The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (28 page)

When you go Kambuja?

Three days.

She hesitated but finally called over another lady. This my friend Oy. My name Toy.

You come to hotel with me? he said to Oy.

She looked him up and down. You want all night or short time?

All night.

No all night me. Only short time.

Okay.

In the back of the taxi he whispered in her ear that he was shy, and she snuggled against him just as Toy had. She smelled like shampoo. She was very hot and gentle against
him. Knowing already that if he ever glimpsed her soul it would be in just the same way that in the National Museum one can view the gold treasures only through a thick-barred cabinet, he tried to
kiss her, and she turned away.

Please?

She smiled, embarrassed, and turned away.

No?

She shook her head quickly.

He reached over her to turn out the light, and she cuddled him. He rubbed her small breasts and she moaned. He kissed her belly and eased his hand in between her legs.
She’d shaved her pubic hair into a narrow mohawk, probably so that she could dance in the bathing suit. He stuck his mouth into her like the midget in the show had, wondering if she’d
push him away, but she let him.

When push came to shove, he didn’t use a condom. She felt like a virgin. When he was only halfway in she got very tight and he could see that she was in pain. He did it as slowly and
considerately as he could, trying not to put it in too far. Soon he was going faster and the pleasure was better and better; she was so sweet and clean and young. He stroked her hair and said:
Thank you very much.

Thank you, she said dully.

He got up and put on his underwear. Then he turned on the light and brought her some toilet paper.

She was squatting on the floor in pain.

Look, she said.

Blood was coming out of her.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m really sorry.

No problem, she smiled.

I’m sorry!

Maybe I call doctor.

He got her some bandages and ointment. She prayed her hands together and said thank you.

He gave her a thousand baht. She hadn’t asked for anything. Thank you, sir, she smiled.

Enough for doctor?

This for taxi. This for
tuk-tuk
.

He gave her another five hundred, and she prayed her hands together again and whispered: Thank you.

He gave her some ointment, and she turned away from him and rubbed it inside her. When they finished getting dressed she hugged him very tightly. She turned her face up to let him kiss her if he
wanted. He kissed her forehead.

She hugged him again and again. When he’d shown her out to the
tuk-tuk
, she shook his hand.

Well, he said to himself, I certainly deserve to get AIDS.

I can’t help but feel it’s wrong, he said.

Well, we’re giving ’em money, aren’t we? said the photographer very reasonably. How else they gonna eat? That’s their job. That’s what they do. What’s more,
we’re payin’ ’em real well, a lot better than most guys would.

What did the journalist really want? No one thing, it seemed, would make him happy. He was life’s dilettante. Whatever path he chose, he left, because he was lonely for
other paths. No excuse, no excuse! When the photographer led him down the long, narrow tunnels of Klong Toey (they had to buy mosquito netting for Cambodia), he got bewildered by all the different
means and ways, but everyone else seemed to know, whether they were carrying boxes on their shoulders or hunting down cans of condensed milk, dresses, teapots, toys; it was so crowded under the hot
archways of girders that people rubbed against one another as they passed, babies crying, people talking low and calm, nothing stopping. How badly had he hurt Oy? He had to see her. Lost, the two
loathsome johns wandered among framed portraits of the king, greasy little bloodred sausages, boiled corn, packets of fried green things, oil-roasted nuts that smelled like burned tires,
hammerheads without the handles . . . But it was equally true that the johns felt on top of everything because they were screwing whores in an airconditioned hotel.

In the bar after the rain, the girl leaned brightly forward over her rum and Coke with a throaty giggle; everyone was watching the game board, smoking cigarettes while the TV
said: Jesus Christ, where are you? and the girl said to the photographer: Tell me, when you birthday?

She said to the journalist: You smoke cigarette? so he bit down on his straw and pretended to smoke it, to make her laugh.

The girls leaned and lounged. The photographer’s girl was named Joy. She kept saying: Hi, darling! Hi, darling! Her friend’s name was Pukki.

Come here, darling, said Pukki. What you writing?

I wish I knew. Then I’d know how it would turn out, said the journalist.

He likes to write long letters to his mother, said the photographer.

You buy me out please, Pukki cried to the journalist.

I love Oy, he said. Tonight I buy Oy.

That’s real good, said the photographer admiringly. That’s the way to show ’em!

The photographer squeezed Joy’s butt and Pukki’s tits, and all the other girls cried in disgust real or feigned: You butterfly man! He bought Joy out, and Pukki screamed at the
journalist:
Please
, you no buy me out,
whaiiiiieee?

I’m sorry, he said. I promised Oy. I’m really sorry.

Why did he want Oy? Because he had hurt her?

He slipped her a hundred baht and she brightened.

So they went to Oy’s bar, the photographer, the journalist, and Joy. The manager came and said: Oy? Which Oy? Evidently there were so many Oys.

The photographer went and looked (he was very good at picking people out), but he couldn’t find her.

All night the TV went
aah!
and
oi!
to dubbed movies while the prostitute lay wide-eyed in the photographer’s bed, bored and lonely, snuggling her sleeping
meal ticket while the journalist, unable to sleep on account of the TV and therefore likewise bored and lonely, could not ask her to come even though the photographer had offered because he
didn’t feel right about it, the way she snuggled the photographer so affectionately (when he got to know her better he’d understand that she wouldn’t have come anyway) and besides
he was worried about the growing tenderness in his balls. Then he had to piss again – that was a bad sign; as soon as he pissed he felt the need to piss again.

When Joy left, she was dressed conservatively, smiled blandly; she shook each of their hands. Did she become that way in the morning, after the photographer fucked her up the
ass, and she saw that he was like the others? Or was her affection just an act?

Probably she’d be dead in five years. Eighty per cent of the Patpong girls tested positive for AIDS that fall. The journalist’s heart sank.

And what’s
this
injection? the journalist asked.

The doctor’s glasses glinted. Pure caffeine, he said enthusiastically.

If I wear a rubber from now on so that I don’t infect the other girls, can I keep having sex, starting today?

I think it would not be good for you, said the doctor. You see, the gonorrhea has already migrated far into the spermatic cord . . .

Receipt number 03125 (two soda waters, sixty baht) was already in the cup, and fever-sweat from the clap ran down his face. The journalist was working, and the girls sometimes
gathered around to watch him write. Lifting his head from the bar, the photographer explained to them: My friend likes to write long letters to his balls.

They were in Oy’s bar. The Western video was repeating and dinner had closed because it was 6:00 now, Oy’s hour to come to work, as the photographer had kindly ascertained; and
paunchy white guys grinned. The staff was getting ready for dance time.

The journalist’s teeth chattered with fever. Man, I hope you make it, said the photographer, and there was worry and sarcasm in his voice.

I’m all right, the journalist said. Do you see Oy around?

At 7:00, Toy came. She said hi, smiling; she said no Oy today. There was something so sincere about her that the journalist almost said to hell with it and asked her to go with him, but she
would only have said no. He wrote her a note for Oy, showing her each of the note’s words in the English–Thai dictionary:
Oy, I worry you blood that night. Are you OK?

Will Oy come today? he asked her again, just to be sure.

Toy patted his arm. Not today, she said.

You come hotel me, Toy?

No, sir.

You my friend?

OK friend OK.

Then Oy showed up from somewhere, smiling. Toy went off to dance.

He bought out Oy, saying: I just take you back. Just sleep watch TV no fucking just sleep you know OK?

OK, laughed Oy.

She seemed in perfect health. That annoyed him after all his anxiety. Oy? he said. Oy? I’m
sick
from you.

Oy hung her head, smiling.

The photographer went back to the other bar to buy Joy, and the four of them walked down the hot, narrow alley, the two girls in fancy evening wear, the two boys in faded clothes a little dirty;
what a treat! Oy stopped in a store to buy condoms (and it never occurred to the journalist until much, much later that she might have been doing it for him); he said no need and she was happy.
They got a taxi to the hotel. Joy rode in front with the driver. Oy pressed against him. He held her hand, gave her leg a feel; her dress was drenched with sweat. You hot? he said. She nodded;
she’d always nod, no matter what he said.

He led Oy into the hotel while the photographer paid off the driver.

The journalist went grandly up to the desk. Two-ten, please.

All the Thais in the lobby watched silently. Oy hung back, ashamed. They began talking about her. She raised her head then and followed her owner into the humid heat and mildew smell of the
stairwell. At the first landing, when she could no longer be seen, she took his hand and snuggled passionately against him.

He told her again that she’d gotten him sick but that it was OK.

I go doctor; doctor me in here! she giggled, pointing to her butt. Later, when he’d gotten her naked, he saw the giant bandage where she’d had some intramuscular injection.

The photographer came in. Same room? said Joy on his arm.

It’s OK, the journalist told Oy. No sex. Don’t worry.

That was truly his plan – just to lie there in the darkness with Oy, snuggling and watching Thai TV while the photographer and Joy did the same. Needless to say, once the photographer took
a shower and came out wearing only a towel and cracking jokes about his dick, the journalist could see how it would actually be.

Oy crawled into bed with the journalist, snuggling him, and he slid a hand between her legs.

I go ten o’clock, she said. Toy birthday party. Toy my sister.

Whatever you say.

She let him kiss her a little but she didn’t like it. Her body was slender, but her face looked rounder and older tonight; her voice was hoarser. She kept coughing. After a while she
started playing with his penis, probably to get it over with. He had an erection, but no desire to use it; his grapefruit-swollen balls seemed to be cut off from the rest of his body. He still
didn’t plan to do it, but when he got up to go to the bathroom with just the shirt around him, the two whores sitting eating room service (the bellboy had carefully looked away when he
brought it into the half-darkened room, the photographer and the journalist lounging like lords with their half-naked girls beside them), the head of his dick hung down below the shirt and they
started laughing and then he started getting wild like the class clown. First he began tickling Oy. Then he started lifting her around and pulling the covers down to show her off naked; she laughed
(probably thinks you’re a real pest! said the photographer, shaking his head); she kept rubbing against him to make him do something, and then she’d look at the clock . . .

Eventually she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he’d have to do it. What a chore! He squeezed K-Y into her and handed her the rubber. She said she didn’t
know how to put it on. Wasn’t that
something
? She tried sincerely, but she just didn’t understand it. He did it and then thrust into her. She pretended to come and he pretended
to come; he didn’t care. In the carpet of light from the half-open bathroom door the other two were doing it in the far bed; Oy lay watching them, and she clapped her hand to her mouth and
snickered softly; meanwhile Joy suddenly noticed that Oy was on top of the journalist and rolled away from her trick and went into the bathroom and turned the shower on loud for a long time.

The journalist really enjoyed playing with Oy’s body, lying there relaxed and feverish, doing whatever he wanted while the TV went
ai-ai
. Light-headed and distant, he enjoyed
snuggling up to her and smelling her, sucking her shaved armpits, pursuing with kisses her face, which sought to evade him; every now and then he’d catch her and kiss her lips and she’d
laugh. Whenever he’d touch her between her legs she’d start going
um um
and begin swinging her hips as if in ecstasy, but she stayed dry and her face didn’t change and her
heart didn’t pulse at all faster beneath his other hand. He lounged, played, stroked in a delightful fog of disease like the foggy sprawl of Bangkok he’d be leaving in four hours,
soaring east over big gray squares of water going into grayness, riding the hot orange sky.

He said: Oy, you want go Kambuja?

No want! No want! Kambuja people is bad people! Thai people like this (she prayed); Kambuja people like
this!
(she saluted fiercely). The journalist saluted her in return, and she cowered
back.