An Untamed State by Roxane Gay Page B

the air too. I took dozens of pictures, couldn’t help laughing. Michael came and grabbed me, and soon we were both playing soccer with the kids, stirring up small clouds of dust as we passed the ball back and forth. A group of older kids and adults began to gather around us. A tall, thick-bodied, blond-haired man was not a common sight in the provinces. The crowd cheered both teams equally, laughing loudly whenever one of the boys stole the ball from the blan . After a while, my father approached us, pointing at his watch. I sighed. We said goodbye to the small crowd, waving until our arms ached.
    In the backseat, Michael turned to me. His shirt was soaked all the way through. “I like it here,” he said.
    I did not care that we weren’t alone. I leaned into him and kissed his lips, my hand against his chest. “So do I.”
    For most of the trip, Michael was wide-eyed, trying to cope with the country and the startling contrasts—so much beauty, so much brutality. Everywhere we went, he stared, at the garbage in the streets, the complex webs of electrical wiring overhead, huge estates with unbelievably high walls around which bidonvilles , shantytowns, sprawled as far as the eye could see, and everywhere, so many people, desperate, angry, hungry, scratching. There was a promiscuity that was, when you spent too much time thinking about it, impossible to bear.
    I told myself he wasn’t afraid to see beyond the gritty surface of the city, because of how he would get out of the car and talk to the roadside vendors all over the city, selling everything that could be sold on brightly colored tarps, or standing near their merchandise hanging from concrete walls. He tried to be a good sport—loved the children, their youthful eagerness, how they all spoke like little adults. He loved the beautiful women and the music and the art and especially the food, which he made me promise to cook for him. I needed to believe that meant he loved me enough to love my country.
    Michael spent a little time each day at my father’s company, learning about my father’s business. He tried to hold conversations with Nadine and Wilma and they were instantly charmed. They mostly forgot about the rest of us. By the end of our visit my mother said, “If Nadine and Wilma even thought Mr. America was going to sneeze, they would be waiting with a handkerchief.”
    I said, “Michael is very easy to love.”
    We spent our afternoons at the beach, lounging on wide couches, drinking rum and eating fruit and swimming together in the warm salt water. Michael openly ogled the women in their bathing suits walking tall, looking good. Once, he whistled, and said, “Haitian women are the most beautiful women in the world,” and I said, “Obviously.” I buried him in the sand up to his neck and straddled his entombed body, teasing him as he struggled to free himself. When he finally did climb his way out of the tightly packed sand, he carried me over his shoulder and threw me into a crashing wave and then fell on top of me, and we lay there, in the surf, beneath the beating sun and he said, “I’m going to love you forever,” and I believed him. I believed in our happily ever after.
    My father took us on an overnight trip to Cap-Haïtien and we toured the nearby Citadelle, a mountaintop fortress built in the early nineteenth century by Henri Christophe, a man who once declared himself king of Haiti, a man for whom we would eventually name our child. As Michael and I stood on the roof, we could see straight to the ocean. There, on what felt like the top of the world, we were surrounded by green and blue and the sweeping peaks and valleys of the mountains around us. It was warm and sunny, but the air was thinner, easier to breathe.
    I held Michael’s arms, squeezed. “You see,” I said softly.
    He nodded, covered my hand with his but later that night he also said, “I am so ready to go back to the States.”
    We were standing in the driveway, while I