Baby Geisha (4 page)

“No, it's not,” Dena said. “And you don't have to write a report about us, so stop counting our brushes.”

“You are not our mom,” VV added, brushing her hair.

“Can we not do this now?” Joanne asked. Their ambitious mother had also been a second-rate journalist who never won her Pulitzer. The three girls agreed on one thing: that their single mom, who had taken even the lamest assignments out of financial desperation, and who, in the years before the Sexual Revolution, had voiced constant frustrations about sexist news coverage and low pay, had lived a Sisyphean existence that none of them wished to emulate. Their mom had died of a stroke, and Joanne wanted retribution in the form of major journalism awards.

The room grew sullen. Joanne pulled a drawer out of its cabinet, dumped the brushes on the floor, marched off to her bedroom, and slammed the door shut; she remained holed up until the next morning when she left without saying goodbye.

 

After transferring in Mexico City, Joanne rode in a ten-person plane that teetered over volcanic peaks socked in by clouds, to reach the rainforest. She thought she'd die flying straight through
this thunderstorm. Lightning flashed all around her, fracturing the sky into scary gray shards. She felt two pangs of guilt for leaving the conflict unresolved back home with Sylvia and Jardina, VV's and Dena's full names. Their mother had always referred to the three girls by their full, more florid names. Joanne felt a third guilt pang, sharp as a cramp. Her sisters would never change, but they were the only family she had left.

Joanne sent loving vibes to North America from the seat of the janky plane, watching boxy, brightly painted shantytowns punctuated by palm trees whiz by below. There were seventeen species of palm here, more than anywhere else in the world, Joanne had read in the previous airplane's magazine. On this last leg of her journey, Joanne realized that she had completely neglected to research the kinds of trees sloths lounge in. She wouldn't have a clue where to look for them.
Hello, sloth journalist, is anybody in there?

As the plane landed in a strip shaved out of banana plantation that looked like Earth's bikini wax, Joanne took notes about the setting in her spiral notebook for her first draft due in five days. As thundershowers whipped banana leaves and palm fronds into feathery green tornadoes, there were three minutes of
Heart of Darkness
effect—feeling the foreignness of the place and wondering how she'd escape alive—until Joanne remembered she had just landed in Costa Rica, a country with no military.

She secretly hoped her cell phone wouldn't work in the jungle, but she was compelled to try it and the reception was excellent. She had several work-related messages.
Joanne, call me asap.—Joanne, guess what? You've been invited to lecture on sloth healing! I've already accepted on your behalf.—Joanne, where are you? Call me back…
The speed with which her editor relayed messages seemed ludicrous at this podunk airport—two benches, a small attendant booth, a soda machine, and the one-plane landing strip. Pressure to come back with shamanic jungle revelations, wearing a sloth-claw necklace, was insinuated in these brief voicemails. What did
these people expect from a woman who pets a sloth for a few minutes? Hailing a cab, she thought again of her sisters, hanging loose, probably reciting spoken-word poems to each other in a shared bubble bath. Joanne, in her own rekindled bubble bath of rage, fumed knowing this article would be paying their rent.

 

“
Le gusta la selva?
” the driver asked, glancing in the rear-view at Joanne.
Do you like the forest?

As the small taxi crossed streams and rutted-out, muddy washes on the way to the lodge, Joanne glimpsed a coati, the anteater's cousin, grazing roadside. It had the same shaped head as a sloth, or wait a minute… Joanne's mind came up blank trying to picture a sloth head.

“
Sí, me gusta. Es una coati?
” She pointed out the window.
Animal knowledge is the mark of a real gentleman
, Joanne wrote on her steno pad.
Even the cab drivers here revere sloths
—It could work.

“
No sé
,” he said. “
Los rancheros no gustan estos animales sucios.
”
Ranchers don't like those dirty animals.

She didn't understand his Spanish, and she didn't even know the Spanish word for
sloth
. Because of the hairbrushes, she'd forgotten her Spanish dictionary. She closed her notebook and gritted her teeth.

 

Checked in to the lodge, a series of teak buildings completely constructed on stilts, Joanne wasn't feeling the boggy central lowland rainforest. Lanky trees dripped with vines, and a trail of leaf-cutter ants marched lime green sails on their backs across her balcony railing. Maybe the ants were headed for the river a few hundred yards away, to windsurf on their leaf bits. The river behind the lodge wasn't overtly sinister but had serious undertow: glassy eddies belied vicious whirlpools. It lacked the gentle demeanor of Joanne's favorite bodies of water: upstate New York's placid lakes. Joanne increasingly lacked that gentle demeanor as well. This river malingered, its rapids looked
treacherous, and its watershed was host to caymans, river otters, bats, water moccasins, winged lizards who could walk across water, spider monkeys, piranhas, tiger herons, sloths, and an occasional jaguar, among who knows what else. Nestling into her porch hammock, Joanne recalled her favorite essay, “In Bogotá,” in which Didion nails overwhelming wilderness.

 

Joanne, swinging, got out her steno pad to compare what she had written so far.

She slugged water from a plastic bottle. She pictured herself in a tank top and walking shorts, getting hugged by cuddly bear-things with long arms. She was
so
going to get a Pulitzer for this. People in New York would not believe she got to pet sloths. Plus, the receptionist told her that Jane Goodall had worked nearby with howler monkeys. She started to feel like
una journal-ista auténtica
. Flipping through a field guide, she found the sloth page and tried to memorize the sloth's face shape.

 

“See the
tucanes
?” a man said to Joanne, after a chicken, rice, and plantains dinner in the dining hall that night. She was reclining on a chaise longue by the pool, staring up at the stars and listening to the tree frogs sing. Their chirps animated the constellations. Joanne looked into a spotlight laced with fluttering pipistrelle bats until she saw the silhouette of a black bird with a huge beak perched on a phone line.

“Chestnut-mandibled,” the man said. He was wearing extremely thick glasses. How did he see a bird fifty feet up?

“
Muy bonita
,” Joanne said. Maybe it could be romantic…
except that this man looked like a mole. Joanne wondered if his eyes could swivel 360 degrees, like a chameleon's—it would make some sense in this region.

Joanne hadn't dated anyone since Basil, who acted more like a bartender than a high-powered professional. Joanne had trouble meeting someone to co-write articles, to read her works aloud to, a lover who could edit her sentences. It was so fucked up, but she could only relate to people through work. She remembered a distant time when she could identify with all types. As a child, Joanne had despised watching her mother slog through daily existence as a lonely matron. She wondered what she still had in common with non-journalists. Maybe this rainforest expert would show her.

“Are there more
tucanes
here?” Joanne asked, pronouncing toucans like he did, in flirty Spanish plural.

“
Sí
,” said the man, handing her a flashlight. “
Soy Raphael. Mucho gusto
.”

The chestnut-mandibled, a showy toucan with a brown-striped beak, gave Joanne and Raphael, the myopic birder, a happy send-off onto the trails. Raphael took Joanne for a flashlight tour of the bushes to look for
serpentes
and
insectos
. Joanne preferred the hand-sized luna moths that flew erratically towards her light beam, and the strawberry dart frogs that looked like single red-painted fingernails. Also impressive were these walnut-sized seedpods ravaged with teeth marks.

“They're the monkey's favorite meal,” Raphael said, winking at Joanne as if monkey food was his big turn-on.

That would have been the makeout cue, but Joanne exuded a bitter DEET sweat, her hair was plastered to her neck from humidity, and she didn't feel vampish at all covered in mosquito bites. Joanne was so far from feeling sexy that this night-walk was quickly growing tedious.

“Look!” Raphael shout-whispered. He pointed his light at a walking stick, a foot-long insect twig look-alike. It crawled off
along the teak-planked footpath. The walking stick became oddly phallic in Joanne's mind, perhaps because it was the first long object they'd seen.

“Want to see my hammock?” she asked. Raphael nodded. They rushed back to her hut where Raphael turned off his flashlight. She fucked him quickly, not in the hammock but in her bed. At least they were lying down. She didn't feel like sharing her hammock. Joanne asked Raphael to leave as he was buttoning his pants.

 

Waking up feeling jaded, Joanne groggily stared at a pair of charming parrot portraits striped by sunlight leaking through the slatted window blinds. Raphael's penis was burned on her mind, small, warm, and flaccid like a freshly killed snake.
New York has ruined me
, she thought.
I'm impossible to impress
. So what if Raphael's penis looked more like a deceased baby boa than a live daddy? Dragging herself to the breakfast bar, she sat, jet-lagged, with her glass of juice. The
marañón
at the juice bar, also known as cashew apple, excited her more than Raphael.
Finding love is more important than exotic tropical fruit
, she told herself. Maybe her sisters were right.
I'm going to ask the sloth what's wrong with me
.

The clinic, two huts over, had six two-toed sloths and two three-toed sloths that slept tangled in branches inside a giant stilted A-frame. Joanne entered through a screen door into a mini-forest of furballs. She was only vaguely aware of their sluggish presence. She hoped Raphael wasn't there. A lady in khaki came in from another room to greet her.

“I'm Nancy,” she said. “Head sloth nurse.”

Joanne introduced herself and her agenda. Nancy took a step back at Joanne's boisterous demand to hold a sloth pronto.

“That might be tricky,” Nancy whispered. “They sleep all day.”

“What about the therapy?” Joanne asked. She pictured a sloth
with a clipboard, taking notes while his patient, reclining on a couch, expressed his emotions.

“People pet the sloths to rejuvenate,” Nancy said. “Come back at sunset.”

A sloth clinic, Joanne realized, was badly suited to her impatient nature. She hated waiting around. Even in her sleep, Joanne was either on the way, or paused briefly to observe, annotate, and resume. Her dreams were as tidily packed as her suitcases. A dozen little stories in each dream, like balled pairs of socks, ready for Joanne to flip through and meld into jaunty magazine articles. Waiting around was wasting time. Wasting time implied letting life pass by without turning it into a story. What was she supposed to do all day while she waited for the sloths to wake up—seduce more strangers? What else was there for her to sum up?

 

Joanne killed time in the bromeliad garden, but being alone wasn't making her feel better. It was true: she did take up projects that guaranteed her a solo experience. She thought of Raphael again, and the stick bug. Trying to connect with people made Joanne feel marooned; why was that? Seated on a rock bench beneath a monstrous and majestic staghorn fern, she wished she had a travel companion. Not a stranger, but a person she had history with. A beautiful fern like this, then, would have been more momentous as an object of worship. She recalled feeling similarly in Alaska, wishing she had had a friend or lover there to share that moment when she first beheld a shark-sized carrot. That moment when the farmer stood the carrot up and it was as tall as her. Witnessing the world's wonders alone made Joanne increasingly doubt reality, and also undermined her belief that her writing could reflect these brushes with beauty accurately. Since no one was there for this reality check Joanne craved, she rebelled by conjuring up a clipboard-sporting sloth therapist.

“While I'm off researching and holding phone conference
calls,” she told Doctor Sloth, “VV and Dena slug bottles of sake during a Samurai film fest, or dress up like ragamuffins to shakedown dancehall moves. I hate spoiling their fun, but they piss me off so badly.”

The sloth was confused. “You obviously care about them,” he said. “As you're talking to me.”

“Mom worked herself to the bone for nothing,” she said. “It isn't fair for my sisters to take an opposite, irresponsible tack.”

She thought of their other most recent fights, over Joanne's refusal to taste test sophisticated tea blends or to get a makeover. She was constantly under deadline, never had time to make her sisters understand that somebody had to pay bills. Thus, they always came to an impasse; traveling was Joanne's only defense. While globetrotting she could remember her sisters more fondly, from afar, and felt in her gut how much her family meant to her. She hoped that loving them during crises—narrowly averted plane crashes or fantasy sloth conversations, for instance—psychically substituted for actually facing her irreconcilable relationships.