Born Slippy Read online

  He decided, out of some misplaced sense of manners, that he couldn’t ring the doorbell until at least nine, and so wandered the neighborhood. A block away a teashop had outdoor seating, and in the early morning, the temperature only in the low eighties, he sat facing his quarry, sipping a cup of coffee. A line of trees rose behind the tall walls, and the house, set back in the lot, could only be seen in tiny patches. It was huge. It didn’t look like the kind of place you bought on an undersecretary’s salary, so perhaps Serang and Dmitry had a lot in common. He imagined Dmitry standing outside the wall, shouting But I LUV her! to the heavens. Probably he did love her. Aside from that story, though, Frank had never seen any particular indication of it.

  At a few minutes before nine, the front gate opened, and a car came out, a big black Mercedes. He started walking toward it and saw that an Indonesian driver, not Prabam, was in front, and in back a young woman. His adrenals had already released a flood of hormones before he could see that it wasn’t Yuli at all, but in all probability one of her sisters. The sister didn’t look up, although the driver couldn’t help but notice his interest — a frenzied, poorly shaven white man didn’t peer into his car every morning. Frank decided it was time to ring the bell, before anyone else left.

  He walked up to small guardhouse flush with the front gate. A man in a blue uniform greeted him.

  “Selamat pagi,” the man said, looking confused.

  Frank didn’t even have the wherewithal to repeat it.

  “Hello,” he said. Was that the best he could do? The guard looked blankly at him through the booth window. Inside there was a surveillance station, four screens, each apparently hooked to three or four cameras, switching every one and a half or two seconds. It was a big property.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Saya tidak mengerti,” he said, whatever that meant. He reached for a phone, said something else in Indonesian, then handed Frank the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I am here to see Yuli.”

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Heald lives overseas. I’m sorry.”

  His disappointment was a punch in the gut.

  “Can I speak to Ms. Serang?” He figured that would cover the mother, the other sister.

  “May I say who is calling?”

  “My name is Frank Baltimore. I’ve come from Los Angeles.” It was possible, he thought, that Dmitry had mentioned him. There was silence for a moment. Probably not. Probably he was never mentioned. Why would he be?

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Serang is not available.”

  “I am a very close friend of Dmitry Heald’s, and I came across from America as soon as I heard of the tragedy. It seems somewhat rude,” and as he said this he started to get a bit hot, “to keep me outside the gate speaking to the butler, if that’s what you are, through an intercom — I might expect this from the prime minister’s office, or the police, but not from the family servants of a friend.” He didn’t know where that little reserve of noblesse petulance came from, but he was kind of impressed by it, and he hoped the butler was. From his “One moment, sir,” it was hard to tell.

  After ten seconds of silence, long enough for him to notice that none of the security cameras ever lit on an actual person, the grounds completely empty, the butler came back on and said, much less aggressively, “If you don’t mind, sir, please hand the phone back to the guard.” The guard took the phone, listened to his boss, hung up, a buzz sounded, and the gate sprung open.

  Frank walked down a red flagged pathway surrounded by large, foot-wide shiny green leaves, trumpet vines overhead supported by a trellis, pink and red hibiscus, and a frenzy of yellow and white frangipani flowers. The tunnel of lush vegetation dropped the temperature ten degrees, making it more like a miniature, manicured rainforest, or an exhibit in a botanical garden, than a pathway to a private home. The city’s noise immediately sounded miles away. The impressive nineteenth-century house rose up in all directions. He reached the front door, which opened just as he arrived, the butler bowing him in.

  “Please, sir,” he said, his outstretched palm up and away, motioning toward a large sitting room to the left. The entryway was at least two stories high, with a tessellated floor, massive columns fifteen or so feet apart, and tapestries on the walls. It looked like an ad for an expensive hotel in the Algarve.

  He motioned Frank to sit. The relation of servants and masters was something he had very little knowledge of, but he recognized that the power in this relationship was not his. He sat.

  “Can I get you anything, sir?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The butler bowed, withdrew, and Frank looked around. Over the mantle of a white fireplace the two cutlasses — or what did he call them, scimitars? — were crossed. Frank wasn’t sure if the wave of nostalgia he felt was about Dmitry, or simply about the merciless passing of time. He sat wishing that Yuli’s sister hadn’t left, or hoping that the other was still home. He had no idea if he would be able to talk to the mother, or if she was even alive. The room was elegant but straightjacketed, and he remembered Dmitry calling it Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t quite that grand, but was more like a museum than a place to live, the Louis the This or Louis the That chairs more like sculpture than furniture. He moved onto a couch that was modestly more comfortable. Freshly cut flowers adorned as many surfaces as one would expect at a mortuary and tchotchkes filled any leftover horizontal space. The scimitars looked to have been polished five minutes ago. He wanted to walk over and see if one had been welded back together.

  The house was as silent as only an old double-walled house can be, the masonry deflecting the outside noise, the internal wood framing and plaster soaking up anything from the inside. Thick wooden doors kept sound from traveling between rooms, upholstery, heavy drapes, thick rugs, tapestries — the place was almost engineered for sound absorption. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hear her enter.

  “Franky.” It was Yuli, standing in the doorway. She had somehow reminded him, the day they met, of Jackie Kennedy, and now she did again, stoic, appropriately grim, slightly shaken yet composed. She wore a simple white t-shirt, jeans, and heeled sandals, perched somewhere exactly between vulnerable and invincible, innocent and world-weary, ethereal and solid, unconscious and hyperconscious, exotic and familiar, elusive and straightforward. Again, he stopped himself, thinking: what the hell is wrong with me?

  “Yuli,” he finally got out.

  “It was good of you to come.” It was all he could do to stop himself from rushing and taking her in his arms like the fool he was.

  “I’m in shock,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

  “Some moments better than others,” she said, with a sad smile. “It is so strange to speak to you now, after only knowing you through Dmitry all these years. We didn’t get a chance to talk when you visited in Taipei, but Dmitry talked of you so often I feel I know you.”

  “And the boys?” He was stupidly overjoyed that she remembered meeting him.

  “They are safe.”

  “Yes…” he said, slightly puzzled by that response. But then it dawned on him: they did need his protection, it hadn’t all been wish-fulfillment fantasy. She motioned to two chairs, facing each other, and as they sat down his hesitancy made her meet his eyes — he could see she wasn’t sure how much to confide.

  “They are with their nannies and the rest of the Taipei staff at one of our houses, on an island. Very few people know of it.”

  “He said he wanted an island,” he said. “And a jet.”

  “Yes,” she said solemnly, “and he got both.” She didn’t have to add that the price had been too high.

  “I want to do anything I can,” he said, feeling awkward, knowing his sincerity was disingenuous, his motives duplicitous, his position false: he was a love-sick wolf in a sheep suit, and every attempt to contain himself inflamed him more. Berating himself for being a snake, he gazed upon her ankles. He wasn’t even able, as discomb
obulated as he had become, to hide it, and all but unconsciously leaned toward her. He felt like an imbecile.

  She gazed at the floor, her perfect hands folded on her perfect lap.

  “I’m sorry, Yuli, I truly am. Please excuse my too-full heart.” Christ, where was this stilted language coming from? Had he lost his mind? “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Forgive you? Please, Franky. We have both loved Dmitry. This puts us in a very tiny club, perhaps a club of two, or four counting the boys. He was never, for most people, an easy person to love. Most people preferred to judge him, or despise him, or envy him, or all of these.”

  Her saying this impressed him; it seemed even wise; it made him love her more. It also snapped him from his trance, made him conjure Dmitry. He sat back, knowing finally that if Yuli needed him, she needed him to be neither a bonehead nor a child. And since it was an adult she needed, he decided he should try to act like one. “What can I do to help?”

  “Help?”

  “Well, do you need to talk about arrangements, or legal issues? Can I help with logistics, money, arrangements, insurance, pick up the laundry?”

  “You are so kind,” she said, smiling, reaching across the coffee table to put a hand on his knee, turning his entire body into a hormonal free-fire zone. “I mean it, Franky, very kind. But I worked in arbitrage. I have a degree in economics and an MBA. And servants! We can handle all of that — but I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have you here, someone who not only has known Dmitry but has always really understood him.” She smiled again as she said this, warmly.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if I really did.”

  She looked at him then with what seemed like added respect. “Yes, well, that is what I mean. To know him included wondering whether you did. But he always felt you did.” She stood up, and he followed suit. The butler immediately opened the door. “Have a drink, Franky, won’t you, so I can? I realize it is the morning, but there is some acceptable option, isn’t there? Something that wouldn’t be too pathetic: a mimosa or Bloody Mary?”

  “I would love either.”

  “We’ll have Bloody Marys on the terrace, Setiawan, with a light brunch.”

  “Ya, Ibu Yuli,” he said, starting to leave.

  “English, please, while Mr. Franky is here,” she said.

  “My apologies, sir,” he said, scowling.

  She stood up and held her hand out to him to come, and as he walked toward her she took his left arm in her right. His chest swelled with the momentary coupling, and as he felt her firm, tender warmth against his side he thought, I have arrived, however briefly, home, home, home. She walked him out large French doors to a tiled terrace, roofed by trellised vines, a mister around the edges keeping it cool. The house might have been some British tea baron’s place in the 1870s, enormous teak beams providing the skeleton, the exterior with a lot of wood — painted clapboard siding, jigsawed trim along the soffits and eaves, oversized gingerbread giving it, from a distance, the appearance of a colonial building half its size, like an exploded, inverse scale model. The interior was all stately columns and arches, smooth plaster and colonnades, with the wide, sweeping staircases of a presidential palace or an Astaire-Rogers movie set. A lot of man-hours. A lot of square feet. A lot of foot-wide, elaborate molding.

  “Please tell me you will stay with us,” she said, “at least for a few days. I can send the driver to get your things, if that doesn’t feel too intrusive. Where are you?”

  “The Ritz-Carlton. I would love to. But won’t you be going to join your boys?”

  She hugged his arm tighter, and leaned her head, very lightly, against his shoulder. “For right now, I think, it would be… well,” and she hesitated. “It would be better for me to take care of things here.” He assumed she was about to say it would be safer, not better.

  They had Bloody Marys and tumpeng, a cone of rice surrounded by piles of savory curry stuffs that were as hard to identify as they were fabulous. They spoke very briefly and tentatively about the bombing, which she clearly didn’t want to discuss. There still was no official word of any kind about who was responsible, nothing. She asked about Frank’s life, his work. He prattled on, aglow in her attention.

  “How did you think to come here?” she asked, then. “And how did you find us?”

  “I followed Prabam to the airport,” he said. “And took one of the boxes.”

  “Ah!” she said, “the solution to the mystery of the missing box.”

  Huh. She knew about that. “In it I found your name. Googling you I found your father, his obituary, actually, where you were mentioned, and then, this morning I went to the Ministry, and got a rough address, well the neighborhood, at least.”

  “Ah! A detective,” she said, and this was either mocking or concerned or neither. “Who did you speak to at the Ministry?”

  “I didn’t get his name, but he wasn’t a fan of your father’s, it seemed. He looked like a morbidly obese lemur.” She smiled at this, but not happily. “For some reason, I don’t even know why, I said I was a friend of Amarya’s.”

  This seemed to relax her. He would try to figure out why later.

  “Amarya? How could you possibly know about Amarya?”

  “She was mentioned in the obituary. And I remember Dmitry telling me she was your messenger during your courtship.”

  “Courtship!” she said, now truly smiling. “My imprisonment, you mean!”

  Two maids had been serving them, but now the butler reappeared at the door without saying anything. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, “and let me take this call.” She left the room, and he sat wondering about life with servants, communication so well-oiled that you can know you have a call without being told. He also wondered about his own state of mind, realizing that he was unaccountably, inappropriately, and quite contentedly happy. The Bloody Mary was warm in his blood. When she returned they talked for another half hour or so, she socially skillful enough to avoid and deflect anything difficult. She talked about the work she had done before the children, in renewable energy finance, which she still dabbled in, kept up. He talked to her about solar heat and hot water, heat pumps, insulation, absorptive surfaces, refractive surfaces, gray water recycling — the home construction end of the ecological equation — and how hard it still was to talk people into doing the right thing.

  “It’s not just my social conscience, Franky, I hate to admit: when I got in, it was an emerging market, and still is. There is money to be made.” He saw her then, the hard-ass businesswoman, the high-flying MBA. It worried him of course, since it reminded him she was really out of his league; if she was going to shop for a new husband, a moderately successful contractor from LA probably wouldn’t be where she’d settle. Someone on a museum board or two…

  “But in any case, Franky, we are on the same side,” she said, and they had one more drink, exulting in their shared interest in ending the horror that was climate change as if nothing else in the world was amiss. Then she stood. Instantly Setiawan appeared.

  “Yes, thank you Setiawan, please have Mr. Franky shown to his room.” She took Frank’s hands in hers and held them to her chest. “I am truly glad you are here.”

  “Mr. Franky,” he said. “Sounds ridiculous.”

  “It is custom. I am Mrs. Yuli, not just here, but at a state dinner. If you are introduced to the President, it would be as Mr. Franky.”

  “Mr. Frank, at least, hopefully,” he said. She looked at him with a quite shrewd glint in her eye.

  “But we have always known you as Franky!” she said, and it wasn’t the last time that he wondered if she was privy to every conversation he had ever had.

  In his room, his bags had already been delivered, his laptop set up on a desk the way he had left it at the Ritz, everything arranged in the bathroom exactly as he had left it there, toothbrush and toothpaste to the left of the sink, deodorant on the right. He had never actually agreed to this, and while he felt minutely taken care of, such an invasio
n of his privacy felt alien. It was like discovering people had been reading his diary or watching him sleep. He felt exposed, unsafe. And although everything about his belongings was the same, the two shirts hanging in the closet, his toiletry bag on the sink, his books on the bedside table, two things were missing. His dirty laundry, which he assumed was out being cleaned. And the box of files. It had been reappropriated.

  He guessed that was only right. It wasn’t his.

  The day and evening before, he had slept the sleep of the beat-up air traveler — necessary, desperate, incomplete. But after the Bloody Marys and so much uncertainty resolved, he lay down in the middle of the afternoon and slept in peace for many hours. He woke up in the dark, except for the slight glow from a nightlight in the bathroom, and noticed for the first time that his room, although quite large, had no windows. Wondering if that was a bunker-mentality design decision from colonial times, he ambled into the bathroom where there was a window, and saw that it was indeed night. He had fallen asleep with the light on and wondered: was it on a timer? Or did a servant actually come in and turn it off? Since he had thrown off all of his clothes and just dropped on the bed, he felt exposed again, literally this time.

  He rustled his phone out of his pants pocket and saw it was only midnight. The world was upside down.

  He turned on his laptop, went back to the bathroom, peed and brushed his teeth, came back and checked for a wireless connection. The wireless system was working, and, he could see, password protected, which meant someone had opened his computer and entered the code. He had that creepy feeling again, like he was living in East Berlin under the Stasi, a disquieting combination of guilt and resentment, or, given all the luxury, like a king waiting for the revolution. He pulled up his email, which held nothing of note, and realized that this was his first trip since Isa left, that for the first time there was no one in the States wondering about his daily being, nobody that cared that he was gone. His quasi-step-kids had their own proto-adult lives, Kennedy with a year to go at University of Iowa, of all places, Lulu a freshman at Mount Holyoke. They both claimed they loved talking to him but could rarely find the time, and of course their interest in him was complicated by the monthly checks he sent. If he went two or even three weeks without calling, they didn’t seem to notice. The business in LA was singing along without him. He felt liberated. He was free. It was not altogether pleasant.