The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “But you had to pretend you liked them, right?”

  “What is it you want to know, Miaow?”

  Rafferty stands in the kitchen with the open refrigerator pouring cold air onto his feet.

  “You hated them, but you had to act like they were handsome or something. You were acting. Isn’t that right?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Rose says. She raises her voice. “Poke, get your beer and close the refrigerator. I can see your reflection in the sliding glass door, just standing there with your big ears sticking out.”

  “A guy can’t even eavesdrop in his own apartment.” He picks up the big beer and opens it.

  “Acting,” Miaow repeats. “In front of a live audience.”

  “More or less,” Rose says. It sounds like she’ll elaborate, but she doesn’t.

  “Improvising,” Miaow adds. She’s not giving up.

  “What does that mean?”

  “No script. Making it up while you were doing it.”

  “Oh, no,” Rose says. “There was always a script. Poke may think these men are interesting, but when they get into the bedroom, there are only four or five kinds of them, and there’s a script for every one of them. Do we have to talk about this?”

  “You were up close,” Miaow says without a moment’s hesitation. “It had to look real. Didn’t it?”

  “Not very.” She’s shaking her head. “They weren’t really looking at me. They were looking at something they wanted, a brown girl who would do what they wanted her to, or the whore who would fall in love with them. See them as different from all the others, prove to them they were different from all the others, which they weren’t. Or they were looking back at the money they spent to get me out of the bar, waiting to see what it had bought. Most of them forgot my name before I left.”

  Miaow says, “But still.”

  “Yes, Miaow, it was acting. All right? Some of them really needed to believe I thought they were . . . whatever they needed to be—romantic or sensitive or sexy or . . .” She looks up at Rafferty as he comes in. “Or like Bob. They needed to feel powerful.”

  “Dr. Srisai says that the only way to make the audience believe something is to believe it yourself. You have to . . . to feel, inside you, the way your character feels.”

  Rose nods slowly. Wherever she thought Miaow was going, this clearly isn’t it.

  “It’s the opposite of that other way, the Del . . . Del—”

  “Delsarte,” Rafferty says, sitting beside his wife. “The Delsarte method. In that approach the gesture, the exterior, creates the emotion. You look like you’re afraid and bang, you’re afraid. In the approach Miaow’s talking about now, it’s the other way around. The emotion inside creates the exterior.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Miaow says.

  Rose says, “I want some of that beer.”

  “Tough,” Rafferty says. “Laurence Olivier—you know who he is, right?”

  Miaow says, “Yes,” and Rose shakes her head.

  “Olivier, in a Shakespeare play, had a scene in which he learned that his character’s daughter had been murdered. Every reviewer talked about the scream he let out when he heard the news. He said later that he made the scream by remembering when he was a boy and he touched the tip of his tongue to a frozen metal flagpole. It stuck, and he had to rip it away.”

  “Ohhhh.” Miaow looks thrilled. Rose raises her eyebrows and ostentatiously licks the spoon.

  “So,” Miaow says to her, “when you had to make them think you liked them, what did you use? I mean, what did you think about? It had to be something powerful, didn’t it?”

  Rose gives her a long look and says, “I thought about being alone.”

  By the time they finally go to bed, Rose seems resigned to the idea that the patrons of the Expat Bar will continue to share the world with her and breathe her air until they’re all dead and that Rafferty is entitled to his own feelings about them as long as he doesn’t mention them by name. They share a slightly perfunctory and not very aerobic romantic workout to put the tension behind them and smooth the surface. Rose, as usual, is asleep and breathing deeply by the time Rafferty rolls over.

  He’s been reading Greek poetry lately, and a line from Sappho surfaces as he drifts: He was handsome then and young, but eventually gray age overcame him, the husband of an immortal wife. The men in the Expat Bar have grown old, but the women on the stages have remained immortally the same age, even if they weren’t the same women. It is, he thinks, a cruel metric: losing your beauty and vitality among all that youth and seeing your faltering present-day self reflected in their uninterested eyes. Seeing the way they reserve themselves, even commercially, for younger men when, inside, you still feel the way you always did—youthful, vigorous, attractive. But, of course, Rose is right: these men signed up all those years ago for the full five-course meal, including the bitter dessert, and they got to this point without ever doing anything to push back from the table and use their lives to accomplish something useful.

  Trying for the tenth or fifteenth time to get the lumps in his pillow arranged just right, he sees the eyes of that bar worker, finding him across the crowd, and hears Arthur Varney call him “the travel writer.”

  4

  An Inactive Post

  “Varney,” Rafferty says, dropping his fork and scowling at the slop on his plate. “V-A-R-N-E-Y.”

  “And what is it you want me to do?” Arthit says. The misunderstanding that divided the two friends during Rafferty’s head-on collision with the lethal former soldier and freelance troublemaker Haskell Murphy has dissipated to the point where they can get exasperated with each other without giving offense.

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Rafferty pushes his chair away from the table to put a safe distance between himself and the food. They’re sweltering in a badly air-conditioned restaurant near the station to which Arthit has been assigned by a superior whose ass Arthit pulled out of the fire and who is uncomfortable with the memory of his near humiliation, which he’s erasing by banishing the person who witnessed it. Arthit claims that his boss chose this station because it’s surrounded by the worst restaurants in the city.

  “At any given point in time,” Arthit says, picking through his food as though he expects to find at least one insect, “the range of possible actions facing an individual, while quantifiable, can feel almost infinite. Rather than you sitting there while I try to eliminate the things you don’t want me to do, why don’t you narrow it down a little? So far you’ve communicated a name, ‘Varney,’ which you thoughtfully spelled out for me, and a vague feeling of unease.” He looks up and gives Rafferty a smile that’s more muscular than cheerful. “How, exactly, would you like me to abuse my powers to help you with whatever it is?”

  Rafferty scrapes the surface of his tongue against his front teeth to scrub the grease off it, with no improvement. He swabs his sweating face with his shirtsleeve. “Since you put it that way, let’s change the subject. The last thing I’d want to do is impose on a friend, and I especially wouldn’t want to make work for a friend who has essentially been transferred to an inactive post—a concept that is uniquely Thai, by the way—and has probably fallen far behind with his report on how many paper clips, staples, and empty ballpoint pens his new police station has.” His irritation, which he’s barely bothered to mask, bubbles all the way to the surface. “Forgive me for thinking you might actually want something to do during your workday.”

  Arthit idly moves a mystery chunk from one side of his plate to the other and looks longingly out the window, as though he’d prefer to be outside, under the powder-gray sky. “You’re in fine spirits today.”

  “It’s nothing. Well, no, it’s something, obviously. This guy Varney—have I mentioned Varney?—is bothering me. There’s something wrong with him, with the way he appeared at the bar. And, of course, then there’s li
fe. At home, Rose has stomachaches all the time, and her gums are swollen, and she pees every twenty minutes, has a bowel movement every four days, and wants a cigarette every other second. We’re all living on yogurt. Miaow is studying the Delsarte method of acting, and she goes around with one hand pressed to her brow, emoting with an English accent. This food is wretched. I’m hot. It’s going to rain until the end of time. And, goddamn it, we have to move.” He rocks his chair back until he’s leaning against the wall, earning him an urgent tsk-tsk-tsk from the waitress, which he ignores. “I’ve been happy in that apartment. I’ve never been really happy anywhere else in my life, and now there are grape-jelly handprints in the elevator and the building is getting sticky and fly-paperish. It’s haunted by decades-old cigarettes.”

  Arthit passes a broad, dark hand over his mouth, literally wiping the smile from his face. He looks out the window again, assessing the day, which has grown alarmingly dark. “She’s in the second trimester?”

  “Well, you know, no host of angels barged in to sing the Annunciation, or if they did, I missed it. Near as she can figure, it’s the thirteenth or fourteenth week.”

  “Well, see this?” Arthit says. He holds up his left fist, clenched. “Your child is a little smaller than this.” He wiggles the fist back and forth. “He or she has fingernails. Here’s something nice. The tail has disappeared.”

  “The tail—”

  “The embryo had a tail for a while. That’s the main thing that whole ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny’ idea came from, the old theory that an embryo, as it develops, goes through the evolutionary stages that humans went through: fish, reptile, and so forth. There was the tail, and there were supposed to be gill slits—”

  Rafferty brings his chair back down and says, “Since when are you an expert on pregnancy?”

  “Since you told me about Rose. I didn’t know anything about it before, but Anna has a son, and she’s walked me through Rose’s pregnancy a week at a time.”

  “You guys talk about this?” Rafferty is surprised at how touched he is. “When we’re not around?”

  “You have no idea,” Arthit says. “I’ve been shown charts and graphs. Ultrasounds on YouTube. You’re the second person today to tell me that your wife is constipated.”

  Rafferty says, “Gosh.”

  Arthit reaches across the table and taps the back of Rafferty’s hand with his index finger. “I’ve wanted to say this for months. Becoming . . . well, friends with Rose has meant a lot to Anna. Even though they’re at different—excuse me—social levels.”

  “It’s not just different,” Rafferty says. “It’s a gulf.” Anna was born into an old, if not rich, family, while Rose is the daughter of an impoverished farmer in the northeast, and she moved even further down the scale when she became, for a year and a half, a sex worker.

  “But they’re reaching across it, to some extent,” Arthit says, “and it’s made a difference to Anna. The deafness sealed her off from people. Her husband’s family took the child and threw her away. Now she feels like her world is bigger. There’s Rose, you, the kids at Father Bill’s. There’s Treasure.” He opens his mouth to say something, closes it again, and—it seems to Rafferty—says something else instead. “It’s . . . it’s . . . well, it’s been good to see.” He sniffs in an aggressively masculine fashion that no one could mistake for the sniffle of someone who feels a little misty. Picking up a fork, he spears something with it, puts it into his mouth, and then takes it out with his thumb and forefinger and puts it back on his plate. “This is awful,” he says.

  “So you can’t help me out with Arthur Varney.”

  Arthit pushes his plate to the center of the table and drinks some creamy-looking iced coffee. “If I wanted to, which I don’t, I could probably go to immigration and find out what his birthday is, where he comes from, and what occupation he lists on his passport. But it wouldn’t be worth the effort it would take and the favors I’d owe. Especially since, as we both know, there are passports and there are passports.”

  “Why do countries have to be so official?” Rafferty says. “Why can’t they be more like high schools or book clubs? You’ve got a question, you figure out who to ask, and you ask it.”

  Arthit flips his heavy watch on its too-big band so that it’s faceup, and he looks at it. “You don’t actually want me to answer that, do you? I mean, even your time is worth something.”

  Rafferty sits back and lets his shoulders slump. “I guess.”

  “And I don’t understand what all the agitation is about. A guy you instinctively dislike knew your name and seems to have asked about you—a bit obscurely, if you want my opinion—when you weren’t around. Maybe he really is interested in writers. Maybe he’s secretly a fan. You must have some fans somewhere. And a bar girl looks at you on Patpong. Looking at men is their job.”

  “It was the way she looked at me.”

  “Maybe she was trying to figure out what you are. Thais like to know who we’re dealing with, and you’re kind of confusing. Thanks to your mother’s Filipina blood, you could almost be Asian, but you could also be farang. It’s like you’re wearing two different uniforms—let’s say police and army—at the same time. Everybody asks themselves, ‘What the hell is he?’”

  “I’ve gotten those stares for years,” Rafferty says. “This was different.” The light in the restaurant goes even dimmer, and he looks out the window to see a world submerged in a yellowish gloom. The passersby have picked up the pace, many of them glancing at the sky. “Listen, we’d better hurry or we’re going to get soaked.”

  “I need to talk to you about something,” Arthit says. He takes a breath and then blows it out and shakes his head. “But it’ll wait.”

  “Until when? Is it important?”

  “It is to me. But I don’t want to discuss it with someone who’s disappointed with the world. It’s a topic that requires optimism. Go home, look at your wife and daughter for a while. Think about the baby. When you’ve stopped feeling sorry for yourself, call me, and we’ll set a time.”

  “Why not now? Look, I’m all cheered up.”

  “Can’t now,” Arthit says, getting up. “I have to get back, but more urgently than that, I need the toilet. The guys at the station call this place the ‘Magic Restaurant,’ because you always seem to get rid of more than you eat.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Rafferty calls after him, although it had been. Seen from behind, Arthit has love handles, something Rafferty has never noticed before. His friend—the closest friend of his adult life—is putting on weight, bad restaurants notwithstanding. Anna, Rafferty guesses, must be feeding him pretty good.

  He’s eating, Rafferty thinks gratefully. And then he thinks, He must be happy.

  5

  The Closet of Wonders

  He dawdles over dinner, hoping Rose and Miaow will call an evening’s time-out in the Brit Twit Marathon, but they’re already anticipating a comeuppance for Mr. Slope, the hypocritical clergyman who blots the nostalgic Eden of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire. Rafferty could spoil it for them, since he’s read the novel twice, but what would he get out of it? They’d just hate him for a few minutes and then decide he’s got it wrong and watch it anyway.

  Still, he stretches out the chitchat, and for a while he thinks he’s snagged Rose’s interest as he tells her how Arthit and Anna are following her pregnancy. She’s got her chin on her knuckles, her long fingers curved under her palm, her elbow propped next to the bowl of yogurt with orange slices in it, her enthusiasm for yogurt having been supplemented with a craving for oranges that borders on druggy. What he’s saying even gets Miaow to look up from the spicy noodles with crisp pork and chilies he picked up for the two of them on the way home.

  Miaow says, “How big?”

  Rafferty says, “Make a fist,” and when Miaow does, he says, “Say hello to your little sister.”

 
“Or brother,” Rose says.

  Looking at her fist, Miaow says, “Hard to believe I was that little.”

  “Your body was,” Rose says in Thai. “Your spirit was the same size it is now.”

  “You think?” Miaow says.

  “Of course.” Rose uses a big spoon to dredge an orange section from the bowl and lifts it to study its color. “Your spirit never changes. In one lifetime after another, your spirit is the light you’re wrapped around.”

  “So,” Rafferty says, at a loss. He feels unqualified to participate when they discuss spirit; his parents’ generic, workday Protestantism didn’t give him the vocabulary for it. “According to Arthit, that’s what you’re toting around this month. Something that big.”

  Rose says, with a glance in his direction that’s so quick he’s not even sure he saw it, “Could be two.” She puts the orange into her mouth.

  Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”

  Rose shrugs, straight-faced, but he sees the flicker in her eyes. “It runs in my family,” she says around the piece of orange, as though they’ve talked about it for weeks. “My father was a twin, and so was my mother’s father.”

  Miaow, who not too long ago had hated the idea of even one new child coming into the family, says, “Cool.”

  Rafferty says, “This is nothing you thought was worth bringing up before?”

  “It never seemed like the right time.” She’s still speaking Thai. “How are your noodles?”

  “Who cares about my noodles? How can you tell? We should find out. What about, you know, whatever it is, where they take a picture of it with—”

  “Ultrasound,” Rose says. “I don’t want one. I want to be surprised.” She picks up her napkin and folds it in half, then passes the crease between her fingernails to sharpen it. In English she says, “Don’t you want two?”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “I mean, sure, two sounds fine, I mean, it sounds like . . .”

  Rose uses the folded napkin to blot her lips, although she’s not wearing lipstick. “Like?”