Currency

by Zolbrod, Zoe

  At that other table, brown farang lady moves very slow, crosses her legs. Her skirt is too short, wow! She’s very pretty lady.

  “Piv! Look, if you see the police, if you know there’s risk, rub the top of your head, okay? If I know something bad is going to happen, I’ll rub the top of my head. Piv?” NokRobin moves so much I have to look. She rubs her head like she’s stirring something, and her hair rises in the air. She looks too foolish.

  I’m already far away, but I try to go farther. I turn my cheek to her. “Why you want to touch my head? Thai people don’t like that!” I smile to show I’m cool.

  “I’m not going to touch your head. If there’s trouble, I’ll touch my own head. Do you understand?”

  She always asks do I understand something. I study English, I study farang. Of course I understand. For me, it will be no problem in her country, because I can stay cool; I can give my attention, and I can work hard. NokRobin thinks that because she cannot, no one can.

  That short skirt woman makes something with one farang guy at that table, I think so. Way that he looks at her, way that he touches her, I think maybe they meet each other on that island and now they come here, Bangkok. It’s the first place they come together. He tries to touch her down there. Then they kiss. They move their faces, use their tongues, very ugly. Maybe they’re drunk, try to make something right here. Sure, some farangs do this. Some nights, Satit find condoms in the toilet.

  NokRobin looks at me, those colored lights still in her eye. How many times have I looked at her? Maybe one thousand times. Maybe ten thousand times. It’s not true what Kathy thinks, that Thai people are prejudice. Many Thai people marry farangs. They can be happy, if they pick the right one, if they try to know the other culture, sure. But most important to be happy is to know the other person. To look ten million times.

  “I want us to be together in the States.” NokRobin’s whisper is like one finger touching my ear. I think she knows that she looks foolish when she rubs her head, but she doesn’t care. Her face looks sweet now. Not beautiful, not smooth, but sweet, cute, like some little sister who worries.

  “Do you like Abu more than you like me?” she asks very soft.

  I move more close to the table. I touch under her chin. “Why you ask that question?” I say to her. “Abu’s not the pretty farang lady.”

  NokRobin gives me one very small smile. Her eyes are shiny. From the lights, from sweat, or maybe from some feeling. “He’s the pretty African man, don’t you think so?” she says.

  “Not my specialty.”

  “Your specialty is farang girls, right?”

  “This farang girl.” I touch the bone on her face. “You.”

  “What about that girl with the short skirt over there?”

  “At this time, my specialty is you.”

  We smile small smiles at each other. On the table, our hands move close; they almost touch.

  “You’ll travel, Piv. You deserve it. But let’s find a safer way for you to go.”

  “Shh. I’ll be careful.”

  At that moment, I can smell garbage, tuk tuk fumes, lead in air, beer foam, and too many kinds of food scents; I notice all the smells of Bangkok. I live in the capital city, so I feel used to this. Sometimes I can forget that I smell it, but sometimes I remember very strong, like now. I think about somewhere else, the mountains near my home, and I think about one small white flower that grows there. Some years ago, when I visit my home, I meet one farang biologist who tells me that the flower belongs to the rose family, and it doesn’t grow anywhere else around this whole world. He has to come to Kanchanaburi to see it. When I visit after that, I always go to the mountain and look for this flower. First time I find, I pick it and bring it home to my mother, but other times after that, to see it is enough. When I find that one, I feel very lucky.

  When NokRobin comes to Kanchanaburi, I want to show her, but we don’t find that flower. Maybe it’s the wrong time of year; it doesn’t come in the dry season. Or maybe we’re not lucky. Maybe she will never see it now. We will never get married. Okay, that’s no problem. Maybe it’s not true what she says, that she wants to be together in the United States. Instead, she might not want one Thai boyfriend in her own country. Mai pen rai. Love is like everything, it can change. But maybe we will be like the farangs say, “just friends.” She knows something about me. She knows my dream. I know something about her, her worries. Across the world, maybe we can still remember this. Even without our bodies, without our romantic thing, even if we cannot help each other, if we’re not together, perhaps we still have one small flower we have both been lucky to see.

  Chapter 24

  Robin hadn’t watched Piv walk out of the room. Instead, she had lain flat in bed and listened to the door’s automatic bolt slide back into its groove. She tracked the faint sound of the elevator rising in its shaft, opening its doors, and falling down toward the lobby—Abu and Piv going off together without her-then she got up to lock the door from inside. Last night after coming home from the bar, Piv had undressed her with the tender precision of a jeweler, then devoted his lips and hands to her body for over an hour. Twitchy with tentative surrender, she worried over how to convince him to leave Abu without endangering herself until her body detached, and she was scarcely aware when Piv gave up on the lovemaking and lay docilely in her arms.

  But she had gone to sleep with a plan. Now she picked up the orange and gold enamel box that sat on the dresser and brought it into bed with her. They called it their cash box, but the bluntness of the title was softened by the rounded edges and a slightly domed top that gave it the air of a tubby Rajasthanian Santa. They had the equivalent of almost three thousand dollars inside in a mix of Thai and American currency, but they owed fifteen thousand baht for the bracelets still at the factory. That left about twenty-four hundred dollars.

  Twenty-four hundred bucks. How pathetic. She’d seen people order half that amount from the J. Crew catalog without changing out of their pajamas, and she had been willing to do almost anything for it, as if it were a princely sum whose interest she could live on for the rest of her life. She stood and walked back to the dresser. In the top drawer lay a purple silk pouch that bulged with the hard edges of jewelry. Six hundred dollars worth of necklaces took up surprisingly little space. Robin loosened the pouch’s drawstring and clattered the pieces onto the cream-colored pressboard. She saw a jumble of gleam already losing its luster; the low-grade silver would tarnish soon if no one wore it, and in the sallow light of day, the jewelry looked to her like silly hippie stuff, the product of a mind addled by too many months of backpacker aesthetic. She picked up a necklace and held the clasp closed at her nape, looked into the mirror hung above the bureau. The five long lengths of chain weren’t falling right; she couldn’t quite get the lotus piece centered. And she herself looked terrible. No matter what else, she had always assumed her youth and passable prettiness, but now one eye was narrowed and twitched and both had circles under them. Her tan looked smudged on. Her breasts hung skimpy and limp.

  She put on a T-shirt, then bagged the jewelry and set it and the cash box on Piv’s pillow. She wanted it to catch his eye as soon as he walked in. She didn’t want an extra moment to pass without him knowing what she had decided: She would save him. She would give him everything, the money and the silver, and tell him to go to the Philippines on Abu’s dime and to disappear. Maybe he’d be able to sell the jewelry. Hopefully he’d still want to come to the United States; she’d suggest they meet in New York or Chicago, somewhere up north, far from the scene of the crime. Piv was the last chance she had to do something remotely honorable. She had to accept responsibility. After all, everything he owned could fit in two canvas bags; to him twenty-four hundred dollars was a lot. He’d never been given opportunities that she had chosen to blow: getting her degree, traveling the world.

  But then her need for exoneration rose up: Don’t stop making excuses for yourself only to make them for Piv. He might love you in bed, b
ut who introduced you to Abu?

  Who introduced you to Abu? She’d asked Piv the same question early on. “Oh, I know him for some time now. He’s my friend. Sure.” That’s what he’d answered. A non-answer. She’d gotten used to those, from him. She sat still on top of the rumpled sheets, all the questions she had posed and Piv had evaded wrapping thick as rope around her. Where had he lived before he met her? What had he done to make a living? The aspects of his life he had allowed her to glimpse only left her with more confusion. Robin remembered dancing away as his mother jabbed a wide broom closer and closer to her feet; she remembered tumbling onto Piv’s big, hard bed to get away. His mom hated her, but Piv had denied and denied it. Why? And then there was now: what was he talking about with Abu?

  Robin slung her feet to the carpet. She walked around the room touching the few things that Piv hadn’t yet packed: the Walkman she had gotten him, the hair gel. The travel case he’d carry tomorrow lay open on the floor, and inside it, the worn paperback he’d been reading since the day she met him rested on top of his carefully folded extra suit. She bent down to see what else he was taking to America. Two T-shirts, one dress shirt, a few cassettes, a pair of dark socks, and a handful of candy-colored bikini underwear. His skinny backpack was propped next to the suitcase, strapped up and ready to be dropped off at his friend’s house on the way to the airport. Robin lowered herself into a crouch and unzipped the side pocket of the pack; a small wicker ball fell out. She’d never seen it before, never seen Piv play a sport, never heard him speak of one, yet this was one of the things he’d chosen to keep near him. I don’t know him, she reminded herself. She picked up the ball and cupped it in her palm with an embarrassed reverence; it was a mystery as small and sad and tender as a movie star’s sock.

  She unzipped another pocket. What was she looking for? If he were an American boyfriend, she’d be snooping for a note or journal entry, some words that were private and therefore true. Of course, if she found something like that of Piv’s, she wouldn’t be able to read it anyway; it would be in Thai. She puzzled over that for a moment, multiplied the difficulty of expressing oneself in a second language by the additional hurdle of using a whole new set of linguistic symbols. Her fingers quit searching and sank idly into the unzipped pocket, as if she were a riverside laundress stealing a moment to daydream, hands finally still under the water’s cool. Did Piv think in the Thai alphabet or in the Roman one? Did people think in letters at all? Although Robin had a few Thai phrases now, the script itself was indecipherable to her, all humps and bubbles and sassy kicks. Perhaps Piv meant to be clear with her. Perhaps his elusiveness was an inadvertent product of their cultural divide.

  Her thighs ached from crouching, and she caught herself holding her weight at her hips rather than letting it sink toward the ground as Piv had taught her to do when she’d wondered how people in the villages could hold the pose for so long. She forced herself to relax her limbs down, and her hand dipped farther into the backpack’s pocket. Her knuckles grazed something crushable and scratchy, and her fingers became her own again, reaching and grasping. She withdrew an object from the bag, raised her hand to eye level. She held a lace-edged blue bow and flowers attached to an elastic. Expecting a tender keepsake of Piv’s, her mind went blank. This was no piece to the puzzle, no part of him. But slowly she realized that was exactly the point-the frilly hair decoration belonged to someone else, not to Piv. Certainly not to Robin, whose taste didn’t run to this kind of feminine glitz. It belonged to another woman. A woman. A girl. Someone Piv cared enough about to want this piece of her near.

  Robin fell back from the crouch onto her bottom. She stared at the blue pouf in her palm; she lifted it to her nose and sniffed. Inhaling the intimate perfumey grease of scalp was like walking full force into a clear glass wall. Momentum stopped with a full-bodied slam. Embarrassment mixed with intense physical pain. Piv was using her. This shred of a thing both clarified and confirmed her great fear: she was one of many, manipulated; of use but not beloved. When the phone started braying incessantly, it was only an echo of the siren in her head.

  Then the phone went quiet, and humiliations rained down in quick, articulated succession: She was an orgasm-addled naïf who’d fall for anybody who’d do her, anyone with a tight belly and pidgin phrasing. She was the kind of stupid, easy Western girl who gave others a bad name. No wonder she hadn’t talked to any women in weeks. They must be shying away from her like they would a bad smell. No wonder Piv’s mother had displayed disgust. And Piv. Robin recalled instances of his icy remove, a certain curl to his lip.

  But also ... those lips soft and parted, reaching for hers again and again. The thousand kisses reflected in his eyes.

  But those were lies in his eyes. Because did he look like that at the other woman, too? Did he bring her home? He did. He did. Other women. The Thai home just a tool of his trade.

  The phone drilled into the room again, and Robin flailed an arm up to the nightstand and swatted the handset off the base. Other women, another woman. A female voice emanated from the toppled phone. Was that an American hello? No. It was Thai, ka. The voice rang out clearly now: Ka? Ka? Of course. The blue-hairpiece lady was Thai. Robin could assume that much. Farangs were necessary, easy, but when Piv could choose he’d want someone tipped in gold jewelry who never spoke too loudly or said the wrong thing. The Thai pair was probably together now, at the love motel Piv had taken Robin to once upon a time, where they had opened that box and the whole gory nightmare began. He was at that love motel with his beloved-no animal parts, just those two-and their matched bodies were reflecting off every mirrored surface.

  But no. No. The film of their lovemaking flapped to a close, leaving a lit, blank screen. The phone’s dial tone pulsed through the room.

  There were always animal parts, now. Everywhere. At this moment, Piv really was with Abu. He cheated on me! It was a realization as painful in a den of smugglers as in a high school cafeteria or a college bar, and she stifled a sob. Never mind your hurt feelings, she told herself. You’re in danger. He used me! No, stop it. Stop it! Abu and Robert and Ray and Volcheck. She had to keep her attention there.

  She started to cry.

  Chapter 25

  I fly on planes before today, sure. First time is four years ago, when I fly from Bangkok to Phuket with one American lady who wants to get to the beach fast. But this is my first time to fly like this: the plane I’m on now is leaving my country; I am alone; I fly over the South China Sea. And I’m happy now to travel alone, not with the farang lady. The way NokRobin acted before I left, to be apart is good for her, good for me. If she doesn’t like me anymore, if she doesn’t want to make something anymore, okay, then we should do what’s comfortable.

  Yesterday when I came back from Oriental Bar, NokRobin looks very white. Her tan seems gone and her mouth looks small. She looks sick. When I ask how she feels, she says yes, she’s sick, her stomach is sick. She gets up and goes to bathroom, and she walks bent over. The door shuts loud. I think she feels embarrassed.

  Sometimes farangs get sick when they come to my country. Thai food is different, very hot, and there is different kind of germ, different kind of taste. So sure. Maybe the stomach doesn’t like it. Even when some farang is here for long time this can happen again, like one surprise. Since I’ve known NokRobin, I already see this happen to her. And when she’s sick, even when she’s still weak, still hurting, sometimes she likes to make cuddle, make love, so her body feels good again. After long time, NokRobin comes out from bathroom and she lies on the bed and I go beside her. But no. She doesn’t want this. She pushes me away. She curls up like one hot snake.

  “It’s my stomach,” she says. She goes in the bathroom again.

  “How are we going to divide the jewelry and the money,” she says when she comes out. Her eyes are pink like sunset. “I suppose you want half.”

  We never talk before about half. We talk more about one whole, about the whole thing we build together. But if she w
ants to talk about half, it’s no problem. I shrug.

  “Half that jewelry still at factory,” I say.

  “Well, take the necklaces then, but you should leave me an extra thirteen hundred baht so I can pick up the bracelets if I want to. Otherwise it’s not fair.” I look at her. She stands by the bed. Her face is white, sick, like some ghost, bad. She takes off her fisherman trousers, but she leaves on her dirty T-shirt when she gets back in bed. She pulls sheet around her head. From underneath there she says one more thing: “But leave me a couple necklaces, at least. So I can see them.”

  That’s the last thing she says to me until today, when she says she’s sorry, she’s too sick to go to the airport, too sick even to go down to the lobby and see me in the taxi. I tell her I will take only half the necklaces. She can take the rest; they’ll all be together again in her country. “Okay,” she says. “Good-bye. Good luck.” She says this like she’s dead to me. She gives me kiss, but it’s dead. When I see her on the airplane to her country, we must act like we don’t know each other. And when we’re in her country, I don’t know for sure, but I think she plans for us to stay like this-dead to each other; not friends but strangers, necklaces apart. Bodies apart. She’s one more farang lady who wants to fly to the next place by herself.

  But this time is different. This time, I don’t get left with only five hundred baht, six hundred baht that someone gives me. This time, I have half of what we make together. In my bag, sixty necklaces. In my wallet, twenty-seven hundred baht that mixes with eight thousand dollars from Abu. When the plane lands in Manila, I make my mind blank. I concentrate on that. Immigration, customs, new airplane, no problem. I don’t think about the bad things, and so they stay away.