by Tom Lutz
“I should have grasped the nettle…” he said.
The traffic was intermittent, and the two of them were the only customers, except for an Indonesian man on the far side of the café, reading his paper. A slight breeze and the café’s large green umbrellas kept the heat from being too oppressive. A tiny bird fluttered to the edge of the table looking for crumbs and then dashed away. He wondered what the hell he was going to do with George Heald.
On the table in front of him was a beat-up old paperback, a pulp Western with a cheesy cover, titled The Brave Rider of Santa Palo. He must have noticed Frank looking at it, because he pushed it toward him.
“This was his,” he said. “When he was young. He loved this book.” Frank picked it up, opened the front cover. On the title page, in a boyish hand, it was inscribed “Dmitry Heald.” Heald took it from him, opened it to the last page, and handed it back. The inside back cover had, in pencil, a series of dates, starting in 1990, when Dmitry must have been around eight. Next to each date was a number, preceded by a £. In 1990, he apparently had £1, and planned to make it £5 by 1991, £25 by 1992, and to keep quintupling it each year. He was scheduled to hit around £2,000,000 by the age of seventeen, and over a billion by twenty-one. That was where the chart ended. He hadn’t hit any of those benchmarks, but he passed them by thirty-one. Now that he was dead, it looked like a pretty pathetic, arbitrary set of goals. His father seemed proud of it.
“I’m sure Yuli would like to see you,” Frank said finally.
“Oh, no,” he said.
At first this seemed a simple fact of his retiring nature.
“No, really,” Frank started to suggest, noticing that he was imitating the father’s quiet, dispersed speaking into the air instead of addressing him directly. He was going to say that she would very much want to see him, without knowing if it was true. But it seemed like the least one could do for a man whose son had just died.
Heald absentmindedly, sounding more like he was talking to himself than to Frank, said, “I don’t trust them.”
“What?”
“The Muslims. They stick together.”
“What?”
“I know them, you know. I worked with them. In North Africa. Sneaky. Conniving. Murderers. As soon kill you as look at you. The whole world is seeing it now, finally giving it some stick. I’ve always known. And now they’ve killed my son.”
Seriously? Could he actually believe that?
Heald’s left hand fidgeted over the book cover, as if petting the Brave Rider’s horse. His tears had dried and Frank searched his face for some resemblance to Dmitry. He could see none. What was he going to do with this guy? His quiet, diminished rant felt less like the derangements of grief than the continuation of lifelong muddles, like some inanity he had repeated every afternoon in his pub for the last forty years. Frank realized he simply couldn’t ask him another question.
“I’m pushing for a memorial service of some kind,” he said, getting up, leaving some money on the table for his coffee. He looked at Heald once more but his gaze was immediately distracted by the bill he had left on the table, fluttering in the breeze. He moved his empty cup and saucer over to weigh it down.
He was going to ask Heald where he was staying, but decided not to. He would be here at the café. Or he wouldn’t.
Walking back toward the house, Frank realized that he hadn’t actually said goodbye. He turned and waved. Heald was looking through the binoculars again, but apparently not at Frank. He didn’t wave back.
Frank flashed back to Dmitry’s story about his sister, the one he told him in the tent. Years later, he had asked him what had become of her.
“You know, Franky, you’re the only one I ever told about that. I do think it had a large influence over me.” Frank thought so too, that it was the reason he was such an addict, the reason he was constantly drawn to illicit sex. “I do believe it is why I am in Asia. I once read, Franky, that men with shoe fetishes develop them as toddlers, fixating from floor level on their mum’s heels. And it makes sense to me that one’s earliest experiences help set the dials on one’s sexual machinery. Some Asian women have the kind of pubic hair — sparse, neatly contained — of a fourteen-year-old British girl. I really do believe it is that uncomplicated.” This struck Frank as batty, as grotesque oversimplification or a sad excuse for introspection, and, yet, perhaps not entirely wrong.
“Simple? Huh,” Frank said. “And your sister? What happened to her?”
“It’s sad, really, Franky,” he said. “She has gotten horribly fat — I mean dreadfully fat, the kind of person who has rolls and rolls of fat, not your average, even American-average overweight fat, but freak-show fat, National Enquirer fat, extra chins, saddlebags on her arms, Franky — she has two fat nasty kids from two loser guys — nice word, that, loser, isn’t it? Remarkably descriptive for such a simple little word — looozer — as is, I hope I made clear, the word fat. She lives like a sorry old who-er in a council flat in Liverpool. Sad.”
“Do you see her?”
“No. Every couple years. Less.”
“She doesn’t visit.”
“Hey, yeah, no, really!” he laughed. “She isn’t capable of getting her corpulent ass into London, much less Asia.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Maybe I should let her live in the mansion in Liverpool with her delinquent boys and whatever brain-damaged meth addict she’s fucking this week, eh, Franky? In that room with me mum.”
Up until that point, it was the cruelest thing Frank had ever heard him say. What a hateful bastard he was.
He walked back through the gate, back down the rainforested front path, and into the house. Yuli came in from the pool wearing a simple sarong, her hair freshly toweled and still wet. She looked so burnished and scrubbed, so spry and delicate, so damned exquisite, it was all he could do not to prostrate himself like Troilus.
“We have to talk,” he said, which sounded more like soap opera than courtly romance.
“Yes?” she said, slightly alarmed by his tone.
“The man at the café?”
“Yes?”
“He’s Dmitry’s father.”
“His father.”
“Dmitry was right, he’s impossible to talk to. But he wants a memorial service, and I agree. I think it’s time.” She waited, instead of responding, still looking him straight in the eye, looking as if she knew this second shoe would drop. “And I’ve been reading through the files in the attic,” he said.
Now she looked at the floor.
So she did know.
“You know what’s in them,” he said.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“It seems Dmitry was doing a fair amount of investing for war criminals. He made money for dictators, death squads, terrorists, mass murderers. The worst of the worst. I always knew he was fundamentally amoral, but still, I’m kind of appalled.” She seemed appalled, too, stricken. “But that’s not important. Except that there are a lot of them, and they are very bad people. Any one of them could be responsible for the bombing. Any of them could come looking for you. So I need to know. Did he double-cross any of them? Is there anything else I should know? Is there anything else you should be telling me?”
She stayed staring at the floor for a minute, but then, of all the answers she might have made, of all the things she could have done, of all the reactions he had thought possible or could have imagined, he didn’t expect this — she kissed him on the mouth, firmly, in promise, and walked down the hallway toward her room.
“Wait right here for one minute,” she said over her shoulder. He stood on the spot, wondering what had happened, what was happening.
A minute or maybe two later — it seemed much longer, but he was aware that time was crawling — she came back. Without saying a word, she took him by the hand and led him down the hallway, into her room.
As they entered, she shut the door, locked it, and turned back to him. In a single motion she allowed her sarong to drop to the flo
or. “Now you know all,” she said, and stood, facing him, unafraid, glorious, absolutely perfect.
He had worried, on and off, the way people do, what it might really be like if his dream came true. The absurdity of his obsession, his irrational, unwarranted, unfathomable fixation — could any reality live up to it? Would he, as seemed to be happening with Amarya, start very quickly to bore both himself and her? Is this where love would die forever? Would he measure up — and of course he wouldn’t in one particular — as a lover? Would that one particular be a dealbreaker? Would they like the same kinds of things in bed? He was experienced enough to know that if someone was a tie-me-up-and-hurt-me person, not as a once-in-a-while experiment, but as a steady diet, there was no jollying them out of it.
And what if he didn’t like the way she kissed? There was a woman once he had a fling with, a very large woman, which was unusual for him. He had always otherwise been attracted to the petite types, but this woman was built like Serena Williams, had thighs practically the size of his waist, and was as tall or even taller than him. Nonetheless he found her astoundingly hot, as well as amazingly sweet, and they were really hitting it off. Then they started making out. Every time they kissed, her tongue plunged into his mouth like something from a horror film, this surprisingly large and sinuous muscle ramming its way towards his tonsils. Nothing he did made any difference, no hints or kissy counteroffers modified this natural expression of her passion, and that was that. They drifted away from each other. Would his splendiferous love for Yuli rip aground upon equally stupid shoals?
And his most sincere fear was that she was acting out of distress, that he would come to find that he was a simple stopgap, a paltry port in her storm, a temporary fix. Or worse, a poor stand-in. Would he be always upstaged by her memories of Dmitry? He wasn’t sure he could bear that.
Or maybe he could. All his fears evaporated as she stepped toward him, unbuttoned his shirt and helped it fall off his back, unbuttoned and unzipped his khakis, all slowly, tenderly, without a trace of anything lascivious or crass or hurried or desperate. He stepped out of pants and boxers and sandals and they stood, touching but barely, electric, nothing but crackling ozone between them. In the past he’d gone to bed the first time drunk, gone to bed high, gone laughing, gone crazy passionate, guilty, romantic, paranoid, bored, heroic, stupid, hesitant, heedless — just about every way, he thought, you can make that first tumble. But he’d never approached it with this combination of solemnity and tenderness and purpose, never with eyes wide open, heart full, all perils at bay, all the angels of heaven hovering, the very universe ahum with a bliss too luminous to be mocked or questioned.
The first time was without any further preliminaries, but so slow that just entering was a kind of extended foreplay. He had heard about the tantric stuff all his life and had tried versions of it at times, staying tense and still for as long as possible, but this was different. They never stopped moving, and yet rushed nothing, poised halfway between maximum bodily tension and pure relaxation, as if somehow they were inhaling and exhaling at the same time. They seemed to agree there was plenty of time for everything, plenty of time to explore, to discover, to experiment, to indulge, to have fun, to goof around. This time, the first time, though, was the unadulterated undulation of nature, man, and woman in their resplendent essences — oh, he knew it sounded like sappy bullshit and he could imagine the knowing smirk any such talk would elicit from Dmitry — and even from himself on many days. But if ever love had found unblemished incarnation, he felt, even as it was happening that afternoon in Jakarta, that this was it.
“You might not believe this,” she said, a couple hours later, “but you are only my second real lover.”
“Really!”
“Really. I was a good girl until Dmitry got hold of me. He ruined me.”
Ruined? “Oh, yes. You were pregnant before you were married. Nobody cares.”
“Not that,” she said.
“What — I mean — did you have affairs?”
“Oh, God, no!” she said with a little laugh. He wasn’t sure why it was funny, but it struck him that Dmitry would have laughed the same way if anyone suggested he didn’t have extramarital lovers.
“You knew that he —” Frank started to say, but paused. It was stupid to bring it up and stupid to stop halfway. What patently false gallantry! She knew that, too.
“Had sex elsewhere? Of course. He was a normal man in Asia. We accept this.”
“But women are not allowed.”
“No, but —”
“But, what?”
“Nothing.”
“What.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
She looked at him. What a great poker player she would make. Whatever was going on inside made a clear impact on her eyes, face, or body, but one that was impossible to read.
“You know these trips he took to Thailand.”
“Yes.”
“I sometimes went with him.”
“What?” It came out faster, and had more heat on it, than he had hoped.
“You see, I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“No,” he said, making a conscious effort to sound much more at ease than he felt, “go ahead, it’s fine. Tell me.”
“I went with him sometimes. To a hotel in Bangkok. He would get a girl or a boy, or both, delivered to the room — I know, it sounds horrible —”
She looked at him for a reaction and he did his best to shake his head no, no, not so horrible, rather than nod yes, which is what he wanted to do. “No, not horrible,” he said. “I want to know.” He wasn’t sure he did, or why he didn’t just say, hey, we all have pasts and let it go, didn’t know why he had to pick this particular scab.
“I told myself it was Dmitry’s show, he was the director, that I was reluctantly playing a bit part, but it wasn’t true. The idea that it was all him — this was a silly ruse, I know, but there it was. It let me live with it.”
“And so?” How perverse was he being? He gestured with his chin for her to go on.
“He would have the Thai boy go down on me — God, it sounds so squalid — it is squalid.”
“No, I get it.”
“You do? Sometimes Dmitry would fuck me while the boy sucked on my shoulders — you know, those places you found already. My only rule was nobody penetrated me but Dmitry. Why was that the rule? I don’t know. Why anything —”
“And the girl?”
“You see how easy it is to get drawn in? But you knew that already.” Did he? “The girls? Oh, you know, the standard things — she would lick his balls while he was doing me. He would ‘call a conference’ once in a while and all three of us would go down on him.” She laughed. “You know how he was. He kept things light. Fun. Most of the time it all seemed more silly than nasty. And sometimes, I don’t know, it seemed so, so human.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“He was a big voyeur, as you must know, and sometimes, when we were momentarily sated, he would have the boy and girl, or the two boys, the two girls, whatever he had ordered up, have sex in front of us. And at first I could hardly watch, but after I got used to it a little, after it became normal, I thought, one night — this is the same as watching actors kiss in the movies, and unlike pornography, they are right here, we are all being nice to each other, it is all very affable, nice, warm, even. There were no cameras — unless Dmitry had set one up — but still, no lights, no bored crewmembers, no microphones. It was all so much more friendly, more chummy, more human than pornography.”
“Huh.”
“You think I was rationalizing? Maybe I was.”
“No, I think you are the most wonderful person in the history of the world and I think you are absolutely right. But I would probably think anything you said was absolutely right. Everything you tell me makes me crazier about you. I am almost ready to make an Aztec sacrifice of myself, rip out my own heart and hand it to you.”
&nbs
p; “Please don’t,” she said, and laughed. “It’s the thought that counts.” That made him love her more, too, but at the same time he noticed that she had said nothing, made no sign, after what was unmistakably a declaration of love. Was she ignoring it on purpose, the most polite way to suggest he shouldn’t repeat it?
He was about to get depressed, but instead found himself reaching down between her legs, where the slightest throb greeted his palm, and moments later he felt again, against his middle finger, the sublime parting, the wet, swelling answer to every question. It brought a mirroring tear to his eye. After all of the women, all of the great and not-so-great sex in his life, there he was, feeling like he had discovered the real thing for the first time.
As they went through the night, making love over and over, dozing off for a while only to re-engage, he felt like he was eighteen again, and more than that, he was finding reserves of sexual ingenuity and dexterity and adroitness, an improvisatory genius he had never thought he possessed. He was under no illusions — it was she who made him a better lover, she who had the reins — but it didn’t matter. It worked. At one point having willed his ten fingers, lips and tongue to do the combined work of a man, two Thai boys, and a Thai girl, she cried out, right after she came again, “My God wow! Franky! Why? Why you didn’t tell me you can do this!” her perfect syntax crumbling in orgasmic delirium. Through it all he remained in awe of the incredible sweetness and tenderness in her eyes, at her body’s flawlessness, at the endless parade of pleasures they served up for each other.
He couldn’t help it. Despite her silent suggestion to the contrary, he couldn’t stop it, and he declared his love again, and declared it again. He told her he wanted to write songs about her, write poetry, paint her portrait, recombine her DNA, teach her to fly, elect her prime minister, canonize her, cast her in a movie, put up a statue of her in the main square. To his eternal delight, she loved his goofy chatter. She soaked it up like light loam takes in the rain, and that made him go on and on and on.