The Stager: A Novel

by Susan Coll

  Complicated backstory notwithstanding, we were both pregnant in Jakarta, and were determined to enjoy ourselves. This would be our own pre-motherhood, chick-flick-style getaway, and we decided on the spot to memorialize this with the pig. What we’d really wanted was two pigs, but in the shop there was only one. The shopkeeper, who wore a lurid neon-yellow polyester shirt, and who told us as we entered that his cousin lived in Nashville, Tennessee, set his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray that already had another butt alit, and put both hands on the counter to lean in hard to close the deal. If we paid for two right now, he said, he’d get us another by morning. In the next sentence, however, he let on confusingly, and in reference to the extortionist price of four hundred dollars, that the pig was one of a kind. We bargained him down to $220, which still seemed obscene, but we bought it anyway, rationalizing that we were feeding the economy like good tourists. Anyway, the steep price tag would make the pig feel special, and would invest the pig with extra, if illusory, value. As he wrapped it in newspaper and bound it in twine, he mentioned that he had a brother who owned the new, hot, excellent seafood restaurant just a mile up the road, on the twenty-second floor of the brand-new Malia Intercontinental, and that if we wanted the best view of Jakarta, for another fifty rupiah, he would call ahead and see that we were treated like VIPs. We shrugged our shoulders and smiled. We were already in deep, so why not?

  * * *

  A HOTEL LIMO was summoned, and forty minutes later, traffic being even more hideous than the Capital Beltway at rush hour, a ridiculous fuss was made over our arrival. Someone was actually waiting for us in the lobby to escort us up the elevator. This was either a sidebar benefit of having paid about ten times the going rate for a bronze pig, or the effect of having pressed Bella’s business card into the shopkeeper’s hand. We were given such VIP treatment that heads turned our way as we were led to a corner table, and I suspect people thought we were celebrities. Or maybe they thought that Bella was a celebrity and I was her celebrity escort.

  We accepted complimentary bubbly apéritifs, our pregnancies notwithstanding, and clinked the tiny glasses. What was it we were celebrating, exactly? That Bella was going to make the best of things, because there was nothing else to be done? Probably that was the decision she had reached, but I’m not sure, since we had stopped talking about it. We were now simply embracing her pregnancy as the reality that it was. I only sipped the alcohol to be polite. I didn’t want to drink while pregnant, on top of which I was still feeling ill. The queasiness and nausea were evolving into something more like stomach cramps. I’d eaten so little since arriving that I couldn’t pinpoint anything that should have been making me feel unwell, unless it had been something in one of the airplane meals. I tried to block out the voice in my head—Vince’s voice, to be exact—telling me this trip was a terrible idea. He had cited a list of concerns ranging from hijacked planes to malaria, dengue fever, and typhoid. He invoked the possibility of terrorist attacks and typhoons. I was surprised he didn’t add alien abductions to his list of potential catastrophes. He had even tried to forbid me to go. Usually, in my experience, the exercise of overthinking bad outcomes serves as a sort of balm. It’s only in the most rare instance that the neurotic fears prove right. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you, etc.

  In a vivid slow-motion loop, the rest of our time in that restaurant still runs through my head on an almost daily basis, like some particularly bad PTSD. My back was to the doorway. The sun, bleeding a surreal orange from the chemical air, was in its final stage of setting, and the city lights were just beginning to flicker on. I flagged the waiter and ordered a Coke, hoping it might settle my stomach as it had back at the shop in the market earlier that day. I began to tell Bella a funny if convoluted anecdote to do with a photo shoot in the current issue of MidAtlantic Home that had gone horribly awry; it involved finding a gun in the vegetable crisper of the homeowner’s refrigerator, and having to call the police. Midway through, I realized that Bella wasn’t listening to me, which was mostly okay—it was a stupid, meaningless story. I was slow to realize something was wrong. Even slower to realize it involved Raymond. The idea that Raymond, of all the people in the world, might have been in Jakarta, at this moment, at this restaurant, would never have occurred to me as even an outside possibility. He was seated at a nearby table, with another woman.

  “Who is she?” Bella asked, as if I might have the answer. As if the answer mattered. They were all the same, from the financial adviser to whom he sent bad poetry, to the stewardess he’d accidentally slept with after one too many beers. Bella didn’t understand this, that they were all the same, and she wasted a lot of time and energy parsing their different attributes to understand how she, my otherwise beautiful, confident, talented friend, failed to line up.

  Even at that moment I was slow to realize that I had been set up. I would soon come to understand that Bella knew Raymond would be in Jakarta, reading from his new collection at an international literary festival, and that the reporting trip had been devised to get us here. But that he would appear at this restaurant? That part would prove coincidence, although not really that coincidental, given that this was evidently the hot new restaurant in town, and that it had just been written up in all of the tourist and airline magazines.

  Even as I absorbed the fact of Raymond’s presence, I was still slow to process the implications. Or maybe not slow. Maybe my radar was more finely tuned than I appreciated, but I was distracted by two other things: by the cramping in my abdomen, which had now grown a notch more intense, but which I now interpreted as the only reasonable response to vile Raymond’s presence, and by an attractive young man in a blue-and-white track suit and a Marlins baseball cap who had just walked into the restaurant and was conferring with the receptionist. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties, and was having issues growing facial hair, as indicated by his wispy beard. Had we been in Washington or New York, I might have identified him as a bicycle messenger, although whether they had bicycle messengers in Jakarta I had no idea, but the baseball cap caught my eye, and something about him made me think he was a courier of some kind. On these particular details I confess to being a bit fuzzy now, but he might have had a package, or he might have asked to speak to someone, or maybe it was the way he was dressed that made me think he was a messenger. Messenger was now morphing into terrorist in my feverish mind as I replayed Vince’s crazy list of fears. I saw him speak to the hostess, and she went to get someone, and some commotion ensued, but it was developing into a night of confusion. Bella got up from the table, walked over to where Raymond was seated, and in a not very Bella-like way (in her defense, not that I’m inclined to defend her, she was seven weeks pregnant and very hormonal) threw her drink at him and let loose with a string of overly loud invectives about his being a two-timing cad. (A wildly amusing understatement, I might point out.) I didn’t know what to do, but as her friend, I felt I should do something to save her from further humiliating herself. I walked toward Raymond’s table and put my hand lightly on the small of her back to lead her back to our table. Her scarf was coming unwrapped, and I picked up a piece of the fringe to keep it from falling to the floor. She pushed my hand away, which was more upsetting than perhaps it should have been. Then my body was seized by a full-on contraction, and I let out a little moan. Raymond stood up, and for one delusional second I thought he was going to help me, but instead he took Bella’s arm and led her to the door, and they left the restaurant. Raymond’s companion and I exchanged strained, awkward smiles. If there was an appropriate thing to say in these circumstances, some etiquette governing the exchange between the current mistress and the former mistress’s best friend, it apparently eluded us both, but she at least had manners, and she stood up to shake my hand. She was tall and dark and surprisingly plain—not half as beautiful as Bella, or even Seema—and this may be difficult to believe, but she was pregnant. Somewhere, I’d say, in the fifth month. Again I was rac
ked with a contraction, such a ferocious one that I nearly doubled over. After it passed, I asked the alarmed pregnant mistress if she knew where the bathroom was. She told me, in a British accent, that it was to the left behind the bar, and asked if I needed any help. I thanked her and said no. As I made my way there, I noticed the messenger turn to leave, but he had forgotten his bag. Now I was certain something was wrong, and I thought about flagging someone, but I was about to double over. I would later reflect on this man, on the coincidence of my premonition and its possible meaning. He was, in fact, only a messenger, but perhaps his message was that there was something else sinister in the air.

  I had only just walked into the bathroom and turned the lock in the stall when I felt the ground begin to shake. The building was brand-new, and the bathroom was elegant, with marble floors and stalls like little private offices, which is not the sort of thing you notice until you are essentially locked inside the cubicle because a piece of the ceiling has just fallen on the door, and you hear mirrors shatter and the sound of water surging from pipes and then, a moment later, the electricity fails. I still didn’t know what was going on. I was now in the pitch-dark, thinking thoughts that didn’t add up. If this was a bomb, was I already dead? If this was a quake, might there be a tsunami to follow? I found myself calculating, in the screwy way one’s mind works when in shock, that we would be okay because we were high up, on the twenty-second floor.

  Perhaps the place was imploding from the coincidence of three pregnant, volatile women under one roof, was my last coherent, or maybe incoherent, thought before I passed out.

  The news stories focused on our collective good fortune. It had been a relatively small quake, but the building was so flimsy, and so many aspects of the construction were below code, that the infrastructure crumbled and the walls came crashing down much more easily than they should have. Four people died. Only four. That’s how they spun it, as if this were a thing to celebrate, four being so much better than, say, five. That one woman miscarried alone in the dark did not merit any ink.

  That was the last time I saw Bella. She tried to visit me in the hospital. She wanted to help arrange my travel back. I refused to see her, even though I almost softened when I heard her voice and picked up her scent in the hallway when she came by my hospital room with a sprig of jasmine. Later, back home, I saw her number a few times on my caller ID, and she once left a message. After that, I never heard from her again. She might have put a little more energy into seeking my forgiveness. She had, after all, found the resources to stalk Raymond Branch halfway around the world. Given all that effort, I think she might have tried a little harder to stalk me.

  * * *

  VINCE AND I separated within a year, which was both easier and harder than I’d anticipated. It was a relief to detach from his sluggish and debilitating rhythms, which had begun to wear me down, and yet in their absence I found that my own movements nearly ground to a halt. For a time I worried that I’d misunderstood the dynamic—I’d thought the parasitic nature of our relationship was grinding me down, but after he left I realized, belatedly, that it might have been the only thing spurring me along.

  The price of my friendship with Bella had been unusually steep. I wondered if my outcome ever weighed on her, or if she ever even thought of me. I couldn’t see any evidence of remorse from what I glimpsed of her on television, nor did I sense remorse inside her house. There was nothing here but the trappings of success embellished with a nice messy normalcy. Was it really possible that Bella’s actions had had no consequences at all, for anyone but me?

  * * *

  I STOOD FROZEN in the doorway of the master bedroom, staring at the bed. My bed. It was madness enough to want to sit on the floor and feed the dusty dolls their plastic food, but the sudden desire I felt to climb into the bed was surely certifiable lunacy. Because I was, in fact, feeling rather mad, and because it really was the very definition of madness to be in this house in the first place, I decided that the only counter to this crazy situation was to leave immediately and never come back.

  I thought I was leaving, actually, when, on my way out the door, I caught a whiff of that horrible, rancid smell again, and felt obliged to at least to see what was going on. For all I knew, there might be a body decomposing in the cellar, which seemed to be the direction from which it was emanating. I descended hesitantly, in part because I couldn’t find a light switch at the top of the stairs, but also because I was a little afraid of what I might discover. After locating a switch at the bottom, I flipped on the light and could see instantly that the word “cellar” had no place in the lexicon of this house. “Lower-level luxury suite” would be the better description for this basement, with the exception of a rather dark, depressing, windowless bedroom. A nanny’s room, most likely. A glimpse inside suggested that it was being occupied; there was a pair of Converse sneakers on the floor, some clothing items on the unmade bed, and a whiff of perfume, or maybe just of some lotion or hair conditioner, lingering in the air, a few of its fragrant molecules still miraculously isolated from the larger stench.

  Immediately past the bedroom was an expansive room with mirrors on every wall that looked like an exclusive-membership gym. There was a rack containing a full range of free weights, as well as two elliptical machines, two treadmills, and two flat-screen televisions. Off to the right of this was a separate room with a shower and a sauna. Sliding glass doors led to the garden, with a pool, beyond which appeared to be a cabana.

  I continued to explore, flipping on light switches as I walked, pinching my nose in a hopeless attempt to filter the stench. Heading back in the other direction, I found a playroom with buckets full of toys, as well as a little faux-grocery-store area with a cash register and shelves full of cardboard food. One might reasonably suppose there was some sort of group day-care program being run in this house, given the quality and quantity of toys.

  If there was a way to quantify the degrees of badness of a very bad smell, I would say it was getting worse, doubling in intensity just about every second, to the point where it was now close to unbearable. The smell led me to the utility room, where I found the washer/dryer (one of two laundry rooms in this exquisitely renovated home!), the hot-water heater, the furnace, and an enormous freezer (also one of two in this double-everything distinctive residence, within walking distance of excellent public schools, not that anyone in this neighborhood would deign to use the public schools!).

  Then I saw the freezer, and knew, suddenly and without question, that the smell was coming from within. I should have left, and yet there I was, grabbing a dish towel from the pile of neatly folded laundry resting in a basket on top of the clothes dryer, pressing it to my nose. I closed my eyes and opened the top, anticipating some horror inside. Raymond Branch might be in there, for all I knew, cut up into tiny pieces. (Does it make me an awful person to confess that the thought, ridiculous as it was, gave me some sly satisfaction?) I found nothing quite as dramatic as a corpse in there, however. In the split second before I began to gag, I glimpsed dozens of gallon-sized freezer bags of the sort one uses to preserve leftovers. And there was the usual assortment of freezer foods—those colorful ice pops that Zed used to like, frozen lasagnas, and, for reasons I didn’t want to explore too fully, especially since I had already entertained the thought of dead bodies, a couple of naked Barbie dolls, which, though amusing, frankly seemed disrespectful of the vast investment in this child’s playthings. All of it stank indescribably. I slammed shut the lid and ran to the garage, opened the door, braced myself against a Mercedes, then stumbled out into the driveway, where there was a Lincoln Navigator SUV, and gasped in air like a dying fish.

  Obviously, all of this putrid food was going to have to be removed from the freezer and hauled to the trash. Although in my handful of previous commissions I had gracefully performed, without complaint, many a task more properly suited to a maid than to a stager, emptying this freezer seemed firmly outside the realm of my job description. On top of
which, I thought I had already decided to quit this job. Nevertheless, I pulled my phone from my pocket and tried to reach Amanda; the call went straight to voice mail.

  After a few deep breaths, I decided that there was little choice. Simply walking away and leaving the putrid contents in the freezer felt unethical, somehow, or at least lazy, like leaving your shopping cart blocking a parking spot rather than wheeling it back to the front of the store. I gave myself a little pep talk, and went back inside.

  As soon as I re-entered the utility room, it all clicked. Crouched beside the freezer was a rabbit. It looked unwell. Large tufts of hair were missing, and its eyes were glassy and unfocused. It looked a little psychotic, which is not to suggest I knew rabbits well enough to determine the status of one’s mental health. Then I saw the cord, the plastic casing gnawed, the electrical wire exposed. The animal must have chewed through the freezer’s electrical cord during this same weekend of debauchery in which it had consumed and then regurgitated the living-room carpet. This had caused all the contents of the freezer to become defrosted, stinking up the house.

  The animal was quivering as it cowered between the freezer and the washing machine, and I paused to consider the effect on a rabbit’s stomach of two square feet of white Berber carpet, as well as an unknown amount of electrical casing and wire. Did it look sort of guilty, as if it was aware of the consequences of what it had just done, or was I imagining this? Then again, the rabbit had a nose, so maybe he—or she—was simply delirious from this smell.

  Rummaging around, I found rubber gloves and some heavy-duty trash bags, and, without further contemplation as to how I had descended so quickly from being the managing editor of a prestigious shelter magazine to being Bella’s de-facto cleaning lady, I went to work emptying the freezer. Over the course of the next hour, I hauled three giant green plastic bags to the edge of the property, where they would, I hoped, be taken away by the sanitation department without any close scrutiny as to whether I had violated the county’s byzantine trash and recycling rules, which I probably had. My own refuse had once been rejected for mixing in some plastic with the cardboard, and it was surprisingly dispiriting to fail at being able to get rid of one’s own waste. Then I went back inside and used every spray cleaner within reach to scour the inside of the freezer and, I hoped, to counteract the smell. After opening the basement windows, I turned off the lights, picked up the animal, and ascended the stairs.