by Tiffany Tsao
The months passed. They celebrated their second wedding anniversary (if “celebrated” was the right word). The new house, behind schedule, was finally ready. They moved in, all her furniture and art purchases leaving it still too barren for two.
It was at this point that Leonard began to enter what Estella and I would later refer to as his “muscle period.” The house was equipped with a full gym: cardio equipment, weight machines, dumbbells, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, medicine balls—the works. Estella used it for an hour twice a week during sessions with her personal trainer. Then one day, out of the blue, Leonard hired a personal trainer of his own—a beefy, amiable man in his thirties who used to be on the national weight lifting team. Estella began to wonder if Leonard’s trainer actually lived in the house without her knowledge: He was in the gym almost every day, early in the morning and late at night, alert and smiling, ready to oversee Leonard’s bulking up.
This new phase brought Estella relief, she said. Weight lifting distracted Leonard from her supposed shortcomings and flaws in a way that work and alcohol never had. And the physical distance they were able to keep from each other in the new house helped as well. For the first time since the start of their relationship, Estella had some room to breathe.
She began collecting again, just like when we were children, but this time, because of Leonard, in secret. She wandered the house with tweezers and a jar, pouncing on insects before the servants did. A bright blue wasp rendered docile by impending death. The stout body of a death’s-head moth, broken in two. The cerulean wing of a swallowtail, torn. She arranged them artistically in a glass-topped jewelry case along with a sachet of mothballs, which she refreshed regularly. The case was kept in her dressing room, in a drawer with her scarves—a place as safe from Leonard’s eyes as any. Not that he bothered to rifle through her possessions anymore, as jealousy had spurred him to do when they were at college.
Just as my activities at the Essig reminded me of Estella, her collecting made her think of me, she said. And she would recall our conversation in our kitchen in Berkeley on our last real night together, what I’d warned her about Leonard getting worse, and that question I’d asked: Can’t you leave him?
But the answer was still no. Even more so than before. Not merely because the two families were now entwined in business, or because Leonard’s family was Catholic and would never sanction a divorce. Nor was it apathy, or because divorce was still generally frowned upon—Tante Margaret was living proof that one could split up and continue to circulate in society, even if she did have to put up with being the subject of gossip for a few months each time. The real reason, however implausible, was that Estella still loved Leonard.
At least, that’s what she had the audacity to call that faded remnant: “love.” If you ask me, it was contagion. He had grown on her, and it was irrelevant whether she still had any affection for him or not. People nowadays speak easily of cutting ties: with parents who behave badly and friends who rub them the wrong way, with lovers who fail to satisfy and spouses they have come to despise. But my sister revealed herself to be a helpless traditionalist, unable to shatter what circumstance had wrought. If I’d been her, I would have clawed and scrabbled and bit like a cornered rat—at Leonard, at my family and his. But no matter how bitter she became, even once she found out about Leonard’s affair and our parents’ knowledge of it, that contagion inside of her still held her back, arresting her movements, refusing to let her go.
She was a fool not to have suspected. After all, it wasn’t as if unfaithful husbands were rare in our world—our opa a case in point. I suppose it is the sort of thing you think could happen to everyone but yourself. Add to that Ma and Ba’s complicity, though, and perhaps her shock was more excusable.
She made the discovery when Leonard was away on business in New York. Like the obedient daughter she was, she took the opportunity to ask our parents if they wanted company for dinner; I’d long since graduated and had been living at home for about two years by that point. But for some reason I was out of town that night. Ma and Ba were delighted to have her over. They rarely saw her anymore. Being an Angsono was practically a full-time job and our family had ceded her willingly. Ma asked a lot of things about the new house. Ba brought out three German Rieslings, just for comparison’s sake. The atmosphere around the table bordered on convivial, and my sister felt almost content. As bad as things were with Leonard, as stifled as she felt by her in-laws, at least she had our parents, who really did care, despite their shortcomings.
After dinner, Estella hung out with Ba in his wine cellar as he pottered around unpacking new acquisitions. It seemed to satisfy what remained of his inner intellectual—the sorting of his wines by provenance and year, grape and blend. Sitting there on a stack of unopened crates, listening to Ba’s inebriated prattle about this wine and that, Estella had the sensation of listening to a lullaby. So the cut, when inflicted, came all the more as a surprise.
“These aren’t drinking well at all this year,” said Ba, cradling a bottle of Médoc. He squinted closely at the label. “Not drinking well at all,” he repeated mournfully, as was his habit when he was very, very drunk.
“But they are saying it will reach its prime in five years, maybe eight,” he continued. “Would you like a case, Stell? I’ll give you ten. The least I can do. I know you’re unhappy. Very unhappy. The least I can do, my darling. I feel it’s our fault, you know. Even though your mother said it isn’t.” He shook his head and replaced the bottle. “But I told her… I told her yes, it is. Yes, it is.”
To this day, I remember my sister’s vivid reconstruction of that fateful night in Ba’s cellar. How deeply it had affected her! To the point where every detail had apparently etched itself into her brain. And her telling of it seemed to transfer the scars to me: I found myself re-creating the scene in my own mind, as if I had been there.
After offering to compensate my sister for her unhappiness in immature Médoc, our father seemed to forget she was there at all, falling into the underworld of his own thoughts. He shuffled away into another aisle, and Estella listened to the trail of disembodied words, interrupted now and then by the clink of glass against glass or the soft thunk of a bottle being shelved.
The words kept flowing. “I told her it’s our fault, and she asked me, didn’t we think of nothing but Estella’s happiness? Didn’t we act out of love—out of what would be best for her? And they were so in love too, the two young people. The Angsono boy especially. Such a good match between families. Such a good, prosperous match.” The voice paused, as if its speaker were taking time to peer around and think. “Compare it to our marriage. What did I bring to it? Nothing. Nothing. It’s true. One has to be frank about these things. I brought nothing. And it wasn’t enough. Wasn’t enough. Poor Sarah. Poor me…”
The voice paused again, this time as if it had lost its way. Then it stumbled back on track. “Another woman is a serious matter, I said to Sarah. And she agreed with me: Yes, but what good would it do to tell Estella? To make her unhappy? And I said, she is already unhappy. But Sarah insisted: What was the point? If you ask me, I think it’s an insult to our family. An insult! How dare he! But what good would it do to tell? Make it all worse. Too late now. Nothing to be done. Didn’t we act out of love?” From the darkness, there was silence. Then a plaintive echo. “Out of love,” it sighed, leaden in the cold air.
The terrible truth of these last words hounded Estella as she burst out of the cellar. She ran through the house and out the front entrance into her car.
The driver awoke with a start.
“Home, ma’am?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Estella.
As they sped down roads made clear by the lateness of the night, she wept over the fact that there was no sanctuary anywhere.
ONLY NOW, WHEN I’m interrupted, do I realize how far I’ve burrowed. I’m dragged out by the legs from Estella’s story as I learned it on our first monarch-viewing trip, and from the reenactment of
that trip during our mission to find our aunt, into the present, this bed, this comatose solitude, by a woman’s voice. I have a visitor, but I don’t know who it is, and she can’t know me all that well either. She’s just whispered to the nurse, “Are you sure this is her?”
I hear the nurse answer in the affirmative before walking briskly away.
Whoever this person is, she seems nervous. There’s a long silence before she speaks. And when she does say something, she does so with a wobble, like a novice cyclist who’s just started pedaling.
“I’m not sure if you can hear me. But I want to apologize.”
I’m intrigued. I wish I could tell her to go on. Thankfully, she does so without my encouragement.
“I know what I did with Leonard was very wrong. I wasn’t thinking clearly. At first I was worried about keeping my job—he was my boss, after all. But then, I guess, I began to like how he showed so much interest in me. It wasn’t as if I was anyone important…”
Revelation dawns. It’s Leonard’s mistress. Her voice, already timid, lowers to a whisper. It’s almost as if she’s worried about someone eavesdropping.
“But that’s no excuse. Please forgive me. I had no idea it would lead to this.”
Lead to what, I wonder, before the second revelation hits: She thinks she’s responsible for Estella murdering us all. And since I’m the only one who is still around, she’s come to confess to me.
Leonard’s mistress begins to cry. “I didn’t mean for your family and his to…” She breaks down completely and stops trying to speak at all.
There, there, I want to tell her. It’s not your fault. I mean it. As if you could ever hope to be so significant. Obviously I can’t, so I stew motionless and silent until she finally decides to take her leave. To my relief, she makes no attempt at any physical plea for forgiveness—hand-grasping, or the like. Her departing words get straight to the point: “Again, please forgive me. And don’t haunt me. Please tell the spirits of your family and Leonard’s family to forgive me as well.”
Of course there’s an ulterior motive, the superstitious little fool. I’ve a good mind to will myself to die just so I can rattle her windows and flick her light switches on and off.
Her visitation has its own ghostliness about it, though, and it spurs me back into my memories in search of the actual motive behind Estella’s deed. The more I dwell on it, the more I’m positive that it had nothing to do with Leonard’s mistress, though I can’t quite explain why.
I crawl back into the tunnels of the past—through Estella’s quest to redeem our family and into the wounds reopened in its course, into the thick of our first flight up the California coast to see the monarchs. I was so sure we could escape for good, from Leonard, from his family, from ours. We were together again. Nothing could stop us.
Could I have been any more naive?
Estella and I had devised the plan together lying in bed after the incident at Matsuhisa. We’d been dying to see the monarch butterflies overwintering in Monterey County ever since we’d heard about them during our first month at the Essig. One of the curatorial assistants had mentioned it in passing, and when we asked him about it, he’d explained: Every autumn, the monarch butterflies in the northern US and Canada undertook a mass migration to warmer climes down south. Monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains traveled to Florida and Mexico. Monarchs west of the Rockies congregated in groves on the California coast.
“It’s quite a spectacle,” he’d said, almost dreamily. “Huge clusters of them everywhere. You should go sometime, if you can.”
Now the chance had come and we seized it. Drunk on rediscovered sisterhood, we packed a suitcase and sped off before dawn. We borrowed Om Albert’s car—a silver Beemer—and left a considerate note: Gone on vacation. Back in a few days. No other details. They’d see us when they saw us. We turned off our mobile phones.
I remember the thrill of having her back, of her being mine again and not his. It almost frightened me, the intensity of my emotions, my attachment to her. And over the course of the long car ride, as she unfolded the events of the last few years in the same way she unfolded the faded maps of California we discovered in the glove compartment, my elation rose and peaked. We had defeated Leonard. We had overcome. Good had triumphed over evil at long last. Estella and I even speculated about our post-Leonard future. I’d acquired plenty of hands-on knowledge and experience working for the family, which would put us in a good position to start our own company.
“I don’t know anything,” Estella sighed. “I’m useless. I know how to call the interior designer, how to train new servants, and how to balance a social calendar. That’s about it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get the hang of it. We’ll do this together. And I don’t mind doing the heavy lifting for the first few years.”
The vision shimmered before us like a mirage. We mused on possible business ideas: Something boring but stable? Something cutting-edge and creative? Commodities? Food and beverage? Light industry? Estella would jolt upright in the passenger seat at intervals, energized by random ideas. Cereal! And then, half an hour later—desalination technology! At the passing of a sign advertising accommodation—a hotel chain! At a pit stop just off the freeway—self-driving cars! The ideas got progressively and deliberately more ridiculous, veering into genetic modification—boneless chickens and odorless durians, shell-less prawns and stingless bees, and insects as tame pets.
“Insects as clothing!” she exclaimed, and we spun images of insect-leather jackets and six-legged hats before casting them away in gales of laughter as I veered us into the parking lot of a seasonal outdoor market.
CHRISTMAS VILLAGE! the signs proclaimed. They also promised SANTA CLAUS!, RUDOLPH!, and AWARD-WINNING CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS!
“I guess there are awards for everything,” I remarked.
Once we were back in the car, a newly acquired crocheted angel dangling from the rear-view mirror, our talk took a turn for the serious, partly due to Estella’s contemplative caffeine-and-sugar-induced transcendent state. In the course of half an hour she’d downed a triple-shot peppermint mocha and a large spiced apple cider. She was now nursing a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm eggnog between the blue alpine-patterned mittens I’d insisted she buy.
“Do you think Ma really meant what she said last night in the car?” she murmured, staring wide-eyed into the distance. “That she and Ba let all this happen,” she chose her words carefully, “because they love me?”
“Of course she meant it.” I sneered. “But it doesn’t make it right.”
As if fueling her meditative powers, she took another sip of the sweet eggy brew. “Ba said the same thing back in the wine cellar, when he accidentally spilled the beans—that they did it out of love.”
“Did what?”
She squinted, trying to recall Ba’s drunken ramblings from several months back. “All of it, I suppose: encouraging Leonard and me to get married; not telling me he was having an affair.”
I shrugged. “Love sucks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“She’s a junior-level accountant,” Estella said. “His mistress.”
“At Sono Jaya?”
She snorted. “Where else? Screwing an employee, how unimaginative can you get?”
“At least she’s not the maid?” I ventured.
“You know, he wasn’t even sorry when I confronted him.”
Estella went on to recount how she’d restrained herself for a while, not letting on that she knew anything, even after Leonard had returned from the supposed business trip in New York. (Who knew what was true anymore?)
He’d been back a week when she decided to confront him, but she needed more conclusive evidence. When she was sure he was asleep, she’d snuck out of bed and searched the drawers in his dressing room and study. Nothing. Then, when she’d turned in desperation to rifling through his briefcase, she discovered the diary that he kept for her.
It was one of those free weekly pl
anners that insurance companies give to clients every year. It was filled with Post-its, playful in tone, and, puzzlingly, written in English. Perhaps their author had wanted to demonstrate her worldliness and sophistication—though the English was ungrammatical enough that it had the opposite effect. Or maybe their author had thought using a foreign language would render the notes more difficult to comprehend if a coworker happened to catch a glimpse. They were exactly the kind of notes one would expect a mistress to write:
Want to exercising later?
I can’t work. I think of you.
Love you so much.
I wearing what you buy me. See you tonight.
Estella went to the bathroom and threw up. Then she stuffed the corner of a towel in her mouth and screamed. Then she sat on the cold marble of the bathroom floor, thinking what a waste her life had been and how perhaps she should slit her wrists with the pair of nail scissors by the sink. He’d be sorry then, even if she only succeeded in bleeding all over the bathroom. Reason prevailed: No, he wouldn’t be sorry at all. He’d just get mad at her for making a mess.
She hated him, she told herself, cramming the towel into her mouth again. The problem was, she knew she didn’t—not completely, not yet. Exhausted, she crept back into bed and lay next to him, red-eyed and plotting for the remainder of the night. Eventually, the hum of the air-conditioner and the sound of Leonard’s somnolent shiftings and grunts gave way to the songs of morning—the chatter of birds, the calls to prayer from the mosques, followed by the tok tok tok of the food vendors’ sticks and the honking of cars, all barely audible through the heavy curtains and windows but deafening to her ears.
Then Leonard’s alarm clock rang and she could carry out the plan she’d spent hours conceiving. The problem was, her plan had some flaws, though she couldn’t see them at first. It relied too much on him responding in a certain way—just so. She was like someone new at playing chess, seeing and anticipating only one possible move in response to each of hers.