Nine Perfect Strangers (19 page)

Masha

PS Yao is your assigned wellness consultant, but please know that I will also be doing everything in my power to deliver you the health, healing, and happiness you need and deserve
.

It was at this moment that Carmel Schneider gave herself to Masha with the same voluptuous abandon that novice nuns once surrendered themselves to God.

22

 

Yao

It was 9
P.M.
The guests had all been fed and were safely in their rooms, hopefully sleeping soundly. Yao, Masha, and Delilah sat at a round table in the corner of Masha's office with notepads in front of them. They were having their daily staff meeting, at which Yao and Delilah were required to give status updates.

Masha tapped her fingertips on the table. There was always a discernible difference in her demeanor at these meetings. You could see her former corporate identity in the language she chose, the crispness of her speech, and the stiffness of her posture. Delilah found it laughable, but Yao, who had never worked in that world, found it charming.

“Right. Next item on the agenda. The silence. Has anyone broken it today?” asked Masha. She seemed brittle. It must be nerves about the new protocol. Yao was nervous himself.

“Lars broke it,” said Delilah. “He was trying to get out of the daily blood tests. I told him not to be a baby.”

Yao would never say that to a guest. Delilah just said what she was thinking, whereas Yao,
sometimes
, felt just a little … fraudulent. Like a performer. For example, he would be helping an ill-mannered guest do a plank and giving them gentle, patient encouragement—“You've got this!”—while thinking,
You're not even trying, you rude lazy motherfucker.

“Frances wrote me a note,” said Yao. “She asked if she could please skip the blood test as she'd had a bloody nose. I told her that was all the more reason to do the test.”

Masha grunted. “Nobody likes blood tests,” she said. “I don't like them! I hate needles.” She shuddered. “When we were applying to come here all those years ago we had to do
many
blood tests: for AIDS, for syphilis. Your government wanted us for our brains but our bodies had to also be perfect. Even our teeth were checked.” She tapped her finger against her white teeth. “I remember my friend said, ‘
It's like they are choosing a horse!
'” Her lip curled at the memory, as if her pride had been hurt. “But you do what you have to do,” she said, without looking at either of them. It was as if she were speaking to someone else not in the room.

Yao looked at Masha's collarbone beneath the straps of her simple white sleeveless top. He had never thought the collarbone to be an especially sensual part of a woman's body until he met Masha.

“Are you in love with this woman or something?” his mother had said to him on the phone, just last week. “Is that why you work like a dog for her?”

“She's nearly the same age as you, Mum,” Yao told her. “And I don't work like a dog for her.”

“More like a
puppy
,” Delilah told him. “You have a crush on her.” They were in bed at the time. Delilah was beautiful and sexually very skilled and he liked her very much, but their hook-ups always felt kind of transactional, even though no money changed hands.

“I'm grateful to her,” Yao said, his hands behind his head as he looked at the ceiling, considering this. “She saved my life.”

“She didn't save your life. You saved
her
life.”

“My supervisor saved her life,” said Yao. “I didn't know what the hell I was doing.”

“And now you loooooove her,” said Delilah, putting her bra back on.

“Like a sister,” said Yao.

“Yeah right,” said Delilah.

“Like a cousin.”

Delilah snorted.

He did care very deeply for Masha. Was that so strange? To love your boss? Surely not so strange when you lived and worked together, and when your boss looked like Masha. She was interesting and stimulating. He found her exotic accent as attractive as her body. He would admit he had a significant crush on her. Perhaps his crush was strange and indicated some flaw in his personality or dysfunctional consequence of his childhood, even though it was just the ordinary, happy childhood of a shy, earnest boy who could get a little too intense about things but mostly slipped under the radar. His parents were softly spoken, humble people who never pushed him. Yao's parents believed in keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment. His father
said
that out loud once, without irony: “Expect to fail, Yao, then you will never be disappointed.” That's why Yao found Masha's egotism so refreshing. She was bigger than life. Self-deprecation was something she had never practiced and did not understand in other people.

And Masha
had
saved his life.

After her heart attack, she had written letters to both Finn and Yao, thanking them and talking about how her “near-death experience” had changed her forever. She said that while she floated above them, she had seen the tiny red birthmark on Yao's scalp. She had described it perfectly: strawberry shaped.

Finn never answered Masha's letter. “She's a nutter. She didn't need to float above our bloody heads to see your birthmark. She probably saw it when she was sitting at her desk, before she collapsed.”

But Yao was intrigued by her near-death experience. He emailed her, and over the years they kept up a sporadic correspondence. She told him that after she recovered from her heart surgery, she'd given up her “highly successful” (her words) corporate career and cashed in her company shares to buy a famous historic house in the countryside. She was going to put in a swimming pool and restore the house. Her initial plan had been to start an exclusive bed-and-breakfast, but as her interest in health had developed, she changed her mind.

She wrote,
Yao, I have transformed my body, my mind, my soul, and I want to do the same for others
.

There was an element of grandiosity to her emails he found amusing and endearing, but really she was not especially important to him. Just a grateful ex-patient with a funny turn of phrase.

And then, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, all his dominos toppled: bam, bam, bam. First, his parents announced they were divorcing. They sold the family home and moved into separate apartments. It was confusing and distressing. Then, in the midst of all that drama, his fianc
é
e, Bernadette, broke off their engagement. It came without warning. He thought they were deeply in love. The reception and honeymoon were booked. How was it possible? It felt like the foundations of his life were collapsing beneath his feet. A breakup wasn't a
tragedy
and yet, to his shame, it felt cataclysmic.

His car got stolen.

He began to suffer from stress-related dermatitis.

Finn moved away and the ambulance service transferred Yao to a regional area where he knew no one, where the call-outs mostly involved violence and drugs. One night a man held a knife to his throat and said, “If you don't save her, I'll slit your throat.” The woman was already dead. When the police came, the man lunged at them with the knife and he was shot. Yao ended up saving
his
life.

He went back to work. Then two days later he woke up just a few minutes before his alarm, as usual, but the moment it went off something catastrophic happened to his brain. He felt it implode. It felt
physical. He thought it was a bleed on the brain. He ended up in a psychiatric ward.

“It sounds like you've been under a lot of pressure,” said a doctor with dark shadows under his eyes.

“Nobody died,” said Yao.

“But it feels like they did, doesn't it?” said the doctor.

That was exactly how it felt: like death after death after death. Finn was gone. His fianc
é
e was gone. His family home was gone. Even his
car
was gone.

“We used to call this a nervous breakdown,” said the doctor. “Now we'd call it a major depressive episode.”

He gave Yao a referral for a psychiatrist and a prescription for antidepressants. “A well-managed breakdown can turn out to be a good thing,” he told Yao. “Try to see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to grow and learn about yourself.”

The day after he got home from the hospital he received an email from Masha in which she said that if he ever needed to escape “the rat race,” he was very welcome to visit and try out her new guest rooms.

It felt like a sign.

Your timing is good, I haven't been well
, he wrote to her.
I might just come for a few days for a rest.

He didn't recognize Masha when he arrived at the house and a goddess in white walked out onto the veranda; a goddess who took him into her arms and said into his ear, “I will make you well.”

Each time he walked out of Tranquillum House to greet new guests he wanted to create that same experience for them: like the sight of land when you've been lost at sea.

Masha nurtured Yao like a sick bird. She cooked for him and taught him meditation and yoga. They learned tai chi together. They were alone in that house for three months. They didn't have sex but they shared
something
. A journey of some kind. A rejuvenation. During that time his body changed; it hardened and strengthened as his mind healed. He became someone else entirely as he experienced a kind of
peace and certainty he'd never known in his life. He shed the old Yao like dead skin.

The old Yao only exercised sporadically and ate too much processed food. The old Yao was a worrier and an insomniac who often woke up in the middle of the night thinking of all the things that
could
have gone wrong in his working day.

The new Yao slept throughout the night and woke up in the morning refreshed. The new Yao no longer thought obsessively about his fianc
é
e in bed with another man. The new Yao rarely thought of Bernadette at all, and eventually completely eradicated her from his thoughts. The new Yao lived in the moment and was passionate about “wellness,” inspired by Masha's vision for Tranquillum House. Instead of just patching people up, like Yao had done as a paramedic, the plan was to
transform
people, in the same way that he himself had been transformed. It felt like religion, except everything they did was based on science and evidence-based research.

His parents visited separately and told him it was time to return to Sydney and get his life back on track, but within six months of his arrival Masha and Yao opened the doors of Tranquillum House for their first guests. It was a success. And fun. A lot more fun than being a paramedic.

A few days had become five years. Delilah joined the staff four years ago, and together the three of them had all learned so much, constantly refining and improving their retreats. Masha paid generously. It was a dream career.

“Tomorrow, I begin one-on-one counseling sessions,” said Masha. “I will share my notes with you.”

“Good, because the more we know about each guest the better,” said Yao.

This particular retreat would set new precedents for the way they did business. It was natural to be nervous.

“I want to learn more about Tony Hogburn's past,” said Delilah. “There's something about him. I can't put my finger on it.”

“It's going to be fine,” murmured Yao, almost to himself.

Masha reached across the table and grabbed him by the arm, her incredible green eyes ablaze with that energy and passion he found so inspiring.

“It's going to be more than
fine
, Yao,” she said. “It's going to be beautiful.”

23

 

Frances

It was now day four of the retreat.

Frances found she had settled into the gentle rhythm of life at Tranquillum House with surprising ease. She rarely had to make decisions about how to spend her time.

Every morning began with tai chi in the rose garden with Yao. Her schedule always included at least one, sometimes
two
, remedial massages with Jan. Some days she had to go to the spa on multiple occasions—if, for example, she was “assigned” a facial. She did not find this onerous. The facials were divinely scented, dreamlike experiences that left Frances rosy and glowing, with her hair sticking up like the petals of a flower. There were yoga classes in the yoga and meditation studio and walking meditations through the surrounding bushland. The walking meditations got brisker and faster and steeper each day.

In the early evening, when it got cooler, some guests went running with Yao (the Marconi family seemed to do nothing
but
run, even dur
ing free time; Frances would sit on her balcony and watch the three of them pelting up Tranquillity Hill as if they were running for their lives) while others did a “gentle” exercise class in the rose garden with Delilah. Delilah seemed to have made it her personal mission to get Frances to do push-ups on her toes like a man, and because Frances wasn't allowed to speak, she couldn't say, “No thank you, I've never seen the point of push-ups.” She now understood that the point of push-ups was to “work every muscle in her body,” which was supposedly a good thing.

Frances meekly allowed Yao to take her blood and check her blood pressure each day, before hopping mutely on the scale so he could record her weight, which she still avoided looking at but which she assumed was
plummeting
, probably in
free fall
, what with all the exercise, and the lack of calories and wine.

The noble silence, which seemed so flimsy and silly in the beginning, so arbitrary and easily breakable, somehow gained in strength and substance as the days passed, like the settling in of a heat wave, and in fact the summer heat had intensified. It was a dry, still heat, bright and white, like the silence itself.

At first, without the distraction of noise and conversation, Frances's thoughts went around and around on a crazy endless repetitive loop: Paul Drabble, the money she'd lost, the surprise, the hurt, the anger, the surprise, the hurt, the anger, Paul's son, who was probably not even his son, the book she'd written with delusional love in her heart, which had subsequently been rejected, the career that was possibly over, the review that she should never have read. It wasn't that she'd found any solutions or experienced any earth-shattering revelations, but the act of observing her looping thoughts seemed to slow them down, until at last they came to a complete stop, and she'd found that for moments of time she thought … nothing. Nothing at all. Her mind was quite empty. And those moments were lovely.

The other guests were silent, not unwelcome figures in her peripheral vision. It became perfectly normal to ignore people, to not say
hello when you found someone else sitting in the hot spring you were visiting but to instead step silently into the bubbling, eggy-scented water with your face averted.

Once, she and the tall, dark, and handsome man sat in the Secret Grotto hot spring for what seemed like an eternity together, neither saying a word, both gazing out at the valley views, lost in their private thoughts. Even though they hadn't spoken or even looked at each other, it felt like they'd shared something spiritual.

There had been other pleasant surprises too.

For example, yesterday afternoon, as she passed Zoe on the stairs, the girl brushed against her and pressed something into the palm of her hand. Frances managed to keep her eyes ahead and not say anything (which was remarkable, as she was very bad at that sort of thing—
both
her ex-husbands had informed her that they could think of no one who would make a worse spy than her while they, in spite of their differing personalities, were both apparently eminently qualified to join the CIA at a moment's notice) and when she got to her room she had found a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in her hand. She had never tasted anything more divine. Apart from Zoe, Frances didn't have much interaction with anyone else. She no longer startled when Napoleon sneezed. She noted that Tony's hacking cough gradually lessened and lessened until it disappeared, and indeed her own cough disappeared around the same time. Her breathing became beautifully clear. Her paper cut vanished and her back pain got better every day. It really was a “healing journey.” When she got home she was going to send Ellen an effusive thank you card for suggesting this place.

According to today's schedule she had a one-on-one counseling session with Masha straight after lunch. Frances had never had any form of
counseling
in her life. She had friends for that. They all counseled each other and it was generally a two-way process. Frances couldn't imagine sitting and telling anyone her problems without then listening to their problems and offering her own sage advice in return. She generally felt that the advice she offered was superior to the advice she
received. Other people's problems were so simple; one's own problems tended to be so much more
nuanced.

But the silence and the heat and the daily massages had all combined to create a peaceful sense of resignation. Masha could “counsel” Frances if it made her happy.

Frances's lunch that day was a vegetarian curry. She had stopped noticing the sound of everyone chewing and had begun to take the most extraordinary pleasure in her food—extraordinary because she thought she already took quite substantial pleasure in her food! The curry, which she savored tiny mouthful by tiny mouthful, had a hint of saffron that just about blew her mind. Was saffron always that good? She didn't know, but it felt like a religious experience.

After lunch, while still reflecting on the wonder of saffron, Frances opened the door marked
PRIVATE
then climbed up two flights of stairs to the princess tower at the top of the house and knocked on the door of Masha's office.

“Come in,” said a voice, a little peremptorily.

Frances entered the room, reminded of visits to the principal's office when she was at boarding school.

Masha was writing something down and she gestured toward the seat in front of her to indicate that Frances should sit while she finished what she was doing.

Her demeanor would normally have made Frances bristle, and she wasn't yet quite so Zen that she didn't note the fact that she had the
right
to bristle. She was the paying guest turning up at the appointed time, thank you very much, not the hired help. But she didn't sigh or clear her throat or wriggle because she was very nearly transformed
,
definitely thinner, and yesterday she did two push-ups
in a row
on her toes. She'd probably look very similar to Masha quite soon.

A wave of laughter rose in her chest and she distracted herself by studying the room.

She'd love an office like this. If she had an office like this, she would probably write a masterpiece without chocolate. There were huge glass
windows on all four sides, giving Masha a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the soft, rippling green countryside. It looked like a Renaissance painting from up here.

In the same way that the silence didn't apply to Masha, it seemed that neither did the “no electronic devices” rule. Masha did not seem averse to the very latest in technology. She had not one but two very smart-looking oversized computer monitors on her desk, as well as a laptop.

Was she surfing the
internet
up here while all her guests digitally detoxed? Frances felt her right hand twitch. She imagined grabbing a mouse, spinning a monitor around to face her, and clicking on a news site. What had happened in the last four days? There could have been a zombie apocalypse or a significant celebrity couple breakup and Frances would have no idea.

She dragged her eyes away from the seductive computer screens and looked instead at the few items on Masha's desk. No photo frames revealing anything personal. There were a few lovely antiques that Frances coveted. Her hand crept out to touch a letter opener. The gold handle had an intricate design with pictures of … elephants?

“Careful,” said Masha. “That letter opener is as sharp as a dagger. You could murder someone with that, Frances.”

Frances's hand flew back as fast as a shoplifter's.

Masha picked up the letter opener and removed it from its sheath. “It is at least two hundred years old,” she said. She pressed her thumb to the sharp point. “It has been in my family for a long time.”

Frances made an interested murmur. She wasn't sure if she was allowed to break the silence, and suddenly she was irritated by that.

“I assume the noble silence doesn't apply right now?” she said, and her unused voice sounded strange and unfamiliar to her ears. She'd been so good! She hadn't even talked to
herself
when she was alone in her room, and normally she was very chatty when alone, cheerfully narrating her own actions and engaging in friendly dialogue with inanimate objects. “Where are you hiding, O peeler of carrots?”

“Ah, you are a person who likes to follow the rules, are you?” Masha
rested her chin in both hands and studied her. Her eyes really were a remarkable shade of green.

“Generally,” said Frances.

Masha didn't break eye contact.

“As I'm sure you know, I did have some banned items in my luggage,” said Frances. She was happy with her cool tone, but her face was hot.

“Yes,” said Masha. “I am aware of that.”

“And I'm still
reading
,” said Frances defiantly.

“Are you?” said Masha.

“Yes,” said Frances.

“Anything good?” Masha replaced the letter opener on her desk.

Frances thought about this. The book was meant to be another murder mystery but the author had introduced far too many characters too early, and so far everyone was still alive and kicking. The pace had slowed. Come on now. Hurry up and kill someone. “It's quite good,” she told Masha.

“Tell me, Frances,” said Masha. “Do you
want
to be a different person when you leave here?”

“Well,” said Frances. She picked up a colored glass ball from Masha's desk. It felt vaguely bad-mannered—you didn't pick up other people's belongings—and yet she couldn't help it. She wanted to feel the cool weight of it in her hand. “I guess I do.”

“I don't think you do,” said Masha. “I think you are here for a little rest, and you are quite happy with the way you are now. I think this is all a little bit of joke to you. You prefer not to take things too seriously in your life, yes?” Her accent had deepened.

Frances reminded herself that this woman had no
authority
over her.

“Does it matter if I'm just here for a ‘little rest'?” Frances put the glass ball back down and pushed it away from her, causing a moment's panic when it began to roll. She stopped it with her fingertips and placed her hands in her lap. This was ridiculous. Why did she feel ashamed? Like a teenager? This was a
health resort
.

Masha didn't answer her question. “I wonder, do you feel that you've ever been truly
tested
in your life?”

Frances shifted in her seat. “I've suffered losses,” she said defensively.

Masha flicked her hand. “Of course you have,” she said. “You are fifty-two years old. That is not my question.”

“I've been lucky,” said Frances. “I know I have been very lucky.”

“And you live in the ‘lucky country.'” Masha lifted her arms to encompass the countryside that surrounded them.

“Well, that phrase about us being the lucky country, it's kind of misused.” Frances heard a pedantic tone creep into her voice, and she wondered why she was parroting her first husband, Sol, who always felt the need to point this out smugly when someone referred to Australia as being the lucky country. “The author who wrote that phrase meant to imply that we hadn't earned our prosperity.”

“So Australia is not so lucky?”

“Well, no, we
are,
but …” Frances stopped. Was that exactly the point that Masha was trying to make? That Frances hadn't earned her prosperity?

“You never had children,” said Masha, referring to an open file on the desk in front of her. Frances found herself craning to look, as if her file would reveal a secret. Masha only knew she didn't have children because Frances had indicated that when she filled in the booking form. “Was that decision made by choice? Or was it forced upon you by circumstance?”

“Choice,” said Frances.
This is none of your business, lady
.

She thought of Ari and the PlayStation games he was going to show her when she got to America. Where was Ari now? Or the boy who pretended to be Ari? Was he on the phone with some other woman?

“I see,” said Masha.

Did Masha think she was selfish for not wanting children? It wouldn't be the first time she'd heard that accusation. It had never especially bothered her.

“Do
you
have children?” Frances asked Masha. She was allowed to
ask questions. This woman was not her therapist. She probably had no qualifications whatsoever! She leaned forward, curious to know. “Are you in a relationship?”

“I am not in a relationship and I do not have children,” said Masha. She had become very still. She looked very steadily at Frances—so steadily that Frances couldn't help but wonder if she was lying, although it was impossible to imagine Masha in a relationship. She could never be
half
of any relationship.