Once I stopped limping, I went to work at the Halekulani. My father maintained a suite there year-round, and he and Miki stayed there whenever they were in Honolulu. Dad was treated at the hotel with all the cachet of a visiting dignitary: he would saunter through the lobby, shaking hands and doling out tips, with the same stylish swagger that my mom commanded on a Vegas stage. This was his kind of show business, and he loved it.
In spite of Dad’s rock star status at the Halekulani, however, I couldn’t even land a waitressing job there. It was very upscale, they hired only the best, and my noodle-shop résumé failed to impress. I was offered a job as a bus girl, and I humbly took it, even though it paid almost nothing. Until I could gather enough cash in tips, I had to live in a seedy part of Honolulu, at the apartment of one of the hotel waitresses. Her name was Shigeko, she was a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American), and she let me stay for free, until I could get back on my feet.
Of course, I could have just stayed in my dad’s suite, but he didn’t make the offer. I guess he considered it his private sanctum. Besides, while I often made room-service deliveries to the other guests, the management made it clear to me that Dad’s suite was off-limits to me. Whatever his business was, he didn’t want me sticking my nose in it.
I didn’t care. I was close to him; that’s what mattered. At least we would be together on my nineteenth birthday.
That very morning, I got a call from Dad. “Sach! Happy birthday! Listen, I wanted to do something special with you tonight.”
I recalled all those endless, tedious nights in Tokyo bouncing from nightclub to nightclub. Now I was old enough to enjoy them. “Okay!” I said eagerly.
“But I can’t. I’m in Italy.”
“Italy?”
“Business trip.” I could hear now the long-distance sound in his voice, a little tinny and displaced. “Sorry I can’t be with you on your birthday. I feel terrible.”
“That’s okay…”
We were interrupted now by the operator, a woman who spoke in Italian, and she and Dad traded a few Italian phrases. Long-distance calls in those days were not the smooth exchanges we have today. There was always an operator, the sound was scratchy and crackly, and every now and then there would be a beep-beep-beep—all of which I listened to now as I waited for him to get back to me.
“So when are you coming back, Dad?”
“Oh, next week, maybe,” (scratchy crackling) “or the week after” (beep-beep-beep). “But listen, honey, you just have a great day today, and I’ll make it up to you. Okay?”
“Okay…” Click. Dead air. He was gone.
So I was spending yet another birthday alone.
Still, I wasn’t about to feel sorry for myself. Last time I tried that I wound up in surgery. Instead, I decided to give myself a little birthday treat.
Since Dad was off in Italy, it seemed the perfect opportunity to breach the sanctum. What harm could it do, after all, just to sneak into his room and poke around a bit?
I charmed the key from the hotel clerk and took the elevator up. I felt a momentary qualm as I slipped the key into the lock, but I knew this would be my only chance.
I pushed the door open, and peered in. I expected to be overwhelmed by lavish furnishings, spectacular views, solid-gold bathroom fixtures, that sort of thing.
Instead I was overwhelmed by a thick cloud of marijuana smoke as it billowed toward me. There was pulsing jazz-rock music playing on the stereo, the kind you might hear in a porno flick. As I moved into the drifting haze, I became aware that there were a bunch of people in the room, and very few of them were wearing clothes. Naked bodies were bouncing up and down furiously on the bed, in a merry synchronized humpfest. In the tangle of limbs I couldn’t tell if they were men or women or what—but I knew one of them was Dad. Back from Italy in record time.
I ran from the room in horror. Luckily Dad never noticed me, or if he did, he never let on—and of course I never busted him on it. Somehow, my sneaking into his room and spotting him in a pot-smoking orgy seemed a far greater offense than his lying to me about being in Italy on my birthday.
What amazed me most in retrospect was the way he’d faked that phone call, with all its long-distance authenticity. The scratchiness, the tinny voice, the beeping…and I’d heard him talking to an operator. Who played that Italian woman? Was he doing all the voices himself? Who was the real actor in this family?
• • •
DAD owned land on the Big Island of Hawaii, in Napo’opo’o, where it is said that Captain Cook first landed when he discovered the Hawaiian Islands. How Dad was in the position to own such an important piece of real estate, I don’t know. That was just his way.
One time I visited Napo’opo’o with him and we took a drive in his white Jeep Cherokee to Kailua, about a half hour away, and cruised around looking at the scenery. I thought it was just a spur-of-the-moment outing, but then he pulled into a parking lot outside an accountant’s office. He said he had some kind of business he had to discuss, and he told me to wait for him in the car. I didn’t want to wait in the car: it was too damn hot, and there was nothing to look at, and I was bored.
Dad was annoyed, and he got very short with me: “Stay there!” he snapped.
So I sat in the car while he went inside. While waiting, I noticed a manila envelope on the front seat. The flap was open. I shouldn’t look in there, I thought. But it was hot, and I was in a bad mood, and I wanted to be entertained by something. So I peeked in the envelope.
Inside were a bunch of loose, glittering gemstones. Diamonds, to be precise. There must have been a hundred of them. I’m no diamond expert, so I didn’t know if they were cut, or finished, or raw. Yet they were diamonds. I knew that.
Why would Dad have an envelope of diamonds in his front seat? Whom did they belong to? Where were they going? Was this part of Dad’s business? What business?
I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to ask. What I did know was that just one of those diamonds would have come in handy for me right around then.
• • •
AS soon as I could afford it, I moved out of Shigeko’s apartment and got a place of my own. She was a lovely woman, and I was tired of mooching off her. On the other hand, I couldn’t quite swing the deposit on my new place, so Shigeko helped me out by paying the first and last month’s rent, no small sacrifice on a waitress’s salary. God bless Shigeko—she was one of those uncanonized saints, like the prostitute in Trieste and the Yugoslavian couple, people who came into my life at just the right time and gave me an enormous lift and a sense of hope when I really needed it.
And I needed it now. I was living in perhaps the most dangerous part of Honolulu. I had no money and no friends. I remember this time as being perhaps the lowest point of my life.
I could barely afford to eat. At the Halekulani we would get one meal a day, lunch, and I made sure never to miss it. Aside from that, I would often stroll through the mall, where the food merchants gave away free samples. I’d go from stand to stand gathering up samples; that would be my dinner.
At the coffee shops, there would be no charge for refills, so I would drink five or six cups of coffee in a row. In my anorexic mind-set, I thought this was good for me. The laxative powers of coffee helped me to purge myself of the toxins, the pain, the loneliness. Every trip to the bathroom was an opportunity to feel clean and emptied out, the darkness gone. In my situation you had to take the positives wherever you could find them.
Still, there was no escaping the depressing reality of Apartment 315. Little more than a tenement apartment, it was a tiny space infested with roaches. I cleaned and cleaned, but there was no getting rid of them. I couldn’t afford bug spray; and anyway, being Buddhist in philosophy, I didn’t want to kill a living thing. So I gave them all names instead, and we did our best to coexist.
My apartment overlooked a tiny shack right below, where a family of native Hawaiians lived. Every single night, they would have a barbecue in their backyard, and every night, I would watch them from my window and live through them vicariously, peeking through the leaves of the palm tree that framed my view. They had a big family—big in every sense; there wasn’t a thin one in the bunch. The aunts, uncles, and cousins would come over every night, swelling the ranks and bringing food for the pot luck dinner. It was always a huge feast: poi, lomi lomi salmon ceviche, banana leaves stuffed with pork…They’d party into the night, drinking and getting rowdy, and dancing around the bonfire. They were as poor as all get-out, but they seemed immensely happy.
I wanted so badly to join them. I was hoping someone would notice me and call me down from my balcony, just like in the movies. I would eat and dance and become part of the family, and marry the handsome chubby son, and we would hula off into the sunset.
It didn’t happen. I stayed apart and alone.
I remember one night sitting on the floor of my apartment watching the roaches scurry along the wallboard, feeling utterly empty. I stared at my phone, waiting for it to ring—which was a futile exercise, because the service had been cut off for nonpayment. Didn’t matter. Nobody ever called anyway. Next door, the party was raging into the late night, everyone in the family laughing and getting rowdy, and reminding me that I had no family of my own.
I knew suddenly, with fierce clarity, that I should kill myself. My life was a failure, nobody cared about me, I was completely alone and forgotten. So why go on? Who would miss me? Who was I kidding?
I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I didn’t have any sleeping pills, so I couldn’t try Mom’s method from The Apartment. There were knives in the kitchen, of course. I could probably hang myself with the belt from my robe. Oh, if I only had some bug spray…
There were lots of possibilities. As it happens, I was too depressed to do anything about it. So I just sat there, all through the night, thinking about being dead.
• • •
THEN everything changed, in the blink of an eye. Two eyes, actually, both gorgeous—and they didn’t belong to a Hawaiian or a Nisei; they belonged to an Australian.
His name was Luke Garrett, and the minute he sat down in the hotel restaurant, I knew I wanted him. He was Hollywood handsome, with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a great tan. All I could think was, Oh my god, who is that?
As it turns out, I already knew who he was. We had met years before, in Australia, when I was about twelve or thirteen. My dad was business partners with Luke’s dad, who had a cotton plantation in Weewaa, which proudly calls itself the Cotton Capital of Australia. The plantation house reminded me of Tara in Gone With the Wind, with its Corinthian columns and winding staircase, crocodile-filled bayous, and black Aboriginal laborers doing all the menial work. The surrounding countryside was barren and dusty, with unpaved dirt roads and far-off mountains. Whenever I see old Westerns on TV, I think of Weewaa.
Young Luke was a teenager then, sixteen or seventeen. I probably had a little crush on him, but it was nothing earthshaking.
This time was different. Now I was seeing him from a fresh, sexually informed perspective, and the earth was shaking plenty.
At first I was a little embarrassed; I didn’t want Luke to know I had turned out to be a bus-girl. At the same time, it gave me a perfect excuse to engage him.
I wanted to look my best when I did, so I put on some extra makeup, hiked up my skirt, and flashed my most charming smile as I approached him and bent over him: “Coffee, sir?”
He nodded, and I promptly spilled hot coffee on his pants. Oh, totally on purpose. It was very artfully done—all around the crotch, without burning anything important. I sputtered apologies as I dried him off, conscientiously patting down the area in question…Then I looked up at his face. “Why, aren’t you Luke Garrett?”
He flashed his own charming smile back—and just like that, we were off to the races. I don’t know if you could call it a whirlwind romance, but it moved mighty fast. A few dates, and then Luke had to return to Australia. Then he came back to get me—and asked me to marry him.
I never said yes faster in my life. I couldn’t believe my fairy-tale luck. I was Cinderella, rescued from the drudgery of busing tables by a genuine Prince Charming, who would sweep me away to his enchanted kingdom across the sea.
Dad was delighted with the match. He remembered Luke from years before, and he was very pleased that our families would be united. Even Miki seemed to approve, which surprised the hell out of me. She never ever wished me well, but now she was beaming like a proud mom. I guess that was Luke’s roguish Aussie charm at work. He could win anybody over. They even started inviting us to hang out with them. I got to see Dad’s suite again, without the naked bodies.
As much as we enjoyed the perks of a comfortable lifestyle, we couldn’t tarry in Hawaii. We had a new life waiting for us, Down Under.
• • •
I’D been to Australia before, not only as a child, but more recently: piggybacking off my New Zealand ski instructor experience, I’d traveled on to the Snowy Mountains region in New South Wales. It was only for about a month or so, but it was memorable.
At the Thredbo ski resort, I was looking to teach, but there were no jobs open, so I wound up working as a maid at a local hotel. There was a whole team of maids, and we rotated jobs. My job was to do the beds, which was a step up from cleaning the toilets. On one particular day, while I was making up a bed, I noticed a curious substance on the sheets. It was creamy, like a gel, and as I bent to smell it, it had an odor sort of like fresh-mown grass.
I had no idea what it was, so I called in the other maids. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
They all exchanged knowing glances, and smiled. “Uh…yeah.”
“What is it?” I asked innocently.
They laughed, and explained to me an essential component of the reproductive experience. I was amazed. I knew about sex, of course—I’d engaged in the act myself—but I didn’t know that this creamy, grass-smelling stuff came out of men. Brad had never mentioned it in his hasty tutorial, and I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway, what with all the blood.
That just goes to show how out of the loop, how utterly clueless, I was about sex. I knew it was fun, I knew I enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand the mechanics of it, the implications of it, or the powerful omnipresence of it. Sex was all around me, and I just never saw it.
For instance, there was a handyman who worked at the motel, an older guy who was seedy looking and a bit creepy. He was always hitting on me, but I didn’t really pick up on the signals. I wasn’t interested in him, so I assumed he wasn’t interested in me. It was only when he cornered me in a guest room and, in what I assume was a gesture of seduction, opened his pants and showed me the crabs around his penis, that I realized his true intentions.
I quit the motel that very day and moved to the nearby ski resort of Perisher Valley. Here I was a ski instructor by day and a waitress by night. The ski-lift operator was an American named Jay, who was a little older, in his mid-thirties, and sort of a hippy-dippy type, with long hair and a beard. Jay lived across the hall from me, in the rooms above the restaurant. I was rooming with a fellow waitress, Katie.
One night after work I came back to my room and found Katie in bed with a guy, having boisterous sex. Without missing a beat, she turned her head to me and said, “Get out!”
I hurriedly shut the door and found myself in the hall. I was exhausted from my shift, and now I had no place to sleep. So I knocked on Jay’s door.
“Sure, you can sleep here tonight,” he said. Unfortunately he had only a twin bed. He seemed like a gentleman, so I assumed it was safe.
And it was. We both climbed into the small bed, and Jay spooned me from behind. I remember I had two long braids at the time, and he held them as he wrapped his arms around me. We stayed that way all night, and nothing happened.
This seemed unremarkable to me at the time, but in retrospect I realized that Jay had acted with exceptional decency (and restraint). When I went back to Australia years later, I made a point of visiting Perisher Valley and thanking Jay for that night. He told me it had taken every bit of his willpower to hold back, but I was so innocent, he just couldn’t take advantage of me. So Jay goes into the small pantheon of Nice Guys.
I wish I could put Luke in that class, too, but I can’t. He wasn’t such a nice guy, as I found out a little too late.
• • •
LUKE had once been a sheep rancher, but now he was a vintner—he owned a thirty-seven-acre vineyard in Pokolbin, in the Hunter Valley, the wine area of New South Wales. We moved there in the spring of 1976. Like much of Australia, it was starkly beautiful: rolling hills with mountains in the distance. The house was a two-story with a veranda, and while it was reasonably modernized, there was no indoor bathroom; we used an outhouse. There was also no dryer, so the laundry had to be hung out on a line to dry. I grew to love the smell of the clean air-dried sheets and clothes. Plus, there were chickens on the property, so we always had fresh, warm eggs.
Yet, it was a lonely place, in the middle of nowhere. The wind was always blowing. Still, it was the kind of life I enjoyed, simple and elemental. I was happy there.
Except when I was working at the nearby wine factory. Now, Luke was a proud man. I’m sure he would have balked at seeing his wife work—but I wasn’t his wife. We weren’t married yet; we hadn’t even set a date. That being the case, he saw no reason why I shouldn’t earn my keep. So he got me a job working on the factory line, putting labels on wine bottles. It was droning, stultifying work, and I hated it. I was ready to blow my brains out, but I did it for love.
MY anorexia had continued unabated all this time, and by now I was down to eighty-two pounds. Yet it wasn’t enough. I still felt that I was too fat. I needed to lose more weight.
I picked up a book called Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which had been published just a few years earlier. I was delighted to see that I could eat all my favorite foods with this diet—steak, eggs, bacon—and was guaranteed to lose weight. How cool was that?
So I went on the Atkins Diet, and gorged myself on protein—and immediately, I started gaining weight. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong—what kind of a stupid diet was this?—but I was enjoying the food too much to stop. Before long, I was back to a normal weight, and I was never anorexic again. You could say Dr. Atkins saved my life.
I don’t mean to minimize in any way the seriousness of anorexia. It is a terrible, ravaging illness, and in its own insidious way a form of suicide; I was extremely lucky to escape it when I did, without any treatment, and I feel an immense empathy for those who struggle with it.
I was also lucky to find Robert. Robert—who was French, and whose name, therefore, enjoyed the elegant pronunciation “Ro-BEAR”—was the chef-owner of Robert’s, a first-class restaurant down the street from the vineyard. The minute I arrived in Pokolbin, I went down to Robert’s and got myself a job as a waitress. I’d paste labels at the wine factory in the morning, and then hop on my bicycle and ride down to Robert’s for the lunch and dinner shift. Between Dr. Atkins and Robert’s rich gourmet cooking, I got healthy very quickly.
Robert’s attracted all kinds of customers: Australian ranchers, wealthy visitors from Sydney, tourists from around the world. Robert and his wife, Sally, were superbly accomplished restaurateurs. Their food was star quality and a little expensive. It was always amusing when some of the locals came in to order pub food. Once they got a good look at the prices, there was many a hasty exodus.
One fine day four cowboys sauntered in and took a table. They were fresh from the fields, dusty and sweaty, and already a few pints in. They looked over the menu and, without blinking an eye, settled on Chateaubriand for four. “And make it well done,” said one of the cowboys.
Now, there are a couple of ways to cook Chateaubriand: rare and medium rare. Anything beyond that is inviting disaster: the meat shrinks to nothing, and the quality is ruined. I tried to explain this to the cowboys. “You know, Chateaubriand is supposed to be pink. If you cook it too much, it spoils the whole experience.”
They didn’t care. “We want it well done.”
“Well, maybe you should order something else well done. Like a sirloin or a rump steak.”
They grew a little testy. “We want Chateaubriand.”
“And we want it well done.”
I smiled brightly. “Okay, I’ll talk to the chef.”
I really didn’t want to talk to the chef. Robbie was a sweet, delightful man, but he was also a classic temperamental Frenchman, and très passionate about his food and his reputation. He would cook his dishes the right way or not at all.
He fumed as I explained the request to him, his cowboy boot tapping petulantly on the floor; Robbie always wore cowboy boots in the kitchen. “I tried to steer them to something else,” I told him, as he glared at me. “But they want Chateaubriand, and they want it well done.”
Robbie swallowed his outrage and gave a Gallic shrug. He then proceeded to make the Chateaubriand exactly the way he wanted: medium rare. Then he poured an extra layer of Béarnaise sauce over the sliced meat, so they wouldn’t notice.
When I brought the dish to the table, sumptuously prepared and beautifully presented, the boys were generally unimpressed. One cowboy spooned the sauce aside contemptuously and looked at the slice of meat in dismay. “What the hell…? This meat is rare. We want it well done!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the chef says it will ruin the dish…”
“We don’t care! Who’s paying for this? We want it well done!” They sent it back to the kitchen.
Robert was not pleased, but he grudgingly accepted that he wasn’t dealing with informed gourmands here. He put the Chateaubriand back in the oven and cooked it to an arguable medium. Any more than that, and he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.
I crossed my fingers and brought the compromised Chateaubriand back out to the cowboys. Still too pink. They rejected it in unison: “We want it well done!”
I timorously returned to the kitchen with the meat. By now Robbie had reached his limit of understanding. “They want it well done?” he exploded, his neck veins popping. “I’ll give them well done!” He took the individual slices of meat, threw them on the floor, and stomped on them, one by one, with his cowboy boots. “There! There!” he screamed. “Well done! Well done!”—and he launched into a string of French obscenities as he stomped, stomped, stomped. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I knew exactly what he was saying.
Then he scooped up the meat and threw it back into the oven, and he cooked the slices until they were black and charred and looked like hockey pucks. “There. Now it’s well done.” He drizzled on some token béarnaise sauce and handed me the platter. “Give it to them.”
I was horrified. I couldn’t serve this mess to them now.
“Give it to them,” Robbie insisted.
I nervously placed the charred Chateaubriand on the Aussies’ table. “Here we go,” I said cheerfully. “Well done!” Then I quickly retreated to the safety of the kitchen.
The cowboys leaned forward, studied the blackened meat curiously, and inspected it from all angles. Then they started eating. We all watched from the kitchen door in disbelief.
They loved it.
• • •
I was so happy at Robert’s. Sally, Robert, the whole staff—they were a real family to me. That’s why I worked two shifts, to be honest. I would rather have hung out there than gone home to my fiancé.
I want to be fair to Luke. He was a very sweet and thoughtful guy when he wasn’t drinking—but he was often drinking. It was part of the culture out there, and Luke was nothing if not cultured. He had a very short temper, and was prone to explosive outbursts.
I first appreciated the extent of his volatility one evening when I was sitting at the kitchen table and he walked out of the bathroom. “What’s this?” he asked.
He was holding something by the tail—it looked like a white mouse with a blotch of red on it. I looked closer and realized, to my mortification, that it was a used tampon.
“What’s this?” he repeated, dangling it right in front of my eyes. “What’s this?”
“That’s mine…” I said meekly.
“I know it’s yours!” he screamed in my face. “Do you know where I found it? Do you? On the edge of the bathtub.” He spat the word out, to underscore the egregiousness of the offense.
“Oh. I guess I left it there.” I reached for the tampon, but he pulled it away.
“Is that what you guess? You guess you left it there? I guess you did, too. I know I didn’t leave it there.” He was looming over me, swaying slightly, as if he couldn’t contain the anger roiling within him.
“Okay, well…” I reached for it again, and he flung it across the room.
“Don’t touch it. It’s disgusting! You think I want to look at that after I come home from a hard day at work?” He was reminding me of my father, asking questions that I wasn’t supposed to answer, and then waiting for me to answer, and then hoping it would be the wrong answer so he could attack me again.
I knew there was only one thing I could say that would satisfy him. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”
“You’re goddamn right you’ll never do it again! Leaving your female shit lying around, as if you owned the place. You show me no respect. No respect!” He overturned the kitchen table, the dishes and silverware clattering to the floor around me. Then he stood waiting, hands on hips, as if daring me to say anything at all in my defense.
I didn’t. Because, in a way, I understood. He was a man, he was a proud product of his chauvinist rancher society, and he shouldn’t have had to be exposed to inferior womanly things. It was insulting and emasculating.
And I was a product of my society, which had taught me to be submissive and accepting, and protective of the male ego at all costs. So I just wept quietly, and kept my head low. After a moment, I heard him sigh with disgust, and mutter, “Clean up this mess.” He stalked out of the house and headed for the vineyards.
I know I should have bolted then and there but this was my first serious relationship, and I didn’t know any better.
So I stayed with Luke. I don’t know why. It wasn’t for the sex, because we didn’t have much. When we did, it was fast and furious. Mostly fast. Not a lot of foreplay: ten seconds, maybe. “Brace yourself, baby!” Wham, bam. “Now feed me.”
Then I’d hop out of bed and make him steak and eggs. Anything to make him happy.
• • •
ONE day, in my continuing aspiration to be the perfect housekeeper, I was cleaning up Luke’s bedroom, putting away his laundry, when, in the bottom drawer of his dresser, I found a sheaf of letters, hidden away. Curious, I took them out and started reading.
They were love letters. Sexy, impassioned love letters. To Luke.
From Miki.
I was staggered. What? My Miki? The evil stepmother? She was sending love letters to my fiancé? How could that be? Was he in love with her? Could such a thing even be possible?
I read the letters in disbelief. They were stuffed with high-flown romantic sentiments along the following lines: “My dearest love…” “My one and only…” “Every time the sun sets, I think of you…” There was some explicit sexual stuff in there, too. Just the thought of Miki and Luke engaged in such intimate couplings, even on a fantasy level, made me positively nauseated.
I felt sick in every sense. It was like being hit by a train. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would burst from my chest.
How had this happened? Maybe Miki had caught sight of young Luke years before, on the business trips to Weewaa. Or maybe they’d first met in Hawaii. Is that why she was so happy that we were getting married? Because it would give her more opportunities to see him? For that matter, had she set up the whole thing herself? Did Dad know? Was he somehow involved?
My mind was racing, all kinds of crazy questions were popping into my head. I never found out the answers, though, because I never confronted Luke. I didn’t dare. I carefully replaced the letters in the bottom drawer and closed it—and never said a word about them.
I wasn’t angry. That wouldn’t have been cool. I almost felt that it wasn’t my business. They were sophisticated adults, after all, and this is what sophisticated adults did: they had affairs, they kept secrets, they did shockingly naughty things. Who was I to pipe up and say they were wrong? No, I was too embarrassed and scared to do anything.
Now I understood. I understood why Miki would make unexpected visits to our home, traveling thousands of miles on a whim. At the time, I’d thought it sweet of her, if a little odd. I also now understood why we were always getting invitations from Dad and Miki to join them in Hawaii, or Greece—to the yacht, the island, the chalet in Italy: all places from which I’d formerly been excluded. I had thought it was because we were such a fun, attractive couple. Now I’d watch Miki and Luke together, though, and I’d see the little flirting glances and accidental touches. What had once gone undetected was now so obvious. I wondered, whenever Luke went out for a smoke or a breath of fresh air, if a rendezvous was in the offing, if one of those feverish acts of passion described in the letters was about to be enacted offscreen—and I would watch Dad’s reaction, to see if he knew, or cared.
Dad never let on one way or the other. He was the master of secrets.
• • •
I lived with the violence and the betrayal as long as I could. The tipping point, I guess, was Melbourne Cup Day. The Melbourne Cup is Australia’s biggest thoroughbred horse race; it’s practically a national holiday. They call it “the race that stops a nation.” It’s held on the first Tuesday of November (coincidentally Election Day in the United States), which is mid-spring in Australia.
On Melbourne Cup Day 1976, everyone gathered in Cessnock, a neighboring town, to watch the race at the local pub. I’ve forgotten the name of it: the Dirty Dingo, or something like that. All the wives and girlfriends were dressed in their holiday best (cream-colored dresses and stylish wide hats) to celebrate the great day. The only hitch was, we weren’t allowed to enter the pub. In fact, there was a sign outside the pub door: “No Dogs or Women Allowed.”
We had to enter through a separate “Ladies’” entrance, and wait upstairs. While the boys were downstairs watching the preliminary races, drinking pints, and getting rowdier and rowdier, the ladies were sipping tea and having a Tupperware party. It was absurd, and excruciatingly dull. I’d rather have been pasting wine labels. I hung in there as long as I could, but finally I couldn’t bear another minute; I had to go home.
I came downstairs and stepped out on the porch, and stopped dead. There was a spring rain falling. Actually, it was more like a monsoon. Heavy sheets of rain were pelting down, making the dirt road a muddy, coursing river.
Unfortunately, the parking lot was behind the building, and I was in my Melbourne Cup dress and high heels. There was no way to get around to my car without getting drenched and ruining my shoes, unless…
Hey, I could just cut through the pub. Why not?
Well, because there was a sign: no women allowed. The sound coming from inside the pub was deafening: loud music, drunken laughter, shouting, and screaming. It sounded as if they were wrestling kangaroos in there. How would they react if I barged in on their party? Would there be a riot? Maybe they wouldn’t react at all. Maybe they were all too smashed to notice. I was only cutting through, anyway. As I looked at the rain beating down relentlessly, I couldn’t see any other choice. So I opened the pub door…
And suddenly—silence. Everything stopped: the music, the TVs, everything. Just like in the movies. Every eye was staring at me with outrage and anger.
I realized right away that I’d made a mistake. I’d violated the sanctuary. I was an affront to their maleness. I should have backed out immediately, but I couldn’t. This will last only a moment, I thought, and then they’ll go back to their regular carousing. Surely I wasn’t worth missing the big race for.
So I took another step in, waiting for everything to go back to normal—but it just got quieter.
I nervously searched the pub for a friendly face. None to be found. Wait, there was Luke over in the corner with his pals. Surely he’d come over and defuse the situation. “Hey everyone, meet my sheila!”
Luke just stared at me, as outraged as the rest—even more so. His face was impassive, but his eyes glittered with fury. He was not happy.
So I had to face the vortex of hostility alone. I kept walking forward, one meekly defiant step after another. It took forever. Like one of those nightmares in which the door keeps receding farther and farther in the distance. I thought I would never reach it. The tension in the room was growing moment by moment. I was terrified that the men would suddenly rush forward to exact frontier justice upon me, and Luke would be cheering them on. When I finally reached the door and got outside, I realized I hadn’t been breathing all that time. I rushed to the car in the rain and drove away.
That night, I waited nervously for Luke to return home. I knew there might be a scene, especially if he’d kept drinking at his usual pace. I would try to explain the situation to him, and maybe he would understand.
A long time passed between the moment I heard his Jeep pull up and the moment he finally walked in the door. He stood in the hall doorway now and stared at me, his eyes red and belligerent. “What’s wrong with you?” he said with contempt.
“It was raining, I had to get to the car…”
“I’m in there with my mates, and you come stomping in like a fucking elephant, embarrassing me, making me look like a fool…”
“I’m sorry…”
“You’re always sorry. You’re a sorry excuse, that’s what you are.” I smiled at his little joke, which was a mistake. “You think it’s funny?” he said. “It’s not funny.”
“I am stupid,” I hurriedly agreed, trying to calm him. “I should have known better, but…I was tired, I just wanted to go home…”
“You just wanted to go home, huh?” He sneered, and threw a chair at me. “Well, now you’re home. Are you happy? Are you happy?” he yelled.
As he grabbed a glass from the table to hurl at me, I fled from the room.
• • •
I decided to call off our engagement. I didn’t tell Luke; that might have been dangerous. I started planning my escape. I saved up my tip money from the restaurant, and every night, I’d sneak a few more pieces of clothing into a suitcase and hide it in a closet.
My biggest problem was transportation. I needed a getaway car. I had my eye on a used pink Vauxhall in the local lot. It was a worn-out piece of junk, but it moved, and it could get me to Sydney. However, I was short five hundred dollars, and I’d never scrape that together from my waitress tips.
So I called Mom. She was in New York shooting her ballet film, The Turning Point.
“What?” she asked in disbelief. “You want to borrow five hundred dollars from me so you can buy some old clunker? You think I’m made of money?”
“I need it, Mom. It’s my getaway car.”
“What are you doing in Australia, anyway? I wouldn’t follow a man across the street. You’ve gotta stop letting people walk all over you.”
“I’m trying, Mom. I just need five hundred dollars. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
She thought it over a moment. Parting with money was always a cause for serious contemplation for Mom. “What kind of interest are you offering me?”
I was confused by this question. “You know I’m always interested in you, Mom…”
“Interest, interest!” She sighed, and worked the numbers over in her head. “Ten percent. Compounded annually. For the life of the loan.”
I didn’t understand business talk at all, but it sounded reasonable to me. “Okay. Whatever. You can have twenty!”
So she sent me the money, and I bought the Vauxhall, and one sultry night, while Luke was at the pub, I got out my suitcase and drove away, barreling down the dusty roads at thirty miles an hour. It would take me eight hours to chug into Sydney, but that didn’t matter. I was free.