Keep Me Posted (21 page)

He made a praying gesture with his hands and then dug his index fingers into the corners of his eyes, pressing down hard. He gave a half exhale and said into his hands, “How could you be so stupid?”

“I know. I was so drunk. It’s not an excuse, but this year has been really tough for me, with so little adult contact and the schlepping around in my mom clothes all the time, and we never had sex, and then I was around all these beautiful party people and I got caught up and made a really bad call. It was a terribly immature and thoughtless thing to do. I know.” It all came out in one breath, and afterward I searched his face for a signal that he maybe sort of understood a little bit.

He was still quiet but looking at me like I was deranged. I started wondering if he’d ever strayed. He’s good-looking, smart, and decent—a catch by any standard.
Maybe he’s got other options.
Maybe’s he pursued them. Maybe he’s been having amazing tantric sex with one—or several—of his hard-bodied gym girls. And if not, maybe I just gave him permission to do so.
I felt off-kilter and unable to trust my thought process.

When he finally spoke, his voice was cold. “No. Not the kiss. A blog, Cassie? A blog was the best place you could think of to store your private letters? Do you even know what a blog is? I mean, what’s next? You wire our life savings to a guy trying to flee Nigeria?”

I reflexively snorted, an unbeautiful sound. He wasn’t smiling. I thought about reminding him that I’d used a private blog without incident at the magazine for three years, but didn’t want to seem argumentative. Instead I tried to look at it from his point of view. It was bad. I was not only his frumpy, haggard, cheating wife. I was also his stupid wife. I had offended his most basic sensibilities when I deemed the Internet a safe place to store my most private thoughts.

He got up and started walking away. I sat there watching him walk, feeling small and dumb and wondering if he was just taking a cooldown lap. But when he didn’t circle back around, I unfroze myself and jogged after him, leaving my coffee on the bench and pulling my cheap wheelie carry-on behind me while hoisting my bag back onto my shoulder. I touched his arm and winced when he turned around with a look on his face like a teenage boy might give an embarrassing mom.

“What can I do?” I asked him, now near tears.

He shook his head. “Just. Leave me alone,” he said.

“Okay.” I gulped and nodded, as if we had a plan. But as the meaning of his words sank in, it became impossible not to cry.

“I need to get back to work,” he said flatly.

I held my breath and went in for a hug, circling my arms around
his back and under his arms, one of which he raised to limply pat my back. Releasing him, I told myself that a limp pat was better than nothing, and turned to
go.

I
spent ninety dollars in the Hudson News store at the airport, buying a big bottle of water, a couple of granola bars, a pack of Dramamine, a book of essays, and magazines—
People, Us Weekly, Monocle, Harper’s, New York, Newsweek, InStyle, Nylon, Vogue, Elle Decor,
and
Dwell
. I may have gone a little overboard, but I was daunted by the twenty-four-hour flight ahead of me and desperate for some distraction from the mess at hand.

At the gate I had a moment of panic when I matched my flight number to that on the board, which read Z
URICH
. Afraid that in my haste, I had somehow purchased the wrong flight and wasn’t even going to Singapore, I approached the gate agent. “Is this right? My final destination is Singapore. Shouldn’t I be headed east?” The uniformed woman with perfect makeup and an ambiguous European accent quickly sorted me out—but not without first making me feel like an unworldly dummy. As it turns out, Singapore is so far away that you can jet either way around the globe and not have
it affect your flight time by much. I was literally flying halfway around the world to tell my sister the truth and to ask for her forgiveness. If this wasn’t a grand gesture, I didn’t know what was.

Of course, Sid was no stranger to grand gestures. In high school, Jeremy Kowalski had her initials tattooed on his calf
after
they’d broken up; she’d been the subject of at least two songs by Tet Offensive, the high school band that played all the dances; and Ryan Wilcox once had six dozen daisies delivered to her at the frozen yogurt shop where she worked in order to persuade her to go to the prom with him. The point is, a phone call wasn’t going to cut it.

By the time I landed in Switzerland, I’d watched two movies and four TED Talks, taken a nap, tried and failed to write Leo a letter, but not opened a single magazine, so I lugged the stack of them with me to the next flight. I passed a line of people in kiosks on their cell phones and wondered if I should call and tell her I was coming.
What if no one is home when I arrive? Where will I go? Perhaps I should have bought a Singapore guidebook instead of all of these magazines.
Wrestling with the unwieldy pile through the Zurich airport, wearing my ratty old clothes and carrying my canvas tote bag, I felt like a frumpy schoolteacher plodding down the corridor at an elite boarding school among her more sophisticated and better-dressed students and colleagues.

On board flight number two, I distractedly leafed through the
Us Weekly
back to front. When I had nearly finished, I came upon a quarter-page piece that read:

WILL THE REAL SLOW NEWS SISTERS PLEASE STAND UP?

In the wake of the sudden popularity and equally as sudden disappearance of the popular blog
Slow News Sisters
, which recorded the letters of two sisters navigating their troubled marriages and messy lives, several would-be SN sisters are popping up to take credit. Speculation also abounds that the blog was created by the PR department at Warner Bros. Entertainment, who is rumored to have a movie of the same name under development. We choose to believe that the Slow News Sisters are real, if only they would reveal themselves.

You would think that since I’d had some time to wrap my head around the situation and I’d already seen my blog on the pages of a magazine, I might have taken it in stride. But the wound was still fresh enough that any change in the wind was a painful reminder that this thing was real. At the same time, I was perversely indignant that other people were taking credit for it. I wondered if this is how Al Qaeda feels when Hezbollah claims to be the perpetrator of one of their bombings.

I arrived in Singapore at eight o’clock in the evening. I found a currency-exchange booth and handed over ten twenty-dollar bills in exchange for nearly three hundred slick pastel-colored Singapore dollars. The long line at Customs and Immigration moved quickly, and when I handed over my card with the little box for “pleasure” checked as the reason for my visit, I hoped it would play out that way.

Soon I was in a taxi, reciting the address I knew by heart to the driver. We drove down a wide palm-tree-lined boulevard, then onto an expressway that passed through what I presumed was downtown: buildings on my right, a giant Ferris wheel on my left. Then
a mile or two of identical, prominently numbered apartment buildings, followed by a long, winding jungly road. The car slowed, and I gasped when I saw the T
ANGLIN
P
ARK
sign, a name I’d written so many times. My heart started beating faster, and the shot of confidence I’d gained from handling the airport like a pro seemed a distant memory and a ridiculous thing to congratulate myself over: With its huge signs in multiple languages and an intuitive layout, it would have been a breeze for anyone. I thought of a framed cross-stitch on the wall at a kitschy nautical-themed coffee shop near Leo’s old apartment: S
MOOTH
S
EAS
D
O
N
OT
M
AKE
S
KILLFUL
S
AILORS
. I began to obsess over this saying, the full weight of the metaphor sinking in. In the scheme of things, my life had been remarkably smooth. No wonder I was so ill equipped to handle this whole disaster.

My hand shook as I rang the doorbell at Sid’s place, and I held my breath at the
click-clack
of a lock being turned. When the door opened, I made an awkward little jazz-hands gesture and said, “Surprise!”

My nephew, River, stared at me, looking more confused than surprised.

“Whoa! Aunt Cassie! I didn’t know you were coming!” We hugged, and he grabbed my bag from behind me and brought it inside. River, eighteen now, seemed even taller and more grown-up than when I’d seen him at Christmas.

“Nobody does. It’s a . . . a surprise,” I repeated.

“Oh, man, I wished you would have called. Mom isn’t even here. She gets back from Bali tomorrow night.”

“You’re kidding!” I moaned. “That’ll teach me to do something so impulsive,” trying to give the appearance of nonchalance, even
though I was jittery with anxiety. That meant I’d have only about twenty-four hours with her.

“Well, listen, I’m starving, and it’s nine a.m. my time, so how about I buy you a late dinner and we can catch up?” I said.

River agreed and showed me to the guest room. The bed was piled with meditation books and yoga magazines. “Oh, sorry, Aunt Cassie. I can move all of Mom’s stuff off for you.”

“No worries,” I said, invoking one of Sid’s trademark phrases. It sounded strange coming from my mouth, like when I swear in front of my parents. “I’ll move it later. Just give me ten minutes to freshen up and I’ll be ready.”

“Cool,” he said.

River and I walked out of their condo down a quiet and winding street dense with giant trees that looked like a sprawling and exotic version of what I knew to be oaks.

“This is the back way to a cluster of restaurants in some old British military barracks from World War II,” he explained.

Though the sun had been down for hours, it must have been ninety degrees or more. The heavy air was reminiscent of the F train platform in August, but instead of garbage and urine, the smells were of plants and flowers (which may sound nice but makes the heat only slightly less oppressive).

River told me to watch out for tree snakes, which are known to drop down and scare the crap out of people. While mildly venomous, they almost never bite, he explained. I let out a nervous giggle that must have triggered some hidden reserve of mirth inside of me, because I was seized by a fit of deep laughter that lasted much
longer than was appropriate, given the situation. Poor River didn’t know what to make of me gripping his arm for support while I doubled over, shrieking. Wiping the tears from my face, which had combined with sweat and tinted moisturizer to form a paste, I was glad I had opted not to apply mascara.

“Just be careful what you wish for,” I gasped finally.

“What do you mean?” he asked, starting to laugh a bit himself.

“It’s just that I was complaining to your mom a few months ago that my life was boring.”

“Okay,” he said, eyeing me sideways and probably forever designating me his weird aunt Cassie.

I let out a last groan and composed myself. “And, well, now I’m trekking through a snake-infested jungle in a foreign country with my little nephew, who is suddenly a grown man. It’s just . . . just not boring.” What I didn’t mention was that this was merely the icing on the cake of my life that could now be read about in
Us Weekly
, complete with adjectives including “troubled” and “messy.”

After a few minutes we arrived at a charming and busy café. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it didn’t seem foreign at all. Its tasteful modern furniture, blackboard menu on the wall, and fashionable and ethnically diverse diners wouldn’t have been out of place in any large US city.

“Inside or outside?” the hostess asked us.

“Inside!” I offered a little too quickly, feeling slightly ill from the heat.

We were led to a small table in the middle of the black-and-white space. When the server came, we both ordered burgers and waters, plus a local beer—a Tiger—for me.

“So you like it here?” I asked River.

“Yeah. It’s cool.”

“I don’t know about
cool
,” I said, motioning to my sweaty face and upper body, the aftereffects of my recent outburst combined with my encroaching jet lag making me a bit punch-drunk.

“Yeah. It took me about six months to stop sweating profusely every time I left the house. It’s funny—the expats here are always coming and going, and you can tell a newcomer by how pink and sweaty they are.”

By the time our food arrived, I had changed the subject to Sid.

“So I can’t wait to see your mom. How is she doing?”

“She’s good. Superbusy with all the stuff she does for the helpers—and she’s gotten really into yoga.” And then his voice changed a bit. “So, um, look, this is kind of awkward, Aunt Cassie, but there’s something I feel like I should tell you.”

“Okay,” I said, tensing up.

“I saw the blog.” Likely prompted by my deer-in-headlights expression, he added, “With all the letters.”

“Oh,” I said. I consciously shifted my demeanor. No longer the loopy and expressive aunt of five minutes ago, I needed to be serious, contrite. I put down my burger, wiped my hands and mouth, and took a sip of my beer, the familiar roar of panic surging through my body.

“Yeah,” he said, wincing at me as if to indicate that we were going to have to talk about it.

I took a deep breath. “That’s why I’m here. I took the blog down—in fact, it was never meant to be live in the first place.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “Then why did you do it?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m not as smart as I look,” I said, attempting a joke. I felt like a child being questioned by my father, which was disconcerting, considering I’d changed this kid’s diaper. I was dying to turn the tables and grill him on how much exactly he’d read, how he’d found out about it, and what Sid knew. But he had the upper hand. So I went with it, offering my pathetic explanation, which I hoped would sound better by the time I gave it to Sid.

“It was meant to be private—I made it private, as a way to save them for posterity, but Fishfood’s server crashed and I didn’t realize it became public, and by the time I found out, it had blown up.”

“Oh, man. That’s crazy,” he said.

“Yep. I still can’t believe it. So has she seen it?”

“No. I was going to show her, actually. But when I went to bring it back up, it was gone. So I didn’t bother—I figured it would be too hard to explain. You know Mom—she’s old-school. She barely even e-mails.

“She is an original,” I said, glad that the subject seemed to be changing but at the same time anxious to get a bit more information from him.

“Yeah—it’s annoying sometimes when things I’m talking about go right over her head. But it’s also cool in some ways. I mean, some of my friends’ parents are their Facebook friends and friending all of their friends, and it can get kind of awkward.”