“Why would I know anything about it?”
“How long have you been with . . . um, Buddy?”
She sits back, increasing the distance between them. “With him? I’m not with him. I make myself available to him from time to time, but I’m not with him. I don’t share anything with him except my time, when he needs it.”
“Which is on a regular basis, according to—”
“He’s a creature of habit.”
“Does he talk to you?”
She gives him a slow, patient look that probably doesn’t last as long as it feels like it does. “That’s all he does, talk.”
“Really. Probably because your English is so—”
“No,” she says. “Time is wasting. Ask me questions.”
“So your relationship is different from the other—”
“From anyone, but especially that bunch of old slags, the aunties. My appeal is on a different plane.” She uses her index finger to rub very lightly at the tip of her nose, as though to defeat a slight itch. “Buddy is a bad boy,” she says, with no change of tone. “He’s always been a bad boy. He’s selfish and cheap and small-hearted, and he’s uncontrollable where women are concerned. Look, he’s abandoned a wife, a daughter, and a son, even if Mama eventually sent the son back by return mail.”
“So you’re what? A confessor?”
“No, not in the sense you probably mean. Why do you think I can help?”
“There aren’t that many people who know him. ‘Small-hearted’ is exactly the way I’d describe him. The night my wife met him, he more or less abused the woman he was with—”
“That would be Pancake. She’s the one he takes out in public. She’s so homely that people see him with her and think, ‘Well, at least he’s not looking for beauty. He must be deep.’ Your wife is Thai?”
Rafferty suddenly finds himself very unwilling to talk about Rose with this woman, but there’s no way to avoid answering the question. “She is.”
“Beautiful?”
“I think so.”
She gives him a lopsided smile. “Pretty little doll?”
“Not even close.”
Aspirin waggles her head side to side, the equivalent of a shrug. “And you’re satisfied with only one?”
“I am,” he says, his face feeling both stiff and hot. “Completely satisfied.”
“Well, Buddy isn’t. Buddy’s a man who’s dying of thirst in a . . . in a water-bottling plant and who is completely convinced that the water tastes different in every single bottle that rolls off the line. So he’s constantly discarding bottles, and like most men who have a lot of women, he finds that his tastes have grown more . . . well, specialized. Harder to satisfy. So he discards even more bottles. And because he also thinks he’s more interesting than he is, he believes that he’s somehow hurt all those tossed bottles.”
“Bangkok has a lot of guys like that.”
“But Buddy’s different from most of them, because somewhere in him his inflated sense of how interesting he is is rubbing up against his conscience. Like a short circuit. He feels guilty, cheating all those women of the splendor that is Buddy. And the world doesn’t punish him. That’s where I come in.”
“How?”
“Well, on the one hand, you have someone who feels guilty and undeserving, and on the other hand, you have the world that keeps giving him things. I adjust the balance.” She crosses her legs and glances down at the big buttons.
“What does that mean?”
“I give him the comfort of retribution.”
Rafferty says, “Aaaahhhh.”
“So it might have been a good idea to have someone come to see me a week ago. A session with Buddy begins with me taking his wallet and everything in his pockets, including all his money. His wallet is one of the ones with a little notepad in it. He knows I’ll read it. That’s where my questions come from. In other words, I know things about him that nobody knows.”
“Has he said anything about—”
She holds up a hand. “How much?”
It’s Rafferty’s turn to give her a long look. She doesn’t faint or clutch at her heart. She doesn’t even blink. He says, “How much do you want?”
“A thousand US.”
He gets up. “Bye, then.”
“I thought you wanted to—”
“He’s not exactly a friend, and it’s not like I have an expense account.”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Haven’t got that much with me.”
She smiles up at him. “But you’re good for it. If you tell me you’ll pay me, you’ll pay me. I can spot honesty a mile away.”
“I’ll pay you if it’s worth it.”
“Sit.”
“Not on that thing,” Rafferty says, with a thumb toward the chair.
“Buddy likes it,” she says.
“That’s Buddy’s problem,” he says, thinking, Poor Edward.
“How much do you have on you?”
“Seven, eight thousand baht.”
“Let’s start with five thousand. That’s about a hundred fifty US. You’ll owe the rest.”
“Fine.” He pulls the money from his pocket and counts out five thousand. Then he folds it once, slips it into the pocket of his T-shirt, and says, “I’m listening.”
She moves down to the far end of the couch and pats the cushion she’s vacated. “Please,” she says, and he sits.
For the next twenty minutes, clearly enjoying herself, she tells him things he wishes he weren’t hearing.
23
A Real Girl
Lutanh hates scrambled eggs, but she’s eating them for two reasons. First, Edwudd made them for her, and second, he said it was what his mother always made him when he didn’t feel good.
She’d been thinking, That’s so sweet, when he said, “She couldn’t cook either.”
“Taste good,” Lutanh says, even though it doesn’t; the only thing she likes about scrambled eggs is salt, and he forgot it. She doesn’t want to insult him by pouring some on, and anyway, it hurts to chew. Something’s not quite right with her jaw, and her throat feels too narrow—bruised inside, as though the Meat Man had squeezed it smaller. She doesn’t remember him doing it, but he must have, because there’s a little flare of pain, like a striking match, quickly blown out, every time she swallows. On the table in front of her, embarrassingly ugly, is the wet, bloodstained ice pack she’s been holding to her nose. Edwudd has seen her nose—he even looked up it at one point to see what was blocking her left nostril, which turned out to be dried blood. So there’s not much about her nose he doesn’t know, but the ice pack, with its pink, diluted patterns of blood, still makes her feel ashamed. She’d throw it away, but the wastebasket in this enormous kitchen seems to be hidden. Edwudd sits opposite her, not even pretending he’s not looking at her. They’re at the table in the middle of the kitchen, the table he called “the island.” She’d never known kitchens had islands, but if he says this kitchen has an island . . . well, this kitchen has an island. She’d betrayed her surprise involuntarily by saying, “Island?” but rescued the situation by pretending she didn’t know the word in English. So at least he doesn’t think she’s too poor and too ignorant to know that kitchens have islands.
He’s left the cooking mess on the stove, piled on top of other dirty pots and pans, like someone who’s never had to clean up after himself, and now he’s resting his chin on his hand, watching her eat. This means that she has to disguise the two moments of pain, the chew and the swallow, that punctuate every mouthful. There’s been a silence for a minute or two that has only served to emphasize to Lutanh how noisily she swallows, and she’s experimenting with tiny, less painful chews with the objective of turning the food into a paste when he says, “How long have you known Miaow?”
Miaow had left about forty minu
tes earlier, after trying once again to phone her mother. She’d seemed upset that the call hadn’t gone through. It’s dark now on the other side of the kitchen windows, but even with the evening rush, Lutanh thinks, Miaow is probably home. Lutanh had recognized that something changed in the room when Miaow left, and instead of what she might have expected—the room feeling larger with one fewer person in it—it feels smaller; and although she and Edwudd are no closer to each other now than they’d been before, he seems closer. She thinks she can almost feel his body heat, thinks she could close her eyes and know where in the room he is. Even with her lids shut tight, he’d be a warm orange glow.
For a moment she’s afraid the feeling shows in her face, so she makes a grab at his question, whatever it was—and there it is, patiently waiting for her, complete with answer: “I meet her same day I meet you, when you do first play. But I meet you at night, she come daytime.” She parks the scrambled egg in her cheek to clear her speech and delay the pain of the swallow and says, “She come my house. Show me how to act. How to be other girl.”
“Act?” he says. “Oh, right, you go to Miaow’s acting class. You were going to do something yesterday, right? You had wings, I think.”
“Peetapan,” she says, feeling a twinge for her lost, broken wings. She waves it away. “My teacher famous too much.”
“How was it? Peter Pan, I mean. Did it—” He scratches his head, obviously figuring out how to formulate the question. “Did it go well?”
“Go okay,” she says. “Two girl wery cry.” She waits, but all he does is duck his head in acknowledgment. “I cry when Miaow dead.”
He says, “Excuse me?”
“That night I meet you,” she says. “In play. In your school. You boy in play, yes? And Miaow is girl, and she die, she come back, she look around. Say goodbye, goodbye everything. I cry. Have—” She brushes her cheeks, very lightly, with her fingertips. “Makeup. For look white.” She tracks tears down her cheeks. “Make all foofoo, have to do again.”
“I remember when I met you.”
“You do?” She can feel her eyes widen. “Yesterday you say—”
“I didn’t recognize you yesterday,” he says. “And all I was thinking about was my . . .”
“No problem. You thinking your papa.” She swallows the mouthful and sticks her fork back into the eggs because he’s watching. “So you now, you acting more?”
“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know.”
She touches the bridge of her nose to see whether the swelling has gone down after the ice, but it feels as wide as a highway. “For you, acting good. You look same-same movie star,” she says, running it into a single word, “moviestah.”
“Me?”
“When I look you, I think moviestah.” She fusses with the eggs, her head down because she’s afraid to see his expression. “You . . . you first person I see.”
“First person you—what do you mean?”
She taps the plastic case with her contact lenses in it. “After I buy eye,” she says. “I look around, you first person I see.”
He says, “Oh.”
“I think you wery pretty. Good luck for me. Happy I not see ugly person first, have bad luck.” She’s just rattling, so she breaks off and lets silence claim the room.
He’s looking at her eggs, too. After a moment he says, “Want another aspirin?”
“No. Have enough. Make me . . .” She rubs her belly.
“Yeah, makes mine hurt, too, but it helps with the swelling.”
She says, “You have beer?”
“He wasn’t—I mean, he isn’t—much of a father,” Edwudd says. “But he’s the only one I’ve got. And I don’t want to go home.”
“Home.”
They’re in the long, dim living room, lit only by the big-screen television, on which the female villain of a Thai soap opera is plotting, probably for the fiftieth time, a bad end for the heroine. The sound is off, and neither Edwudd nor Lutanh is watching it. Lutanh is on her back on the thickly carpeted floor with her legs up and her calves resting on a big, soft footstool, with Miaow’s denim skirt tucked demurely between her knees. She’s feeling the pain fade, courtesy of the aspirin. Two-thirds of a bottle of beer has eased even more pain, and she’d like another. Edwudd is halfway across the room, also lying on his back, on one of the two couches. They’re talking in a desultory fashion, but what they’re looking at is the ceiling.
“America,” he says. “Where my mother is.”
“Oh.” She digests this for a few seconds. America is just a movie to her, a movie where people shoot each other a lot. “You like Thailand?”
“I didn’t think I would,” he says, “but I love it.”
“Me, too,” she says. She lifts her head enough to bring the bottle to her lips without spilling on herself. The bottle feels light. She swallows and says, “Love too much.”
He shifts his back on the couch, as though scratching it on the upholstery. “Well, sure, you’re Thai.”
“No Thai,” she says, “me Lao.”
He rolls onto his right side to look at her, and she fights the impulse to use her free hand to hide her swollen face. While they’ve been staring at the ceiling, with the television to distract them once in a while, she’s forgotten what she looks like. “Really?” he says. “Where in Laos?”
She wants to yank her hair out. If it weren’t for the beer, she’d never have told him. “Small, little, small.”
“How small?”
“Not have name.” She laughs. “Have pig and people. And dog.”
“But your family—”
“Not have movie, not have big store, not have—” She almost says, Bar, but deflects it and says, “Movie.”
“You already said movie.”
“Not have two movie,” she says. “Not have many, many movie.”
“When did you come to Bangkok?”
“Oh,” she says. She should have seen this coming the moment she said she was Lao, but it’s too late now. “Three, four year,” she improvises. “When I fourteen.”
“So now you’re—”
“I nineteen,” she lies, adding a year. “Lao age. America age eighteen.”
“I’m almost the same age.”
She lets that pass and then says, “We get more beer?”
“No, I’ve still got some.” He holds up the bottle and sights through it at her as though to check the level but doesn’t drink. “Why did you come?”
“School better here,” she says promptly. It’s what she tells the customers. They like to think of her as being in school.
“Wasn’t it hard, getting used to a new system?”
“No problem,” she says. “I smart.”
“What grade?”
No one has ever asked her this before; the image of her in a school uniform has always been potent enough to reduce her customers to silence. “Eight?” she says. She hears the question mark and overwrites it with a confident, “Eight.” She hoists her bottle and sends him a mental message to drink, but it doesn’t seem to get through. “Why you not like Papa?”
“All he wants is women.”
“Many man same-same.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t even like women. All he wants is . . . you know.”
“Him old man,” she says, making it up as she goes. “Some old lady, they want baby, baby, baby. Sometime have many man, look for baby. So some man—”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with babies,” Edwudd says. At last he takes a swallow of his beer, and she follows suit, emptying hers. “He hates babies.”
“Cannot hate baby,” she says. “Everybody like—”
“He says the best way to become invisible, if you’re a man, is to be carrying a baby. Women don’t even see you. Carry a baby, push a baby carriage, he says they look through you like you’r
e a window.” He drinks again and then sticks his index finger into the neck of the bottle and dangles it over the edge of the couch. “But maybe he’s wrong. He was never as handsome as he hoped he’d be, and I think he hates women because all they ever wanted was his money.”
She doesn’t want to get into men paying for companionship, so she blows into the mouth of her bottle, making a low, hollow flute sound. He glances over at her and blows into his, which produces a sound high enough, she estimates, to make it one-quarter full. She blows into hers again, and the two of them hold a kind of beery harmony until he runs out of breath.
“You’re easy to be with,” he says.
“I,” she says, and has nothing to add; the comment has taken her off balance. So she gestures with her beer bottle at the big-screen. “You look Thai teewee?”
A glance at the screen and a shrug. “Not much.”
“Why? Girl wery pretty, some man wery handsome. Have nice cloe.”
He looks over at her, “Cloe?”
“Shirt,” she says, sitting up a little and tugging at Miaow’s dress. “Pant. Cloe, okay?” She settles back in. “If I have teewee this big, I look-look-look.”
“I watch DVDs sometimes.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Deeweedee? Have Iron Man? Have Mulan? Someday I want act Mulan. Have Chucky?”
He says, “Chucky?”
“You know,” she says, holding her hand, palm down, a couple of feet above the carpet to indicate Chucky’s height. “Him—him little, same-same doll. But have big knife, make foom-foom-foom,” she says, miming stabbing herself in the stomach. “I wery like Chucky. Make me brrrrrrrr.” She illustrates the word by rubbing goosebumps on her arms.
“You like being scared?” Edward says. “Why?”
“Because,” she says, “when movie finish, everything okay. Not same, ummm . . .” She makes a big circle with her hand, indicating the real world. “You know?” He doesn’t reply, and suddenly her stomach is in knots. “I not talking about you papa,” she says. “Him . . . him okay. I know, him okay. So you—” She ransacks her mind for a new subject.“You not like teewee, look deeweedee.”
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