“After a week, he figured that he understood all there was to know about whoring in Bangkok. He went back to Fawn—the girl he had started with—and Fawn, along with six other HQ girls, all wearing identical skirts from Howard, gathered around him. Fawn had done a little homework.
“She had gone out to Chatuchak Market on Saturday and found Howard’s skirts for one red and the scarfs going for half a red. That’s several light-years away from a purple. She wasn’t impressed that he had bought them at the Oriental Hotel. All she cared about was her ass being sold far below market value.
“As ‘Sexy Eyes’ started up, she told Howard that she didn’t like being discounted. And the other girls were pissed off for being taken advantage of, but that was okay.
“‘Never mind,’ she said. She walked hand in hand with Howard out the back door and into the alley, where Howard hired the same taxi with the driver who had turned his headlights on the skirt that first night for Fawn. Only this time the driver headed to Klong Toey—the Harlem of Bangkok. The driver had a few of his friends waiting near the Chao Phraya River. They pulled Howard out of the taxi. He was crying and pleading. His hands folded in prayer. Fawn sat in the back of the taxi, her sexy, tapered legs crossed beneath her new skirt, and smoked a cigarette. She watched as they beat the shit out of Howard. Stripped off his clothes and left him naked and bleeding along the side of the road.
“What hit him hard was the boutique at the Oriental Hotel had screwed him on the price of the dresses and shit. It took an HQ girl, a regular, to find the real price. He never came back to HQ. He never went to the police. He headed back to New York City with an important lesson about wholesale bargains. Certain things in life have a fixed retail price that is sacred. Bargain that price down and you are guaranteed, when things fall apart, to learn that the retail price had been a real bargain from the start.”
* * *
LIKE Tuttle, neither Snow nor Crosby had ever been married. Women were a form of indoor entertainment, thought Lawrence. He had been married to the same woman for half his life; a stable partnership, with the day-to-day give-and-take, combining personal companionship, affection, and familiarity. He had married his college sweetheart—who also happened to be Tuttle’s sweetheart; a piece of information Lawrence believed over the years was no more than a small footnote in a long, weighty text of their marriage. What was difficult to swallow was the second text—the one in Sarah’s own hand; the one she had hidden in her office, volumes and volumes, where Lawrence had been the footnote.
Certainly both couldn’t be true? Had Sarah worn a kind of mask, performed a part, all those years? Had he never taken her away from Tuttle? His head pounded with the whiskey and soda, with the unanswered questions from the smoke drifting across the room from a hundred cigarettes. He had arrived in Bangkok with a private mission: to uncover Sarah’s secret life, looking for some small detail that could give him comfort. Instead he had been on a steady diet of deception, indifference, and he suspected, fabrications. They had been playing a game with him. “Let’s see what kind of man you really are” kind of game. They had been examining his likes and dislikes at each stage of the night, deciding whether to promote him through the ranks.
Snow made out that he was an innocent; playing off the ancient wisdom of Crosby; and Tuttle, as always had been the case with him, seemed to orchestrate the group with an unseen hand. It had always bothered Lawrence that everyone else around Tuttle understood he was working out of place and time deep in a private sedimentary deposit of knowledge. Lawrence never believed it for a moment. The circles around him were being misled. Snow’s Lahu Godman was a perfect description of Tuttle, thought Lawrence. It was the role he had played his entire life. Going up the mountain with his illusions and messages, Tuttle played the prophet. The oracle who haunted page after page of Sarah’s diaries.
Lawrence turned to Snow. “Ever thought of marrying a Thai? ”
Snow’s dilated eyes blinked several times. A flicker of a smile crossed his thin lips. He revealed a photograph of a young Thai girl from his wallet. “Marriage, you say,” said Snow. “I’m open-minded, and I almost married this one.”
“But she created a bit of a row,” said Crosby. “The usual misery, I’m afraid.”
“What kind of trouble? ” asked Lawrence, looking around the table. Obviously they all knew the story, and were looking to Tuttle to determine if they should continue.
“Nop had a BA from Thammasat University,” said Tuttle, breaking the silence. “A regular job. She wasn’t a bar girl. She came from a good family. But she wanted certain guarantees from Snow.” “Cash guarantees,” said Snow, nodding his head. “She had commercial concerns.”
“Sod that,” interrupted Crosby. “That one would have disappeared with the bankbook.”
“I could have ended up like one of those wandos who comes here, falls in love with an HQ hooker, marries her, and either hauls her back to a council house in Leicester or a townhouse in Houston. Those guys are fucking doomed, man. Beyond hope, beyond salvation. To marry the thing you’ve paid to fuck you is major league confusion. It’s like trying to play basketball with a baseball bat. You strike out and foul out all at the same time.”
Snow had picked up steam again. The fire returned to his voice, and his hands danced around the photograph of Nop on the table as he spoke.
“A sixty-six-year-old Australian married little Noi, aged nineteen. He buys a house for two-million baht and puts it in the mother-in-law’s name. Six months later, he goes back to Aussieland for a two week holiday. A short R&R to see family. Big fucking mistake. He should have chained Noi to the bedroom door with a two-week supply of food. Of course, little Noi who had found her dream man. Man, she had the Aussie believing that he was her wet dream material. Forget that her sixty-six-year-old dreamboat came fitted with a diesel engine that chugged at half speed on a level grade. Wasn’t this every girl’s dream? What else could she ever want in life? She’d spent nineteen years waiting for this ancient dream lover to sail into her harbor.
“‘Will I marry you? No fucking problem. Oh, darling, by the way, farang can’t own land in Thailand,” the Aussie said.
“But we need house,” she said.
“How can we buy house? ” he asked.
“She had the perfect solution. ‘You put deed in Mama’s name. We can live in that house forever. Just the two of us. I look after you every day, every night.’
“What an offer. No Aussieland chick’s gonna knead his balls every night and tell him he’s the best lover she’s ever had, and that he doesn’t look a day over forty. ‘House in your mama’s name? Why didn’t I think of that? You really don’t want to go to Sydney with me? You would love it. Oh, you want to stay and look after the house? Weed the garden, scrub the floors, and bake bread? Have everything just right for when I return? And see some of your friends and family. Why didn’t I think of that? How selfish of me. Two weeks will go fast.’
“Fast? Man, there isn’t a Thai woman who can’t turn over a house and land anywhere in the Kingdom in less than seventy-two hours. Little Noi disappeared into the woodwork. The Aussie searched, went to the police, who laughed and shrugged their shoulders. Now a broken man, he writes a letter to the editor of the newspaper. She never turned up, and the Aussie lost every cent he had ever saved.”
Lawrence leaned back and shifted his knees to the side, letting Crosby slide past him and disappear off to the toilets. He had heard the story before. Snow picked up the photograph of Nop, held it up, as he tipped back his beer. Around the border of the jukebox, activity was picking up. Girls filtering in from the discos, better dressed, some who looked like students.
“The story isn’t finished, man. A year later a Brit marries a Thai and takes her to London. Six months of married bliss, and one day she says, Darling, I miss Papa and Mama, go back to Thailand for one week, okay? Oh, I love you like monkey love banana. After two weeks, he’s not heard a word from her. Does an alarm bell go off in his head? Sur
e. But the wrong one. He’s worried something might have happened to her. That was the romantic in him. The hopeful chance that just maybe she’s had an accident, a mugging, held hostage. And with most romantics, the whole nine yards of horror rushed through his head. He had to act; he had to rescue his wife. So he flies into Bangkok, takes the train up to Chiang Mai, knocks on the door of the family shack.
“We no see Noi. We think she with you.”
“Another week looking for her in Bangkok, hanging out in HQ telling his story to Old Bill in the back booth, tears rolling down his cheeks. Damn, how he loved that girl. He flies back to London, and discovers Noi’s a very clever girl. She had waited until he had left England, then went to the bank and cleaned out the savings and checking accounts—which he had put in joint names, flew back to Thailand, and was never heard of again.”
Tuttle leaned forward in his seat, the well-developed muscles in his forearms tensed as he clasped his hands together, looking at the latest girls to arrive. “Never heard of that until Snow almost married her. She had changed her name to Nop. She was a real success story. Someone who had learned the American dream. Rags to riches through accumulating other people’s money. We did a little digging and found out her past. One smooth lady.”
“Tuttle managed to get some money back for the Aussie and Brit. She broke down, cried, admitted everything. She said I had changed her, made a new woman out of her. An Oscar performance for a woman who was officially married to two husbands.” Snow slowly slipped her photograph back into his wallet. The ends were worn, slanted with age. The image still inspired a mixture of fear, relief, and the recurring flash of terror that comes from a near miss with disaster.
* * *
SNOW slid out of the booth with his half-empty beer. A moment later he was smiling and joking with one of the HQ regulars. Gliding across the surface of melancholy with a squeeze, laughter at the outer rim far away from shame and wounded pride. That safe terrain where they both expected to sustain their dance until first light, then she would leave with her morning-gift tucked inside her wallet. And Snow, again in solitude, would pull out the photograph of Nop, marvel at the confidence of her smile, and ask himself why he had never thrown it away. Sometimes he told himself, he kept the photograph because it was a marker for the time he had become moonstruck. When Nop had been in his life, he had discovered and venerated romance, and for a brief intense time he thought it might be enough.
Lawrence slipped on his jacket, and began to thread his tie around his collar. Several girls were singing along with ‘We Are the World’ playing. It was insane, thought Lawrence. The most crippled members of the species had found a place to drink, sing, and play. The mentality predated the invention of hand tools by mankind, he thought, knotting his tie. Tuttle had watched him, recording the emotions crossing his face like an electronic billboard; Lawrence had been mocked, excluded, alienated, and insulted over the course of the evening. He had arrived looking for a sanctuary to express his private grief, and instead Tuttle had blasted the religion of marriage.
Tuttle’s message had been clear; Lawrence had found it in one of the short stories Sarah had collected. She had used her Magic Marker to underline several paragraphs. In the months following her death, Lawrence had read those paragraphs many times.
“You put another two baht into the jukebox at the center of the universe and pick your song. Any song. One that helps you focus on the price of things in life. How discounts work. How they can defeat you. And you keep coming back to the basic question, what am I buying? What is that I want to buy for tonight? For tomorrow night? How does anyone figure a price for anything beyond tomorrow night? And you go over the collective agreement, thinking about the fine print in that invisible document memorized by every working girl and every hard-core regular in the place.
“No matter how many times you go through it, you keep coming back to the same conclusion. This is about work for her. About the terms and conditions of the color purple.
“This is about an expression of pleasure for me. HQ operates an exchange system with known values for the instinctual drive. The color of sex is always purple. And the color of love? The color of gas, helium, the kind of gas you use to fill circus balloons. And there is the history of balloon payments in HQ.
“I call myself her customer—look kah—whenever I talk to her. She knows from that moment, I’m hard-core. She can relax, go to work, her mind can drift off someplace else; inside the jukebox, following the cockroach circling round and round the colored balls, locked inside, looking for an escape hatch, not knowing there isn’t one, circling round and round for a lifetime, listening to music it can’t understand.”
8
Lawrence had little hard knowledge about Tuttle’s recent past; he knew Tuttle had abandoned his journalism career. Sarah’s diary had mentioned something about an English language school for slum kids that he had started. But the series of events that caused him to leave journalism and open the school had not been revealed by Sarah. Tuttle had little money, few books, and a few rooms on the third floor of an old building donated by a sympathetic landlord. Late at night, after a day teaching, he wrote the stories that Sarah saw rising like bubbles from the depths in magazines from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, and London. In 1984, he had written a story about an English school teacher in Bangkok; how he had gone full circle from sleeping with the girls to teaching them English.
The story was titled Monsoon Language Lessons. Lawrence had shown a copy to Kelly Swan the night before he left Los Angeles. She read the story like a legal document, tearing through the sentences as if looking for a single rule or point, and discovering everything else on the way. When she finished the last page, she had the look of someone bucked off a saddle. The desk lamp cast a warm yellow light over her confident, proud, angular face. A face that did not conceal her emotion of unvarnished contempt.
“Why does Tuttle focus on the helplessness of women? We have fought against this. Because the image is wrong.”
He hadn’t expected the tears that followed her condemnation. She balled up the story and flung it across the room, running from the room crying. Lawrence had gone after her. He found himself in the strange position of defending Tuttle to Kelly Swan. Or was he defending Sarah’s decision to keep the story in her file? He no longer knew his own motives but found himself raising his voice in his own house. In the eight years Sarah and he had lived in the house, he couldn’t ever remember when either of them had raised their voices. But there he was, shouting at Kelly who had locked herself into the bathroom.
“For God sakes, it’s about communication,” he shouted through the door.
“It’s not. It’s degrading to women.”
“Where is it degrading? ” asked Lawrence, unballing the story, his eyes sweeping across the page.
“That a man can do whatever he wants, and a woman’s gotta stand for it, or she’s a bitch,” Kelly said as she unlocked the bathroom door, swinging it open fast enough to clip Lawrence on the chin. “And you’re going to spend a week in Bangkok with him.”
“I am spending a week in Bangkok and that’s final.”
Her anger about his Bangkok journey had been brewing up from nearly the time Lawrence announced his decision. Tuttle had become the battleground, a whipping boy for a load of things neither of them was prepared to face directly. History repeated itself in an odd way, Tuttle had been the battleground with Sarah years earlier. He hated the irony of his presence protruding into every relationship he had. This invisible fist slamming him hard in his emotional belly of his life.
“Why don’t I go with you to Bangkok? ” Kelly asked standing in the door with watery eyes. She had asked the same question a dozen or more times.
“Because of the . . .”
“The Ryan deal,” she said, finishing his sentence. “Fuck the Ryan deal.”
He smiled, still rubbing his chin, looking at his fingers for a hint of blood from the bang on the door. “That comes from a woman
who wants to be a partner? That’s not the bargain, Kelly. Either you’re seriously committed to the firm or you’re not. Which is it? ”
“Does that mean if I don’t like your friend’s story I’m blackballed? ”
“He’s not my friend. I don’t even like him.”
“Then why are you going to Bangkok? ”
“I don’t know,” he shouted. But he did know; it had been the Tuttle of Sarah’s diaries he wanted to meet; the man who had communicated to his dead wife in page after page of her diaries; he was going in search of the Tuttle who had written about the breakdown of communication between men and women, the battle over words, the desire to say and hear certain phrases and not others.
The truth embarrassed Lawrence; he could never have trusted anyone enough to have explained why he was going to Bangkok. He wasn’t certain he trusted himself with the uncomfortable feeling that Tuttle possessed the right combination of words to heal the wound of Sarah’s death, of her secret betrayal, of the warning signal transmitted in his dreams—that there was danger ahead and he didn’t know how to avoid the collision anymore than Sarah.
A Killing Smile Page 13