A Woman of Bangkok

by Jack Reynolds

  Once again she snatched up her sarong but this time she fixed it differently, tightening it round her chest so that it swathed her cylindrically from her chest to her knees. Her moods were very variable and from being a bit dejected a moment ago she had suddenly turned angry. Too many white men after they had slept with her a few times would suddenly take up this nasty attitude, and the queer thing was it was often the ones that had seemed to like her the most, the ones she herself was most drawn to, who did so. That just showed how little you could trust men, even the most charming of them. She conjured up a picture of Dick holding her last night with her arms pinned against her sides, breathing down great gusts of whisky smell into her face. ‘Why must I give you money every time, honey? This is love, don’t you understand? Just this once you can give it a guy for free, for Cry sake.’ Would he have spoken to one of his own white women like that? No, of course not. He would never have dreamed of insulting a white girl so badly. But with her it was different. She was only a Siamese. He thought she wasn’t as good as he was. He thought he could do anything he liked with her. He had tired of her and this was the way he chose to make her hate him. But he hadn’t succeeded. For she was Siamese and as good as anyone else in the world. She’d never hate him—you can only hate someone you could love. But from that moment she’d begun to despise him.

  She despised all men. And especially she despised white men because they despised her own race. There was only one good thing about white men: they had more money than any one else. And it was her duty to get as much of that money off them as she could. For money was important: it was the most important thing in the world. If you had money you could do anything. If you had enough money no one dare look down on you. If you were really very rich even white men would respect you—and you would be able to spit in their arrogant faces. And that would make you feel strong and happy, and better, much better, than they were …

  She picked up her personal dipper of solid silver and a cake of expensive American soap and once more descended to the hongnam. This time she shut herself in securely, bolting the door.

  She hung the sarong on a nail. A few years ago, like any other modest Siamese woman, she would have kept it on while she bathed, but dancing-girls like prostitutes soon get accustomed to the idea of their own nudity and once that premise had been established her practical mind quickly grasped the advantages of bathing in the western style, stark naked, except of course for the sandals, which were indispensable.

  So she stood in a shaft of sunlight coming through the skylight and tossed bowlfuls of water over herself. There was nothing methodical about the process. She didn’t do her arms and then her torso and then her legs, or follow any other pattern, but just as the whim took her she would rub her face, or an arm, or her front, or her back, using the soap sparingly, and stopping frequently to throw fresh bowlfuls of cold water over herself. And as she rubbed and rinsed her spirits rose. For bathing was another of the beautifying rites she enjoyed and soon she had forgotten about Dick and her resentment against the white race generally and had begun to sing in a dry high rather pleasant voice, but a little uncertain of the notes.

  ‘I—wonter—whooss—skeessing—hernow,’ she sang, and then stopped while she concentrated on a knee, and then she sang the same line over again, and then stopped while she did the back of her neck, and then, very loudly, happily, she sang the same line again. It was one of her favourite tunes, played every night at the Bolero, but she seldom sang it all the way through, partly because she had some difficulty in remembering the western sequence of notes, but more because her mind would always fly off the tune to some other matter and then return to the tune only to fly off again: she never disciplined her thoughts: who did? why should they? Her brain was very good, and in moments of crisis she could think quickly what to do for the best, but crises seldom occurred in the hongnam: there your mind could run free, as when you were a very young girl, your body had run free about the country, never imagining what was in store for it.

  She thought fleetingly of childhood. It had been almost the best part of her life, but not quite: young girlhood had been the best, from ten, say, to sixteen-and-a-half; the years when you had known that every hour was increasing your beauty, that one day this beauty would surpass that of all other girls in the ampur, and that finally when it was supreme you would donate it to some man, rich, good-looking, young, benevolent, and captivated, a paragon of a man, a perfect lover, yet faithful to you alone; playing around with prostitutes, of course, as any man must, but never seeking to introduce rivals into your house. Those had been the best years, for then too Jamnien had been her friend, Jamnien who had been the naughtiest girl in the village next to herself, who had led to all this, and was probably in Bangkok still, if she wasn’t dead.

  ‘But I don’t want to think about my story,’ she told herself. ‘It only makes me sad.’

  But the annoying thing was that once you began thinking about your story you couldn’t put it out of your head. And especially if something had gone wrong, like this business with Dick, you would get into a morbid mood and then there would be no escape from memories that hurt until—well, until you went on a drunk. And getting drunk was dangerous for a dancing-girl—goddam, look where it had landed her last night, yielding to a man who (she’d gone through his pockets) had only sixty-six tics in the world, and forty of those she’d had to give back so he could take a taxi out to Don Muaag in the small hours. No, she mustn’t start thinking about her story again, but even as she made the resolution she knew it was hopeless; it had been hopeless from the moment that, turning from the window in her bedroom, she had thought of her Mama back there in the province of Korat; today was going to be bad, bad, bad, there would be rows with Bochang and Siput and maybe with Udom too, there would be rows with the men at the Bolero tonight, and no way out of her misery until about three o’clock tomorrow morning when exhausted and with head swirling she would drop into her bed, too drunk, too drugged with weariness, too much molested by whatever man she had picked up, to care any more until about this time—noon—tomorrow.

  If only I could go home for a few days, she thought.

  She slumped on the stool in front of her mirrors. She began taking her hairclips out and shaking and freeing and frothing up her hair. But she wasn’t thinking about what she was doing. She was staring straight at her image in the glass but for once it was powerless to hold her attention. She was seeing instead her home, her Mama, her sisters when they were all young together, before life had got amongst them like a whirlwind on a hot afternoon, and sent them all spinning crazily across the face of the world.

  She picked up a strong blue comb and began to drag it cracklingly through her tangled mane, though it wasn’t time to do her hair yet, that item came a good deal further down the programme.

  Home—that was the only heaven she had known, the only one she would ever know in this life. As she told herself this she deliberately suppressed the memory that before she had escaped from it often enough home had seemed less like heaven than like a prison. Deliberately she forgot her old grandmother’s acid tongue and the squabbles with her sisters and the hours and hours of sulky mutiny against her mother. She thought only of the good things—food that was always just right, the fun at times of Buddhist festival, the utter absence of worry, the famous salad her mother made of coconut, mango, peanuts, chili, and sugar all grated together, the wonderful curries flavoured with powdered waterbugs, great white juicy woodlice …

  Her thoughts seemed to have a recognizable drift. She ran to the door. ‘Bochang! Bochang!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is my lunch ready?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I want it immediately.’

  ‘It’ll only be a few minutes.’

  ‘I want it now. I’m hungry.’

  Like sleep and whisky, a good meal could usually be relied on to put worries and spectres to rout, at least temporarily. It might work today.

  Meanwhile sh
e returned to the mirror and got busy. First she undid and did up the sarong more securely. Then she began to work cold cream into face, neck, shoulders and arms. She worked swiftly and vigorously, her eyes never leaving her image in the glass, and often she would step back like an artist from his easel to judge how the work was progressing. Especially when she was doing her back and chest and shoulders her hands moved caressingly over herself, almost like a lover’s hands, and like the beloved she responded to the caress, she felt soothed and pleasantly stimulated. When she had greased herself enough she wiped off the excess with tissue and stood back and admired herself and then peppered her face and shoulders with powder until she stood in a thin perfumed cloud. Then she stood back from the mirror again, took off the sarong and shook it and whirled it as a toreador whirls his cloak and refixed it. And all the time she watched herself, enamoured of her own beauty, her grace of movement, this lovely living body which was hers. Why had she felt dreary on and off this morning? There was still nothing to worry about; the mirror did not deceive …

  Thus the foundation was laid, and now on it the face had to be built. Unlike many dancing-girls—for instance, the Black Leopard—she wasn’t completely made up all day long. Neung chu-um—the first hour of the evening—seven o’clock, according to her Lolex—was early enough to don the full regalia. In the day time it was better to take it easy, to give seduction a rest, to put on just enough stuff to make yourself look passable at impersonal daylight distances and smell good to yourself and others. Many dancing-girls of course made themselves miserable, never daring to be themselves for a single minute, always over-made-up, overdressed, over-refined, pecking at their food (even when it had been bought for them by an escort) because they thought it unladylike to appear hungry, always asking for, when invited by a foreigner to eat, European food that you just toyed with with knife and fork, never, like her, demanding say chicken giblets and a Thai salad and glutinous rice and wolfing them down, as she did, with her fingers, confident that if the man really liked her he wouldn’t mind, and if he did mind, well, to hell with him, he could only too easily be replaced with someone who didn’t. The Black Leopard was like that, a low low creature who would sleep with samlor-boys or waiters or taxi-drivers if they brought foreigners to her house and were handsome enough and demanded that as their fee; she was as low as that; yet always, when out with a foreigner, she must act very high, as if she’d never eaten with her fingers off a banana-leaf in her life …

  So she pencilled on in black a little emphasis for her eyebrows and in red today’s lips. She never gave herself quite the same mouth two days running. This wasn’t because her hand faltered: her hand was her servant, it had to be obedient as Bochang and Siput were. But it amused her to experiment with her mouth. One day it would be Lita Hayworse’, another day Lady Lamarr’s, a third day Yvonne de Carlo’s. Dearly she would have liked to be able to adopt the Yune Allyson mouth, for of all feminine filmstars Yune Allyson was her favourite; ‘a pewty, pewty girl’ she would say in English, running ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’ into one of her numerous portmanteau words. But she had enough taste to know that the Yune Allyson mouth would not sit comfortably on her oriental, life-worn countenance; it was altogether too young and western and sweet; oh, the whole girl was too young and sweet to accord in any way with the Number One Bad Girl of Bangkok. That was a dream of beauty beyond attainment … Today, she decided, after running her mind through the movies at present showing in town, she would be Mor-leen O’Hala. The Mor-leen O’Hala mouth fitted easily over her own; she had merely to run the red a little less widely into the corners than usual and play down the two lobes of the upper lip under the nostrils. And there it was. She pulled back her lips while she crayoned the inner part that faced her teeth: it showed when she smiled, and she hated a two-coloured smile with bloody edges and an anaemic core. When she let her lips return to normal again, she saw that today’s mouth was a success.

  Open the sarong and shut and lock it again.

  What else was there to do? Curl the eyelashes with the twenty-five-tic gadget. Rub scent into your armpits. Drop a little Lurine into each eye. And then, except for doing your hair, you were temporarily finished.

  While she was combing and combing her hair, leaning over forwards with it all hanging down in front of her face, then hurling it back and leaning to one side with it all falling down sideways, her son came into the room. She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Goddam, why you not go school?’

  She often talked to him in English, for the more he knew of that language the better: there was money in it. But to her distress he was quite ambitionless, or rather his only ambition was to drive a motor-samlor and that was worse than having no ambition at all. For the traffic was dreadfully dangerous and he would certainly be killed: moreover too many of the samlor-men were cowboys (she used the modern Thai word for criminal type) and she had no desire for her son to become that. Not at any rate the petty samlor-type cowboy.

  ‘You hear what I say? Why you not go school?’

  He spoke wearily in Siamese. ‘Don’t be stupid, Mama. Today’s Saturday. School’s finished early.’

  ‘Oh, Saturday. I forget.’

  She stared intently in the mirror while she made the parting and then seated herself on the stool again. The energetic combing had loosened the sarong and it was slipping down, but she disregarded this. One hand was raised to her scalp to keep a mass of hair in position whilst the other went to and fro between toilet-table and head, picking up clips and inserting them in a vertical line above the ear. As she pushed in each clip she either shut her eyes or looked sideways but the rest of the time she stared in the glass, either at her reflected head or past it at the reflection of her son wandering aimlessly round the room.

  Only the Buddha knew how much she loved this boy, only the Buddha and herself. Sometimes she loved him so much that she almost gave the game away. Like two nights ago, when that handsome fair-haired English boy who’d been so free with his money had left unexpectedly early, about two or three o’clock. Instead of returning to her own room she had crept first into her son’s, next to the maids’, downstairs. She had parted the mosquito net and stared down at him, her heart, expanded by numerous peppermints and the thought of good money easily earned, suddenly filled with an almost intolerable love for this child who was hers, unquestionably hers, the one good thing remaining to her from her three marriages. How handsome he was! Exactly like his father, except that he had unfortunately inherited her own flat nose. He was lying sprawled on his back with his mouth open, breathing noisily, because his tonsils were bad and one day he’d have to have them out. Sometimes he could hardly speak or breathe. But she was always putting off the operation, always thinking up fresh excuses for delaying it; it would interfere with his schooling, he was frightened of the doctor, she couldn’t afford to spend two weeks looking after him at the hospital, she couldn’t spare Bochang to go with him either, that would mean the house would be left unguarded whilst she was at the Bolero and out and about, and as for Siput, who would wash and clean at home if she went to the hospital?—and anyway Udom was too thick with her as it was. Right now it was winter, and too cold for an operation on the throat—yet here he was lying almost naked with his blanket kicked off. She could hardly resist the desire to draw the blanket over him again. But if she had done so she might have awakened him, and if he had awakened and seen what she was doing he would have guessed her secret, that she loved him, and that would have been fatal. For then he would have lost his fear of her. He would have thought, ‘She’s weak after all, she’s weak enough to love me as other silly weak women love their sons’ and then he would have begun to take advantage of her, as other sons do of their mothers; his natural male badness would have asserted itself, and never again would she have had any control over him. But while he was frightened of her she could exercise authority and that discipline was good for him. But every day he was getting harder to hold down—more ‘nerty’, as she
expressed it to herself using another of her original contributions to the English language, this one consisting of ‘naughty’ and ‘dirty’—and more resentful of her continual nagging. He didn’t realize that she had only his own good at heart, that she was doing her best to fit him for a world which only too well she knew to be cruel and unhappy …

  She could see that he had picked up a women’s magazine and was flicking through its pages without hope of finding anything of interest in them. And as he stood there with his thin eyebrows drawn down over the huge dark eyes which were so like his father’s she felt her love for him come over her again in another dangerous tidal surge such as that night’s. She had a sudden insane desire to hurl herself across the room and sweep him into her arms and hug him till he broke free. But that would have been madness: he was fourteen years old: both he and she would have been deeply disgraced by such a scene of weakness …