by Tiffany Tsao
The most amazing thing of all was that Leonard wasn’t lying. He really had been behaving better. I learned this from Estella, who called me often in those days in an attempt to make sense of Leonard’s surprising about-face.
After more than seven years of marriage, Estella had grown accustomed to the snide remarks, the criticisms of her appearance and mannerisms, the brooding silences that had become such integral parts of their interactions. In that last stage of his life, he instead began inquiring about her day. Or asking her opinion on something related to business. Or telling her funny stories, although religion hadn’t improved his comedic abilities.
At first, Estella kept a wary distance. Then she began trying to provoke him, as if she couldn’t bear the suspense of having Leonard’s inner brute concealed for so long. She introduced lapses in her domestic management that she knew he normally wouldn’t stand: meals served late, and tepid; towels infrequently replaced; business shirts folded, not hung. The maids carried out her wishes with incredulity, then promptly made themselves scarce. Leonard didn’t seem to notice with all that God on the brain. Estella had even begun talking about Mutiara whenever she could, to remind him that she had deliberately gone against his and his family’s wishes. He’d responded by showing interest, asking questions, nodding and smiling.
“I swear, Doll,” said Estella, dragging her maraschino cherry through the soupy mess left in her sundae bowl. “I thought aliens had abducted him and replaced him with someone else.”
I laughed. “Then maybe he’s still alive, flying around in a spaceship somewhere.”
The comment was designed to make her laugh too, but instead she sighed. In our irreverence, I’d forgotten that she’d actually loved him, and I’d taken the jokes one step too far.
“I remember,” she murmured, “when I realized what religion was doing to him.”
Out of compassion, I adopted a gentler tone. “I do too. Remember? I was there.”
Ever since finding Jesus, Leonard had been relentless about trying to get Estella to accompany him to church. Estella had held out as best she could, but it was like being under siege. Five months after Leonard’s baptism, she finally caved. She agreed to go with him, and she insisted I come too.
I did of course. (Could I ever refuse Estella? Even when I put up a fight, I always eventually gave in.) It was the same church that had hosted the event where Leonard was saved. They had no building of their own, so the congregation met in the ballroom of a luxury hotel, and it disoriented me to see the familiar backdrop of weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays now serving as the venue for a religious service. The setup was similar to that of the Easter service we attended with Nikki: chairs arranged in rows, facing the front, and a stage platform flanked by two projector screens displaying religious song lyrics.
A band headed by a man singing and strumming a guitar led the congregation in song—tunes alternately upbeat and ballad-ish, catchy but odd once you realized what they, and you, were singing about: “blood” and “lamb,” “power” and “blessing,” “lifting up” things and declaring God “worthy.” The man sometimes closed his eyes and raised his hands, as did the people around us. At the end of the fourth song, the drummer stopped, but the keyboardist continued to play a stream of notes that had no beginning and no end, that floated the listening ear down quiet streams as the guitarist stopped singing and began to pray. He was addressing God directly, that much was clear, but he seemed to be doing so as if it were part of a show, a display, for the audience as well as the Holy Trinity upstairs. “Lord Jesus…” he intoned frequently (the same elongated “Jee-zus” of Leonard’s prayers). The guitarist pleaded with Him to open hearts and touch lives and bring comfort and peace. Then he prayed for someone named Pastor Mathias—that he be anointed by the Lord that morning and that he wield God’s truth like a double-edged sword.
Gradually, the guitarist’s words faded, overtaken by a thundering voice, also praying to God. I squinted one eye open. Pastor Mathias himself had mounted the stage. He was Chinese, swarthy and pockmarked, and he looked more like a construction worker than a man of God. But he wore a well-tailored black suit and a maroon collared shirt, and in his right hand he hefted a black leather-bound Bible as a sign of his authority. Estella had one eye open too, but it was trained on Leonard.
Like I’ve said, Leonard wasn’t unique in embracing Christianity. Thanks to the recent economic and political turmoil, it had become all the rage—especially the kind claiming that material prosperity was an outcome of following Jesus. But where this brand of Christianity made most of its adherents sleeker and glossier, Leonard seemed… more pathetic, somehow. Diminished. Reduced.
The sermon began. We both saw the same thing: Leonard rapt, hanging on to the pastor’s every word, following along in his own Bible, eagerly highlighting passages. More than that, we saw the hollows in his cheeks, the dark circles around his eyes. His face, once baby-cheeked and fleshy, had acquired a wild, ascetic look.
The contrast between the sermon going on in front of us and Leonard’s appearance couldn’t have been starker. Pastor Mathias was speaking of the prosperity that God wanted to lavish upon His children. This message was on par with what we often heard recent Christian converts in our set say: how their God was a god of abundance; how spiritual and material riches were to be found in Christ. The whole economy had started to pick up by that point, along with everyone’s fortunes, but a Christian belonging to this school of thought was more likely to attribute the turnaround to divine favor. Only Leonard seemed to be the exception, both in health and circumstance. Everyone else was on the rise, but it seemed God could only do so much with a man so lacking in talent. Being born again improved Leonard’s business abilities not a jot, though to his family’s relief, it made him more accommodating, more willing to heed his uncles’ and cousins’ advice. Sono Jaya stopped leaking money, but as long as Leonard was in charge, the chances of the family’s conglomerate actually recovering from its losses looked dismal.
What Estella and I perceived in Leonard that Sunday only seemed to confirm this. We saw how weak he’d become, how toothless with spiritual enlightenment. Certainly, he’d been on the decline before that, but he’d retained his surliness, had put up a fight. With one foot in the kingdom of heaven, he seemed to be wasting away without minding at all.
Leonard’s downfall didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Rather, it came as the termination of a long, straight road. You can see it well before you reach it, and there are signs to alert you so you’re not too surprised. Even so, I don’t think either my sister or I foresaw exactly how Leonard’s end would come or what form it would take, or that it would mean total, physical destruction.
We surveyed the melted remains, admitted defeat, and paid the bill. It was getting dark.
“Let’s go back to the hotel room,” Estella suggested. “We can order a bottle of wine from room service.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
We made our way to the car. As Estella steered us back to Carmel, I couldn’t help but dwell further on those final months of my brother-in-law’s life. Instead of taking the highway, my sister opted for a roundabout scenic route that hugged the coast so we could take full advantage of those precious last rays of sun. Set against the dimming backdrop of the rugged coastline, with its long stretches of brush and shaggy wind-slanted trees, the events that led up to Leonard’s death took on a gothic hue as I turned over in my mind all that I had learned from Estella.
It had started harmlessly enough: a question one morning at breakfast before he and Estella left for work.
“Doesn’t it ever trouble you?” he asked Estella.
“Does what ever trouble me?” Estella asked back.
“You know, how we made our money. How we still make it, despite all the government talk about cracking down on corruption.”
“I’m not sure you can call what you’ve been doing ‘making money’ ”—that’s what I would have said if I were in her
place, anyway.
Estella was more tactful, as always. “Which country do you think we’re living in, Len?” she asked. “This is just how business operates here.”
“But doesn’t it make you feel… sinful?”
Estella tried not to cringe. “What choice do we have?” she asked, trying to sound lighthearted. But Leonard refused to be anything but serious.
“ ‘You are a chosen people,’ ” he intoned, staring into his bowl of chicken congee, as if the mysterious words he muttered were written inside. “ ‘A royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession. That you may declare the great deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.’ ”
My sister’s response was only natural: “What?”
“First Peter, chapter two, verse nine. God commands us to shun sin’s darkness and live in the light.”
“I should get going,” said Estella uneasily. “We’re expecting a shipment for the new factory lab.”
Leonard continued to stare trancelike into his breakfast. “You do know how the Halim family got the exclusive government contract for Mutiara in the first place.”
“Of course I do,” Estella sighed. “It’s how everyone gets government contracts—including Sono Jaya, in case you forgot.”
In response to this parry, Leonard gave a melancholy nod. “I know,” he murmured before falling silent again.
Not knowing what else to do, Estella left for work. She called me from the car, and we tried to make sense of the conversation together.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
I stated the obvious. “Religion.”
“Is it?” she asked. “Then why aren’t the other fanatical Christians we know acting the same way? No one else looks like they’re crazy, or dying. No one else seems to be worried about how ‘sinful’ doing business in this country is. Everybody but Leonard is happy to look the other way.”
“Maybe we just don’t know about it,” I said, racking my brain for the other gung-ho Christians of our acquaintance. “Maybe Martin Yulianto is actually withering away underneath all that flab. Maybe our cousin Chris didn’t really transfer seven hundred thousand US dollars into the offshore bank account he owns under a different name.”
I couldn’t keep it up. I broke into a chuckle.
“It’s not funny, Doll,” said Estella. “You aren’t married to him.”
“True. Thank God.”
“Har-har. Thanks for all the help,” she quipped. I could tell she wasn’t really mad, but I apologized anyway.
“Have a good day at work,” I added.
“I’ll try.”
I really didn’t take my brother-in-law’s guilt too seriously. After all, Leonard was a creature of change. How many identities had he picked up and thrown aside since meeting my sister? Amiable jokester, jealous boyfriend, ill-tempered drunkard, womanizing muscle-head. And now: holier-than-thou religious fundamentalist. Surely, this phase too would pass. Besides, other, worthier matters required my attention. I’d obtained the start-up capital from the family for Bagatelle. I’d rented office space, hired top-notch scientists from Europe to start experimenting, and assembled a team of designers, marketing experts, and legal staff. At long last, my life was taking off, and Leonard wasn’t going to stop me. Estella was right, I wasn’t married to him, yet thanks to what he’d done to my sister, he’d managed to guzzle up a great deal of my youth. Estella continued to keep me updated, though. And Leonard continued, inexplicably, to obsess about the sin on which our luxurious life was built.
The Bible verses he quoted took on a definite theme: repentance, turning from evil, becoming pure. He seemed to dread going into the office, instead spending extra time doing his early-morning devotionals and often leaving only after Estella had departed for Mutiara. Or at least she assumed he went to work. He was often back at home before she was that she began to wonder. The only evidence that he had left the house at all were his shoes, discarded and idling at the bottom of the great staircase banister, toes pointed into the house interior rather than toward the front door, which was how the maid would lay them out in the mornings. For all Estella knew, Leonard simply changed the direction of his footwear and stayed at home. It wouldn’t have surprised her.
He even began to experience spells of paralysis. He would be sitting in the bedroom slotting in a cuff link, or at a dinner party swirling a glass of wine, when revelation would arrest him. He would stop and stare at the $4,000 Cartier cuff links his fingers had been fiddling with and the plush ivory carpet and the white French linen on the bed. Or he would gaze slack-jawed at the hothouse peonies in the table centerpiece or the plate of untouched foie gras being cleared away by a waiter. He was surrounded by opulence, by a world made possible through unrighteousness. And this knowledge ate away at him from the inside out. Perhaps it was only natural that he set about trying to shatter this world into pieces. He began by pleading with others to open their eyes too.
According to my sister, he’d even brought the matter up with his uncle, Om Paulus. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live with clear consciences?” he’d asked the man at one of the Angsono Sunday lunches at the Grand Hyatt. The weekly family tradition was still going strong, even if Sono Jaya wasn’t.
I’d learned about the debacle from my sister, who’d called me immediately afterward, while the entire awful exchange was piping hot in her mind. They’d been dining on dim sum in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, and Om Paulus had just bitten into a steamed dumpling. He’d coughed and swallowed before turning a cold eye on his nephew.
“My conscience is clear, Len,” he growled. “If yours isn’t, then that’s your problem, not mine.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that we defaulted on so many of our loans during the Krismon?”
“A lot of companies defaulted, Len. We didn’t have the money.”
“Sure we didn’t,” Leonard said.
Leonard’s other, younger uncle, Om Marcus, shushed him angrily from where he was sitting. The lazy Susan in the center of the table stopped moving. Except for the kids, who were at their own table, the whole family was all ears.
“What are you getting at, Len?” asked Om Paulus in a dangerously low voice.
Tante Elise tried to intervene, though her standing among the Angsonos had taken a tumble when Om Albert died and her son began ruining the family. “No business talk on Sundays!” she sang out desperately before turning to Leonard and pleading, “Don’t bring this up now.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we face the facts about where we get all the money to live like this?”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t come from you,” Om Marcus thundered. “Since your father died, your stupidity has been draining us dry.”
Om Marcus’s eldest—Leonard’s cousin—chimed in. “It’s a good thing Om Albert lived long enough to oversee the debt restructuring. If you’d been in charge, we’d be completely bankrupt by now. You’ll never be a tenth of the man he was,” he spat. “Or even a hundredth. You’re worthless!”
All hell proceeded to break loose. They were lucky they were in one of the restaurant’s private rooms. Even the children started paying attention at that point.
“Tante Estella, what’s going on?” asked one of Leonard’s nieces, tugging on my sister’s sleeve.
“Nothing,” Estella replied unconvincingly, just as Om Paulus barked, “Now you listen here, Len!”
Leonard’s uncle continued, “This family’s had it up to here with you and your newfound piety. If you want to be religious, fine, but don’t be a pain in the ass. We’ve already lost a bundle thanks to you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you take away what’s left!”
“No business talk on Sundays,” implored Tante Elise again, feebly.
Om Paulus turned on her. “Shut up, Elise. The only reason we’re talking ‘business’ is because your son’s an imbecile.”
Tante Elise began to cry.
“What did Om L
eonard do?” the same niece asked my sister.
“Nothing,” Estella replied again, no more convincingly than before. Meanwhile, Leonard, stunned by his family’s hostility, had sat in silence for the rest of the meal.
Even that didn’t stop Leonard, I mused as the very last traces of light disappeared and our car was swallowed up by night. The road was winding past golf courses, resorts, and private estates now. The only illumination came from our car’s headlights and the footlights of elegant hedge-bordered signs informing us what we were driving past: Cypress Point Golf Club, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Casa Palmero, the Mariposa Ranch.
It had become increasingly clear that Leonard was preparing to do something rash. But no one had any idea what it would entail until he’d mentioned it to my sister. They were in the car on the way to Barry Sutiodjo’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Estella was fidgeting absentmindedly with her brooch when Leonard suddenly said, “Maybe we should come clean about it all.”
“Huh?” she said, not sure what he was talking about.
“About our sins. Sono Jaya and Sulinado Group should go public about them. You know, confess.”
This was enough explanation for Estella to know roughly what he had in mind. The pin in her fingers slipped and drew blood.
“Len, you can’t be serious!” she cried.
“Why not?”
My sister stared at him, which he apparently took as a sign he should keep going. “I’ve been praying about it and God has shown me the way. I can do an interview with one of the newspapers. Herry owns one. He could make sure it’s done well. That we’re put in a good light.”
“A good light…” repeated Estella, resting her forehead in one weary hand.