—Tam eng. Arroy, na? I said.
—Yeah, right?
Ploy’s reply struck me. Familiar. Unable to place it, I felt unsettled.
—Ahaan maak, gern bpai, Béa said precociously.
Ploy explained:
—She says there is too much food. It is true, but don’t worry! My friends will come later. They eat a lot. Boys.
She laughed.
It must have been the chilies from the som tam. I must have let the seeds linger too long on my tongue, because a slow burn began in my mouth. My skin grew hot. Ploy fed me a spoonful of palm sugar to dull the pain, and when that didn’t work, she mixed a cordial of honey, lime, and ice. I took gulps from the glass, greedily pressing its coolness to my burning lips. All the moisture left my mouth. I picked out ice cubes with the crook of my finger and rolled them on my tongue. Ploy couldn’t help herself. She found my intolerance to spice hysterical.
I got up, trying to regain my sense of comfort, my whole body burning. In Ploy’s bathroom, there was only a thin grating over the window, and sounds outside were overly clear: trucks and cars on the superhighway. I sat and tried to breathe evenly. Tears came to my eyes from the spice. Then, in the semidarkness, came the sound of voices, familiar, and footsteps on the drive.
—It’s weird, dude. You see it, right? It’s, like, pretty fucking there. Full on—
The traveler’s voice and heavy step, crunching gravel. Then Seb’s soft laugh, click of a helmet clipping onto a frame. Voices amplified between tile walls. I didn’t dare turn on a light.
—The whole fuckin’ village gets it. They’re like, dude, that falang’s in heat.
—Yeah, right?
That phrase, said like that, inflected, is Seb’s signature. It means he gets you, he agrees. I needed more context, but already I wanted to throw a sharp object at the traveler.
—So you do notice? the traveler asked.
—We’re good friends, Seb said evenly.
—You fucked her?
I climbed up on the toilet seat to try to see them through the grate. It was impossible. Strobe patterns from the superhighway flashed in the space.
Seb said something muffled, to which the traveler gave a full-throated laugh.
—Don’t repeat that, Seb said. It’d be, y’know, messy.
—I wish you would—
—Why? Seb said, snorting. Worried someone’ll have to?
—Yeah right? the traveler said, Seb’s imitated phrase fitting him poorly.
Shame and anger added to the burn in my mouth. As crude as Seb’s reaction had been, I forgave it. It was the traveler’s presumption that enraged me. How could he think I’d want him? Burly, crude, yet what he said hurt because it held some truth—tightness in my throat, shortness of breath when Seb was near, it wasn’t clean or pure. Deep down I knew it had no necessary tie to Seb. Still, I clung to him with a bodily obstinacy that was the enemy of good sense.
The traveler laughed nervously.
—I don’t know—if it’s a falang dude she wants, since you’re settled and all.
—I’m not settled, Seb said. This isn’t … lasting.
—Why not? Ploy’s supercute. She’s funny as hell, too.
—Yeah, right? But she’s—they’re all clingy.
I flushed the toilet and went back to the living room, my mouth in pain, eyes watering. I tried to gather my thoughts, but they foundered, waiflike. The traveler’s words stung: Falang in heat. Seb’s: messy. Seb with Ploy? Ploy gave us our assignments for next week.
—Falang suay, she said to me with a wink.
I stared at her, confused. I’d thought suay meant “beautiful.”
—Next time we will add fewer chilies, she said kindly. You are too delicate, sensitive.
My head still throbbing, I picked out my sandals from the pile of shoes by the door. I was bent over, fastening the strap, when the doorbell rang. There was Ploy’s melodious “Come in,” a strip of green evening light, then space collapsed into a black-red nugget. Crack of metal against a hard object. My hands reached out, grabbing at nothing. In the door frame was Seb, warm cedar of his smell, breeze behind him carrying scents of the summer night and the rushing highway traffic. Thud of a body falling, terrible taste in my mouth.
—Dude, is she out? Did you knock her out?
Voices, sharp intakes of breath, feet coming from the kitchen, pain at skull base, moving like a wave to the fingertips. Familiar gray eyes checking over my body, long in meeting mine.
—Shit. I’m sorry, Seb said.
Pain came in beats with my pulse. Seb’s warm hand. Hungrily, my fingers laced with his.
—Can you get up? he asked. Are you okay? Open your mouth.
Something spilled from my mouth as I lifted my head. Ploy’s eyes bulged. She left and returned with a damp towel. The sight of my blood snapped me to awareness. I turned my head to the floor. More liquid escaped. Ploy tucked the towel beneath my jaw. Afraid, I squeezed Seb’s hand.
—She might have to go to the hospital, Seb said, freeing his hand from my grip.
—There is a lot of blood, Ploy agreed.
—She should sit up, Béa said. If she stays like that, she’s going to swallow it.
They lifted me, supporting my head. I moved my tongue over all of my teeth, relieved to find them in place.
—It looks like it’s her tongue that’s bleeding, Béa said, inspecting me. I’ll call the hospital.
I tried to protest, but no sound came. My head ballooned with pain, but the thought of a hospital made everything worse. Béa was calling. There was no answer. Seb looked miserable.
—You know the sound of the metal door? Ploy asked, trying to make things light. The sound is khlaaaang, she said, drawing out the long aaa, Do you know what khlaang means?
I shook my head, breaking a clot. Blood on the towel made me gag. I wanted to go home.
—It means “love.” Not love between two people, but the love of a crazy person. Klang-klai!
Ploy’s laughter rang out, innocent. Seb gave her hip a little shove.
—I want to go home, I said, surprised at the sound of my voice.
Ploy took two Singhas from a small refrigerator and held a cold bottle to my cheek before handing one to Seb and the other to the traveler. Béa said she’d call a taxi. I said I would drive.
—You’re not drinking? I heard the traveler ask Ploy.
—It will give me a belly like you! Ploy said, poking him.
—Are you sure? Béa asked me, raising her voice over their laughter.
I got to my feet, pain firing from every nerve. Ploy found my remaining shoe and bent down to fasten it for me.
Outside, patches of unblackened sky hung over the superhighway like sores. We walked to the market, where we’d left our motorbikes. My head felt large, oversensitive. Béa’s lighter exploded in the darkness; our steps in the gravel were avalanches of sound. Passing cars ricocheted in my nervous system like electric shocks. My mouth was gummy and dry, the rest of me swollen from embarrassment. Headlights on the drive home seemed unremitting.
February 22
With every word swallowed, you inherit a history. Seb’s words in Ploy’s mouth. Horrible night. Head splitting. From a body cut open, no soul escapes, only passions, appetites. Now, in my room, protected, alone, I am this sequence of thoughts like vapors in candlelight. Here I let in only so much, just enough to metabolize. Myself is what I know of it. Desire acts without the will, breeding itself like a virus into systems of signification. Desire is the ass of language. We clothe it with words and it bulges beneath them. Unfastened from its object, loose in the world, it will eat us alive. Aurelia is home. In the kitchen. She has knocked over a pan and is foraging. Crackle of food packaging. I’ll hear her later, repentant, doing sit-ups on the chaise cushions. Aurelia doesn’t age. Obsession protects her from time. She keeps white nights so that her days never end. Her body sheds no blood. Her periods don’t come. Ha-ah? She cannot sleep. Don’t have cigarett
es before bed, Seb told her. No, they don’t affect me. Aurelia, afraid of being seen, is disappearing like a photograph on a tin roof in sunlight. Nothing ever passes, enters, or leaves her body, which is always circling so as not to change. Maybe she has long understood what I’m coming to learn: unbearable weakness of a body in want. Desire is humiliation. Whittle yourself down and there’s less you, less want. Roosters picking in the yard. A breeze, quickening, smacks the window against the side of the house.
28
SWEET COLD LIGHT OF A FEBRUARY MORNING in a bed under skylights dirty enough to hide the sky. It’s a paradox that everything I do to know her hooks me into this life, different from the life I lived with Z. After the concert, after drinks, Zoë trailed us, her face half-hidden behind the corner of a building, one brown eye visible, laughing like a spy, making sure that this is what I wanted. Yes. Now the painter is rinsing a small coffeepot, turning it in his long fingers on the other side of the studio as winter light from the skylights slips into the room.
Tout dans le même endroit, he explained last night. His canvases, paints, and kitchen are in the same large room as his bed, where I am wrapped in blankets, my clothes over a stack of easels. I wanted to be painted so I’d feel like Ella, my body becoming not words, but something fixed, other.
The painter speaks very fast and says he is sorry, but my French is slow, so I just smile when he asks, Tu veux un café?Des oranges? Je te peins encore ce matin dans cette belle lumière, si ça te va? I grasp at the threads of his phrases, unable to compose a response in time. How does it happen, this coming of a voice? Will immersion, will submission cast us up to the surface one day, and all at once?
Our breakfast is efficient and mute. The painter has a habit of smiling with one side of his mouth, as if overwhelmed. At first, I thought his offer to paint me was a pretext, but it seemed to engage him more than the sex, not in a perverse way. Now his glance flicks to his easel, and he indicates the ratty divan. The floor is gray rubber with energetic stains of dry paint.
—Tu n’as pas froid? he asks me.
I shake my head, less nervous now. His painting is abstract and solid, telluric even, terra-cotta and turquoise layered to give the work hints of a third dimension. Like sculpture. I’m no judge of talent, but what he showed me of his work was calming, sensual: self-portraits, jugs, bathtubs, his father’s face, disordered and somehow compelling. When he paints me, I don’t have to talk or plan out what to say in French. I can think. I like the look of his face, absorbed, so different from most faces. I find an odd pleasure—a sense of justice—letting myself be translated like this, from flesh to acrylic and pigment, back to earth.
From my supine position, I think of Ella filling herself with words, submitting herself to Thai, repeating the sounds to discover how else one might live. I am witness to her picaresque pickings among ways of being. She’s apprenticing herself to the world, and I to her, despite her youth, because of her guilelessness. I know she is taking on words so that one day she’ll decide, as if by magic, to make them her own. She isn’t usual. Most often we live in foreign words until we die.
In the journals, Ella asks. Is the old concept “self” anything other than a mosaic of other’s words? I am becoming her words, as much as I fix her in mine. We’re connected now, and I’ve only to close my eyes to find myself far away from this white city where it has again begun to snow. It’s getting harder to tell which of us is creating the other.
29
A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE HOT-SEASON VACATION, a familiar figure appeared on our veranda with an oversize backpack and two camera bags around his neck. His shirt was dark with sweat, and he wiped his face with a bandanna as we spoke. I recognized him from the costume party my first month here, when every encounter, because of its newness, had uncanny staying power.
—Weren’t you moving to Mongolia? I asked, hesitating to hug him because of the sweat.
Aurelia slipped away, saying he must want a glass of cold water. The native photographer removed his backpack. I helped him with one of his camera bags, lifting it above his head.
—Thanks, he said, wiping his forehead.
He explained that he’d gotten a job subbing photo classes at the Alliance française, since the regular teacher was preparing his own exhibition. I smiled. I knew the regular teacher, Lek—Béa’s friend, the soft-spoken man with a gaze so intent that it made me feel exposed.
—Mongolia is still definitely next, the native photographer was saying. Béatrice gave me your address. I told her I knew an American girl who works at the university. She said it had to be you. Can I crash a few nights while I look for a place?
Aurelia came back from the kitchen with chilled water and a lemon slice. The native photographer emptied the glass in one gulp and shuddered from the shock of the cold.
She lit a cigarette and studied him. We were part of a travelers’ culture where everyone seemed to know everyone, at least by degrees, and it wasn’t unusual to colonize others’ couches. We talked it over and decided the native photographer should stay through the hot-season vacation. It would be nice to have someone to look after the house. The native photographer, happy with this arrangement, promised to plant a garden while we were away.
—A rock garden, he added, looking at the gravel of the yard.
The next days were full of departure preparations. Soraya had reserved a place for me at the monastery—initially for ten days, since she didn’t like the idea of me gone a long time. I asked her to extend it, not liking to do things halfway.
—Okay, my Western daughter, she said, a whole long month. Then you will be in Chiang Mai for Songkran. Songkran? Oh, it’s the Thai New Year. Chiang Mai is the best place to celebrate. Everyone goes out in the street and throws water.
I knew this, but I let her tell me anyway. Soraya had reconciled with the administrator, who was sending her to a spa in Japan over the hot-season vacation. I asked if he would join her.
—For the last part, she said, unfolding and refolding more neatly a shirt I’d laid out on the bed. He has work responsibilities, she added, her eyes lowered, very urgent ones.
Aurelia and I caught the same bus to Chiang Mai, where I had dinner plans with Seb (who was on his way to a beach town with the traveler), and Aurelia, I suspected, had a tryst. She’d been coy when I asked about her plans, saying something about a villa and asking to meet up after my retreat, since we’d both be in Chiang Mai. After the retreat, and after Songkran, Seb and I had plans to backpack through Vietnam. With perverse melancholy, I feared something would happen to prevent the trip, which I looked forward to with unhealthy fervor.
In Chiang Mai, later, at Seb’s favorite of the riverside restaurants, I watched lantern light flicker across his cheeks and forehead.
—No one but you ever suffers, he said, arcing his body toward me across the table.
His eyes narrowed, challenging, prodding me out of myself. He was mocking me, but the word sounded strange in his mouth, as if he’d been given a swab of cotton to chew. I swilled Singha. It was warm and flat. Heat of these nights made the mind soft with longing.
—You take yourself so seriously, he continued, raising an eyebrow.
Colored lanterns quivered on their suspension wire, reflections flickering in the river.
Signaling with his hand, Seb ordered another round. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. The beer girls probably thought us coupled and bored, empty of stories to tell each other.
—Fine, I said. Tell me how you suffer. Unseriously.
—Darling, I never do.
Emptying his glass, he leaned in again, resting his chin on his palm. He made me think of those Greek statues that change their demeanor with your angle of view.
—Everything’s clear when I’m alone, he said. Most of the time, I find people boring.
A beer girl approached. She plucked ice cubes from a bucket with silver tongs and dropped them in our glasses. She opened a large Singha and poured.
—You’re here
why, then? I asked sharply, though his tone had been soft.
—Me? I’m here to watch the beer girls, he said, sardonic again. A better question is why are you?
He fished his ice cube out of his glass and threw it in the river. Heat gathered beneath the skin of my face. Then Seb leaned in again, serious.
—You’re different. You feel real to me. Other people, it’s like they forget what life is. …
—And what is it? I asked. Or am I supposed to remind you?
With no notice, his eyes were full of intensity.
—To me, you’re interesting, he said softly.
For a moment I thought he would lean even closer, kiss me. But he broke my gaze and looked down, fingers moving over the keypad of his phone. On a small stage, a singer-guitarist duo began a cover of Norah Jones. I asked Seb who besides the traveler was going with him to Pattaya. I wanted to know if Ploy would be there.
—Few guys, Seb shrugged, tapping his foot to the music.
—Are you coming back after, for Songkran?
Our flight to Hanoi was from Bangkok, but I wanted Seb to be there when I got out of the monastery. I wanted to spend the Thai New Year together. I wanted the bus ride to Bangkok, Seb restless, pressed against me in the small seats.
—Oh. Right. We’ll see, he said, leaning back in his chair.
—You have a thing, I asked, a thing with Ploy?
He nodded, not meeting my gaze. He said it was nice but not that serious, and he seemed about to say something else, when a new message lit up his phone. I saw it was from the traveler.
—Up for a club? he smiled at me. What time do you have to be at your convent?
—It’s a monastery. Eleven. Not too early. Not four A.M. Every day is four A.M. Wake-up.
I was sounding like Aurelia, my thoughts disjointed.
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