The Bigness of the World (19 page)

“She gave me the creeps. Immediately,” continues Sylvie, by way of letting these relative strangers know that her instincts are keener than Noreen’s. “But Noreen invited her to play pool with us, so what could I say? Then, halfway through the game, this really blond, granola-y type walks in and sits down at the bar. She’s watching us play, so finally I go over and invite her to join the next game, and it turns out that she’s Australian.” She pauses as though she has revealed something significant.

“Olivia Newton-John?” suggests Calvin dryly, and the others laugh because, boring Beach Boys story aside, Calvin is funny.

“What?” says Sylvie nervously, bewildered by the laughter but still joining in, assuming that if others are laughing, then something must be funny. Perhaps because they have spent so much time around
strangers on this trip, Noreen has begun to notice just how often Sylvie does this — laughs when she has no idea what is funny, her hand flying up to her mouth to hide the way that confusion tugs it downward.

Noreen suddenly feels tired, tired of the story itself as well as of the way that Sylvie keeps talking over her, keeps saying, “That’s not what happened” when it is, in fact, what happened. Then, there’s the way that Sylvie steered the story right past the particulars of Noreen’s meeting with Deb, had somehow gotten her talking about Deb’s thighs when the meeting was really the important part.

What had happened was that Noreen was sitting at the bar, Sylvie’s stool empty beside her, when Deb sat down on it, leaned toward her, and said, “You know why the Jews didn’t leave Germany?” Noreen had been put off at first, thinking that Deb was telling a joke, some one-liner about the Holocaust. After all, it was at this very bar that the
DJ
had, between songs, once asked, “How many Polacks does it take to rape a lesbian?” and when Noreen complained to the owner, a pudgy man in running shorts, he had said, “What? Are there Polacks here?”

But Deb was not telling a joke. She was relating an anecdote that she had read somewhere, a reply that a Jewish man had given after the war, after he had survived and been asked to explain, in retrospect, why it was that the Jews had not left when they had the chance. “Because we had pianos,” the man had said, at least according to Deb. Deb was slightly tipsy but not at all drunk, and so she did not go on and on about this in an overly sentimental way, which Noreen appreciated, yet it was obvious that the man’s response had meant something to her. Later, Noreen told Sylvie about the exchange and Sylvie had seemed impressed, so how, Noreen wonders, could Sylvie tell the story without beginning there, with the Jews and their pianos?

The others are still laughing at Calvin’s Olivia Newton-John crack, everyone except for Noreen and Martin. They have just added Martin,
so there are six of them now, sitting at a table beside a pool in a tiny hotel in Yogyakarta, drinking beer and taking turns describing their oddest brush with fame. When it was his turn, Martin, who grew up in Washington, had shrugged and said, “I don’t know,” and then, as though it were a question: “Ted Bundy used to be my parents’ paperboy?” Martin is forty-five, the oldest of the group, and the others sense that he would not have joined them back home, that he has joined them now precisely because they are not in the United States.

The truth of it is, they are all tired of dealing with non-Americans, tired of having to explain themselves and of having to work so hard to understand what others are explaining to them. They are tired and what they want, crave actually, is just to sit around with a bunch of other Americans playing silly games like this, games that do not require them to stop constantly and explain, to say things like “Ted Bundy? Are you kidding? He’s famous.” Because, of course, the explanations never stop there. If they were talking to an Asian, they’d have to explain the whole concept of serial killers (unless the person were from Japan, of course) and if the other person were European, forget it — they’d spend the next half hour discussing why Americans were all so damn violent.

This tiredness is what attuned them to accent as they overheard one another soliciting directions from the hotel employees and ordering eggs sunny-side up, though it was Calvin who finally brought them together, yesterday afternoon as they lounged around the pool with the other hotel guests, eyeing one another. He had thrown out some ridiculous sports question, something about American football, and they had all clamored to respond — even those who had no interest in sports — because they understood that sports was not the point. They stayed up until midnight drinking and discussing where they were from, without having to stop to explain that Minnesota was cold, or worse, having to fumble around trying to figure
out what thirty-below Fahrenheit translated into for the rest of the world. And they would have kept going had the front desk guy not warned them that other guests were starting to complain.

“The loud Americans,” they called out in stage whispers as they disbanded, laughing and giddy after a night of drinking, happy to have found each other, a feeling that they all share, though one that they haven’t verbalized for various reasons — Noreen because she feels that it would make them seem provincial to acknowledge such a thing and Joe, on the other hand, simply because he sees it as a given, and Joe’s belief is that people who state givens are either insecure or stupid.

That was last night, and now they have reconvened, adding Martin, whom Joe overheard discussing flight reservations with the front desk man when he got up to use the restroom. “That’s the guy,” Joe said, indicating Martin with a nod as Martin passed their table, and Sylvie called out to him, politely but with the slightly patronizing tone that people in groups sometimes adopt when addressing someone alone. “Hey! Excuse me. May I ask where you’re from?” she asked, even though they already knew where he was from, knew, that is, that he was American.

Martin turned and looked at them;
sizing them up
was how Joe saw it, which is how Joe generally sees such things, just to be clear about Joe. Joe is, as his name suggests, an average guy — moderate in habit and opinion with uninspired taste. He grew up in a rural, slightly-depressed-though-no-more-so-than-the-towns-around-it town in Minnesota, where he was a mediocre student, of average intelligence and in possession of no real talents that set him above others, that marked him, that is, as someone destined to rise above his humble beginnings (as such beginnings are always described after a person has done a little rising). But what Joe did possess was a desire to do just that, to leave that town behind entirely, a desire,
moreover, that wedded itself to no one plan for doing so, which actually made the whole thing far more accomplishable than had he hoped to achieve it, say, by becoming a doctor or wowing everyone with his athletic prowess.

Instead, Joe accomplished it by lying, by packing his bags and moving to California, where he knew nobody, which meant that there was nobody to point out that he was lying. Once there, he lied his way into a progression of increasingly better-paying jobs, his favorite for the chamber of commerce, where he was the guy that got sent out with giant scissors to cut the ribbon when new businesses opened, from which he learned that women really gravitate toward a man with big scissors. When it was Joe’s turn to discuss his brush with fame, he described meeting Dorothy Hamill, a lie, of course, and an easy one at that, for Joe knows the trick to lying well, which is either to go really big or, as is the case here, really small — to talk about sharing a ski lift with a figure skater who was last known for her haircut.

Besides lying, or perhaps hand in hand with it, what Joe does have a talent for is sizing people up. Thus, as he sat watching Martin size them up and sizing him up back, he sensed immediately that Martin was disdainful of them, of their need to be together. Disdain is one of those things that hits too close to home with Joe (perhaps because of the humble beginnings) and is, therefore, one of the few things that diminishes his objectivity, which is why he failed to consider that Martin might simply be distracted, might be focusing on his own problems to the exclusion of what is going on around him, a state of mind that can easily be mistaken for disdain.

This is precisely the case with Martin, who has come to Indonesia with his wife of thirteen years, a trip that the two of them began planning even before they were married and which it has taken them all this time to bring to fruition. Martin has always been vaguely distrustful of success, a disposition that allows him to now feel vindicated
because here in Indonesia, things have fallen quickly apart for Martin, starting in Bali of all places, where he and his wife began their vacation because everyone back home told them that Bali was
the
place to start: Bali was paradise, these people said, an Eden of smiling, happy people, and the dances, especially the
barong
dance, were simply the most beautiful things they would ever see.

During the long flight to Bali, his wife had started out in a state of wine-drinking jubilation, but as the hours went by, she developed a terrible headache, the result of caffeine withdrawal, which neither aspirin nor a belated cup of weak airline coffee could assuage. Then, as they flew over the turbulent Strait of Malacca, she became nauseated as well. Martin was sure that she would feel better once they landed, but as they entered the airport, they were met with the sweet, cloying smell of jasmine and the overwhelming humidity of the tropics, and she rushed to the nearest garbage can and exploded into it, the entire history of the flight recorded in her vomit as she held weakly to the can with one hand and pushed back her stringy brown hair with the other. And through it all, Martin stayed frozen where he was, perhaps fifty feet away, watching as several young soldiers looked on impassively from the exits and the other members of their flight, strangers with whom they had spent the last thirty hours, passed by and stared at his wife, bearing witness to the contents of her stomach and seeing her hunched over, her mouth smeared with something pink, the wine that she had consumed thousands of miles ago when she was still feeling festive.

Finally, a saronged woman about his wife’s age approached her and, in what sounded like an Irish accent, said, “Get it all out, luv. It’s the only way.” She handed his wife several tissues, looking discreetly away as his wife cleaned her face. “All better, isn’t it then?” the woman said encouragingly, his wife thanking her weakly as she went on her way. Only then had Martin spun into action, coming up behind his wife as though he had been there all along, whispering, “Do you need
the bathroom?” and “No? Are you sure? Because there’s one right here.” Later, as they rode in a taxi through the streets of Denpasar, he had wanted to acknowledge his failure, or, even better, he had wanted her to acknowledge it, to scold him in the loud voice that he hated, but she had said nothing, her head thrown back, eyes closed, as the taxi sped along.

Three days later, they checked into a hotel in Singaraja along the northern coast of Bali, a hotel that catered to Indonesian businessmen and where they were the only tourists and, as such, were accorded the dubious honor of being placed in a room directly across from the hotel desk. There, with the night receptionist just outside their door and Indonesian businessmen snoring away behind the paper-thin walls on either side of them, his wife had wakened him in the middle of the night to tell him that she was thoroughly and profoundly miserable, that she had been for years and had been concealing it from him, and that she now understood that he was to blame for all of it, even the fact that she had been concealing it. He switched on the lamp next to the bed because it felt wrong to be discussing such things in the dark, and when he did, she began sobbing, but all Martin could think about was the night receptionist outside his door, listening to his wife cry.

Hoping to discuss the situation more rationally, Martin got out of the narrow bed and sat in a chair beside the armoire, leaning back with his arms crossed in front of him. He knew, of course, what crossed arms conveyed — inapproachability, an unwillingness to listen, outright hostility — for he had the sort of job, a middle-management position with a company that produced copiers, where people were always going on about things like teamwork and communication and body language, but he also knew that his arms were incapable of doing anything else at that moment but reaching toward each other and holding on.

After listening to his wife sob and curse him for nearly an hour,
he asked in a low voice that he hoped she might imitate, “What can I do?”

He had meant what could he do at that moment to make her stop crying, but she had looked up at him incredulously and said, “Can you learn to cry when you hear sad songs? Can you learn to articulate why you prefer radishes to cucumbers? Can you learn to appreciate irony? Wait. Can you learn to even
understand
irony? No? Well, then there is absolutely nothing you can do, Martin.”

He slept sitting upright in the chair, and the next morning, with no mention of what had happened during the night, they packed and moved on to Ubud. During the day, they walked around the town, visiting the monkeys and stopping, it seemed to him, at every shop they passed. At one of them, his wife bought a carving that was heavy and round like a softball, the wood cut into the shape of a man with his legs pulled up to his chest, his head and shoulders curled over his knees.

“Is weeping Buddha,” the shopkeeper told Martin’s wife. She sighed and gave the man the exact amount of money that he asked for, and Martin kept his mouth shut.

That night, they ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant called Kodok, which, according to a poorly written explanation on the front of the menu, was the Indonesian word for
frog
. Martin supposed that the word was an onomatopoeia, and he marveled at the fact that
kodok
was nothing like the English word for the sound that frogs made,
ribit
, yet both words seemed exactly right to him somehow. Normally, he would have shared this observation with his wife, but he didn’t, just as normally she would have commented on how beautiful the garden was, with candles nestled in beds of woven banana leaves and flowers everywhere and a pond near their table, but she didn’t.