I'm probably the last person you expect to hear from but here goes...I’m at this old hotel in Bali. Christ, you should see this place: Kitsch seventies all the way. Thatched walls, rattan flooring and wooden carvings. Surrounded by dank tropical gardens and with a poolside bar. Nostalgic to say the least. (This accounts for the rather odd hotel stationery). Anyway you’ve been to these kinds of places: as soon as you walked through the front gates, it's the usual pandemonium of south-east Asia: snarled traffic, stalls selling tourist junk, broken pavements, temples discoloured by pollution. At least the hotel is cheap. Every morning I get up, have breakfast (why do breakfasts in south-east Asia always leave me feeling slightly queasy?) and consider going out to the islands or taking a tour of some volcano or catching a bus to some yoga retreat inland that will probably be full of sanctimoniously mellow Americans chanting in the lotus position, but each time I go to the reception desk to book one of these things-each time I reach for a colour brochure-I become indecisive. Or maybe I’m just lazy? I don’t know. I end up spending most of the day sitting around the hotel, attempting to read. (I never understood the whole idea of reading on holiday. You come all this way only to push your nose into some shitty Tom Clancy novel in order to escape the tropical experience you've paid good money for). Anyway, I'm not sure if it was the constant drone of mopeds or mandatory bartering with the local vendors (or even worse having to witness my fellow countrymen react so badly when confronted by these vendors) but for the first part of the day I usually don't leave the hotel grounds. I sit by the pool, equatorial clouds overhead, frozen in the same spot for hours at a time like a photograph. And when that becomes boring, I go for a walk around back streets, and then usually end up down to the beach which is pretty underwhelming compared to Australian beaches.
After a few days I started talking to one of those beach vendors that has set up a little fridge powered by a car battery and a few plastic chairs in the sand. This guy is a good man. Or so he tells me. He has four kids and he is a practising Christian. He has the kind of simple life that a tourist might envy. I asked him the other day what the deal with drowning on the beach was (the surf is usually quite rough) and he said the last tourist was a drunken Italian who got taken out by the rip. They tried to help him to no avail. I can talk to this little Indonesian for hours at a time. Mainly he tells me about his life. I suppose when I finally decide to leave I’ll have to give him some money. I did make another friend. The concierge at my Hotel (I think he readily makes friends with all lone tourists who check-in). Each day he exerts a gentle pressure. Dressed in his decrepit bellhop uniform, he tells me he was once the Olympic ice skater and that his baby needs breast milk because his wife cannot produce it herself. A sad story indeed. I guess it is equally sad that cynicism takes over as soon as I stepped left the airport. Anyway, when I first got here, each night I would listen to this story of need while the hotel band played cheesy pop songs in the empty pool area. Later on, the 'back in five minutes' sign was put on the reception desk and I was taken for a little ride (both figuratively and literally) through the groovy backstreets of the local area. The concierge drove me to a local convenience store on his moped where I am expected to buy him and his buddy (the smiling security guard) cigarettes and bottles of beer. I was being used but I didn't really care. In terms of entertainment value, it's worth the price.
Other nights I’ll go out (drunk) and sit on a street corner playing chess with some locals, drinking some of their palm wine or some other methanol-laced lobotomy juice. And it was on one of these drunken nights that I lost my smartphone so this is the reason I am reverting to this: Paper and ink! There is an old-fashioned manual typewriter sitting out in the lobby area in amongst the fat beach novels and cane furniture. A prop I think, an object to take up space on the shelves. A dust collector. So this is what I have taken to doing at night when I'm pissed. I feed some of the Hotel stationery into the machine and start banging away. Maybe it's therapeutic. Maybe it's me living out some Graham Greene fantasy. Maybe I just need to get this off my chest.
I became ‘buddies’ with another guest a few days ago (Beyond the usual casual conversations by the pool). She was an American. I was vaguely aware of her checking in, with her small stack of luggage and her direct inquiries about the hotels in-house massage services and what time the breakfast finished each day. You don't really have to try in these kind of settings. When they travel, people need to make contact quickly. (I often think what a real life was like this? Would it become exhausting? With everyone bounding around as friendly as a Golden retriever?) Anyway, as I said, I was sort of lolling about by the pool, about four beers into my daily drinking routine and we get talking. And it was all very nice. Physically speaking she was healthy and statuesque almost. There had been work done. She had been tightened and tucked. Her teeth were stereotypically Southern California White. Obviously, time and money going into maintaining this exaggerated exterior of health. That first time I met her, I wasn't even thinking along sexual lines. She just wasn't my type at all. I was just enjoying the conversation, assuming it wouldn't go any further than touching base once or twice over the coming days. And then, we were sitting by the side of the pool both drinking beer which was fine. I didn't tell much about my life (by then I was a bit tired discussing my problems with strangers). At some point, it comes out that she's a war widow and that her husband died in the Iraq. And of course, this is very sad. She goes on to explain that she's come to Bali to do a bit of soul-searching. We meet up later in the afternoon and decide, on her suggestion, to have a meal together. Great. No problems. And things seem to progress from there in terms of getting to know each other, and then we spend the next day together, just walking around, shopping, going in and out of large hotels to use their pool and bar facilities. Matters progress until that night we're back at the hotel, drunk, and there seems nothing else left to do except pick a room. Either mine or hers. (We choose mine). Thing quickly became intimate. We strip off and proceeded to have what I would say, without a doubt, was the worst sex I've ever had in my life. I won't go into too much detail because, as you know, I'm a reasonably private person. Anyway, it is awkward and mechanical. There is a prevailing sense of disconnection or confusion between us because all that flirtation and companionship over the past 24 hours has culminated in….nothing. Awkwardness. Anxiety and the queasy feeling you've ended up in the wrong place with the wrong person. She actually gets quite hostile with me. As if my naked body is an affront to her. After we go through this, we just lay there on the mattress, panting in the humidity, the AC struggling, the pointless prophylactic draped over the nightstand like a beached jellyfish. She complains for a while that she had a headache from the sun and consuming too much alcohol, indicating to me that I was responsible for encouraging her to drink. Hell, I don't really know what to say to her. And even though she tried to unload her guilt on me, even though she keeps saying, ‘Oh my god what have I done?’ she won't leave. Which I would think would be the sensible thing to do (she keeps telling me she is embarrassed to be seen sneaking around the courtyard. That she wants to make sure everyone is asleep). Once the anger has dissipated, we have this long confessional discussion and by long, I mean for the rest of the night. Or near enough anyway. And she then she tells me that her husband didn't die in the war. He was only badly injured. And as a result, he has become this unstable nutcase back on the Army base in South Carolina. One of these paranoid, gun-toting Yanks. She tells me that she has spent the last four years of her life putting up with his psychological bullshit. Being followed around the little town they live in. This guy getting his friends to spy on her. In the shopping mall. At the movies. Monitoring her Facebook account. I listen to all this because I feel some sort of misplaced commitment. The whole time I'm thinking there has to be another side to the story because there always is. If she is so controlled, how did she get to travel here, halfway around the world, all by herself? She tells me that she picked Bali because she’d ‘seen that Julia Roberts movie. Eat, Pray, love at the multiplex back home and I thought, before I die, I want to go there and visit that place’.
The point is, I spend time with this woman in a way I didn't expect. Once we’d dispensed with the weary expectation that we needed to have this hot holiday fuck, we were finally able to have a very real conversation. So I listened to her talk about all the things she doesn't like about her life, including her husband, all the things she wants to do before it got too late, the disappointments, the compromises, the desires, the risks she was willing to take for short-lived gratification, the risks she won't take because she was past the age where she was willing to sacrifice her financial security. It always amazes me that women can justify their decisions under these circumstances. Of course, I had to hear how terrible she felt about being a terrible wife. But once we had dispensed with that, once she had been paired back to feeling like an individual, free from all commitments beyond the walls of our hotel room, well…let's just say it always amazes me how people can justify their actions at 3 AM. We were still talking as the sky outside began to get light and then finally she got up and went off to her room. By then she's pretty much told me everything that she could tell anyone else in her life because it would have been too disruptive and corrosive to the social bonds.
I caught up with her periodically over the next couple of days, coming and going, hanging around in the lobby, making plans to travel out to the islands or returning from shopping. That kind of thing. When we bumped into each other, there was no residual feeling of either animosity or intimacy. We were cordial to each other. That night and all its tiresome confessionals were fading from view. My universe had righted itself: hallelujah. I was actually glad things turned out this way. I have regained my anonymity. I was just a friendly guy who hung around the pool, making small talk and drinking beer. I had not asked to be recast as someone’s shrink.
Three days later and I had pretty much forgotten about that evening. Then one afternoon the police show up. The concierge told me that the American woman-I suppose I should give her a name. Angie- had died in her room. Died! She was 49 years old (I learnt this later. She told me she was closer to 40) and she just stopped living. Simple as that. An aneurysm. A clot in her brain. To be honest with you, I really didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I wasn’t responsible for her nor was I her friend. The police involvement was merely a formality: the room door had been locked from the inside and the local coroner confirmed she had died of natural causes. I walked past the room while they were still in there. She was laid out on the bed with about six men standing around, talking quietly in Indonesia. A man from the American consulate showed up sometime later and collected her personal effects and documents. I asked him what would happen from this point on, explaining that I had talked briefly to her over the past couple of days. He explained that the husband was on route from the United States.
As you can probably guess, I've had this kind of conversation on several occasions throughout my life. (I don't mean with the consulate official. I mean with the wife before she died). I don't know what it is about me that always leads to this. When we were younger I slept with a few other blokes’ girlfriends. It started happening in uni I suppose. And as you know, this kind of behaviour could lead to unpleasantness. Angry confrontations and even violence. Of course back then, in uni, it was hardly the end of the world. When you're young, you tend to bounce back quickly from a broken heart right? There are other opportunities waiting. And besides, we were all running around in those days, sexually speaking. The problem was that this behaviour stayed with me into adult life. I don't know what it is but for some reason, I always seem to end up with married women. I don't know if it is something I give off or what? Not that I am excusing myself or trying to assign blame elsewhere. Believe me, Keith, I am not. This is just the way things have turned out for me. I can tell you from experience that one of the most honest, the rawest conversations you'll ever have is with someone else's wife at 3am. The situation demands it. In those hours, they finally get the opportunity to shrug off-at least temporarily- the life which has collected around them. The life that is in most cases beginning to suffocate them. Of course, it has: why else would they be in bed with another man? Look, before I go on, you know me, Keith. I’m no lothario. I don't look like George Clooney. I have an acceptable level of charisma. There is nothing which puts me in this category and I can honestly say I have never gone out of my way to encourage these kinds of sexual relationships. As you know I’ve tried to be in a monogamous relationship. I was unhappily married to Jasmine for five years. And after we separated there was some online dating which generally turned out to be pretty disastrous. And interspersed between those dates, three girl friends who hung around for a few months. But nothing really stuck. You know about my love life because we’ve talked about it. I remember you said you envied my track record with women. Anyway, over the years there has been one constant: I swear to God every once in a while I look up and there is somebody's wife, just standing there looking at me, and I know. I’m 'in' as they say. At the park, at a party, at the pub, a sports field. If I told you the extent of it, you would either think I'm lying or...I just don't understand it. In these situations, you want to take the high road most of the time I never did. It was never beyond my control, I know that. I always had an opposition. I guess what I’m saying is that over the years, this kind of thing...just seems to have been disproportionately available to me. Every other sexual experience or relationship I've had with a woman, when condoned in a socially acceptable way, seemed lifeless and contrived. Some of our acquaintances, as you know, have over the years gotten up to all kinds of extramarital shenanigans and weirdness (I won’t mention names but you know who I’m talking about). Some have been more adept at hiding their dalliances from their wives and from the community in general. Christ, the number of times we have sat around, raising eyebrows, gossiping like women because so-and-so couldn't get enough ‘professional company’! And how so-and-so had a thing for trannies. I don't want to smear other people's’ reputations. I’m just trying to be realistic about how we all conduct ourselves. Anyway, as I said, straightforward, conventional relationships with available women became lifeless and pointless for me. It was like being in a dull play night after night, reciting the same lines and going through the same actions. I'm still trying to figure all this out. I think with this latest thing, the American woman, and the way my life has changed over the past couple of weeks-I guess I'm finally taking stock. I want to stop avoiding responsibility. I have been too good at the secrecy of it. The duplicity. And I’ve been doing it for too long. And you know all this because of what happened between me and Lucy last year. And how it has ruined our friendship. I'm fairly confident that you are still angry enough with me to have a go if we ran into each other. I’d deserve it. Sure. When I was younger I used to be able to lay the blame on the woman. She was, after all, was the one who was cheating. Maybe there is some consolation in the fact that I have finally managed to destroy all lingering (and long-suffering) social and professional relationships in New South Wales. (You would be surprised how effectively you can ruin your own professional and social standing in a community. I was. Usually, these things dissipate over time. All you need to do is cross the wrong man. A man (again, you know who I am talking about) who is vindictive and influential enough to make your life untenable). Who knows? Maybe I was destined to end up one of these silver-haired foxes you hear about on a cruise ship dancing the night away with grateful widows? At this moment, I'm not sure which direction to head in. There is very little left for me back in New South Wales as I mentioned. I have some money and I have a little bit of time. I will be returning to Australia but not for a while. Finally, I need to apologise to you. For the way I undermined your marriage. I don’t suppose that helps but there you are.
P.S. I did leave the hotel eventually. I went off to one of those islands and I had a reasonably good time. Four days of low gear tourist activities. When I got back to the hotel, the husband was there. He was what you would expect from her description. A greying buzz cut. American military. Square shoulders and a square jaw. Impressive dental work. Probably used to play football in high school. All that. I felt like I should talk to him. Instead, I chickened out. How would it help him? To explain to him that his wife thought he was an asshole. I decided to write to you instead. Anyway, there wasn't time. He was getting into a taxi. I heard him say, airport, please.
I became ‘buddies’ with another guest a few days ago (Beyond the usual casual conversations by the pool). She was an American. I was vaguely aware of her checking in, with her small stack of luggage and her direct inquiries about the hotels in-house massage services and what time the breakfast finished each day. You don't really have to try in these kind of settings. When they travel, people need to make contact quickly. (I often think what a real life was like this? Would it become exhausting? With everyone bounding around as friendly as a Golden retriever?) Anyway, as I said, I was sort of lolling about by the pool, about four beers into my daily drinking routine and we get talking. And it was all very nice. Physically speaking she was healthy and statuesque almost. There had been work done. She had been tightened and tucked. Her teeth were stereotypically Southern California White. Obviously, time and money going into maintaining this exaggerated exterior of health. That first time I met her, I wasn't even thinking along sexual lines. She just wasn't my type at all. I was just enjoying the conversation, assuming it wouldn't go any further than touching base once or twice over the coming days. And then, we were sitting by the side of the pool both drinking beer which was fine. I didn't tell much about my life (by then I was a bit tired discussing my problems with strangers). At some point, it comes out that she's a war widow and that her husband died in the Iraq. And of course, this is very sad. She goes on to explain that she's come to Bali to do a bit of soul-searching. We meet up later in the afternoon and decide, on her suggestion, to have a meal together. Great. No problems. And things seem to progress from there in terms of getting to know each other, and then we spend the next day together, just walking around, shopping, going in and out of large hotels to use their pool and bar facilities. Matters progress until that night we're back at the hotel, drunk, and there seems nothing else left to do except pick a room. Either mine or hers. (We choose mine). Thing quickly became intimate. We strip off and proceeded to have what I would say, without a doubt, was the worst sex I've ever had in my life. I won't go into too much detail because, as you know, I'm a reasonably private person. Anyway, it is awkward and mechanical. There is a prevailing sense of disconnection or confusion between us because all that flirtation and companionship over the past 24 hours has culminated in….nothing. Awkwardness. Anxiety and the queasy feeling you've ended up in the wrong place with the wrong person. She actually gets quite hostile with me. As if my naked body is an affront to her. After we go through this, we just lay there on the mattress, panting in the humidity, the AC struggling, the pointless prophylactic draped over the nightstand like a beached jellyfish. She complains for a while that she had a headache from the sun and consuming too much alcohol, indicating to me that I was responsible for encouraging her to drink. Hell, I don't really know what to say to her. And even though she tried to unload her guilt on me, even though she keeps saying, ‘Oh my god what have I done?’ she won't leave. Which I would think would be the sensible thing to do (she keeps telling me she is embarrassed to be seen sneaking around the courtyard. That she wants to make sure everyone is asleep). Once the anger has dissipated, we have this long confessional discussion and by long, I mean for the rest of the night. Or near enough anyway. And she then she tells me that her husband didn't die in the war. He was only badly injured. And as a result, he has become this unstable nutcase back on the Army base in South Carolina. One of these paranoid, gun-toting Yanks. She tells me that she has spent the last four years of her life putting up with his psychological bullshit. Being followed around the little town they live in. This guy getting his friends to spy on her. In the shopping mall. At the movies. Monitoring her Facebook account. I listen to all this because I feel some sort of misplaced commitment. The whole time I'm thinking there has to be another side to the story because there always is. If she is so controlled, how did she get to travel here, halfway around the world, all by herself? She tells me that she picked Bali because she’d ‘seen that Julia Roberts movie. Eat, Pray, love at the multiplex back home and I thought, before I die, I want to go there and visit that place’.
The point is, I spend time with this woman in a way I didn't expect. Once we’d dispensed with the weary expectation that we needed to have this hot holiday fuck, we were finally able to have a very real conversation. So I listened to her talk about all the things she doesn't like about her life, including her husband, all the things she wants to do before it got too late, the disappointments, the compromises, the desires, the risks she was willing to take for short-lived gratification, the risks she won't take because she was past the age where she was willing to sacrifice her financial security. It always amazes me that women can justify their decisions under these circumstances. Of course, I had to hear how terrible she felt about being a terrible wife. But once we had dispensed with that, once she had been paired back to feeling like an individual, free from all commitments beyond the walls of our hotel room, well…let's just say it always amazes me how people can justify their actions at 3 AM. We were still talking as the sky outside began to get light and then finally she got up and went off to her room. By then she's pretty much told me everything that she could tell anyone else in her life because it would have been too disruptive and corrosive to the social bonds.
I caught up with her periodically over the next couple of days, coming and going, hanging around in the lobby, making plans to travel out to the islands or returning from shopping. That kind of thing. When we bumped into each other, there was no residual feeling of either animosity or intimacy. We were cordial to each other. That night and all its tiresome confessionals were fading from view. My universe had righted itself: hallelujah. I was actually glad things turned out this way. I have regained my anonymity. I was just a friendly guy who hung around the pool, making small talk and drinking beer. I had not asked to be recast as someone’s shrink.
Three days later and I had pretty much forgotten about that evening. Then one afternoon the police show up. The concierge told me that the American woman-I suppose I should give her a name. Angie- had died in her room. Died! She was 49 years old (I learnt this later. She told me she was closer to 40) and she just stopped living. Simple as that. An aneurysm. A clot in her brain. To be honest with you, I really didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I wasn’t responsible for her nor was I her friend. The police involvement was merely a formality: the room door had been locked from the inside and the local coroner confirmed she had died of natural causes. I walked past the room while they were still in there. She was laid out on the bed with about six men standing around, talking quietly in Indonesia. A man from the American consulate showed up sometime later and collected her personal effects and documents. I asked him what would happen from this point on, explaining that I had talked briefly to her over the past couple of days. He explained that the husband was on route from the United States.
As you can probably guess, I've had this kind of conversation on several occasions throughout my life. (I don't mean with the consulate official. I mean with the wife before she died). I don't know what it is about me that always leads to this. When we were younger I slept with a few other blokes’ girlfriends. It started happening in uni I suppose. And as you know, this kind of behaviour could lead to unpleasantness. Angry confrontations and even violence. Of course back then, in uni, it was hardly the end of the world. When you're young, you tend to bounce back quickly from a broken heart right? There are other opportunities waiting. And besides, we were all running around in those days, sexually speaking. The problem was that this behaviour stayed with me into adult life. I don't know what it is but for some reason, I always seem to end up with married women. I don't know if it is something I give off or what? Not that I am excusing myself or trying to assign blame elsewhere. Believe me, Keith, I am not. This is just the way things have turned out for me. I can tell you from experience that one of the most honest, the rawest conversations you'll ever have is with someone else's wife at 3am. The situation demands it. In those hours, they finally get the opportunity to shrug off-at least temporarily- the life which has collected around them. The life that is in most cases beginning to suffocate them. Of course, it has: why else would they be in bed with another man? Look, before I go on, you know me, Keith. I’m no lothario. I don't look like George Clooney. I have an acceptable level of charisma. There is nothing which puts me in this category and I can honestly say I have never gone out of my way to encourage these kinds of sexual relationships. As you know I’ve tried to be in a monogamous relationship. I was unhappily married to Jasmine for five years. And after we separated there was some online dating which generally turned out to be pretty disastrous. And interspersed between those dates, three girl friends who hung around for a few months. But nothing really stuck. You know about my love life because we’ve talked about it. I remember you said you envied my track record with women. Anyway, over the years there has been one constant: I swear to God every once in a while I look up and there is somebody's wife, just standing there looking at me, and I know. I’m 'in' as they say. At the park, at a party, at the pub, a sports field. If I told you the extent of it, you would either think I'm lying or...I just don't understand it. In these situations, you want to take the high road most of the time I never did. It was never beyond my control, I know that. I always had an opposition. I guess what I’m saying is that over the years, this kind of thing...just seems to have been disproportionately available to me. Every other sexual experience or relationship I've had with a woman, when condoned in a socially acceptable way, seemed lifeless and contrived. Some of our acquaintances, as you know, have over the years gotten up to all kinds of extramarital shenanigans and weirdness (I won’t mention names but you know who I’m talking about). Some have been more adept at hiding their dalliances from their wives and from the community in general. Christ, the number of times we have sat around, raising eyebrows, gossiping like women because so-and-so couldn't get enough ‘professional company’! And how so-and-so had a thing for trannies. I don't want to smear other people's’ reputations. I’m just trying to be realistic about how we all conduct ourselves. Anyway, as I said, straightforward, conventional relationships with available women became lifeless and pointless for me. It was like being in a dull play night after night, reciting the same lines and going through the same actions. I'm still trying to figure all this out. I think with this latest thing, the American woman, and the way my life has changed over the past couple of weeks-I guess I'm finally taking stock. I want to stop avoiding responsibility. I have been too good at the secrecy of it. The duplicity. And I’ve been doing it for too long. And you know all this because of what happened between me and Lucy last year. And how it has ruined our friendship. I'm fairly confident that you are still angry enough with me to have a go if we ran into each other. I’d deserve it. Sure. When I was younger I used to be able to lay the blame on the woman. She was, after all, was the one who was cheating. Maybe there is some consolation in the fact that I have finally managed to destroy all lingering (and long-suffering) social and professional relationships in New South Wales. (You would be surprised how effectively you can ruin your own professional and social standing in a community. I was. Usually, these things dissipate over time. All you need to do is cross the wrong man. A man (again, you know who I am talking about) who is vindictive and influential enough to make your life untenable). Who knows? Maybe I was destined to end up one of these silver-haired foxes you hear about on a cruise ship dancing the night away with grateful widows? At this moment, I'm not sure which direction to head in. There is very little left for me back in New South Wales as I mentioned. I have some money and I have a little bit of time. I will be returning to Australia but not for a while. Finally, I need to apologise to you. For the way I undermined your marriage. I don’t suppose that helps but there you are.
P.S. I did leave the hotel eventually. I went off to one of those islands and I had a reasonably good time. Four days of low gear tourist activities. When I got back to the hotel, the husband was there. He was what you would expect from her description. A greying buzz cut. American military. Square shoulders and a square jaw. Impressive dental work. Probably used to play football in high school. All that. I felt like I should talk to him. Instead, I chickened out. How would it help him? To explain to him that his wife thought he was an asshole. I decided to write to you instead. Anyway, there wasn't time. He was getting into a taxi. I heard him say, airport, please.
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