Kyra Read online

  I had always appreciated Randy’s calm, his patience with students and with colleagues. I had liked his skepticism about the term cross-cultural, the bemused look on his face as to who was doing the crossing, and on whose terms. In Thailand, among these quiet mountain people, he had taken on an aura of grace. Like water finding its level. His private life had always been private. What I did experience with him was a remarkable perceptiveness and a kindness that seemed without limit. We had arrived after the rice harvest, during the dry season, which the Akha called the “people’s season.” The rainy season belonged to the spirits. He wanted me to see the village replacement ceremony that ushered in the claiming or clearing of new fields, the restoration or building of new homes, depending on whether the tribe was migrating or staying put, and the construction or restoration of the three gates that marked the entrance to the village. He helped me to struggle with the question of how you could have boundaries without having barriers. Think about encompassment, he said, the sense of being surrounded, protected rather than kept out or hemmed in. Everything is porous, he said, his face tanned by the sun. There is always a center in every house, every village, and yet the center can shift, just as there is a sense of being at once in motion and still. Like a dancer, I thought, beginning to grasp it not as a concept but in my body. My inner compass reset and I found myself walking more freely, speaking more slowly, feeling less guarded, more sure.

  I handed Anna the letter. “Here, read this.” She had settled on the sofa beside me, her feet tucked under her, her robe flowing over her knees. She picked up my tea and took a sip, her eyes scanning the lines on the page. She read it twice and then looked up, hesitant, I could see, to place her hand on the scale. “They might have asked you first,” she said, “but then you were away.” A far-off look in her eyes. I started to say something but then she said, “Why not give yourself a week. Wait until your body has landed.”

  I looked at the phone poised on the wall in the kitchen, as if ready to spring into action at any moment. I was grateful Andreas had told Peter to wait for my call.

  Back at sea level now, on an island surrounded by water, the cells of my body registered the change. Walking on the beach one morning, my thoughts drifted to the Akha word nyma. It means “heart-mind,” the center of the body to which the soul is connected. When the soul wanders off, the Akha have a ritual for calling it back. They believe that when one heart joins with another, in friendship or love, the souls also join.

  Like with Simon, I thought.

  I knew Anna saw a problem with this idea, but to me it made sense. Simon and I had been nested, like person and household, lined up with the cosmos. When that happens, the nyma, the heart-mind, is jo sha, meaning level, and then one is contented, at ease. It was important for people’s heart-minds to be at ease rather than unsettled. In the village, discussions would continue until everyone’s nyma was jo sha. If a child cried a lot or demanded too much of others or did what he or she was not supposed to do, their nyma was said to be too big. But a person with a large nyma would not be afraid of others, would not frighten quickly. Being a migratory people, the Akha always saw the potential for shift—what was too big in one place might be advantageous in another.

  I tried to explain this to Anna. I assumed she would understand. She was shifting her life, but she was also distracted. Her mind was on oysters, she was working with Tony. I watched her carefully, wondering, as she would say, what’s up.

  The first time I saw Simon, he was wearing sandals, blond curls wreathing his face. I had transferred into the architecture program, abandoning biology with its endless classification. I had signed up for a seminar on the city. He had come in late, folded his body over the long table, and begun writing furiously in his notebook. Then he’d looked up with a wonder or curiosity so radiant that he looked like an angel. An annunciation had come into my life.

  We fell in love quickly. For both of us, it was the first time. I had had boyfriends, crushes, some that lasted for months, one for over a year. But this was like the once in once upon a time. We felt no two people had ever experienced what we did—our souls, our bodies, were joined. There were the inevitable conflicts and tensions, but neither of us ever turned back. And now he was gone, and I…I was not going to turn back. I would move forward, but with him, as if he were still here, our heart-minds joined. Without him, I would be a half-soul.

  Felicia called a few days after I got back. “Darling,” she said, her Viennese accent recalling a world I had let go. “How was your trip?” She wasn’t interested in hearing about the Akha. After the minimal politeness of a few questions, she could no longer contain herself. “I have news for you, actually two messages. My cousin, you know, your friend Andreas, is in Barcelona doing this fantastic new opera about Nixon, but he’s coming back in June. The second, but perhaps someone has already told you.” She didn’t pause to find out. “Richard Livingston is bringing your Tosca to…”—she never could quite manage Nashawena—“to your island. This summer. He loved it. It’s a marvelous way to let people know about your project.”

  I hadn’t called Peter yet. I wasn’t sure what I thought about Tosca on Nashawena. I was uneasy about Andreas coming.

  “Richard might have asked me,” I said.

  “He was planning to,” Felicia countered, “but he thought you’d be pleased. And as for my cousin, I know you like Andreas. Now you’ll have him for the summer.”

  “Tosca is an indoor opera,” I said. “I’m surprised Andreas is willing to do it outside.”

  “He said he would if the cast was willing. Like your city, it will be an experiment. He could not start now again with new singers. But he was waiting also to know what you thought.”

  There was silence on the line.

  I thought of the island protecting new growth. It wasn’t really the moment to draw attention to the project, nowhere near done. Still. The train had already left the station, it would take a boulder now to derail it. Richard would have raised the money, not hard after the rave reviews, and knowing him, he probably had contacted a ferry service about bringing people over for the performances. A vision of Glyndebourne, people in evening dress, picnics in wicker baskets. But this was New England, and as it turned out they came in summer dresses and shorts. Andreas’s stipulation was met, two of the trios were available, and they adjusted the schedule accordingly. They would perform on Saturdays and Sundays, weather permitting.

  “Come see me, sweetheart,” Felicia said, closing the conversation. I resisted the order, wondering what Andreas thought I thought.

  A knot formed in my stomach. They might have contacted me. There were ways, even in Thailand. I replaced the phone and steadied myself against the counter. I went to the sink and ran the water, staring at the pine outside the window, its branches studded with new yellow-green cones. I filled a glass, took a sip, and carried it across the room.

  The tide was coming in, the marsh filling. There were the practical questions: would the buildings be ready to accommodate the performers, would the amphitheater be finished. There were other questions too. Where would he stay, would he be bringing his father and son? The problem with Felicia is…I stopped. Everyone means well, Anna would say. I took a long drink, the well water sweet, an aftertaste of iron. To the Akha, one’s zang may be different from another’s, but not better in the sense of truer. It’s just a different type of zang. They have a phrase for this, Randy had told me one day when we were sitting outside the hut they had built for him, his arms freckled from the sun. “To each his own.” I had said it sounded Western. He had looked at me skeptically. “In the West, you can’t say different without saying better or worse. To the Akha, when one spirit priest chants with a different verse from another spirit priest, he is viewed as practicing a different type of zang, not a true or false version of it,” he had said. I had said, “Come off it, Randy, I get it.” Still, with Felicia, she assumed her way was right. It’s the Viennese-zang, I told myself, wondering what else Andrea
s had said to her. I picked up the pillow with the Aramaic design. Speak to me, I said.

  That evening, I called Peter and said it was okay with me. “I knew it would be,” he said, which I found irritating. But construction was moving fast, I was busy with the project, there were decisions to be made each day, so I let it go. And now that I think about it, what it really boiled down to was the theater was ready and I wanted to see him.

  Days of misty fog alternated with days of sun. The beach plums blossomed, and the Gulf Stream must have come nearer to the shore because by mid-June the water was warm. Anna and Tony were together much of the time, busy with their oyster hatchery, going over to the Vineyard to learn how to do it from the oyster farm on Tisbury Great Pond. In the evenings, they pored over books and catalogues. Tony would leave late, steering his boat back to the Vineyard across the Sound. I wondered why he didn’t stay over, whether he had stayed over while I was away. Our household was beginning to encompass his lithe body, his restless energy, his eyes searching the sea. I shrouded myself in my leave, rearranged my room, and tried to give them space.

  I had left a message on my office phone saying that I was away. I ignored the paper on Akha settlement structure I had promised to write for a journal on urban design. In the mornings, I would check in with construction and then head off with my watercolors, taking a sandwich and a thermos of tea. I was trying to capture the shifts in light and color. When it rained, I spent the days reading, curled up on my bed.

  If someone asked what I was doing, I would say “not much,” meaning nothing that registered on the Cambridge Richter scale. With her therapy practice closed, Anna was also off the chart. When I asked her what was happening with Tony, she shrugged me off. “I’ll let you know when I know.”

  They came in mid-June, Andreas, the performers, the technical crew. I went to meet the boat at the dock. I had moved into the theater, his space, but he had invited me in. This wasn’t my idea. That freed me from responsibility. Perhaps it was fate, whatever that meant, I told myself, as I watched Andreas climb onto the pier. Our eyes met, questioning, and suddenly we laughed. Here we were, but it was as if we had been moved by forces beyond our control.

  Enough of the housing was ready, thanks to a great spurt at the end on the part of Grant and his crew. I had set aside one of the cottages for Andreas, with room for Jesse and Abe, who would be coming at the end of June. I was grateful for this time alone with Andreas.

  It had been two months, we’d been in different parts of the world. There was a lot to talk about, including the plans for the summer. He said that he worried that this was an imposition, an intrusion on my leave. I said it was. I thought it was presumptuous on everyone’s part. He didn’t disagree. I felt him listening, his face attentive, waiting. I said I wanted to write about my experiences in Thailand while they were still fresh, before I lost the feel of it. The life there was so different from this life. I had thought I needed quiet, which was difficult at best with the ongoing construction. I worried about inviting the public into what was still a construction site. But the theater was at the far end of the site, away from where they were working, and the performances would only be on the weekends. Andreas’s interest in what I had experienced might spur me to actually do the writing. As for my leave, it had been extended. A faculty grant I had applied for came through. My chairman was pleased, and thanks to his flexibility I wouldn’t be teaching again until February. By the end of the conversation, I felt we had aired everything and moved on.

  Rehearsals began, the design questions were minimal. There was no church, no walls, only trees and a stage with several levels. We were back to the challenge of creating an intimacy between performers and audience, now outdoors. The darkness will do it, Andreas said. But darkness came late in June.

  “Let’s go and sit in the space,” I said.

  We went at night to get the feel of how it would be and so Andreas could check the acoustics in the night air.

  It was the last week of June, just after the solstice. I don’t know if it was the light or the feel of summer in the air, or whether the Akhazang was still with me, but all the spaces felt new—as if a wind or a tide had swept through. With the Akha, there was no word for forever.

  Patches of clover dotted the grass, white against the green.

  It was hard to sort out my feelings; everything was changing, the earth was shifting, swelling into summer, and my body—I had been living at such a high altitude. Now I felt the sea—my body pulsing with its rhythms.

  We were sitting on one of the risers that had been sunk into the ground, stone holding the earth that rose now in steps from the performance space up the side of the hill. The top buttons of his shirt were open, the arms of his sweater tied around his shoulders in a knot. I watched the knot rise and fall with his breathing.

  It was not that anything special happened that night. We talked about the opera, checked out the acoustics, he told me what had happened in Boston, the performances growing through the run. The success had made him edgy. He wanted to go further, strip the performance down more. I thought he was totally absorbed by his work, but then he turned to me and said, “I’ve missed you.”

  And it was different. At that moment. I mean, it didn’t sound different from other things we had said to each other. Working together, we had become friends. The first time I brought him to Nashawena, when we threw stones into the sea, I thought he was a playful man. That night at the Harvest when he told me about his life, I thought he was courageous, as one thinks of people who have lived through great suffering. But there was also a gentleness to him. He was used to picking up subtle shifts in emotion. It’s what made him such a good director. I had seen it in his work with actors, and also with me.

  “What?” he said, the trees slowly absorbing the light.

  I had been thinking about the look of solemnity on Simon’s face the night he was shot. There was something else, something I had forgotten. Anton’s betrayal had been so shocking that I had blocked it out. But now it came back. As they were taking him outside, Simon had turned to me. The expression on his face was one of pure love. “Kyra, go,” he had said. “Leave Cyprus. Do that for me. Go.” And it occurred to me that maybe what he meant was that he wanted me to live.

  The thought startled me. My body righted itself.

  His knees rose up like pillars. Evening stars dotted the sky. He wasn’t directing. He didn’t say anything. He picked up a twig and turned it slowly.

  I didn’t want to say anything about it, at least not yet. It was too new a thought, that Simon had wanted me to live.

  I turned to Andreas.

  “I know about betrayal,” I said quietly.

  “Then we both know,” he said, “to be careful.”

  Which is exactly what we didn’t do.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I thought of cathedrals, walls like a thin skin, filtering light, letting it in. I turned on the sheets, the count of stitches, the weaving together of threads. There was something different about this man—a kind of freedom, a latitude I had never felt before in my life. I turned my head on the pillow and willed myself to sleep.

  In the first light of morning, I went into Anna’s room. I used to do this when we were children, climb into bed with her, my older sister.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Of what?” She turned, half asleep.

  “I don’t know.”

  Now it seems prophetic. Because I really didn’t know.

  I’m trying to go back to how it was then, climb into that walled garden, that summer. Because I didn’t see over the wall.

  We found a clearing at the top of the woods, the ground flat, the bay on one side, the sea on the other, a grassy spot between ledges of rock. We spread a blanket and took off our clothes, laying them on the hot rock. The woods smelled of wild gardenias—a startling smell. Like nakedness is startling, the first time. We were seeing in the way that painters see, washing our eyes. We had undressed each other, unho
oking, unzipping, watching, waiting for the flinch of retraction—but I thought, but I wanted, but you promised—and finding—no—flesh—yes—and beauty, yes, and that gesture, the readiness, the nakedness, and yes, the knowledge that now we could wound each other. Would this become another story about wounds, exposed now to the sun, healing over, scar tissue, to remove the scab, break the bone again, the surgeon skilled, tight-lipped, determined this time to set it right.

  “Lie down,” he said to me, with a gentleness that is just now unbearable. “Lie still. Wait. Let it happen.”

  And I did.

  Maybe it was the smell of wild gardenias that led us to forget what we both knew, about wounds. Or maybe it was the discovery that there is such a thing as a wild gardenia—

  He ran his finger along my body, touching first my shoulder and then following the line down along the round of my breast, across my belly, through the valley of my groin to the length of my thigh and leg.

  “Breathe,” he said. I was holding my breath and then the smell of the gardenias came into me.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  I did not see the shadow, the wingspread blocking the sun. The air was thick with summer. I couldn’t see.