by Tiffany Tsao
During this period, Leonard abandoned tending to the flesh. He simply didn’t have the time for personal-training sessions anymore. He needed to prioritize, he said. The fact that he was at home every night, albeit in his study or pacing the house making phone calls, suggested that he was also neglecting his mistress—at least for now. Oddly enough, Estella was privy to his business affairs more than ever before, if only because he began mumbling about them at dinner. Worry possessed him, eating from his lips in mutterings and rants at breakfast as well, and right before bed, and finally in his fitful sleep in between snorts and starts. Yet Sono Jaya’s performance on the whole continued to decline, and all Leonard received in return for his anxiety and effort was loss after loss.
Without the bodybuilding, all his muscle turned to flab. He couldn’t sleep. He developed excruciating back and neck pain that frequent massages and acupuncture couldn’t cure. He was a wreck. I couldn’t blame Estella for being secretly pleased.
Another woman might have been distressed at the erosion of her husband’s fortune and, by association, hers. But Estella hadn’t married Leonard for his money; she’d been deluded enough to think him madly in love with her, and helpless enough to form an attachment that simply wouldn’t go away. Leonard was now suffering in a manner akin to how he had made her suffer, and she exulted in his being forced to draw close and share in the orbit of her pain.
She took a perverse pride during this period in ensuring that her conduct and bearing as a wife were faultless. In this respect, more than five years under her mother-in-law’s tutelage had served her well. She dressed and groomed herself impeccably, and met her domestic and social obligations without flaw. She even fielded Leonard’s occasional complaints about everyday extravagances with equanimity, though they caught her by surprise. Before this, he’d never given the cost of comfort any thought: not the expense of ordering new parts for their German plumbing system, or the price of a private eight-course dinner party for fourteen prepared by Jakarta’s top sushi chef. It had never occurred to him to consider whether upholstering the seats in the new BMW with Hermès—not generic “Italian”—leather was really necessary, or whether it was even prudent to buy a new BMW at all. Most of the time, though, he was unable to bring himself to live below the standard of what he had been taught was the “right” way to live, and so he simply tried to get on with his lavish life. “Penny smart, dollar foolish,” he’d say—a phrase in English he’d picked up in college but modified unwittingly. The few times he did give into an irrational urge to cut corners—for example, when he sold his luxury yacht—he felt unutterably ashamed, unspeakably debased.
Our family’s financial ascension would only begin a year later, but the Angsonos’ abrupt descent led us to change our relationship with them. Where the association of our name with theirs had once opened doors, in this new era of zealous reform, it now put us at risk of being labeled corrupt cronies of the old establishment. Our business dealings with the Angsonos had become more liability than asset: Leonard’s bad judgment, not to mention his newfound resolve not to “let anyone get the better of him,” made him a dangerous business partner indeed. Pragmatically and pitilessly, Om Benny set about disentangling Sulinado Group from Sono Jaya.
The Angsonos’ misfortune also affected how our parents treated Estella’s situation, whether they were aware of this change or not. Previously, they’d looked the other way at Leonard’s treatment of Estella, not to mention the annexation of her from our family into theirs. Now Ma asserted the rights she and Ba had as her mother and father. They invited her out for meals much more frequently. And Estella was bold enough to accept, even when it conflicted with plans with her mother-in-law or the extended Angsono family. Leonard, of course, was always invited by our parents as well, but he felt acutely what this signified: a loss of face, a lessening of respect, a subtle shift in the balance of power. So he refused to come along, even when it meant he would be dining alone. It was just as well that he was absent: These days, our mother was much freer in criticizing Leonard and his family. Where she never did so before, she gave vent viciously now: the nerve of Leonard in treating her daughter like a two-bit concubine; the airs his family had always put on, and how they deserved everything that was happening to them. Our father—always quietly indignant on Estella’s behalf—couldn’t have looked more cheerful during these bouts of rage. He would happily siphon glass after glass, basking in the righteous fury of his wife.
It was around this time that our mother suggested Estella leave her life of leisured entrapment and regain some independence.
“How do you feel about running Mutiara?” she asked one night after dinner. The maids had just cleared the table and brought in dessert: some very fine Harum Manis mangoes and a fluffy Japanese cheesecake sent by Om Gerry Sukamto’s ever-thoughtful wife, Lilly. Ma would have never dared to make such a proposal before, but now she didn’t feel she had to respect the Angsonos’ outdated notions about married women not working.
I was there too, though I’d moved into my own place a few months earlier (not long after Sono Jaya and Leonard began to fray—perhaps it was my unconscious way of celebrating).
“Mutiara? The silk factory?” Estella asked. “The one that Om Jan was running?” She speared a mango slice and ignored the cheesecake. Lately, she had begun taking better care of herself, watching what she ate, being more diligent with her personal-training sessions. She was nourishing the sense of self-worth that her husband and in-laws had starved.
Our mother nodded. “I’ve been trying to find a replacement since he passed away last week. The position is yours if you’re interested.”
“Sure, why not?” said Estella instantly. And I felt a swell of mingled disappointment and hope: disappointment because Estella had agreed so quickly to running Mutiara, but had been so cagey about helping me start Bagatelle; hope because if she’d said yes to Ma, there still might be a chance she’d say yes to me. Not that the plans for Bagatelle had progressed much since the trip to Monterey. Thanks to the Krismon and the instability that followed it, I’d put further conceptualization on hold. The waters were still too murky to make solid plans for starting a new business, especially as the fashion industry was so high risk. That was my excuse; undeniably it was a good one. But if I were honest with myself, I hadn’t resumed working on Bagatelle in earnest because Estella, though supportive, had been noncommittal. My timing must have been off, I thought as Ma clapped her hands in delight at Estella’s ready assent. I must have requested too much of my sister too soon. Our trip to Monterey had prompted her to wear her circumstances with more dignity, but the diminishment of the Angsonos and her husband had strengthened her even more. I made up my mind to bring up Bagatelle again when she and I were alone.
After dinner, when Ba had disappeared into the wine cellar and Ma had retired to bed, Estella and I drifted up to her old room; it was more or less unchanged. Since returning from Berkeley, I’d rarely ventured in. It evoked too many happy memories of Estella. They would have smothered me if I stayed too long in their midst.
The walls were still pink. The dream catcher still dangled above the bed. The same framed poster of a pile of sleeping kittens hung above the enormous desk. Her old stuffed animals, dolls, books, and high school trophies sat expectantly on the shelves as if awaiting her return.
Estella pulled out the desk’s bottommost drawer.
“Where are our collections?” she said with a frown. “Did they throw them out?” It seemed to strike her only then how long she had been away. She hadn’t so much as peeked into that drawer since before her marriage. Practically all of its contents had been removed: the exoskeletons in assorted glass jars, poorly spread butterflies pinned into a Gucci handbag box, an envelope of detached butterfly and wasp wings. All that remained was our dismantled ant farm and an empty sachet that once had contained mothballs, long since evaporated into thin air.
“I bet Ma asked the maids to get rid of them,” she sighed, shutting the dra
wer again. “Ma always hated our insects.”
I made my move. “There could be other insects. You’re doing Bagatelle with me, aren’t you?” I tried to sound playful and nonchalant, though I could barely hear myself speak over the beating of my heart.
She smiled. Then those two infuriating words: “We’ll see.”
I burst into tears.
“You agreed to Mutiara!” I cried. “Why not to Bagatelle?”
Gently, she placed her hands on my shoulders and sat me down on the edge of the bed. “Doll, it’s a great idea. I mean it. Just go ahead without me. I can help you without getting involved.”
“It won’t be the same!” I hiccuped. “Don’t you see? It’s our chance to be together again. It’ll be like it was before.”
She shook her head. “Gwendolyn,” she said, her voice like a vanishing morning moon. “It will never be like it was before.” She put her hands on mine. “Promise you’ll go ahead with Bagatelle without me.”
“Why? What’s the point?” I mumbled.
“I’ll be so proud of you,” she said, not answering me. With the heel of her hand she wiped away my tears. “Promise me,” she insisted.
I was silent a long time before I nodded. Then we rose together and left the room.
At the time I didn’t understand why Estella wanted to remain on the sidelines, cheering me on. But the hindsight from my hospital bed grows ever sharper as I dive toward memory’s bottom, groping for precious clues that will put everything into place. I’m convinced of it now: that Estella regarded Bagatelle as a soap bubble—apt to burst if she dared touch it; that she saw me as her avatar, forging a path to freedom in her stead. She contented herself with what she considered attainable: namely, Mutiara. She was officially installed as its CEO before the month was out.
Leonard was furious, as was his mother, but their anger was impotent. Any power over our family they’d once possessed had disappeared. Our mother gave Estella records of the company’s fundamentals, as well as access to all relevant documents. The operations manager gave her a tour of the factory and the office, which was on site. They cleared out our dead relative’s desk and hired a new secretary for Estella. And just like that, my sister was transformed from a lady of leisure into a working woman.
Well, kind of. As I’ve mentioned, Mutiara was hardly an exciting business to oversee. It ran more or less by itself, and it didn’t run so much as plod. It was a shabby affair to boot: a stunted brick of a building crumbling at the corners like old toast. Estella had the entire office refurbished—ordered the walls repainted and new carpeting put in, replaced the air-conditioning units and installed brighter lights. But there were only so many improvements she could make.
The offices were located one level above the factory floor, which was as dingy as one might expect. The ceiling was low and the space a tad too small for so many large machines. Thanks to an ill-conceived cost-cutting measure, the electricity on the first floor had been wired to ensure that the lighting was permanently dim. As a result, the work being done seemed even more sinister than it was.
The cocoons arrived in crates from China, dead, each inhabitant steamed in its own wrappings before it could complete its passage to winged adulthood. A musty stench swept across the floor when they opened the boxes and lingered throughout the production process: the boiling of the cocoons to loosen the filaments, the unraveling of them onto wheels, then the reeling of them into skeins—a third of which Mutiara sold to other manufacturing companies in Indonesia and the remaining two-thirds of which Mutiara retained for its own use. It took Estella a while to get accustomed to the smell. She swore it permeated even the office air-conditioning units, steeping her and the other employees in putrescence.
It wasn’t ideal, but Mutiara would be a welcome refuge once Leonard’s unraveling began in earnest. We thought he’d hit rock bottom, but he hadn’t found Jesus yet.
In the meantime, I remained faithful to my promise to Estella, spending all my spare time working on my plans for Bagatelle. Up to that point, I had envisioned it as jewelry made from dead butterflies, beetles, wasps, et cetera, with their bodies and wings hardened somehow—enameled, perhaps. But the idea of keeping them alive occurred to me after Estella told me about the cocoons. If only there were some way to preserve them, but keep them alive. Even better, to control their movements—to transform them from insects into exquisite animated dolls…
As Estella embarked on the newest stage of her life, I set about preparing for mine. While she redecorated Mutiara’s office, I converted my apartment into the habitat I’d always dreamed of: oak and walnut paneling, chocolate leather and green velvet, accents of brass and gold. “Very masculine,” my interior decorator said with a laugh when I told her what I wanted. Whatever. I was going to start my new life on my own terms.
I didn’t draw the parallels at the time, but I see them now: Estella, me, and Leonard at the start of the new millennium, each of us undergoing our respective metamorphoses. Estella’s transformation was recent but anticlimactic. Mine was imminent and promising. Poor Leonard’s was, ultimately, fatal.
Still, as Estella would say four years later, on that pier in Monterey, on our second jaunt to see the monarchs, on our quest to find our aunt: Leonard was the most bearable toward the end—at least to her. To the rest of us, he was insufferable. And though his pathetic end state gave me some satisfaction, I resented that it made my sister feel more sympathy for him than she should have.
I WOULD NEVER have imagined that Estella and I would be able to laugh together about that last, hyperreligious phase of Leonard’s life. Yet there we were, eating hot fudge sundaes by the Californian seaside, doing exactly that. The vacation atmosphere of Monterey must have been infectious: a sunny, salt-air boardwalk beachiness despite the late autumn chill. After lunch, we’d strolled farther down the waterfront to partake in some window-shopping, flicking through racks of discounted souvenir T-shirts and running our hands through barrels of saltwater taffy.
“Dessert?” Estella had asked, pointing to an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor next to a store called Swell Seaside Shells.
“We just ate,” I said, amused.
“It’ll be our dinner,” she said. Dragging me in by the wrist, past the Please Wait to Be Seated sign, she plunked us down at a window-side table overlooking the beach.
She took the lead on reminiscing about Leonard’s late-blooming religiosity, as she had with everything else on this trip.
“Remember when he got born again?” she asked, sucking a glob of hot fudge off the back of her spoon.
“How could I forget?” I said, half wincing, half chuckling. “You called to tell me at, what, three in the morning?”
She laughed. “I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do.”
I couldn’t blame her. Unlike an actual birth, Leonard’s spiritual rebirth had come without warning. An old high school chum of his—Kelvin Chandra—had invited Leonard to an evening event organized by his church. A “miracle healing service,” they called it. Kelvin had promised it would help with his neck and back pain, and Leonard had thought it was worth a shot. It cured him, Leonard would later claim, of his physical ailment as well as what he often termed “the hole in his soul.”
He had come home at one in the morning after going out for late-night coffee with Kelvin when the event finally finished. His friend helped him process everything that had happened: the strangers praying over him, his experience of fainting, the vision he’d had of a man in radiant robes performing surgery on his heart.
“I think he’s having a mental breakdown,” Estella had whispered over her mobile phone, from her bathroom. “He came into the room, woke me up, and began crying nonstop. He was begging for me to forgive him, swearing God’s changed him for the better.”
“Good for him,” I’d yawned. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Doll, this is serious! He was acting like a lunatic. He wouldn’t leave me alone. The only reason I’m talking to you now is
because he finally passed out.”
He’d kept repeating his pleas for forgiveness, but she’d just stared back in disbelief. And when he’d tried to take her in his arms, she’d pushed him away. Then he’d begun howling about how he deserved it, before curling up at the foot of their bed and whimpering himself to sleep like a dog.
I almost choked on my ice cream now that I recalled the details in full. “You were convinced he’d joined a cult!” I laughed.
After that, the anecdotes flowed freely, each one seeming, for some reason, more hilarious than the last.
She remembered him getting some famous pastor from the UK to cleanse their house of evil spirits. The man’s name was Eli Elizer, or something like that—an authority on spiritual warfare who was doing a speaking tour of Asia. He went from room to room, bellowing and anointing all the doorframes with special oil.
I recalled how Leonard began accepting the invitations to dinner at our parents’ place—and how they begged Estella not to bring him anymore once his intentions to convert them became plain.
Estella recalled his baptism, which had taken place in a private swimming pool, at the house of a fellow church member. There were five people being dunked that day and Leonard was one of them—the fourth in line, to be precise. My parents and I were in attendance, more out of curiosity than anything else. Tante Elise was there too, only to see with her own two eyes if her worst fears were true. Just days before, she’d consulted a Catholic priest, who had confirmed that her son was committing a grave error in getting rebaptized.
“Remember his testimony?” Estella asked.
I did. It had stood out from the others, though it too had been delivered in a nervous stammer and had gone on for an excessive amount of time. I remembered it because, despite the bad delivery, Leonard had been shockingly honest. He spoke about how terribly he had treated his wife, and even admitted that he’d kept a mistress. (He’d got rid of her a few days after his conversion—Leonard had made the announcement to Estella after coming home from work.) He listed all his past sins: the drinking, the sudden outbursts of temper, his selfishness, his pride. And he praised the Lord for how He had transformed him and was changing him still. Tante Elise turned red, then turned tail, fleeing the scene as soon as her embarrassment of a son emerged from the pool.