Where the garden gets really complicated, though, is with the question of tomatoes and corn. Like the West Bank, like Taiwan, like Kashmir, the tomatoes and the corn are still contested territories. My mother plants the tomatoes, but my father is in charge of staking the tomatoes, but then my mother harvests the tomatoes. Don't ask me why! Those are just the rules of engagement. (Or at least they were the rules of engagement last summer. The tomato situation is still evolving.) On the other hand, there is corn. My father plants the corn and my mother harvests the corn, but my father insists on personally mulching the corn once the harvest is done.
And so they toil on, together but separate.
Garden without end, amen.
The peculiar truce of my parents' garden brings to mind a book that a friend of mine, a psychologist named Deborah Luepnitz, published several years ago called Schopenhauer's Porcupines. The operative metaphor of Deborah's book was a story that the pre-Freudian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer told about the essential dilemma of modern human intimacy. Schopenhauer believed that humans, in their love relationships, were like porcupines out on a cold winter night. In order to keep from freezing, the animals huddle close together. But as soon as they are near enough to provide critical warmth, they get poked by each other's quills. Reflexively, to stop the pain and irritation of too much closeness, the porcupines separate. But once they separate, they become cold again. The chill sends them back toward each other once more, only to be impaled all over again by each other's quills. So they retreat again. And then approach again. Endlessly.
"And the cycle repeats," Deborah wrote, "as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing."
Dividing and subdividing their control over such consequential matters as money and children, but also over such seemingly inconsequential matters as beets and blueberries, my parents weave their own version of the porcupine dance, advancing and retreating on each other's territory, still negotiating, still recalibrating, still working after all these years to find the correct distance between autonomy and cooperation--seeking a subtle and elusive balance that will somehow keep this strange plot of intimacy growing. They compromise a lot in the process--sometimes compromising away precious time and energy that they might have preferred to spend doing different things, separate things, if only the other person wasn't in the way. Felipe and I will have to do the same thing when it comes to our own spheres of cultivation--and certainly we would need to learn our own steps of the porcupine dance around the subject of travel.
Still, when it came time to discuss with Felipe my idea of going off to Cambodia without him for a spell, I broached the topic with a degree of skittishness that surprised me. For a few days, I could not seem to find the right approach. I didn't want to feel as though I were asking his permission to go, since that placed him in the role of a master or a parent--and that wouldn't be fair to me. Nor, though, could I imagine sitting down with this nice, considerate man and bluntly informing him that I was heading off alone whether he liked it or not. This would place me in the role of a willful tyrant, which was obviously unfair to him.
The fact was, I was out of practice for this kind of thing. I had been on my own for a while before I'd met Felipe, and I had grown accustomed to shaping my own agenda without having to take account of somebody else's wishes. What's more, up until this point in our love story, our externally mandated travel restrictions (as well as our lives led on separate continents) had always ensured that the two of us had plenty of time alone. But with marriage, everything would now change. We would be together all the time now, and that togetherness would bring trying new limits, because marriage is a binding thing, a taming thing, by its very nature. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It's a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine.
The Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written exquisitely about this subject. He believes that modern couples have been sold a bill of goods when they're told that they can and should have it both ways--that we should all have equal parts intimacy and autonomy in our lives. Somehow, Bauman suggests, we have mistakenly come to believe in our culture that if only we manage our emotional lives correctly we should each be able to experience all the reassuring constancy of marriage without ever once feeling remotely confined or limited. The magic word here--the almost fetishized word here--is "balance," and just about everybody I know these days seems to be seeking that balance with a near-desperate urgency. We are all trying, as Bauman writes, to force our marriages to "empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfill without burdening."
But perhaps this is an unrealistic aspiration? Because love limits, almost by definition. Love narrows. The great expansion we feel in our hearts when we fall in love is matched only by the great restrictions that will necessarily follow. Felipe and I have one of the most easygoing relationships you could possibly imagine, but please do not be fooled: I have utterly claimed this man as my own, and I have therefore fenced him off from the rest of the herd. His energies (sexual, emotional, creative) belong in large part to me, not to anybody else--not even entirely to himself anymore. He owes me things like information, explanations, fidelity, constancy, and details about the most mundane little aspects of his life. It's not like I keep the man in a radio collar, but make no mistake about it--he belongs to me now. And I belong to him, in exactly the same measure.
Which does not mean that I cannot go to Cambodia by myself. It does mean, however, that I need to discuss my plans with Felipe before I leave--as he would do with me were our situations reversed. If he objects to my desire to travel alone, I can argue my point with him, but I am obliged to at least listen to his objections. If he strenuously objects, I can just as strenuously overrule him, but I must select my battles--as must he. If he protests my wishes too often, our marriage will surely break apart. On the other hand, if I constantly demand to live my life away from him, our marriage will just as surely break apart. It's delicate, then, this operation of mutual, quiet, almost velvety oppression. Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never--not even for a moment--pretend that we are not confined.
After a good deal of thinking, I finally brought up the subject of Cambodia with Felipe one morning over breakfast in Bangkok. I selected my words with a ridiculous amount of mindfulness, using such abstruse language that for a time the poor man clearly had no idea what I was talking about. With a good dose of stiff formality and a whole lot of preamble, I awkwardly tried to explain that, while I loved him and was hesitant to leave him alone right now at such a tenuous moment in our lives, I really would like to see the temples in Cambodia . . . and maybe, since he finds ancient ruins so tedious, this was a trip I should perhaps consider undertaking by myself? . . . and maybe it wouldn't kill us to spend a few days apart, given how stressful all the traveling had become?
It took Felipe a few moments to catch the drift of what I was saying, but when the penny finally dropped, he put down his toast and stared at me in frank puzzlement.
"My God, darling!" he said. "What are you even asking me for? Just go!"
So I went.
And my trip to Cambodia was . . .
How shall I explain this?
Cambodia is not a day at the beach. Cambodia is not even a day at the beach if you happen to be spending a day at an actual beach there. Cambodia is hard. Everything about the place felt hard to me. The landscape is hard, beaten down to within an inch of its life. The history is hard, with genocide lingering in recent memory. The faces of the children are hard. The dogs are hard. The poverty was harder than anything I'd ever seen before. It was like the poverty of rural India, but without the verve of India. It was like the poverty of urban Brazil, but without the flash of Brazil. This was just poverty of the dusty and exhausted
variety.
Most of all, though, my guide was hard.
Once I'd secured myself a hotel in Siem Reap, I set out to hire a guide to show me the temples of Angkor Wat, and ended up with a man named Narith--an articulate, knowledgeable, and extremely stern gentleman in his early forties who politely showed me the magnificent ancient ruins, but who, to put it mildly, did not enjoy my company. We did not become friends, Narith and I, though I dearly wished us to. I do not like to meet a new person and not make a new friend, but friendship was never going to grow between Narith and me. Part of the problem was Narith's extraordinarily intimidating demeanor. Everyone has a default emotion, and Narith's was quiet disapproval, which he radiated at every turn. This threw off my composure so much that after two days I barely dared to open my mouth anymore. He made me feel like a foolish child, which was not surprising given that his other job--aside from being a tour guide--was schoolmaster. I'm willing to wager he's terrifyingly effective at it. He admitted to me that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the good old days before the war, when Cambodian families were more intact, and when children were kept well disciplined by regular beatings.
But it wasn't merely Narith's austerity that prohibited us from developing a warm human connection; it was also my fault. I honestly could not figure out how to talk to this man. I was keenly aware of the fact that I was in the presence of a person who had grown up during one of the most brutal spasms of violence the world has ever witnessed. No Cambodian family was left unaffected by the genocide of the 1970s. Anyone who was not tortured or executed in Cambodia during the Pol Pot years merely starved and suffered. You can safely assume, then, that any Cambodian who is forty years old today lived through an absolute inferno of a childhood. Knowing all this, I found it difficult to generate casual conversation with Narith. I could not find any topics that were not freighted with potential references to the not-so-distant past. Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grisly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who had managed to escape death. This leaves one rather desperate to avoid asking questions like "So--is this the bedroom where your brother murdered your sisters?" or "Is this the garage where your father tortured your cousins?" Instead, you just follow along politely behind your guide, and when he says, "Here is a particularly nice old feature of our house," you merely nod and murmur, "Yes, the pergola is lovely . . ."
And you wonder.
Meanwhile, as Narith and I toured the ancient ruins and avoided discussing modern history, we stumbled everywhere on groups of unattended children, whole tattered gangs of them, openly begging. Some of them were missing limbs. The kids without limbs would sit on the corner of an abandoned old edifice, pointing at their amputated legs and calling out, "Land mine! Land mine! Land mine!" As we walked by, the more able-bodied children would follow us, trying to sell me postcards, bracelets, trinkets. Some were pushy, but others tried more subtle angles. "What state are you from in America?" one little boy demanded of me. "If I tell you the capital, you can give me a dollar!" That particular boy followed me for long stretches of the day, throwing out the names of American states and capitals like a shrill, strange poem: "Illinois, madam! Springfield! New York, madam! Albany!" As the day passed, he became increasingly despondent: "California, madam! SACRAMENTO! Texas, madam! AUSTIN!"
Strangled by grief, I offered these kids money, but Narith would only scold me for my handouts. I was to ignore the children, he lectured. I was only making things worse by giving out cash, he warned. I was encouraging a culture of begging, which would spell the end of Cambodia. There were too many of these wild children to help, anyhow, and my boon would only attract more of them. True enough, more children gathered whenever they saw me pulling out bills and coins, and once my Cambodian currency was gone, they still flocked around me. I felt poisoned by the constant repetition of the word "NO" coming out of my own mouth again and again: an awful incantation. The kids became more insistent until Narith decided he'd had enough and scattered them back across the ruins with a barking dismissal.
One afternoon, walking back to our car from a tour of another thirteenth-century palace and trying to change the subject from the begging children, I asked about the nearby forest, wondering about its history. Narith replied, in an apparent non sequitur, "When my father was killed by the Khmer Rouge, the soldiers took our house as a trophy."
I could summon no reply for this, so we walked along in silence.
After a spell, he added, "My mother was sent into the forest with us, with all her children, to try to survive."
I waited for the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story--or at least nothing more that he wanted to share.
"I'm sorry," I said finally. "That must have been terrible."
Narith shot me a dark look of . . . what? Pity? Contempt? Then it passed. "Let us continue with our tour," he said, pointing to a fetid swamp on our left. "This was once a reflecting pool, used by King Jayavarman VII during the twelfth century to study the mirror image of the stars by night . . ."
The next morning, wanting to offer up something to this battered country, I tried to donate blood at the local hospital. I had seen signs all over town announcing a blood shortage and asking tourists for help, but I didn't even have any luck with this venture. The strict Swiss nurse on duty took one look at my low iron levels and refused to accept my blood. She wouldn't even take a half pint from me.
"You are too weak!" she accused me. "You have obviously not been taking care of yourself! You should not be traveling around like this! You should be home, resting!"
That evening--my last evening alone in Cambodia--I wandered around the streets of Siem Reap, trying to relax into the place. But it did not feel safe to be alone in that city. A peculiar feeling of composure and harmony usually settles on me when I'm moving solo through a new landscape (in fact, that very sensation is what I had come to Cambodia to find), but I never reached it on that trip. If anything, I felt like I was in the way, that I was an irritant, an idiot, or even a target. I felt pathetic and bloodless. As I was walking back to my hotel after dinner, a small swarm of children gathered around me, begging again. One boy was missing a foot, and as he hobbled gamely along he stuck out his crutch in front of me, deliberately tripping me. I stumbled, arms flapping clownishly, but did not quite fall.
"Money," said the boy in a flat tone. "Money."
I tried stepping around him again. Nimbly, he stuck out his crutch once more, and I had to basically leap over the thing to dodge it, which seemed awful and insane. The children laughed, and then more children gathered: now it was a spectacle. I picked up my pace and walked faster toward the hotel. The crowd of kids tagged behind me, around me, in front of me. Some of them were laughing and blocking my way, but one very little girl kept pulling at my sleeve and crying out, "Food! Food! Food!" By the time I neared the hotel, I was running. It was shameful.
Whatever equanimity I'd proudly and stubbornly been holding together over the last few chaotic months caved in Cambodia, and caved fast. All my expert-traveler's composure fell to bits--along with all my patience and basic human compassion, apparently--as I found myself panicked and adrenalized and running full-speed away from small, hungry children who were openly begging me for food. When I reached my hotel, I dived into my room and locked the door behind me and pushed my face into a towel and trembled like a shitty little coward for the rest of the night.
So that was my big trip to Cambodia.
One obvious way to read this story, of course, is that perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place--or at least not at that moment. Perhaps my trip had been an excessively willful or even reckless move, given that I was already fatigued from months of travel, and given the strain of Felipe's and my uncertain circumstances. Perhaps this had been no time for me to go proving my independence, or laying down precedents for future freedoms, or testing the boundaries of intimacy
. Perhaps I should have just stayed there in Bangkok with Felipe by the swimming pool the whole time, drinking beer and relaxing, and waiting for our next move together.
Except that I don't like beer and I would not have relaxed. Had I reined in my impulses and stuck around in Bangkok that week, drinking beer and watching the two of us getting on each other's nerves, I might have buried something important within me--something that may have ultimately turned fetid, like King Jayavarman's pool, creating contaminating ramifications for the future. I went to Cambodia because I had to go. It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don't always know the right move.
What I do know is that the day after my encounter with the begging children I flew back to Bangkok and reunited with a Felipe who was calm and relaxed, and who had clearly enjoyed a restorative break from my company. He had passed the days of my absence happily learning how to make balloon animals in order to keep himself busy. Upon my return, therefore, he presented me with a giraffe, a dachshund, and a rattlesnake. He was extraordinarily proud of himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little undone, and was not at all proud of my performance in Cambodia. But I was awfully glad to see this guy. And I was awfully grateful to him for encouraging me to attempt things that are not always entirely safe and that are not always fully explainable and that do not always work out quite as perfectly as I may have dreamed. I am more grateful for that than I can ever say--because, truth be told, I am certain to do this kind of thing again.
So I praised Felipe for his marvelous balloon menagerie, and he listened carefully to my sad stories about Cambodia, and when we were both good and tired we climbed into bed with each other and lashed our lifeboat together once more and continued on with our story.