Behind the Moon (27 page)

She wanted to tell them how frustrated she was with Stan; how he had turned away from her ever since she stopped believing in his art. She hardly ever saw him because he was always in his warehouse studio. She had tried to persuade him to resume his studies but he’d become so hostile that she was afraid of further violence. She was always anxious now. She worried that they would run out of money. She worried that she would get caught and be deported for working illegally. She worried that Stan’s mother would find out what he was doing and blame her. Most of all, she worried that her marriage was not working out the way she had imagined. She could not bear the thought of divorce: the shame in front of Uncle Duong and Auntie Ai-Van and Stephanie-TiffanyMelanie’s happily-ever-after married lives with husbands and children; the humiliation of admitting this particular failure to her mother.

She wanted to confess all to the Circle of Truth, but Maya and the other women were thrilled that Gaia had channelled her creative energies through Stan. They marvelled and questioned her about Stan’s other work. They envied her for being married to an earth-sensitive artist so embedded in the matrix of the universe. And she found that she could not tell them the truth about him.

At the end of the evening, the women were urged to attend a weekend within the circle at a resort out at Sausalito—Gaia’s Journey, Maya called it. They would explore these things in greater depth and learn how to touch their inner divinity. It would only cost four hundred and fifty dollars. It was money that Tien could ill afford, but she wrote out a cheque anyway because she was lonely and unhappy, and she needed the connection with strangers who might be potential friends.

She cooked enough food to feed Stan for a week, packed it into neatly labelled plastic containers and put them in the freezer. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, still going through the motions of marriage in the hope that ritual would one day become reality. He didn’t reply because he did not believe her. In his mind, he had already categorised her as a liar. She did not speak her true feelings to him, therefore he could not trust what she said. And in her heart, Tien believed that he was right. She had never been honest with him.

Nothing was solved by the Gaia’s Journey weekend. Tien gained neither enlightenment nor intimacy with the goddesses but she continued to meet with them just for something to do. Stan encouraged her to keep going. He liked the Gaia goddesses. They appreciated his art. He even earned a few commissions from them.

After a few months, however, Tien felt herself being sucked into an enervating depression where she couldn’t see the point of doing anything, even getting out of bed. She stopped going to the Gaia meetings, quit her illegal job and lounged around the apartment indulging her depression, for it gave her the licence not to worry about Stan, his studies, his mother, or their financial situation. She had a right not to care, she told herself; she was depressed.

It took Stan a while to notice, but when he finally did, he could not contain his irritation. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you these days? You’re not the woman I married. You just lie there doing nothing and feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve let yourself go. Well, just snap out of it.’

So she did. Tien woke up early one morning and made Stan
pho
for breakfast. When he left for his studio, she went to the offices of the International Red Cross and the Salvation Army. She had decided to find out what happened to her father. She wrote letters to the US army and various Vietnam veterans’ associations. She went to the public library every day and began to read about Étienne Thibodeaux’s background. She learned to distinguish Cajun from Creole culture, and she researched oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. She found telephone directories for the state of Louisiana and began to compile a list of phone numbers and addresses for all Thibodeauxs. She knew that the family might have moved, but she had to start somewhere.

Finally, she received a letter from the International Red Cross telling her that Étienne Thibodeaux went missing in action shortly before his tour was due to end. He was presumed dead, but they had traced his family to an address in Lafayette, Louisiana. His parents—Tien’s grandparents—were still alive, living with the younger of their two daughters.

Tien told Stan about her search for her father. She wanted him to accompany her to Lafayette. She had never travelled anywhere new by herself. She was afraid of the left-hand drive of the American car she would have to hire. She was afraid of driving on American roads. She was afraid of getting lost, and she was afraid that the Thibodeauxs would not believe that she was Bucky’s daughter. She needed his help.

Stan was gratified. He agreed at first and she booked two tickets to Baton Rouge rather than Lafayette. She assumed that the airport would be bigger in the state capital, and interstate flights would therefore be more frequent. Then, five days before their trip, Stan pulled out. He’d just been inspired with an incredible idea for a performance art piece underpinned by the Gaia philosophy and he wanted to undergo guidance sessions with Maya and some of the other goddesses to develop his idea further.

‘Phone me and let me know how it all went after you meet the Thibodeauxs,’ he said. ‘You can even reverse the call charges.’

Tien landed at Baton Rouge and hired a car. After getting lost trying to drive out of the rental-car parking lot, she managed to navigate her way onto the Interstate 10 highway. After a quarter of an hour, she realised that she was heading eastwards when she should have been going west. She exited the I-10 and after much panicking and honking from other irate drivers, managed to get back on in the right direction.

It was late afternoon by the time she found the Thibodeauxs’ street. She parked the car opposite their house, unclipped her seatbelt and sat there, watching the house from across the road. She told herself to unlock the door and get out, but she found that she could not do it. She realised that she had not thought about what she was going to say to them. Neither had she brought any proof apart from the letter from the Red Cross that she was Bucky’s child. They had no reason to believe her. She knew nothing about her father or what kind of people he came from. Linh had said that he was kind and easygoing, affectionate and gentle. But Linh had been in love with him; she was not objective. What if the Thibodeauxs were anything like Stan’s family?

She sat there, tortured by indecision. There were very good reasons why she shouldn’t just march straight up to the house and knock on the door. There was probably nobody home at this time of the day. She could see no car in the driveway. It would be better to wait a while until there was some sign of life.

A few minutes later the front door opened. A middleaged woman and her teenage daughter stepped out onto the small porch, followed by an elderly white man and a black woman. They embraced and kissed on the porch, then the elderly couple waved the woman and her daughter goodbye and stepped back inside the house. The woman and daughter walked down the street and turned into a garden path four houses down from the Thibodeauxs’. The woman pushed the front door open, and they both disappeared inside.

Tien simply sat in the car and watched.
Get out of the
damned car and go to the house, you wuss
, she told herself fiercely.
Go! Just fucking go
. But she couldn’t do it. She slumped over the steering wheel and shut her eyes. She wanted Linh, she realised. She should have done this with her mother. She wanted Linh and Gillian and Annabelle and Justin and Gibbo and Tek and even Bob. She wanted her family with her. She didn’t know how long she waited in the car. It was dusk by the time she sat up and wiped her face with her sleeve. She looked at the Thibodeaux house again. There was a light on in one of the windows now. Smoke curled up from behind the roof and she could smell the grilling meat of a barbecue.

She pulled her seatbelt across herself and fastened it. She turned the key in the ignition, switched on the headlights, signalled carefully, and pulled out onto the road. Checking the rear-view mirror for traffic, she swung the car into a U-turn and headed back towards Baton Rouge. She booked herself into a hotel near the airport and rang Stan at the Chinatown apartment, then his warehouse studio. There was no answer. She lay awake in the dark, then caught the earliest flight back to California the next morning.

Later, Tien would be glad that Stan put an end to their marriage. She even came to appreciate the farcical absurdity of its demise. She arrived in Oakland mid-afternoon and caught the AirBART shuttle into town, then took a taxi back to the apartment because she was exhausted and running on fumes. She hadn’t slept properly for a long time. She unlocked the apartment and stepped straight into an extramarital cliché, except Stan wasn’t fucking Michiko in bed or on the floor or, indeed, at all. He was slouched on a chair in white boxers, his head thrown back, right foot on the floor and bony left foot disappearing into Michiko’s mouth. She knelt in front of him in nothing but a Hello Kitty! bra and sucked away noisily at his toes.

Tien realised then that you couldn’t hang around Annabelle Cheong for half your adolescence without something rubbing off. The first thought that jumped into her mind was a revolted, ‘Ee-yer! So
lah-cha
! Dirty like anything! Did he sterilise his feet with Dettol first?’ And after that, her mind went beautifully blank. She watched unmoved as Stan jerked in panic and kicked Michiko in the face. They both scrambled to their feet, simultaneously alarmed and truculent, apologetic and accusing. She looked at them and felt nothing.

‘I’m going to have a shower and then I’m going to go to bed,’ she announced dully. ‘I really need to sleep. Keep the noise down, okay?’

When she crawled under the covers, she slept peacefully for the first time in days.

Stan told Tien they needed some breathing space. He couldn’t think about their marriage right then because he was working on another commission for the Gaia goddesses and helping them to set up a men’s group. He suggested that Tien travel around the country. She agreed. Now that she had made her first solo journey to Louisiana, she felt more confident about organising her travel. She bought a backpack, took some of Stan’s mother’s money from their joint account and booked a Greyhound ticket to New York via the most circuitous route possible. She flew back from New York just before Christmas and found the apartment empty. Stan had moved in with Michiko.

Tien felt lonely, so one Monday evening she climbed the three flights of concrete stairs into the Gaia cave, stripped off her clothes, re-wombed herself, shaved off her pubic hair and examined herself with greater curiosity and enjoyment than before. Then she entered the Circle of Truth where she could be completely honest and there would be no-one to judge her or tell her what to think or feel because she would be protected by the Circle. She told the Gaia goddesses what an arsehole Stan was, and how his work had been disparaged by the few critics and artists who bothered to check it out. She told them about Michiko’s affair with Stan. And she demanded that they do something about it. She wanted justice and sympathy from these women who, even if they weren’t exactly friends, were the only people she knew in San Francisco apart from her husband and Michiko.

‘I’m sorry, you’ve missed the entire point of the journey, Tien,’ Maya said coldly. ‘It is not our place to judge or to condemn. We can’t tell others what to do or what not to do. Each woman must look within and follow her own divinity.’ And she closed the circle.

The women got dressed and Tien stood around waiting to see what would happen next. They were supposed to offer her unconditional love and acceptance, for they were interconnected with her and the universe. Nobody talked to her. Everyone avoided her or slid her hostile glances. Michiko was well-liked among the goddesses. She fitted in. Tien did not.

‘I thought I could be totally honest within the Circle of Truth,’ Tien said softly. ‘You’re not supposed to hold what I say inside the Circle against me after it’s closed.’

Nobody said anything. They turned away and ignored her, even Maya. Tien walked out and closed that chapter of her life.

Tien did not know what to do with herself. She didn’t know what she wanted. There were some days when she couldn’t wait for the divorce to be finalised; she was eager to slough off her marriage and get on with her life. On other days, she didn’t know whether she wanted a divorce at all. How was she going to tell her family that she had failed? And although she didn’t love Stan, she didn’t want to be alone either, especially during the holiday season.

She guilted him into staying with her for Christmas, nagged him into taking her along to his relatives’ house in Marin County for lunch even though everyone was awkward and uncomfortable because they knew about the pending divorce. But Tien was defiant. Her marriage wasn’t officially over yet, and wasn’t the primary reason for a partner so that you didn’t have to spend public holidays alone? But then he’d snuck off after Boxing Day, the bastard, leaving her in Oakland to face New Year’s Eve 1999—the most celebrated New Year’s Eve of the last millennium—utterly alone.

New Year’s Eve is the loneliest night of the year; the one night when everyone knows for certain who their friends are and what their exact status is in their friends’ lives. Christmas is for family; New Year’s Eve for friends. Tien didn’t have any by that time. Stan went off with Michiko to a party in North Beach while Tien curled back into the apartment like a mollusc drawing into its shell. She sprawled on the couch with a bottle of gin and a bag of chips. She turned on the television and watched the world spinning into millennial celebrations—black skies sparked with unfurling flowers of fireworks, the phallic Eiffel Tower aflame, New Yorkers crammed awkwardly into the freezing frame of Times Square waiting for that glitzy ball to drop. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . . She saw a replay of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, molten with cascading light, and she wept. She longed to be back in Sydney. For the first time in years she yearned for her childhood friends. She wanted Gibbo and Justin and she mourned for the stupidity of lost time and squandered friendships.