The Hot Countries (4 page)

“Peetah,” Miaow supplies.

Rose says, “Euh,
Peetah
.”

“This is exactly what I was afraid of when I bought the television,” Rafferty says. “How are your grapes?”

“Poor little things,” Rose says, prodding one. “How was your night out?” She touches her index finger, cold from the grape, to the back of his neck.

“Girls galore, just lining up right and left, pushing each other out of the way to reach me. Took half a dozen cops to get me out safely.”

“Next time don't take any money. They won't even see you.” Rose picks up a grape, examines it, and puts it down again. To Miaow she says, “Give me your spoon. You're not using it.”

“I was at the Expat Bar again,” he says. “It was kind of sad.” They look at him without replying, so he goes on. “They're getting old, and some of them are dying, and, you know, they don't have anyone except each other, and they don't even like each other very much.” Rose sits back, putting a little more distance between them, her eyes still on him. Miaow is watching Rose watch him. “And they're a million miles away from their real homes, their families, people who speak their language
 . . .
”

“Whose fault is that?” Rose asks. She dips the back of Miaow's spoon into the yogurt and licks it.

“I'm not talking about
fault
.”

“Why not?”

“Why
not
? I'm not judging them. I'm not qualified to judge them. Jesus, I might have
been
one of them.”

“Never,” Rose says, skimming the yogurt's surface with the back of the spoon again.

“Because I met you.”

“A
lot
of men met me,” Rose says, in Thai that sounds as if the words have been clipped apart with tin snips. “But you knew what you were looking for, not like those old fools.” She sips her water and makes a face. “They're elders now. They should be earning respect and balancing their life's karma and setting an example, and they're still chasing their dicks around.”

Miaow follows the conversation like someone watching a boxing match. They've rarely talked about this in front of her before, at least not so frankly.

“I know,” he says. “And that's sad, don't you think?”

“No,” Rose says. She plants the spoon deep in the yogurt and lets go of it. “Name one of them.”

Rafferty pauses. “Why?”

“I want to see if I remember any of them. Just name one.”

“This is silly.”

“So I'm silly. One name.”

“Okay. Bob Campeau.”

Rose looks past him, riffling through the bar girl's mental Rolodex. Most of the women who work the bars—the successful ones anyway—can dredge up years later the name of a man they met for ten minutes. “Mouth like
 . . .
?” She draws an upside-down U in the air with the tip of the spoon and then mimes a comb-over, brushing her hand forward and sideways above her head. “Hair
 . . .
?”

“That's Bob.”

Rose shakes her head. “He was old when I started working.”

“Yeah, well, he's older now.”

“And you like him?”

“I didn't say I
liked
him.” Rafferty feels like a tourist who's accidentally violated some esoteric cultural taboo. “I'm not defending him. I'm not defending any of them. I just said—”

“Right, you feel sorry for them.” She takes a handful of hair on the top of her head and yanks on it, something he has often seen her do when she wants to focus her thoughts. “Well, then,
Bob
,
let's talk about Bob. At my first bar, when the girls on the stage saw him come in, nobody would look at him, because they didn't want him to point at them to come sit with him. But
somebody
had to sit with him, so a game of rock-paper-scissors would start at the front of the stage and go all the way around, and the girl who lost had to sit with your
friend
when she got off the stage.”

“He's not my—”

“At my second bar, no one would sit with him at all unless it was a new girl who didn't know anything and another girl was mean enough to say he was okay.” She's avoiding Poke's eyes now, and Miaow is watching her with her mouth partly open. “So the poor, dumb new girl would get Bob. Or some older or uglier girl who hadn't been bought out all month and needed to get the bar fine or she might get fired. And do you know why nobody wanted to go with him?”

Rafferty says, “He's not very pleasant, but—”

“Because Bob, your friend Bob, he thought he was Wonder Man. He liked the girls to
call
him Wonder Man. Miaow, put your fingers in your ears.”

Miaow says, “Oh, come on.”

“Do it loosely, then. Just satisfy me.” Rose waits until Miaow's fingers are in the general vicinity of her ears, and then she says, “He had to do it three times. Because he was Wonder Man. Every time he took a girl. She couldn't leave until he'd had his three wet little pops.”

Miaow's eyes have doubled in size.

“And then, after all that work, he paid her
small money
. She spent practically the whole night to get this old wreck up and keep him there. She lost two or three other customers, and he gave her eight hundred baht, a thousand baht. And if she argued, if any of them argued, he shouted at her. He slapped two or three of them.”

Miaow says, one finger still in an ear, “How do you know?”

“The Bamboo Telegraph,” Rose says, not looking at her. “That's what the
farang
used to call it. Everybody in the bars knows everything. A customer tells a girl he's going to go only with her, and early the next night he goes butterfly with a girl from another bar. By the time he walks into his sweetie's bar at midnight, it's like the two of them were on TV. Or a customer is a pincher or a biter or wants something disgusting. Every woman in every bar district knows who the good and bad customers are. Some girls try to keep the best ones to themselves, but sooner or later they brag to a friend, and the next time the guy comes in, the friend is sitting on his lap, and at that moment every girl in the bar makes a note. Bob, he's famous. He's been a mean, bad-hearted cheap Charlie for years and years.”

“I don't like him any better than you do,” Rafferty says, wondering how he got himself into this position. “But it's still sad. The whole
group
is sad. I mean, they sold their lives for something they probably outgrew or got sick of or can't even
do
any more, and now they're stuck here. And the ones who haven't outgrown it, they're the saddest of the bunch.”

“You can have all of them,” Rose says. “You can tie them together with a rope and push them into the river.”

“Fine,” Rafferty says. “My, my. This bottle of beer is certainly empty.” He gets up and heads for the kitchen.

Miaow says to Rose, “When you were working there, you didn't like the customers?” Rafferty keeps going, but figuratively cocks an ear.

“It was
business
,” Rose says. “Some of them were better than others. But most of them? I hated them.”

“But you had to pretend you liked them, right?”

“What is it you want to know, Miaow?”

Rafferty stands in the kitchen with the open refrigerator pouring cold air onto his feet.

“You hated them, but you had to act like they were handsome or something. You were
acting
. Isn't that right?”

“I hadn't thought of it that way,” Rose says. She raises her voice. “Poke, get your beer and close the refrigerator. I can see your reflection in the sliding glass door, just standing there with your big ears sticking out.”

“A guy can't even eavesdrop in his own apartment.” He picks up the big beer and opens it.

“Acting,” Miaow repeats. “In front of a live audience.”

“More or less,” Rose says. It sounds like she'll elaborate, but she doesn't.

“Improvising,” Miaow adds. She's not giving up.

“What does that mean?”

“No script. Making it up while you were doing it.”

“Oh, no,” Rose says. “There was always a script.
Poke
may think these men are interesting, but when they get into the bedroom, there are only four or five kinds of them, and there's a script for every one of them. Do we have to talk about this?”

“You were up close,” Miaow says without a moment's hesitation. “It had to look real. Didn't it?”

“Not very.” She's shaking her head. “They weren't really looking at me. They were looking at something they wanted, a brown girl who would do what they wanted her to, or the whore who would fall in love with them. See them as different from all the others, prove to them they
were
different from all the others, which they weren't. Or they were looking back at the money they spent to get me out of the bar, waiting to see what it had bought. Most of them forgot my name before I left.”

Miaow says, “But still.”

“
Yes
, Miaow, it was acting. All right? Some of them really needed to believe I thought they were
 . . .
whatever they needed to be—romantic or sensitive or sexy or
 . . .
” She looks up at Rafferty as he comes in. “Or like Bob. They needed to feel powerful.”

“Dr. Srisai says that the only way to make the audience believe something is to believe it yourself. You have to
 . . .
to feel, inside you, the way your character feels.”

Rose nods slowly. Wherever she thought Miaow was going, this clearly isn't it.

“It's the opposite of that other way, the Del
 . . .
Del—”

“Delsarte,” Rafferty says, sitting beside his wife. “The Delsarte method. In that approach the gesture, the exterior, creates the emotion. You look like you're afraid and bang, you're afraid. In the approach Miaow's talking about now, it's the other way around. The emotion inside creates the exterior.”

“That's exactly it,” Miaow says.

Rose says, “I want some of that beer.”

“Tough,” Rafferty says. “Laurence Olivier—you know who he is, right?”

Miaow says, “Yes,” and Rose shakes her head.

“Olivier, in a Shakespeare play, had a scene in which he learned that his character's daughter had been murdered. Every reviewer talked about the scream he let out when he heard the news. He said later that he made the scream by remembering when he was a boy and he touched the tip of his tongue to a frozen metal flagpole. It stuck, and he had to rip it away.”

“Ohhhh.” Miaow looks thrilled. Rose raises her eyebrows and ostentatiously licks the spoon.

“So,” Miaow says to her, “when you had to make them think you liked them, what did you use? I mean, what did you think about? It had to be something powerful, didn't it?”

Rose gives her a long look and says, “I thought about being alone.”

By the time
they finally go to bed, Rose seems resigned to the
idea that the patrons of the Expat Bar will continue to share the world with her and breathe her air until they're all dead and that
Rafferty is entitled to his own feelings about them as long as he doesn't mention them by name. They share a slightly perfunctory and not very aerobic romantic workout to put the tension behind them and smooth the surface. Rose, as usual, is asleep and breathing deeply by the time Rafferty rolls over.

He's been reading Greek poetry lately, and a line from Sappho surfaces as he drifts:
He was handsome then and young, but eventually gray age overcame him, the husband of an immortal wife.
The men in the Expat Bar have grown old, but the women on the stages have remained immortally the same age, even if they weren't the same women. It is, he thinks, a cruel metric: losing your beauty and vitality among all that youth and seeing your faltering present-day self reflected in their uninterested eyes. Seeing the way they reserve themselves, even commercially, for younger men when, inside, you still feel the way you always did—youthful, vigorous, attractive. But, of course, Rose is right: these men signed up all those years ago for the full five-course meal, including the bitter dessert, and they got to this point without ever doing anything to push back from the table and use their lives to accomplish something useful.

Trying for the tenth or fifteenth time to get the lumps in his pillow arranged just right, he sees the eyes of that bar worker, finding him across the crowd, and hears Arthur Varney call him “the travel writer
.
”