Ria is screaming from her room for something or
other.
Now go to your daughter, I say, and tell her you won’t be home
for a month. Enough playing canasta with feelings.
Liz, you know I don’t know how to play canasta.
Hello Kitty glass! Ria yells, demanding that someone bring her the
most inaccessible glass in the whole house.
Your daughter’s thirsty, I tell Peter.
Peter leaves our room and creeps downstairs, and I hear the dishwashing
machine creak open and the water faucet opened, as he washes the
dirty glass by hand. He treads back up the stairs.
Peeking in from the darkened hallway, I spy him lying close to her
on the bed, her face poking over the blanket, as she sips some water
from her favorite glass. She tries to share some with her favorite
stuffed rabbit.
Her lips seem to form a small pink oval, as if about to blow a bubble.
Why you wisping, she asks him.
Whispering.
Whish-pering.
Because. I don’t want anyone else to know.
Know what!
Clearing his throat, he tells her he’s going away to write
a fairy tale. Not the type where the man and woman lives happily
ever after, but simply a story about fairies—those little creatures
with wings on their back with names like Emerald, Ruby Red, and
Crystal Heart who flutter around in your backyard, and sleep in
beds of roses, or violets, making good prevail and the bad slip
back into everlasting shadow.
Now, the thing is, I don’t have a lot of time to cover the
story, so the first thing is, Ria, the first thing I need to check
out is—what I meant to say is, I don’t want anyone to
know about the fairies, if they’re there. Then, the second
question I’m actually examining is whether they’re forest
or desert fairies. Or flower ones. But I won’t know what kind
until I get there, as I said before. I’ve never been to this
place, actually.
Ria’s thin little eyelids jaw open. He continues, Yeah, those
tiny winged creatures. They could affect my whole schedule. Why,
do you like them or something?
It’s just the two of them in the nightlight. Ria isn’t
old enough for Harry Potter, let alone an expose of a coca plantation
smack in one of the world’s.. most volatile regions. So he
gives her the next best explanation.
I’m going to catch a couple of fairies, I hear him repeat.
There are fairies in Corumba? she asks.
Colombia, pumpkin.
You never understand me!
Let me rephrase. There are fairies all over the world. Even in Corumba.
You coming back tomorrow?
A little longer than that. But soon.
Day after tomorrow?
What this actually depends on, Chicken, this time business, is what
I find when I get there. After investigating the situation, I’ll
know exactly if there are, you know, any—
—why you whis-ping again ?
I’m not whispering. Look. It took a long time to write
Winnie the Pooh and Cinderella too. What I’m writing takes
time.
OK, Daddy, she finally says.
OK, Ria, good night.
Good night, Daddy.
He turns in the doorway to face her one last time. I sneak backwards
into the hallway, still listening.
You want me to bring something back? he adds.
OK. Thanks Daddy.
I’ll look for something from Corombia. Something to keep your
Barbies company.
Thanks, Daddy.
Tell your stuffed animals goodbye for me. I don’t want to wake
them up. Tell them I’ll see them real soon.
It’s OK to tell them that?
No, but probably. But Ria: go to sleep now. I’ll see you soon.
All right.
Good night.
Good night.
When he comes to the door of our bedroom, all smug-faced, all I
can do is stare out the blue-black window and think: I also got
taken by his stories. Ria’s not the only one. All those years
of hiking the rainforest with him in our early days made his gallivanting
OK. There’s always a missed opportunity in life, a road you
don’t take that you end up paying a steep price for later.
That’s the line he fed me. Recklessness on a shoestring, we
called it one day, carelessly laughing our way through the Venezuelan
Amazon. Right from Day One (nine years ago), when he’d gotten
down on one knee on the faux Persian rug of our one-bedroom apartment,
he’d literally pushed the envelope of relationship—sliding
a three-by-six inch business envelop, containing his dead mother’s
silver engagement ring, across the wood floor—to the only attractive
woman he could find who got the pun. Eloping to the shock of friends
and family, we honeymooned to where monkeys howled from the jungle,
unsmiling Indians strained beneath mounds of textiles, and hotels,
if we lucked out, featured mosquito nets and cold, clean showers.
Looking for an out from my corporate job in St. Louis, I ate up
those big blue skies, Mayan ruins that made sunburn nearly worth
it, eco-tours that strayed just a tad into guerilla country. Those
early days! Yeah, I too had dreams. I dreamt I might one day become
a birder, helping tourists spot rare mccaws and parrots, so their
cameras could catch iridescent wings glinting in the dappled forest
like underwater tropical fish. Still, I couldn’t just leave
my salaried job in St. Louis. He was a freelance journalist with
on-and-off income, a knack for disappearing. Our futures seemed
set in stone. Besides, after two years of trying, and trying, we
had Ria. I went part-time on my corporate job, but my dreams quit
altogether. Breast-feeding was my new job-and-three-quarters. Peter
didn’t have the breasts and so he resumed disappearing two,
three weeks at a time. What else could I be other than the understanding
wife? I held the fort at home. Struggled to pay the bills. A silent
referee judging my husband’s wrestling match with fate. And
the subject of neon blue parrots never came up again.
He enters the room and sits on our bed, nice and relaxed.
Mission accomplished, he says, swiping his hands like he’s
cleaning them of something.
I feel something hot rise up, rise up a well-worn pathway, complemented
by the bitter taste of bile in my mouth.
They’re on the State Department Watch List! It’s a civil
war. Does this mean something to you?
Liz, when will you stop prosecuting me? This is my dream. Other
reporters are living for this story—
—You were going to say dying.
Was not.
You didn’t have to.
Listen. I know this is tough for you, Liz. But the ranch is protected!
It’s like I’m covering Fort Knox. And it’s a people
story, not a war story.
You’re hanging out with people who have nothing to lose, I
say. You have a wife and daughter. A nice house on a quarter acre.
We don’t even have to lock the door at night.
I imagine his ride to the airport. Or the plane ride in. Looking
out at the clouds, feeling the unity of the universe, harmony of
man. He’s sensing a commonality with Walt Whitman. I begin
to sob. He strokes my neck, unbuttons my shirt. I push my breasts
up to him. That’s how much I already miss him. I clamp my legs
around his as if squeezing water from a stone. I fumble through
his buttons. Clothes are tossed. I lie on my back and he eagerly
straddles me, feeding off my hunger. My back arches involuntarily.
I am thrusting up to meet him, feel him to my core for possibly
the last time.
Ten microseconds later, our bodies collapse like empty marionettes.
You should do this for a living, Elizabeth, he says trembling, rolling
off my sweaty stomach.
Maybe you already do this for a living, I say, my words ripe with
meaning.
But he doesn’t answer. Peter’s already sleeping, eyelashes
fluttering like fairy wings.
We awake to his alarm in the pre-dawn darkness of the bedroom. The
clock’s on the floor, lampshade crooked. When he slipped under
the sheets, everything had been in order, and now our neat bedroom
is in chaos, sending him into a mild panic. It’s 5:24 a.m.
He rebuttons his pants and shirt and, five minutes later, stands
with his bulging backpack beside the bed, silently moving his lips
to take last-minute inventory.
I still feel a bit of post-coital serenity.
Tell me where you’re going again, Tessler, I say, lying there,
addressing him like his editor might. The nation or the university?
Colombia, with an O.
So—the nation, I say, play-acting.
Sure. That’s where I’m going, Elizabeth.
He slings forty pounds over his left shoulder. I’ll have my
editor call your editor, he jokes, pecking my pale, cool lips.
My editor will be waiting for that call, I joke back, sitting up
against the pillow to get a possibly last look at my husband.
He sneaks out of the room. I hear the automatic garage door downstairs
creaking open, and picture a coffin lid hinging shut.
Five-forty-three a.m.. Bedroom dark, and empty. I hear a muffled
sigh through the wall. Ria must be dreaming of the fairies her father
can’t possibly bring back.
Easing myself back under the sheets, I close my eyes. I dream. I
dream I’m in the back seat of a taxi. Oddly, Peter’s not
in it. I ride up a twisted highway in Colombia somewhere. Peering
out the pane of glass, I see an old, innocent world: groves of trees
dripping with silver leaves, dark-faced children smiling, dirty-cheeked
farmers hacking corn stalks with machetes, barefoot families idling
by mud-and-stick huts. I see what Peter would see. As the car floats
up another curve, I crane my neck to get a last look at cows grazing
on meadows like omens of famine, their bones jutting out so far
they might jab the laborers who milk them each morning.
In the dream, a phone rings. There’s a phone ringing right
in front of me. It sits in a cradle jutting from the rear of the
front seat of the taxi.
I pick up.
You murderer, a woman’s voice hisses through the ear piece.
My eyes jerk open. Suddenly I’m awake in my bedroom, my heart
thumping against my chest like clown shoes in a dryer.
Peter should have been in that taxi, not me.
Years later, when I think back to how Peter’s assignment went
bad, how he came back wounded instead of with a Pulitzer, I think
of the essential conflict between his life and my dreams. I stare
out the bedroom window late at night, his body still as granite
in the bed behind me. He is sick now. In the moonlit backyard, the
only constellations are the night insects, the bleating of crickets
searching for mates. A whispered voice startles me, and I turn.
Peter stands there, his pale face marbled in moonlight, shoes sipping
from puddles of intense white.
“Liz,” he whispers. He turns quiet and serious. “Listen.
I just wanted to say …” But he stops in mid-sentence,
staring at me. He says a funny little foreign word. His hand worries
his forehead; he shuffles his feet like he’s trying to keep
warm even though the night is hot and humid.
“I have no idea where my matches are,” he says, vaguely
trying to open the night table drawer. I open it for him and, finding
a book of matches, light his cigarette and he stands alone by the
window away from me, blowing streams of smoke through the screen.
He is back from Colombia, but he is not back, because he is far
away from the present moment. A lie is a punishable act, I know,
because we are all connected to the truth, and when we tell a lie
we nibble away at that truth until there is nothing left. The soul
is all we have left but the soul is just a piece of cotton, a puff
of white smoke, which nobody can really see, but it’s the only
thing left inside us when you throw everything else away.
I just wish Peter was here with me to see that.
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