Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  “Worse than that, he would torture himself.”

  The Chinese grunts. He’s worked with whores all his life. The way they are able to read men at a glance still astonishes him from time to time.

  Mitch Turner takes her to a Thai restaurant in Adams-Morgan, just off Columbia Road. She is impressed that he knows not to take her to an upmarket Thai place, where the chile is diluted and the food virtually tasteless. This one is budget to mid-range and frequented by Thais. The food, although not quite the standard of a Bangkok food stall, is not at all bad. One of the waiters happens to be a young Japanese, and for the duration of the evening she is convinced Mitch Turner brought her here to show off. When she gets to know him better, she will revise that view, but she is impressed. He looks so totally American, the kind that might boast he doesn’t own a passport, but his fluency and obvious familiarity with Japanese manners causes her to revise her estimation upward. What she likes most is his deference to the young waiter’s background, even to the point of bowing. Very few farang can call on such courtesy. She allows him one of her more generous smiles. He is as delighted as a schoolboy. There is no need to sleep with this man to have him in the palm of her hand—he is safely nestled there already.

  He hardly drinks at all, which disappoints her a bit. Thanee taught her to enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner, and the tension in the air could certainly do with some help from alcohol. Unfortunately, he seems afraid of it. She settles for a single glass of red wine; Turner drinks mineral water.

  Another surprise: he’s not bad at small talk. Not as good as Thanee, of course, who could talk amusingly about soap bubbles—there is a self-consciousness in the way Turner chats about Washington, this and that—but he’s not nearly as heavy as she feared. In return she confides how much she loves The Simpsons, in the enthusiastic tone of a recent convert. He smiles. Giving nothing of his profession away is clearly second nature to him, however. The meal is almost over before he comes to the point.

  “I’m sorry I put the heat on Yip. I was desperate. Now you’ve done what I wanted, and you’re having dinner with me. I’m a man of my word—anyone who knows me will tell you that—so I won’t be bothering you again. If you say no next time I ask to see you, I’ll take that as final. Just do one little thing for me. Read this.” He hands over a book-sized package that she has already noticed. “It’s in Thai. If you don’t have a lot of time, just read the New Testament, especially the four gospels.”

  She looks at the package in bewilderment.

  When he drops her at her apartment building, he says: “I don’t want to sleep with you. Not till we’re married. I just want to see you from time to time.” A painful smile. “I want to court you. I’m very old-fashioned.”

  She stares at him, holding the book in one hand, her Chanel handbag in the other. She admits that for a full minute she is seduced by the prospect of a simplified, safe, clean, scrupulously moral existence with a strong, honest, devout man who will never let her down, who will provide for her and their children and generally enable her to live happily ever after. Then she realizes she’s thinking about soap opera, not life. His timing has certainly added to the unreality. Is it part of American culture to virtually propose on the first date?

  Her revised opinion is that this is a very dangerous relationship for one of them. As an illegal immigrant, she can only suppose the victim will be her. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that he has won this round. She will not refuse to see him again. But there is one thing he has to understand: “No way am I going to get close to you without sex. Whatever your God thinks about that, you better tell him: no courting a Thai girl without a lot of sex. Tons of it, till it’s coming out your ears.”

  She ignores the pained expression on his face as she turns to walk to the lifts. She had decided not to turn again to look or wave at him, and he is quickly obscured by a concrete pillar. When she reaches the lift doors, she stops in her tracks. The voice of Homer Simpson calls out: “Chanya, say Chanya, I got tickets for the Springfield Isotopes game next Saturday, wanna come?” She turns quickly, even tries to search for him in the parking lot, but he is gone. She is gaping in wonder. That was not merely the mimickry of a gifted amateur, that was a perfect, professional-quality imitation, and more than a little eerie.

  As she ascends to her apartment, she is thinking:

  Chanya catches strange fish this time. Twenty minutes in bed with him, and Chanya will know everything. His face not so bad, but he’s ashamed of it. Wants to be pretty American boy. Something unreal, like movies. In Amerika everyone in the movies. Maybe he can’t get it up?

  What a disaster that would be, to marry a man only to find out he’s useless between the sheets. But why has she decided to see him again at all? Financially she’s doing extremely well at the sauna, and she could hook any number of Asian men whom she knows in the diplomatic corps and who are constantly calling her, all of whom would understand her so much better than the farang. Karma is a weather system too complex to analyze.

  Once in her apartment, she dumps the Bible on a table, still in its package, and forgets all about it.

  So who is Mitch Turner? Chanya would have been surprised to know how many people have asked themselves this question. She realizes after the first supper that he has told her nothing personal about himself at all. Even the Thai translation of the Bible, which could seem a charming and intimate gesture by a pious man, was clearly a contrived event, something not quite what it seemed, as if the piety were all in the acting.

  He waits a whole three weeks before asking her out again, this time to the Iron Hearth near Dupont Circle. No chiles here, it’s high-end romantic, with lamb chops in paper garters at finely laid tables around a blazing fire. Did he realize he was setting himself a trap? It is not the kind of restaurant where you can decently not drink wine. He makes a good, knowledgeable choice of a Napa red, which is fine by Chanya, but he hardly takes more than a couple of sips from his glass. Halfway through the meal the bottle is three-quarters empty, and Chanya puts down her glass to stare meaningfully at him. She has done almost all the drinking but is only slightly tipsy. Self-consciously he takes three or four sips, then puts his glass down. She continues to stare. He picks the glass up again to drink a little more. She doesn’t let him off the hook until he has drunk all of it. Apparently satisfied, she allows the waiter to empty the remains of the bottle into her glass.

  “Isn’t she the most beautiful goddamned thing you ever saw in the whole of your life?” Mitch Turner, red faced, suddenly demands of the waiter, who shares an astonished glance with Chanya.

  They skip dessert, and she has to fend off his advances in the cab all the way back to her apartment. His greedy, strong, needing, famished hands are everywhere. When she threatens to slap him, he giggles. “It’s coming out my ears, Marge,” he whispers in that perfect—and eerie—imitation of Homer.

  Once in her flat, she takes him in hand whore-style: a shower together first, when she carefully washes his private parts in cold water, with no effect on his impressive erection. Softly humming to himself, he covers her breasts with liquid soap and tries to write his name in the bubbles. In bed he comes alive in a way she could never have predicted.

  In fact, he’s amazing. Twenty-five minutes in, and he’s still pumping away and she is bucking and humping under him, sustained mostly by professional pride. To his very tender “Did you come, darling?” offered in a French accent, she is compelled, as a truthful Buddhist, breathlessly to admit: “Three times.”

  “Me too.” He chuckles and goes on humping. By the fourth climax she is reconsidering the Christian Bible. Maybe there’s something in it after all?

  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 mos
t 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 ménage is permanently in a state of combat readiness; then she finds the gigantic terrarium full of big, hairy, and exotic 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 sp
ot 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 cliché 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.