An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

-What can I do for you?

-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags….If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man….No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it. Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me… at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror nobody else sees.

-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim. Not knowing what to say he changed the subject—Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.

- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act…and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in those words…not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas…just the clutter of a woman's home…countless things if she marries well…countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable…I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.

- Are you leaving me?

- No, I'm not so courageous. It will always be more of the same for me. So I am sitting with this so called goddess of Bubastis, this cat on my lap, and as I do so it seems to me that a cat is good for cuddling but a man with his premature pecker is not a cuddler…just a lovemaker. That is what he is good at. The Egyptians were right about there being a woman in the cat and a cat in a woman, for the two creatures need to feel real within the propinquity of touch. There with another non-threatening suffering creature of this world, touching to feel real, maybe it is just another mirror—just a bigger love, a fuller love and perhaps a more selfish love than a man and a woman feel but this cuddling with a cat is better for a woman.

The memory reeled around and played so distinctly that he almost thought he was there with his wife; but how much of it he had distorted to make it more meaningful, dramatic, and aesthetic than it really was, he had no way of knowing. The brain was always rewinding bits of memory, analyzing them, and splicing them together like film; and as were two people walking down a sidewalk without looking at each other, who were and were not together, so was memory—it was and was not.

Were articles dating back fifteen years adulation about the artist of his youth that might have been true words then but little pertained to the man of forty, or were his works tremendous talent that did not hinge on the salacious biography of the artist and would live beyond his short eruption of ephemeral years? It seemed to him, nonsensically, that they both were and were not. Nonetheless, it was absurd to merely think that over the past few years he had aged so tremendously that critics and commissioners of his work alike had lost interest in him entirely. The art critics had been writing about him, albeit less frequently, until he ran out of inspiration for his redundant themes, irrespective of the surfeited forms of whores who came in droves, each with slightly different circumstances, and each with slightly different expressions. "I was a sensation until I lost interest in beating and stirring up such muck, and none of it has anything to do with turning forty," he told himself, but he knew that it was and was not true.

It was true that just four years ago he, the once eligible but continual playboy, was appealing enough to be referred to as "Naughty Nawin" with those English words in their headings proving that he had not turned into mushy and deciduous fruit in the little over three summers since; but it was not true that as unseemly as his life might be in view of the fact that he was a glutton of the personal life like a boy in front of a thousand cookies he was the same as any foreign business holidayer of the masculine gender looking for the nearest brothel. His was more of a spiritual decadence. "Forty is just a number. You are as handsome as ever," he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror. "You stopped painting and they stopped writing about you. It is as simple as this"; nonetheless he did not believe in simplicity.

He missed the hype organized by galleries. He missed magazines catering to those needing a celebrity from whom they could learn intimacies, tiny facts or rumors of facts about the personal lives of the gods. He checked himself. His mind was going in circles around the word, forty. The circles were more of a vortex as, on bad days, when he descended for some seconds or more into early family and abuse, which could suck him in fully were it not for his active vigilance.