Face Time – Chapter 28

Lee

Laura makes breakfast for lunch, and I sit at her kitchen table and watch her cook. She slipped on tiny little shorts and a tank top, and every time she bends over I go insane with lust. Not because I just had the best sex of my life, but because I can have that sex for the rest of my life if I play this right. I want her. No one else.

But after we eat, she reaches out her hand to me, and the good mood and conversation of lunchtime ends.

“Come with me, Lee.”

She opens the door to her room and flips on the light. The candles are all out now, and the place still smells like smoke and sex. The area at the foot of her bed is cluttered with clothes so she picks them up in her arms and tosses them on the other side. Pointing at the floor, she says, “Sit here.” I sit down cross-legged and wait as she opens her closet and pulls out an old cardboard box.

“This is everything I brought back from Asia.” On top is a thick journal, and her hand shakes before picking it up, dropping and fumbling for it.

Opening the journal to the last page, she shuts her eyes for a whole minute before handing it to me.

I read, “I’m pregnant. And I have no idea who the father is. I’m just home from the family doctor. He refuses to give me the strong antibiotics I need to kick whatever has lodged itself in my intestines because I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant. How could I let this happen? It doesn’t matter. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with someone about an abortion. I can’t have this baby. I don’t want it. I don’t even know whose it is.”

“Laura…” I start, but I’m not sure how to continue. She looks at me for a moment, her body as rigid as a plank, and nods her head.

“I honestly don’t remember a lot about my time in Asia. I was a very sad and depressed person, and I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I’ve slept with dozens of guys.” She’s staring down at the journal in my hand so she doesn’t have to see my reaction. I think I’m keeping my face calm, but I can’t be sure. Dozens? Plural? I’ve only ever slept with six women. “I was promiscuous and self-destructive. I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to hear all this, but it’s true, and I can’t hide my past from you any longer. I also did a lot of drugs, which is why I can’t remember most of it. It’s a blessing in disguise.”

“What drugs?” I can’t look away from the journal. This all happened to the woman I’m totally in love with.

“Opium, mainly, which was a hard habit to kick when I got back, but I don’t think I was addicted. Even now.” She reaches for the journal and flips the pages to the beginning. On page one is a recount of the first guy she met and slept with. She even numbered him. I start to flip the pages, just searching for the numbers, and they climb steadily through the twenties into the thirties. I stop. I don’t want to know any more.

“Lee, I was only twenty-two and totally fucked up. I couldn’t love that baby because I couldn’t even love myself. I spent months in Asia having sex with any guy I could find because I just wanted to feel something.” She pounds on her chest with her fist, and I reach for her but she shrinks back. “I wanted someone to love me like I couldn’t love myself. My mother couldn’t love me because she was so sad about David’s death, and I had failed at college and life. My father never once loved me or said a kind word to me. David was the only person who ever cared, and he was gone.”

How does something like this happen to such a wonderful woman? I don’t get it at all, and the control I usually have on my rage is building. This is unfair. She never deserved to be treated this way.

“So I had the abortion and it sent my father over the edge. I committed the ultimate sin in his eyes. Only two men have ever called me a whore in my life: my own father and Rene. Two days after writing that final entry, I was having my planned miscarriage (that was what I called it for years) all over the bathroom at home. They gave me pills I could take at home because it was so early in the pregnancy, but I was weak and sick, and the bleeding was way too intense. My mom was catatonic with grief over Aunt Susan’s death and never noticed I was gone, but my dad found me bleeding out on the bathroom floor.”

I should be saying something, doing something, anything, to abate her grief, but I’m immobile. I take a deep breath and thumb through the journal in my hand, stopping on an account of her time in the north of Thailand when she smoked opium and had sex with three guys in a row, numbers thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight. I gasp and immediately wish I had kept my mouth shut.

“Laura…” I look up from the journal in time to see her rise unsteadily to her feet. Her knees are shaking, and she’s so pale she’s practically glowing. She turns and runs for the door, but her knees give way, and she slams into the door jamb. Her forehead smacks into the door frame, and she bursts into tears. I jump up to help her, but Laura makes it out of the room to the bathroom where she kneels over the toilet. I think she’s going to puke up lunch, but nothing comes, and she moans before lying down on the floor.

“I’m sorry, Lee. So sorry.”

“Jesus Christ. You’re bleeding.” I quickly sit down next to her and pull her head onto my lap. The cut is minuscule but bleeding heavily. Goddamn head wounds. I pull the towel off the wall in back of me and put pressure on her forehead.

“You can leave,” she whispers, and my heart breaks. “I’ll understand. Rene found all this out, and we were through. I’m so ashamed.” She begins to cry again so I pull her to my chest and shush her.

For fuck’s sake, I knew what she had to tell me was big, but I didn’t anticipate this.

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to leave you because of this.” I look at the journal where I dropped it on the floor and sigh. “Why did you keep the damned journal? Why did you keep everything?”

She sobs into my chest, whole sobs that shake her entire body. She pushes back from me and holds the towel against her forehead with one hand, swiping at her tears with the other. “Because that was the defining moment of my life. After that, I knew I was so damaged no one else would want me. I tried to live a normal life after, but it was no use. I never thought I’d date again, but you came along.”

The journal is a lie disguised as the truth. What happened to her feels like fiction, not a personal account of Laura’s life. These are things Laura did yet they are not Laura. I know they’re not her, but the ghost of this woman haunts Laura, deep inside her. It haunted her, her mother, her father, and it will never leave.

“This is not you.” I take the journal and shake it at her. “This shit does not define you for the rest of your life. This is a bump in the road, a lesson. It’s not who you really are.”

“It is!” she cries.

“It was you. This is not the Laura I know now. The statute of limitations is over for this. Way over.” I’m such a lawyer some times. I flip through the journal again and this time I see more than the men she slept with. I find passages of just Laura, sad and lonely. They remind me of my time in college. “Do you think I define myself by the shit I did in my twenties?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “No, I don’t. I did a stupid amount of drugs to escape my parents, and I was the asshole who stole my best friend’s girlfriend.”

“Lee…” she gasps. Good, she’s not thinking about herself anymore.

“Yep. I didn’t even date her for very long, and I lost a great friend. Stupid. I still hate myself for that. Then, a year later, I met the most wonderful girl — also, Caucasian with dark brown hair, like you. Her name was Sarah, and we were madly in love… perfect for each other.” I stop for a moment and remember her. We did everything together, traveled, laughed, and cried together, and she was some of the best sex I’ve ever had until today. “But I ruined our relationship because I wouldn’t introduce her to my family. I was afraid of what they’d say and the hard time my mother would give me for dating someone who wasn’t Korean. We broke up, and I regretted it for years.”

I take Laura’s hand in mine, and her fingers are freezing so I rub some warmth into them. “The mistakes we make are lessons. I learned from that mistake. I knew the next time I found real love, I would have to do anything to protect it. What did you learn from your mistakes?”

She bites on her lip, staring past me at the wall behind me. “That I couldn’t fix loneliness by sleeping with a million men. I spent my time in New Orleans celibate for that reason. I had a boyfriend, Paul. He was good to me, sweet and kind, and he was responsible for helping me find a job. He introduced me to my friends, and we had a good time together, but I never slept with him. I couldn’t. It was too soon. I think he might have worked out if I had just opened up a little more. I didn’t tell him anything about Asia.”

“What went wrong with Rene?” I ask, and her eyes fill with tears again.

“That one was almost perfect. We had a good relationship, but my mom spilled the beans about my abortion to him, and he was religious.”

“Why would your mother do such a thing?” How incredibly rude and insensitive. The more I hear about her mother, the more I dislike her.

Laura shrugs her shoulders. “Jealous, I guess. My parents had an awful relationship. Maybe she didn’t want me to be happy. I don’t know. Theresa thinks she’s a narcissist.”

“Sounds like it.” I sigh and open the journal again, flipping to a passage Laura wrote in Bangkok. I read it out loud.

“I missed this anonymity of city life. When you live on the beach, in a small hut, for weeks at a time, everyone knows who you are, where you came from, and who you’ve slept with. But I walk the busy streets of Bangkok, and I’m a number, an empty face, a person without a past, without a future. I’m more at home here. Anonymous. I wouldn’t say I’m happier, but at least, I’m calmer.”

Laura pulls up her knees and rests her back against the tub behind her. “I forgot I wrote that.”

“You’re a beautiful writer. I just don’t understand why you kept this. All you civilians never destroy evidence when you should.” She huffs and smiles for a brief moment. I start flipping through the journal and everything I find that isn’t about with the men she slept with gets ripped out. I set aside passages about the beach, a meal she loved, the temples she visited, and then stop and skim an entry about one man she did sleep with who made her laugh when she was so sad. That’s the only one I keep. Near the end of the book are illustrations too: a rope, a boat on the water, and a flower. The flower immediately makes me jump.

“This is your tattoo.”

She nods at me, pulling the towel from her head. “Am I still bleeding?”

“No.”

She hands me the towel, pulls her hair over her shoulder, and turns around on the floor. Between her shoulder blades is the same flower, inked in purples and greens. I saw it while we were making love earlier and didn’t say anything. “It’s a jasmine flower. I got it to remind me of the baby.”

“Well, the tattoo is permanent and there’s nothing I can do about it. At least, it’s beautiful. But the rest is evidence and has to go.” I set aside the pages I ripped out to keep and leave the bathroom with the journal in my hand. In the kitchen, I open a few cabinets until I find a big stock pot. I grab the lighter from the bedroom and return to the bathroom.

Laura tries to stand up, but I’m afraid of her falling again. “Sit over there, baby.” I point to a spot away from the tub, then place the stock pot in the tub, light the journal, and throw it in.

I sit down next to her, and she rests her head on my shoulder as I hold her hand. “Don’t ever do that to yourself again,” I say, turning and kissing her on the forehead. “Don’t keep the ghosts around to haunt you for the rest of your life. Just let it go.”

—-

The journal burns brightly for a minute before I turn on the water in the shower and put out the flames. It’s gone.

I help Laura get cleaned up and suggest we take an afternoon nap. She climbs into bed with me easily, less shaky than earlier. I pull her against me under the covers and sigh. Her room is dark enough with the blinds down that I will fall asleep in minutes. Outside, New York is covered in a blanket of rain and gray clouds, but we’re warm in bed together.

“Have you told me everything now?” I whisper in her ear.

She sighs and rubs her feet together. “No. But that was the worst of it. It’s enough for now.”

I let my head sink into the pillow, internally sighing. “Okay. I’m not going anywhere. You’re perfect for me.”

“Lee, speak to me in Korean until I fall asleep.”

I love her. I have no idea how it happened or when, and I wish I could tell her without it being too forward or strange, even though we’ve already slept together. But the need to say it is so strong, a compulsion, much like when I blurted out she was my girlfriend.

I start to speak in Korean slowly, low and soothing. I think of every possible romantic and wonderful thing I can say, about how happy I am to have met her, how she fills my days with happiness, how I’d love to marry her and have kids with her. I want to travel with her and live with her. I want to hold her hand and make love to her. I want to hug her when she’s sad. I want her to meet my parents and be a part of my life. I tell her I love her over and over. I say the words saranghae and sarang until I think she’s asleep, but her breathing stops, and she rolls over to face me.

“You love me? Saranghae is ‘I love you,’ right?”

“How do you know so much Korean already?” I ask, trying to be serious but a smile breaks through anyway.

“I studied all the important phrases first.” She tips her face up towards mine and kisses me. Her warm, soft lips are a treat. “I love you, too. I’ve been wanting to say it for a week and haven’t.”

“Me too.” I laugh. “I love you, and nothing you can say about your past is going to make me change my mind.”

“Well, just wait till you meet my mother, and you may run for the hills.”

“Yeah, same here.” I set my head down and kiss her on her forehead again. “Go to sleep.”