Bangkok Tattoo (21 page)

We Thais do not set great store by the compulsive amplification of emotion through that distortion of the facial muscles so beloved in the West. When they say goodbye for the last time, it is in the parking lot of Thanee’s apartment building. His chauffeur, a Thai, will take her home. Both are dry-eyed and solemn at the last kiss. Both know they will never meet again.

At exactly the moment when Thanee’s plane takes off, Mitch Turner calls her in her apartment, where she is watching TV.

“Hello,” he says, his voice dry and unnaturally high. “I hope you don’t mind my calling. I guess you didn’t expect to hear from me, but, ah, I did hear over the grapevine that Thanee flew out just now, and I was afraid—ah—you might be feeling a bit down. Maybe you have a lot of other things to do, but if not, I wondered, could I buy you a drink or a bite to eat? I certainly would like that very much.”

“Get lost,” Chanya says, and hangs up. She goes back to watching
The Simpsons,
the quirky humor of which she has only recently begun to understand.

The
farang
is certainly stubborn. He does not actually stalk her, he knows better than that, but he carefully chooses moments to simply show up. Thanee told her Mitch Turner is CIA undercover, ostensibly another Washington staffer taking care of lobby groups and visiting dignitaries. She wonders if he might not be abusing his professional privileges, so uncanny are the occasions when they almost bump into each other. A Thai man in that state of towering lust (her word; she doubts Turner would have called it that) would certainly start to make threats sooner or later; Turner could easily check her passport and visa on the CIA database and threaten her with deportation if she didn’t give him what he wanted. She allows him points for doing no such thing. He behaves, in fact, like a gentleman in love. Quietly persistent, from sidewalks, carefully chosen tables in her favorite cafés, the odd telephone call: “Just checking you’re okay, no need to feel threatened. Want me to get lost?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry I said that, it was a bad moment. Thanks for calling.”

“Sometime when you’re over him?”

“Maybe.”

She puts the telephone down with a wan smile. The romantic
farang
thinks she is moping over Thanee. Well, she is in a way, but there are many ways to mope. When you’ve been brought up by subsistence farmers, lovesickness can be something of a luxury, and Chanya has a problem. Thanee paid three months of her rent on her small apartment and has left her with ten thousand dollars on top of all the gold and expensive clothes. In addition, she still has the thirty thousand dollars she saved in Las Vegas. But when the rent and the money run out, she will be back to ground zero as far as making a fortune in
Saharat Amerika
is concerned. A week after Thanee leaves, she calls Wan to ask her if there are any places vacant at the sauna of the hotel where she works.

Wan fixes her up with an interview with the boss, a Hong Kong Chinese, who sees her potential instantly. Samson Yip makes sure she understands that this is the United States, not Asia, especially not Thailand: feds are everywhere. They are especially interested in Asian women who work in massage and sauna businesses. Some of the men who come for massages are FBI hoping to sting the joint. The slightest hint of soliciting for work on her part would be a disaster not only for her but for him, Samson Yip, too. Yip is short and fat and does not share her reluctance to sport huge quantities of gold. His own necklace is even chunkier than hers, and a lot uglier. As a Thai, she is familiar with the Chinese mind. He is ruthless and greedy but straight. He will not try to cheat her. In return, she better not try to cheat him if she wants to stay in America. Understood? Good, so this is how it is.

More than half the men who come for massages or to use the sauna baths are foreigners. Some are sophisticated Europeans, especially French and Italian, with whom a certain understanding is possible. Many are Asians, especially Japanese and Chinese, who generally know how to play the game. Samson Yip tells her she can use a certain very limited amount of discretion in such cases. Americans, on the other hand, are strictly off limits unless he personally gives her the go-ahead.

After a week he sees he’s been wasting his breath. Chanya is far too smart to make a false move. Yip tells her never to take a customer back to her apartment. He supplies a room in the hotel. The room changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, so she will not draw too much attention. Of course, certain employees in the hotel know what is going on. Keeping them quiet is part of his overhead.

Within two weeks he has doubled her hourly rate. Within a month she is his star worker. It isn’t merely her good looks and physical charms; those three months with Thanee have polished her natural talents. Diplomats especially appreciate a certain subtlety in her approach, a new charm to her conversation. All the men like the way she makes them feel special. It is almost like not being with hired flesh, more like having found the woman of your dreams waiting for you in a sauna bath.

So when Mitch Turner shows up for a full-body massage, she gets the shock of her life. She’s been so careful, tried to make sure he is not following her when she comes and goes from the hotel. She has only a very limited understanding of the difference between FBI and CIA. She hasn’t heard from him or seen him for more than three weeks, so she assumed his passion was spent and his mind flipped on to some other obsession in the feckless way of American men. But here he is, with a white towel wrapped around his loins, lying on the massage couch, waiting for her.

She makes no sign of recognizing him, simply treats him like any other customer, except that she is especially careful not to do anything that might be misconstrued. Her massage technique has improved somewhat, although to tell the truth she has never exactly been of professional standards. In his case she carefully leaves out upper thighs and buttocks. She has to admit he owns a superb musculature, one that is obviously the product of many hours pumping iron. Neither of them says anything personal or gives any sign they know each other, until half an hour into the massage, when she tells him to turn onto his back and their eyes lock. She turns her face away to speak to the wall.

“Why are you here?”

“Because I’m obsessed with you.”

“I don’t want you to come here again.”

“How can I stop myself?”

“I’ll leave, go to another city.”

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll go back to Thailand.”

“I’ll find you.”

“I’ll cut your dick off while you’re sleeping.”

“That’s the most Thai thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

She hadn’t considered he might be familiar with Southeast Asia.

When she’s finished with his massage and he’s left, Samson Yip calls for her to go see him in his office. He asks her about her last client. She tells him truthfully all she knows. Yip looks grim, in a state of shock almost.

“He knew everything. Every damned thing. Even the numbers of the rooms we use. He must be FBI or CIA. He’ll close me down if you don’t do what he wants. It’s up to you—you can run away, or you can see him. He claims he only wants to get to know you better, have dinner a few times, no sex, just give him a chance. He’s weird enough to actually mean what he says. What will you do?”

“Tell him I’ll have dinner with him once. That’s all. No sex. If he wants more, I’ll run away—or he can have me deported if he wants. Up to him.”

Yip nods, his big oval face of many chins concentrated in puzzlement. “Just tell me one thing. He seems like a good, clean-living American with a strong career—the kind of man women like you come to this country to marry. Why do you keep rejecting him?”

Chanya looks into Yip’s face and sees only money, greed, stupidity. “Because I’m a whore.”

Yip nods again. He isn’t so stupid after all. He is just testing to see how smart
she
is. “You’re right. An American like him could never forget or forgive. Once the first months of passion were over, he would torture you with it for the rest of your life.”

“Worse than that, he would torture himself.”

The Chinese grunts. He’s worked with whores all his life. The way they are able to read men at a glance still astonishes him from time to time.

Mitch Turner takes her to a Thai restaurant in Adams-Morgan, just off Columbia Road. She is impressed that he knows not to take her to an upmarket Thai place, where the chile is diluted and the food virtually tasteless. This one is budget to mid-range and frequented by Thais. The food, although not quite the standard of a Bangkok food stall, is not at all bad. One of the waiters happens to be a young Japanese, and for the duration of the evening she is convinced Mitch Turner brought her here to show off. When she gets to know him better, she will revise that view, but she is impressed. He looks so totally American, the kind that might boast he doesn’t own a passport, but his fluency and obvious familiarity with Japanese manners causes her to revise her estimation upward. What she likes most is his deference to the young waiter’s background, even to the point of bowing. Very few
farang
can call on such courtesy. She allows him one of her more generous smiles. He is as delighted as a schoolboy. There is no need to sleep with this man to have him in the palm of her hand—he is safely nestled there already.

He hardly drinks at all, which disappoints her a bit. Thanee taught her to enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner, and the tension in the air could certainly do with some help from alcohol. Unfortunately, he seems afraid of it. She settles for a single glass of red wine; Turner drinks mineral water.

Another surprise: he’s not bad at small talk. Not as good as Thanee, of course, who could talk amusingly about soap bubbles—there is a self-consciousness in the way Turner chats about Washington, this and that—but he’s not nearly as heavy as she feared. In return she confides how much she loves
The Simpsons,
in the enthusiastic tone of a recent convert. He smiles. Giving nothing of his profession away is clearly second nature to him, however. The meal is almost over before he comes to the point.

“I’m sorry I put the heat on Yip. I was desperate. Now you’ve done what I wanted, and you’re having dinner with me. I’m a man of my word—anyone who knows me will tell you that—so I won’t be bothering you again. If you say no next time I ask to see you, I’ll take that as final. Just do one little thing for me. Read this.” He hands over a book-sized package that she has already noticed. “It’s in Thai. If you don’t have a lot of time, just read the New Testament, especially the four gospels.”

She looks at the package in bewilderment.

When he drops her at her apartment building, he says: “I don’t want to sleep with you. Not till we’re married. I just want to see you from time to time.” A painful smile. “I want to court you. I’m very old-fashioned.”

She stares at him, holding the book in one hand, her Chanel handbag in the other. She admits that for a full minute she is seduced by the prospect of a simplified, safe, clean, scrupulously moral existence with a strong, honest, devout man who will never let her down, who will provide for her and their children and generally enable her to live happily ever after. Then she realizes she’s thinking about soap opera, not life. His timing has certainly added to the unreality. Is it part of American culture to virtually propose on the first date?

Her revised opinion is that this is a very dangerous relationship for one of them. As an illegal immigrant, she can only suppose the victim will be her. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that he has won this round. She will not refuse to see him again. But there is one thing he has to understand: “No way am I going to get close to you without sex. Whatever your God thinks about that, you better tell him: no courting a Thai girl without a lot of sex. Tons of it, till it’s coming out your ears.”

She ignores the pained expression on his face as she turns to walk to the lifts. She had decided not to turn again to look or wave at him, and he is quickly obscured by a concrete pillar. When she reaches the lift doors, she stops in her tracks. The voice of Homer Simpson calls out: “Chanya, say Chanya, I got tickets for the Springfield Isotopes game next Saturday, wanna come?” She turns quickly, even tries to search for him in the parking lot, but he is gone. She is gaping in wonder. That was not merely the mimickry of a gifted amateur, that was a perfect, professional-quality imitation, and more than a little eerie.

As she ascends to her apartment, she is thinking:

Chanya catches strange fish this time. Twenty minutes in bed with him, and Chanya will know everything. His face not so bad, but he’s ashamed of it. Wants to be pretty American boy. Something unreal, like movies. In Amerika everyone in the movies. Maybe he can’t get it up?

What a disaster that would be, to marry a man only to find out he’s useless between the sheets. But why has she decided to see him again at all? Financially she’s doing extremely well at the sauna, and she could hook any number of Asian men whom she knows in the diplomatic corps and who are constantly calling her, all of whom would understand her so much better than the
farang.
Karma is a weather system too complex to analyze.

Once in her apartment, she dumps the Bible on a table, still in its package, and forgets all about it.

So who is Mitch Turner? Chanya would have been surprised to know how many people have asked themselves this question. She realizes after the first supper that he has told her nothing personal about himself at all. Even the Thai translation of the Bible, which could seem a charming and intimate gesture by a pious man, was clearly a contrived event, something not quite what it seemed, as if the piety were all in the acting.

He waits a whole three weeks before asking her out again, this time to the Iron Hearth near Dupont Circle. No chiles here, it’s high-end romantic, with lamb chops in paper garters at finely laid tables around a blazing fire. Did he realize he was setting himself a trap? It is not the kind of restaurant where you can decently not drink wine. He makes a good, knowledgeable choice of a Napa red, which is fine by Chanya, but he hardly takes more than a couple of sips from his glass. Halfway through the meal the bottle is three-quarters empty, and Chanya puts down her glass to stare meaningfully at him. She has done almost all the drinking but is only slightly tipsy. Self-consciously he takes three or four sips, then puts his glass down. She continues to stare. He picks the glass up again to drink a little more. She doesn’t let him off the hook until he has drunk all of it. Apparently satisfied, she allows the waiter to empty the remains of the bottle into her glass.