by Nicki Chen
The musician was, indeed, beautiful—young with silky, powdered skin and red painted lips, her hair pulled back from the perfect oval of her face. She was kneeling on a raised platform, her turquoise-and-gold silk gown spread around her like ripples in a pond as she plucked the strings of a large, boxy instrument, kind of a zither. She swayed as she played, her elbows, torso, and neck dancing to music that flowed like ribbons from quivering strings. Diana was wasn’t well-versed in traditional Chinese music, but it was obvious that this woman was no amateur. In any city, a musician like her would be playing in a high-class restaurant or club crowded with diners. Diana looked over her shoulder at the three other tables that were occupied. “I wonder what she’s doing here,” she whispered.
“The musician?” Jay lowered his menu. “Maybe she knows someone. Thought she could make some money, have an adventure, find a husband. Who knows? Dreams of paradise, perhaps?”
When their crispy fish arrived, it was sizzling, its tail raised in one last swish.
“I walked around Erakor Island today,” Diana said as Jay lifted a diamond-shaped chunk of flesh from the fish’s side and placed it on her rice. “It was nice.” What could you say about a perfect little island at the mouth of a large lagoon? “Small. If I hadn’t dawdled, I could have walked around it in half an hour.”
She spooned out some sweet chili sauce and dipped the fish in it. “I had a swim in the hotel pool,” she said. “Then I sat in the lobby, sketching people who passed by and writing to Mom and Andrew.” Separate letters. Pastel, flowered paper for Mom, and wheat-colored linen-look stationery for Andrew.
She picked up another bite of fish with her chopsticks. “I came across some missionary graves on the island. A pastor, his wife and children, and their Samoan assistants. I thought Andrew would be interested. Did I tell you he was still calling Vanuatu the New Hebrides? I wrote, reminding him they changed the name when it became independent ten years ago, and he wrote back that ten years was such a brief span of time. We should wait and see if the name sticks and the country lasts.”
“Historians,” Jay agreed. “They live in another world.”
She nodded, crunching the sweet, crispy fish as she stared out at the night sky. An upside-down slice of moon hung over the lagoon leaving a soft tracing on its surface. If any place could be described as “another world,” this would be it.
She’d felt that other-worldliness that afternoon while she was sitting in the lobby, ukulele music playing over the intercom, palm fronds rattling beside her. Looking out the open, windowless sides of the lobby, she hadn’t seen a single reminder of the world beyond Vanuatu. The quiet hotel grounds, the hibiscus flowers, big as children’s faces, the Indian mynahs whose wings seemed to trace circles in the air when they flew . . . this was her new reality.
When they got back to their room, Jay patted the rim of the Jacuzzi. “A nice soak in the Jacuzzi would sure feel good about now,” he sighed, switching on the light.
She smiled. “Warm water up to our chins, bubbles rolling up our backs.”
“And between our legs,” he said.
He was teasing, of course. She didn’t have to remind Jay about the hot water. By this time Dr. Feliciano’s fertility rules were permanently inscribed in their brains.
In the beginning, when they believed following a long list of rules, all of them based on research, would quickly solve their problem, they joked around and talked about them. It wasn’t long, though, before they began to resent having the rules intrude into their thoughts and lives, especially those rules that regulated their lovemaking. And the calendar. That loveless calendar with its starred days that shouted, You must have sex today, and its empty squares that whispered, Don’t bother. Eventually she started hiding the calendar. If Jay wanted to know if it was a fertile day or not, he had to peek when she wasn’t around.
Rules? What rules? It was better to pretend that everything they did was natural and spontaneous and that the outcome would just naturally be for her to get pregnant.
So now, on their second night in Vanuatu, they turned Jay’s comment about a soak in the Jacuzzi into a joke. Instead, they took a shower together. Once they were clean, they dried each other’s backs. She wiped his chest; he patted her face and shoulders. Then, in unison, they stepped back and dried their own limbs. Just in case she was fertile tonight, it wouldn’t do to have sex in the shower, standing. Both of them knew the optimal position for achieving fertilization. Neither of them was about to mention it.
29
Abby arrived humming and jingling her car keys. In the sunshine, her red hair was a vivid complement to her lime green sundress and chunky coral beads. “Ready?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Diana said. “Let’s go.” She skipped ahead of Abby, and yet, somehow they both climbed into the car and slammed their doors at the same time. They looked at each other and burst out laughing. “You look bright and sparkly today,” Diana said.
“And you look . . .” Abby gave Diana a quick head-to-toe inspection. “Light as air, as though at any moment you might fly away.”
“I just might.” Diana laughed. But it was true. Heading off to lunch with her best friend made her feel like a kid skipping to the ice cream parlor, carefree and light-footed, coins clinking in her pocket.
“Well,” Abby said, “wha’d’ya fancy?” Her accent of the moment was more Michael Caine than Queen Elizabeth. “You keen to try flying fox?”
“For lunch?” Diana was an adventurous eater, but she wasn’t ready quite yet to eat a fruit bat, certainly not this early in the day.
Abby backed up, throwing a shower of gravel in her wake. “Just joking,” she said with a wink. “We could join the yachties and beer drinkers for steak and seafood at Waterfront Café. They have a hearty salad bar. Or . . .” She raised her eyebrows and grinned. “If you like people-watching, fresh-baked croissants, and strong French-roast coffee, we could go to La Tentation.”
“Oui,” Diana said. “Let us be tempted.”
“Did I mention the cream cakes and Napoleons?”
Diana rolled her window all the way down to match Abby’s and reached out to feel the breeze. She hadn’t felt so carefree for . . . well, for a long, long time.
“Hey,” Abby said. “You’re messing up my aerodynamic flow.”
Diana slapped the side of the Toyota. “Hey, yourself.” Finally she pulled her hand back in, grinning. “By the way, what are you doing with a bronze-colored car?”
Abby snorted. “You mean instead of the unobtrusive white favored by Carole Anne?”
“Exactly.”
“I told Saudur I had to have red. He was relieved to settle for bronze.” She pulled into a parking place at the edge of the open-air market and cut the engine. “This way.” Abby locked her arm around Diana’s elbow to guide her over the puddles in the parking lot and led her to a large covered terrace adjoining the sidewalk.
Squeezing between chattering diners, they made their way through shafts of light that slipped through the vines growing through the mesh roof. At the edge of the terrace, they found a free table beside a row of potted plants. The room smelled of coffee, fresh bread, and the sea. “Nice,” Diana said. “I like this place.”
A pale, balding man near the entrance to the adjoining patisserie tipped his head and fluttered his fingers in their direction.
“My dentist,” Abby said. She leaned across the table and added in a whisper, “He left the drudgery and boredom of his practice in Marseille, bought a vanilla plantation, and brought his wife out here to enjoy the simple life. Come to find out, growing vanilla wasn’t so simple. The plants take two or three years to mature, and pollinating the flowers with a bamboo splinter the size of a toothpick turned out to be more tedious than drilling teeth. The enterprise lost money, his partner backed out of the deal, and his wife divorced him.” She sat back in her chair. “These are the stories he tells after he’s made me mute with Novocain.”
“What a sad tale!”
&nb
sp; Abby nodded.
Glancing around the room at the other diners, Diana noted that most of them were white, a few Asians, even fewer ni-Vanuatu. And they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. Whether or not that meant they were in the process of realizing their dreams, it was impossible to say.
“So,” Abby said after they’d placed their orders—a spinach quiche for Diana, a croque madame for herself, and coffee for both of them—“what do you think so far?”
“I think I’m going to like it here.”
Abby nodded. “As you know, I started out hating it. I thought I was Napoleon, exiled to my own little Saint Helena. But Saudur likes the projects he gets here, and the twins couldn’t be happier, so . . .” She raised her palms. “What could I do? I had to succumb to the charms of this quirky little country. And now you’re here. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to talk Jay into moving. And then, just in the nick of time, that Hoffmann thing happened. Perfect timing, huh?”
Diana was caught by surprise. “You heard about that?”
“Of course. Ye olde D-TAP tittle-tattle.”
“Right. But that’s not why he decided.”
“It couldn’t have hurt.”
“I guess not. But . . .”
“Hey. People make decisions for multiple motives. Nothing wrong with that. And you’re here. That’s what matters.”
“Yes.” Diana nodded. “We’re here.”
The waitress came up from behind Diana and placed her quiche on the table, a nice looking salad on the side.
“When I was a kid,” Abby said, plucking a new subject out of mid-air. “I loved to ride my bike.” She sliced off a bit of her croque madame, cutting through the ham and cheese and fried egg. “Did I ever tell you about our village?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The village was surrounded with green fields.” Abby stirred the yolk of her egg in with the béchamel sauce. “I could bike for miles without running into heavy traffic.”
It was a picture Diana couldn’t resist: the little red-headed girl pedaling down the tree-lined English country road. “We had a hill in our neighborhood,” Diana said with the hint of a smile. “Being brave enough to ride down that hill was a rite of passage for us.”
As they ate, they talked about baking fiascos and ugly childhood haircuts.
“My parents were rich enough,” Abby said with a sad little smirk, “to behave like snobs but too poor and untraveled to have a cosmopolitan outlook . . . which was why they objected to Saudur.” She tossed her curls. “I don’t care. Let them leave the old manor house to my brother. It’s so dilapidated; he’ll have to spend a fortune fixing it up.” They were silent for a moment. Then Abby added: “I reckon your mum loves Jay. Right?”
“Yeah.” Diana looked down at her salad. “Everyone loves Jay. Everyone loves Saudur too,” she added quickly.
Abby chuckled. “Indubitably. Even my parents like him. Just not for me.”
“They’ll come around.”
Abby made a face and changed the subject.
They were almost finished eating when Diana noticed an Asian woman entering the restaurant. She was unusually beautiful. Graceful as a dancer in her high-heeled sandals, her short white dress dancing around her thighs. “Do you know that woman over by the pastry counter? She looks familiar.”
Abby turned around. “Sure. That’s Suling Chao.”
“How do I know her?”
“Didn’t you say you ate at the Golden Dragon last night? She plays there twice a week. Wait. I’ll go get her.”
She ran off, and by the time Diana had pulled another chair over, Abby was back, her arm firmly locked around Suling’s elbow.
“I come here to buy a Napoleon for Alexi,” Suling said as she slid into the chair. “But there is no more.” She set a white box on the table in front of her. “I buy chocolate meringues instead.”
For a moment Diana felt tongue-tied by Suling’s beauty. The famous beauties in the movies and on magazine covers really were different from everyone else.
“Well,” Abby said. “How ’bout a beer?”
Suling made a face.
“Okay, wine then. No more coffee. You know how I go bonkers when I’m over-caffeinated.”
“Maybe I can drink small glass.” Suling glanced apologetically from one to the other. “My face is gonna turn red.”
Abby shrugged. “We can handle that.”
They ordered the house white, and though Suling took small, cautious sips, it wasn’t long before she was glowing pink—not a totally unbecoming look on her smooth, pale skin. Aside from the intimidating effect of her beauty, Suling was easy to be around. She was funny and straightforward. And though her English didn’t always come out right, it was more than passable.
“Oh-oh.” Abby frowned at her watch. “I’ve gotta pick up the twins soon.”
Suling sighed. “You are so lucky. That’s what I want, twins. Then I and Alexi can have big family quick.”
“Me,” Diana said, “I’d be satisfied if I could have just one baby.”
“Oh, Diana, you want baby, too? We are same. I want baby sooo much. Sometimes I think I cannot wait one more day.” She slumped back in her chair and stared at the vine and iron mesh over their heads. “In two weeks, I am thirty years old.”
“Ha,” Abby laughed. “You’re just a youngster.”
Diana nodded, although in fact, she was surprised to hear that she was that old. Suling was right to be anxious. “Before long,” Diana said with all the conviction she could muster, “both of us will be walking around with big bellies.”
“You think so?” Suling asked.
“Uh huh.” Diana swirled her wine. “Here we are on this peaceful, pristine little island. Willing husbands. What’s there to stop us?”
30
“G’day, miss.”
Diana squinted, looking past the racks of dresses to where a freckle-shouldered young woman with honey-colored hair was perched on a high stool. “Good afternoon.”
After the sunny openness of the street, Frangipani Boutique felt like a jungle—blouses and dresses climbing the walls like so many orchids, spots of light slipping through the side windows, wide-brimmed hats fluttering like butterflies in the path of a rotating fan.
This afternoon she was exploring the town. She had to pick Jay up at five o’clock so they could drive out and take a look at the house Johnny Gamboa would soon be leaving. Until then, the day was hers. She’d already spent a couple hours walking up and down Port Vila’s main street checking out the video store and the drug store, the Vanuatu Museum of Culture and the musty little library. Outside the library, she’d stood puzzling over the sidewalk exhibit of an enormous kettle purported to have been used by cannibals. Then, leaving behind for the time being the question of why the ni-Vanuatu would choose to display their bloody past so prominently, she continued exploring. She poked around souvenir shops filled with wooden masks and T-shirts emblazoned with funny or obscene phrases. She stopped at a store that sold everything from spools of thread and bolts of calico to televisions and air conditioners.
She liked this stylish little boutique, she thought, as she browsed through the dresses. It was the clerk, though—flipping her hair and filing her nails—who piqued Diana’s curiosity. What was she doing here? It was the same question that had been running through her mind all afternoon. Who were these people? Not the ni-Vanuatu; they belonged here. Not the Chinese and Vietnamese whose grandfathers were brought to Vanuatu by the English and French. No, the others. All those white people who walked down the streets and stood behind the counters as though they, too, belonged in this little out-of-the-way place.
“Those are the twos and fours.” The young woman crossed one thin, shapely knee over the other. “The sixes and eights are over there.”
“Thank you.”
The girl raised her eyebrows in acknowledgement.
Was she bored? Diana wondered, as she smoothed her fingers over the size sixes, the cottons a
nd rayons and the occasional silk. Maybe her friends were all in college or working abroad while she was here, working for her mother or her aunt—someone with enough money to own a boutique. Someone who, as anyone could see, had an eye for colors that evoked tropical beaches and sunsets. Diana took a pink-and-white sundress off the rack and held it up.
“The mirror’s over there.” The young woman pointed with her chin. A chummy sort of nonchalance.
It wasn’t Diana’s kind of dress, but she brought it over anyway.
“Hm,” the girl said. “Pretty.”
Diana chuckled. “Maybe if I were still in high school . . .” She draped the girlish pink dress over her arm. Starting to turn away, she caught a glimpse of herself—her plain white blouse and navy knee-length shorts, her straight hair and pale blue eyes. The woman in the mirror looked like an accountant. “I need something colorful,” she said.
The girl might have laughed since all the dresses in the store seemed plucked from a flower garden. Instead, she put the cap back on her nail polish. Then, casually displaying her long legs again, she jumped down from the stool. “Six?”
Diana nodded.
In a matter of minutes, she found herself in a small changing room with a selection of dresses that would brighten anyone’s garden. She tried on a sunny yellow dress with blue and white daisies down the front and a sophisticated plum-colored sheath. When she stepped into the blue, green, and purple print sundress, her blue eyes sparkled. The fitted bodice hugged her waist, and the full skirt revealed flashes of coral when she moved. She stepped back and struck a pose. Someday she and her little girl would have matching dresses. She smiled and turned sideways. Even with her bra straps showing, she looked fantastic. Snatching up the filmy fabric, she swished it around like a Spanish dancer. Then she opened the curtain and came out to look in the larger mirror.
