“After more time passes, you’ll find a way to make your own choice, Larry. You can either rebuild things and let go of the past; or you can shut the door on life and blame the world, your dead wife, your friends, your life; and keep that stain of pain fresh every day you live.”
* * *
LAWRENCE’S mouth felt sticky and dry. He coughed, swallowed hard, looking at Asanee first, emotions tearing at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and then up at Tuttle, whose eyes were red.
“I understand there is a Thai expression,” said Lawrence, looking at Asanee. “I’m not certain if I can pronounce the words right. But it’s Dtam Jai koon.”
Asanee repeated the expression. “That was Sarah’s advice to me. The day before I left Los Angeles. She loved that phrase very much.”
Lawrence looked away and whispered, “I know.”
12
Lawrence was hard pressed to say the horror of having your wife commit suicide was worse than waking up one day and discovering you had a daughter who moonlighted in a Bangkok go-go bar and spoke broken English. Tuttle had equalized the balance of pain; synchronized the language of hurt.
That afternoon, after lunch, Asanee returned to three hours of teaching. She caught Lawrence watching her eat, staring at the ring on the third finger of her left hand, her Morse code way of communicating with her father.
“There are thousands like Asanee,” said Tuttle, calling for the waiter to bring the bill. “Amerasians working the bars and clubs. Girls who belong nowhere. Last night at HQ remember the girl who cut her wrists? ”
Lawrence nodded. He had hardly touched the rice and shrimps on his plate. His mind had been working too fast, edging out his appetite. “Her name is Lek.”
Tuttle was impressed that he had remembered her name.
“I’m going to run some food and medicine over to her room. Come along and have a look,” said Tuttle.
Asanee threw a disapproving glance in the direction of her father. “You break her face, Father.” For the Thai there were two disasters to avoid. Losing face wrecked a Thai’s state of well-being, but to “break face” was a high social crime, causing an intense furnace blast of provocation. The girl lived in a slum. For Tuttle to willingly bring Lawrence into the overwhelming poverty of Lek’s world had great risk; a strange farang would see the reality of the place she inhabited, not the illusion created in the night world, and that shattered image might rob her of her usual defences. She had few reserves, guessed Asanee. Lek had hit emotional bottom and was looking for some way to climb back. Tuttle was about to withdraw the offer when Lawrence cleared his throat, pushing his plate aside.
“I can’t speak Thai. But maybe if you translate, Bobby, I can explain what suicide does to those left behind.”
Tuttle watched his daughter’s reaction quietly; she folded her hands on the table, her expression giving away nothing of what was inside her mind. “You would do that? ” she finally asked in a tentative fashion as she emerged from her shell.
As the waiter returned with Tuttle’s change, Lawrence felt the gravity of Asanee’s question. She was protective like her father. If Lawrence were going to penetrate into Lek’s private enclave, he had to understand the consequence of finding a disturbed girl undressed by the squalor of her confinement.
“Larry might reach her,” said Tuttle.
“He might,” admitted Asanee.
* * *
TUTTLE and Lawrence climbed into the Mercedes, and Tuttle made a mental note to instruct the driver to park out of sight of Lek’s hotel. They would enter her soi on foot. The Mercedes and Thai driver in livery provided a brief moment of amusement for Tuttle. The notion of Lawrence arriving in a luxury car so he might explain to a girl caught in the grip of grinding poverty all the reasons why she should choose to live.
As they turned onto Sukhumvit Road, a dense black cloud rolled from the ancient exhaust system of buses and trucks, fouling the air with a texture as rich as volcanic ash. Lawrence’s mind wasn’t on the snarled traffic or the thick layers of dust and exhaust fumes that created an enclosed twilight dome over the road; he thought, instead, of Sarah’s letter, with his thoughts shifting back and forth between Asanee and Tuttle. The voltage of emotions in the headmaster’s office alternatively horrified him and invoked his sympathies. Neither Tuttle nor Asanee had questioned him about whose suicide he had in mind. He was grateful. He had made the offer spontaneously; perhaps to win Asanee over, and, of course, it was too late to retract and too soon to explain.
If there were absolute and universal moral laws, then some rational connection existed between cause and effect, Lawrence thought. But the large ganglion that made up causality had split apart. Each time Lawrence appeared to find a plausible progression toward an answer, the bottom dropped out. The more he contemplated what Tuttle had told him, and Sarah’s letter, the less clear was the imaginary line separating disgrace from honor. He had begun to surprise himself. Where was his legendary self-control? As a lawyer, he picked apart his own conduct; only this time, he was having trouble knowing whether what he had done was as desirable or should be rejected as a flaw.
It was like a drafting problem, he thought. Every clause served the entire document. The meaning had to be clear, the purpose exact, each phrase with significance to a precise set of circumstances. Life, he thought, was outlined according to the same set of drafting rules; break one, and errors and discrepancies filtered in to the everlasting confusion of the whole. Sarah had killed herself. A voluntary act of self destruction, without bitterness or scorn, but for some larger purpose that she had never shared with him. And in her letter, she had appointed Lawrence as her sole instrument to execute her chief desire. Sarah had requested him to take responsibility and shape the lives of Robert Tuttle, Asanee, and their school, and the lives of strangers whose needs, from her own action, she had valued as having greater claims than any claims in her own life, or her life with Lawrence. She had assumed placing full power and authority in his hands was the minimum price for his consent.
A slum school in Bangkok didn’t match up in value to Sarah’s life. He couldn’t see it; and he certainly didn’t understand it.
Lawrence had been a supreme rationalist; and his wife’s death and last request had the hallmarks of irrationality. Everywhere he looked Lawrence was seeing the shape of people and events without fully understanding how they were connected or, if he made a connection, he was at a loss as to what meaning to accord them. He had assumed Asanee was Khun Kob’s daughter, ignoring the sparkling green eyes; he had not understood the context of HQ the previous night, or why Tuttle had made the point of selecting that place; the exact location where, if he had looked carefully, he would have observed here was the intersection where Tuttle’s life had shifted gears: from accumulating girls for bed, to bringing them into the classroom.
Tuttle explained Lek’s background. Her father had been a black American. Charles Washington had played varsity football at Cornell. He had been posted for two years in Thailand, where he had been appointed the head of a UN relief agency. He met Lek’s mother in a Patpong bar. Tuttle outlined the crushing banality and ordinariness of such a story; like thousands and thousands of other girls, Lek’s mother had come down from the north and worked the go-go bars. Washington picked her mother out of other girls working the same bar; bought number 46—his old football jersey number at Cornell—seven nights in a row; she thought that meant he loved her. She moved into his apartment and they lived together for two and a half months. Washington got restless, and got her a job in a cocktail lounge, gave her a handful of baht notes. She didn’t want to go and decided to keep him; she got pregnant. The guilt worked on Washington for awhile, and she moved back into his apartment. After Lek was born, Washington had acknowledged her as his child—what he thought was a noble gesture, then six weeks later he changed his mind and got the UN to post him out of Thailand. He never married Lek’s mother.
His escape from the scene left Lek stateless. Under bot
h Thai and American law she was neither Thai nor American. She fell between the seams, and there was no one waiting to break her descent. She didn’t look Thai, and her dark skin wavy black hair, and thick lips made her an object of discrimination. Lek had been excluded from almost day one by the other Thai kids; she developed a king-sized chip on her shoulder. She enrolled in the school for a couple of months, but she kept losing confidence, saying she was stupid. A stupid nigger, she called herself. She had lived a lifetime of sorrow and rejection. Only Asanee seemed to be able to reach her; she trusted Asanee who knew the slights that had been carefully aimed at look kruengs the half-breed Thais.
Asanee spent a long time with her, talking to her, trying to get her to fight back. Learn English so one day she could talk with her own father. But she claimed never to want to see him; she hated that “bastard”—the one English curse word she remembered and used whenever she talked about him.
If Washington had simply vanished from the scene, then the authorities would have been forced to presume that Lek was a Thai national. Asanee’s mother had never told Tuttle about his daughter because of that very risk. Asanee could be a full Thai because Tuttle had never asserted his paternity, or made a public record of it. Lek was worse off than Asanee, and that drove a wedge between them. Lek had entered the gray world where she was nothing, a world where she could not find her own identity. And there was Asanee with the best of both worlds: her actual father at her side, and her Thai passport and nationality secure.
Half of the students who came to the school had a background similar to Lek’s; farang fathers who never married their mothers, and left them in a no-man’s-land where everything was stacked against them.
* * *
THE Mercedes let them out on New Phetchaburi Road. Tuttle grabbed a large plastic bag of food he had bought earlier in the morning at Foodland. The driver deposited them at the entrance to Soi 43, and they walked under the baking mid-afternoon sun down the soi past rows of small rundown rooming houses and hotels. Tuttle turned and entered one of the buildings. An overweight Thai woman in her early forties stood at an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, a bowl of steaming noodles at her elbow, as she pulled out a plug and stuck it into a new slot below a flashing red light. Down a short corridor, all the doors of the rooms were wide open on their hinges; the still, humid air made Lawrence’s shirt cling to his damp body. Music blared across the corridor from one of the rooms. Garbage had been collected in the narrow hallway. A low, hacking cough muffled by the thin walls and heat echoed behind their footsteps.
Tuttle halted, searched for a room number, then finding it, knocked on the open door of room 104. A teenage Thai, in rumpled white hot pants with her string top unhooked on one side, appeared in the doorway. Her puffy eyes surveyed Lawrence, and then Tuttle. She wore no makeup; a money belt was tied around her waist. She smoked a cigarette with one hand, and cleaned her ear with a Qtip with the other. Each movement jangled a dozen arm bracelets that fell like sand in an hourglass from her wrist to her elbow. She sucked hard on her cigarette, and let the smoke curl out her nose, looking bored and hot, as Tuttle and Lawrence stepped inside the narrow room.
Constructed of concrete blocks painted yellow, the room housed four Thai bar girls. Three lay in a tight row, side by side like sleeping children, jammed together in on a queen-sized bed. At one end a wooden rod ran the length of the room holding four separate, yet interchangeable wardrobes. Lawrence recognized two of the girls from Headquarters the previous night. The girl in the white hot pants jiggled Lek’s arm, stopping only to inspect the content of ear on the end of the Q-tip.
Lek, her eyes swollen, her face pale and drawn, raised her head, and managed a smile as Tuttle placed the bag in the empty space at the foot of the bed. Her arm bandages were soiled, and had slipped down to reveal stitches and clogged blood. Lek was eighteen years old, and had travelled to Bangkok from Surin, a town in the Northeast, where her mother had gone after Charles Washington fled the scene. The pain of her injury showed on her face. She balanced herself on one arm, one arm tucked below her rib cage, she shifted from side to side, grinding from her hips, as if she were dancing in a bar, and all the while keeping her head in a half-bowed position. Her expression darkened as she glanced up at Lawrence, an unknown farang, who stood behind Tuttle.
“Food and medicine are inside,” said Tuttle. “Stay in bed a couple of days and rest. Don’t forget to eat. And Lek, don’t do this anymore. It’s bad luck.”
“Cannot sleep. Head no good. Stomach hurt. Have period,” she said.
Tuttle removed a small plastic bag of pills. “Take these. Four times a day. Before you eat. Okay? You understand? ”
“Why you bring your friend? ” asked Lek. A look suggesting betrayal darkened her face. One of the other two girls moaned, rolled over on her side in her sleep. The roommate in hot pants passed her cigarette to Lek, who slowly inhaled, looking Lawrence up and down.
“He saw you cut yourself last night. He feel very bad. He feel sad young girl, pretty girl, want to die,” replied Tuttle, sensing Lawrence’s discomfort.
“Me no pretty,” said Lek. “Thai girl soo-ay—beautiful.”
“Bobby, tell her I know she hurts inside. My wife hurt inside, too. And she killed herself,” said Lawrence, his voice breaking. He tried to swallow back the storm of feeling that burned in the back of his throat as Tuttle translated to Lek.
Her expression immediately softened and she crawled forward on the bed. She stretched out and took Lawrence’s hand and cradled it against her face. Lawrence tried to say something else but he couldn’t; he broke down, sat on the edge of Lek’s bed and wept.
“Tell her I’m sorry,” he finally said.
“She understands,” said Tuttle, watching the girl in white hot pants take out another Q-tip and begin cleaning the space between her toes.
“The person who I was the closest to in my life killed herself,” said Lawrence, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “And that’s something I can’t undo. I can’t change. I have to live with it. And that’s unfair. There’s always another day, another way around a problem. All you have to do is ask. Ask the people who care about you.” He gently placed his hands around Lek’s face. “All you have to do is ask. Do you understand? ”
Her face clouded as she found Tuttle’s face. He translated Lawrence’s words in Thai, and at each pause, she nodded, looking back at Lawrence, tears rolling down his face.
* * *
AT Headquarters, Lek and her friends became the grammar for the abstract words “sexy,” “good,” “beautiful” giving those words faces and flesh and emotions. They floated around the floor like dreams auctioned off to the first farang who gave that discreet nod, wave of the hand, or any of the other signals that meant the same thing. “I know your price. And I’m buying. Buying something for myself this night. Something I can’t point out but I find outlined in the way you dress, walk, and smile.” And they created the illusion that each farang was part of their dream and the promise in each gesture and glance that their world of smiles lacked nightmares.
The posters in Lek’s room illustrated the field of dreams for any teenage girl. Middle aged men, the farang, were absent in every poster, picture, and object on the walls, headboard of the bed, and table. The farang was the ghost who did not appear. Except in an hallucination, where the girls were unable to do anything to stop him from roaming the dark roads of their dreams. Then Tuttle and Lawrence arrived at their bedside; how frighteningly dangerous they looked at close quarters standing in the midday sun, straddling the equator of their own world. The farang who came to weep with the girl who had tried to kill herself. Everyone’s world had spun upside down in a reverse orbit.
Before Lawrence and Tuttle departed, Lek nodded her approval for one of her friends to pull out a package of noodles; another of fish under cellophane wrap, laid out side by side like the girls in the room. The other two girls rubbed the sleep from their eyes, then sat back like hungry childre
n on their elbows waiting to be fed. One girl slipped a cassette, a Thai rock song, into a new sleek black Sony. Stuck in the headboard of the bed was a toy teddy with a pair of sunglasses pulled forward on the bridge of his furry nose. Lek sat on the edge of the crowded bed staring at her feet. Her friends had clawed the wrapping off a box of cookies that Tuttle had stuffed in the plastic bag. Packets of tomatoes, chicken, and soup were scattered over the bedding.
“Phone me tomorrow. Tell me how you feel. I take you to the doctor, if you’re not better,” said Tuttle.
Lek stared at Tuttle, wiggling her painted toenails, one ankle hooked behind the other, nodded, and quickly looked away from Tuttle’s eyes. He touched his palm against her forehead. Then he felt her neck, and pulled his hand away.
“Bpen Ky ! —you’ve got a temperature.”
A Killing Smile Page 21
