What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

* * *

  He trudged back down the street alone, his suit jacket folded over his arm, his shirt adhering to his back, carrying his briefcase in a damp grip, winding his way around the groups of people. Vendors dotted the pavement, cooking over charcoal grills.

  That headshake to Bardin, that lie told without words, had been an impulse prompted less by caution than by vengeance. For the insult, the nothing important. Also for the general air of mockery, and for taking him to Patpong. Bardin had known that Robert would be uncomfortable there. He’d perceived what Robert had striven for years to hide: how often he felt an onlooker in the company of other men, outside their easy bawdiness and filthy banter. Robert’s otherness had made school, that welter of vicious adolescent boys, a misery before athletics had rescued him, and it bred in his adulthood a certain isolation—men didn’t invite him along when they went to seedy places, or tell him about their adventures there.

  Robert had seen the same otherness in Philip, and had silently worried about it. When the boy developed an interest in judo, it had seemed to be a gift. Genevieve had been dead set against it. Violence is not the answer, she’d said. Sometimes it is, Robert had said. He had ended that discussion with a fiat: Find him a judo class. Imperious, peremptory. His son would not suffer as Robert had. Philip would have the soft corners knocked off while being taught how to fight back, would gain self-confidence so that even if he stayed small he could move powerfully in the world of men. If Genevieve had been surprised by Robert’s vehemence, she had not said so. She’d found Philip a judo class.

  Robert hadn’t eaten since lunch. He stopped at one of the smoking sidewalk grills.

  “Is that chicken?” Robert asked, pointing to a cluster of skewers at the side of the grill. “Gai?”

  “Gai, gai,” nodded the vendor, taking a skewer threaded with chunks of pale meat and thrusting it into the flame. “You want spicy?” he asked, lifting a liquid-filled jar with two nail holes in the lid. Robert nodded, and they both watched the meat sizzle for half a minute in the dancing fire one side, then the other, before the vendor withdrew it and spun the wooden stick expertly between his fingers, shaking liquid from the jar over the meat. He held the skewer out to Robert and put his hand up, two fingers. Two baht.

  Robert paid and devoured it on the spot, standing with his jacket over his shoulder and his briefcase between his feet, pulling the meat pieces from the stick with his fingers, stuffing them into his mouth. They were searingly hot. The spice of the sauce deadened his lips and mouth and throat. It was delicious. He pointed again, paid for another, gobbled that down. When he was finished, his eyes watering, he saw the vendor looking at him expectantly.

  “What?” said Robert. Unconsciously mimicking the speech pattern of the bar girls, “I already pay, four baht, very good.”

  The vendor reached to the side of the grill and took up a coffee can, wordlessly tilted it toward Robert. Inside, a crowd of wooden skewers, little flecks of meat and fat still clinging to them. Obviously the vendor reused them, washing them clean between patrons—or probably not even doing that. Robert dropped his two skewers into the can, feeling a wave of nausea. Hadn’t they all been warned countless times against eating from street vendors’ carts? Had it even been chicken meat? How many mouths had that wooden stick been in tonight? He thought of Ruth, the pink feather, the coins dropping.

  It’d serve him right if he got sick from this.

  * * *

  Genevieve greeted him at the door and kissed him on the cheek as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  “Sorry I’m so late,” he said.

  “I sent the servants to bed.” Her voice was free of reproof, but Robert could sense the specter of some emotion there, as though strong feelings had been indulged and then erased. “Harriet left a plate for you in the kitchen.”

  “I had a little something to eat,” he confessed. He regretted it now, his lips still slightly numb and a smoldering under his ribs. He put his briefcase in its usual spot beside the hat rack.

  Genevieve wasn’t looking at him, running a fingertip along the surface of the entryway table, inspecting it before reaching into the vase of flowers on its top, frowning when her fingers came out dry. Was she considering the fate of another servant, was Choy or Noi at risk of being expelled from the household for faulty dusting or inadequate vase filling?

  “Do you remember Ruth?” he asked.

  “Ruth,” she repeated, her gaze drifting up from her fingerpads.

  “That maid we had when we first got here. The Number Three.”

  Her brow cleared. “Oh, yes. Ruth. Intolerably lazy.” Robert thought of the half-hearted hops of the coin dance. “I would have sacked her the very first week if she hadn’t been that Number One’s cousin.”

  “She was the Number One’s cousin?” he asked.

  “Darling, they were all that Number One’s cousins, the first ones.”

  “I wonder what happens to them after they stop working for us.”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Perhaps they go on to another household. Although that would be unlikely without a reference.”

  “You don’t write them references when they leave us?”

  “Of course not,” she said, still with that slightly abstracted air. “A false reference isn’t in anyone’s best interests. Not even theirs: if they’re not suited to domestic service, they should find a new line of work.” The jolt of dislike took him by surprise. She gave him a puzzled look. “Whatever made you think of Ruth?”

  “I saw someone who looked like her tonight.”

  “What a funny man you are,” said Genevieve. “She was only here a couple of months. I’m not sure that I would recognize her now.”

  He noticed that her hair was loose, not styled and sprayed into magazine perfection as it usually was on Monday. She must have washed it at home.

  “You should always wear your hair like this,” he said.

  He stepped toward her, lifting a hand to touch it, and she went very still, as if she were willing herself not to step back. Surprised, he stood still too: His wife flinching away from him? They stood frozen like that for a second or two before a mask seemed to draw down over her features, and she wrinkled her nose.

  “You’d better give me that suit jacket,” she said. “It absolutely reeks.”

  That explained the flinch. Of course, she was repelled by the smell of him, the spilled whiskey, the cigarette and marijuana smoke. As he slipped the jacket off, he cast about in his mind for a plausible explanation—he would not have acquired those smells at the office—but she didn’t demand one.

  “It’ll need to be sent out,” she said without pique or curiosity, accepting the jacket from him and carrying it away through the house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  SHE HADN’T known she was waiting for it, but when the whistle came again, Noi was ready. She dropped the dress over her head and buttoned it as she crept down the steps from the Quarters. Somchit wasn’t there; she ran through the garden and opened the gate. There he was. She stepped through with her eyes down, ashamed and thrilled to feel her knees in the open air. He said That dress is perfect, his voice proud, its perfection more a reflection on him for choosing it than on her for wearing it well. He patted the flat panel of metal behind his bicycle seat and she climbed on, shyly allowed him to take her arms and put them around his waist. She tightened her grip as they swooped away from the curb, the wind rushing up her narrow skirt. Her heart raced but she wasn’t frightened; she wanted to memorize every detail, so she could repeat it all to Sao. How the reflected taillights of cars made long red columns on the wet pavement; how Noi found she could affect the bicycle’s balance by shifting her weight to one side or the other. How Somchit swore when she did that but he was laughing, and skilled enough that they didn’t fall.

  They didn’t go to the cinema. The films had all started already, he said, she had taken too long coming down to his whistle. She had taken only two minutes, but she didn’t protest. Instead
they went to a tiny restaurant, had a meal of glass noodles in a lemongrass broth, her eyes wide to be eating something from a stranger’s kitchen. Afterward, they walked close together along the khlong, wheeling the bike. Somchit asked about her family, and she told him about her parents and sisters and her brothers, the river chuckling past the house on stilts. He told her that he was the eldest of five, that he liked the city and didn’t ever want to go home. He bought a Coca-Cola and tipped the thick glass bottle to his lips and then to hers, alternating sweet swallows. I’m sorry you miss your family, he said, but it is lucky for me that you came to Krung Thep.

  The bicycle tick-tick-ticked as they walked through the sleeping garden of 9 Soi Nine. She didn’t want the evening to end. She floated up the steps to the Quarters, turned at the top to look down at him and wave goodnight. To her astonishment he wasn’t at the foot of the stairs—he was right behind her. She made a sound of surprise and he put his hand over her mouth softly, shhh. He leaned against her and she let him push her down the external walkway and into her room, where he slipped the hand away from her face and replaced it with his mouth.

  She had expected more violence, remembering the animals in the countryside. She kept her hands on his biceps until it was over, thinking: This is more important than it seems. She didn’t cry. After he dressed again and left, Noi lay on the mat alone as the moon slowly moved out of her window. Once, she thought she heard the clink of amulets behind her, and her heart leapt; but she must have been dreaming, because her sister didn’t speak or touch her, and Noi didn’t hear the sound again that night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AT THIRTY-THREE, the bulk of what Genevieve guessed to be true about sex was greater than what she actually knew. She had expected her husband to teach her, but Robert had come to the marriage bed almost as naive as she, and there had never been anything in their demure congress of the wildness she had experienced in room 510, the memories of which now chased her even in her sleep. Two mornings in a row, she awoke into the open air of a shuddering orgasm, Robert slumbering unaware beside her.

  It seemed that the encounter had awakened a stranger within her; perhaps that creature she had heard about only in whispers, the nymphomaniac, who craved sex and rotted her body with it. Genevieve willed herself to forget room 510, to dedicate herself to the minutiae of the present and let the past seal itself up behind her. She experienced the weekend parties at a remove, as though from the other side of a thick glass, but woke into Monday feeling more herself. She marshaled the children through breakfast and went to the salon. Like any Monday.

  “Have you heard?” said Irene, her voice juicy with rumor. They were side by side, their bare feet in bowls of scented water. “Maxwell Dawson left his wife. They might be getting a divorce.” The last word mouthed without sound as the pedicurist lifted one of Irene’s feet from the water and enfolded it in a towel.

  After the deafening initial shock—had room 510 been responsible somehow?—Genevieve heard the rest of what Irene was saying, that the separation had taken place months ago, before Dawson had come overseas. In the tide of relief that she wasn’t responsible, there was a tinge of disappointment for which Genevieve chided herself: of course their afternoon together hadn’t meant anything to Maxwell. She wouldn’t want it to.

  “Thank God they have no children,” said Irene, studying three bottles of nail polish in her hands. She sparkled wickedly at Genevieve, brandishing one. “What do you think? I’m feeling racy.” Genevieve nodded, and Irene leaned forward to tap the pedicurist on the shoulder with the bottle, saying in that loud pidgin she sometimes adopted with the Thai I change my mind and I think this color instead.

  That afternoon and the next, Genevieve doubled down, exhorting the servants to greater meticulousness, puzzling the children by accompanying them to their lessons. She stood at the side of the ballet class to watch the row of little bodies at the barre, twinned in the mirror: first position, second position, plié. She stood outside the riding ring as the children went past, posting up and down. Beatrice, posture perfect, paid no attention to her, while Laura kept twisting around to look and nearly fell off. Philip, surprisingly, had a natural seat. How had Genevieve not known that? When Wednesday came, Genevieve announced her intention to attend the judo lesson also, but Philip objected.

  “None of the parents go,” he said. Frowning, anxious. “And there’s nowhere in the shade for you to stand.”

  “Don’t you want me to see how good you’re getting?” she asked. He shook his head.

  She didn’t argue. It felt inevitable. Her resistance had been pointless and temporary, a frail promontory of sand beset by a restless surf, all week the fingers of the tide clawing long crumbling ruts into it. She realized that her capitulation had already been written into her daily choices—she’d forsaken elaborate hairstyling, had been applying only the barest makeup. No longer a stiff-sprayed untouchable doll. She’d known all along that she would go back.

  She had the driver drop her at the club, dawdled a few minutes outside the entrance, then walked down again to the street and caught a tuk-tuk. As she settled onto the vinyl cushion, she felt no doubt, no worry about consequences, only a sparkling mindless anticipation. The door of room 510 opened and Maxwell stood there, face brightening at the sight of her; he swung the door wider and stepped aside to let her in.

  Chapter Seventeen

  NOW HE saw them everywhere: in the streets, in the shops. Not much older than his daughters, in short dresses and garish makeup, leering at men, offering themselves. Had they always been there? Obviously they had. Robert had not been looking.

  Bardin didn’t appear at work all the rest of the week, leaving Robert in a pother of indecision. Should he tell the Boss about finding Bardin in his office? Robert went through his files and his desk drawers thoroughly: nothing seemed to be missing. Telling the Boss might also entail confessing Robert’s lie, that impulsive headshake No that had seemed to reassure Bardin so much. It was a lie without consequences: information passed to the Viet Cong wouldn’t imperil a boy in Thailand. For that reason, Robert thought the whole story about the photograph might be a fabrication. What had Bardin really been doing in Robert’s office? Each evening, when everyone else had gone home and it was too late to act, Robert felt fresh outrage about the incident and was sure that he would tell everything to the Boss at the next possible opportunity, but by morning that resolve had evaporated. This went on all week.

  He fretted through the weekend, Friday’s party at home and Saturday’s party out and brief Saturday-night sex with his wife that was complicated by unwanted visuals. Thank God Genevieve couldn’t see inside his head.

  In the middle of the afternoon on Monday, Robert stood up abruptly and snapped his briefcase shut, carried it down to his car, and stowed it in the boot. He locked the car and left it, walked down the street with a brisk, purposeful gait.

  Patpong was muted in daylight, the neon turned off, the streets less crowded. In the Lotus, only a few couples were on the dance floor. Even the cab girls at the counter seemed subdued, talking quietly among themselves.

  “Hello, daa-ling,” said one of them, as Robert approached the bar. “You buy my bar?”

  Although her smile was wide, the invitation sounded half-hearted. He had the impression she’d been enjoying chatting with her friends.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Robert told her. “A tall Englishman. Mr. Bardin.” What in the world was the man’s first name? They’d done the boarding-school thing and used last names only. “Red hair.”

  “Sie som,” said the girl. She touched the hair beside her ear. Orange.

  “Yes,” said Robert.

  “I maybe know him,” she said. “You want dance?”

  “Not right now, thank you,” said Robert. “The red-haired man. Has he been here today?”

  She screwed up her face as if considering, while her eyes slid to a spot behind Robert. He knew what was there: the door in the wall.

  “Is
he in that room? The special room?” said Robert.

  She slipped down from her seat and leaned close against him, looking up with a smile. Her bangs fell into her eyelashes and she blinked them free. “Dance with me,” she said.

  She was terribly young. She might not be out of her teens. There seemed an inexhaustible supply of these sylphs, glossy-haired and miniature, their bodies created with a miracle of economy, not an extra bit of flesh. We’re monsters beside them, Robert thought, all freckled and lumpy and hairy.

  “My—sie som—friend,” said Robert, taking a step back, making a space between their bodies. “Is he in the special room now?”

  She looked across the bar at the door in the wall, then back at Robert, and her face changed a little bit. “Two hundred baht,” she said.

  Did she mean to go into the room, or just for the information? He looked at the anonymous door. Who knew what lay behind it? Apparently, something that cost ten dollars.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” said Robert. “I just want to know if he’s there now.”

  “Master!” cried a voice behind him.

  Ruth was fully dressed today by Lotus standards, in a spangly dress with a V-neck that dipped nearly to her navel. She said something in quick Thai and the girl to whom Robert had been talking turned away without apparent chagrin and went in the direction of the entrance, where a group of men had just come in.

  “Hallo, Ruth, how are you?” Robert asked. “Or—what is your real name?”

  “Root okay,” she said. “You want drink? Beer whiskey Green Spot Coke Fanta.”

  “Beer,” he said. She smiled, waiting, and he understood that he should pay her. He gave her the money and she carried it the few feet to the bartender, who produced two bottles, one beer, one orange Fanta with a striped paper straw in its mouth. She brought them back, gave Robert the beer and took a long pull from the straw in the other bottle.