I wait five minutes before pulling the bell again. I seem to hear the slap of bare feet on teak boards, but it’s hard to be sure because of distant traffic noise and the interminable thump-thump-thump from speakers on Koashan Road. I try once more. On the third pull I realize I’m being watched from an open window by a woman in her sixties with the fearful eyes of the incurably shy. I give her my best smile.
“Khun Bradley around?” She stares. “I’m a police officer.” I fish for my ID and flash it at her, aware that she is probably illiterate. She continues to stare so I try: “Mother, I have your wages for last week.”
A smile breaks out on her face: naÏve, country, joyful. A bright pink tongue and gums set off the pure ebony of a few remaining stumps. It seems the house even boasts an authentic grandmother with an authentic betel habit. She disappears and with surprising speed the front door opens. She is less than five feet tall with black hair drawn back in a ponytail which reaches the base of her spine; not a trace of gray. She wears a sarong and a cream-colored shirt, a gold chain with an oval in gold displaying a former king of Thailand. She presses her palms together and makes a deep wai. Now that she has decided to trust me she lets another smile reveal the untouched soul behind her eyes.
As I enter the house she leans over the stair rail and emits a stream of rich vermilion fluid which hits a specific target on the ground.
“Remind me, mother, how much do we pay you each week?”
“Four hundred and fifty baht.”
I pull a roll of notes out of my pocket. “Sorry to be so late.”
“Not late, today is payday.”
“When did you last see them?”
“Two days ago. But she came back sometime and took her things. It must have been yesterday, when I was with my daughter in Nakhon Sawan.”
“Yesterday was your day off?”
“Yes.”
“You sleep here?”
“Yes.”
I squat down in order not to tower above her. She immediately squats also, so as not to keep her eyes above mine. I take out the picture of Bradley. “This is Khun Bradley, no?” She nods her head vigorously. “I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of Madame Bradley. Do you?” She shakes her head. “Could you describe her?” The question only raises a moment’s doubt in her eyes; she has decided I’m a good man and a few strange questions will not shake her faith now.
“Tall, oh! Very tall. I never saw such a tall woman.”
“As tall as him?”
“As him? Nobody is as tall as him. He is a giant.”
“Who gave you your orders?”
“She.”
“Did she speak Thai like you and me?” The question confuses her. “She farang or not?”
“No, not farang. She’s Thai, speaks, talks, same as us. At first I thought she was African”-the woman makes a shape around her head indicating big hair, and raises her hand to show height-“but she’s Thai.”
“What did you call her?”
“Madame Bradley.”
Silly question. “Mother, I want to look around, okay?” She shrugs. How could she stop me? I cast an eye over a large downstairs room which takes up the whole of the first floor, with two teak pillars equidistant from the walls. The floor of long narrow boards is highly polished, even more so than is usual in these houses, and reflects light with a dull, antique glow. Brightly colored throw cushions and futons are scattered over the floor. The cushion covers are silk, in electric shades of green, orange and purple, contrasting well with the old wood of the walls and floor. Panels in the walls are picked out in gold leaf and midnight blue and there is a sunken teak table about ten feet long with a hidden well for legs and feet. The table is laid with a homespun blue cloth, rattan napkin holders with yellow homespun napkins, celadon plates and bowls, citronella candles in coconut shells.
I’m not an expert on the American military, but it occurs to me that this is not the kind of home an average marine would be inclined to show his comrades. The choice of a teak house to live in is eccentric even by Thai standards. They tend to be inhabited by oddball foreigners or Thais of the arty type who have spent a lot of time overseas in places like Paris or New York. When I look more closely, I notice great varnished grain storage baskets of the kind which have become so fashionable, and the futons are all in gold print silk which is only produced by the Khomapastr Corporation, which exports to royalty and billionaires worldwide. Wall brackets hold what seem to be priceless antiques: kendi water jars, reliquary urns with lotus-bud handles, ceramic medicine jars. Everything is Thai, everything is alien. The whole room is begging to be photographed by farangs.
To reach the next floor it’s necessary to leave the house and return to the external staircase. The entrance to the second floor is locked and I have to go downstairs again to find the old woman. “Mother, I’ve forgotten my key, can I use yours?” She fishes under her shirt and I catch a glimpse of a modern money wallet of the kind favored by backpackers. She draws out a large brass key and hands it to me. Upstairs again I open the lock with the big key, and gratefully enter the cool of the old house.
15
The slatted shutters on the windows (there is no glass) allow air to circulate, and the teak walls are good insulators. It’s dark apart from the brilliant outline of the doorway, and I find a light switch, then close the door. The lighting seems to come from nowhere, directed upward from behind a teak panel which runs the length of a corridor I’m standing in.
On the walls hang six twelve-by-eighteen-inch studies of the same woman’s face; they are the same print in different colors, in exactly the style of famous Warhol portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The woman is definitely half Thai, half Negro, which puts her into a specific category in my feudal society. If she is in her thirties she would have been born in the late sixties or early seventies, when the city was permanently flooded with American servicemen on leave from the war in Vietnam. It is notorious that America sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to the war, and many of their female offspring now work the Bangkok bars. My racist people tend to marginalize them, and their lot can be a tough one. I open a door which gives on to the master bedroom, where homage turns into obsession.
The woman is everywhere, in oils, watercolors, black-and-white photographic studies, color photos, sometimes full length, sometimes in portrait. There is a huge nude study in oils, opposite the bed, tastefully done, with her pelvis turned slightly to one side; no pubic hair visible, perfect brown breasts with black areolas and nipples, a long fine neck, multicolored hair artfully chaotic and not really African: I think that with the color and frizz washed out it must be straight and black. Somehow the eye travels most naturally not to her face but to a jade ball set in a short gold stick which diagonally pierces her navel in two places.
I sit on the bed mesmerized by the extraordinary beauty of this woman, her long shapely legs, high buttocks, elegant arms, finely tapered hands turned in the style of a Thai dancer, those alluring oval eyes, almost hollow cheeks, full lips smiling ironically, perhaps a reference to her nakedness, a fine straight nose which must have come from some Caucasian cross in her blood. I put my hands behind my neck and recline full length on the bed, to think about Bradley.
Suppose a man for whom no other man had ever been a challenge, an accomplished athlete and soldier, himself of pure African blood, heterosexual and surely a connoisseur of the female form as it appears all over the world, a man on the brink of middle age and retirement but more vigorous than a man half his age, stationed in Bangkok and perhaps addicted to the city, as often happens, a frequent visitor to the bars of Nana Plaza, searching as he has searched over decades for that perfect female form?