What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  When a year had passed, the Boss said they were making headway. In the second year, the Boss said The goal is in sight. That was the year the draft came at home, the call-up order determined by birthdate, 366 slips of paper plucked one by one out of a jar. Both Robert and Philip were ineligible, of course, but Robert couldn’t help but note the numbers assigned to each of their birthdays—what their draft numbers would have been: Philip’s was 26, Robert’s 280. If he’d been eighteen years old, Philip would have gone in the first wave.

  At the three-year mark, the Boss had spoken of finishing what we started, and been uncharacteristically frank: Robert could quit if he liked, but he’d be given no covering letter of reference if he did. Such an unexplained hiatus without references would be career poison, the Boss didn’t need to say, and Robert understood that he’d been backed into a corner. By pride more than money, more than either of those by his love for his wife. There was no way to tell Genevieve the truth now without revealing the broad sweep of his dishonesty—in four years, that first lie had fathered a million others—and he couldn’t bear to think how things between them might change if she found out. He did not fear her anger as much as her contempt. A junior G-man, she might exclaim, and then he would see it too, how ridiculous it all was.

  * * *

  He told Ruth a halting, extremely abridged version of the story. It wasn’t clear how much she understood, but she listened intently. When he was done, she said something in Thai, the last vowel sound crooning to its end, and put a hand on Robert’s chest, making him jump. What would he do if she tried to kiss him?

  “Buddha people have many life,” she said, in English.

  Was that supposed to be comforting? Was Ruth acknowledging that he’d made a cock-up of this life but he needn’t worry, he’d have a fresh start after death, another chance to get things right? Maybe that philosophy explained why the Thai were always laughing and never seemed to take anything too seriously.

  Her eyes moved from his to something behind him, and her smile broadened. She took her hand away from his chest—he felt a mild sorrow at the tiny loss of its removal—and waved it enthusiastically. He turned to look: Was Bardin coming out of the special room? It would be just Robert’s luck to be spotted sitting cozily with a prostitute.

  It wasn’t Bardin, or anyone he knew; Ruth had been waving at a girl, another tiny doll with long shiny hair, wearing white boots and a skirt so brief that her matching underpants showed. She waved back at Ruth and led the man she had come in with onto the dance floor.

  “Prem have good boyfriend,” Ruth said, watching the couple. “They go Hong Kong already.”

  “How nice,” he said. Uneasy: Was Ruth angling for him to be “good boyfriend” too? He didn’t know how to make it clear to her that he was to be no kind of boyfriend at all. He had not touched her and he didn’t intend to do so. Perhaps letting her touch him had muddied the waters. But how did one reject a woman’s hand? It would have been rude to push it away.

  He felt no desire for her, only a kind of camaraderie, the warmth one might feel for a peripheral character from a shared, beleaguered past, a classmate who’d suffered under the same cruel head boy. He also felt gratitude: the act of confessing, although it hadn’t brought absolution, had lightened his load. To sit with Ruth a while longer, and buy more drinks, would be a way to return the kindness. She might not get another customer today. She was not as pretty as some others here, not so young. There were just so many to compete with, all beautiful, all willing. And all just seven dollars.

  Chapter Eighteen

  EACH MORNING now, Noi slipped the buttons of the white blouse through their buttonholes and zippered the skirt without thinking, before hurrying through the garden at dawn. No more lingering on the paving stones and hoping for a whiff of khlong to be carried over the walls, and Sao’s amulets never made their delicate rattle behind her anymore in the dark. News from home told her that Sao had married Tee and had a baby, a little boy called Moo. From his play name, Noi guessed he was fat as a piglet, and she wondered what his ears looked like, although it didn’t really matter. Whatever his fortune was, pebble or weed or water buffalo, in one way at least his luck was assured: he would spend this life as a boy.

  Noi knew that what she and Somchit did together brought babies, and she wanted a baby to come. She ate pomelos and eggs, round hopeful things that might woo a child into her womb, and visited the shrine to the spirit who lived in the trees near Khlong Saen Saep, bringing as offerings a circlet of jasmine and a long smooth stone she’d found in an oil-paisleyed puddle in the street. She dreamed of her own baby lying naked, waving its little fists and laughing; it had Somchit’s beautiful eyes and her own small mouth. She knew she should want a boy, but when she saw the bunched cleft between the fat kicking thighs, she was delighted. Come soon, she told her daughter. Come to me soon.

  Somehow, Noi’s virgin sensibilities had remained intact: a crude comment would make her blush like fire, and she could not have described aloud what she and Somchit did together in the dark of her room in the Quarters, in the cool of the garden at night, once even, ineffably daring, on the warm red leather of the Mercedes. Still, she felt a thousand miles away from the child she had been. She felt her world changing, expanding, filling with sensation; she understood more of the beat that drove everything. At night, she undid her long braid and let the hair fall, thick and shiny, tickling her shoulder blades; she admired herself when she bathed, running the washcloth over her stomach and legs. She dreamed of the countryside where she was born, the swollen, always-moving river, the rice plants poking up from the flooded lowlands in brilliant green lines. She awoke with a longing to see her sisters.

  * * *

  Somchit had greater ambitions than driving for the Prestons, although he assured Noi often that it was a very good, high-class job, and he loved the car. Affection came into his voice when he talked about it. It’s not good, all the stop-and-go, stop-and-go in the city, he told Noi. A fine engine requires speed. Sometimes when his eyes jerked back and forth behind their lids in sleep, Noi guessed that in his dreams he was driving. As fast as he wanted, no traffic ahead of him, no one in the back seat telling him where to go.

  He had plans, he said, but he didn’t offer specifics; when Noi pressed him, all he would say was I’m waiting for my luck. She conjured up details in her own imagination. Perhaps a little grocery store. A stall in the market to begin, then in time a real shop with a counter and an electric fan on the ceiling. She could see herself shaking out paper bags with a snap and making change after a purchase, counting up the coins and dropping them into the customer’s palm.

  She would prefer a dressmaking shop to a grocery. There was plenty of custom. Farang women bought clothes in Europe and had them copied in Bangkok; their husbands ordered handmade shirts by the dozen. Noi was good at sewing. In her room in the Quarters, she had studied discarded Preston garments carefully, taken them apart and put them back together again and again until she knew their secrets: how to set a dart, how to bury a zipper invisibly into a side seam. A tailoring shop would be perfect for her and Somchit. And the baby, who could sleep while Noi sewed, kicking its legs and cooing in a basket in the corner. When business grew, they could hire on another girl to help; perhaps her cousin across the city, or Choy, the Preston Number Two, who had poor vision and troublesome joints and needed an easy job without much standing. Choy could cut cloth, sweep the floor, mind the baby.

  Noi had a lot of time to think about these things while Somchit talked. He barely spoke all day; he believed it was better if farang didn’t know how well he understood English. Each night when he came to her, the words rushed out of him as if they were under pressure. About the car; about how stupid the farang were, how careless; about how spoiled the children were, how whiny. She paid little attention, mostly waiting for the fountain of speech to turn into compliments, as it reliably had in the beginning. But now when he stopped complaining about work and talked about her instead, it
was usually to chide her lack of ambition.

  “You could make much more money than you are making,” he said.

  “Shhh,” she said. “Daeng will hear you.” The Number One’s room in the Quarters was two rooms away, on the other side of Choy’s.

  He put his lips next to her ear. “Two or three times more money,” he said.

  “I don’t want to work in a different house.” She didn’t contradict the ridiculous claim, two or three times more. The Prestons paid well. Nine Soi Nine was a good job: a lot of rules, but Noi was accustomed to them now, and the parties were relatively modest, confined to weekends and usually over by midnight. Nothing like the near-nightly bacchanals that went on in the house where her cousin was currently employed.

  “Stupid girl.” His kiss took the sting out of it. “I’m not talking about another Number Three job.”

  From this she understood that he meant a Number Two position, and despite herself, she was intrigued. As Number Two she would be shielded from the most unpleasant and dirtiest tasks. Perhaps the Number One at the new job would be nicer than Daeng, who of late seemed to invent arduous chores for Noi—this week, she’d had to empty all the khlong jars that stood at the back of the foyer holding emergency water for use during cutoffs. Her hands still stank from scraping out the slime that had accumulated at their bottoms.

  “I’m too young,” she said. Most Number Twos were at least twenty-five. She drew his arm over her and turned on her side, hoping he would do the same. She loved that part best, when they nestled together. He didn’t turn; he stayed on his back.

  “Madame goes to the Erawan almost every day,” he said. “I leave her at the club, but then I see her come out again and get into a tuk-tuk.”

  “Mmm,” said Noi, not listening. She was waiting for his words to run down and the rest to begin: the kissing, and the closeness. “Why would she go there?” She turned back toward him, nuzzled the soft place behind his ear that reliably made him passionate.

  “Why do you think?” he said.

  She lapped her tongue around his earlobe; there was no more talking for a while after that.

  “Come with me tomorrow night,” he said before he left. “I’ll introduce you to the man with the job.”

  A man? Usually the lady of the house did the hiring. Perhaps it was a bachelor—that would be much easier than looking after a family with children.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  From the window she watched him push his bicycle through the garden, his hair glossed with moonlight; she felt her heart go with him out of the gates. Her future was entwined with the luck and love of this handsome man. She hoped his luck would have a dress shop in it.

  * * *

  That night she dreamed that the baby she’d prayed for entered her womb, small as a millet seed, and settled in to grow.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “WHAT DO you tell people?” Genevieve said into the hum of the air conditioner. “About where you are.”

  She was sitting naked in one of room 510’s chairs, which she’d pulled up in front of the laboring window unit. She lifted her heavy hair from the back of her neck and held it bunched against her nape with one hand.

  “I don’t tell them anything,” Max said. He was lying on his side on the bed, his head propped on one fist. “They don’t ask.” He patted the mattress to invite her back to it, and when she didn’t move he reached for the packet of Pall Malls on the night table. “They probably think I’m with a Thai girl,” he mumbled around the cigarette as he scratched a match into flame. “Most of the men here have girls.”

  “None of the men I know.” She imagined Giles Benderby with a Thai mistress, his naked pale belly slopping over his pants as he pulled his belt from its loops. The girl would have to be on top, a mosquito riding a hippo, otherwise he’d crush her. Genevieve shook her head as if to toss the thought out of it: her mind went such disgusting places when she was in this room.

  “Do you always know where Robert is?” said Max.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He patted the bed again.

  She rose, walked over to the bed, and sat down on it, swung her legs up and leaned back against the pillows.

  “I like your knees,” he said, putting his mouth to her kneecap.

  “Robert doesn’t keep secrets from me,” she said. “He’s not like that.” He’s not like me.

  “Everyone has secrets,” he murmured into her thigh.

  “Not him,” she said. “He’s perfectly dependable. I can practically set my watch by him.”

  “Good old Robert,” Max said, lifting his head away from her, rolling back onto his side and putting the cigarette to his lips. “Punctual as a train.”

  “Don’t make fun of him,” she said. “He’s a wonderful father.” She didn’t know of any other husbands who took such an interest in the doings of their offspring. It had sometimes struck her as distasteful, effeminate almost, how Robert tracked the mundane details of the children’s lives, inquiring about Bea’s sniffles, Laura’s insect bite, Philip’s mystery rash.

  “If he’s such a paragon,” said Max, his eyes on his own hand where it played with the curly hair over her pubic mound, “what are you doing here?”

  “I really don’t know,” she said, drawing the sheet up over herself, knocking his hand away. He put his head down and breathed on her through the linen, then pulled himself up and kissed her neck.

  “What do you wish for?” he murmured. “If you could have the world as you want it. If you could change anything. What would you do?”

  “I’d go home,” she said immediately.

  He pulled back; his eyes searched her face.

  “Back to Washington,” he said, his voice flat. “Back to your life there.” She nodded yes. He leaned back on an elbow, brought the cigarette to his mouth. “What is it that you miss so much?” he said. “Tell me.”

  After a pause, during which her thoughts went around like a carousel, every horse beloved, she said, “My house.” Adding the disclaimer, “It’s not modern or fancy; it’s old and it has its problems. But I chose it. And every stick of furniture in it. All antiques, all priceless.”

  “How did Robert enjoy paying for all of that?” Maxwell said as he reached to stub his cigarette out into the ashtray.

  “He didn’t pay for it,” she said. “It’s mine. Family heirlooms. My mother

  * * *

  used some pieces when I was very young, but everything went into storage when they began traveling.” Words wouldn’t quite suffice to explain how it had felt to rescue those abandoned, beautiful objects, those artifacts of her childhood, from the dark, climate-controlled vault where they’d been waiting. “They kept the Washington house mostly empty.”

  “Your parents traveled,” he said. “You didn’t go with them?”

  “I boarded at my school. I saw them on holidays. I’m not complaining,” she said. “It was a very nice childhood.”

  He lit another cigarette, the light jumping in the hollows of his face and the flesh under his chin folding on itself in an unattractive way. She might not even recognize a photograph of him as he looked at that moment.

  “And when you grew up, you did as your parents did,” he said. “Put the furniture into storage and took flight.”

  Was he mocking her? “Not by choice,” she said. “I long every day for the life I left.”

  He cocked his head, still that unattractive stranger. “You believe that life is waiting for you still? Everything just the same?”

  “Not exactly the same,” she said. “Who knows what’s happened to the garden by now. I’ll have to start it all over again.”

  “I don’t mean your house,” he said. “I mean your country.” He turned his head, breathed a cloud of smoke away. “It’s not the same place you left four years ago.”

  “Nonsense,” she said tightly. “The fundamentals never change. Something dire is always happening, some group is always protesting. It’s all just headlines.” />
  “It’s more than headlines,” he said.

  He reached for the ashtray on the bedside table, placed it on his stomach.

  “Albert Einstein had a famous thought experiment,” he said. “About identical twins.” As he spoke, he was rolling the tip of his burning cigarette against the thick glass rim of the ashtray, making it into a point. “One of them leaves Earth and travels on a rocket ship at the speed of light for a year, then turns around and spends another year coming back. When he steps out of the ship, he’s two years older than when he left, but in that same time his twin has aged a decade.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Genevieve, flooded with impatience, her fists balled in the sheeted valley of her lap. “My family is not on a rocket ship. We’re not traveling at the speed of light. We’re buried at the end of the world, for the best years of our lives. For what? For what?” She gulped a furious sob. “A project that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone enough to complete it.” She did not care how rude this was, or that she was speaking to her husband’s superior.

  “You misunderstand me,” he said. He took a last pull on the cigarette, then crushed it into the ashtray. His voice held a grave pity. “You’re not the twin in the rocket ship. You’re the one who was left behind.”

  “Please,” she said. She felt the world outside bulging the walls of their idyll inward, and closed her eyes. “Please don’t ruin this.”

  The clatter of the ashtray back onto the bedside table, a shushing of sheets, and then his arms were around her and he was whispering Jenny, and all was forgotten for a while.

  * * *

  Sometimes it seemed to Genevieve that she was living in two separate geographies, as if the afternoons in room 510 were a chain of islands off the mainland of her regular life. She didn’t feel divided; oddly, it was quite the opposite—she felt whole. If in room 510 she had discovered something unexpected within herself, a kind of whirling, consuming physicality, well, that was all it was. It wasn’t love, and honor, and the bonds of marriage, and raising three children. Room 510 was simply a tonic, a welcome wildfire that burned messy underbrush away. It anesthetized her longing for home into a distant throb; she felt less trapped and frantic. She was more patient with the children, with the servants, with her husband. When the electricity cut off, she shrugged mai pen rai and they made do with candles. It was clear to Genevieve that the hot hours in room 510 were good for everyone.