The Hundred Secret Senses. Amy Tan
seconds of awkward silence, he looked sheepish and mumbled the way people do when they’re caught arguing with themselves while walking down the sidewalk. Poor guy, I thought, and at that moment my heartstrings went twing.
After class, Simon and I would often take turns buying each other coffee at the Bear’s Lair. There we added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies. We discussed primitivism as a Western-biased concept. Mongrelization as the only longterm answer to racism. Irony, satire, and parody as the deepest forms of truth. He told me he wanted to create his own philosophy, one that would guide his life’s work, that would enable him to make substantive changes in the world. I looked up the word substantive in the dictionary that night, then realized I wanted a Substantive life too. When I was with him, I felt as if a secret and better part of myself had finally been unleashed. I had dated other guys to whom I felt attracted, but those relationships seldom went beyond the usual good times induced by all-night parties, stoned conversations, and sometimes sex, all of which soon grew as stale as morning breath. With Simon, I laughed harder, thought more deeply, felt more passionately about life beyond my own cubbyhole. We could volley ideas back and forth like tennis pros. We wrestled with each other’s minds. We unearthed each other’s past with psychoanalytic gusto.
I thought it was eerie how much we had in common. Both of us had lost a parent before the age of five, he a mother, I a father. We both had owned pet turtles; his died after he accidentally dropped them into a chlorinated swimming pool. We both had been loners as kids, abandoned to caretakers – he to two unmarried sisters of his mother’s, I to Kwan.
‘My mom left me in the hands of someone who talked to ghosts!’ I once told him.
‘God! I’m amazed you aren’t crazier than you already are.’ We laughed, and I felt giddy about our making fun of what had once caused me so much pain.
‘Good ol’ Mom,’ I added. ‘She’s the quintessential social worker, totally obsessed with helping strangers and ignoring the homefront. She’d rather keep an appointment with her manicurist than lift a finger to help her kids. Talk about phony! It wasn’t that she was pathological, but, you know – ’
And Simon jumped in: ‘Yeah, even benign neglect can hurt for a lifetime.’ Which was exactly what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words. And then he clinched my heart: ‘Maybe her lack of attention is what made you as strong as you are today.’ I nodded eagerly as he went on: ‘I was thinking that, because my girlfriend – you know, Elza – well, she lost both parents when she was a baby. Talk about strong-willed – whew!’
That’s how we were together, intimate in every way – up to a point. I sensed we were attracted to each other. From my end it was a strong sexual charge. From his it was more like static cling – which he easily shook off: ‘Hey, Laguni,’ he’d say, and put his hand firmly on my shoulder. ‘I’m bushed, gotta run. But if you want to go over notes this weekend, give me a call.’ With this breezy sendoff, I’d trudge back to my apartment, nothing to do on a Friday night, because I had turned down a date hoping that Simon would ask me out. By then I was stupid-in-love with Simon – goo-goo-eyed, giggly-voiced, floaty-headed, infatuated in the worst way. There were so many times when I lay in bed, disgusted that I was twitching with unspent desire. I wondered: Am I crazy? Am I the only one who’s turned on? Sure, he has a girlfriend. So what? As everyone knows, when you’re in college and changing your mind about a million things, a current girlfriend can turn into a former one overnight.
But Simon didn’t seem to know that I was flirting with him. ‘You know what I like about you?’ he asked me. ‘You treat me like a good buddy. We can talk about anything and we don’t let the other thing get in the way.’
‘The other what?’
‘The fact that we are … Well, you know, the opposite-sex thing.’
‘Really?’ I said, faking astonishment. ‘You mean, I’m a girl but you’re a – I had no idea!’ And then we both broke into hearty guffaws.
At night I’d cry angrily, telling myself that I was a fool. I vowed many times to give up any hope of romance with Simon – as if it were possible to will myself not to be in love! But at least I knew how to put on a good front. I continued to play the jovial good buddy, listening with a smile on my face and a cramp in my heart. I expected the worst. And sure enough, sooner or later, he would bring up Elza, as though he knew she was on my mind as well.
Through three months of masochistic listening I came to know the minutiae of her life: That she lived in Salt Lake City, where she and Simon had grown up, tussling with each other since the fifth grade. That she had a two-inch scar on the back of her left knee the shape and color of an earthworm, a mysterious legacy from infancy. That she was athletic; she kayaked, backpacked, and was an expert cross-country skier. That she was musically gifted, a budding composer, who had studied with Artur Balsam at a famous summer music camp in Blue Hill, Maine. She’d even written her own thematic variation on the Goldberg Variations. ‘Really?’ I said to each praiseworthy thing he said about her. ‘That’s amazing.’
The strange thing is, he kept speaking about her in the present tense. Naturally I thought she was alive in the present time. Once, Simon pointed out I had smeared lipstick on my teeth, and as I hurriedly rubbed it off, he added, ‘Elza doesn’t wear makeup, not even lipstick. She doesn’t believe in it.’ I wanted to scream, What’s there to believe!? You either wear makeup or you don’t! By then I wanted to smack her, a girl so morally upright she had to be the most odious hominid ever to walk planet Earth, in her non-animal hide shoes. Even if Elza had been sweet and insipid, it wouldn’t have mattered, I still would have despised her. To me, Elza didn’t deserve Simon. Why should she have him as one of her perks of life? She deserved an Olympic gold medal for Amazon discus-throwing. She deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for saving retarded baby whales. She deserved to play organ for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Simon, on the other hand, deserved me, someone who could help him discover the recesses of his soul, the secret passageways that Elza had barricaded with constant criticism and disapproval. If I complimented Simon – told him what he had said was profound, for example – he’d say, ‘You think so? Elza says one of my biggest faults is going along with whatever’s nice and easy, that I don’t think things through hard enough.’
‘You can’t believe everything that Elza says.’
‘Yeah, that’s what she says too. She hates it when I just go along with what’s been handed to me as truth. She believes in trusting your own intuitions, sort of like that guy who wrote Walden, what’s his name, Thoreau. Anyway, she thinks it’s important for us to argue, to get to the marrow of what we believe and why.’
‘I hate to argue.’
‘I don’t mean argue in the sense of a fight. More of a debate, like what you and I do.’
I hated being compared and falling short. I tried to sound playful. ‘Oh? So what do you two debate?’
‘Like whether celebrities have a responsibility as symbols and not just as people. Remember when Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted?’
‘Sure,’ I lied.
‘Elza and I both thought he was great, taking a personal stand like that against the war. But then he wins back the heavyweight title and later President Ford invites him to the White House. Elza said, “Can you believe it?” I said, “Hell, if I were invited, I’d go to the White House too.” And she said, “By a Republican president? During an election year?” She wrote him a letter.’
‘The president?’
‘No, Muhammad Ali.’
‘Oh, right. Of course.’
‘Elza says you can’t just talk politics or watch it happen on television. You have to do something, otherwise you’re part of it.’
‘Part of what?’
‘You know, hypocrisy. It’s the same as corruption.’
I