When he left, abruptly, without buying, one of her colleagues asked who that strange customer was. May shrugged. “Some hustler,” she said. Bangkok had more of them than Hong Kong.
She thought no more of him until several weeks later when Charles popped back into the store, looking prosperous and dressed in a custom-tailored safari suit. This time he purchased four rings, worth about $250 each, of middling quality—infinitesimal diamonds and sapphire chips. “I will sell these tonight,” he confided. “And I will triple my money.” Presently he took her to dinner, where May became privy to a bit more. Charles held the belief that tourists come to Bangkok with the desire to purchase good jewelry, but that they are overwhelmed by the hundreds of stores that congest the city—in addition to their ignorance of quality and value. He looked about the dining room of the Sheraton Hotel and he gestured toward a bar. “I can go over to that bar and sit down and within five minutes strike up a friendship with a tourist,” he said. Then, a day or two of helpful courtesies, perhaps a dinner, a personally guided tour of the floating market or the Temple of Dawn, and—Charles snapped his fingers—that person is willing, eager to buy his gems. He was building his business on “trust” and “confidence”—and natural human greed for a bargain. That he was selling his wares for thrice what they cost in reputable shops was not the point. Since he had seen May last, Charles had been to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Teheran selling stones. And if May was not impressed by all of this heady talk, Charles let her know that he was also in the “oil business” in Teheran. By the time dessert came to the table, May was reasonably certain that a major millionaire was sitting next to her, his knee suggestively dancing against hers. From his pocket he withdrew a few jade and sapphire rings, all of good quality, and he invited May to select one to mark their first date. She chose a modest jade band. “The next one I give you will be all diamonds,” he promised.
Even as he was writing his love letters to Canada, Charles took May for a lover, or reasonable facsimile thereof. He liked to go to discos, but Charles was a terrible dancer and May was embarrassed to be seen on the floor with him. He liked bowling, but he was poor at that, too; May regularly beat him. Each night when they dined, usually at Chinese restaurants, there was little conversation save incessant questions about the jewelry business, so many that May began to feel she was teaching a class in gemology. And in bed, at the various second-class hotels where Charles stayed, moving around the city like a desert emir and rarely staying more than one night in any inn, explaining to May that he was looking for a luxurious penthouse to buy, he was a clumsy and inattentive lover. His forte was stripping the clothes from his body and parading about the room, striking provocative poses and displaying his powerful body. But once between the sheets, excuses and sudden fatigue were usually pleaded, and quickly Charles was asleep, leaving May frustrated and bewildered.
On the morning of August 2, 1975, Charles ran puffing into May’s jewelry store to reveal he was on the way to the airport. He had to meet a “friend from Canada” who was arriving to join his business. That was good news to May. Charles needed an aide, someone to help him keep appointments and thus avoid standing up people, which he had done to her more than once.
Marie-Andrée cleared customs easily, Bangkok being a city that does not overly scrutinize Western travelers, and saw Charles waiting, smiling, happy to see her. She ran into his arms, but all she received was a hug that would have been suitable for reunited elderly sisters. And then she was stuffed into a hot taxi where sweat poured down her face on the long drive to the city, inching along canals and processions of monks with gleaming bald heads, stalling in traffic, Charles rattling away about this and that, but never about them.
When the taxi pulled up in front of a deluxe hotel, where Marie-Andrée erroneously assumed the honeymoon suite was waiting, Charles instead led her like an unwilling mare to the shopping arcade, insisting that she meet his “special friend.” Marie-Andrée protested. She was exhausted, her body clock damaged by crossing too many time zones. She was hot, too disheveled to meet anyone. Her hair was plastered wet to her face; dark patches of perspiration blotched her clothes. What she wanted was a cold bath, a dark room—and Charles.
Before she could make further protest, Marie-Andrée was pulled into the refrigerated cool of an elegant shop that offered bolts of brilliant silk and showcases of rings and necklaces that bespoke Oriental grandeur. A stunning young woman scarcely more than twenty approached, her feet barely touching the carpet. Her complexion was cream, her hair richly dark and cut as if by a Paris coiffeur, her eyes showed happiness at the sight of Charles. They embraced, gently, but more tenderly than what Marie-Andrée had received in welcome. Then Charles turned to Marie-Andrée and did something impossibly cruel.
He put his hand around May’s slim waist and he said, “This is May, my girl friend.” Then he gestured to the disheveled, perspiring girl from Canada and said, “And this is Marie-Andrée, who has come from Canada to be my secretary.”
May fumbled for a word of greeting, but the moment was more than awkward. It was heavy with pain for both women. Immediately May realized that Marie-Andrée considered herself to be more, far more, than Charles’ “secretary.” And though Marie-Andrée tried to smile and express friendliness, her eyes were suddenly red and moist, and she turned away hurriedly to feign interest in a tray of gems. If Charles discerned the anguish in both women, he did nothing to assuage it.
That night they dined, à trois, and neither woman could manage more than a bite or two of food. Swallowing was difficult. Conversation impossible. And, incredibly, on her first night in Bangkok with the man who had written of a love so intense that it would rival that of the gods, of his minute-by-minute desire to worship her body, Marie-Andrée found herself in bed not only with him, but with another woman. The three of them—Charles, Marie-Andrée, and May—passed the night in a cheap hotel, neither woman able to sleep, both unwilling players in an absurd farce that was void of laughter. Nothing happened, nothing at all, nothing save an occasional muffled sob that was masked by Charles’ snoring. He was in the middle, content, an arm around each girl, surrounded by people that he assumed loved him. And would be grateful to share him.
During the most terrible night of her life, Marie-Andrée almost summoned enough gumption and courage to get up and get out—on the next plane back to Canada. But that would be humiliating. She would face ridicule the rest of her life in Lévis. And every time she felt the curve of Charles’ naked body against hers, resolve weakened. And a little surge of competition was born. She had thrown away her life in Canada to come to this man’s bed—and if she was any kind of a woman at all, she could get rid of the bitch on the other side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Annabella, stuffed with sedatives and tranquilizers, could not bring herself to return to the cabin in the thick woods of central California where Jimmy killed himself. As spring awakened the forest, she moved back in with her parents, into the room where she had spent her teens, a womb of chintz and lace and stuffed animals, coexisting with memoirs of her long stay in Europe. She found an old framed quotation in the closet and put it on the wall beside her bed, finding, perhaps, a certain irony in its message:
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful human being on earth.
For a long time, Annabella stared blankly at this quotation, or at the inanities on the television set, or at novels that she held in her hands but did not really read. She went irregularly to a therapist who counseled her after her husband’s death. He suggested a long period of treatment and a quick return to as much activit
y as she could stand. But Annabella was never very confident in the value of psychiatry. What she had to deal with was guilt, and it was the one emotion that was her constant companion. “If only I had taken Jimmy back,” she said so often. Or, “If only I had gone after him when he jumped out of the car.” Or, “If only I had recognized his pain and gotten him some help.”
Nonsense, said her mother Jane, who was busy arranging shopping trips, discreetly telephoning her daughter’s friends and beseeching them to offer invitations. With quiet desperation, Jane was trying to crowd her daughter’s life so that the inevitable would not occur. But in her heart Jane felt the futility of her endeavor. She saw flight coming as clearly as a train on a Kansas prairie. Forestall it, perhaps. But not stop it.
In early summer, 1975, as Marie-Andrée was tormented in Canada by the deluge of love letters from Charles, and as Jennie Bolliver was trying to assemble a life in Seattle after her journey around the world with a now distant Christopher, Annabella went to San Francisco for a weekend with some old friends from Stanford. She tried very hard to make the weekend pleasant and not let any of the dark shadows within her fall on the others. But for the most part she was gloomy and silent. A friend named Marcia, who was a postgraduate student in psychology, watched the unconcealed anguish festering in Annabella and took her aside. The group was going to Sausalito for the afternoon. Marcia had a better idea. She knew where the world’s greatest omelet was served, and where they could have a heart-to-heart talk. Gratefully Annabella agreed. She was tired of putting on a counterfeit face. The two women, both in their late twenties, went to a San Francisco restaurant called Mama’s, where spectacular omelets stuffed with sour cream, avocado, tomato, and crab meat are the specialty. They gorged themselves and drank herb tea until the afternoon was almost gone. Marcia turned blunt. It was a time for direct talk even if it stung. She suggested that Annabella was hanging onto the guilt over Jimmy’s death, long past its nuisance value. What good was it doing her?
Annabella shook her head. It was not a question of “good.” She simply could not escape the emotional condemnation that when her husband held out his hand for help, she refused to take it. And now he was dead. She did not enjoy the feelings that ate at her like acid, but she could not expel them.
Marcia reached into her repertoire of case histories. For a time she had worked at a crisis clinic in the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles area hospital. People walked in off the streets and obtained immediate therapy. Analysts were trained to deal with a problem in the first few minutes. Once, when Marcia was on duty, a thirty-nine-year-old middle-class housewife had come fearfully in what seemed to be emotional disintegration. Her marriage was ghastly, to an icy man who refused to leave their home for any social affair, who rejected intimate talk, who had not made love to her in a decade, who threatened suicide each time the woman spoke of leaving him. Annabella listened to the story attentively. What was the point?
The point, said Marcia, was that this unfortunate woman had dug her own pit, sprung her own trap, attached her own chains. She blamed her husband for all of her pain, when indeed she fed on it. She had written her life script so that she wanted to feel guilty and abused. She was a coward, said Marcia. “Guilt,” she continued, “is the least valuable and most destructive human emotion. You’ve paid your penance to Jimmy, but you didn’t put those sleeping pills in his mouth. He did. He was sick but it was his responsibility. He was trying to make you feel guilty—and God in heaven how he succeeded!”
Not long thereafter Annabella told her mother that she was cashing in her life in California and returning abroad. The news was not a surprise. Jane remembered a ten-year-old child returning from two years in Europe and saying, “Right now I am in this country, but I am not a part of it.” And Jane made no protest. As she drove her daughter to San Francisco and put her on a plane that would eventually set down in Europe, Jane accepted the terms of this leave-taking. Annabella would not be returning except as a rare visitor to the storybook valley in this softly beautiful part of California.
In their last moments together mother and daughter avoided the emotional issues and dealt with logistics and maternal advice. Annabella’s travel plans were vague and open-ended. She intended to visit friends in Europe, then thread her way across the Middle East into India, where she wanted to meet Sanjoy’s parents in Bombay. It seemed important as part of her recuperation to face the family of the boy whose destiny had brought him to California, to the promise of a rich new life, to the back seat of a stupid airplane that crashed and burned on a foggy night in San Luis Obispo. It was an appointment she had to keep, one last burden to lift from her shoulders.
“If you run out of money, or feel you’re going to, call us. Promise!” ordered Jane. Annabella hugged her mother. She doubted if it would be necessary. In her purse was an around-the-world airplane ticket and $3,000 in traveler’s checks. And if the cupboard grew bare, she could find a job. She had done it before.
“Call us anyway,” pleaded Jane. “It’s good for both of us when you connect with home.” She tried not to sound demanding, for Jane respected her daughter’s maturity and independence. She still considered Annabella to be her best friend.
Annabella nodded assurance, and on her face was one of the first genuine smiles since the tragedy of Jimmy. At that moment, she was exceptionally lovely, thinner, her eyes huge and luminous from the long season of grief. Finally a spark was in them that might burn away their deadness.
In Seattle, Jennie told herself she was sated with world travel and it was time to make a new life. She rented a tiny coach house in a college district and filled the two rooms with plants, pillows, straw mats, miniature figurines of Buddha and Hindu gods. These were pieces of Jennie, and they were as precious to her as a rich man’s gold. Incense burned continuously. A quotation from Buddha about the necessity of suffering was tacked to the front door beside which slept an eccentric cat named Doloma, to whom Jennie spoke in Tibetan. When one of her girl friends exclaimed over the little house, Jennie said, “It’s all I ever want. I can stay in here a week and lose all track of time.”
With a nest well feathered, Jennie enrolled in a junior college to study biology and holistic medicine, nursing the intention to set up a lay practice someday in Seattle and convince people, particularly the elderly, to foreswear meat and pills that doctors prescribed. A disciple of fasting, Jennie went without food or beverage for forty-eight hours at least once every month, convinced that urban poisons were being expelled from her body. Around her neck she wore a Buddhist token, several red wool strings braided together and tied in a tassel. Jennie never took it off, for she believed it protected her from all harm.
On her twenty-first birthday, Jennie celebrated with old friends, mostly graduates from the Nova experimental high school. None of these youngsters to whom complete academic freedom was granted had progressed very far, either professionally or emotionally. They were remnants of the counterculture, leftovers, still speaking the vernacular of the disenchanted, but quietly slipping back into the mainstream of American life. Cassie, a quiet, pioneer-looking young woman who made beautiful tapestries on a loom, was trying to establish business relations with major department stores. At twenty, she counted one broken marriage, and a second one in jeopardy. Margret, an erotically beautiful girl who had spoken fire half a dozen years earlier and intended to stir the blacks of Seattle into rebellion, now worked as a widower’s housekeeper. Her reading pattern had shifted from Karl Marx to Tolkien. And there was Cybilla, who, after dalliances with the most desirable boys in her orbit, was now living openly with a woman and committed to the militant lesbian wing of the women’s liberation movement. Carmen, Jennie’s long ago friend from the beach years in Southern California, was now lost to domestic anonymity as the wife of a dentist.
But the major trauma was Christopher.
They returned from the Far East as the best of friends, nothing more. Jennie tried a hundred times to analyze the reasons for the disintegratio
n of what had been to her a love of epic proportions. “I don’t know,” answered Christopher. “It’s nothing I can put my finger on. It’s nothing you’ve done, or I’ve done. It’s simply that we’ve grown apart. We need some time away from one another.”
Jennie agreed, trying not to show her wounds, but there were times when she would stay inside the coach house for days, weeping, angry, frustrated, at a loss. She tried to convince herself that Christopher was not any longer the man she had loved, certainly not the free spirit who had climbed mountains and whose mind was a restless probe of all established values. Now he was planning to open a health food store and was caught up in talk of bank loans and accountants and even franchises. “I was the number one flake in my crowd,” she told Margret. “Now I think I’m the only one with any sense left.”
Other wars, “negative forces” as she called them, were festering in Jennie’s head. Although she professed contentment at the order of her new life—home, college, part-time work as a bookstore clerk-she found it difficult to obey the vows she had made at Kopan Monastery in Nepal. There she had promised not to drink, smoke, swear, kill, lie, or engage in carnal activity. To one of her Buddhist friends in Seattle, a woman named Olga, Jennie made a tearful confession. “I can go two or three weeks without even thinking about sex. Then I say to myself, ‘Jennie, you’re twenty-one years old, in the prime of your life, you’re healthy, reasonably attractive, and everybody you know is out dancing.’ So I go. And then I come home and suffer for a week.”
Olga told her not to worry, that when her priorities were in order, the “negative forces” would no longer be a problem.
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