by Ann Patchett
Marina shook her head. “Go, go,” Milton said. “We’ll come and watch.” He got up stiffly and helped Marina to her feet. “They want us to see how pretty they are in the river.”
“They were pretty enough just lying there,” Marina said.
“We are the parents,” Milton said. “We have to watch.”
Marina went along with a sullen sense of duty, but out from under the umbrella the world was a different place. It had not been cool beneath the candy colored stripes, but away from them the sun meted out a pummeling that was stunning. She stopped for a moment to spot the Bovenders as they walked into the brown water holding hands. On a few occasions since arriving in Brazil she had been as hot but she had always been able to step into the shade, to go into a café for a can of soda, return to her hotel room and stand in a cold shower. She had come to know in advance when the heat was about to overwhelm her as clearly as if there had been a thermometer built into her wrist and so she had been able to save herself accordingly, but looking out at the water and the sand she was uncertain of where she could go. She was melting into the people around her, into Milton. There was a little ice chest beneath the umbrella that Milton had brought with them—cool bottles of water and beers for Jackie. She could rub a piece of ice against her neck. Far ahead of them the Bovenders sank into the water and blurred into all of the other children around them as they swam away. With everything in her she cursed them for being unwilling, unable, to wake before nine. After all, she had been tired herself. She had taken a Lariam fresh from the new bottle Mr. Fox had sent the night before and at three in the morning she had woken herself, and no doubt everyone else in the Hotel Indira, with her interminable screaming. Someone is stabbing a woman to death, was the thought she had swimming up through sleep before she realized where the sound was coming from. After that she was finished for the night, no more sleep, just waiting.
“You do a good job of this,” Milton said, keeping his eyes towards the river. “I admire your patience.”
“Believe me, I have no patience.”
“Then you create the illusion of patience. In the end the effect is the same.”
“All I want to do is find Dr. Swenson and go home,” she said slowly. The words coming out of her mouth felt hot.
“And to get to Dr. Swenson and to get home you must first get past the Bovenders. The Bovenders are the guards of the gate. It is their job to keep you away from her, that’s what they’re paid for. I have no idea if they know where she is, but I am certain that no one else knows. They like you. Perhaps they’ll figure something out.” An arm went up in the water and waved and Milton raised his hand and waved back.
Where in the world was the rain? Those blinding cataracts that she had endured day after day? She needed one now. It didn’t necessarily cool things down but at least for a while it blocked out the sun. “They couldn’t like me.”
“They think you’re very natural. Mrs. Bovender told me that. They see you as a person who is honestly grieving her friend and trying to get information about his death.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said, although that description only covered her obligations to Karen.
“They’re starting to think that Dr. Swenson would like you,” Milton said.
Marina felt the top of her head turning soft as the sun worked into her brain, unloosening its coils. “Dr. Swenson knew me once already. I’m quite certain she had no feelings for me one way or the other.” She mopped at her face with a large red handkerchief Rodrigo had pressed on her that morning. When she declined it once he had made her a gift of it, though probably it went on Vogel’s account all the same. Under her clothes she felt the swimsuit with every inhalation. It wrapped around her body like an endless bandage, growing larger and looser as it soaked her up. She kept pushing the cloth against her face. Her vision was clouded by the sweat in her eyes. She could only make out the most basic elements of the landscape: sand, water, sky.
“What the Bovenders require is diplomacy,” Milton said. “They just need some more of your time. They want to study you and make sure you are what you seem.”
Marina squinted out towards the waving line of the horizon. “I don’t see them anymore.” What she meant to say was that she thought she might faint. At that point she might have said Milton’s name. She didn’t fall, but she was thinking of falling, and with that thought he took her arm and walked her over the remaining expanse of sandy beach to the river. He walked her into the water up to their knees and then up to their waists. It was like a bath, silky and warm. The current was so slight it barely disturbed her clothes. She wanted to lie down in it. Milton dipped his own handkerchief into the water and spread it wet over the top of her head. “It’s better, isn’t it,” he said, though it wasn’t a question.
She nodded. Jackie had been right to make Barbara go in. It was lifesaving. When Marina looked down she saw nothing, just a line where her torso vanished into the water. All around them children kicked their rafts and jumped off one another’s shoulders. “How do you know what’s under there?” she asked him.
“You don’t,” Milton said. “You don’t want to.”
When Marina got back to the hotel room and checked her cell phone she had two messages from Mr. Fox, one from her mother, and one from Karen Eckman, whose number showed up in Anders’ name. She might as well have been home. She was feeling slightly sympathetic towards Dr. Swenson’s refusal to have a phone at all. She took a cold shower, drank a bottle of water, and went to bed, where she had a dream about losing her father in a train station. When Barbara Bovender called on the hotel line at nine that night she woke her up. “We wanted to check on you,” she said. “I’m afraid we nearly killed you this afternoon with our idea of fun.”
“No, no,” Marina said, disoriented by sleep and heat and dreams. “I’m fine. I just haven’t gotten used to all of it yet. I suppose it takes some time.”
“It does!” Barbara said, sounding gleeful for no reason. “I’m so much better at it now than I used to be. The secret is not to let the heat keep you in. Jackie swears the air conditioning weakens your immune system after a while. The more you get out the more you get used to it. You should come over to the apartment and have a drink.”
“Now?” Marina said, as if she might have something else to do.
“A little walk at night would do you good.”
Maybe the Bovenders were the guards at the gate but it was also true that they were lonely. There was nothing keeping Marina at the Hotel Indira. Tomo had moved her to a bigger room two days before, a reward that acknowledged the length of her stay, but it was still as musty and dismal as the one before it. There was a better view but the same metal bar attached to the wall for clothes. Marina looked at her wool coat, even from a distance she could see the lacework of holes the moths had eaten near the collar. She said she’d come over.
Walking through the city streets past all the closed up shops, Marina could understand how exciting it would be to see one of them open now. If there had been a light on in Rodrigo’s store tonight she would doubtlessly have gone and stood with the crowd on the street, craning her neck to try and see what was going on inside. She had not come up with a time line for how long she would wait in Manaus if the waiting continued to be nothing but an exercise in frustration, but she could feel herself coming to the end. Marina was used to being good at her work but she was no good at this. The same concierge who had been sitting at the desk in the lobby of Dr. Swenson’s apartment building at eight in the morning was sitting there still at nine-thirty at night. It appeared he was very glad to see her. After all, she hadn’t been by in several days. “Bovenders,” she said to him, and then touched her index finger to her chest. “Marina Singh.”
When Barbara Bovender opened the door and invited her in, Marina had the sense that she was crossing a portal from the wasteland of Manaus to another world entirely. Granted, she had spent more t
han a week in a badly furnished hotel room wearing the same three outfits she rinsed out in the bathtub at night. She was very far from beauty, and yet she had to think that this place would have struck her as beautiful no matter where she came across it. She praised it lavishly, sincerely.
“You’re so sweet,” Barbara said, walking her down a hallway past a series of small framed works on paper that could not have been Klee and yet looked like Klee. The hallway brought them into a large open living room with a high ceiling. Two sets of tall French doors were open onto a balcony and a breeze that Marina hadn’t felt anywhere in the city stirred the edges of the sheer silk curtains that had been drawn aside. The breeze smelled like jasmine and marijuana. From the height of the sixth floor the river appeared to be rimmed in small, blinking lights. If Marina didn’t focus her gaze she could have been in any number of splendid cities. “It’s a wonderful place,” Barbara said, looking at her home with impartial judgment. “I’m sure the bones have always been good but it really was a wreck when we got here.”
“Barbara’s done amazing things,” Jackie said, taking a small hit off a joint and holding it up to her. Marina shook her head and so he brought her a glass of white wine instead, kissing her on the cheek when he gave it to her as if they were old friends. She was surprised how much the kiss startled her, more even than the joint. Jackie raised his hands, motioning to the walls around him. “The woman who lived here before us, Annick’s last assistant, had her sisters strung up in hammocks all over the place.”
Barbara took the joint from her husband, allowing herself a modest inhalation before stubbing it out in a small silver ashtray. She gave herself a moment and then exhaled. “Annick just wanted something nice. That was the only thing she said to me about it. Of course you would, wouldn’t you? Coming in from all that time in the jungle, that’s not so much to ask. Good sheets, good bath towels—”
“A decent glass of wine,” Jackie said and raised his glass as an indicator that they should all drink up.
There was something perfectly spare about it all, a bouquet of some sort of white flowers she had never seen before on the dining room table, a long, low leather bench in front of an equally long white sofa, walls that were painted a shade of blue so pale it might not have been blue at all, it might have been the evening light. And then there were the Bovenders themselves, whose many physical attributes were highlighted by the elegance of their surroundings. Barbara’s stacking bracelets seemed to have been carved from the same wood as the floor boards so that one might notice how the color of the floor complimented the warm color of her skin. Still, it was difficult to imagine Dr. Swenson perched on that sofa. Marina doubted Dr. Swenson’s feet would touch the floor. “Where do you go when she comes in?”
Barbara shrugged. “Sometimes we just move to the guest room. It depends on whether or not she needs us for anything. If we have some time we go to Suriname or French Guiana so Jackie can surf.”
“I need to get to Lima,” he said, glad to have the topic turn in his direction if only for a sentence. “The waves are exploding there, but getting flights from Manaus to Lima is an unbelievable bitch. It would take me about as much time to walk there.”
Marina wandered over to the balcony. She couldn’t take her eyes off the river; that thick brown soup was a mirror in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have expected there would be something like this in Manaus,” she said. She wouldn’t have expected the Meursault either, and she took another sip. She couldn’t help but wonder what all of this was costing. It couldn’t really matter to Vogel. The expense of one apartment in the Amazon for a researcher who didn’t use it was nothing when put against the potential profits of fertility.
“There was a lot of money here once, you have to remember that,” Barbara said. “It used to be more expensive to live in Manaus than in Paris.”
“They came, they built, they left,” Jackie said, dropping himself down on the sofa and stretching his bare feet out on the bench in front of him. “When there wasn’t any money to be made in boiling the rubber out of the jungle anymore that was it, instant history. The people around here were very glad to see those people go.”
“I think there’s a lot about this city that’s still very elegant. This building is as good as anything you’d find in a real city,” Barbara said. “And Nixon takes care of everything at the front desk like a professional. I tell him all the time he could get a job in Sydney.”
“Nixon?” Marina said.
“Seriously,” Jackie said, his eyes lightly pinked.
“Well, he isn’t much for delivering the mail,” Marina said, and then she thought again. “Unless you did get the notes I sent you.”
Barbara stood a little straighter. In her heels she was taller than Marina. “We didn’t. I told you that.”
Marina shrugged. “So much for Nixon.”
“All the mail goes into a box for Annick.” She walked away and came back from another room holding a neat looking steel crate with handles on either side, the kind of thing an idle girl would order from a design catalogue to be delivered to Brazil when putting mail into a cardboard box seemed too messy. “Look,” she said. “I don’t even check it. Annick says straight in the box and so there it goes. I keep it in her office.” She put the crate down on the bench near her husband. There was a pale V marked across the tops of his brown feet where his flip-flops had interfered with his tan. “I used to answer the letters, to tell people they couldn’t come to see her, but in the end Annick decided that any interaction was a form of encouragement so she told me to stop.”
“These people take no as encouragement,” Jackie said.
Marina came and sat beside the box, putting her glass of wine down on the floor. She did not ask. She slipped her fingers into the back and moved the letters forward. She didn’t have to go very far before she found her own handwriting on the hotel’s white envelopes. “Bovender,” she said, dropping the first one on the bench and then going back to find the other two. “Bovender, Bovender.”
Jackie leaned forward and plucked the paper from the envelope. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bovender,” he began.
“Please!” Barbara said, and covered her ears with her hands to make her point. “It makes me feel like a total idiot. From now on I’ll look at the mail, I promise.”
Marina looked up at her. “Don’t you pay the bills?”
Jackie shook his head. “They all go straight to Minnesota. I bet that was something to set up.”
Of course, so no one would be bothered. Marina went back to the box. The magazines stood up neatly at the side, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Scientific American, the New England Journal. There seemed to be a host of letters from Vogel, letters from other countries, envelopes from hospitals, universities, drug research companies that were not her own. Her fingers kept flipping, flipping.
Barbara peered over the edge and watched her employer’s correspondence sift through the hands of someone she in fact did not know at all. “I’m not so sure we should be doing this,” she said in a tentative voice. It seemed it was just now occurring to her that bringing out the entire box of mail might not have been her best decision. “Unless you wrote us more letters. She doesn’t like for us—”
But there it was. Marina didn’t have to go so deep into the crate. It wasn’t such a very long time ago that he had been here. “Anders Eckman.” She dropped the blue airmail envelope on top of the stationery from her hotel. Jackie pulled up his feet quickly, as if she had set down something hot.
Barbara leaned forward, looked without touching. “My God. Who do you think it’s from?”
Anders Eckman, in care of Dr. Annick Swenson, a particularly inaccurate phrasing. “His wife,” Marina said. Once she had identified Karen’s handwriting she could find the letters quickly. Everything she pulled from the box now would have been written after he had gone into the jungle. Writing in care of Dr. Swenson in Manaus was the only
chance Karen had of reaching him once he had left the city, there were no other addresses. Before he was in the jungle she would have called him or e-mailed or, if she was feeling sentimental, sent him a letter at the hotel. Karen would have told him about the boys and the snow, told him to come home now because he was sounding worse, and anyway, they obviously had not thought this through well enough at the outset. Marina knew the contents of every letter that passed through her hands and one by one she dropped them onto the bench where Jackie’s feet had been. She could see Karen sitting at the island in her kitchen, perched on top of a high stool, writing page after page in the morning after she had taken the boys to school and then again at night when she had put them to bed, her head bent forward, her blond hair pushed behind her ears. Marina could read them as if she were standing over Karen’s shoulder. Come home. The letters came singly and in pairs. They came in groups of three. Karen would have written every day, maybe twice a day, because there was nothing else she could do to help him. But she didn’t help him. Marina did not doubt that Anders knew Karen was writing him and knew that her letters had hit a wall in Manaus. He would have known his wife’s loyalty as a correspondent. But by not receiving those letters he never knew that she was hearing from him. Anders would have died wondering if any of his letters had made it out of the jungle. Who wouldn’t imagine that the boy in the dugout log would have simply taken the coins he was given and let the envelopes float in the water as soon as he had rounded the bend in the river, and that those letters were divided between the fish and the freshwater dolphins? In the meantime, Karen Eckman turned her love into industry, writing her husband with a diligence that was now spread across a low leather bench in Dr. Swenson’s apartment.
