She had started coming undone over the last few days, just a little, but you could see it if you looked very closely and knew her well. I had and I did. She could ignore her own emotional deterioration as long as she maintained a separation between herself and any semblance of reality. Fantasy honeymoons and alcohol served her well to a point. She had a very hard exterior; no one else could have read from her poised and calm carriage over the last few days the panic and homesickness that had swallowed her. I should have seen it sooner. The waiting was eating her alive.
She sat gasping for air and spitting out salt water. I slapped her on the back with my palm cupped slightly to help clear her lungs and her throat; it was a trick my mom had taught me in some other life when I’d had bronchitis. I handed Piper the champagne and she took another gulp, clearing the salty taste from her throat.
“And you were going to dump this?” I asked.
She turned her back to me, then swiveled around behind me to lean against my back. As she moved in the soft sand, it stirred, releasing a new burst of glowing plankton around us. We sat silently in this position, naked, back to back.
She had slept in the same bed as me numerous times, just as naked as she was at the moment, leaning her back against mine, but things had changed. She slid her hands into the crooks of both my arms and forced her own arms through. We locked elbows and pulled closer. Once we established this comfortable arm lock, we settled against each other, like a warm chair back. I could feel her heart pounding through her wet, slippery back. Her suntanned skin radiated heat, and although the water was as warm as the night, the added heat felt good. I wanted to hold her, but I couldn’t move. I had that awful feeling you get right before going over a roller coaster’s first summit.
8 Stuck in the Middle with You
Brussels, Belgium
October 1993
IT CERTAINLY WASN’T THE PAYDAY that everyone had waited for in Indonesia, but it was better than a big fat zero. We had all returned to the States a few days earlier after having been rushed out of Indonesia empty-handed as quickly as Alajeh could get us out of there. We did not get to make the trek to Yogyakarta I had been so excited and nervous about. We only made it as far as the Hyatt in Jakarta when the trip was officially declared a flop. But twenty-four hours after our plane touched ground in Boston, we were all summoned back to Chicago.
In Chicago, we were introduced to a new facet of Alajeh’s operation—new to us anyway. We were to transport a large sum of money from Chicago to Paris and then to Brussels. We needed three more people than we had available to carry the money. Alajeh was very specific about how many people he wanted us to use to facilitate the move. He would pay each person six thousand dollars to carry approximately fifty thousand dollars. Craig and Molly were sticking firmly to their decision to not do another trip in spite of the fact that this operation felt like a gift more than a risk.
We had flown into and out of both Paris and Brussels several times by now and the security in both airports was not particularly daunting. There was no such thing as money-sniffing dogs, or so we were told, and therefore we were allowed to check our luggage instead of having to carry it onto the plane. I had already broached the possibility of Piper taking Phillip’s or my place as an escort occasionally and Phillip’s primary objection had been she was unqualified to do so. The money trip was a perfect opportunity to begin grooming her.
In spite of being weary and homesick, Piper agreed to cut her visit home short and earn some easy money. I flew out a day before everyone, and Phillip would be the last one out. I could begin delivering the bundles of cash to contacts in Brussels as Phillip continued to collect the bundles of cash in Chicago and send our friends over. I retrieved Garrett from the airport in Belgium; the next day Garrett retrieved Donald, and so on. No one ran into any difficulties along the way, except Piper. Her bag had not made it onto the same hop from Paris to Brussels. She did get her bag back, but she was a wreck by the time Donald returned from the airport with her.
I paid each courier as they arrived out of the money they had just delivered. Piper’s anxiety quickly gave way to a celebratory mood as she told us of her harrowing adventure. None of us had ever had to wait patiently under the watchful eye of airport security for so long—impressive for a first rodeo. Piper’s making it through Customs for the first time also made her officially one of the family. We took her out on the town.
The next morning, Phillip came into the room, and in one angry and fluid move, he dropped his garment bag onto my bed and flung his Armani-ish suit jacket onto the armchair by the window. He abruptly opened the curtains and the window, letting fresh oxygen and sunlight pour into my sleepy cave.
With one eyelid stuck at half-mast and my mouth too dry to form consonants, I mumbled an unfathomable greeting. Phillip’s wordless arrival had stunned and woken me, but I was not fully conscious of my whereabouts, the day, or my own name quite yet. He hadn’t called and he hadn’t knocked. He had just let himself in with a key. I concentrated hard, trying to hurry along a reality reassembly process in my still half-asleep, throbbing brain.
He must have retrieved a key at the front desk. We were Mr. and Mrs. Adam Stern to the Hôtel Carrefour de l’Europe. We never checked into hotels under our real names.
Phillip was pissed off. I knew why. I was supposed to have met him with a car at the airport hours earlier. He pulled his sunglasses off and made a disapproving grimace while he surveyed the previous night’s wreckage.
I finally sat up, but too quickly, and saw stars floating around like lightning bugs. They vanished quickly and I looked at the scene Phillip was taking in, including a bunch of empty mini liquor bottles on the desk and an overflowing ashtray. I recalled a few choice bits from the night before and got a little rush of panicky adrenaline.
“Where’s the minibar?” Phillip smiled in spite of my fuckup. I think he got a tiny little bit of sadistic satisfaction from catching me in such a sorry state. It was more often the reverse: him hung over, me all bright-eyed trying to get him up to go get coffee or go bungee jumping. He was also probably very anxious to get out of his suit, into his boxers, under the influence, and lying flat on his back. His long legs and economy class seat on the red-eye from Chicago to Paris did not equal the same relaxing flight that the first-class passengers woke from just in time to start the new day in Paris and hop on the quick flight to Brussels.
He noticed that the soft, downy comforter on the other bed had already been fluffed and messed up for him by someone. “Who ate my mint?” He was referring to the chocolate treat that should have been perched on his pillow, in a still made-up bed. I assumed Piper had. I remembered we’d had a little quarrel at the restaurant. I remembered I’d left her there. I also remembered why I’d left her there and felt instantly ashamed and embarrassed.
“Piper must have eaten it. Fuck!” I stopped myself. Phillip didn’t need to know about this.
“It’s a piece of chocolate.” He laughed, but he was understandably perplexed by my overreaction to the missing mint. The night before I had flipped my wig in a little jealous fit, when I thought Piper was hooking up with some woman we’d met at a restaurant. I definitely didn’t want Phillip to know about that.
“But it’s the mint!” I reached over, punched him in his thigh, and laughed in an attempt to make my reaction out to be a joke.
“It’s okay. I’ll get another one tomorrow.” He went along with the silly banter, feigning sad resignation over the loss of his chocolate mint. After sitting, or rather flopping, his butt down beside me on my bed so hard I almost bounced out, he tried to kick his shoe off and one small empty bottle flew from the tip of his Italian black loafer, across the room, and into the stone wall. It didn’t hit hard enough to break, but the clatter it made, bouncing around on the ceramic floor, chiseled into and shattered my fragile head.
Phillip was clearly pissed at me for standing him up at the airport, and rightfully so. I couldn’t do math quite yet—my brain wasn’t a
wake—but he had to have waited for me for at least a couple of hours before giving up and grabbing a taxi. Nearly bouncing me off the bed was his sweet way of saying that all was sort of forgiven. The bottle kicking had been an accidental emphasis, not deliberate violence. And I thought his remaining irritation with me could be cured with a little alcohol.
I pointed to the armoire, secretly praying there was still actually some liquor left in there. The minibar was tucked inside the one ornate relic adorning our room. But this one very baroque or rococo reminder was enough to assert that in spite of the otherwise Holiday Inn feel to our space, this was no Holiday Inn, and we were not in Kansas anymore.
Once opened, the armoire lost its European antique charm. It cleverly concealed, behind its faux drawer fronts, all the modern accoutrements of hotel life: a television, a radio, a miniature coffeemaker, a couple of Styrofoam coffee cups, sterilized water glasses, a digital safe, and a minibar chock-full of itty-bitty versions of liquor bottles atop a little fridge. The fridge had been stocked with a beer, wine, and soda assortment.
Phillip and I had devised a jet-lag cure our first morning in Paris, back in the spring on our first trip abroad together. We both drank scotch, and what started out as one polite nightcap between friends at the crack of dawn, intended only to help us fall asleep, ended up as the discovery of our fail-safe jet-lag cure. We always arrived in Europe at daybreak, but our bodies still registered this as last call, Eastern Standard Time. We ended up polishing off all the brown liquor in the minibar, not just the scotch, on that first trip. We passed out and woke up the same evening, miraculously cured of jet lag but starved and thirsty. This jet-lag remedy had become our ritual, albeit an outrageously overpriced custom.
Unfortunately, on this trip the stage for the rite was no longer set. We had not arrived together. Phillip was walking into a used space, not a room with a full minibar and chocolate mints still perched on two creased and fluffed pillows, on two perfectly made beds. The room was a chaotic wreck. Piper had gone through every outfit she had packed suitable for a night out in Brussels and left the ones she had opted not to wear all over the place. The whole gang had started our night out in my room and the trash bin was full of what used to be the mini fridge’s contents.
Phillip leaned over the opened minibar on top of the little fridge to discover we had cleaned it out. He opened the fridge and all that was left there was one Diet Coke, opened and half-empty. He stood up, arched his back in a stretch, with his hands on the backs of his hips, staring at the pillaged treasure. “You have got to be joking!” He shook his head, slipped his loafers back on, gave me an angry glare, and stormed out of the room, slamming the heavy door behind himself without another word.
One of those tiny bottles of liquor cost about fifty francs, or nearly nine dollars in U.S. currency; a can of beer cost seven dollars, a bag of peanuts, five, and so on. Not only had I failed to make sure there was at least something left for Phillip, I also had just needlessly wasted a bunch of our money when I should have been pinching pennies. There was a store right in front of the hotel that sold almost everything we had consumed.
Phillip had left his bag and his jacket where they lay, so his return was inevitable. He was likely heading to housekeeping to request our liquid treasure be restocked, to the front desk to get another room if he was mad enough, or across the street to the store to buy a full-grown bottle of Dewar’s. In any case, I didn’t have long to get ready to face the music. He’d be back.
I got up, splashed water on my face and crazy hair, brushed my teeth, and then quickly toweled my face and hair dry. I waged battle with my defiant bed head and otherwise tried to return to my human form before Phillip returned for a fight. I didn’t think he would let me slide on all that I had done wrong already with just three words and an angry eyeball. Even if he did, I still had a lecture coming for all the money I had blown in Bali.
I licked my dry lips and considered how long it might take to get down to the café and back to the room. I knew the boys weren’t in their room either or they would have come in when Phillip arrived, so I couldn’t send one of them to the café for me. I wondered if they were all together—Piper, Donald, Garrett, and Edwin. I hoped they were not discussing me. Piper might have told them about my jealous outburst at the restaurant the night before, especially if I had done anything more to make her seek alliances or solace.
That would be just perfect, if while trying to get an accounting of the amazing trip to Bali that we would never be reimbursed for, Phillip also learned I had lost my mind and potentially destroyed the trust of any of our recruits, much less the woman I had posited might relieve him of his obligations. If only I could remember exactly how far I’d gone with my totally inappropriately jealous flipping out. Piper and I were not lovers, which put me on par with bunny-boiling psychos—I was embarrassed and humiliated, even if that was the sum total of my actions. The problem, though, was that I could only recall bits and pieces of the night before, just enough to worry me.
I couldn’t leave the room. If Phillip did come back to finish our conversation and I was gone, he’d be angrier than he already was. It would be much better to have this conversation while he drank the scotch he was probably retrieving from the store I should have gone to. I knew he wouldn’t come back empty-handed or before asking the front desk to restock our bar, and I knew he wasn’t done with me. His swift exit was a dramatic pause, that’s all. If we didn’t finish this now, it would be meaner and uglier later, with more consequence than if I just waited for him and got it over with. Phillip and I could put on a good fight when our stresses and the stakes were high.
I figured Piper must have slipped out earlier because her bed was messed up. Had she helped me wipe out the liquor in the minibar? I just couldn’t remember if we’d done that or if it had just been me. If she had helped me, she was probably nursing her own hangover, rehydrating with cappuccino, probably at the café on the corner. That is what I would be doing now were I not awaiting my punishment.
I stopped staring at the café outside my window, wishing for clarity or a hangover cure, and called room service. I ordered two coffees, an orange juice, a bottle of water, and a baguette. Both the coffees were for me. Room service didn’t offer pots of coffee served with low-fat milk and sugar on the side, like an American hotel might. The closest you could get to a regular coffee here was a tall espresso served with hot condensed milk on the side. They were small, so I’d ordered two. I needed my coffee, a cigarette, and some aspirin—best hangover cure in the world and the perfect start to any day.
You didn’t have to wait forty-five minutes for such a simple order.
I had barely gotten a clean shirt over my wet head when the goodies I had ordered arrived. I opened the door to let a young woman with her treasure-laden tray into my room, and I followed her to the desk where she set it all down. She gave my room a horrified glance. Instead of instantly signing the check, I held up a wait-one-minute finger, poured the hot milk into the espresso, and guzzled down the first coffee. I removed the other coffee, my juice, the water, and the warm baguette from the tray, signed the check, and handed the tray back with all of its unnecessary additions still onboard. I wanted to minimize the proof that I had just ordered overpriced room service. Phillip didn’t need more evidence of my extravagance.
I found my pill bag in the safe and popped a couple of the codeines I had been saving, skipping the aspirin. The first surge of caffeine, sugar, and hot liquid fortified me in an instant. I took a seat by the open window, where I could see the street below and keep my eye on the café and the tobacco store, the two places Phillip might visit before returning if he’d actually left the hotel. I also watched for the rest of my crew to appear. A wisp of fresh air on my damp face and wet hair countered the warm sun and felt refreshing.
I lit a cigarette and took a long, deep drag, exhaled, and then drank down the cold orange juice. I felt the chilled elixir of vitamins and health going down, coursing through my vei
ns, and reanimating every alcohol-poisoned and dying cell it encountered. A clear agenda for the morning was finally forming in my addled brain: deal with Phillip, find Piper, put last night’s debacle to rest, find the guys, and defuse the situation as quickly as possible.
I had woken with the nauseating certainty that I had blown up or done something bigger than just oversleeping and leaving Phillip at the airport.
I recalled coming back to the hotel by taxi the previous night, pissed off at myself for losing my control in the restaurant, feeling dejected, embarrassed, and disappointed. The concierge had asked about my friend, and it had irritated me further. I hated the eruption of irrational feelings that kept coming up, and I had wanted to quiet them, knock myself out, and start over. I had lined up all the little bottles containing brown liquor to drink them. I had awoken to find them empty. I recalled crying but not the exact reason for it or whether I’d had company. The last thing I could remember was Piper’s angry expression spinning over my head.
My stomach did a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-to-me flip, sending up a coffee and orange juice burp that tried to be more and almost destroyed my resolve to refuse a hangover residence in my body. I needed to eat something solid or I would be sick. I started to worry that maybe old codeine hadn’t been the best choice, wondering what happens when prescriptions expire.
The baguette was thankfully still warm, its crust thin but crunchy, its center moist, soft, and bakery fresh. Instead of gently cutting a piece off and preparing it, I ripped one from the soft loaf, slapped butter on the end, and added a dollop of strawberry preserves. I inhaled the chunk in one bite, then repeated until the loaf was gone and my stomach felt settled. I took a sip of my second cup of coffee, which was no longer piping hot but still warm and delicious.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 14
