A member of Colonel Chao’s district office staff, who was related by marriage to the manager of the business service bureau at Lawrence’s hotel had commented on a twenty-five page fax from Los Angeles. It had cost the hotel guest over a thousand baht just to receive the fax! The manager, a university graduate, possessed a normal curiosity; he read the fax, and made a copy, for security reasons, of course. The fax might be lost and the hotel would be greatly embarrassed if the guest could not be given a duplicate.
Not long after the fax had been received, a copy of contents had been delivered to Colonel Chao’s office. Several officers were immediately assigned to study, evaluate, and report upon the document. The name of Tuttle English School appeared a number of times in the document. Upon examination, the Colonel’s staff informed him that three trustees were to be appointed with the advice and consent of Robert Tuttle.
Colonel Chao spread his copy of the document out in front of Tuttle. Appropriate passages had been underlined in red ink. On the second page a sum of money was in boldface type: ONE MILLION US DOLLARS. A red ink box had been drawn around those words. Tuttle sighed, flipped to the end of the document, and turned it over, face down on the table. This time, no one had to tell Tuttle to watch his back. He looked at the Colonel who leaned forward, extending his hand.
“Whenever you need funds, just phone me,” the colonel said smiling for the first time. He spotted his namecard on the table, reached over with a pen, and wrote on the front. He looked up. “My personal home phone number. A sign of my good faith. If you should need to reach me about anything.”
“We are honored to have Colonel Chao administer the funds,” said Khun Kob. “Property and assets must be in the right hands, or otherwise we may have some danger. And I can personally speak of my support for his willingness to be of assistance.” Colonel Chao glanced at Tuttle’s untouched glass of champagne.
“You don’t drink champagne? ”
“I never developed an appetite,” said Tuttle.
Colonel Chao raised his glass, holding it out towards Tuttle. “Here’s a toast, then, to a change of appetites? ”
The Colonel waited until Tuttle raised his glass before drinking. Tuttle left his glass suspended motionless in midair until Colonel Chao pulled back his chair.
“We must find me to play a round of golf,” said the Colonel.
“Your club or mine? ”
The Colonel stared for a moment without blinking, as if taking in the total of Robert Tuttle. “You have quite a sense of humor, Khun Tuttle. Sometimes that make a problem.”
The Colonel did not wait for a reply and vanished as quickly as he had arrived. Tuttle dropped the glass on the floor. The owner and waitresses scurried around with towels, broom, mops, barking at one another as if they had been responsible. Khun Kob chased Tuttle out into the street. “You forgot this,” he said.
Tuttle looked down at Colonel Chao’s name card, shoved it in his shirt pocket, and wondered what had ever possessed him to give Khun Kob the courtesy title of headmaster. He cut down the sub-soi. A scrappy dog with swollen teats barked in a hoarse, tentative fashion, then turned and ran through an opening in a fence as Tuttle walked past. Large bamboo trees arching overheard rustled in a light wind, rustling the leaves above the narrow paved soi. In the far distance, the roar of jet engines penetrated the night. Children’s voices, cranky and tired, travelled from a fenced compound. Someone clapped hands and shouted in Thai. The dull, worn, aching cry of a baby echoed from an open window. The smell of rice soup drifted from a kitchen. A hundred fibers of sounds and smells knitted a blanket thrown over the night; and any one strand alone was sufficient to exhaust the capacity for human compassion.
But as hard as Tuttle tried to blot out Khun Kob and Colonel Chao, Lawrence’s million-dollar document, with the distractions of the night, his mind couldn’t shake free of the number of hands reaching for the pie. How could he blame them, he thought. Hadn’t he been the first to think of Lawrence as a potential asset for the school? Someone who might turn around his fortunes with a pledge of funds? He was all but certain that Lawrence would use money to bring Fawn around to accepting a teaching position at the school. Did he actually think that he could contain the information? Perhaps not, but what he hadn’t done was identify the complex framework of new wage demands, political intrigue, and an alliance with a Thai police colonel, who had pulled away in a new baby-blue Mercedes, leaving Khun Kob on the pavement bowing from the waist.
* * *
SNOW’S hands made loops in the air, slicing through the smoke from Crosby’s cigarettes. It looked as if he were trying to rope the smoke; pull it to the floor; tame it and make it harmless. Lawrence, sitting opposite in a shirt open at the throat and market-stall trousers, was laughing as Tuttle came to the table carrying a large bottle of Kloster.
“So Kob’s out,” said Snow in a voice that could have been either a question or declaration.
“Kob’s in,” said Tuttle, sinking into the booth.
“Giving up his politics? ” asked Crosby.
“He sees no problem in doing both,” said Tuttle, putting the beer bottle to his lips. Old Bill emerged smiling from a group of girls; he slowed down, reaching the table, and waited until Tuttle pulled the bottle away from his lips and set it on the table.
“That Lotus in the parking lot,” said Old Bill, standing perfectly erect, his white hair slicked back. “I ask myself, who are these people? Where do they get this kind of money in Thailand. I look around the room, but I never see them. Where are they, Robert? It’s a mystery.”
“Business dealings, Bill,” said Tuttle, using his thumbnail to tear at the edge of the label on the green bottle of Kloster. “Cement? ”
“The same stuff used to construct your lighthouse in Cornwall.”
“I can’t figure it.” And Old Bill turned, taking his fountain pen from his safari shirt pocket, unscrewing the cap, and admiring the nib, walked away, muttering softly to himself like a child who no longer expected a meaningful answer from an adult.
“It doesn’t surprise me about old Kob. I figured him for someone you couldn’t trust,” said Crosby, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“Everyone gets used, man,” said Snow. “The girls think they are the only ones who get used. Yesterday, I woke up at nine, there is Lek perched on the end of the bed in the floor squat position stark naked. She’s eating a banana and staring at me. She’s waiting for me to unlock the bank vault. Draw her purple and flee the scene. The banana peel covered her little fist and she chewed away. Lek didn’t blink. Her tiny cheeks were bloated with contraband banana. And what was going through her head at that moment? ”
Lawrence helped himself to one of Crosby’s cigarettes. “Well, what was going through her mind? ” he asked Snow.
Crosby cut off Snow with a quick reply. “I can tell you what’s in her head. ‘This is my life,’ she’s thinking. ‘This is what I do for a living. What I do serves no purpose. I serve no purpose. So I squat and eat and stare.’ Not wholly different, I suspect, than what goes through Khun Kob’s mind.”
“Wrong, man, his mind’s more complex. ‘I squat and eat and stare and plan to run for public office,”’ said Snow, pursing his thin lips and nodding his head back and forth like a nodding toy dog in the rear window of a teenager’s car.
“You sound a little bitter, Snow,” said Lawrence.
“Me bitter? ” asked Snow, snapping his head back, and fanning away at Crosby’s smoke. “Tuttle, remember when the Pope came through Bangkok in ’82. The Bureau in Hong Kong asked me to cover his stay. I’m thinking here’s my chance to score a by-line. You remember those stories I wrote, Tut. I showed them to you. Some of my best writing ever. I had an entire series of great articles about the Pope, man. Lots of local color, impressions of the Thais, the role of the Catholic community. Every night I phoned the Bureau Chief, in Hong Kong. Susan, I’d say, you’re gonna love what I’ve got for you. And I’d start reading the copy out over the phone.
Slowly so she could take it down. A paragraph into the story, I could tell from the tone in her voice that she was bored out of her fucking mind. Susan wasn’t writing down a goddamn word.
“I’m a chump, I just keep reading out the stories. I phoned in every day. ‘Good job, Snow.’ Man, that’s all the fuck she said four days in a row. And I say to her, ‘Susan, you’re not telling me something. You’re holding back on something I ought to know. Can’t you give me a hint? ’ And there would be this long, fucking silence. ‘You’re doing a good job. Snow, you are giving us exactly what we want,’ she finally said.
“Two years later in Singapore, I ran into Susan. We both got drunk. Susan tells me the truth. I had been a local hire for the wire in the event the Pope was shot. They hired me for the deathwatch patrol. And decided not to tell me. They thought I might be demoralized. The job was one rung below local scum. No one in their right mind would touch the job. Absent a direct hit on the Pope, they didn’t want to hear from me. Or take my calls. All that brilliant background color in my stories. Stories they knew from day one they’d never use. I was in Bangkok to cover their ass. If someone killed the Pope, and they didn’t have some local scum covering the hit on the scene—well, it was their ass on the line.
“You know what she said at three in the morning? She’s naked next to me in bed. She’s about to pass out. We had gone through a bottle of gin. But she has to tell me something. Man, she’s deep into private confessions. She says, ‘Snow, in Hong Kong, we thought of you as our foreign guide. Our man on the scene. I couldn’t tell you, though. You had too much fucking pride. You would’ve told us to kiss our ass. We needed a foreign guide on the scene.’
“I roll over on my side and raise up on my elbow, and I say, ‘Susan, lay off the girls for calling themselves foreign guides. You can call me a whore. ‘
“And. . . ? She’s puking out her guts. I pulled a banana out of the fruit bowl and sat in bed beside her eating it. I was thinking. ‘This is my life. It serves no useful purpose.’”
Snow’s face sagged; he seemed embarrassed with what to do with his hands. He clowned with a girl in a yellow T-shirt—her name embroidered in Thai at the back of the neck by a worried mother; she leaned forward, talking to a friend, her hips arched against the table edge. She had been disappointed he arrived without the Vogue magazine. Snow poked her hip with his forefinger. “Now that serves a useful purpose,” he said.
Lawrence recognized an aspect of himself in Snow’s sorrow. He understood the full force of that remote private vision that had struck hard, without warning, a force that knocked Snow down from behind. His imagined his own face must have had the same startled expression, one that never quite emptied from the face of the person whose legs had been cut out with a few sharp words, lines jotted on a piece of paper. It was his own face that he saw; the face he noticed one morning shaving, the morning after he had found Sarah’s diaries inside her university office filing cabinet.
* * *
“SARAH collected your short stories,” said Lawrence. His tone was serious, confiding, as if the information had been classified.
A long silence followed. Lawrence waited for Tuttle to say something. But he was lost in his preoccupations with Colonel Chao and Khun Kob.
“Why did you stop? ” asked Lawrence, drumming his fingers to the music from the jukebox. A middle-aged woman with heavy makeup, chewing gum, caught Lawrence’s eye, smiled, snapping her fingers to the music. He quickly looked away. “You stopped writing. Why Bobby? ”
Tuttle looked over at him. “I had an epiphany in a massage parlor.”
Across the booth, Snow was babbling. “Drugstore touts will hit the strip next. Grab your arm and show you a card with fifty kinds of pills. Pills to make you fly. Pills to make you high. Pills to trim your sails. Pills to make you hard. Pills to make you laugh. I can hear them calling out these slogans at five in the morning outside of Foodland.”
“In a massage parlor? ” repeated Lawrence, with a forced laugh. The forces of logic suggested this couldn’t be true. He tried to imagine a young Thai woman kneading Tuttle’s muscular shoulders; Tuttle’s serene face sheathed in the warm light slanting from a small lamp.
“I was in the room with the girl. I can’t remember her name or badge number,” Tuttle said, watching Snow come apart at the seams. His Hawaiian shirt was open at the neck, and a ridge of sweat pooled and dripped from the hollow of his throat; Snow had smoked too much in the alley, something he always did when he was trying to put something out of his mind.
“She had a trolley cart beside the bed,” Tuttle resumed, worrying about Snow. “Q-tips, hot towels, cold towels, nail clippers, and scissors all laid out like an operating room procedure was about to take place.
“She kept a box of condoms in a small hilltribe silver box. The box had been cast from melted-down nineteenth century French franc coins. There were dragons and trees and people and mountains on the sides and top. She undressed, hung up her white uniform on a door hook, and began peeling back the white foil, exposing the pink condom. She put the lid back on the box. She had me wrapped with that expert, one flick of the wrist motion; she was smooth. For her, it was like sticking the key in the ignition and switching on the engine. After we finished, she climbed off—no, it wasn’t a climb, it was like the show-pleasing flip of a gymnast dismounting the parallel bars. Sweat clung bubbling, smeared from her neck to her pubic hairs. She floated over to her trolley, towelling herself. Underneath the trolley was a magazine rack. She leaned over, still naked, pulled off the first magazine, opened it, tore out a page, and leaned over the bed.
“The formula is, she does the wrap but once it’s been used, she won’t touch it. Once the rubber has been contaminated so the duty is on the guy to dispose of it quickly. Put it out of sight. Farang fill container, farang empty container. She tells me in Thai to take it off and shoves the magazine page in my face. She doesn’t want to know what’s happening below my chin.
“I reached down and slipped off the rubber. I examine the pinkish nose cone of this thing. It looks like a parachute that didn’t open. I shift over onto my right side, and she spreads a fresh towel around my neck. She has the glossy magazine page two inches from my face. She has this bored, distracted look of a checkout counter girl when you spend too much time finding your money. I glance at the page. I did a doubletake. She is holding the first page of ‘The Boy Who Loved Marilyn Monroe’—one of my short stories. There is my name in fourteen-point type. Story by Robert Tuttle. I recognized the artwork; the photo insert of Monroe with the drawing of a farang kid suspended midair between the diving board into a swimming pool. She’s waiting for me to get on with it.
“But I am looking at the story which she’s holding like Christmas wrapping paper, wanting me to deliver the gift, the used rubber. I start to laugh. She ripped the Durex II out of my hand and made a classy one handed dunk shot smack into the center of the page hitting the tip of the diving board and Marilyn Monroe’s chin. Then she stepped back from the bed; she had mistaken my laugh as aimed at her; the laugh had cost her a great deal of face, and she wadded up the page. She flexed the muscles in her jaw, grinding her teeth and making a dreadful face. She pulled back her arm and threw the balled-up page with the rubber wrapped inside straight at me; a great shot, straight through the hoop; she caught me square on my right eye. Then she turned, walked stark naked out of the room, carrying her dress, and slammed the door. She had felt betrayed, laughed at, put down, left to feel like a fool, however you want to phrase it.
“As far as I knew, no story of mine on the printed page had ever had such an impact. I lay alone in that small room, and carefully unwrapped the page; a wet stain had spread across my name and the story title. So much for craft, the petty actions of others, throwing people together on the page, inventing ways for them to scramble, to deceive, lie, overthrow one another. To what point or end or reason? What happened to ‘The Boy Who Loved Marilyn Monroe’ at the end of the day? In the words of Snow, to w
hat purpose had I devoted so much concentrated energy? If the writing had surpassed John Updike, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, so what? In the end, it was a whorehouse wrapper.
“I had knocked out the middleman; I had become my own ultimate consumer. And my consumption had absolutely nothing to do with the story; good, bad, sad, funny, entertaining, it didn’t matter in the end. All that mattered was the paper; a disposable wrapper to package whorehouse debris. I had found myself at the end of the chain, where an honest, practical, basic use of fiction had been shoved in my face. What was the point of writing to be read? There were millions of pages that would do as a receptacle for a used Durex. Why not camp at that end of the chain? Rather than filling the page with words, drop a used condom from the height of about a foot; stare down at the pattern of your own sperm on the page. There was the clue that had eluded me. Form and substance had almost nothing to do with what I had written on the page.
“A couple hundred thousand of my sperm were swimming around in the condom and spilling over, reversing position, blocking, dying; exerting themselves for specific purpose—to become, no, to create the shape of a personal story for which anyone knew at a glance was totally futile; but that wouldn’t stop them from struggling to sustain life for one more second smack in the middle of the Marilyn Monroe story. There was no level of the story—all about holding a magnifying glass to the word rescue—that could match the level of drama happening on that page. I had backed myself into a corner. I felt bad. I tried to write a couple more stories but everything I put down seemed like foreground, unimportant.
A Killing Smile Page 27