The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (4 page)

The oldest calendar enclosed was from 1960. I flipped through it—nothing but business appointments, unfamiliar names, places, and times. In the middle of it all was a note in my father’s hand:

Then, at the very back, a thin blue airmail envelope, folded neatly into a small rectangle. I took it out and unfolded it. It was addressed to:

I hesitated. Did this unassuming blue onionskin hold the key to my father? I took the letter and walked over to the stove. I could burn it. The flames would transform the
thin paper to ashes in a matter of seconds. I turned on the burner, heard the gas hissing, the automatic ignition clicking, the flame. I held the envelope close to the fire. One move and the family would have its peace. I can’t remember how long I stood in front of the stove; I only know that I suddenly started to cry. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn’t know why I was crying, but the tears just kept coming, harder and faster, until at some point I found myself back on my bed, bawling and sobbing like a little girl.

The clock on my nightstand read 5:20 when I woke. I could still feel the grief in my bones. For the space of a few breaths I couldn’t remember the reason and hoped that it had all been a dream. At the table I unfolded the letter very gently, as if it might pop like a soap bubble in my hands.

I read it a second time and a third, folded it and tucked it back into its envelope. I looked at the time. It was Saturday morning, just after seven. The rain had stopped, the clouds had given way to a deep blue sky under which Manhattan was slowly waking. The sun rose across the East River. It was going to be a cold and beautiful day.

I grabbed a piece of paper in order to make a few notes, to analyze the situation, to come up with a strategy, just as I would have done at the office. But the paper remained blank; I had already passed the point of no return. The decision had been made for me, though I could not have said by whom.

I knew the number for United Airlines by heart. The next flight to Rangoon would be leaving on Sunday and traveling via Hong Kong, then Bangkok. I would have to get a visa there to continue on Wednesday with Thai Air to Burma.

“And the return flight?”

I thought for a moment.

“Leave it open.”

Then I called my mother.

MY MOTHER WAS
already having coffee and reading the
Times
when I got there.

“I’m going out of town tomorrow.” My voice sounded even more cowardly than I had feared. “To Burma.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said without looking up from her paper.

It was with sentences like this that she had been able to silence me all my life. I took a sip of mineral water and looked at my mother. She had had her gray hair colored dark blond and cut short again. Short hair made her look younger, but also more severe. Her sharp nose had grown more prominent over the years. Her upper lip had almost disappeared, and the corners of her mouth, tending ever downward, gave her face an embittered air. Her blue eyes had lost the glint I remembered from my childhood. Was it age, or was it the look of a woman who hadn’t been loved—at least not in the
way she needed or wanted to be? Had she known about Mi Mi and hidden it from her children? She took a sip of coffee; I could not interpret her expression.

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“And your job?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re risking your career.”

She was right. I didn’t know who Mi Mi was, where she was, what role she had played in my father’s life, or whether she was even still alive. I had a name and an old address from some village whose precise location was unclear to me. I’m not the kind of person to act impetuously. I trust my intellect more than my instincts.

Still.

“What do you expect to find over there?” she asked.

“The truth,” I answered. It was supposed to be a statement, but it sounded more like a question.

“Whose truth? His truth? Your truth? I can tell you mine here and now in three sentences. If you care to hear it.” She sounded tired and empty.

“I’d like to know what’s happened to my father.”

“What does it matter now?”

“Maybe he’s still alive.”

“So what if he is. Don’t you think he would have gotten in touch if he had wanted anything more to do with us?”

She could see that I was taken aback and added: “Or is it that you want to play detective?”

I shook my head and looked at her.

“What do you want to know?”

“The truth.”

Slowly she put down the paper and looked at me for a long time. “Your father left me long before the day he disappeared. He betrayed me. Not once and not twice. He betrayed me every hour, every day of the thirty-five years we were married. Not with any lover who accompanied him secretly on his travels or with whom he spent the evenings when he was supposedly working late. I don’t know whether he ever had an affair. It doesn’t matter. He made false promises. He promised himself to me. He became a Catholic for my sake. He repeated the priest’s words at the wedding: ‘In good times and in bad.’ He didn’t mean it. His faith was a sham, and his love for me was a sham. He never gave himself to me, Julia, not even in good times.” She paused.

“Do you think I never asked him about his past? Do you really think I didn’t give a damn about the first twenty years of his life? The first time I asked him he consoled me, gave me that soft, knowing look that I hadn’t yet learned to resist, and promised that one day he would tell me everything. That was before we got married, and I believed him, trusted him. Later I pestered him. I wept and wailed and threatened divorce. I told him I’d move out and come back only when he stopped keeping secrets from me. He would say that he loved me, why wasn’t that enough? How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not
prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?

“After you were born I found an old letter in one of his books. He had written it shortly before our wedding. It was a love letter to a woman in Burma. He wanted to explain it to me, but I didn’t want to hear anything about it. It’s odd, Julia, but a confession, a disclosure, is worthless when it comes at the wrong moment. If it’s too early, it overwhelms us. We’re not ready for it and can’t yet appreciate it. If it’s too late, the opportunity is lost. The mistrust and the disappointment are already too great; the door is already closed. In either case, the very thing that ought to foster intimacy just creates distance. For me, it was too late. I had no more interest in tales. They would not have brought us closer together; they would only have deepened the wounds. I told him I would leave him if I ever found another letter like that, no matter how old it was, and that he would never see me or his children again. I never found anything else, though I went through his things thoroughly every couple of weeks.”

She paused, drained a glass of water, and stared at me. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away and shook her head. For that, too, it was too late.

“How could I defend myself? How could I make him pay for what he was doing to me? I decided to keep secrets of my own. I shared less and less with him, kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. He never asked. As far as he was concerned, if I wanted to tell him something, to share something
with him, I would do it. And so we went on living in parallel worlds until the morning he disappeared.”

She stood up and got another glass of water, walked around the kitchen for a while, sat down again. I remained silent.

“I was young, not even twenty-two, and very naïve when we met. It was at a friend’s birthday party. I saw him coming through the door, tall and lean, with his full lips, a mouth that seemed always to smile slightly. He was good-looking, and women adored him, whether their attention was welcome or not. Maybe he didn’t even realize it. Any one of my girlfriends would have been happy to get him. His strong nose, high forehead, and those narrow cheeks gave his face an ascetic look that attracted everybody. His black, round glasses emphasized his beautiful eyes. There was an ease to his movements, an elegance in his face and voice, an aura that impressed even my parents. He would have made the perfect son-in-law for them—educated, intelligent, flawless manners, self-confident without a trace of arrogance—if only he had been white. Even on their deathbeds they never forgave me for marrying a ‘colored man.’ It was the first and last time that I truly rebelled against them.

“As you know,” she said, “that’s not the kind of person I am. I stepped out of line just once, and I’ve been paying for it the rest of my life.”

She told me my father didn’t want to marry her.

“At first he said that we didn’t know enough about one another, that we ought to wait until we knew one another
better. Later he claimed we were too young, that we ought to take our time. Shortly before the wedding he warned me that he couldn’t love me the way I perhaps expected or needed him to.

“But I wouldn’t listen to him. I wouldn’t believe him. His reluctance, his hesitation, only strengthened my resolve. I wanted him, him and no other. During the first few months I suspected him of having a wife in Burma, but he said that he wasn’t married. That was all he would tell me about those years in his native country. And at that point it didn’t really interest me, anyway. I was convinced that in the long run he wouldn’t be able to resist me and my love. Burma was far away.

“I was the one who fell asleep and woke up next to him,” she said. “I wanted to conquer him. Was it my bruised vanity? Or the well-behaved child from a respectable family rebelling against her parents? What better protest against my father’s world than to marry a dark-skinned man. I don’t know. I still don’t know.

“I’ve tried for many years to find an answer to these questions. Without success. Maybe it was a combination of reasons. By the time I realized that I couldn’t change your father the way I had hoped, it was already too late. At first we stayed together for your sake and your brother’s. Later, we lacked the courage to separate. At least I did. As for your father, I can’t really say what motivated him.

“Go to Burma if that’s what you want,” she said, exhausted. “When you get back I won’t ask you a thing, and
I don’t want you to tell me anything, either. Whatever you find there, it’s no longer of any interest to me.”

I
left the next morning. The limousine to the airport was waiting right outside my building. It was a cold, clear morning. The taxi driver’s breath smoked in the frigid air as he walked back and forth in front of the car. The doorman carried my bags to the car and loaded them into the trunk. I didn’t feel well. I was scared, anxious, and sad. I never realized how unhappy my mother had been in her marriage. I thought of a sentence my mother had said to me the day before: “Your father left me long before the day he disappeared.” And how about me, I thought. How long ago had my father left me?