He can handle this. After three rum and cokes on an empty stomach, he is starting to think screw the D. A., screw the judge, screw the case. He is ready for his first drag show.
Tuki was wrong about his response to Silver. He watches her come and go with her Broadway show tunes routine without so much as a single stirring below the belt or a pitter-pat of the heart. He is just wondering how this queen hides her stuff in that silver, skin-tight jumpsuit. How did Tuki hide it in that spandex dress? He is thinking that maybe they use duct tape or something to pull their hardware back between their legs when suddenly Silver starts into a lip-synch of “Memory” from Cats. He almost gets up and walks out. He hates this karaoke-like stuff.
But then Nikki makes her entrance as Janis Joplin, Southern Comfort bottle and all, which he can see she is slugging on for real. She rips the club open with “Me and Bobby McGee” and then goes buck wild in her closer, the long version of “Piece of My Heart.”
Maybe this is karaoke, he thinks, but Jesus … are you sure she’s really a guy?
The house lights go dim for thirty seconds while a waitress rakes the money off the stage. Then a blue spotlight picks up a figure in a red, filmy evening dress standing at the top of the steps. A diamond choker glitters at her throat. Slowly, her head starts to rise. She looks just like Whitney Houston. Her hands fall from prayer, her fingers begin a slow rhythmic snap, her hips pick up the beat, the mike rises to her lips, and she is singing “Exhale.” Not lip-synching, really singing. “Everyone falls … in love sometime …”
“Holy shit!” thinks her attorney.
The background guitars and strings cut in. Her voice is a woman lost in a memory of love on a hot slow night in the delta. The Mississippi … the Mekong … or the Chao Prya, Bangkok.
Down the stairs she comes, three steps on the beat. She pauses. Her body does a slow burn to the pain of the lyrics. Then she takes three more steps in a kind of lazy shimmy, her voice gaining strength with each step like an approaching freight train. The audience is whistling and cheering, so loud that the sound and light kids have to amp up the volume on the speakers.
She strolls the runway with classic voguing—chin high, three strides, turn, smile, pose. Again. When she hits the chorus, she starts with the “Shoop, shoop, shoop, shoo be doop, shoop, shoop” then holds the mike out low at arm’s length, a signal for the audience to pick up the refrain. As they do, she scans the crowd. People wave creased bills Whitney’s way. Mostly singles, but fives, tens, twenties, too. She folds them into her free hand before she slips the green into her cleavage.
When the music stops and the applause rings, she sees Michael sitting alone at a table on the right side of the runway. She makes eye contact and gives him a little smile.
Richie shoots her two thumbs up from the bar, and a waitress comes up onto the stage with a huge champagne goblet that has a big red strawberry at the bottom of the glass. This is part of the act. It is Perrier, and it gives Tuki a chance to catch her breath and unload her tips into the basket on the waitress’s tray. She takes a slow sip, holds the glass out in front of her, eyes it. Then she begins—a cappella—Whitney’s torch of torches from the final scene of The Bodyguard.
“Bittersweet memories,
That is all I’m taking with me,
So goodbye, please, don’t cry,
We both know I’m not what you need,
And I … will always love you …”
The sound system weeps with violins. Now she is dragging her sorry self back home across the room toward the staircase. Singing.
Sitting there tasting the last of his rum, he sees that she is unpacking her heart, her soul, for the crowd, for him if he will just pay attention. Closing her eyes, she sings so that she will not cry as she remembers.
A girl in a secondhand red dress boards a water taxi at a big house on the klong in Thonburi, near the sheds where they keep the royal barges. She can still smell a man’s lemon bath and fresh sweat on her hands and in her hair. The shadow of a man is standing there, watching her, in his white linen suit. Motionless. Overcome. The taxi breaks free of the dock in the current, and a raft of water hyacinths fills the void of brown water. She heads out on the swollen river downstream, toward the Patpong. She watches until she can no longer even see the bowed roof of the house she leaves behind.
And she sings again, “I will always love you …”
She does not even notice the money being shoved into her left hand.
At last, she slips out of her red pumps and starts up the stairs. They are the stairs at the Oriental Hotel dock near the Patpong, and they are the stairs from the stage back to her dressing room. She feels as heavy as the river. The music and the sound of her own voice cut her like a snare of piano wire. Her skin freezes in the blue beam of the spotlight. At the top of the stairs, she stops and holds the last note of the song until she is completely out of breath.
Twice she pauses and looks back around the room. Through her blurry eyes she thinks she sees a smooth Asian face with his eyes riveting on her. She is wrong. It is only a lawyer, a man who would rather go fishing than find out who really killed her lover. But he is also a man who seems unexpectedly struck with waves of emotion.
ELEVEN
His client and the case keep tumbling through his mind for the whole drive south back to Chatham. He cannot shake the image of a woman in a red dress, dragging herself up a staircase. Singing. Closing her eyes. Was that all just an act or was there substance? It felt so real. So sad, really. How can you not be moved after such a show? There is a strange hollowness in his chest.
He remembers the voice of the Thai detective on his machine, “I understand you are Miss Aparecio’s lawyer. More than five years I am searching for her. Please call me. Perhaps you do not know who you are getting into here.”
Who you are getting into? What a Freudian slip. His head boils with questions. What is she hiding? If she did not kill Big Al, who did? Does she know? Who set the fire? Why? Why would someone frame her? What about this escort service he has read about in the police reports? How do Tuki and the victim fit into that picture? What does any of this have to do with Bangkok? And … if you get really lucky, pal, and score some answers, can you be of any help here? Or is the judge right? Will the D. A. eat you alive?
The questions are still rattling through his head when he shuffles up the outside stairs and into his attic pad to find a body on his mattress. He can see its contours in the light filtering into the room from the cone of yellow fog around a street lamp outside. He stands in the doorway, stares, tries to focus.
Suddenly, the body sits up, tosses off the sleeping bag that she had wrapped over her to keep out the summer dampness. “Hey, where you been?”
“Filipa?”
“Who did you expect?”
He says nobody, he thought she had to work tonight. She is interning this year at a women’s psych clinic in Cambridge, part of the practicum for her PhD.
She rubs her eyes, seizes a wine glass sitting on the floor next to the mattress, takes a sip. He can smell the Chardonnay.
“I got off. We were over-staffed. So I thought I’d surprise you. Traffic to the Cape was hell. Want some wine?” He shakes his head no. He cannot understand why she never remembers that he really does not like Chardonnay.
“You don’t sound too happy to see me.”
“No. No. Of course, I am. I’m just really beat, Fil. This case is messing with my mind, you know?”
He dumps his briefcase on the table, tosses his suit jacket on the back of a chair, heads for the fridge. A pain is starting behind his eyes. Four rum and cokes. Maybe there is still some fizzy water left.
“Provincetown is more gothic than ever. I swear it looked like The Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. And that’s just on the surface. I can’t even imagine what goes on behind closed doors. Guys dressed like girls, girls like guys. The whole lets-hold-hands gay thing. I saw a guy with a mustache dressed like Dolly Parton. And my client may be t
he biggest fruitcake of the—”
She grabs him around the chest from behind and hugs him while he is bent over staring into his fridge. He can feel her breasts warm his back, her pelvis presses against his hips.
“Do we have to talk about work?”
“Not if you keep doing that.”
He turns around. They kiss. Long, slow. Grinding bodies. Her hand feels for him. His fingers slide up under her skirt, slip along the smooth curve of her hip. In thirty seconds she has his pants down around his ankles and they are screwing each other against the open door of the refrigerator. She is petite. Her short legs struggle to clutch his hips to hers. He sucks on her neck, lost in a secret garden beneath her mane of thick hair. It is naturally dark brown, but she has dyed it a coppery red for him. Now she does not look like all the other Portuguese princesses who he grew up with in Nu Bej.
He goes off before her, tries a long, probing kiss to sustain his vigor for her sake. But his legs are melting as he drives her harder with each thrust against the refrigerator door.
“Ouch.”
“You okay?”
“Something’s biting me in the …”
He steps back from the fridge, eases her to the floor.
“Did you miss me?”
He rubs his open hands up under her jersey, feeling the peach fuzz as his fingers slide from the small of her back to her shoulder blades.
“You have no idea,” he sighs.
Just as he is about to nod off, she spoons up against his back and whispers. “I tried to call you about ten times tonight while I was stuck in Cape traffic on Route 6. Why was your cell phone off?”
“Not a clue. Maybe it was out of juice. Sorry. Was there a problem?”
“It’s my mother, Michael. She was calling me all day, bugging me with thirty different things about the wedding. Her latest thing is that the bridesmaids’ dresses clash with the rugs in the church. She wants to buy a new carpet. Damn her. If the invitations hadn’t already gone out, I’d ask you to elope with me, you know?”
The mattress muffles his response. He is trying to will himself into a dream about fishing out on Georges with his father. But his mind keeps picturing a girl in a red robe standing over a burned and bloody body on the beach.
TWELVE
She finds him standing outside the screen door of her bungalow. It is ten o’clock on Monday morning. The sun is burning off the last of the fog. From her doorstep, here on a steep hillside, you can see Cape Cod Bay in the distance, spreading out to the west like a sea of sapphires. She lives in one of the studio-style guest cottages at a compound called Shangri-La in tony Truro to the south of P-town. “I thought you were going fishing.”
“I’m back,” he says. It is true. Yesterday he and Fil went fishing for striper with some of her old friends from college who summer in Bass River. He hooked into a forty-five-inch monster. Landed it, tagged it, let it go. It’s amazing the focus and high he can get from fishing.
“Are you still my lawyer?”
“You still need one?”
She is silent, thinking. Remembers all the raw emotion she saw on his face at the end of her show. Finally she opens the screen door for him to enter. She is wearing a deep blue kimono with little red and gold dragons stitched over the breasts. Her hair, with its sun streaks and kinky braids, is exploding around her face. No makeup. He likes the look. He thinks that if you put her in normal clothes like a pair of Calvins and a simple cotton top, no one would ever suspect her gender secret. Maybe it is just the wackiness of Provincetown that makes him feel all itchy inside, not Tuki at all. Or maybe he has just gotten used to her, started folding at least one drag queen into his vision of world order.
They sit at a little breakfast table that looks out through a picture window to the bay. He opens his briefcase and pulls out a tape recorder.
There is a delicate white chrysanthemum in a red fluted vase in the center of the table. She picks up the vase and lifts the flower to her nose and inhales. Then she pours them each a cup of green tea.
“Where do we start?”
He has been thinking about this since yesterday morning, wondering what his dad, the great fish hunter, might do. Now he has a little bit of a plan. He has decided to stay away from talk about the night of the murder and the fire for a while, avoid talking about her relationship with Al Costelano. He is not going to ask her again about the Thai dick whose call he has not yet returned. He wants her to trust him, drop her guard, tell him everything that crosses her memory. He knows that sometimes it is the most seemingly insignificant, peripheral details from way before the time of the crime that will make your case.
“Why don’t you tell me some more about Bangkok?”
Klaus, a sailor from a Dutch ship, reminded the girls of River Phoenix the first time they met him at a food stall in the park. He was all over her beloved best friend Ingrid. Between her thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, she grew about five inches taller and ventured into wearing her mother’s minis and makeup. She started going out on the town looking like a stand-in for Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Everyone was always looking for a piece of her candy. And as far as sailor boy was concerned, Ingrid was throwing a fire sale.
These days, she has all but disappeared. On the few occasions that Tuki sees her, the girl’s eyes are rolled halfway back in her head like she has been smoking opium or something. So Tuki is alone for the first time in years. At first she hangs at home in the theater, rips through books like toilet paper, watches about two movies a day, listens to Lionel Richie tapes—doing her “Tuki the Sponge” thing big time.
And she’s having body problems of her own, but not the good kind like Ingrid. The spaces beneath her arms and below her bellybutton are suddenly sprouting thick, dark hair like crazy. Shaving large parts of her body and plucking her brows has become a lifestyle. Brandy and Delta see what is happening, but they figure as long as she still has to wear a uniform to school, and students have a “no jewelry” rule, things cannot get too out of control with Tuki.
But at night when her mothers are performing, or on dates, she starts spending hours working on her eyeliner, lashes, and lipstick. She roots through her mothers’ boxes of costume jewelry, but she cannot find big enough earrings to suit her or enough brass bracelets. She begins wearing Delta’s black bras even though she has nothing to put inside except tissue paper. She tries on her mothers’ clothes, puts her hair up in a French twist, steps into a pair of Brandy’s pumps. At first, she just listens to Lionel Richie on the cassette player and practices walking in those shoes. Eventually, she is singing along and doing her own routines to Mary Wells, Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, and songs from Flashdance in front of a dressing mirror. She imagines men falling in love with her, sending flowers, buying her presents after they see her perform.
Then one summer night before her fourteenth birthday, she decides to hit the streets. Yes, she is an Asian girl by day and just about everybody in the Patpong knows her. So it is time to try perfecting the skill that will keep American immigration agents guessing for five years. For her debut as a W-O-M-A-N, she goes black. She wants to be her own girl, not some hand-me-down thing from Brandy and Delta. So she goes shopping. As the Thais say, Kai ngam phro khon. A chicken is beautiful because of its feathers. But of course, she is as poor as a roach, so other means than Thai baht must be used to procure the costume to transform her into a sex machine.
For the first time in her life, Tuki wants things she cannot afford to buy. So she steals. It is not pretty. And you will not hear her making any excuses, except one: she only steals from the rich and she always leaves something beautiful in return.
This kind of stealing is actually quite easy. Walking home from school alone, she discovers that every day the Montien Hotel on Surawong Road throws out a lot of flowers. She takes the best and makes bouquets. Then she goes around to the fancy shops on New Road and offers flowers for sale. She is most successful in early evening when people are getting out of work and stores a
re very crowded with shoppers. She is a cute little luk sod with big round eyes and almost a meter of silk hair down the back of her school uniform. When she goes into a shop, smiles prettily, and offers her bouquets, the sales people usually say they will buy flowers for their wives or girlfriends or husbands or mothers. But she must wait because they are busy with customers.
So she smiles a lot, wanders around the store. Eventually the clerks get so distracted by their business that they forget about her. That is when the size-four dress rack, the wig collection, and shoe display get a little emptier, and her school bag gets a little heavier. That is when she leaves flowers in a pretty place like the top of a jewelry case … before disappearing in the crowd.
Pretty soon—with the stealing—she has her own wardrobe. Now she is dressing to kill in a little black silk dress, black hose, gold heels, plenty of jewelry, a light touch of dark makeup, and sassy ruby lipstick. Her own hair is pinned up under a stocking cap, and she is wearing a shag wig, teased up into a funky nest. The wig is streaked with blonde, like the one she saw Tina Turner wearing in a video. She grabs a little patent-leather purse, pulls on a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, and sneaks out into the streets.
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues Page 5
