Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  43

  The disco was stifling hot, and everybody mopped their faces with the chemical towelettes that the hostess brought. Waves of stupid light rusted across the walls.

  You happy? he asked the English teacher who couldn't speak English.

  Good! the other replied. I'm berry excited . . .

  It was long and low in there with occasional light bulbs. Girls said aaah and ooh and aiee while the crowd swarmed slowly and sweatily. Semen-colored light flickered on men's blue-white shirts and women's baggy silk pajama-pants or dresses; the accustomed smell of a cheap barbershop choked him like the weary Christmas lights. The barmaid brought a tall can of Tiger beer. Hands clutched all around, as if in some drunken dream -

  44

  She almost never smiled. Once again that night she traced an invisible bracelet around her wrist, then his. He watched her sleeping. In the middle of the night he pulled her on top of him just to hug her more tightly, and she seemed no heavier than the blanket.

  45

  She lay hardly breathing. He could barely hear her heartbeat. Her hands lay folded between her breasts. Her nipples were very long, brown and thin.

  46

  In the morning she cracked his finger-joints and toe-joints for him; she stretched and twisted his arms and legs; she slapped him gently all over. Then she made her rendezvous with the mirror, where she stood painting her eyebrows in slow silence. When she was finished he sat her down with his guidebook, which contained a few dictionary pages. He pointed to all the different words for food, pointed to her and then to him. She just sat there. He made motions to indicate the two of them going off together. She followed soundlessly. He locked the door. She came downstairs with him, into the lobby's world of eyes which shot the weak smirk off his face, and the eyes watched in silence. She was behind him on the stairs, creeping slowly down. He dropped the key onto the front desk and she was far behind him. He let her catch up to him a little, not too much because she might not want that, and went out into the street that was filled with even more spies, spectators, jeerers and hostile enviers, and she was farther behind than before. It must be difficult for her to be seen beside him. He concluded that the best thing to do was to walk without looking, which he did for half a block, then sat down at an outdoor restaurant where they brought him tea and bread. She had not come. He drank a few sips of his tea, paid, and walked wearily back. He said to the cigarette vendeuse: You see my friend?

  Market. That way, she said.

  You tell her, please, if she go to hotel, she come in.

  No, no. You go market. She that way.

  He did, but of course he never found her.

  47

  He felt miserable all day. He didn't want to fuck her anymore, only to straighten things out. He'd find someone to speak English to her ...

  Again and again he circled the market's yellow-tiered cement dome. The traffic was slow enough to let jaywalkers stand in the street. He loitered among the umbrellas and striped awnings, under each a vendor's booth or table; and sometimes they tried to sell him things: moneychangers studied him behind their jagged walls of cigarette cartons; but there was only one vendeuse he wanted, and what she had, it seemed, he couldn't ever buy.

  The photographer's girl, on the other hand, had stayed. The photographer was getting sick of her. He told her that he and the journalist would have to go to work soon; he pointed to her and then to the door, but the girl tried desperately not to understand. In the middle of the morning she was still there. She wanted him to buy her a gold bracelet. They were out on the street, the three of them, and the photographer said to the journalist: All right. We'll each grab a cyclo and split.

  Where to?

  Where to? cried the photographer in amazement. Anywhere! Just as long as we get rid of this bitch . . . Oh, shit, she's getting a cyclo, too!

  Finally they went home with her. She took them down a very dark narrow dirt lane, then right into an alley, then up a steep plank ladder two inches wide to a dormitory that smelled like wood-smoke and was rowed with tiny square windows for light and air. Puddles on the floor darkly reflected the ceiling's patchy plaster. Mosquitoes and fleas bit the journalist's feet. The room was filled with beds, enclosed by patterned sheets hung from strings like laundry; sturdy beds, neatly made up. People lay one or two to a bed, very quiet, some sleeping, some not. The photographer's girl said that she paid ten thousand riels a year to stay there. She lived with her aunt, in a bed against the wall.

  She pulled the photographer down on top of her, tried to get him to marry her - with a gold chain -

  How many times has she been married? asked the journalist.

  The aunt smiled and fanned him. - Five times.

  He heard the sound of a thudding mallet, saw the shadow of a woman's bare legs darkening the nearest puddle on the dirty-grey cement. The photographer lay listless and disgusted on the bed, his girl on top of him whining, working him slowly but determinedly like a cyclo driver polishing his wheels. The journalist felt sorry for her.

  Now they brought another girl for the journalist to marry in the dimness; she'd gone through it three or four times at least from the look of her gold chains; she took over the task of fanning him, smiling so wide-eyed that the journalist began to feel sorry for her, too; he already had a girl - Pala, Pala! he said. - The photographer's girl knew what he meant, and she gnashed her teeth. This rejected matrimonial prospect turned away and put on a new bra, kneeling on her pallet two feet away. The disks of her gold necklace gleamed consecutively when she turned her head, like the bulbs of a neon sign. While she was away the aunt resumed fanning him. Her teeth were perfectly white except for one of gold. She wore a ruby ring from Pailin (where he had promised his editor he'd go; he had no intention of going because the Khmer Rouge were still in control of the town).

  I can't stand this anymore, the photographer said. Let's get out of here.

  They'll want us to take them out to lunch.

  So we'll take 'em out to lunch. Then we'll dump 'em.

  The aunt didn't come. So it was only the photographer and his girl and the journalist with two new ladies, each hoping and vying, who went to the nearest sidewalk restaurant. He was a little afraid of one of them, a very pale girl with a Chinese-porcelain face (was she albino, or sick, or just heavily powdered? The longer he looked at her, the more corpselike she seemed . . .); she, noticing how he studied her most frequently, said something in a smug undertone to her rival, who then withdrew her solicitudes. The Chinese-porcelain girl kept lowering her head and smiling, fingering her strings of gold, while the other girl, still hopeful to a small degree, gazed lovingly from time to time into the journalist's eyes. Crowds lined up behind their chairs, staring unhappily. By and large, they did not seem to admire whores or foreigners who whored. But of course there wasn't a damned thing they could do about it, thought the journalist as the Chinese-porcelain girl peeled him the local equivalent of a grape, which had a green rind, an inner sweet grey substance the texture and shape of an eyeball, and then a round seed - did it taste more like a grape or a cantaloupe? Being a journalist, he really ought to decide the issue once and for all - oh, GOOD, he'd have another chance (she'd hardly touched her soup; she looked very very sick; quite suddenly he was sure that she was going to drop dead any minute) . . . She called the fruit mayen.

  48

  So after lunch they dropped the girls, and the girls were very disappointed.

  49

  The photographer had to go back to the hotel to get more ointment for his rash, which had spread from one arm to the other and itched practically as bad as scabies or crabs (which the well-traveled photographer had already experienced; of course he'd never had *** GONORRHEA *** so the journalist was one up on him there). The journalist sat waiting for him in an open square of grass riddled with wide walkways and rectangular puddles between which children ran. On the far side (this park was quite large), two-storey houses whose roofs were truncated pyramids strutted stained balcon
ies. Between the roots of a tree, a boy was digging with a stick.

  The journalist thought about the gold chain that his prostitute wore about her naked waist. He wondered who'd given it to her, and whether the man had loved her in his heart or whether he'd just paid her. Did he still see her?

  There were red lines running down her skin in slanted parallels from her shoulders to her breasts, three lines on her left side, three on her right, the two triads arrowing symmetrically inward; they reminded him of aboriginal tattoos. Most likely they'd been made with a coin's edge. Someone had told him that Cambodians did that to ease the blood when they were ill. Suddenly he recalled the nightmare pallor of the Chinese-porcelain girl, and he almost shuddered.

  50

  Night having smothered the wasted day at last, he set out for the disco while his dear friend the photographer lurked in the rat-infested shadows of the garbage heap, not wishing to show himself to his girl, the five-time bride, whom he'd dismissed definitively, and who was in corresponding agonies. The journalist knew very well that by returning to the disco he'd be disturbing her, and the photographer as well, but this was the time to actualize his own reproductive strategies. So he passed through the hot outer crowds alone. Every time he came here they seemed more menacing. It was all in his head, but that was his problem; as the saying goes, he was thinking with the wrong head. As soon as he'd been sucked into the sweaty inner darkness, the photographer's girl came running up, seizing him by the hand, weeping, pleading in a rush of alien singsong. He shook his head, patted her shoulder (this was becoming his stereotyped Pontius Pilate act), and she stamped in a rage. Just as nightshade grows tall and poisonous in American forests, its spider-legged veins hung with red balls, black balls, and milky white putrescences, so grew her fury in that long narrow cavern whose walls dripped with lust-breath. She ran away into the cigarette fumes between the crowded tables and though he'd lost sight of her, her terrible howling made his ears ache. She was back again, snarling and groveling monstrously (did she need to eat so badly as that? what didn't he understand?) and he wondered whether she only wanted him to buy her out so that she could rush to the hotel in pursuit of the photographer, or whether she wanted him now, whether he was her fallback; anyhow it was clear that she wasn't Pala's friend (that night she finally took the trouble to tell him that the woman he was falling in love with was not named Pala, but Vanna) because that afternoon she'd tried to get him to go with the girl in the bra, the Chinese-porcelain girl, or failing that the other one (did she get a commission?); she wasn't loyal to Vanna! -Thinking this helped him harden his heart. (In truth, what could he have done? His loyalty lay with Vanna and with the photographer, not with her.) - I want Vanna, he said. - Excuse me, sir, said a low-level pimp or waiter or enforcer, presenting him with two other girls, each of whom slid pleading hands up his kneee. - I want Vanna, he said. - The photographer's girl said something, and the others laughed scornfully. Then they all left. (Later the photographer said that he saw his girl come running out, and he hid behind the garbage pile so she wouldn't discover him; she got on a motorbike and went to the hotel to sniff him out; not finding him, she came back weeping. ) - Vanna must be dancing, probably. There was no possibility of finding her if she didn't want to be found. She was a taxi girl; it was her profession to find him. If she wanted him she'd come ... He sat back down, and a waiter said something in Khmer that to him sounded very eloquent. Evidently it was a question. Tall, white, conspicuous, the journalist sat at his table facing the stares from other darknesses. - Seven-Up, he said. The waiter trotted off, and returned with a long face. - Sprite, said the journalist. The waiter brought him three cans of ice cream soda. - Perfect, he said wearily. The photographer's girl was sitting down beside him again; he slid one can toward her. His own girl came from the dance floor at last, eyeing him with what he interpreted to be an aloof and hangdog look. A man said to him: YES, my friend! . . . and began to explain something to him at great length, possibly the causes and cures of hyperthyroidism, while the journalist nodded solemnly and Vanna stared straight through everything. The journalist offered him a can of ice cream soda as a prize for the speech. The waiter remained anxious at his elbow; the two staring girls needed so badly to be taken out... - At last the man pointed to Vanna and then to himself, joined two fingers together . . . Then he said something involving many vowels, concluding with the words twenty dollah. Buying a girl out was only ten. The journalist reached into his money-pouch and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill. The man rose formally and went behind the bar, speaking to a gaggle of other smooth operators as the journalist took Vanna's hand and tried to get her to rise but she made a motion for him to wait. The man came back and announced: Twenty-five dollah. The journalist shook his head and popped up from his seat again like a jack-in-the-box. He was required to stand and sit several more times before the man finally faded. Then he took Vanna's hand. She walked behind him without enthusiasm. Every eye was on them. The photographer's girl made one more attempt, weeping again. He was too exhausted now to feel anything for her. Outside, Vanna shook her hand away from his. He'd already slipped her a stack of riels under the table. She picked out a motorbike and he got on behind her. The hotel was only three blocks away but she didn't like to walk much, it seemed. When they got to the hotel she paid the driver two hundred from her new stack, and they went in. The lobby crowd watched them in silence as they went upstairs . . .

  51

  Wait, he said gently, his hand on her shoulder. He left her in the room and went downstairs.

  Do either of you speak English? he asked the desk men.

  Yes, they both replied in low voices.

  Will one of you please come and help me? There is someone I want to talk to, and I cannot speak Khmer.

  There is some kind of problem?

  No problem. I just want to talk to her.

  I cannot go, one clerk said, and the other clerk said nothing. Maybe if my friend comes I go or I send him. What is your room number, please?

  102.

  OK. I go with you, the other man said.

  That's great, the journalist said with all the enthusiasm of his nationality. I sure appreciate it . . .

  She was standing in the middle of the room, staring into the mirror.

  The journalist said: Please tell her I want to talk to her. I want to find out if she is angry with me.

  The man in the yellow shirt said something, and she opened her mouth and began to reply. It was practically the first time he had heard her speak (but as long as he knew her it always seemed that way when she said something; she talked so seldom). He marveled at the lisping syllables, the clear calm childish incomprehensible voice.

  Oh, it is only a misunderstanding, the man laughed. She think you are ashamed of her, because you walk in front of her very fast.

  Tell her I thought she was ashamed of being with me, because she walked very slowly.

  You walk very fast, she walks very slowly; it is nothing. I told her you seem to be a nice person, a good person; she says she likes you very much.

  Please ask her what she expects from me.

  Well, you know she does not like to ask you for anything. She never ask. But a small gold chain, for a souvenir of you, that would please her very much. To show your ... - well, it makes her very happy.

  Ask her if I should give her the money to buy whichever gold chain she wants.

  She says she wants to go with you, to pick it out together with you.

  Ask her if she has anything to ask me.

  She says she wants to do what you want, to make you happy.

  Ask her if she can stay with me tomorrow morning.

  How long you want her to stay?

  Up to her.

  She says she can stay until eleven or twelve. She has a job in the morning. She gets paid by the hour to work in the fields for small wage; that is no problem, to miss that; she simply won't get paid. But after that time maybe her uncle comes looking for her. These taxi girls, you know
, they do this work to make money for the family. They never tell the family what they do.

  52

  Then they were alone again. Once more she wasn't really looking at him. Then she smiled a little and got the towel and went into the shower . . .

  53

  He'd made up his mind, as I've said, not to fuck her anymore. He just wanted to be with her. When they lay in bed that night he kept his arm around her and she drew him close, drumming playfully on his belly, pinching his nipples; but then she was very still on her back beside him and he could see that she was waiting for him to do what he usually did (as meanwhile in the street the photographer met his former girl, who'd come hunting for him again alongside the girl with the Chinese-porcelain face, who still entertained hopes of majoring in journalism on her back; the photographer's girl was sobbing and screaming in the street. . . ) He didn't even kiss her or touch her breasts. He just held her very close, and the two of them fell asleep. All night they held each other. He wanted to respect her. In the morning he could see that she was waiting for it again, so he got up and took a shower and started getting dressed. He couldn't tell if she was surprised. She got up, too, and pulled her bra on, while in the other bed the photographer lay grinning.