by Michael Cart
He is still looking at me very serious. But then his face gets soft and kind again. He smiles and touches my face. “Oh, Lep, I’m sorry,” he says. “I was just surprised about how you speak English. Come on, let’s go. I don’t want to waste any time.”
In the taxi we hold hands and sit very close and talk about how much we miss each other. Talking is delicious. At the hotel we go right up to his room. Now we are impatient. He pulls my clothes off very fast and I pull off his. And tonight it is better than the first time, almost one year ago. Tonight we can say, “I love you,” and many other things too. And tonight is Saturday, so I don’t have to work tomorrow at the school or at the Khunying’s house. We don’t get out of bed until lunchtime on Sunday.
We eat lunch in the restaurant and we talk, talk, talk. If I don’t understand, I look in the dictionary. Now I can tell him about my life. “Very unfair that you can’t go to school, someone as smart as you who can learn English so well, so quickly,” he says.
I think from his voice maybe he is not happy that I am smart, but I tell myself I imagine it. I smile and lift my shoulders. “This is my life,” I say. “And my English not very good yet.”
He tells me about his life. He lives with his mother in a small house very far away from Paris. He works building the railroad track. He talks a lot about karate, how he goes to class every day, and now he can wear a black belt.
“It is very important to you to fight with other people?” I ask him, joking.
“No, not that. I do it because it makes me feel good, and to stay in shape.” He lights another cigarette.
After lunch we go to walk in the park, where there are many tall trees, and flowers, and a big lake. “But this is not like the real jungle, where my village is,” I tell him.
“Someday I would like to go to your village,” he says.
“I will be proud to take you there.” I am very happy he wants to go, and not only because I want to show him. I also don’t have enough money to go by myself—I have not been back to see my family and friends since I came to Bangkok four years ago.
Then I have to go to the toilet very bad. I know where it is, because when I am not studying I come to the park on my days off. “I have to go to the toilet. You can see it over there,” I tell him, pointing. “I have to hurry. I meet you there.”
I run to the toilet. Then inside I have to wait for somebody else to finish. He takes a long time. Finally I can go. I take a long time too. At last I come out.
Bernard is standing there waiting. He has the same very serious frowning face he had at the airport. “Who did you have sex with in there?” he says.
“Huh?” I say, not understanding.
“Sex. S. E. X. Look it up in your precious dictionary. You should know the word. You’re always looking for it.”
Now I understand. “Bernard, why you think I want to do that when I am with you?” I lower my voice. “I love you.”
“Easy to say that. Not so easy to explain why you were in the toilet for so long. Was he Thai or farang?” He lifts his hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.” He turns and walks away.
I feel like crying, except I already use up all my tears when I am a child. I hurry after him. I reach for his arm. “Bernard, I have to wait a long time for somebody else. Then it takes me a—”
He pushes my hand away. “I can hear in your voice you are lying.”
People are looking at us, but I don’t care. Now I am angry too. I grab his elbow and pull him around very hard to face me. “Stop it!” I shout at him. I know it is wrong to speak so loud in public, but I forget that now. “Stop being crazy man! You are imagine everything!” I lower my voice again. “After so many times with you last night, and you are right here waiting, you think I do that with another? Baa!” I say, meaning “crazy” in Thai.
Bernard’s mouth opens. His eyes are wide. Then he puts a hand over them and shakes his head. “Oh, Lep, my darling Lep,” he whispers, choking. He sounds like he is going to cry. “I’m sorry. I love you too much, that is the problem. Come back to the hotel with me. I have to hold you. Now.”
And back at the hotel it is even more passion than before, because first we were fighting, and now we are making up. Bernard has tears in his eyes while we make love. And afterward we sit together at the desk and he helps me with my English writing. He is a very gentle teacher, not like the teachers at my village school where they hit you when you make a mistake.
Every evening as soon as I am free I come to be with Bernard. I sleep with him at the hotel and get up at three to go to the market. We have sex all the time. We talk a lot. We eat together. He helps me with my English. I get almost no sleep. I have never been so happy.
Bernard tells me he really wants to go to my village—he has never been outside of Bangkok. And I am very proud to bring him to my home. So on the next weekend I get Saturday off from the Khunying—of course I will lose the pay, even though she is very, very rich. On Friday after work we take the overnight train to Surin, and then the bus to my village in the morning. We can stay there for one night.
Everybody is very impressed that I am with this tall rich farang. The babies cry when they see Bernard; they have never seen white skin before and think he is a ghost. Bernard is very polite. He has no problem using the Thai toilet or showering outside in his underpants with a basin and dipper or sleeping on a mat on the floor in the same room with everybody else. In the village Bernard is not jealous because he can see very clear that here, men never have sex with men, they cannot imagine it. So, of course, we cannot do it in the village. When we get back to the hotel in Bangkok on Sunday night we fall into each other’s arms.
Bernard has to go back to France the next Sunday. On the Saturday night before he leaves we go to a big disco. Here, women dance with women and men can dance together too! Bernard has never seen me dance before and he is very surprised to see that I dance very good, very funny and smiling, and I make up many steps. People stop dancing to watch me.
Then I have to go to the toilet. I run upstairs fast and go quickly and come down fast, remembering about the park. At first I can’t find Bernard when I come down. Then I see him at the bar, drinking whiskey. Normally he doesn’t drink it. I sit beside him and he orders more whiskey, and smokes one cigarette after the other. “Bernard, I come back form the toilet very fast,” I say.
“Did you?” He lifts his shoulders and takes a big drink of whiskey. When I ask him what is wrong he says nothing is wrong. He will not talk about it. I am very sad because this is our last night together. Soon we leave the disco. When we go to find a taxi he walks like a snake—he is very drunk. I ask him many times what is wrong and all he will say is, “Nothing.” I tell him this is our last night together, but he acts like he doesn’t care. Back at the hotel he will not let me touch him. He drinks the whiskey in the room and smokes cigarettes. And even though I am very worried and unhappy, I still go right to sleep, because I have been sleeping very little in all these two weeks.
I wake up when I feel something pressing down very hard on my face—Bernard, pushing a pillow down against my head. I can’t breathe!
Bernard is strong from karate. But I am very strong from working on the farm and working in construction—especially strong in my legs. I lift both feet and put them next to Bernard’s stomach and then I kick, with all the strength in my legs. The air comes out of Bernard’s mouth and he drops the pillow and falls backward off the bed onto the floor. He sits there on the floor with his back against the wall, trying to breathe.
Then he leans forward and cries and cries and cries. I have never seen anybody cry like this. Tears are running down his face and making the carpet dark. And even he just try to kill me I still love him. I don’t really understand why, except that for me love is a very strong feeling, stronger than anger and fear. I go over and sit beside him and put my arms around him. He holds on to me very tight. He can barely talk, he is crying so hard, but he tells me it was the way people were watching me dancing, and many
follow me up to the toilet. He says he is sorry he is so crazy, he has never loved anyone as much as me.
And then we make love right there on the carpet on the floor. This time it is more passion than ever before—because Bernard just try to kill me.
He leaves the next day. He gives me his picture and I keep it in my wallet. He tells me in many letters how sorry he is, how much he loves me. I write back that I love him more than before. It is true.
I work at the school, I work for the Khunying. I study English with another book, more difficult, so I can speak better with Bernard. I write to Bernard often. I tell him I love only him: I miss him so much, he is always on my mind. And I tell him when is school vacation. He writes back that he can’t wait to see me, he will take time off work to come sooner, he will come when is school vacation. We can go away together!
And finally Bernard comes back to Thailand for the third time, just when I have my vacation from the job at the school. We go to a beautiful island in Malaysia, Pulao Tioman. We live in a thatched bungalow on the beach. It rains and rains, but we don’t care, we are making love in the bungalow, day and night. When we don’t make love, Bernard helps me with English.
On the last night it is not raining and we go to a bar on the beach, and drink with the men from the island. I am happy, I forget, and I dance. The men clap for me. Bernard keeps drinking.
That night in the bungalow, naked, Bernard smashes a whiskey bottle and tries to cut my neck. I tell him, “No, Bernard, don’t do this!” but he will not stop, he pushes the broken bottle at my neck. I reach out fast and squeeze his balls, so very hard that he screams and drops the bottle and cuts his foot. He cries and cries while I clean and bind his foot, he says he is so sorry, so sorry, he loves me too much. And then we make love. Very passion—always special passion after Bernard tries to kill me, because we have terrible fight and then we make up. I feel passion too. I love him too.
But now I know Bernard is crazy. And I am beginning to be afraid of him.
Big storm next day, and the regular ferry is canceled. But we cannot wait, because Bernard has to catch a plane in Bangkok the next day to get back to work on time. We take a small fishing boat in the storm, with many other people. Very crowded, very rough water, and everybody is throwing up for six hours. Everybody but Bernard and me. We sit on the deck in the rain with our arms around each other, talking and laughing. I am thinking maybe I can forgive him, even he try to kill me two times.
We take the train from Kuala Lumpur to Penang, from Penang to Bangkok. At Penang we have to get off the train and do customs. Many people, long lines. While we wait, I talk to some Thai students. They see me with Bernard and ask me about the handsome farang; I tell them we are very good friends, on holiday together. They think I am very lucky.
On the train again, Bernard is not talking. He is angry. But I know he cannot kill me on the train in front of all the other people. So I close my eyes to sleep, hoping he will not be angry any more when I wake up.
When I wake up Bernard is gone. I wait, but he does not come back from the toilet. I look all over the train. He is not in the toilet. He is not on the train.
Then I feel my pocket and the breath goes out of me. My passport is gone. My heart starts to beat very strong. My wallet is gone, with all my money and my ID card and Bernard’s picture.
Now I understand, and my heart goes hard. Bernard was jealous because I was talking to the Thai students. He took my wallet and my passport and got off the train, leaving me alone, with nothing. Lucky we are already in Thailand and I don’t have to go through immigration.
This time I cannot forgive Bernard. I cannot love him now. When he try to kill me he was drunk, not thinking, not in control. But this time he is not drunk, very in control, very thinking. What he do this time is worse.
In Bangkok it takes me very long time to get new passport, new ID card, especially because I have no money. I have to walk everywhere, and Bangkok is very big. Letters from Bernard come to the school, but I do not open them, I throw them away. When I finally get new passport and new ID card, I try to find new job. I don’t want Bernard to know where I live. And I think maybe I can get better job, more money, now that I can speak English because of Bernard.
I get a job as a bartender, easier work and more money. The owner likes me because I speak English with a French accent, he says. The bar is on a street with many bars where girls dance on platforms in swimsuits and wear numbers. Many farangs come and drink, and if a farang likes a girl, he pay the bar and she has to go with him.
The customers like me, because I make many jokes with them in English and we all laugh a lot. Sometimes I get up on the platform and dance, not for work like the girls, but for fun. The customers like this very much. They call me, “Lep the dancing bartender.” More customers come because of me. The owner sees this, and he pay me more money.
Now I have my own room to live in, and many friends, and a new life.
And one customer tells another, and another tells another, about me. And one night a farang comes to the bar who works for the English newspaper in Bangkok. He does not come for the girls, he comes to meet me. He is not as handsome as Bernard. I do not fall in love with him in one night, like with Bernard. For many days we just talk in English, about everything. He loves to talk to me and thinks I am very smart and writes down many things I say.
And after we know each other for a month, we finally sleep together. By the time we do, we know we love each other. It is a deeper feeling than the love I had for Bernard. This time it is real.
He is not jealous, he is not crazy like Bernard.
We are building a house in my village. I was always the poorest, and now I have the most beautiful house. I have everything that I ever dreamed of in my life.
Sometimes I think about Bernard and I wonder: How could I imagine I love someone who is so crazy? And then I think: Where will I be now, if I never knew him?
DYKE MARCH
BY ARIEL SCHRAG
THE MISSING PERSON
BY JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
That was the summer I gave up on being a boy, and became a girl instead. Most people didn’t notice the difference, because it wasn’t a matter of what I wore, or even how I acted. But something changed in my heart that year, and never changed back.
I didn’t know the word transgendered back then, and even after I learned the word it would be years and years before I could say it out loud. But the summer between eighth and ninth grades I knew that somehow I had left the world of boys for good, and began slowly, blindly, feeling my way toward the world of women.
We’d moved that June into a house in Devon, Pennsylvania, a town famous for its weeklong horse show and country fair. For the last week of May and the first week of June, Devon was filled with men and women wearing jodhpurs and carrying riding crops, open jumpers, hunters, and the Budweiser Clydesdales. Women in long dresses sat in the backs of antique horse-drawn carriages, and as I stood in the front yard of our house, I watched as they rolled down the street away from me and waved good-bye.
People said our house was haunted, that a girl who had drowned in the 1920s floated through the hallways, or paced around and around in the attic. The bedroom that I was sleeping in had been hers, a long time ago.
In the summertime I kept all of the windows open in my room, and sometimes late at night I’d hear, on the street outside, the sound of a single rider approaching, the hooves clopping ominously as the horse drew nearer and nearer.
Other times, I heard—or imagined that I could hear—the sound of small footsteps going around and around in a circle on the floor of the attic over my head.
My dog, Sausage—a fat, demented Dalmatian—raised her head and listened to the footsteps and growled.
You know who that is, Sausage? I said to the dog. That’s somebody who isn’t really there.
The dog nodded. Sausage had a pretty good sense of what the deal was. Somebody who isn’t really there? the dog said. You mean—someo
ne like you?
That was the same summer that some friends of my parents—the Reynoldses—welcomed an exchange student named Li Fung into their house. Li Fung came from Taiwan and had come to America in order to study English.
She’d been at the Reynoldses’ house for only a few days, though, when she suddenly disappeared. She’d gone up to her room before dinner one night, locked the door, and vanished.
When the Reynoldses called her down for dinner, there was no response, and with a sense of rising panic, they banged on her door. Mr. Reynolds eventually kicked the door open with his foot, sending the deadbolt skittering across the room.
When they entered Li Fung’s bedroom, they found her shoes placed neatly together at the foot of her bed. Her window—like me, she lived on the third floor of an old, supposedly haunted house—was closed. The closet door, which held the very few articles of clothing Li Fung had brought with her from Taiwan, was slightly ajar. On her bed, open and facedown, was a copy of a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
The police were called in, including a pair of detectives who checked the room for signs of forced entry. There were none. No one had propped a ladder up and climbed to the third floor and hauled her off; no one had tampered with the lock. Li Fung had simply gone up to her room and turned to steam.
Sometimes I considered the mystery of Li Fung as I lay in my bed listening to the soft creak of footsteps from the attic or the clop of horses’ hooves on the street. It seemed to me that the secret of the disappearance lay in the open copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull that had been left upon her bed. My theory? She’d fallen into the book.
I knew it was a tragedy and everything; and there was no doubt that the Reynoldses, whom I’d see in the days to come drinking gin in our black living room with my parents, had been fundamentally unraveled by the turn of events. But there was a part of me that was resentful of Li Fung as well, just dissolving into nothing like that. To me it seemed she’d taken the easy way out.