PR04 - Queen of Patpong

by Timothy Hallinan

  The man who was staring at her—what was his name? The girls he talked to had told her.

  So many names.

  Howard. His name was Howard.

  Chapter 18

  Rose

  Rose,” Howard announces. “Your name should be Rose.”

  They’re curled up, Howard pressed against her back, on the endless bed in his hotel room, which he keeps so cold that Kwan always puts on a shirt before she goes to sleep. They’re both fully clothed: This is one of the nights when Howard just buys her out and gives her, as he says, a vacation.

  “Cannot say,” Kwan replies. She tries to pronounce it, but it comes out “Lote.” She pushes her rump against him. “Good, no good?”

  “No good. Terrible. Listen: Rose. Hear it? Now: Lote. Do they sound the same to you?”

  “Not when you talking.”

  “Okay,” Howard says. “What’s the name of the fat man in the red suit who comes and gives everybody presents?”

  Kwan pauses for a moment, assembling the sounds in her head before saying them. She’s been working on this one for weeks. “Santa . . . Claut. No, no, no. Clauzzzz. Santa Clauzzz.”

  “Good. And when does he come? And if you say ‘Chritmat,’ I’ll make you eat raw red meat for dinner.”

  “Chrizzzmazzz,” she says very carefully.

  “See? You can do it. Rose.”

  Her face tense with effort, Kwan says, “Lozzze.”

  “Progress,” he says. “We’re making progress.”

  She wants a cigarette, but it seems like too much work to roll over and reach for her purse, and Howard’s body is the warmest thing in the room. So she heaves a nicotine-deprived sigh and says, “Why Lozzze? Why not easy name?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know farang name.”

  “Vicki,” Howard suggests.

  Rose says, “Wicki.”

  “Okay, no good. Tallulah.”

  Rose is laughing even before she tries it. “Tarrurrurru.” She reaches back and slaps his thigh. “Not real name.”

  “Owww. Of course it’s a real name. But Rose is better.”

  “Lozzze.”

  “The middle of your tongue,” Howard says. “Not the end of your tongue. Just bring the middle of your tongue partway up. Not all the way, not so it touches, just partway. Rrrrrrrrrose.”

  “Rrrrrote,” Kwan says. “Cannot. Why . . . that name? Why that name good?”

  “Hold it,” Howard says.

  Kwan says, “Hold what? I no see it.”

  “Oh, great, now you’re funny in English.” He gets up, the bed creaking as his weight leaves it, and goes to the coffee table. The room they’re in is the one he always brings her to, an enormous, overfurnished space with a king-size bed, two televisions—one on each side of the carved wooden partition that almost divides the room in two—a work desk, and a couch and coffee table. There’s a refrigerator full of little drinks at prices that horrified Kwan when Howard read them to her. The room’s longest wall is covered with floor-to-ceiling curtains that can be pulled back to reveal Bangkok sparkling all the way to the edge of the earth. The room is much bigger than the two rooms Kwan shares with Fon and her friends.

  She’s been keeping some of her clothes in the closet for weeks.

  Howard leans down and grabs a magazine from the coffee table, its cover shiny and vibrant with color. Rose has leafed through it several times, checking the pictures and puzzling out some of the simpler English words. It’s a magazine for farang tourists that pretends to tell them something about Thailand as an excuse to print advertisements for jewelry stores where the stones are artificially colored and Indian tailors whose clothes, Kwan has been told, never fit. He leafs through it. “Here,” he says. “In Chiang Mai.” He folds the magazine back and carries it over to her.

  “Oh,” she says, looking at the picture. “Dawk goolap.”

  “In English, rose,” Howard says. “Rose. It’s the queen of flowers. That’s what farang people say. And you’re the queen of—”

  “Of what?”

  Howard leans down and kisses her on the lips, very lightly. “Of everything.”

  “Pahk waan,” she says. “Sweet mouth.”

  “You’re Rose to me. You can be anyone you want when I’m not around, but for me you’re Rose.”

  Kwan says, “Rrrrozzzzze.” She looks up at him, and he grins and nods. “Okay. In the bar, everywhere. I Rrrrrozzze.”

  Howard says, “What would you like to eat, Rose? You can have anything in Bangkok.”

  Rose says, “We in Bangkok, na? We eat Thai food, okay? Phet maak maak.” Very spicy, which Howard hates.

  Howard goes to the closet to get a clean shirt. He changes his clothes all the time. He says, “What a surprise.”

  She tries, not very hard, to reach her purse and comes up short. “Can I have coat?”

  “It’s not cold.”

  “Have cigarette in coat.”

  “Make a deal. You can smoke a cigarette if I can eat American.”

  “No problem. You eat American, I eat Thai.”

  “You win.” He takes the jacket off the hanger and says, “Why so heavy?”

  “Oh,” Rose says, remembering. “Nothing. You just bring, okay?”

  But he already has his hand in the pocket. “What in the world is this?” He holds up a smooth, dark stone.

  She looks at it in his hand, remembers picking it up that morning. She says, “For luck.”

  “Fine,” Howard says. “I suppose it’s lighter than a horseshoe.” He starts to put the stone back in the pocket.

  “Throw away,” Rose says.

  He stands there, jacket in one hand and stone in the other. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She gets off the bed and goes to him, takes the stone, and drops it with a thunk into the wastebasket. “Now I Rrrozzze. I no need luck.”

  THE RAIN PELTS down outside, and the fluorescents are flickering, suggesting a power failure in the near future. Thai music stutters through the speaker system. Every few minutes a sopping farang opens the curtains over the doorway, peers in, sees the women smoking and putting on makeup, and backs out again. “I’m just saying it, that’s all. Oom ran away from him. Maybe she knew something you don’t.”

  Fon helps herself to some dried squid, a heap of which is creating a spreading grease spot on a fold of paper towels. All over the club, girls look into mirrors as they apply makeup or sit still with their eyes closed as their friends do it for them.

  “You don’t know what happened with Oom,” Rose says. Unlike the others she is neither made up nor making up. She won’t be working tonight, because Howard has paid the bar fine for weeks to come. She just stopped by to talk with Fon.

  Fon nips off a length of squid and says, “And neither do you.”

  “They had a fight, just before he left the country. He didn’t think it was important, but when he came back, Oom wasn’t anywhere he could find her.”

  “A fight about what?”

  “About nothing. Howard wanted to take her to Singapore, and Oom didn’t want to go.”

  Fon regards the squid skeptically. “Why wouldn’t she want to go?”

  “How would I know? He’d helped her get a passport. He said she never argued about getting the passport, just about using it.”

  “Right. She didn’t want to go to Singapore.”

  “You saw him. You saw how upset he was.”

  “I saw how fast he took you out, too.”

  Rose surprises herself by bringing a flat hand down on the tabletop with a crack that snaps every head in the bar toward her. Fon jerks back a few inches, blinking. “We didn’t do anything,” Rose says. “Not for months. He just wanted to talk. He bought me out and took me to dinner and talked, and then he gave me money and I went home. You should know, I was always home before you got there. It was eight or nine months before we even kissed each other. We just talked.”

  “Talked about what? About Oom?�
� This is the first time Fon has ever gotten angry at Rose. “What is there to say about Oom for all those months? ‘Oh, no, she’s gone. I looked everywhere. I miss her. I don’t know why she left.’ How long did that take? Five seconds? And she was pretty, Oom was, but nobody would call her interesting. So what was there to talk about all that time?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t like it, that’s all.” Fon snatches another piece of squid as though she expects the paper towel to be yanked away at any moment. “How do we know what happened to her? She’s here one night and then she’s gone forever.”

  “They fought,” Rose says patiently. “She didn’t want to see him. So she didn’t come back to the bar. She went someplace where he wouldn’t find her.”

  “He loves Oom so much and then, bang, he loves you.”

  Rose looks away and sees rainwater seeping in beneath the curtained doorway. Drunk men will slip and fall later. She draws a slow, long breath. “One more time. Oom left him. What’s he supposed to do, cry for the rest of his life?”

  “There’s something wrong with men who fall in love with prostitutes,” Fon says. “They’re missing something.”

  Rose feels a worm of unease in her gut, but she says, “Maybe he doesn’t think of me just as a prostitute. Maybe he thinks of me as a person.”

  Fon starts to say something but shakes her head. “Up to you. Just be careful, that’s all. I don’t want to have to nurse you through a broken heart.”

  “Howard can’t break my heart.”

  Fon studies the squid as she shreds it between her fingers. “You even let him change your name.”

  “Rose is better. Farang men can remember Rose. Nobody remembered Kwan.”

  “So what?” Fon says. “They just came in and asked, ‘Where’s the tall girl?’ That worked, didn’t it? We always knew who they meant.”

  “Not the same.” Rose rummages through her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Anyway, what do you care?”

  “What do I care?” Fon places her greasy fingertips, widely spread, in the center of her chest. “We’re supposed to be friends.”

  “We are,” Rose says, reaching over and taking Fon’s wrist, tugging the hand off her chest and stroking her own cheek with it, leaning against it and smelling the squid. “You’re the best friend I ever had.”

  “That’s not fair,” Fon says, pulling her hand away.

  “What’s not fair?” Rose lights her cigarette.

  “Going all sweet like that. I’m serious. I don’t want you getting hurt. What do you really know about him?”

  “I know a lot about him.”

  “Where he’s from,” Fon says, “if it’s true. What he does for a living, if it’s true. What he wants with you, if it’s true. You don’t know whether anything is true.”

  “I know a lot more about Howard than I do about the strangers I go with every night.”

  “You think.”

  “Fon.” Rose closes her eyes and leans on her friend’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go with different men all the time. I hate it. I don’t want to have customers staring at me while I’m dancing, wondering what I’ll let them do to me in bed, or how much hair I have down there, or whether I’m wearing a padded bra. I don’t want to smile at men I hoped I’d never see again. I don’t want to watch men flipping coins to see who gets me. I don’t want to lie to everybody about working here a month or two when it’s been almost two years. I want to tell the truth to somebody, and I want to tell the truth all the time. And I don’t want to remember any more names.”

  Fon plucks the forgotten cigarette from Rose’s hand and knocks the ash onto the floor, then takes a deep drag. “So,” she says. “What does he want with you?”

  Rose says, “He wants to marry me.”

  Fon puts a forearm on the table and rests her forehead on it.

  Rose lays a hand on Fon’s hair. “It’ll be fine. He’ll take care of me. I won’t have to work like this.”

  Without lifting her head, Fon says, “What about the dowry?”

  “He understands about the dowry. He’s going to—”

  “Why?” Fon demands. “Why does he understand about the dowry? Farang don’t know about dowries.”

  On the other side of the curtain, the sound of the rain doubles. “I explained it to him.”

  “He didn’t learn about it by promising to marry any other—”

  “Stop.” Rose listens to the rain hammering down, wishing it were so loud that she and Fon couldn’t hear each other. “We talked about it. He’s going to give my parents more money than they ever thought they’d get.” She caresses Fon’s hair. “Fon. He’s going to take care of Mai. Of my sister. He says he’ll frighten my father so much that my father won’t even think about doing anything bad.”

  “He’ll even take care of your sister,” Fon says as the lights go out, plunging the bar into blackness, and the music stops dead. Fon says, “He’s thought of everything.”

  WHEN SHE ASKS herself later whether she should have known that something was wrong, she remembers a hundred things. Inconsistencies in some of the things he told her. The friends, big, fit men very much like himself, but taciturn and reserved, whom she instinctively disliked. The occasional flashes of anger over things most Thais would have laughed off.

  One evening in the hotel room, she had drawn a house, just an ordinary village house. It was a daydream in pencil. Like half the girls she knew, she was hoping that she could build a new house for her parents and her brothers and sisters someday, but her imagination went no further than the kind of house she’d grown up in.

  She’d been sitting at the desk, hunched over a piece of hotel stationery. Her lap was full of bits of pink eraser, from the messy, rubbed-looking spot in the house wall where she’d placed a second window, which she thought was a daring innovation. Still, the house would have fit into any Isaan village without attracting a glance: a single room raised a meter above the ground, a door in the center of one wall, a few steps leading up.

  She had run out of ideas, so she’d put a sun in the corner of the sky and was drawing a dog under the house when she felt him behind her.

  “For your mom and dad?” Howard asked over her shoulder.

  “Maybe,” she said, suddenly shy. She covered the sketch with her hand, but he slid the hand aside.

  “Scoot,” he said. “It’s a big chair.”

  Rose shifted sideways, and Howard perched himself on the edge of the seat. He took the pencil from her hand, moving so fast she barely saw it, and began to make bold, heavy strokes, ruler-straight. She watched as the house got bigger, saw a second room appear, and then Howard sketched a big central window, four times the size of the one she’d drawn and all one big pane, like the windows in the hotel. Finally he tilted his head, studied the page for a moment, and added a modern roof, raised in the center, instead of the flat pitch of corrugated iron she’d visualized.

  It was a real house.

  “Room,” she half whispered. “Mai can have a room.”

  “Here,” Howard said, and he scrubbed at the paper with the eraser for a moment and blew on it, and in the blank space a third room appeared, with its own little door and window. He obliterated some of the deck on the left and redrew it, bigger, to accommodate the addition. “She gets her own door,” he said, pointing the pencil tip at it.

  “Lek, too,” Rose said, looking at the door as though she wanted to go through it.

  “Who’s Lek?”

  “Other sister,” Rose said. She let her index finger hop up the stairs.

  “Yeah?” Howard said without looking at her. “How old?”

  “Only eight. No worry yet.”

  “Sure,” Howard said. He drew a little stick figure in a skirt on the stairs and then rubbed the eraser on her index finger until she moved it. “She can stay here, too.”

  She stared at the page and at the strong hand resting at its edge. The desk light was on, and it made a reddish gold fri
nge out of the hairs on the back of his fingers.

  Howard said, “We can do this.”

  Rose reluctantly stopped looking at the house and met his eyes. “Can . . . ?”

  “Build this. We can build this for your family.”

  “I save money,” Rose says. “Have. In bank.” She passes a finger over Mai’s room. “But this—maybe not enough.”

  “I can pay for it. I will pay for it.”

  She said, “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  “They’re going to be my family, too.”

  Rose leaned forward and rests her head on the pad. She closes her eyes.

  Howard said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just happy. Want to stay like this.”

  He put his hand on the back of her neck and rubbed, and she lifted her head and saw his other hand, still holding the pencil, only inches from her face. “You hand,” she said. “You hand have hair too much.”

  “Because I’m a guy,” Howard said. “More guy than a roomful of cops.”

  “Hair too much,” she said, and she picked up his hand, closed her teeth on a few of the hairs growing on the back of his ring finger, and yanked them out.

  “Shit!” Howard said, and he shoved her away, so hard she slid off the chair and hit the floor. “Goddamn.”

  She looked up at him, amazed, and found him shaking his hand in the air, and she thought it looked funny, until she saw his eyes. When she saw his eyes, she backed away, two or three feet across the floor, without even getting up.

  He looked down at her and through her, and it seemed to take a few seconds for him to bring his eyes out of the hole he had stared in her so he could focus on her face. When he did, he grinned. “That hurt,” he said. “Did I push you off?”

  She nodded, still watching his face.

  “Well, you had it coming.” He looked down at his hand and then blew on his fingers. She had taught him how to blow on what hurt, to make it feel better. “There,” he said. He shook the hand as though it were wet. “All fine now.” He extended the other hand. “Come back up here. I’m sorry. And look, I have a new idea for the house.”