The Stager: A Novel (21 page)

Once again I caught a whiff of something foul, but tried to focus on the task at hand. The first thing to do was put these toys away. The Easy-Bake oven; the mounds of stuffed animals; the American Girl dolls sitting at their miniature mahogany dining-room table clad in bathing suits, napkins spread across their laps, the plastic slabs of skewered meat set out on a platter. I walked over to begin disassembling the display, but felt a disarming wave of sadness at the sight of those girls just sitting there, waiting. Waiting and waiting, for the girl to come home from school, to find them compelling enough to sit down on the floor and change them into proper clothing, to help them resume their evening meal.

Did ten-year-olds play with dolls? Did the princess and doll phases intersect, and which was outgrown first?
Ten
. At what age did a girl want to set fire to all this, to paint the walls black and plaster them with posters of scantily clad vampires or of her favorite goth bands? What did I know? Not much. I had missed the opportunity to engage in, or, more likely, do battle with, any Ugg-booted, miniskirted, gum-snapping, cell-phone-texting ten-year-old girls. I felt a headache coming on, or maybe it was just that the sliver of my brain that had been cryogenically frozen with the memory of my pregnancy was undergoing an unfortunate thaw.

I decided this room could wait, and went out into the hall and climbed the next flight of stairs. By this point I was trembling, as if I was about to enter some fraught Jungian landscape marked with totems from my past, and that was before I even realized how apt the metaphor was: until the moment I reached the threshold of the master bedroom, I’d forgotten about the bed.

Bella’s distinctive scent emanated from within, fortifying the perimeter like an electric fence. I stopped accordingly. I would not cross this threshold. At least not today. Eventually, of course, I would have to enter, but the idea of touching Bella’s things—the wedding picture on the dresser, the perfume bottles, the earrings on the nightstand—felt to me like a moral violation more extreme than the one I was already engaged in.

My head began to throb. The bed. I could hardly believe it. I knew this bed, just like I knew that pig downstairs.

Surely it was possible that I was investing all of these inanimate objects, these mere things from my life, with too much meaning, but ever since Vince and I had separated I’d felt especially sentimental about the matter of the bed.

Toward the end, I said, cruelly and ridiculously, that our bed was at the heart of our problems: It was from IKEA and it was falling apart. I began to obsess about beds I saw in catalogues and in department-store showrooms. Canopy beds with deluxe pillow-top mattresses fifteen inches thick, as lush as wedding cakes. Goose-down feather quilts tucked inside silk duvets. Once, I saw a Restoration Hardware bed that was so sumptuous, with its mounds of pillows and shams, that I crawled inside, just to feel the Italian 50-Year-Wash sheets against my skin. I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and though I don’t think I actually fell asleep, the next thing I knew a security guard had come over to nudge me along.

Who can say what that whole bed thing was about? Just one last grasp at the poetry of marriage, at the limp sort of sentiment that makes people cling to something that is clearly dead. Poor Vince. My husband had looked at me, crushed, when, to punctuate my thought, I picked up one of the bolts that had come loose from our sad IKEA contraption and handed it to him.

But
this
marriage bed, Bella and Lars’s bed, the bed that should have been mine—this was a sturdy instrument: made of teak, a four-poster, king-sized, low-to-the-ground sanctuary draped in layers of gauzy batiks so elaborate and unusual it seemed to merit some designation apart from “bed.” On this bed, there were no loose bolts.

We’d discovered it together, me and Bella, in Jakarta, in a little shop behind the Jalan Kebon Sirih Timur market, and I had instantly fallen in love. Bella had helped me bargain with the shopkeeper to bring down the price, and he was confident he could arrange swift shipment to Maryland. But then I hesitated, and said I wanted to think about it overnight.

Vince and I were in a phase where we managed little more than polite exchanges to do with questions of household management, notwithstanding the fact that I had finally, unexpectedly, conceived. By that point we were beyond discussing the elephant in the room, the clock ticking on the manuscript he was not writing, the empty bottles in the recycling bin. I was safely past the sixth month, and determined to embrace this marriage, to try to believe in the future.

Vince had been intensely negative about my decision to go with Bella to Indonesia. I decided to ignore his objections. It was true that buying a round-trip ticket to Jakarta only three days before departure was obscenely expensive, but, then, the hotel room was free, and, really, how often do these sorts of travel opportunities come along? Besides, I saw this as my last hurrah before being constrained, happily so, by a child. On top of which, Bella was having a rough time of things and she needed me along. Or so she said, and I was a sucker for Bella, easily seduced by the idea that I, her trusted confidante, could soothe her through this troubled patch.

As I stood in the market with Bella that day, I’d thought, optimistically, that perhaps the very thing we needed to go with a new baby was a new bed. This was no ordinary bed; it was huge and worthy of Homeric epic, which seemed to me exactly what it would take to get me and Vince to turn the corner. I had blissful if delusional visions of us parked here for the next few years while we slept, or tried to, and the baby fed, and we healed. Maybe Vince would even plug in his laptop, prop himself up against the oversized batik pillows I’d buy, and finally write his book. That said, I wasn’t sure that the headboard, even disassembled, would fit through the awkward angles of our hallway, and it seemed prudent to call Vince to consult about the dimensions before arranging to ship this behemoth piece of furniture. I told the shopkeeper I’d come back the next day. That had been our first afternoon in Indonesia, before Raymond Branch showed up and the ground shook and there would be no going back to the market, at least not for me.

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.