Donald stares down at the bar, shaking his head.
“Ben wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t do it.”
I decide to become part of Ben’s story.
“It’s really none of my business.” I am on a mission to make their business my business. “But what’s the point of torturing yourself over questions you’ll never have the answers to?”
Donald thinks and nods. “You’re right, not that you know fuck all about it.” Catherine leans around Donald to look at me.
“Uh … excuse me, but who the hell are you?”
Here, I think, is my opportunity. But it is fragile. These two are grieving, which makes them vulnerable. But they are not stupid. This will not be easy. But I do not like Bangkok. I would much rather be on a secluded Thai beach. With … a job? A job. Yes. Ensconced in faculty housing. Students. Colleagues. Purpose. I will serendipitously show up at just the right time to fill the position left by the tragic and untimely death of … shit, what was his name?
“You’re right, I’m nobody,” I tell Donald apologetically. “And I’m sorry, your friend, his … the way he … passed. None of my business. Guess I’ve had one too many. Probably a little starved for conversation. But that’s no excuse.”
“No worries,” Donald says. “Don’t sweat it.”
“Thanks,” I say. “And really, I’m sorry about your friend. Sounds like he was a good guy.”
“He was. He really was.”
“Yeah,” Catherine says wistfully, “Ben was like—no bullshit. He always told the truth. How many people can you say that about?”
Ben. Right.
“Too few,” I say. “Too damn few.” I call out to the bartender for another round. When he brings it, I raise my glass.
“To Ben,” I say. “No bullshit.”
Catherine and Donald raise their glasses. “Ben,” they say, and, misty-eyed, we down our drinks. It is the beginning of a beautiful, if brief, friendship.
I entice them into playing hooky from work so that we can take a day trip to Kanchanaburi, where we tour the wildlife sanctuary, ride the train along the Death Railway, and have lunch with the monks. At night we get drunk at upscale clubs filled with Westerners and expats. By day five of our lovefest, I know the names of their bosses and their bosses’ bosses, the brownnosers, the wimps, the backstabbers, and the decent guys in the Lehman Brothers Bangkok office. I don’t care but I act like I do. They need to think that I do. Because we tell each other everything. Our friendship has the intensity of bonds made at summer camp and in freshman dorms. We reveal our most intimate secrets. Mine are lies tailored to suit Donald and Catherine’s particular needs. I research and fabricate a résumé just imperfect enough to make me the perfect candidate for Ben’s job. When I leave, Catherine gets teary. We all promise to stay in touch. Really.
Two weeks and a five-hour train ride later, I am sitting in a chair opposite Tim, the dean of McCarthy College, who is younger than I, American, ginger-haired, and freckled. There is a surfboard leaning in a corner behind his desk. I stare out past his balcony on to Cha-am, the most beautiful beach I have ever seen, as he peruses my fabricated résumé and letters of recommendation from two senior vice presidents at Lehman Brothers Bangkok.
When he finishes, he looks up at me and shakes his head. “Professor Conrad—”
“Oh, please, call me Joe.”
“Alright then, Joe—you are a godsend. Seriously.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t know Ben the way Cathy and Don did, but I do know he loved it here. I’ve wanted out of the city for a long time, so—I didn’t want to take advantage, but as you can see, Don and Cathy seemed to feel Ben would approve.”
“I know he’d be thrilled,” the dean says. “He was that kind of guy. Generous.”
“And no bullshit,” I add.
Tim nods. “Exactly.”
I am surprised at how quickly, how seamlessly I slide into this life. And how much I enjoy it. The nondescript but tidy modern campus has all the amenities its 3,500, largely American students and faculty could want. And I have classes, faculty functions, office hours. Suddenly, I have a life. Not my own, but a life that I am living. Every day. And I feel normal. Every day.
I awake expecting not to, but I do. I wait for the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t. The sun shines on the ocean and I realize I am happy to be just where I am. I begin dating a colleague—Karen, from the poli-sci department. When, after some months together, she suggests we move our things into one bungalow and cohabit, I am stunned at how quickly and happily I agree.
Whatever was wrong with me (which seems to have happened an eternity ago), I think, must be gone. Because I am happy. Again and again. Every day.
And then, without warning, a tsunami hits our little island, taking with it everything I hold dear. Except I am the only person whose life is lost. Karen tells me, as she is packing her things, that there were plenty of warnings. That she herself issued them, as did Tim, my best friend. But I refused to listen to anyone. She tells me she loves me but cannot live with me anymore; cannot be with me anymore.
She tells me I need help. And Tim—my friend, my boss—says he cannot cover for me any longer. That he has to let me go. I don’t remember doing anything terribly untoward, but when he goes over the laundry list, it is long: coming to class drunk, not coming at all, hitting on students, starting fights with deans, more drinking, conducting drug deals on campus, punching a student. It begins to sound familiar. To wash over me in sickening waves.
I am my own personal tsunami. I have wiped out my life again. The debris floats around me, reminding me that this was no cure, just a happy hiatus.
Now it’s back. I am back. So I leave. Filled with more dread for what lies ahead than I have ever felt before. Because this was good. For a long time. And I don’t know what I did to fuck it up or how the hell to get it back. And that is a new kind of terror.
New York, 1994. In general, I dislike coming to the dayroom. Two weeks in, I got bored with the circus animals that lie around here throwing their crap at each other. Now it is just irritating. And depressing. I can’t decide which is worse. But when a guttural scream comes from the dining area, I know there’s at least a chance that something entertaining might happen.
“How can you even think of not coming tomorrow? I cannot go one more day without my own clothes!” It is Glenda—manic, psychotic, paranoid, and generally unpleasant—she arrived a few days ago. And has been a one-woman show ever since.
By the time Glenda was brought in—tiny, wild-haired, raving mad—she hadn’t eaten or slept in weeks. Her skin was almost translucent except for the deep gray moons under her eyes. Any normal human would have been half dead with exhaustion, but Glenda had an energy that was like watching gasoline burn. And despite all the drugs, she has not settled down. She is like watching Twyla Tharp interpret a six-car pileup.
Her mother sits next to her knitting, not even blinking as Glenda screams at the top of her lungs.
“I am completely dissatisfied! I am unimpressed with your church! I hope you die cleaning their kitchen like the slave cunt that you are!”
“I am going to pray for you,” Glenda’s mother says quietly without looking at her daughter.
“You are an old woman and you don’t know anything! You are ignorant and uneducated! I don’t need you to pray for me! I need my fucking clothes!”
At this point Glenda begins to yank off her hospital top, revealing a lacy lavender bra.
Her mother continues to knit, silently absorbing the vitriol.
At this point, there is no show I would rather be watching. Unfortunately, Glenda catches me. “What are you staring at, you fucking pervert?”
“You,” I answer. “Because you’re undressing in public, you fucking pervert.”
Glenda stands and screams again as she upends the flimsy Formica table she and her mother have been sitting at. I’m guessing Glenda is somewhere in her late thirties. Her mother, in her late fifties. I won
der how many times they’ve played this scene on this set before. Glenda’s mother continues to sit there knitting as two or three orderlies come running.
“I don’t need you in my life, you bitch!” Glenda screams as she is being restrained. But Glenda is stronger than she looks and reinforcements, in the form of the two New York City policemen whose job it is to protect the fancy hospital and its mostly white doctors and patients from the surrounding immigrant neighborhood, enter through the double-locked doors. It’s not the first time the staff has summoned the men in blue since Glenda arrived here. As she is being escorted to the Quiet Room, she looks over her shoulder at me.
“You see how I treat my mother? Don’t even think about messing with me. It’ll be a thousand times worse.”
Nurse Frankie pats me on the back.
“She’ll be fine when her meds kick in. She’s actually very sweet.”
That’s too bad, I think, she’s so much fun just the way she is.
EIGHTH
What if this is the end? What if this time I don’t come back?
Maybe I’d deserve that. Maybe not. Regardless, I will have brought it on myself. That much is clear. I can’t argue—though I have tried to on countless occasions with an impressive array of doctors, law enforcement officials, and more women than I can count—that my behavior over the last ten years has been to varying degrees … inappropriate.
So maybe it would be justice, I think, the panic slowly rising as I go under. Maybe this is karma coming around to vindicate the victims of my bad behavior. Karma coming around to bite me in the ass.
Santiago, 1991. I tell lies. Everywhere I go, I am someone else. Every country, every day, every woman, a different lie. There is a speedy thrill to it—losing track of myself. But I’m starting to get bored. Twitchy. I roll over in this king-size bed with its massive head- and footboards made out of trees ripped from the local rainforests and stare at Miren, the lovely young woman I have been fucking and pretending to care about for the past two weeks.
She has round hips and a substantial ass and big, heavy breasts. But what I like best about Miren is the enormous black thatch of ungroomed pubic hair between her legs and the little tufts under her arms to match. My passion for female armpit hair is a relatively recent development. I might have come to it sooner if I’d had the opportunity, but you don’t see a lot of fuzzy pits coming down the red carpet or signaling for the check at the Ivy. If only those women knew what a huge turn-on it is to wander the sidewalks and markets here and to feel as if every woman who hails a cab or opens an umbrella is flashing me, allowing me to steal a glimpse of her little pocket-sized vagina.
After we fucked for the first time, I told Miren the women where I come from shave or wax most of their pubic hair off.
“And you think it look nice, these womens with the little baby cunts?” She made a thoroughly disgusted face. “And the mens, they rip the hairs off their balls too?”
“No, the mens get to keep their pubic hair,” I told her.
“Dats fucked up,” she said.
And cultural differences aside, I couldn’t disagree. Miren is Basque, twenty-three, and was traveling through South America with friends when we met at a bar nowhere near my five-star hotel. I watched her in the bar for a long time before I approached her. I’ve learned by now that watching them, deciding what I like about them, helps me decide who I am. What lies I will tell.
With Miren there was a lot to like. I liked how she pounded her fist on the bar after every shot she drank. How she lifted her thick, dark curls off her neck and fanned herself. And I liked how she held her girlfriend’s hips from behind and swayed with her on the dance floor. And most of all, I liked how her wide, deep laugh reverberated in me. How it bounced around in my empty spaces. I liked the kind of man she made me. By the time I bought Miren her first drink, we were already intimate.
Five days ago, Miren sent her traveling companions—three girlfriends from university and a couple of charmless, unwashed German boys—ahead, choosing instead to stay here with me in Santiago. This trip is supposed to be Miren’s last bit of frivolous fun before she starts working as an au pair for a family in Greenwich, Connecticut.
If Miren has made any assumptions, they are her own. I did not encourage nor discourage her choices. I never do. Despite that, she’s angry when I tell her I’m leaving. When Lee tells her. Lee Majors, hotel security specialist.
“East Africa, Lee!” Miren yells over the noise of the shower. “Why don’t you just put a gun in your head? Do you know what’s happening in there? AIDS, civil war?”
The doors of the enormous three-headed shower are completely transparent, so the only buffer I have between me and this irritating whining is the water and whatever steam I’m generating (which isn’t much since Miren has the annoying habit of leaving the bathroom door open). Still, I refuse to engage.
“Got to go where the jobs are, babe,” I call out cheerfully, making sure to keep my back to her. Rules of nonengagement. Rules to live by. I know she is standing out there yelling at me completely naked, probably with her hands on her full, fleshy hips. Miren is completely unselfconscious.
“That’s bullshit, Lee. No tourist with any brains is going to go in there now.”
I turn off the water, and as I step out of the shower Miren chucks a towel at me.
“Thanks.”
I dry off absentmindedly as I walk past her into the dressing room, dropping my towel on the thick vanilla-colored carpet and pulling one of the hotel’s three-hundred-dollar terry-cloth robes out of the closet. As I slide into it, I think how very nice it would be to be alone right now. I look across my deluxe suite at the clock and wonder how quickly I can get rid of Miren. I feel the need rise in me like dirty flood water—murky, violent, impure.
She has followed me out of the bathroom and I can feel her standing behind me—stiff, angry, lips pinched. “Goddammit, don’t just walk away.”
I ignore her, fill a glass with bottled water from the minibar, and stand in front of the mirror drinking it down while she stares at me, fuming. I am buying time. Because what I’d really like to do is turn around and slap her. Hard enough to make her shut her fucking mouth. I see my hand pull back to gain momentum, watch it fly through the air toward her face, and feel a sharp, painful sting as I make contact.
Miren gasps. “My God, Lee. You are fucking crazy.”
Like a dog’s electric collar, the pain reminds me of my boundaries. I would never do that. The drops of blood on the carpet are mine—a shard from the glass I slammed onto the marble counter is stuck in my palm. I would never hit a woman. That would show a lack of control. An unseemly weakness. And Lee Majors is not that kind of man.
“Hey, Miren, sweetheart?” I say with great tenderness.
“Yes, Lee?” She looks at me expectantly.
“I could pretend to appreciate your concern but I really don’t give a shit what you think, so let’s just skip to the end, okay?”
Her mouth falls open and experience tells me I have less than forty-five seconds before she picks up something and throws it at me. The ubiquitous hotel Bible is a popular choice.
“Just what the fuck do you think you can be doing?” she spits at me.
I move to the in-room safe and spin the combination while I talk to her over my shoulder.
“What I mean is … you are a smart, funny, sexy woman. And you are going to do great things in life.”
“That is not an answer. Answer me, you kabroi hori.”
I am standing beside myself. Watching this scene. Enjoying the comic absurdity of the hysterical, chubby naked girl with the full bush screaming at the cruel, unfeeling bastard.
Twenty, maybe twenty-five seconds left on the clock.
Her eyes are darting around the room. I grab the envelope from inside the safe where I’ve kept it since I made my purchase yesterday. “I have something for you.” And before she can make a move, I put it in her hands. She is wary but carefully tears it open and
peeks inside.
“You are paying my ticket to JFK?” she says, stunned.
I look into her eyes and gently caress her cheek. “I think you’re a good investment,” I say softly and know I’ve just closed the deal.
She throws her arms around my neck and I can almost hear the door closing behind her.
“Thank you, Lee,” she whispers in my ear. “I never forget this. Or these weeks we spend. Or you.” She kisses me, and without bothering to put on underwear, throws on her clothes, grabs her backpack, and bolts. Just like I knew she would. Because she doesn’t want me to find out what I already knew when I bought her $875 coach ticket—that her Greenwich employers sent her a plane ticket when they hired her. And that she’s rushing out to cash in the one I gave her for U.S. dollars.
I straighten the sheets, lie down on the bed, and aim the remote at the TV, speeding through the Spanish-speaking channels on my way to the universal language of porn. I sigh with relief. I am alone. Lee is alone. Lee is alone. Lee …
I try to concentrate on the girl-on-girl action, but a disturbing feeling of weightlessness has begun in my ankles and is creeping up toward my colon. I’m aware of my heart picking up speed in my chest. I get up and walk slowly to the hotel safe, hoping maybe I won’t realize I’ve begun to panic. The safe is still open. I take out my old passport and examine it carefully. Surname: Todd. Given name: Greyson Harold. Date of birth: 4 August 1945. I take my wallet out of the safe and dump the contents on the bed, examining the defunct credit cards, expired driver’s license, ancient AAA membership. I recheck the passport. Todd, Greyson Harold. I check the picture against my image in the mirror. Close enough.
The panic recedes and I climb back into bed. I call room service, order a bottle of Ketel One, and go back to the porn. Relieved. Greyson is alone. Greyson is alone.
Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See Page 13