Bangkok Tattoo sj-2

by John Burdett

  Even after he's finally finished and she's taken him to the shower again and they are lying side by side, that single glass of wine is still working its magic. He lies there spilling his guts like a schoolboy. After his life story (he went to a strict religious school in Arkansas, Yale, studied in Japan), he starts into Washington gossip of the most virulent kind.

  It seems that Mitch Turner was brought up by strict Southern Baptists, and his father was a senator. He has a sister to whom he is very close, and two brothers, both successful businessmen and near billionaires in the telecommunications industry. But it is his strange repertoire of accents and voices that holds her attention and astonishes her with the accuracy of the mimickry. His rendering of the large range of different characters that seem to inhabit his body is so precise, she has to cover her mouth from the sheer weirdness of his theater. When he leaves, she can only shake her head. A strange fish indeed.

  In her diary Chanya admits to a certain irresistible callousness concerning Mitch Turner and alcohol. She will see it work over and over again, that most amazing metamorphosis. Turner is thirty-two and loses about half of those years every time he drinks. The mysterious process renders him useless for all social purposes, but in private he's a big, hyperhorny sixteen-year-old with a dozen different identities and a lot of fun. From now on she always keeps a bottle of red wine at home. The ritual never fails. He enters guilt-laden, tense, serious, taciturn, heavily mysterious, hinting that he doesn't know how much longer he can go on sinning with her. She gives him a glass of wine, and within minutes he's peeled off the whole of his adult personality and turned into a big, groping, babbling baby. After sex he invariably unloads, psychologically. The problem, though, is that this unloading involves a number of increasingly contradictory stories. In some variants of his personal history, his beloved sister disappears and is replaced by a lovable but wayward brother whom Mitch is perpetually saving from ruin. Sometimes his mother is a Catholic from Chicago. Quite frequently his father is a wastrel who abandoned the family when Mitch was four years old. (Mitch got to where he is today by dint of brilliance and scholarships.) In yet other variations, his father was a diplomat who was stationed in Tokyo for years; hence Mitch's fluency in Japanese.

  Another woman might have seen danger signals, but experienced prostitutes are used to listening to men tie themselves in knots. She assumes he has a wife and family somewhere and does not credit Chanya with enough intelligence to detect the contradictions. Slightly amused at the extent to which his prejudice has led him to misjudge her, she admits she looks forward to his visits, to witnessing his dramatic personality change, the extraordinary sex, and best of all the funny, wild, infantile babbling-in-many-voices that in her humble opinion makes him a kind of genius. Let's face it, she's known one hell of a lot of men, and not a single one ever made her laugh like this. True, it's the laughter of astonishment, of disbelief, but isn't that what men in love are supposed to be able to do to a girl? She hasn't had this kind of fun since she was in Thailand.

  The detached Buddhist side of her also notes that his dependence on her is already a little scary. Twice he has admitted that he feels reborn. Or to be accurate, born for the first time. Now that he's known fun, Thai-style, he can see just how totally fucked up his childhood was (his expletive). Or was this simply American bullshit?

  She is fascinated by the extent to which he has underestimated her and likes to trick him into ever more glaring inconsistencies.

  "Mitch, tell me the truth now. Was your father really a senator?"

  "Dad? Sure, one of the finest on the Hill, a fine upstanding American, the kind you'd trust your fortune to, or your wife."

  She gazes at his glass. Recently she has subtly increased the dosage. She bought two balloon-sized wineglasses that can hold half a bottle each. She has poured maybe a quarter of the Napa red into his, and he has sipped maybe a third of that.

  He grins. He knows she is waiting for him to drink some more and go through his metamorphosis. Slightly tipsy already, he sniggers a bit. She smiles. He takes a gulp. Of course, he is thinking about the sex they are about to enjoy-another marathon for sure-while she is waiting with her usual fascination for the personality change. A couple more sips, and here it comes. His face flushes, a new light comes into his eyes.

  "So what was he like really?"

  "A total shit, a twenty-four-karat asshole," Homer Simpson says.

  She has doubled up on the sofa. It's the dramatic shift of consciousness, so total and so blatant, coming without warning or apology. To her it's the most literal illustration of the truth of Buddhist doctrine, which explains that there is not one personality but a million modes of consciousness. Properly understood, an individual can choose any one of them at any time, although the enlightened choose none at all.

  "An asshole?" She's laughing so hard, she can hardly get the word out.

  Her laughter-the laughter of a beautiful woman whose charms, to him, have grown to mythic proportions-is highly contagious. She can see this clearly enough. (Whatever else is fake, his obsession for her is authentic, or she really has lost her knack for reading men.) He joins her on the sofa, where she is still laughing from deep in her gut, an abandoned belly laugh. "You know, once he turned the TV off because it was showing two dogs fucking?" That really sets her off. She winds up on the floor helpless for a full five minutes. But is it true? What are they both laughing at, exactly-theater or reality? Perhaps the contradictions are deliberate after all, to see if she would play this game by his strange rules. For a moment she thinks she understands: this is a variant of a kind of sex play common in men who visit whores: her function is to enter into some long-suppressed world of childhood, which is the only place he feels alive. As if to confirm her suspicions, he begins an extraordinary and hilarious five minutes when he mimicks brilliantly every TV personality whom she names.

  In the middle of the hilarity, he suddenly stops laughing. She has not seen this before, although it will recur with greater frequency from now on: a hole has suddenly opened up somewhere in his mind, he is swallowing nervously, and his face is racked with some complex emotion, whether guilt or resentment or plain old fear is hard to say, and he gives no explanation. Perhaps he is unaware of his own change of mood? She reaches to his glass on the coffee table and hands it to him. He drinks greedily, finishing the glass. Within seconds the hilarity is back. She steers clear of dangerous themes and lets him undress her. She makes a note never to ask about his parents again.

  What exactly is his attraction for her, outside of the belly laughs and the sex marathons? Why does she put up with him when she could get the same money from a hundred other johns? Any whore would understand: this strange man has shared his complexity with her. In a career that has already spanned nearly ten years, all she has known of men is the oversimplified commercial transaction, a pasteurized, time-limited congress uniquely appropriate for the modern West if only they would change their hypocritical laws. The way she sees it, Mitch Turner is her real introduction to Saharat Amerika. Maybe it is love that brings a smile to her face when he stands in front of the mirror, admiring his triceps and worrying that he isn't going to the gym often enough anymore. In a handsome man this vanity might be embarrassing, but in him it's a form of charm. Like a woman, he is constantly working on improvements. For a long time he has been planning an epic tattoo on his back but cannot find the right body artist here in the States, where most tats are so lurid. Next time he goes to Japan, he'll seek out the best. Japanese tattoos-horimonos-are a genuine form of art and can be quite exquisite. Maybe one day he will summon up the courage to spend a month in Japan to undergo a full-body horimono.

  On her one and only visit to his apartment (his personal sense of security is extreme) she finds that it is exactly a reflection of him. At first glance everything seems to be under control, all items in their proper places, as if his menage is permanently in a state of combat readiness; then she finds the gigantic terrarium full of big, hairy, and e
xotic spiders, and his bedroom walls covered with photographs of naked Oriental women elaborately tattooed. The porn doesn't bother her half as much as the spiders. Is this a normal hobby for a grown farang?

  One evening, when she is in a somewhat hostile mood toward men (a spot of trouble at the sauna bath, which drew a reprimand from Samson Yip), she breaks her own rule and confronts him with the most glaring of his contradictions so far:

  "Mitch, just level with Chanya for a minute. Your father was a senator, or he left you all when you were young, or he died in a traffic pileup when you were twelve?"

  There's no doubting the speed of his mind: "It's all true. The man I call my father, the senator, was actually my stepfather, who my mother married after Dad deserted. Dad did abandon us when we were all young, and he did die in a traffic pileup when I was twelve-but none of us had seen him for more than eight years by that time."

  "And your mom: a Baptist from Texas or a Catholic from Chicago?"

  "Mom? Well, she was both. She was born a Catholic in Chicago, but when she married the senator she converted. That was the one stipulation he made-after all, he was giving her one big leg up the social ladder by marrying her."

  "And your beloved sister Alice?"

  A cloud passes quickly over Turner's face as he changes the subject. "Want to know about my childhood, really? It was hell, as simple as that. Hell as in the kind of deliberate, planned, petty-minded torture of a concentration camp. Why have you brought this up? You know it upsets me."

  "Okay, okay. Why you study Japanese?"

  The question brings another furrow to his brow. He does not answer for quite some time. She thinks he is wrestling with another of his astonishing and very Western demons and waits in anticipation. Finally he says it: "An old World War II vet introduced me to Japanese pornography." She gasps in astonishment. He explains.

  Then as now the Japs were way in advance of the West in this important industry, and by the age of thirteen, thanks to the vet, Mitch Turner was already a connoisseur of the genre. He and his best buddy kept a virtual library of mail-order magazines from all over the world. It took Mitch and his pal a month of intense analytical research to confirm empirically that Japanese quality control won the day, in porn as in so many other industries. You could practically feel the quality of the girls' flesh, almost hear the moans, just by looking at the magazines. When they got into video, the difference was even more obvious. With their very artistic tattoos, the highly inventive situations so far in advance of the women-in-school-uniform cliche of the Western model, the sheer variety of the S M, you could see why the Jap economy was doing so well. Turner saw futon after futon occupied by naked and artfully tattooed young women, all the way from Fukuoka to Sapporo.

  "So why you join the-ah-thing you joined, the Company?"

  Mitch Turner suddenly grins: "They wanted spies who were fluent in Japanese. At the time there was concern the Japs were stealing American industrial secrets in a government-sponsored program. And I'm a genius at passing exams, so I got through the recruitment stuff no problem." A condescending smile: "I have a photographic memory and an IQ of a hundred sixty-five-genius level."

  "So you can be anyone you want?" She is aware how provocative this question might be and deliberately locks eyes with him, in a kind of challenge. She watches his confusion carefully, until he seems to decide on a new direction. With a thoroughly convincing beam: "You know, I don't think I could live without you, now that I've found you. You're the only woman in the world who has ever understood me."

  But the alcohol is wearing off, Mitch Turner's metamorphosis is going into reverse, and soon the guilt and the responsibility will claim him all over again. Chanya thinks there is time for one last innocent question: "So you screwed your brains out while you were in Japan?"

  Too late, the chemical reaction has reversed itself, the impermeable Outer Layer is creeping over him like rust, protecting that bizarre inner core from further oxidation. "No, I didn't."

  "Why not?"

  A shrug in which there is more than a little contempt all of a sudden, even revulsion. "There are better things to do during your short time on earth, Chanya. I hope you'll see that someday. I do wish you would read that Bible I gave you. How much do I owe you for today's massage?"

  She has grown used to it. At the end of every session, even when they have spent the night together, he will suddenly pretend that he hired her for a simple no-sex massage and insist on paying her whatever she asks. She has learned to play up.

  "For the massage? Five hundred dollars." When he has paid up in crisp new bills, which he must get from the bank every time especially for her, she says: "When will I see you again?"

  A somber shake of the head. "I don't know. I'm not sure we should continue with this. It's wrong. It's not good for either of us, and I really do need to think about my responsibility to you, about what I'm doing to your soul. I don't think we'll be seeing each other again for a while."

  She agrees, making the appropriate expression of regretful acceptance. She knows he'll call again in a day or so, but does he? How lost between two minds is he?

  This is a question she will not be able to answer until it is way too late. She is all alone in a big rough country, after all, and as tough as she is, there are times when a big lonely hole opens in her mind, too. Once, not thinking, she rang him at his office to tell him about that episode from The Simpsons when Marge got breast implants. She had his number because he'd made a point of giving her his business card when he was drunk. ("I want you to call me every hour on the hour, I want to hear your voice, I want to talk dirty with you for hours and hours": of course she knew better than to use it when he was at work and sober.) Now, suddenly cognizant of what she has done, she holds her breath, not sure how he'll react. Maybe she's gone too far and he'll break it off for real this time? A long pause, then: "Marge didn't mean to get implants-it was a screwup at the hospital." A pause. "I'll take you to lunch. Where do you want to go?"

  "Jake's Chili Bowl?"

  "That's black, not a good idea."

  "Oh yeah, that's right."

  "Tell you what. Dress up for business, and I'll take you to Hawk and Dove, up on the Hill. I'll tell everyone you're part of the Thai ecology delegation. They're here for two weeks to try to stop Americans from buying up huge chunks of their nature reserves. Ad lib if anyone comes up to talk to us."

  Chanya has not had a chance to be a real human being since Thanee left. She doesn't realize how much she's missed playing the exotic Oriental trade delegate until Turner mentions Hawk and Dove, which Thanee took her to twice. The Thai diplomat bought her a black business suit of American cut (pants, not skirt), which she now wears for Mitch Turner, along with the big chunky gold necklace with Buddha pendant that she has never worn outside her apartment. With her hair pinned up and her mascara cunningly applied in the way taught in the beauty salons, black high heels and a serious expression on her face (Thanee once taught her how to do American Grim, advising that it was the best facial expression for getting things done in the United States), the combination of severe trouser suit with extravagant Oriental gold makes her look not so much part of a lobbying group as a member of the Thai aristocracy.

  Context is the most magical of powers. In Hawk and Dove, sitting on a stool next to the very serious Mitch Turner, who never does anything but Grim while on duty, it is clear that staffers who serve the needs of members of Congress assume she is a foreign dignitary of enormous importance and treat her with a respect she didn't know her soul craved. She decides she loves Hawk and Dove and will extract frequent visits there from Turner as a price he has to pay for the deepening of intimacy, even though at this very minute he is experiencing something of a crisis, not believing he's had the reckless balls to take her there at all. Surely there are customers of hers among the clientele?

  She looks around with a studious expression on her face. Nope, no man whose cock she's serviced, as far as she can remember. Mitch Turner's flesh tur
ns gray, and he orders a bottle of wine.

  In her diary Chanya tells us no more about this lunch, or by what process they wound up back at her apartment, where they proceeded with the usual ritual. The lunch has had an effect on him, though, that neither anticipated. In bed afterward Turner, still high from his medicine, reflects on the wisdom of introducing her to his parents. She does not ask which set of possibly fictional mothers and fathers he has in mind. Obviously, they are playing a variation of the usual game. The mood is light and careless, and Chanya is caught unawares.

  "Not a good idea, Mitch. I'm Thai. Thai women have reputation, you know."

  Pensively: "But you did so well at lunch today. I could always tell them that you're here on some kind of trade delegation. They won't know the difference. You'll have to meet them sooner or later."

  "No, I won't."

  Watching that hole open up in his mind is more than a little scary. Surely only children experience such lightning mood swings? His face is contorted with fury, quite suddenly, without warning. But what world are they in, exactly? Which parents are they talking about? The senator and the sister disappeared from view weeks ago; in the most recent version he was brought up by an eccentric aunt.

  "You're saying you're not going to marry me?"

  The incredulity in his voice says it all: What, a third-world whore passing up the chance of a lifetime?

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "I want to talk about it. Chanya, I'm sorry to have to say this, but I can't go on any longer, I really can't. I don't think you realize how much I'm compromising here. You haven't even read anything of that Bible I gave you."

  To shut him up: "Okay, I'll read the Bible, then we'll talk."

  She has no idea why her reading the Bible should be a precondition for discussing marriage-after all, he has not shown the slightest interest in Buddhism-but she wants at all costs to do something about his sudden black mood. This is the first time she really admits to herself that alcohol may not have a totally benign effect on this farang.