Phnom Penh
It was our last day together. After we visited Choung Ek and the Royal Palace, Lijsa and I went for a walk by the river to occupy the short time before her flight home. The annual harvest festival would begin in a few days and some preliminary boat races splashed by on the broad water, like early French Quarter parades a week before Mardi Gras. The esplanade thronged with students and lovers, rowers and watchers, tourists and laborers. It was hot -- blunt-hot, sun-hot, silent-hot despite the crowds.
Lijsa bought a pineapple from a street vendor. We returned to the guesthouse, got her backpack from my room, and went outside to find her a moto to the airport. First we took a picture, me holding her camera out at arm's length and shooting the two of us. Our pressed cheeks would have been sun-scalded and heat-oiled, her cold sore nearly gone. I wish the photo was not of the two of us but a longer shot, so that you could see me aiming the camera, see us creating the moment of travel there on the third-floor walkway: but I have never seen the picture.
That last line was true when I wrote it, and so was the one about not hearing from her since the short email I read in Winslow a month later. I liked that total narrative closure: a photo I have never seen, of a woman I will never see again. But they're not true anymore. Not only did she get back in touch last summer, Lijsa actually visited me in the US -- and she brought the pictures. The one of us two is cut off vertically, so that you can see only one face: mine. I'm sure it should be the other way around. I'm almost angry about the mistake. The curtailment of Lijsa offends the eternal truth of that moment on the walkway, in which it is her golden face that endures, her doctor's poise and bravery and curiosity; while I am in my darkness, effaced. Instead there is my flat, oddly absent smile affixed for the camera, and next to it not black but white, an angel's void. The photo shows a different truth, but a truth nonetheless, my truth: the mugshot of my consummate solitude, no more or less expressive than the faces of prisoners on the boards at Tuol Sleng.
Now we are standing on the corner where moto drivers vie to take Lijsa to the airport. Suddenly a plutonian thunderstorm blows in, low and green and angry. Things become unstable, foundations shake, color flees in the wind. She puts on the plastic orange poncho that she had removed new from its package in Siem Reap. By now it is risibly tattered, more holes than plastic. She gives me her pineapple. Sweet dolorous fruit. I am hungry. We are in Cambodia. She is about to be gone and she kisses me long and unshy on a crowded corner, and while she kisses me two million people, ten thousand motos, and the endless delugent clouds race past -- all Phnom Penh bustles by as if in a time lapse, as if it is the next afternoon by the time her parted lips part from mine. She has kissed me that long, it seems, with calm assurance and mortal certainty, as though she knows she must go now to the Underworld but we will be rejoined at the Reckoning. She gets on the back of the moto and disappears, as they say, in the throng, which closes around her like a book.
Three minutes later, the rain comes. Three minutes after that, it goes again.
She was smooth, rare, and iridescent, like a pearl -- and also lucksome like a pearl. Luck, by definition, must change. After two weeks we might have hated each other. But we were together for only one, and our incompatibilities had no time to obtrude. Blissful and hot, like fed lions on the plain, we lay on the deck of a speedboat to Phnom Penh. Her appearance in my Sweet Dreams was so sudden and outlandish -- yet so natural, so irrefutable -- that it forced me to reconsider faith. It made me want to say that Luck is another word for God.
She left me with direction: Go to the beach. Take a break from the hard travel. That's what she would do, she said, were she staying in Cambodia. But she was not, so I felt a surrogate responsibility to go to the beach for her. And as always I went where I was led, even if my guide was leaving me to go alone. I heard the road to the coast was good, so I took it.
Next Week
Sihanoukville: {...and now what?...}
