“Those were my wings,” Lutanh says in Thai. “They were already broken when I got here, but he made them worse.” She looks at Clemente. “Make him move. I want my wings.”
Clemente lifts her chin and scoots the man farther away with both hands, and the man steps back. There’s a kind of sullen satisfaction in his face, the expression of someone who has always expected the worst and has finally been proved right.
“More,” Clemente says. “Back to the wall.”
He backs up, sliding his bare feet on the carpet. As Lutanh crosses in front of him, his eyes follow her with no interest at all.
She picks up the backpack and stands there, looking down at it. Tugging at the end of a piece of wood, she pulls out a wreckage of wood and plastic and regards it. Her chin suddenly wrinkles, and Rafferty holds out his arms, and she comes to him, and he holds her.
She’s shivering. He says, “You can still fly, Lutanh.”
“Okay, she’s got it,” the man says. “Now what? Two cops and whoever you are,” he says, nodding at Rafferty, “that’s overkill, don’t you think? For a fucking ladyboy. She robbed me and stabbed me and cut my face, and now you’ve helped her get her shit back, so what now? Capital punishment?”
“Where’s your wallet?” Clemente says.
“Of course,” the man says. “All Thai cops, all the same. In my pants. Over there.” He indicates the couch behind the coffee table with the line of partially eaten meals on it.
Anand goes over and gets it. He opens it and flips through the currency. “About fifteen thousand baht.”
“Take twelve. Give it to Lutanh.”
When Anand has handed the bills to Lutanh, Clemente holds up the photocopy of the man’s passport. “You asked what now. This is what now. You have until six this morning to be on a plane out of Suvarnabhumi to somewhere, I don’t care where. The money you have left will cover your cab fare and give you a little extra.”
“Small change. Fucking crooks.” He squints at the paper in Clemente’s hand. “What is that?”
“Come take a look. A plane leaves Thailand about every twenty minutes. Be on one of them. This is going to Thai immigration. You’re never coming back.”
The man stops about three feet away. “That’s my passport. You can’t do that.”
Clemente says, “You’re not taking me seriously. Poke, is there an English expression people would use to announce that a threat is serious? That it has something behind it?”
Rafferty says, “I’ve always been partial to ‘putting things on a firmer footing.’”
“‘Footing’? Is that a word?”
“It is.”
“Fine,” she says. She takes two steps toward the man and says, “Putting things on a firmer footy—”
Rafferty says, “Footing.”
“Sorry, footing. Putting things on a firmer footing.” She transfers the copy of the passport from her right hand to her left, shifts her weight slightly, brings up the right, fist tightly clenched, and delivers a very short, very fast punch, dead center on the man’s nose.
The man stumbles back, blood pouring down over his chin, and falls into the chair he hit after Lutanh stabbed him. In a voice so strained that it sounds like she’s being choked, Lutanh says in Thai, “He likes it when you push the chair over.” Anand takes a couple of steps, raises a foot, and shoves the chair over backward. Then he leaves the room, and they hear him knocking at the bathroom door. “You can come out now.”
A reedy voice says, “I want my clothes,” and Anand comes back in and goes to the bed, where he gathers up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, then bends to retrieve a pair of shoes and a small purse.
As he heads back to the bathroom, Clemente bends over the man. “Do you know how old Lutanh is?”
Still on his back in the armchair, he wipes the blood from his face and looks at it. In a shaky voice, he says, “Nineteen, twenty.”
“Not nineteen, eighteen. Well, eighteen Thai age, because Thais—and Chinese, too—say you’re one the day you’re born. In your country she’s seventeen. And, of course, she’s a boy.”
Lutanh had opened her mouth as though to argue about her age, from which Clemente has shaved a year, but resisted the impulse. Now, though, she says, “Not boy.”
“By the standards of his country, you are.” To the man in the chair, Clemente says, “So you’ve raped a minor, and guess what? You’re gay, which apparently doesn’t sit well with you. You should see a therapist. By this time tomorrow, Thai immigration will have a police form identifying you as a pedophile, which your country takes seriously, so you want to be out of here before they get it. You won’t come back, and if you ever do, you’ll be stopped at the airport and a call will be made to the American embassy: ‘Come and get your child molester.’”
“A world of trouble,” Rafferty says.
Clemente says, “Sorry?”
“English expression. Problems without end.”
“A world of trouble,” Clemente says to the man. “Be on one of those planes. Immigration will notify me one way or the other. Lutanh?”
“What?”
“Do you want to kick him a couple of times?”
“No,” Lutanh says. “I finish with him.” The bathroom door opens, and a slight, small-framed person who appears to be a girl runs to the room door and out into the corridor.
“They’re expecting you to check out soon downstairs,” Clemente says. “Don’t disappoint them.”
Rafferty says to Lutanh, “Do you want me to carry your wings?”
To Rafferty’s surprise, when they go back into the street, the asphalt is shining with rain, an increase in the humidity that makes the heat more personal, turns it into a heavy, muggy shroud. The rain must have been coming down harder a few minutes earlier, but now it’s a fine, bath-temperature drizzle that needles the darkness and hangs halos on the streetlights.
Clemente steps back under the sagging awning at the top of the four steps to the street, puts her hands over her head like a little hood, and says, in English, “Great. As though my hair isn’t curly enough already.”
“Give me the keys,” Anand says. “I’ll get the car.”
“Fine.” She flips them to him. “But I’m driving.” With obvious affection she watches him jog to the car.
“You guys getting along?” Rafferty asks.
“Oh, yes,” Clemente says. “Just among the three of us”—she nods at Lutanh—“we’re getting along just fine. But don’t tell him.”
“It’s our secret.” Rafferty takes Lutanh’s arm and says to Clemente, “I’m going to walk home, so say goodbye to him for me, okay? And excuse us a minute.”
He and Lutanh go down the steps into the drizzle. In Thai, Rafferty says, “Was that enough money to get back into your room?”
Her eyebrows go up. “My room?”
“Sure. You hadn’t paid the rent, and—”
“I don’t need that much.” Lutanh’s eyes shift past him and then come back. “But . . . but the . . . um, the police—”
“You’re with the police. They’ll take you home and go in with you. It there’s any problem, they’ll take care of it.” She’s looking up at him as though she’s trying to translate what he’s said, and he feels a twinge of uncertainty about what he’s doing—surely he should allow the two of them, Lutanh and Edward, to work it out for themselves. And he will, he thinks, tomorrow. Just not tonight. Tonight seems too saturated in possibility for him to be comfortable with it. He takes out his last couple of bills and gives them to her. “Use the asshole’s money for the doctors, and if you need more, come talk to me. Clemente will take you home.”
“Home,” she says. She nods as though something has been confirmed and looks down at the wet pavement. Up the street, they hear Anand start the car. She says, “I see.”
“I’ll call Edward and
tell him you’re okay. And tomorrow I’ll have Miaow give you a call.”
It takes a few seconds, but she says, without looking up, “Okay. Say hi for Miaow.”
He hands her the backpack. “I think it’s a good idea,” he says. “You and Miaow, you’re older than Edward, not in years but you’ve had . . . you’ve had bigger lives. He’s still a kid in some ways, and I think it’s a good idea to give him a little time, at least until this thing with his father is over. Don’t you?”
She nods and then puts her arms through the straps of the backpack. When she’s done and the broken bits and pieces of cane bristle up behind her shoulders, she says, “Yes.”
In Thai, Rafferty says, “You’re a good girl.”
In English, Lutanh says, “I know.”
31
You Don’t Have to Be Just a Piece of Candy
The sudden spatter of rain on the balcony startles her, pulls her out of a world of alien vowels used by people speaking rather odd English, impossibly fast. She has the sliding glass door wide open. Both she and Rose are more comfortable with the heat than Rafferty is, although lately Rose has seemed almost American, her energy fading visibly when the temperature scales too high. These days the air-con in the bedroom, which Rose has always tolerated for Poke’s sake, has often been on even in the daytime, with the door to the living room standing wide open, just to blunt the heat’s edge.
Without getting up she slides down to one end of the couch so she can see past the flat-screen TV to the balcony. The ironwork is slick and shining. She loves the way Bangkok looks when it’s wet and at a distance—it almost seems clean. After taking it in for a moment, she grabs a long breath of freshly washed air and slides back to the middle of the couch. She backs up the movie on her laptop, plays a few seconds’ worth, hits pause, and says aloud, “’Ooo’s troying t’deceive you?” Again she says “’Ooo’s” and nods, satisfied, and then says “troyin’.” This time she shakes her head. “Not trying, not really troyin’ either.” She brings her hands to her cheeks and opens her mouth wide, the pose from one of Rafferty’s favorite paintings, The Scream. When she’s got it out of her system, she says, “Why am I doing this?” and then she sighs, backs the film up, and listens again.
Where in this big, wet city is Rose?
For at least the twentieth time since she got home, she checks her phone. Yes, the ringer is on. No, it’s not in airplane mode. Yes, it’s still charged. No, no missed calls, no voice mail. She wants to call Poke, but that’s stupid. He’s more worried than she is, he’d call her if he knew anything, and if she calls him, he’ll go into heart spasms the moment his phone rings, thinking either that everything is all right at last or that the worst has happened: baby and mother, both gone. Either way she’ll be an anticlimax.
Most of the movies she’s seen and the books she’s read present women as being more emotional than men, but Poke’s emotions are so close to the surface she can almost see them moving around under his skin at times. Rose, on the other hand, can be as practical as a pair of pliers.
She’s all right, Rose is. Miaow is certain she’d know instantly if something bad happened to Rose. But the baby . . . she doesn’t know about the baby. Until recently she’s had mixed feelings about the baby.
Like Miaow before Poke and Rose took her in, Eliza in the play doesn’t seem to have a mother. She has a father who drinks a lot and who, Miaow supposes, is intended to be funny. A lot of it seems to be intended to be funny, but she can already feel some long stretches where the audience will cough and fidget and the smaller kids will probably talk out loud.
Once the real story starts, though, once the frog begins to turn into a princess, the place will quiet down. She’ll make it quiet down.
She sprawls out, precisely dead center on the sofa with her bare feet on the glass table, the loose pages of the script—reprinted to replace the ones Poke took—scattered around her, and her MacBook Pro on her knees, open and on. She’s thinking about vowels and half listening to the drips of water from the balcony above pinging on the steel handrail of their own balcony.
About an hour ago, long before the rain started, she’d despaired of ever being able to figure out what Eliza is supposed to sound like. Out of sheer desperation, she’d sought help on YouTube. There she discovered an ancient movie version of the play that stuck pretty close to the script and was so old it wasn’t even in color. Most of the actors have a kind of look-at-me phoniness that makes her think they wish they had a cape they could swirl around themselves or a mustache to twirl; they seem to be saying their lines to someone a hundred yards away, and they don’t listen to each other. But the girl who’s playing Eliza is amazing. Two minutes into the first scene, Miaow became aware that her mouth was hanging open, and she’s been consciously closing it ever since.
The name of the girl playing Eliza is Wendy Hiller, and Miaow has already found out that Wendy Hiller is dead. She died when Miaow was one or two, which Miaow thinks is kind of sad. On the other hand, Wendy Hiller kept acting until she was tremendously old and not so pretty, so what Lutanh always says—if you’re a girl and you want to be a movie star, start early, because no one will want you later—isn’t necessarily true. Wendy Hiller won an Oscar when she was practically a hundred. Well, fifty, but then she kept working forever, and that means this can be a long-term job. You don’t have to be just a piece of candy for ten years and then disappear.
Not that Miaow thinks she’s pretty enough to be a piece of candy.
She pushes the play icon and listens to the line again. It’s a nothing line. It’s the third or fourth time Eliza has tried to make the very same point, to people who are socially far, far above her: that they’re treating her badly and that she’s a person, too. It’s repetition, almost filler, but it tells the audience that Eliza is stubborn and that she’ll stand up for herself, two qualities that will be very important later in the play. After being in two plays and watching a million hours of television, Miaow knows that some lines—lines such as these, that aren’t big surprises, that don’t lead to action, that just say something about a character—are like bookmarks: They tell the audience where they are, but they’re not very interesting. She also knows that moments like this one are harder to play well than the big emotional scenes where you get to scream and throw yourself around. In fact, she’s come to think that an actor who’s interesting when he or she is doing these lines is an actor worth watching, and Wendy Hiller makes every one of these nothing sentences feel different from the one that went before and the one that follows.
“’Ooo’s,” she says, giving it a more defiant emphasis. “’Ooo’s troyin’ t’deceive you?”
Picture something, Poke had said. Wendy Hiller, Miaow thinks, is picturing something different on every one of these lines, boring on the page but not when Wendy Hiller says them. Maybe the thing to do is to forget about the accent for now and think about what’s behind the words Eliza speaks.
Resentment, sure; Eliza practically lives in the gutter, compared to Freddy and his mother. And she’s probably more than a little humiliated to be so lowly and dirty in front of young, handsome, clueless, clean old Freddy. Freddy is a sap, but, Miaow thinks, Edward is pretty enough to make him interesting on the stage, at least to the girls in the audience.
Edward and Lutanh. What’s happening over there?
She pushes aside the thought, and the little knot in her stomach it engenders, and pops into her mouth the last in Rose’s only remaining jar of maraschino cherries, something Miaow is sure her mother will hate in a week. It’s sweet enough to make her tongue shrivel in self-defense, but the sugar is keeping her awake. She’ll have to sneak out and buy a new jar tomorrow; this one was unopened when she took it out of the refrigerator.
Lutanh and Edward. Don’t think about it.
Edward is a good choice for Freddy because he’s handsome and he’s smart and he always seems so clean. Even his
shoes don’t get dirty, and his hair always smells like some kind of flowery shampoo. When she asked about it, he stammered as though he’d been caught in something and said it belonged to Auntie Pancake.
How is Poke doing with finding Edward’s father? He’s been gone all evening. Something must be happening.
She knows what it is to be dirty in front of people you envy. She experienced that for years, beginning when she was two or three and her parents used a piece of twine to tie her wrist to a bus bench and went away forever. After a few hours, a dirty, wild-haired boy came by, cut the twine, and took her with him. With half a dozen other homeless kids, she lived on the streets for years, so filthy she smelled and scratched all the time. Scratching was worse than stinking; they all had fleas, they all had lice, they all had snot on their upper lip, they all wore clothes that looked like they’d been washed in coffee grounds. The clean people, the rich and well-to-do of Bangkok, gracefully stepped aside to avoid getting near them, averted their eyes from the unsettling experience of looking at them, or, with wrinkled noses, tossed a few coins into a paper cup, or—even more insulting—onto the sidewalk, the same way they might toss food to a dog they’re not sure about. Don’t touch it; it’s dirty. It might bite.
When the person refusing to look at her was a kid her own age, or even a little younger, a kid who’d never been filthy in his or her life, it was unbearable.
So yes, Miaow knows how Eliza feels when Freddy steps on her flowers without apologizing, how she feels when she has to grovel to sell them a blossom or two, only to be told they haven’t got change that’s small enough for the value she puts on her flowers.
Every cell in her body knows what it feels like.
She reads the lines of dialogue again, her mouth moving silently. Before, they’d looked like cards in a deck, one following the other almost at random—you could shuffle them without changing anything—but now she begins to see a pattern, to understand why Eliza chooses these words and in this order, how much it costs her to keep begging from these thoughtless twits who didn’t do anything but be born in order to have pockets full of money, nice clothes, perfumed skin.
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