Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

big mysterious black heart hidden out there under the lights. I sat and smoked a Winston, and for a few minutes, everything fell into place. The family trip doesn’t bother me anymore: I knew it was the last time for me. And that I was where I needed to be.

THE FAMILY: So we returned, dashing across the last few states to Philadelphia, overcome by a sudden desperate urge to sleep in our own beds. Back East, nothing much was changed. It was still August 1962, the cicadas still at their summer wars in the treetops. Our new car, unmarred by the dust of prairies and alkali flats, was still a sumptuous gold. Were we the same? That was a question not one of us, for a long time, would think to ask. Not until years had passed, and other, far more sophisticated vacations had been taken—jaunts to Europe and Africa and Asia, paid for by credit cards and boosting us to a palmy level of worldliness we’d never dreamed of. Not until we Harmon children had gone our separate ways, and looked back suddenly to realize that this was the trip by which we would judge all others. A journey that defined the ambiguous shape of our citizenship, when we moved across our country feeling as apprehensive as foreigners and at the same time knowing that every grain of dust was ours. And a private moment of glory, the kind every family has just once. When the highway belonged to us, and our car was the best on the road. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” sang Dr. Harmon for a joke, as we turned the corner of our suburban street. And the Rambler Classic carried us home.

M

USIC

. C

URTAIN.

Interesting Women

Interesting women—are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man. It’s the same for all my girlfriends, whether they’re in the States or in Hong Kong, where I’m now living. They come back from vacations or parties and announce proudly—with an air of defiance—that they met the most fascinating woman. What a refreshing change it would be if the new acquaintances were gorgeous lesbians or bisexuals whose intoxicating charm fed straight into hot, wet tumbles between rented sheets! Instead, these encounters are always drearily platonic. More than anything—and I speak from experience—they turn out to be schoolgirl crushes in disguise, instant friendships that last as long as it takes to swap tales of love and desperation. In short, an ephemeral traffic of souls that is about as revolutionary as flowers pressed in rice paper.

My hotel in Thailand is swarming with interesting women. I am probably one of them, though I try not to be. My husband, Simon, metallurgist and tireless père de famille, is presently looking over strip mines in Hunan Province, so I’m free to reinvent myself. I plan to occupy six days of Easter vacation with conspicuous idleness—no sightseeing, eating and drinking without compunction, binges of in-room movies with our twelve-year-old daughter, Basia. And, when I sit by the pool, I even bend back the cover of the book I’m reading, so no one can see that it’s literature.

This hotel is the kind of place where guests read worthy books: it has, of all things, a library on the beach, where one can come in covered with sand and, under lazily revolving ceiling fans, open a glass case and consult The Oxford English Dictionary. It also has a meditation pavilion, and a high-tech gym, and bougainvillea garlands placed on the beds in the bungalows every morning; it has a view of an opalescent bay strewn with distant islands of surpassing beauty, and a chef with California leanings, plus a mad French owner who bestows on each guest a handwritten guide that mingles facts about the medieval kingdoms of Ayutthaya and Sukhothai with information like “The hotel grounds are kept secure at night by dogs trained to bark only at Thai faces.”

On my third afternoon here, in a lazy moment, I fall into a conversation from which I sense that I will not be able to extricate myself without relating the usual set pieces of emotional history. I am pulling a kayak up over the sand, after a jaunt on the lagoon with Basia. She is still in her kayak, skimming around the shallow waters inside the reef, and I am huffing and puffing, scratching my feet on broken coral, and exchanging cheerful insults with her. “You’re a wuss,” she calls. “Go ahead, desert your only daughter!”

A slim shape emerges from the palms behind me, and I see that it belongs to a woman I have been observing idly since I arrived. I’ve seen her by the pool, drinking gin-and-tonics with a pair of Swiss anthropologists, husband and wife, who live in Bangladesh and are here with their adopted baby son. I eavesdropped on an emotional discussion they had about child prostitution and AIDS in Bangkok, and noted that this woman was demanding some kind of attention, not sexual, from her new acquaintances, which the couple, focused on their gorgeous, dark-skinned baby, couldn’t give. And at odd moments of the day, I have been aware of the woman sitting, not reading, in a deck chair pulled into one of the furthest clefts of the elephant-colored rocks that loom over the water. I judge her to be in her early fifties, about ten years older than I am. Looking good without pushing it, still in the game. No matronly straw hats or designer sunglasses. Over various stylish bathing suits she wears a white pareu, expertly tied, and she walks barefoot with the lounging gait that in the Far East often marks members of the great diaspora of Westerners who imagine that they are not tourists.

“Is it hard?” she asks, coming up beside me and indicating the kayak.

“It’s easy, as long as you don’t go outside the reef.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow.