by Paul Theroux
The Thai workers were competent and hardworking, the factory so well run by the local managers that he had time on his hands. So did Larry and Fred. Like Osier, they had wives back in the States, but it didn’t stop them going to strip shows and massage parlors.
“Soi Cowboy! Great bars! The girls are hot—they wear boots and Stetsons!”
“Great little place called Angels. They’re barely legal!”
They talked like excited boys. Maybe it was a feature of going overseas, a danger in outsourcing—you were infantilized by the efficiency of the locals. Larry and Fred were like teenagers. Had Bangkok done that to them? Even he felt it, the vitality of being among healthy hardworking people.
“Guess Bar—Soi Four. It’s not far.”
“Nana Plaza—amazing women, but they’re all dudes!”
Joyce always asked what life was like in Bangkok.
“I don’t know what to compare it to,” he told her, but thinking of Larry and Fred he wanted to say, “It’s like being young. I guess it’s a kick.”
Because when you were young you had a sense of choices, of not knowing how your life would turn out. Only the old foresaw the undeviating road ahead, and beyond it a darkness. That was how Osier had felt, but now his nights were empty.
In the shuttle bus Fred Kegler said, “Funny seeing you here.”
“Just thought I’d hitch a ride.”
“Maybe we can tempt you to have a drink,” Larry said. But he laughed, because Osier had rejected them before.
“Maybe one,” he said.
The shuttle bus dropped them at Patpong Road. They walked to a bar, Fred leading. “Here we are,” Larry said. It was dark inside, smelling of beer and incense, with side booths. Osier squinted ahead, wondering if he’d be recognized. He liked the bar for being dark.
“Pretty soon you’ll be out of all of this,” Fred said.
He meant Osier’s retirement. Were they gloating?
Osier said, “We’ve got a house. Near Rockland, Maine. My wife’s already there.” Out of fastidious sentiment he avoided mentioning Joyce’s name in this smelly bar.
“A lot of guys opt for the severance package and stay right here in Thailand. You have a bundle coming to you. You’re on one of the old contracts. You could have a second career.”
Creer again; it jarred on Osier and seemed like satire. They didn’t know the half of it, even Joyce didn’t. Yet Osier said in an offhand way, “But what would that be like?”
“That would be a wet dream,” Larry said, giving each word a meaningful lilt.
The bar was everything that Osier had objected to the first time, not just the rankness of beer and the slime of cigarette smoke on the clammy plastic cushions of the booth, the American rock music, and the Christmas lights, but the girls, too—six or seven of them, overfriendly, converging on the booth. They seemed to know Fred and Larry well.
Fred said to one of them, “This is our friend. Be nice to him.”
“We be nice to him.”
Each of the men had a familiar and favorite girl, who brightened at their arrival, almost like a steady girlfriend. Instead of talking to him, as he’d feared, they talked to these bar girls and took them aside, leaving him to nurse his drink with the remaining girls. The girls watched, whispering, as he took his diary from his briefcase. He sketched their pictures on a blank page. They laughed, but for a while they stood still, because he was drawing so carefully.
In the booth of four girls, only one was attractive—tall, thin-faced, slender, a bit aloof, possibly haughty or else shy, while the others fluttered around him.
Osier sketched her pretty fallen-angel face, her long lank hair, then said, “What’s your name?”
But she turned away and wouldn’t tell him. Sketching, he stared, and as he did, he heard Fred call from his booth to Larry in the next booth, “I’ll mud-wrestle you for that one.”
Fred laughed and said, “Reminds me. I told my ex-wife, ‘When you’re fifty you’ll be standing on a street corner waving at cars.’”
Hearing their voices, Osier put his sketchbook away and finished his drink. Larry looked at Osier, sitting with the four girls, and said, “A bevy of beauties! Hey, Boyd, we’re going back to the hotel. Are you staying?”
Surprised in his solitude, Osier said no and left with them in a taxi. This was all? A drink, a giggle, then back to the hotel? He felt kinder toward the two men.
Larry said, “They all have families. Like us. They send money home. Ask them what they want and they won’t say a husband. They’ll say, ‘I want a coffee shop,’ ‘A grocery store,’ ‘A noodle shop.’ Having a drink there, I figure we’re helping the economy.”
“Piss them off and you’re in hell. Horror show,” Fred said, and the hoor grated.
At the hotel, Osier said, “I’ll pay.” After Larry and Fred had gone into the lobby, he said to the taxi driver, “Take me back to the bar.”
“Casanova? Patpong Road?”
“I guess.”
The girls laughed when they saw him, the man who had just left, and that made him sheepish. Did they understand more of what was in his heart than he did? As though anticipating what he wanted, they made a place for him at the far corner of the bar in a small booth.
He said nothing, he hardly glanced at the tall girl, and yet one of the girls said, “You come back see her!”
They knew exactly why he’d come. They were so shrewd about men. But then, what was so complicated about men?
The tall girl emerging from the shadows looked even more like a fallen angel. She walked over, stately in her high heels, holding her head up, dignified, giving nothing away in her expression.
“Have a drink with me.”
She seemed to hesitate. Osier was not dismayed, because after considering the offer, she chose him. She sat beside him and ordered drinks—beer for him, lemonade for herself. They drank without speaking, and for once Osier was glad for the loud music filling the silence and the space.
Finally she said, “You make picture?”
He showed her his diary, flipping pages. She put her finger on the sketch of the king and touched her heart.
“You like Bangkok?”
“I like the railway station.” Though it no longer seemed safe to him.
“Nice station.”
“And I like you.”
She sipped at her lemonade and then looked away. “You not know me.”
“But I want to know you.” And as he sat closer, she made room on the bench, accommodating him.
I am out of my mind, he thought. What did I just say? Am I telling the truth? But at least the room was dark, the music loud, and he was alone. Osier was drunk, he could tell from his slowness, the numb warmth in his arms, his drowsy talk, a creeping weight in his body, his feet like cloth, all of it brainlessly pleasant, making him feel like a big fool. When he put his hand on the girl’s thigh she reacted sharply.
“What’s that?”
She said, “My knife.”
She had to repeat the word before he understood. Smiling, he lifted his heavy arm and placed it on the girl’s skinny shoulder. She shrugged but she didn’t resist. Then he kissed her—on the cheek, like an adolescent’s first smooch. She laughed and became shy.
“You’re pretty.”
She stroked her face with her fingertips. “What country?”
“America.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He felt reckless enough, no one was looking—who cared in this place? He was as anonymous here as he’d once been in the waiting room of the railway station. He winced at his memory of it.
But, drunk, with his drunken sense of sliding slowly out of control, he felt that he was at the edge of a dark pit, a wide bowl of night, about to tumble in face-first. When he leaned to pat the girl’s knee she recoiled again. That reaction made him hesitate and sobered him a little.
He drew back and said, “I have to go home.”
She smiled. She said, “Everybody always go home,” and
as he left, staggering into the noise and fumes of the street, Osier reflected on the minimalism of her barroom wisdom.
Back at the hotel, alone with his guilt, he felt he ought to call Joyce. His cell phone was not in his pocket. The girl had stolen it. He deserved the anguish he felt. He used his room phone to call the emergency number to cancel his cell phone account. He was put on hold. Music played. He thought, I am off my head. He called his own number. After a few rings, a smoky voice.
“Hello.”
“Who’s that?”
He heard smoky laughter but no reply.
“You have my cell phone. I need it.”
“I give you tomorrow.”
“When? Where?”
She spoke the name of a bar, she repeated the street, but even so, writing it down, Osier was not sure he’d heard the name correctly. Free had to be three. What was nigh?
The next day was Saturday. Osier hailed a taxi after lunch and read the scribble he had written. The driver said, “I know, I know,” but he didn’t know. They discovered the soi in Sukhumvit, but he guessed at the bar—Siamese Nights.
From the outside, it was indistinguishable from six other bars nearby: neon sign, opaque window, strings of beads hanging at the entrance. But inside it was large, vault-like, and quiet, gong music playing softly, like the melody in a children’s toy. Out of the back window he could see a canal, and plump lotuses in it, floating on their outflung petals, light falling across the water. He was looking into a Bangkok that was enclosed and placid and pretty.
She wasn’t there; hardly anyone was in the bar. He sat in the mildewed air of midafternoon and drank lemonade—it was too early for alcohol. Besides, a beer would tire him, and this being a Saturday, he planned to spend the rest of the afternoon walking—not to the railway station or the big flea market, but simply to exhaust himself in the heat—then an early dinner and bed.
At a quarter past three he saw her. She entered the bar and without hesitating walked straight to him. He was reminded of the directness of the man-woman at the railway station who’d confronted him.
He was relieved to find her manner the same as the previous evening: assured, casual, undemanding, as though they knew each other fairly well. He was glad the place was dark. He’d thought of taking the cell phone and leaving, but now he felt like lingering. He loved her piercing eyes, her thick hair, her height—even sitting down she was almost his height, their eyes level. She was not a sprite, not kittenish like the other girls, but a cat-like presence.
“Lemonade,” she said to the waitress.
A shaft of sunlight slanted through some boards near where they sat, and he could see through that crack the brightness of water, the glittering canal, the floating flowers, the bubbly stagnation shimmering in the hot afternoon.
“This is nice.”
“Everything nice for you!”
She remembered that he’d said she was nice, but what he wanted to say was that he was less lonely. Her accurate memory made her seem intelligent, impatient with small talk.
“I meant it’s quiet.”
“Other bar too noisy. Too many people. Crazy people. Farang ba-ba boh-boh. This better.”
“What’s your name?”
“I Song. What you name?”
“Boyd.”
“Boy,” she said.
He smiled. “That’s right.”
The gong music seemed to slip through him and beat like a pulse, relaxing him. A small boy in a red shirt approached, selling single flowers. Osier bought one for Song, and he felt as he had on his best night at the railway station—serene, calmed, triumphant. The sunlight glancing from the klong glimmered in a bright puddle on the ceiling. He thought, This is all wrong, but this is bliss.
“I’m happy.”
“Why not? Life too short.”
She’d heard that from someone, another farang, and yet it pained him to hear it. It was true. He felt absurdly tearful, thankful to her for saying that.
And now he remembered himself at the railway station, mourning, seeing the travelers leaving on life-altering journeys while he sat sketching their faces, as though grieving for them. He had believed his waiting was a death watch for them, but no, he was grieving for himself, as he waited for retirement. I don’t want to go, he thought, and glancing across at Song, he was creased by a pang, something deeper than hunger, like the foretaste of starvation.
“You’re so young,” he said, and heard fear in his voice.
“Khap khun ka. Thank you. Look young, but not!”
“How old?”
“I hate this question.”
Impressed by her rebuff, he said, “Me too. Any children?”
She laughed and tapped his arm as if gratefully, and said, “No children.”
“None for me either.”
“We same!”
Bar talk, flirty, facetious, but a little more than that, with the revelations of foolery, Song emerging as clever and gentle and self-mocking.
Then Osier remembered. “My cell phone,” he said. “Where is it?”
Song took the phone out of her bag but she didn’t hand it over. She said, “You give me?”
“Why?”
And because he’d hesitated, she gave it to him.
But because she gave it to him so quickly, he said, “Why do you want it?”
“So I can talk you.”
He loved that. He tapped her arm as she had tapped his. He said, “Yes. I’ll get you one. Let’s go.”
He still sat. He didn’t want to leave this shadowy place, Siamese Nights, the coolness of it, the girls huddled on the banquette, laughing, their knees together, the one other farang at the bar shaking dice onto the counter out of a cup and talking to the bartender. The watery light from the klong outside dappling the ceiling gave its fishbowl completeness an illusion of life’s essence.
This is who I am, this is where I belong, this is a place where I can tell the truth. Guessing that Larry and Fred were consoled by places like these, he understood them better. He told himself that he had no wish to possess Song, but only to ease his famished soul by being with her, to relieve his gloom.
But this was peaceful. He thought, I have someone I can tell this to. He told her. She listened with bright eyes, saying nothing, not judging him, her skin so lovely he wanted to stroke her like a cat.
And when at last they were on their way to the cell phone shop, in the traffic and the heat, he wished he were back in Siamese Nights, sitting with Song, looking over her pale shoulder at the canal beyond the back window. Song had sat placidly with her hands on her lap. Osier liked her size, not one of those tiny bird-boned Thai sprites, but rather tall, angular, with a deep laugh, and a presence he hadn’t associated with the Thais he knew. Song was a woman confident in repose, sweet without being submissive, with the melancholy he’d first seen that made him think of a fallen angel.
He said, “Why don’t you have a phone?”
“They cancel. I no pay.”
The clerks in the shop were so helpful, Osier let them explain the calling plans, though he knew most of the details by heart. He chose the simplest one, a six-month plan, renewable, inexpensive. Song picked out a red phone, and Osier signed the agreement.
Side by side in the taxi, he called her number.
“Hello, Boy.”
“Hello, Song.”
“You happy?”
“I’m happy.” But he caught a glimpse of himself in the taxi’s rearview mirror and turned away from that idiot face.
“Who are you calling?” he asked, seeing her tapping numbers into the phone.
“Mudda,” and, hearing a voice, she smiled and broke into Thai. Osier heard gleeful croaking from the other end and was content.
For the next few days they called each other. He did so just to hear her voice. He didn’t want to think why she called him, but she seemed happy to hear him. He remembered how, when he’d seen her in a group of five or six girls in a bar, Song had seemed the most feminine,
the most mature, the softer, the more self-possessed, the only one not reaching out, not trying to catch his eye. She had not been looking at him at all; she’d been looking at the other girls posing for him, smiling slightly, and her narrow smile made her seem strong. She was not a coquette.
Her looking away had allowed him to study her body, which was fleshier than the others’, heavy-breasted. Song sat straight, her legs crossed, and he saw that her makeup had been more carefully applied. He felt a connection: she was the first real woman he’d seen since arriving in Bangkok, and he felt as he had when he’d met Joyce long ago, a pang of desire that was like a seam of light warming his body.
In a reflex of self-consciousness he called Joyce.
“I miss you,” she said.
Burdened by her saying that, with a catch in his throat, he could not reply at once.
He said, “I miss you too,” and wondered if she heard the strain in his voice. They talked a little more, about some trees that needed to be trimmed in the yard, and then he said he had to go to a meeting.
Joyce said, “Please don’t be angry. I know how busy you are.”
Too confused to reply, he said, “Take care,” and called Song a minute later. He said, “I miss you.”
“You make me feel like a million dollar,” Song said.
“I want to see you,” he said.
“See you when I see you,” she said.
Another of her catch phrases; she’d learned these quips from men. The thought made him vaguely jealous, but he was not possessive. He wanted her to be happy.
The next time he saw her—in the friendly bar, Siamese Nights, which was like a refuge by the klong—he said, “I’m going to the States.”
“Always they say that to me.” Though her eyes looked pained, she shook her head as if she didn’t care.
“But I’m coming back.”
“They say that always too. ‘I coming back, honey. Love you!’”
“I mean it.”
“Maybe you not come back. Maybe you be glad. ‘No more Song. No more trouble.’”
What trouble? he wanted to ask. He didn’t know whether he’d be back. He hoped so. The decision was not in his hands. There was a meeting in Boston—headquarters. Then he’d drive to Maine, swing by on the way to check on Joyce’s mother. His return to Bangkok depended on the presentation of the accounts, whether his continued presence in Bangkok was justified.
