A Nail Through the Heart (18 page)

M
adame Wing does not telephone to demand an update that night. Rafferty calls anyway to report that he has identified the Cambodian man, but Pak says she is too busy to come to the phone. “Nothing else is happening,” Rafferty says.

“According to you,” Pak says mysteriously, and hangs up.

“Why do I have the feeling,” Rafferty asks Rose, “that things are being kept from me?”

Rose is settled at Rafferty’s desk, doing her business accounts. She has a pencil in her hand, another behind her ear, and a hank of hair between her teeth, usually a prelude to some frustrated pencil chewing. Twice a week she writes down in a ledger every baht she has earned and every baht she has spent—for food, rent, shampoo, soap, clothing, pink plastic hair clips, donations at the temple, money sent to her family, and—finally—her business expenses:
tuk-tuk
fares, advances to the women, new T-shirts and jeans for their interviews, cell-phone charges. The exercise does little for her mood.

“When I think of all the money I threw away when I was dancing,” Rose says, studying the numbers on the page, “I could scream.”

Rafferty looks at the familiar terrain of her profile, at the play of light on her hair, at her straight back and at the smooth skin over the curve of her neck. At the carefully ironed shirt she wears tucked in to her jeans because the bottom is frayed and it embarrasses her. “I haven’t heard you scream in a while.”

“Since you gave me that money, I have nine thousand baht in the bank,” she says, ignoring him. “A little more than two hundred dollars. Do you think I should send some of it home?”

“Save it for a rainy day,” he says in English.

“Poke,” she says gently in Thai, “it rains nearly every day.”

A wave of longing, mixed with something like loneliness, washes over him. “All the more reason,” he says, also in Thai.

“I’ll send them five thousand. Half and a little bit. That will make them happy.”

“You make a lot of people happy, Rose.”

She says nothing. Rafferty can almost see the words hanging in the air between them. He feels the same breathless awkwardness he experienced in junior high, when he first asked a girl for a date. The stillness in the room presses in on him like water.

“Rose—”

“Don’t confuse me, Poke,” she says. She closes the ledger with a soft pop. She still has not turned to face him.

“I’m not trying to confuse you.”

She waves the words off. “But you are. You’re making me think too much. And don’t tell me I said I’d think about it. I
am
thinking about it.” The chair’s hinged back creaks when she leans away from the desk, as though she wants to be farther from the ledger and the numbers it contains. Her right hand tightly grips the arm of the chair. “We were fine until you started. We got along, we laughed, we didn’t…we didn’t ask questions. I was comfortable here. Now you want to change everything—adopt Miaow, bring the boy in, marry me. You
do
want to marry me, don’t you?”

“Well, I…yes. Sure. That’s why I asked.”

She leans back some more and then straightens. For a moment he thinks she is not going to answer him. “Getting married is much more complicated than just sleeping with me.”

“Why?” He thinks he knows some of the answers, but they have to talk about them sometime.

She breathes out sharply in exasperation and turns to him. “How far is it from me to you right now?”

This is not what he expects. “I don’t know. Six, eight feet.”

She throws the pencil onto the desk. “It’s a million miles, Poke. And more than miles. It’s what we believe, what we’ve done, who we are. What we need to do.”

“If it’s that far,” he says, trying to make light of it, “we should get started early.”

She claps her hands, just once, to get his full attention, and he feels his shoulders straighten. “
Listen
to me. You’re a fine-looking man. You’re sweet. You have a good heart. Any woman in her right mind would be happy you asked. I don’t know, Poke. Maybe you should ask one of them.” She gets up and walks to the sliding doors and then past them, the city lights framing her.

“That’s silly, Rose. This isn’t a raffle. I don’t want anyone except you.”

“And I suppose I want you.” She stops in midstride and gives him both eyes in a gaze that seems to focus about four inches beneath his skin. “But that may not be enough.”

Rafferty wants to stand, too, but he is afraid to. The connection between them is suddenly so tenuous that almost anything could sever it: a disturbance in the air, a beam of light coming in through the window. And, fragile as it is, it’s a bridge he has to cross. “If that’s what we have, it’s what we have,” he says. “And I’ll do whatever it takes to make it enough.”

“I know you’ll try. But can you do it? I don’t know. And I don’t know whether I can either.”

Rafferty starts to reply, but the words are carried away by a cold breeze that seems to blow straight through him. He can feel his heart contract. He has made a tremendous mistake. He’s been so focused on
Miaow that he hasn’t taken the time to look at all of this from Rose’s perspective.

Or even to recognize that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what Rose’s perspective is.

The room, with all its familiar features, suddenly feels like someplace he’s never seen before. An unknown place in an unknown country.

His hands are in mid-air before he knows consciously what he is going to do. He brings his hands together, palm to palm in a gesture of prayer, to make a
wai
. He raises the
wai
face high to express respect and says, “Forgive me.”

Keeping her eyes on his, she turns her head slightly to the left, as though she might be able to see him more clearly this way. She looks wary. After a moment she says, “I have forgiven you many times. What am I forgiving now?”

“I’m an American,” he says. “As much as I love you, as much time as I’ve spent here, I’m still an American. And I’ve made the classic American mistake.”

She doesn’t even blink. “Which is?”

“To think that everybody is really just like us, even if they don’t act that way. Or that they
want
to be like us, they
would
be like us if they could just shake off all the stuff that makes them seem different.” He is choosing his words anxiously, picking one, discarding others, knowing how limited his Thai is, how unequal to this challenge. He hadn’t worried about it until this moment, convinced that the most important part of the conversation would be heart-to-heart. But now he knows he doesn’t understand Rose’s heart either.

“If it’s really a million miles from me to you,” he says, “please help me to cross it.”

Rose pulls her head back fractionally, less than an inch, as though she has been struck by something very soft. Her hands go into the pockets of her jeans, and she stands there, considering, while Rafferty holds his breath. Then she says, “I believe in ghosts, Poke. Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I believe that trees and stones have spirits living in them. I believe
that people have light inside them, even the worst people. I believe that the lives we are living now lead us to our next life, and the lives we led before led us to this one. Do you believe in your next life, Poke?”

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through my current one.”

“No, you don’t,” she says. “And that’s a problem for me. I have problems, lots of problems, that you can’t see, Poke, and some of them are about you. I see things in your life and mine, and Miaow’s, that can’t just be
fixed.”
Her hair has fallen forward, and she pulls her hands from her pockets, slips them beneath the long fall of hair, and throws it back over her shoulders, a gesture he has always found compellingly beautiful. “You see a problem and your response is to fix it, like it’s a broken air conditioner, or forget about it. I can’t do that. That’s not how life works for me. The things we do, the things we don’t do, they carry forward into other lives. Lives that come after this one. And they affect other people’s lives, now and in the future.”

Rafferty’s head feels like it weighs fifty pounds. He lets it drop forward so his chin almost rests on his chest. “Give me an example.”

“My life before I met you.” Her voice is defiant.

Poke had expected this subject, but not in this context. “I know all about that.”

“Do you? I don’t think you do. You know about it the same way you’d know the story of a movie you watched.” She raises her hands to her shoulders and brings them straight down, putting herself inside an invisible frame. “She danced, she went with men, she quit. End of story, except that you get to feel good about yourself by putting it all in the past, by saying it doesn’t matter anymore. But it
does
matter.”

“I know this is probably the wrong thing to say, but it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Do you understand the damage I did to myself? Do you know what I have to carry with me? That I danced up on that bar night after night with my rear end showing, so men could say, ‘Send me Number 57,’ like I was a sandwich? That I went to their hotels, no matter what they wanted—whether they wanted to make a pornographic video, or
have me pee on them, or give it to me in the ass? I
did
that, Poke, I did all of it. I
took money
for it. I could have walked out of those rooms at any time, and I didn’t.”

She stops herself and draws two deep breaths. Her shoulders slump, and suddenly she is sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch. She picks up a pack of cigarettes, works one out, flicks the lighter, and looks at him over the flame.

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” Poke says, “except to love you and to understand why you did it.”

“Yes,” she says. She inhales hard, brightening the coal at the cigarette’s tip enough to cast a red glow on her cheekbones. “You do understand that. I did it for my family.”

“And that makes merit,” Poke says. He has both hands on the edge of the table, leaning forward with enough force to whiten his knuckles. “That has to mean something. It has to…I don’t know, cancel out some of…some of the other stuff.”

“I’ll carry it with me as long as I live,” she says. “And beyond.” The cigarette dangles loosely from her fingers, forgotten. “And I bring that damage into your life. Into Miaow’s.”

“We need you,” he says.

“You think you do. And you think I’ll be good for you and you’ll be good for me, and that will fix me, just like adopting Miaow will fix her, just like you want to fix the boy. That’s good of you, Poke. It’s generous. It comes from a warm heart. But we’re not air conditioners. We are who we are because of who we’ve been, in this life and in the past. It’s too deep to tinker with, and you can’t see that, even though to me it’s a wall fifty feet high.” She rediscovers the cigarette, puts it to her lips, and lowers it again without taking a drag. “And it will be here, that damage, in this house.”

And then she’s up again, walking away from him. “You think you understand about my family,” she says without looking back. “You know I worked the bars because of my family. But if I did that for them, Poke, what else will I do?”

“You’ll take care of them. I’ll help you take care of them.”

She turns to face him. “We have ten dollars left,” she says. Her
voice is so low he has to strain to hear it. “Miaow is hungry. My little sister up north is hungry. Who gets the ten dollars?”

Rafferty pushes the table so hard it slides away from him. “We’re never going to be down to ten dollars, Rose. You can’t take an insurance policy against the entire future.”

“I would send the money to my sister,” Rose says. “Without a minute’s thought. Is this a problem?”

After a moment too long for Rafferty to measure it, he says, “Yes.”

“Well, that’s what you would be getting, Poke. You would be getting my damage, my mama and papa, and my brothers and sisters, too. You would be getting
my priorities.
And I would be getting the knowledge that I might harm you, and even Miaow.”

“How much harm would you do to Miaow if you left?”

She shakes her head, and for a second he thinks he misunderstood something she said. “I’m not talking about
leaving.
You said you wanted to marry me. That’s different than playing house. That’s joining souls, Poke. The threads they’ll tie around our heads will join my soul to yours. I do you the honor of taking that seriously.” She holds up a hand, palm out, to stop him from replying. “Don’t you think this is difficult for me? Don’t you think it would be easier for me to pretend that none of this matters? I could just say yes, Poke, and bring you into a world you’d never understand. You wouldn’t even know who was sleeping next to you. Most girls who came out of the bars would say yes in the amount of time it would take their hearts to beat. And then they’d clean out your bank account and leave you in the middle of the night, and I know lots of girls who would think I’m crazy for not doing that.”

“They’re not you.”

“No, they’re not. But what they would have done to you might be better for you than marrying me.”

He leans back, suddenly aware that he looks like someone who is about to spring. “I’m listening to you. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. Do I get to talk?”

She gives him a half smile. “I’ve never known you not to.”

“Okay.” He folds his hands, looking desperately for the words. “So here’s me. I’m not the greatest bargain in the world. I’ve spent most of my life looking for something easy, something that might be fun for an hour or an evening. I’ve been the guy in the hotel room, remember? Ask Fon. I’m not proud of that. I’m not proud of much I’ve done. I’ve wasted a lot of my life.” He grabs a breath. “This life anyway.” Rose lowers her head to hide another smile. “Maybe the best thing I can say about myself is that I try not to hurt other people. I don’t always succeed, but I try.”

“That counts.” Rose has leaned against the edge of the desk, her back straight. Holding her left shoulder with her right hand. To Rafferty it looks like a defense.

“And you…well, you’re one of the best people I’ve ever met. You’re good and generous and truthful and beautiful. I could look at you for the rest of my life without my eyes getting tired. Maybe you’re right, maybe I don’t see most of what you see. Maybe I’m lost, maybe I’m sleepwalking. Maybe you could wake me up.”