I.
Thanksgiving.
There are twelve of us, in my condo, my dining table joined to the folding table I photograph silver against, the two of them under one cloth. I know seven of the people at the table and am related to four. The turkey is dry. The turkey is dry every year, my sister having faithfully reproduced our mother’s methods, including the one that produces breast meat with the moisture content and approximate texture of industrial-grade insulation, and tonight I can hear it, the small dry rasp of the serrated knife at the far end where my niece’s boyfriend is sawing and pretending he is not sawing. Cranberry sauce from a can. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows, one corner of the marshmallows scorched where my sister lost track of the broiler, and the smell of that burnt corner is the best thing in the room. And the annual discussion of whether yams and sweet potatoes are the same thing, nineteen consecutive Thanksgivings and counting, unresolved because resolving it would deprive the table of its one reliable topic that doesn’t involve politics, religion, or the romantic failures of anyone present.
Dave is here. Dave is always here: Thanksgiving is the one American holiday that functions as a collection point for people with nowhere else to go, and that covers the recently divorced, the geographically displaced, and the two middle-aged gay men at the end of the table whose arrangement has outlasted every marriage represented by the other ten guests. Nobody has ever asked what we are. At some point in the last few years the family simply filed us, as families do instead of asking, and the filing is generous and completely wrong and I have never corrected it because the wrong file is the one with no follow-up questions in it.
Nobody at this table knows Dave was in Bangkok with me this year. Nobody knows there were two beds in that room, or who slept in which, or that the bar on Soi Twilight spent one evening quietly working out what a man is worth when he turns up with a second one. Dave passes me the cranberry sauce and asks my sister about her knee. We have not discussed that trip once since we got back, not on the plane, not at LAX, not here, and the not discussing it is the most married thing the two of us have ever done.
What we discuss instead is success. The nephew’s internship. The refinance my brother-in-law closed at 3.1 percent, his war story, his body count. My niece’s promotion at a company that does something with logistics software, no two accounts agree on what, but her new title contains the word senior, and my sister says it back twice, senior, handling it like a coin she suspects is real. This is the American liturgy: rates, titles, square footage. I have a verse of my own, the store’s feedback score, the quarter’s margins, the number I check at 2 AM to confirm that God is still where I left him, but you cannot say the baht is at 30.72 over dry turkey without someone asking why a silver dealer needs it to the second decimal, and the honest answer is a person, and the person is not discussable, so I nod at senior with everyone else and pass the yams.
My brother-in-law, who operates on the principle that the best question is the one nobody wants to answer, asks: “So when’s your next trip?”
The question lands and the table hears it. Not because the question is hostile. My brother-in-law is not hostile. He is bored, and the bored man’s weapon of choice is inquiry. But because “the trip” is the family’s euphemism for the thing no one discusses: that I fly to Thailand multiple times a year for reasons that have been explained as “silver business” so many times that the explanation has achieved the status of received truth even though everyone at the table, including the cranberry sauce, knows it’s only half the story.
“January,” I say.
Dave is looking at the cranberry sauce. He has been looking at the cranberry sauce for a while now. He does not look up, and he does not stop looking down either, and the difference between those two things is the whole conversation we have not had since LAX. Then he asks my sister whether she ever got the second opinion on the knee, the same knee he asked about an hour ago, and the table goes with him, because Dave has spent thirty years knowing exactly when to change a subject and four hundred an hour is what people pay him for it.
I change the subject to yams anyway, a beat late, to nobody.
II.
Later. Midnight. Dave left at ten. My sister cleared the table and retreated to the guest room. The nephew fell asleep in front of the television with the phone still going in his hand, playing something that makes the same sounds as everything else he plays on it. Somewhere in that phone is the game where he and a man in Bangkok play most nights, the one open channel between this condo and Soi Twilight, asleep in his hand. So the condo is not empty, and it is not quiet either. It ticks. The HVAC comes on and starts taking the turkey out of the air, one degree at a time, the way it takes everything out of the air.
I have done this before. Not this holiday, but this exact sequence, in this exact room: the laptop, the store, the rate, the light off, and a bed. I could do it with my eyes shut and on a Tuesday in March I have. The only difference tonight is that two hours ago there were twelve people in here and now the machine is removing the evidence, and I am going to sit down in the middle of it and write.
I sit down at the kitchen counter, ten feet from the sleeping boy and the small noise of his game, with my back to both. I open the laptop. I open WordPress. I begin to type.
Not about Thanksgiving, not about the table or the turkey or the brother-in-law’s question. About Americans. About how Americans are dicks, and how everything in this country, politics, foreign policy, social justice, same-sex marriage, comes back to the national obsession with dick. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson naming his. George Bush broke the world because his was small. We don’t know where Australia is and don’t care because our guy’s got a bigger dick than theirs.
The prose comes fast. Faster than it comes for the Gop posts, faster than the careful, parenthetical, snarky style I use when I’m writing about the bars. This is different. This is bravado, loud enough to drown out whatever it is designed to cover. And what it is designed to cover is eight thousand two hundred and sixty-five miles, which is a number I did not have to look up.
It is five in the afternoon there. He is between the gym and the bar, in the hour when he is at his best and knows it: hair wet from the second shower, the gray tank he wears until the last possible minute because the bar’s shirt is polyester and he hates it, being looked at by men who are not me. I have his number. I have had it for four years and I have never once used it at five in the afternoon his time, because a man who calls at five in the afternoon is checking, and checking is a thing you do to a rate. And because I know what I would ask. Not how was the gym. On the first night of that trip he put me in one of those two beds, without discussion, without apology, and I have been carrying since LAX the discovery that being put somewhere by him did not feel like losing. That is the question. There is no version of it that fits in a phone call, and no answer to it that I could afford at this exchange rate.
I finish the post. I add photos: stock images, flags, the specific iconography of American excess that will make the European readers chuckle and the American readers nod, and neither set of readers will notice that the post was written at 2 AM and does not contain, in any of its twelve hundred words, the word Thailand. Or the word Gop. Or the word love.
I save. I schedule the post for Friday. I close the laptop.
The condo hums. There is no reason to check the rate on Thanksgiving night. I check it. 30.72, down from last week, the wrong direction, and I knew that at the table, I recited it to myself over the turkey, and I opened the tab anyway to be told again. I have just filed twelve hundred words arguing that this country measures itself by what it can put on a table, so I know what I am doing when I open a tab to find out what my dollar is worth against the country he lives in, and I do it anyway, and I will do it again tomorrow.
Forty days until January. Forty-three until the train north, which he has been asking about for two years and which I have been saying yes to for two years in a tense that does not mean yes, and both of us know it.
I go to bed. The machine has won by now and the air smells of nothing at all. I like it that way. That is the worst thing I have admitted all night. In the dark I think about the German at Babylon. You think you’re different. The you’re not is mine, added in post. And I think: the German is wrong. I am different. Not better. Not smarter. Not more enlightened. Different in this specific, non-negotiable way: I know exactly what I am, and I’m writing dick jokes about it at 2 AM on Thanksgiving. The jokes are funny. The jokes are armor.
I miss him tonight.
I don’t write it. I write about Kennedy’s dick instead.
Same thing.
