Another Fight (excerpt)

Part 6

Mats saw the arguing women first. They were standing a square in the center of The Hauge, a cozy looking place with restaurants and empty tables placed outside on a cold day in November. Modern looking buildings with roofs like roller coaster, perfect triangles, and the helmets of futuristic warriors loomed overhead.

    We had spent most of the afternoon walking around the famous small city with its tribunal for world affairs and the home of Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Earring which was housed at the famous Mauritius museum, which we walked by and acknowledged with a nod (besides the Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring was Mat’s second favorite painting). Even with last night’s sexual fiasco we were once again in love, and at the moment, we no longer cared about the past.  

Mats ran towards the arguing women who were standing in the center of the square by what seemed the statute of an explorer dressed in a large bronze cape

When I got closer to the commotion I realized Ting was grabbing at Belinde’s dark blue wool coat.  Belinde tried to shake her of while trying to walk away with her finance. 

“Leave me alone,” Belinde said loudly.

 “Stop. Please,” Ting insisted, grabbing at the other woman who constantly jerked her arm away from her.

“What do you want?” Belinde asked furiously, as she turned around to face the other woman.

“Is my husband with you?” Ting asked.

“What are you doing?” Mats asked when he grabbed Ting’s arm, surprising her with his sudden appearance.

“Are you with her?” Ting asked him when she regained her composure. Her eyes were swollen from crying, her face pale. She had on the same fine wool suit from the day before and her silk scarf with the hummingbird and flowers was casually tied around her suit jacket. She collected herself and waited for an answer.

“We will talk later,” Mats insisted angrily.

“We will talk now,” Ting said, surprising Mats with her tone.  

“He is with her,” Belinde chimed in loudly while pointing at me as if she had found the guilty party in a police lineup.

Ting looked my way, shocked and hurt when she made the connection between meeting at the hotel conference room and realizing I was with her husband. Her mouth slightly opened in surprise at the discovery of my betrayal and lies, even it if was only for the short time we shared at the hotel. 

I lowered my head in shame and felt a hot redness cover my cheeks.

When I looked up, I noticed Belinde had a smirk on her face. Her finance, who had bruises on his face from the fight two nights before, seemed to take in all the commotion with a certain curiosity.  Mats was a captain he admired, a coworker and pilot whose skills he wanted to emulate.  Mats had said to me that on several occasion he had brought him chocolates as a sign of his gratitude for being a mentor

Ting continued to take her rage out on Mats.

“Who is it? Who are you with, MY HUSBAND?” She continued with a tone of sarcasm.

“We will not talk now,” Mats said sternly, grabbing her by the arm and leading her away from the others as if he intended to find a quiet space to mull things over and calm her down.

“Liar! Liar! Marriage and loyalty are nothing to you,” Ting screamed at him, violently shaking off his grip of her arm.  She stood her ground and became infinitely stronger and taller as she called him out on his relationship sins.  If this confrontation was her last chance at marriage and divorce integrity she was going to get satisfaction in this pretty European square, across the way from the world’s tribunal of justice.

“How appropriate,” I thought. Even with my embarrassment of being caught red-handed in what seemed a misunderstanding of relationship endings and beginnings, fogged over by internet connections, conversations, and real-life meetings, I admired her gumption and understood her need to claim integrity in the oozing mess of pain and hurt, post relationship ending.  I had also tried to confront the other woman in my marriage and had taken a certain satisfaction with my intent to do so by driving to her office to face her even though she had left the building when she saw me coming.

Ting’s words stung Mats. She struck at the very heart of his relationship credo, that each relationship stand on its own two feet, free and clear of any ties to a past one.  He was always hard pressed to consider the overlapping threads of emotions that shifted and fogged his ending time line; that more talk, sex, healing might be needed to truly end a connection with a woman he had once loved, especially on the part of the woman.  He wanted the separation to be as clean and quick as a winning shot to a deer he had spent all day hunting.

In all actuality, he was in the process of starting to get his divorce from Ting, but it had happened too quickly for her. Only I knew she was the rebound, information I gathered from our online conversation in which he mentioned his Spanish/Danish lover and hardly ever his current wife.  “I should have never married her,” he said to me in genuine distress time and time again.

Ting, on the other hand, didn’t want to believe that she was flimsy band-aid to his broken heart, maybe because they had been married for three years -- enough time, she thought, for him to heal and move his emotions along.   But Mats had not allowed himself to experience the heartbreak from his breakup with Marie, so his mind remained clouded and his actions towards Ting not wholly honorable or well-intended.

“You asked for a divorce on the telephone. I was in China. You left me there.  My home is in Denmark… with you.”   He let go her arm and stood there a broken man. Even his game of clean endings was caught, dissected, and deemed a failure. 

“Explain that to me, “she demanded. When he remained silent, his head bowed, and his spirit broken, Ting took her black leather clutch and slapped him hard across the face. She stared with audacity at her own action and waited for a response. When Mats remained silent, his head lowered in shame, she continued to pummel him with her purse, each strike invigorating her further, each strike aimed at his hard and unforgiving head as the culprit of all his wrong actions towards her. In one blow his baseball cap, which hid his shaved head, went flying off.

Then Belinde joined the action because she liked violence, because she had her own complaints against the captain., because she was frustrated by his relationship with her, and because she had never really let him go.

With both hands, she slapped Mats on the shoulders, across the face, on the back, anywhere she could find a space to unleash her fury, anywhere Ting did not claim first. Sometimes her slaps coincided with the other woman’s hits, which made the women accidently hit each other or add a double impact of furor and violence on Mats.  Each woman released her anger in pummels that seemed to fall on the captain like cinder blocks leveled at him from the sky. Still, he didn’t move.

He allowed them to punish him as if it was well-deserved. He took their blows from their hands and purses keeping his head lowered in shame.

I had seen the same violent scene before. When I was child the women in my father’s life had also pummeled him on the streets after the funeral of his adult son from his second marriage, who had died in a car accident. There had been shouting and screaming at the gathering at my house after the wake. His two ex-wives, adult daughter, and my mother had had much to say to each other, about cheating, disloyalty, betrayal.  My father had lain in bed all afternoon heartbroken. When he accompanied the women outside to wait for their limousine they suddenly began to attack him with their clutches. All the women dressed in black with black veils and black purses looked like a cauldron of vultures frenzied and feeding on the carcass of a man too heartbroken to respond.

Now, tourists gathered around the commotion.  Some took pictures. Belinde’s finance and I were dumbfounded. “Go away, go away,” I said angrily to them.  “This is not a show. Go away.” I shooed them with my hands as if I was scattering a bunch of hungry pigeons.  

When Belinde’s finance deemed there had been enough violence, he grabbed his girlfriend and then Ting and put them on the sidewalk as if they were toy soldiers. Each woman dazed, exhausted, and emptied of all feelings, stood unmoving.  After Mats regained his composure he looked for his baseball cap, which a gawking tourist held it in his hand, and he put it back on his head.   

“Okay, we will eat now,” Belinde’s finance announced with the authority of an airline captain who had proposed the most natural action in the world.  No one questioned or refused his invitation.  Everyone was too dazed or exhausted to leave the scene of such a frantic and emotionally charged experience, so we followed him instead, down the cobbled streets of Amsterdam. The two captains walked together speaking in Danish. Belinde and Ting walked side by side in silence, and I followed them down streets with the pretty half -moon bridges, busy hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, and avenues named for what seemed the cryptic and dark language of a fairy tale.

Later that evening, I learned that Belinde’s finance’s name was Finn.  He had recently made captain of the same airline that Mats worked for. Both men seemed to have a quiet respect and regard for the other. Even Mat’s fiasco with women was held to high regard by Belinde’s finance .     At the restaurant, Belinde became rambunctious once again.  She seemed to have penchant for handling changing moods with spirit, passion, and quick turnovers.

We stopped at their favorite Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam, a small quaint place with sand colored walls, dark wood trim, and delicate carvings on floors and chairs. There were tasteful Indonesian masks hanging on the walls and tiny flags of Holland and Indonesia placed on the banister. Pretty wall sconces lit up the place.

Belinde and Finn knew the owner. “Their favorite place to eat in Amsterdam,” Belinde said, smiling. She had recuperated from giving Mats a violent thrashing and was once again herself, speaking to all as if nothing had happened. Ting was quiet, and Mats was cautious giving Ting and me a quick glance every so often.

I had adopted a nonchalant attitude to everything that happened that weekend because even my instincts could not clearly detect or direct my actions.   Mostly, my I heart beat loudly in my chest, even though I played it cool, waiting to see how others would respond instead.

We were all still shocked by that afternoon’s happening, and it might have all been awkward if it was not for Finn and Belinde playing charming hosts at our gathering that evening.  The owner who came to greet them with a beautiful smile and welcoming hand gesture, led us to the best table by the large front window.  He placed napkins on our laps and removed the plates with the help of his Indonesian servers who also had the same genuine smiles. Then the waiters brought hot towels so that we could wash our hands.

Mats sat at the head of the tabled. Ting to his right, Finn to his left, Belinde next her finance I sat by Ting.  Finn ordered for all of us, and before we knew it, the table was filled with colorful dishes in expensive white ceramic bowls all placed in its center like a festival of floats. 

The servers announced the dishes: Satay, beef rendang, sambals, nasi goreng, soto batawi, ketropak, sotomie, gudeg, bakso.   The oranges, yellows, greens of the vegetables, and the shiny, healthy glow of the meats made it seem a feast had been prepared to make us forget all misunderstandings.  The servers, with some difficulty in their English translations, explained that that meatballs were made with meat paste, rice cooked in coconut milk and tumeric, boiled vegetables were doused with peanut sauce, and bean sprouts was served with deep fried tofu and onions.   We drank Bintang, the popular beer of Indonesia.

“Do you know Indonesian food,” Belinda asked after serving herself rice and handing me the bowl.”

“I traveled to Bali once, and I did enjoy the food there, especially a sea bass I had at my hotel.”

“We want to go for our honeymoon. What is it like?” Belinde directed her question at me with excited eyes

“Heaven with pockets of hell,” I answered while taking the rice bowl she handed me.

“I like the way you describe it. What do you mean?”

I looked over at Ting who looked over at Mats who was in deep conversation with Finn, probably about something at work.  Both men were enjoying their beer and laughing about something or other

“Do you now Indonesia, Ting?” I asked trying to include her in our conversation, but she did not hear me. She kept her head lowered while she ate, giving Mats a quick glance every so often.

“Ting, we were talking about Indonesia. Do you know it?” I asked when she turned around and gave me an annoyed stare. She was cutting her meatballs with her fork (In Indonesia knives were never used nor where they offered at this restaurant, making it a very traditional experience).

“I went once for my company, but I did not see the country,” she said dismissively before continuing to cut her meat.

“Tell me about heaven and hell,” Belinde insisted, seemingly annoyed by Ting’s inability to let bygones be bygones.

“There is all this ancient stuff there - villages, temples, gods, rituals, myths, dragons, volcanoes, Buddhism. To the foreigner it is magical, but to the people who live there it can be deceiving.  You must be careful with ‘black magic.’” I said with confidence.  I was beginning to find my voice in all that afternoon’s strange activities, and it felt good to have something to say.

“Black magic?”  Belinda asked with a twinkle in her eye, already liking the direction of our conversation. She was now as joyous and full of life as she had been the other night when we smoked pot and danced in the hotel room.

“That is what my server at the hotel called it. He was very serious about his warning to me.”

“What warning?”

“He said a couple from the UK, who he was serving at the hotel, talked about seeing children dressed in white playing by a stream at the temple they visited.  When they showed him the picture in their camera the stream was there but not the children.  He called that black magic.”

 “Black magic,” Belinda whispered mesmerized. “What did you think about it?”

“I think he meant not to confuse good with the illusion of good.  It’s easy to do that there because everything feels so alive.  They’re animists and believe everything has a spirit, so they don’t mow their lawns, cut their trees, fumigate, or light the night with street lamps,”

“But how do you know illusion?” Belinda asked a ting of sarcasm in her voice

“I would think from your personal radar.” 

“Oohh… it sounds strange.”

“Yes… Time stands still or moves at the speed of light. I don’t know which.  Everything happens at once: They bury their dead in shallow graves at the monkey jungle until they can afford a proper funeral; they make beautiful offerings of frangipani flowers every morning to the gods of the volcanoes so that they won’t erupt...  Life there is beautiful and threatening.”

“So you believed in the black magic?”

“I couldn’t remember phone numbers to call my children back home. I couldn’t feel my pulse, and even after I got back to the States, I was light-headed for weeks. I thought I caught Dengue fever like I feared before traveling there.” I said with a laugh.

“Did you see any ghosts?”

“No, but I did go to Gunung Kawi, the same temple the server mentioned in his story about the English tourists, and I thought I saw the shapes of ancient soldiers, kings, and queens in the trees.  When I asked the server if they landscaped trees into figures, he warned me about black magic.”  

“Did you hear what Eva said about Indonesia, Finn?” Belinde poked her finance away from his conversation with Mats.

I thought they had a good understanding of their relationship; that it is was allowed to be hot, cold, passionate, broken, healed, whatever they deemed fit at the moment.  Maybe Finn knew that Belinde had a thing for Mats, but that was also allowed in the expansive room they gave each other to be together. I also thought they were perfectly suited for one another.

“No, what did she say?” he asked in the same jovial tone as Belinde.

I repeated my story of the English couple once again.

“And what do you think of Amsterdam? Is it your first visit?” He asked me with a beautiful smile and clear blue eyes. He had Belinde’s elegant bone structure with high cheekbones and chiseled jaw. 

“I don’t know about Amsterdam.  I can’t see it because I forgot my glasses, but I’m too in love to care.”  I marveled at my honesty, which could have been triggered by the beer. Such honesty was difficult for me.  Mats had always resented my American hypocrisy as he called he. “Stop being nice, just be honest,” he always insisted.

“What about you, Ting, what do you think of Amsterdam?” he directed his question to the quiet and shy Ting who was still working on eating her vegetables.

“I was in love when I first arrived but not much now,” she said confidently while glancing over at Mats who did not acknowledge her.

“We should toast to unrequited love,” Belinde said while holding up her glass of beer.   

“Do you know what that is?” Belinda asked Ting who shook her head softly.

“It is loving someone who does not love you back,” Belinde said before taking a swig from her glass. 

I squirmed afraid of where this conversation might lead.

“I think it is both the captains’ favorite kind of love. I know it is mine. Maybe it is a Danish thing,” Belinde continued.

“What do the men think?” Belinde asked, brazenly staring at both captains who had now joined our conversation.

“It works for me, especially to chase such a woman I have that feeling for,” Finn said giving Belinde a wink.

“I do not believe in it,” Mats said harshly.  “A relationship is on or it is off.   Why want someone who does not want you?” he said looking over at Ting with his blue eyes clear and blazing as if conviction seared his words with undeniable truth.  I noticed then he had a nasty red scratch on his cheek from the beating.

Already he started with his cruelty.  When he felt cornered he acted like a petulant child and now he intended his hurt directly at Ting. Really, he was on the way to his resentment of her because eventually he would resent her, like he did all the women in his former relationships.  

I looked over at her and thought she might be about to cry, so I placed my hand on hers, and she didn’t move it.

We quickly developed an affinity for our situation, not as victims of a man who loved too many women or victims of relationship gone wrong or about to go  wrong – as it was inevitably to be my case -- but as women who respected the complexity of our feelings and the intricate juxtapositions placed on us by the feelings of being in love with the same man, of meeting and sharing heartbreak and a meal, and being honest and civil about it anyway.  Not easy, but life had thrown us too many curves at the moment to commit to any one emotion for too long. Anger, rage, bitterness, envy, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, civility had quick flashes of appearance and just as quick flashes of disappearance, so we honored it all and moved along as quickly as possible. Ultimately, we sensed that acting with respect towards each other was the last thread of integrity we could exhibit in the strange situation we had been placed in.

 Anyway, after drinking so much beer, we were all tipsy and honest, and I was relieved when the waiter asked if we wanted dessert. We shook our heads, but they brought dessert and another flask of beer anyway. “On the house,” the owner said to us. He explained that the dessert was made with java dark brown sugar, glutinous powder, green food coloring and fresh grated coconut.

 “This is delicious,” Belinde said, as she put the neon green coconut dessert in her mouth.

I had eaten the same dessert in Bali. After asking my taxi driver about a place to lunch, he whisked me to a farm right outside the outskirts of the city where Western woman took cooking classes because there was a wood-fired mud brick stove, he said.  From the balcony of the restaurant, I saw a farmer working late mid-morning in the rice fields, and off to the corner of the fields a small brick kiln for baking. I don’t remember much of the meal, but I do remember the fun, sticky dessert and how I sat there and smiled like a child while eating it.

It was the wonder traveling solo to Bali to celebrate my 40^th birthday, three years ago, to a country that constantly gifted me with scary and amazing surprises: the pack of dogs who paid no attention to humans as they wandered the streets day and night; a night so dark it seemed to weigh me down and make me want to crouch in its honor; the rhesus monkey, at the sacred monkey jungle, who grabbed me by the neck and hand to get hold of the shiny aluminum covering on my disposable camera; the medicine man who lived in an ancient village and prophesized I would be married two more times and do something in a creative field; the beautiful temples I covered up in scarves to visit; the recording of Louie Armstrong’s “Life is a Cabaret,” I borrowed from the hotel library and constantly played in my room; and the small hotel where I stayed with the teak furniture and balcony overlooking a thriving jungle that belonged to the King of Ubud, who dressed in driving shoes, polo shirts, and khakis and ate his dinner while facing a stone wall in the hotel garden every night because my server said he was busy most of the time and wanted to be left alone.  

Bali was the closest tier to heaven on earth; it was the place I started to heal after a brutal divorce. .All the fights, sleepless nights, depression, and anxiety of starting over as a single mother were sedated by Bali’s sublime nothingness, a zen-like monotony that didn’t require too much beating from my heart, just a constant moment to moment wonder for its jungles filled with bamboo growing as trees or shrubs, the komodo dragons lounging in deep pools at the zoo, the large kingfishers with beaks the size of lounge chairs and feathers the colors of tribal headdress, petite Indonesian women who carried on their heads 10 times their weight, temples with monster-size gods caved into the side of mountains or sitting in meditation with heads reaching the sun, and the healing massages that took the “knots,” as the Indonesian therapists called it, out of my muscles.    

A friend once said you traveled to collect pieces of your soul, but I believed Bali submerged mine in its healing otherworldliness, far greater and farther away than any of the human tribulations I was going through.  

.   Meeting Mats in Amsterdam was the second step to my healing and liberation even though I could not see that at the time. 

            Outside the restaurant the men chatted with Belinde.  Some paces away, I stood by Ting.

“You are strong,” I said.  You proved that today.  And…,” I continued after a brief pause, “I am sorry,” I said with my head bowed in honest regret.   

“Be careful with him,” she said as she grabbed my hand and squeezed it before turning around to walk towards a waiting Mats who was holding a taxi for them. Mats would accompany her back to her hotel to get her things before taking her to the airport for her flight back to China that same night.

That night, I walked back to my hotel with Finn and Belinde. We talked some more about Indonesia. They asked if I wanted me to join them at a pub, but I refused. By then, I had tired of their company.  

 At around midnight, I sat with Mats at a bar in the Redlight District. He wasn’t in the mood to be in the hotel room.  At the bar, they played merengue and its patrons danced fast, furious and close on a small floor by the front door. We sat on stools at the bar and ordered rum and coke, but we didn’t talk about Ting, Belinde, divorce or any of that’s weekend’s highly-charged incidents. Our conversation went in a new direction instead:  Mats wanted to start a fight with our Hispanic bartender.

“What do you mean?” I spoke in his ear because the music was too loud.

“Look at him, He thinks he’s all that.” Mat’s said using a funny American expression. I laughed even though his proposal made me nervous. I knew it was in his nature to fight, a sign of his manliness.  We had had conversations about his need to display such aggression, and how he needed a woman who triggered situations to fit that need.

“I wasn’t that kind of woman,” I said, “and you’ll eventually hold it against me.” He was adamant that I misunderstood him; that what he really needed was to feel masculine, desired, and protective of his woman.  Yes, I wanted that too. I respected his manliness, power and thoughts even though I was an independent, free-thinking woman: I wanted to be his woman even though I couldn’t seem to now play the role of the femme fatale.  

What he really wanted was to be sweettalked out of a violent episode, but I didn’t do that either.  I froze like I did when my father beat people up. He seemed to have the same need Mats did to display aggression in public; in my father’s case he sometimes beat up the mailman, grocer, subway attendant. I was horrified to go out with him as a child.

Mats was muttering something under his breath and taking a swig of his drink every so often.  I turned around and looked at the happy dancers and caught sight of a beautiful Dutch man with a crown of curly hair who winked at me.   There air was filled possibilities for fun, but I sat in my stool worried about what Mats would do next.

 When I asked him to dance he said he didn’t know how.  I should have danced any way and asked the beautiful Dutch man to join me; that would have started the fight Mats wanted so badly.

“You know, Mats,” I reached over to speak in his ear, “Americans can’t seem show any emotions and Danes can’t seem to find enough of them to tap into,” I said.

He laughed

His eyes softened and dilated, and he kept looking at me as if trying to find an end of his affections for me. He was madly in love with me.