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Tbrady

Tracy McArdle is the author of Confessions of a Nervous Shiksa and Real Women Eat Beef. She spent twelve years in New York and Los Angeles as a publicity executive at such companies as Turner Broadcasting, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment before moving home to New England to wr...

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Love in the Time of Elephant Poo

Tracy McArdle

Have you had a horrible honeymoon, or know someone who has?  Please share your stories after reading....

Day One

“I’ve never been treated like this in my life,” said one guest in the bar of the famed Oriental Hotel Bangkok. The hotel is splendid; the Thai people, small and happy and eager to make us happy. In our room a complimentary bottle of wine, chocolates, fresh fruit so exotic it is unrecognizable, and sweet orchids await. It is Christmas Eve. Fireworks go off , sleek guests mill about the luxurious lobby clutching complimentary silver gift packages, we are in Thailand and I am married to the man I love at last. Let the honeymoon ecstasy begin.

Day Two

After a morning exploring the Grand Palace, Husband’s Christmas gift to me is an afternoon in the Oriental Bangkok spa for two. We are led to a plush waiting area and fed cucumber water and apples, then escorted to a luxurious bathroom the size of our house. There is a tub, sauna, showers, about $300,000 worth of tile and a large massage area adorned with orchids and tiny beautiful Thai women ready to rub and scrub us. We are given modest bikini bottoms made of pantyhose for our mud wrap. We fall asleep holding hands during the ninety minute massage. I never want to go home.

Day Three

Husband wants to go to the famed Jim Thompson House to see the architecture. I want to walk and taste and see and smell Bangkok, all its chaotic glory and throbbing debauchery. For a hideous ten minutes, he stands at the concierge desk waiting for directions while I steam nearby, we get both what we want. On the perilous drive through Bangkok traffic in a tuk-tuk, we see dozens of neighborhoods, nearly die in a crash and almost choke of pollution. Still, it is exciting and freeing in a way that leaf peeping in Vermont could never be. We drink Singha beer from cans and eat spicy papaya salad for a criminally low price. We are happy and never want to return to the states, where we argue about folding laundry and too many vehicles in the driveway.

Day Five

At brunch overlooking the Chao Phrya River this morning it is sunny and hot. Husband confesses out of the blue that my sunglasses make me look like a bug. In fact, he’s always wondered why I wear them. I counter testily that if he looked around the Oriental Hotel patio or inside any magazine he would know that large, square eyewear is very chic. He maintains that chic is not in his vocabulary but practical is. “That’s evident from the decade-old, dork squad sandals you insist on wearing,” I say. We fly to Chiang Mai, wearing said accessories, in silence.

Day Six

Unable to navigate the narrow mountain roads and yell at the same time, we pull over somewhere on the Mae Hong Song loop. “I told you that I didn’t want to spend this much time in the car,” I say. “We agreed that this is what we were doing,” he states flatly. “You agreed that this is what we were doing,” I correct him. “Welllll,” he sings malevolently, “should we just turn around and go back, then?” I stare straight ahead through my Mary Kate Olsen sunglasses, picturing his sandals, and how much more fun I’d be having if one of my divorced girlfriends were with me right now.

Day Seven

I order us eggs for breakfast, which look a little runny but we inhale them. On our way out of Pai, we pass several elephant “camps.”  Husband is loathe to participate in cheesy tourist attractions, but I’ve been collecting elephant figurines for two decades. In our long dating history - our teens, then twenties, and finally reconnecting once and for all in our mid-thirties - he’s given me more than a few elephants. The elephant ride, like so many things, is more fun to anticipate than actually do. The guide is silent, toothless and grinning, but laughs raucously when he commands our elephant to lie down in the river and we promptly slide off its back into the water. My pants rip, and Husband disappears under the surface, where many elephants have swum, and, we noticed, pooped that day. In this moment I love him more than I ever have.

Day Eight

We’re spending New Year’s Eve in a Phuket Hospital, where Husband gets intravenous fluids and antibiotics from doctors who can’t speak English. He’s annoyed that I brought him here, but I honestly thought he was dying. I thought I was going to really think about the whole concept of marriage during our honeymoon, but now I find myself rooting for Husband to hold down the half piece of toast he’s just eaten.

Day Ten

The nurses have left a Happy New Year! handwritten note with two chocolate candies on Husband’s dinner tray, which sits ignored under its plastic wrap sheath at the end of his bed. Some neutral slab of meat accompanied by a creamed starch and a few tired looking green beans. The doctor still isn’t here. “Be in the moment; you’re so impatient,” Husband would say during one of our arguments stemming from the volatile combination of my impatience and his passion for detail. Well, I’m in the moment now, I think, every moment I wait for this doctor to show up and tell me if he is going to live. Plus, I was the one who ordered the egg and displayed irrational exuberance for a romp in Elephant Poo river. The couch I’ve set up camp on in his room isn’t bad. It’s puffy and puckered and leather and white – something out of Austin Powers’ jet. Husband is stretched out on the standard hospital bed, a severe looking beige metal affair which reminds me, every time I look at it, of the one the corpse is wheeled away on in the opening credits of “Six Feet Under.”

Day 11

Every thirty minutes or so, a nurse or two comes in to take his temperature, which seems to hover at 38 Celsius (whatever that means), blood pressure or give him some pain “for nausea” they say, or “for fever” in their demure accents. He is so obedient I find myself jealous of the nurses’ power over him. I can’t help but think of Debra Winger and John Malkovich in “The Sheltering Sky” where he is deathly ill in the middle of the African desert, ninety light years from anywhere. All she can do is keep putting cold towels on his head and watch his life ebb away in front of her until there is nothing to be done but leave his body and begin a mute but torrid love affair with the tribal leader of the nomadic village. She gets really sunburned.

Day Twelve

“You have fever,” the pretty, tiny nurse person with flawless skin tells him, smiling in apology. It seems to me that he smiles at her, that even in this state, he is charming. The nurses are flirting with him. I don’t know whether to be proud or pissed off. The she puts the thermometer under his armpit, which seems rather primitive but what are you going to do, we’re in Thailand. Then a horrible thought occurs to me. You can die from diarrhea. I read once somewhere that it’s the number one killer of children across the third world. You get dehydrated. Your organs fail. Your heart stops. Because of something you were probably joking about a few days before. Like a runny Thai egg. Or elephant poo. I go find the doctor and make him speak English. He tells me Husband is going to be fine and can probably leave tomorrow. Then he hands me a bag with all his clothes in it – including his lovely sandals.