Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  She stinks, she itches, she hurts, there’s still a fringe of the night’s terrors ruffling the frilly ends of her nerves. The guilt and the fear of angering the Sour Man wrap themselves around her and squeeze. Why does she stay alive?

  Habit, she thinks.

  With all the bed’s pillows jammed behind her back, Rose sits, looking through the part of the window that’s not blocked by Rafferty’s air conditioner and watching the dawn declare its intentions. The baby is in the crook of her left arm but no longer at her breast. He had fallen asleep while nursing, gradually letting go of the nipple, but not until he had been making his little wet-paper snore for a few moments; he had nursed his way into a dream. She can smell her milk on his lips, and she raises her right arm, slowly and carefully, just enough to blot her breast with the bedsheet. Fon will change the linens today, as she does every day, acting on one of her three commandments of motherhood: keep the baby warm, keep the baby clean, give the baby love.

  She’s gotten used to being awakened at this time, so easy to identify by the paling of the sky. And she begins, as she has for the past five or six nights, to start a mental countdown of the time stretching between now and 10 a.m.—the time Fon will come through the door, taking charge of the world and towing other women in her wake. Some of the visitors, like Fon, haven’t danced in years but (unlike Fon) they preserve the bar worker’s internal clock, plugged in until dawn and then rubbery with sleep until the rest of the world is finishing lunch. A few of them are still working nights, mostly in the relative respectability of the cocktail lounges where, as Fon says, “No one will fire you if you gain half a kilo.” These women arrive late enough to be rested and leave just early enough to avoid being fined for not punching in on time.

  By now Rose has internalized these rhythms, the tide that brings new women in each day and sweeps others away. She has learned the sequence and she clings to it more than she can admit to herself, because the presence of the changing cast of women, with their energy, their bawdy humor, their open-mouthed adoration of Frank, keeps her from focusing on the people who aren’t in the room anywhere near as often as she’d thought they would be: her husband and her daughter. As full as the apartment is most of the day, it still feels empty to her much of the time.

  She had never thought it would feel empty.

  10

  The Last Puritan

  Rafferty wakes up late, somewhat surprised to realize that he’d gotten to sleep at all. The first thing he sees is Fon, followed by another woman, tiptoeing across the living room toward the kitchen. The room is very bright, and through the glass doors of the balcony he sees that the western sides of the buildings aren’t catching the full weight of the sun, so it must be high in the sky: it could be as late as ten-thirty or eleven. It’s a Wednesday, so either Miaow has overslept for school, which she never does, or he’s somehow snored through the entire morning mob scene: doors opening and closing, the shower running, the toilet flushing, the smell of the coffee Miaow’s taken to drinking after years of deriding it as bean drink. (Edward, he suddenly realizes, likes coffee). He’s slept through the clatter of plates landing on the counter and the arrival of at least part of the day’s squadron of former bar girls. He might have even slept through the baby crying, which would be a first.

  In his morning basso profundo he croaks, “Time is it?” and is rewarded by seeing the unflappable Fon propel herself four or five inches straight into the air. The other woman laughs at her.

  In the second or so it takes her to come back down and turn to face him, Fon has almost, but not quite, reassembled her composure. “Wery late,” she says, still slightly rattled; like Rose, Fon conquered the V sound years ago. “Now make lunch.”

  “Jesus,” Rafferty says. He sleeps in his underpants, so he wraps his sheet around him as he gets up, and Fon gets even for “wery” by saying, “You no hide. I see before.”

  “Not this one, you haven’t,” he says. “It’s had a limited circulation.” The woman he doesn’t know, cheerful looking and plump as a muffin, covers her mouth and chortles. With the sheet half draped around him making him look, he thinks, like a Roman senator on welfare, he heads for the bedroom.

  Behind him, Fon says, “All same-same. Only man think is different.” He’s trying not to laugh when she calls after him, “You wan’ coffee?”

  “Does the sun rise in the east?” he says, and he opens the door.

  Rose sits on the end of the bed, her white blouse pulled down on one side and the baby at her right breast. The smile she gives him when she turns to face him makes his eyes water.

  He has to say something manly. “What about the formula?”

  “He like me better,” she says.

  “But you hurt.”

  “No problem. Sometime this one, sometime other one.”

  “Lucky kid. Hi, Brush-head,” he says to the baby as he sits, very carefully, beside them. He drapes the sheet over his shoulders and leans over to kiss her cheek. She says, “Mmmm.”

  He says, “While he’s still so small we could use him as a bottle brush.”

  “I rent him to Toots at the bar,” she says. “Make more money than me.”

  “He’ll have to join the baby union. When they’re unhappy with working conditions they carry little picket signs and cry.” He reaches across her and passes his fingers over the straight shock of hair. “You know,” he says, “the earlier they get hair, the earlier they get bald.”

  “They get hair early,” she says serenely, “they have big brain. No room for hair.”

  The doorbell rings.

  “The crew assembles,” he says, leaning forward to get up.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “You stay here. Please? Fon and Claudia open door.”

  “Claudia?”

  Rose shrugs. “She like the name.” The baby has pulled away from the nipple, its wide blue eyes fixed on something on the ceiling. Rose follows the baby’s gaze. “Him see spirit.” A bright morning babble of voices erupts in the living room. They all sound very happy.

  “Me too,” Rafferty says, studying her.

  “Sweet talk. Now I am just fat lady.” She turns, catches him in mid-stare, and just barely overrules a smile. “I like when you come in.”

  He gets up. “I’ll come in more often,” he says. “I promise.” He bends to kiss the top of her head, and Fon announces, behind him, “Coffee.”

  The women—Fon, Yim, Nui, Waan, and the one he doesn’t recognize, who must be Claudia—crowd into the bedroom. Waan and Yim give him a wai, hands pressed together as though in prayer, their fingertips meeting near the space between their eyebrows. This is higher than the ones they usually give him, and he thinks the promotion must reflect his fatherhood. He returns the greeting as well as he can with a sheet hanging from his shoulders and a cup of very hot, very weak coffee in his hand and gets the kind of laugh he usually hears only in sitcoms. Fon could make a pound of coffee last until the baby is shaving. The first time she’d made his coffee, five or six days earlier, she’d let the water drip over whole beans.

  So, he thinks as he comes into the living room, re-draping his sheet, on with the day. Real coffee, black enough to write with. Eggs and bacon. Fon’s favorite dishes are heavy on fish, and he’s not someone who can easily contemplate the notion of fish for breakfast. He’s passing the counter, planning his meal, and heading for the coffee grinder, when his heart misses a beat.

  His notebook. He hadn’t put his notebook away, and now it’s not where . . .

  He literally pops a sweat. He stands there, one hand on the counter to steady himself, and then he sees it. It’s closed, at least, but it’s all the way down at the far end of the counter, right in front of the sliding glass door.

  Where Miaow eats.

  This is what comes of not having secrets, he says to himself. You get out of practice.

  For a moment, he
worries about Fon. If anyone would tell Rose about his second, third, and fourth thoughts, it would be the fiercely protective Fon. But then he dismisses the notion. Most Thais who have learned English on the fly, as opposed to in school learn it orally. Their reading is usually limited to some relatively simple print, but few of them can find their way through cursive script, especially a cursive script as sloppy as his.

  Miaow, on the other hand . . .

  Jesus.

  It’s not just what he wrote last night, which had included a few of his misgivings about fatherhood and an addendum about canoodling. He’d been writing down his issues with fatherhood practically since the kid came home. He’d done, for example, a paragraph on his horrified first sight of a full diaper, which had been just a couple of days ago, so what kind of a father was he? He’d described it as the world’s worst peanut butter. He’d written that the kid could drink his weight in milk every day. He’d written about feeling left out, pushed to the margin by the crowds of women, about feeling displaced in Rose’s feelings, among many, many other things. He’d viewed these reactions, as he wrote them, as bits of a candid and completely private journal of new fatherhood, with emphasis on the areas he couldn’t discuss with Rose and also those that made him feel he wasn’t up to the job, either practically or emotionally. Or, in the case of diapers and milk throw-up, even aesthetically.

  And, he remembers, he’d written about Miaow’s play, mostly worries over the size of the challenge she’d taken on. Now, flipping back through those pages, he relaxes a little. His admiration of her courage and his belief in her talent are there, too. She’d be okay with it because the doubts he’d expressed would at least tell her that he was being candid.

  Although the paragraph about canoodling . . .

  How old am I, anyway? he thinks. When did I become the Last Puritan, the Holder of the Scales of Justice?

  Coffee. If he’s going to navigate this minefield, he needs coffee. Real coffee.

  Still, the first thing he does is take the notebook and put it into the file drawer in his desk with the spine down and the edges of the pages up. That makes it almost indistinguishable from the printouts of his articles and the catalog copy and the hundred or so pages of his new and, if he’s being honest, abandoned book. He’d learned the hard way that it was one thing to write a book about a place when he was an outsider who could focus on the impressions, mostly on the surface, that a traveler would experience over the course of a few days, and a completely different challenge when he’d essentially married the country, seen the indifference of the rich toward the poor, seen the enormous engines of exploitation, the endless layers of corruption, the complicated reality and the omnipresent tragedy behind so many of the smiles. Look at his own family, assembled literally from the wreckage: a child abandoned to the streets with no official infrastructure to take her in, and a daughter of the impoverished Northeast—where rice-farming families, including her own, have been methodically cheated for decades—who became a Bangkok prostitute for the sake of her younger brothers and sisters. The story has been told so often that it’s woven into the country’s urban legends.

  So, no, it’s not so easy to write about Thailand now. Not, given the Kingdom’s current level of censorship, if he wants the book to be sold here.

  He closes the drawer. Miaow will still find it if she wants to, but it’ll be a little more difficult.

  He’s grinding the beans when he decides what to do. He texts her: Found your diary, we need to talk. She’s at school, but she’ll get back to him between classes.

  Within thirty seconds, his phone rings. “Impossible,” she says, without waiting for him even to say hello. “Totally impossible. First, you couldn’t find it because it’s with me, and second, you wouldn’t . . .”

  He waits, and by the time he’s counted to four she says, “Oh.” He lets her stew in it, and then she says, “It was right there.”

  “Was it addressed to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, that was the easy question. Was it open?”

  She says, “Um.”

  He dumps the ground coffee into the filter, slides the unit into place, and goes to the sink to run some water into the carafe. “It was not,” he says. “It was closed and as far away from where you sit as it was possible for it to be and still be on the counter. So that means you had to get up and look at it, pick it up, carry it all the way back to your seat, decide to open it, and then decide—”

  “I already feel bad.”

  “Good. You’re supposed to.” He smells the first hello between the water and the coffee almost immediately. It raises his spirits a little, but he pushes that aside. “And then decide to read it, even after you saw what it—”

  “I didn’t know what it was. At first. I thought maybe it was, you know, notes for a new book. About Thailand. Thought maybe I could help you get it right this time.”

  “Tick. Tick.”

  “Well.” She’s raised her voice, something she does only when she knows she’s wrong. “What do you want me to—”

  “I want to know why you thought it was okay to—”

  “Because until I looked at it, I didn’t know you feel the same way I do. About the baby. Because I’ve been feeling really, really guilty about it, and there it was all of a sudden. You’re as bad as I am.”

  “I’m not sure I’m as bad as—”

  “Maybe badder,” she says, and then she’s laughing. “The worst peanut butter in the—”

  “Okay, okay.” He pops open the cabinet and takes down the cup Rose gave him, the one with the sleepy eyes that open wide when the cup is tilted. He kicks the underside of the counter to speed up the brewing process, and says, “Hello?”

  “I needed to read that,” she says, “so I’d know I wasn’t the worst person who ever lived.”

  “There were the Borgias,” he says. “There was Hitler.”

  “There’s you,” she says. She pauses, and then says, “Do you know what?”

  “Do I want to know what?”

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever been able to laugh at.”

  “That’s sort of a mixed bless—”

  “Because I know you love me. Because you know, umm, that I love you.”

  He goes absolutely blank for a moment, and then he says, “Okay. But you can’t read my diary.”

  “It’s not really your diary,” she says, “it’s your bitch book. You just needed someplace to bitch about not being a perfect father.”

  “Well, as long as we’re being so honest, you leave a lot to be desired in the Big Sister Sweepstakes, too.”

  “We’re awful,” Miaow says.

  “So no reading my bitch book. And you’ll go in and spend some time with your mom and your brother.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll take Edward away from you.”

  “You’re not his type.”

  “Wow,” he says. “One-upped by my own daughter.”

  “Again,” Miaow says. “So, the baby. I mean, what do I say to him?”

  “How the hell do I know? What do you think, he’s going to correct your grammar?” Still holding the phone, he pulls out the pot and slides the cup under the stream until it’s full, and then does the switch in reverse, not spilling much; he’s gotten good at this. “She—your mother—just needs to know you love him.”

  Suddenly Fon is at the sink beside him, giving him a hip-bump to move him aside. “Strong too much,” she says, glancing at the coffee. She’s got Rose’s cup and she’s running water into it.

  “I’m a strong man,” Rafferty says.

  Miaow says, “That’s pathetic.”

  “Oh, are you still there? Aren’t you supposed to be in class? Learning something?”

  “It’s lunchtime,” she says. “Boy, were you snoring this morning.”

&
nbsp; “Takes a lot of sleep to be a strong man. Think about what I said. More time with you-know-who.”

  “I promise. Sorry about, you know.”

  “Hell, I’m glad you read it. We would never have had this talk.”

  “I actually could have done without the talk,” she says.

  “Good to be appreciated,” he says. “Love you.”

  She hangs up. Fon is looking at him accusingly.

  “Miaow,” he says, and Fon starts to laugh. Vaguely stung, he says, “It might have been somebody else.”

  “No, no,” Fon says, and she makes a maternal clucking noise as she reaches up to pat his cheek. “You good boy.”

  For the next four hours or so, he’s an exemplary father, the kind that might get a four-column picture in a New York Times piece on the shape of the modern family. He learns how to mix, decant, and heat the formula, even though the baby snubs it when he’s done. In front of the assembled women, he’s given a purely theoretical diaper-folding class, with diapers just out of the washing machine, still warm and clean enough to squeak. Awkward as he felt, the women didn’t laugh much at all until Fon said something in Thai that was too fast for him to catch, at which point they all pretty well fell apart. He spends almost an hour and a half beside Rose, watching her as she handles the baby, one hand almost always beneath the bushy head. He even holds Frank, or, as he sometimes thinks of the child, Arthit, for fifteen long, uneasy minutes until the baby squalls and waves his arms, a semaphore of distress, and Rose takes over. He can’t help seeing the contrast between her and himself: when he’s got the child, it absorbs every atom of his attention, while Rose seems almost frighteningly nonchalant. Worrying uselessly about the kid as Rose bounces him up and down in her arms, Rafferty realizes that the baby’s warm, milky smell makes him go a little soft in the knees.

  That startles him a bit, but what most startles him is Rose’s glow. If it were any brighter, and if he had tears in his eyes, which, he’s proud to say, he doesn’t, it might look like a halo. He dismisses the thought as hopelessly banal but when she catches him looking at her, he says, “You’re glowing.”