Out of Orange (14 page)

In the meantime, I could take a little more time to figure out if I really thought my idea was rational, would work, or whether she would even be interested in being an escort. I also had to be sure I could really trust her before I went down that road and wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk with Phillip about my concerns in regard to his mental state. It would suck to be stranded in Indonesia with a bunch of people if he just dropped the ball. I didn’t have an American Express card or the credit to get one.

To complicate matters, which is my specialty, I had previously accepted an invitation to join a friend of mine in a home-buying venture in Vermont. Larry still worked at Spoleto. He was the one who had served me my scotch the first night I was back in town. He and his wife were buying a house outside of Brattleboro, Vermont, and it had a second building on the property they thought I might be interested in renovating. What they were really interested in was the cash I could provide for a down payment. I had about twenty-five thousand dollars saved up so far. I liked Larry and loved the idea of rehabbing the little dilapidated carriage house when I saw it. I thought it was a wise investment and that, in the very least, I would have my own home.

I figured the house in Vermont would be a project I could work on slowly. I wasn’t going to do the work myself, though, or camp out in a tent with my cats until it was done. So when the San Francisco idea came up, it was a good place to plant myself, Edith, and Dum Dum till our house was ready to live in, and I was ready to live in Vermont. Vermont seemed like someplace to retire to with a partner
or to become a hermit. In the meantime, I got to spend more time with my friend Piper and keep my cat sitter. Our plan was to move to San Francisco in August. After we got back from our successful apartment hunt in San Francisco, Piper gave her two-week notice at the Brewery.

Making plans with me at this particular time in my life was a crapshoot. But Piper knew that. She had her agenda and her schedule set for getting to San Francisco, job hunting, and all of that business, and she would stick to it no matter what, even if I did get called out right in the middle of our move across the country. It’s a good thing she was so organized and able to easily make her own plans to pack up and go to San Francisco without me, because that is exactly what she would have to do. Fortunately, Alajeh called Phillip and me back to the starting gate
before
Piper and I were actually on the road to California, loaded down with both of our belongings and my cats in tow.

Alajeh had a sudden urgent need for me to get to Jakarta. He wanted Phillip and me to have five people ready in Jakarta and five more ready to go when the first five finished. We couldn’t do that. The best we came up with was two rounds of three people. Piper’s best buddy, Donald, was now one of our couriers. Donald and Garrett both thought they might have two more guys we could bring, but there was too little time to try to get that all together so fast.

Alajeh settled for what we could do. Since this was going to be potentially two or more round-trips in a row, and half the people knew what they were doing already, Phillip and I made an adjustment to how we operated as escorts. He would cover the U.S. to Europe and Europe back to the U.S. portions. I would cover the Europe to Jakarta and Jakarta back to Europe portions. By doing this, we could move the two groups through more quickly. Our groups could overlap in Europe. Phillip and the second group would fly to Europe a couple of weeks after I left with the first group to Jakarta. Assuming everything went as planned, he could send me the second group from Europe, meet up with the first group returning from Jakarta, take them home, and turn around
to do it again. When I got rid of the second group in Jakarta, I could then finish my move to San Francisco with Edith and Dum Dum.

I didn’t have to leave that minute, but it was too short notice to try moving myself to San Francisco yet. I would do my move when I came back. Piper and I still had a little time before she would leave for San Francisco without me, and I would leave for Jakarta. But it was not going to be a relaxing two weeks. She had to get ready for her move and I had to get ready for another psychotic mission. I was not particularly thrilled with the idea of going all the way back to Indonesia again, and going alone made me even more anxious. After all, the last trip there had been anything but quick and smooth.

The two weeks that would get cut off on either end of the trip Phillip and I planned helped us out. By splitting up, we decreased the amount of time each of us would have to travel by two whole weeks, but it meant I would not have a sidekick and it would still be a monthlong journey for each of us. I got a bright idea. I asked Piper if she would come with me to Jakarta. I was certain her job hunt in San Francisco wasn’t so pressing that she would turn down a trip to someplace as exotic as Jakarta. I would have jumped on it if a friend had offered me a chance to go on this trip when I was her age, no strings attached. Of course, I had ulterior motives; I just wasn’t quite ready to share them with her. Piper accepted my invitation.

In the meantime, I made arrangements for another woman to stay at my house in Northampton with Edith and Dum Dum, since Piper wouldn’t be there and I was keeping my apartment a little longer. It was just until I got back from the trip and it didn’t seem like money was going to be an issue by then. Piper would meet me in Jakarta after she finished her move to San Francisco. I would have a sidekick, even if she were just there to keep me company.

Ultimately, we had everything settled and everyone was ready to go. Phillip and I had our frenzied itineraries full of contingencies for what if this happens or that, and our crew was prepared. Piper was packed and ready for her move. She would get that done and then meet me in Jakarta. If she were going to rule the world with me, she should probably get a peek at how this all worked.

Piper’s friend Donald was the one who had most recently joined our secret club. I had a feeling they were going to be very good at our expanding profession. Piper and Donald, more than the others, struck me as people who would never get bothered by officials. They were both tall, with the same shade of strawberry-blond hair, pale but freckled skin, and the same blue eyes. They even shared many of the same snobby mannerisms. Mistaking them for siblings was easy to do, even though they weren’t related. I wondered if it would make her a better escort if she actually carried drugs once herself or if it mattered. Really, all an escort is, is a glorified travel agent who babysits.

By the time the trip actually launched, Craig, Molly, Donald, and Garrett were the first four to go. They left Northampton with me. Garrett’s lover, Edwin, and two friends of theirs would fly with Phillip a couple of weeks later. Piper would come on her own to Jakarta via Paris, after she finished her move to San Francisco. Molly and Craig’s trip went according to plan, not a single hitch. After the debacle they’d had during their first trip, I sent them back first when we discovered only two bags were arriving. Garrett and Donald got stuck in Bali. The bags were coming in two at a time and not quickly.

Alajeh’s big rush was turning out to be a big bust. So I left Garrett and Donald in Bali, where we had already been for the two weeks we had planned on, while I went to Jakarta to send Craig and Molly on their way. Phillip slammed on the brakes for the next group to come over to Europe. When he was done collecting payment for Craig and Molly in Chicago, he and Edwin flew all the way to Jakarta. Phillip flew to Jakarta to bring me a pile of cash to get me through the rest of the trip, which was now going to take considerably longer to complete, because Alajeh had told him to.

Somewhere in there Piper flew to Paris and got stuck, because in all the ticket changes I was making, I forgot to have hers waiting for her at Singapore Airlines in Paris. Somehow she got in touch with Phillip to resolve the issue and she made it to Jakarta while Phillip was still there. Phillip flew back to the United States. Edwin, Piper, and I joined Garrett and Donald in Bali, and the wait began.

Bali, Indonesia
Midsummer 1993

I
POURED A CUP OF COFFEE
for myself from the full pot and took my seat at the table on our small porch. There was an assortment of whole fruits and a couple of breakfast pastries on the tray. I grabbed a banana and a croissant, leaving the fruit I didn’t know how to eat for Piper to figure out. The little breakfast spread was the same every morning. Piper had ordered it from room service the night before, as she had done every day we had been there. I was getting a little bored with the rituals we had established on our first day at the Bali resort.

My face felt dry and tickled, like my skin might be on the verge of peeling, and the sun was already beating down on our side of the building. The sun had jumped out of its sparkling orange slumber in what felt like an instant and had extinguished the dazzling colors in the clouds and the water it had risen from. Soon it would be too bright and hot to sit comfortably on the porch, and we would pack it in and go to the beach. Piper slid the door open and joined me, closing the door behind her to preserve our air-conditioned escape from the sun.

“Ouch!” Piper held her hand up in front of her face to block the sun while she surveyed the tray and picked out the star-shaped fruit and the pale green fruit that was filled with something very much like snot. But then she hesitated and traded them both for a banana nut muffin. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were bloodshot. I suspected she felt as bad as she looked. We had eaten at the resort’s version of a sports bar the night before and she had won a contest involving a meter-high beer glass, which had required assistance to drink from. Donald, Garrett, and Edwin had lost. I had defaulted when I accidentally poured my beer all over the floor and myself.

Piper took the seat next to me and gave me an evil eye, like her hangover was my doing. She grabbed the liter of bottled water and nearly drained it in one shot. Then she ate her tiny muffin and poured herself a cup of black coffee. “I think I will skip the gym today.” Her voice was a little gravelly. She had also smoked quite a few cigarettes the night before that were not her brand but an expensive alternative they sold at the bar. They were pretty but tasted like they might be made of asbestos instead of tobacco.

She dressed in shorts and a spaghetti-strap shirt made of air that had just been returned to her from the laundry service. The bill for this tiny luxury was probably higher than what she had paid for the shirt. The breakfast tray, I knew, was costing us about forty dollars a day. I had checked on the remaining cash I had in the room safe and started to worry. I was going through cash like the safe could magically replenish itself while it was closed. Phillip had already needed to wire me more, twice, and that was on top of what he had personally delivered to me in Jakarta a month before.

While we were at the beach that day, I had made a quick decision to put an end to the bleeding and save myself from boredom. We would have one last little party that night. But the next day we were flying back to Java. We were all going to go check out Yogyakarta, the place Henry and Bradley had claimed to be heading to a lifetime ago. I would wait until the party later to break the news about leaving paradise. No sense ruining a relaxing day at the beach. Nobody was going to be thrilled about our next stop.

Later that night, I nearly lost my resolve about leaving when my attempt to convey the new travel plans to my friends was drowned in champagne and revelry. Nonetheless, I managed to make our departure announcement without incident. I realized, though, that the reality of leaving was not going to elicit any complaints until we were actually packing up and exiting Eden.

I nabbed one of the unopened bottles of Veuve Clicquot from the ice bucket, slipped out of the lanai, and closed the door behind me. My friends’ drunken sing-along wasn’t quite as torturous from the other side of the door, and the Walkman’s puny speakers sucked. All I could hear from my vantage point were my friends’ voices howling their horrible rendition of 4 Non Blondes’ latest hit, “What’s Up?” Their voices rose as they got to the chorus, which everyone knew the words to, even drunk:
“Twenty-five years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of hope . . .”

Edwin loved this song. I had too until then. I think Edwin thought they’d written the damn song for him. Not really, but he had tortured everyone for the last month, playing it over and over again, trying to make it his own. Donald, Garrett, and I had been there for six weeks already, and the two extra weeks made a big difference in my capacity for irritants. I was homesick and had been out of touch with my family, my cats, my real life, for too long.

The sing-along I had just escaped had started out as an interruption to my important discussion regarding our upcoming departure back to Java. Edwin hadn’t been listening. He never did, and he had spontaneously burst into a pathetically overtheatrical serenade to his lover, Garrett. Like Tom Cruise’s impromptu serenade to Kelly McGillis in
Top Gun,
except that in this case, it had been Tom getting serenaded and Kelly had been lip-synching, not singing. I think everyone else had started singing just to put an end to Edwin’s performance and Garrett’s humiliation from the display.

Watching Garrett’s attempts to train Edwin to be a good drug smuggler was nerve-racking. Then listening to the fights they would have after Edwin reached the belligerent drunk status, as he did just about every night, was also getting tiring. I had started considering
the possibility that Garrett had recruited Edwin with the actual intent of getting rid of him. There was no way this guy could be trained enough to get home. Failure to get through Customs would certainly put an end to their relationship.

Leaving the lanai, I walked out into the quiet night until all I could hear were crickets and a slight breeze slipping through the palms. I strolled alongside the serpentine swimming pool that crawled through Hilton’s Bali resort, casting its bluish-green glow on everything it passed, and considered taking a swim. It was an unusually comfortable night and my champagne buzz was perfect. I continued along the walkway, encountering only a couple of other late-nighters on the long trek through the grove heading down toward the ocean.

I got spooked by a woman behind one of the waterfalls. This was near where a rock bridge arched across the pool. She was well hidden and probably thought she was invisible, but the electronically forced waterfall had a rhythm to it. It created a strobe effect in the lit veil of water cascading down in front of her. She stood in the shadows, but I got a couple of glimpses before I fully understood what I was looking at. The woman was naked and not alone. Happy I had not yelped when startled, I hoped they would not see me. I picked up my pace and walked very lightly, keeping my flip-flops from flapping. After that, there were no other resort residents about in the dark. I walked around the bend in the pool, where it elongated, became wider, and looked as though it reached out to merge with the ocean.

Standing at the sidewalk’s edge, I could see the ocean glistening beyond the last row of coconut trees. These marked the perimeter of the resort’s green landscape. The moon was bright enough to cast shadows in the beach’s white sands, and the tide was in. I stepped into the moist grass, careful not to step on one of the hundreds of frogs that came out after dark and littered the grass and walkways. I couldn’t see them very well in the grass.

Stepping on a big old frog in the dark, in your flip-flops, was an awful business. This was not the same as the bugs I probably stepped on daily without ever knowing, and while squishing a frog
under my foot is not nearly as horrible as accidentally hitting a bunny rabbit or squirrel with my car, it still upset me to carelessly murder another being so gruesomely with my toes. So I navigated to the beach with great care.

I made my way across the sand and out toward the calm sea. The glassy water reflected the night sky with so little distortion that it looked like I could leap into the heavens from my sandy edge of the world—or fall off. It had a dizzying effect too, when mixed with the Valium and all the champagne I had consumed. I had discovered I could buy certain prescription drugs over the counter in Indonesia and they helped soothe my ever-increasing anxieties. I pulled my loosely knotted sweatshirt from my hips and spread it over the soft sand.

I had come out here on a couple of nights during our long stay in paradise and had already discovered that there were no crabs or any other exotic night creatures to fear here. The beach was wide with a gentle slope, almost imperceptible, and the water’s edge a long walk from the start of the sand, even when the tide was full. I think this was what accounted for the lack of surf, or at least a gentler surf than I had seen before. The waves here didn’t crash onto the beach like elsewhere; they just sort of rolled in without cresting.

I sat down on my sweatshirt and lay back. This was the same spot where I had been sitting with Piper, hours earlier, watching our last Balinese sunset. Two women we’d met at the resort had been there with us. It was also our last night with our new friends and our fake relationship. We had kept up a ruse about being together and held hands just like they did. Piper had discovered the pair earlier that week. Their room was across from ours and their porch faced ours. Piper had been doing a crossword or reading one morning. They had thought Piper was staring at them. One of the women had walked over to introduce herself to the peeping Lulu. The gaydar signals were confirmed when they learned Piper and I were from Northampton and Piper learned they were from San Francisco.

The women were presently living in Jakarta, working for a bank, and were on vacation. They were not openly gay at work; they
couldn’t be. They were just a little older than we were. One was in her late twenties, the other in her midthirties. They had lived in Jakarta for over a year and missed the company of other lesbians. Piper had admitted to them we were from the same church (gay) but had added that we were lovers.

I can’t recall what Piper’s rational for this deception was, but I went along with it. She couldn’t come out and just tell them we were all drug-smuggling buddies and we were stranded in Bali because the heroin we were supposed to be transporting had not yet arrived. Instead, she made up a cover story that we had been together for a while, she had just graduated from Smith College, and this trip was her reward. I’m not sure why our new friends never questioned how we could afford such a long stay. I’m nosy about stuff like this and forever asking inappropriate questions, like how much money do you make or how much did that present cost, even when it has nothing to do with me.

We had been hanging out with them most of their trip and we had told them we had already been there for two weeks when we first met them. That was when we’d thought we were about ready to leave. They’d had to save their money for a year to afford the resort in Bali for two weeks. We had taken them out to dinner a few times, and then we had spontaneously decided to stay longer. They never asked me about what I did for a living. I assumed everyone was as nosy as I was and guessed Piper had spun some excellent fantasy, one that kept them from asking.

They kept telling me how lucky I was to have Piper. They said she was beautiful, so smart, and how great we were together. I had figured Piper made me out to be her benefactor and they were entreating me to appreciate what I had. Perhaps they sensed the charade but mistook it for a fading interest on my part. I would have made the same sort of assumption if a couple in this paradise displayed no more affection than holding hands. I suppose they worried I was bored and might dump Piper and move on to the next Twinkie my money could buy so they were trying to talk some sense into me. They could not have been more wrong.

When I found out that they thought Piper was our gravy train, not me, and our good fortune was her family’s money, not my money, I realized they had just been stating the obvious. I was lucky to have Piper. She was beautiful and smart, and we were great together. But I already knew that. The idea of becoming Piper’s lover had already taken residence in my dreams and was affecting my ability to make rational decisions. I thought of little else. It was good we were getting away from this place, before I spent all my money and Phillip’s too trying to entertain her and show off.

In the daytime, I would stride a good distance out into the emerald water and it still only reached halfway up my calves. If I wanted to swim or play in the surf, it was better to head left, farther up, where the beach sloped more sharply and the water deepened quickly. But here, the surf rolled softly and traversed such distances into the beach that by the time it reached its destination, it made only the tiniest little trickle. People sunbathed here sitting or lying right in the water.

The sand was so fine that it squeaked as I walked on it. If I sat on it in the water, the sand felt like a warm yielding body. The water remained shallow until a hundred yards out; therefore, creatures large enough to eat me couldn’t reach me. It was probably the most delicious tanning in the world, but I had suffered a few burns doing this when we’d first come here in our milky winter skins.

That had been the spring trip, when Craig, Molly, and I had discovered Bali. It was fall now and I wasn’t burning anymore. No sunburn chills anymore, just a radiant warmth that would last through the night and not peel off in the morning. I felt like a battery being charged in the sun and the water, then drained every night dancing, drinking, and running amok. Even Piper and Donald, with their fair skin, her blond hair, his reddish hair, and their freckles, had stopped burning and had fallen into this boho’s dream. Now they were both sun-kissed blonds and their freckles had merged into a healthy glow.

In the daylight, cabana boys would make the long hike down to the beach to the marinating sunbathers and make sure our frozen
mudslides, strawberry-banana daiquiris, and margaritas stayed full and frozen. I often wondered how frequently tourists drowned in this drowsy luxury. Late at night, though, the beach was desolate and quiet, not even a noisy surf to disturb me. With no city lights competing, the stars filled the sky and mirrored in the water all around me so densely that it looked like an infinite black well of diamonds hanging above, as if I could reach up and scoop out a handful of stars in my hand.