Double Happiness (16 page)

It was dull at my party. Loud and dull. And once the cake was served and I'd posed for the photographs and I'd obligingly tongued some red strawberry icing along my husband's new dental work, I was free to wander. I wandered to the front door and tried to leave. Mustache sprung to his feet. No, Mrs. Fawn, more surprise coming soon.

Yes, Mustache, I know that. I'd adopted a tone of absolute dominance, which is the basic how-to of talking to a servant in Jakarta. Betsy would faint, laugh maybe, then faint. But it was the protocol. Mustache and I were friends. In a mystical no-communication kind of way, I think now, looking back.

Mrs. Fawn, he said, bowing, but I could see his machete tucked into the block-print vest he wore—textiles, another burgeoning economy here—and something else bulged under his armpit. I smiled, I couldn't help it. He whispered, really to himself, because addressing me directly was out of the question. Poor Mrs. Fawn, he whispered, and then began to shout at a passing waiter in a language I would never learn. I knew all about diversion, as a fashion model it was my profession. So I slipped out of the party to see if I could call Betsy on a pay phone in the coffee shop. She would definitely remember my birthday, hers was only two days later. We'd done sixteen and seventeen together, eighteen we missed because of my honeymoon on Khashoggi's yacht—so crowded, no phones. But at nineteen we could wish each other well, we were grown-ups. The world was changing at our feet. By now she might have an old American of her own; if not, well, there are worse things than trading complaints with Hec!

Just for fun, I took the emergency staircase. My legs, even with the twins poking their way out of my belly, were still as okay as ever. Get the Fawn! For almost a whole year I was in every single beverage ad in all of Japan that involved a leg shot. Not just Tokyo, I mean everywhere! I froze my fanny off posing in hot pants and skis on Mount Fuji, but it was all necessary. Contrast, everyone understood, contrast is what sold. The biggest contrast in Jakarta is between the rich, who hang out at the Hilton, and the poor, who live in cardboard lean-tos
stacked against the chain-link construction fence, because every day the Hilton gets bigger.

The coffee shop on the lobby level had recently become pink, which is why normally my instinct would have been to avoid it. Although pink is believed to be almost universally flattering, Betsy and I discovered one late night, with some hilarious experimental pubic hair dying, that pink didn't work with my skin. Too much, she paused, too much, and decided on a nice silvery blue instead. Just the thing for your geriatric. Fortunately that stuff washes right out, so he never saw it. I didn't want to make him feel I was mocking him. Talk about a thin skin!

Up until my birthday at the Hilton I never really took guns seriously, they were just an ornament to set the tone the way a good pair of false eyelashes could rearrange an expression straight from tired to joy. Tokyo wasn't exactly dangerous in the Roppongi district but sometimes at parties, and in the suites afterward, there'd be some blue hardware lying around creating a mood. A mood, let me say, I liked! And so did Betsy, it sort of pushed us out of ourselves in a way that redesigning our pubic hair couldn't. And as professionals we limited our drugs. Quaaludes, Valium, okay. Heroin, any variation on cocaine—and there was a lot around—bad for business. I like to think that's what attracted my old American, my professional discipline—Betsy's, too—and then to single me out, my legs.

In the coffee shop I was scouting around for the pay phone that just last week I could swear was right beside the candy
counter when I noticed the four identical guys in textile vests blocking all the elevators. I'd been right to take the stairs! I inserted myself between some free-floating banquettes before anyone else could get picky about the birthday rules.

Although the Hilton was usually the hot spot for foreign investors and expats, the place had been cleared for my party. No one spun through the cathedral-height doors complaining about their luggage still stuck in Kuala Lumpur. This Hilton had a direct line to the baggage carousel in the Malaysian airport I would come to know so well. But today, no lost anything, no outraged arrivals. The great glass doors were sealed and the men by the elevators were gluing their eyes to the twelve guys by the entrance in demimilitary gear, scarcely the thing for a summer party—hot!—and their guns were mood killers. Nothing sexy about those black toaster ovens hanging down from shoulder straps. Not even a festive bullet belt. Somehow that was more of a downer, the idea that all the bullets they would ever need were already loaded.

I had to go to the bathroom in the sudden emergency style that comes over pregnant people. I shimmied toward the ladies room and managed, for the first time in my life, to capture no one's attention. Betsy was completely right about pink! Like you're not even there! she said, and usually that was a big liability.

It was old-fashioned in the bathroom, and as I sat and pondered the surprising security detail of my birthday party I thought about my husband with such nostalgia, as if I already
sensed the future. He meant well. The whole subservience thing just a personality glitch. My own mother was a problem for me in that way. Either devote your life to me and my wishes, or die. Those were my Denmark options. So Betsy sold her family's only car (they were surprised!) and we lit out for Tokyo where Western-style models are popular, especially blondes. My god, I sent my mother so many presents, but she never responded. Betsy had some ideas about this, and when I first met my old American, she said, Just call him Mommy! Maybe she repeated this at the party. Maybe that's why she got the boot. I do miss Betsy. She always said what was on her mind. What would she say to see me loitering in a bathroom that looked like an overstocked showroom. White marble pedestal sinks and satin-wrapped chaises by the dozen.

But the one thing the Indonesian laborers got all wrong, as hard and fast as they worked—and so cheap!—was the idea of privacy. Apparently it was untranslatable, no word in the language, that's what my husband said. And it pissed him off to no end. They liked sleeping stacked together like lumber. They liked doors that never closed. They liked more doors not closing per room than people to pass through them. And so, as with every room here at the sprawling Hilton, this one had several exits. At least two of them led to the outdoor pavilion surrounding the wishing fountain and the pool.

Probably my biggest professional problem is the tendency of my skin to burn like toast. Really quick. But the pavilion
was shady, so that was good. And quiet, as if the deafening happiness of my party flew up into the sky and took all the noise of the world with it. Here in the swimming arena only the gurgle of the wishing fountain and the buzz of the automatic insect remover made a sound. No birds, no workmen keeping world-record schedules; everyone and everything off duty for my birthday.

The pool was a suspicious shade of lavender, something to do with salt and alkaline something or other, but it looked so cool, so inviting. And the twins were heavy in the heat. I shimmied out of my birthday dress and under things and made a giant splash entry into the deep end. My husband wouldn't mind if the party leaned over the edge of the wraparound terrace and saw me. It was just part of my general charm: free-spirited, pregnant with sons, very blonde. But no one looked, and the terrace thirty stories up was as remote and quiet as a fortress in a movie when everyone inside knows the enemy is hiding in the shrubbery.

Sometimes swimming makes me feel like a baby myself, less at the compound because everything was familiar, but here at the Hilton in a pool meant to exercise an Olympic team someday, I floated around and felt my baby self, cuddled down in a sleep hammock, ignored by my mother who was smoking a cigarette and thinking dark thoughts. This is a story I tell Betsy all the time. Oh, no, she says, here it comes, the maternal dodge.

Not so! No, I just understood early that I wasn't exactly the pip of her universe. I mean, I'm a realist! I was a realist baby!

Yeah, yeah, said Betsy, hold still. And she applied a hot but pleasantly scented wax to my inner thighs. Jasmine? I asked.

Yuck, she said.

Sometimes I think it's that realist bent that made things go the way they did later on. When Mustache kept telling me that any moment the phone service would return to the compound and I might even get a passport, well, I knew a fib when I heard one. But that's all later, and the part I'm talking about—the part Betsy would call the shriveled nut—happens in the pool. I like to think I made a choice that day, and maybe even a good one.

I was bobbing around in the shady water where the pergola imitates the Parthenon, only in wood. The twins settled into their natural element and stopped pressing into my kidneys. This floating strategy would come in handy as time went on. At the compound whenever they played the recording of my old American saying that dumb stuff about the photo albums, the twins would get all aggressive, so I'd flop into the pool and float until they calmed down. And Mustache just had to wait. Had to cultivate a little patience if he thought I was going to sit there and look at my husband's first, second, and third wives, again, for the eightieth time. And all their expensive daughters. I got so tired of the albums. And Betsy predicted it. You may be the Big Now, for now, she said, but just wait.

Wait for what?

The marriage merge: he won't know who's who. He'll be calling you Helga, and the bad part? You'll be answering. So sad.

How did she even know there was a Helga? Betsy is uncanny that way. If only she'd been there. She'd have known what Mustache needed to find in the albums in a snap.

But on my birthday I was twirling around in the Hilton pool, eyes closed, feeling just like I was back in Denmark, in the creek in our yard, doing a dead-body-style swim to scare my mother. Easy to do, very slow breaths, no bubbles allowed, limbs loose and wavy in the water. I'd squint open a half lid to check, but my mother would be smoking and staring at her hand, not a bit concerned. I'd climb out onto the bank where she sat. So you can float, she said, a turd can float.

Not really, I said, and she slapped me. But why think of this at my party. Except that in a flash in the shady end of the Hilton pool I knew I could float or sink, pretend to be alive or dead, and no one could make the comment to grab and squash the pip of my heart ever again. I'd grown up for good. And I opened my eyes, thinking I should find my old American and tell him my insight. But instead, lounging in a disrespectful way by the pool side, was Mustache. And he'd borrowed one of the toaster-oven guns from the guys in the military costumes. He still wore his party vest, which I preferred.

I don't need guarding, I growled. Go away, Mustache. I'm happy on my own.

Happy birthday, Mrs. Fawn! Please choose to dress now. Surprise finished. He made what might be an Indonesian hand gesture of celebration. I really don't know. But what was most obvious was that he was wearing my husband's watch. A ridiculous gold Bulgari that always embarrassed me. But it was a gift and that's all that mattered to my old American. He was all about gifts. Dewi Sukarno went home that long-ago Tokyo morning with his red silk kimono in a shopping bag. There was some mysterious language at work here. Me? He gave me the gift of himself, which after a while became more and more perplexing. I like diamonds, but I didn't get any. It was strange. Don't spoil her! said Dewi Sukarno, lifting her large pocketbook, waving a diminutive farewell. She's perfect just as she is. Well, what would she think if she saw me with the twin belly, and the sunburn that's become permanent? The whole time we were stuck in the compound, Mustache refused to refill my prescription sunblock. It was not essential. Not what Betsy would say! But Mustache, from the start, was a very different kind of roommate.

Is it worth saying my mother was unconcerned with my fair skin, too? She was quite dark herself, my father must have been albino to make up the difference, and the question only got me a dislocated arm. So temperamental. Betsy said there were other words for it, but I refused to listen. My husband was right, Betsy could be fanciful about people's ordinary habits. For instance, on our first date, Betsy came along, and he got
spectacularly high, stole a car—from a friend so it wasn't actually stealing—and drove it all the way to the Ginza section, pie-eyed, before hitting a news- stand. Demolishing the intricate fan pattern of the international glossies. Death wish, she called it. And maybe he heard her and took it the wrong way. But she was actually talking to me. I realize that now. She hadn't really liked my old American. Morose, she called him, in fact, psychotic.

He's reflective, I said, you just don't recognize a thinker when you see one.

Mustache was a thinker. After all the birthday security moved into our compound, whenever I woke up in the middle of the night—guaranteed with the twins—in the master suite Mustache was always awake. Even curled on the mat at the foot of the vast carved bed, his eyes were wide open as if I might dream myself up the twenty-foot wall and free.

Mustache, I'd say, stepping over him, feeling my way to the loo, I don't like you that way. And by then I was only lying slightly. That mat used to be mine. My husband thought it incredibly sexy if I slept there. Up and going to the bathroom for old-guy reasons, he would trip over me and then wow! he'd have fun!

Why subject yourself to that shit, Betsy asked on the phone, back when I could call her.

It's nothing, I said.

I'll say.

Every day Mustache made a big promise to turn the electricity back on, and with it, the central AC, like he was the boss. Which, it turns out, he was! But I'd stopped believing him, even if he did make a mean rice and mango on the propane burner in the servant hut. I wasn't allowed in there because his wife, mother, sisters, and daughters would all be tainted by me. But every once in a while they'd peek out the slits between the boards to get a look-see.