Drunken Love by Que Son (to read list TXT) 📖

an impoverish family where siblings frequently fought for every scrap of food, that she was a tomboy who had learned to survive on her own while still young, that she had never fallen in love with anyone in her life except the man who had just dumped her, that if she had loved when she was younger, like in her late teens or early twenties, she would have had more children, not just the three that she had now, that she moved to Cambodia in the late 1980’s, then crossed the border into Thailand and lived in a refugee camp for a couple years then migrated to the US.

 

On some occasions, she lent him her Lexus. She asked him to help transport people to work. She bought him soda when it got hot, she gave him foods, she invited him to dinner, among other things. Adam knew what the woman wanted. But he stayed unresponsive. And he thought she knew that he was not interested. So after a while, seeing that her efforts were futile, she dropped the overtures, but continued to treat him nice and with respect--because he was different from all the people there. She once said Adam was like a being from heaven, not from the earth. And he was stunned, not knowing how to respond.

 

After two months, she stopped all her come-ons and started to confide in him that she had been talking to a guy in Orlando, through the introduction of a mutual friend. This woman really needed a man, and she would go to great length to get herself one. One day she said that she was going down to Orlando to meet her perspective boyfriend. And she showed him his pictures. It was a muscled man with dark complexion. According to her, he was also Cambodian, working as a cook, and making decent money. She also said that he had divorced his wife four years ago. He had one daughter but his wife got custody of the child. So he had been lonely for a while and was also interested in finding a woman. That was the story she told him. On his part, Adam encouraged her to go ahead and wished her success. Then one day she flew down to Orlando. After three days she came back and told Adam that she had succeeded in convincing him to move to Philadelphia, to live near her, so they could get to know one another better. That was how it went all summer.

 

During the time in Philadelphia, on Friday afternoons Adam drove back to New York and spent the weekend with Jane. And he started to have sex with her again, feeling much stronger and more invigorated perhaps because of the daily physical labor. His blood pumped faster and color returned to his face and his arms and legs got firmer. He felt well.

 

May, June, then July. One evening after work Adam stopped at an internet café to check out his emails and saw a message that stopped his heart: it was from Eve. Why now, after all these years? He could not believe his eyes, but it was her name on the header. The message was brief and the few things she said in the message were the details only she and he knew. He had thought that they had become non-existing to each other except in the occasional and fleeting thoughts, and that nothing would ever happened between them again. Adam could not figure out how Eve had his email address. Could it be the sister in Viet Nam who had given her his address? Adam glued his eyes to the computer screen--immobilized.

 

In the short email, she asked him how he was and hoped that he reply to her message. He was thrilled to hear from her again, but unsure how to react. It had been 12 years since they had any contact. Adam remembered the last time he was in touch with her was in 1992, and it was a couple of letters and a brief phone conversation. Then all was lost. Now the sudden email from her. Twelve years. Because they had been living in oblivion of each other for so long the possibility of finding each other again was almost non-existent. After reading the message, Adam wondered if he should answer her. Memories of love came back to him and he knew that he still loved her, that she was the only true love of his life. But to reenter her life? Adam was not too sure about that: she was now a wife and a mother with big responsibilities, he believed, I don’t want to disturb the water. So he did not reply to the message, but still wondered if he was doing the right thing not responding to her. Thoughts about Eve now quietly crept into his mind daily but it got lost among a million other fleeting thoughts. He had more immediate concerns.

 

In the days after the message, Adam debated with himself about the matter. What was he going to do now that he had contact with Eve again? One week later he found another message from Eve. She asked him why he had not reply, and wanted to know if he still considered her his "friend." Thinking no more, he immediately replied to the second message. And pretty soon, they started an email conversation. Things of the past came rushing back to him with each email. Eve expressed regret that they had lost one another for so long, and said to him that she still thought about him and loved him despite the time and space between them. Days went by, and slowly Adam felt as if he was falling in love with his old lover all over again even though she was not physically near him and the feeling kept intensifying until one day he found that he was a lovesick man. It was the powerful memories of their young love that resurrected the passion in him.

 

He and Eve wrote to each other daily. She wrote that she regretted Adam did not know her better when they first fell in love, when they were still in Viet Nam--those long lost years of adolescence! She wrote about the years waiting for him, the longing, the hope, the sadness and the desperation. She explained how she had lost faith in him, why she decided to get to get married, and she wrote briefly about her present situation: two teenage children and a husband whom she had no feelings for. She mentioned her hurt pride because of Adam’s rejection, the tragedies that had happened to her at sea, and said that they were the two reasons she had not look for him after she arrived in the America. She could not come to him with a damaged body and a hurt pride, she wrote. Despite the love.

 

One month later, at the end of the summer, Adam moved back to New York because the lawsuit with the landlord demanded his fulltime presence. He continued to exchange messages with Eve. She gave him her cell phone number. All of this happened without Jane’s knowledge. Eve invited Adam--and Jane--to visit her family in San Jose, saying that she would treat them as friends. But Adam was making sure Jane didn’t know he was in contacted with Eve because he knew that to Jane, Eve was a rival, an enemy. The two women had talked at one another once in 1992 while Jane was in jealous rage. So he dismissed Eve's invitation, thinking that it was only diplomacy that made her say so. Besides, he and Eve could not be just friends, because they had been lovers, and lovers they would remain.

 

Days went by and the messages became more and more intimate. They wrote about the memories of their love, the time they were with each other in Da Nang. And Adam increasingly felt that he must see Eve again. He was falling in love with her all over again. The lovesickness in his heart became more acute after each email, and the more he remembered what had happened between them, the more passionate about her he became, and the more he wanted to see her. He told her about his feelings. She wrote back that she wanted to see him too, because it was also her wish, but she just did not know how it could be arranged.

 

And while all this was going on, the lawsuit was settled. Jane had agreed to move out of the apartment with a compensation package of 15,000 dollars and almost two years of free rent. So they found another apartment that cost more but in a better neighborhood, and moved in. After things settled, Jane planned a trip back to Viet Nam. She would go alone. Adam declined to accompany her, citing lack of money and occupation with finding a job--which were true.

 

The train pulls into a station and Shakespeare emerges from his fantasy. It was not his stop, he realizes, then closes his eyes again and imagines the state of mind Adam is in--Adam who was now a lovesick man. Shakespeare thinks up to this point Adam has become obsessed with Eve and thoughts about her has totally occupied his mind--to the exclusion of all else. Adam says to himself--as Shakespeare imagines:

 

"I am a man possessed. But I like the state of mind I am in. Possessed...consumed, devoured by a thought, by one idea. About you. What a long and strange trip it has been, five months now since we found each other, and there is no end in sight.

 

I am a lovesick man. I feel sick right now. I have been sick for the last few months. Nobody knows I am sick. But no one should know. Because there is nothing anyone can do. Yes, this love makes me sick. And I have no immunity. Not that I am sick of love, no, no one should be sick of love. Because to be able to love is a sacred gift from heaven. Rather, the love unfulfilled makes me sick, very sick. The longing to be united with the object of my love is killing me. The sickness is eating me up hour by hour, day by day. All the songs I am listening to now remind me terribly of you. I know I am being selfish, very selfish, because I love but am not satisfied with just that, I want my love to be answered, I want a union with the object of my loving-madness. I thirst for a spiritual and physical union with my beloved. You. Eve. But no union is possible right now, that is why I am so sick. I am sorry, but I am not Jesus or Buddha, I am only a man, a mortal, that is why I am selfish, that is why my heart cries when my call for union with you is not answered.

 

The mind-trip continues and there is no sign of ending. Yeah, I think I understand you better now. But not entirely, there is still some questions unresolved, some unknown that bugs me. You told me about the terrible suffering you had to endure on the sea and what trauma it had left you and how it had changed you. I was sad and felt guilty as you continued to write about what happened to you in those years. You blamed me for abandoning you. You said I was heartless, that I did not care about you, that I did not know you had been waiting for me all those years, that I was responsible for the dissolution of our relationship. That all was my fault. That I had hurt you with my rejection of you, written in the last letter I sent you while I was in America and you were in Ca Mau. You said your pride was badly wounded and you decided to end it with me. I admitted I