Max Frood and Arianna Javaheri were married in Paris in the spring. Her first preference for honeymooning, the Dalmatian Coast, was ruled out by war, her second, Iran, by the militants, and her third, the Aegean’s Kyklades by Max who said he had a better idea.
“I know an isle where a mild wind blows.
Few tourists. Only the diving purist goes.
Quite over-canopied with banana trees,
Fresh coconut milk, and a few monkeys.”
Max and Vera Katawijaya had exchanged only a few letters in the years since he had left Southeast Asia. She had struggled with Catch-22 but proudly wrote to him of finishing it, asking, “What is it with ‘Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?’” Max sent her Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and she wrote back in a letter, “Are you my game keeper?” He was not.
She knew he was in Paris, and he knew she had expanded Wet Dreams from six to sixteen bungalows—seven and seventeen if you included Bungalow Zero—but neither of them was much good at writing about their inner selves. It came therefore as a surprise to Vera that Max had settled down in marriage, a fact he disclosed to her in his fax requesting a week’s accomodations at Wet Dreams on Gili Trawangan.
Before arriving on Lombok, Max and Arianna toured Bali, making up for in the exotic what she had missed in the archeologically significant in the Kyklades. She bought batik sarongs as gifts for her mothers and sisters, and old rosewood carvings for the someplace she and Max would be living in soon.
Max’s description of the islands had prepared Arianna well enough, but what came as the second biggest surprise to him was the growth. It could no longer be said that there were beachfront bungalows anywhere on the island’s east side. Every property had had its beach separated from living quarters by the bricked esplanade supporting the foot, bike, and wagon traffic that got heavier by the day. As the tourists came, so came the boat traffic carrying them and their food, fuels, fresh water, telecom equipment, t-shirts, sunglasses, medicine men, money changers, dive gear, fishing gear, furniture, flatware, glassware, paper products, lumber, concrete, and plumbing—for starters—and the locals who would deliver all the services at third world prices. And with the locals came a mosque, and amplified prayers and community announcements blasting from the minarets. Blast fishing, the use of explosives to kill schools of fish and provide meals ready-to-grill for the ravenous western guests, had already put the fish stocks in decline. So, like coals to Newcastle, fish were being imported to the islands.
The biggest surprise for Max was Vera’s girls. Maxime, fivish, could have been the fruit of Max’s last visit from nus. Putu, a splendid Balinese girl, looked to be about twenty, and was not Vera’s daughter, but a gofer of the first order with unrestricted access and unlimited resourcefulness. Like Maxime, she shared Vera’s private quarters.
Arianna and Max dangled their feet in the pool waters from Bungalow Zero, snorkeled, swam, walked, ate, made love, and slept soundly until the roosters and the mullahs roused them. She was manicured and pedicured and ayurvedically massaged by Swedish hippies in dreadlocks. She took the local psilocybin mushrooms that had been dried until they were blue and the consistency of cardboard. She avoided the sometimes-fatal local moonshine tainted with methanol. She smoked the imported hashish. There were no police on the island, and if there were laws, they were for the proprietors and not the tourists.
Arianna asked Vera, “How did you choose such a beautiful French name for your daughter?”
Vera left out many facts when she answered, “We Indonesians like western nicknames. Her given name is Gema, and Maxime was favored by Murray, my ex.” When Arianna inquired about Murray, Vera left out the dates, steering her away from the truth, leaving Arianna to infer that he had been the father before he died.
“Tragic. I’m sorry,” Arianna said, and let the subject go. In their few days together, Arianna and Vera walked the esplanade hand in hand like little girls, laughed at Max’s obsessions, and cried like old friends on parting. Vera did everything she could to protect Max, and his new wife left without the slightest suspicion that Vera had preceded her.
To Max, Vera said, “We did make something new together. You wouldn’t have wanted to know, would you?”
“No.” After a long pause he said, “I should do something for her.”
“She doesn’t need help now. She may need it later. Promise me you’ll be there then, for whatever.”
“Western schools?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what I’m thinking.”