Saint Jack

by Paul Theroux

  Leigh was eager to please Hing—that was plain. He had not found out it was no use. And who was he, this accountant from Hong Kong? A clerkly fugitive, laying low after an incautious embezzlement in London? Sacked by a British bank for interfering with a woman in Fixed Deposits, or for incompetence; and like many ang mohs in the East, seeking cover in a Chinese shop, consoling himself with clubby fantasies and the fact that he was too far away to be of concern, an alien at a great distance, the bird of passage who mentioned from time to time when things got rough that there was always Australia? He had lied about his clubs—the first time anyone had tried that on me—but so had I, three times over. It could not be held against him.

  The feeling I had for him was an inward clutching at self-pity. There was so much I could have told him if only he had been friendly and stopped calling me Flowers. Go away and save yourself, I wanted to say; I could have watched him do that and watching him given myself hope. I had my girls; I knew the limits of employment; I had faith in extraordinary kinds of rescue, miraculous recoveries; I knew a thing or two about love. What was his alternative? I decided to watch him closely, this version of myself; his nervy question still rankled, and pity prevented me from asking him the same. He was not aware of how much I knew.

  Seeing me engrossed, Gopi left, shoulders heaving. His arms did not swing or give him motion. They dangled uselessly as he pedaled. He was a small man, and sometimes I believed that without him I would have floundered.

  I dialed another hotel for Gunstone and got another refusal. That was the last of his Victoria Street favorites. It was nearly lunchtime, so I called the Belvedere. I was at the airport, I told the receptionist, and did they have an air-conditioned double room for one night?

  “All our rooms—we got eight hundred plus—they are all air-conditioned,” she said.

  “That’s very nice,” I said, and made the reservation. “If Hing asks,” I told Gopi, leaving him holding the can as usual—but who except the meekest man would hold it?—“tell him I’m down with the flu.”

  Since it was going to be lunch at the Tanglin, then off to the Belvedere, I thought I’d better change my duds.

  “Why the black suit?” Gunstone asked.

  “My others are at the cleaners,” I said, still rolling “I’ve just come from a funeral” around on my tongue. He would have asked who died, or perhaps have been spooked by the announcement. I had the fluent liar’s sense of proportion and foresight. Gunstone was calmed.

  Lunch was the Friday special, my favorite, seafood buffet. I followed Gunstone, taking the same things he did, in the same amounts, and I soon realized that I was heaping my plate with oysters and prawns, which I liked less than the crab and lobster Gunstone took in two small helpings. I put some oysters back and got a frown from the Malay chef.

  At the table I said, “I hope I haven’t boobed, Mr. Gunstone, but I’ve fixed you up at the Belvedere this afternoon.”

  He stabbed a prawn and peeled off the shell and dunked the naked finger of pink meat into a saucer of chili paste. “Don’t believe we’ve ever been to the Belvedere before, have we, Jack?”

  “The other places were full,” I said.

  “Quite all right,” he said. “But I ate at the Belvedere last week. It wasn’t much good, you know.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Gunstone,” I said. “That food is perfectly hideous.”

  “Exactly,” said Gunstone. “How’s your salmon?”

  I had not started to eat. I took a forkful, smeared it in mayonnaise, and ate it. “Delicious,” I said.

  “Mine’s awful,” he said, and he pushed his salmon to the side of his plate.

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, “it does taste rather—”

  “Desiccated,” said Gunstone.

  “Exactly,” I said. I pushed my salmon over to the side and covered it with a lettuce leaf. I was sorry; I liked salmon the way it tasted out of a can.

  “Lobster’s pretty dreadful, too,” said Gunstone a moment later.

  I was just emptying a large claw. It was excellent, and I ate the whole claw before saying, “Right again, Mr. Gunstone. Tastes like they fished it out of the Muar River.”

  “We’ll shunt that over, shall we?” said Gunstone. He moved a lobster tail next to the discarded salmon.

  I did the same, then as quickly as I could ate all my crab salad before he could say it was bad. I gnawed a hard roll and started on the oysters.

  “The prawns are a success,” he said.

  “The oysters are—” I didn’t want to finish the sentence, but Gunstone was no help “—sort of limp.”

  “They’re cockles, actually,” said Gunstone. “And they’re a damned insult. Steward!” A Malay waiter came over. “Take this away.”

  Demanding that food be sent back to the kitchen is a special skill. It is done with panache by people who use that word. I admired people who did it, but could not imitate them.

  “Yours, Tuan?” asked the waiter.

  “Yes, take it away,” I said sadly.

  “Want more, Tuan?” the waiter asked Gunstone.

  “If I wanted more would I be asking you to remove that plate?” Gunstone said.

  The waiter slid my lunch away. I buttered a hard roll and ate it, making crumbs shower down the front of my suit.

  “That steward,” said Gunstone, shaking his head. “The most intelligent thing I ever heard him say was, ‘If you move your lump of ice cream a bit to the right, Tuan, you will find a strawberry.’ God help us.”

  I laughed and brushed my jacket. “Still,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind joining this club.”

  “You don’t want to join this club,” said Gunstone.

  “I do,” I said, and saw myself lying in the sun, by the pool, and one of those tanned long-legged women whispering urgently, “Jack, where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s all set.”

  “Why, whatever for?”

  “A place to go, I suppose,” I said. The Bandung’s only publicity was the matchboxes Wallace Thumboo had printed with the slogan, There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung!

  Gunstone chuckled. “If they can pronounce your name you can join.”

  “Flowers is pretty easy.”

  “I should say so!”

  But Fiori isn’t, I thought. And Fiori was my name, Flowers an approximation and a mask.

  “Now,” said Gunstone, looking at his watch, “how about dessert?”

  Gunstone’s joke: it was time to fetch Djamila.

  The old-timers, I found, tended to prefer Malays, while the newcomers went for the Chinese, and the Malays preferred each other. The Chinese clients, of whom I had several, liked the big-boned Australian girls; Germans were fond of Tamils, and the English fellers liked anything young, but preferred their girls boyish and their women mannish. British sailors from H.M.S. Terror enjoyed fighting each other in the presence of transvestites. Americans liked clean sporty ones, to whom they would give nicknames, like “Skeezix” and “Pussycat” (the English made an effort to learn the girl’s real name), and would spend a whole afternoon trying to teach one of my girls how to swim in a hotel pool, although it was costing them fifteen dollars an hour to do it. Americans also went in for a lot of hugging in the taxi, smooching and kidding around, and sort of stumbling down the sidewalk, gripping the girl hard and saying, “Aw, honey, whoddle ah do?” Later they wrote them letters, and the girls pestered me to help them reply.

  Djamila—“Jampot,” an American feller used to call her, and it suited her—was very reliable and easy to contact. She was waiting by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank with my trusty suitcase as we pulled up in the taxi. I hopped out and opened the door for her, then got into the front seat and put the suitcase between my knees. Djamila climbed in with Gunstone and sat smiling, rocking her handbag in her lap.

  Smiling is something girls with buck teeth seldom do with any pleasure; Djamila showed hers happily, charming things, very white in her broad mou
th. She had small ears, a narrow moonlit face, large darting eyes, and heavy eyebrows. A slight girl, even skinny, but having said that one would have to add that her breasts were large and full, her bum high and handsome as a pumpkin. Her breasts were her virtue, the virtue of most of my Malay girls; unlike the Chinese bulbs that disappeared in a frock fold, these were a pair of substantial jugs, something extra that moved and made a rolling wobble of her walk. That was the measure of acceptable size, that bobbing, one a second later than the other, each responding to the step of Djamila’s small feet. Her bottom moved on the same prompting, but in a different rhythm, a wonderful agitation in the willowy body, a glorious heaving to and fro, the breasts nodding above the black lace of the tight-waisted blouse, the packed-in bum lifting, one buttock pumping against the other, creeping around her sarong as she shuffled, showing her big teeth.

  “Jack, you looking very smart,” said Djamila. “New suit and what not.”

  “I put it on for you, sweetheart,” I said. “This here’s Mr. Gunstone, an old pal of mine.”

  Djamila shook his hand and said, “Jack got nice friends.”

  “Where’s that little car of yours, Jack?” Gunstone asked.

  “It packed up,” I said. “Being fixed.”

  “What’s the trouble this time?”

  “Suspension, I think. Front end sort of shimmies, like Djamila but not as pretty.”

  “It’s always the way with those little French cars. Problems. It’s the workmanship.”

  The taxi pulled up in front of the Belvedere. The doorman in a top hat and tails snatched the door open and let Gunstone out. I handed over the suitcase; it was a good solid Antler, a sober pebbly gray, filled with copies of the Straits Times and an R.A.F. first-aid kit, a useful item—once we had to use the tourniquet on a Russian seaman, and the little plasters were always handy for scratches.

  “You should get yourself a Morris,” said Gunstone at the reception desk.

  I could not answer right away because I was signing my name on the register and the clerk was welcoming me with a copy of What’s On in Singapore. I was not worried about being asked about Gunstone and Djamila; anything is possible in a big expensive hotel, and the accommodating manager will always smile and say he remembers you. In the elevator I said, “Yes, your Morris is a good buy.”

  “I like Chevy,” said Djamila.

  The elevator boy and the bellhop stared at her. My girls looked fine, very pretty in bars and on the street, but in well-lighted hotels they looked different, not out of place, but prominent and identifiable.

  “I hate these American cars,” said Gunstone.

  “So do I,” I said. “Waste of money.”

  “Nice and big,” said Djamila. She gave a low throaty laugh. Most of my girls had bad throats: it was the line of work, all those germs.

  “Here you are, sah. Seven-o-five,” said the bellhop. He followed us in and swung the suitcase over to a low table; I could hear the newspapers shift inside. He started his spiel about the lights and if there’s anything you want, but I interrupted him, pressing fifty cents into his hand, and he took off.

  “Your lights,” I said, discovering the switch and turning them all on. I went around the room naming appliances and opening doors, as the bellhop would have done if I had given him a chance. “Your TV, your washroom, window blinds, radio—” switching that on I got a melody from Doctor Zhivago. “I think everything is in order.”

  “You couldn’t do better than a Morris,” said Gunstone. He came over to me and said, “What’s she like?” in a whisper.

  “Very rewarding,” I said. “Very rewarding indeed.”

  Djamila was sitting on the edge of the large double bed, removing her silver bracelets. She did it with dainty grace, admiring her arm and showing herself her fingernails as she pulled each bracelet past them.

  Gunstone, on a stuffed chair, sighed and twisted off one of his shoes. He had pulled off a sock and was intently poking the limp thing into the empty shoe, pushing at the balled-up sock with his trembling finger, when I said: “I’ll leave you two to get on with it. Bye for now.”

  The elevator boy, seeing the feller he had just deposited on that floor, looked away from me, at the button he was punching, and I could tell from the movement of his ears and a peculiar tightening of a section of scalp on the back of his head that he had summed up the situation and was grinning foolishly. I felt like socking him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tony-lah,” he said. A person sobers up when he has to tell a stranger his name.

  “Here you are, Tony.” I handed him a dollar. “Don’t blab,” I said. “Nobody likes a blabber.”

  That dollar would have come in handy, and I could have saved it if I had gone down the fire stairs, which was what I usually did. But seven flights of dusty-smelling unpainted cement was more than a man my age should tolerate. A little arithmetic satisfied me that I could afford one drink; in the Belvedere lounge-bar the hors d’oeuvres were free.

  Avoiding the lobby, I nipped into the lounge, found a cool leather armchair, and sat very happily for a few minutes reading What’s On and looking up every so often to admire the decor. Yardley and the rest did not think much of the new Singapore hotels—too shiny and tacky, they said, no character at all. Character was weevils in your food, metal folding chairs, and a grouchy barman who insulted you as he overcharged you; it was a monsoon drain that hadn’t been cleared for months and a toilet—like the one in the Bandung—located in the middle of the kitchen. Someday, I thought, I’m going to reserve a room at the Belvedere and burrow in the blankets of a wide bed—the air conditioner on full—and sleep for a week. The ground floor of the Belvedere was Italian marble and there was a chandelier hanging in the lobby that must have taken years to make. I was enjoying myself in the solid comfort, sipping my gin, looking at a seashell mural on the lounge wall, periwinkles spilling out of conches, gilded sea urchins and fingers of coral; but I became anxious.

  It was not my habitual worry about Gunstone’s engine failing. It was the annoying suspicion that the seven or eight tourists there in the lounge were staring in my direction. They had seen me come in with Gunstone and Djamila and like Tony they had guessed what I was up to. The ones who weren’t laughing at me despised me. If I had been younger they would have said, “Ah, what a sharp lad, a real operator—you’ve got to hand it to him”; but a middle-aged man doing the same thing was a dull dirty procurer. I tried to look unruffled, crossing my legs and flicking through the little pamphlet. Recrossing my legs I felt an uncommon breeze against my ankles: I wasn’t wearing any socks.

  How could I be so stupid? There I was in the lounge of an expensive hotel, wearing my black Ah Chum worsted, a dark tie and white shirt and shoes my amah had buffed to a high gloss—and sockless! That was how they knew my trade, by my nude ankles. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t without calling attention to myself. So I sat in the chair in a way which made it possible for me to push at the knees of my pants and lower my cuffs over my ankles. I tried to convince myself that these staring tourists didn’t matter—they’d all be on the morning flight to Bangkok.

  I lifted my drink and caught a lady’s eye. She looked away. Returning to my reading, I sensed her eyes drift over to me again. You never knew with these American ladies; they made faces at each other in public, sometimes hilarious ones, a sisterly foolishness. The other people began staring. They were making me miserable, ruining the only drink I could afford. The embarrassment was Leigh’s doing; the stranger had called my vocation “poncing.”

  “Telephone call for Bishop Bradley . . . Bishop Bradley . . .” The slow demanding announcement came over the loud-speaker in the lounge, a cloth-faced box on the wall above a slender palm in a copper pot. No one got up. Two ladies looked at the loud-speaker.

  It stopped, the voice and the hum behind it; there was and expectant pause in the lounge, everyone holding his breath, knowing the announcement would start again in a moment, which it did,
monotonously.

  “Bishop Bradley . . . Telephone call for Bishop Bradley . . .”

  Now no one was looking at the loud-speaker.

  I had fastened all the buttons on my black suit jacket. I stood up and turned an impatient face to the repeated command coming from the cloth-faced box. I swigged the last of my gin and with the eyes of those people upon me, strode out in my clerical-looking garb in the direction of the information desk. I knew I had made them sorry for staring at my sockless feet, for judging my action at the desk, and There goes the bishop, they were saying.

  Outside I walked up and down Orchard Road until Gunstone and Djamila appeared, all the while blaming Leigh for this new behavior of mine, embarrassment and fumbling shame making me act strangely. His shadow obscured my way: I wanted him to go.

  5

  IT WAS EARLY lighted evening, that pleasant glareless time of day just before sunset; the moon showed in a blue sky—a pale gold sickle on its back—and it was possible to stroll through the mild air without hunching over and squinting away from the sun. It was the only hour when the foliage was not tinged with hues of sickly yellow; trees were denser, green, and cool. All the two-story Chinese houses set in courtyards along Cuppage Road had their doors and green shutters open for the breeze, and there was a sense of slowed activity, almost of languor, that the sight at dusk of men in pajamas—the uniform of the peaceloving—produces in me.