Double Happiness

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  Her husband picked up the green suitcase, said, Hope you brought your sneakers! Boat’s in the water.

  You think I’d miss it? asked the girl, who looked committed to missing everything.

  Not in a million, he said, hefting the suitcase higher, showing off. The train already just a dark distant groan. After you, he smiled, following slowly, struggling now to settle the unbalanced thing against his chest while the mother waited below to watch, perfect, as Melody climbed the whole long way up the high stairway, so quick and light and lovely.

  Guidance

  IT’S NOT LIKE I GAVE UP A LOT IN LEAVING TOKYO, BUT I did forgo a few things I barely knew I counted on. My roommate, for instance, and our apartment in the Roppongi district. The tatami mat bedroom and the electric rice cooker. Who knew that rice was slimming? We were models, and then, so quickly, I was married. My husband three times my age, but handsome. Tall in the American fashion, his chest lifted up and wide. Not like the drooping tulip boys we left behind, not like old Stefan and Hec. Better to be thick-topped, compact, than bent over and complaining about a bad back every second of the day. Or debating the taste of vinegar and fish, good, bad. All of that is no longer relevant. And my roommate, Betsy, might have to find her own American husband now without my help.

  At first Betsy was welcome at all my new husband’s parties. Then, one morning after an impromptu sleepover she may have made an unsavory observation, maybe a sarcastic remark about an important friend or client. Not that I was paying attention, I don’t even know where she slept! But next thing I knew, my husband was saying, Out! And hustling her toward the foyer. She barely had time to find and grab her model’s bag, a satchel full of every secret to keep us beautiful. She tracked all of that, and once she was gone, I had to learn to improvise. I’m still not even twenty, so I have options. But I miss her.

  Betsy wouldn’t much like it in Jakarta, it’s hot. But there were compensations. I had my own compound, for instance, built of stone with marble floors even in the garage. The servants had a small wooden hut, without any floors, so it was very easy to tell who was who. I suspect this was where Betsy ran into trouble with my husband, saying whatever she thought to everyone. There was privacy in Jakarta, not that I was looking for that, I had no problem sharing a tatami with Betsy. At the compound I had a master’s suite, a dressing room, and a terrace where I could sit naked because no one could possibly scale the twenty-foot wall, and since the air space was embargoed small planes and helicopters were out of the question.

  I did get a quick thrill one day early on when a young servant, Mustache, ran through my private terrace with a machete. He was chasing the ratsies he said and held his hands wide so I understood the pressing nature of the hunt. Mustache seemed not to notice my breasts or the unusual pattern of my pubic hair—I liked to change it pretty frequently, but not as often as Betsy!—he seemed blind to me, except to the notion of a superior being who required an explanation. He trembled not with lust—I really know the difference—but with fear.

  You’re okay, I said, but that wasn’t enough. Okay! I barked, adding a haughty growl. He bowed his head, so like Stefan and Hec, though small and malnourished and brown-skinned. Okay! I said again, and he backed away. And I rested on my chaise. I put my ice water to my forehead. I had a nice little fantasy about the urgent reason for his surprising appearance, and poof, I came, with barely a tickle. A heat situation, I wanted to tell Betsy all about it, as if she might move after all for the crazy advantage. But it wouldn’t last. Soon I was pregnant with twins, and an entire squad of Mustaches with machetes would leave me supine and quiescent. Big words. I’m starting to read my way out of here.

  I like to think I made an impression on Dewi Sukarno and that’s why I came to Jakarta at all. It happened right when Betsy became unmentionable. That morning, after showing Betsy the door, my husband waved my life management book before my eyes like a magician, slow backs and forths as if I wouldn’t catch on right away. Then he walked to the balcony rail and with an overhand toss released it to destiny. There was a whole career in that book. I hoped some beautiful girl from Denmark with a knack for clearing her face of all expression, letting the textures and colors speak the human language, someone just like me, might pick it up and continue where I left off. Like a torch passing, because I’d done some very jazzy work already.

  But there was Dewi, in an off-white silk suit, her hair in a classic chignon, sipping an espresso. She watched my husband move in his long red kimono as if he was the center of a Noh drama. Yes, she hummed, and now she was looking at me, saying, Such a cute girl. I smiled, she smiled back. I winked, she looked startled. I told her the story of the baby fawn that appeared in the cottage the night I was born.

  Speckled? she asked. Freckled! I said, no need to point out the constellation that covered my nose and cheeks. She’s perfect, said Dewi to my husband. I’ll put on some clothes, he said.

  But neither Betsy nor Dewi showed up at my surprise nineteenth birthday party at the Jakarta Hilton. Dewi obviously I didn’t know well, but Betsy would have been the best surprise of all. In the center salon of the penthouse, which occupied the entire top of the main building, an orchestra, with both Western and gamelan playlists, blasted tunes from a raised marble plinth. There was plenty of room but the music was mildly deafening so the party assembled on the covered wraparound terraces as wide as freeways. And also in the head-of-state dining room. Some sat for earnest conversation in deep leather bucket chairs in the long library, which had not a single book on the elaborately carved shelves. It’s worth saying that everything in Jakarta is elaborately carved. My husband explained the economics of woodwork. The cocktail bar of the Jakarta Hilton, for instance, had required more artisan laborers than St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But they finished the whole thing in three weeks, not three centuries!

  In the penthouse there was a back bedroom draped in various silks, large swooping swaths of fabric, held back, just barely, by silver dragon curlicues. There were actually four of these bedrooms, color coded. I chose red for the power of my birthday, and sat on the bed to make a phone call to Betsy back in good old Tokyo. No one would miss me at the party. No one actually knew me. Except Mustache who’d been hired to sit in a small chair by the front door doing nothing. The hotel operator was very polite, and when I told him my name, said, Happy Birthday, Fawn! Still, he regretted he could not connect my call. Party rules.

  It was dull at my party. Loud and dull. And once the cake was served and I’d posed for the photographs and I’d obligingly tongued some red strawberry icing along my husband’s new dental work, I was free to wander. I wandered to the front door and tried to leave. Mustache sprung to his feet. No, Mrs. Fawn, more surprise coming soon.

  Yes, Mustache, I know that. I’d adopted a tone of absolute dominance, which is the basic how-to of talking to a servant in Jakarta. Betsy would faint, laugh maybe, then faint. But it was the protocol. Mustache and I were friends. In a mystical no-communication kind of way, I think now, looking back.

  Mrs. Fawn, he said, bowing, but I could see his machete tucked into the block-print vest he wore—textiles, another burgeoning economy here—and something else bulged under his armpit. I smiled, I couldn’t help it. He whispered, really to himself, because addressing me directly was out of the question. Poor Mrs. Fawn, he whispered, and then began to shout at a passing waiter in a language I would never learn. I knew all about diversion, as a fashion model it was my profession. So I slipped out of the party to see if I could call Betsy on a pay phone in the coffee shop. She would definitely remember my birthday, hers was only two days later. We’d done sixteen and seventeen together, eighteen we missed because of my honeymoon on Khashoggi’s yacht—so crowded, no phones. But at nineteen we could wish each other well, we were grown-ups. The world was changing at our feet. By now she might have an old American of her own; if not, well, there are worse things than trading complaints with Hec!

  Just for fun, I took the emergency staircase. M
y legs, even with the twins poking their way out of my belly, were still as okay as ever. Get the Fawn! For almost a whole year I was in every single beverage ad in all of Japan that involved a leg shot. Not just Tokyo, I mean everywhere! I froze my fanny off posing in hot pants and skis on Mount Fuji, but it was all necessary. Contrast, everyone understood, contrast is what sold. The biggest contrast in Jakarta is between the rich, who hang out at the Hilton, and the poor, who live in cardboard lean-tos stacked against the chain-link construction fence, because every day the Hilton gets bigger.

  The coffee shop on the lobby level had recently become pink, which is why normally my instinct would have been to avoid it. Although pink is believed to be almost universally flattering, Betsy and I discovered one late night, with some hilarious experimental pubic hair dying, that pink didn’t work with my skin. Too much, she paused, too much, and decided on a nice silvery blue instead. Just the thing for your geriatric. Fortunately that stuff washes right out, so he never saw it. I didn’t want to make him feel I was mocking him. Talk about a thin skin!

  Up until my birthday at the Hilton I never really took guns seriously, they were just an ornament to set the tone the way a good pair of false eyelashes could rearrange an expression straight from tired to joy. Tokyo wasn’t exactly dangerous in the Roppongi district but sometimes at parties, and in the suites afterward, there’d be some blue hardware lying around creating a mood. A mood, let me say, I liked! And so did Betsy, it sort of pushed us out of ourselves in a way that redesigning our pubic hair couldn’t. And as professionals we limited our drugs. Quaaludes, Valium, okay. Heroin, any variation on cocaine—and there was a lot around—bad for business. I like to think that’s what attracted my old American, my professional discipline—Betsy’s, too—and then to single me out, my legs.

  In the coffee shop I was scouting around for the pay phone that just last week I could swear was right beside the candy counter when I noticed the four identical guys in textile vests blocking all the elevators. I’d been right to take the stairs! I inserted myself between some free-floating banquettes before anyone else could get picky about the birthday rules.

  Although the Hilton was usually the hot spot for foreign investors and expats, the place had been cleared for my party. No one spun through the cathedral-height doors complaining about their luggage still stuck in Kuala Lumpur. This Hilton had a direct line to the baggage carousel in the Malaysian airport I would come to know so well. But today, no lost anything, no outraged arrivals. The great glass doors were sealed and the men by the elevators were gluing their eyes to the twelve guys by the entrance in demimilitary gear, scarcely the thing for a summer party—hot!—and their guns were mood killers. Nothing sexy about those black toaster ovens hanging down from shoulder straps. Not even a festive bullet belt. Somehow that was more of a downer, the idea that all the bullets they would ever need were already loaded.

  I had to go to the bathroom in the sudden emergency style that comes over pregnant people. I shimmied toward the ladies room and managed, for the first time in my life, to capture no one’s attention. Betsy was completely right about pink! Like you’re not even there! she said, and usually that was a big liability.

  It was old-fashioned in the bathroom, and as I sat and pondered the surprising security detail of my birthday party I thought about my husband with such nostalgia, as if I already sensed the future. He meant well. The whole subservience thing just a personality glitch. My own mother was a problem for me in that way. Either devote your life to me and my wishes, or die. Those were my Denmark options. So Betsy sold her family’s only car (they were surprised!) and we lit out for Tokyo where Western-style models are popular, especially blondes. My god, I sent my mother so many presents, but she never responded. Betsy had some ideas about this, and when I first met my old American, she said, Just call him Mommy! Maybe she repeated this at the party. Maybe that’s why she got the boot. I do miss Betsy. She always said what was on her mind. What would she say to see me loitering in a bathroom that looked like an overstocked showroom. White marble pedestal sinks and satin-wrapped chaises by the dozen.

  But the one thing the Indonesian laborers got all wrong, as hard and fast as they worked—and so cheap!—was the idea of privacy. Apparently it was untranslatable, no word in the language, that’s what my husband said. And it pissed him off to no end. They liked sleeping stacked together like lumber. They liked doors that never closed. They liked more doors not closing per room than people to pass through them. And so, as with every room here at the sprawling Hilton, this one had several exits. At least two of them led to the outdoor pavilion surrounding the wishing fountain and the pool.

  Probably my biggest professional problem is the tendency of my skin to burn like toast. Really quick. But the pavilion was shady, so that was good. And quiet, as if the deafening happiness of my party flew up into the sky and took all the noise of the world with it. Here in the swimming arena only the gurgle of the wishing fountain and the buzz of the automatic insect remover made a sound. No birds, no workmen keeping world-record schedules; everyone and everything off duty for my birthday.

  The pool was a suspicious shade of lavender, something to do with salt and alkaline something or other, but it looked so cool, so inviting. And the twins were heavy in the heat. I shimmied out of my birthday dress and under things and made a giant splash entry into the deep end. My husband wouldn’t mind if the party leaned over the edge of the wraparound terrace and saw me. It was just part of my general charm: free-spirited, pregnant with sons, very blonde. But no one looked, and the terrace thirty stories up was as remote and quiet as a fortress in a movie when everyone inside knows the enemy is hiding in the shrubbery.

  Sometimes swimming makes me feel like a baby myself, less at the compound because everything was familiar, but here at the Hilton in a pool meant to exercise an Olympic team someday, I floated around and felt my baby self, cuddled down in a sleep hammock, ignored by my mother who was smoking a cigarette and thinking dark thoughts. This is a story I tell Betsy all the time. Oh, no, she says, here it comes, the maternal dodge.

  Not so! No, I just understood early that I wasn’t exactly the pip of her universe. I mean, I’m a realist! I was a realist baby!

  Yeah, yeah, said Betsy, hold still. And she applied a hot but pleasantly scented wax to my inner thighs. Jasmine? I asked.

  Yuck, she said.

  Sometimes I think it’s that realist bent that made things go the way they did later on. When Mustache kept telling me that any moment the phone service would return to the compound and I might even get a passport, well, I knew a fib when I heard one. But that’s all later, and the part I’m talking about—the part Betsy would call the shriveled nut—happens in the pool. I like to think I made a choice that day, and maybe even a good one.

  I was bobbing around in the shady water where the pergola imitates the Parthenon, only in wood. The twins settled into their natural element and stopped pressing into my kidneys. This floating strategy would come in handy as time went on. At the compound whenever they played the recording of my old American saying that dumb stuff about the photo albums, the twins would get all aggressive, so I’d flop into the pool and float until they calmed down. And Mustache just had to wait. Had to cultivate a little patience if he thought I was going to sit there and look at my husband’s first, second, and third wives, again, for the eightieth time. And all their expensive daughters. I got so tired of the albums. And Betsy predicted it. You may be the Big Now, for now, she said, but just wait.

  Wait for what?

  The marriage merge: he won’t know who’s who. He’ll be calling you Helga, and the bad part? You’ll be answering. So sad.

  How did she even know there was a Helga? Betsy is uncanny that way. If only she’d been there. She’d have known what Mustache needed to find in the albums in a snap.

  But on my birthday I was twirling around in the Hilton pool, eyes closed, feeling just like I was back in Denmark, in the creek in our yard, doing a d
ead-body-style swim to scare my mother. Easy to do, very slow breaths, no bubbles allowed, limbs loose and wavy in the water. I’d squint open a half lid to check, but my mother would be smoking and staring at her hand, not a bit concerned. I’d climb out onto the bank where she sat. So you can float, she said, a turd can float.

  Not really, I said, and she slapped me. But why think of this at my party. Except that in a flash in the shady end of the Hilton pool I knew I could float or sink, pretend to be alive or dead, and no one could make the comment to grab and squash the pip of my heart ever again. I’d grown up for good. And I opened my eyes, thinking I should find my old American and tell him my insight. But instead, lounging in a disrespectful way by the pool side, was Mustache. And he’d borrowed one of the toaster-oven guns from the guys in the military costumes. He still wore his party vest, which I preferred.

  I don’t need guarding, I growled. Go away, Mustache. I’m happy on my own.

  Happy birthday, Mrs. Fawn! Please choose to dress now. Surprise finished. He made what might be an Indonesian hand gesture of celebration. I really don’t know. But what was most obvious was that he was wearing my husband’s watch. A ridiculous gold Bulgari that always embarrassed me. But it was a gift and that’s all that mattered to my old American. He was all about gifts. Dewi Sukarno went home that long-ago Tokyo morning with his red silk kimono in a shopping bag. There was some mysterious language at work here. Me? He gave me the gift of himself, which after a while became more and more perplexing. I like diamonds, but I didn’t get any. It was strange. Don’t spoil her! said Dewi Sukarno, lifting her large pocketbook, waving a diminutive farewell. She’s perfect just as she is. Well, what would she think if she saw me with the twin belly, and the sunburn that’s become permanent? The whole time we were stuck in the compound, Mustache refused to refill my prescription sunblock. It was not essential. Not what Betsy would say! But Mustache, from the start, was a very different kind of roommate.