Behind the Moon (26 page)

‘You gotta be kidding.’

‘No way!’

She bullied them into compliance. They sat there on the piano bench, two 23-year-old young men, meekly sight-reading a duet score to the mechanical tick of the swaying metronome, getting verbally abused and smacked on the knuckles for their pains. After a while, the absurdity of the situation began to dawn on them both. Gibbo glanced sideways and saw that Justin was grinning. They caught each other’s eyes and burst out laughing. Their fingers stumbled over the keys. They nudged and shoved each other. The metronome jolted and tumbled down, knocking the score off its ledge and bouncing onto a jangle of jarring keys. Gibbo and Justin yelped hysterically. Miss Yipsoon exclaimed in annoyance and wielded the ruler more vigorously. When they left her house, she had smacked them into tentative friendship once again.

In the City of the Gaia Goddesses

But such delights she feigned and did not feel: who can you love when no one knows your heart?

Wind in bamboos, rain on plum trees she ignored: a hundred cares beset a single soul.

Her heart, evoking things long past or fresh, became a raveled skein, a mass of sores.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Tien and Stan had been living in Oakland for just over a year when he hit her. It never happened again, just as he swore it wouldn’t. But it left her watchful and wary, constantly assessing the barometer of his moods, careful not to say anything that might offend. Careful not to say anything at all. She wanted to make her marriage work.

Stan had brought her to California so that he could further his medical studies at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. He said he wanted to be an oncologist. His mother was thrilled. She bullied his father into paying his university fees. It wasn’t as good as going to Oxford or Cambridge, she said, but on the whole she was satisfied with his choice. Even excited by it. She threatened to pay them an extended visit when they had settled in. She had never been to America before, although she had a half-sister who lived in Marin County. She insisted they stay near Stan’s aunt, but they looked at the rental prices and decided to stay in Oakland for convenience as well as cost.

Stan and Tien found a modern one-bedroom apartment near Chinatown. They were happy initially. They spent the first two weeks taking the Bay Area Rapid Transit to San Francisco to do gawky tourist things, then they returned to their neighbourhood in the evening to explore the various Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao markets and grocery stores along Eighth and Ninth streets, where Tien discovered baskets of fresh lemongrass, holy basil and kaffir lime leaves. She crushed the soft leaves of fragrant herbs between her fingers and lifted her hands to her nose. She sniffed deeply and felt right at home. She would be happy here in this land over the rainbow.

It took her several months to realise all was not well with Stan. He left the apartment early in the morning, walking to the station to catch the BART across the bay to Civic Centre, where he boarded a bus to the Parnassus Heights campus. He spent the whole day there, returning after eight each night. They ate dinner in front of the television, then went to bed. Tien assumed that he was busy with his studies and obtaining valuable clinical experience at the medical centre.

Then one morning, as she was cleaning the apartment, she lifted the toilet lid and shrieked when a large grey rat poked out its whiskered nose and twitched at her. She slammed down the lid and sat on it, breathing heavily, her heart stuttering with fright. She could hear animal noises coming from the pipes. She did not know how many there were infesting her plumbing. She thought that if she got up from her seat, the rat might hurl itself against the lid and lift it, thus gaining access to the bathroom and the apartment. She manoeuvred herself around on the toilet lid so that she was kneeling on it, then she flushed the cistern repeatedly and listened for any sounds of drowning. All she could hear was the whoosh of wasted water sucked down into the pipes.

After twenty minutes, she made herself get off the toilet seat. She dashed to the kitchen and grabbed the heavy carbon steel wok from the stove and lugged it into the bathroom. She placed it on top of the toilet lid and tried to ring Stan at his research lab in the UCSF School of Medicine. He was not there. He hadn’t been there for the last five weeks. She was disconcerted by that, but even more distressed about the rat. She went to the kitchen and picked up the large pumpkin she had bought for Halloween so that they could play at being Americans. She carried it into the bathroom and placed it carefully in the wok. She filled the rest of the wok with potatoes, then she grabbed a spare roll of gaffer tape they’d used when they were boxing up presents to send back to Stan’s mother, and she ripped off long ribbons to seal the edges of the toilet lid and the rim of the bowl. Only then did she dare to leave the apartment. She walked to the nearest supermarket and bought a two-gallon tub of bleach. She brought it back to the apartment, peeled off the gaffer tape, removed the potatoes and pumpkin, heaved the wok off the toilet lid, flushed the toilet a few more times, then lifted the lid. There was no rat. She poured two gallons of bleach down the toilet and waited for Stan to return.

Stan was not interested in the rat. ‘You should catch it and plunge it into boiling water,’ he said. ‘That’s what my grandmother always said to do.’

When she asked him where he’d been when he was supposed to have been conducting research in the lab, he smirked at her and grew excited.

‘Shall I tell you?’ he considered. Then he smiled. ‘All right, I will. But you have to keep the secret. Actually, I’ll show you after dinner.’

He took her down to the wholesale produce markets around the estuary, stopping in front of an old wooden warehouse with a corrugated iron roof. He folded a handkerchief into a bandanna and tied it around her eyes. Then she heard him unlocking the padlock and hauling back the doors. He guided her inside and flipped on bright overhead lights. He pulled off the bandanna and gestured elaborately. ‘Ta-dah!’

Tien faced the banality of her husband’s artistic vision: spiny assemblages of corroding steel, large canvases slashed with faecal colour, a squat stump of terracotta turd and, in the centre of the room, a large perspex box containing a torn brown paper bag, a milk carton with a pink-striped straw protruding from its open lip, a rotting, half-eaten banana and a mould-encrusted sandwich among a scatter of Smarties. Tien walked up to the box and read its plaintive caption:
Where are the children now?

‘This is what you’ve been doing with your time,’ she stated flatly.

‘Yup.’

‘What about the lab and your clinical work? Your graduate degree?’

‘What about it?’ He gave her what he imagined to be an engaging grin.

Tien looked at him and shook her head slowly. ‘Your mother is paying thousands of dollars for you to study at the UCSF School of Medicine.’

‘I know. How do you think I make the rent for our apartment and this place?’ He took her by the shoulders, looked into her eyes and said earnestly, ‘I’m an artist, Tien. When will the people I love understand that? I must create or wither!’

He hugged her close and rubbed a hand over her back. ‘I’ve lined up a showing at a gallery. Then everyone will see. Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to lie to you anymore. I haven’t enjoyed the experience.’

She didn’t know what to say, and he took her silence for understanding and support. He was especially considerate in his lovemaking that night. There was no membrane of unfortunate but necessary lies separating them now, he told her sleepily. They could connect in total honesty.

Stan’s exhibition took place just before Thanksgiving. Four people turned up and were unanimously rude. They made no effort to hide their contempt. Stan sent Tien home and went to a bar in the downtown district to get wasted. He staggered home after midnight and wanted sex, even though he could barely keep himself—let alone his penis—erect.

‘Make me feel better, darling,’ he slurred, planting a clumsy kiss on her neck.

She pushed him away angrily. ‘Fuck that. You’re pathetic, you know that? You deserved what you got tonight. Here you’ve been lying to your mother and me all these months, brazenly fleecing her of money she thinks she’s investing in your future, and thinking you’re so clever about it. And what have you to show for it? That crap you call your art. It’s rubbish. I’ve always thought so all along, and now you know it too.’

The whip-crack across her cheek resounded in the silent apartment and she staggered back under the force of the blow. She put her left hand up to her cheek to rub it and when she drew it away, there was blood on her palm. He had cut her with his wedding ring. She simply stared at her husband in shock, and he hung his head and began to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m totally pissed. I didn’t know what I was doing but you shouldn’t have said that about my art. I swear it won’t happen again.’

She cleaned him up and tucked him into bed, then she tended to the swelling bruise on her cheek. When she slipped into bed, he turned away from her and said sulkily, ‘I thought you believed in my art. You made me think that you really
got
me. But you were lying to me all this time.’

She did not defend herself because, her outburst that night notwithstanding, she had gotten used to silence. The thoughts in her head no longer connected with her vocal cords. In any case, there was just enough truth in Stan’s accusation to make her feel vaguely guilty. Somehow, he’d managed to make her the villain of their relationship.

. . .

Tien needed to get a job to pay their rent. She didn’t have a green card so she had to work illegally for a Chinese restaurant in their neighbourhood. There were only two staff apart from the chef and his wife. Tien prepared ingredients and washed dishes while a young Hong Kong woman waited on the tables. Her name was Chang TsuiLing, but she wanted to be called Michiko because she thought Japanese girls were much sexier. Michiko was Tien’s first friend in California. She came over to the apartment several times a week when Stan was late and watched TV with Tien. She wore round, yellow-lensed John Lennon glasses, pornographically short skirts festooned with silver chains and thigh-high black stiletto boots which resulted in weekly visits to the reflexologist, and she streaked her hair and the tips of her eyelashes blonde. After they had known each other for about six weeks she invited Tien to a Gaia Goddess evening. She gave Tien a leaflet advertising the event.

She is the sacred mystic womb of the universe which birthed
Pontus and Uranus and all that exists, the transcendent void of
knowing, being and feeling beyond your worst nightmares and
wildest hopes. A chaotic alchemical interconnectedness of
feminine mystery. The supreme joy of all genitalia, the mother
of all pleasures, she is Gaia. She is Earth Goddess. She is you!

When you discover Gaia, you discover your Self. There
are no leaders or teachers to tell you what you know by your
own divine instinct. Our dedicated guides generously
provide the psychic and spiritual protection you need as you
journey deep within your uniquely individual, sacred
Woman-Self to encounter the goddess who will empower
you and break the boundaries of all your limitations to
fulfil your deepest longings
.

On a drab drizzly Monday evening when the restaurant was closed, Tien and Michiko climbed three flights of bare concrete stairs and knocked on a door slathered with thick brown paint. They were welcomed by an athletically toned woman in a kimono whose dirty blonde dreadlocks sprouted out from her fuchsia-flowered gypsy scarf. She introduced herself as Maya, their Gaia guide, and ushered them into a blood-red cave with a black ceiling. Incense smoked in the stuffy, overheated room. Tea-light candles flickered in a wide circle and two reproductions of fertility goddesses—Venus of Willendorf with her soccer-ball head, pendulous breasts and rounded belly, and Venus of Lespugue, shaped like a penis fused with a garlic bulb—were placed on opposite sides of the circle. To Tien’s amazement, she recognised the terracotta tumescence presiding in the centre of the circle. Stan’s clay turd had found a home after all.

‘I went to this electrifying new exhibition by this amazing up-and-coming Chinese-Australian artist,’ Maya explained when Tien mentioned the lump. ‘I recognised the feminine earth forces flowing through it immediately. Very
yin
.’

They were joined by half a dozen other women—eerily similar in form to the Willendorf—who had already stripped naked. Tien and Michiko did likewise. They began with a re-wombing experience, rolling around on the synthetic shag pile of the red carpet to the shivering strains of Ravi Shankar while Maya repeatedly intoned that they were safely wombed in Gaia’s space. After several minutes the music faded away. They lay somnolent on the carpet and listened to Maya’s mesmeric voice.

‘In Gaia’s womb you are safe. You are loved. The universe is tender towards you. You have the answers within. In Gaia’s womb you are in a spiritual space of transformation which awakens you to the essence of your powerful goddess self. Feel the wisdom of the universe welling up in you. Awaken the sacred force of Gaia within you!’

After fifteen minutes they were given razors to shave their pubic hair off. Mirrors were then handed out for them to squat over so that they could look at their vaginas and confront their femaleness without flinching in fear or embarrassment. Tien was astonished at how much she resembled a plucked chicken. She was acutely uncomfortable. She cast her mind back to one of Stan’s anatomy textbooks and steadied herself by labelling what she saw: mons pubis; frenulum, prepuce and glans of clitoris; urethral opening; labia majora and minora, vestibule of vagina. Everything sounded so much more polite in Latin and medicalese. When they’d had sufficient time to accept their goddess femininity, the music came back on and they were ushered into the circle to sit cross-legged around Stan’s deity.

‘This is the Circle of Truth,’ Maya informed them. ‘A charmed and sacred gathering where safety is ensured. Within the circle, you can say anything, be completely honest. You can be yourself. Cry, scream, rage, swear. Let it all out. Whatever you say or do within the circle will not be held against you after this divine ritual is over. There is no-one to judge or to tell you what to think or feel or do. The Circle of Truth protects you.’

They took it in turns to introduce themselves, sharing and emoting volubly. A few of the women were coming off bad relationships. They swore vengeance against men and cried for fear of loneliness, and were comforted by the fleshy press of other women’s bodies melded in a psychic sacred group hug. Then it was Tien’s turn.

‘Well,’ she said nervously. ‘I’m half-American, halfVietnamese-Australian. My father was Cajun-Creole. I never met him. He was lost during the American— sorry, the Vietnam war. I guess I’ve sort of been missing him all my life and wondering about him. I don’t know what happened to him. Anyway, I’m married now.’ She jerked her chin towards the terracotta-clod goddess. ‘In fact, my husband made that.’