“That’s right, Larry. You don’t know. About me, yourself. And I’m beginning to wonder if you ever really knew Sarah.”
The force of his slap knocked Kelly down. A trickle of blood spilled from a small cut on her lip. She looked up at him, with an injured expression and making a low whimpering sound. He dropped to his knee and rocked her in his arms, kissing her head. That night he dreamt the pattern her dried blood made on the front of his shirt had come alive as dark, brown animals, jungle animals. He woke up startled in the pitch-dark room, rolled out of bed and peeked through the curtains. He was still in Los Angeles, the jungle animals of Bangkok had not yet come for him.
* * *
LAWRENCE removed the photocopy of the story from his jacket and slid it across the table to Tuttle.
“I found this among Sarah’s papers at the University,” he said.
Tuttle looked down in a vacant stare. His own words with Sarah’s yellow Magic Marker touching a word here, a sentence there, as if she were pointing out her own way through the passages. Were the markings an endorsement, a question mark, or a register of disappointment? A story about language enigma engraved enigmatically by the hand of a dead woman—Sarah would have liked the harmony of those tones, thought Tuttle.
“Could you read it aloud? ” asked Lawrence.
Tuttle’s head jerked up. “You want me to read out loud now? Here? ”
“Why not here? Why not now? It’s about this kind of place; the people who come into this place.”
Clearing his throat, Tuttle paused a moment, his eyes circling the jukebox. “Yeah, why not? ”
* * *
MONSOON LANGUAGE LESSONS
A Short Story
by
Robert Tuttle
YOUR first monsoon season changes the way you see Bangkok. The bars are dead. The resident farangs are holed up for weeks. The jukebox is silent for hours at a stretch. None of the girls can spare two baht for a song. The September rain falls in tidal waves, turning the sois into muddy rivers. A group of us sits below ground level at HQ. Every year there is fear the floods will enter and sweep away the girls. In the name of progress, the klongs have been paved over; high-rise offices and shopping centers cluster over the buried waters. Then the monsoon reclaims what is underneath the surface, and the hidden klong rises like a decomposed corpse.
You must take taxis everywhere now. You smoke a joint in the back seat, and tell the driver to take you to Soi Cowboy. The taxi seems to float above the surface of the brown river, spraying sheets of water window-high. You roll down the window a crack, and touch the surf with your fingertips. It’s like skipping flat stones across the water as a kid. You laugh and joke with the driver.
By the time the taxi arrives, you’re stoned. You get out of the cab, a little shaky on your feet and stumble, almost fall on one knee into a pool of brackish water. You are too stoned to go far, and you turn into one of the first bars in Soi Cowboy.
Inside you find twenty-five bored teenagers. Go-go dancers sitting around smoking, gossiping, sleeping, playing with their toes, or staring off vacantly at the empty stools as if hypnotized by the sound of falling rain and the ghosts of customers from the past. You are the only farang in the bar. Your shoes, socks, and pant cuffs are wet. Your hat is matted down with rain. Rain runs off your face and drips off your earlobes. You have that stoned smile of a thoroughly soaked human being who is in a state of chemical bliss. You wander past the bar spinning the stool tops; the girls giggle and applaud. The girls reach out and touch your face and neck. A stroke here. A brush and pinch there.
You stop and try to focus on the girl with short-cropped black hair and long silver earrings. She sits cross-legged on the stool; her red high-heel shoes tipped over on the floor at your feet. You speak to her. She is eighteen, and coasted into Bangkok from Nakhon Sawan only days before. And because you’re stoned you find yourself believing her. You can’t get over the perfect, tiny, white teeth and full lips and shiny, open, passionate eyes.
She is drying you off with a towel, cleaning your ears, unbuttoning your shirt and wiping your damp chest and stomach. Before you can protest she has your shirt off, and you’re wearing a bar T-shirt. You feel dry for the first time since you’ve entered the bar. And you ask yourself the Bangkok Monsoon Season sixty-four dollar question: Do you want to buy a girl for the rainy season? Not for two hours, not for all night, but for several months. Would you like to disappear into your own private life with a girl while the loud claps of thunder and heavy rains pound the city? Listening to the cadence of rain on your roof with a rent-a-wife? Cut your moorings from HQ for the rainy season.
Noi holds a cup of hot coffee to your lips. And as you’re sipping, you can’t take your eyes off her smiling face. She has a long-term face; one you feel certain will outlast a single night. But is she monsoon rent-a-wife material? You are stoned and prone to snap judgements. Those teeth and lips, her flat belly, perfect breasts, narrow hips, the graceful movement of her hands behind the towel over your face, neck, and chest. She’s playing the piano, touching every key with perfect harmony; a song is bursting from your throat as you sip the hot coffee.
This one is what you have been looking for; you deserve her. She’s a life raft with all the right equipment. You buy her a Cola, and she bows, hands folded like in prayer, kisses your cheek. She comes back and sits on your lap, her arms around your neck. The rain pours into Soi Cowboy as if it had been built underneath a waterfall. This isn’t rain, you tell yourself. This is the end of the world. You have minutes to pack in your supplies and get out. The floods will carry away every business, bar, girl; everything not fastened above the waterline. You know where to go. This is maybe your last chance to choose the woman who will be at your side as you hear the sea rolling in, reclaiming lost territory; when you watch the tidewater sweep in, rise over your head, and in that moment when you can no longer breathe, she is at your side, holding you tight.
Three hours later, she is beneath you in bed. Her tiny hands clawing at your back. Flashes of lightning from outside pierce the darkness of the room every few seconds. Soi dogs howl in that scared, half-mad moan. Her eyes are closed tightly; her face twisted into a mask of pleasure. She moans, turns her head into the pillow, her lower teeth bite into her lip. The time is near. She arches her hips. Her breathing is fast and hard. As you are about to come inside her for the first time of all the many times you have already inside your head, she shouts out in the darkness.
She screams a single word. Not a Thai word. She shouts the word again. You are still stoned, but the word works deep inside your mind and you freeze on top of her.
“Wunderbah,” she shouts. “Wunderbah.”
Six days in Bangkok, she had said. Your erection goes limp inside her, and you think of a Wolfgang or Gunter pumping up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs in some rundown short-time hotel, “Wunderbah. Wunderbah,’’ as he fucks little Noi for the second or third time in a two-hour stretch. And minutes later you are in your clothes, and she is in hers, and you are walking in knee deep water, carrying her in your arms like a small child bundled under a blanket. You walk slowly through the sludge of dead leaves, garbage, and sewage; the rain pelting against your face.
You stand on Sukhumvit Road cradling her in your arms, rocking her until she is nearly asleep in your arms; then you remember where you are, and you feel the hot rain striking your face, and soon a taxi pulls up. You bundle her into the back seat with two crisp, fresh purples. And she still doesn’t understand what has gone wrong. She simply doesn’t get it. How can you explain to her where you have drawn the line? How defeat is slung over one side, and victory over the other? That the factors that turn one into another can be one word. She looked so tiny and childlike in the back of the taxi, her hair matted down against her face. She looked so lovely. And you take a deep breath, shake off the drugs, the emotion that had moored you to her for a moment, the draw of the wish you had for her, and tell her that you were stoned back in
Cowboy. That you never had taken a monsoon rent-a-wife. But that if you ever did, she would be top on the German language-speaking list.
You kiss her lightly on the lips and watch the taxicab pull away from the curb, spraying a mist of brown water on the sidewalk. She waves from the back of the taxi. You raise your hand and wave back; and you look again, and this time you see that she’s twisted her tiny hand into a gesture. You recognize the gesture. She sticks her hand out the other side of the rear window of the cab and gives a Nazi salute. A formation of the fingers and palm from a distant war. And you feel sick in the knowledge that the war was still fought; and this time you lost, and next time down the road, with the tide coming to your ears, you have this feeling you may lose again.
* * *
SNOW and Crosby parachuted back to the table as Tuttle finished the last two paragraphs of the story. Snow towed along a young girl, a twenty-year-old, nicknamed Toom; she scooted across the fake black leather bench, holding her miniskirt with both hands, coming to a stop nestled hip to hip with Lawrence. Her large imploring eyes, brooding mouth, and tiny baby nose suggested the face of a child beggar who had moved up the career ladder put against the wall of life for the poor. She was shy, and Lawrence liked her. Snow scooted onto the bench and hiked Toom onto his lap. She laughed, covering her mouth with both hands like an embarrassed child.
“There’s one lesson in teaching the girls English. Man, you gotta get there first. Kilroy was here. You’ve gotta to be ruthless and teach them that first phrase. That’s the trace memory that makes you their first farang. About first years ago, I bought out a fresh face from Benny’s Bar in Patpong. She had worked the strip about a week and she didn’t know a word of English when I bought her out. Not a fucking word. Three in the morning, I’d smoked an entire joint and she sat in squat position on the bed next to me. I looked at her in the mirror. And I said to her, ‘I like a banana like a monkey like banana.’ I repeated the sentence. I broke it down one word at a time. One syllable at a time. Like fucking reverse engineering. I had the entire sentence pulled apart. And slowly showed her how to build it back up.
“Five a.m. and I was totally wrecked. I popped another diet pill. Ten minutes later, she finally had the phrase down pat, man.
“‘I like a banana like a monkey like banana.’ Then she’s doing variations on the theme like, ‘I much like banana like little monkey like big banana.’
“Like Toom here, she was bright, had natural timing. She could have been on Letterman’s or Leno’s. She looked at herself in the mirror as she said the words. She could have gone far. After a year or so on the circuit she picked up another two hundred words of English. ‘I fuck you good, you buy me TV and motorbike, okay? ’ Or some such shit. ‘You fuck me, go to PX and buy colored TV and case Johnny Walker Red. Good deal for you.’
“Or try this one, ‘You like lady boy suck dick? Or you like suck dick lady boy? ’
“And some wando comes across her two, three years down the road, buys her out, and just as he’s getting off his rocks, she’s whispering in his ear, ‘I much like you like little monkey like big banana.’
“Years down the pike of wonderland, she uses the phrase in the letters that Old Bill will write for her. Letters to America, man. She’s like a parrot handed down through hundreds of short-term owners. Each adding a new phrase along the way. One thing, though, she ain’t never gonna forget her first English sentence. That’s a buzz. Forget about popping a cherry. Taking virginity is finding that girl straight off the bus from Chiang Mai who doesn’t know a fucking word of English. And knowing wherever she goes, no matter who she fucks, your words are gonna be in her mind. She can’t ever shake loose from that message you stuffed in a bottle deep inside her head. In every hotel room in Bangkok, as she strips down before some green wando from London or New York City, she hears that phrase in her head. And she repeats it to the guy. And he says, ‘Who taught you that? ’ She says, ‘I learned with the Snow. Inside, the Snowman.”
* * *
LAWRENCE felt Toom’s hand kneading his leg under the table. His head swivelled around. She was talking in Thai to Crosby, delivering a passionate argument on some point that Lawrence couldn’t understand.
“Is this the girl, Tuttle? ” he asked.
Tuttle grinned, shaking his head. “That’s not her.”
“You’ll know Asanee when you see her,” Crosby piped in, interrupting his conversation. “You won’t need to be told.”
“When does she come? ”
Snow leaned across the table, with a look of intuitive insight into what Lawrence was thinking. “Asanee never comes in here.”
“Why not? ” asked Lawrence, thinking there must be some logical explanation.
“That’s a long story,” said Snow. He looked away as if the conversation was over as far as he was concerned.
Crosby used the lull to immediately change the subject. No sooner had a waiter delivered a Cola for Toom, than Crosby rushed in to fill the void of silence.
“It’s bloody difficult to know who’s a greater source of iniquity in this city. The Huns or the Yanks. With the possible exception of Tuttle, what farang at HQ speaks above second-grade level Thai? Not very many. This is beyond the realm of simple wordplay. Language is more than simple manners and style. You search for the valve that opens up the Thai’s way of thinking. One word is layered in a hundred Thai expressions. One word modified countless times, day after day, from whorehouses, shops, schools, and banks. The word? It’s heart. Thai is a language of heart talk. English is from the head. The clash is between two kinds of thought.”
Toom jerked, picking her name out of the conversation. She elbowed Crosby and asked him in Thai why he was talking about her to the farang? Her beggar’s eyes sweeping Crosby’s face for a hint of deception. Crosby protested, in Thai, that he had not spoken badly of her. She glanced over at Tuttle, who with a nod, confirmed that Crosby was telling the truth.
“Tuttle jai dee, “ said Toom.
“There’s the word. Heart. Good heart,” said Crosby. “Jai dee is very important to the Thai. Not good head. But good heart. That’s your starting point. From there you build an entire way of talking about heart. Jai tahm—literally means black heart. Mean-spirited. And there is Jai yen—cool heart. That ability to take anything life throws at you with a smile. Patience is of the heart. You want to condemn someone, you say he is Jai rawn—hot heart, hot-headed, someone who loses his temper and the razor and knife flash hot with blood. Jep! Jai—the hurt, aching heart of the abandoned lover. The girl who tried to kill herself earlier was Jep! Jai; dumped by her farang boyfriend. Bplack jai! —surprise of the heart. tuean jai! —remind, you remind not the head but the heart. And in Thailand you don’t change your mind, you change your heart. Bplee-un jai!”
This torrent of heart-modified Thai words came from the mouth of a man Lawrence was convinced had no heart. But Crosby with feeling, had movingly claimed to have discovered the hidden territory of the Thai language. Each time Crosby had used a Thai “heart”-modified word, Toom had giggled nervously. It was like watching television where there were snatches of your own language tangled in a vast ocean of foreign, clacking words.
“Don’t forget hen! jai!,” said Snow. “Sympathy.”
“Or Nahk! jai!,” added Tuttle, in a deliberate tone that made the word appear it had been said strictly for Lawrence’s benefit.
“Which is? ” Lawrence asked, as Toom leaned her head against his shoulder.
“The rough translation is heavy heart,” said Tuttle.
The table went silent for a moment. Crosby dealt in the last “heart” card. “Kreng jai—awe-heart is the rough translation,” he said. “But it can’t be translated. English lacks a counterpart. Kreng jai is an attitude. It’s about class and social order. About rank. Not something Americans like talking about. Kreng jai is how you honor class rank. In the better knock-shops, you see kreng jai everywhere. It’s making yourself small; never imposing on the other person.
Between the boss and girls, between girls, boss and customers, between the cops and boss. Each girl in a peu-un pod knows her role and place. They never ask for something; that violates the rule, but they wait to receive. Kreng jai circles around the English words like deference, consideration, diffidence.
“Thailand is the land of hearts in awe of their social betters. The girls show kreng jai to their father, boss, husband, and to an older girl. But there is a dark side. When a Thai is totally pissed off but she owes the kreng jai, then she locates a target below her on the social scale for a good kick or punch. Dogs are good. Children are okay. So a Thai guy might kick a dog to death as a message to his boss. His indirect way of saying, ‘I’m really upset with you, and my heart which is filled with a witch’s brew of awe and fear requires me to vent my anger on this miserable creature.’ And the boss listens. That’s why the girls love the farang. We fall even lower on the social scale than an HQ girl. They don’t have to hold back, or show respect. They owe us no kreng jai. We are down at the bottom next to soi dogs; only we are better, we pay to get kicked.”
A Killing Smile Page 14
