The Bigness of the World

Idyllic Little Bali

Calvin goes first, telling them about the time he was in Florida and decided to attend a Beach Boys concert, not really knowing anything about the Beach Boys except that they played music for basking in the sun to, which, Calvin being from Michigan, might explain why he knew so little about them. He hitched a ride up to Fort Lauderdale, which is where the concert was being held, with a guy in a convertible who dropped him off right at the stadium, and it wasn’t until the band came on stage hours later that he realized the convertible guy, the guy with whom he’d scored the ride, was actually one of the Beach Boys, the drummer, whose name he couldn’t recall.

This is exactly how Calvin tells the story, his clauses like tired acrobats, and though the others at the table have known Calvin only a day, they are disappointed. Joe goes next, then Martin, and after them, Noreen and Sylvie begin a long story about their first date, on which they went to a run-down bar on the west side of Albuquerque, the kind of place, Sylvie explains, where Hispanic butch-femme couples show up in wedding gear on Saturday nights to hold their receptions, the butches playing pool in their tuxedos, the femmes taking over the bathrooms, where, in a never-ending cycle, they fix their makeup and cry with happiness.

“So,” Sylvie says in a voice thick with drama. “There we are on our first date, and Noreen invites this woman, Deb, to play pool with us.”

Noreen cuts in, explaining that this Deb woman had actually struck up a conversation with her while Sylvie was off in the bathroom. She describes Deb as a massive-thighed Amazon who raised horses and engaged in competitive weight lifting, details that, in her mind, make clear that Deb had posed no threat to their date. She even tells them how Deb, who was wearing shorts, had said, “Go ahead. Feel it,” flexing her very large thigh for Noreen, and how she, Noreen, had of course refused.

“I didn’t even know her,” she reports earnestly. “So why would I feel her thigh?” She actually seems to be soliciting their input, though it is not clear whether she is seeking plausible reasons that she (or anyone in that position) might have opted to feel the thigh or their approval for not having done so.

“It’s irrelevant anyway,” announces Sylvie, but Noreen doesn’t reply because she is thinking about Deb’s thigh, about the way that Deb had first extended her foot delicately, like someone testing the water in a pool, but then had ground her toes hard into the floor, making the leg muscles leap to the surface. There is absolutely nothing sexual about the memory. On the contrary, the thigh had been far too large, too freakish, for her to find it appealing. Noreen had felt the way she did the first time that she saw the penis of an aroused farm animal, fascinated and repulsed, actually unable to look away, but with no sense that what she was seeing had anything to do with her.

“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 was from Japan, of course) and if the other person was European, forget it — they’d spend the next half hour discussing why Americans were all so damn violent.

This tiredness is what had attuned them to accent as they heard 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 one another, 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, they 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 fifteen 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, 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, rib-it, 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 around them was, with candles nestled in beds of woven banana leaves and flowers everywhere and a pond near their table, but she didn’t.

In keeping with the restaurant’s theme, Martin ordered frog legs, which he had never had before. Several minutes after placing his order, as the two of them sat rolling their bamboo placemats up like tiny carpets and letting them unfurl, he watched as a boy bent over the little pool and, hands flashing, grabbed two plump, kicking frogs and rushed back to the kitchen with them. Martin was horrified. He thought that if he hurried, he could change his order before the damage was done, but when he looked up, his wife was staring at him with such naked revulsion that he did nothing — nothing, that is, except suck the frog legs clear down to the bone when they arrived.

The trip had gone on like this, the two of them speaking only about small matters such as who should go to the front desk to request more toilet paper and what bus seats they had been assigned. They continued to sleep in the same bed, not talking, not touching, not even accidentally, and finally, after a week of this, Martin gathered his courage one morning at breakfast and asked, “Is it because of what happened in the airport?” For even though it was impossible to change things, he felt that he had to know.

His wife had stared at him blankly for a moment. She was eating papaya, which she loved but which they rarely had back home in Ohio.

“Maybe we should go our separate ways?” he said then, because as he watched her eat the papaya and smack her lips, he understood that she was content, perhaps even happy.

“Think about the money,” she scolded. “How can we afford to keep traveling if we don’t share expenses?” Then, after a moment, she added, “Besides, what’s so different, Martin, really?” She asked this almost gently, which made it worse, for it meant that she felt secure enough to consider his feelings.

At least here in Yogyakarta they have begun spending their days apart. She has hooked up with four grown siblings, three sisters and a brother, who are staying at their hotel, and though Martin feels that she is intruding upon the siblings’ family reunion, he does not say this to her, knowing that she would scoff at him, would say something like, “Poor Martin. How does it feel to always think you’re in the way?”

In a few days, they are supposed to leave for Jakarta, and from there, they are to fly to Sumatra, and it is not until two weeks from now, an interminable amount of time, that they are scheduled to return to Jakarta and begin their trip back home, but Martin has realized that he can’t continue on like this. He simply cannot. That is what he had been speaking to the front desk man about when Joe wandered by. The front desk man, it turned out, was actually the manager, a helpful fellow with the unfortunate facial features of a toad: darting tongue, lidless eyes, and thin lips that cut far back into his cheeks. Martin felt immediately apologetic when he faced him, which he later understood to be residual guilt over the frog legs.

“I must change my flight,” he told him, forming the story as he went along. He laid out his ticket, Garuda Airlines, Jakarta to Singapore, for the man to see. “I read about the Garuda crash in September, and quite frankly, I’ve become nervous.” He began his request in this way to conceal his real motive, which was to change the flight date from two weeks hence to tomorrow, though why he felt he needed this bit of subterfuge, he could not say. However, as he spoke, he realized that there was truth to what he was saying. He had never been the sort that gave flying any thought, that questioned the ability of planes to stay aloft, but he saw now that things were not as he had always thought them to be.

“Sir, there is nothing to worry about. Garuda is our national airline. It is very safe. That accident, it was caused by the forest fires — the smoke — but that was months ago. I think there is no need to worry.” The man studied the ticket. “Also, sir, your flight is not for two weeks.” He added this quietly.

“I see,” said Martin, quietly also. “Well, I was thinking that as long as I’m making such a big change anyway, perhaps I might change the dates as well. In fact, I would like to take a flight tomorrow afternoon, from Jakarta. Can this be arranged?”

“I am not sure, sir,” the man said, flustered for some reason by the request. “You see, it is rather short notice. And your wife? Mrs. Stein?” he said, pronouncing Martin’s surname so that it sounded like the mark that dropped food leaves on one’s clothing, but Martin did not bother to correct him because he couldn’t imagine that it made any difference to either of them.

“My wife will be staying. Only I must return early. You understand.” And to be sure that the man did understand, he placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, which, he had read in his guidebook, was the way that things got done in Indonesia. The man seemed embarrassed by the bill’s appearance and in no way acknowledged it, but neither did he return it. Instead, it sat on the counter between them as he made his calls, first to Singapore Airlines, arranging a shuttle flight from Yogyakarta to Jakarta for the next morning, followed by an afternoon flight to Singapore, and then to Garuda Airlines, canceling the original flight. Only after hanging up the telephone for the final time did he place his hand on the counter between them, over the twenty-dollar bill, and, still mispronouncing Martin’s name, he declared, “Everything is arranged, Mr. Stein.”

“Thank you,” Martin replied, but looking at the kindly, toad-like features, he felt suddenly ill. He walked quickly away from the desk, and as he passed the nearby pool area, which doubled as a bar, a woman called out to him from one of the tables, asking where he was from.

He turned and stared at the woman and her companions for a long moment, thinking to himself, “Where am I from?” and finally, he took a deep breath and said, “Cleveland,” and then, as though these people might not know where that was, he added, “Cleveland, Ohio,” and they all nodded and smiled.

“Of course we know Cleveland. We’re Americans,” they said, and they invited him to sit down.

* * *

They are playing a game, the fame game. Martin hates games, and when it is his turn, he tells them about his parents’ paperboy, Ted Bundy, though hesitantly, for he is still not sure that he understands the point of the game. The two lesbians go next, relating a very long and increasingly convoluted story about a woman with big thighs and an Australian who might or might not have been Olivia Newton-John. The thigh woman was raised by Satan worshippers in Minot, North Dakota, but had escaped when she was seventeen. Now, she raises horses and lifts weights and is a lesbian also.

Suddenly, or so it seems to him, Sylvie, the lesbian who is doing most of the talking, pushes her hands against her own throat as she explains that the thigh woman had threatened to kill the Australian woman with a pool cue, claiming that the Australian had been sent by the Satan worshippers to retrieve her. Martin is sure that he has missed something, some crucial detail, and he studies the others, hoping for a clue, but the waiter approaches their table with another round of drinks, and Sylvie pauses while everyone pays, a chaotic undertaking because they are all distracted by trying to convert rupiahs into dollars in their heads.

Joe, seeing an opportunity to get the conversation away from this god-awful story that, as far as he can tell, has nothing remotely to do with a brush with fame, turns to Martin and asks, “Did I hear you discussing flights with the desk guy?”

Martin considers explaining that the “desk guy” is actually the manager, but he is tired, so he simply says yes, he is leaving the next day. He does not mention that he moved his flight up two weeks, only that he has made the change to Singapore Airlines. “I’m feeling a little nervous about this Garuda Air,” he says. “They had a crash in September. Now, Singapore Airlines — you know how things are in that country. They cane pilots for crashing.” They all laugh because it is the only thing they do know about Singapore — that it’s that little country that’s always caning people.

Amanda, the sixth and youngest member of the group, says softly, “I think you’re very wise, Martin.” She is the sort of woman that men describe as sweet, which simply means that she listens far more than she talks and that she is prone to comments like this, comments that reinforce their opinions of themselves in very uncomplicated ways. She is the only one who has not yet described a brush with fame and who is actually interested in Sylvie’s story, partly because she has a cousin in Minot, North Dakota.

There is another thing to know about Amanda, a secret that she has maintained successfully over the last two days, largely by keeping track of her vowels. Amanda is not American. She is Canadian, though her mother is American, a Minnesotan who fell in love with Amanda’s father years ago over the course of a weekend getaway to Winnipeg with a group of friends. “With my girlfriends,” her mother says when she tells the story, though Amanda has told her mother repeatedly, and at times petulantly, to stop using girlfriends like that — to talk about the women with whom she bowls and shops.

“Only lesbians call other women girlfriends these days,” she explains, “and they don’t mean friends.” But her mother disregards everything she says, every attempt she makes to offer advice that might save her mother from embarrassment.

Once, for example, during their annual visit to Minnesota, she overheard her mother telling a group of relatives that Warren — Warren was Amanda’s father — had to “really Jew down” the used car salesman from whom they had just purchased a car. Amanda was sitting on the sofa nearby reading a book about lighthouses. She always read books about strange topics when she visited her relatives because she secretly liked promoting the notion that they already had of her — as different. Different was not meant as a compliment, but because she considered her relatives backward, she clamored after the label as though it were. She lowered the lighthouse book and said, “Mother, I cannot believe you said that.”

“What?” said her mother.

“ ‘Jew him down.’ I cannot believe you would use an expression like that.”

The conversation had stopped as they all turned to look at her, seventeen-year-old Amanda, their flesh and blood, who was being raised in Canada. No wonder she had such odd ideas. No wonder she read books about lighthouses. But her mother just laughed. “Honestly, Amanda,” she said. “Sometimes you have the most peculiar ideas. Next you’re going to tell me that the Dutch are up in arms about ‘going Dutch.’ ” The relatives laughed then also, laughed because even though Amanda’s mother had moved to Canada, she still had her sense of humor.

Amanda hopes to sleep with Calvin, though Calvin is not yet aware of her interest, a state of affairs that would normally suggest that nothing is going to happen between them. Calvin, however, does not work that way, does not allow himself the luxury of choosing friends or sexual partners. Calvin waits to be chosen. Today is Calvin’s birthday, but he has not yet decided whether he will tell the others, afraid that they might find him weird, even pathetic, if they learn that he is here celebrating alone. Back home in Michigan, the story of his trip to Indonesia will play differently. His friends and coworkers will say, “That’s Calvin for you, trotting off just like that to celebrate his birthday in Java — wherever the hell that is.” Back home, he is funny, risk-taking Calvin, spontaneous Calvin who runs off to places like Java and Florida and Belize, warm places, at the drop of a hat. Calvin has worked hard to create his own myth.

By the time the group begins to break up for the night, Calvin has finally noticed the way that Amanda’s hand creeps across the table when she addresses him, the way it sits demurely in her lap when she speaks to everyone else. Then, too, there is the way that she laughs at his jokes, heartily, with a whispered, breathy “Oh, Calvin” at the end. He thinks that all they need is one more good session of drinking and chatting as a group, one more chance for him to showcase his humor for her, and so, as they stand to go off to bed, he says, “Tomorrow, folks? Same table? Fourish?”

Everyone nods except Martin, of course, who will be in Singapore by then. Even Noreen nods, though she is tired of everyone, but she is most tired of Sylvie — Sylvie, who never knows when to stop talking. Even when they are in bed, lying side by side with books in their hands, Sylvie cannot stop talking. “Do you see these books in our hands? That means we’re reading,” she said to Sylvie a few nights earlier, her voice straining to make it sound lighthearted, like a joke. And tonight will surely be worse because tonight, frustrated by having her story cut short, Sylvie will feel compelled to finish it again and again as they lie in bed.

Sylvie, she suspects, did not notice that the others were alternately puzzled and amused by the story, not to mention annoyed by the pace at which it was told. Noreen tries to imagine the story from their point of view, a story heard over drinks around a pool in a hot, bright country, and though she had sympathized with their impatience, she still cannot make sense of their reactions, for she cannot find amusement in anything about that night, certainly not in the fear she felt as Deb pressed the Australian woman against the bar, pool cue twitching in her red, meaty hands, and announced, “In two minutes, if you are still here, I am going to kill you,” not screaming the words as an exaggerated expression of anger but stating them clearly and matter-of-factly, attaching a time frame, making of them a promise.

Is it possible, Noreen wonders, to locate the exact moment that fear (or hate or love) takes shape? And is there ever a way to convey that feeling to another person, to describe the memory of it so perfectly that it is like performing a transplant, your heart beating frantically in the body of that other person? That night, after the Australian fled, Deb turned to Noreen and Sylvie and remarked nonchalantly, “She knew,” and Noreen, looking fully into Deb’s eyes for the first time, saw in them something distant and unmoored, like a small boat far out at sea.

When it was Noreen’s turn at the pool table, her hands shook as they held the cue, which felt different to her now — like something capable of smashing open a head or boring through a heart. As Deb racked the balls for the next game, her back turned to them, Noreen grabbed Sylvie’s hand, and they fled the bar also, sprinting across the vast, dark parking lot, glancing around nervously as they fumbled to open the doors of Noreen’s car. Once inside, they locked the doors and flung themselves on each other for just a moment, their hearts thudding crazily against the other’s groping hands, before Noreen started the car and sped out of the parking lot, not turning on the headlights until they reached the street. Halfway home, they pulled over on a dark street and finished each other off quickly right there in the car, not even bothering to silence the engine.

* * *

On the third afternoon, shortly after the five of them convene and order their first round of drinks, a sweaty woman approaches their table and asks whether they have seen Martin. “Martin?” they repeat in a sort of lackadaisical chorus.

“Yes,” she says impatiently. “Martin. I saw him having drinks with you yesterday. I’m his wife.”

They look at one another nervously. Martin had not mentioned a wife. “We haven’t seen Martin today,” Joe says at last.

Martin’s wife picks up a napkin from their table and wipes her face with it. “I’ve been out all day with friends,” she explains. “Man, is this place muggy.” She studies the napkin for a moment, then says, “Well, I better run up to the room and get myself into a shower.” But she does not commit herself to action; instead, she continues to hover over them, and so they feel obligated to ask her to sit down.

“I must look a fright,” she says, falling quickly into a chair. She eyes them suspiciously, as though she suspects them of harboring a loyalty to Martin, and then launches immediately into the story of how Martin ordered frog legs in Ubud. Amanda, with a drawn-out Canadian “oh” that almost gives her secret away, shrieks, “Oh no, the poor frogs.” The others say nothing, especially Calvin, who does not think that Amanda would be impressed by a joke about the dead, legless frogs.

In the midst of this, the front desk man appears beside their table. “Mrs. Stein,” he says quietly, addressing Martin’s wife and mispronouncing her name.

“Stein,” she corrects him curtly.

“Stein,” he repeats dully. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Stein. I do not know how to say this, but the plane has crashed.” He does not know when he decided to begin in this way, by referring to the plane, a pretense suggesting that they share between them the knowledge of her husband’s departure.

“I’m afraid that you must have me confused with another guest. I don’t know anything about a plane,” says Martin’s wife, speaking stiffly, almost angrily.

He puts his hand nervously into his pocket, seeking out Martin’s twenty-dollar bill, which feels different from Indonesian money, sturdier. Yes, it’s there. It exists, which means that everything else exists — Martin, the flight change, the plane — but, he realizes as he gets to the end of this chain of associations, what this means is that none of them exists.

“The plane that your husband was on,” he croaks. “I switched him yesterday because he was nervous about flying our local airline. I called the Singapore office myself. He flew to Jakarta this morning, and from there he was going to Singapore.” His seemingly lidless eyes blink once, slowly, and then focus on the table.

“It’s true,” says Noreen. “Martin told us yesterday that he was leaving this morning, that he had just changed his flight because Garuda made him nervous.”

“Why didn’t you mention this a minute ago when I asked?” Martin’s wife asks, widening the scope of her anger to include all of them.

“I guess we thought that maybe he’d changed his mind,” explains Calvin.

“He did not,” says the manager sadly. “I took him in the hotel van myself.”

“It really was none of our business,” adds Joe.

Martin’s wife stands then, stands and takes another napkin from the table and passes it across her face, and when she is done, it is as though she has wiped away the angry expression, and in its place a new expression struggles to take shape, her face like a television screen as one fiddles with the antennae, all blurs and fuzziness and glimpses.

The manager has begun to cry, quietly and without embarrassment. “Come,” he says to Martin’s wife gently, reaching for her arm. “The families are gathering at the airport to grieve. I will take you.”

The five Americans watch them walk away from the table together, too shocked to speak. They order one round of drinks and then another, and finally Calvin says, “That front desk guy’s a heck of a nice guy,” and because they are a little tipsy by now, they drink a toast to the front desk guy.

“His English is really good also,” says Sylvie. “I mean, he knows a word like grieve?” She holds up her glass, and they drink a second toast — this time, to the front desk man’s English.

Only then do they discuss Martin, shaking their heads finally at the irony of the situation: how Martin died as a result of his desire to live. “Yep, old Martin would have liked that,” Calvin says, and they nod together, agreeing that their friend would have appreciated the irony, for that is how they have come to think of Martin — as a friend — because he is dead and they were the last to know him.

“Well,” says Noreen after a moment, stretching to signal that she is done for the night. She stands, and Sylvie rises as well. “It was nice meeting you all. We’re leaving for Bali tomorrow.” She does not look at Sylvie as she says this.

“Idyllic little Bali,” Joe replies.

“What?” says Noreen.

“Idyllic little Bali,” repeats Joe. “Don’t you remember yesterday, when Martin first sat down and I asked him where he was coming from? He said: ‘I’ve just spent eight days in idyllic little Bali.’ ” From very far away, which is how yesterday seems now that it has become a time when Martin was still alive, Noreen can hear him intoning the words, like a man in a trance, like a man exhausted by the task of putting paradise into words.