The Queen of Patpong (21 page)

One afternoon Tra-La lowered her scissors, stepped back, and said, “You know what you need?”

Kwan looked up from her fashion magazine. “Can I have a hint?”

“Hair to the bottom of your butt, blunt-cut straight across.”

Kwan looked in the mirror and slowly turned her head and shoulders. Her hair reached about a third of the way down her back, black as a crow’s wing, slightly fringed on the sides. “Do you think so?”

“Look at your height,” Tra-La said. “And you’ve got the hair for it. Hardly any split ends, and it’s got such good weight. Think of it. A river of hair flowing as you dance.”

She looked again, visualizing it. Mirrors no longer bothered her. She was prettier than before, she thought, but she didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “Hard to take care of.”

“Oh, and you have so
much
to do,” Tra-La said. “Wash it, let the air dry it, brush it a hundred times a day.”

“That’s what I said. Hard to take care of.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Always,” Kwan said. “Any girl who doesn’t want to know what you think is stupid.”

“I think it could make you the queen of Patpong.”

Kwan looked at Tra-La’s eyes in the mirror and held them. Tra-La returned the gaze steadily.

Kwan broke the contact and picked up the small hand mirror Tra-La used. Then she swiveled the chair so her back was to the big mirror, and she looked into the hand mirror to study her back, to look at the way her hair fell. Without moving her head, she flicked her eyes to Tra-La.

“Really,” Kwan said.

OOM NEVER CAME BACK.

About nine months after the night Oom had leaped from the stage into the arms of the big man, he came into the bar, obviously expecting to see her. He stopped just inside the curtained door, staring up in surprise at Kwan, dancing where Oom usually did. Looking puzzled, he shouldered his way between the customers to the back of the bar, to the room with the lockers where Oom always sat between sets. Kwan saw him again a few minutes later, talking with the mama-san, who was shaking her head. The big man’s eyes darkened as the mama-san talked, and when she held up a hand, palm up, and moved it side to side, indicating the girls on the stage, he wheeled around and stalked out. The mama-san watched him go and then shrugged her shoulders.

“Well,” Fon said into Kwan’s ear, “I guess they didn’t run away together.” When Oom failed to return, the talk in the bar had been that the big man had paid her bar fine for four weeks and then they’d probably made some sort of permanent arrangement: married or almost married was the consensus. They were living in Bangkok, or in Chiang Mai, or in some small town, Nakhorn Nowhere, or maybe he’d even taken her out of the country with him. Oom was beautiful enough for something like that to have happened.

Three weeks later he came in again. This time he talked to several of the girls. Afterward they told Kwan he’d been asking them whether they’d heard anything about Oom. He said he’d been to every bar he knew of, all the way down to Pattaya, looking for her. He seemed worried, even frightened that something had happened to her.

That night Kwan left the bar around ten with a man who had taken her out three nights in a row. They turned right, heading for an Italian restaurant on Surawong. They were most of the way there when Kwan heard someone call her name. She turned, gasped, and grabbed the man’s arm.

The woman behind her had two black eyes, a broken nose that was at least twice its usual width, and an upper lip swollen almost all the way up to her nostrils. When she tried to smile, she revealed a chipped front tooth. The man Kwan was with began to step between the two women, but Kwan tugged on his arm and said, “Nana?”

“Hello, Kwan.” Nana put a hand up over her mouth as she talked, probably trying to mask the broken tooth. She said in Thai, “You’ve gotten pretty, haven’t you?”

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” Nana said. She looked up at the man Kwan was with, who was eyeing her uncertainly, as though assessing her potential risk to Kwan. “Tell your dog here that you know me. He looks like he’s about to rip out my throat.”

Kwan said to the man, “No problem,” and paused as she tried to think of the man’s name. “Steven,” she said, finding it, “this is Nana.”

Steven nodded, and Nana gave him a tenth-of-a-second glance.

“I need money,” Nana said. “Have you got five thousand baht?”

Kwan said, “I want to know what happened.”

Nana turned away in frustration, giving Kwan a quick view of a jagged cut on her right jaw. “Some man. He thought I was trying to steal from him, and he went crazy. Just hit me and hit me.”

“Were you?”

Nana said, “What? What are you asking?”

“Were you stealing?”

Nana glanced up at Steven as though she were considering abandoning Kwan and asking him for the money, but Steven avoided her gaze and stared down at his feet, his face tight with distaste. “Of course not. I was looking for change. I only had thousand-baht bills, and I was looking in his wallet to see whether he had any five-hundreds so I could swap them.”

“Where was he?”

“What do you care?”

“Up to you,” Kwan said. She took Steven’s arm. “Steven and I are going to dinner.”

“He was in the shower,” Nana said.

“That’s what I thought. Did the bar fire you?”

Nana’s damaged mouth tightened, and for a moment Kwan thought the girl was going to spit at her. But instead she said, “Until he’s gone.” Her voice was rigid with control, but Kwan could hear the lie. It was going to be difficult for Nana to find a bar that would take her. Nobody wanted customers coming in and making a scene about thieves.

Kwan said, “I see.” She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a fold of money. “I can give you three thousand,” she said.

“Ask him for the rest.” Nana’s eyes were on the money.

“No, I won’t. I like him. I want him to keep taking me.” She peeled off two thousands and a pair of five-hundreds and held them out.

Nana made no move to take the money. “You’ve got a lot more.”

“Yes,” Kwan said. “I do.”

“You wouldn’t have anything if I hadn’t brought you here.” Her voice had risen, and Steven stepped forward.

In English he asked Kwan, “Is everything all right?”

Kwan said in slow English, “No problem. She want money.” To Nana she said, “Are you going to take it or not?”

Nana snatched the bills from her hand. “Fucking Stork,” she said. “Give me back my watch.”

Kwan said, “Your what? Oh, that. It stopped working months ago. I threw it away and bought a good one.” She held up her left wrist to show Nana the genuine Omega that someone—Robert, his name was Robert—had bought her after four days together. “Look, you can even get it wet.”

Nana leaned in to her. “You think you’re a queen,” she said, her voice strung tight although the words were indistinct through swollen lips. “But you can end up in the street, too.”

Kwan said, “I know.” She put the rest of the money back into her pocket and said, “We go, Steven, okay?” and the two of them left Nana on the sidewalk. As they neared Surawong, as Kwan tried to find some satisfaction in what she had just done, she felt the pressure of eyes on her and looked over to see the big man who’d been searching for Oom. He nodded at her, but she avoided his gaze and snuggled up to . . . to Steven.

The man who was staring at her—what was his name? The girls he talked to had told her.

So many names.

Howard.
His name was Howard.

Chapter 18
Rose

R
ose,” Howard announces. “Your name should be Rose.”

They’re curled up, Howard pressed against her back, on the endless bed in his hotel room, which he keeps so cold that Kwan always puts on a shirt before she goes to sleep. They’re both fully clothed: This is one of the nights when Howard just buys her out and gives her, as he says, a vacation.

“Cannot say,” Kwan replies. She tries to pronounce it, but it comes out “Lote.” She pushes her rump against him. “Good, no good?”

“No good. Terrible. Listen:
Rose.
Hear it? Now:
Lote.
Do they sound the same to you?”

“Not when you talking.”

“Okay,” Howard says. “What’s the name of the fat man in the red suit who comes and gives everybody presents?”

Kwan pauses for a moment, assembling the sounds in her head before saying them. She’s been working on this one for weeks. “Santa . . . Claut. No
,
no
, no.
Clauzzzz. Santa Clauzzz.”

“Good. And when does he come? And if you say ‘Chritmat,’ I’ll make you eat raw red meat for dinner.”

“Chrizzzmazzz,” she says very carefully.

“See? You can do it. Rose.”

Her face tense with effort, Kwan says, “Lozzze.”

“Progress,” he says. “We’re making progress.”

She wants a cigarette, but it seems like too much work to roll over and reach for her purse, and Howard’s body is the warmest thing in the room. So she heaves a nicotine-deprived sigh and says, “Why Lozzze? Why not easy name?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know
farang
name.”

“Vicki,” Howard suggests.

Rose says, “Wicki.”

“Okay, no good. Tallulah.”

Rose is laughing even before she tries it. “Tarrurrurru.” She reaches back and slaps his thigh. “Not real name.”

“Owww. Of course it’s a real name. But Rose is better.”

“Lozzze.”

“The middle of your tongue,” Howard says. “Not the end of your tongue. Just bring the middle of your tongue partway up. Not all the way, not so it touches, just partway. Rrrrrrrrrose.”

“Rrrrrote,” Kwan says. “Cannot. Why . . . that name? Why that name good?”

“Hold it,” Howard says.

Kwan says, “Hold what? I no see it.”

“Oh, great, now you’re funny in English.” He gets up, the bed creaking as his weight leaves it, and goes to the coffee table. The room they’re in is the one he always brings her to, an enormous, overfurnished space with a king-size bed, two televisions—one on each side of the carved wooden partition that almost divides the room in two—a work desk, and a couch and coffee table. There’s a refrigerator full of little drinks at prices that horrified Kwan when Howard read them to her. The room’s longest wall is covered with floor-to-ceiling curtains that can be pulled back to reveal Bangkok sparkling all the way to the edge of the earth. The room is much bigger than the two rooms Kwan shares with Fon and her friends.

She’s been keeping some of her clothes in the closet for weeks.

Howard leans down and grabs a magazine from the coffee table, its cover shiny and vibrant with color. Rose has leafed through it several times, checking the pictures and puzzling out some of the simpler English words. It’s a magazine for
farang
tourists that pretends to tell them something about Thailand as an excuse to print advertisements for jewelry stores where the stones are artificially colored and Indian tailors whose clothes, Kwan has been told, never fit. He leafs through it. “Here,” he says. “In Chiang Mai.” He folds the magazine back and carries it over to her.

“Oh,” she says, looking at the picture.
“Dawk goolap.”

“In English, rose,” Howard says. “Rose. It’s the queen of flowers. That’s what
farang
people say. And you’re the queen of—”

“Of what?”

Howard leans down and kisses her on the lips, very lightly. “Of everything.”

“Pahk
waan,”
she says. “Sweet mouth.”

“You’re Rose to me. You can be anyone you want when I’m not around, but for me you’re Rose.”

Kwan says, “Rrrrozzzzze.” She looks up at him, and he grins and nods. “Okay. In the bar, everywhere. I Rrrrrozzze.”

Howard says, “What would you like to eat, Rose? You can have anything in Bangkok.”

Rose says, “We in Bangkok,
na
? We eat Thai food, okay?
Phet maak maak.
” Very spicy, which Howard hates.

Howard goes to the closet to get a clean shirt. He changes his clothes all the time. He says, “What a surprise.”

She tries, not very hard, to reach her purse and comes up short. “Can I have coat?”

“It’s not cold.”

“Have cigarette in coat.”

“Make a deal. You can smoke a cigarette if I can eat American.”

“No problem. You eat American, I eat Thai.”

“You win.” He takes the jacket off the hanger and says, “Why so heavy?”

“Oh,” Rose says, remembering. “Nothing. You just bring, okay?”

But he already has his hand in the pocket. “What in the world is this?” He holds up a smooth, dark stone.

She looks at it in his hand, remembers picking it up that morning. She says, “For luck.”

“Fine,” Howard says. “I suppose it’s lighter than a horseshoe.” He starts to put the stone back in the pocket.

“Throw away,” Rose says.

He stands there, jacket in one hand and stone in the other. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She gets off the bed and goes to him, takes the stone, and drops it with a
thunk
into the wastebasket. “Now I Rrrozzze. I no need luck.”

THE RAIN PELTS
down outside, and the fluorescents are flickering, suggesting a power failure in the near future. Thai music stutters through the speaker system. Every few minutes a sopping
farang
opens the curtains over the doorway, peers in, sees the women smoking and putting on makeup, and backs out again. “I’m just saying it, that’s all. Oom ran away from him. Maybe she knew something you don’t.”

Fon helps herself to some dried squid, a heap of which is creating a spreading grease spot on a fold of paper towels. All over the club, girls look into mirrors as they apply makeup or sit still with their eyes closed as their friends do it for them.

“You don’t know what happened with Oom,” Rose says. Unlike the others she is neither made up nor making up. She won’t be working tonight, because Howard has paid the bar fine for weeks to come. She just stopped by to talk with Fon.

Fon nips off a length of squid and says, “And neither do you.”

“They had a fight, just before he left the country. He didn’t think it was important, but when he came back, Oom wasn’t anywhere he could find her.”

“A fight about what?”

“About nothing. Howard wanted to take her to Singapore, and Oom didn’t want to go.”

Fon regards the squid skeptically. “Why wouldn’t she want to go?”

“How would I know? He’d helped her get a passport. He said she never argued about getting the passport, just about using it.”

“Right. She didn’t want to go to Singapore.”

“You saw him. You saw how upset he was.”

“I saw how fast he took you out, too.”

Rose surprises herself by bringing a flat hand down on the tabletop with a
crack
that snaps every head in the bar toward her. Fon jerks back a few inches, blinking. “We didn’t do anything,” Rose says. “Not for months. He just wanted to talk. He bought me out and took me to dinner and talked, and then he gave me money and I went home.
You
should know, I was always home before you got there. It was eight or nine months before we even kissed each other. We just talked.”

“Talked about what? About Oom?” This is the first time Fon has ever gotten angry at Rose. “What is there to say about Oom for all those months? ‘Oh, no, she’s gone. I looked everywhere. I miss her. I don’t know why she left.’ How long did that take? Five seconds? And she was pretty, Oom was, but nobody would call her interesting. So what was there to talk about all that time?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t like it, that’s all.” Fon snatches another piece of squid as though she expects the paper towel to be yanked away at any moment. “How do we know what happened to her? She’s here one night and then she’s gone forever.”

“They fought,” Rose says patiently. “She didn’t want to see him. So she didn’t come back to the bar. She went someplace where he wouldn’t find her.”

“He loves Oom so much and then, bang, he loves you.”

Rose looks away and sees rainwater seeping in beneath the curtained doorway. Drunk men will slip and fall later. She draws a slow, long breath. “One more time. Oom left him. What’s he supposed to do, cry for the rest of his life?”

“There’s something wrong with men who fall in love with prostitutes,” Fon says. “They’re missing something.”

Rose feels a worm of unease in her gut, but she says, “Maybe he doesn’t think of me just as a prostitute. Maybe he thinks of me as a
person.
”

Fon starts to say something but shakes her head. “Up to you. Just be careful, that’s all. I don’t want to have to nurse you through a broken heart.”

“Howard can’t break my heart.”

Fon studies the squid as she shreds it between her fingers. “You even let him change your name.”

“Rose is better.
Farang
men can remember Rose. Nobody remembered Kwan.”

“So what?” Fon says. “They just came in and asked, ‘Where’s the tall girl?’ That worked, didn’t it? We always knew who they meant.”

“Not the same.” Rose rummages through her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Anyway, what do you care?”

“What do
I
care?” Fon places her greasy fingertips, widely spread, in the center of her chest. “We’re supposed to be friends.”

“We are,” Rose says, reaching over and taking Fon’s wrist, tugging the hand off her chest and stroking her own cheek with it, leaning against it and smelling the squid. “You’re the best friend I ever had.”

“That’s not fair,” Fon says, pulling her hand away.

“What’s not fair?” Rose lights her cigarette.

“Going all sweet like that. I’m serious. I don’t want you getting hurt. What do you really know about him?”

“I know a lot about him.”

“Where he’s from,” Fon says, “if it’s true. What he does for a living, if it’s true. What he wants with you, if it’s true. You don’t know whether anything is true.”

“I know a lot more about Howard than I do about the strangers I go with every night.”

“You think.”

“Fon.” Rose closes her eyes and leans on her friend’s shoulder. “I don’t want to go with different men all the time. I hate it. I don’t want to have customers staring at me while I’m dancing, wondering what I’ll let them do to me in bed, or how much hair I have down there, or whether I’m wearing a padded bra. I don’t want to smile at men I hoped I’d never see again. I don’t want to watch men flipping coins to see who gets me. I don’t want to lie to everybody about working here a month or two when it’s been almost two years. I want to tell the truth to somebody, and I want to tell the truth all the time. And I don’t want to remember any more
names.
”

Fon plucks the forgotten cigarette from Rose’s hand and knocks the ash onto the floor, then takes a deep drag. “So,” she says. “What does he want with you?”

Rose says, “He wants to marry me.”

Fon puts a forearm on the table and rests her forehead on it.

Rose lays a hand on Fon’s hair. “It’ll be fine. He’ll take care of me. I won’t have to work like this.”

Without lifting her head, Fon says, “What about the dowry?”

“He understands about the dowry. He’s going to—”

“Why?” Fon demands. “Why does he understand about the dowry?
Farang
don’t know about dowries.”

On the other side of the curtain, the sound of the rain doubles. “I explained it to him.”

“He didn’t learn about it by promising to marry any other—”

“Stop.” Rose listens to the rain hammering down, wishing it were so loud that she and Fon couldn’t hear each other. “We talked about it. He’s going to give my parents more money than they ever thought they’d get.” She caresses Fon’s hair. “Fon. He’s going to take care of Mai. Of my sister. He says he’ll frighten my father so much that my father won’t even think about doing anything bad.”

“He’ll even take care of your sister,” Fon says as the lights go out, plunging the bar into blackness, and the music stops dead. Fon says, “He’s thought of everything.”

WHEN SHE ASKS
herself later whether she should have known that something was wrong, she remembers a hundred things. Inconsistencies in some of the things he told her. The friends, big, fit men very much like himself, but taciturn and reserved, whom she instinctively disliked. The occasional flashes of anger over things most Thais would have laughed off.

One evening in the hotel room, she had drawn a house, just an ordinary village house. It was a daydream in pencil. Like half the girls she knew, she was hoping that she could build a new house for her parents and her brothers and sisters someday, but her imagination went no further than the kind of house she’d grown up in.

She’d been sitting at the desk, hunched over a piece of hotel stationery. Her lap was full of bits of pink eraser, from the messy, rubbed-looking spot in the house wall where she’d placed a second window, which she thought was a daring innovation. Still, the house would have fit into any Isaan village without attracting a glance: a single room raised a meter above the ground, a door in the center of one wall, a few steps leading up.

She had run out of ideas, so she’d put a sun in the corner of the sky and was drawing a dog under the house when she felt him behind her.

“For your mom and dad?” Howard asked over her shoulder.

“Maybe,” she said, suddenly shy. She covered the sketch with her hand, but he slid the hand aside.

“Scoot,” he said. “It’s a big chair.”

Rose shifted sideways, and Howard perched himself on the edge of the seat. He took the pencil from her hand, moving so fast she barely saw it, and began to make bold, heavy strokes, ruler-straight. She watched as the house got bigger, saw a second room appear, and then Howard sketched a big central window, four times the size of the one she’d drawn and all one big pane, like the windows in the hotel. Finally he tilted his head, studied the page for a moment, and added a modern roof, raised in the center, instead of the flat pitch of corrugated iron she’d visualized.