“I don’t think you’d enjoy it.”
“No, I’d love nothing more. There are many Bangkok neighborhoods that I never saw when visiting my mother. Please, show me.”
So they wandered together. Those first few weekends, they wound their way around Klong Toey alley markets crowded with stands that sold underwear and sun-dried sea creatures on the same table. They trekked through sois on the Thonburi side of the river, following its gentle turn southward, the murky water mostly invisible behind buildings and homes, until they saw it again through temple grounds. They wormed through dusty new suburbs edging the city outward and up highway tributaries choked with overloaded, market-bound trucks and their spindly sugarcane stalks and deathly silent animals, and when they tired, they hailed a two-rowed passenger truck to return to the city proper. These afternoons walks were always sun seared, and the traffic fumes overwhelmed even a longtime Angeleno’s smog-encrusted lungs, but Sammy couldn’t get enough of seeing the city with her.
But she said no to his question of a walk in the old city. “You should go without me,” she said over the phone.
“It would be a far more enjoyable walk if you’d come,” he said.
“No, I’d rather not. I went to university around there. I’ve seen more than I needed to see.”
So he went on his own, camera in hand, camouflaged amid the antlike columns of tourists threading past the famous temples and palaces. His father once pointed out to him, as they rode a trolley car to the Khao Din zoo, that many of these places had been situated to mirror where their predecessors had been in the old capital of Ayutthaya, before it was sacked by the Burmese. He did now as he had done then, as many of the gawking farangs were also doing: he raised his camera and took photos.
At a corner shop by the great red swing, he stopped for a bag of icy olieng and thought of Nee as he stood sipping through a straw. It was clear to him that he was upset, almost angry, that she hadn’t come with him. Part of the point of this solo walk was to show Nee that he didn’t need her to explore the city of his birth. He figured that she must not have wanted to feel she had to act as tour guide here, like the many leading their throngs with a brightly colored flag held high. He wished that she could see how he’d hardly needed to unfold his map. He had visited many of these places when he was a boy, and he was surprised at how much of them he hadn’t forgotten. He knew all about Bangkok too.
He would tell her so a few nights after, while showing her photos he’d taken on that walk. He was no longer staying at the hotel. It was his first night at the condo that was now his, and he’d invited her to come up and have dinner with him. On the other side of the long dining table, he’d laid out stacks of black-and-white photos, two to a column, the way he arranged his portfolio books when showing a new client.
“You have a good eye,” she said, touching a photo of a woman, her back to the camera as she wove a wisp of bamboo into a birdcage. Light poured through the tree leaves above to dapple the woman’s otherwise overshadowed back.
“I’d hope so,” he said. “I’ve probably been taking photos since I was eight. My grandfather gave me one of those Kodaks you held at the chest to look through. Like this.” He pretended to look down at a boxy shape he made with his hands.
“Hey, you took this one of me,” she said, pointing at a photo he had been careful to include in one of the middle stacks. It was taken during their stop at a temple somewhere by the river. They had asked the monks to perform a merit ceremony, and the photo showed her half kneeling under the shade of a tree, pouring out ceremonial water from a silver bottle to let good karma flow onto his recently departed mother, onto their dead ancestors, onto souls they’d wronged in lives past and present, onto the guardian spirits of the places they lived, and, with whatever was left, onto all the realm’s pitiful wandering ghosts.
“I couldn’t help it. I hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s okay. I don’t.”
“I’d love to take more photos of you,” he said. “Can I?”
“Yes, I guess.”
He took her response as the signal he needed to reach for the camera he’d put in position on a table nearby.
“Now?” she asked. He only nodded and raised the viewfinder to his eye and, on seeing Nee gazing down with a suppressed grin, pressed the shutter. She looked up at him, and when he saw that she wasn’t mad, he pressed the shutter again.
“Come with me. Let’s go where the natural light is more diffused.”
She didn’t refuse. She followed him to the living room, where he pulled closed the gossamer curtain. He motioned her to turn this way and that to help her pose, and then he guided her by a tap or a brush of his fingertips.
“You’re a natural,” he said. It was a reliable line, one he’d said so many times that he only had a dim awareness of saying the words.
He went through a whole roll of film before he leaned in for a kiss that turned into hungry devouring.
They walked together to the spare bedroom that his mother had set aside for her son, instead of the master bedroom where his mother once slept. They took off their clothes and wrapped themselves around each other.
Always, he treasured the newness of another’s naked body, each a country with its own strange language of flesh and bone. With Nee, he detected a growing vacancy between them as their bodies entwined. She seemed to have retreated into a separate room within herself. When he tried to follow, by look or touch, she responded, but her every passionate look and gesture served only to distract him from the secret material that sealed the place where she had dived through. He pretended not to notice.
Anyone else might find it maddening to be with someone who could seemingly vanish during such intimacy, but he found familiarity. She was revealing who she was, and so was he, in turn receding into his own separate place as he moved and collided with her, savoring the pleasure of their bodies from a distance far above the performance. Where did she go? Who was she thinking of? He wouldn’t ask her, not wanting to answer the questions himself.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
For a good while, more than two decades before, he’d thought himself happy. He had met a woman, a stewardess, at a Swedish expat’s midsummer’s party in New York and within a year they were married and living in her home city of Stockholm.
Weekends, they drove out to her parents’ island villa on Blidö and he chopped firewood, every once in a while stopping to wipe his brows and gaze out to the serenity of the bay. He learned when to switch from hard to soft k’s with the new words he was picking up, and how to make gravlax out of a whole fish in their flat’s cramped kitchen, and what sweets to bring to fika with the new friends he was making through Anja. He leisurely dissolved, bit by bit, into that life.
Who did he remember when he thought of his former wife? The most he could now recollect of Anja was the memory of remembering her. She returned to him not as one whole person but as an apparition in parts: a collection of stills that appeared to him for no longer than the flash of a strobe light. For a moment, he could breathe in long dissipated whiffs of rose and jasmine in her perfume and hear the sigh she let out as she turned over to get up in the morning to catch a flight. She had wanted to quit her job and find a new one without as much traveling involved, maybe go back to university and work toward an advanced degree.
The thought of her body still excited him. In his mind, he liked to pose her as she had appeared in bed on a sunless day. He could feel her shoulders again, and her reedy runner’s arms, and the give of her breasts cupped in his hands. He liked the way other men looked her over and how they winced at him.
There were, of course, other memories. Their last year together echoed with shouts and cries. Shattered pieces of their belongings scattered where they’d hit the floor.
He didn’t like to reanimate those times. He most cared for the parts of his life that made him happiest to
think of old happiness.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Nee called him out on another trait of his: he avoided confrontation. She said this after they had waited half an hour for a restaurant table and then lost it to a family who sidestepped him and sat down. They were at one of those places where the food was so revered the staff didn’t care if customers stared each other down and fought over chairs. He had volunteered to guard one table that looked to clear out, telling her and her friends to feel free to go use the washroom or grab a smoke.
“They had kids,” he said.
“They could have come with a whole orphanage, but still,” said Nee. He could see why his mother had picked her.
They were there with half a dozen of her old classmates, and he had failed them. It had been about three months since he’d begun seeing Nee, and he’d earned an invitation to join them on an outing. He had long been curious about the lives of Thais to whom he wasn’t related, and he knew Nee admired her friends, whom she thought had done so much better than she in their professional lives, grateful that they stayed in touch and never treated her differently. She kept careful guard of them, and only when he’d proved himself to be worth their bother was he allowed to circle closer. Theirs was the kind of friendship forged only in the fine weave of Bangkok schools and universities. As infinite as the city appeared, its people moved in the same clusters from birth to death.
To their credit, her friends didn’t make a big deal about the table. After they were finally seated, they clinked foamy glasses of Singha and Kloster with his and kept him in conversations they could have carried on without pausing to ask for his thoughts.
“Nee tells me you’re a photographer,” one of her friends said. “You must have a great eye.”
“It’s the light and equipment, really. I simply press the shutter.”
“You took some great photos of Nee. She showed me,” another one said. He remembered the photos, taken after one of their midday trysts. Nee went out to the balcony and rested her elbows on the railing, taking in the vast city trembling with incessant urgency. From where he lay with his camera, she looked glorious in the harsh afternoon light, which could only break through at the very edge of her shadow, as if she had grown large enough to smother the sun.
“Make room, make room,” a waitress interrupted, earning his eternal gratitude.
When he saw the food being paraded out the kitchen toward them, he wished he’d brought the camera with him, so that pressing the shutter button could calm his nerves. This wasn’t the ornately plated Thai food he was used to in Bangkok’s hotels. Fish came at him, silvery and whole, bathed in plum juice and ginger. Grilled prawns the size of men’s hands oozed with orange roe, and bowls of curry the color of flames formed a volcanic ring around the table. He kept eating, teary-eyed, until suffering melted into a mode of pleasure.
At that table, he imagined this was what his life would have looked like, had he come back to his birth city after Surrey. It might not have been a bad life; he might have been happier.
He watched Nee, jubilant among her friends, her place so effortless and rightful, and felt annoyed at how easily she could make herself be loved. His mother had fallen for her, and she’d seen to it that he did the same. How could he deny her wishes?
In bed later that night, Nee asked him if he’d had a good time. Her question made him wonder if it was an instinctive extension of her office training. Has your stay been satisfactory? How else can we be of help? But he said only that he’d had a wonderful evening and her friends were some of the most gracious people he’d ever met.
“That’s good. Wonderful memories to take with you when you leave.”
It took him a few seconds to recognize that she had meant it as a question. All the time they’d seen each other, he hadn’t told her about any of his plans for the future, and she hadn’t asked.
“I don’t think I’m going to leave,” he told her.
She had been on her side, facing away from him. The glow of the city shone through the windows and cast her shadow between them, on the sheets. He could smell flowery sweetness wafting from her hair. A hand reached over to caress her shoulder, and he heard someone whisper assurances, and for a moment he thought a phantom had crawled into the bed, but he had only been watching himself.
She did not turn to him when she said, “It’s probably nothing, but my period is late a few days.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Sometimes, he would imagine what his life would have been had he stayed married and living in Sweden.
He would have seen Anja continue her studies and, afterward, likely join the ranks of a ministry or charitable enterprise. He would have tried his hardest to find assignments in northern Europe. He still knew people who owed him favors in London, and on visits to the city, he would have dropped in on Helen and Freddie and his family and, every once in a while, dutifully found the time to pull the weeds at his father’s grave.
Anja was also an only child, and the villa on Blidö would have been theirs after her elderly parents passed away. He had thought of building a studio shed in the yard there: a simple Nordic structure of wood and glass large enough for a backdrop setup, a few flat files, and a closet-sized darkroom. He would have found himself spending more time at the villa than at their flat in the city. Anja wasn’t the type to stay far from civilization for long, and she would probably be in Stockholm during the weekdays, while he stayed behind to focus on his projects.
It was likely that they would have had children. Anja wanted two, to give each child the early company that their parents never had. He was fond of certain Swedish names, like Magnus, Astrid, Signe, and Linnea, and maybe Anja would have agreed to at least one for their children.
They would have had to renovate their flat, turning the study into another child’s bedroom, or to move to a larger place elsewhere, perhaps Bromma, where some of their friends lived. He would by then be able to hold extended conversations about football in Swedish with the other fathers taking their kids to the förskola, and when his kids neglected to take off their shoes in an orderly way on coming back home, he would call out their names from the foyer and point to the little sneakers scattered at his feet. When they had other parents over for fika, he would impress them with cookies he’d learned to make from the well-thumbed copy of Sju Sorters Kakor inherited from Anja’s parents, who used to make sticky buns with a touch of cardamom when he and Anja visited.
He would be more than satisfied, he had wanted to believe, to make this part of his life everlasting.
It turned out that he had felt then only the first wave of psychic tides that would arrive years apart. The high ecstasy of assured comfort that greeted him when he first landed with the love of his life in Stockholm was followed by depths of dread on staring out at the bluest and most serene of bays and its postcard islands of pine and rock, and spotting only the final resting place of his own contentment.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
He found Nee by the pool. Around her, children hung from the tiled edge and kicked tiny whirlpools. Parents looking up from magazines yelled encouragement in Thai, Swedish, and Mandarin. Other Sundays, he had watched from the balcony with his 300 mm lens, complying with her rule that they not be seen together on the grounds of the building. She didn’t want gossip, but he hadn’t seen her in almost a week, and she wasn’t returning his calls. He regressed to the impatient, spoiled child that he was. Whenever he threw a rock, it unnerved him if he didn’t hear it strike something.
When she gave the kids their ten-minute break and got out of the water, he walked up to her with a towel.
“Here you go, my sea lioness.”
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s a nice day. I wanted to see you.”
“See me? Are you sure?”
Her voice fumed with subdued anger. She woul
dn’t let it grow any louder, not here with the children she loved to teach and the parents she’d tried hard to keep happy.
“I started thinking about you the second you left.”
It was true. He had thought about her immediately because he knew what was coming and she didn’t.
“Sammy, I know about the tickets.”
“Yes, the tickets.”
“Special delivery by motorcycle messenger? You wanted me to sign for them.”
Yes, he had bought tickets for New York, and he had asked the travel agent for them to be sent and signed for that day, knowing she’d be the only person in the office.
“I was going to tell you. An old client is flying me in for a shoot. I’ll be back soon.”
He felt free to give any excuse. None would matter. The curtains had been flung down, and it should be clear to her by now that he was full of it.
“What do you mean by soon?”
“Next month. This year. Sometime.”
His rock had hit. A kind of pained spasm, like an animal turning under a sheet, undulated across her face.
“Is it because I’m late, Sammy? You aren’t leaving because of that, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“But you won’t be back.”
“What would make you think that? Didn’t I just say I would?”
“Because you aren’t brave enough. It’ll be easier for you to go off to wherever else, again.”
“That’s not true. You can’t say that.”
“Then tell me. What is it that you want to happen for us?”
He didn’t answer, although he tried. Perhaps it had been his mistake to expect Nee to take his prevarications so easily. He thought she was smarter than to have expected more from him than she had from past lovers, but he also wanted to make sure she knew that she’d had him all wrong.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 16