by Tiffany Tsao
“Take a fun class. Live a little,” she counseled earnestly. “They’re always the ones that end up changing your life. Am I right, Ray?”
The guy next to her ran his hand over his buzz cut as he took a swig of Sprite. “Yeah, totally. I’m an electrical engineering major, and the best class I took as a freshman was Classical Philosophy with Professor Bergson. Awesome teacher, if you’re interested. It really blew my mind.”
I’m not sure if the class on insects was mind-blowing, per se, but it felt—I don’t know how else to put it—like relief. Like cool water on a patch of skin that had itched for so long we had learned to take its itching as part and parcel of existence.
We threw ourselves wholeheartedly into doing well in entomology, even as we sought to remain diligent in our other areas of study. Staying on top of all the coursework was challenging, and Estella and I, without really meaning to, became recluses. It didn’t help that other Indonesians—at least those we were used to having as friends (i.e., mostly Chinese, and of a certain social class)—were far less thick on the ground at Berkeley than in places like LA or Boston. No one of our family’s acquaintance was there, nor was anyone else from our high school. On the whole, we kept to ourselves.
We did attend the occasional BASA event: dumpling-making study breaks, or bowling with bubble tea afterward. We also had a bewildering coffee with a brunette named Kelly from our statistics class. After she talked at us for ten minutes straight about anime, we realized she thought we were Japanese. Not living in student housing made avoiding the company of others all too easy. When we weren’t in class, we were studying at home, or studying in a café, or eating out with each other, or, toward the end of the semester, volunteering at the Essig Museum of Entomology—learning to properly pin, label, and classify insects; inspecting drawers of specimens for signs of infestation by dermestids.
The family was still too shaken by Oma’s death to contemplate vacationing abroad that winter, so Estella and I flew down to LA after exams to stay with Ricky for a week. From there, the three of us would fly back to Jakarta together. Ricky was still renting an apartment with Leonard, and entering their world from ours was like being thrust out of a cave into broad daylight. Somehow, and probably through no contribution of Ricky’s apart from his careless affability, the two had become a sort of social epicenter for the wealthy Chinese-Indonesian students in the area. People hung out at their place around the clock, often under the pretense of studying, but more often they watched movies and simmered in the Jacuzzi, shot pool and played cards, draped themselves in bunches around the living room and kitchen and bedrooms, chatting animatedly and laughing. Food streamed in like tap water: delivery boys bearing boxes and containers of all shapes and sizes, squads going out on quests to fulfill the hankerings of the mob—beef ball noodles and lamb curry from Ramayani in Westwood; In-N-Out burgers and Popeyes fried chicken; spicy tofu stew and galbi from BCD Tofu House; banana cream pie from Marie Callender’s. Some of their friends would stay over if it got too late. We’d emerge from the guest bedroom to find snoring bodies scattered on the sofa, or even piled in a platonic heap like a litter of baby hamsters, smelling of sleep, breathing as one.
In that environment, that emanation of easy hospitality and communitarian goodwill, you couldn’t help but make friends and reconnect with old acquaintances. There were recognizable faces in abundance—former classmates and several children from families we knew. Ruby, Diana, and Jenny; Frank, Stenson, Lawrence, and Anton; Fat Chris, Handsome Chris, and Just Plain Chris; Nadia and Sweetie—they all ebbed and flowed through Ricky and Leonard’s front door. And they were genuinely happy to see us, especially the girls: cheek kisses, little screeches of delight, and beratings about not keeping in touch assailed us every time one of them walked through the door and spied us in our state of social thaw. I don’t think we realized how isolated our life at Berkeley was until then, and we experienced for the first time a pang of remorse for choosing academic prestige over the comfort of the close-knit network we knew we’d have found there in Southern California. I think Estella regretted it more keenly than I did. Though I too enjoyed our time at Ricky and Leonard’s, I was ultimately glad at the prospect of heading back—to the cool green wilds of the north and the mothball-pungent space of the Essig; to frigid mornings spent gazing out the bay window of our rented house and sipping coffee, instant because we’d never had to make our own and we couldn’t be bothered to learn.
I mentioned this to Estella on our last night there, or, more accurately, our last morning. (A bunch of us had just come back from a midnight showing of some action movie whose title I don’t remember.) We were crawling into the bed in the guest room we were sharing, and I remarked how relieved I was that we didn’t live in LA.
“Not,” I added, “that it hasn’t been fun.”
Estella looked surprised. “Really? I kind of like it here. The Bay Area seems so boring by contrast.”
“But wouldn’t you get tired if we had to deal with this all the time? I thought you enjoyed the peace and quiet we have where we are.”
“I do,” she yawned. “But… I don’t know. There’s more to life than just studying and pinning insects.”
“Like Leonard?” I asked. I meant for the question to sound pleasant and teasing, but it didn’t. Perhaps I was too tired. His name caught in my throat like a fish bone, and my remark came out ragged and dry.
She was on her guard immediately. “Why do you say that?”
“He spends a lot of time talking to you.”
“To us, you mean.”
“But, really, he’s interested in you.”
“Well, are you interested in him?”
“No,” I said with a sniff. “But I think he’s bad news. I think you should stay away.”
“Why? He’s nice.”
I coughed. “He acts nice.”
“What are you talking about?” Estella was getting riled up now. I felt the blanket tighten around us, as if it too were agitated. “That’s why he has so many friends. Because he’s a nice guy.”
I didn’t say anything because now I was mad myself, and I knew the best way to irritate Estella was to remain silent.
“You’re so annoying,” she muttered. “Come on. Tell me, Doll. Why don’t you think he’s nice?”
I sighed long and loud for effect. “There are people who are genuinely nice and there are people who aren’t—who are nice only because they want something. Len”—I sneered—“is not genuinely nice. You can see it in his eyes. You can see it in his expression when he strokes someone’s ego, or expresses sympathy, or treats everyone to dinner, or lets someone use his stuff or borrow his car. Haven’t you noticed how smug he gets? The satisfaction it gives him to have influence or power over people?”
I had one specific incident in mind, which I didn’t mention because I hoped Estella would forget it. The day before, Leonard had insisted on taking us to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I’d been standing a few paces away, and he had seized the opportunity to stand far too close to my sister.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he’d said, gazing into her eyes, brushing the hair from her face with his fingers.
“Let me get this straight,” Estella said, not mentioning the incident either. “There’s something wrong with him because he wants other people to like him?” She sat up. “Guess what, Doll. That’s what most people want.”
“That’s not true. Look at Ricky. He couldn’t give a damn what other people think. He’s just nice for the sake of being nice.”
“So now your standard for niceness is Ricky? Ricky’s not nice, Doll. He’s just lazy.”
All right, maybe Ricky wasn’t the best example. And, in hindsight, the terms “nice” and “not nice” couldn’t have been more inadequate in describing what Leonard was trying to be and what he actually was. But they were the best words I could come up with at the time. I see now, from the wisdom of my comatose state, what my younger self was attempting to articulate: Leon
ard’s insatiable desire not just for mere approval but for unadulterated adoration; the swollen ego that relied on sacrificial offerings to maintain its hollow bloat.
But that was back then, and we had no idea what manner of creature we were up against—not I, whose blind instinct was to flee; nor Estella, who had fallen under its spell. We were two children squabbling over whether the doggie was a friendly doggie, not whether its breath would strip the flesh from our bones.
“I’m just watching out for you,” I said coldly. “I don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all.”
“You’re jealous,” she snapped.
At this, I let loose a derisive snort. “Fine, go out with him,” I said. “See if I care. But when you realize what a jerk he is, don’t come crying to me.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” came her retort. And we willed ourselves angrily to sleep.
Neither Estella nor I ever apologized to each other for our quarrel. Such formalities were not the way of our family, and we were our family’s children. Conflict, ill feelings, anger—dealing with them directly was unnecessary. We tended to leave that task to the eminently able hours and days, weeks and months, which gnawed at these hard matters as waves do at broken glass.
By the time we’d returned home to Jakarta, Estella and I had forgotten our midnight spat almost entirely. And not once during the vacation did the subject of Leonard come up again. I tried to believe that nothing more would come of Estella and Leonard’s brief dalliance in LA.
The lack of communication between them stoked this hope. Those were the early nineties—before cheap international calling plans, before widespread mobile phone or internet usage even. And to my relief, Leonard, on vacation with his family in Switzerland and France, didn’t bother with letters or postcards. When the end of our vacation rolled around and it was time to return to Berkeley, I was laughing at myself for worrying so unnecessarily.
As I now know, my relief was premature. While Estella, in Jakarta, was letting her newly sprung ardor cool, I’m fairly certain that Leonard was fanning his into a tremendous blaze, feeding it whole fir trees while skiing through the alpine powder snow, stoking its embers over dinners of buttered country loaves in French countryside châteaux. If anything, distance probably made Estella more desirable, leaving his imagination free to endow her with all the qualities of his ideal woman—a combination of magic mirror and genie, able to discern his true worth, able to fulfill the deepest yearnings of his heart. During our stay with him and Ricky, she had laughed at his bad jokes at all the right moments and said all the right things—at least, this was what he had perceived. And unlike the other girls in the crowd he mixed with, Estella possessed a certain intelligence and independence of mind, which he appreciated for all the wrong reasons. He wasn’t interested in valuing someone else, but he liked the idea of someone worthwhile valuing him.
And so Leonard decided to set his sights on my sister. Since, at the time, he enjoyed winning people over, I’m sure he took special pleasure in wooing Estella to make her wholly his.
* * *
The assault on Estella began in full force shortly after our second semester at Berkeley had started, and presumably immediately after Leonard had resumed his own classes. He began calling her all the time, and before I knew it, she and Leonard were talking for hours every night. Pyramids of roses and sunflowers, lilies and gladiolas greeted us on our doorstep when we returned from campus. Sometimes the arrangements came accompanied by chocolates, stuffed animals, or foil balloons.
Estella was flattered, and how easy it is to mistake being flattered for falling in love. Neither of us had ever had boyfriends in high school, unlike some of our classmates who dated without their parents knowing. We weren’t bad-looking, but we were hardly beauties or the buxom type—the two kinds of girls at our high school who usually attracted advances from the opposite sex. I’m sure the reputation we’d acquired as nerdy entophiles didn’t help, which was fine by us.
Leonard was the first guy who’d ever pursued Estella, and he did so with such aggression that she had no choice but to believe it was love. We had learned from the movies and our disappointed mother that love was the opposite of the watered-down stuff our father had to offer. Love was forceful and obsessive, extravagant and jealous. It never took no for an answer. Instead, it wore its object down until said object realized the right answer was yes. So when the first warning signs came, Estella merely thought them part and parcel of what should happen in a romance: Leonard grilling her about an outing with the BASA crowd and expressing his irritation that she’d spoken to other guys; his annoyance when she cut short their phone conversation because she had to go to class. Once, he mentioned how pretty she looked with her hair down, then began asking how she was wearing it whenever they spoke (the wrong answer was “up”). The slightest hint that she wasn’t paying close attention would spawn a suffocating cloud of sarcasm.
There is only so much room in a person’s life, and none if someone else insists that he take up all of it. And though Estella tried to keep Leonard and me in separate compartments, my allotted space shrank until I found myself out in the cold.
Toward the end of our freshman year, their relationship reached the inevitable next stage: a series of back-to-back weekend visits, sometimes extending to the surrounding Thursdays and Fridays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Initially Leonard was the one who would fly in—he was over the idea of road trips by now. He stayed in the guest room at first, and then one night he didn’t. Her class attendance dwindled. Her grades went into a nosedive.
Estella kept me updated whenever she had the chance. And what she was too embarrassed to tell me, my imagination filled in. I charted the progress of their relationship—its budding, its blossoming, its quick overflowering into sweet decay—as if it were running through my own nerves, insinuating its way into the chambers of my own heart. Estella’s soul could not be ripped from mine so easily—not yet. It is when a part of your body is being bruised, seared, sliced, that you are most alive to its existence. It was when Leonard was engaged in tearing Estella from me that I could sense her every tremor with an intensity that I could hardly bear.
Their first kiss. It happened during Leonard’s second visit, after they went to Yoshi’s in Oakland for a romantic night of sushi and jazz. Leonard insisted on driving (he always did) even though the car belonged to Estella and me, even though he’d had four sake cocktails in the space of two hours, even though it was pouring sheets. He turned the wrong way onto a one-way street, nearly hit an oncoming car, and swerved to a stop by the side of the road. The sound of the other car’s horn, monotonic and urgent, rang in their ears. Estella didn’t move, didn’t speak, sat there trembling to the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain pelleting down so hard and fast on the roof and windshield that it felt like the whole world was being washed away. Then, without any warning, came Leonard’s mouth. No lips. Only a mouth and its resident tongue, aroused and muscular and hot.
The first fumblings? The first strokings and squeezings? It is impossible to pinpoint their beginning; I can only imagine where and how: always at night, after dinner, after drinks, after a movie, after a concert—always after, when fatigue awakens lust and stirs it to languorous action in the plush, muffling seats of a theater, the recesses of our sofa, the back seat of our parked car, the carpet of Estella’s room, then the yielding surface of Estella’s bed.
The first sex. Probably not that first night he stayed in Estella’s room, nor the second. Maybe the fourth or fifth, amid the dead of sleep. A rolling toward and a rolling on top. Hands slipping buttons free, sliding under elastic, rubbing gently, then more firmly. Sleepy half protestations giving way to sleepy submission.
The more Estella gave Leonard, the more he required, like a monstrous houseplant spilling out of its pot. I hoped against hope that the physical separation imposed by the summer break would slow him down. He spent most of the vacation period doing an internship his father had arranged for him at Goldman Sachs in New York. E
stella and I split our time between Jakarta and an extended stay with our parents at Tante Margaret’s then-husband’s holiday home near Salzburg. But the commencement of our sophomore year only brought a fresh and frightening demand. Why, he asked, was it always he who had to come up to Berkeley to see Estella? Wasn’t it only fair that she travel to LA equally often to see him? She flew down immediately for the sake of appeasing him, and continued her migrations from then on, alternating them with his fortnightly trips to the Bay Area.
Then: Why limit their visits just to weekends? He couldn’t bear to be away from her, how could she take being apart from him? How could she be so loveless, so cold? Who needed to go to classes anyway? Alternating weekends turned into alternating weeks—six to eight days during which I had to endure Leonard’s presence followed by six to eight lonely days in an empty house.
By this point, our parents knew about Leonard and Estella. Our mother was beyond ecstatic. Who wouldn’t be to have a daughter in a serious relationship with a son from the Angsono family—the Angsono family? In those days the success of Leonard’s family was at its peak. They were the owners of vast and lucrative holdings in timber, telecommunications, banking, real estate, and cigarettes (those were the main ones; they were a large family with countless fingers in countless pies). Perhaps most crucially, Leonard’s father and uncles were on an amicable footing with high-ranking government and military officials, including President Suharto himself.
A marriage alliance with the Angsonos would benefit our fortunes. It would pave the way for joint ventures and favorable partnerships with Leonard’s clan, and give us access by association to the powerful inhabitants of the sphere just above ours. Estella told Ma about Leonard once he’d started visiting on weekends (though she didn’t mention that Leonard was staying with us, nor did Ma ever ask). Our mother immediately relayed the information to Opa, who responded with an approving nod. Ma then told our aunts and uncles, who greeted the news with delight.