by Susan Coll
We were by then two years and six months into the Raymond narrative, and eighteen months since it had theoretically come to its conclusion but had not. Forget the memoir that I’d likely never write, I could write a book about the Bella/Raymond affair! I could even provide a time line to help readers locate events lest they become confused, fleshed out with detailed field notes and a sketch or two. Even though my talents lean toward capturing the nuances of furniture—the dimple in the cushion, the worn fabric on the armrest, the gash in the woodwork made by the child who’d rammed it with the toy truck—I had, in fact, done more than a few rough profiles of Raymond. I am fascinated by that cratered, weathered penny of a face that some women find attractive, and I have always been a little bowled over by that hand.
Even that first night at the garden party, I found myself unable to stop staring at him, and when I went home, I’d drawn a picture of him and Seema, wrapped in her exquisite shawl. I made records of his face on each of the three occasions that we met, admittedly rendering him a little more craggily than was fair. That I laid eyes on him so few times is hard to believe, in retrospect, given how much of my mental real estate the man has always occupied.
Of Bella I have many records. I am not so indiscreet as to broadcast this horror show, but if I was, hypothetically, to attempt some transcript, the narrative actually lends itself quite well to discrete chapters.*
1. The garden party: love at first sight, ominous weather conditions, etc.
2. The Ritz-Carlton: liaison number one, room-service champagne, rich desserts, endearments, projections, empty promises, etc.
3. Repeat chapter 2 with slight geographical variations: Paris, Rome, New York, Malaysia. We settle into an almost dull routine, even though it has only been three months.
4. Bella learns of Raymond’s other affairs: tension, drama, tears, six-month breakup.
5. Coincidental meet-up in Brussels: resumption of affair, repeat chapters 2 and 3. (Shake, stir, and yawn.)
6. More tension, drama, tears over the discovery of some poems Raymond has been exchanging, full of innuendo, with his financial adviser. (How she could deduce the sexual implications embedded in a stanza to do with property index derivatives is beyond me—she read it to me twice, and it went completely over my head.)
7. Bella sleeps with Guillermo Peña, the Yankees first baseman.
8. Pregnancy ensues.
9. Deductive reasoning points toward Raymond.
10. Guillermo disappears. A café in San Salvador was the last place he was reportedly seen.
11. We go to Indonesia!
I watched and counseled with a mix of both genuine concern for my friend and a clinical fascination. It was educational, in its way. Though I loved Vince, I realized I had only ever really known Vince, and had never been in the grip of anything quite like what I saw. Passion, lust, desire: those are the words one typically uses to describe a love affair, I suppose, but Bella’s behavior appeared to me more like illness, and I considered myself fortunate to have been spared such torture in my personal life. A grown woman, a professionally successful woman, a married woman, checking her cell phone every five minutes for Raymond’s texts, then lapsing into despair and paranoia when one failed to arrive. She would reroute her own travel to coincide with his, would invent stories that needed to be reported in obscure cities. And the lies she’d concoct were shocking in their detail and complexity. She once told Lars that she had to make an overnight trip to Boston to accompany me to a doctor’s appointment at the Dana Farber clinic because I’d had an ambiguous mammogram, and asked me, on the off chance Lars should contact me (as if he would—we’d never even met), to go along with the elaborate lie. I don’t remember agreeing to that, but I was also too much in her grip to push back, and was there for her twenty-four/seven, even if, by chapter 8, I was beginning to experience a bit of crisis fatigue. I was involved in a love triangle in which I had no role, and the whole thing was becoming a grind. That the affair had run its course was obvious to me, if not to the central protagonist.
If you have ever been to the movies or read a book or seen an opera, you know the stuff of chapters 1–11: the self-absorption, the deceit. All pretty run-of-the-mill. Frankly, it’s beyond me what all the fuss is about, given that the endings are all largely the same. The only thing that makes this story special is that few have the gall to drag into the mess their pregnant best friend. At least I assume I was her best friend. She never spoke of any other friends, best or otherwise.
Bella was seven weeks along, evidence of her pregnancy visible only to those who knew her well—unlike me, so enormous by this point that I looked like I might tip over when I walked; in fact, I nearly did on a couple of occasions when I ill-advisedly wore high heels. I was sick much of the time, and my skin a spotted, hormonal mess. By way of unsurprising contrast, pregnancy made Bella even more radiant. She actually had that glow I had thought apocryphal.
When we arrived in Jakarta, Bella had insisted that we waste no time; after checking into the hotel, we’d gone directly to one of the old markets. I’d pleaded for a bit of rest first, but she said that jet lag was all in the mind and that the best way to address it was just to soldier through the day and ignore it. Yes, but what if you have just spent some thirty-plus hours in travel on two separate flights, and you happen to be more than six months pregnant? I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
The heat, the cars, the scooters, the honking horns, the pungent smells from the food stalls lining the narrow streets of the bazaar, the shopkeepers pressing beads and scarves and small carved Buddhas into my hand, the heat, the heat, the heat. I felt like I’d been blindfolded and spun in circles, as in some children’s party game. I was growing profoundly disoriented—unsure, even, of what we were doing in Jakarta. I knew only that it had something to do with a series Bella was working on, investigating the shady financial trail of certain extremist factions in Indonesia. I actually believed this, although in retrospect I’m ashamed to have been so gullible. For one thing, although Bella had been plucked from the intern pool and hired as a reporter by then, it was nonetheless unlikely that such a plum assignment would have landed on her desk so early in her career. I certainly didn’t question it, however; by this point in our friendship, like a long-married couple, Bella and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time discussing certain things, and one of them was work.
After an hour, I actually thought I might faint. I took Bella’s arm, and she steered us to a quiet, shady spot behind one of the stalls, where she instructed me to lean against a craggy brick wall. My heart was racing, and I was soaked with sweat. Bella pointed out that I was likely dehydrating, so she left me for a moment and went to get water. When she returned (without water), she said she’d noticed a shop with breathtaking furniture that she insisted I see. We were immediately swept in by the shopkeeper, who mercifully pressed cool bottles of Coca-Cola into our hands and led us toward the back, where I gravitated toward an aged window air-conditioning unit, but it was only wheezing out more hot air. At least the sweet syrup helped me revive, and a few moments later, I found myself ogling that bed. Then Bella appeared by my side to help me begin the process of claiming it.
* * *
IF WE WERE going to do Jakarta, why not do it in style, at the swankiest place in town? This was what Bella asked, rhetorically, an hour or so later, as we lay side by side in lounge chairs at the pool. She looked like she’d been planning this outing, or at least packing for it, for a lifetime, with a batik scarf wrapped around her head (fashionable, yet useful for religious-sensitivity purposes), oversized sunglasses, and a sarong hiding her minuscule bump. She ordered us a pair of Niçoise salads and virgin piña coladas and commenced comparing and contrasting the virtues of this particular poolside setup with other luxurious accommodations around the world. Dubai rooftops had the funkiest views, which I’m not sure she meant in a good way; Florence the most romantic; Delhi was too smoggy; ditto on the pollution in Bangkok and Beijing; Singapore was perfect,
but why would you want to go there, really; and Tokyo … Mexico City … Jerusalem … I listened with feigned interest; since I was never going to any of these places, she might as well have been describing the surface of Mars. Only Bella could rattle off these names, these rooftops, these fabulous hotels, and make it seem so matter-of-fact. This was simply her life—it had been for the brief time when Lars remained on the tennis circuit, and now, through her own work, she was managing to find ways to continue to roam in relative style. She wasn’t bragging about this, exactly; or, if she was, I was too enthralled by her to see. At the time, I took at face value that she was simply mentioning these places the way a motorist might name-drop rest stops along the New Jersey Turnpike, debating which ones had cleaner bathroom facilities. If anything, she’d tell you that she found it all pretty tiresome, that what she really longed for was a little boredom in her life, a small, quaint house with a garden and a picket fence, a slobbering dog, that sort of thing. I think she was talking herself into, or out of, the bad decision she was about to make, finding a way to bridge mentally the fact that she’d made a hot mess.
I remember, lying by the pool, the sensation that I was swaying, as if I had just stepped off a ship. I put my hands on my belly and waited for a kick, which had become my way of grounding myself lately, but when it didn’t come, I didn’t think too much of it. She was a peaceful infant, whoever she was, and not much of an acrobat. I could see her already, although I tried not to see, having grown up with the sort of Old World superstition that caused my grandmother literally to spit and throw salt over her shoulder to ward off the evil eye, kein ayin hara, whenever someone muttered anything the least bit nice about her, or about me, or even about the lovely weather. She’d shush all compliments should someone comment on my fledgling signs of talent—as if saying it was so, even just a throwaway comment about my ability to draw, would make the skill evaporate or actively invite disaster. Whether she ever paused to consider that the absence of encouragement might have its own detrimental effect, who knows? So I tried not to think about her too much, this person growing inside me, and yet felt I knew her, a little bookish introvert with unruly black curls. I’d swaddle her in the receiving blanket Vince’s mother had already bought. It was adorned in cheerful blue and red bears.
Because my husband’s family knew nothing of persecution, of superstition, of spit and salt, Vince thought it strange that one might wait to prepare for the baby until it arrived, and so he planned to paint the nursery while I was away. Even though I would have preferred to wait, I didn’t give this too much thought; I just assumed that, like every other project he said he would undertake, it wouldn’t get done.
The skinny boy whose job it was to stand sentry by the pool came over every few moments, offering to spritz us with Evian and refresh our supply of drinks and towels. I listened to Bella continue to name-drop exotic cities, but I was feeling heavy and depleted and was melting into my chair. Bella seemed to have more stamina; maybe she was just the better traveler. This was the farthest from home I’d ever been, and, at least where I came from, this was the sort of journey people spent months planning, reading guidebooks about what to see, what to wear, and how to eat, rather than just jumping on a plane three days after a friend makes an idle suggestion. I hadn’t even given thought to the climate this time of year, had only heeded Bella’s advice to pack a bathing suit. Who knew what the exchange rate was, or what the currency was called? Until we arrived at the airport and Bella led us toward an ATM, I hadn’t contemplated the existence of the rupiah in this world. As I lay there sipping soda water, trying to quell my unease, I assured myself that my reaction was the normal one—that at some basic physical level this sort of travel was fundamentally unsound; the human body wasn’t meant to step off an airplane after flying halfway around the world and slip right into the new time warp without a hiccup or two. Perhaps there was something wrong with Bella for being so adaptable. Maybe Bella was so unmoored by the mess of her life, or just so restless generally, that she occupied most comfortably the space on hotel rooftops, where there was minimal connection to reality.
Me, I needed a nap and a guidebook and several days to adjust to this unfamiliar landscape, to get my mind around this skyline that looked like it might have been haphazardly assembled from a template in an urban-design class. The assignment: create a modern, soulless metropolis using an assortment of asymmetrical and incongruous skyscrapers while paying lip service to the Old World bazaars. This was so disorienting that I was weirdly comforted by my own sweat, relieved that it was still with me, that it had managed to transport all this way.
Not only was I disoriented, but I truly felt unwell. I locked into the familiarity of Bella’s voice as she moved on to comparing the virtues of various Niçoise salads she’d sampled around the world. If I squinted, I could make believe we were in Miami, and the palm trees, the pulsing electronic music pouring from invisible poolside speakers, and all of the stylish fellow hotel guests made this easier than I might have supposed. Even the family of what Bella said were Libyans, with the women in abayas, did nothing to detract from my decision to pretend that we were simply in South Florida.
After Bella ran out of travelogue, we read for an hour before returning to our room. We showered and dressed, and by then it was time for dinner. I agreed, even in my woozy state, that since we had so little time in Jakarta we ought to dine outside the hotel, in an effort to continue to explore the city. Not that there was much to explore: from what I could tell and from what I had heard, apart from the few old markets like the one to which we had already been, the place seemed to be dominated by shopping malls. We nevertheless planned to ask the hotel staff for dinner recommendations. I hoped we wouldn’t wind up anywhere too fancy, because I felt positively bovine in my only seasonally appropriate maternity dress. Bella looked gorgeous, of course. She wore a blue sleeveless shift accessorized by another fabulous batik scarf. Before Bella adopted the more conservative wardrobe of a banker, she was always draped or wrapped, like a princess, or a gift. We had just alit from the elevator and were headed toward the concierge when it caught my eye, beckoning to me in the same way that bed had done a few hours earlier: the pig.
I tapped Bella’s shoulder and pointed toward the gift-shop window. Her eye went straight to the pig, too, even though it was one of many objects on display, and one of the tiniest at that, dwarfed by a couple of sinister-looking shadow puppets on either side. The pig, a tiny bronze orb, was compact and self-contained, like a vacuum cleaner that needs no attachments. An all-in-one pig, its face etched right onto its body.
Bella and I, too, were back to all-in-one: a pair of giggling girls locked arm in arm, determined to have that pig. I won’t pretend to recall our actual dialogue—I’m always suspicious of those who claim to remember in detail events from long ago—but I know that we went inside the gift shop and purchased that pig, and we decided on the spot that we’d keep it forever to commemorate this trip.
And what of this trip? To the extent that the reason for it might have seemed even the least bit fabricated, which it genuinely did not, I figured the only excuse for deception might have been because Bella needed to get away and reboot. A few weeks prior to our departure, she had been in full crisis mode. She had shown up unexpectedly on my doorstep on a Tuesday night at midnight, woken me and Vince up, scaring us both half to death with her maniacal ringing of the bell. It would be an understatement to say that Vince was not happy about this, or about the fact that I sat with her, talking, until 4:00 a.m. She had just discovered she was pregnant.
Vince had become one of those well-meaning but suffocating spouses; he wanted to micromanage my pregnancy. He read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and tried to regulate my sleep and diet and exercise. He had come into the kitchen at least three times that night to suggest that whatever drama was unfolding could surely wait until morning, and that I should send Bella home and get some sleep.
I was exhausted, and of course he was right
, particularly since I had only recently begun my new job at the magazine and needed to be in for a meeting by 9:00 a.m., but I’d been through a lot with Bella over the last couple of years, and I’d never seen her this wrecked. Discovering her condition should have been a good thing, given that she’d been trying to conceive since around the time I’d first met her, but her life had been so eventful—her word, I assure you, not mine—these last few weeks that she wasn’t sure who the father was, even though the timing pointed toward Raymond. Still, it could have been Guillermo. And maybe the outside possibility of Lars, but she couldn’t remember, with any accuracy, the date when they’d last had sex. Before winding up hysterical and wretched at my kitchen table, she’d gone first to Raymond, who’d been in New York, and then, the next day, to Guillermo, who’d been en route to the ballpark for practice. Neither one of them had seemed particularly animated by the situation. Raymond had been on his way to the theater with Seema, and he told Bella, somewhat dismissively, to calm down and go back to D.C. and suggested they talk by phone later. Guillermo didn’t speak enough English to understand, or at least that’s what he indicated, even though Bella was pretty sure she was saying the Spanish word for baby correctly (wasn’t it bebé?!), and if she had it wrong, pointing to her belly and indicating a mound with her hand ought to have gotten the message across. I didn’t know what to say. This was the stuff of daytime soaps, not the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to a highly educated woman who knew her way around birth control. But she’d been trying to get pregnant for so long she’d basically given up hope, and, hard as it was to believe, she said she’d sort of forgotten about this potential outcome. Meanwhile, Lars had seen the pregnancy test in the bathroom trash, pressed for an answer, and gone straight to the store for champagne.