Leaving God on Cuba Street
Darkness had fallen on Cuba Street with a certainty that felt unusual and unforgiving to Ruth when she disembarked from her bus at six in the evening. Restaurants and shops had switched on their lights, for it couldn’t be helped: summer had ended, and they had all wound their clocks forward, pushing themselves into a darkness that would spread into their days like spilled ink as they headed into the winter months. This was her second year in New Zealand, and she was still unused to the inverted seasons. She wasn’t yet ready to let go of the long, exhilarating days, of the early evenings spent sauntering up Cuba Street in the fading daylight, past restaurants, galleries, and secondhand bookshops, toward Maya’s fourth-floor apartment on Webb Street. It was only the first of April, and she was sure even Maya wasn’t ready for winter.
Couples and families rushed past her, huddling inside their windbreakers as they complained about the sudden cold. She walked to Little Penang, where she ordered a large Mee Goreng, a curry laksa, and two pandan cakes upon Maya’s request. On a normal evening, she and Maya would have had dinner at Little Penang before walking back to Maya’s apartment, talking about books and complaining about their jobs as the crowds thinned and paved roads took the place of cobblestoned walkways. Or else she would have walked straight to Maya’s apartment from her bus stop before nightfall, anticipating the scent of Maya’s cooking cocooning them both in the warmth of their parents’ kitchens as they talked about their writing, or else traded gossip about the clueless racists they had to deal with at work. For Ruth, it was her coworkers at the Ministry of Education who were surprised she could speak such good English, and for Maya, it was a PhD student consulting her at the university library where she worked, who liked asking Maya about “her war-torn country” and whether it was getting so bad that her entire family would have to flee to New Zealand. “They never try to hide it here, not like in America,” Maya said, as she returned to her cooking, steam rising to her face as she stirred her beef caldereta or her lemongrass fish sinigang. “It’s because they don’t have to,” Ruth would reply, surprising herself with her own candidness as Maya lifted a teaspoon to her mouth, making sure her cooking struck the right balance between asim and anghang. There were times when Ruth didn’t realize how guarded she was in her daily life, how she had grown habituated to keeping her thoughts in check with coworkers, relatives, even the man she’d been dating for nearly a year. It was only with Maya that she could feel this rare sense of ease, knowing that somehow, in this tiny fourth-floor apartment that smelled of her parents’ kitchen, she didn’t have to worry about giving herself away.
But she was sure Maya didn’t have the energy to cook tonight—it was why Ruth told her she’d be there in an hour, even if Maya insisted she was all right. Ruth felt a strange exhilaration as she walked toward Maya’s apartment, clutching the plastic bag that contained their takeaway dinner, thinking of how Maya had relented on the phone when Ruth insisted that she drop by that night. Not that she enjoyed hearing about Maya’s sudden and unexpected breakup, but Ruth couldn’t understand why such a strong and self-assured woman like Maya had fallen so hard for someone like Paolo. She’d never met him, since he lived in Auckland and visited Maya on weekends, but the way Maya talked about him, he sounded a tad dense and not well informed. It seemed that even someone like Maya was capable of making poor decisions and that she, like Ruth, was also flying blind.
Ruth asked to be buzzed upstairs and shared a creaking lift with a middle-aged couple she and Maya often crossed paths with inside this building. The Asian wife never seemed to acknowledge her, but her white husband nodded at her and smiled, as though expecting her, at any moment, to reveal to him her reasons for being here. Maya’s apartment was at the end of the hallway, and when she knocked she could hear a rustling inside, followed by footsteps.
The door swung open, and Maya held the door open for her, looking away even as Ruth tried to meet her gaze. Her nose was red, and so were her eyes. She coughed into a handkerchief as Ruth stepped inside. She saw the opened canisters on Maya’s table, the clumps of crumpled tissue scattered around them like soft, hesitant fists.
“You might catch what I have,” Maya said, as she blew her nose. “I’m really sorry for the mess.”
“Don’t worry about it. You need to eat.”
Ruth set their takeout boxes on Maya’s kitchenette countertop as Maya rushed to the dining table, gathering the tissues into one large ball as she pushed the canisters aside. “I’ve been trying everything to get rid of this cold. I’ve even been drinking Paolo’s green tea, my God.” Apart from the clutter on Maya’s dining table, the rest of her apartment was clean: the kitchen countertop had been wiped down, the sink was empty of dirty dishes, and her tiny living room looked the same as it was whenever Ruth visited: there was no cushion or book that was out of place. She had anticipated a greater mess than this, and Maya kept apologizing to her as she tossed the ball of tissue into the trash and arranged the canisters on her table, her voice straining against an invisible weight as she complained about her landlord, who had inspected her apartment that day and had given her a failing grade because of the mess he had seen.
“Maya,” Ruth said, as Maya picked up the coasters on her table, beautiful coasters with colored bits of glass arranged in intricate floral patterns. Maya slipped them into their decorative glass holder before turning to Ruth. Gone was Maya’s usual look of quiet determination: her face had been stripped bare of this, leaving it naked and soft.
Ruth rushed toward her, pulling her into an embrace. She didn’t expect Maya’s tears to come so soon, but once they did, Ruth felt the tightness in her own chest loosen, like a spinning, unwinding rope.
____
“He told me that talking to me felt like a chore,” Maya said, staring at her cooling Mee Goreng. “And that at some point, near the end, he was just faking it.”
“Fucking asshole,” Ruth said, watching Maya push a fork through her noodles.
“But what if he was just being honest? It’s better than him telling me that he loved me even if he didn’t really mean it.”
“He said that?”
Maya laughed. “Yeah.”
Ruth sighed. “What a terrible thing to say.”
“And if it were true? I made him feel that way too.”
“You were trying your best,” Ruth said, staring at Maya’s leftovers, hoping Maya would at least finish her meal before she left. “You even had sex with him while you were sick. You were doing everything.”
“He said I lacked enthusiasm.”
“But you were sick.” It seemed so uncharacteristic of Maya to be this hard on herself after a man had left her—she had once seemed so independent, so willing to forsake a man’s company for her own happiness, but then again, Ruth had met her before Paolo came along.
Maya leaned back in her chair and said, “Can I tell you something without you laughing at me? You have to promise me not to tell anyone.”
“Of course.” She and Maya had only been friends for less than a year, and though she knew she could keep a secret, the strain in Maya’s voice seemed to test the limits of Ruth’s devotion, checking its firmness before trusting it with the weight of her words.
“I was a virgin before I met Paolo,” Maya said, with a smirk.
Ruth could feel a light blossoming in her head, bringing clarity to the puzzling devastation this man had left behind.
Maya giggled and said, “Which makes me pathetic, no?”
“Of course not.”
“To think that we started planning to move in together, just a month ago,” Maya said, pushing her leftover noodles into a neat pile. “I just wanted to get rid of my virginity and grow up, like everyone else.”
“But you’re a bigger grown-up than I am,” Ruth said, with an incredulous laugh. “You live alone. You came to this country alone. I could never do that.”
“It’s why I wanted him so badly,” Maya said, forking up a clump of noodles and bringing it to her mouth. She chewed, and said, “I thought he’d be the one person who’d make me feel like this was home.”
After promising to call Maya the next day, Ruth stepped outside, glancing up through the rooftop’s opening at wispy clouds sliding across an inverted crescent moon. When she had first arrived in New Zealand, she’d send pictures of this moon to her friends in America, who’d gawk at its strangeness before telling her how much they missed her. But they were all getting on with their lives without her, judging by their Instagram posts that no longer awakened in her the same yearning to return. The more Ruth made peace with her decision to stay on in New Zealand, the less she felt the tug of her past life, of her old friends whose memories of her remained frozen in time. In two weeks, her family would leave her in this country. It was a decision that still made her uncertain and giddy, despite its finality.
Her father’s contract with his construction company in New Zealand had ended, and her family was flying back to Los Angeles in two weeks, even if her father wasn’t sure if he could find a new job in America upon their return. Though she had followed her family to this country in which her father had found a job after being laid off at the engineering firm where he had worked for years, she was not joining them on their flight back to the States. Though New Zealand didn’t feel like home, neither did she feel a strong impetus to return to what her parents insisted on calling home. She was afraid of admitting this to her parents, but she was waiting for America to exert the same pull on her that Maya seemed to feel whenever she spoke about the Philippines, the shared land of Ruth and Maya’s births. Ruth’s parents insisted they were American, but she noticed how her parents became uncharacteristically at ease with Maya whenever she spoke to them in their native Tagalog. With Maya, their laughter spooled away from their chests, filling the air as they wove witticisms in a language that crept to the tip of Ruth’s tongue, before hesitating there.
Outside Maya’s apartment building, she had an even better view of the crescent moon, and a reassuring chill crept around her heart as her eyes traced its smooth, perfect lines. Its sharpness excited her, as though even from this distance, she could reach her hand up and slide a finger down its curved, sharp edge.
She usually quickened her pace after leaving Maya’s apartment, hoping that Caleb wouldn’t see her from his window as she crossed the pedestrian lane into Cuba Street. She wasn’t sure if he still lived here, for he had stopped texting her a year ago, and she knew her fears were irrational whenever she walked past his building, because a full year had passed since he’d made it clear to her that he was seeing someone else.
Her eyes scanned the glassed-in units of his flute-shaped building, noticing the full, unobstructed views of the bedrooms they contained. It was one of the many aspects of this country she had yet to adjust to: the wide-open windows, the implicit trust. As she peered through his window, into a bedroom where Caleb’s presence lingered, she felt violated, exposed. She hastened her steps, feeling his invisible gaze burn through her clothes as she turned away from a window that gawked at her like a fixed, unblinking eye.
Ruth had received Caleb’s final text as she was walking down Lambton Quay on a drizzly afternoon in April of the previous year. As office workers strode past her with their cups of coffee and their swinging leather briefcases, she stepped aside, toward a bench nearby. “We can’t see each other anymore. I have a girlfriend now,” was all his text said.
Inside Glassons Department Store, mannequins wearing leggings and form-fitting merino sweaters fixed their confident, eyeless stares at a sunless sky. When they matched on Tinder, Caleb had told her he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, and she had believed him, because wasn’t this what she had wanted for herself, to have meaningless sex with a man who felt nothing for her in a country where she knew no one? Droplets collected on her phone, and she wiped them away with her thumb as she reread his text. She had visited his apartment two days before, and he had held her as she shuddered, pulling her close and whispering her name in her ear as she vaulted across the sky. As these office workers strode past her, she crossed her arms over her chest, bracing herself against the autumn cold, against the weight of an old, familiar shame.
“You can always change your mind,” her mother said, after their waitress had taken their orders. “Just think about it. There are more opportunities for you in the States.”
“But I couldn’t find a job there,” Ruth said, eyeing the wrapped gift her mother had set beside her. It had the shape and heft of a book, and she was sure she’d set it aside once she unwrapped it at home. Her guess was that it was written by Joel Osteen, his wife, or any of those preachers whose sermons her parents played on a loop in their living room.
“It’s gotten better since we left. With Trump, the economy’s booming,” her mother said, her lips quivering before easing into a smile.
“But I have a job here already,” Ruth said, knowing it was easier to cite this fact than to get into another debate with her mother over politics. She and her parents had drifted further apart since the elections, and though she was sure they knew where she stood, they never hid from her their enthusiasm for their new president whenever they met. There weren’t that many things they could do to prove how American they were, but this was one of them.
“Anyway, you’re always free to follow us whenever you’re ready,” her mother said, flipping open their table’s water flask and filling their glasses. “And whenever Liam feels like he’s ready to come with you to America.”
It was easy to cite her boyfriend, Liam, whenever her parents and siblings questioned her decision to remain in Wellington, and perhaps he was the only tangible reason she had for staying on. She knew it was time for her to strike out on her own, but only Liam could make this decision feel right.
“We will visit you in LA,” Ruth said, as she eyed the expansive views of the city’s harbor from where they sat, thinking of how it would be a long while before she could dine at such an expensive restaurant with the kind of money she earned.
Her mother traced a finger over the colorful balloons jostling for attention on her gift’s wrapping, and said, “Anak, have you ever thought of going to church again?”
Ruth stuttered. “Do you want me to?”
“It’s not a question of me wanting it for you,” her mother said, staring at her gift. Was it a Bible? Ruth wouldn’t be surprised if it was. “It’s a question of whether you still believe in God.”
Ruth swallowed, realizing how dry her throat was. As she took a sip from her glass, her mother fixed her with a pleading look.
“Even if you don’t believe in Him anymore, He’ll always be there for you,” her mother said, tears welling in her eyes. “He’ll give you more strength than any of those pills you take.”
“Mom, let’s not get into that,” Ruth said, her throat growing sore as her roast lamb was served in front of her. “Enjoy,” the waitress chirped, turning away as a tear rolled down Ruth’s cheek.
“I know. I’m sorry, anak,” her mother said, dabbing her eyes with her table napkin. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that your faith will give you strength when we’re not here. God is watching over you, even if you don’t believe in Him.”
“Thank you, Mom,” Ruth said, wiping away her tear with the back of her hand. She picked up her knife, feeling her mother’s eyes on her as it shook in her hand. Putting the knife down, Ruth said, “I’ll be right back,” and picked up her purse as she rose. Her mother nodded absently, knowing exactly what her daughter meant without wanting to know.
Inside the restaurant’s high-ceilinged, wallpapered bathroom, she locked herself in a cubicle, leaned against the wall, and performed the breathing exercises her therapist had taught her. God is watching you, her mother had said, and she could almost feel His eyes judging her as she popped a pill in her mouth and washed it down with water. If she were to listen to her mother, every problem could be solved by a deep and lasting surrender to the Lord, even if she had suffered from these panic attacks before she left their church, her faith in God slipping away from her the more she prayed, and waited, for Him to redeem her from these convulsions that ran through her body like ruptures in the earth. She performed her breathing exercises again, checking her watch, worrying about how much time she was spending inside this cubicle, even if this wasn’t the first time she had made her mother wait. Her mother, as always, had chosen to look away, knowing that God was watching over her daughter, punishing her with an ardor only a beloved child deserved.
She had stopped going to church long before she followed her parents to New Zealand, and yet they persisted in inviting her to the megachurch they attended at the foot of Cuba Street. She needed God in her life, they both told her, and if she were to insist on moving out of the house they rented, the least she could do was to join them in worship once a week, where they could receive God’s blessing together, as a family, before they went their separate ways. No matter what she believed in, they told her, she was still a part of their family, and only God could bring them together to weather any storm that came at them, whether it be her father’s layoff, the foreclosure of their home, or their banishment to this country at the edge of the earth where they had no kin. “He has a plan for all of us,” her father told her when she met them for dinner after their day-long service at the Arise Church. “Which you’ll only comprehend if you accept His will.”
“So what do you do on Sundays?” Cherie, Ruth’s younger sister asked her, as they sipped flat whites at a café across the street from the Michael Fowler Center. It was a Saturday, and in an hour, they’d cross the street to see a free concert; Arise Church’s bright yellow signs weren’t yet plastered around the Center’s pillars, the signs laying their claim to the auditorium’s sharp, irregular architecture that bore the appearance of a collapsing tent from afar. On Sundays, she had walked past the young men and women in yellow Arise T-shirts handing out leaflets to passersby, and she had taken their leaflets, stuffing them into her jacket pocket as she made her way up Cuba Street to Caleb’s apartment. She never looked at these crumpled flyers, and threw them away when she returned to her apartment at the end of the day, and yet she didn’t have the heart to embarrass these smiling young people as they handed her their colorful flyers, hoping perhaps that just one leaflet would win one more soul.
“It’s the only time of the week I can spend on my writing,” Ruth said to Cherie, as she stared at the small queue that was beginning to form outside the auditorium’s door.
She had found herself incapable of spending her Sundays alone at her desk, staring at a page that judged her with its blankness, in a room that faced a hillside and received no light, in a country she hadn’t chosen to immigrate to; without the overwhelming sense of awe that had once enveloped her and suffused her with light as she sang and called out to Jesus in an auditorium filled with lost souls like hers, she felt unmoored, bereft. But inside Caleb’s apartment, as her pleasure rose within her the more he fucked her from behind, she could feel her soul taking flight, soaring through the clear summer sky, slipping through wispy clouds touched by the gentlest light.
As she gripped his sheets and begged him to go harder, her eyes slid down the stretch of Cuba Street, toward the Michael Fowler Center where her family sang and yelled, drunk on the kind of pure, divine ecstasy that had lost its effect on her once she had started engaging in impure thoughts, in the impure pleasures of the flesh. But couldn’t her body be a vessel for receiving His glory if she could feel her body levitating from itself, transcending its own limitations as her breasts jiggled and her body undulated behind a pane of glass? She wanted people to see her, for it was only this that could cement her shame. A harlot would never be welcomed back into the temple of God, but maybe her spirit, freed at last from this impure body, could float through the gates of heaven.
“Will you let me read your writing sometime?” Cherie asked her. “You never show us anything.”
“I will, when it’s ready,” she said, avoiding Cherie’s hopeful look as she traced the inside of her coffee cup’s handle.
At her office desk, she ran a finger down the hardcover edges of her mother’s gift, guessing it was something religious and inspirational, something her mother had purchased at Whitcoulls and found useful for the daughter she had to leave behind. Ruth didn’t even need to unwrap her mother’s gift to know how sappy it would be. In their feeble attempts to open up to her, her parents always managed to grasp at the words, and thoughts, of complete strangers.
After work, she set out for the leafy suburb behind Parliament where Liam lived, forgetting to leave her mother’s gift in her desk drawer to be buried underneath papers and forgotten in time. Maybe Liam would discover it in her backpack and tease her about it, but she needed to be reminded that there was a world outside her parents’ church, a world where their opinions ceased to hold sway. She had clothes and a toothbrush in Liam’s pad, and she was beginning to spend more time in his apartment than the one she shared with two roommates she barely spoke to. She and Liam were practically living together, and she wondered if it was finally time to make it official.
“Is that a present?” Liam asked as they ate, gesturing with his eyes at the wrapped gift peeking out of her backpack’s unzipped mouth.
She shrugged, piercing a ziti noodle with her fork. “It’s from my mum. I met her for lunch today.”
He narrowed his eyes. “And you haven’t opened it yet?”
“I don’t have to open it to know what’s in it.”
He rose from his seat and made his way to his lounge, where her backpack leaned against the back of his couch. “But I don’t know what’s in it,” he said, carrying it back to the dining table, where he returned to his seat, pouted at her, and said, “May I?”
“Sure.” She stared at her food, unable to hide her embarrassment as he smirked and tore open her gift.
“Aww.” He smiled at its cover and turned it to face her. Love Your Life: Living Happy, Healthy, and Whole, it read, beside a smiling Victoria Osteen.
“Gross.” She was touched but was unsure if Liam needed to know this.
“But it’s sweet.” He grinned.
“Yeah, I guess.” She reached her hand toward the book, and he handed it to her.
In Love Your Life, Victoria Osteen speaks directly to women and gives them a pathway to understanding the great responsibility, and how to learn to embrace its beautiful choices. She believes that you must teach yourself the principles of self-love in order to be able to pass them on. Osteen speaks nearly every week about the role of women to the large congregation that makes up the Lakewood Church in Texas.
“Yeah. It’s sweet.” She set the book on the table. “Wait until you read its contents, though.”
Liam snatched the book away and began paging through it. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” he said, settling on a page. “ ‘When I look back over my life, I can see where I missed out on some God-given opportunities,’ ” he read aloud in a singsong voice. “ ‘Maybe you are saying the same thing. If so, I want to encourage you: don’t live in regret.’ Doesn’t sound too bad,” he said, snapping the book shut.
“You can keep it,” she said, before forking up the rest of her ziti and bringing it to her mouth.
“You’ve never brought me to your church,” Liam said, the grin on his face refusing to ease.
“Their church,” she said, dabbing her mouth with her napkin. “And why the hell would you want to go?”
“I don’t know, maybe I just want to see what your parents look like when they’re speaking in tongues.” He giggled, then said, “It was a joke.”
She was still getting used to the stealth of his jokes, the way they often came at her when she was least prepared for them. She never joked about his parents, perhaps because she didn’t know how she could make fun of their casual racism: after all, she’d still be the object of ridicule if she repeated his mother’s questions about whether she knew the meanings of commonly used words in English, or whether she knew how a dishwasher worked.
“Seriously though,” he said, his grin finally easing. “Sometimes you just disappear without telling me anything.”
“What do you mean?” She put down her fork, startled by this sudden turn.
“You know, like when you went up to Martinborough last weekend, I only learned about it when you were on the train,” he said, shrugging as he fingered his place mat’s fringe. “Or when you went up to the Kapiti Coast without inviting me.”
“But I told you about those trips.”
“You did, but you didn’t ask me if I wanted to come with you.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to come with me,” she said, having lost her appetite. She didn’t want him to be with her the weekend she had gone up to Martinborough, but it wasn’t because she had fallen out of love with him: with her family’s impending departure, she needed time alone to think, and with him, she was simply unable to gather her thoughts.
They had only been seeing each other for less than a year, and they weren’t yet officially living together. Her weekends, as far as she was concerned, were still hers.
He rose, taking his empty plate with him to the sink. “Why don’t you want me to come along with you?”
“Does it hurt you?”
He leaned against the kitchen sink and said, “Yes, it does.”
She stared at her uneaten ziti, unable to rise from her chair and dump the remains of her dinner in the trash. She knew this was the right response to his demands: to show her displeasure, to raise a fuss. But she merely felt her stomach sink as he ran water over his plate, and when he asked her if she wanted dessert, she simply said yes. As she watched him scoop ice cream into little cut-glass bowls, she felt like a child again, cowed by the silent authority of an adult. When he set her bowl before her, asking her if she wanted him to take her plate away, she nodded, for he was being kind to her now, and she didn’t have the heart to embarrass him.
As she sat in a café facing Martinborough’s tiny World War I memorial that served as its main square, watching women in summer dresses and men in shorts walking, hand in hand, in the direction of the vineyards, she told herself that she was happy, that there was nowhere else in the world that she wanted to be. It would be different once her family had left this country for good, but while she was still at peace with her decision, she hoped to savor its finality. No longer was she depending on her parents to teach her where to go, for she was forging her own path, in a country where she had no blood kin to tell her what was right and no religion to steer her away from the life she wanted to live.
If Liam had probed her any further, she probably would’ve admitted to him that she had enjoyed taking long walks alone down the quiet streets of Martinborough, past vineyards stretching as far as the eye could see. She wasn’t exactly a wine person, but she’d pop into wineries and fork up twenty dollars for wine tastings, emptying her glass as couples walked past her, trading furtive smiles in between sips of wine. She was surprised to find that she didn’t yearn for Liam’s company as she watched the sun set over these vineyards, feeling lighthearted and tipsy from all the wine she had imbibed. Didn’t he realize that she had sacrificed everything, even her family, to be with him? It was true that she probably wouldn’t have claimed her independence without him, but the least he could have given her in exchange for her sacrifice was the occasional weekend alone. But maybe this was what he feared: that if she could enjoy her own company, perhaps she could find a better man.
Ruth didn’t expect Maya to appear cheerful and refreshed as she walked through the doors of this hole-in-the-wall that served baskets of fish and chips alongside metal bowls of steaming pho. Ruth had expected to see her distraught and lacking in sleep, so was caught unprepared for the light chirp in Maya’s voice as she ordered a bowl of rare beef pho and a can of coconut water at the restaurant’s till. “You seem fine,” Ruth said, as they made their way to the small table Ruth had reserved for them. “Other people can’t get out of bed after a breakup.”
“That’s just silly,” Maya said, laughing. “Of course I have to get out of bed to eat.”
She had seen just how broken Maya had been in the hours after Paolo had dumped her, and surely her brokenness lingered beneath this bright façade.
“So, I went to this walking meditation class at the Botanical Gardens last Sunday, and it was great,” Maya said, as they waited for their orders to be served.
“What’s that?” Ruth asked, hoping she didn’t sound rude.
Maya’s eyes widened with excitement, her fingers twitching as they formed a shy triangle on the table’s edge. “It’s like meditation, but you’re walking, and you’re grounding yourself in the present by feeling the earth beneath you as you walk.” She flipped open their table’s water flask and filled their glasses, then added, “It’s like normal meditation, except that you’re using the act of walking to ground yourself.”
“I didn’t know you meditated,” Ruth said, glancing at the menu board pinned above their heads, at the pictures of hamburgers and fish and chips displayed right beside pictures of pho. The pho at this restaurant was excellent and cheap, which was why she and Maya kept coming back, but she wanted to try their fish and chips this time—somehow, she just had to understand the strange logic behind this awkward pairing of cuisines.
“I do yoga at the university, and there’s this weekly meditation class I started going to again after I stopped it last year.” Maya pursed her lips and added, “It’s helping me a lot.”
“What about having fun?” Ruth asked, hoping this suggestion would help lighten the mood. Maya was going at this with a seriousness that worried Ruth, as though Maya could simply file away what had happened to her with a walking meditation class and a firm resolve to move on.
Maya laughed. “I signed up for a swing class the other day, if that’s what you mean.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Ruth said, realizing that she was confronting the same kind of stubbornness she had sensed in Maya the first time they met. There was a part of Maya that insisted on doing things the right way, no matter what. It had to be the reason why she had remained a virgin until she met Paolo—and Ruth felt somewhat disappointed to learn that Maya wouldn’t even try to rub out the stain Paolo had left on her by at least sleeping with another man.
“You know what I mean,” Ruth said, with a smile.
“I don’t think I’m ready to date right now,” Maya said, giving their waiter a perfunctory smile as he set Ruth’s fish and chips before her.
Ruth took a hot chip, bit into it, and said, “You don’t have to go on dates. I mean, just have fun.”
Maya stared at her, as though she had difficulty comprehending what Ruth meant, and said, “I don’t have time for that.”
“But everyone has time for fun.”
“I just want to concentrate on myself, that’s all.” Maya’s bowl of beef pho was served, and she avoided Ruth’s eyes as she pulled her chopsticks apart.
“I’m sure Paolo’s doing it too.” She hadn’t planned to go in this deep with Maya, but Maya had to have a breaking point, and it didn’t seem fair to be lied to when she was Maya’s friend, and they both knew she was hurting.
Maya stirred her noodles with her chopsticks and said, “I don’t care what he’s doing right now.”
As Ruth munched on her fish and chips, she observed how Maya fumbled with her chopsticks, setting them down with unsteady hands before taking her spoon and immersing it cautiously into her soup. Ruth had only succeeded in making her uncomfortable, but maybe it would lead them to another unburdening similar to what she had witnessed in Maya’s apartment just a week before. Maya was human, just like her, and who was she to claim she was above temptation, that she could make a clean, uncomplicated break with her past? Losing Paolo had surely cast her adrift, so why couldn’t she just lose herself in the messiness of her heartbreak and rejoice in her newfound freedom?
“And how’s your writing?” Maya asked, without lifting her eyes from her meal.
“I don’t know,” Ruth said, knocked off balance by Maya’s question. “Why do you ask?”
“You say that everyone has time to sleep around,” Maya said, resting her chopsticks on the lip of her bowl. “So I wondered if you finally found time for your writing.”
____
Ruth didn’t end her meeting with Maya by causing a scene but listened to Maya talk about the swing class she had signed up for, feeling Maya’s words sink deep into her like an anchor taking root within the pit of her stomach. She had nothing more to say to Maya as they parted ways at her bus stop, and as she watched Maya make her way up the stretch of Cuba Street to her apartment, Ruth remembered what she had planned to ask Maya at the beginning of the evening: whether it was right to listen to the warning bells ringing in her ears after her conversation with Liam.
“How’s Maya?” Liam texted her, when she was seated in a city bus.
“Way better than I thought,” Ruth replied. “Likely faking it till she makes it.” She always knew that Maya was uptight, so what made her think they could ever be alike?
“Poor thing. Dinner tomorrow night?”
She waited until she was home to answer him. “Ok. Text you tomorrow.”
After undressing and preparing for bed, she opened her laptop, scrolling through her Instagram feed before finally deciding to open the folder that contained everything she had written after graduating college four years before. She hadn’t looked at any of these files for months, including the only story she had attempted to write in New Zealand. When Ruth had gathered the courage to show the story to her, Maya had told her, “I’m struggling to find a plot.”
Maya had been right: the story made absolutely no sense, and Ruth cringed at the oblique descriptions of sex, at images that failed to capture the lightness she felt as Caleb brought her toward the peak of her pleasure. She had avoided the most intimate details of their relationship, choosing, instead, to be vague. “Flecks of light dancing on your glistening skin”: wasn’t that a cliché? She slammed her laptop closed and returned to bed.
Was Caleb’s girlfriend prettier and better in bed? Ruth switched off her bedside lamp, hoping that the darkness would obliterate these thoughts completely. She stared at the moonlit leaves outside her bedroom window, at a moon that had waxed in the time since she had last noticed it, before she’d grown oblivious to its presence in the night sky.
She rose from bed and picked up her phone from her bedside table, scrolling through it before finding Caleb’s number. It felt like ages since they had last seen each other, even though it had hardly been a year. A lot had changed in her life since then, and perhaps a lot had changed in his.
Liam would know nothing of this as she typed out a text and sent it to Caleb. She and Liam could still remain together, without Liam knowing about this exchange. It was the act of teasing the boundaries of her relationship with Liam that excited her, just as the lines became more solid and distinct. All she needed was to know how Caleb was, and just like that, she’d be teetering on the edge.
Her phone bloomed with light. “Doing great, how are you?”
“I’m ok,” she answered, hesitating to say anything more.
It took a few more minutes before she received a response. “My girlfriend’s in Hastings this week,” he typed. He then added, “Do you want to have some fun?”
Her face grew hot, and she quickly switched off her phone.
The heels of her boots clicked with purpose as she walked past tea shops, boutiques, and a chocolate café on Willis Street at four in the afternoon. She was to meet Liam for dinner at seven in the evening, and there was no need for her to rush back to his apartment at the opposite end of town. This was her time, and she was going to use it whichever way she wanted.
Her footsteps slowed when she reached the brick-paved section of Cuba Street that was only open to foot traffic. She took a seat on a park bench, right in front of a concrete lizard that frowned at her as a pair of blond children slipped down the slide behind it. They snapped onto their feet and ran to the Bucket Fountain, just as the bottommost bucket tipped over, splashing water into the bottom pool and spraying water onto their jubilant, screaming faces.
She pulled her jacket over her chest, glancing to her right, toward Caleb’s apartment, which faced Cuba Street’s farthermost end. The lines of his apartment building grew sharper and more distinct as daylight faded, and soon it would be evening; did he still live here, or had he moved to a different address? His texts hadn’t given her clues.
As a late afternoon chill settled upon her, she felt a giddiness filling her body that surely wasn’t love, but lacked the heaviness of duty. Her legs turned liquid while she rose from the park bench, and she felt herself swimming as she walked past restaurants and stationery shops. Her heart pounded as she walked past homeless men asking for change and mom-and-pop Malaysian restaurants reopening for dinnertime. She paused at a street corner a block away from his apartment and checked her phone. “Are you missing me?” he had texted her that morning. She hadn’t replied to him since the previous night and wasn’t sure how long she could maintain her silence.
She came to a halt at the end of Cuba Street, beside a bench where a bearded man in a hoodie and grimy puffer jacket sat. “Could you spare some change, miss?” the man asked, his insistent tone prodding her hesitating limbs.
She stared through Caleb’s window, remembering the times when Caleb would squeeze her neck, making her lightheaded and faint as he brought her closer to the edge of her pleasure. There was a buoyancy that came from teetering on this thin, precarious knifepoint, its sharpness slicing her away from the messiness of her surroundings, before Caleb released her, bringing her back to a world of tangible boundaries as she gasped for air. There was safety to be found in Caleb’s light-filled room, in his arms that held her as she gasped, then giggled, which was why she’d ask him to do it again: there was no finer rush than returning to earth after wavering on the edge of an abyss. Did Liam suspect this was how she had spent her weekends? She was beginning to like the idea of Liam watching her in horror as another man used her like a filthy rag.
She took another step forward, but her chest gripped her and she staggered back. She stumbled toward the bench and held its back to steady herself, breathing hard.
“Miss, are you all right?” the man on the bench asked her.
She sank into the bench beside him, breathing in the man’s sharp, earthy scent as her heart thrashed and fluttered.
“Just breathe, miss,” she could hear the man saying, her vision blurring, then sharpening in the waning afternoon light.
The man’s stench rose through his thick, grimy jacket while her breathing eased. When their eyes met, she felt her body convulse with an old, tired sorrow, as though emitting a sigh. This stranger with chapped lips and kind eyes had no idea what had just happened to her, and yet with him, her body could finally collapse around its own grief.
“Hey, miss, it’s all right,” the man said, his voice thick and faraway. Her sadness was a tide that pulled her into its quiet churning, and in its depths, she felt her body’s yearnings grow still.
Monica Macansantos is a 2024–2025 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Returning to My Father’s Kitchen (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2025) and the story collection Love and Other Rituals (Grattan Street Press, 2022). A former James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, The Hopkins Review, Literary Hub, among others.