Exposed

by

Nicki Chen

It’s early morning and Bob and I are eating breakfast on the patio. Anyone peeking over the steel gate at the side of the garden would see us—Bob in his cream shirt and silk tie squeezing lime onto his papaya, and me, lightly covered in raw silk spreading strawberry jam on my toast. My observer would see our Filipina maid in her neat yellow and white uniform walking toward us with a pot of hot coffee. He would notice the potted palmera, the maiden hair fern, the spacious garden at the patio’s edge, smooth and green with brilliant tropical flowers climbing the walls. He would hear Tessie greeting us softly, calling us ma’am and sir. All in all, his impression would be one of gracious living, peace, a measure of success.

I pour milk into my coffee, and Bob cuts his papaya slice—two lengthwise slashes and numerous quick crosscuts. He mentions an appointment he has this morning with the Minister of Finance. “It shouldn’t take long,” he says, “that is, assuming the Minister’s secretary remembers this time to inform him.” He turns his knife on its side and cuts the squares of papaya off the skin. The mist that was resting on the surface of the lagoon at sunrise is gone. A thin slice of the blue Pacific is visible beyond Erakor Peninsula. The air is fresh and warm. A visitor from the United States would be reminded of vacations he’d been on or dreamed of. He would frown at us, suspecting we took the warmth and beauty for granted.

I’ve been doing this for a long time, creating for myself a sympathetic observer. Today though it’s different. Today I’ve moved back a step or two, and I see myself watching the imaginary person who is watching me. It’s a perspective I don’t particularly enjoy. Maybe I’ll get used to it.

I certainly wouldn’t want to blame Ginny for anything. I started feeling uneasy even before her visit, a strange sense of dread that I succeeded for the most part in ignoring. When her plane landed, it seemed that everything was okay. She and her daughter climbed down from the plane. They waved up at me, and I leaned close to the wire mesh and waved back. I called Ginny’s name from the observation deck. I was thrilled to see her again—this old friend—every bit as thrilled as I told everyone I would be.

Outside the customs area, we hugged, and she introduced me to Kirsten. Last time I saw her—aside from Christmas card photos—she was a toddler. Now she was an attractive high school senior, soon to head off to college.

Then Ginny and I stepped back and looked at each other. And below the smiles and the pleasure, at the bottom of my chest, I felt something else. It was like the tap of a padded drumstick on a very large kettledrum, the sound low and edgeless, seemingly unheard. If someone had asked me then to interpret the feeling, I would have called it excitement. But now I wonder if it wasn’t fear. I think that afternoon—only twelve days ago—I had the same sensation looking at Ginny as I did the day we became friends: the sense of being known. Only then I was a college freshman from Wenatchee, longing to be known; and she, also a freshman from a small town, wanted to know me.

We met in the dormitory, fourth floor, west wing. She was on her way to the shower room. I had my door open. She saw me pulling my hair back and folding it under, admiring the reflection in a hand mirror of my reflection in the mirror over the sink, and she stopped, leaning her hip against my doorframe. “You don’t want to cut your hair,” she said simply, confident she knew my heart better than I did. And though I already had an appointment at the beauty parlor, already had plans to skip my afternoon Spanish class, I dropped my hair. Then I turned my head from side to side, and, feeling the softness of it on my shoulders, realized she was right. I didn’t want to cut it. Ginny just smiled, and continued on toward the shower room, her thongs slapping knowingly against the bottoms of her heels.

By the end of fall quarter, she was my best friend, she and Bernadette. We were a threesome. Gin, Cyn, and Bern we called ourselves for a joke. In those days gin was just another drink, and sin and burning were distant if not impossible fates, things from which we would almost certainly be preserved by all our good intentions.

Now, so many years later, I’m all too familiar with gin, an ingredient in Bob’s first drink of the evening. And, though not exactly preserved from sin and the threat of burning, I have managed over the years to banish the concepts quite nicely from my mind.

I expected Ginny to look different, and she did. In the airport, even as I was feeling and dismissing the tympani beat in my chest, I noted all the little signs of her aging: the expanded width of her hips, the scattering of white in her auburn hair that she easily could have covered with a good hair dye.

I helped them pull their suitcases over to the curb. On the sidewalk we passed through a small crowd of people waiting for relatives and friends and business associates. Most of them—both the ni-Vanuatu and the expatriates—wore thongs or sandals. Some children and a few adults were barefoot. A man whom I knew as a longtime expatriate, scruffy in his safari shorts and his Aussie bush hat, leaned against the wall. Two minibuses waited at the curb for their loads of tourists.

I glanced quickly at Ginny. This airport scene had come to seem normal to me, but I wondered what she thought. Vanuatu was not the kind of place one would expect Bob to be working in at this point in his career. In actuality, it had been a demotion for him, a kind of exile from his organization’s center of power. But we never spoke of that. And I imagined no one understood or speculated on the reason he had been sent here. I distracted people when they came to visit with Vanuatu’s strangeness and its pleasures—sailboats and flying fish and spitting volcanoes. I took them snorkeling off Moso Island and hiking up les Cascades. I gave parties, introducing them to an exotic mix of people. It was easy to impress visitors. I was worried, though, that Ginny would be different. She had always talked back, always challenged my interpretation of things.

Once in the car, passing through countryside about which I knew a story or two for every half mile, I began to relax. I was the tour guide, Ginny and her daughter, the tourists. I pointed out the sprouting fenceposts: “Even the fenceposts grow here.” And the golf course; “I knew a man who spent four years on this island and never drove farther from town than this golf course.” And I went a little out of my way to show them Mele-Maat Village. “The whole village was relocated to this spot after a volcanic eruption virtually destroyed the little island they lived on before.” Ginny and Kirsten exclaimed in all the right places. I even imagined Ginny saw some connection between the simple villages we passed and my earlier plans of joining the Peace Corps after college.

I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this. It doesn’t make any difference now what Ginny thought about this island and about me. Still, I find myself hoping that her silence during the ten days of her visit meant she understood, that she appreciated the way life gets formed by such small increments that you don’t notice it happening. Maybe, I think, she had some experience with the way a woman, in letting a man make his own choices, can suddenly find herself implicated, when all along she’s been busy congratulating herself for her forbearance.

Bob is leaning back in his chair, and I’m down to my last two bites of toast. Soon the police will be here, and I’ll need to watch myself from the outside so I can play my role well. I’m beginning to realize how much easier it was to observe myself when I didn’t know I was doing it.

 Bob looks at me over his coffee cup. “The police will probably show up sometime between nine and nine-thirty,” he says. His gaze is as casual as someone telling his wife when to expect the plumber.

And I tilt my cup just as casually, pausing to wait for the last drops of cold, bitter coffee to run into my mouth. Today I won’t pour myself a second cup for fear of the caffeine. A small clue to my state of mind, I suppose, but I doubt my imaginary observer would notice. “A civilized enough hour,” I say, raising my eyebrows in approval. “It should give me plenty of time to shower and dress.”

They’ve left me until last. They questioned the others yesterday or the night before, but for me they waited. You have to respect them for that—for having the sensitivity to give me a little extra time to get over the shock of my friend’s death. Or maybe they understood how busy I was yesterday trying to help Kirsten—though she wasn’t eager to accept my help. I can’t blame her. But she couldn’t handle everything herself—the overseas phone calls and the airline reservations and the negotiations with the official at the morgue who originally insisted that since he had only two refrigerated spaces, he couldn’t keep her mother’s body for more than twenty-four hours.

“You know what to tell them,” Bob says. He pushes his chair back and tosses his unused cloth napkin on his dirty plate which is his way of making sure Tessie washes it and gives him a fresh napkin at lunchtime.

I nod. I know what to tell the police. The story is simple, easy to remember precisely because it’s what they expect to hear. A death at the home of a “big man”, someone who flies a flag on his car and parties with the Prime Minister and the high commissioners. A white woman, his houseguest, is dead. The details of the accident are all they require, words to fill the empty paper in their tablets. Later the words will be transferred onto the right form by someone named Brigitte Marie or Mary.

That night the police saw for themselves the large bookend made from a milky green stone. They felt how heavy it was, how sharp its corners. They saw its mate not far from the body, but high on a shelf, resting too near the shelf’s edge.

The story fits all the visible evidence. One could hardly say Bob invented it. It was there for the taking. He was fast though—enlisting Haruki, the tallest of the men, to move the books and the remaining bookend to a higher shelf while he darted across the room, grabbed Noor’s wine glass and threw it on the tile floor. At the time, I had no idea what he had in mind for what would later become a useful detail: the shattered glass and spilled wine.  He warned us not to touch it. Then he called the police. All this only minutes after Ginny’s death. As soon as he hung up the phone, he gestured to us with his chin. And we came—the men who work for him, their wives, Tessie, me. Only Kirsten didn’t respond.

The rest of us gathered around him, some at the edge of the patio, some just inside the open doorway where he stood with one hand in his pocket. “The police will be here soon,” he said. As always, his voice was clearly audible while at the same time giving the impression of being soft and intimate. “I think it’s incumbent on us to make allowances for the relative lack of sophistication of Port Vila’s police force.” He raised his hands, showing the palms. “Now don’t get me wrong,” he said, flashing a smile, insider to other insiders. “I’m not criticizing the training supplied by the Australian government. I’m sure it’s been first rate. But, as we all know, training only goes so far.”

Sometimes I close my eyes and listen to Bob, I ignore what he’s saying and simply let myself be mesmerized by his voice. It’s the voice of a news anchor, low enough to turn his every utterance into truth and folksy enough with just the right touch of humility to put you off your guard. With my eyes closed I can usually remember why I fell in love with him.

“The police will have an easier time of it if we keep our description of this incident as simple as possible,” he said. Then he went on to describe “the incident.” Ginny reached up for a book. Then Noor Farley knocked her wine glass off the coffee table. Ginny, startled by the sound of broken glass, turned abruptly, and knocked the heavy bookend on her own head.

We nodded. Some details were wrong, but Bob’s version of events had the virtue of being consistent with our image of who we were and who we were known to be. In that sense it was truer than the truth.

I suppose nothing could be easier than making those few adjustments to the story of Ginny’s death. Yet my mind insists on rehearsing it. In the shower I go over the words I will use. It happened so fast, I will say. I was across the room on the sofa. I didn’t notice anything was wrong until I heard a little noise, like a sigh or a shriek, and then, almost immediately, a loud crashing sound.

The water pressure in this house is strong, and this morning the water is especially warm. I want to cry from the feel of it on my shoulders. Something caught in my flesh seems to be seeping out, burning me as it shoots up my neck and down through my chest like a beautiful, painful truth. And then it’s gone. I close my eyes and listen for its echo while water pours down my back and steam rises up my naked front.

When finally, I turn off the water, the room is filled with steam. It hovers; it drifts with invisible air currents; it feathers and dulls everything that was sharp and shiny, the mirrors, the cobalt blue ceramic tiles, the chrome faucets. I dry my body and wind the same towel around my head. I powder my breasts and put on my underwear. Then I open the door and let the steam disperse.

It’s lost in our bedroom against the white walls and the matching white appliqued bedcovers I bought in China, disappearing into the camouflage, the white on white which keeps you from noticing the twin beds. Or so I have imagined. It’s impossible not to notice the two beds, though, with the red Afghan rug between them drawing your eye to the space.

I push the louvered bifolds to either side of my closet and stare at the six-foot expanse of cotton, silk, and rayon. It’s a jumble of colors and designs, sunrise pastels, midnight blue, burgundy, splashy jungle prints, daisies, stripes, pure cool white. In college, we wore wool skirts and sweater sets to class. Ginny’s favorite was a blue-and-green pleated skirt that she wore with a Kelly-green sweater set, I think with a pitiful little smile that just about breaks my heart. I pull out the blue-and-white cotton dress I decided on last night. It’s a simple, well-cut dress made from a floral print that calls to mind expensive English china.

I’m buttoning the last button when I hear a vehicle coming up the driveway. Car doors open and slam shut. The doorbell rings. I lean close to my reflection and fit the slim stud of a pearl earring through the hole in my ear.

Tessie has spoken to the police already, but I know she’ll be nervous about seeing them again. It’s their uniforms and their black skin. And maybe she senses the Power behind them, that frightening power of the State with its fragmented consciousness and diminished individual responsibility.

She knocks on my bedroom door. “Ma’am,” she whispers, “they’re here. The police are here.”

“Okay, thank you, Tessie,” I say, hoping the ordinary tone of my voice will calm her. “Would you ask them to sit down please. I’ll be right out. Ask them if they want something to drink.”

By the time I enter the living room the policemen are sitting across from each other in matching armchairs, and Tessie is in the kitchen, gingerly opening cupboard doors and setting out china. The younger policeman is fingering an ebony Balinese carving, and when he sees me, he hurriedly puts it back on the end table. Smiling to myself, I think how harmless they look after all, their bare knees showing above their navy-blue half-socks and nothing more lethal than nightsticks in their belts.

“Good morning,” I say, extending my hand to the senior officer first. He introduces himself as Officer Telukluk and his partner as Officer Edwin Tom. Officer Tom jumps up and straightens his shoulders.

“Would you like some tea?” I ask even though I can hear the tea kettle beginning to hiss in the kitchen.

“Your housegirl already said….”

“Of course. Please sit down.”

They settle back into their armchairs. They turn the pages of their notebooks and take the caps off their pens. I wait while Officer Telukluk gazes at his blank notebook page and Officer Tom looks around the room. Conversations in Vanuatu begin slowly. They often include long comfortable periods of silence.

“Where shall I begin?” I ask finally.

Officer Telukluk continues to stare at his notebook a moment longer. Then he looks up. Turning his head slowly from left to right, he pans the room, taking in the Korean chest, the bookcase, the glass doors leading to the patio, the floor lamp. His head sweep ends at the sofa where I’m seated. “Where were you,” he asks, “when Mrs. Virginia Alexander was injured?”

Injured? What a euphemism! A strange reversal, considering that the Bislama word for “hit” is “kill”.

“I was here,” I say, patting the cushion on my right, giving them sufficient time to write in their notebooks. “Mrs. Farley and I were talking about American Independence Day celebrations.” I cross my leg and then uncross it.

That night Noor Farley and I both had our legs crossed, our knees angled toward the center of the sofa. The angle was not so sharp, though, as to hide the view of Kirsten flipping her long strawberry-blond hair in a way that I knew Bob would find provocative; not so sharp that I couldn’t see Bob leaning against the bookcase, steadying himself with one hand, the other reaching for Kirsten.

“Mrs. Farley was telling me about a parade she saw last year in her husband’s hometown. She said she enjoyed the bands, and especially the bagpipers.” I wonder if the officers notice how irrelevant this is. I have no idea why I even mentioned it. Except I remember it so clearly, the way Noor seemed to be kissing the rim of her glass as she sucked wine through her cranberry-colored lips and listened to me talk about my hometown parade, the horses and the logging trucks. And all the while Bob’s hand was sliding down Kirsten’s hip and his chin was coming to rest on her shoulder. I heard everything Noor said about the fireworks display she saw. And though I was caught up in praying that Kirsten would be quiet and discrete and would be able to slip away before Ginny returned from the bathroom, still I remember watching Noor, her tiny fingers flicking the air, her ruby ring sparkling as she described the red and yellow and white explosions over the ballpark in Chick’s hometown.

“Mrs. Farley gestures a lot when she speaks. That must be how she broke her glass.”

Yes, everything does make sense, even this small detail. The policemen are writing faster now, like students taking lecture notes. If I speed up, they’ll feel pressured. But why should I antagonize them? Things are going well.

“It all happened so fast,” I say, shaking my head and frowning. It’s a stock phrase, the thing witnesses always say. When the time comes to recount the tragic event, above all, the witness is struck by how fast things can happen. Or maybe we just remember the thousands of police dramas we’ve seen. Maybe we need to speak familiar words from fiction so we can feel at home in a new role.

The policemen have stopped writing. Even though now I’m telling them about the book and the bookend and Ginny reaching up to get the book, Tessie has their attention now. She’s right here in front of them, balancing the tea tray on the edge of the coffee table, removing things one by one— teapot, sugar bowl, creamer, the plate of cookies. She’s setting cups and saucers and napkins in front of each of them.

“Thank you, Tessie,” I say, and when she’s gone, I pour their tea. I offer them cream and sugar, and they respond to my low, soft tones with murmured thanks. I’ve often thought what a kindness it is to speak softly, to refrain from setting the air vibrating with demands to be heard and attended to. Kirsten would undoubtedly have done better to have kept her voice down.

Or to say nothing at all. She easily could have edged away from him and then slipped off to the kitchen or the patio. If she was so intent on indulging her outrage, she could have waited until she and her mother were alone in our guestroom. Then any words which passed under the door or through the walls could have been ignored.

We stir our tea, listening to the tinkling of the little silver spoons inside our teacups. Then we lift our cups and sip, each of us savoring the barely audible yet pleasant sounds of this British ceremony.

Officer Telukluk returns his cup carefully to the saucer. “Yes,” he says. “Yes. It is all the same. Mr. Stevens and the others told us the same things about poor Mrs. Alexander and how she died.” He looks at Officer Tom, who nods, and we all raise our cups for another sip of tea.

Of the other witnesses, only Noor was as near as I was, Noor and Bob. But then Bob can hardly be called a witness. The men, Haruki, Chick, and Gabriel, were at the far end of the room, refilling their glasses and sampling the chilled shrimp and stuffed mushrooms Tessie had laid out on the dining table. Sakura Abe and Anita Lopez were outside, sitting at the patio table. I seem to remember them facing the garden, so they may not have seen anything. But they must have heard the shouts, first Kirsten’s “ex-cuse me” which was a shout of disgust rather than a plea to be excused, and then Ginny’s demand that Bob get his “dirty hands” off her daughter.

Ginny seemed to fly from the hallway right to Bob’s throat. I think we were more surprised by her wild, screaming attack on Bob than we were by his response. The air of normality had already been destroyed by the time he grabbed the onyx bookend, swung it, and hit her hard in the head.

Officer Telukluk lowers his eyes. “Only Mrs. Alexander’s daughter saw something different,” he says.

I shake my head and look off to the side. “Poor girl,” I say. “She is half crazy with grief.”

“Yes. That is what everyone says.” He closes his notebook and replaces the cap on his pen. I realize he’s not going to ask me to explain the discrepancy. Nor is he going to repeat Kirsten’s words to me. In a few hours she will be on a plane to the United States with Ginny’s body. Without Kirsten, her account will be worthless. The rest of us will avoid speaking openly about what we saw. And before long even our memories of the incident will fade until eventually, we won’t be able to say for sure whether the whole thing happened or not.

“Would you like more tea?” I ask. And both men accept, smiles flashing and then disappearing. The interrogation is over. I pour their tea, offer cream and sugar, pass the plate of Australian-made shortbread.

I have to control myself to keep from sighing as I settle back on the sofa cushion. Officer Telukluk scratches his knee, and Officer Tom takes one deep breath followed by another. It can’t have been a pleasant prospect for them: the possibility that they might have to accuse a man like Bob.

I feel starved for oxygen. Maybe I can breathe in slowly, fill my chest all the way to the top without being obvious about it. If I could just conjure up an imaginary observer—a stranger, say, someone on the patio peering through the mosquito screen, or a chance visitor, someone who wanders in through the kitchen and catches a glimpse of us from the kitchen doorway. If only I could be reassured by the opinion of such a person that I look relaxed and that this scene—these policemen drinking tea and eating cookies in my living room—is nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s no use, though. I can’t make it work anymore.

The policemen finish their cookies, washing them down with diluted, sweetened tea. They wipe their mouths and gather up their pens and notebooks.

I watch their car back down the driveway, waiting a minute before grabbing my keys and getting into my own car. Then I drive to the other side of town, past the French School and the Parliament Building, the Chiefs’ Nakamal and Manway Restaurant. Later, after lunch, I’ll have to take one of these little side streets that lead to the hospital where Ginny’s body is being kept in cold storage. But for now, I avoid thinking about my friend’s dead body. I bypass the center of town, drive past the supermarket and the Red Cross Building and the Catholic Church. Just beyond the large Japanese-owned resort-hotel where Kirsten has been staying the past two nights, I turn into a dirt road and park my car.

The little ferry to Erakor Island is waiting. I wave to the boatman and hurry to the end of the dock. As we cross the lagoon the boatman and the only other passenger shout across the metal boat in loud bursts of Bislama.

On the island I walk unnoticed across the beach, between sunbathers and toddlers with buckets and shovels. Inside the little open-air café, a waitress hums and pours a beer. The trail I’m looking for begins in crushed rock with palm lilies and crotons planted at regular intervals on either side. It leads between concrete tourist bungalows with wicker chairs on their porches and air conditioners bulging from their sides like ugly, square warts. Then there’s nothing but island bush—betel palm and pandanus and the tangled branches of beach hibiscus. A sign points to missionary graves at the center of the island. But I headed for the far end of the island where the lagoon opens to the ocean.

When I get there, the tide is out. Shallow, transparent water hovers over the blond sand and bleached rock and coral inside the reef. The ocean, blue and endless, is far from shore, held back by the wall of coral. I kick off my sandals and wade into the water. Tiny, warm waves play around my toes, gurgling over the lacy rocks and slurping through the seaweed. I don’t know why I’ve come here. To catch my breath maybe. Or to escape prying eyes, to be alone for a while, unseen. I could have stayed home, climbed into the closet and pulled the doors shut around me.

I wade farther out, and, although the water is still shallow, the rocks are sharp, and there’s hardly any sand to step on, only seaweed hiding broken shells and timid creatures. Maybe that’s why I came here: to cut my feet, to expose myself to poisonous sea snakes. To do penance for Ginny’s death.

I see a small sandy spot beyond a line of rocks. Clumsily I climb over the rocks, steadying myself with one hand. I look back at the shore, but no one is there. No one is watching me. And still, I feel watched. I feel wide open, as transparent as a jellyfish with my innards on show. I rub the sore bottoms of my feet in the sand and curl my toes. I’m tired. I want to sit down in this shallow, warm water and let it wash over my legs and wet my neat blue and white dress. And if a wave were to lift my skirt up to my shoulders, what would it matter? I’m already exposed.