I sensed a fight with Ntino would come the moment we were alone. I was damned if I went in, damned if I didn’t. Kicking off my shoes outside the house, I made sure they were lined up correctly, toes facing outward to bring money to the dwelling, not send it away. I brushed the salt off my arms, still feeling as if I was in water. I’d had a good day of surfing and sure, I’d lost track of time, but I had a world championship to defend in two days.
Besides…Ntino’s family hated me. Knocking on the weathered wooden screen doorframe, I pasted a pleasant look on my face and forced myself to smile when his mother opened the door.
“Gaby, we’ve already started.” Ntino’s mother, a small, birdlike Laotian woman, let me in, her demeanour sour. The open door seemed a grudging action.
“Good evening, Nani. I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You’re always late.”
I tried so hard with Ntino’s family, really I did.
I felt her gaze sweep over my brown skin and my clothes. I was in my Sunday best. Ntino had screamed at me not to wear shorts and now I felt uncomfortably hot in my Dockers and plaid shirt.
Between Nani’s seething anger behind those small, hard-pebble eyes and the warmth of the enclosed kitchen, all in all, I should have settled for being damned for not coming to the Promise Ceremony.
Nani did not approve of our relationship.
Inside the stuffy kitchen, a mountain of food lay in wait on every available surface. She led me into the living room, through the long, long hallway, one finger crooked behind her as if hooking me like a great, giant carp. Or maybe she just thought I’d get lost on the way.
I wanted to scream ‘I’m gay, not stupid’. Not that she really knew I was gay. She only knew her beloved son, Ntino, had done the unthinkable and left home before marriage to move in with me, Gabriel ‘Gaby’ Loe, Hawaiian state surfing champion and, I hoped, soon to be the world champion third year in a row. Officially, Ntino—say Tee-no—and I were roommates, but after two years, I think she’d started to suspect something else was going on. She and her husband, Leng, desperately wanted to get me away from their son.
The sickly-sweet cloud of incense wafted over me as I entered the living room. The massive and ornate
butsadan
, a three-hundred-year-old Buddhist altar, took up an entire wall and was the family’s pride and joy. All eyes were turned to the
gohanzon
in the centre of it, the long, narrow scroll that contained the prayer of life.
Ntino glanced up at me and lost his rhythm.
One look at him and I was seduced anew. I’d never been with a Laoatian man before. For him, breaking from his tight community and being involved with a Hawaiian man’s family was too much for his own family to handle. Of all the people he could have aligned himself with, I knew this much. Nani disliked the Vietnamese family across the road even more than me and she was grateful he hadn’t moved in there. I didn’t quite understand the long simmering tensions between the Vietnamese and Laotians from the old country, but it was like hanging onto anger towards Japanese people because of Pearl Harbor. It was time to forgive…not that I would say this to Nani.
“Nam myoho renge kyo
…” Ntino’s father led and controlled the pace and volume of the chant. I pulled my sandalwood prayer beads out of my pocket and wished I could have kissed the man I loved. He always gave me a lift. At twenty-five, he just topped five foot seven and was slim, with short black hair and an easy laugh. I was two years older and towered over him with my six foot two frame and husky Hawaiian build. We fit one another. We just clicked.
“Hi, Gaby.” Ntino’s smile was not unfriendly, but not entirely authentic either. He was sitting on the sofa beside his sister, Aleka, and her intended husband, Leono. Ntino’s father turned from the
butsadan
and gave me one of his blank looks. I was the invisible man to Leng. I had a sneaking suspicion he was a closet gay. I wondered if he’d ever had a decent blow job in his life and my gaze shifted back to my own man, who was glowering at me.
I perched on a chair that must have been occupied by Nani until I’d arrived. It was still warm. I found myself sitting next to Ntino’s fifteen-year-old sister, Kiana, who adored me and whom I in turn, loved deeply. I put my arm around her and she snuggled into me. She was still kitten-like in demeanour and clearly didn’t follow the rules. She was a kid after my own heart.
Aware of Ntino’s mounting hostility, I took my arm from her, wound the beads through my fingers and joined in the chanting. For fifteen minutes it continued, then Leng banged the gong for a swift recitation of the sutra prayer.
Despite the speed and monotony of tone, there was always a joyful feeling in this otherwise Spartan home when sutra was being said. I am not a religious man, but for Ntino, I had embraced Buddhism. I was aware of Leono’s family sitting to my left. This was a marriage between their eighteen-year-old son and Ntino’s seventeen-year-old sister that both families wanted very much.
Leng banged the gong three times again and, on the third and final
Nam myoho renge kyo
, everybody turned and faced the couple sitting on the sofa. Boy, were the foldout chairs brought out especially for the occasion uncomfortable.
“Aleka and Leono, you make your families very proud on this day.” Leng smiled for the first time since I’d known him and he had quite nice teeth, now that I got a close look at them.
“Thank you, Father.” My, Aleka was being very formal. She proceeded to thank her parents for the wonderful life full of riches and blessings they had given her.
Riches and blessings? None of their furniture matched and she and her sister still shared a small bedroom, despite the fact that there was a huge bedroom sitting empty right across the hall. It was Ntino’s old bedroom, kept as a hopeful shrine, just in case he came to his senses and reclaimed it.
Aleka once told me her mother cleaned and vacuumed that room, changing the sheets every week, hoping her son would return home.
Return? We saw them frequently despite the constant tensions between us.
There was a pause and Ntino’s father began his words of encouragement to his soon to be lawfully wedded daughter.
“Aleka, Leono, to live is to suffer. To cease to suffer, one must cease to desire…”
Was this supposed to be a marital pep talk? Was he telling his daughter not to bonk her husband? Or was he warning his future son-in-law not to even think about bonking his cherished daughter? Or was he telling them, yes, you’re getting married, but life is hard and then you die?
I traded glances with Ntino, who was trying hard not to laugh. His father really was a clueless man.
Even Nani eventually had enough of this maudlin monologue and clapped her hands together.
“Now we have the
baci
ceremony!”
Leng was still mid-sentence, but everybody flew into instant activity and he had no room to argue. There wasn’t much room for anything after we pushed back the chairs. A triangle was made on the floor of
ti
leaves and flowers and the happy couple stepped into it. A visiting monk, who was staying at a local bed and breakfast until the wedding the following day, chanted a prayer and tied white string around the couple, then left small strings tied on their wrists.
“With the
baci
ceremony, we symbolically invite this couple’s wandering spirits to return and enhance their future lives together.” The old monk beamed. I wish he’d been allowed to give the pep talk—at least he spoke of a future and not a bunch of depressing forebodings.
“The strings must be left on your arms until they fall off,” the old man instructed them.
Everybody was given a piece of string tied around their wrists, then a whole chicken was placed into the triangle, a symbol of good fortune, and Leono and Aleka stepped out of the ring. I was glad I’d left my dog, Ginger, at home or she would have embarrassed me running off with that chicken.
Everybody drifted towards the dining room and kitchen for the pre-wedding feast.
“You embarrassed me,” Ntino hissed.
“No, I didn’t. How did I embarrass you?”
“You’re always late!” He was winding himself into a real tirade now.
“Don’t you know any other songs?” I asked and immediately regretted it. Ntino’s eyes turned hard. Boy, was he ever Nani’s progeny.
“I can’t believe you could be so rude.”
“Ntino…” I lowered my voice. “I love you. I’m here. I am getting ready for a world championship in two days, you know.”
“Don’t you ever think about anyone except yourself?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Kiana was pressing a plate of food into my hands. It was crammed with generous portions of the feast Nani had been preparing for two days. There was
laap
, the staple of all Laotian festive occasions.
Laap
was ground-up chicken tossed with lime juice, garlic,
khao khua
—roasted, powdered rice—green onions, three kinds of mint and chili peppers. I knew from experience it would be peppery hot or ‘broke da mouth’ as we say on the islands. There was also fresh-caught red snapper drizzled with
pan daek
—chunks of freshwater fish, rice husks and rice dust. There was a scoop of carrots cooked in coconut milk and topped with ground peanuts.
My mouth watered at the sight of
khao pun
, flour noodles topped with a sweet-spicy sauce. It was known as Lao Spaghetti and I lived for that stuff. There was also a big mound of sticky rice. I took my plate to the backyard, sitting on the cool stone steps with Kiana.
“Get out of the way,” Ntino snapped from behind me.
Kiana and I moved beneath the plumeria tree, watching a pair of luminous dragonflies lazily circling the air, drunk with the pungent scent of all that good food, coupled with the heady ginger and guava growing in the garden. I stared out beyond the garden to the dramatic emerald backdrop of the Na Pali Mountain range. A huge bank of clouds hovered. We’d get a heavy rainfall tonight. The waterfalls feeding all the wells in the foothills provided a soothing soundscape in the midst of lowing cattle from the ranch opposite us and all the family drama right here.
Ntino was sitting beside Aleka and Leono on the back steps. They listened as he talked, deftly shovelling food into his mouth with his fingers. He was the only man I knew who could make that singular act look graceful. Aleka and Leono glanced at one another. Even now the couple was not allowed a moment of solitude.
Kiana put her head on my shoulder. “Gaby, is he always mad at you?”
“No, not always.”
“Looks like it to me. He’s always yelling at you.”
“Maybe I deserve it.” I didn’t think so, but things always had a way of getting back to Ntino and I was in enough trouble as it was. We all ate with our fingers, which was the Laotian way and frankly, the way of me. I approved of anything that saved time and got good food into my belly as fast as possible.
“When are you going to teach me to surf?” Kiana was being extra snuggly now.
This had been an ongoing battle between me and Kiana’s parents. I wanted to teach her, the sooner the better. They were afraid she’d get eaten by sharks.
“Let me talk to them. I promise you, after the wedding, I’ll bring it up to them.”
She smiled, knowing I was a man of my word. I had given her a couple of lessons, finding her to be a natural. Then her family found out and an innocent, island pastime suddenly took on sinister overtones. There was a strong…suggestion that I was after their daughter’s maidenhood. No, I wasn’t. But I sure coveted their son’s cock. I was too busy babysitting it to think of anything else, except surfing. Ntino called it the other man, but it had been good to me. I had not only carved out a lucrative career as a professional surfer, following the big waves all over the world, but I was also in line now for some big money. Ntino could have everything he wanted. Including the babies he kept saying that he wanted to adopt from Laos.
Just not yet. One more year. In one more year, I would have the endorsements people were starting to talk about and my own line of surfboards would be out.
I picked up our plates and ferried them back to the kitchen, sidestepping Ntino.
Nani eyed my empty plate and gave me a withering look. “You always eat and run.”
“I wasn’t going to run.” I was stung now. I’d really had enough of this. I made a point of picking up one of the tall glasses of hot lemongrass tea waiting on a metal tray. It was an old one from the fifties, a tourist kind of souvenir tray with hula dancers and a map of the islands.
The tea itself was really boiling hot water with a slice of lemon and a stick of lemongrass. It always amazed me that Nani was stingy with small things like lemongrass.
She watched me take the tea, but within seconds, other people were leaving, Leono and Aleka hightailing it to the beach. Nani snatched the glass from me like it was all my fault.
“Thank you, Nani. It was a wonderful meal.” I held my hands in
wai
, hands together, fingertips pointing upward, as if in prayer. I remembered to keep my hands away from my chest, held up high, but not higher than my nose, to show gratitude and respect.