The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  The truth of it is, they are all tired of dealing with non-Americans, tired of having to explain themselves and of having to work so hard to understand what others are explaining to them. They are tired and what they want, crave actually, is just to sit around with a bunch of other Americans playing silly games like this, games that do not require them to stop constantly and explain, to say things like “Ted Bundy? Are you kidding? He’s famous.” Because, of course, the explanations never stop there. If they were talking to an Asian, they’d have to explain the whole concept of serial killers (unless the person were from Japan, of course) and if the other person were European, forget it — they’d spend the next half hour discussing why Americans were all so damn violent.

  This tiredness is what attuned them to accent as they overheard one another soliciting directions from the hotel employees and ordering eggs sunny-side up, though it was Calvin who finally brought them together, yesterday afternoon as they lounged around the pool with the other hotel guests, eyeing one another. He had thrown out some ridiculous sports question, something about American football, and they had all clamored to respond — even those who had no interest in sports — because they understood that sports was not the point. They stayed up until midnight drinking and discussing where they were from, without having to stop to explain that Minnesota was cold, or worse, having to fumble around trying to figure out what thirty-below Fahrenheit translated into for the rest of the world. And they would have kept going had the front desk guy not warned them that other guests were starting to complain.

  “The loud Americans,” they called out in stage whispers as they disbanded, laughing and giddy after a night of drinking, happy to have found each other, a feeling that they all share, though one that they haven’t verbalized for various reasons — Noreen because she feels that it would make them seem provincial to acknowledge such a thing and Joe, on the other hand, simply because he sees it as a given, and Joe’s belief is that people who state givens are either insecure or stupid.

  That was last night, and now they have reconvened, adding Martin, whom Joe overheard discussing flight reservations with the front desk man when he got up to use the restroom. “That’s the guy,” Joe said, indicating Martin with a nod as Martin passed their table, and Sylvie called out to him, politely but with the slightly patronizing tone that people in groups sometimes adopt when addressing someone alone. “Hey! Excuse me. May I ask where you’re from?” she asked, even though they already knew where he was from, knew, that is, that he was American.

  Martin turned and looked at them; sizing them up was how Joe saw it, which is how Joe generally sees such things, just to be clear about Joe. Joe is, as his name suggests, an average guy — moderate in habit and opinion with uninspired taste. He grew up in a rural, slightly-depressed-though-no-more-so-than-the-towns-around-it town in Minnesota, where he was a mediocre student, of average intelligence and in possession of no real talents that set him above others, that marked him, that is, as someone destined to rise above his humble beginnings (as such beginnings are always described after a person has done a little rising). But what Joe did possess was a desire to do just that, to leave that town behind entirely, a desire, moreover, that wedded itself to no one plan for doing so, which actually made the whole thing far more accomplishable than had he hoped to achieve it, say, by becoming a doctor or wowing everyone with his athletic prowess.

  Instead, Joe accomplished it by lying, by packing his bags and moving to California, where he knew nobody, which meant that there was nobody to point out that he was lying. Once there, he lied his way into a progression of increasingly better-paying jobs, his favorite for the chamber of commerce, where he was the guy that got sent out with giant scissors to cut the ribbon when new businesses opened, from which he learned that women really gravitate toward a man with big scissors. When it was Joe’s turn to discuss his brush with fame, he described meeting Dorothy Hamill, a lie, of course, and an easy one at that, for Joe knows the trick to lying well, which is either to go really big or, as is the case here, really small — to talk about sharing a ski lift with a figure skater who was last known for her haircut.

  Besides lying, or perhaps hand in hand with it, what Joe does have a talent for is sizing people up. Thus, as he sat watching Martin size them up and sizing him up back, he sensed immediately that Martin was disdainful of them, of their need to be together. Disdain is one of those things that hits too close to home with Joe (perhaps because of the humble beginnings) and is, therefore, one of the few things that diminishes his objectivity, which is why he failed to consider that Martin might simply be distracted, might be focusing on his own problems to the exclusion of what is going on around him, a state of mind that can easily be mistaken for disdain.

  This is precisely the case with Martin, who has come to Indonesia with his wife of thirteen years, a trip that the two of them began planning even before they were married and which it has taken them all this time to bring to fruition. Martin has always been vaguely distrustful of success, a disposition that allows him to now feel vindicated because here in Indonesia, things have fallen quickly apart for Martin, starting in Bali of all places, where he and his wife began their vacation because everyone back home told them that Bali was the place to start: Bali was paradise, these people said, an Eden of smiling, happy people, and the dances, especially the barong dance, were simply the most beautiful things they would ever see.

  During the long flight to Bali, his wife had started out in a state of wine-drinking jubilation, but as the hours went by, she developed a terrible headache, the result of caffeine withdrawal, which neither aspirin nor a belated cup of weak airline coffee could assuage. Then, as they flew over the turbulent Strait of Malacca, she became nauseated as well. Martin was sure that she would feel better once they landed, but as they entered the airport, they were met with the sweet, cloying smell of jasmine and the overwhelming humidity of the tropics, and she rushed to the nearest garbage can and exploded into it, the entire history of the flight recorded in her vomit as she held weakly to the can with one hand and pushed back her stringy brown hair with the other. And through it all, Martin stayed frozen where he was, perhaps fifty feet away, watching as several young soldiers looked on impassively from the exits and the other members of their flight, strangers with whom they had spent the last thirty hours, passed by and stared at his wife, bearing witness to the contents of her stomach and seeing her hunched over, her mouth smeared with something pink, the wine that she had consumed thousands of miles ago when she was still feeling festive.

  Finally, a saronged woman about his wife’s age approached her and, in what sounded like an Irish accent, said, “Get it all out, luv. It’s the only way.” She handed his wife several tissues, looking discreetly away as his wife cleaned her face. “All better, isn’t it then?” the woman said encouragingly, his wife thanking her weakly as she went on her way. Only then had Martin spun into action, coming up behind his wife as though he had been there all along, whispering, “Do you need the bathroom?” and “No? Are you sure? Because there’s one right here.” Later, as they rode in a taxi through the streets of Denpasar, he had wanted to acknowledge his failure, or, even better, he had wanted her to acknowledge it, to scold him in the loud voice that he hated, but she had said nothing, her head thrown back, eyes closed, as the taxi sped along.

  Three days later, they checked into a hotel in Singaraja along the northern coast of Bali, a hotel that catered to Indonesian businessmen and where they were the only tourists and, as such, were accorded the dubious honor of being placed in a room directly across from the hotel desk. There, with the night receptionist just outside their door and Indonesian businessmen snoring away behind the paper-thin walls on either side of them, his wife had wakened him in the middle of the night to tell him that she was thoroughly and profoundly miserable, that she had been for years and had been concealing it from him, and that she now understood that he was to blame for all of it, even the fact that she had bee
n concealing it. He switched on the lamp next to the bed because it felt wrong to be discussing such things in the dark, and when he did, she began sobbing, but all Martin could think about was the night receptionist outside his door, listening to his wife cry.

  Hoping to discuss the situation more rationally, Martin got out of the narrow bed and sat in a chair beside the armoire, leaning back with his arms crossed in front of him. He knew, of course, what crossed arms conveyed — inapproachability, an unwillingness to listen, outright hostility — for he had the sort of job, a middle-management position with a company that produced copiers, where people were always going on about things like teamwork and communication and body language, but he also knew that his arms were incapable of doing anything else at that moment but reaching toward each other and holding on.

  After listening to his wife sob and curse him for nearly an hour, he asked in a low voice that he hoped she might imitate, “What can I do?”

  He had meant what could he do at that moment to make her stop crying, but she had looked up at him incredulously and said, “Can you learn to cry when you hear sad songs? Can you learn to articulate why you prefer radishes to cucumbers? Can you learn to appreciate irony? Wait. Can you learn to even understand irony? No? Well, then there is absolutely nothing you can do, Martin.”

  He slept sitting upright in the chair, and the next morning, with no mention of what had happened during the night, they packed and moved on to Ubud. During the day, they walked around the town, visiting the monkeys and stopping, it seemed to him, at every shop they passed. At one of them, his wife bought a carving that was heavy and round like a softball, the wood cut into the shape of a man with his legs pulled up to his chest, his head and shoulders curled over his knees.

  “Is weeping Buddha,” the shopkeeper told Martin’s wife. She sighed and gave the man the exact amount of money that he asked for, and Martin kept his mouth shut.

  That night, they ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant called Kodok, which, according to a poorly written explanation on the front of the menu, was the Indonesian word for frog. Martin supposed that the word was an onomatopoeia, and he marveled at the fact that kodok was nothing like the English word for the sound that frogs made, ribit, yet both words seemed exactly right to him somehow. Normally, he would have shared this observation with his wife, but he didn’t, just as normally she would have commented on how beautiful the garden was, with candles nestled in beds of woven banana leaves and flowers everywhere and a pond near their table, but she didn’t.

  In keeping with the restaurant’s theme, Martin ordered frog legs, which he had never had before. Several minutes after placing his order, as the two of them sat rolling their bamboo placemats up like tiny carpets and letting them unfurl, he watched as a boy bent over the little pool and, hands flashing, grabbed two plump, kicking frogs and rushed back to the kitchen with them. Martin was horrified. He thought that if he hurried, he could change his order before the damage was done, but when he looked up, his wife was staring at him with such naked revulsion that he did nothing, nothing, that is, except suck the frog legs clear down to the bone when they arrived.

  The trip had gone on like this, the two of them speaking only about small matters such as who would request more toilet paper and what bus seats they had been assigned. They continued to sleep in the same bed, not talking, not touching, not even accidentally, and finally, after a week of this, Martin gathered his courage one morning at breakfast and asked, “Is it because of what happened in the airport?” For even though it was impossible to change things, he felt that he had to know.

  His wife had stared at him blankly for a moment. She was eating papaya, which she loved but which they rarely had back home in Ohio.

  “Perhaps we should go our separate ways?” he said then because as he watched her eat the papaya and smack her lips, he understood that she was content, perhaps even happy.

  “Think about the money,” she scolded. “How can we afford another two weeks if we don’t share expenses?” Then, after a moment, she added, “Besides, what’s so different, Martin, really?” She asked this almost gently, which made it worse, for it meant that she felt secure enough to consider his feelings.

  At least here in Yogyakarta they have begun spending their days apart. She has hooked up with four grown siblings, three sisters and a brother, who are staying at their hotel, and though Martin feels that she is intruding upon the siblings’ family reunion, he does not say this to her, knowing that she would scoff at him, would say something like, “Poor Martin. How does it feel to always think you’re in the way?”

  In a few days, they are supposed to leave for Jakarta, and from there, they are to fly to Sumatra, and it is not until two weeks from now, an interminable amount of time, that they are scheduled to return to Jakarta and begin their trip back home, but Martin has realized that he can’t continue on like this. He simply cannot. That is what he had been speaking to the front desk man about when Joe wandered by. The front desk man, it turned out, was actually the manager, a helpful fellow with the unfortunate facial features of a toad: darting tongue, lidless eyes, and thin lips that cut far back into his cheeks. Martin felt immediately apologetic when he faced him, which he later understood to be residual guilt over the frog legs.

  “I must change my flight,” he told him, forming the story as he went along. He laid out his ticket, Garuda Airlines, Jakarta to Singapore, for the man to see. “I read about the Garuda crash in September, and quite frankly, I’ve become nervous.” He began his request in this way to conceal his real motive, which was to change the flight date from two weeks hence to tomorrow, though why he felt he needed this bit of subterfuge, he could not say. However, as he spoke, he realized that there was truth to what he was saying. He had never been the sort that gave flying any thought, that questioned the ability of planes to stay aloft, but he saw then that things were not as he had always thought them to be.

  “Sir, there is nothing to worry about. Garuda is our national airline. It is very safe. That accident, it was caused by the forest fires — the smoke — but that was months ago. I think there is no need to worry.” The man studied the ticket. “Also, sir, your flight is not for two weeks.” He added this quietly.

  “I see,” said Martin, quietly also. “Well, I was thinking that as long as I’m making such a big change anyway, perhaps I might change the dates as well. In fact, I would like to take a flight tomorrow afternoon, from Jakarta. Can this be arranged?”

  “I am not sure, sir,” the man said, flustered for some reason by the request. “You see, it is rather short notice. And your wife? Mrs. Stein?” he said, pronouncing Martin’s surname so that it sounded like the mark that dropped food leaves on one’s clothing, but Martin did not bother to correct him because he couldn’t imagine that it made any difference to either of them.

  “My wife will be staying. Only I must return early. You understand.” And to be sure that the man did understand, he placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, which, he had read in his guidebook, was the way that things got done in Indonesia. The man seemed embarrassed by the bill’s appearance and in no way acknowledged it, but neither did he return it. Instead, it sat on the counter between them as he made his calls, first to Singapore Air, arranging a shuttle flight from Yogyakarta to Jakarta for the next morning, followed by an afternoon flight to Singapore, and then to Garuda Airlines, canceling the original flight. Only after hanging up the telephone for the final time did he place his hand on the counter between them, over the twenty-dollar bill, and, still mispronouncing Martin’s name, he declared, “Everything is arranged, Mr. Stein.”

  “Thank you,” Martin replied, but looking at the kindly, toad-like features, he felt suddenly ill. He walked quickly away from the desk, and as he passed the nearby pool area, which doubled as a bar, a woman called out to him from one of the tables, asking where he was from.

  He turned and stared at the woman and her companions for a long moment, thinking to himself, “Where am I
from?” and finally, he took a deep breath and said, “Cleveland,” and then, as though these people might not know where that was, he added, “Cleveland, Ohio,” and they all nodded and smiled.

  “Of course we know Cleveland. We’re Americans,” they said, and they invited him to sit down.

  They are playing a game, the fame game. Martin hates games, and when it is his turn, he tells them about his parents’ paperboy, Ted Bundy, though hesitantly, for he is still not sure that he understands the point of the game. The two lesbians go next, relating a very long and increasingly convoluted story about a woman with big thighs and an Australian who might or might not have been Olivia Newton-John. The thigh woman was raised by Satan worshippers in Minot, North Dakota, but had escaped when she was seventeen. Now, she raises horses and lifts weights and is a lesbian also.

  Suddenly, or so it seems to him, Sylvie, the lesbian who is doing most of the talking, pushes her hands against her own throat as she explains that the thigh woman had threatened to kill the Australian woman with a pool cue, claiming that the Australian had been sent by the Satan worshippers to retrieve her. Martin is sure that he has missed something, some crucial detail, and he studies the others, hoping for a clue, but the waiter approaches their table with another round of drinks, and Sylvie pauses while everyone pays, a chaotic undertaking because they are all distracted by trying to convert rupiahs into dollars in their heads.

  Joe, seeing an opportunity to get the conversation away from this god-awful story that, as far as he can tell, has nothing remotely to do with a brush with fame, turns to Martin and asks, “Did I hear you discussing flights with the desk guy?”