Empathy (13 page)

‘Hello, mister.'

‘Hello, mister. Give me money.'

‘I don't know her that well,' Lucy said.

‘Lucy, you've lived with her for a long time. You must know something.'

The rice fields rang with a cacophony of ‘Hello, mister's.

‘She's a very generous woman,' Lucy said. ‘Her husband works in a big hotel in Sanur. She is very kind and very religious. I think of her as one of my closest friends. She had three daughters. I love those kids so much. She used to live in the city. Now she has moved to the country.'

The road was all dirt by this time. Almost a footpath.

‘She sure has,' I said. ‘This is pretty rural.'

I looked out over the rice fields at the farmers in thatched huts and sarongs and all those palm trees. It reminded me of every movie I'd ever seen about Vietnam.

‘The only time I've ever seen scenery like this is right before it gets firebombed.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Hello, mister. Give me money.'

Everyone standing by the side of the road noticed us and most of the children said ‘Hello, mister.' The only ones who paid no attention at all were the shirtless old women carrying bowls of grain on their heads. They didn't scowl or show scorn. They were simply disinterested. Maybe they were the independence generation. People who know what's wrong with the West.

Kids were following us the whole time and I could smell my own flesh broiling. After another hour of fields, sheds, and old houses, we turned a bend and came upon a project of brand-new homes, all white and alike with identical garden plots and red-tiled roofs.

‘There she is, the oldest girl. There's Nofri,' Lucy said. The kids called out her name and ran toward us. Soon we were led into the
house by clinging children to meet Dorothy in her Peggy Fleming haircut, Australian makeup, and pedal pushers. She showed us the house.

‘We bought it this year,' she said, showing off the three bedrooms, two living rooms, sit-down kitchen, and tiled
mandi
. ‘It's a new settlement here.'

Each room was furnished with sturdy new wardrobes, couches, and armchairs. The lush garden was being cared for by a young boy, while another servant, a young woman, washed dishes in the back. The children wore starched, sparkling Western clothing, and there were two new motorbikes parked outside.

‘Presents,' Nofri said, patting Lucy's bag.

‘Tomorrow,' Lucy said.

‘
Besok
,' I said, remembering it from my Indonesian phrase book. Something felt very wrong in the way we were interacting with everyone.

Dorothy and her husband, Cholid, rode Lucy and I back to the hotel on their motorbikes, insisting that we come the next day to stay with them. But when we got to the hotel's courtyard, Dorothy wrinkled up her nose.

‘I no like,' she said. ‘Cheap. Dirty.'

‘Oh no,' Lucy said. ‘It's fine for us.'

Dorothy spoke to her husband in Indonesian.

‘I know,' she said. ‘Mansur brought you to this place.'

‘No,' Lucy said.

‘Mansur tell me he stay with you at the Bali Hyatt and you pay for it.'

‘Hyatt? No, never. I can't afford that.'

But Dorothy wasn't listening.

Later I told Lucy, ‘Dorothy thinks you're rich.'

‘I could never make her understand that,' she said. ‘Or Mansur. Whenever we spent the night together he expected me to pay for everything.'

The next day we followed Dorothy's directions for an easier way to her house and went through Denpasar, passing lots of teenage boys selling cassettes of American rock bands. There was also a cinema showing four Clint Eastwood movies.

‘Presents,' screamed Nofri when we arrived. Three-dollar watches from Canal Street for the girls and Western dresses for Dorothy.

‘These are from the shop where I work,' said Lucy. ‘I got them on discount.
Discount
.'

‘In America, much money,' Dorothy said, stepping out of one dress and trying on another. ‘But then my friends from America or Holland or Germany send me money and I can buy rice. If my friend have nothing and I have only one thousand, I give him five hundred.'

The maid brought in the washing.

‘In America you have much money. You eat in restaurant.'

I came to an ad in the Australian magazine. It was for Courvoisier. A man in a tux and woman in a gown drank cognac under the smile of a white-jacketed waiter.

‘Lucy, how much rent you pay, one month?'

‘Three hundred dollars.'

‘I pay five hundred for a whole year. America - much money. Maybe you send me a plastic raincoat.'

‘What color?' Lucy sighed.

‘You choose,' Dorothy said, sitting back with a smile.

Sleeping in Dorothy's house we couldn't touch or kiss because it was too hot to close the door.

‘You know, Lucy,' I said. ‘Dorothy could be a nouveau riche housewife in any suburb in the world.'

‘Tomorrow I must see Mansur's brother,' she said, ‘and tell him I'm not going to marry Mansur. First thing tomorrow.'

Mansur's brother, Ansar, lived in an older part of Denpasar, behind the bimo terminal. He owned his own home too and lived there with his wife, mother, and three children. Lucy said he used to be a
playboy until he got a woman pregnant and had to marry her. Now he's a salesman for Hobart restaurant equipment.

We ate dinner there in front of the TV and then retired to the living room to listen to Julio Iglesias sing “Begin the Beguine” in Spanish on Ansar's Pioneer tape deck. Palm trees grew outside but the living room was decorated with plastic ones and a bowl of plastic papayas.

‘Here in Indonesia, I work and work and never get anything,' he said. ‘In Melbourne, my brother makes money.'

His wife brought in sirop and cakes. A servant washed dishes in the background.

‘I have not heard from Mansur in about one year. He sent a picture of himself working in a fruit market.'

There was the picture. Mansur smiled in his Aussie clothing, leaning on a crate of lemons.

‘He changed his name now, to Mark Starr. Better for Australia. Whenever he talk, Lucy, he talk about you. I know everything. Everything. I had an American girlfriend too. A long time ago. Now she works for Federico Fellini. I want everything for my brother that I never had.'

We drank some more sirop until another man came into the house. He had darker skin and whiter clothes, a Muslim cap and a brighter face. Abdul was cool. He wasn't depressed. He didn't want blue jeans.

‘You see,' he said, ‘I've been in the West, man. I've been in Thailand and Germany. I've played in the snow, man. I know the West. I understand. It's great to travel but Bali is my home. It's quiet here. I can stay in my house, I can look at the stars, I can eat cakes. Everyone knows me. You can go down to Kuta and say “Hello from Abdul” and everyone will smile. I know there's nothing better over there than everyone has here. I've seen it so now I can relax.'

And I was really glad to hear that, someone who knew the truth. Someone with perspective. Someone smart enough to sit back and
sip sirop and listen to music and know that that's something. But Ansar kind of laughed at him, like one of those former rockers in the suburbs who keeps an old hippie friend around just for old time's sake. Then Ansar got up to turn over the Julio Iglesias record and Abdul leaned over.

‘You want junk?'

Finally it was time to go back to New York, and Lucy and I trudged silently to the airport. We were angry, not only because it was hot, but because they sent us to Building B where we were sent back to Building A where we were sent back to Building B, all the time carrying everything. Finally we went back to Building A and sat at the bar. I didn't even answer when the bartender asked, ‘Where do you come from?'

I was sitting there thinking about the mountains that wind around the blue ocean and the monkeys just hanging out by the side of the road and the jackfruit and bananas everywhere. I thought about the children with painted lips and the sound of gamelan music all day long. And Lucy turned to me and said nothing. At that moment I saw her turn to me and I wanted her to say something that showed that she knew me. That she watched me. That she knew what kind of person I was. Not agree. I didn't need her to agree. Just notice. But I didn't get anything. Just a blank stare.”

“We're there,” she said. “This is the right stop.” They got out together and walked down the platform.

“Wow,” Doc said. “You were looking for morality and personal recognition in the middle of serious tourism. That's very
Heart of Darkness
of you. I mean, there's no way to be there and be polite because your presence itself is rude. But geographically, we're in the sphere of your humanity now. That's what is up for consideration. If this was the World Court, probably no one would care. But that's one of the strangest aspects of analysis, Anna. No one is looking at you but you. That, of course, has its ups and downs.”

“I know, Doc, it's really confusing. I mean something different in the World than I mean in my world.”

“You watch,” he said meekly. “You listen when people talk. You listen too closely. You listen so closely to find the meaning that you never find the meaning.”

“Not
the
meaning,” she said. “But
a
meaning. If I look too closely I get these strange results that make it worth it. The same thing is true in love, Doc.”

“How?”

“When a woman is really happy. When our faces are close and there is only streetlight, she looks slightly Mongoloid, her most beautiful. There's that way that she kisses when she really likes me. Too lightly on the forehead.”

“Then you have to choose,” Doc said, feeling slightly hurt, like there was some distasteful counter-transference going on. “You have
to choose between your own vision and reciprocity. And remember, reciprocity is not on the general agenda for the nineties.”

“Why not, Doc?”

“Because, Anna.”
Thank God I got my authority back
, Doc thought.
Why do I want her to like me? That's supposed to be one of the advantages of being a man. I'm supposed to be able to have control and still slide around at the same time
.

“Because, Anna, most people don't listen to each other. They don't listen to themselves. They don't think about what other people mean and are feeling and the impact of their own words on others. They don't remember later what they said in the first place. They don't think about it when they're saying it. You listen too closely. You are overinformed. Do you want to have lunch first? What are you staring at?”

“Wow, Doc. This is very important to you, isn't it? Someone must have interrupted you big-time. You keep coming back to this listening thing over and over again.”

Then she said, “Let's have lunch, buy the flowers, and get this over with.”

Confidentially, it was Doc's birthday too, his thirty-first. He wished she would give him the flowers. Flowers. When they got out of the subway he made a phone call to an old number that he still remembered. He left a message on the tape asking something of this woman, asking this person who did not know how, to remember his birthday with kindness. It was a sneaky thing to do since Doc already knew what would happen. But he did it for reassurance of the status quo. However, once that tape actually beeped, he stammered, leaving uncertainty and weakness unretrievably on the answering machine. He had wanted to be careful, to not say one wrong word. Sometimes people jump on you for saying the wrong word. This woman in white was one of those people. If Doc said, “You know, I was thinking about going to San Francisco …” then she would say, “What do you mean,
you know
? How am I supposed to know?”

She was always right down the other person's throat. She didn't listen to the intention behind the vocabulary. And whose fault was that?

They looked for a restaurant. The Upper West Side had a mystique about it that had not been deserved for some time. True, it had once been majestic, faded, with high ceilings, cheap apartments, huge rooms, Haitians, Dominicans, Holocaust survivors, student radicals, John Lennon, Leonard Bernstein, old women eating lunch. But it had lost its soul and become schlocky the way that rich people can. It had gotten greasy.

“What about this place?” Anna asked, pointing to a very normal, dirty leftover.

“No, not here,” Doc said. “This is the kind of restaurant that is so disgusting the waitresses bring lunch from home and go to the coffee shop next door to use the bathroom.”

“What about the coffee shop next door?”

“Okay.”

“Forget it, Doc. I'm already nauseous. Let's go for a walk.”

They walked around slowly.

“Now, Doc, family is a delicate thing. Families of lesbians are particularly hard.”

They walked even slower.

“What is the most important thing to remember about families of lesbians?” Doc asked.

“That you just can't outwit them,” Anna answered. “There's always some weird little twist. No matter how normal you try to be, you'll never be normal. Like last year my friend Nancy's mother died. It had been a long, horrible thing and we were all involved. On the morning of the funeral I started getting dressed. Suddenly I realized that all of these lesbians, Nancy's friends, were about to walk into a synagogue in South Brooklyn and Nancy wasn't even out to her relatives. It would be terrible for her.”