by Paul Theroux
He opened his case of samples and pulled out a limp contraceptive and made a face (“Oh gosh!”) and shoved it back. Then there was an elaborate business with the brushes, various shapes and sizes. He demonstrated each one by tickling the housewife in different places, starting on the sole of her foot. Soon he was pushing a feather duster under her loosening bathrobe. The housewife was laughing and trying to hold her robe shut, but the horseplay went on, the robe slipped off her shoulders.
I recognized the sofa, a large prewar claw-foot model with thick velvet cushions, and just above it on the wall a picture of a stag feeding at a mountain pool. The man took off his shoes. This was interesting: he wore a suit but these were workman’s shoes, heavy-soled ones with high counters and large bulbs for toes—the steel-toed shoes a man who does heavy work might wear. His argyle socks had holes in them and he had a chain around his neck with a religious medal on it. His muscled arms and broad shoulders confirmed he was a laborer; he also wore a wedding ring. I guessed he had lost his job; as a Catholic he would not have acted in a blue movie on a Sunday, and if it was a weekday and he had a job he would not have acted in the movie at all. Out the apartment window the sun shone on rooftops, but I noticed he did not take his socks off. Perhaps it was cold in the apartment. Afterward he walked back to his wife through some wintry American city and said, “Hey honey, look what I won—twenty clams!”
The housewife was more complicated. Judging from her breasts she had had more than one child. I wondered where they were. There was a detailed shot of her moving her hand—long perfect fingernails: she didn’t do housework. Who looked after her kids? From the way she sat on the sofa, on the edge, not using the pillows, I knew it was not her apartment. She took off the fancy bathrobe with great care—either it was not hers (it was rather big) or she was poor enough to value it. She had a very bad bruise on the top of her thigh; someone had recently thumped her; and now I could see the man’s appendix scar, a vivid one.
Two details hinted that the housewife wasn’t American: her legs and armpits were not shaved, and she was not speaking. The man talked, but her replies were exaggerated faces: awe, interest, lust, hilarity, pleasure, surprise. She kissed the man’s lips and then her head slid down his chest, past the appendix scar—it was fresh, the reason he was out of a job: he had to wait until it healed before he could go back to any heavy work. The housewife opened her mouth; she had excellent teeth and pierced ears—a war bride, maybe Italian, deserted by her GI husband (he thumped her and took the children). The camera stayed on her face for a long time, her profile moved back and forth, and even though it was impossible now for her mouth to show any expression, as soon as she closed her eyes abstraction was on her face—she was tense, her eyes were shut tight, a moment of dramatic meditation on unwilling surrender: she wasn’t acting.
Mercifully, the camera moved to a full view of the room. On the left there was a wing chair with a torn seat, a coffee table holding a glass ashtray with cigarette butts in it (they had talked it over—Are you sure you don’t mind?—perhaps rehearsed it), and on the right, the face of a waterstain on the wall, a fake fireplace with a half-filled bottle on the mantlepiece—the Catholic laborer had needed a drink to go through with it. There had been a scene. If you’re not interested we’ll find someone else. And: Okay, let’s get it over with. It was breaking my heart.
There was a shot of the front door. It flew open and a large naked woman stood grinning at the pair on the floor—this certainly was the owner of the fancy bathrobe (the cameraman’s girl friend?). She joined them, vigorously, but I was so engrossed in the tragic suggestions I saw in their nakedness I had not questioned the door. It was a silent movie, but the door had opened with a bang and a clatter. The feller beside me had turned around and was saying, “What do we do now?”
7
WITH SOME kidding fictor’s touches, by changing the time of day and my tone of voice to make the story truer, by intensifying it to the point of comedy where it was a bearable memory, my escape from the blue movie raid became part of my repertoire, and within a year I was telling it at the bar of my own place, Dunroamin: “—Then the Chief Inspector, a Scotty, says to me, ‘Have I not seen you somewhere before?’ and I says, ‘Not the club, by any chance?’ and he says, ‘Jack, I’ll be jiggered—fancy finding you in a place like this!’ ‘I can explain everything,’ I says. ‘Confidentially, I thought they were showing Gone with the Wind,’ and he laughs like hell. ‘Look,’ he says in a whisper, ‘I’m a bit short-staffed. Give me a hand rounding up some of this kit and we’ll say no more about it.’ So I unplugged the projector and carried it out to the police van and later we all joked about it over a beer. And to top it off I still haven’t found out which club he had in mind!”
I walked through the bar at Dunroamin all night, chatting fellers up, introducing the girls, and settling arguments.
“If you’ve got a certain attitude toward cats, you’re queer they say. Ain’t that right, Jack?”
“Sure. If you want to bugger a male cat, that means you’re queer, prih-hih!”
As always, my clowning went over well, but like my new version of the blue movie story it was the clowning that worried me—the comedy struck unexpected notes of despair. I turned my worst pains into jokes to make myself small and to obscure my sick aches; it was my fear of being known well and pitied—my humor was motivated by humility. I sang songs like “What Did Robinson Crusoe Do with Friday on a Saturday Night?” and saying, “I wouldn’t have anyone here that I wouldn’t invite into my own home,” I treated Dunroamin—where I had moved in with my amah and pets—as another joke. But it was no laughing matter. I had plowed my whole savings into it. My refusal to admit I took it seriously was my way of guarding against anyone feeling sorry for me if it failed.
It didn’t fail; and the feature of it that I had conceived as a joke of last desperation was what saved the house from collapse. The house itself was not large, but it was walled in and set back from the road. I picked it for its high wall and rented it cheap from a superstitious towkay: it was on Kampong Java Road and the rear opened on to the Lower Bukit Timah Road cemetery. Those several acres of tombstones and the fact of the house being associated with some Japanese atrocities accounted for the low rent, but gave me headaches when it came to getting girls to live in. The joke was the Palm Court orchestra: fellers often came and paid my slightly higher bar prices to sit and listen.
Finding girls who didn’t believe in ghosts was very difficult—the house was haunted; finding South Indian violinists was easy—many were looking for work. Mr. Weerakoon was my first violinist; he was backed up by Mr. (“Manny”) Manickawasagam and Mr. Das. Albert Ratnam played the piano, Mr. (“Subra”) Subramaniam the cello, Mr. Pillay the clarinet. Manny, an impressive baritone, sometimes sang, and Subra switched to the accordian for the faster numbers. They turned up punctually at six every evening in their old-fashioned tuxedos and bow ties, smelling of Indian talcum, breathless after their hike from Serangoon Road. Their hair was neatly parted in the middle, making two patches of brilliantined waves which shook free to glistening black springs as soon as they began playing. Weerakoon, who had a severely large handlebar mustache, made them practice until seven, and he interrupted them constantly, saying, “No, no, no!—Take that from the top again,” while looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
He refused praise. I would say, “A very nice rendition of ‘Roses from the South.’”
“Hopeless. But what to do? Ratnam can’t read music.”
“It was very bouncy. I’ve never heard it played bouncy before.”
“Fast tempo—I think it suits your house. But Pillay was dragging his feet. We need much practice.” And pinching the waxy tails of his mustache, he’d add, “We shall have umple of trouble with more tricky numbers.”
Weerakoon persuaded me to redecorate the front lounge and turn it into a music room. He had me print a concert card with the selections and intervals listed on it, menu fashion: he p
ropped this on a music stand at the door. The orchestra had the effect Mr. Sim obtained by swallowing live mice—it fixed restless seamen into postures of calm, and later they told me Dunroamin had class. I could see them from the bar, where I stood to greet fellers arriving: a row of rough-looking men with sunburned arms, sitting and listening attentively on the folding chairs. And all night the scree-scree from the music room took the curse off the banging bedroom doors and the noisy plumbing, the creaky bedsprings and quacking fans, and that loud way the girls had of washing, sluicing themselves with dippers and gargling at the same time.
The Singapore residents, clubbable ones especially, flattered themselves that the Palm Court orchestra was for them, though some complained, calling Weerakoon and the others “greasy babu fiddlers.” Some said I should sack them and get a couple of girls to put on a show. But I resisted these suggestions—sex exhibitions saddened me nearly as much as blue movies: this panicky nakedness was desire’s dead end. The Palm Court orchestra, central to what I came to think of as my little mission station—a necessary comfortable house on the island outpost—was for the seamen. I had discovered something about them that I had been too obtuse or distracted to grasp on the Allegro: most men who go to sea are quiet and conservative by nature, an attitude that is fostered by the small protected community on a ship where the slightest disorder can be fatal; even the youngest have elderly cautious tastes—pipe-smoking and hobbies—and few read newspapers; most are anxious in the company of women and very shy on land, natural drunkards and rather unsociable. It was for them that Mr. Weerakoon practiced the waltz from Swan Lake, and he encouraged them to make requests after he finished the selections listed on the concert card. Then, a seaman with a ruined face would lean over, making his wooden chair squawk, and in a gravelly voice ask for “Brightly Shines Our Wedding Day” or “Time on My Hands.”
My girls passed out cold towels from trays or leaned against the walls with their thin pale arms folded, or scuffed back and forth in the flapping broken slippers they always wore. In many ways, though it was not my wish—I was still groping to understand my job—Dunroamin was a traditional establishment, with cold towels, hot towels, glasses of tea, offering a massage at five dollars extra and all drinks more expensive than in a downtown bar; the oldest and frailest amahs did the heaviest work—yoked themselves to buckets of water and tottered upstairs to fill the huge stone shower jars, scrubbed sheets on the washboards out back, or boiled linen, which they stirred with wooden paddles, in frothy basins of hot evil-smelling water on the kitchen stove. In those same basins, after a quick rinse, they made mee-hoon soup and ladeled it out to the customers who demanded “real Chinese food.”
Dunroamin worked smoothly, but it was older than my devising: the system of payment—the chit pads in the bar, the shakedown in the bedroom—the jaga at the front gate (Ganapaty, who said, “I am a dog, only here to bark”), the thickly waxed oxblood-colored floors in the graceful white house, camouflaged by vast Angsana trees that dripped tiny yellow blossoms, flanked by servants’ quarters and a carriage shed; sloping rattan chairs with leg rests on the top floor verandah, the light knock on my back room and (though I insisted they call me Jack) the soft cry of “Tuan” with the morning tea, the skill of the Indian musicians and Weerakoon’s habit of saying “Blast” when he played a wrong note—it was all a colonial inheritance, and it had fallen to me. But if my whorehouse was a scale model of the imperial dream, I justified my exploitation by adding to it humor and generous charity, and by making everyone welcome.
What Chinese fellers visited, mostly embarrassed businessmen with names like Elliot Ching and Larry Woo, did so for the same reason the rest of the Chinese stayed away—because my girls made love to redheads. I watched from my corner of the long bar, near the telephone and Ganapaty’s emergency buzzer, greeting arrivals with, “Glad you could make it—what can I do you for?” and later watched them go down the gravel drive, each one depleted, rumpled from having dressed hurriedly—their ties and sometimes their socks stuffed in their back pockets—and wearing the pink face people associate with outrage but which I knew to be the meekness that comes after spending energy in a harmless way. It was pleasant to see them leave with new faces and I was flattered and reassured by their promises of generosity: “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, Jack—”
But I was the host. “Just settle your bar bill at the end of the month, thank you, and a very good night to you all.”
I got up early. In my pajamas at a sunny desk I totaled the previous night’s receipts and checked to see that the bar was well stocked and the rooms were clean—in each room a girl would be brushing her hair before a mirror, a houseful of girls brushing: it cheered me. It was a strenuous round of ordering and overseeing, making sure the laundry was done, the pilferage recorded, the grass cut, the house presentable; then, I took my shower, cut across the cemetery to Lower Bukit Timah Road and caught the number 4 Green Line bus to Beach Road, and climbed onto the stool in my little cubicle and took orders from Hing.
In the days when I had hustled on the street and in bars, saying “Kinda hot” to likely strangers, I was glad of the safety of Hing’s. I knew my job as a water clerk well enough to be able to do it easily. And though the money was nothing (any of my girls earned more in a week), the stool where I hooked my heels and pored over the shipping pages of the Straits Times was important. It was the basis for my visa, a perfect alibi, and a place to roost. But the success of Dunroamin made me consider quitting Hing’s.
I continued to get friendly promises of attention from the fellers who came to Dunroamin, yet my relationship with them remained a hustler-client one. I was a regular visitor to the clubs and knew most of the members; in the shipping offices of the Asia Insurance Building and in the Maritime Building, fellers called me by my first name and said how nice it was to see me. But they never stopped to pass the time of day. The talks I had with them took place at prearranged times and for a specific purpose; and I was seldom introduced to their friends. I was careful not to remind them that I knew more about them than their wives—and seeing them with their wives, by chance after a movie or at a cricket match at the Padang, it amazed me that the fellers came to Dunroamin: their wives were beautiful smiling girls (it was about this time that I had my fling with the Tanglin Club wife whom I reported as being “ever so nice”). My quickness might have disturbed the fellers. My attention to detail in arranging for girls to be sent out to ships or for club members to make a discreet visit in a trishaw for a tumble at Dunroamin could have been interpreted as somewhat suspicious, a kind of criminal promptitude, I think, the blackmailer’s dogged precision. Still, most of the fellers insisted I should get in touch if I ever had a problem.
Once, I had one. It was a simple matter. Mr. Weerakoon said he needed new violin strings and could not find any in the shops. I knew the importer; I had fixed him up on several occasions. I gave him a telephone call.
“Hi, this is Jack Flowers. Say, I’ve got a little problem here—”
“I’ll ring you back,” he said quickly, and the line went dead.
That was the last I heard from him. I asked about him at his club.
“Why don’t you leave the poor chap alone,” one of his pals—also a customer of mine—said. “You’ve got him scared rigid. He’s trying to make a decent living. If you start interfering it’ll all be up the spout.”
That was the last I heard from the pal, too. I got the message, and never again asked for a favor. But they continued to be offered. They sounded sincere. Late at night, after the larking, the contented pink-faced fellers were full of gratitude and good will. I had made them that way: I was the kind of angel I expected to visit me. They said I should look them up in Hong Kong; I should stop over some day and see their ships or factories; I should have lunch with them one day—or the noncommittal, “Jack, we must really meet for a drink soon.” The invitations came to nothing; after the business about the violin strings I never pursued them. So I
stayed at Hing’s, as his water clerk, both for safety and reassurance: it was the only job I could legally admit to having—and soon I was to be glad I had it.
A young Chinese feller came in one evening. It was before six, the place was empty, and I was sitting at the bar having a coffee and reading the Malay Mail.
“Brandy,” he said, snapping his fingers at Yusof. “One cup.”
Yusof poured a tot of brandy into a snifter and went back to chipping ice in the sink.
I knew from his physique that the Chinese feller did not speak much English. The English-educated were plump from milk drinking, the Chinese-educated stuck to a traditional diet, bean curd and meat scraps—they were thin, weedy, like this feller, short, girlish, bony-faced. His hair was long and pushed back. His light silk sports shirt fit snugly to the knobs of his shoulders, and his wrists were so small his heavy watch slipped back and forth on his forearm like a bracelet. He kept looking around—not turning his head, but lowering it and twisting it sideways to glance across his arm.
“Bit early,” I said.
He looked into his drink, then raised it and gulped it all. It was a stagy gesture, well executed, but made him cough and gag, and as soon as he put the snifter back on the bar he went red-faced and breathless. He snapped his fingers again and said, “Kopi.”
“No coffee. Cold drink only,” said Yusof.
The feller frowned at my cup. Yusof reached for the empty snifter. The feller snatched it up and held it.
