The Bigness of the World (6 page)

Our colleagues considered our move to Nine-Story Building strange, though perhaps no stranger than the fact that we had continued to live in a hotel for months, and in the weeks that followed, they inquired frequently about our new lodgings. When we answered, “Everything is fine,” they appeared skeptical, and so we began complaining about the elevator, which smelled of urine masked by curry and made noises suggesting that it was not up to the task of carrying passengers up and down day after day. Soon we began using the stairs, which we generally had to ourselves because the other tenants seemed not to mind the elevator’s strange noises, or minded more the certainty of the exertion that the stairs required than the mere possibilities suggested by the noises, and so we went back to answering that everything was fine, dismissing our colleagues’ interest as yet another example of the unsolicited attention that we received in Malacca, where we seemed to be the only westerners in residence.

In fact, as we walked around town, people whom we had never met called out, “Hello, Miss Raffles College,” greeting us both in this same way. We were regarded as the American spinsters, teachers so devoted to our work that it had rendered us sexless, left us married
to the school. We were thought of in this way because we were strict with healthy expectations—that students study and not cheat, that they arrive on time, that they not take on the disaffected pose that teenagers find so appealing—but also, I suspect, because we were women without men.

As spinsters, we were thought to possess a certain prudishness, a notion that was clearly behind the request that Mr. Narayanasamy made of us one day after summoning us to his office. “We have a grave situation requiring our expeditious attention,” he began, gesturing grandly at the produce market visible from the window to the left of his desk. “That is the produce market,” he said, assuming that American spinsters would be unfamiliar with such a dirty, chaotic place, though in fact, we stopped there often to buy vegetables and practice our Malay because the vendors rarely tried to cheat us.

“I have just this morning received an upsetting visit from several of the vendors. It seems that two of our students have been observed holding hands and even”—he cleared his throat—“kissing.” He looked at us apologetically, as though explaining that we would not be receiving raises, and we nodded because we knew the couple to whom he referred.

“You must speak to them,” he declared, slapping his hand down on his desk.

“And tell them what?” Julia asked.

“Tell them that they must stop,” he explained in a reasonable tone. “Tell them that they are discrediting the school, their families, and themselves.”

“But they’re adults,” Julia said.

“Very well,” said Mr. Narayanasamy, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Then I shall speak to them, though I too am busy. Still, it is my duty to attend to the duties for which others lack time.” He reached up as though to tighten his tie, but the knot already
sat snugly against his throat, and Julia and I departed, allowing our refusal to stand as an issue of time constraints.

“You let me do all the talking,” said Julia several minutes later as we sat outside a café, waiting for our orange juice to arrive. We had become a bit obsessed with orange juice, for no matter how carefully we stressed that we did not want sugar, we had yet to receive juice that met this simple specification. “You made me seem like the unreasonable one.”

I knew that Julia hated to appear unreasonable, and so I considered apologizing. “Care to bet on the sugar?” I said instead, hoping to redirect her ire, to remind her that I was an ally, at least when it came to sugar.

The waitress, a young Malay woman with a prominent black tooth, appeared balancing two very full glasses of orange juice on a tray. As she drew near, she seemed to lose speed, as though she sensed the depth of our thirst and was overwhelmed by the power she held to alleviate it, finally stopping altogether, resting the tray on the back of a nearby chair. As we watched, she picked up one of the glasses and took a sip before placing it back on the tray and continuing toward us. Smiling, she set the sipped-from glass in front of me, the untouched one in front of Julia.

“Excuse me,” I said politely. “I believe you drank from my glass.”

She smiled at me. “Is fine,” she replied and departed gracefully.

“What did she mean by that?” I asked Julia. “Did she mean, ‘Yes, I did drink from your glass and the fact that I did so is fine,’ or did she simply mean that the juice is fine? As in, ‘I took a sip of your juice just to make sure, and it’s fine.’”

We studied the juices for a moment. I knew that Julia wanted to drink hers, and why shouldn’t she? Nobody had sipped from her glass.

“Well,” I said peevishly. “Go ahead.”

“Maybe she was just smelling it,” she suggested once she had taken two very long drinks.

“Smelling it?” I said.

“Yes, you know. Just sniffing it.”

“You saw her drink from it.”

“Yes, she definitely drank from it,” she agreed, changing tack. “Though I don’t see what the big deal is.”

I considered the implications of this last statement, considered it, that is, within the context of our relationship. Julia and I had been together for two years, not a lifetime, granted, but it was, I believed, a
length of time. She knew things about me: that I could not tolerate the smell of fish in the morning; that I felt suffocated at being told the details of other people’s bodily functions; that I abhorred public nose picking, both the studied sort in which some of my students engaged, and the fast poking at which I always seemed to catch people on buses or in line. Then, too, there was the matter of what she jokingly referred to as “the zones,” which, simply put, are the areas of the body that I do not care to have touched nor to see touched on others nor, quite frankly, to even hear discussed. During my last checkup just before we left for Malaysia, my doctor nonchalantly pressed her hands to my abdomen, coming far too close to my navel, which, along with my neck, is a primary zone.

“Could you please not brush against my navel?” I had said, perhaps a bit sharply.

“Your navel?” she replied, pulling back as though I had accused her of biting.

“Yes,” I said. “It unsettles me.” I felt that
unsettles
was a perfectly appropriate word for the situation, precise enough in connotation to convey my displeasure, but cryptic enough to save me from feeling foolish, assuming that she had the good manners not to press the issue, which she did not.

“How strange,” she replied, pausing to regard me. Then, her hands drawn to her own navel, she began to massage it. “The navel, you know, is the final remaining symbol of our connection to our mothers, a reminder of our past dependence.” Her rubbing intensified, and I suspected that she might be newly pregnant.

“Please,” I said stiffly. “I would prefer that you not touch your navel in my presence. In fact, I would prefer that we not even discuss navels.”

When I arrived home that afternoon, I told Julia about the encounter, huffily, in a way that suggested that the doctor had been intentionally trying to goad me. She had been sympathetic, but that night at dinner, she had tentatively broached the subject again, her tone suggesting that she found my reaction perplexing, even perturbing, and though I concealed my dismay, I could not help but recall the early days of our relationship, when she had stroked my brow encouragingly as I related the story of the wood tick that had worked its way deep into my navel when I was eight.

“The big deal,” I replied, speaking loudly, which Julia hates. “The big deal is that this is my juice.” That night, as I lay in bed, Julia asleep next to me, it occurred to me that I did not even know whether the juice had come with sugar or without.

The following Saturday, Julia and I encountered Shah on the footbridge. I was surprised to see him there though not surprised at what his presence meant. He was wearing a pair of large white pants that flapped like sails in the evening breeze and, as usual, a purple shirt. As we passed him, he looked away, thus acknowledging my presence, and I, in deference to his wishes as well as bridge etiquette, said nothing.

“Poor fellow,” Julia remarked as we descended the steps at the other end.

“It does not justify his behavior,” I said vehemently, for I sensed
something in her tone, particularly in her use of the word
fellow
, which made Shah seem hapless, free of guile.

The next morning, Sunday, we were awakened early by the sounds of screaming, and when we dressed quickly and stepped out of our apartment, we found our neighbors gathered on the walkway outside, pressed against the railing that curved around the courtyard like theater patrons looking down from their box seats. As we wiggled our way in next to them, we saw that all around Nine-Story Building, the tenants stood in similar rows, everyone peering downward, at where a body lay in the courtyard below, face down, arms out, like a doll flung aside by a bored child.

“But this is becoming too much,” complained our neighbor Prahkash. “Why must they always come here to do themselves in? I pay the rent, not they. We should begin charging admission.” He spit over the rail, and I watched the drop fall and disappear.

The next day, we read in the newspaper that the victim was a Chinese man in his late forties who had just returned from a gambling trip to Australia, where he had lost the equivalent of fifty thousand U.S. dollars, a sum of money that it had taken his family five years to save. They were preparing to start a business, a karaoke restaurant, and the man, impatient to begin, had flown to Sydney, lost everything at the blackjack tables, and returned to Malaysia broke, taking a taxi from the airport in Kuala Lumpur back to Malacca. He was dropped at the night market, where he drank a cup of coffee at one of the stalls, leaving the suitcase behind when he departed. After seeing the man’s picture in the paper the next day, the stall owner had announced that he had the man’s suitcase, the suitcase that had, presumably, been used to tote the fifty thousand dollars on its one-way journey. The story of the abandoned suitcase had appeared as a separate article, next to a picture of the stall owner holding it aloft.

“Did you see the suitcase in the newspaper?” a neighbor inquired several days later as Julia and I passed her in the hall.

“Yes. The poor man,” I replied sourly. “Misplaced his suitcase as well.”

She paused and then, not unkindly, said, “Ours is the only building tall enough. It can’t be helped, you see.” She was trying to prepare me, letting me know that this was not an anomaly, but perhaps I looked puzzled or in need of further convincing, for she said it again, with the same air of resignation that tenants used to discuss the smell of urine in the elevator: ours was the only building tall enough—she paused—tall enough to ensure success. That was the word she used—
success
—from which I understood that somebody who jumped and lived would also have to suffer the humiliation of failure.

Julia said nothing during this exchange, but after we closed our door, she turned to me angrily and said, “Why do you have to act that way?”

“What way?” I asked, feigning innocence.

“Like you’re the only one who cares what happened to that man. Like she’s a jerk for even talking about him.”

“She was not talking about him,” I replied. “She was talking about his suitcase.”

“People are never just talking about a suitcase,” Julia said quietly.

That night, she did not come into our bedroom to sleep, which was fine with me as I found sleeping alone preferable in the tropical heat, though I had not mentioned this to Julia because it seemed imprudent to discuss anything related to our bed at that particular moment. There is a term that lesbians use—
bed death
—to describe what had already begun happening long before Julia took the bigger step of physically removing herself from our bed. In fact, at the risk of sounding confessional, a tendency that I despise, I’ll admit that we had not actually touched in any meaningful way since the afternoon that we bathed together at the seedy hotel. That this kind of thing
occurred with enough frequency among lesbians to have acquired its own terminology in no way made me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse, for I dislike contributing in any way to the affirmation of stereotypes.

Then, on the second Friday after she stopped sleeping in our bed, an arrangement that had continued without discussion, I was returning from Mahkota Parade with groceries when I ran into three students. “We saw Miss Julia at the bus station,” announced Paul, an amiable boy with a slightly misshapen head. This happened often, people reporting to us on the other’s activities, even on our own, as though we might have forgotten that we had eaten barbecued eel at a stall near the water the night before.

“Oh?” I replied, striving for a nonchalant
oh
rather than one that indicated surprise or begged for elaboration.

“Is she going back?” Paul asked, by which he meant leaving.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation, knowing it to be true, for, as Paul spoke, I had the sense that I was simply being reminded of something that had already happened.