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

I have misgivings already, when I have to wait in the taxi for fifteen minutes, as Silver, at the front desk, calls the States to shout endearments to her boyfriend, who, it seems, is a retired oil-field engineer. Flies swarm sociably into the rear end of the taxi, which is a rump-sprung tuk-tuk with aluminum seats. The driver, one of the few fat Thai men I’ve ever seen, occasionally turns to regard me with lazy amusement. Finally Silver appears, with a crisp white Indian kurta pulled over her pareu, and asks me whether I mind making an extra excursion. Before she moves on to the other islands she wants to visit—Bali, Lombok, the Moluccas—there is something she wants to do here. A program of meditation and yoga coupled with high-colonic irrigation.

“Enemas! You’re crazy!” I say. I say it in the downright tone of an old Methodist churchwoman.

Silver looks thoughtful. “One thing I really got to understand in India is that the body can’t be separated from the spirit,” she says. “You can’t make any real progress toward enlightenment unless your body is clean. You don’t know how much toxic stuff you’ve been carrying around with you for years.”

And then, as the driver heads toward town, she tells me about a man she knows who did colonic irrigation and found that the encrustations in his guts had included a dozen little round pellets of metal, slightly bigger than buckshot. It turned out that when he was six he used to bite the heads off his toy soldiers, and they’d stayed with him.

“Excuse me if I’m too blunt, but the whole thing has always sounded to me like getting buggered for your health,” I say. “People talk about the benefits, but why doesn’t anybody talk about the erotic part of it?”

It’s impossible to offend Silver. She simply smiles, rakes back her hennaed hair, revealing a narrow band of white at the roots, and shakes her head at me with a tinge of pity. Then she tells me that in Goa she heard of two places on this island, health centers where one can go on retreats for meditation and purification of both ends of the body. She wants to find them—and this, I discover, is the main purpose of our shared outing. “Come on,” she says. “We can get our shopping done, and then set off and look. One of the places is over by the caves. I heard it used to be good, but the owner, a German guy, has turned into an alcoholic, and it may have gone downhill. If it doesn’t look promising, we can always go find Cornelia, the American woman who runs a retreat in the bush. They say she’s the best, if you can find her.”

She looks at me with her urchin’s smile, and I recall wondering earlier how this frail-seeming woman had managed to travel alone but unscathed through the backwaters of half of Asia. Now I see how: an exuberant opportunism protects her as absolutely as angels guard saints and children. Already I know that I’m going with her and that I’ll probably get stuck with the taxi fare, too.

Silver pats my shoulder as we rattle along. “Come on. It’ll be an adventure.” She’s astute enough not to press any spiritual points. “Cornelia went to Wellesley,” she adds brightly.

In the port town, a fat, naked baby with brass anklets crawls around, laughing, on the floor of a shop that sells cheap viscose pants, sundresses, and cotton bathing suits from Bali. The baby’s parents are eating noodles in the back of the shop, and keeping a weather eye on Silver, who is going through the racks of clothes and pulling out things with magisterial gestures as if she were shopping at Saks. I catch sight of a black-and-white pair of pants which I immediately know will look good, and buy them. “You move fast,” Silver observes.

A pronouncement on my entire uncontemplative life. But part of my haste is due to a suspicion that I might end up paying for her purchases as well. “Yes,” I say, and move on to the next shop, arranging to meet her afterward at a café on the waterfront. Wandering through a market past heaps of coriander, lichees, and jackfruit, I ponder whether I should simply escape back to the hotel in one of the many bush taxis that pass me, crammed with country people. But I’m held there by my curiosity, which seems to grow stronger in the heat, like a kind of jungle itch. I wait for Silver in the café, which looks out on two long, decayed jetties that stretch into the flat dazzle of the straits. Around me, waiting for ferries, killing time, sit golden Australian boys with dive gear and many large, ugly foreign men looking like assorted Calibans beside tiny, beautiful Thai prostitutes. A jeep pulls up and a tattooed American girl jumps out and hands around invitations to a full-moon beach party on a far island: live music, magic mushrooms. I stare out over the blazing sea that is as motionless as gelatin, and punish myself by rereading a Chinese poem I found in a book borrowed from the hotel library:

How sad it is to be a woman!

Nothing on earth is held so cheap.

Boys stand leaning at the door

Like gods fallen out of heaven.

No one is glad when a girl is born.

Silver appears, and we get back in the taxi and race toward the first of our anal destinations. We drive along the bay, away from the stylish south of the island, where the good beaches and fancy hotels are. Soon our taxi stops in a palm grove gray with fallen, withered fronds. A large, faded signboard reads EMERALD CAVE HEALTH SPA. Below is a list: “Thai Massage; Yoga Classes; Vegetarian Cuisine; Detoxification Cures; Pranotherapy; Gymnastics.” Nine or ten thatched bungalows form a semicircle around a larger bungalow, and beyond gleams the incorruptible sea. After the green-velvet lawns