by Austin Bunn
“He can’t make you feel anything, sweetheart,” Mac said. “But I do tend to feel fat and pale around him.”
Saul arrived in sandals and grimy cargo shorts and sick with stomach flu. He slept for two days. She found sand, fine as flour, on the bathroom tile. They left him the apartment during the day, and odd books, pilfered from their shelves, appeared on the counters. Haley and Mac came home to elaborate meals Saul had made using every possible kitchen implement. Cans of coconut milk mounted in the sink. More than one fresh pineapple lay quartered on the cutting board for them in the mornings. It was clear Mac loved Saul, or loved how Saul made him remember himself, but Haley found Saul’s restlessness unsettling. She felt like he was going through every drawer while they were at work, looking for something they did not have.
Once, after a dinner Saul had made for them, Mac asked him about his walkabout in the South Pacific. Mac was good at making other people’s stories interesting. Few people ever asked him about his work at the ad agency. If they did, he’d say, “It’s all just a matter of deciding where to put the puppy.” Mac hadn’t traveled much, and as Saul spoke, Haley finally understood why Saul liked him—it was the same reason she did. He was precisely where you left him.
“So wait, where was that amazing beach again?” Mac asked from the bathroom, the door open while he peed. Saul brought out the insouciant boy in him. Soon, the cigarettes would be released from their cryogenic hold in the freezer.
“I’m telling you,” Saul called back. “You two will not want to come home.” He leveled his hand over the candle flame. “I almost didn’t.”
“But you did,” Haley said. “You did come back.”
Saul sighed and looked out the window. He’d tied his hair back in a ponytail. His features were big and American, a face that belonged on a coin. “You’re right. And I’m still trying to figure out this whole slam.” She understood Saul had lost the plot. Snow made drifts on the windowsills. Saul would not be staying in Chicago for long.
From the bedroom, Mac called out, “Hal, what happened to the goddamn atlas?” Because they still had an atlas. In fact, the whole Rand McNally set, spines unbroken, on the bookshelves next to the bed, Mac’s contribution to the nostalgia fetish of their times.
She went to fill Saul’s wine glass, but he put his hand over the rim and stared at her. “Is everything okay?”
She realized she had been avoiding eye contact with him, afraid of what he might draw out of her. It wasn’t that Saul was beautiful. It was that he was utterly alone and had made a strength of it somehow, and that threatened her. She’d run from the solitude of her twenties, the stir-fries she ate alone, the solo trips to museums, the nights she called college roommates to check in. Mac had ended the anxiety, but it came with a sense that she’d avoided some essential encounter with herself.
“I’m fine. Why?” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I want you to like me, Haley.”
Of course she liked him. He was Saul’s best friend. “It’s just that sometimes I feel bad for not having adventures,” she said. “Like you.”
Saul just watched her. “I’m sleeping on your couch without a job,” he said. “Welcome to the adventure.”
The following morning, Mac off to work, Haley sat next to Saul on the couch to explain the television remotes. Saul, logy from sleep and wrapped in a sheet, took her hand and pulled her into a kiss. He was going to ruin her.
On the deck of their bungalow, Haley chewed her fingernails, nibbling away at the wedding lacquer. It was afternoon now and a busted upholstery of gray clouds rolled toward them at the horizon. The glassy lagoon stretched before her and water gently lapped the bamboo pilings underneath. From here, from the furthermost bungalow, Haley couldn’t see another soul. Mac had gone to an Internet café—of course, they’d left all their devices at home except for Mac’s phone, which had no bars, no network connection—to let their family know they were alive after the bombing, to look into the possibility of flights home, and she felt bereft. They’d paid for the remoteness, and now Haley desperately wanted others around.
She wondered if it was possible to keep these disasters from becoming the story of their time here. A friend had been married on a cruise ship in New York Harbor in the summer of 2001. Every single one of her wedding photos had the Twin Towers in the background. They were divorced now, and the only thing people saw was the wreckage to come. That must not happen to her.
While she watched, two brown-skinned islanders paddled out to the raft in an outrigger. They tied up and peered through the water. Haley drew a sharp breath. The taller of the two dove, his hands steepled over his head, and did not surface. Her chest tightened. They were diving for the ring.
Haley rushed along the walkway toward the hotel lobby, her eyes locked on the figures. She passed a hotel worker, a short, chubby woman. “Out there, bad things,” Haley said, and the woman smiled warmly. Haley wanted to scream. At the concierge desk, she banged the silver bell. The concierge came wiping food from the corners of his mouth.
Haley pointed. “What are they doing?”
The concierge gazed outside, black eyes squinting. “These men work in this place.”
“You ask them to get our ring?”
“We ask,” the concierge said, which wasn’t even an answer.
Haley waited while he located a whistle. The concierge blew it out on the deck and the pair paddled back to the shore. They were both teenagers. The shorter seemed terrified to be noticed at all. But the taller figure, the one Haley had watched dive, was pretty and unafraid. His muscles looked like they had been scored into clay with a knife. He was lighter-colored than the concierge, almost caramel. Like the others, he seemed to have no body hair whatsoever, a flawless envelope of skin. His age was impossible to guess, maybe eighteen, maybe thirty, there were no wrinkles to judge. Standing in wet swim trunks, he scanned Haley as much as she judged him. She realized she was wearing one of Mac’s vintage T-shirts that read, “South East Asian Community Pride!” Please God let them not read English.
“What’s your name?” Haley asked.
“Langy,” the concierge said for him. “He only speaks Balinese.”
“What was Langy doing out there?” she said.
The concierge translated. Between each consonant there were these crazy, sweeping hammocks of vowels. “He say he try to get your ring,” the concierge said. “But he cannot find it.”
“How do I know he doesn’t have it already?” Haley asked.
It was an absurd question—he had nowhere to hide it—but it felt appropriately skeptical and assertive. Haley watched Langy’s face for signs of nervousness. His cheekbones, she wanted his cheekbones. Langy shook his head and spoke.
“What he say?” she asked.
“He say he doesn’t see your ring.”
“He say more than that,” Haley said. “I hear more sentences than that.”
The concierge looked at her with annoyance. “Miss—” he said.
“Mrs.,” Haley said.
“Please calm,” he said. “Your ring is where you leave it.”
Mac returned from the Internet café with a warm bottle of orange soda for her. He’d met a middle-aged Australian tourist who’d been on the street when the bombs went off, who had a cell-phone camera. The footage “was insane,” Mac said as he sat next to Haley on the foam mattress and tried, unsuccessfully, to recline on one of the odd triangular pillows.
“You watched it?” Haley asked.
“He seemed like he needed to talk,” Mac said.
It turned out there’d actually been one blast inside the restaurant, which killed some people, and when others rushed outside, there was another bomb waiting street-side, a trap.
“Please stop,” Haley said. “Are we getting out of here?”
Flights were booked for two days, Mac explained. Anyway, now was the safest time, he said. “These things never go in runs.”
“You don’t know that,”
she said.
“I do,” he said. “I read The Economist.”
“I never see you read The Economist.”
“I savor The Economist on the toilet. Where you are not.”
She told him about the staffers trying to dive for the ring. Mac thought she was paranoid. Nobody would try anything in the daytime, he said. Plus, the raft was right there. They could see it through the open doors of the bungalow.
He was doing his best to buoy her. He fetched two cocktails from the bar, tall glasses dressed with hibiscus flowers. He gave her a back rub that, inevitably, led to more. But even with the rum and slurry of tropical fruits in her, Haley was not in the mood. A pale green gecko moved across the wall above them. Everything seemed to be moving at the fringes, including the bungalow itself, rocking slightly in a breeze. Mac held her and napped. Haley looked out across the water and wondered what kept the raft in place, what deep cable made it stay.
In late afternoon, the clouds cracked and sent down sheets of rain. The power flickered in the bungalow for a moment and a volatile, blue-gray light rushed into the room. How fragile this place was, how jury-rigged.
“It’s pouring out,” she called out to Mac, in the shower. “The ring’s going to get washed away.”
Mac came to her in one of the big towels.
“What’s the worst that happens?” he asked. “The worst is that we go and buy another ring.” He thought for a moment. “No, the worst is that I drown trying to get the ring back and you have to soldier on, the sexy widow, the WILF. Unable to love again.”
Haley tried to pull away, but Mac reached his arm around her, intuiting her tension. Maybe other things got less beautiful as they got older, but his arms were strong and could hold her.
“Drowning was too much?” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He convinced her to go to dinner off-resort, at a warung he had passed on his way to the Internet café. It was a classy restaurant, he said, with music and a guard out front checking bags and ID. Haley was reluctant to leave the resort, to join him on the rusting blue moped he rented. “You go to more dangerous places in Chicago, babe. You’re totally hard-core.”
“Is this the part where you mention Linda Hamilton?”
“This is not that part.”
She got on the moped and discovered it didn’t feel like imminent death, a bullet train to their bodies in a ditch. It was more like a restless carousel animal. When Mac cranked the pedals and the engine roared to life, she felt a swell of pride in him for seeming like he knew what the hell he was doing.
The road ran along a narrow causeway, beach on one side and marsh on the other. Along the roadside, roosters had been deposited in bell-shaped baskets, looking abandoned, watching the traffic. Taxis buzzed past them, horns beeping constantly. A warm breeze lifted Haley’s spirits, softened the edges of her anxiety until another moped blasted past them with a “No Police” bumper sticker on the back. What could that possibly mean? Who wouldn’t want police? She belted her arms tighter around Mac and stared out into the march. She saw a small shrine, a gilded tower that looked like a dollop of frosting, backlit by sundown. People came all this way to meditate in a bog.
The restaurant sprawled off the side of a hotel, with tiki torches flanking the front. The lot was crowded with cars and motorcycles, which was a good sign—the place was popular. At the entrance, an islander checked bags, but he waved them in.
“Great security,” Haley said. “I feel really safe.”
“Come on,” Mac said. “I’m a white guy wearing jams right now. I’m not scaring anybody.”
Over speakers came the sounds of gongs and a woman’s voice wandering the scale. A mixed crowd of light and dark faces filled the room. Haley felt reassured to see Westerners. They requested a table far from the entranceway. The restaurant opened out to a patio at the back, overlooking the beach. If necessary, Haley thought, that was where she would run. When they sat, on chairs made from the trunks of coconut trees, Haley caught herself in the glass of the table surface. She wore no makeup and her long blond hair had gone viny in the humidity. She looked like a woman who had stopped showing up for things.
“Have I told you today how much I love you?” Mac said. He clutched her kneecaps under the table and opened her legs wide. “I love you this much.”
While they were still working on their second cocktails—these mai tais really were juicy and sinister—a waiter came around with fresh fish on ice in a metal bucket, and they pointed out the pieces they wanted.
“When I went to the Internet cabana, I got an e-mail from Saul,” Mac said. “His thing in Aspen didn’t work out. He asked if he could stay with us again.”
Saul’s name plummeted inside her. He had left for Colorado and she hadn’t heard from him, thank God, until the wedding, where he’d appeared in a red velvet suit. In the traffic of congratulations, Haley remembered hugging him and feeling his dampness, the sweat coming through the heavy material. In a flash, she remembered how much he perspired when they’d been together, the slick of his back. She thought he was over. She wanted him over.
“What do you think?” Mac asked.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said.
“It wasn’t a problem last time, was it?”
He held her eyes, studying her, and she felt like vomiting up the whole experience, get it out and get done with it. She had been waiting for the right time for the honesty, but it had not come, would never come.
“We need our space,” she said. “And he’s a grown-up. He can rent a place.”
Mac nodded. “He was screwing girls left and right in Chicago, anyway. It’d be weird energy to have in our place.”
The news gripped her throat. “Wait, he was?”
Mac took a big gulp of whatever oversweet garbage they were drinking. “What do you think he did all day?”
So Saul was a cad. That was not new information. And yet she’d made the obvious error of believing she was special—if only so that it gave her power over him in her memory. Haley took Mac’s drink and finished it.
The light in the restaurant dimmed, and someone turned up the music, which had triangles and gamelan and the sound of bamboo in trouble. Haley saw that islanders and grizzled sailors with scary tans now packed the bar. The women, in cutoff jeans shorts and miniskirts, had no hips. They snuggled in between the middle-aged Europeans, risking their fingers through the last redoubts of the men’s hair.
“Are those girls?” Haley asked. “Or guys?”
Mac spooned up the last of the mango dessert. “Lady, if you gotta ask you’re never going to know.”
A striking brown-skinned woman entered, wearing a wig of perfectly straight, platinum blond hair. She eyed Haley for an instant before sauntering to the bar. She wore glass teardrop earrings, a dark blue dress, a cluster of loops at her wrists.
When the waiter delivered the bill, Haley asked about the men and their women at the bar.
“Yes, waria,” the waiter said. “Bali specialty. Boy-girls. Pretty, yes?”
Haley stared at the blonde until she made sense. It was the tall young man from the hotel. Langy, the thief transformed. He wore nothing on his fingers, no ring, Haley made sure to examine the fingers. She watched as Langy shook hands with an older man with shaved brown hair, most of it on his neck, wearing Bermuda shorts and a tank top, criminal at his age. She stared long enough that, eventually, Langy looked back.
“Who wants to have sex with a transvestite?” Mac said, polishing off his fourth cocktail. “If you’re straight, you want vagina. If you’re gay, you don’t want lipstick. Is every transvestite a lonely hag?” His head bobbed in the light.
“I think they just want to be beautiful,” Haley said.
They paid the bill and Mac leaned on her to make it outside. He was in no shape to drive the moped. “I think I’m going to puke,” he said. “I have that over-salivating thing.” Haley led him to the shadowed side of the restaurant, near a dumpster. She stood by while he
yawned up the fish and cocktails.
“It’s probably sun poisoning,” Haley said, rubbing his back.
Mac stared into his puddle. “Fucking sun.”
Haley’s eyes followed the sandy path that led behind the restaurant. She could hear the dinner conversations and laughter fanning out over the water and wondered if this was what the terrorists hated. The joy of paradise-seekers. Had their pleasure brought the bombs? What would be here without them?
Further up the alley, a shape leaned against the wall. She could make out the middle-aged man’s Bermuda shorts even in the dark, halfway down his legs. At the man’s waist, a head pistoned, hands stretching upwards underneath the Hawaiian shirt. Haley saw the blond wig, whisking back and forth. The man against the wall moaned and thrusted, holding Langy’s head in place with both hands. The wig got out of place, and Langy, without stopping, brought a hand up to shift it back into place. The man sighed, pushed Langy off, and drew his shorts up.
A cab beeped in the drive and Mac stumbled off toward it. “Haley, come on, come on,” he said.
Langy wiped his mouth and looked at Haley, straightening his wig. The older sailor passed Haley, head down shyly, beelining his way back into the restaurant, and Haley felt an exhilarating pulse of desire, of need, whatever it was that got her out of her head.
“Haley, please.”
In the cab, Mac leaned against the window, groaning at every turn. Haley opened his zipper and slid her hand in, holding him in her hand. She wanted to console him. He had just retched his guts out and still it stiffened.
“Oh, Haley,” he said. “That feels so fucking nice but please don’t.”
She could have stayed with Mac, in the cabin, listening to him sleep. There was a guidebook that she had not read, had not even opened. But Haley felt restless and charged up, so she left Mac passed out on the bed in the bungalow, champagne tin at the side, in case.
