by Tiffany Tsao
She would reveal only a little at first: what our father had accidentally let slip. Leonard would deny it. Then she would disclose that she’d found the incriminating evidence. His face would pale.
“How could you do this to me?” she would ask. Her fury would be pure and resplendent. For once, he would cower before her.
“Oh my God. Stell, I never meant for you to find out,” he would say. “It meant nothing. I’ll break it off right away.”
“You piece of shit,” she would say. How long she had yearned to say those words out loud. Because he was. A piece of shit.
He’d be shaking by now. “Please, Stell. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. Give me another chance.”
“I’m leaving you,” she’d respond coldly. “I want a divorce.”
Leonard would get up from his chair, the napkin on his lap dropping to the floor. “No, Stell. Please don’t leave.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
He’d approach her cautiously. He’d be crying, tears streaming down his face. “Because I love you. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I shouldn’t have…”
It would then be her turn to cry. “It’s not just this, Leonard. It’s everything. You treat me so badly.”
“I know. I know. But I love you, I swear. Please don’t leave me. I’ll change.”
Her spine would straighten. “I have to think about it.”
He would get down on his knees and hug her calves. “Please don’t leave.”
“I need time to think, Len.” She would extricate herself and walk out. And after that, the imagined scene went black. The curtain fell. She didn’t know what she would decide. Would she leave him, or accept his apology and give him a chance to reform himself?
That was how it was all supposed to play out. And by the time she had mustered up enough energy to get out of bed, descend the stairs, and confront him during his breakfast, it had taken on the quality of fact foretold.
So it rattled her when he called her a crazy bitch without even glancing up from his newspaper.
She pressed on, revealing she’d found the notes. Her voice was trembling, faltering. Her tears came too early.
“How could you do this to me?” she asked.
He drained his coffee and calmly wiped the corners of his mouth, as if he hadn’t heard her. He pushed out his chair and rose to his feet.
She repeated her question. His gaze was lizard-like and indifferent, with a modicum of what appeared to be revulsion.
“What happened to the woman I fell in love with?” he asked. But the question wasn’t directed at her. It was as if she were an inanimate object and he were speaking out loud to himself.
He walked out. Too late she picked up the coffee cup and hurled it after him. It shattered against the doorframe. This made her feel somewhat better, so she did the same with the saucer and the shallow bowl of chili sauce and the plate with the little heap of unfinished fried rice on it.
She never got to tell him he was a piece of shit.
He came home very late that night, long after dinner, close to two in the morning. He turned on the bedroom light, and she scrabbled awake. She’d spent all day crying in bed like some moron in a soap opera, among mounds of sodden, crumpled tissues.
“You’re a mess,” he observed. She couldn’t deny this. She hadn’t bathed. Her hair was matted. Her face was puffed up with grief.
“Can you blame me?” she said bitterly.
He jerked his head in the direction of the open suitcase at the foot of the bed. A pile of clothes and undergarments sat inside, trying to look ready for immediate departure, doing an unconvincing job.
“Are you going to your parents’ place?” he asked.
Miserably, she shook her head. She’d called Ma earlier to tell her what had happened and to ask if she could stay with them. Ma had told her to try to work things out first before doing anything rash.
He sat down on the corner of the bed. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you.”
The nerve. The indignity. But she had no energy left.
“Stell, you really need to pull yourself together.”
It was worse than drowning. Worse than burning.
He rose and headed to the bathroom.
“I didn’t want this,” he said, undoing his shirt buttons. “I thought our life together would be different.”
The bathroom door clicked shut. She heard the shower running. She considered going to our parents’ anyway. It wasn’t as if they’d turn her away once she was there, but she felt so tired.
Then she crawled over to her side of the bed and fell asleep; all she wanted was blankness—the effortless passing of the hours, the absence of consciousness.
At this juncture in her story, Estella removed her mittens, pried the lid off her eggnog, confirmed that none was left, and sighed.
I repeated Leonard’s words, incredulous: “ ‘What happened to the woman I fell in love with?’ What the hell did he mean by that?”
Estella smashed the empty cup between her palms and rivulets of cream trickled down her wrists. She flung the remains into the back seat and licked her hands clean, the left one first, then the right, like a cat. “Same thing as ‘I thought our life together would be different,’ I suppose.”
Only years later would we find out what he actually meant.
We had driven up to see the monarchs, supposedly, but I’ll admit that they didn’t make much of an impression on me. I was too fixated on Estella, and my memories are primarily of the effect they had on her—how happy she was, how entranced; the gasp that escaped her when she spotted the first sleepy cluster, dozens of wings folded at rest on a drooping eucalyptus branch; the brightness in her eyes as she watched the livelier ones flit about in the cold sunshine. The sight of my sister’s pleasure only heightened the excitement I’d been feeling since the start of our journey. Watching her was like watching a hungry child devouring a sundae, face aglow and smeared with chocolate sauce, chin dripping melted ice cream.
We only stayed two nights in the end, returning to LA as giddy and giggly as schoolgirls who’d just come back from playing truant. Leonard, either too proud to show he cared or actually indifferent, treated us with an aloof disdain. Our mother gave us a good scolding, but seemed relieved that we weren’t dead or kidnapped or raped, as she had feared. Our father was mostly amused and asked if we’d had a good time.
Leonard’s father seemed to have barely registered our absence, but it was clear that Leonard’s mother regarded our shenanigans as something incredibly shameful: as if Estella had run off with another man. When we walked through the Angsonos’ front door and our mother rushed at us, showering us with furious embraces and kisses, Leonard’s mother had stood there motionless, scarlet as a slab of barbecued pork. She refused to speak to either of us for days, and when conversation resumed, it was decidedly frigid, even more distant than usual—the manner of a respectable woman interacting with someone whom she considered morally debased.
* * *
“It’s not fair,” I said to Estella a few nights later in our room—it had become our room ever since the dinner at Matsuhisa. Leonard had given no sign that this arrangement bothered him in the least. “Her son does the philandering and manhandling, and she acts as if you’re the culprit.”
Estella laughed. “Yes, she should be ashamed of herself, shouldn’t she?” It pleased me to see that she had grown bold, brash even. She wore her indignation like an emerald choker, her shoulders thrown back, her neck long and haughty.
“Why don’t you ask for a divorce?” I asked.
She laughed again: a delicious ripple that sent shivers down my spine. “Maybe. Can’t be bothered right now, though. We’ll see once we’re back in Jakarta.”
It was like watching a freshly hatched butterfly spreading its wings for the first time. It was beautiful. And even better, we seemed to be of one mind. It was as if I were inhabiting her body, her soul, experiencing her newfound courage firsthand.
I hugged her fiercely.
“Don’t forget,” I whispered. “We’ll start something new. You don’t need him.”
She didn’t reciprocate, but she let me hold her. And when I released her, she smiled.
At the time, her placidity reassured me. I took it to mean she was confident, assured. Of course this was the end of her and Leonard, her demeanor seemed to say. Of course she would get a divorce. Of course we’d start a business together. Of course, of course…
I was wrong. I thought she was serene when in reality she was resigned. Or perhaps the improbability of actual escape had only begun to impress itself on her as we were waiting for our cars. The complete hopelessness of the entire situation probably struck her later, as she glided through the wrought iron gates of their property, designed by the architect that Leonard’s mother had hired. Can I blame her for being daunted anew by the loveless mansion that she was supposed to call home? Who wouldn’t have lost their nerve upon being confronted by the foyer—the great marble staircase and its swan-themed balustrades; the urns and statues and draperies, brawny in their elegance, selected and strategically placed to impress and impose?
She could no more escape her life than she could escape her own skin, or so it must have seemed. How enmeshed she was in it. And, if she were honest with herself, how embedded Leonard was in her. Like climbing ivy, Leonard had grown on her in the most insidious way. He had set down his roots during their college years, and the only way he could be dislodged now was for her to rip out her heart.
Meanwhile, I rode off with Ma and Ba, gestating the embryonic brainchild that would become Bagatelle. As I gazed off into the horizon of our sparkling future together, Estella’s and mine, I hadn’t the faintest inkling that she had already jumped ship.
* * *
The fundamental concepts of Bagatelle took firm hold of my mind in the months that followed our return from the US. Whenever I chattered excitedly about them to Estella, her response would be, “Great!” She was a wonderful sounding board. She asked insightful questions and encouraged me to think everything through. Yet all she would give me was an evasive “We’ll see” whenever I asked her for a pledge of involvement. Then some apologetic excuse would follow about the social obligations she had to get out of the way, or the errands that needed doing, or the household affairs she had to manage.
The monarch-viewing trip had reconnected us, and though we weren’t nearly as close as we had been in the pre-Leonard past, I was high with excitement. It took me several weeks to realize that Estella was never coming on board. Back then, I didn’t know that this was a deliberate decision—and the method she had settled on as her only viable way out. If she couldn’t save herself, then she would live vicariously through me. At the time, I thought she had given up, but now her logic seems all too clear. To attempt to actually change her life would only drive home the fact that she couldn’t. Much better to conjure wild dreams of freedom, to bask in imagined success, than to batter herself against the bars and find they would not break.
As far as her married life was concerned, things pretty much picked up where they left off. Leonard continued seeing his mistress (at least this was what Estella assumed; neither of them brought it up). He would come home late several times a week, and go out of town supposedly on business at least once a month. He kept up his rigorous bodybuilding routine. They still had sex, though Estella found the idea of sharing her husband repulsive. But as always, Leonard seemed to require little to nothing from her in their physical relations; mere acquiescence was enough.
It would take the monetary crisis to really change anything. And in the Angsono family’s case, it changed a great deal.
EIGHT YEARS LATER and here we are again, I thought as Estella and I stood next to each other, squinting up into the trees. We kept our hands in our pockets and our backs hunched against the cold. It was almost noon, but the sun still hadn’t broken through the clouds and the sea fog tinted everything a gentle gray.
“We’re not going to see any monarchs at this rate,” my sister complained.
“Maybe we should come back in an hour or two,” I suggested.
As if on cue, the clouds parted and the sun cast a spotlight on a high branch overhead. We saw them then: a cluster of brown triangles hanging heavy from the lobe of a eucalyptus tree, made conspicuous by the warm light that set the monarchs’ wings opening and shutting at intervals like a colony of winking, disembodied eyes.
The minutes passed and the sun grew even stronger, rolling back the fog and flooding the grove with light. More clusters revealed themselves, flashing orange. Here and there, individuals took flight and began dancing in the air, a few even fluttering downward like animated autumn leaves.
Estella came to life too, her eyes brightening, her face bursting into a brilliant beam. And I felt unnerved all of a sudden by how much that scene resembled the one so many years prior. Sure, our mission was different this time: not escape, but the retrieval of our long-lost aunt. Still, hadn’t we stood there, in more or less the same spot, on that first trip? Hadn’t my sister looked just as ecstatic? What cosmic logic had guided us to that same place, like the hands of a clock returning to the same numbers on different days? Was it the same invisible force that herded those poor butterflies up and down an entire continent every year?
“They look distressed,” I observed. The day was definitely warming up now, and it was as if the heat had set the monarchs in motion without their consent. I couldn’t help but contrast their agitation with the peaceful dormancy of my bagatelles and wonder if they might have been better off in a state of rest.
Estella merely laughed. “They look free, if you ask me,” she said as one alighted just above her left ear. “It’s from the Majesty collection,” she said, pointing, then sucking in her cheeks to mimic a fashion-model pout.
I played along. “No, dahlink,” I said with a frown. “Ze balance is all wrong. It should be just above ze eyes. To give an air of meestery.”
With an outstretched finger, I brushed the monarch’s furry chest in an attempt to prod it into place. It flitted away.
“No touching the butterflies!” someone yelled.
It was one of the park volunteers, a pudgy, bearded man clad in a ratty white T-shirt and a dark green fleece vest.
“No touching!” he cried again, before issuing a slow explanation that made clear his uncertainty about our English-comprehension skills. “Your fingers are oily. The oils damage their wings.”
He was talking about human fingers in general, not just mine, but I still couldn’t help but be irritated by his choice of phrase.
I stared him down coldly. “Thanks, I know how to handle lepidopterans. It’s my line of work.”
My English was faintly accented—that couldn’t be helped—but the imperiousness of my tone was enough to startle him. He recovered and shook his head. “No exceptions, miss,” he insisted, though more politely than before. As he tottered away, I was reminded of what Ray Chan had told us about folks here thinking that Chinese people were submissive. And I couldn’t help but wonder what Ray was doing now.
“Let’s go to the aquarium,” Estella suggested, tugging me back into the present. “We didn’t get around to it last time.”
We got into the car and drove ten minutes east to the town of Monterey. Truth be told, I felt relieved that we were diverging from our previous itinerary. A
fter last night and this morning, I’d started to fear that Estella would insist on replicating our first trip entirely. Somehow I knew I would have found that difficult to refuse.
I tried to lose myself in the dark climate-controlled corridors of the aquarium, among the snoozing, bulb-snouted octopuses; among the jellyfish pulsing like gelatinous disembodied hearts and the towering forests of silky green kelp. Sitting on the carpeted platform steps in front of the floor-to-ceiling tanks, we gazed into deep blue voids at the swirling schools of silver, the broad-sided tuna and sleek-winged skates slicing through the water like knives. But my mind refused to wander sufficiently. No matter how hard I stared at each exhibit’s depths, there was always a trace of our present situation reflected dimly in the glass.
I used to have nightmares about Tante Sandra, right after we’d learned that she had died. I would see her body tangled in seaweed, kissed by tiny colorful fish passing her in long trains, like people paying their respects at a wake. I’d see her free-floating and decaying, flecks of her flying into aqueous space, what was left bobbing on undersea currents, drifting through the ocean to who-knew-where.
As Estella and I passed through the aquarium, I imagined our aunt in the same scenes, but alive, holding her breath, incubating in that shadowy otherworld, waiting to come back from the dead, waiting to wash up on American soil, gasping for breath and born again, ready to start a new life unencumbered by the family, by us.
We reached a tank containing a great white shark. I read the sign. It was the first and only one worldwide to be on exhibit for such a long period of time. Apparently, great whites didn’t do very well in captivity as a rule. It glided through the water, its eyes cold black marbles, its nostrils permanently flared, its teeth perpetually on display.
Suddenly it struck me. “Oma lied to us about Tante Sandra that whole time,” I murmured.
Estella stared. “You’re only processing that now?”
“But why?” I asked, ignoring her incredulity.