Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  When they had climbed the stairs to their floor, Hom slowed and picked Miaow up, saying, “Shhhh.” In his never-ending effort to reduce costs, the building’s owner had removed the bulbs from two of every three of the corridor’s overhead lights, so she could see the pale strip beneath the door of their room all the way from the stair landing. She was surprised by how disappointed she felt. For a long moment she listened to her own heartbeat as she debated turning around and going back down the stairs. Instantly, she had a plan: drop Miaow with Sonya and ask her to recommend the cheapest hotel she knew of. That way, even if the hotel was rat-infested and bug-ridden, she would know the baby was safe with Sonya. Better still, maybe Sonya would let Hom sleep there, too, just for that night or for a few nights, on that clean, soft floor.

  This is a daydream, she thought. I can’t do any of it until I’ve had more time to plan it, to find a new job, or he’ll be waiting for me when I get off work. He even knows where Sonya’s place is. And behind the practical issues rose a wave of doubt. Maybe she wasn’t being fair to him. He was much unhappier than she was. He was the one who couldn’t get a job. If she left, she’d have Miaow; he was the one who would be alone.

  Maybe. That perfume: maybe he wouldn’t be alone at all. The money for the liquor: maybe he already had a job. Maybe.

  And everything she owned in the world was inside that room. Shifting Miaow to her left arm, surprised yet again by the child’s weight, she walked slowly down the hall and then, positioning herself to go through the door right shoulder first so she’d be between him and the child, she slipped the key into the lock and turned it.

  There was only one light on, the little one on her side of the sleeping mat. He was lying on his back with both their pillows beneath his head, reading a comic book with the pages tilted toward the light. She stood there, still in the doorway, looking at him, and he put down the comic, lowered his head, and asked her forgiveness. Then he asked again. Miaow whimpered as they went into the room, but she put the child down and went to him, allowing him to wrap his arms around her. He was shaking as though he was cold.

  25

  Something Coiled About It

  Daw finally landed a job with a moving company, lugging large items from one place to another. The firm specialized in relocations within Bangkok, so he was rarely gone overnight, which she viewed as a mixed blessing. But the family’s clock was now completely at the mercy of his job: sometimes he had to be up and out by 5 a.m., and quitting time depended on how much they had to move, and how hard it was to get stuff out of the old place and into the new place. Occasionally, they did two jobs in a single day, and on those days he didn’t get home until midnight or even later. On those nights, he said, “the boys” would go out for a drink or two, and he always came home reeking of alcohol. Occasionally, one of the “boys” apparently wore perfume, because those were the nights she was most likely to smell a florid, over-sweet, probably cheap, scent. At first this sign of betrayal hit her like an elbow in the ribs, but week by week and month by month she realized that the landscape of the relationship was changing on the most basic levels. She and Daw, she thought, were less and less like lovers and more like business partners, united primarily by the need to keep the unit of three afloat from day to day. They rarely made love now. Miaow had a kind of emotional barometer that sensed when her mother’s focus was primarily on Daw, and she didn’t hesitate to demand attention at those times. Then, too, Daw was usually tired from his work, she was usually tired from her work, and, of course, there were those perfumes. It got to the point where her reaction to the colognes and the toilet waters and the powdery fragrance of makeup felt so little like jealousy it was hard to call it that. In time, she had to admit it was more like hurt feelings.

  And she learned, more or less, to ignore it. They were polite, even occasionally affectionate, with each other, more focused than before on the challenge of surviving in the city. She tended to Miaow when she could and got her to and from Sonya’s when she couldn’t; and as she and Daw dealt with the small but insistent demands of daily life, the amount of energy they had for each other waned, and with it went much of the tension between them.

  On one hand, Hom welcomed the easing of the drama, but on the other, it soon began to feel to her that the drama had become the primary emotion in the relationship, the only energy they shared. Its decline left her feeling not closer to him but more remote. And as they grew farther apart, going from lovers to spouses to parents to, she supposed, collaborators in the enterprise of staying alive, she invested even more of her heart in Miaow.

  But she was still a young woman, energetic and curious, and even during the rare intervals of affection between her and Daw, she felt like the horizon that once seemed so vast and full of possibility had shrunk practically to the tip of her nose. She was trapped in a cycle: small room; moody, often distant husband; a child who, at three, intermittently delighted and exhausted her; and the dull, unchanging routine of work. Life was as monotonous and as predictable as a drumbeat. Even her new friends, who had so engaged her at first, soon began to oppress her. They were unattached, they were having adventures in the big city; they talked about the men—alternately good and appalling—who seemed to drift in and out of their lives. They made jokes and laughed until the tears came. Hom couldn’t remember the last time she’d made a joke, or even felt like making one. Compared to them, she was an obscure, colorless satellite caught in a tiny orbit around her husband and her child. As a small, lifeless moon, she could barely remember how it had felt to be the planet around which things revolved. How it felt to be the person who mattered.

  Primarily, she supposed, she felt foolish. She had believed him and believed him and believed him: when he said he loved her, when he promised to be a good husband, when he came to make amends after she escaped his mother’s house. She had believed him about the fast train, and the optimistic picture he had painted of how they would find their feet in Bangkok. She had believed that she and Miaow would be safe with him. Worst of all, she had believed that their marriage would be a world inhabited solely by the two of them, and then the three of them. Not that there would never be problems, but that the problems would be shared. The problems might prove to be difficult to solve, but they would be theirs alone, and she had believed that love would bring them through. Because that, she had thought, was what marriage was. It was a shelter they would share: the three of them on the inside, caring for each other, and, out there, everyone else.

  But perfume. Perfume meant he had told the biggest lie of all.

  Her sense of betrayal was more about trust than it was about sex. They had made love much less since Miaow was conceived. He had been nervous at first that it might not be good for the child she was carrying, and then his interest waned as her belly thickened. After the birth, he gave her the time she needed to recover, and then more time, until she asked about it, and he said he was ashamed to go to bed with her in his mother’s house. In the early months of their marriage, Hom had been noisy in her enthusiasm, and they both knew that his mother could hear her. And now, being jammed into a tiny, thin-walled room with their daughter only a few feet away wasn’t really conducive to spontaneous affection, either. On the few occasions now when they did make love, she could see that he interpreted her silence as a lack of enthusiasm, which, in part, it was. He might not, she thought, have wanted her often, but he wanted to believe that he still had the old magic. So he sulked.

  And he had struck her. She had known since her early teens that some men occasionally hit their wives; it was no secret in her village that some marriages were much worse than that. The occasional infrequent slap, while it was nothing for either partner to be proud of, didn’t necessarily mean that the marriage was over. Men, she had been told, were like that sometimes. Men drank too much sometimes. The women whose husbands never raised a hand to them kept silent to avoid isolating or shaming the ones who were less fortunate.

&n
bsp; But she hadn’t thought it would happen to her.

  So, all that, and perfume, too.

  Marooned on icebergs of resentment and disappointment, she and Daw floated apart.

  But then there was an opening in the clouds, and Hom, at least momentarily, caught a glimpse of freedom. She would no longer be imprisoned twelve to fourteen hours a day at work and in the increasingly oppressive room she shared with Daw and Miaow. Sonya moved into a new two-room apartment and hired a helper, so it was possible for Hom to leave Miaow with her much later than before, until ten in the evening or even eleven. Instead of waiting in the tiny room, empty until Daw finally decided to come home, Hom had her evenings to do whatever she wanted. She began to go out four or five times a week with her circle of friends from work. The restaurant they favored was a little dump not far from the Isaan place where she and Daw had gone when they first arrived in Bangkok. The food was acceptable and the beer was cheap, and they began to assemble in groups of five or six, shoehorned into a booth for four, carrying on several conversations at the same time and elbowing each other every time the place’s newest employee, a tall, willowy young man named Chai, emerged from his usual station in the kitchen—he was an apprentice cook—to deliver food to some customer when the waitresses were overextended.

  The waitresses were often overextended, and over the course of a few weeks Chai was pressed into service often enough that he began to call the women in the booth by name, although it was Hom’s name he memorized first, blushing when he said it. Hom found herself thinking, What a country boy, and was surprised to realize it wasn’t an insult. One night, one of the women looked at the full tables and said, “Maybe I should work here,” and two days after that Hom spoke to the manager and was given a short four-hour shift waiting tables during the busiest period of the evening. She felt a little guilty about leaving Miaow with Sonya’s helper, but the money—especially the nightly tips—felt good in her pocket. She began to hide the tips in the bottom of the bag she used for dirty laundry, someplace Daw would never look, and she told herself she could save it there until she could afford a place of her own. Although the idea startled and even frightened her when it made its first appearance, as the days passed it blossomed before her: just her and Miaow, no fights, no sulking, no irregular hours, no perfume. A closed partnership of two. The fact that she was taking action lightened her heart. She even felt, on occasion, affection, of a newly remote kind, for Daw.

  She was, it turned out, a first-rate waitress. She remembered customers’ preferences and, if they told her their names, she remembered those as well. Generally speaking, she liked most people until they gave her reason to change her mind, so smiling was easy. Her tips grew at such a rate that she began to share them with the people who worked in the kitchen. And, slowly, she and Chai made friends.

  He was lonely. He was homesick. He was the oldest of three boys and he had come down to Bangkok with the assignment not only to earn his keep and send something home, but to prepare for his brothers to come down as well. As handsome as he was, he seemed completely unconscious of it, while at the same time Hom’s beauty seemed, at first, to intimidate him. Before they got to know each other she’d sometimes feel his stare from across the room, or one of the girls would nudge her and say, “Fish alert,” and she’d look up to see Chai gaping at her with his mouth open as wide as tilapia some Isaan rice farmers raised in their paddies.

  After two or three weeks the looks had become mutual and Hom stopped hurrying out to pick up Miaow the moment the dinner rush was over, sitting instead in one of the empty booths with a glass of juice or, if she was feeling reckless, a beer. On the nights she wasn’t working, when things got really slow, Chai would come out, usually with a little treat he’d made for her, and sit, as far away as possible while still having both buttocks on the cushions of the booth. He talked to her about his family and his brothers and his ambition to own a restaurant of his own someday, and she listened. He asked her questions, and then he listened, although her answers weren’t completely honest: she edited out both Daw and, with an intense pang of guilt, Miaow.

  She had been with only one boy in her life, and he had been transformed into a sullen, untrustworthy, inarticulate stranger who had apparently come to prefer other women to her. Chai was young, he was sweet, he was easy to talk to. She could still smell the village on him—slow, warm, dusty—and it reassured her. Occasionally, when there were no customers, they clocked out early and he took her someplace nearby for a drink, beer for both of them. She stayed with him, one eye on the wall clock, until she had to run to get Miaow in time. Twice, Sonya was on the verge of going to bed, and treated Hom to a raised eyebrow that was both a comment and an invitation to share, but Hom just thanked her, apologized for being late and hurried out. The second time, Sonya said, “If you keep this up, you’re going to get here one night after I’ve locked up, and you’re going to have to leave Miaow here all night. Not easy to explain to your husband.”

  Hom had said, “He won’t even notice,” in a tone Sonya had never heard before, and from then on she and Sonya weren’t quite so close.

  The next night, Chai asked her to go out again, and she declined. But she knew that the door was there, any time she wanted to go through it. Her world got a little bigger. At any time she chose, she knew, she could say yes and then yes again, and Daw would no longer be the only man with whom she had made love. The possibility hung there in front of her, glittering faintly. Of course, Chai still didn’t know about Miaow.

  After a couple of months on the new job, as she and Chai continued to warm their hands at the fire of their potential, she realized that Daw had adjusted to her schedule and that he was now coming home later and later every night, sometimes at one or two, even when he had to get up at the crack of dawn, and she noticed that he had a new kind of energy, speedy, edgy, and somehow brittle. One night, hanging up the pants he had left on the floor, she found six small white pills mixed in with his change. She put them in a neat stack on the little shelf she’d built above the metal bar from which they hung their clothes, and in the morning she asked him about them.

  “They’re great,” he said. “Even on the hardest days, I don’t get tired. Don’t need to eat as much, either.”

  She had been gaining weight, what with her after-dinner dinners with the boy from the restaurant, and she asked if he thought she could try one.

  “Sure,” he said, “but let me cut it in half for you. You’re not as big as I am, and half will be plenty.”

  When she went to work that day, she seemed to feel the little tablet in the pocket of her jeans, emitting a kind of warm buzz, even through the square of toilet paper into which she’d folded it. Since her morning energy was always high, she decided to take it after lunch, thinking it would get her through her shift at the restaurant and keep her from yawning in Chai’s face if they went out afterward. But when it came time, she hesitated. She went to the bathroom and took it out, unwrapped it, and studied it. It was small and white and as clean-looking, as safe-looking, as an aspirin, but reassuringly smaller. She licked her finger, touched the tablet, and then tasted it. A little bitter, but no more so than aspirin. Still, she sensed something coiled about it, something that made her think it might be bigger than it looked, and she folded it up in its paper wrapping again and put it back in her pocket.

  That night she told the boy in the restaurant that she was sleepy and had to go home. When she picked up Miaow early, she was feeling virtuous and committed, and on her way home she stopped and bought Daw a treat, a little cellophane-wrapped box of spicy tamarind candy that he loved. That night, he got back after midnight, walking into things as he came in and absolutely stinking of something that someone had probably thought smelled like flowers.

  She lay still, pretending to be asleep and counting her heartbeats as he fumbled through undressing and getting into bed. When he put his head on the pillow his cheekbone hit the corner
of the candy box and he said, “Shit,” and threw it across the room without looking at it. It took him no time to begin snoring, but she lay awake until it began to get light, vacillating between fury and despair. She finally fell asleep by focusing on the sound of Miaow’s breathing.

  Time stuttered onward, five days of working at a job and a half and grumbling about it, followed by two days spent wishing she were back at work. She took the half pill two days after he gave it to her, just before the lunch break in the sorting room, and was amazed at how the time at work seemed to fly past, how interesting everyone was, how much she—who had always been shy—had to say to them and how quickly the words came. She asked him for another and then two more, continuing to break them in half, although when she took the third one he gave her, she swallowed both halves and was dazzled by her energy and how well-disposed she felt to everyone. Daw had taken to coming and going as he pleased, not getting home some nights until two or even three in the morning, then dragging himself out of bed in the morning, taking a pill, and then bouncing off to work. By now the sleeping mat smelled like a bag full of makeup, even when he wasn’t home. He was working some weekend days now (or said he was) and for the first time, there was money in the house. He bristled with energy, although his memory was a little spotty, and he always had bills in his pockets. She could see the change in both his finances and his confidence; his hair was neatly cut again, and he was shaving every other day in the bowl of water he filled up from the bath at the end of the hallway and then left in the middle of the floor, right where she’d trip over it later and have to spend five or ten minutes mopping up and wringing the cloths out through the window that wasn’t supposed to be open. She’d stopped worrying about the window, thinking that now, with him working and her doing almost two full jobs, they had enough to get a real place to live. She entertained the idea several times before she realized that she was no longer thinking seriously about leaving him. Things had been easier since they began taking the pills. They fought less often, in part because they seemed increasingly to inhabit separate worlds, coming together and separating without the collisions that had made things so difficult. And, if she had to admit the truth to herself, she had long spent her bag of tip money to buy her own pills, and her new tips went as fast as she earned them.