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

and manicured hibiscus of the hotel where we are staying, the place looks ominously neglected.

Silver disappears into the office, and I walk down a path toward the beach. A small outdoor restaurant with white-plastic tables and chairs is deserted. A Thai woman with square-cut hair and a scowl uncharacteristic of the friendly islanders peers out at me from behind the bamboo bar, and then vanishes. Nearby, three cats are sleeping under a Ping-Pong table with a broken net, and on a deck chair outside an open-air cubicle containing a treadmill and a few barbells sits an enameled tin bowl that once held someone’s lunch and is now black with flies.

Music fills the air—a Chopin nocturne. For a minute, I think it is live, produced by the German gone to seed. But then the music shifts to Peruvian flutes, and I realize that it’s a cassette, broadcast through speakers wired to the palms. A man, a Westerner, brown-haired and pasty-skinned, is snoring in a hammock at the edge of the beach. I turn and walk quietly back to the car.

Silver comes back with her hands full of papers describing what Emerald Cave can offer. On one is a list of health products with names like Hatha Purge, on another a Xeroxed diagram showing rolls of tubing and a kind of plastic-and-metal table for attaching over a toilet.

I look at it all. “Don’t do this,” I say to her, overturning my vow not to get involved. “At least, don’t do it here.”

“It’s very cheap,” she says stoutly. “My funds aren’t what they were.”

“Don’t.”

She looks at me as Basia does when I get tough. “Well, then, we’ll go find Cornelia,” she says.

Locating Cornelia involves a return to town and a stop at a bakery popular with trekkers, where we look for a notice posted on a bulletin board, and a dive with the taxi down a path into the bush past a huge, unpacific-looking water buffalo. Hours pass, as we jolt over red mud roads. All spirit of independence withers within me. Desperately thirsty, flapping my hands feebly at the mosquitoes that billow into the back of the truck at every stop, I realize that I’ve undergone a minor conversion to a vaguely Eastern worldview: sweat and fatalism. At one point, the taxi bounces over a bridge across a vine-filled gorge where water is falling among clouds of orchids, a paradise I know I visited in dreams all through my childhood. “Please stop for a minute,” I say in a faint voice, but the place is past, never to be found again in this incarnation. And we head onward toward Cornelia.

It is late afternoon, and the taxi driver has begun to give us ominous glances over his shoulder, when we pull into a clearing in the middle of a huge palm grove. Before us is a modest concrete house with a heap of coconuts against one wall. ISLAND WELLNESS CENTER is written on a small sign posted on a tree trunk. A thin, deeply tanned woman in a plum-colored leotard and a pair of loose batik pants comes out on the veranda and looks at us.

“Are you Cornelia?” calls Silver, clambering nimbly out of the truck and advancing with the triumphant air of Stanley sighting Livingstone.

The woman acknowledges her with a spare, formal nod. I instantly dislike her.

In a matter of minutes, Silver and Cornelia have clasped hands like long-lost friends, gazed into each other’s eyes, and vanished into an office with screened windows, leaving me on the veranda with a portly, yellow dog, who studies me tranquilly. The reddening sun is level with the tops of the acres of palms surrounding us, and I think with a pang of Basia, who must be fretting because I’ve run off and left her. Beside the heap of coconuts, our driver, who has plainly given up hope of an early dinner, squats companionably to smoke with a couple of young men who drove up behind us in a truck full of gas canisters. From inside, where the two women are sitting, comes a murmur of excited voices. The door opens and Cornelia beckons to me. “You can come in,” she says, as if she were speaking to a small child.

I tiptoe inside and settle on a low rattan stool in a corner of the room beside an overflowing bookcase, where I see Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, and Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss. More books crowd the desk where Cornelia sits, and on the wall behind her hangs a Thai anatomy chart, dense with notations in green ink.

“We do a lot of work in the sea,” Cornelia is telling Silver. “Breathing and movement. You live in one of our huts down by the beach. They are very basic, of course. No hot water. You’ll be fasting and doing the high colonics every morning and evening, before meditation. The results of the colonics can be amazing. People reexperience fragments of past lives.”

Cornelia has a phenomenally narrow torso, and breasts with sharp nipples that show clearly through her leotard. Her frizzy, sandy hair is dusted with gray. She has a penetrating voice, and a look in her pale eyes which I recognize as subtle orneriness. She, I see immediately, is another interesting woman. She has already made it clear that she speaks fluent Thai, and has given a quick, disdainful sketch of her rejected past life, not omitting Wellesley.

Silver is staring at her, bedazzled. I feel a pang of the kind of jealousy I haven’t felt since Girl Scouts, when my troop leader—one of those dear, old-fashioned closet lesbians—liked my best friend better than me. Just yesterday Silver was staring at me like that as I rattled on about my ex-husband’s shenanigans and the rigors of a writer’s life. Evidently I wasn’t ethereal enough for her. And besides, getting a taste for these chaste female encounters can lead to incredible promiscuity. Another day, another soul laid bare.

I clear my throat and announce—philistine that I am—that I