Pattaya 24/7

by Christopher G. Moore

  Valentine couldn’t stop looking at her, smacking his lips and jutting out his jaw and proclaiming to no one in particular, “Her name is Jirapan. She is our special guest of honor tonight. Along, of course, with our own private investigator, Vincent, who you will now have all met.”

  Sandra leaned over and whispered, “This is another sanom audition.”

  She had the passionless tone of a county coroner performing a 2.00 a.m. autopsy while dictating notes into a microphone.

  Calvino nodded, wondering what sexual deviation had brought her to Valentine’s attention.

  Jirapan sat on a chair next to the grand piano, facing the other people in the room. Sitting down Valentine, because of his height, was eye-level with each of his sanom who were standing. He had to look down to catch Jirapan’s eye. She wore a dress and nylons and sat with her knees locked together. Slowly Valentine returned to the keyboard; his hands came down onto the keys. A Mozart concerto thundered out. Valentine, his eyes half-lidded, slipped into a private world far removed from Thailand. No one else in the room followed him in his dream-like fugue. Jirapan’s reality was too large of an interfering presence for the sanom and other women. She occupied the chair traditionally reserved for Maew, which translated as cat. This was the chair designated for Valentine’s number one sanom, though he had initiated the idea of rotating the privilege of sitting in the chair among the three. Number One was followed by Number Two, and finally by Gop. The frog, his Number Three, filed past last. That way, Valentine had reasoned, everyone had the chance of being admired and recognized as the chosen one. Jirapan had usurped the rotation. It had been Maew’s turn. Everyone in the room except Calvino and Jirapan knew it was Maew’s turn. Sitting in the first row, she appeared to be one substantially unhappy cat. Her face lay on the chopping block. And there was Valentine in his own world, fingers gliding over the keyboard, his ponytail swinging from the back of his head as his head moved in tempo with the music.

  Ever since Prasit’s death, and the de facto strike if not organized then inspired by Prasit’s widow, Valentine had retaliated the only way he knew how. He knew bringing back strange girls would cause a disruption to the usual protocol. It was management’s way of breaking the strike. If they were going to turn the social arrangement on its head, he would see that their face suffered as a consequence. This tit-for-tat low-level warfare had been going on for weeks. No one in the room was secure in her position. The presence of Jirapan was just the latest aggravation to the tense domestic scene. Management on the piano; employees in the audience lined up by seniority. Next to Maew in the front row was Kem fol- lowed by Gop. They automatically sat in accordance with their ranking: Number One followed by Two and Three. None of the women in the front row smiled or listened to the music. They couldn’t take their eyes off Jirapan.

  Kem whispered that she must have used cream to lighten her skin. No one was that white. Gop said she thought her long legs and large breasts also came out of a bottle. No urban myth can hold a candle to a rural-urban myth. Kem whispered, “No, not a bottle, a knife.” They had an argument about whether a doctor could make a woman’s legs longer. Fon and Som, with Sandra, Valentine’s secretary, sat in the back row. There was a lot of whispering back and forth. Valentine was oblivious to the background chatter ten feet away. Jirapan averted her eyes, her hands folded in her lap, knowing the women were staring and whispering about her.

  Valentine’s workforce formed a solid block—despite the fact that Som was Burmese and Sandra was Indian—one united by a common suspicion of any new female who might be an intruder onto their turf. No one could quite determine her status: had Jirapan been invited to hear Valentine play or was she coming to play with Valentine? No one knew, but that didn’t stop the front row from speculating in loud whispers. The sanom, despite their obvious hatred and the prejudice and fear it produced, were right about one thing. Jirapan had translucent white skin, the blue veins showing in her neck and hands. This had been their first calculation. A woman with dark skin was often from Isan or a Khmer or from the south. Women with light- colored skin felt superior to anyone whose skin started toward the copper end of the spectrum and moved down to a hue of teak to cobra black. Dark meant peasant stock. Dark promised evil and suggested dangerous and threatened dirty. Dark-skinned people—particularly women—were the other, the outcast, the outsider, and an undesirable. There was no such thing as too white. Valentine’s invitee to the recital had skin close to the edge of albino. Any damn fool could translate white as meaning high-class, good, and desirable. And more than a few fools did. As Valentine played, he turned once and smiled at Jirapan.

  She applauded. “Not yet, sweet Jirapan. You must learn when to applaud. Never too soon, or too late,” he said, con- tinuing to play.

  The sanom stopped talking the moment Valentine spoke to Jirapan. They didn’t wish to miss a word from Valentine’s lips that might be a clue as to his intentions. Once he returned to his playing, they immediately resumed chattering among themselves, the conversation growing more emotional and shrill as they talked about Jirapan as if she weren’t within listening distance. The Thai word for white—khaow—rose up again and again only to be pushed under by the Mozart coming from the grand piano. The thing was, this Thai with too-white skin had created a presence that made them feel as if they had been transported against their will into a world of inferiority. In the world of skin color, Jirapan sat at the top of the highest order. If the sanom and other employees had held up scorecards, Jirapan would have scored a perfect ten from all six judges. Add white along with her proximity in the room to Valentine, and Jirapan was a gale-force storm blowing through their lives, rocking their little boats, threatening to capsize them. The best thing against that feeling of drowning was to hang onto each other, brace against the hard wind, and wait until the storm blew over.

  Among Valentine’s staff, the ultimate humiliation was having someone else make them into that other woman who felt that she was looked down upon. When Valentine had started the concert, Calvino had watched the women, thinking about how little encouragement most people needed to sign on to the whole fascism and racism program. Calvino had an uncle in New York City—his mother’s younger brother—who said that the human species had been hardwired for fascism; it was the default operating system for mankind.

  Valentine switched to a Liszt concerto he played by heart. As his fingers touched the keyboard, Kem held up a photograph of the goat named Liszt, showing it to Valentine, who nodded. She lowered it to her lap. Expats could be a strange lot, but Valentine was in a category all by himself, thought Calvino.

  Halfway through the Liszt, Valentine stopped and looked up at the women, who were now almost shouting. “Creatures, please. You are making it very difficult for me to play. If you are such savages that you can’t appreciate Liszt, then please remain silent so others with more refined taste can enjoy the music.”

  The front row averted their eyes and stared at their hands. No one responded. The room was silent except for the hiss of two large humidfiers. Valentine resumed playing and the women resumed talking. After he finished the Liszt, he looked up. Jirapan was clapping her hands politely. A moment later, Valentine’s secretary joined in the applause, followed by the maid, Fon and Calvino. Without question he had a true feeling for the music he played, bringing a sense of urgency and drama. But not everyone in the room agreed; those seated in the front row sat on their hands smiling nervously, not certain what was coming next. The degree of refinement and appreciation and loyalty rolled out in the order in which Valentine had expected it.

  “As my creatures don’t appear amused by the music, it is time perhaps to tell a story. It begins with my mother and her friend. Without doubt the most enduring influence in my childhood was my mother’s friend. Her name was Sutida and she was from Thailand. Sutida was an intellectual. She loved Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. She was also left-wing, and that made it dangerous for her in Thailand. She chose to work as a laborer in a factory even th
ough she had gone to university. She sweated in the factory as a show of her solidarity with the working class. Her grandmother had been Chinese. The grandmother’s feet had been bound when she was four. Her feet, as a result, never measured longer than five inches. They were eternally the size of a four-year-old’s. She had been crippled and hobbled. Why would the Chinese do such a cruel thing to a child? Making her into, in our eyes, a cripple?

  “This was done to enhance her sex appeal to men. And for the usual Chinese reasons: power and money, and beauty and grace. The grandmother had a collection of lotus shoes. Beautiful, ornate decorated silk slippers. Blue, red and gold colors. These silk slippers fit easily into the cup of the hand. Then after the Republic came to power, the practice of foot binding was officially banned. Fines were imposed against any family who permitted this feudal practice. What had been the height of sexuality became, in a few years, a disgrace, or burden, and something to be hidden from sight. From sexual arousal to disgust in less than a generation.

  “The practice of foot binding started with a consort in the Chinese royal court in the 10th century and lasted nearly a thousand years. First they bound the feet, then the mind, and finally the soul. That is the history of China. Submission started with the feet and worked its way up to the brain. Giving one’s self up for family, for a man, for fashion, for a look. The feet were admired and adored. They aroused. At weddings and at funerals the tiny lotus shoe clad feet were displayed. The woman’s feet were a status of their class. Much later the peasants got it into their heads that by binding their daughters’ feet they could be associated with—or more likely confused with those who didn’t know better—the higher classes. Farmers’ wives had their feet bound. The most striking thing about the grandmother was the absence of hatred or even regret at the outrage. Think what it would mean to have a deformity imposed upon a woman. She could hardly walk. But she possessed a serene aura, a pride and dignity bestowed by her suffering. She wore her deformity as a badge of courage and honor and beauty. What she had done at the urging of her mother was to repay the debt she felt she owed to the family. And what was her obligation: to bring the best possible suitor to the doorstep. She did this with her tiny feet inside a pair of lotus shoes.

  “Khun Jirapan, as I’ve come to learn, also had a great- grandmother whose feet were bound at a young age. She has shown me a pair of her great-grandmother’s lotus shoes, which have been handed down as a treasured family heirloom. She has them with her tonight. Please, Jirapan, show these people in the audience a gift of insight into their lives. Show them to those who think that they have suffered an injustice. Show them the shoes your great-grandmother was made to wear after her feet had been bound. Did she ever complain? No. She never had an unkind word or a wish to have been someplace else or born in another family.”

  Jirapan pulled the lotus shoes from her handbag and handed them to Valentine. He rose from the piano stool and walked over to the corner where he pulled back a cloth to reveal a glass case on a stand. Inside was another pair of lotus shoes. He plucked a key from his pocket and opened a small lock, pulled open the glass door and reached inside for the shoes. The pair easily fit inside his palm. He walked back to the grand piano with the shoes. Sitting down on the bench, he produced, as if by magic, a small ruler from inside his formal black jacket and proceeded to measure the shoes from the glass case and the shoes Jirapan had given him. He measured them twice. The sanom and others watched as if they had never seen something like this before.

  When he looked up, he said in a loud, clear voice, “The shoes worn by Khun Jirapan’s great-grandmother are half a inch longer. Lotus shoes to be sure, but still slightly larger than the ones my mother’s friend gave me on my sixteenth birthday.”

  He went back to the case, replaced the lotus shoes and locked the door. He addressed the women in the front row. “You think your life is hard. Please have a look at these shoes. Remember next time you are crying yourself asleep over some nonsense that if you had been born in China a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have a nice man like me looking after you, providing you with a degree of luxury others would love to have, and fresh air, and music and consideration. So I think each of you should begin to put the past behind and let us all start again fresh and new. Remember when you believe that your suffering is the greatest that there is always someone who has suffered a half an inch more.”

  His speech meant nothing to the sanom. The shoes were thought beautiful and elegant and made them wish for smaller feet. They knew almost nothing of Chinese foot binding. For them, the message they took into the night was that Valentine had found yet one more fetish to amuse himself.

  NINETEEN

  CALVINO ARRIVED MID-morning at the house of Pramote’s widow. She waited inside the door as if she were expecting a visitor. She betrayed no surprise at the arrival of a farang in a sports jacket and shirt open at the collar, smiling. One thing she was certain about: this had little chance of turning out to be a good-news smile. Since Pramote had gone missing in February, there had been no good news. When his body was found in June, those who came to her door with the news had been smiling. Her four year old daughter, a curtain of straight black hair hanging above her eyes, hugged her mother’s leg. The widow looked him over, making up her mind whether to invite Calvino inside or to close the door and back away. Holding her eighteen month old baby cradled onto her side, she shifted, using her free hand to take a long drag off a cigarette. Her hair, uncombed, the ends twisted from the baby’s tiny hands, looked unwashed. She wore no make-up. She’d gnawed her fingernails down to the flesh. They looked red and swollen. At the first knuckle, her fingers had turned nicotine yellow. Her T-shirt was soiled from the baby. Food, snot, or shit—it wasn’t immediately clear from color or smell which orifice the stuff had leaked from. Calvino imagined she had once been beautiful, fire in her eyes, a ready smile and laugh. Some pure energy of youth had ignited inside her and burnt brilliantly, hard and fast. Then the fire had gone out, leaving a shell of grief and suffering, and the smile extinguished. What he was witnessing were the ashes of that stellar beauty.

  “My name’s Vincent Calvino. I have a few questions about your deceased husband.”

  As he looked at her and thought of the mental and physical weight of her two kids, he thought about the newspaper photos of her husband’s bones stacked beside a farm well. What had once been a flesh-and-blood husband and father and reporter following up a story was no more than a pile of discolored bones. That was the memory she had been left with, the one she had to find a way to prepare her children for when they were old enough to be told why their father wasn’t with them.

  “What kind of questions?” she asked.

  “A few basic things. Like what your name is? That kind of thing.”

  “Nueng.”

  “And this one?” Calvino nodded to the eighteen-month-old boy.

  She put down the toddler, who peered up at Calvino. “This is Daeng.”

  “And her name?”

  “Jep.”

  The toddler drooled, staring at Calvino. She wiped his mouth with a cloth.

  “We don’t get a lot of foreigners coming here,” she said. “My face normally doesn’t scare children,” he said.

  Just as Calvino had finished with his ice-breaker questions, feeling that his friendly reassurance was working to gain the widow’s confidence, Daeng’s mouth went crooked.

  “Farang, farang, farang,” he repeated, before tears spilled out of his eyes.

  The widow snapped back into defensive posture. “You didn’t come here to ask our names.”

  Calvino nodded. “That’s right. I am here because of what happened to your husband.”

  “I don’t understand. Why does a farang ask about my husband?”

  “I am a private investigator.” He showed her his ID. She glanced at it and shrugged. “I’m working on a case and need to ask you a couple of questions. It won’t take long.”

  Her haunted look turned to suspicion. No
one helped anyone without wanting something in return. “I think the police already know everything. Ask them your questions,” she said. “There’s no secret.”

  “One day your children will want to know why their father died.”

  She sighed and looked around for an ashtray to stub out her cigarette.

  Calvino continued, “Your kids will want to remember their father as a brave man doing what he believed in.”

  “Is that what you think?” The disbelief swelled in her throat. She coughed, that low hacking cough of a heavy smoker.

  Calvino nodded. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth. If he thought like this, my husband must have hated us. If he cared about us, he would take the money and forget the story. If he did that, then I would have a husband and they would have a father. Now we have nothing. That’s not brave. That’s stupid. What he did was foolish.”

  Bitterness twisted her face. She lit a fresh cigarette and drew in hard.

  “I heard that he was a good man,” said Calvino.

  “A good man stays with his family. He doesn’t get himself killed.”

  They were nearing a standoff.

  “A good man sometimes dies for what he believes in.”

  “If the police won’t help, how can a farang?”

  “By looking in different places and asking different questions,” said Calvino. “All you have to lose is twenty minutes of time. And what you have to gain is a chance to understand what happened. Why not take a chance to recover something you lost?”

  “What’s there to recover?”

  Calvino saw the toddler had tired of him and gone down on the floor to play with some plastic toys. “Peace of mind. Dignity. Hope. Respect. Truth. Faith in yourself and a hatred of injustice. A list of things that everyone wants and aren’t for sale. The kind of things that are of the greatest value can’t be bought.”