“I don’t know what I have to do with it.”
“Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”
Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.
“For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”
“Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again- a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”
“So what do you want?”
“Just take care of her, OK?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terry said, and his mouth made several odd shapes, though no sound came out. He looked as if he were trying to commit a long and difficult equation to memory.
Caroline was sitting under a tree in the rain when Dad and I approached. I knew she was quietly tormenting herself. I thought I could hear her thoughts, fully articulated in my head. She was thinking of evil, whether she possessed evil herself or was possessed by it. She wanted to be good. She didn’t think she was good. She thought she was a victim of circumstance and that maybe all people who do evil are also victims of circumstance. She thought not only that Dad had cancer but that he was cancer. She wished he would fall in love with someone else and then die peacefully in his sleep. She felt Dad had taken over the story of her life and was rewriting it with messy handwriting so it became illegible. She thought her life had become illegible and incoherent.
This is what I was certain I heard her thinking. I felt so sympathetic, I wished the ground would open up and swallow her.
Dad strode up and laid it on the line. I should have guessed his first foray into noble deeds would blow up in his face. The truth is, his generosity of spirit extended only so far, and while magnanimously sacrificing himself on the altar of their love, he was unable to wipe the hurt look off his face, which killed the point of the whole exercise. It was this hurt look that made her explode.
“No! How can you say that? I love you! You! I love YOU!”
Dad pushed on. “Look. Terry was your first love, and I know you’ve never stopped loving him. It’s nobody’s fault. When you agreed to marry me, you thought he’d been dead for twenty years. We all did. So why pretend?”
Dad put forth a convincing case and got all worked up as he laid it out. He was so convincing that what seemed inconceivable suddenly became conceivable- and that threw Caroline into confusion.
“I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Is it that you don’t love me anymore? Yes, maybe it’s that.” And before Dad could answer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I love you, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”
Dad’s resolve was tested here. Why did she keep tormenting him like this? How could he keep it up?
“I want you to admit it,” he said.
“Admit what?”
“That you’re in love with him.”
“Martin, it’s-”
“Admit it!”
“OK! I admit it! First I started thinking, why does he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he have just stayed dead? And the more time I spent with Terry, the more I realized I was still in love with him. Then I started thinking, why do you have to be alive? Why are you dying so slowly? How unjust that someone who loved life, like my son, had to die so suddenly when someone who wants to die, like you, gets to live unendingly. Every time you talk about suicide my hopes jump up. But you never do it. You’re all talk! Why do you keep promising suicide if you won’t do it? You’re driving me crazy with all these promises of killing yourself! Do it or shut up about it, but stop getting my hopes up like that!” Suddenly Caroline stopped and covered her mouth with her hand, doubled over, and vomited. The vomit came through her fingers. When she straightened up, her face was twisted in shame. Every part of her face was magnified by it- her eyes were too round, her mouth too wide, her nostrils the same size as her mouth had been. Before anyone could say anything, she ran off into the jungle.
Dad swayed on his thin legs, and his complexion became what I can only describe as grainy. My life has been an unfair and humiliating series of losing propositions, his face lamented. Love was my noble suicide bid.
Just then Terry came out of the house. “Did I hear shouting?” he asked.
“She’s all yours,” Dad said.
“What do you mean?”
“Caroline- she’s all yours. We’re finished.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. You can be together now. I don’t mind.”
All the blood drained from Terry’s face, and he looked as if he’d just been told the plane he was on was making an emergency landing nose first in a volcano.
“Well…but…I can’t give up my prostitutes. I told you, love doesn’t work without possessiveness. No. No way. I can’t turn my back on my life now, after so long. No, I can’t be with Caroline.”
“Don’t you love her?”
“Leave me alone! What are you trying to do to me?” he said, and walked off into the jungle, but in the opposite direction to Caroline.
So the triangle had effectively broken up. Nobody was with anybody. The three points were single lines again, parallel, not touching.
Oops. My fault.
I didn’t witness the scene later that day between Terry and Caroline, but I saw Caroline afterward, walking as if tranquilized. “Are you OK?” I called out. Every now and then she’d stop and pound her head with her fists. “Caroline!” I called out again. She looked up at me with desperate eyes. Then Terry wandered past my window, looking bulldozed. He informed me that we were going back to Bangkok in the morning. At last, good news. I wondered if Terry’s curiosity about the terrible event to take place in Eddie’s house had been satisfied by the explosion of the triangle. Either way, I couldn’t wait to leave, nor could I spend the rest of the day in that house. I had to get out.
With no other option, I went with Eddie in his car as he went on his rounds. He seemed glad of the company and eagerly delivered a creepy monologue that compared doctors with gods. We visited a few farmers he’d finally discovered had chronic illnesses. After his consultations, to my disgust, he hit on their daughters right in front of the parents, girls who couldn’t be older than sixteen. Not knowing enough about the culture, I wasn’t sure of the perils of Eddie carrying on in this fashion, but it was hair-raising the way he went about trying to seduce, intimidate, and buy these poor girls. I couldn’t find his redeeming features anymore. The man I had grown up with was gone. As we left, he made up words about these girls, “fuckalicious” and “fuck-worthy” being the most common. Every word and gesture of his seemed saturated in frustration and fury. Back on the road, I thought: This man is a grenade waiting to detonate, and I hope I’m not around to see it.
Then he detonated.
I was around to see it.
My forehead was pressed against the car window, and I was wishing that the jungle around us was in fact the interior of a lavish, jungle-themed hotel and any time I liked I could go upstairs to my room and crawl between clean sheets and order room service and take an overdose of sleeping pills. I would have liked nothing better.
“What’s this?” Eddie said, breaking my reverie.
It was a girl of about fifteen running down the road waving her arms, signaling us to stop. Here’s trouble, I thought.
Eddie pulled over and we both got out of the car. She was motioning for Eddie to follow her. From what I could gather, her father was sick. Very sick. She was in a panic. She wanted Eddie to come right away. Eddie summoned his most professional posture. He translated for me, repeated the symptoms as she described them: fever, vomiting, powerful abdominal cramps, delirium, and lack of feeling in the legs and arms. Eddie grunted and sighed at the same time. Then he shook his head obstinately. The girl started shouting in a pleading voice.