Out of Orange: A Memoir Read online

  While we were at the beach that day, I had made a quick decision to put an end to the bleeding and save myself from boredom. We would have one last little party that night. But the next day we were flying back to Java. We were all going to go check out Yogyakarta, the place Henry and Bradley had claimed to be heading to a lifetime ago. I would wait until the party later to break the news about leaving paradise. No sense ruining a relaxing day at the beach. Nobody was going to be thrilled about our next stop.

  Later that night, I nearly lost my resolve about leaving when my attempt to convey the new travel plans to my friends was drowned in champagne and revelry. Nonetheless, I managed to make our departure announcement without incident. I realized, though, that the reality of leaving was not going to elicit any complaints until we were actually packing up and exiting Eden.

  I nabbed one of the unopened bottles of Veuve Clicquot from the ice bucket, slipped out of the lanai, and closed the door behind me. My friends’ drunken sing-along wasn’t quite as torturous from the other side of the door, and the Walkman’s puny speakers sucked. All I could hear from my vantage point were my friends’ voices howling their horrible rendition of 4 Non Blondes’ latest hit, “What’s Up?” Their voices rose as they got to the chorus, which everyone knew the words to, even drunk: “Twenty-five years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of hope . . .”

  Edwin loved this song. I had too until then. I think Edwin thought they’d written the damn song for him. Not really, but he had tortured everyone for the last month, playing it over and over again, trying to make it his own. Donald, Garrett, and I had been there for six weeks already, and the two extra weeks made a big difference in my capacity for irritants. I was homesick and had been out of touch with my family, my cats, my real life, for too long.

  The sing-along I had just escaped had started out as an interruption to my important discussion regarding our upcoming departure back to Java. Edwin hadn’t been listening. He never did, and he had spontaneously burst into a pathetically overtheatrical serenade to his lover, Garrett. Like Tom Cruise’s impromptu serenade to Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, except that in this case, it had been Tom getting serenaded and Kelly had been lip-synching, not singing. I think everyone else had started singing just to put an end to Edwin’s performance and Garrett’s humiliation from the display.

  Watching Garrett’s attempts to train Edwin to be a good drug smuggler was nerve-racking. Then listening to the fights they would have after Edwin reached the belligerent drunk status, as he did just about every night, was also getting tiring. I had started considering the possibility that Garrett had recruited Edwin with the actual intent of getting rid of him. There was no way this guy could be trained enough to get home. Failure to get through Customs would certainly put an end to their relationship.

  Leaving the lanai, I walked out into the quiet night until all I could hear were crickets and a slight breeze slipping through the palms. I strolled alongside the serpentine swimming pool that crawled through Hilton’s Bali resort, casting its bluish-green glow on everything it passed, and considered taking a swim. It was an unusually comfortable night and my champagne buzz was perfect. I continued along the walkway, encountering only a couple of other late-nighters on the long trek through the grove heading down toward the ocean.

  I got spooked by a woman behind one of the waterfalls. This was near where a rock bridge arched across the pool. She was well hidden and probably thought she was invisible, but the electronically forced waterfall had a rhythm to it. It created a strobe effect in the lit veil of water cascading down in front of her. She stood in the shadows, but I got a couple of glimpses before I fully understood what I was looking at. The woman was naked and not alone. Happy I had not yelped when startled, I hoped they would not see me. I picked up my pace and walked very lightly, keeping my flip-flops from flapping. After that, there were no other resort residents about in the dark. I walked around the bend in the pool, where it elongated, became wider, and looked as though it reached out to merge with the ocean.

  Standing at the sidewalk’s edge, I could see the ocean glistening beyond the last row of coconut trees. These marked the perimeter of the resort’s green landscape. The moon was bright enough to cast shadows in the beach’s white sands, and the tide was in. I stepped into the moist grass, careful not to step on one of the hundreds of frogs that came out after dark and littered the grass and walkways. I couldn’t see them very well in the grass.

  Stepping on a big old frog in the dark, in your flip-flops, was an awful business. This was not the same as the bugs I probably stepped on daily without ever knowing, and while squishing a frog under my foot is not nearly as horrible as accidentally hitting a bunny rabbit or squirrel with my car, it still upset me to carelessly murder another being so gruesomely with my toes. So I navigated to the beach with great care.

  I made my way across the sand and out toward the calm sea. The glassy water reflected the night sky with so little distortion that it looked like I could leap into the heavens from my sandy edge of the world—or fall off. It had a dizzying effect too, when mixed with the Valium and all the champagne I had consumed. I had discovered I could buy certain prescription drugs over the counter in Indonesia and they helped soothe my ever-increasing anxieties. I pulled my loosely knotted sweatshirt from my hips and spread it over the soft sand.

  I had come out here on a couple of nights during our long stay in paradise and had already discovered that there were no crabs or any other exotic night creatures to fear here. The beach was wide with a gentle slope, almost imperceptible, and the water’s edge a long walk from the start of the sand, even when the tide was full. I think this was what accounted for the lack of surf, or at least a gentler surf than I had seen before. The waves here didn’t crash onto the beach like elsewhere; they just sort of rolled in without cresting.

  I sat down on my sweatshirt and lay back. This was the same spot where I had been sitting with Piper, hours earlier, watching our last Balinese sunset. Two women we’d met at the resort had been there with us. It was also our last night with our new friends and our fake relationship. We had kept up a ruse about being together and held hands just like they did. Piper had discovered the pair earlier that week. Their room was across from ours and their porch faced ours. Piper had been doing a crossword or reading one morning. They had thought Piper was staring at them. One of the women had walked over to introduce herself to the peeping Lulu. The gaydar signals were confirmed when they learned Piper and I were from Northampton and Piper learned they were from San Francisco.

  The women were presently living in Jakarta, working for a bank, and were on vacation. They were not openly gay at work; they couldn’t be. They were just a little older than we were. One was in her late twenties, the other in her midthirties. They had lived in Jakarta for over a year and missed the company of other lesbians. Piper had admitted to them we were from the same church (gay) but had added that we were lovers.

  I can’t recall what Piper’s rational for this deception was, but I went along with it. She couldn’t come out and just tell them we were all drug-smuggling buddies and we were stranded in Bali because the heroin we were supposed to be transporting had not yet arrived. Instead, she made up a cover story that we had been together for a while, she had just graduated from Smith College, and this trip was her reward. I’m not sure why our new friends never questioned how we could afford such a long stay. I’m nosy about stuff like this and forever asking inappropriate questions, like how much money do you make or how much did that present cost, even when it has nothing to do with me.

  We had been hanging out with them most of their trip and we had told them we had already been there for two weeks when we first met them. That was when we’d thought we were about ready to leave. They’d had to save their money for a year to afford the resort in Bali for two weeks. We had taken them out to dinner a few times, and then we had spontaneously decided to stay longer. They never asked me about what I did for a li
ving. I assumed everyone was as nosy as I was and guessed Piper had spun some excellent fantasy, one that kept them from asking.

  They kept telling me how lucky I was to have Piper. They said she was beautiful, so smart, and how great we were together. I had figured Piper made me out to be her benefactor and they were entreating me to appreciate what I had. Perhaps they sensed the charade but mistook it for a fading interest on my part. I would have made the same sort of assumption if a couple in this paradise displayed no more affection than holding hands. I suppose they worried I was bored and might dump Piper and move on to the next Twinkie my money could buy so they were trying to talk some sense into me. They could not have been more wrong.

  When I found out that they thought Piper was our gravy train, not me, and our good fortune was her family’s money, not my money, I realized they had just been stating the obvious. I was lucky to have Piper. She was beautiful and smart, and we were great together. But I already knew that. The idea of becoming Piper’s lover had already taken residence in my dreams and was affecting my ability to make rational decisions. I thought of little else. It was good we were getting away from this place, before I spent all my money and Phillip’s too trying to entertain her and show off.

  In the daytime, I would stride a good distance out into the emerald water and it still only reached halfway up my calves. If I wanted to swim or play in the surf, it was better to head left, farther up, where the beach sloped more sharply and the water deepened quickly. But here, the surf rolled softly and traversed such distances into the beach that by the time it reached its destination, it made only the tiniest little trickle. People sunbathed here sitting or lying right in the water.

  The sand was so fine that it squeaked as I walked on it. If I sat on it in the water, the sand felt like a warm yielding body. The water remained shallow until a hundred yards out; therefore, creatures large enough to eat me couldn’t reach me. It was probably the most delicious tanning in the world, but I had suffered a few burns doing this when we’d first come here in our milky winter skins.

  That had been the spring trip, when Craig, Molly, and I had discovered Bali. It was fall now and I wasn’t burning anymore. No sunburn chills anymore, just a radiant warmth that would last through the night and not peel off in the morning. I felt like a battery being charged in the sun and the water, then drained every night dancing, drinking, and running amok. Even Piper and Donald, with their fair skin, her blond hair, his reddish hair, and their freckles, had stopped burning and had fallen into this boho’s dream. Now they were both sun-kissed blonds and their freckles had merged into a healthy glow.

  In the daylight, cabana boys would make the long hike down to the beach to the marinating sunbathers and make sure our frozen mudslides, strawberry-banana daiquiris, and margaritas stayed full and frozen. I often wondered how frequently tourists drowned in this drowsy luxury. Late at night, though, the beach was desolate and quiet, not even a noisy surf to disturb me. With no city lights competing, the stars filled the sky and mirrored in the water all around me so densely that it looked like an infinite black well of diamonds hanging above, as if I could reach up and scoop out a handful of stars in my hand.

  We were leaving Bali the next day and flying back to Jakarta, back to Java and the dirty masses. There, we would hop a train to a place north of Yogyakarta, another city on the island of Java, the most densely populated island in Indonesia, or in the world for that matter. Java is more densely peopled than most places on Earth. It has a population of 143 million, but it’s only as big as New York State, whose population is under 20 million. Imagine New York City with seven times as many people. That is what had me unsettled and in need of peace, a combination of excitement and nerves, along with feeling a little sadness. Resorts were lovely, safe places to wait out delays while in the third world, but they were an expensive solace.

  If this trip went belly-up, I would be broke, but Phillip would be screwed. He was my true partner in crime. He had been sending me Western Union wires on his American Express. That put him in danger of ending up with a bill he could never pay on a bartender’s wages. Never mind the fact that drug smugglers should probably avoid doing business on paper. The best way to slow the spending—or bleeding, as he had taken to calling it—was to leave the safety of our Western resort and travel somewhere inland on the big island. Our honeymoon was over and Piper would probably not be very happy with our next stop. Edwin, Garrett’s spoiled little queen, would definitely hate it.

  I picked myself up and sat facing the water. I opened the bottle of champagne I had toted with me and took a bubbly swig that went up my nose. The water appeared to be glowing and it was not from the reflection of the sky. I watched as little points of bright greenish light moved slowly in the surf, and I stood back up to get a better view. Once standing, I could see that the entire shallow waterfront was aglow wherever there was movement in the water. I looked around in all directions, thinking a sight like this would bring others out to the beach. But I was still alone in my moonlit silence.

  I dropped my shorts, took off my sandals, and stepped out into the water. I knew what it was. I had seen it elsewhere, just not this much of it. It was glowing plankton that swirled around my feet as I waded through the water. I laughed like a giddy toddler in the bath and considered returning to this place, in less stressful times, to do this on mushrooms. I looked behind me again to see if anyone had come out. The hotel permitted nudity, and local laws, if any, didn’t apply to the Hilton’s long stretch of beach. Some of the Europeans wore nothing at all in the day. But in the dark isolation, I still worried. Some drunk fool, roaming around like myself, might get some crazy idea about my naked butt all alone out here.

  I would have to walk too far out into the abyss, where sea monsters lurked in the dark, to actually swim or even legitimately wade, so I decided to be less conspicuous and less likely to be eaten by sitting down in the water right where I was. I walked back up onto the beach to the place where I had left my shorts, champagne, and sandals and took my shirt off. I threw it into the little pile of my belongings, lit a cigarette, and waited for just a couple of minutes to make sure no one was coming. I felt exposed and vulnerable but only for a moment. I grabbed the champagne and headed back out into the glowing water, walking slowly backward, each step glowing in the sand for a few seconds before it faded away. As soon as the water reached my calf, I sat down.

  I took a long drink of the champagne and finished my cigarette, scanning the beach constantly. The beach remained desolate and quiet; just the light breeze disturbed the palms a little but not the water. I think this is what sailors refer to as a dead calm. I could barely hear anything, but I kept worrying someone would come to the beach. They would catch me all alone and naked as a jaybird, with my clothes on the beach.

  I sat in the water, which looked like Coke-bottle, green-lit glass when I swirled the sandy bottom with my fingers and grabbed handfuls and turned around to face the infinite horizon. The glowing plankton lit my naked thighs in its greenish light where sand slipped from my clenched fists. I reached down into the water with both my arms and gathered it, as if the water were a blanket I could lift. I pulled the water up and out of itself, so that it spilled down my arms and into the air. It looked like liquid neon as it fell from me and hit the water again. Plankton is made up of many living things. As the cascades of pregnant water fell back into itself, the plankton would swim crazily in maddening and bright little circles. I played like a child alone in the world of my bathtub and lost myself, which is why I didn’t hear the water swooshing behind me until Piper had nearly reached where I was sitting.

  “Wow!” she whispered softly as if she might disturb the spectacle. I flinched a little. I wasn’t disturbed by being discovered naked. I had gotten over that with Piper. She was far more comfortable with her body than I; stripping for a skinny dip was as natural as hopping in the shower. I was, however, perturbed at having been discovered so out of my character. I had worked extremely hard
to maintain a sort of cold distance between us until we were home again, safe. If I was serious about offering her Phillip’s role, and I was, I could not be her lover and partner in crime at the same time. Having a lover at all would make me horrible at my job. Having a person I loved involved in this same mess had already taught me a hard lesson. I didn’t need another Hester. In general, I thought it a very good idea that I stay single until I got out of this business. This distance thing was easier to do with the others than with Piper but more important to do with her. There was a chemistry brewing that I had not anticipated.

  She sat down in the water beside me, resting her warm thigh on mine. I handed her the champagne and she took it, tossed her head back, and drained the bottle. She’d had a buzz on before she’d arrived and she clearly wanted to maintain it. She pulled from behind her back a new cold bottle of champagne she had brought with her. She popped the cork with none of the decorum the waiter had when he delivered the bottles to us in the lanai. The champagne foamed quickly up and over the lip of the bottle and into the water. Where it fell in the water, the plankton went dark. I tested this and poured another few drops into the water. We watched, and sure enough, small spheres of darkness appeared in the water where the champagne had just fallen.

  Piper wanted to repeat the test yet one more time and I stopped her. She was about to empty the contents of the bottle into the sea to make it go dark for fun. Although neither of us really needed any more to drink, there was something profane about simply dumping a bottle of champagne out and pointlessly massacring a universe of plankton. I grabbed a fistful of sand. When I did this, it agitated the plankton and made it light up brightly, and I poured the sand out onto her submerged thigh. She was mesmerized and repeated the gesture, laughing each time it worked.

  She lay back in the water, not realizing that it was an inch or two too deep to comfortably rest one’s head without drowning, and she nearly choked. The salt water filled her mouth and nose in an instant. I watched as she reclined slowly in the warm water. Specks of luminous plankton stuck to her cheeks and glowed for an instant before the light vanished. When Piper shot back out of the water, clumsily choking, flinging her long, wet hair, and spraying watery moonlight over my dry shoulders, I realized that she was completely drunk. This was not her style.