His calling certain songs “her” music. His discreet awe of pill and tampon. His wife had finished with all that. First wife.
“Oh, John, look!” While they were having breakfast one of the tribe of feral cats had come into the yard, stepping sideways with little hops. He knew what the trouble was. He said, “Somebody put boiling water down the drain. They scald their paws.” The house sinks emptied directly into a concrete drain surrounding every house like a little moat, running into the great V-shaped monsoon gutters along the streets and roads. Strays fed in the drains, cats and the hairless raw-skinned dogs. The cats had eye infections but kept their hair. Cats are like women, Amy thought. We are not as pitiful as the men.
That liquid song was an oriole, John said. That swipe of yellow paint in the profuse white flowers of the frangipani tree planted all over the lorong, the little circular lane where the university housed visiting faculty. And was it the tree of graveyards, as someone said? Closer to the house was a row of lime trees, the fruit like bottle caps among the leaves. Sometimes a lime flinched, blinked, became the pouch of a green lizard.
John stood up, stretched and shook himself, ran his hands through his hair already darkened with sweat. “Don’t forget the Barneses are coming for a beer. I think that’s still on. And the fellow from New Zealand. Carruthers. His wife’s gone home without him. Don’t you do that.” There was a faint tremble in the hand that tipped up Amy’s chin. She sank against him.
“Let’s not do anything special,” he said against her hair. “Just put out beer, they’ll leave before dinner. Do we have any napkins?”
Napkins. How could he think of that? An invisible life reared up in back of him. A woman. Napkins. Silver.
“We have some paper ones. I wish . . . I wish they didn’t have to come.” With her thumb she wiped the sweat from under his eyes. She would have liked to press the dark lids restfully down.
“I don’t care much for the idea either,” he said. “But let’s get it over with. It will satisfy everybody for a while.” He sighed and tapped his breastbone. She didn’t like that, the scar there with his heart under it.
One day not long after they arrived, the students who played handball with him had made him stop. They had sat him down, fanned him. They weren’t medical students but he was short of breath and they called the hospital.
The doctor who saw him had a wife in the Koran study group, who mentioned it the next day. Amy pretended she knew. When she asked John, he said they had made him sit down not because of his breathing, as the wife reported, but because of twisting his ankle on the court. And indeed he was limping.
He waved from the gate and disappeared on the back path to the hospital. This whole slope of the city was recently cleared jungle. Part of it was cultivated, rubber trees being grown in slim-trunked orderly rows, but old stands of jungle remained here and there, little zones of furious life. Monkeys came out to rob the trash cans. Once when John took the back way at night with his flashlight there was a thrashing in the bushes and a huge lizard wagged across his path.
She could picture him, alone under the thick trees, hand on his chest. He wouldn’t be looking out for anything. He thought everything was behind them.
Spiders swung against his cheek when he was hurrying to Accident & Emergency to operate on the boys who wrecked their motorbikes on the Federal Highway or flipped into the drains scattering tanks of cooking gas, baskets of pottery, plate glass.
“He died?” she would say. She was a nurse, used to the ones who died. But no, they didn’t die. If she was meeting him in the hospital she would see these boys of his, shrouded in gauze and elastic burn mask, hobbling between nurses. She repeated the Malay she heard them croak, “Perlahan-lahan.”
“Slow-slow,” John said.
She shut her mind and began to work on her theory of suffering. The insistence on countries might be wrong, but it was no better to think of the world as one, one organism with a saline of wrongs dripping in regularly and impartially. Wrongs didn’t go steadily, fairly, into solution. They went into lumps and clots. It was all right if all suffered, but some escaped.
“No one escapes,” John said, smiling because he knew the story of the spell on Amy, cast by her mother and witnessed by her brothers, that kept her from harm. She was the youngest. Her father had begun to drink, leaving things in the hands of four brothers already obliged by a decree from their dying mother, binding and irreversible: Take care of your sister.
When she got away from her brothers the spell continued on its own. In one of her tests of it, she forded a Guatemalan stream where flies carrying Onchocerca were known to breed. She unloaded a jeep and carried supplies, one bundle after another, across the waist-deep water into a village full of river blindness, and the worm in the stream did not settle in her.
Pouring out of a hole in the floor, the ants filed up past the medicine cabinet to a hole in the ceiling. No, some of them were coming down, the line was double. Sometimes they came down carrying some of their own. What drew them inside and up? Did they live up there, or were they fighting an invader? What was up there? Did they die working on it? Did they weaken and fall out of the line when the time came? What was age, what was natural death for an ant? She can walk on ants, the Malays said. It meant that lightness of step the women had no matter how much they had in their arms along with the babies proudly turned to show you if you smiled.
She could sit for a long time in the bathroom studying the ants. On the way up, huge loads, shouldered and pushed. Once a dozen of them had maneuvered a peanut up the wall. And the forearm jaws around a corpse: that carrying away of the dead looked like dignity. They should learn not to squander themselves on these crusades! But each one on the wall today might never have been there before, pushing with a head like a shiny seed. But a seed with sense organs—able to find a grain of palm sugar on the kitchen counter.
The medicine cabinet had a gap behind it where cicaks lived in the cracked plaster. Sometimes an unusually large one, gray and pink, came out when she was shaving her legs in the bathtub. Once it fell into the tub and swam, lunging to and fro like a little shark. The warm water must have dazed it; it let her lift it out by the tail.
You must leave, everybody said, if the cicaks ever leave.
One day a baby one, tiny, popped out of the ants’ hole and raced down the wall. The big gray-pink one snatched it back. Look at that, she thought. Saved.
For a moment, crosswise in the adult’s mouth, the baby cocked its head, flicked its black eyes. “Oh, God,” Amy said aloud, as it was deftly flipped and swallowed.
Someone said, “At this point, all religions are cultural treasure.”
It was an older woman in a batik halter dress, with skin tanned dark as that of the waiters, if not silky and luminous like theirs. This was a party in a garden with lanterns. She was English, maybe she was the hostess.
She gave Amy’s hand a downward yank when they were introduced and turned to John. She was saying that before she came she had sat herself down to do her reading, and made her husband do the same. Some of the new arrivals, the wives in particular, had no idea. They were surprised to get off the plane and find themselves in a Muslim culture. Though there was more to it, of course, than Islam. “I drove myself here tonight! I drove the Federal Highway in that awful car!” So she was not the hostess. “Our driver is sick. Why? He saw the Penanggalan and it put him to bed.”
The Penanggalan was a ghost, a head that flew, trailing intestines. “I have no doubt he saw it!” the suntanned woman said, shaking her finger at Amy, who had started to laugh without any feeling of amusement. She was doing that here, in the heat, if she had anything to drink. That was when the woman, curving one shoulder toward John in a way that excused Amy from having to speak, said to John, “All religions are cultural treasure.”
Why are there so many people now I can’t stand? Amy thought.
Allah, the Koran said, “imposed mercy on himself as a law.”
The ha
lf dozen women in the Koran study group wanted to do without a guide, to be under no obligation, as Eleanor said—she was the one emerging as the leader—except to consider just what the meaning of the sacred book might be.
Amy would imitate Eleanor. “I say, this may do the trick.” If John was tired she did various women in the group to make him laugh: the know-it-all doctor, the timid Japanese woman Eleanor bullied, the nice Australian—that was their neighbor who had fried the pork. “‘Yehs, the attitude to animals . . . yehs . . .’” That was Eleanor, with her sprayed gray permanent and her maddening “yes” on the intake of breath, listening intently, especially beforehand when they were all drinking tea, or after an hour or so when the planned topic would wilt of its own accord like a parachute that had made it to earth. Almost as soon as she met you Eleanor found something in her big embroidered bag for you and whisked it out. The second time Amy was there Eleanor said, “A member of the royal family has made animals her cause,” and she slipped Amy a little pamphlet and patted her hand closed on it.
The newest member of the group, the doctor, had arrived some months after Amy had, but she already knew how everything worked. She knew all about the place, she knew it was not going to be her favorite stint overseas. “It’s the religion,” the doctor said briskly, whenever anyone in the group complained about anything. She said the female medical students were not permitted to touch a patient. Because they were women they had to reach out of their deep sleeves and touch with a pencil. A pencil! If she felt that way, why was this doctor attending the Koran study group? “I have to do something with my mind,” she said.
This woman knew how to drive in the flying traffic to a particular kampong for batik, and to the Batu Caves outside the city to take pictures. She was a photographer as well as a doctor. She showed her slides at the meeting, lingering over one of a monkey on the stone steps to the Hindu temple, taken with a wide-angle lens so the eyes in the monkey’s lined face bugged with weary comment at a pilgrim carrying up a tray of fruit. Another was of a fantastically wrinkled trishaw driver smoking a cigarette. “You’ve captured him, dear!” Eleanor said. The driver’s eyes were abnormally bright yet full of calm. Amy looked away from them.
The women in the study group knew how to choose a live chicken, and behind which cement wall in the open market the sellers of pork were sequestered, and where the veterinary hospital was, and which teacher at the International School belonged to which religion. All of this tired Amy, made her balk.
She had always been efficient. Why in this country was she going in circles in the heat, when all the vendors had the same red chilies, the same sheaves of long beans, to find the vendor who had smiled at her? She didn’t want to choose a live chicken swung by the legs with straw between its toes; she went in secret to the new supermarket to get chicken in a package. Quite suddenly she was not practical, not enterprising. She wouldn’t have a car. They took the cheap taxis when they had to go somewhere. If she had to go out she scraped her hair back or wore a scarf. They could say foreign women, too, had to veil themselves, as a faction was proposing, and she would do it gladly.
In a storm, blue lightning flew through the house along the wiring and spat out of the outlets. She would sit on the floor with her back to the inner wall of flagstone, at the farthest point from any outlet, and plug up her ears. If John was home to see it he said, “Is this the girl who saved Guatemala?” He liked to be reminded of how long he had actually known her, as if years held the power of gradual sanction.
She had always been one of the calm ones who could be put to work with the dog handlers. Hours after the Guatemala earthquake she had been on the plane. They worked through the aftershocks, twenty-hour stretches in the rubble with dogs. For a surprising number of days they could dig out bodies that were alive; she had seen a slab of concrete act as a perfect tourniquet.
By the time she was in her mid-twenties she had stepped out of floatplanes and cargo jets all over the world. Sometimes on her return she could hardly say what country she had been in. A place of crumpled awnings, statues lifted off their bases, roads heaved into ditches, where her team had sat on sand, seen eels and bright fish in a new lagoon where houses had been standing a few days before. The dazed figures lining up to get out were not the men and women they had been previously, any more than she was the same person who had been pacing with her coffee in an airport hours before. Once you felt your teeth bite down on ash, or used your hands to gouge out mudbanks, once you herded the mesmerized, all airports, all normal sleeping and eating, were set aside. Rescuer and rescued were indistinguishable, like heads bobbing in the water in a lifesaving class.
Her boyfriend Tommy had put this choice of hers down to being raised with no mother, raised with brothers. Raised by brothers, to strap on a catcher’s pad, gap the spark plugs, go for the two-year EMT course after graduation. Though she knew her brothers had expected her to go to college, even to medical school. She was smart enough for that, they thought. But she wasn’t and she didn’t want to.
She couldn’t brag that she was a natural, that nothing suited her better than to grab a duffel and pass through terminal doors into the smoke and tears of whatever place had been flooded or crushed or quickly rigged up as shelter.
After a few years of that she went to nursing school. She nursed. She got married.
Always, Amy had boyfriends to spare. But except for the one prolonged, impossible crush on a married man, once she met Tommy she settled in, waited years to marry him. His mother, with five sons grown, had been waiting, too. So had Amy’s brothers: the wedding swarmed with brothers, hers and his, nearly a dozen of them.
Tommy was not the baby, as she was in her family, though he was the last to marry. In the receiving line his mother, who had four daughters-in-law, whispered, “Now I’ve got my daughter.” “And I’ve got you,” Amy answered.
But she had managed without a mother since she was six. It might not be lucky for her to take someone else, even this mother-in-law who kept hugging her, for a mother. It might remove the umbrella that traveled over her, of her mother’s blessing.
After she had been lifted away from the hospital bed, where she had been allowed to lie beside her mother, words had been spoken to her brothers: the spell that kept her safe.
In the receiving line Tommy’s mother kept saying, “Aren’t I lucky? Now Amy can do all the worrying about this guy.” In reality no one worried about Tommy, who said every day, “I’m a happy man.”
They were both lucky. By the time Tommy started his peds residency they could afford the down payment on a house. On the day they were to sign the papers, she was reading the chart as she followed a bed out of the recovery room when Dr. Woods appeared, blocking her way. He had something to speak to her about; could she have lunch? She stuttered. “Today? Today? Oh, but I—I’m supposed to meet the realtor.” In a departure from his usual courtesy he turned away with a shrug. “Well, but what about tomorrow?” she said.
“All right,” he said, frowning. “Yes, all right, tomorrow. That will have to do.”
She thought he was going to mention a position she ought to apply for. A promotion. If so the timing was right, because of the house and the fact that she was eight weeks pregnant.
Still, she was uneasy at the thought of having lunch with him. He was the one. John Woods. He was the one, with his looks and that shyness unusual among surgeons, on whom not just she but all of them had had crushes when they were in school. When he went in for his bypass, nurses had shed tears. It looked bad. It was bad; the nurses had kept the CCU filled with balloons for a month while he came back to life.
Seeing her friend Gail peel tape off the deep lines in his cheeks and lift out the sticky endotracheal tube, Amy had had a sweltering sensation. She had put her hand on Gail’s arm and passed out.
For her the whole episode had stretched out and become, really, something far less agreeable than a crush. She had followed this man. Tears squeezed out of her shut eyes when she was on
the phone with him about a post-op. Gail, who had three children, told her this kind of thing meant you needed to get pregnant.
In the elevator she clenched her thighs at the sound of his voice making polite replies about his health. It was a kindly voice, thickened and withdrawn a little now into his convalescence. Down it sank into her, while the large eyes he was known for looked straight into the interior of her where the naked encounters with him took place.
He always took pains to speak to her, asking her opinion. He went to some trouble to have the patients he was uneasy about assigned to her. In her old rosary case she kept a Polaroid of him cutting his birthday cake at the nurses’ station. It was hers to be held, beseeched.
All the while she was throwing on her raincoat at the end of the day, grabbing her wedding lists, running out to meet Tommy in the parking lot.
At the end of the last quarter she gave in to it. She was that way; she decided a thing. It was a dark Friday morning. Patti Smith was singing “Because the Night” on the car radio and she crossed the wet parking lot with the song going on inside her. She took a Valium out of a cup on the pre-op cart. She didn’t see him on the OR schedule. He must be in clinic. Three times she pushed the heavy door into the stairwell where she often met him coming down, and mounted the concrete stairs as lightly and slowly as if she were being carried up by water. She was going to speak. She was ready.
But he was not there; he was on a plane to Mexico. He had gone away with his wife and son. It was said that this son, much younger than his other children, who were grown now, was unstable. He had had trouble in school after his father’s heart attack, he had been suspended for getting into fights in the gym. Everyone said the whole family needed a rest.
Finally Amy graduated, got out. Eventually of course she got on with things, and put him out of her mind. She washed her hands of her student self, the skimping, praying, caffeine-driven girl who had treasured a Polaroid wrinkled with tears. She got ready for her wedding.
Criminals Page 3