Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Three days later, they checked into a hotel in Singaraja, along the northern coast of Bali, a hotel that catered to Indonesian businessmen and where they were the only tourists and, as such, were accorded the dubious honor of being placed in a room directly across from the hotel desk. There, with the night receptionist just outside their door and Indonesian businessmen snoring away behind the paper-thin walls on either side of them, his wife had wakened him in the middle of the night to tell him that she was thoroughly and profoundly miserable, that she had been for years and had been concealing it from him, and that she now understood that he was to blame for all of it, even the fact that she had been concealing it. He switched on the lamp next to the bed because it felt wrong to be discussing such things in the dark, and when he did, she began sobbing, but all Martin could think about was the night receptionist outside his door, listening to his wife cry.

Hoping to discuss the situation more rationally, Martin got out of the narrow bed and sat in a chair beside the armoire, leaning back with his arms crossed in front of him. He knew, of course, what crossed arms conveyed — inapproachability, an unwillingness to listen, outright hostility — for he had the sort of job, a middle-management position with a company that produced copiers, where people were always going on about things like teamwork and communication and body language, but he also knew that his arms were incapable of doing anything else at that moment but reaching toward each other and holding on.

After listening to his wife sob and curse him for nearly an hour, he asked in a low voice that he hoped she might imitate, “What can I do?”

He had meant what could he do at that moment to make her stop crying, but she had looked up at him incredulously and said, “Can you learn to cry when you hear sad songs? Can you learn to articulate why you prefer radishes to cucumbers? Can you learn to appreciate irony? Wait. Can you learn to even understand irony? No? Well, then there is absolutely nothing you can do, Martin.”

He slept sitting upright in the chair, and the next morning, with no mention of what had happened during the night, they packed and moved on to Ubud. During the day, they walked around the town, visiting the monkeys and stopping, it seemed to him, at every shop they passed. At one of them, his wife bought a carving that was heavy and round like a softball, the wood cut into the shape of a man with his legs pulled up to his chest, his head and shoulders curled over his knees.

“Is weeping Buddha,” the shopkeeper told Martin’s wife. She sighed and gave the man the exact amount of money that he asked for, and Martin kept his mouth shut.

That night, they ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant called Kodok, which, according to a poorly written explanation on the front of the menu, was the Indonesian word for frog . Martin supposed that the word was an onomatopoeia, and he marveled at the fact that kodok was nothing like the English word for the sound that frogs made, rib-it, yet both words seemed exactly right to him somehow. Normally, he would have shared this observation with his wife, but he didn’t, just as normally she would have commented on how beautiful the garden around them was, with candles nestled in beds of woven banana leaves and flowers everywhere and a pond near their table, but she didn’t.

In keeping with the restaurant’s theme, Martin ordered frog legs, which he had never had before. Several minutes after placing his order, as the two of them sat rolling their bamboo placemats up like tiny carpets and letting them unfurl, he watched as a boy bent over the little pool and, hands flashing, grabbed two plump, kicking frogs and rushed back to the kitchen with them. Martin was horrified. He thought that if he hurried, he could change his order before the damage was done, but when he looked up, his wife was staring at him with such naked revulsion that he did nothing — nothing, that is, except suck the frog legs clear down to the bone when they arrived.

The trip had gone on like this, the two of them speaking only about small matters such as who should go to the front desk to request more toilet paper and what bus seats they had been assigned. They continued to sleep in the same bed, not talking, not touching, not even accidentally, and finally, after a week of this, Martin gathered his courage one morning at breakfast and asked, “Is it because of what happened in the airport?” For even though it was impossible to change things, he felt that he had to know.

His wife had stared at him blankly for a moment. She was eating papaya, which she loved but which they rarely had back home in Ohio.

“Maybe we should go our separate ways?” he said then, because as he watched her eat the papaya and smack her lips, he understood that she was content, perhaps even happy.

“Think about the money,” she scolded. “How can we afford to keep traveling if we don’t share expenses?” Then, after a moment, she added, “Besides, what’s so different, Martin, really?” She asked this almost gently, which made it worse, for it meant that she felt secure enough to consider his feelings.

At least here in Yogyakarta they have begun spending their days apart. She has hooked up with four grown siblings, three sisters and a brother, who are staying at their hotel, and though Martin feels that she is intruding upon the siblings’ family reunion, he does not say this to her, knowing that she would scoff at him, would say something like, “Poor Martin. How does it feel to always think you’re in the way?”

In a few days, they are supposed to leave for Jakarta, and from there, they are to fly to Sumatra, and it is not until two weeks from now, an interminable amount of time, that they are scheduled to return to Jakarta and begin their trip back home, but Martin has realized that he can’t continue on like this. He simply cannot. That is what he had been speaking to the front desk man about when Joe wandered by. The front desk man, it turned out, was actually the manager, a helpful fellow with the unfortunate facial features of a toad: darting tongue, lidless eyes, and thin lips that cut far back into his cheeks. Martin felt immediately apologetic when he faced him, which he later understood to be residual guilt over the frog legs.

“I must change my flight,” he told him, forming the story as he went along. He laid out his ticket, Garuda Airlines, Jakarta to Singapore, for the man to see. “I read about the Garuda crash in September, and quite frankly, I’ve become nervous.” He began his request in this way to conceal his real motive, which was to change the flight date from two weeks hence to tomorrow, though why he felt he needed this bit of subterfuge, he could not say. However, as he spoke, he realized that there was truth to what he was saying. He had never been the sort that gave flying any thought, that questioned the ability of planes to stay aloft, but he saw now that things were not as he had always thought them to be.

“Sir, there is nothing to worry about. Garuda is our national airline. It is very safe. That accident, it was caused by the forest fires — the smoke — but that was months ago. I think there is no need to worry.” The man studied the ticket. “Also, sir, your flight is not for two weeks.” He added this quietly.

“I see,” said Martin, quietly also. “Well, I was thinking that as long as I’m making such a big change anyway, perhaps I might change the dates as well. In fact, I would like to take a flight tomorrow afternoon, from Jakarta. Can this be arranged?”

“I am not sure, sir,” the man said, flustered for some reason by the request. “You see, it is rather short notice. And your wife? Mrs. Stein?” he said, pronouncing Martin’s surname so that it sounded like the mark that dropped food leaves on one’s clothing, but Martin did not bother to correct him because he couldn’t imagine that it made any difference to either of them.