WIFE "Mer, let's get a divorce." Suryo said to her that night. "Why?" "Exactly." Suryo sighed, throwing his back to the sofa. Meri sat there at the tip of the chair, worked hard to command balance with her wide presence. Her eyes were going nowhere but the glaring screen. Her hands were busy crushing peanuts. Driving away her unruly hair. Scratching somewhere or other. The dress was rosy once. Just when, neither of them could remember. Suryo have known her well enough to see that those ears were never his at this time of day. When there is the stupid sitcom on air. Yet he did not care. "Your 'why's drive me crazy," he said to Meri's back. A why for everything. "It's so funny," Meri said, "Look, that man's doing it again." "Great." Suryo wanted out, it was killing him that he couldn't say where to. Okay, so he was not the Man of The Year, but what has he done to deserve Meri? "Read the news once in a while, will you?" he told her. "Why?" "You're gonna need it one day." "Why?" "Well -- don't your friends read anything?" "Nope. Why?" "You can know more than all of them about the world. That's a good thing." "Why?" Rrrrrgh. And those. "Why does Johan buy that new car?" "How the hell could I know. He's got lucky with those projects." "Why didn't you get the projects?" "The boss hates me, okay." "Why does he hate you?" "Because he's a colossal asshole, that's all." "Why are you talking like that?" "Oh please." Meri asks why ten times a day (Monday to Friday) and twenty times (holidays and Sunday), that was a big problem. Worse, he couldn't answer most of them. "Ask me what," Suryo said to her. "Ask how to those garage people. But why is --" he always stops there. Lately Suryo has been trying to be anywhere as long as Meri was not near. He felt like a skinny schoolboy every time he saw his wife. Who wants to marry a question mark? What a life. The rent was up next month. The matchbox, he bought that hundreds of years ago, it was still there, he couldn't get some little money to burn as cigarettes. He still used the typewriter his father got from an uncle, it was as old as the Mataram kingdom. And Johan got that new car. Nobody knew how people got rich, some got nothing at all and no explanation for that either. But the most mysterious thing was how come he ended up something Meri's. And when he got mad once, he said he regretted the fact that they have ever met, Meri asked him, "Why did you marry me?" He couldn't even answer that why. And that sitcom mesmerized her like everything else except what mattered. Suryo got up and shook Meri's shoulders from the back. "Mer! Listen! LET'S GET A DIVORCE!" Meri turned her head around, lifted up her eyes to meet his, and, "Why?"
POINT
ZERO The lonesome little piece of the moon was hanging there like an unclaimed sorrow. How many times of this now? Elinor asked herself; her glacial gaze upon the six o'clock sky could almost read the answer right there written in the late clouds: five months. Half of her that was thrusted into the air of the outer world was withdrawn then, she closed the window on departure. Five months of being together with Maikel, of locking themselves up in this nice little house, far from everything, far from everybody, far from everywhere. She smiled her happy smile - each time she got to drive her small red car out, for some emergencies like the depletion of sugar or coffee or tea, she could scarcely wait to get back into the house again - even while she was barely out of the white-fenced yard then. Maikel was that good. From the second she laid her eyes on him in Anita's party she had already known this was the man she wanted to live for. Maikel was, as a matter of fact, in love with Anita back then; but this kind of extemporae infatuation she could forgive, for it did not take much of him off her hands. She loved him so much - the sight of him could send a delicious pain right into the core of her soul, when he wasn't yet with her. Although he did gave Anita some roses at the party, and so far he had never given her any, she wasn't sore - Anita did get the flowers but look who's got Maikel now! Elinor straigthened up the tablecloth and pulled several of the chrysants that were withering, and neatly put them into the trash bin. She got to replace the flowers then; she didn't want him to see the table so bare while a honeymoon was as a rule to be full of the season's piquancy; she thought for supper it was to be graced by fresh jasmine. She got out and closed the door quietly behind her. When she reached the flowerbeds her heart leapt in fear for a fraction of a second. A sprite? Among the faraway rows of cypress she saw along the horizon there seemed to stand a human figure - she closed her eyes and then quickly opened them again; it's gone. Elinor, much against her own will, broke into laughter. There. She had started to imagine things again. This was most annoying especially when Mikael was near. Elinor picked the tiny white flowers one by one in no haste; supper was still half an hour away. She got back into the dining room and put the vase away; the exquisitely fragrant buds she spread all over the table. Then she prepared the meal in the kitchen; she stopped for a moment at the door to revel in its prodigality of reasonability - it had everything that she could ever need, no more, no less, exact, finite. That's how she liked things to be. She arranged her belongings in the house that way; the house itself was subject to the same principle. Everything was. Except herself. "Her Loveship," Benny mock-curtsied her once. Benny was gay and he was her brother. He died seven or eight months ago. They used to take care of each other in this house of her late mother; Elinor remembered that Benny always fell in love at least every Saturday to a different man; and they were mostly men who didn't wish for his companion. Poor Benny. He always thought that Elinor couldn't love anybody; that she wasn't gay but wasn't straight either, she was sexless. How wrong that was. She couldn't love anyone back then, only because the scene didn't have Maikel..... And then she and Benny were seeing one man for a time. How jealousy was repulsive to her! She had never known Benny could be so venomous and mean. Elinor herself was not greatly attracted by the man; she only let him in for convenience. To this plan Benny at first agreed but after some time his worse self rebelled against it, he wanted the man for himself only. Oh, thought Elinor, poor, poor Benny! She recalled how it started to fell apart, the good plan; she remembered how Benny, naked and mad, was standing there in the middle of the room, showering the most horrible words upon his sister and the man with her in bed - as if he owned the man, as if he had never seen them having sex before, as if he was to be the center of everybody's attention - "Ouch!" Elinor sucked her finger - it bled, she was carried away by the reminiscence. Never to think about Benny in the kitchen, she thought to herself; who knew what was to happen next. She finished cutting the carrots and put them in the steamer, then she softened the beef. She hoped Maikel wouldn't mind her finger. It wasn't badly cut anyway. She drifted again into her thoughts of the past - after their lover went away, for which Benny blamed her and she was certain it was Benny's doing, only a short time was to remain between Benny and oblivion. He died in the bathroom, bled to the end. Elinor sighed a little - life was eerily empty after the suicide; she didn't know she could miss Benny even though only a little. She was all alone then. Until, of course, there was Maikel. She knew he was afraid of her. Of the intensity of her passion, of her love that went like flood to drown him, of her devotion. She didn't merely adore him; she was worshipping him. And he couldn't think of how come. "I'm not that good, girl," he said, and on the voice alone Elinor could have dined forever; "Let's just relax, okay? Slow down a bit. You scare me." She didn't relax and she didn't want to; more than that, she couldn't have done so. Day and night, dawn and dusk, every minute every hour every single day of her life, Maikel was there on her mind, nothing else. And he was, Anita said, not even so good-looking. Maikel had the talent to get fat in a short notice. Anita said at thirty he would have been a big ball sliding down the road to calamity - yeah, right, Elinor thought; Anita didn't see him the way Elinor did; only the one who loved knew its worth. But then Anita had slept with him. She said so, casually, to Elinor; and she was bad enough to add that he wasn't very good in bed either - just like he was average elsewhere. How mad Elinor was at the time. Maikel, average? True, he didn't have a Roman god's features; but he wasn't Roman to begin with; so what's with that? Elinor caressed the face within her mind everytime before she could do that in all actuality; he was handsome beyond compare to her. She even found his rather thick midway sexy; at any rate, he was anything but average. She smiled now while frying the beef; Anita was definitely jealous of her, just like Benny. Oh, how wicked people were, to see her happy! That was rather hurried her to decide to live together with Maikel; she wouldn't take any risk of losing him forever. She took the plates to the dining room and for a while lingered there, recalling the first time she got him there - the start of his stay - it was in the middle of a supper like this. They had never finished the meal. And she was standing approximately where she was now, taking her clothes off until none remained; she danced for him. She would do that again tonight. Elinor felt a rush of warmth coming along her veins thinking of it; she turned around and walked into her bedroom. "Supper is ready, hon," she walked to the bed. "You'd love the steak," she said, hoping very much so, "I had no beans, but there are carrots and everything else." She winked. They went to the dining room together. "I love you," she said from across the table - all the love that she couldn't put into the common words was flowing through her eyes. Maikel and all the rest of her world were silent. He had been dead for five months now. To the remains of his corpse Elinor sent the feelings she had while tears kept running down her face; Maikel surely did smell bad.
FEATHERWEIGHT "So," Jali looked at her rather like Columbus after discovering America; "What do we do now?" "Umm.....Lunch?" Suli backed off a little bit when her boyfriend loomed large on her immediate horizon in the form of fuming rage. "YOU, Y-O-U -" Jali always lost his speech when he got really agitated, and the tragedy was he always got agitated and determined to speak at the same time. Suli retreated a few paces further from the epicentrum of this lovequake, and waited for the coast to get clear. Jali was, when he didn't get ideas like to get mad, a lovable person as far as Suli was concerned. He's twenty-one, almost good looking, very amiable to living creatures, nice to the unanimated, and very poor. His encounter with money had been similar to the one between Suli and the dinosaurs; the rare occasions of such were restricted to the realm of imagination, documentary films on TV and science-fiction. Suli worked as a salesperson in a garment shop and this meant a small but steady income to pay for the rent of the room and a few feminine paraphernalia, and her sole ambition was to succeed the venerable Mrs. Imah as the shop's informal leader and formal supervisor. She met Jali on the pavement right in front of the shop - he was laying down there, face caressing the concrete, fainted because of some intricate medical condition that in laypersons' words could be summarized as 'starvation'. Her motherly apparatus that had been hitherto dormant was awaken in an instant, and she took him into her life since. Not only that, she also bought him fried rice at the spur of the moment. Jali had dropped-out of the formal pedagogic institution that hated him as much as he did it a week before Suli found him. She could understand why he got there in the first place -- because every young man from a remote village who didn't see any prospect of inheriting some land and didn't want to do anything in the meantime, based on her vast recollection, invariably got the tendency to enter universities. She was glad nonetheless to have found him already in the state of uneducatedness. It meant a promising future, and she entertained the idea of putting Jali into the employement of her boss. This scheme was carried out and it expired just as easily. Jali arrived on the scene without his obligatory white-and-blue uniform as security guards were to don; he didn't do the security guarding either, and the wisdom of Mrs. Imah had expelled him from the commercial sphere in less than no time. Only then Suli knew that Jali's talent might, as he had been tirelessly announcing, lay in literature. He wrote poems of eroica around the Independence battles. This was substantially unlimited by the geographic borders of Indonesia but encompassing every Independence battle he could find anything about, including the American, the French, etcetera; and others of which his friends had severe doubts such as the Hawaii'an (from Japan) and English (from Cromwell). After the same fashion Jali embarked on an even wider definition of the words 'battle' and 'independence', producing quite a bulk. He was to be engaged upon those and other most important matters in human affairs, excluding the inconsequential tidbits of empty living such as electricty bills, the rent, and meals. As a non-literary person Suli was to take care of all these and she had been doing it without any complaint, since having a poet under her roof exalted her position in the social pyramid in the neighborhood. But magazine and newspaper editors seemed to be oblivious of the genius that had laid not one, not two, not a dozen, but practically tons of literary masterpieces on their desks every week or so. Suli's mother, who visited her last year, expressed her gravest concern at this, or more precisely at the part of Suli's salary that evaporated into some haze of nicotine needed by the poet whenever he was in the creative process. Jali was very offended. "Vincent van Gogh," he said, "was only discovered when he was already dead." Suli's mother gave this precedent a considerable thought, and finally she suggested to hasten the discovery as soon as possible. They have never talked with each other again afterwards. Yet little did the mother know that Jali's triumph was only two hundred and fifty-six days ahead of that time. Yesterday Jali's poem about the heroic scarecrow in a monsoon-infested rice field got printed in a weekly paper, and he had cashed in the reward earlier today, and he wanted to celebrate it by getting something for Suli, and he was to determine what it was to be. Suli was happy for him and for herself at the hastened discovery without Jali being dead first -- but she found her enthusiasm waning minute by minute since she couldn't change Jali's mind about buying her a pair of new sandals. "There is nothing wrong with my sandals", she said, and that was true - her rubber-soled sandals might have been four years old but they still worked just fine and she was rather attached to it, feeling like naked whenever she had to slip her feet into the shoes for work. "NOTHING is wrong with your sandals, right," Jali told her, already a little fuming, "except that it IS altogether WRONG. I can't believe that you keep wearing them everywhere - to the Mall, to weddings, to funerals, to the bathroom - Now I'm gonna get you a new sensible pair for the rest of the business of living, and you can still wear these antique things to go to the bathroom." In horror Suli found out that this thought of his about her sandals had been on his mind forever; or so Jali said; but he had been holding his tongue until then because he was considerate; his need for cigarettes was still rampant so he couldn't suggest to her the purchase of a new pair. After a futile half of a day of suggesting a new kerosene stove, a teflon frying pan, a new bedsheet, and electricity bills, finally Suli agreed to his proposal, and without further ado they got on a bus and went to a score of stores at Solo Street, where shoes and sandals were in a commercial amok. But Jali didn't find the sandals that he wanted, although at the first shop Suli had already found what she liked. Jali rejected her choice so thoroughly that the shop attendant got a very unhealthy blood-rate when the couple left the shop. They went in and out of probably fifteen sandals-selling places, it was already dark outside, and Suli asked him to stop a while until she was sure she was still alive. They sat on the concrete sidewalk, catching their breath. And then Suli discovered that her old sandals had found the day's heroic excursion too much for its age; the straps were broken. Jali was almost looking genuinely happy watching her throwing the adieu and the sandals into the nearest garbage can. But he was also hungry. "Let's eat," he took her hand. "But I'm not gonna walk like this!" Suli protested. "Let's eat there," Jali pointed at the small stall a few meters away, saying that she didn't need sandals just to walk a few steps into it. "No." Suli folded her arms, putting on her very rarely displayed look of The Adamant. "Oh, pleeeease," Jali pleaded with her, "I'm starving." "Get me some sandals first." "But we are here for nothing else!" Jali said. "Let's eat and then look into the shops we haven't been to." "Sandals first." At nine p.m. when all shops were closing Jali and Suli were already back home. Jali was full of supper, but he wasn't happy at all. Suli went right away into the bathroom wearing her new sandals of new rubber soles exactly like the ones before. |
