Rising Heat
Samoa was barely nineteen, when we met in art school. Fifty years later, I’m wondering if I knew her at all. From what she tells me in text messages and the odd phone call, I sense an unacknowledged calamity of sorts. Samoa was the proverbial frog swimming in a pot on a lit stove, not feeling the rising heat.
I always knew she was a passionate woman, as her mother’s blood runs through her veins. Like all Javanese, Samoa’s mama believed the world was inhabited by 85 evil spirits and an infinite number of benign entities, ready to possess her at dusk—the spirit hour. Her privileged life on Java, as a member of the aristocracy, ended unexpectedly and forever with a visit to the country of the belandas. She fell in love with a handsome, tall Dutchman from the working class. Soon after, the German army invaded the country. Both lovers joined the resistance and for the good cause, lived an exciting life with sabotage acts under the German occupation. After the war, their two daughters were born, and Samoa’s mama’s life grew quiet.
**
Samoa told me she’d always felt loved. Boundless love flowed steadily, especially from her papa to his golden girls. As an exuberant child, her life’s mantra became I feel, therefore I am. Sis looked like her, but took after their dad: deliberate, in control, very Dutch—the dominant type. Samoa adopted her mama’s belief in hidden forces, and her mama’s astrologist became her fortune teller too.
At thirteen, infatuations grabbed her. As her parents turned protective, tempers flared, between Samoa and her mama, sometimes paired with hair pulling. Tossed around in an ocean of emotion and choking on words, Samoa poured whatever moved her onto the page. She didn’t exist, until that boy liked her. When he responded in kind, she floated on clouds and was in hell, when he ignored her.
Easy Indo girl were the taunts from milky-white classmates, and she steeled herself. At sixteen, she fell in love with a handsome, tall Dutchman from the working class. A rowdy confrontation at home made her pack her bags, and she moved in with her Rembrandt. Now she was free.
**
Life doesn’t work that way. Her papa’s connections in the world of books led to the job of converting Harlequin romances into Dutch. Art school students at night, the couple worked daytime jobs. That’s when I met them, and became their friend. She confided about John’s aggression, that he pushed her around, following his father’s example at his home. At the weekly dinner with Samoa’s parents, her papa pulled the ace from his sleeve: two rental suites in their large, four-story house.
“Sweetheart, are you in trouble? I could let you have a suite.”
Samoa jumped at the offer and countered. “That’s great, papa, but John must come too, and you can’t come upstairs and snoop.”
He kindly agreed, and it was settled. To keep things even, Sis moved into the other suite on the floor below Samoa and John.
**
After our graduation, we stayed in touch. John and Samoa hawked her designs in London, but beyond filling the orders, her fashion adventure went no further. As their love faltered, so did her embryonic calling to dress the beautiful.
She hadn’t lacked admiration before and the tempting-hot devil of new love beckoned. With the change of lovers, she changed careers too. Other amours warmed her bed and her home became theirs. “I believe in love. It’s what I live for,” she told me.
**
I left the country and news trickled in. I had to read between the lines, until we caught up, face-to-face. The story is familiar: she gave, and gave, and forgave. She was the steady address for the man with a girlfriend elsewhere. Choking off the beast of jealousy, she asked little in return and her sense-of-self shattered. She enabled the addict to use her for his bread and butter, a roof over his head. With a bruised heart and a coke habit, she finally told the last man to leave her home. Her well had run dry.
The cure for despair became to work long hours in her chosen job. As she dressed the faces of celebrities for film and TV, her private life evaporated. She played the Oscar-worthy role of the coveted, Indo artiste—pliable and sweet. The praise for her work was the balm for her soul. As she kept her distance from heartbreaking love, she found a satisfying substitute with plenty of willing lovers on short vacations abroad. She became the queen of flirtation.
**
When her mama fell ill, Samoa as the single daughter took on caring for her. As the 85 evil spirits haunted her mama, she’d only fall asleep with Samoa in bed beside her. Until the day Samoa became the unknown ghost in her mama’s fearful mind. Lost in the jungles of her past, Samoa’s mama lived another year in a care home.
For the sake of his little grandson, Samoa’s papa offered Sis a trade: his ground floor apartment with the garden for the second floor. Samoa could taste her resentment. “Sis surely isn’t going to help me with dad,” she predicted. Her trips abroad stalled, and her life became all work and no play, as she made sure her papa was alright. Sharing the same front entrance with him, she didn’t invite anybody, and of course, no men.
The day Samoa found her papa on the floor beside his bed with his face blue and his eyes open, staring at her but not seeing, she understood. She dropped down beside him and begged. “Papa, wake up, you can’t leave me, papa, damn you, wake up.” She dialed 911. When the ambulance arrived, Sis also stepped into the room.
“I still don’t want to think about that day,” Samoa confessed. “If I do, his face will haunt me in my dreams. Everything was difficult then. Fearing his lingering spirit, I didn’t ever go into his apartment.”
**
When Sis faced a depression, Samoa shrugged it off. “What possibly could make her life difficult? She hasn’t worked a day beyond showing her perfect hands for a couple of commercials.”
I objected. “Looking after a child and a household with a man is also much work.”
“It really isn’t,” she insisted.
Her resentment building, Samoa rang the doorbell one day, and when Sis appeared in the doorframe, Samoa said she couldn’t cover for Sis that day.
Her sister yelled, “You, selfish bitch. I won’t give you the satisfaction of breaking up my marriage. I’ll get another sitter. Who needs you?” She slammed the door in Samoa’s face. That was the last time they “talked.” Cut off from the only child in her life, Samoa most of all cried for her lost life.
**
Another year went by, and another. She suffered a bout of physical ailments. “This is no life. I must change things,” she told me.
She sold her two floors of the house—her inheritance. As she purged her dad’s unit of old furniture and family memories, Sis arrived to see about the noise. Like a queen, she scanned the floor. “Are you going to rent out papa’s floor?”
A whiff of Chanel number 5 hit Samoa’s nose, and her stomach cramped. She told Sis she’d sold her home. “I’m getting rid of papa’s things. Take whatever you like.”
Sis took what she wanted, although it wasn’t much. A few days later, Samoa left her birth home and relieved, slammed the door shut on that life.
**
In her new, tony condo, Samoa blossomed. “I could plan to see a friend every day of the month and never see anybody twice.” Then added: “To be honest, I prefer to live and travel alone now.”
With money in the bank, she could afford to become choosey on contracts and dropped the less desirable clientele. Now she liked her calling even more. “Retirement isn’t for me. I’ll just work forever,” she assured everybody. With plenty of free time, she traveled to beaches and cities, capturing the hearts of gorgeous young men with her confidence and beauty. She sparkled. “I love the manly man, the one who hunts and appreciates a liberal woman, southerners. Northerners have no game,” she announced.
She lived life to the fullest, loved passionately and drank thirstily from that well, unencumbered by moral codes. “Every adventure is a good adventure,” she told me. “When the affair is over, I move on.”
Partir, c’est mourir un peu. To Leave is to Die a Little. Again, and again, she faced rejection. A decade-long affair finally met its crescendo, after his wife and young child had left him, but he still rejected Samoa, for no reason at all. Her toes buried in the warm sand, she wondered who’d miss her if she walked into the ocean. An obliging Greek god saved her from that moment, and it passed.
Yet, another lover-boy pursued her through the hot streets of Crete and squatted inside her vacant heart. One month later on a Dutch rainy day, the same twenty-something Adonis arrived at her home. “I’m trembling, like I’m sixteen again,” she confessed on the phone, as he was sleeping. “He may be my last chance for love.”
When he woke up, his request to sponsor him pierced her heart: to him, she was a wallet with Euros, and she refused. He left the following day. She crumbled, wanted to jump from the roof to end the pain of humiliation.
Her milky-white friends were useless: “All their lives they stay within their boxes. What do they know about love in the eyes of my Adonis?” Expecting my unconditional love from half a world away, she let her rage fly on WhatsApp. Insulted by my concern, she fumed: “If you think I’m going to kill myself, you’re crazier than me. No, I don’t need a therapist. I have my astrologist. A little compassion, is all I ask.” She planned to die before she would get ugly and old, Samoa had told me on her sixtieth birthday. “Eighty is not for me, no way.”
Alas, our friendship didn’t survive her ceaseless barrage from decades-long of pent-up, displaced anger. She mistook my silence for permission to continue to trash me, until she was tired of it. As I’m grieving for my lost friend, she seemed unaware of the rising danger in her submerged state.
———–
