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  “I’ve always been good at making money,” he said, “but I never learned how to save the shit. I drink too much wine. I was overprotective of my children and I’ll probably always be overprotective of you. I’m paranoid—my natural Brazilianness makes me that way—so whenever I misunderstand what’s going on around me, I always assume the worst. I’ve lost friends because of this, and I always regret it, but that’s just the way I am. I can be antisocial and temperamental and defensive. I am a man of routine, which means I’m boring. I have very little patience with idiots.” He smiled and tried to leaven up the moment. “Also, I can’t look at you without wanting to have sex with you.”

  “I can work with that,” I said.

  There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo. My narcissistic neediness, left unchecked, has every bit as much potential to sabotage a relationship as Felipe’s financial daredevilry, or his hastiness to assume the worst in moments of uncertainty. If we are at all self-aware, we work hard to keep these more dicey aspects of our natures under control, but they don’t go away. Also good to note: If Felipe has character flaws that he cannot change in himself, it would be unwise of me to believe that I could change them on his behalf. Likewise in reverse, of course. And some of the things that we cannot change about ourselves are mirthless to behold. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.

  With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness. “All human beings have failings,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. (And she—one-half of a very complex, sometimes unhappy, but ultimately epic marriage—knew what she was talking about.) “All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”

  Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions—someone’s idiocies, even—is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, in the daily acceptance of your partner’s most tiresome, irritating faults.

  I’m not suggesting that anyone should learn to “tolerate” abuse, neglect, disrespect, alcoholism, philandering, or contempt, and I certainly don’t think that couples whose marriages have become fetid tombs of sorrow should simply buck up and deal with it. “I just didn’t know how many more coats of paint I could put on my heart,” a friend of mine said in tears after she had left her husband—and who, with any sort of conscience, would reproach her for ditching that misery? There are marriages that simply rot over time, and some of them must end. Leaving a blighted marriage is not necessarily a moral failure, then, but can sometimes represent the opposite of quitting: the beginning of hope.

  So, no, when I mention “tolerance,” I’m not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible around a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock-star moments of divine ecstasy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way—in some quietly measureless way—all the same?

  And even beyond the flaws, there are just some simple differences between Felipe and me that we will both have to accept. He will never—I promise you—attend a yoga class with me, no matter how many times I may try to convince him that he would absolutely love it. (He would absolutely not love it.) We will never meditate together on a weekend spiritual retreat. I will never get him to cut back on all the red meat, or to do some sort of faddish fasting cleanse with me, just for the fun of it. I will never get him to smooth out his temperament, which burns at sometimes exhausting extremes. He will never take up hobbies with me, I am certain of this. We will not stroll through the farmer’s market hand in hand, or go on a hike together specifically to identify wildflowers. And although he is happy to sit and listen to me talk all day long about why I love Henry James, he will never read the collected works of Henry James by my side—so this most exquisite pleasure of mine must remain a private one.

  Similarly, there are pleasures in his life that I will never share. We grew up in different decades in different hemispheres; I sometimes miss his cultural references and jokes by a mile. (Or, I should say, by a kilometer.) We never raised children together, so Felipe can’t reminisce to his partner for hours on end about what Zo and Erica were like when they were little kids—as he might have done had he stayed married to their mother for thirty years. Felipe relishes fine wines almost to the point of holy rapture, but any good wine is wasted on me. He loves to speak French; I don’t understand French. He would prefer to linger lazily in bed with me all morning, but if I’m not awake and doing something productive by dawn, I begin to twitch with a kind of ferocious Yankee mania. Moreover, Felipe will never have as quiet a life with me as he might want. He’s solitary; I am not. Like a dog, I have pack needs; like a cat, he prefers a quieter house. As long as he is married to me, his house will never be quiet.

  And may I add: This is only a partial list.

  Some of these differences are significant, others not so much, but all of them are inalterable. In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy. We humans come into this world—as Aristophanes so beautifully explained—feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.) Desire is the severed umbilicus that is always with us, always bleeding and wanting and longing for flawless union. Forgiveness is the nurse who knows that such immaculate mergers are impossible, but that maybe we can live on together anyhow if we are polite and kind and careful not to spill too much blood.

  There are moments when I can almost see the space that separates Felipe from me—and that always will separate us—despite my lifelong yearning to be rendered whole by somebody else’s love, despite all my efforts over the years to find someone who would be perfect for me and who, in turn, would allow me to become some sort of perfected being. Instead, our dissimilarities and our faults hover between us always, like a shadowy wave. But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of Intimacy herself, balancing right there on that very wave of difference—actually standing there right between us—actually (heaven help us) standing a chance.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marriage and Women

  TODAY THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME IS

  HOW TO JUGGLE WORK, LOVE, HOME AND CHILDREN.

  —Betty Friedan, The Second Stage

  During our last week in Luang Prabang, we met a young man named Keo.

  Keo was a friend of Khamsy, who ran the tiny hotel on the Mekong River where Felipe and I had been staying for some time already. Once I’d fully explored Luang Prabang both on foot and bicycle, once I’d exhausted myself spying on the monks, once I knew every street and every temple of this small city, I finally asked Khamsy if he might have an English-speaking friend with a car, who could
perhaps take us around the mountains outside the city.

  Khamsy, thereafter, had generously produced Keo, who had in turn generously produced his uncle’s automobile—and away we went.

  Keo was a young man of twenty-one years who had many interests in life. I know this to be a fact, for it was among the first things that he told me: “I am a young man of twenty-one years who has many interests in life.” Keo also explained to me that he had been born very poor—the youngest of seven children in a poor family in the poorest country in Southeast Asia—but that he had always been foremost in school on account of his tremendous mental diligence. Only one student a year is named “Best Student in English” and this Best Student in English was always Keo, which was why all the teachers enjoyed calling on Keo in class because Keo always knew the correct answers. Keo also assured me that he knew everything about food. Not only Laotian food, but also French food, because he was once a waiter in a French restaurant, and therefore he would happily share his knowledge with me on these subjects. Also, Keo had worked for a while with the elephants at an elephant camp for tourists, so there was a great deal that he knew about elephants.

  To demonstrate how much he knew about elephants, Keo asked me, immediately on meeting me, “Can you guess how many toenails an elephant has on its front feet?”

  At random, I guessed three.

  “You are false,” said Keo. “I will permit you to guess again.”

  I guessed five.

  “Unfortunately you are still false,” Keo said. “So I will tell you the answer. There are four toenails on an elephant’s front feet. Now, how about the back feet?”

  I guessed four.

  “Unfortunately you are false. I will allow you to guess again.”

  I guessed three.

  “You are still false. There are five toenails on an elephant’s back feet. Now, can you guess how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk can hold?”

  I could not. I could not even imagine how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk could hold. But Keo knew: eight liters! As he also knew, I’m afraid, hundreds of other facts about elephants. Therefore, spending a whole day driving through the Laotian mountains with Keo was certainly an education in pachyderm biology! But Keo knew about other subjects, too. As he explained carefully, “It is not only facts and explanations about elephants about which I shall inform you. I also know a great deal about fighting fish.”

  For that is exactly the sort of young man of twenty-one years that Keo was. And that is the reason Felipe elected not to join me on my day trips outside of Luang Prabang—because one of Felipe’s other flaws (although he did not mention it on his list) is that he has a very low level of tolerance for being quizzed relentlessly about elephant toenails by serious young men of twenty-one years.

  I liked Keo, though. I have an inherent affection for the Keos of the world. Keo was naturally curious and enthusiastic, and he was patient with my curiosity and my enthusiasms. Whatever questions I asked him, no matter how arbitrary, he was always willing to attempt an answer. Sometimes his answers were informed by his rich sense of Laotian history; at other times his replies were more reductive. One afternoon, for instance, we were driving through an immensely poor mountain village, where the people’s houses had dirt floors, no doors, and windows cut roughly out of corrugated steel. And yet, as with so many of the places I’d seen in rural Laos, many of these huts had expensive television satellite dishes tacked onto their roofs. I pondered in silence the question of why somebody would choose to invest in a satellite dish before investing in, say, a door. Finally I asked Keo, “Why is it so important to these people that they have satellite dishes?” He just shrugged and said, “Because TV reception is really bad out here.”

  But most of my questions to Keo were about marriage, of course, that being the theme of my year. Keo was more than happy to explain to me how marriage was done in Laos. Keo said that a wedding is the most important event in a Laotian person’s life. Only birth and death come close for momentousness, and sometimes it’s hard to plan parties around them. Therefore a wedding is always a huge occasion. Keo himself, he informed me, had invited seven hundred people to his own wedding, just last year. This is standard, he said. Like most Laotians, Keo has, as he admitted, “too many cousins, too many friends. And we must invite them all.”

  “Did all seven hundred guests come to your wedding?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” he assured me. “Over one thousand people came!”

  Because what happens at a typical Laotian wedding is that every cousin and every friend invites all their cousins and all their friends (and guests of guests sometimes bring guests), and since the host must never turn anybody away, things can get out of hand quite quickly.

  “Would you like me to instruct you now with facts and information about the traditional wedding gift of a traditional Laotian marriage?” Keo asked.

  I would like that very much, I said, and so Keo explained. When a Laotian couple is about to get married, they send invitation cards to each guest. The guests take these original invitation cards (with their names and addresses on them), fold the cards into the shape of a small envelope, and stick some money inside. On the wedding day, all these envelopes go into a giant wooden box. This immense donation is the money with which the couple will begin their new life together. This is why Keo and his bride invited so many guests to the wedding: to guarantee the highest possible cash infusion.

  Later, when the wedding party is over, the bride and groom sit up all night and count the money. While the groom counts, the bride sits with a notebook, writing down exactly how much money was given by each guest. This is not so that detailed thank-you notes can be written later (as my WASP-y mind immediately assumed), but so that a careful accounting can be kept forever. That notebook—which is really a banking ledger—will be stored in a safe place, to be consulted many times over the coming years. Such that, five years later, when your cousin down in Vientiane gets married, you will go check that old notebook and confirm how much money he gave to you on your wedding day, and then you will give him back the exact same amount of money on the occasion of his marriage. In fact, you will give him back a tiny bit more money than he gave you, as interest.

  “Adjusted for inflation!” as Keo explained proudly.

  The wedding money, then, is not really a gift: It’s an exhaustively catalogued and ever-shifting loan, circulating from one family to the next as each new couple starts a life together. You use your wedding money to get yourself going in the world, to buy a piece of property or start a small business, and then, as you settle into prosperity, you pay that money back slowly over the years, one wedding at a time.

  This system makes brilliant sense in a country of such extreme poverty and economic chaos. Laos suffered for decades behind the most restrictive communistic “Bamboo Curtain” in all of Asia, where one incompetent government after another presided over a financial scorched earth policy, and where national banks withered and died in corrupt and incompetent hands. In response, the people gathered together their pennies and turned their wedding ceremonies into a banking system that really worked: the nation’s only truly trustworthy National Trust. This entire social contract was built on the collective understanding that, as a young bride and groom, your wedding money doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the community, and the community must be paid back. With interest. To a certain extent, this means that your marriage doesn’t entirely belong to you, either; it also belongs to the community, which will be expecting a dividend out of your union. Your marriage, in effect, becomes a business in which everyone around you owns a literal share.

  The stakes of that share became clearer to me one afternoon when Keo drove me far out of the mountains of Luang Prabang to a tiny village called Ban Phanom—a distant lowland community populated by an ethnic minority called the Leu, a people who had fled to Laos from China a few centuries earlier, seeking relief from prejudice and persecution, bringing with them only their silkworms and t
heir agricultural skills. Keo had a friend from university who lived in the village and was now working as a weaver, just like every other Leu woman around. This girl and her mother had agreed to meet with me and talk to me about marriage, and Keo had agreed to translate.

  The family lived in a clean square bamboo house with a concrete floor. There were no windows, in order to keep out the ferocious sun. The effect, once you were inside the house, was something like sitting in a giant wicker sewing basket—which was fitting in this culture of gifted weavers. The women brought me a tiny stool to sit on and a glass of water. The house was almost empty of furniture, but in the living room were displayed the family’s most valuable objects, lined up in a row in order of importance: a brand-new loom, a brand-new motorcycle, and a brand-new television.

  Keo’s friend was named Joy, and her mother was Ting—an attractive, roundish woman in her forties. While the daughter sat in silence, hemming a silk textile, her mother bubbled over with enthusiasm, so I directed all my questions at Mom. I asked Ting about the traditions of marriage in her particular village and she said that it was all fairly simple. If a boy likes a girl, and the girl likes the boy in return, then the parents will meet and talk over a plan. If all goes well, both families will soon find themselves visiting a special monk, who will consult the Buddhist calendar to find an auspicious date for the couple to marry. Then the young people will marry, with everyone in the community lending money. And those marriages last forever, Ting was eager to explain, because there is no such thing as divorce in the village of Ban Phanom.

  Now I had heard remarks like this before in my travels. And I always take it with a grain of salt, because nowhere in the world is there “no such thing as divorce.” If you dig a bit, you will always find a story buried somewhere about a marriage that failed. Everywhere. Trust me. It all reminds me of that moment in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth when a gossipy old society lady observes: “There is a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.” (And the “case of appendicitis,” by the way, was polite old Edwardian code for “abortion”—and that happens everywhere, too, and sometimes in the most surprising circles.)