“My father likes you more and more,” she was saying. “He likes the idea of you more than anything, I think. I’ve always thought the idea of a person and the person himself are more or less the same.”
“I wish I could talk him out of that. I don’t really understand—”
“He says, by the way, I should take you to Phnom Chisor. It’s only an hour away and we could take the family driver. Like a picnic. Would you like to do that?”
“A day trip?”
“Yes, and you might even like it. Of course I don’t know what you like. It’s a ruined temple, like Angkor but lonelier.”
“I like ruins. Or I think I like them.”
“We’re famous for our ruins. People who come here are more interested in our ruins than they are in us.”
“They have to be interested in something.”
“But not you—you don’t seem interested in anything.”
“I’m a bit aimless, it’s true.”
“I know you’re a pathless wanderer. I can tell.”
“Is that your phrase?”
She said, “That’s my phrase, yes. I’m always right too.”
He threw up his hands and smiled. “Then I’m a pathless wanderer. Is there a cure?”
“Marriage.”
“Then I’ll have to be pathless for a while—”
“You’ll be thirty soon. Then it’s almost too late.”
“Is it? Not in my country, it isn’t.”
“You’re not in your country.”
He put down his knife and fork and said he wanted to buy her a bottle of wine. A Bordeaux, no?
“Big spender!” she cried.
The Duhart-Milon, then.
It was a mad expense, but he calculated he could just about manage it and survive. He ordered the wine and she told him it was entirely unnecessary but that she was glad he had. She needed a serious drink and a bottle of Duhart-Milon was it. When it came they went quiet and it was poured and they raced into it with a childish pleasure.
“I love getting drunk like this,” she said. “In the dark on a terrace. With a silly boy.”
“So now I’m silly too?”
“Yes.”
In fact, the wine had gone to his head immediately.
“Shouldn’t I be teaching you English?”
“Go ahead.”
“I forgot the lesson.”
“Then there is no lesson today. You’ll have to make it up to me.”
“You’ve been speaking English since you were three.”
“Two.”
“So your dad is wasting his money.”
“Isn’t that his problem?”
“Well, I suppose it is.”
Robert cut into his timbale and he thought ahead for some reason—to the following day, to the following decade.
He said, “It seems quite unreal here. Has your father been coming to this place for years? It seems like his kind of place.”
“All of us have been coming here for years. It’s our place.”
“Your father seems very kind. He didn’t need to give me that money. I didn’t want to take it—”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. He wanted to help you.”
“That’s just the thing—I don’t understand why.”
“There’s nothing to understand. It’s a feeling—he has a feeling for you. It’s enough for him.”
“I’m not even teaching you English. He knows perfectly well you speak it perfectly.”
“Perfectly.”
“So it’s just a ruse, isn’t it? Perhaps I shouldn’t mind. I should just shut up and take the money.”
“That’s pretty much what you should do, Mr. Beauchamp.”
“In a way I did.”
She fed him a forkful of green beans.
“You have a charmed life. There’s something charmed about you. People do things for you—don’t they?”
“I wish they did. I don’t think they do.”
“You land on your feet anyway. They think you’re helpless and have to be helped.”
“I am kind of helpless.” He looked at her archly.
She said, “It’s your greatest asset. You never know what’s going on. There’s a definite charm in that, but I’m not sure it lasts forever. For the moment you’re doing very well.”
“You make me sound rather awful.”
“Awful’s an old-fashioned word. You’re not that, you’re something else. The maids say something amazing about you. They say you have an aura of disaster about you.”
She covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed.
“Jesus,” he sighed.
“They’re country women. They can see these kinds of things.”
It was probably true. He was disaster incarnate, lumbering through the world without a clue and destroying everything around him without knowing it. But the idea that this quality projected an aura—it might have been true.
“But then,” she went on, “there are disasters and disasters. What kind of disasters do you bring on?”
“None that I am aware of.”
She pouted. “I don’t believe it. You’re a disaster on two legs.”
“On four legs,” he said.
—
They ate clafoutis for dessert. His body broke into an uncontrollable sweat. It ran between his eyes and he looked up at the clouds and caught the far-off lightning. He felt a hundred years old and he drank most of the bottle without remembering his manners. All his life he had drunk when he felt nervous and now he felt nervous again with her. Any minute, he had decided, she was going to unmask him and then there would be a miserable and wretched scene. He had decided he wasn’t going to grovel and apologize. He was going to laugh it off and be a boor and tell her a tall story and that would be that, they would part and it wouldn’t matter.
“I think I said before,” she was saying, “that you don’t seem like a teacher. I never asked you what you teach—it’s rude of me.”
“It’s all right. English literature.”
He didn’t say it with much enthusiasm.
“Is that a hard one to teach?”
“I have the feeling it’s a dinosaur subject. The children aren’t interested in it anymore. I feel like I’m just talking to a wall most of the time.”
“They’re more interested in the Internet?”
“I don’t know what they’re interested in. It’s not like I’m so much older than them—but it feels like two or three generations. They’re on a different planet.”
“Then you should change jobs.”
“There’s something sad about it,” he admitted. “Do you know who John Donne is?”
Slowly, she shook her head.
“You think all the time that these famous writers are universal and then you realize that no one outside of a very small culture has ever heard of them, not even in your own country. If Khmers read John Donne I’d be delighted and amazed. But when fifteen-year-old English boys don’t even know the name…”
“Is it surprising?” she asked.
“That they’re forgotten? Maybe. Then what am I doing with my life? Teaching forgotten things to those who won’t remember.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re a teacher. That’s your mission.”
“Not now anyway. Let someone else do it. I’ve decided to be in the present and nowhere else. Like everyone else.”
“Maybe you could teach John Donne in Cambodia—be the first one.”
“A brilliant idea which no one will go for.”
But long ago the French had probably taught Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo to little Khmer children in stuffy schoolhouses. It could be done for a while, futilely and nobly. He thought of the room where he taught in Elmer, with its walls covered with pop posters of Great Writers intended to make them more appealing to teenagers who would never, in fact, find them appealing. Shakespeare in a hip beard, Wordsworth in psychedelic colors. The hint that they took drugs and had orgies. The hard, yet wan
dering look in those teenagers’ eyes as he walked back and forth with an open book, reading paragraphs of George Eliot. It was comical, but there was no other way. His rage built up over a long time but it was a rage against the years he himself had spent mastering this material. He had to justify it somehow. He could not just admit that it had been a waste of life and time.
—
They went for a walk in the rain by the river and it seemed like the first night they had been together, only the city seemed larger and brighter and fuller. They planned out their picnic to Phnom Chisor as they sat on the promenade wall and looked up at the white kids eating pizza at the FCC.
“Are you really going to find a job here?” he asked. “I got the feeling you missed Paris.”
“I went for an interview at a hospital today. It went well. I can find a job—they need doctors here—but that’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“I don’t know. I’m never happy in any one place. Perhaps the world got too small.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
They walked down to 130 and got ice creams on the street. The quay was lazily alive with drifters and amorous strollers dragging their feet under the frangipanis; they walked over to a man selling toy birds on the curb, transparent birds filled with throbbing colored lights which gave off a manic chatter like an aviary of living animals. It was astonishingly realistic and yet the birds glowed red and blue and violet. It was there that they ran into one of her friends, a Dutch artist who was walking home with two models for a night of painting. His name was Horst and it was not his name. They tagged along and soon they were climbing up a dark stairway to a terraced studio with paintings all over the floors and jam jars filled with fresh joints. They sat on the floor of the terrace with the glow of nearby neon flashing on and off and the sound of real caged birds in the unit above and the Khmer girls took off their clothes and posed and they drank a lot of vodka together. Horst was a small man filled with electric energy. He had been married four times to courtesans, three of them in Africa, and had washed up on the shores of the Tongle Sap in search of further illuminations. He paid his girlfriend, who was not there, two thousand dollars a month to share his bed and his canvases, though the canvases were more important to him than the bed. His career was successful and he made a small fortune selling his work in upscale galleries in Amsterdam. At night he trawled the bars and clubs looking for faces who could fill his nightmare paintings and by and large he found them. Now he sent one of the girls down to get them oysters and she returned with a vast plate of crustaceans wrapped in cellophane and bedded on crushed ice. They ate them on the floor with lemons and iced beers and hot green dipping sauce. Horst took off his clothes as well and soon they were all naked and smoking the joints while Horst painted the two girls. It was three in the morning when they came down. They went home separately and agreed to meet early the next morning at Colonial Mansions.
—
She was there with her family driver at seven. They had a coffee by the pool amid chattering pintails.
“I didn’t sleep,” she said cheerfully. “And yet I don’t feel tired at all.”
“It’s far too early—but I don’t feel tired either.”
She had brought her swimsuit and they went into the pool for a while and sipped their coffee at the edge with their bodies submerged. Then, at about eight, they headed out of the city in a clear blue morning tinged with yellow dust and found the long, straight road that swept past the darkened temples of Ta Phrom toward Chisor.
EIGHTEEN
At Ta Phrom they stopped and walked away from the dusty car park into the piles of stones and soon they had come to the great back wall which seemed to be shored up with wildflowers. A group of children had followed them with expertly desperate eyes and they murmured continuously to Sophal in Khmer as they wandered across to a new temple in the short shadows of morning. It was the hour when the grass is alive and butterflies swirled around them. She took his hand as they circled back to the ruins and picked their way into a sanctuary lit by a high skylight and then back to the car park where the driver waited. Between the pale yellow straps of her dress her shoulder blades had become lustrous with moisture and the silver watch on her wrist sparkled against a skin that now looked as dark as cinnamon bark. At Chisor, the vendors were not yet there and the vast steps leading to the top of the little mountain were empty. They began to climb and when they had cleared the treeline they stopped and sat on the steps next to a homemade shrine and felt their heartbeats. The horizon was flat and green, slightly hazed, and at its farthest limit the mauve clouds gathered in a line of tension.
“It’s the end of the rains,” she said, holding out her tongue. “I can taste it.”
The slopes were forest, singing with insects. Higher up, the surrounding plain appeared as a partial circumference with no signs of the present century. The sky’s blue flesh became richer and out of it poured a blinding sunlight. The steps ended in a cluster of temple outbuildings and a path that crested and then fell downward toward the ruins. At the highest point they rested again and Robert looked down at the endless flight of steps and he thought he saw a man standing there in the shade of a few trees. The figure was in a shabby dark suit and he was talking to a monk who had appeared out of nowhere and the two men were gesturing to each other in some manner. He squinted and then shaded his eyes and he thought, In this light one could hallucinate anything. He turned back to Sophal, who was looking the other way toward the ruins, which could not, in fact, be seen from that vantage point.
“I love it when there’s no one here,” she was saying.
“I wonder how many people have heart attacks on those steps.”
Leaning in, he kissed the glistening space between the shoulder straps. She flinched slightly.
His lips moved against her hot skin. “I think we’re being watched.”
“There’s always someone watching.”
No doubt it was true. Or half true.
She raised her eyebrows and her smile was slight, as if she for one didn’t mind being watched. As if that was a norm she could accept.
The downward path passed by some handsomely maintained new buildings, including a quadrangular pond. The paint white and gold and fresh. There were donation plaques from Buddhists in America. They came down into a kind of square with ancient trees and old people lying on the benches seemingly oblivious to them. Prayer flags moved in the wind and from the square they could look out over the dark green plain where the oval shadows of clouds moved like grazing cows. Behind them rose the ruins. Temples of Vishnu long toppled and scattered. They moved between the buildings in a gathering and claustrophobic heat and eventually climbed up through a weathered portal and onto the top of a flight of steps that led down to a terrace. Here they lay in the sun for a while. The wind flowed over them and there was no sound but that. Humans seemed not yet to have arrived in that landscape or to have left long ago—you couldn’t tell which. He reached over and laid his hand on her breast and the smile came back, the same slight, stone-carved smile that made her face so serene-looking and ancestral. She turned over and they began to kiss. Soon, however, he heard voices in the square and they got up and walked to the end of the terrace and sat there for a long time enfolded in each other until the clouds on the horizon advanced halfway across the plain. He could see her features in the stone faces above them. The bloodlines, ancient and unbroken, and the mouths with the same smiles. It was a matter of observation, not romantic fantasies. Then, as they watched the plain darken and a roll of thunder reached them, he felt a sudden wave of cold fear overtake him and he turned his head and looked up at the walls. There was no one there but it didn’t matter. There was something there, if not something in human form.
He said, “It’s going to rain, isn’t it? We should beat a retreat.”
He had never believed in the supernatural, but as they wandered slowly back through the ruins he permitted himself t
he feeling that comes with the nearness of ghosts. Inside the sanctuaries, candles had been lit which had not been lit before. There were flowers, dishes of sweets and incense, and the air had become denser with perfume. At the square the old people had roused themselves and watched them with less indifference. A few monks also sat there eating from plastic plates, though there were no tourists. They sauntered back up the hill to the covered platform where the steps began and sat there in the shade with some cold water they had bought from an old lady with an icebox near the pond. Sophal was thinking ahead to dinner with her parents that night. Should she invite the English boy as well? She was a little confused. She could never gauge how much her father could guess about her.
“What are you doing tonight?” she finally asked.
Robert shrugged and he was conscious of the gesture being lame. He was about to add something when she said, “You can come and have dinner with us tonight if you like. It’s a bit boring for you, but I’ll be there!”
“Then I’ll come.”
“I’ll call them when we’re driving back. You sure you don’t have other plans?”
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