Serpentine Page 34

  Late in the day, when there was no more wine in the jug, Carmen and Jennie shared a private moment. The day had been devoted to memories, and nobody suspected that Jennie was leaving on a spiritual quest from which she intended not to return. But Carmen, warmed by the wine, studied the friend she had known so long and sensed there was more to the journey than simply “further study” and “meditation.” She spoke carefully. “It looks like you’ve finally found the answer,” ventured Carmen.

  Jennie smiled. “You remember all those years when we acted crazy, looking for something? I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t know the question—much less the answer.” Carmen nodded, memories of yoga, TM, hypnotism, séances washing over her in flashback. How well she remembered Jennie’s frequent observation that she was a person trying to find water, digging one well, coming up dry, digging another, and another, her thirst never slaked.

  “You see,” said Jennie, “I’ve stopped digging wells. Going back to Katmandu may not be the final answer to my life, but right now it’s a solution.”

  They went out on the town for a going-away party—Jennie, Carmen, and two other girls—touring the old haunts, driving along the beach where a new generation was ensconsed but as purposeless as the ones who had danced on the sands before, winding up at Big Daddy’s, a disco in Santa Monica. The crowd was sparse, and the girls were forced to get on the floor alone. Then a handsome black man appeared and gravitated toward Jennie, as if obeying a force. Other dancers cleared a circle for Jennie and the black man. They danced for an hour, until perspiration soaked their bodies, doing the “bump” and melding their limbs in raw primeval sexuality. Carmen thought to herself, “Jennie’s caught herself a humpy dude for her last night in the old home town.” Then, abruptly, Jennie kissed the black man politely on his cheek and returned hurriedly to her table. Whatever fire had been lit was now doused. Carmen would recall the moment: “It was as if Jennie walked to the very edge of the cliff, with the valley of temptation below. But she refused to jump.”

  On the drive home Jennie was strangely silent, embarrassed for letting herself surrender to an hour of dancing.

  On the night before her departure, in Seattle, Jennie was rushing to one last going-away party given by her girl friends. But she had a final piece of business to attend. Summoning her courage, she telephoned his number and kept her voice steady when Francine answered. When Christopher took the phone, Jennie said, “I’m leaving tomorrow for Katmandu. I’m going back to Kopan. I may be gone for a while.” Of course Christopher knew. He had heard the news from all of their mutual friends. But he felt the decision was so powerful that it was not a subject he could initiate. He was waiting for Jennie to tell him.

  “I hope you’ve thought it out carefully,” said Christopher.

  “I have. It’s something I must do.”

  They spoke trivially for a few moments, then Jennie cut through with the worth of her call. Was there any possibility that Christopher might join her at the monastery some distant day? In her voice could be heard the memory of nights together in a tent on a wind-whipped hill above a monastery. Obviously Jennie held the smoldering hope that somehow this flight to the Himalayas could effect a reconciliation. Christopher was stunned. He had assumed, incorrectly, that Jennie was over their breakup. He had to move quickly to send her away with grace and affection, and acceptance of the truth. “Francine and I are thinking about traveling East someday,” he said. “Maybe we could meet at Kopan. Maybe. I’d write you first.”

  Jennie was silent. It took a long while for her to answer, “I’d like that,” she finally said, her voice sliding in all directions. She was close to tears; Christopher could feel her pain as well as hear it.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that in my heart you are my constant companion.”

  “And in mine, too.” Jennie hung up quickly.

  Jennie and her girl friends played charades until well past midnight, then fell into dark and varied conversation. Sex was covered thoroughly, Margret wondering how Jennie handled a long stay in a monastery. “I don’t know of any way to put this tactfully,” she said, “but don’t you get horny? Or do they put something in the gruel?”

  Jennie laughed. “The first time was terrible,” she said. “Christopher and I slept together, in a tent, but we weren’t supposed to touch. During the night I’d find myself snuggled up against him, then the realization hit that I wasn’t supposed to be even close. So I’d scrooch over … After a while, your head gets so busy that the rest of you shuts up.” For the past several months, Jennie had been celibate, although the others did not know. They realized that she had suffered from her membership in the new sexual liberation. On her scorecard were two abortions, a string of one-night stands, a flirtation with homosexuality, the sorrowful and still unrequited affair with Christopher. Each of the other girls had similar misadventures of the heart, and they almost envied Jennie going to a place where sex was not allowed to be a nuisance.

  And, finally, just before it was dawn and time to leave for the early morning flight, they spoke of death, a curious subject for a going-away party, but one which Jennie herself initiated. She raised the possibility that she might perish on the far side of the setting sun.

  “Don’t talk that way,” said Cassie, the pioneer-looking friend with thick rimless glasses and a gingham long skirt. “You’re just worried about the plane falling down.”

  Jennie shook her head. “Maybe. But I also recognize the fact that I am entering a new stage of life … There may be dangers. But they don’t really bother me. If I die, I die. It’s not my decision to make anyway.”

  Margret wanted an amplification of that murky comment.

  “I’m not in control of my life, nor is anyone. Karma is. The best we can do is lead a good life in preparation for death.”

  The girls fell silent, chewing on destiny and its puzzles. Someone began speculating on the “best way” to die. At this, Jennie said something eerie. This girl who had been afraid of water all her life, who would not even stand in the shallow end of a swimming pool, Jennie suggested that drowning was best. There would be the initial fright, she said. Then a euphoria takes over as the lungs fill with water. “I’ve known for a long time that I have a water karma,” she said.

  Margret shuddered. Enough talk of death. The faint shimmer of dawn was coming through her living room window. But Jennie would not let the subject go. “Death is just another form of life, anyway … Can’t you see the beauty?”

  Before leaving, Jennie asked to make a pact with her friends. If she died, if any one of them died, then there must be cremation. The others nodded in agreement. They put their fists together and swore. No burial! “The body isn’t important,” said Jennie. “I don’t want to be bound by any of my remains left on earth. I want to get on with the next phase—whatever it is.”

  “You mean,” said Cybilla, “that you don’t want part of you staying under the ground down here … while the rest is somewhere else?”

  “Exactly,” said Jennie.

  The girls watched their friend struggle through airport security, laden down as she was with items for the monastery—a garden hose, a typewriter, a bedroll for one of the Tibetan children she had made her favorite. They watched as Jennie walked out to the waiting jet, which, on this day, was being boarded by one of the old-fashioned staircases. When Jennie reached the top step, she turned and looked toward the terminal, knowing her friends were peering through the wall of glass.

  A broad smile cracked her face. Then she did something typically Jennie: she jumped into the air and clicked her heels together! With that, Jennie was swallowed up by the plane that would rush her across the earth to a quiet place on a hill outside Katmandu where, perhaps, she would become a nun; or where, perhaps, Christopher, after studying his heart, would come once again to love her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  For several listless days, Marie-Andrée moped around the Rajah Hotel in Bangkok, her physical being assaulted
by jet lag and her emotions torn by the puzzling and painful burlesque that was Charles’ welcome. “I find my love rather distant,” she wrote in her journal, employing remarkable understatement, “giving me the impression of not wanting us to be intimate. I am disappointed. After the second day, the only word is disappointed. Disappointed by his behavior toward me! I have the feeling of not being able to please him. I have the feeling that his love for me is not that deep, and the worst of it is that I shall have to play the role of a secretary toward a woman he wants to conquest …”

  Before the first week was over, Charles pried out of Marie-Andrée the information that her purse contained $2,000 in traveler’s checks. His attitude softened and his affection increased in direct proportion to this revelation. Suddenly May disappeared from the other side of the bed. He banished her, Charles confided, because he wanted Marie-Andrée to understand fully the scope and horizons of his “business.” From his pocket he pulled a handful of tiny stones and dropped them on Marie-Andrée’s pillow. These were worth several thousand bahts. It was his intention to find tourist customers who would pay twice or thrice what he purchased them for. And it was necessary that he remain friendly with May, for she was extremely knowledgeable in the gem business and could spot a flawed ruby without a magnifying glass. Moreover, she could steer clients to him, and tip him off to possibilities of major sales. “Thai girls are very proper,” Charles said. “May would not help me with my business unless she thought I loved her.” That was the reason for his charade, and that was the reason why Marie-Andrée would have to tolerate the role of secretary. Only for a short while. Only until his jewelry business grew successful. Then he came directly to the point. He wanted Marie-Andrée’s $2,000 to invest in his endeavors. His absolute guarantee was that she would double her money if not increase it tenfold or more.

  Prudently, the Canadian girl refused. This was her insurance money, her return to Canada if this fling did not work out, as indeed it seemed unlikely to do. But Charles wheedled and cajoled, and kissed and held her, and whispered the words that she wanted to hear. She cashed $1,000 of her checks and the money disappeared into Charles’ pocket. True, she extracted a quid pro quo for her investment, that being the permanent expulsion of May from Charles’ schedule. But this promise lasted about as long as the ice cubes in a Bangkok gin and tonic.

  On a Sunday morning not long after Marie-Andrée’s return to Bangkok, Charles slipped out while she was still sleeping under a listless ceiling fan in the thick August heat of their hotel room. He picked up May and went to the Thieves’ Market, a carnival of vendors under crimson and orange tents. In one section, an explosion of tropical flowers blinded the eye—shiny, waxy anthuriums, tapioca trees in dragon pots, pink lilies with milky poison in their stems, monkey tails seemingly sewn from chenille, white bleeding hearts whose sorrowful petals, the legend goes, mark the tears of a girl whose lover abandoned her. Huge straw baskets of fruits and vegetables consumed acres in the market, with toothless old women chanting and cackling as they offered up rose apples and jackfruit and clusters of dreary-looking brown sapodillas that, when peeled, transform into creamy yellow flesh, translucent and sweet.

  But Charles was not interested in flora or fauna, hustling May through the market that offered serpents and fighting cocks and monkeys that screamed displeasure. Nor did he stop to wander through the rabbit warren where antiques were sold and where the sharp eye might discover a Ming vase or a brass chest from Peking. His destination was an area of hustlers who hawked raw gemstones freshly dug from the red clay near the Cambodian border.

  May was in a foul mood, angry over a myriad of misdemeanors that Charles had committed against her, uncertain as to Marie-Andrée’s role in this triangle, tired and sweating after being led like a donkey through the crowds. They finally stopped at a stall where blackish-red rubies were for sale, and Charles picked out one and presented it to May as a peace offering. He was sorry for the confusion over Marie-Andrée. The Canadian was only his secretary. She would never be anything else. “I want to marry you,” said Charles, “but I can’t do it for four years.” May didn’t believe any of it, but she was intrigued enough to ask how he hit upon the unusual waiting period of four years. “Because my life is very complicated,” he answered, and May believed that.

  Nearby a pen of white spitz puppies barked exuberantly and caught May’s attention. She knelt and picked up a small ball of wriggling white fluff. Noting her interest, and hoping to pacify her, Charles made a proposal—the ruby or the dog. May was spoiling for a fight anyway and she scowled. “Why don’t you buy the dog for Marie-Andrée?” she suggested sarcastically. “Then she’d have someone to keep her company.”

  Marie-Andrée loved the dog. She named it Frankie and she cradled it as people do who need love and are not getting it anyplace else. But Charles lacked even the grace to allow her an unclouded moment of happiness. “We can sell the dog in Europe someday for three times what we paid for it here,” he said.

  For almost a month, Charles juggled the two women, not very deftly. He moved from hotel to hotel, Marie-Andrée and her dog in weary tow, making it a point to have breakfast with the Canadian girl, usually at a Chinese restaurant, then disappearing until midnight or later. In those hours, Charles was usually at loose in the city, haunting tourist gathering places, then dining and dancing at discos with May. If either girl complained, he made her seem ungrateful for not appreciating the time he allotted. And by the end of August 1975, Charles had managed to extricate another $800 from Marie-Andrée’s purse, leaving her with very little as get-back-to-Canada funds. Then her tourist visa for Thailand, good for twenty-one days, neared expiration. Marie-Andrée pestered Charles what to do. No problem, he answered. Visa extensions are easy to obtain, particularly for someone like Charles, who had “influence” with the police. He reminded her that Bangkok was a city oiled by corruption; a few bahts placed in the right bureaucratic palm could accomplish whatever was needed. But the expiration date came and went, and each time that Marie-Andrée brought the subject up, he accused her of being a scold and a nag and that it was impossible to get business accomplished with feminine whinings buzzing in his ears. Thus was she now illegally in Thailand.

  Marie-Andrée had other grievances. What of those trips to exotic places that Charles had promised in his letters? Where were the villas in Sri Lanka and the beach cottages in the Philippines? Where were the gowns of red silk, and the necklaces and earrings of rubies and turquoise? Thus far, all Marie-Andrée had seen was the inside of various second-rate Bangkok hotels, and her only gift was a white fluffy dog that Charles intended to sell. But she must have gotten through to the man, for he found a little time to pay ardent attention to the frustrated visitor from Canada. So much so that she was able to write in her journal:

  “Life is going on … I have had two weeks of physical relations with Charles that finally gave me a sense of communication both physical and spiritual … and some tenderness that is essential to me. I did, after all, give up my family and my country to be with my beloved …”

  Pattaya is the Waikiki of Thailand, two hours by car south of Bangkok, a once slumbering fishing village pumped up and painted by Western commerce into a vulgar parade of high-rise hotels and infernal motorboats that assault the placid sea like mosquitoes on a sunbather. But the weather is benevolent year round, and elephants can be rented as taxis, and the main drag is a mélange of German sauerkraut and French crepes and Japanese noodles and American disco. Tourists usually love it, particularly those smart enough to hire a boat and find the remote peace of a coral reef isle where the snorkeler can delight over sea creatures as brilliantly colored as the flowers in the Thieves’ Market.

  On the very first day of September 1975, a young Australian PhD candidate and his Indonesian bride sat on the sands of Pattaya beach and sipped coconut milk from shells. It was the intention of Russell Lapthorne and his wife, Vera, to spend but this one day at Pattaya, for their schedule was crowded. In the days t
o come, they would thread through the fringe of Asia, stopping at the romantic-sounding places called Hua Hin, Hat Yai, Penang, and Kuala Lumpur, final destination Singapore before flying home to Melbourne, where he was a graduate student majoring in politics and sociology. The Lapthornes were very much in love and they entwined their arms to drink from the coconut shells, ignoring a gaggle of Thai boys who were laughing and pointing from behind palm trees.

  Another couple suddenly rode up on bicycles. The man was dressed in swimming trunks and a polo shirt. He was at first glance, thought Lapthorne, an Oriental, for the face was tinged burnt gold and the hair, though styled European, was thick, black, and coarse. But when the man waved and spoke a cheery “Hello,” then launched into a rapid inquiry about where to buy such coconut milk, Lapthorne heard French-accented English. The woman, who hung back shyly, spoke little, for she was not comfortable in English. Their names, they said in introduction, were Jean Belmont, of Paris, and his wife, Monique, once of Canada.

  Without being asked, Jean Belmont and his quiet wife, whose face was angry pink from the tropical sun, joined the Australian couple and within moments a friendship was struck, the easy kind that people fall into when on vacation. Monsieur and Madame Belmont revealed very little about themselves, save that they had been in the resort city for four days and were in the middle of a trip that had taken them from France to Beirut. Later they would travel to Bali and the Philippines before a regretful farewell to the East and a return to Paris, where Belmont was a “manufacturers’ representative” and where his wife, Monique, was in “fashion.”

  Presently, Belmont stripped off his polo shirt, paused in calculation to display his strong body, and plunged into the warm sea. But he returned quickly, complaining that the water was dirty and that civilization was destroying one of nature’s most idyllic treasures. It is true, agreed Lapthorne. For that very reason, he and his bride were going to Hua Hin, a remote and little-known beach on the other side of Thailand, where lovers could find a less commercial paradise.