So many people had no idea how to dance, just stood around on the dance floor jerking inanely and self-consciously along to the rhythm. Clumping. Leena had no patience with them. Dance was a ritual, a ceremony; you had to learn the steps, patiently, or it was no good. With a tingle of malicious pleasure, she would fling herself into some complicated routine, knifing her small slender body through the throng; she loved it when a Latin-inflected song came on and the crowd thinned out, groaning, because the steps were too difficult, and she twirled into a flying patchwork of calypso, rumba, mambo, lambada—names that were wonderfully evocative and faintly absurd, while people would stop dancing to watch her, even to clap, and at the end of it she would give a deep, ironic curtsey.
• • •
She had noticed Steve the first night, leaning over the railing that separated the bar from the dance floor. She didn’t think he was a guest at the hotel, of which the disco formed a part, or she would have noticed him sooner: she was the front desk receptionist. She knew he was watching her, and she liked the way he looked: tall, tennis-player lean and blonde, his hair just a tad too long and grazing the collar of his T-shirt.
She went dancing three nights in a row, and each time he was there, watching her. He knew she knew. She concentrated on him now, Salome-fashion, when she danced.
On the third night he moved towards her casually and asked if he might buy her a drink. She flicked her tangled hair out of her eyes.
“Why not,” she said.
• • •
Of course, he had to be from California. Where else? California by way of Germany, where his parents were born.
“My parents were born in India,” she said. “Kerala,” she added, for his benefit, and of course it turned out that he had spent time in an ashram in India in the 1970s. It was too much. He reminded her of those assembly line actors in the American television series of her childhood: lanky in jeans, driving round in open-topped cars, vaulting fences, spouting cliches. Except that Steve never said much, letting her spin, like a whirlwind, from one topic to another. He was not as young as he’d first appeared to be; nearer forty than thirty, there were slight lines around his eyes and streaks of grey amidst the blonde. When he moved, his movements were like a cat’s, slow and lithe and deliberate and sinewy. His low drawl was casual to the point of impenetrable.
He seemed to Leena inscrutable.
“Honey, I’m just an Oriental cowboy.” She hit him, hard; she detected a lurking sardonicism.
• • •
“What are you doing out here?” She meant in Singapore.
“Business. Things.”
He lived in an expensive condominium apartment and drove an expensive car. The apartment was in his name, starkly white and sparsely furnished, the austerity relieved by two gigantic abstract canvases in the sitting-room—curiously impersonal, and yet, curiously Steve. A Siamese cat called, improbably, Bhumipol, padded its way warily from one room to another, occasionally springing onto Steve’s shoulder and nuzzling his ear, but leaping away with a diabolical yowl if Leena tried to approach it. She fully reciprocated its loathing.
“Such as?”
“Commodities. Raw materials. Import, export. I buy and sell stuff, set up deals, that sort of thing.”
“Wheeling and dealing?”
“You could call it that.”
“Ethical?” Leena said. “Or not?”
He grinned.
He had an office in one of the shopping centres to which he went at ten in the mornings and came back around three. Visiting the office once, she found it as spare as the apartment, with a single bored receptionist buffing her nails. She did not inquire further. In that respect, she feared, she had been culpable.
• • •
“Why is everything in your apartment white?”
“I’m a colourless person.”
“White is a colour.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s an agglomeration of all colours. It’s the negation of colour.”
“Black is the negation of colour.”
“Black is a kind of white and vice versa.”
He was being deliberately wilful. She gave up.
• • •
Steve’s friends were a wilder, ever changing crowd of expatriates, more rowdy and hard-drinking: oilriggers, seamen, jewellery dealers embroiled in litigation, various other people with ill-defined and probably dubious jobs. Leena suspected that one or two of them belonged in jail: the more charming they were, the more their criminality shone through, like a rash. They turned up on Saturday nights, uninvited, with crates of beer and stacks of country music records, great wholesome chunks of sentimentality to which they cried and stomped their feet along.
Like many expatriates Leena had met, they seemed oblivious to their actual surroundings, living, in their case, in a permanent mental American heartland frozen circa 1975. Vietnam was still an incendiary topic and opinions were evenly divided. One night, two men started a fight over the War, right in the middle of a Grateful Dead song; someone screamed, and Steve heaved a bucket of ice water all over the pugilists, who demanded, aggrieved, Wassa matter, man? And Steve said, Nobody interrupts the Grateful Dead. They claimed, all, to be flag-loving Americans “through and through,” although none of them seemed particularly to want to go back: they were in hiding from ex-wives demanding arrears of alimony, governments demanding arrears of taxes; they were in the East because it was cheap and to “get their heads together.” They talked, desultorily, about fleeing to Bali for good, they were caught up in the stream of their slow, rootless, restless drift around the world, a peregrination to nowhere. They believed, superstitiously and silently, that each new destination was another bead on a charmed necklace, the purpose of which, ultimately, was to stave off death: they were all, in the end, refugees.
Amidst all this unfocusedness, Steve moved through with the sharp, defined edges of a diamond; he was not in the drift, or so she thought.
• • •
They were married three months later.
• • •
Her parents were quietly horrified. Who was Steve? What was his history? What did he do? And where had she met him? Stiff with grief, as if someone had died.
They had never understood where her hoary streak of rebellion came from, her need to kick, mercilessly, at every perceived restraint. Changeling. Viper in the bosom. A tiny wisp of a girl in an otherwise ample family: any one of her brothers could have picked her up bodily with one hand. A mouth as wide and full-lipped as a jazz singer’s, a pert, swinging walk seen at its best in short, flared skirts, a direct, challenging stare.
Her parents, nonplussed by all this sensuality, did their best to stamp it out. Leena was expected to be both a scholar and a traditional Indian woman, helping her mother with the chores while her brothers gambolled off. Chafing, Leena alternated between docility and outbreaks where she disappeared from home for days at a time. At eighteen, her truculent announcement that she was not going to university unleashed storms, her father (who ran his own law firm and believed firmly that life other than as a professional was not worth living) warning darkly that she was condemning herself to “a slide down the social ladder.” Leena, unmoved, moved out: being the black sheep of the family was a draining activity.
But this was the decisive break—Leena and her parents both knew it. Leena had deprived her mother of the pleasures of matchmaking, of the noisy, triumphal excesses of a wedding; she had married a man who, in the orotund words of her father, had “the odour of too many scams about him.” Again and again, her mother demanded to know: why this hole and corner business of popping into the Registry of Marriages one afternoon without informing anyone? Was she, heaven forbid, pregnant? Leena tried to explain: it seemed like a crazy, wonderful, impulsive thing to do! Her father said, swelling: crazy—wonderful—impulsive—we are not characters from a Victorian novel or a Hollywood romance!
Leena sat in the sitting-room of her parents’ home, watching the clock on the wall. Two hoiirs of heated discussion: nothing achieved, except mutual feelings of irritation and ill-will.
“Wouldn’t you like to see Steve at least?”
“We never want to see that man.”
A shade of doubt crossed her father’s face at these words: even he seemed to think they sounded faintly ridiculous. But it was too late to recall them, they had been spoken. Leena said, “I’m sorry,” and flew out of the driveway to where Steve stood, waiting, leaning against his car parked in the shade of a roadside tree.
• • •
The women of her family were fertile, if nothing else. Leena quickly found herself pregnant, and embarked on a voyage of unrelenting nausea, rollicking waves of it that made her feel as if she were at sea. She had to give up her job. Marooned in the apartment during the day, she was bombarded with calls from her family, entreating her to come home. But I want to be with him, she said, an unanswerable retort. She got the number of the apartment changed, twice, knowing that her family would be too proud to visit.
“There’s no need to be so ruthless,” Steve said.
“You don’t understand,” she said. Incapable of divided loyalties, she only understood partisanship.
Alone, she brooded, fitfully, on Steve. “I’m not an autobiographical kind of guy,” he said once; at the time, she thought it a quaint phrase. She found that trying to glean information about his past life was somewhat like extracting teeth, a laborious, unyielding process. If she went too far, she could feel him recoiling, warily, and if they were in bed he would roll away from her and walk out to the balcony. There was always a final, inviolable territory to which he retreated and which no one could enter; she felt like an intruder for trying, even though she knew her questions were perfectly reasonable.
“Aren’t they?” she said to Bhumipol the cat. “Isn’t it reasonable to want to know a little?”
Strange thoughts occurred to her: perhaps Steve will be reincarnated as a green-eyed cat? And, I feel like a gangster’s moll. Living in a zone of careful, studied ignorance.
She looked through his personal correspondence and his accounts when he was not there, but they were as unrevealing as Steve. When they kissed, it was as if they were sealing a pact of complicity—complicity in what, though, she couldn’t say. And his unspoken resistance was wearing her down too; day by day she found it less and less unpalatable to accept him for what he was obviously determined to be, a fully sprung enigma.
• • •
She read in the paper one day that an American Vietnam War veteran, who had married a local Malay girl, had gone over the edge, kidnapping the children from his estranged wife and blowing his brains out in a messy suicide.
That night, troubled by a certain train of associations, she asked Steve whether he had ever been in the Vietnam War.
He laughed. Wouldn’t stop laughing.
She grew annoyed. “Were you?” she persisted.
“Are you kidding? Come here.” She settled, heavily, on the sofa beside him. Pregnant, she felt as large as an aeroplane hangar, ankles swollen and elephantine. “I feel ugly,” she said disconsolately.
“Never,” Steve said, his face buried in her tangled hair: barbed wire, she called it—she hated her hair. Taking hold of his wrist, she ran her fingers over the intricate bones, testing each knob; the pulse in his wrist throbbed, steadily, under the pressure of her thumb.
• • •
When the baby was born, they called him Ranjit. He was a tranquil baby who seldom cried, and seemed contained and self-sufficient in his cot, gurgling at invisible, friendly presences.
Leena cut off her hair and wore it close-cropped, penitential: she felt in need of a change after Ranjit’s arrival. Depressed, intermittently tearful, she sat for hours beside the baby’s cot, regarding him with the fascination she would have brought to the arrival of an extra-terrestial: he looked like a cat, she thought, a large, unblinking, hairless, skinned cat. (When she told Steve this, he said, worriedly, “Shall I call your mother?” And she snapped, “No!”) She would start sewing clothes for the baby and, just as abruptly, would tear them up again. She remembered the French boyfriend, acquired at the age of eighteen, and how he had seemed to her so incomparably cultivated, until she had discovered he was seeing another girl. Then she had taken a pair of scissors to all his clothes. In moments of reverie, she could still hear the snip of metal tearing rents in cloth: a sweet, vindictive sound.
Steve said to her, “Are you going to be all right?”
She said, “Yes.”
She wondered what she had got herself into.
• • •
In the beginning, she had liked the idea of it. Steve said he had business to do in various parts of Malaysia, that it involved a lot of travel over the next few months, and why didn’t she come along? Leena was enthusiastic: she wanted, badly, to get away.
So they swathed the furniture in heavy covers, left Bhumipol with a friend, and piled, baby and all, into Steve’s car one morning while the dew was still fresh on the grass. Wearing a red halter top and sun-glasses perched on top of her head, she looked so good that Steve insisted on taking a picture of her, which he did, and he stuck the Polaroid on the dashboard, for luck, he said; and when Steve rolled the top of the car down and the wind pinioned her to the seat and she could see the Causeway approaching in the distance like a flat, grey snake swimming across the surface of the water to connect the two land masses, she was glad, glad, glad. She slipped her hand round Steve’s neck as they sped on, and though he smiled, he continued to look straight ahead and not at her.
• • •
So began that somnambulistic trip.
Her memories of it were disjointed, like a film made with a jerky, handheld camera: images skittered on and off, isolated names resonated.
Everywhere women in the Islamic headdress and men staring at her and Steve; she imagined silent strictures where there were none, then she grew indifferent. Everywhere the same small, dusty towns where the new and the decrepit stood side by side and the shops sold the chunky sweets which she remembered from her childhood in the same transparent plastic bottles on which the flies clustered thickly.
They stayed in the ubiquitous international chains in the larger cities, and in small family establishments of dubious cleanliness in the more rural places. Was it her imagination or was there a night when dozens of cockroaches crawled out from under their bed in the ramshackled Hotel Labuan and did a sort of jig in the middle of the floor, while she flew about, swatting them in her horror, while Steve said, drowsily, from the bed, that even cockroaches had the right to live?
And the time that the baby caught the flu, and it turned blue in the face from the fever and when they finally located the doctor, he pursed his lips and said they were mad to go tramping about the country with a newborn baby, didn’t they know any better? And that was the only time she had seen Steve lose his temper, shoving the doctor up against the wall, unnecessary violence masking his—their—guilt, and they had had to leave town in a hurry, since the doctor was threatening a police report. The baby was fine in a few days, though.
Memory was a slippery, skidding thing.
• • •
Steve’s ‘business’ consisted mainly of looking up various numbers in his diary and arranging appointments in every town. In the beginning, she accompanied him to these meetings. The acquaintance was invariably some Chinese man hoisting a handphone to his ear while his eyes raked Leena up and down curiously, and she glared back, defensively. In the larger towns, he wore a polo T-shirt and loafers and was called Johnson or Freddie; in the small towns he sloped into the restaurant (Steve’s business was usually conducted over lunch) wearing slippers. They all seemed to know Steve from a previous incarnation: names of mutual friends, people she had never heard of, would be swapped with an artificial zest, the conversational equivalent of two boxers circling each other in the ring before a fight. Then they would suddenly descend to the nitty-gritty, talking in a cryptic code which Leena didn’t understand and didn’t bother to understand. (Her father had always deplored her lack of interest in money matters. Money, he liked to say, was the only vernacular in Singapore.) Calculators would be produced, and filofaxes, and impressively large numerals bandied about: sometimes the advantage would be with Steve, sometimes with the other man; it seemed to ebb and flow according to a barely understood law, indicated either by a discreet lift of the eyebrows or a crude banging on the table. All the while the Chinese man would urge Leena to eat, eat, a new mother needed sustenance, and if she said, no, she wasn’t really hungry, he would look at her, frowning, and reply that he had ordered the best dishes in the restaurant. When she got bored, she would start reading, openly; finally, the Chinese man, unable to bear the provocation, would ask her what she was reading and she would show him the cover, with a creditable show of indifference. “No Harold Robbins, huh?” he’d crack, and she’d smile daggers at him and say, no, not today.
Steve said to her, “Do you have to be so childish?” She thought she might say to him, “Do you have to sup with the devil?” But she didn’t.
So she took to walking around the streets with Ranjit propped in a sling across her shoulders, while Steve was out. People were friendly, Ranjit being a useful conversational tool, and they grew even friendlier when she practised her kindergarten Malay on them, making them laugh. Drifting from stall to stall, she would buy armfuls of oranges, roasted corn on the cob, chestnuts, kueh pinang, and nibble her way through them with a furtive, guilty, sensuous pleasure. Coming back, Steve would find the hotel room strewn with half-empty bags and feign horror. He himself never seemed to eat, lived on a diet of salads, mineral water and bread, if that; he was getting ascetic in his old age, he said, only half-jokingly.
• • •
There was the time too that they woke up one morning to find a note slipped under their door saying, ‘Get Out OR You’ll Be Sorry’, which she thought rather funny and clumsily melodramatic, but Steve had taken it seriously, going to the extent of questioning all the hotel staff about security: who was at the front desk the night before, didn’t they see anyone coming in, what the hell, did they call this a hotel? By which time the staff were glowing with hostility and resentment, their faces closed in like so many fans snapped shut. And Leena standing in the background, pleading with him to drop it, it wasn’t important, Steve, let’s go. Seeing him as he must have appeared then: a crass, bullying American, a living justification for charges of neo-imperialism. Refusing to speak to him during the long ride to the next town, all four, dusty, bone-shaking hours of it, except to ask, Steve, do you have any enemies? And knowing then, knowing always, that he wasn’t going to answer that.
It was best in the beach resorts, where she could lie on a towel on the sand all day, leaving the baby with the hotel baby-sitter, while Steve went off to town. Through half-closed lids she contemplated the shimmering bay, fringed by wooded hills, with a slight sense of misgiving that such unaccustomed physical beauty could exist, while all around her the mostly European guests baked themselves insensible, white maggot flesh metamorphosing into a blotchy lobster-red: her own skin ached for them in commiseration. When she could summon up the energy, she would take the launch out to go snorkelling (what a word, it sounded like a combination of snorting and snivelling). What did the fish see, she wondered, a gigantic behemoth with a face-mask goggling at them from the surface of the water? Letting her body go inert, limp, while they swarmed trustingly around her, and suddenly she would flail, faking a seizure, and watch them dart away in uncomprehending terror.
• • •
Once, he left at nine in the morning and failed to be back by four, as promised. She sat bolt upright in the hotel room, her eyes fastened with a painful concentration on the hands of the clock on the wall. She felt chained to it, every second ticking past a slow, corrosive drip on her patience; it snapped, finally, when Steve stepped into the room at midnight and she flung a book at his head and burst into wild sobbing. It took him a long while to calm her down, apologising all the while, rocking her back and forth, and gradually she stopped shaking and lay in his arms, docilely, while he stroked her hair, very gently, as though he were stroking some wounded animal. Later, she would think of that night as the night that he had unwittingly broken her in, like the horses he had broken in as a boy on his father’s ranch; and she no longer remembered, not caring to remember, a life before Steve.
• • •
In Penang, she befriended an elderly German couple, peeling valiantly in the sun. Childless themselves, they made an extravagant fuss over the baby, who had developed a predilection for rolling his tongue. “Gr-r-r,” he would say, menacingly, tiny fists clenched, and they would look at him in unbounded admiration.
“And how long have you been travelling, my dear?” the German woman asked Leena over lunch.
“Four months.”
“With a baby? Oh, that is too remarkable. And how do you manage?”
It hadn’t occurred to Leena that there was anything to manage. “I like change,” she assured the other woman.
“And how old are you, my dear?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Yes,” the German woman said, musingly, looking at her with what Leena surmised, with some resentment, to be a look of pity.
When she told Steve about this conversation, he grew annoyed and said they had to leave; he didn’t like people interfering.
“She wasn’t interfering. And I like it here.” But Steve was already packing. She maintained an ominous silence. Passive resistance.
“You know,’ she said, “I’m beginning to have my doubts about you.”
“Only now?” Steve said, drily. He glanced across at her. “Honey, you’re watching too many of those TV movies. I promise you I’m not a psychotic killer or a Bluebeard or a guy who secretly likes little boys, OK? This is just how I make a living.”
“So what is your living?” She lay back on the bed. “You’re always so mysterious. What am I supposed to think?”
“I’m a very ordinary guy,” Steve said, ironically or not, she couldn’t tell.
• • •
Clichés, she thought. Stars, hundreds of them spangled with a lush carelessness on a black canopy, hundreds of hackneyed phrases and trite sentiments slewed across the night sky; she had never realised there were so many before. It’s the reflection of the city lights that obscures them and makes them invisible back home, Steve said, and she replied, sleepily, oh yeah? as she settled back on the cool, night sand. The tide was coming in in the dark, the water’s edge marked by phosphorescent pinpricks of light, a wavy, luminescent hem. Wrapping her arms around Steve, she imagined she was embracing some long, hairy, unknown animal, a whippet, perhaps; the thought amused her. A civet, Steve whispered in her ear. I’ve always wanted to be a civet.
• • •
Two weeks later, her nightmare began. Steve left for one of his interminable meetings and failed to return by nightfall. He had taken the car, or she would have driven out to look for him. She told herself not to panic: he would be back by midnight, like the last time, and she would kill him, then fling herself on him in exquisite relief. Sitting in the lobby in dark glasses, she ordered one daiquiri after another, losing all sense of time, until a waiter told her that the bar was closing. One A.M.
She went back to the room and lay down on the bed, fully dressed. Alcohol-numbed, she drifted off, dreaming fitfully of a splintering sun falling in a shower of ragged sparks to earth. A door banged in the corridor; asleep, she said aloud “Steve?” At dawn, dry-eyed, she watched the sky brighten, like a reddening weal, and made up her mind to go to the police.
The police failed to take her seriously at first. Yawned, unimpressed, in the middle of her recital. Called, impatiently, for coffee to erase the lingering traces of early morning inertia. Seemed to think that Steve, like many Caucasians in the town, had probably visited a local fleshpot and overstayed a little. Murderously, in the tone of voice meant for an idiot-child, she said, “But I’m trying to tell you Steve isn’t like that.”
Desperate to shake their apathy, she drew out some money from her purse and laid it on the table. Their faces rumpled with indignation. Was she trying to bribe them? She shrugged, and for a moment it looked as if this gaffe had thrown the fragile state of bilateral relations between their two countries into the breach, when one of the officers, relenting, wordlessly gave her a form to fill in.
It was a missing persons report. “Eyes,” she read. “Hair.” “Height.” “Race.” She checked it twice to make sure she had left nothing out, then settled down on the one hard bench in the station to wait. An officer suggested to her that she should wait at the hotel, but this elicited such a wild, swivelling glare that he retreated hastily.
• • •
Six hours later, they fished Steve’s body out of the river. He had been stabbed cleanly—if cleanly was the word—through the heart. The wound was barely visible. It was clear that he had died before being heaved into the water. Attempts had been made to tidy up the body before she was asked to identify it at the mortuary, but a discoloured strand of seaweed was still strung, like an incongruous tribal decoration, around his neck.
• • •
“Suicide?” the police inspector hazarded, hopefully, pencil hovering above the stack of forms he had to fill in. Leena felt an impulse to scream, to smash something, rising up unbidden; only the thought that there was no one to hear her—no one who really mattered—constrained her. She was telepathically aware of an unspoken, insidious, floating suggestion that Steve’s death was more of an administrative nuisance to the police than anything else. If they could have closed the file on Steve Bauer, they would have done it with a smart click and an exhalation of relief.
“I want an autopsy,” she insisted. “He was murdered. Do you hear me?”
Her vehemence was such that the inspector adroitly removed all sharp objects (mainly pencils) from her vicinity. Sighing paternally, he pointed out they had no leads. She had no idea what her husband did, whom he had gone to meet. His diary was missing. They would do their best, but really—he gave another shrug, wonderfully expressive of a resigned fatalism. “You should go home, Mrs Bauer.”
Leena tried to call her mother in Singapore from the hotel, but no one was answering. Replacing the receiver, she was startled when the telephone burst into shrill, ringing life: it was the mortuary, wanting to know what her plans were.
“Plans?”
“For the disposition of the body.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t think right now,” Leena said.
A pause. “Well, we are running out of space...”
She left the phone dangling, and, sweeping Ranjit up in her arms, fled to the beach. The afternoon sun had the intense white brilliance of a magnesium; she felt blinded, bludgeoned by the light. The fine powdery sand ran over her toes and burned the soles of her bare feet. Fully-dressed, Ranjit asleep against her shoulder, she walked into the sea, kept walking, until the water covered her waist, and stood, irresolute, looking towards the horizon.