The Other Side of the World (20 page)

I raised my hand.

“Yes?”

“Two words,” I said: “Palm oil.”

“Mister Eisner is correct,” Tamika said, and thanked me, adding that because I worked for a palm oil manufacturing company, I was a person who knew what he was talking about. Then: “Can you tell us more, Mister Eisner?”

“Please call me Charlie,” I said.

“Well then, Charlie,” she said. “Can you tell us more?”

“Sure,” I said, and I found myself regurgitating a lot of stuff I'd learned when, during my first weeks in Singapore, I'd spent dozens of hours Googling ‘palm oil' while waiting for Nick to take me to my next appointment, or tell me what my responsibilities were. I talked about how the cutting of timber and the burning of rainforests and of land that lay above peat bogs was releasing large and dangerous quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, and how the resulting fires and deforestation were more damaging to the climate than any benefits that might be gained by switching to biofuels made from palm oil. I talked about how the deforestation was depriving significant numbers of birds and animals of their natural habitats, was encroaching on the last remnants of primary rain forest, and I said that when these rainforests were gone, they'd be gone forever.

I paused, and Tamika cocked her head to the side in a way that said, ‘Keep going, please.'

The clearing of forests also reduced biodiversity, increased vulnerability to fires, and had nasty effects on indigenous communities that depended on forest ecosystems for survival, I said, in addition to which, the large amounts of petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers used in the cultivation of palm oil polluted local areas while at the same time contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. According to some studies, the clearing, draining, and burning of Borneo's peatland was by itself responsible for more than eight percent of the entire planet's fossil fuel emissions.

“Anything else?” Tamika asked.

“Before I left Singapore,” I said, “I saw a report from the World Health Organization claiming that palm oil consumption increases the risk of heart disease.”

I exhaled. “Enough?”

“For now,” Tamika said, “though I am wondering if you might answer one additional question.”

“Probably.”

“
Probably?!
” she laughed. “Well, let me take a chance, given how forthright you have been so far. But tell us, Charlie: When it comes to palm oil and its production here in Borneo, are you for or against?”

“Got you there, lad,” the Englishman said.

“Look,” I said. “I was just answering your question. Whether I'm for or against palm oil production hardly matters given the push—the money—behind what's been going on here, and—”

“I did not mean to put you on the defensive,” Tamika said. “We thank you for sharing so much information with us, especially given who your employer is. We really do. Our lips are sealed, of course—yes, everybody?”

The others nodded their agreement, and a few minutes later, we entered the park.

 

On our first day in Bako, we walked along paths bordered by freshwater mangrove forests, explored a cave where remains of human communities that existed perhaps twenty thousand years ago had been discovered, and climbed through a small rainforest to the top of a mountain that gave a spectacular view of long, empty, golden beaches, and of the South China Sea. We saw orangutans, silver-leaf monkeys, and an astonishing variety of birds: a red-crowned barbet, a cuckoo dove, a black-backed swamphen, a crested goshawk, and kingfishers, flycatchers, and snipes, and while we walked, Tamika named what we saw, and told us which birds and animals were endangered, and which were flourishing. She talked about the great Deer Cave, among the two or three biggest underground caves, which was not far from Kuching, and which she urged us to visit—it had the capacity to hold five cathedrals the size of London's St Paul's, and was home to at least three million bats who produced piles of guano that could rise to more than three hundred feet high.

After lunch we hiked along trails bordered by sumptuous
beds of wild orchids, along with flowers called pitcher plants that to my eyes were often indistinguishable from the orchids—carnivorous plants that fed on insects, and had seductive vulva-shaped, satin-skinned flowers.

What amazed—and pleased—was not only how lush and plentiful everything was—how variegated the brush, trees, and streams, how vivid and various in shape and color the birds, how well-kept the trails, rest stops, and beaches, but also how, on that day and the three that followed, we didn't encounter a single other human being. I felt at times as if we were the last people on earth, and when I said this to Tamika, she said she'd sometimes felt the same way, but the good news was that it wasn't so. Because we were here, she said, the chances that endangered species would survive were greatly increased.

I could understand why she might
hope
we could make a difference in saving a world so dear to her, I said, but in terms of cause and effect, what she said made no sense. That we were here—tourists—had nothing to do with whether or not beasts, birds, flowers, and trees survived.

“Ah, Charlie,” she replied, “are you not being
merely
rational when you think that way?”

“I suppose,” I said, and our discussion ended there. When we were in the boat on our way back to the hotel, however, she sat next to me and told me again that I was mistaken. It was because of visitors like me that she was encouraged to believe that much of her native land would still be saved.

I shrugged, and instead of arguing, recited a line that had been with me on and off for much of the day. “‘Death is the mother of beauty,'” I said.

“Oh yes!” she exclaimed. “‘Death is the mother of beauty'—of course!—that is a
wonderful
way to understand what's happening here, and it reinforces everything I believe.”

“You don't understand,” I said.

“But I do,” she said. “Nick once said the same words when he was here.”

“What I said isn't from Nick,” I shot back. “It's from a poem—a line from a poem he heard from
me
that I heard from my father and that my father took from a poet named Wallace Stevens.”

“Well, there is a trail there too, then, is there not?” she said.

“A
trail
?”

“In the way we make our associations and, thus, are connected to one another.”

“You don't get it,” I said.

“No,” she said. “
You
do not get it.” Then she squeezed the back of my neck between thumb and forefinger, hard.

When we were back at the hotel, she shook hands with each of us, and said she would meet us in the same place at seven-fifteen the next morning. I felt dizzy, light-headed—confused, really—and eager to get away because the last thing I wanted was to talk about what I'd seen, thought, felt, or was feeling. In a world of strange, new experiences and sudden, startling contrasts—from the utterly sublime (the beauty of the place was so exquisitely otherworldly as to be almost unbearable), to the predictably banal (the English couple, the German businessmen), and irritating (but why did the hotel's lavish perks, or Tamika's naïve optimism get under my skin?)—the only thing I wanted was to be in a place without others and without sound—a place where I wouldn't have to be with, talk with, or listen to anyone ever again.

But Tamika held onto my hand until the others were gone. I was afraid for a second she was going to offer me some kind of private tour where she'd try to prove she was right and I was wrong about saving Borneo (or the planet!), or where I'd feel obligated to try to seduce her (so that she'd have the pleasure of rejecting me?), or where she'd want to talk about Nick's good deeds, but she'd kept me from leaving only to tell me she
was getting together with Alicia and Amanda after dinner—she hadn't wanted the others to feel left out—and if I wanted to stop by their suite, I'd be welcome. She let go of me then, and when she did, and when I watched her step into the mini-van and pull the door closed behind her, I realized she was considerably older than I'd thought at first—and also, a more unsettling realization: that this woman I'd found so enchanting might not be what she seemed: that she might not be a woman at all.

 

“You may watch,” Tamika said.

I sat in an easy chair while, like performers setting up for an old-fashioned
tableau vivant
, they assumed their poses. Tamika wore a royal blue silk strapless full-length gown, and Alicia and Amanda wore white blouses and pleated gray skirts of the kind worn by girls at prep schools. Without holding hands, the three of them moved in a circle, counterclockwise, their heads tilted backward. Debussy's
La Mer
was playing softly.

“So, Mister Eisner,” Amanda asked. “Who are we?”

“The three graces,” I answered.

“Correct,” Amanda said. “And representing—?”

“Beauty, charm, and creativity.”

“Correct again,” Amanda said. “But that still doesn't mean you've been granted permission to touch us.”

When I'd entered the suite, they were drinking champagne and feeding appetizers to one another—raw shrimp, samosas, curry puffs, mushrooms, olives. They sat across from me, side by side on a plush russet-colored couch, told me about themselves, asked me about myself. Alicia had grown up and gone to school in Boston (Boston Latin, Radcliffe, Harvard Law School), where she now worked as a litigator. Amanda, who'd grown up in Bradford, a small Rhode Island town near Watch Hill, had gone to Duke and then to the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill, and was a pediatrician in Newton.

When
La Mer
came on, they'd risen and moved to the middle of the room, where, without touching, they turned in languid circles.

“Are you ready?” Tamika asked me.

“
Me
?”

“Am I talking to someone else?”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“Then turn down the lights, please? That way if you become bored watching us, you can either take a nap or go to the window and watch the stars come out.”

I turned down the lights. “The three graces are not the same as the three muses,” I offered. “Did you know that? Because if…”

“Shh,” Tamika said, a finger to her lips. “Be a good boy now.”

They joined hands again, and continued in a circle, first one way, and then the other. Some time later—ten minutes? twenty?—the music stopped, and they stood still—immobile—their breathing deep and steady.

Then Alicia stepped toward Tamika, and rested her hands on Tamika's shoulders, while Amanda, from behind, undid Tamika's gown, and let it fall to the floor. Tamika wore no undergarments, and she was, I saw—why would I have thought otherwise?—very much a woman. Her breasts were smaller than I'd imagined, her hips wider, and her stomach surprisingly ample, with a lovely ripple of extra flesh at her waist. I sipped my champagne—my third or fourth flute by this time—and I thought: how wonderful it must be to be Tamika—to be an exceptionally tall, beautiful woman whose body, as she headed into her middle years, was just beginning to know the sweet, natural effects of time and gravity.

Amanda, still in her schoolgirl outfit, rose on her toes and kissed Tamika lightly on the mouth. She and Tamika flicked tongues for a while, after which they began to kiss with increasing passion while Alicia, on her knees, put her mouth to the
base of Tamika's spine, and began kissing and licking her there. Tamika sighed, and that was when I found myself thinking not of Seana's novel, but of my father telling me about it after he'd read it the first time—about the mother-daughter-father
ménage à trois
, of how original and—his word—
delicious
he found it, and of how proud he was of Seana, and I wondered: would I ever feel free enough to tell him about what I was seeing now?

I also wondered if Nick had been invited to watch a performance like this when he'd been here, and as soon as I imagined him sitting where I was, the pleasure I'd been feeling washed out of me. I watched Alicia get down on her knees, part the folds of Tamika's sex, and lick her gently even as, still on her knees, Amanda parted Tamika's cheeks and began probing Tamika's anus with her tongue. Eyes closed, Tamika stared ahead with a look of such extraordinary contentment that for a moment I was able to put aside the bitterness I was feeling toward Nick so that I could try again to imagine what it might be like to be Tamika.

After a while I closed my eyes and drifted off into a pleasant haze, and I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes Amanda and Alicia were lying side by side on the floor—they were naked, their uniforms nowhere in sight—and Tamika was tending to them lovingly. I watched for a while but nothing they did aroused me, and this was surprising because when I'd watched lesbian porn films—this had started at Smith College with girlfriends there—the films had always turned me on. Nor did my presence seem to make a difference. Although they'd seemed happy enough to have me in the room, once they'd begun playing with one another, they never really noticed me again, so a bit later on, while the three of them lay on the carpeting, happy and exhausted, I set my glass down and, as quietly as I could, left the room.

 

The next morning, when I boarded the mini-van, Alicia and
Amanda were already there, and they acted as if we were what we were and nothing else: three American tourists staying in a luxury hotel in Kuching and looking forward to what promised to be a second fascinating day in Bako National Park. They were so friendly and pleasant, as Tamika was when she arrived a few minutes later (Did you sleep well? Have you had breakfast? Did you remember to bring bug spray? Have you been keeping up with news from the States?), that I was on the verge, several times, of asking if what had happened the night before had actually taken place.