A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  ‘You know her, yes? Perhaps you like her very much? More zan me, I sink?’

  ‘Like her? Good heavens, not me! She’s—she’s—hideous, that’s what she is.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘She’s—oh, what the hell’s the word—’ and then I get it—‘she’s na-gliet.’

  Usually the farthest that a Thai will go in disparagement of a lady’s looks is the mildly negative ‘mai suei’—not beautiful. To call her na-gliet—ugly—is to be almost violently over-emphatic. The Mongol—Lily—Vilai—is greatly amused. Her laugh tinkles out, that delicious little tee-hee tee-hee which before was at my expense.

  ‘You say Black Leopard na-gliet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I sink I go tell her now.’

  ‘OK. Go and tell her.’

  ‘Tee-hee. Tee-hee.’

  ‘But be sure you come back. Quick.’

  She has started to go but she wheels and returns her face clouded again. ‘Why you fray all the time I not come back? You sink I cheating girl?’

  ‘No, no, sorry—I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I very good girl. I must come back your table. Not have finiss my d’ink yet.’ That’s a point of course. ‘I come back as soon as I finiss pee-pee, darling. Don’t worry.’

  Surprisingly she’s soon back. That makes me happy of course. And no sooner is she seated than the boy brings her another peppermint thoughtfully ordered by me during her absence. That makes her happy, too. In fact she is so pleased that she insists on ordering another beer for me. An air of bonhomie encompasses us like warm steam. We talk as easily as—well, as two men would. As Slither and I would do, if it was he that was sitting next to me.

  I can’t remember what we talk about. There is a lot of beery persiflage. I have the impression that I am at my wittiest best and better still, that my audience is unusually appreciative. We both laugh a great deal and drinks vanish and re-appear as if a conjurer were at work on them.

  At one stage a bent brown ugly old woman with straggly hair and disturbingly sober eyes tries to sell me flowers. The Mongol—I still think of her as that—selects the largest bloom from the basket and fixes it in her hair. It is white. She also buys a wreath of small white flowers with a sweet penetrating scent and this wreath she insists on slipping over our wrists, hers and mine. When it is on she looks towards the kindergarten and raises our arms so that the girls over there can see us thus bucolically entwined. ‘Give me ten tic for the old girl, darling.’ I throw her a hundred-tic note and have to ask five times for the change. Dimly I am aware that a few minutes after I have paid for the flowers they vanish just as if a conjurer were at work on them too. Dimly I suspect that the Mongol is the conjurer; that she only borrowed the flowers from the old woman for as long as it took her to charm ten tics out of my pocket and into her handbag. But the perfidy of this creature, unlike the perfidy of other women—for a fleeting moment I think of Sheila and I chuckle—this Mongolian perfidy is a joke and I don’t resent it at all, rather I enjoy the ruses by which I am being rooked. I am laughing at everything and anything and sometimes at nothing at all, just laughing, laughing, because I feel so exhilarated, so emancipated, such a dog, such a whale of a dog. I have never enjoyed female company so much as this before. Not even Venus’s, not even Sheila’s. For with Sheila I was always under restraint as of course a parfit gentil knight must inevitably be in the presence of his queen, the beldam sans mercy; thus Ivanhoe was always on his best behaviour with Rowena. As for poor dear Venus, excellent wench that she is, she remains when all is said and done a pro: our bodies are mighty orators in their lust but when they have thundered out their hackneyed speeches our tongues stammer; one hour of dalliance exhausts all our invention; our brains yawn at each other almost without attempt at concealment or apology. But with this animal I feel I could chatter cheerily till dawn and then after a short slumber resume the conversation at the breakfast table just as spontaneously as now after a swig of beer. For once, I feel, my instincts have not erred: when I picked the Mongol out as the girl for me I was inspired.

  In a moment of clarity I try to focus my eyes on this woman, try desperately, for I must exercise my mind if I am to keep it alert and this is the chore I choose for it, a problem, trying to analyse her charm for me.

  Lovely. Depraved. Mongoloid.

  Those were the words that occurred to me whenever I recalled her upcountry and those are the words that recur now when she is so close that her knee is actually thrust against mine.

  Lovely is not a word, it is more like a sigh.

  And depraved?

  But I become aware that she is kneading my arm and that she has been kneading it for quite a time.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Darling, you want take me home?’

  I don’t really know—I’ve just been living in the present. While I’m hesitating—there was some reason why I’d sworn off women for tonight—she changes her tack a little. ‘Darling, I like you very much. You nice boy, I sink. I want very much you take me home, give me two hundred tic.’

  I laugh at that ‘If you want me to take you home, you must give me two hundred tics.’

  She frowns and looks bothered; it seems this matter is too serious to joke about. ‘No, you give me,’ she says, earnestly. She puts on a whining tone. ‘Honey, I love you so much. Please take me home, honey.’

  ‘Don’t call me honey. I’m not American.’

  ‘Darling, what you say? You take me home, darling, give me two hundred tic?’ Kneading my arm some more.

  She looks worse than depraved now, she looks downright evil, with her face all screwed up by cupidity. I say, not trusting her—who could be so serious over two hundred tics?—‘How do I know it’s going to be safe to take you home? Maybe you have a husband there. Maybe when you get me to your home your husband will hit me on the head with a blunt instrument.’ I feel my cunning matches hers.

  ‘I not have husband. Why you say that? You safe with me, darling. If anysing happen tonight, bad for you, at my home, tomollow I cannot come work at Bolero. Manager say, You bad girl, man go your house get hurt, you cannot work here, get my place very bad name … You not want be fray, darling.’ She is still massaging my arm, and she has a strangely skilful way of doing it, she somehow sinks the balls of her fingertips between the ligaments and finds nerves that respond to her touch at once soothed and stimulated. ‘Darling, you come now, give me two hundred tics?’

  I wish she wouldn’t keep harping on the financial aspect but all I say is, ‘I’ll give you one hundred and eighty. I’ll take twenty off because they’—motioning towards her chest—‘aren’t real.’

  It’s been a joke between us for the last hour, I insisting her breasts are artificial—‘no girl could have real ones that good: they must be rubber’—she denying; but now she can’t see any humour in this topic either.

  ‘Darling, darling—’

  ‘OK.’ If you don’t want to play. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘You give me two hundred tic?’

  ‘And something else besides.’

  She’s so relieved she’s almost purring. She pats my arm in companionable fashion, her face quite glowing.

  I wonder whether it is the prospect of sleeping with Mr. R. E. Joyce or just the prospect of getting money. I haven’t many doubts. ‘You want another drink?’ I ask, ‘or shall we go now?’

  She says, ‘Not want go now. You sit here, darling, have one more beer. I go speak my frand. By and by I come back.’

  ‘You going to walk out on me?’

  ‘You not trust me?’

  ‘What if some other bloke offers you three hundred tics?’

  ‘Who?’ It is supposed to be a joke but she takes it seriously. She believes the world contains a fool who would be daft enough to give her, a common whore, six pounds for her favours. ‘If my frand say he give me three hundred tic, I come to you, ask you give me four hundred. I not go with my frand, darling, unless he give me more money than you. I lik
e you very mutss.’

  ‘I’m honoured.’

  ‘You want me order you one more beer?’

  ‘As you like. One for the road. One for the bed, honey.’

  It is now my turn to go excuse. I find a baffling difficulty in getting out of my chair and when I do finally get erect, my head spins and rings and everything goes black: clearly I’ve been sitting too long. Then my eyes re-open and I set off. The armchairs are too close together and I stumble over several before I reach the dancefloor. I don’t venture onto that, of course: I have an idea that it is slippery like a skating rink, and I don’t want to fall over and make myself look silly. As I skirt it I think I hear people tittering at me but at the same time I admit to myself that I am too self-conscious in public: people come to nightclubs to have a good time and of course they are all laughing, but not at me; they are laughing because they are having a good time. But I always feel embarrassed when I go excuse in a public place.

  The lavatory door—‘inswinging on perpetual creosote.’ That’s William Faulkner. This one inswings on other matter, and so precipitantly that I almost go headfirst into it.

  Over the partition I can hear two girls chattering. I am almost certain that one of them is the Mongol.

  Depraved. At any rate that’s a word, not just a burp, like ‘lovely’. It implies Lavater and a science of reading character from physiognomy, and it implies that I know something of that science, or think that I do. It implies that to me the Mongol is anything but the personification of chastity: that blonde bloodless blue-eyed milksop who is set before us in our childhood days as the ideal to seek out and adore. It implies a lot of other things and where in hell is the door?

  Re-finding my own table presents some difficulties but in the end one of the boys takes me by the arm and guides me in the right direction. I give him ten tics. There’s a full glass and a full bottle but really I’ve had enough to drink. However, since it’s here—

  Mongoloid was the other word. It is the best because it is the most concrete. And it can be justified. There are plenty of suds on the table-top and I lean forward and try to draw with my finger the essential Mongoloidity of that face. Under the dark rich canopy of hair the low narrow forehead widens downward like this to the outwings of the eye-sockets. The cheekbones are wider still, but jutting inwards and obliquely downwards to the nose. From their roots, where the ears are delicately perched, the cheeks descend vertically to the angles of the jaw, which are as wide as the cheekbones at their widest; but from those angles the jaw turns in almost horizontally to the chin which is square, and the cheeks above the jawline are slightly hollowed. The nose is practically bridgeless, very wide, and tip-tilted, so that the nostrils aim forwards; it is a poor nose seen from the front, but in profile it is straight, delicate, ineffably refined—a perfect jewel of a nose. I have mucked up the drawing but the rest would be too hard to do anyway, for it is in the mouth and the modelling around it, and in the eyes, which are placed wide apart in their shallow sockets, small, honey-brown, with thick short lashes and little white, that the real life and individuality of her beauty lies. She has the slightest suggestion of double chin—all Thai beauties have it, cannot hope to become Miss Thailand without it—and between that double chin and her collarbones there are horizontal folds in her neck, three or four; and even across her chest, first round the base of the neck, then from shoulder to shoulder, there are long faint sweeping semi-elliptic creases in the flesh—lines that would be blemishes on a western woman but here suggest only opulent maturity. Oh, she’s beautiful without a doubt, a noble woman nobly—

  ‘Hey. You. Han-sum.’

  I look up. There is a reddish blur as if a blood-vessel had burst in my eyeball. Gradually it resolves itself into—Frost’s girl, the plump one in pink.

  ‘What in hell do you want?’

  ‘Why you sit alone?’

  I shrug.

  She comes nearer. ‘That girl’—with a toss of her head—‘she no good. She leave you. She have ’nother frand, old frand, give her much money. You not want trust her, darling. I know her long time. She very bad girl.’ She seats herself on the arm of my chair. I shrink away from her. I don’t want anything to do with her. She is just clay whereas the Mongol is fire. Her chest and shoulders are as opulent as the Mongol’s, she has two double chins as against one, her breasts are huge but not unsightly, as well I know, for have I not seen her stripped to her bra and knickers, dancing with Frost?—but—

  I put out my hand to push her away. She grabs it and holds it.

  ‘Honey—dream boy—’ Her voice is thick with simulated passion.

  But suddenly there is a swirl and flash of cloth and the Mongol is back. Her voice is like a lash whistling through the air. Daisy gets up hastily off the arm of my chair and shouts back, her voice fraught with a different sort of passion from a few seconds ago and this sort genuine. From being a couple of magnificent oriental beauties, fit for a sultan’s palace you would think, they are suddenly a couple of fishwives brawling outside a pub.

  The Mongol is the accuser, speaking evenly in a low voice, in English. ‘Why you must steal my man? Every time you must try steal my man from me. Why you not find man for you-self? Plenty men in Bangkok will go with very low cheap girl like you I sink.’

  The answer is shouted in Thai.

  The Mongol says, ‘So, you want fight, eh? OK, I very fighting girl. You want fight, I fight you anywhere, any time. But not here, in Bolero. Too many pipple look what we do. Make manager angly to us. Only silly girl fight here, maybe lose job.’ She looks at her watch. ‘Now we go back work, make money. Twalf o’c’ock, when we finiss work, we go fight, OK?’

  More shouted Thai, not quite so choleric.

  ‘So you not want fight, eh? You only want fight wiss mouse.’ I presume she means mouth. She laughs. ‘You lemember last time, eh? And many times before.’ Laughing. ‘I very good fighting girl, I sink. I fighting good more zan you.’

  It occurs to me that for the first time in my life women are quarrelling over me and that makes me laugh.

  The Mongol turns on me with eyes blazing. ‘Why you talk this girl? You like her, I sink. You like her more zan me.’

  I answer sullenly, ‘Mai chob.’ I don’t like her at all. ‘I told you before, she’s na-gliet. She’s na-gliet as sin.’

  At that the Mongol laughs. She turns on Daisy again. ‘You hear what my frand say? He speak Thai very good. He say you mai suei, you na-gliet.’ She turns to the handful of girls who have gathered round. ‘My boy not like Black Leopard. He say she na-gliet.’

  The girls titter. Daisy gives me a furious look and fills her lungs for another blast. But just at that moment a boy appears and speaks to her urgently. Her face goes black with rage but she shrugs her shoulders and stalks away. The Mongol calls after her, ‘You see? What I tell you? All the time you make tlouble. Manager no like girl who make tlouble. Maybe he make you stop work three day.’

  She slumps into a chair. It is the one nearest to me but she doesn’t look at all happy.

  ‘What a cow—’ I begin but she snaps my head off:

  ‘Don’t speak me.’

  She sits frowning darkly for a few more moments until I venture to reach for my drink, then she bursts out: ‘She very bad girl. All the time try to steal my man. If she can steal my man from me, she sink very good, she sink she make her face very big. But I know she low girl, very low. If she take my man, if he go with her, I no want speak him again. She very low, she make him low too.’

  ‘I didn’t speak to her, she—’

  ‘You very low man, too, I sink. I leave you here short time, straight way you make eye to Black Leopard.’

  The injustice of that!

  ‘I not like man who make eye to other girl when I go ex-cuse.’

  ‘You didn’t go excuse. You went to talk to some other man. You’ve got no right—’

  ‘I only like man who good to me.’

  ‘Sweetheart!’—trying to capture her hand. B
ut she snatches it away.

  I feel miserable. For a start things went badly between us but then they picked up and everything seemed to be going swimmingly; but now it’s all a mess again; probably everything is ruined. Any other man, I feel, would be able to do something decisive or at least say something decisive at this juncture. He would have the courage to show his feelings—‘aw, go to hell’—stake everything on the chance of her reacting the right way, nor care very much if she didn’t. But I as always am utterly under the dominion of the girl’s mood: because she is angry I can’t be anything but submissive and wary, dumbly, miserably hoping that my sympathy will touch her, uneasily waiting to see which way her rage will flare out next.

  Finally, the silence becoming unbearable, I whisper, ‘Sweetheart—Vilai—’ She makes an impatient gesture but says nothing. Encouraged I continue, ‘Dearest, let’s get out of this dump. Let’s pay the bill and clear off to your home. I want to go with you, darling, I really do.’

  She looks at her watch. ‘If we go now, you must give me sixty tic more.’

  ‘Why?’ Always that wounded yelp.

  ‘Because not twalf o’c’ock, darling. I not finiss work. Any girl go out of Bolero before twalf, her boy must pay manager sixty tic.’

  I toss over another hundred. At the same time I say, ‘Call the boy.’ I too can be a man of action.

  As it happens the boy is already at my elbow with two or three bills on his tray. I pick them up and look at them stupidly. He tells me the total and I almost faint.

  ‘How much?’

  He repeats the same figure. It is over three hundred tics.

  ‘That’s impossible!’ I exclaim. I propose to go through the bills item by item, but then I notice that the Mongol is looking at me critically. At all costs I must prevent her from getting the idea that I am miserly: even at a cost of three hundred tics I want to avoid that. I peel off four more notes. The wad is a lot slimmer than it was.

  ‘I sink you not have mutss money,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause tears come your eye every time you must pay.’