by Tom Lutz
He looked at the ceiling and indulged a strong, full-sense memory of exquisite Yuli — he couldn’t help it, that was how he always thought of her, exquisite Yuli — hugging his arm as they walked through her house. He knew, extremely clearly, that this was what he wanted for the rest of his life. Or at least for as long as humanly possible.
He knew how crazed that was. She was in mourning, and he was a friend of her dead husband. He needed to move slowly, he found himself thinking. Fool! He needed to not move at all, he needed to keep this stupid fantasy life to himself, respect her grief! He needed, he knew, to get a grip.
He sat down at the laptop to tour the Asian papers and could see that the news cycle had started to purge talk of the Taipei bombing, with no new information to be found. He checked on a Scorpio 72 he had bookmarked, berthed outside of Taipei, and saw it was still for sale. Maybe that would be his new home. He’d sell California, start living.
The Serang house was dead silent, which meant nothing. He dropped back in bed, propped up a couple pillows, and flipped on the TV. He maundered through hundreds of satellite channels, marveling at the strangeness of the American content, the peculiar Japanese stuff, the time-warp Eastern European variety shows, the new slickness of Chinese TV, feeling throughout like a Martian ethnographer cataloging the varieties of human media experience. American shows he had forgotten existed were in syndication: Simon & Simon, St. Elsewhere, Alf. He dozed off again and woke up at 2.30am. It was going to be one of those nights.
Should he drink the tap water in the bathroom? He decided to venture out to the kitchen. He threw on the silk robe that was hanging in the closet and opened his door. The hallway had low lights and he felt like a thief as he padded through the carpeted hall and down the stairs. He jumped as he came around the corner and saw Setiawan waiting for him in the foyer, fully dressed.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Setiawan, you startled me. I was looking for some water.”
“The tap water is fully filtered, sir, but I can fill an ice bucket for you if you’d like.”
“Thank you, that would be great.” He had no real desire for ice, but it felt better than slinking back to his room empty-handed.
“I will have it sent up to your room straightaway, sir.” Frank got the distinct feeling that he was being told to go back to bed like a child.
“OK, thank you, Setiawan,” he said, as if reasserting his position by not calling him ‘Mister.’
Just then a soft bell tone sounded and Setiawan looked slightly nervous.
“Good night, then, sir,” he said, staring at Frank, ignoring the bell, clearly waiting for him to leave. Frank started back up the grand staircase and Setiawan went to the front door and waited another few seconds for Frank, who had purposely slowed down, to get up the stairs. The bell went off again and Setiawan gave up and opened the door.
“Selamat jalan, Nona Amarya,” he said, as a young woman entered. Amarya, the younger sister, Dmitry’s early confederate.
“Wait!” she said, ignoring him, “Is that Franky at the top of the stairs?” She came bounding up the stairway. “I heard you were here!”
She was not the girl he saw leaving in the morning. She was a spitting image of her sister Yuli, some years younger, not much past twenty, and, it seemed as she darted up the stairs, a little drunk or high or both.
“Amarya,” Frank said. “Forgive me, I’m not exactly dressed,” suddenly extremely self-conscious in his thin robe and bare feet.
“He knows my name!” she trilled. “How adorable!” She came to the top of the stairs, grabbed his right hand with her left, and started dragging him back down. “Come down and have a drink and let me get a better look at you!” she said. She stopped suddenly halfway down so that he bumped into her. She fell back into his arms, and pronounced, almost in his chest: “They didn’t tell me you were cute!”
OK.
“I’m cute, too,” she added, turning and heading down the rest of the stairs. True enough. “Dmitry talked about you so often!” she added. That surprised him.
He was torn between letting himself be pulled wherever she wanted and going back and putting on some clothes. As he saw Setiawan’s disapproving face his embarrassment won. “Let me throw some clothes on, at least,” he said.
“Nonsense, Franky!” she said. “You’re practically family, and I’m hardly dressed myself!” She was gotten up, it was true, for a night on the town, in a very sheer club dress, cut low and high and clinging to everything else. She saw him notice and laughed. “You see what I mean! It’s outrageous, isn’t it? Us young girls these days!” She laughed again and turned to Setiawan. “Have a tray of drinks sent into the parlor, will you, Setiawan?” she said. “And don’t be a sourpuss — that will be all for the night.” To Frank she said, “It will just be the basics: gin, whiskey, soda, ice, is that OK?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. Setiawan bowed, frowning, and left.
“I swear he is something out of Dickens,” she said. “Sit down!” She gave him a slight push onto a sofa and plopped down next to him, revealing a — whoa! — yes, outrageous stretch of inner thigh. She again noticed his glance and laughed. “I see that you and Dmitry were kindred spirits,” she said.
Then, with an abrupt emotional reversal, she threw herself into his chest, weeping, moaning in grief. “It is so, so, so, horrible!” she said, quietly. He was conscious of being in nothing but what amounted to a silk scarf with sleeves, conscious of her superb form in even less, conscious of her vulnerable state, conscious of it being the middle of the night, conscious of his own increasing arousal. What a monster! A maid entered with the tray of drinks, as if Setiawan was too disgusted to see them again, while Amarya stayed cuddled against his silk-robed chest, his arms having somewhat automatically encircled her. The maid didn’t look at them directly as she set the tray down, but he still felt more awkward than he thought it possible to feel. Amarya took no notice of the maid, and he wondered whether she had passed out. For some perverse reason, that increased his state of arousal. The only thing that could have added to his consternation would be if Yuli walked in.
He needed to stand up and get out of there, but as he tried sliding out from under her, she turned over, squirming farther onto his lap, and threw her legs out across the sofa, kicking off her heels, leaving at most an inch of silk covering whatever she might be wearing under her skirt. And that showed him he was wrong, there was something that could add to his consternation. As she squirmed getting comfortable, his now-engorged penis throbbed against her back like an obnoxiously loud knocking at the door. In his defense, it had been quite a long time since he had had sex, and he did, immediately, try to extricate himself and stand up. She put a finger up to his lips, in the international signal for “don’t say a word,” rolled toward him again, and threw her arms around his waist.
“Please don’t leave me,” she said.
He now felt her breast hard against his thigh, his erection cupped in her armpit, and her latest squirm had left the thin line of a thong across her hip exposed. It was too damn much.
He lifted her off, stood up, tried to straighten his robe, and as discreetly as possible, which wasn’t saying much, used the robe’s belt to minimize his comic outline, strapping his hard-on against his stomach just as Yuli was coming in the door.
“You’ve met,” she said, without the slightest trace of disapproval, even amused, walking up to them, putting a hand on his arm. Frank wondered if Setiawan had summoned her. “You could at least have allowed him to dress!” she said to Amarya, but again with a light tone, almost teasing, and full of kindness. “These days of adjustment after that flight, sleeping at the oddest hours, they are so difficult,” she said to him. Amarya had gotten up and gone to Yuli, hugged her, and remained with her arms around her, her face resting on her sister’s perfect shoulder. “And Amarya, the dear,” she said, “has a very fluid sense of personal boundaries. Your jetlag will be her jetlag.”
“Shut up,” Amarya said, petulant but playful, the words muffled, as her face was now buried in Yuli’s neck. Then she kissed Yuli on the cheek, stood up straight again, turned to Frank with a huge smile, and said, cheerfully, “Let’s have that drink!”
The jetlag that hits you going from the US to Asia can be as strong as psilocybin, throwing you into several days of a fugue state. Amarya passed him a gin and soda, and he floated through the rest of the night, remembering little of the conversation, except that every few minutes he became aware in an awkward flash of his thin robe. Then he would forget everything and bask in the glow of these two magnificent women, or this magnificent woman and magnificent girl.
He drifted through the days and nights that followed as unaware of how he seemed to people as any volunteer subject at a hypnotist’s show, compounded by the fact that Amarya began to slip in and out of his room at all hours and in all sorts of undress — he knew that it made him a terrible, terrible person to let her. He had abandoned any notion of his own future, and not just the near future — he had no idea what he would be doing not just in a day, two, three, or a week, but in a year, a decade, two. Yuli and Amarya seemed unconcerned as well, and he supposed this was how the Zen people and sadhus would like us to live, moment by moment, no future, no past, although perhaps they would suggest doing it without servants. The third sister, it turned out, didn’t live in Jakarta, but in Bali, where she owned a resort. She had been heading to the airport when Frank saw her. The mother, they explained, had been shuttled off to join her grandsons on the island, and this news gave him one of his few brief jolts of reality. It reminded him that they were in an ongoing state of at least potential siege — why else hide the boys? As Dmitry had warned, some people would be wanting their money back. The only question was whether they knew to look in Jakarta. He should talk to Yuli about those accounts in Tokyo, ask if he should go find them and transfer them.
In the morning, though, just as he came down, a phalanx of police arrived at the door. Amarya was gone, and Yuli looked panic-stricken when Setiawan announced them. Frank suggested he go talk to them alone, but she came with.
“Selamat pagi, Ibu Yuli,” the man in charge said.
“May we please speak in English? My friend and counselor,” she said, motioning to Frank, “does not speak Bahasa Indonesia.” Counselor.
“I wanted to ask same,” the man said in English. “I have two colleagues here from Taipei. They do not speak our language also.”
“Please, sit down,” she said.
Three of the policemen peeled off from the group and followed them into the parlor. These must be the detectives, or the ones who spoke English. The other four stayed by the door.
“My colleagues of Taipei have some questions.”
The main detective from Taiwan had a gentle face and bowed. “My condolences, Madam, for your loss.”
Yuli nodded but said nothing.
“Perhaps you could explain, Madam, your sudden departure from Taipei after the bombing?”
“So it was a bomb?” Frank said.
“Excuse me, sir, no, I misspoke. We have not made finding yet. But, Madam, you hurry why?”
“It was not sudden,” she said, “Only coincidental. We had been planning to move back to Jakarta for some time, were already moving when —”
“I see,” said the detective. “And was Mr. Dmitry Heald also moving back to Jakarta?”
“Yes,” she said. “He was planning to retire.”
“Retire?” the detective said, and flipped through his notebook. “But he is only thirty-five years old!”
“Yes,” she said. “But very successful. And thirty-one. His corporate biography added a few years.” Not defensive, not boasting, just the fact.
The detective wrote in his notebook. He had not expected this and was stymied, for some reason. His colleague, taller, with tiny eyes and a head of hair that was all cowlicks, stepped into the breach.
“Please excuse my English,” he said, and it was pretty atrocious, English sounding like “egg dish.” “But where Dmitry Heald?”
At this Yuli threw her hands to her face and started to whimper. Frank stood up, the big hero.
“What kind of thing is that to ask?”
“He is here?” the cowlick asked, undeterred.
“No, he is not here,” Frank said. “He is dead!” He managed not to add you cad!
“Yes,” the first detective said, rallying. “This is one assumption.”
“What other is there?”
“He is alive and fugitive.” This made Yuli shudder.
“Tactful, aren’t we, detective,” he said, realizing immediately that sarcasm was tough to get across in such a situation and wondering how much English you have to study before you get to ‘tactful.’ But then he asked: “Fugitive?”
“He is wanted for questioning, like everyone else who worked in the building and did not die.”
Frank couldn’t help it. It made him curious. “What makes you think he didn’t die?” he asked. Yuli looked up to hear the answer too, red-eyed and wet-faced. Frank couldn’t tell if it was also hopeful.
“Please, sir, what is your connection?”
“I am a friend of the family.”
“Your name?”
“Frank Baltimore.”
“Franky,” the detective said, writing in his notebook.
“Frank.” Was that a mistake?
“Madam, you know why we come here. No remains are identified. We want to decide what happened. Have you heard from your husband since explosion?”
“No.”
“Is something else you can tell me?”
“I can’t imagine what,” she said.
“We would like search house,” the Taiwan cop said to Yuli.
“See here,” Frank said, again having that odd sensation he was saying lines someone else had written, and written in the 1940s. “Is that necessary?”
“No, Franky, it’s fine. Please,” she said to police, holding out her arm in welcome.
The detectives said something in their respective languages to their patrolmen at the door, who then spread into different parts of the house.
“Setiawan,” Yuli said, and he miraculously appeared. “Unlock any doors that need unlocking.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The detectives asked for a download from the security system and she had Setiawan load it on a drive they provided. Eventually all four of the other policemen came back empty handed.
“Thank you for time,” the Taiwanese detective said.
“We may need to speak with you again,” the Indonesian detective said. “I’m sure you want to help discover those responsible. Please let me know if you are leaving the city.” All four detectives then awkwardly, in eight handoffs with a lot of crossing of arms, each gave Frank and Yuli one of their cards.
The affair with Amarya — it was hardly that, in a way, since she seemed to take it as lightly as ordering a pizza — convinced him that his obsession with Yuli was something more than infatuation. Even he assumed, with part of his brain, that the whole mirage of love was based on the fact that Yuli had the ideal body, was exotically different, too young, and extremely beautiful, but Amarya had and was all of those things as well, and although she was enormously exciting, she didn’t move him in the same way at all. His love for Yuli was epic, his desire for Amarya wonderfully, beautifully mundane.
Amarya also was, thank god, a made-to-order safety valve. Every night or morning that she came to his room gave him the strength to get through another day without spilling his guts and making a fool of himself with Yuli. He still had to strain to keep himself from dropping to one knee or both when he was with her, but it also helped that, as he played out various scenarios, the film scripts always went awry, and none of them gave him any succor. Most ended with him on a plane home, tail between his legs, heartbroken and dreamless. He wasn’t sure if he was biding his time until he could arrange his perfect future, or simply delayi
ng his inevitable despondency.
One day in the parlor, as the three of them had a cocktail under the withering eye of Setiawan, this time at least at an internationally recognized hour for such things, he took notice of the books in a glass-doored bookcase, and with a shock of recognition realized that a couple shelves were devoted to classic novels, all of which were among his favorites: Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Melville’s Typee, Greene’s The Third Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, O’Connor’s Wise Blood, James’s The Ambassadors, some Conrad and Kafka, Library of America volumes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Cather and Wharton. Patricia Highsmith. Some Freud and Nietzsche. And Marx.
“I wondered if you would notice that,” Yuli said. “The Baltimore Public Library, he called it.”
“It looks like every book I ever mentioned to him.”
“He would do a running commentary for us about each book,” Yuli said.
“It was infinitely boring,” added Amarya.
“I believe it,” he said.
“Hardly,” said Yuli, and then did a credible Dmitry imitation: “In marginalia now housed in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Library at Yale University, Yuli,” he would say to me, “the esteemed Exchequer of the Horseguard and internationally renowned flugelhornist Franky B. — he often calls you Franky B. and gives you outlandish titles — noted that Henry James’s Ambassadors is the first novel to take seriously the modern phenomenon of advertising, and to chart its relation to age-old moral conundrums regarding rumor, sexual deception, and the relativity of cultural value — Dmitry talks this way, too, sometimes, so maybe these aren’t your words? — while insisting that renunciation of our desires, rather than gratification, was the only way to forestall the inevitable alienation into nothingness — I’m sorry, I’m losing the voice.” But she was quite a good mimic, and they all felt his presence for a moment, her reversion to the present tense — he talks this way — heightening it. “I can tell you, in fact,” she added in her own voice, “what you thought about many of these books.” There was a challenge in it.