The two of them are sitting on the floor of the larger of the two rooms that Fon and now Kwan share with two other women from the bar. The others are out eating a very late breakfast. After her sixth night of serving drinks, Kwan put some tip money into the pool for the weekly rent, and the next morning Fon gave her a key. With the door locked behind her and Bangkok held at bay three stories down, she almost feels at home.
Kwan says, "But most of the girls want to go with the younger ones."
"Girls are crazy," Fon says, looking for the ashtray. She gets to her knees and hobbles dwarflike toward the three-legged table, stretching an arm out, and Kwan knots a fist in the back of Fon's T-shirt to keep her from falling on her face. Fon laughs and leans farther, and Kwan has to use both hands to keep her upright. When Fon has a grip on the ashtray, Kwan pulls her back, and when Fon lands on her rump, they're both laughing.
"It's a job, not a date," Fon says. "Some girls never figure that out. They keep going after the young, handsome ones, and when they get one, they lord it over girls like me, girls who make three times as much money as they do. It's as if they have to fool themselves every night that it's really about love, like the only reason they're up there is because it's the natural place to meet the solid-gold man, the handsome, good-hearted young farang with the big bank account who's waited his whole life to fall in love with some worn-out bar girl so he can marry her and support her whole family for the rest of his life."
"But that happens," Kwan says, feeling very young. She waits, but Fon doesn't respond. "Doesn't it?"
"Oh, honey," Fon says, putting her free hand on top of Kwan's and tapping the ash from her cigarette with the other. "Not you, too. Yes, it happens. Maybe eight or nine times a year, but it never works. The guys lie about how much money they have, or they lie about not being married already, or they lie about when they have to go back home. So some dumb girl goes through the marriage ceremony, and promises her mother and father they're going to be rich, and gives it to him for free for three or four months, and then one day she wakes up and he's in Australia. Not even a note." She takes an ambitious drag. "And then there are the girls who marry a guy just so they can steal everything he's got. They get the fool to buy a house, which has to be in her name because he's not Thai, and one day they sell the paper on the house for half of what it's worth, empty out the loving hubby's bank account, and run north."
Kwan says, "It never works?"
Fon turns the coal of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray with great delicacy, shaving off a fine film of ash. "It didn't for me."
"Oh," Kwan says. "I'm sorry. I didn't know-"
"How could you? I didn't tell you. No reason to. It didn't matter. No broken heart. I didn't love him. I loved the idea of a passport, and a house in wherever it was, and money going up to my family every month. When he disappeared, the only thing that really upset me was that I hadn't been sending money home. I'd stopped working, and he kept telling me it took time for his bank in… in Germany, I think, to transfer everything he owned here. He couldn't even give my parents a dowry payment until the money arrived, and it didn't, and then it didn't some more. After a couple of months, he said he'd have to go home to handle it. And I went to the airport with him and hugged him and even managed to cry a little. And he never came back to me."
"You never saw him again?"
"Oh, sure. About a year later. I'd changed bars, but he didn't know that. He figured he was safe as long as he stayed out of my old bar. And I was in the back room when he came in, so he sat at the edge of the stage without having any idea I was there."
Kwan glances at the window. The afternoon is starting to fade, and the evening looms ahead of her, bright and full of noise. "What did you do?"
"I went onstage like always, but I changed places with the girl who was dancing in front of him, and then I leaned down and picked up his drink. He looked up and saw me, and I gave him a big, friendly smile and spit in his drink. I'd been saving spit since I saw him walk in, so there was a lot of it. Then I put the drink down and went up and down the stage, telling every girl that he was an asshole and pointing at him so he'd know what I was doing."
"What did he do?"
Fon drags on the cigarette, squinting against the smoke. "If he'd been smart, he would have left right then, but he couldn't let me see that I'd chased him out, so he waited until my shift was over and I'd left the stage, and then he threw down some money and almost ran out. By then I'd put a wrapper over my dancing clothes, and I counted to ten or something and then went out and watched him go into the Play Pen. I gave him a few minutes, just to make sure he was staying, and then I followed him in and told the manager-" She breaks off, looking doubtfully at Kwan. "Have you been into the Play Pen?"
"I've never been to any of the bars except the Candy Cane."
"I'll take you around some night when we're off. Well, the thing about the Play Pen is that about half the girls are ladyboys. So I told the manager that he'd walked out of my bar complaining because it only had girls, so he should tell the ladyboys to go to work on him. There were four of them hanging on to him when I left."
Kwan starts to laugh. Fon watches her solemnly, and then she stubs out her cigarette. "Once in a million years, it works. Getting married to a customer, I mean. Out of maybe five hundred girls I know, two of them have done it and made it last. One of them is here, one's in America. But it's nothing you should think about. This is not about love. When you finally get up on that stage, just remember, it's a market and you're the best-looking cut of meat. Get every penny you can and forget the rest of it. What time is it?"
Kwan looks at Nana's watch. "Four o'clock."
"We've got two hours before work, then," Fon says, "and I can't look another minute at that schoolgirl haircut."
Chapter 14
Silk That Thinks It's Cotton
"Oh, no." The ladyboy in front of the mirror clutches his heart as though it's stopped in midbeat. He or she is broad-shouldered and heavyset beneath the flowered gown and the cloud of scarves, and wears shoulder-length hair, dyed midnight black, curled under at the ends, 1940s style. So much black makeup surrounds his eyes that Kwan thinks he looks like he's wearing a mask. Five-o'clock shadow prickles its way through a thick layer of pancake, but his voice is a flute. "Darling," the ladyboy says in English, "what did they cut it with? A lawn mower?"
Kwan decides to think of the ladyboy as "she," since it seems polite to let her be what she wants to be. In English she replies, "Not understand."
"That hair." The ladyboy raises both hands chest high, palms out and fingers curved in, shaking them in mock terror, like a starlet confronted by the half-eaten corpse that's always lurching out of the closet in Thai movies. The gesture rattles the beads on the twelve or so bracelets that circle each wrist. "My God, my God-that's English, by the way," she tells Kwan in Thai, in a matter-of-fact tone, "and you should learn it. When anyone says something surprising or when you want to pretend some customer has impressed you by, for example, the size of his equipment, you say 'Oh, my God.' "
Kwan carefully repeats, "Oh, my God," and gets a nod of approval. Then she says, "Equipment?"
"Later." The ladyboy lifts Kwan's hair and drops it. "Terrible, terrible. Who did this to you, your mother?"
"Yes."
"Oh, well, excuse me. I'm sure she meant well. But look at you, just look at you." She puts her hands on the sides of Kwan's head and swivels her face toward the mirror. Kwan tries to look at herself but sees Fon reflected behind her, laughing, and she laughs, too.
"I don't want to hear any laughing at all," the ladyboy says. "This is serious, even tragic. There isn't enough beauty in the world to waste it this way. You may not be responsible for the fact that you're beautiful, but you are responsible for taking care of it. It makes people feel better, seeing something beautiful. Don't you want people to feel better, don't you want to lift them out of their gray, muffled, boxed-in lives for a minute or two and put a silvery little sli
ver of light in their souls? That's what beauty is, you know-it's tiny glimmers of light left over from the Creation. You're Buddhist, of course, but in the farang holy book, which is called the Bible, practically the first words out of God's lips, and I'm sure they were very nice lips, are 'Let there be light.' There was probably quite a lot of it, too, Him being God and all. Most of it's gone, now, of course-the light, I mean, we've pissed on the flame by living such dreary, cowardly lives-but there are still bits of it here and there. Sunsets, music, really good jewelry. A face like yours. Don't you want to share it?"
"I don't-" Kwan begins, and stops.
"What is her problem?" the ladyboy asks Fon.
Fon says, "She doesn't know she's beautiful."
"Ohhh." The ladyboy puts the tips of four straight fingers over her mouth as though warning herself not to say something unseemly. "How very unusual. Most of the time, I work on cotton that wants to be silk, and here I am working on silk that thinks it's cotton." She laces her fingers together and holds them in front of her chest, palms touching, like someone about to beg a favor. "Let's go slowly, shall we? Sit down, please." She turns the chair toward Kwan and makes a show of dusting the seat with her longest scarf.
"The hair first," Fon says, sitting on a plastic chair against the wall and picking up a magazine with a girl's face on the cover. "And, Kwan, this is Tra-La. Like singing."
"Of course the hair first," Tra-La says severely. "Do I come to your bar and tell you how to dance?" To Kwan she says, "But you are going to have to sit. I can't cut you on tiptoe."
"Sorry," Kwan says. She eases herself into the seat. "Nice to meet you."
"Yes, I'm sure it is." Tra-La swings the chair around to face the mirror. She puts her fingertips lightly on Kwan's cheekbones and tilts her head right and left, then up and down. "It really isn't fair," she says. "No bad angles at all. What's your name?"
"Kwan."
"Well, you'll have to do something about that, won't you?" She's taking out one pair of scissors after another, snipping the air with them once or twice, then replacing them in a black metal cylinder that's bristling with them.
"Why? It's my name."
"And it's a pretty name, but not for a bar." She finally chooses a very slender, very silvery pair and holds it, point upward, while she musses Kwan's hair with her other hand. She ruffles it, lifts it, and lets it fall. "It's the Kwan that means 'spirit,' right? Not exactly the world's sexiest name."
"I'm not sexy."
"Just look how your hair falls. Like it was blow-dried by angels before you were born. Darling, if you're not sexy, I'm an army sergeant. You just give me half an hour here and we'll discuss it further. Oh, my goodness, I'm so distracted I forgot to cover you up. Can't have you getting hair all over your awful clothes." Tra-La puts down the scissors and grabs a length of white cloth, which she tosses over Kwan's shoulders and fastens at the neck with a hair clip. Then she picks up a spray bottle, says, "Close your eyes," and begins to mist Kwan's hair.
"Smells nice."
"Lavender," Tra-La says. "I make it myself. One must do the little things, you know. Otherwise we might as well live in holes and eat roots. Have you honestly never looked at your hair and thought, 'What does my mother have against me?' "
"Never." Kwan feels a surge of loyalty toward her mother. "At school everybody's hair looks like this."
"Yes, but I was at school, too, as hard as that may be for you to accept, and believe me, darling, most of your classmates deserve hair like this. Oh, I wish I had another five or six inches to work with, but we'll do what we can, and then later we'll play with it some more." She begins to snip, and bits of cold, wet hair land on Kwan's cheeks.
She opens her eyes and sees herself staring back from the mirror beyond Tra-La's busy hands. "I don't want to look."
"Whyever not?"
"I don't like to look at myself."
"Fine with me." Tra-La turns the chair ninety degrees so Kwan is facing the window. "The light is better this way."
From her chair against the wall, Fon says, "Didn't they have any mirrors in your village?"
"Yes," Kwan says. "I just didn't look in them." To Tra-La, who seems sympathetic, she says, "Everybody called me Stork."
"Well, honey, fuck all of them and the dirt they sit on. You're in Bangkok now, where people can tell diamonds from dung. Lift your chin." Tra-La is snipping, very quickly, the hair that falls over Kwan's forehead, holding the scissors almost vertical, and a fine rain of hair sifts down past Kwan's eyes. "This works," Tra-La says, nodding agreement with herself. She backs up and cocks her head with her eyes narrowed and her lips tight, then wields the scissors again. "This works just fine."
As Tra-La busies herself, Kwan watches people go past the window, which faces onto Patpong. Here and there she sees groups of bar girls dart through the crowd, their hair wet and gleaming from their afternoon showers, shiny as fish, all talking at once as they go to one of the neighboring restaurants for food to take to the bar. They'll eat as they put on their makeup, and discuss last night's dreams and the lottery numbers they're playing, and say awful things about the women who haven't arrived yet. The metal pipes that frame the night-market booths have been clamped together, lights are snapping on in bar doorways, and neon is beginning to add its acid sizzle to the night. Kwan feels Fon's eyes on her and realizes that her friend has lowered the magazine and is watching with fascination as Tra-La works.
Tra-La turns and follows Kwan's gaze, and when her eyes meet Fon's, Fon smiles. "Oh, yes," Tra-La says, eyebrows arched. "I'm exactly that good."
Kwan says, "What? What does that mean?"
"You just sit there, Miss Thailand, and let me do my magic." The scissors snick near Kwan's ears, and the short, straight snips of hair accumulate in her lap, and after fifteen minutes or so Tra-La steps back and says, "Hmmmm." She lowers the hand with the scissors in it, takes several more steps back, then tosses the scissors onto the table in front of the mirror, where they land with a clatter. She attacks Kwan's hair with both hands, fluffing it, tugging it, yanking it on top so vigorously that Kwan feels her eyebrows lift. Tra-La keeps toying with Kwan's hair as she circles the chair, and Kwan realizes that the ladyboy is humming. Tra-La leans across Kwan to get the scissors, moving so fast she bumps the back of Kwan's head without even noticing, and waves the scissors around until she finds a spot to improve, just a snip here and a snip there, while Fon watches the process, not even noticing when the magazine slips from her lap. Finally Tra-La gets a dryer and spends a minute or two grabbing hold of bits of hair, stretching them out, curling them around her finger, hitting them with the hot air, shaping Kwan's head in a way that reminds Kwan of the way she patted her bag of treasure back into its teardrop shape.
Then Tra-La puts down the dryer and says, "Indulge me." She grabs a shoe box full of little jars and bottles, opens one, and spreads something soft and fragrant over the skin on Kwan's face. Kwan sees Fon get up and come closer, but Tra-La says, "Eyes closed, please," so Kwan closes her eyes, and for what seems like a long time she gives herself over to this stranger's fingers on her face, smoothing, patting, massaging, whisking soft brushes across her cheekbones and spreading a moistened thumb beneath them, toying with her hair again, and then doing something with a creamy-feeling pencil to her eyebrows and upper eyelids. "Open your eyes and look up," Tra-La says, and when she does, Kwan sees Fon leaning in, no more than a foot or two from her face, the tip of her tongue trapped between her teeth, as Tra-La draws a line on Kwan's lower lid. "Look at these lashes," Tra-La says to Fon. "Long as palm fronds. It'd be a sin to put goop on them." She purses her mouth, studying Kwan's eyes in a way that seems completely impersonal and doesn't make her uncomfortable at all. "Maybe just a little shine, what do you think?"
Fon says, "Yes," and Tra-La opens a slender tube that has a tiny brush in it and tells Kwan once again to look up. The brush barely touches Kwan's lower lashes before she's ordered to look down, and she feels the strokes, almost as soft as Tra-
La's breath, on her upper lashes. Tra-La screws the brush back into the tube, and she and Fon move away. Tra-La says, "Yes, yes, yes," and drapes an arm comfortably over Fon's shoulders, and the two of them stare at Kwan as though she were a photo in a magazine.
Then Fon starts to laugh, and after a surprised pause Tra-La joins in. Fon is laughing so hard that she bends forward and rests her hands on her knees, and Tra-La wipes her eyes and smears black makeup over the bridge of her nose.
Kwan feels the heat mounting in her face. With an abrupt jerk, she swivels the chair to the mirror, looks, and stops breathing.
There is no one in the mirror who looks familiar. The once-blunt, geometrical hair is jagged and spiky, no two locks the same length, and the longest ones, on the sides, have been swept forward to frame a pair of cheekbones that have been highlighted and shaded until they almost dominate Kwan's face. Her eyes are lined in a darkness that makes them seem brighter than ever before, and her mouth has been redefined in a pale pink so that its fullness is apparent. The way her hair tapers down above her shoulders makes her neck look a yard long, and she thinks, Stork's neck, and then instantly, Swan's neck, and the words strike her like lightning. She instinctively lifts her chin to make her neck even longer and pulls open the cloth Tra-La wrapped around her, to see the way her collarbones wing out on either side at the base of her throat. She has no idea how long she has been looking at herself when she says, at last, "Is this really me?"
The Queen of Patpong pr-4 Page 17