suitcase,” Julia said quietly.
That night, she did not come into our bedroom to sleep, which was fine with me as I found sleeping alone preferable in the tropical heat, though I had not mentioned this to Julia because it seemed imprudent to discuss anything related to our bed at that particular moment. There is a term that lesbians use— bed death —to describe what had already begun happening long before Julia took the bigger step of physically removing herself from our bed. In fact, at the risk of sounding confessional, a tendency that I despise, I’ll admit that we had not actually touched in any meaningful way since the afternoon that we bathed together at the seedy hotel. That this kind of thingoccurred with enough frequency among lesbians to have acquired its own terminology in no way made me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse, for I dislike contributing in any way to the affirmation of stereotypes.
Then, on the second Friday after she stopped sleeping in our bed, an arrangement that had continued without discussion, I was returning from Mahkota Parade with groceries when I ran into three students. “We saw Miss Julia at the bus station,” announced Paul, an amiable boy with a slightly misshapen head. This happened often, people reporting to us on the other’s activities, even on our own, as though we might have forgotten that we had eaten barbecued eel at a stall near the water the night before.
“Oh?” I replied, striving for a nonchalant oh rather than one that indicated surprise or begged for elaboration.
“Is she going back?” Paul asked, by which he meant leaving.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation, knowing it to be true, for, as Paul spoke, I had the sense that I was simply being reminded of something that had already happened.
Her clothing and computer were gone, but so too were the smaller, everyday pieces of her life: the earplugs she kept beneath her pillow, the biography of Indira Gandhi that she was halfway through, the photo of her great-grandmother Ragnilde with her long hair puddled on the floor. In fact, their absence hurt more, for it suggested a plan, a methodical progression toward that moment when she boarded the bus with her carefully packed bags, leaving nothing behind —not even, it turned out, a note, which meant that she had left without any sort of goodbye, that she had considered the silence that reigned between us those last few weeks a sufficient coda. I sat on the bed and tried to determine the exact moment her decision had been made, when she had thought to herself, “Enough,” but I could not, for it seemed to me a bit like trying to pinpoint the exact sip with which one had become drunk.
Eventually —hours later I suppose, for it had grown dark outside —I realized that I was hungry and, with no desire to cook the food that I had purchased for the two of us that afternoon, decided to visit our favorite stall, where we had often whiled away the cool evenings eating noodles and potato leaves and, occasionally, a few orders of dim sum. I knew, also, that the owner would ask about Julia’s absence and that this would afford me the opportunity to begin adjusting to the question and perfecting a response.
I locked our apartment door, but as I turned toward the stairwell out of habit, I felt a heaviness in my legs and considered taking the elevator. If Julia had been there, she would have said, “We are not taking the elevator,” and I would have felt obligated to make a small stand in favor of it, but Julia was not there, which meant that the decision was mine: if I took the stairs, it would be as though Julia still held sway, but if I took the elevator, it would seem too deliberate, a reaction against her, particularly as I hated the elevator as much as she. As I stood debating in the poorly lit doorway of the stairwell, there came from farther up the stairs a heavy thudding sound. I imagined some large, hungry beast making its way down the steps
That night, she did not come into our bedroom to sleep, which was fine with me as I found sleeping alone preferable in the tropical heat, though I had not mentioned this to Julia because it seemed imprudent to discuss anything related to our bed at that particular moment. There is a term that lesbians use— bed death —to describe what had already begun happening long before Julia took the bigger step of physically removing herself from our bed. In fact, at the risk of sounding confessional, a tendency that I despise, I’ll admit that we had not actually touched in any meaningful way since the afternoon that we bathed together at the seedy hotel. That this kind of thingoccurred with enough frequency among lesbians to have acquired its own terminology in no way made me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse, for I dislike contributing in any way to the affirmation of stereotypes.
Then, on the second Friday after she stopped sleeping in our bed, an arrangement that had continued without discussion, I was returning from Mahkota Parade with groceries when I ran into three students. “We saw Miss Julia at the bus station,” announced Paul, an amiable boy with a slightly misshapen head. This happened often, people reporting to us on the other’s activities, even on our own, as though we might have forgotten that we had eaten barbecued eel at a stall near the water the night before.
“Oh?” I replied, striving for a nonchalant oh rather than one that indicated surprise or begged for elaboration.
“Is she going back?” Paul asked, by which he meant leaving.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation, knowing it to be true, for, as Paul spoke, I had the sense that I was simply being reminded of something that had already happened.
Her clothing and computer were gone, but so too were the smaller, everyday pieces of her life: the earplugs she kept beneath her pillow, the biography of Indira Gandhi that she was halfway through, the photo of her great-grandmother Ragnilde with her long hair puddled on the floor. In fact, their absence hurt more, for it suggested a plan, a methodical progression toward that moment when she boarded the bus with her carefully packed bags, leaving nothing behind —not even, it turned out, a note, which meant that she had left without any sort of goodbye, that she had considered the silence that reigned between us those last few weeks a sufficient coda. I sat on the bed and tried to determine the exact moment her decision had been made, when she had thought to herself, “Enough,” but I could not, for it seemed to me a bit like trying to pinpoint the exact sip with which one had become drunk.
Eventually —hours later I suppose, for it had grown dark outside —I realized that I was hungry and, with no desire to cook the food that I had purchased for the two of us that afternoon, decided to visit our favorite stall, where we had often whiled away the cool evenings eating noodles and potato leaves and, occasionally, a few orders of dim sum. I knew, also, that the owner would ask about Julia’s absence and that this would afford me the opportunity to begin adjusting to the question and perfecting a response.
I locked our apartment door, but as I turned toward the stairwell out of habit, I felt a heaviness in my legs and considered taking the elevator. If Julia had been there, she would have said, “We are not taking the elevator,” and I would have felt obligated to make a small stand in favor of it, but Julia was not there, which meant that the decision was mine: if I took the stairs, it would be as though Julia still held sway, but if I took the elevator, it would seem too deliberate, a reaction against her, particularly as I hated the elevator as much as she. As I stood debating in the poorly lit doorway of the stairwell, there came from farther up the stairs a heavy thudding sound. I imagined some large, hungry beast making its way down the steps
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