Interesting Women

by Andrea Lee

  “Don’t stare at him, Mom!” begs Basia.

  “Oh, he doesn’t mind being stared at,” says our new friend. “He’s used to it. It’s an element. You learn to breathe in it, and then, if you’re not careful, you have to have it. It used to be part of my life,” she goes on after a pause. “People turning around to look. Now that phase is over. It’s not important anymore.”

  Basia looks so inclined to take this statement as a pearl of wisdom that I rise abruptly from the water and say that I’m chilled to the bone. I grab my reluctant daughter, and we head off to shower, leaving our new acquaintance reclining in the sea. Before departing, I introduce myself and ask her name. “Silver,” she says.

  “Is that your real name?” I blurt rudely.

  “One of my real names.” The voice drifts out of the darkness, which in tropical style has fallen like a sudden curtain.

  * * *

  At dinner, predictably enough, it is Basia who defends Silver while I roll my eyes over that ridiculous New Age alias. “I think she’s cool,” says Basia, taking a tiny spray of green peppers out of her milky soup. “She’s really, really mysterious.” At the tables around us, people with careful, moderate tans are wearing pale clothes and sitting over hurricane lamps whose amber glow makes the dining terrace look vaguely like a shrine. A real shrine sits nearby, under the mango tree, a tiny spirit house that is a replica of the hotel, with candles, fruit, and flowers around it. The hotel, recommended by my editor, has been a disappointment, I think: pretentious; arrogantly overpriced; hardly any kids, and none Basia’s age. Instead, it’s a perfect hideaway for upscale lovers: without turning around, I can count two honeymoon couples, an enamored pair of Englishmen, and a German businessman with his young mistress.

  “Mysterious? Oh, please, sweetheart,” I say. “She’s the classic kind of woman who is very beautiful and lives for that, and then the beauty fades, and she goes and gets spiritual. Like Bianca Jagger.”

  “Who?”

  “Bianca Jagger was one of the most beautiful women back in the seventies. Way back before you were born. Now she’s not so beautiful, so she’s involved in saving humanity.”

  “Silver doesn’t want to save humanity.”

  “She wants to save her soul. Same difference.”

  Basia giggles and crunches the ice from her Diet Coke. “But I thought you liked her. Why are you trashing her?”

  “I am not trashing her,” I say untruthfully, and I wonder why I am bothering to be malicious about a woman I’ve just met, who seems more like than unlike me. That’s it, of course. That and the fact that I revealed a great many intimate facts of my past to a complete stranger down on the beach. Why, I wonder? Am I becoming an embittered woman of a certain age, maddened at the sight of romantic couples, and driven into serial episodes of pathetic self-revelation as my daughter flowers into maidenhood? For a second, I wallow in gloomy speculation.

  Basia stares across the candlelight at me. She is wearing a green tie-dyed dress and her round, seraphic face is deeply tanned, an irritating fact that reminds me of our daily battles over sunscreen and hats. It is Simon’s face, but my eyes look out of it, and whenever she turns those eyes directly on me I experience an eerie jolt of total recognition. “Mom? Are you missing Daddy?” she asks.

  “Not right this second,” I reply, with bravado. But suddenly I do miss Simon. He would have added a bit of male ballast to the unbearable lightness of this female vacation. He would have fussed about the price of drinks and worried about hepatitis and bilharzia and insisted on renting mopeds for horrible family excursions. He’d have insisted on daily screwing at siesta time—not such a bad idea, that—and at least once he would have attempted to amuse both of his girls by turning on MTV and dancing around in a pareu, imitating Cher. He would have laughed at Silver. I take a forkful of rice and try to think of something wise and maternal to say, but Basia has stolen most of my lines. “We’ll call him tonight,” I mutter.

  * * *

  One of my weak points, as Simon continually tells me, is my untrammeled curiosity. The next morning, when I should be horizontal under a palm tree, reading disguised literature, I agree, in a moment of wild perversity, to share a taxi into town for a morning’s shopping with Silver. At breakfast, with Basia out having a half-day diving lesson, my new acquaintance looked interesting to me again.

  I have misgivings already, when I have to wait in the taxi for fifteen minutes, as Silver, at the front desk, calls the States to shout endearments to her boyfriend, who, it seems, is a retired oil-field engineer. Flies swarm sociably into the rear end of the taxi, which is a rump-sprung tuk-tuk with aluminum seats. The driver, one of the few fat Thai men I’ve ever seen, occasionally turns to regard me with lazy amusement. Finally Silver appears, with a crisp white Indian kurta pulled over her pareu, and asks me whether I mind making an extra excursion. Before she moves on to the other islands she wants to visit—Bali, Lombok, the Moluccas—there is something she wants to do here. A program of meditation and yoga coupled with high-colonic irrigation.

  “Enemas! You’re crazy!” I say. I say it in the downright tone of an old Methodist churchwoman.

  Silver looks thoughtful. “One thing I really got to understand in India is that the body can’t be separated from the spirit,” she says. “You can’t make any real progress toward enlightenment unless your body is clean. You don’t know how much toxic stuff you’ve been carrying around with you for years.”

  And then, as the driver heads toward town, she tells me about a man she knows who did colonic irrigation and found that the encrustations in his guts had included a dozen little round pellets of metal, slightly bigger than buckshot. It turned out that when he was six he used to bite the heads off his toy soldiers, and they’d stayed with him.

  “Excuse me if I’m too blunt, but the whole thing has always sounded to me like getting buggered for your health,” I say. “People talk about the benefits, but why doesn’t anybody talk about the erotic part of it?”

  It’s impossible to offend Silver. She simply smiles, rakes back her hennaed hair, revealing a narrow band of white at the roots, and shakes her head at me with a tinge of pity. Then she tells me that in Goa she heard of two places on this island, health centers where one can go on retreats for meditation and purification of both ends of the body. She wants to find them—and this, I discover, is the main purpose of our shared outing. “Come on,” she says. “We can get our shopping done, and then set off and look. One of the places is over by the caves. I heard it used to be good, but the owner, a German guy, has turned into an alcoholic, and it may have gone downhill. If it doesn’t look promising, we can always go find Cornelia, the American woman who runs a retreat in the bush. They say she’s the best, if you can find her.”

  She looks at me with her urchin’s smile, and I recall wondering earlier how this frail-seeming woman had managed to travel alone but unscathed through the backwaters of half of Asia. Now I see how: an exuberant opportunism protects her as absolutely as angels guard saints and children. Already I know that I’m going with her and that I’ll probably get stuck with the taxi fare, too.

  Silver pats my shoulder as we rattle along. “Come on. It’ll be an adventure.” She’s astute enough not to press any spiritual points. “Cornelia went to Wellesley,” she adds brightly.

  * * *

  In the port town, a fat, naked baby with brass anklets crawls around, laughing, on the floor of a shop that sells cheap viscose pants, sundresses, and cotton bathing suits from Bali. The baby’s parents are eating noodles in the back of the shop, and keeping a weather eye on Silver, who is going through the racks of clothes and pulling out things with magisterial gestures as if she were shopping at Saks. I catch sight of a black-and-white pair of pants which I immediately know will look good, and buy them. “You move fast,” Silver observes.

  A pronouncement on my entire uncontemplative life. But part of my haste is due to a suspicion that I might end up paying for her purchases as well
. “Yes,” I say, and move on to the next shop, arranging to meet her afterward at a café on the waterfront. Wandering through a market past heaps of coriander, lichees, and jackfruit, I ponder whether I should simply escape back to the hotel in one of the many bush taxis that pass me, crammed with country people. But I’m held there by my curiosity, which seems to grow stronger in the heat, like a kind of jungle itch. I wait for Silver in the café, which looks out on two long, decayed jetties that stretch into the flat dazzle of the straits. Around me, waiting for ferries, killing time, sit golden Australian boys with dive gear and many large, ugly foreign men looking like assorted Calibans beside tiny, beautiful Thai prostitutes. A jeep pulls up and a tattooed American girl jumps out and hands around invitations to a full-moon beach party on a far island: live music, magic mushrooms. I stare out over the blazing sea that is as motionless as gelatin, and punish myself by rereading a Chinese poem I found in a book borrowed from the hotel library:

  How sad it is to be a woman!

  Nothing on earth is held so cheap.

  Boys stand leaning at the door

  Like gods fallen out of heaven.

  No one is glad when a girl is born.

  Silver appears, and we get back in the taxi and race toward the first of our anal destinations. We drive along the bay, away from the stylish south of the island, where the good beaches and fancy hotels are. Soon our taxi stops in a palm grove gray with fallen, withered fronds. A large, faded signboard reads EMERALD CAVE HEALTH SPA. Below is a list: “Thai Massage; Yoga Classes; Vegetarian Cuisine; Detoxification Cures; Pranotherapy; Gymnastics.” Nine or ten thatched bungalows form a semicircle around a larger bungalow, and beyond gleams the incorruptible sea. After the green-velvet lawns and manicured hibiscus of the hotel where we are staying, the place looks ominously neglected.

  Silver disappears into the office, and I walk down a path toward the beach. A small outdoor restaurant with white-plastic tables and chairs is deserted. A Thai woman with square-cut hair and a scowl uncharacteristic of the friendly islanders peers out at me from behind the bamboo bar, and then vanishes. Nearby, three cats are sleeping under a Ping-Pong table with a broken net, and on a deck chair outside an open-air cubicle containing a treadmill and a few barbells sits an enameled tin bowl that once held someone’s lunch and is now black with flies.

  Music fills the air—a Chopin nocturne. For a minute, I think it is live, produced by the German gone to seed. But then the music shifts to Peruvian flutes, and I realize that it’s a cassette, broadcast through speakers wired to the palms. A man, a Westerner, brown-haired and pasty-skinned, is snoring in a hammock at the edge of the beach. I turn and walk quietly back to the car.

  Silver comes back with her hands full of papers describing what Emerald Cave can offer. On one is a list of health products with names like Hatha Purge, on another a Xeroxed diagram showing rolls of tubing and a kind of plastic-and-metal table for attaching over a toilet.

  I look at it all. “Don’t do this,” I say to her, overturning my vow not to get involved. “At least, don’t do it here.”

  “It’s very cheap,” she says stoutly. “My funds aren’t what they were.”

  “Don’t.”

  She looks at me as Basia does when I get tough. “Well, then, we’ll go find Cornelia,” she says.

  Locating Cornelia involves a return to town and a stop at a bakery popular with trekkers, where we look for a notice posted on a bulletin board, and a dive with the taxi down a path into the bush past a huge, unpacific-looking water buffalo. Hours pass, as we jolt over red mud roads. All spirit of independence withers within me. Desperately thirsty, flapping my hands feebly at the mosquitoes that billow into the back of the truck at every stop, I realize that I’ve undergone a minor conversion to a vaguely Eastern worldview: sweat and fatalism. At one point, the taxi bounces over a bridge across a vine-filled gorge where water is falling among clouds of orchids, a paradise I know I visited in dreams all through my childhood. “Please stop for a minute,” I say in a faint voice, but the place is past, never to be found again in this incarnation. And we head onward toward Cornelia.

  * * *

  It is late afternoon, and the taxi driver has begun to give us ominous glances over his shoulder, when we pull into a clearing in the middle of a huge palm grove. Before us is a modest concrete house with a heap of coconuts against one wall. ISLAND WELLNESS CENTER is written on a small sign posted on a tree trunk. A thin, deeply tanned woman in a plum-colored leotard and a pair of loose batik pants comes out on the veranda and looks at us.

  “Are you Cornelia?” calls Silver, clambering nimbly out of the truck and advancing with the triumphant air of Stanley sighting Livingstone.

  The woman acknowledges her with a spare, formal nod. I instantly dislike her.

  In a matter of minutes, Silver and Cornelia have clasped hands like long-lost friends, gazed into each other’s eyes, and vanished into an office with screened windows, leaving me on the veranda with a portly, yellow dog, who studies me tranquilly. The reddening sun is level with the tops of the acres of palms surrounding us, and I think with a pang of Basia, who must be fretting because I’ve run off and left her. Beside the heap of coconuts, our driver, who has plainly given up hope of an early dinner, squats companionably to smoke with a couple of young men who drove up behind us in a truck full of gas canisters. From inside, where the two women are sitting, comes a murmur of excited voices. The door opens and Cornelia beckons to me. “You can come in,” she says, as if she were speaking to a small child.

  I tiptoe inside and settle on a low rattan stool in a corner of the room beside an overflowing bookcase, where I see Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, and Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss. More books crowd the desk where Cornelia sits, and on the wall behind her hangs a Thai anatomy chart, dense with notations in green ink.

  “We do a lot of work in the sea,” Cornelia is telling Silver. “Breathing and movement. You live in one of our huts down by the beach. They are very basic, of course. No hot water. You’ll be fasting and doing the high colonics every morning and evening, before meditation. The results of the colonics can be amazing. People reexperience fragments of past lives.”

  Cornelia has a phenomenally narrow torso, and breasts with sharp nipples that show clearly through her leotard. Her frizzy, sandy hair is dusted with gray. She has a penetrating voice, and a look in her pale eyes which I recognize as subtle orneriness. She, I see immediately, is another interesting woman. She has already made it clear that she speaks fluent Thai, and has given a quick, disdainful sketch of her rejected past life, not omitting Wellesley.

  Silver is staring at her, bedazzled. I feel a pang of the kind of jealousy I haven’t felt since Girl Scouts, when my troop leader—one of those dear, old-fashioned closet lesbians—liked my best friend better than me. Just yesterday Silver was staring at me like that as I rattled on about my ex-husband’s shenanigans and the rigors of a writer’s life. Evidently I wasn’t ethereal enough for her. And besides, getting a taste for these chaste female encounters can lead to incredible promiscuity. Another day, another soul laid bare.

  I clear my throat and announce—philistine that I am—that I have to get back to the hotel, and Silver and Cornelia wince with annoyance. They agree that Silver will begin her cure in a day’s time, and then they embrace.

  “I think you are absolutely beautiful,” says Cornelia to Silver.

  “You are exactly what I have been looking for,” says Silver to Cornelia.

  Silver and I ride back to our hotel in silence and arrive there at dusk, just in time to view the underlings of the fashion shoot trudging up from the beach lugging equipment and screens with the weary air of peons returning from the fields. I pay the entire taxi fare without a murmur and run to find Basia. She is lolling under the mosquito net in our bungalow, watching MTV broadcast from Kuala Lumpur and finishing the last of the forbidden M&Ms from the minibar. She is so happy to see me that she forgets her twelve-year-old’s dignity and jumps up
and hugs me like a much younger child. “I thought you’d never come back!” she tells me. “I thought I was going to be stuck watching ‘An Evening with Aerosmith’!”

  Her mouth drops open when I describe Silver’s quest. “Oh God, Mom—you mean she’s going around looking for places to get her ass washed out?”

  “Don’t use crude words to show off,” I say coldly. “And it’s her colon, really.”

  “It’s still her butt. Remember that joke: Are there rings around Uranus? Is there intelligent life on Uranus?”

  We look at each other and snicker. Then I tell her about the man who swallowed the heads of toy soldiers and we collapse on the bed and sob with laughter. We’re still laughing on our way to dinner. Outside the dining room, Basia stops to inspect the spirit house as she always does, touching with the tip of one finger the minute plastic figures set inside it and the fresh offerings of fruit and flowers around them. On our first night at the hotel she read aloud to me from the guidebook a passage explaining that these tiny houses are set up for wandering guardian spirits. In the light of the candles set on the miniature carved veranda, Basia half resembles a little girl looking over her dolls, and half—with her flimsy dress, tumbled hair, and glowing sunburn—a nymphet in a romantic soft-porn photo. A familiar wave of emotion sweeps over me, an even mixture of tenderness, envy, and general terror of the future. At the same time, I wonder how I could have left this angel even for an hour for such a poor substitute as Silver. It occurs to me, as it often does, that I am supposed to be setting an example for Basia. And what a cockup I make of it, sometimes.

  Basia turns away from the little house and looks over at the lamp-lit diners at the restaurant tables. “I’m still thinking about those toy soldiers,” she says in a dreamy voice. “I wonder what Silver will find.” A pause and a giggle. “I wonder what you would find.”