“My apologies,” he says to the room. He puts the empty glass on a side table and then returns his hands to the keys.
“All right, where was I?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It’s another night at the Grand Eastern, and his knees are killing him.
He’s wearing his new jacket, cut in cotton the blue of midday. With a stringy tape measure, the tailor had charted wider paths around his body, and now he can button up and still reach for the higher octave keys without feeling the fabric clamp up underarm.
“How’s that? Didn’t Crazy Legs promise it was going to get wild in here? It did, didn’t it?”
He bows to the crowd—this one at least paid enough attention to applaud when they were supposed to—and clambers down the steps, passing the next performer, a Chinese songstress dressed in a red silk qipao. She stands wavering behind the gold-colored curtain, as if it was meant to shield her nakedness, and when she catches his glance, she returns his smile with pursed lips. Already, the crowd’s clapping and calling for her before she even walks onstage.
At the bar, Happy taps a finger on the usual bottle.
“Heading someplace else. Just hand over that envelope.”
Outside, neon lights remake him in pink and green. It’s raining. The puddles, too, brim with light.
He hails a tuk-tuk and tells the driver to turn right when he says so at the intersection of Sukhumvit and a minor soi. They make more turns, past storefronts and stalls shuttered until someone’s gladiatorial contender wakes them from its rooftop coop at dawn. This hour, away from the tourist roads and the baited hotels and massage parlors, dark swaths of the city sometimes get so quiet he can hear the whole animal breathe. He tells the driver to stop at a nondescript building with black-filmed windows framed by a strip of Christmas lights.
Stepping inside, he counts maybe two dozen men, some settled into rounded grottoes carved into the wall, others at the bar, lips whispering by ears, arms resting on willing shoulders. Coupled shadows shuffle on the floor to tinny bossa nova. He plops himself on a barstool.
It takes less than five minutes before a young Thai approaches him from across the room. The man has a pale, heart-shaped face, and in the dim light of the club he could be a crane striding past water buffalos in a rice field.
“Louis Armstrong not come here for long time. Sao very sad.”
“Well, I’m here. Took the scenic route.”
“Louis Armstrong alone tonight? Handsome man doesn’t have to be.”
“Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I saved a man’s life?”
“Sao, good memory. Louis Armstrong tell story many times.”
Clyde waves to the bartender and orders overpriced martinis he knows will be badly made. No use not spending the money he now has, minus Bobby Blue Eyes’s cut and enough for the suit and next month’s rent. He might even use some of it to find a new place, somewhere farther out, with fewer Americans around. A ticket to New York would’ve cost all that.
“Cheers.”
“Chon kaew.”
As Sao raises the stemmed glass to meet his, Clyde notices, underneath the tightened shirtwaist, the outline of a switchblade. It’s the first time he’s seen one on Sao. He’s been warned before to be cautious with bedfellows whose passions are for hire, who—so the lore goes—can strangle a man for his wristwatch as easily as they can launch him to the heavens. They all carry some thorn or another, he suspects, and he ought to feel an overboil of fear, hot in his nerves like when the lieutenant stood over him, clench-fisted and panther-eyed in that deserted street.
Instead, he feels relief finding the certain beat of his earthly life knocked a little off its bounce, the few hours to come like cigar smoke curling past the reach of lamplight. So returns a feeling from decades ago, standing outside that big pavilion by the sea and watching the dime-a-dance band twiddle the floor to near explosion. In the middle of a number, the piano man onstage, a brooding angel with his forehead dripping and a vest soaked dark, glanced up from the keys to wink at this boy, and the clear and pounding thrill of the instant ate him live and whole. What has he found since, chasing its quivering echo?
He feels a warm hand fold over his, as if it has been searching a long time for a place to lie down. “Let’s get going somewhere,” Sao says. “No funny funny. This time Louis Armstrong tell Sao what he wants.”
His grandma had looked forward to the eternity that awaited her—the golden-spired cities, the walls of sapphire and amethyst, the springs that would flush out all despair. He’s no good for that kind of forever. He wishes Morris had known that, too. Even the most glorious day should carry on only so long.
“Hell if Louis Armstrong knows. He was hoping you’d sing it to him.”
BIRTHRIGHT
The connecting flight had been fully booked and he was lucky to have a seat, after much pleading with the Pan Am ticket agent at LAX. He leaned forward to look out the window. Below, the Thames shimmered white, curving across curtains of office towers and stripes of traffic beaded by red taillights. He peered into the glowing rectangular innards of a stadium built long after he had left this city. The green pitch was lit so bright he thought he could hear the cheering crowd. Closer to ground, parking lot lamps painted circles on tiny cars. Billboards topped low-rise office buildings. He couldn’t tell what it was that they wanted to tell him. What he wanted to know was whether or not his father was already dead.
From his stepmother’s call, he knew that his father had passed out at the pond during a morning swim, luckily in shallow water. His father’s swimming buddy, a barrister who had been a colleague, had dragged him to shore and then ran to a telephone booth to call emergency services. Come quickly, Helen said.
It wasn’t the first time he thought his father would abandon him. He felt that he’d long been primed for whatever duty it was that a son should perform with solemn ceremoniousness at the end of his father’s life.
He boarded the bus. It wouldn’t take long to get in from Heathrow. He closed his eyes and fell in and out of sleep, the kind of sleep that comes with short bus rides, momentary drifts into dreams that dimly started and then faded off. He was somewhat aware of a child crying in front of him and cognac exhaled nearby. A man and a woman argued about Gerald Ford in whispers everyone could hear. He woke up when the bus pulled into Victoria Station.
He almost didn’t recognize Freddie, waiting for him by a shuttered newsstand. They hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years, and at first his half brother looked like any brown-haired bloke waiting for a friend coming in on a late bus from some other English city. Then he recognized the hairline like his own, squared high at the sides, and the same unfortunate ears that winged the fringe of their heads, both their father’s gifts.
“Samart,” Freddie said with hesitation. “Or would you rather that I call you Sammy?”
“Whichever you’d like. I hope you haven’t waited long.”
“Not at all, but I did get a few looks from those constables over there. Suspicious man standing alone at a train station. It’s the world we live in now.”
It seemed fanciful of Freddie to think that anybody could read potential harm into his figure. Here was Paddington Bear, on a mission from the North.
“Am I too late?”
“Actually, he seems to be doing fine. After his CT and echocardiogram, and another night in observation, he insisted on coming back home.”
“But that call . . .”
“I’m sorry my mother reached you with such alarm. We can’t ever be sure with him, you know.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here any earlier,” Sammy said. Some part of him wanted his father to see him again with eyes still live and aware, yet he could have dealt better with finding his father in the state he’d expected. He felt tempted to turn around and hop on a bus back to the airport.
In the backseat of a cab, as Freddie made polite talk comparing the weather in London and Los Angeles, Sammy could hear his father’s bony arms steadily chopping the water, as if keeping time.
“How’s business?” asked Freddie.
“It’s doing fine, too many assignments or not enough, the usual loony clients, what’s new.”
“Must be delightful not having to work behind a desk. I think about it, getting up and leaving. ‘Fare thee well, billable hours,’ I’d yell to the partners, and go do what I don’t know. Then I remember I’ve got Lilith and Alder, and Emily would surely feed me rat poison for the insurance payout.”
Freddie envied a false, glorified notion he had of his half brother’s life, Sammy thought. He had no idea of the hours Sammy spent calling up ad agencies’ finance departments about unpaid invoices, or helping a hired assistant take apart lighting setups and coiling up three duffel bags’ worth of cords, or eyeing luggage handlers as they carted away equipment he couldn’t afford to insure, much less replace, all for the privilege of beatifying a cereal box or office chair on medium-format film.
“The swimsuit models make it worthwhile,” Sammy said. He could sense Freddie’s imagination tipping in his favor.
They were being driven on Fulham Road, where he found himself imposing the London he’d known on the London outside the taxi window. Familiar ancients stood under their bowlers and knit caps and waited for the light, and he saw them restored in his mind to who they’d once been—men and women no different from the adults long ago in his own life, their degeneration unthinkable then. They stood alongside impatient young men with their angular trouser legs jutted out like flying buttresses. Who were they? Why were they here? What he least recognized in these streets was the youth. It seemed strange that he was no longer one of them, on streets they should know he’d marked and claimed.
He rolled down the window to take a photo. Nobody acknowledged him. He was another Asiatic tourist snapping future memories of a faraway place.
They arrived at the two-story row house. It was one of those built before the war, kindred with its unremarkable Georgian-style neighbors. Long ago, his father had rented it from a Mrs. Fielding, who had retired to Bath to be closer to her daughters and rarely visited. Eventually his father bought the place. Since Sammy had last been there, the white exterior had been repainted a light slatelike hue, and teal-blue curtains now hung at each window. Someone, probably Freddie, had planted third-rate shrubs out front.
While Freddie paid the fare, he carried his suitcase down the steps to the ground floor and rang the door.
“You’re here,” said the British woman who’d supplanted his mother. Although deepened grooves now ringed her eyes, and her pale face seemed more cantilevered from her high cheekbones, it was clear that she had once been very beautiful. She drew him close for a hug, and he let her, barely feeling the grip of her arms. She had likely lost some strength in them, but he suspected that she was also being careful with him, the way she might have handled a delicate book at the library where she used to work.
“Hello, Helen.”
“Look at you. You haven’t aged a day.”
He wondered with which age of his she was making the comparison. She could have meant sometime in the 1960s, when he’d come to visit his father before leaving London for good, or how he’d looked in the photos he sent his father from his unannounced wedding in Stockholm, back when he thought he could give marriage a chance with a sweet, healthy-minded woman. Or it could just be something Helen would say to someone she should remember well but couldn’t.
“Is he awake?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being woken up to see you.”
“No, I can wait until morning.”
“We’ve prepared you a room. It’s not terribly big, but there’s a comfortable daybed.”
“Thank you.”
“Freddie, won’t you show Samart his room? Freddie?” She walked back to the foyer to check on her son, who’d gone upstairs where he lived with his own family.
Sammy peered down the hall to see a door slightly ajar. He walked over. Inside, his father lay nearly upright, a double layer of pillows behind his back, looking healthy and well preserved, better than what Sammy had imagined of someone who’d just had a stroke. His father still had most of his hair, and his father’s skin, the same soft tan of milky coffee as his own, hadn’t paled to the blue-veined translucence he’d seen in other elders. Only the small skyline of pharmaceuticals on the nightstand hinted that something was wrong. Sammy snuck out his camera and took a shot. His father, if awake, wouldn’t have allowed it.
“I’d say, ‘What a sweet sleepy cherub,’ if I didn’t know better,” said Helen, walking back. They both smiled at the man asleep, head down, chin against chest. What more could he do for his father? He thought of the notion he’d had, not to come at all.
“Helen, would you mind if I ring someone later?”
“There’s a phone in your room.”
“It’ll be long distance. I’ll pay.”
“Don’t you worry. You took the trouble to travel on such short notice.”
“He is my father.”
“Well, I’m happy for him. You’re here. It’s been some time.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Here he was again, at the place that he and his parents had once called their London house.
For hours into the early morning, he lay looking at the blue and starless dark outside the window. The houses of his father’s neighbors seemed unpeopled, the street a thoroughfare for phantoms. As a child, he had looked out in terror at the strange country where his family had been sent, and it was only on a night like this, when the silhouetted scenery had been emptied and he was alone, feeling like a miniaturized figure of a boy in a scale model town, that he had felt comfortable. Tonight, though, the silence and stillness only encouraged his anxiety. Whether Helen knew it or not, she had put him up in the room where he’d felt most unwelcome in either house: his father’s study.
This room might once have served as a small parlor, but by the time he and his parents moved in, permanent shelves had been installed in its walls. Amber light from a lamp outside illuminated rows of books reaching the ceiling. Dread towered over him. He hadn’t quite known if these were the same books his father had forbidden him to touch in the old house in Bangkok. He rarely entered this room even when his father was there, glimpsed between hills of books borrowed from the Foreign Ministry library. Some instinct stopped him from announcing himself to the strange figure who now sat in his father’s chair and wore reading glasses that seemed like a disguise.
He’d presumed his father to be reading diplomatic treatises or legal screeds befitting a Thammasat-educated rising star of international law, but one day his curiosity won out while his father was away, leading to his discovery that those books on his father’s desk had nothing to do with the law. They were instead books that recorded the maneuverings of men and horses on charred muddy hillsides, or the effusive words of Christian saints recounting their myriad remorses, or incomprehensible lines that he would only later come to know as poetry.
Even at his age, he knew that he had more than trespassed beyond his father’s warnings not to touch the books or play around the desk. He was glimpsing a kind of nakedness that his father didn’t want anyone to see. When his father returned, he didn’t ask him about the books. He had waited in the darkened spare bedroom next to the study and watched his father from behind the furniture. When the man emerged from the study, the man would become his father again.
What else had waited for him to come back so it could come to life? Lying on the daybed now, he walked through the house in his mind; he reentered each room—not as they were now but as he’d known them in his youth. With his child’s hands, he touched the cherrywood furniture Mrs. Fielding hadn’t taken to the country. His fingerprints smudg
ed the long oval dining table. His feet brushed the Persian carpet in the living room, a housewarming gift from his father’s friends at the Thai Legation.
He saw his mother in the hallway, practicing her English with the housekeeper, and his father in front of the mirror in the foyer, pinching tight the knot in his tie. Then the people arrived, first as murmurs he couldn’t quite hear—his father’s colleagues, guests from other countries’ posts, some English neighbors they liked. The laughter and singing reached him long after he had been dispatched upstairs to the far exile of his bedroom, Thai and English rising through the floorboard gaps, and sometimes Dutch or French.
He gave in to a succession of recalled moments until he was standing across from his mother in the kitchen, back when the curtains weren’t teal blue but ivory. She was wearing a sleeveless crimson gown and frustrated that the liquor for the evening hadn’t been delivered.
“Sammy, don’t touch anything!”
They had been in London for more than a year. His better friends at school were British—boys with names like Simon and Wendell—and he now went by Sammy, the Anglicized name his mother had picked for him.
The housekeeper had laid out trays of finger foods on the table, formations of toasted mushroom sandwiches and beef Wellington tartlets and cut celery with crabmeat. In a glass dish, a mass quivered.
“What is that, Mother?”
“They call it a trifle. I read about it before we arrived here, in one of the imported magazines.”
He had some notion of what a trifle was from mentions in his school reading, but this was the first time he’d seen a specimen. A choppy white foam rose out of it, and underneath the foam, glistening red and purple globules alternated with yellow deposits of custard.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 4