By

Nicki Chen

A rainy day, though the blank-faced sky pretended innocence, shining in the puddles and on the rain-slicked pavement. Behind her Toyota’s fogged-up windows, Natalie leaned across the steering wheel like a student driver and looked straight ahead, feigning invisibility. Without turning her head, she saw a group of ni-Vanuatu women carrying big multi-colored umbrellas—red, blue, yellow, and green in wedges like giant pinwheels. The women stopped in front of le Privee Disco and waited to cross, each one holding her skirt tight around her knees with one hand as though she were about to ford a stream.

Almost every day Natalie made this seven-minute drive into town—for shopping or to rent a video or pay a bill. On school days she dropped Mariko off and picked her up. But on a Saturday afternoon like this she had no legitimate reason for going to town. On Saturdays in Vila everything closed at noon and didn’t open again until Monday morning. The only exceptions were the little Chinese general stores and the Chinese-owned supermarket, Au Bon Marche. As soon as she passed Au Bon Marche it would be hard to explain what she was doing.

After seven months in Port Vila, Natalie might have been able to say she was enjoying the experience of living abroad—might have, that is, if it hadn’t been for the way her husband had changed. She wasn’t sure when it started or what the cause was. The first couple of months were a blur—the strangeness of life on a little South Pacific island, the hassle of getting set up in a new house and enrolling Mariko in a new school. If Yoshio’s attitude toward her had started changing immediately, she hadn’t noticed. The first incident she remembered was the night of the dinner theater performance at Ma Barker’s.

It was March, a week after the second cyclone, and big stacks of broken branches were still piled everywhere along the streets waiting for garbage pickup. The two sandalwood trees inside the grounds of the French Embassy had lost so many branches the Indian mynah birds hardly had enough nesting spots for the night. Yoshio had parked their car two blocks away from Ma Barker’s in front of Pilioko House.

Almost as soon as they’d slammed the car doors, Natalie found herself trailing behind. She called to Yoshio to wait, but he didn’t answer and he didn’t slow down, so she ran to catch up. As soon as she was beside him, she relaxed and he pulled ahead again. Running once more, she caught him by the arm. “Hey, what’s this?” she shouted over the raucous squawks and clicks of the mynah birds. “You want a wife who walks three paces behind?” He pulled his arm away and kept walking.

They had a table that night with Chick Farley and Yoshio’s boss Bob Stevens and their wives. Chick Farley was the number-three man in the Vanuatu office. Yoshio—the youngest and least experienced of the professional officers—was, out of ten officers, number ten. Natalie had thought he was rushing because he was nervous about keeping his boss waiting. But he needn’t have worried. Natalie and Yoshio were the first in their party to arrive.

While they waited, Yoshio didn’t seem interested in talking, so Natalie sat back and looked around. This was the first time she’d been inside Ma Barker’s, one of the oldest restaurants in Port Vila. Its native-print curtain, worn woodwork, and amateur painting of nineteenth century sailing ships evoked that period in history when Western exploitation of and enchantment with the South Seas was at its height. The evening’s entertainment was a series of British comedy sketches, so she wasn’t surprised to see the tables filling up with expatriates: long-time resident English and French former colonialists; Australian, Chinese and Vietnamese businesspeople; and the diplomats, aid givers, and wanderers who moved endlessly from the world’s capitals to its backwaters and back again.

After the Stevens and the Farleys arrived, the three men gravitated to one end of the table. Waiting for the food to be served, they drank whiskey and discussed what Natalie after only three months already recognized as their customary topics: golf, business, and work-related gossip. At that time Yoshio was at a disadvantage on the subject of golf. Natalie overheard Bob Stevens pressuring him to take it up and Yoshio protesting that he didn’t have any clubs yet.

“Well,” Bob advised him, “you’d better get hopping. You’re going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

When Bob chided Chick Farley for a disastrous putt, Cynthia Stevens turned to the women and smiled. “Bob’s favorite tactic,” she told them in a low voice, “is to get his opponents off-balance. He likes to wager large amounts at crucial points in the game because he believes fear gives him an edge, especially against younger men.”

The comment was more candid than any Natalie had heard before from Cynthia. The boss’s wife was a thin woman in her early fifties. She carried herself with dignity, straightening her back and neck at frequent intervals. Usually, she dressed in vibrant blues and greens, some days in shades of lavender or coral. That evening she was as warm and poised as ever, but for the first time Natalie noticed Cynthia’s habit of losing touch with a conversation, her pale blue eyes wandering, a look of melancholy settling on her face. Noor Farley seemed unaware of it. If Noor was describing her latest trip to Sydney or her success in growing Malaysian vegetables and herbs, she just assumed that Cynthia was listening. But Natalie was unsettled by it, and often stopped short or hurried a story to its conclusion. She was glad when the comedy sketches started, ending the necessity of conversation.

Afterwards, on the way back to the car, Yoshio took the lead again. The way he swaggered just ahead of her—knees and elbows wide, back straight, toes out—Natalie couldn’t avoid conjuring up stereotypical images in which she was the little woman mincing along behind in wooden clogs. “Husband, dana-san, dana-san,” she shouted in a high-pitched, childlike voice. Then with tiny, scuffing steps, she hurried to catch up with him.

“Stop clowning around,” he said, without slowing his pace.

On both sides of them theatergoers opened their car doors, started their engines, and clicked on their headlights, providing an interval of action and light on Vila’s quiet main street. And in the sandalwood trees the Indian mynah birds, who were finished fighting for their positions, slept quietly.

That night it still seemed a joke, but in the following weeks Yoshio continued to pull ahead of her every time they walked somewhere together. Sometimes Natalie grabbed his elbow and a couple of times she complained. Once on the way to the swimming pool at Le Lagon she grabbed his hand, digging her nails into his soft caramel skin. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded. They were alone on the sidewalk above the pool. Mariko had run ahead, scampering across the lawns, missing most of the sidewalks.

“Doing what?” He looked genuinely uncomprehending.

“Walking ahead of me.”

“Why are you lagging behind?”

“Every time I try to walk beside you, you pull ahead.”

“Come on, Natalie,” he said, “what kind of paranoia is this?” He frowned, his lips forming the pronounced inverted “u” of a Japanese war mask as he jerked his hand loose and strode toward the pool, passing between lawns and decorative palms and hibiscus plants with salmon-colored flowers each the size of a child’s face.

After that she tried to be subtle about catching up with him, or she stayed behind. Maybe, she thought, the whole thing would pass when he became more established in his new office—a place riddled with rivalry, if she judged it correctly. She remembered Cynthia Stevens’ comment about her husband using fear to get an edge on younger men, and she thought back on all the mock-humorous put-downs she had heard pass between Yoshio’s colleagues. Under the circumstances, she concluded, she shouldn’t take Yoshio’s behavior too seriously.

Yet that was how it all started: with his trailblazing tendencies and her complaints, and then her sympathy. Maybe she simply lacked imagination, not knowing what to do next when her objections didn’t produce results. Or maybe she lacked will. Today at least she was doing something—although she still had a failure of imagination when she tried to think where her little investigative trip would lead.

By now she had passed Au Bon Marche. She turned the corner and started down the road to town. Fine raindrops spattered the windshield, got wiped away, and then spattered it again. A small yellow bus stopped in front of her, and a man in striped shorts prepared to climb aboard. She felt trapped behind the bus, conspicuous. If someone saw her, she would just say she was going to pick up Mariko from a play date. That didn’t hold water though. Mariko’s friend lived in the other direction. Finally, the bus started up, and Natalie followed it down the hill. Why, on the other hand, would anyone bother to ask where she was going? Still, they might …. How involved even the simplest lie became!

Yoshio’s office building was on the main road, but his window faced a side street. She slowed in passing just enough to see the two cars she was looking for: Yoshio’s and Dominique’s. Then she drove past the last store on the street and turned around at Trader Vic’s.

Rather than make a second pass in front of the office building, she made her way around and through enormous mud puddles to the rutted gravel road behind the shops. Only one shop was open, Video World. She parked behind it next to three other cars. This was ridiculous, she thought. She should go back home and wait for him. Then, when he arrived, she’d confront him directly. That’s undoubtedly what she would have done a year ago. She couldn’t deny, however, that things had changed since they left the States. Somehow here she always seemed at a disadvantage. Everywhere, even in her own kitchen.

For years she’d been serving Japanese and American meals in roughly equal numbers. The arrangement had always suited them both. After eight years of living in Oregon, Yoshio appreciated a thick steak every bit as much as he did a fresh slice of sashimi.  A month or two after they got settled in Vanuatu, however, suddenly he didn’t want American food anymore. He didn’t come right out and tell her, but nothing American pleased him. If she cooked a beef stew, he wanted rice to go with it. When she baked scalloped potatoes with ham and cheese, he grumbled about no real meat. And one day when she made fish and chips, he told her it was a waste of good snapper. “I don’t know why you didn’t steam it with ginger,” he said. She began to feel uneasy about serving spaghetti, and she knocked meatloaf off the menu entirely. She wasn’t the first woman in the world to give in to her husband’s preferences in food. Her own mother, for example, who always ordered fish or seafood in a restaurant, never cooked it in her own home.

Natalie took the key out of the ignition and slammed the car door. She might as well finish what she’d started. Taking the long way around, she walked behind the shops, crossing the street by Ma Barker’s. It was one thing to be willing to indulge her husband’s food fancies; finding the ingredients was something else. She couldn’t buy nori in Vila, the wasabi she brought from the States was almost gone, and prawns were almost never available. When they were, the price was outrageous. For a month after the first cyclone, they were consistently out-of-stock. Natalie remembered the day she finally found some at the fish market. It was the same day Yoshio brought Stevens and Dominque home after a cocktail party at the Australian High Commission.

Natalie turned down the side street next to Ma Barker’s—one short side street that was Vila’s Chinatown. It was alive that afternoon, but not exactly lively: one car, two ni-Vanuatu men leaning against a wall, a couple browsing at the sidewalk rack. Even though the rain was light, Natalie dodged from one awning to another. She passed two little Chinese girls sitting on the curb in front of Chan Store pushing rubber bands through the rainwater with plastic rulers. Chinese smells emanated from an open door, though the bush knives and cheap kettles in the window gave no clue to the source. Yoshio’s office was on the next block. She could approach it from behind.

At the intersection near the police station, she stopped. She was almost perpendicular to the reflective glass of his window, but even so it might be possible for him to see her. She backtracked and hurried across the street farther down, then, hidden by awnings and overhangs, she approached the entrance to his building.

The night of the Australian High Commissioner’s cocktail was the first of many nights that Yoshio unexpectedly showed up with his friends, and Natalie cooked for them. That afternoon, thinking she would use only half the prawns for tempura for herself and Yoshio, she froze the rest. She gave Mariko an early dinner of chicken fried noodles. Then she got to work shelling and butterflying the prawns.

When Yoshio came through the door, he looked agitated. “Get some snacks,” he told Natalie as soon as he saw her. Bob Stevens and Dominique, the new technical assistant from the office, were right behind him.

“Sorry to barge in like this, Natalie,” Stevens said. “Damned bad manners.”

“What would you like, Bob?” Yoshio asked, “Scotch? Martini? Beer?” He pulled open the upper doors of the china cabinet and waited to choose a glass.

“What kind of Scotch do you have.”

“Glenfiddich. Only the best for the boss.”

“Yeah, I’ll stick with Scotch. A splash of water.”

“Gin and tonic for me,” Dominique said. She picked up a small figurine and sat down on the arm of the nearest chair. “What’s this guy doing?” She tapped a pretty tapered finger on the palm of the little porcelain man’s hand. Her straight black hair fell over one eye, reaching to the tip of her small breast.

“He’s begging,” Natalie said, offering Dominique a choice of two varieties of rice crackers.

“Oooooh! I don’t like beggars,” Dominique said, holding the figurine at arm’s length.

Natalie took the offending monk from the young woman’s hand and returned it to the end table. “He’s a Buddhist monk,” she said. “Would you like some crackers?”

“We don’t have any beggars in Tahiti,” Dominique said, as she gracefully filled her hand with crackers.

“Come on. Every country has beggars,” Stevens argued, swirling his Scotch. “Don’t knock ‘em. Anybody could end up a beggar; I could myself.”

Dominique snickered, dropping her head abruptly so that her hair fell like a waterfall over her face.

“No, I mean it,” he said. He lowered himself into the chair beside her as though he didn’t notice she was sitting on the arm. “If you need to, you beg. Of course, if you’re smart enough, you’ll never need to.” He looked straight ahead, lecturing the Japanese scroll on the far wall. “And, if you’re fast and mean besides, you can force the bloody buggers to get down on their knees and come begging to you.”

Dominique snorted. She tossed her head back and lifted both arms to smooth the hair across the top of her head. “What bloody buggers?” she asked sweetly.

“Ask Yoshio,” Stevens said. “He understands these things.”

Yoshio closed the small refrigerator behind the bar and motioned for Natalie. “Me?” he protested. “Do you ever see crowds of supplicants kneeling on my office floor?” And to Natalie he whispered urgently, “Lime, we need slices of lime.”

“You see, Dominique,” Stevens said, “he’s been imagining just such a scene. This man of yours is going places, Natalie. Someday you’ll be a manager’s wife.” He turned to Dominique, his eyes at breast-level, “Yoshio’s got the right instincts for playing the game.”

“Does he?” Dominique said, leaning closer to Stevens as she studied Yoshio.

“Do you want me to call Cynthia for you?” Natalie asked.  “Let her know you’re here?”

“No, she’ll eat when she gets hungry.”

Guessing at the course the evening would take, Natalie brought out some sliced limes. Then she went back into the kitchen and started thawing a couple of chicken breasts and the rest of the prawns.

“We could use something more substantial than rice crackers,” Yoshio called to her from the sofa where he was joining the boss in Scotch with a splash of water. “What have you got, Nat?”

The next Friday Yoshio invited a bunch of them home after work for drinks: Stevens and Dominique, and also Farley, Hashimoto, and Lopez. Soon Friday nights expanded into Fridays and Wednesdays or Thursdays. Not everyone stayed for dinner; some only stayed for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Stevens and Dominique almost never missed the drinking and eating sessions; sometimes Dominique dropped by for dinner on her own.

One day in exasperation Natalie called Dominique a pest.

“Honey, you’re like a big sister to her,” Yoshio protested. “She’s all alone here in Vila. How would you like to eat alone every night?”

She tried to ignore the clues. Then one day from the kitchen where she was cooking pork tepanyaki for dinner, she saw Mariko staring at Yoshio and Dominique. They were sitting across from each other at the dining room table with a hibachi between them. Yoshio was holding a barbecue stick up to Dominique’s mouth and she was gazing into his eyes while she daintily bit into a thin strip of sate-flavored chicken breast and slid it off the end of the stick. When Mariko saw her mother, she blushed. Then she turned away and ran out the front door. Seeing it through her daughter’s eyes, there was no way Natalie could pretend it didn’t exist. Nor could she ignore any longer Yoshio’s newly discovered love for working at the office on weekends.

The rain was becoming heavier now. Standing under the overhang at the entrance to his office, Natalie hesitated. She had prepared an excuse. She would say she’d left a letter from her mother on Yoshio’s desk. She’d started to answer it when she realized it was gone. Did she leave it in his office? She wiped the accumulated rain off her shoulders and the tops of her arms, fluffed it out of her hair, and opened the door to the dark stairway. Halfway to the first landing she stopped to remove her shoes. A warm dampness settled around her. As she continued up the stairs, the sound of her breathing filled the enclosed stairwell. A few stairs from the top she leaned against the wall and put her shoes back on.

Once she was standing in front of the one-way mirror of the door to the suite of offices, there was no turning back. She pushed the door gently and stepped inside. Dominique’s computer was humming, its blue screen bright and still. Her handbag was resting against the leg of her chair. This was the central open area for secretaries and technical assistants. She walked deeper into the suite toward Yoshio’s door and stopped. In the empty office, Dominique’s giggle easily penetrated the closed door. Then Yoshio’s voice, low, intense. Silence. Some rustling.

This was what she’d come to find out. Turning away, she fled, tip-toeing, pursued by a high pitched “oo-la-la.” Before she could open the door to the stairs, she heard his low, breathless growl and the scraping of furniture.

The sounds seemed to follow her as she plunged down the first flight of stairs. She stopped to catch her breath at the landing. Then, starting down again, she almost ran into Bob Stevens slowly making his way up the stairs. “Hi, Natalie,” he said without changing his pace, looking past her as he sometimes did.

Outside, she collapsed against the building, too weak to move, as though something solid inside her had fizzled out. The possibility of an affair had been nothing more than speculation, easy to pretend out of existence. But a suspicion had no giggles, no oo-la-las, no passionate grunts. If only she’d left it that way! She might have been able to live with it.

A car splashed through some puddles on the main street and disappeared. At the corner, a man squatting under an awning stared at her. Natalie forced herself to stand independently of the wall. Soon everything would be out in the open: Yoshio’s affair, her spying. Despite her rage, she cringed at the thought of Stevens opening the door on Yoshio and Dominique.

She hurried past the Chinese trade stores. From the doorway of Chan Store the same two little girls looked out, twirling rubber bands.

Dodging the potholes behind Video World, Natalie fumbled in her purse for the car keys. When she got to her car, though, she walked right past it. Of course not, she realized suddenly. Stevens wouldn’t open the door. That wasn’t his way. Heading toward the bay, her eyes clouded with tears, she tripped over the irregular chunks of coral rock that dotted the grassy strip between the gravel road and the seawall. Stevens would wait for Dominique to come out and then, ten or fifteen minutes later, he’d think of an excuse to talk to Yoshio. Casually he’d mention something about seeing Natalie on the stairs. That was all. Everyone would know; no one would admit knowing.

As she approached the seawall, Natalie could see deep fissures running across the ground next to it. In places the earth had completely given way. She jumped across a small chasm. Vila’s seawall was undermined not only by the recent cyclones but also by the everyday waves that lapped at it, waves like those that now whispered against it innocuously. Raindrops, larger and more than before, hit the water and jumped out again. Not far away an outboard engine hummed.

She wouldn’t have to admit hearing anything either, she realized. Suddenly it seemed as though an alternate world was coming into focus before her eyes, a world where, in the absence of public disclosure, truth was irrelevant and anything was possible as long as everybody conspired in the illusion.

All the way home in a pelting rain, Natalie could think only of sleep, of her bed—even though it was their bed—of closing her eyes, forgetting.

She dropped her handbag and her wet clothes on the bedroom floor and sprawled naked and exhausted on the bed for thirty minutes, her mind numb, unthinking. Then she dressed and forced herself into the kitchen to wait for Yoshio.

She was butterflying prawns when he drove up.

From the moment he called to her from the living room she sensed what he expected. “I’m in the kitchen,” she replied, her voice as normal as his. No embarrassing scenes, no public humiliation. No need to change. She sliced halfway through the convex side of a prawn. Then with the tip of her knife, she lifted its slender gut, carefully so the transparent tube with its blackish waste stayed intact.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked, appearing in the doorway. His face was a perfect mask of normality.

Holding a prawn up by its tail, she faced him. “I haven’t decided on a recipe yet,” she said. “What would you suggest?”

He blinked. “It’s entirely up to you.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “That it is.”

He stood there a moment longer, watching her—for some clue, she thought. Or was he willing her to play the game?”

As soon as he left, she covered the prawns with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. She needed some air. Their little charade had been brief but exhausting. She stumbled out onto the veranda and sank into a chaise lounge. There wasn’t even the shadow of a breeze, and the air, warm and heavy after the rain, had a sickening odor, sweet and tropical and ripe for fermentation. If she drove to town now, she wondered, would Dominique’s car still be there next to Steven’s? And if she tip-toed upstairs, would Dominique’s computer still be humming blandly; would the boss’ office door be closed? And then if she sat on the receptionist’s desk until his door opened and waved her mother’s letter as an excuse before she left, would Stevens merely smile at her and wish her a good day?

Natalie closed her eyes and thought of Cynthia with her tall hedges, her careful smile and straight back. Her empty respectability. Suddenly at the edge of the veranda there was a rustling of leaves. Then the air—pretending freshness—swept across Natalie’s skin and lifted the hem of her skirt. Through the red black of her eyelids shadows danced, forming a circle around her. They were nothing but specters, bloodless shapes smiling and shaking bangles on their invisible wrists. “Easy,” they called to her. “It’s easy, easy.” And though they had no substance, she felt their lure.

And she knew enough to fear them.