Currency

by Zolbrod, Zoe

  “Thousands of baht, yes, but dollars ...” I shrug my shoulder. “Not so many. And money is coming. I think so.”

  NokRobin smiles at me the biggest smile she gives all day. “So I come up with a line of silver jewelry, and you get the pieces made cheaply right here, and we sell them together?” Sometimes her face is not beautiful. Farang face, hot and sandy. But her big smile, happy eyes, make her look beautiful right now to me.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “That’s my idea for us. That’s my plan.”

  We don’t talk when driver starts the motor and turns back down the klong to Chao Phraya. The motor runs, and the air is smooth, and we see everything again, but we don’t say many words. Only one time NokRobin speaks. She asks me for the army knife. She uses the small blade on that to cut the long white string that falls out from the bottom of her shirt. After she gives knife to me again, she puts the string on my head. She makes the shape of one circle on top of my short hair. I don’t know where she learns about the Thai wedding ceremony-that the most honorable guest puts white string on the head of the man and the woman when they marry-maybe from studying something about Jim Thompson she learns about that. But when she puts that string, I think even more that her feeling for me is not just for today. That she will stay with me. That we’re attached and will move together, over the world.

  Chapter 16

  For three days, Robin and Piv visited the sites of Bangkok. They went to Wat Pho, the national museum, the royal barges, the major residencies-King Rama V’s and Jim Thompson’s again, coming at it overland this time-and Robin followed the tours and quizzed Piv and jotted notes and made drawings in the thick, square book she had begun to carry with her, the paper handmade in Nepal. She’d taken several studio art courses as part of her major, and she’d been quick with a sketch in her first few years out in the real world, but that had fallen off when she’d gotten into cars. It felt right to be doing it again-something fast she was good at, something pretty and purposeful and loose.

  “See,” she said to Piv on the fourth day, using her pencil to put the last few touches on the page in her lap. They were sitting on the sala steps at Wat Suthat. The glossy marble floor of the wat’s courtyard and the gold leaf and whitewash of the buildings amplified the midday glare, so even in the shade, Robin wore sunglasses. She’d been looking back and forth between her paper and a lotus rising on a poker-straight stem from a large porcelain bowl. Now she handed Piv her sketchpad.

  Piv tilted the book; he tilted his head. He traced one swooping line with his tea-colored finger. “Very good one. Beautiful,” he said. Robin blushed and chewed her lip. She had drawn a necklace of four long links, two of which curled up at the ends into rootlike gestures. Twined together, they made a stem that would rise from the lowest point of the necklace up a wearer’s clavicle, where it blossomed. It was her favorite thing she’d drawn so far, the first time she’d felt her efforts might justify Piv’s praise. He touched his sandal to hers. “Farangs never see one like this. That’s why they’ll buy it. Special. Like you.”

  Robin smiled at him. He smiled at her. She leaned back on her arms and softly joggled her knees. The edge of a cloud rippled over the sun, and the water of the lotus pool sparkled. Orange robes, hung on ropes tied between the sala’s white pillars, fluttered in front of a standing gold Buddha. Inside the bot, monks chanted prayers that were being broadcast over loudspeakers hung underneath the eaves, but there was no one in sight; Robin and Piv were alone, and the throat-stinging hassle and racket of Bangkok seemed millions of miles away.

  Robin took back her book from Piv and folded it closed. Without speaking, in unison, they stood and walked to the bot. Robin approached with assurance—she now knew that it was okay to climb the stairs still shod, to enter the shade of the portico; that she could wait to slip out of her sandals until just before stepping over the raised threshold that led to the interior. Walking lightly, the marble floors cool on her bare feet, she went to look at the murals that covered the walls so that Piv could go privately to the heart of the room and kneel before the Buddha statue she’d read about in her book: it was from fourteenth century Sukhothai. Her attention was split between the dusky fantabulous paintings and the sight of Piv, his head bowed slightly, his pressed hands raised, the crest of his top lip silhouetted in the dim light, curved more gracefully than anything she could draw. But he had asked her to draw, and her sketches-her ideas, her sensibilities, her eye and her taste-were really going to be made into actual things. Her heart bloomed with happiness.

  When they left the wat, they faced another minor landmark, Sao Ching-Cha, the Giant Swing. It looked like a shiny red utility tower, except that its two poles were joined at the top with carved screens instead of metal bars holding wires and circuits. All of the tour books described the annual ceremony that used to take place here: men swung in high arcs and tried to grab a bag of gold attached to a tall bamboo pole. But only some of the books mentioned that many people died trying to reach the treasure. Now traffic careened unconcernedly around the swing-cars, trucks, buses, tuk tuks, motorcycles that revved and darted alarmingly. Robin and Piv waited for the infinitesimal break in the flow that would allow them to cross the road. They were on their way to meet a friend of Piv’s, who Piv had been told could help them with the logistics of getting silver things made cheaply. When, where, how much, by whom-and where would they get the money? A familiar carbon-monoxide ache crept up from Robin’s throat and into her temples. A vision of a rhino galloped by. She took a deep breath and stepped with blind faith into the path of an Isuzu minivan, hoping the driver would slow enough to let her cross.

  They’d already met with several of Piv’s friends and acquaintances that week, Thai guys who supposedly had connections to factories. Robin couldn’t tell who Piv knew well and who he didn’t. The men all had an easy air of familiarity with one another and with the bartender at Jimmie’s Rasta Bar. The conversation might start out with an exchange or two in English—“Hey man, where you been? You eat yet?”—but inevitably it would slip into Thai. Piv would buy rounds of Singha or Coke, and Robin would sit half-smiling and ignored, and eventually she’d start craning her neck, looking around. The backpackers she’d partied with on the islands appeared to be long gone, but there was always another crop with bad jewelry on, and she’d scope out their ubiquitous hoop earrings decorated with crosshatch and silver spheres in order to fuel her confidence in the necessity of her own designs.

  Today started off little different, except that they met at the Joy Luck Club, an arty café on Phra Athit Road that was more of a Thai hangout than the backpacker-oriented Rasta Bar, and except for the fact that when Robin tuned out the conversation between Piv and Bongthe friend of a friend-and began to look around, this time she did see someone she knew coming in through the door.

  “Zella!” she exclaimed. Piv and Bong looked at her. “Zella! Hey!”

  Her fairy godmother! It was unmistakably Zella, her voluminous curls swirling around her head like a cloud, her extremities spangled in gem-studded silver and gold. The woman slung a bright tapestry bag over the back of a chair and tossed a quilted pouch onto a table. What great timing! Zella’d know how to get this silver thing going. Robin was moving toward her before noticing Zella’s companion. He had copper skin and dark eyes, and with his heavy silver chains and a red shirt open at the neck, he matched Zella in drama; he was even looking at Robin in the same way, like she was a mildly curious stranger.

  “I’m Robin. Remember? We hung out together in Bangkok a couple months back ...” Robin’s expectation of a gushing reunion dissipated. “You loaned me money.”

  “Sure,” Zella breathed. “Sure. Sit down. Meet Guy.”

  Robin sat. There was a pulse of silence, an almost imperceptible exchange of glances between Zella and her date.

  “How was India?” Robin asked, because she had to say something.

  “India? Oh, it’s always the same, isn’t it?”

  “Where’d you go after Del
hi?”

  “Delhi? I haven’t been there in years. No, we’ve been up to Laos.”

  The waitress came, and Robin tried to regroup. Zella had been headed to Delhi, hadn’t she? In one fit of pique, hadn’t she made a big deal about getting there late? Then she heard Guy speak to the server in Thai. He was Thai, and she hadn’t even known it! He was a size or two bigger than Piv, but still—Zella was a we with a Thai guy. Robin felt a confused blush at the similarity of her own situation. Might it somehow look as if she’d been copying?

  Zella took a peanut from the small bowl that the waitress had left on the table, and Robin noticed that the slim, pointy fingernails she had envied were now unmanicured and crested with slivers of dirt.

  “Laos. Cool. It’s still pretty rough there, right?”

  “Oh, Laos’s divine. It’s like the sleepy, sleepy, Wild West. Isn’t it darling?” she said to Guy.

  “Wild,” he said.

  Was he really Thai? With his thick black hair and a slightly beaked nose, he could have been Mayan, Peruvian, Montnaguard. Robin could also see that Zella’s nails weren’t the only thing about her that looked worn. And yet the sunburst of lines sketched around her eyes, the cracks in her lips tinted with that morning’s coral lipstick, the faded cast of her black cotton garment-it all served to embellish her appearance; it gave her an elegant patina. Of course she’d been in Laos, where the hoards weren’t yet but would be soon. Robin felt convinced that in Zella she was previewing the next season’s look.

  “So what’d you send back to the studio from up there?”

  “Well, not much, really. The mail, you know. But here’s something.” She unzipped the pouch on the table and took out a bundle of soiled turquoise fabric, which she unwrapped with leathery fingers to reveal a blackened opium pipe. “The real deal. I’ve got a friend who knows a buyer for this chain of head shops. They’ll love these.”

  Head shops? What about Alexander McQueen? Robin eyed the long, thin opium pipe, but didn’t reach to take it. It might be the real deal, but she had seen so many fake ones piled on the factory-made blankets at tourist-trap market stalls that she had no interest. Zella set the pipe down and flipped a few other squares of fabric from her pouch: teal, fuchsia, scarlet, burnt orange, shot through with complex silk embroidery.

  “They do some goooooorgeous things with fabrics,” Zella said, drawing out the word like she was reclining into it. “But they’ve already butchered a lot of the old pieces. They make the scraps into these little bags.”

  Robin picked one up. It gave off a sweet, musky smell at the touch, the organic prototype for the manufactured scent wafting from a magazine subscription card. This was all Zella brought back? At least both sides were antique; it wasn’t backed with some cheap poly print, like most of the ones in Chiang Mai. She unzipped it, saw a passport inside. “Nice,” she ventured, tipping the booklet half out of the bag, hoping for a distraction from the paucity of Zella’s find. “Perfect place to keep this. Do you mind?” Passport sharing was a regular traveler’s card game, but Zella had never offered hers in the time they spent together. Now she just shrugged.

  The photo was recent: Zella was as tan in the picture as she was here in person, with the same smattering of gray in her mane. But Robin was surprised at the names.

  “Gazelle Ester Raboniwitz-Johnson,” she recited. “Where’d you get all those?”

  Zella’s eyes narrowed. “Now I remember you,” she said. She slid her elbow forward on the table and dropped her chin in her palm. “You’re the one with all the questions. ‘How do you dooooo this for a living? What designers do you know? I don’t have any money left, will you give me some moooore?’”

  Robin recoiled, hurt and shamed. She’d never asked for money. She’d never asked after any names Zella hadn’t dropped—falsely, it was starting to seem. Robin looked over at Piv, who was rubbing the inside of his cheek with his tongue as he listened to Bong.

  “Johnson’s my husband’s name,” Zella said, her tone suddenly blandly congenial. “When we got hyphenated we made our tribe names our legal first names, too. His was Bear. We were Rainbow Tribe kids. You know how it is.” No, Robin didn’t know how that was. She didn’t know if Zella was putting her on. When they’d shared a room, Zella wore Prada sandals, not Berkinstocks. “But that was ages ago, obviously. So then I became Zella.”

  Robin couldn’t see far enough under the table to tell what shoes Zella was wearing today. Why did she even care? But another question popped out. “You were married?”

  Zella split a peanut between her thumb and forefinger. “He sends me a check whenever I ask. I guess that’s married.”

  Guy said something to Zella in Thai-did he live off the rich bear’s proceeds, too?-and Zella replied in kind. Robin felt a prick of sadness and of jealousy. They could speak together in two languages.

  Zella turned to Robin, but spoke as if still addressing Guy. “No, she doesn’t need that,” she said. “She needs to keep her money. She’s a baby. A different generation. She should stay here where they’re making it safe for her, where they’re nationalizing the hill tribes, where they’re giving the trek guides a lecture and a license. They’re even setting up roadblocks on the way to Phangan. That’s the way it’s going now.” Zella took a deep breath and lolled her head on her neck while she kept her eyes on Robin, viewing her from different sleepy angles as if intuiting an antique’s real age, its secret depths. Robin remembered that look. It was one of the things that had enamored her of Zella, but now that she was its object, she bristled.

  “It’s time to go away, darling,” Zella said to her. She gestured gracefully with her wrist and palm. “Don’t ask me any more questions. Don’t ask me what I do for a living. You’d better figure something out for yourself. You’d better go away.”

  Robin took a last peek at Guy. The open shirt and the chain on his broad chest made him look piratey. Without saying good-bye to either Zella or him, she stood and went back to her table.

  Piv and Bong had decided to go directly from the Joy Luck Club to the factory, leaving Robin to finish the day’s itinerary on her own. She’d planned to visit the student galleries at Silpakorn University, but there wasn’t much to see there, and she spent most of the next few hours sitting at a picnic table within the walled campus, waiting until it was time to meet Piv in the nearby park. She nursed a giant Slurpee from the 7-Eleven and watched the students cluster and disperse. Some of the young women still dressed as schoolgirls in white blouses with Peter Pan collars, others wore platform sandals and flared black pants with tight print shirts. They all ignored her. Even if Gazelle Ester Raboniwitz-Johnson was a stoner and not a design scout, Robin still envied her: she could speak in Thai to Guy. Probably that was why secrets and silences existed between Robin and Piv, because there was a whole world of language that she couldn’t enter with him. She kept her sketchbook open, but she couldn’t concentrate on her jewelry ideas or the details of Bangkok. She doodled faces idly, generic cartoon visages that gradually became more specific: her own face, then Abu’s, then Piv’s.

  He appeared at the agreed-upon spot almost on time, and he brought with him a rented mat and plastic bags of still-warm fish cakes and fried oysters, the sauces packaged separately, in miniature. They spread the mat on the grass and ate their greasy dinner while he told her about the factory salesman—a friend of Bong’s uncle, a very nice guy. The cost of a gram of silver remained the same-about six baht—but the cost of workmanship went down as the numbers went up. Piv had some rough estimates. Neither Robin nor Piv had any idea about how much Robin’s design might weigh, but at least Piv was familiar with the metric system. He guessed that it would be around fifty grams-that sounded like a lot—and they used Robin’s sketchpad to do some calculations. With the sky deepening to evening, and the lit, gold spires of the Grand Palace reaching into the velvety blue, the numbers sounded magical. They lay on their backs in private reflection, but Robin didn’t feel that the silence postponed their mutual unde
rstanding this time; she felt like they were very close. The remaining twinges of Zella-envy blew away. The last of the day’s kites were being flown overhead. One advertised an outdated Batman movie, one boasted stars and stripes: red, white, and blue.

  “That flag’s for you. It flies for your country,” Piv said.

  Robin fiddled with the straw in her plastic bag of Coke, trying to make it stand in a perfect vertical. “Piv, I haven’t told you this, but I’m not even sure it will be news to you.”

  “Oh no, it falls!” Piv said. He reached out to straighten the toppling straw. Once it was upright again, he kept his finger on it. “Tell me some news.” His eyes danced.

  Robin paused a beat. Should she? Yes.

  “Abu knows. He knows we know about the rhino horn.”

  Piv turned his face away from Robin’s, keeping his finger on the straw. He looked over his shoulder at the child holding the spool of the America kite. The boy ran a few steps, then fell down. When Piv’s face came back it was hung with a sheepish smile.

  “Oh no,” he repeated. His tone hadn’t changed. In an exaggerated gesture he hit his hand to his head. The straw slumped down. “Maybe we’re in trouble now.”

  Robin searched his face. “I hope not. I don’t think so. Abu didn’t like me sneaking, but he didn’t really seem to mind.”

  “With Abu, sure. It’s no problem. But how does he know this? You tell him?”

  “He just knew. Believe me, I’ve been wondering how.” She took an extra breath. “But it really doesn’t matter, Piv. I don’t care how he knows. He explained what it was like for him at home, in Kenya, but I still feel confused. I mean, they’re endangered. They’re disappearing from the face of the earth—” She stopped herself. She hadn’t meant to bring up the animals.