Andrew slid across the upholstered bench to his mother’s side; as Jeremy—a regular customer, a punter, as they are called—ordered Klosters; and Andrew got a Coke. Lek, one of the bar girls, was Jeremy’s “special friend.” In the traditional display of respect, Lek folded her hands, with the tips of her thumbs pressed together, slowly bowed, raising her hands in a wai to Jeremy and then to Susan. The two women locked eyes for a moment seeking a common channel, some shared frequency where a message could be sent or received.
Susan, who was thirty-seven, imagined Lek was about eighteen; maybe nineteen, with the sweet face of a girl buried beneath the painted mask of a harder, older, more experienced woman. Just as Susan felt a connection of sorts, Lek looked away as a tray of cold towels arrived. It was time to go to work.
She unwrapped a towel from the plastic bag and carefully wiped Jeremy’s face, starting with his forehead and working down his cheeks to his neck. Another girl massaged his hand, gently cracking his knuckles. When Lek finished, Jeremy wrapped the cold towel underneath the collar of his shirt and stared forward at the dancers swinging and twisting among the jungle gym of silver poles on the elevated stage. Lek’s girlfriends, who wore hot pink Our Way nylon robes like prize-fighters before going into the ring, encircled Andrew’s end of the table. Their job was convincing customers to buy them Colas. Having spotted Andrew in his baggy shorts, dirty tennis shoes with laces that glowed in the dimly lit corner, and a T-shirt with deadly spiders, they became distracted from their normal duties.
A gang of three giggling girls enveloped Andrew, tickling him. Six hands on his chest, belly, and legs. Andrew scooted out from his corner and streaked down the side of the bar, with two of the girls giving chase. He ducked into the gents’ bathroom. A moment later he reappeared, flushed and out of breath.
“You can see the women’s bathroom inside the men’s,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “There’s no door or anything. Girls can see you pee.”
“Two hundred baht,” Lek said to Jeremy. Half jokingly, she had offered to buy Andrew for the night. She glanced over at his baby-fat face and sparkling, bright, terrified blue eyes; a shank of his light brown hair reflected in gold highlights in the rotating overhead lights.
“He’s just a boy. Only eleven years old. He’s not for sale.”
“You buy me, “ she whispered in his ear. “Why not I buy him? ”
“Cannot,” said Jeremy.
“Can,” teased Lek.
Jeremy looked over at Andrew. His son was overexcited, vulnerable, and confused. The restaurant had been so empty and boring; and the bar overfilled with girls focused solely on him. Andrew had a similar look one day earlier in the summer when he had taken his son fishing off Pattaya and Andrew felt heavy pressure from his bowels. They were nearly a kilometer offshore. Jeremy ordered his son to strip off his clothes. Andrew thought about it for a couple of minutes and then ripped off his clothes. He remembered lowering his son over the side of the boat and into the sea.
“I can’t shit in the water,” moaned Andrew.
“Take your crap.”
“But I’ll pollute the sea, dad!”
“Where do you think whales shit? In their hotel rooms? ”
Andrew had submerged himself for the bowel movement and then crawled back into the boat, with the same anxious, worried expression of helplessness as the three bar girls lowered him into the corner and tousled his hair and stared at his blue eyes. Andrew tried to avoid capture by darting, diving, running in the down-field pattern of a rugby player.
“One day all this will seem perfectly natural to him,” Jeremy said to Susan. “He won’t have our hang-ups. That bodies are shameful. That sex is bad.”
“Most eleven-year-old boys don’t like girls.” Susan raised her glass to Lek.
Andrew came up for air and slid in between his mother and father.
“I forgot to tell you,” he said, panting. “I ran out of money on Sukhumvit today. So I went into Asia bookstore and read all afternoon. Did you know that Marilyn Monroe died on August 4, 1962.”
“The date of my first erection in midtown,” Jeremy whispered to his wife.
Susan pretended to ignore this remark. Where on earth did you find that? ” She asked Andrew.
“In a book. She died on August 4th. My birthday is August 4th. Isn’t that weird? ”
“You were born much later than 1962.”
“I know, I know. But Marilyn Monroe was brilliant. When she was eleven she was fat. When she grew up she was beautiful. Everyone loved her. I love that she was fat as a kid.” He ducked as one of the girls reached for his hair. “Why are they always trying to get at me? ”
“They’re not trying to get at you. They want to play,” said Jeremy.
“You won’t forget to give the letter to your grandfather? ” said Susan, wrapping an arm around her son.
“Won’t forget.”
“And the tape . . .” Susan began to remind Andrew.
“Recorder,” said Andrew, finishing her thought. “I won’t forget to give the tape deck to aunt Liz. God, you never believe anything I say, Mom.”
“I always believe you. But, like your father, you sometimes forget,” said Susan. She glanced over at Lek, wondering what kind of half completed sentence they might finish for each other.
“Doesn’t seem right this should be the end of summer,” sighed Jeremy. “Marilyn Monroe! Where does he come up with this jazz.”
“I saw sixty videos this summer,” said Andrew.
“And read . . .” began Jeremy, pausing to let Andrew fill in the blank.
“Twenty-three books, not counting the one on Marilyn Monroe, which makes twenty-four.”
“What do I forget? ” Jeremy asked. Susan did not reply.
Lek sat, arms folded, smoking a cigarette. She stared off into the middle distance. A flower vendor, a dwarf with a large tattoo of a skull on his bare right arm hobbled up to the table and stuck a fist of roses into Susan’s face. Andrew dug deep into his trouser pocket, removed a crinkled ten-baht note, and bought half a dozen roses. Smiling, he handed them to his mother.
“That was a sweet thing to do,” said Susan. She glanced over at Jeremy, his eyelids half closed, as he stroked Lek’s leg under the table. “Don’t you think that was sweet of Andrew? ”
“Of course he never forgets.”
Susan divided the roses in half. She caught Lek’s eye again and extended three roses to her. Their hands brushed together for a second. This time Susan sensed a connection; as their eyes explored each other through the roses, a halo of understanding and feeling registered in that region beyond words.
* * *
THEY hated the end of summer and were trying to be very brave. Summer’s end was the start of another long period of separation. Jeremy hated these comings and goings because they made him aware of the tick-tock sound of his own mortality. He wanted to stop time and the world inside the Our Way Bar. But he didn’t know how except by ordering a third round of drinks.
“We’ll miss the plane,” said Susan.
“We have plenty of time,” said Jeremy. “Just one more drink, love. It is the end of summer. Indulge me.”
Susan smiled. “Yes, why not? ”
“Sixty movies,” sighed Jeremy.
“Yeah, and back at school the headmaster always lets me pick the video. Because I’ve seen them all. You see, it makes perfect sense. And if I’m really lucky I’ll bag a really great bed next to Eric this year.”
“True,” said Susan.
“And when I get older I want to sell Apple computers in New York, and London, and Paris, and Disneyland.”
Jeremy frowned as he thought about the cities on his son’s list.
“You’ll want to return to Bangkok. You can sell computers here, can’t you? ”
“Maybe. It’s not too bad. But the girls don’t leave you alone. I don’t
like them pulling at my hair and trying to tickle me. It’s rude.” “When you’re older you
r software and hardware might change your mind.”
“No way.”
That was true innocence. The ability to perceive the world without hormones driving the engines of passion and desire, fuelling every glance, touch, and word with the texture of a rumpled sheet. The bar girls flocked to Andrew for that very reason. Innocence in a Soi Cowboy bar was as rare as honesty in politics. Andrew reminded the girls of something lost deep inside themselves. Not that many years earlier they had waited on that same runway edge between childhood and adolescence; they couldn’t wait to take flight, to be airborne into the world of grownups.
Only no one had told them Our Way Bar would be their landing field. Just to touch Andrew was to reunite with that forgotten world they had left behind. Lek and her friends were not flying off to an exclusive American boarding school that evening—not any evening; they were off to board for a couple of hours, or the entire night, with a middle-aged farang. Next year, they would still be dancing and caging drinks. And the year after. Sooner or later the summer would arrive when Andrew would see them through his father’s eyes. But for the moment, they were lost in the magic of a boy who didn’t understand the place of girls in the sea of grownups. A beautiful, fair-skinned boy who watched videos, read books, rode his bicycle and knew when Marilyn Monroe had died.
* * *
“WHY did Marilyn Monroe kill herself? ” asked Andrew looking at his father.
“Because she didn’t like growing old.”
“She was very sad,” said Susan.
“But she was a brilliant movie star!” insisted Andrew.
“Sometimes people do strange things. Think strange thoughts. They try to hold onto things they should let go of.” Susan glanced over at Jeremy and found he was staring at her. “Another beer? ” There was a glint in his eye. As if to say, please stop the time; please stop my boy from going away and adding another year to his life; please save me from the tick-tock of my own life winding down.
“We can’t. We’ll miss the plane.”
“And who the hell would care? ”
“But, Dad, I’d miss rugby practice on Wednesday,” said Andrew with a sense of alarm.
“It would screw up his first term, Jeremy,” said Susan firmly.
“Eric’s dad said that there is only one rule for living: avoid changing airplanes,” said Andrew, noisily sipping his Coke through a plastic straw.
“Eric’s dad is an asshole who managed to say one clever thing in his whole life,” said Jeremy, taking the bar chits from the plastic cup. He tallied the bill, wrapped them together with a five-hundred-baht note, and then pressed them into Lek’s hand. A few feet away, with disco music blaring, lights spinning and flashing across the room, the go-go dancers were churning, twisting, kicking, and laughing all the way to the bank.
“I know why Marilyn Monroe killed herself,” said Jeremy, counting his change after Lek returned.
“Really! Tell me!” said Andrew, sitting erect and leaning forward in an attentive attitude.
Jeremy looked over his son and at his wife. “Because she felt under pressure never to forget who she was.”
“I don’t get it,” said Andrew. “I think Eric’s dad explains things better.”
Susan, with her long, slender fingers, brushed the hair out of Andrew” eyes. “Your father’s not Eric’s father, is he? ”
“Let me try and be profound like Eric’s dad, then,” said Jeremy. “Why did Marilyn Monroe kill herself? You really want to know? ”
Andrew nodded.
“Okay, the truth. She wanted to forget all the stuff that had happened to her. Everything she had done . . . or had been done to her. The faces, the places, the names. But no one would let her forget. Maybe she was ashamed of her past. Maybe a little frightened, too. My theory is someone pushed her, maybe forced her to relive those old memories. She couldn’t take it and went for the big sleep.”
Andrew looked puzzled but said nothing. There was something strangely sad in his father’s expression. He looked straight past his son and at his wife, as if he wanted to tell her a secret but couldn’t find the words or the courage to convey the words he had found.
This time Susan found Lek’s eyes watching her. Lek fingered the rose petals; a feathery bed of red petals covered one end of the table.
“I think she was disillusioned,” said Andrew. “You know, kind of sad? ”
“Marilyn Monroe was world-famous,” said Susan, looking at Lek as she spoke. “A beauty, a goddess, and she thought men truly wanted her. Only she discovered a very hard lesson. There was no one there. No one for her. No one really cared. In July when your father took you fishing and put you over the side of the boat. You knew he’d pull you back in.”
“Right,” said Andrew.
“In Marilyn Monroe’s life, the men just rowed away. Left her out there all alone.”
And Jeremy looked over at Lek, and for the first time saw that she had Marilyn Monroe eyes. The rose stems had been picked naked; all the petals had been stripped away. Susan, with the tips of her fingers, touched the side of Lek’s cheek. Marilyn Monroe’s terror had been in Lek’s eyes the entire evening; a billboard message written in neon tears.
As Susan looked around the room she saw the same billboard message in the eye of every one of the girls. “Rescue me. Save me. Pull me back to safety.” The same, urgent message flashing through the hot tropical night. Each time they looked at Andrew, they wore their girlhood expression of innocence, play, and hope. At the end of his eleventh summer, Andrew had begun to teach parents about life.
Only when Andrew was much older would Susan buy him a Kloster and reminisce about the end of a summer in Bangkok when he was very young. About a final evening in Soi Cowboy when he had asked his father a question, about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide. And how his mother had found the answer in a teenage bar girl’s eyes.
17
At three in the morning, along The Strip, the varsity team of thieves, smugglers, drug dealers, gamblers, hitmen drifted onto the empty field, as if Patpong’s sex-exotic attractions had been a pre-game warm-up. As Tuttle wandered along down the street littered with cartons, broken bottles, old newspapers, empty boxes, the carnival atmosphere was gone; like a circus that had pulled up stakes and left in a hurry. On the side lanes shadowy figures glided past a lone beggar with a shiny scar where an arm once had been attached. A drunk puking in the gutter; a guard whacking a stray dog with the end of his flashlight; a group of men wearing turbans and beards examining a long-bladed knife for sale by a man who straddled a black Honda motorcycle.
Tuttle had little difficulty tracking Crosby down to an upstairs redneck bar off the main strip; a bar tucked away in a labyrinth of cubby-hole bars, massage parlors, barbershops, and restaurants nestled next to a gray concrete multistory parking lot. Inside the bar, he looked through a bamboo partition. A fat man of indeterminate age, with hair dyed a raven black, coifed in a 1950s biker gang style, turned red behind a wooden table. He coughed and hacked into his enormous fist, a screaming cough deep from blacktarred lungs. The clasped fist cast a quivering shadow that danced against the bamboo like a great python struggling to swallow a small pig whole.
“Where is that bitch in the little green shoes,” he roared. “Tell her to get her ass over here. I need a drink.” His guttural southern voice sounded as if it poured forth from a small speaker inserted in the ham hock rolls of fat rippling beneath his chin and operated by remote control from Mississippi. Seated around the table were five other middle-aged players—Vietnam war vets. Tuttle watched the card dealer who had short-cropped silvery gray hair and forearm tattoos of the American flag and a bald eagle. They had nearly finished a third bottle of Mekhong; the thin, sickly sweet smell of the cheap whiskey perfumed the fat man’s cigar smoke. The blades of an overhead ceiling fan rotated on slow speed, mixing smoke, whiskey fumes, and lies.
Red, blue, and black plastic chips lay in the center of the table. A stuffed water buffalo head, with lifeless eyes stared down
at the fat man’s hand. The panelled walls were covered with photographs of famous racehorses, formula A racing cars, greyhound dogs with numbers on their side. A coyote skin had been stretched out and nailed across the opposite wall, and at the tail-end of the coyote was a confederate flag.
“I got a son forty-three years old,” said the fat man. “So I’ve lived long enough to know a few things, asshole.” As Tuttle stepped towards the table, it was clear, the fat man was talking to Crosby who sat with his cards face up on the table. “You wanna get killed? Then just try and pay with a fucking third-party cheque. Do I look like a goddamn banker? ” he thundered, hitting the edge of the table with the palm of his hand, rattling the chips and glasses.
A Killing Smile Page 29
