The Men in My Country

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emembering is a way to keep someone near. I have remembered now for seven years. And what I try to remember isn’t just the men or the country but also the woman who was me. The me who bought an expensive bottle of champagne one day. Then brought that bottle to a certain man’s place one day at noon. The me who believed that love was worth celebrating, troubled and troubling as that love may be. I have a meeting, the man said, promising to be back by 1 o’clock. At two the woman went shopping. Sat down in a cafe to drink a cup of café au lait. Read a magazine, borrowed from an expatriate friend, a magazine filled with words about a famous poet who wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and then stuck her head in the oven and fell asleep. Later, her husband married the woman he’d been having an affair with and that woman went and put her head in the oven too, as if this head-in-the-oven business were a very cruel but inescapable little copycat trick. Or maybe there was something wrong with the oven. A pilot light that kept going out. At three the woman goes for a walk. At four she decides it is time to celebrate. She returns to his house. Pops open a bottle of champagne. Watches the cork fly high, hitting the ceiling and leaving, she suspects, a mark she can now do nothing about. Will he notice? she wonders. Will he care? All celebrations leave their mark, all travel leaves its trace. She wishes she had bought more bottles of more champagne and she would open every one, hitting and leaving her mark. R ................................................................................ 118 She drinks and drinks and drinks and drinks, one glorious solitary swig after another, and isn’t it interesting, she thinks, that it has taken her so long to discover the pleasure of what that word, swig, means? She decides this is a party and she wants to dance. He isn’t home so she dances anyway, waltzing around his kitchen, moving to the sound of the words in her head, gliding on his dirty hardwood floors, giddy from the sparkling champagne, singing to herself, You have a pencil in your ear, a pencil in your ear. Excuse me, Miss, what’s that? That? Oh, nothing. I have a pencil in my ear. She gets toasted. Toasted. She remembers a night early on, when she’d just arrived in this country . Her neighbors had given her a welcome-to-the-country party. Food. Champagne. A large bouquet of flowers as if she were a princess, a goddamned princess, I tell you, she told Ellen when Ellen called that night from the United States. One of the neighbors, a young handsome man, taught her slowly the names of body parts. Eyes. Me. Nose. Hana. Mouth. Kuchi. Shoulders. Kata. She tried to teach him how to raise a glass of champagne to make a toast. But the word — toast — went over his head. Bread? he said. Yes, he liked bread. She was too toasted at the time to sort things out. And now here she is, several years later, toasted again. Toasted. Her whole body is toasted and aches. Her whole head is filled with junk. Clichés she knows are not quite right. As sorry as a sandwich? As quiet as a rat? She remembers an article from a small-town newspaper long ago. A 78-year-old woman killed her husband. Why? the judge asked. So late in the game. Because he ate my chocolate Easter bunny, she said. She arches her back to get the kinks out, notes she is a cat in heat, eager and urgent and out of control. She takes from her black bag a bottle of perfume. She sprays the perfume into the air, onto his books, into the dull white sheets of his low, narrow bed, indiscriminately spraying, marking this territory, claiming it as her own. She thinks of herself as male and female now, aggressively and prettily able to piss 119 perfume. Perfume all over these stark white walls. Perfume she hopes will leave a stain. She repeats his words now. Love is wide. Love is wide. Love is a wide-assed woman, naked on the bed. A woman covered in gruel, throwing crockery in the...