A Trailing spouse

A trailing spouse
by David Benjamin

“He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey — McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
— Donald Trump, 13 Apr.

TAIPEI — Too often, we tend to measure our lives by our irritations.

We have, for instance, a White House occupant who is — if we can believe his boasts — worth billions. He owns towers. He holds the most powerful office in the world. His First Lady is an exotic supermodel who lets him romance Playmates and porn stars, and he never — ever! — loses at golf. And yet, his Twitter feed is a shrill fugue of grievances. One of the most privileged silver spoons in the history of Fifth Avenue, he nonetheless styles himself as Job, the quintessential whipping-boy of an unfair God.

Incongruously, I feel Donald Trump’s pain. I, too, have ample reason to bellyache about my unappreciatedness. But when I look a little more closely, it occurs to me that any of my troubles short of death tend to come off as presidentially self-indulgent.

I entertained this philosophical perspective while having coffee at a food court in the Yuanshan district of this city, where a little girl in a pink dress was dancing for me. I’d come to Taipei because Hotlips, my wife, was a guest moderator at a conference on automotive technology. I’m what is called a “trailing spouse,” a somewhat demeaning designation with which I’ve reconciled because of the perks it bestows.

Not only do I get to travel in Hotlips’ wake, I’ve become haltingly conversant on the functions of AI, radar and lidar in the dubious new wave of algorithmic, deep-learning, self-motivating Hal 9000 robocars. My only role on this trip was to copy-edit Hotlips’ news dispatches. This left me pretty free to explore Taipei. By now, venturing into the strange (to me) precincts of a Chinese-speaking city of seven million souls holds few terrors. This wasn’t always so.

My first big city was Milwaukee. I was eleven, and on the very first day of my month with Aunt Barbara and Uncle Merv, I took a walk, made a wrong turn and got lost. I immediately assumed I would die. Only a frantic bout of scurrying and whimpering got me back — entirely by happenstance — to Barbara’s doorstep. After that, I never set foot beyond the stoop, and Milwaukee remained for me a sinister black box.

Now, in Lisbon or Kowloon, if I happen to blunder into an uncharted neighborhood, I say to myself, “Well, this is interesting.” I explore, stick my head into a church or two, take snapshots voluminously, stop for coffee, catch up on my travel diary and figure out where the closest subway station is.

Urban Rule #1: There’s always a subway station.

After all these wander years, I dread no longer the storied hazards of Metropolis. But I grew up in a small town and I know how fearfully a lot of folks regard the nearest big city. They see a moonscape of horrors where voracious criminals of degenerate ethnicity lurk in black doorways, waiting to pounce on the gormless hayseeds from Gooberville, to strip them naked, rape and rob and leave them bleeding, broken in the verminous gutters of the meanest streets in a godforsaken dystopia.

Having lived in — and survived — my share of godforsaken dystopias, I tend to just cross over to the mean street’s sunny side, where I find myself smiling, nodding, peeking into picturesque alleys and petting the occasional feral dog. Here in Taipei, suddenly, I was accosted by a genial native pushing a wheelchair, testing his broken English and offering directions. I say, “No, I’m fine. Thanks very much.” (I knew exactly where the subway was.) By and by, I collected the little dancing girl, a lady in the park doing tai chi, two other ladies practicing kendo, and a cameraful of photos of trees, flowers and birds I would never see in Wisconsin, or even Minnesota.

My stroll continued toward a pair of temples that promised dragons and dioramas. Then, there was Dihua Street. The top half is a half-deserted ghetto of decrepit doorways and old men on park benches, the lower half a street-clogging marketplace selling shiitake by the bushelful, a hundred varieties of dried fruit and spices, most of which I didn’t recognize, cookware and housewares, shirts, pants, shoes, ceramics, giant woodcarved gods and monsters, heaps of veggies, piles of greens, walls of flowers, a ramen joint, the odd Buddhist shrine, a coffee and tea shop on every corner and in the midst of all this, a Starbucks and a Seven-Eleven.

All the way down Dihua, I found nary a mugger, nor ninja, nor even an enterprising pickpocket. I interacted with a lady who sold me chopsticks and two lovely little hand-carved wooden frogs (for my grandsons). She cut the price, “Just for you,” she said but this I doubt. I could’ve probably haggled her down a little more but come on, man. This shit is cheap.

I think I enjoy this circus all the more because I’m no longer young. The recent deaths of my sister and brother — and too many friends — are intimations of mortality that lend urgency to my curiosity and render rather insignificant my fear of the stranger in the black doorway.

When I come home from these travels, I tend not to talk too much about where we’ve been, what I’ve seen, what we ate and where I got lost. And most people don’t ask — but not, I think, because they’re envious. It’s more a matter of indifference or, more accurately, realism. They know how hard it is to convey the experience — the sights, sensations, smells and surprises — with an immediacy that brings them back to life. A memory begins to perish as soon as it’s born. The tale pales in the telling because the moment was unique to the witness. The little girl in the pink dress was dancing, after all, just for me.

About that, I cannot complain.