The Stager: A Novel (22 page)

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.

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.