Published: November 20, 2008

Tim sat next to me at a table facing the Indian Ocean and I felt like a fraud, like we were playing house, as our waitress approached and asked in well-rehearsed English if we were celebrating our honeymoon.  He put his arm around my chair and I said nothing.  I looked at my feet half-buried in the sand.  I looked at the vacant tables where customers should have been.  I looked at a woman selling yo-yos being shooed away from the imaginary edge of the restaurant’s boundary.  I looked at Tim and his chipped tooth that felt sharp on the bottom of my tongue, his eyes so green they were almost yellow, and his chubby hands that didn’t match the rest of his body.  I looked at the horizon fading quickly as night bled from sky to sea.  I wanted to say that everything was beautiful, that our last weeks together had been wonderful, and that I would miss him when I went to the airport later that week.  Instead, I said nothing.

The waitress, poised expectantly with a pencil, launched into a recitation of the daily specials.

“Where are you from?” she asked with practiced intonation when we didn’t order fast enough.

“New Zealand,” Tim answered.

“Chicago,” I said.

“Oh. And you met here?”

“No.” I said before Tim could go into his usual explanation of how we’d met in Barcelona five years earlier and fallen in love immediately.  He’d tell anyone who commented on our different accents—cab drivers, hotel clerks, strangers in bars.  I hated when he told our story.  It was no stranger’s business and besides, he always told it wrong.  We both had to love each other for his version to be true.  I would have rather ignored their disapproving glances and let them go on assuming we’d just met, and that I was his vacation hook up, although the truth was much more complicated.

We had studied together on a teaching course and had apartments in the same area of Spain and became fast friends—largely due to our similar interests in music and art, and our shared lust for travel.  We would walk at night along the Passeig de Gracia, stopping in at boutiques and cafes.  We’d spend weekends exploring Barcelona, climbing to the top of Montjuic to look out at the sprawling metropolis.  We visited the Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum.  We held hands along Las Ramblas as we peeked in at vendors’ stalls.  When he kissed me for the first time outside of my apartment—an old stable that had been converted for residential use—my head spun in a million directions.  “I just had to try that,” he said sheepishly.  I smiled.  I went upstairs, not knowing how to feel.  Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I returned his affection, convincing myself that we could make a relationship work even though I would need to return to the US for a few months to wrap up my life in Chicago.  He promised to visit.  He didn’t.  We were both supposed to apply for work in Japan.  He went back to New Zealand, and I eventually went there instead.  We spent five years in cycles of intense time together followed by months apart, and I felt like I was always the one going somewhere for him.  Indonesia was a compromise, a halfway trip for us both, and one last shot at seeing if we could work.

“Lobster is very good.”  The waitress smiled.  “We are close to the sea.”

“That sounds nice,” Tim answered for both of us.  “Let’s get a bottle of white too.”  He squeezed my shoulder with his fat fingers.  He smiled his jagged-toothed smile.  I said nothing.

***

After weeks of curry in street stalls and watered-down glasses of Bintang, when Tim suggested dinner on the beach, it sounded like an opportunity to relax and reconnect.  I rationalized this by telling myself that spending weeks together in moldy guesthouses and cramped buses would weigh heavily on even the strongest couples.  We walked down the road to the restaurant, the light from houses behind high walls edged in broken glass spilling over just enough to light our way.  Tired dogs with sagging nipples lazed in the grass, finally liberated from the scorching sun.  A plane flew low into Denpasar and the windows looked like ice cubes against the darkening sky.

The restaurant was unassuming with just a painted sign marking its entrance.  Inside, the walls were lined with tanks full of condemned lobster.  This death row of the sea would become our dinner.

“Welcome. Come in. Right this way.”  A man stepped out from behind the bar and rapidly approached.  With a broad sweeping gesture that landed his arm at our backs, he ushered us to a beachside table after we’d barely stepped in the door.  “First customers. Early for dinner,” he said.  “For you, the best table.”  And with staged politeness, he pushed us into our chairs.  Our menus were presented and our water glasses were filled.  “And for you, the prettiest waitress.”  Unbreaking smile.  Broad sweeping gestures.  Within minutes we had already been served our wine.

***

“This is amazing,” Tim said, digging a meaty forkful out of the tail.  “Do you know how much this would cost?”  He wiped his mouth on his crisp white napkin, branding it with dark spots of garlic butter, and leaving a greasy sheen on his fingers and chin.  He had ordered two lobsters for us to split, one with garlic butter and one prepared with crushed peppers and spice.  I scooped out a section of the peppered tail and it stung my sunburned lips.  I ground the chewy meat between my molars and remembered how I’d felt about lobster at home.  The rare lobster dinners that I had eaten had been socially symbolic more than anything else.  Lobster was expensive, lobster was hard to ship to the Midwest, lobster was for celebrating, so therefore lobster must be good.  Nevermind that I thought it tasted fishy and didn’t really like seafood anyway.  Chewy meat between my molars.  A greasy sheen on his fingers and chin.  Lobster was for celebrating.  I waved to our waitress and ordered a second bottle of wine.

“I thought we were early for dinner,” Tim said as she pulled out the cork.  Forty minutes had passed and the only other patrons were a German family who had been seated with similar enthusiasm.

“He told you that?”  She nodded toward the manager.  She leaned closer in and shook her head covertly.  “Nobody comes to Bali after the bombs. Every night we used to be full. Now business is bad.”  She glanced up to make sure he wasn’t looking and spoke rapidly, dropping her service smile and breaking her schoolbook speech.  “You give me tip, he take it. Give me when he can’t see.”  She straightened up, resumed smiling, and walked away as if she’d shared with us a privileged secret that she didn’t tell every customer who sat during her shifts.

***

“Have you eaten anything strange?”  The doctor asked, opening her bag on the bed.

“We had lobster last night,” Tim said.

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“And you’ve been vomiting since morning?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like food poisoning.”  She took out two thermometers, covered them in plastic sheaths, and stuck them under our tongues.  “And you were both feeling fine before?”

Tim nodded and I let her assume he was speaking for both of us.  At least she hadn’t commented on our mismatched passports.

“Did you pick the lobster yourself?”

“Mmwhat do you mean?”  Tim mumbled.

“Did you pick them from the tank?”

He shook his head.

She fished in her bag, assembling a cocktail of antibiotics, antidiarrheals, and antiemetics.  “They gave you bad food. The lobsters were already dead.”

Tim looked at me, then at the doctor, twisting his face into a theatrical expression of concern.  “Already dead?”

I felt his hand grab mine on top of the moldy smelling bedspread, strangling my clammy hands.  I looked at the ceiling fan spinning wobbly overhead.  I looked at my bags in the corner, already packed and ready for the airport.  I looked at the doctor scribbling our receipt.  I looked at Tim who always told our story wrong.  Five years of uncertainty.  Five years of e-mails and phone calls filling the gaps between weeks of togetherness in faraway places.  Five years of being foreigners with each other and to each other.  The aftermath of our dinner burned in my stomach.  The leftovers of a relationship lay next to me in bed.