“I told her a few years ago. She thought it was funny. She wanted to know if it ever got any further than helping with your act. It didn’t, did it?”
“Sonchai, you were ten years old and I’m not that kind of woman.”
“My mother said no wonder I had a wild adolescence, when my first experience of a woman’s private part was darts shooting out of it.”
“Not totally misleading, if you listen to the way some men talk about women. D’you hate women?”
“No. But you hate men.”
“Let’s not go into that. I hate men in the abstract. You I like. You helped me perfect my act.” She has taken an aluminum tube out of the lunch box together with a pack of condoms. She hands me the condoms while she lies on a futon on the floor. While she is fitting the tube, I cross the room and blow up the condom until it is about a foot long, then I tie the end and hold it out. Kat has prudishly arranged her dress so that she can shoot the darts without flashing me, like an archer from a fortress. I hold the condom as far from my face as I can while she fits a dart into the tube. Suddenly, without any sign of movement from Kat, the cock-shaped balloon bursts and a dart sticks in the plaster. There are pinpricks and chips all over the plaster.
“I never understood why you couldn’t use a dartboard.”
“The customers always move the balloons a little bit. I think I make them nervous. I need to know how to hit something wobbly.” She giggles. “Anyway, there’s a certain satisfaction in killing cocks.”
“Was it Bradley made you hate men?”
“Shit.” The dart had missed and now it was stuck in the wooden door, really some distance away. I had noticed a slight movement in her lower abdomen this time, in the region of her ovaries. “My first and only husband made me hate men. I’m the jealous, possessive type and he was a motorcycle taxi driver. All over the city, especially to the bars and massage parlors. I don’t think there was a whore he didn’t screw. I was seventeen years old, for god’s sake. Thai men claim to like women, but they only like fucking. Not even that, they love anything forbidden, new, unused. They’re terrible for underage girls, far worse than any farang. He was like that. I’m a one-heart woman. I give it once, then I don’t have it anymore. So I decided I would never have another man. I learned to shoot darts from my pussy instead. I shoot down a whole army of inflated dicks just for practice. Of course, there’s always another army waiting to be shot down.”
“But you did know Bradley?”
“Yes, I didn’t want to talk about it in Nana. Yes, I knew him. An American marine. It’s a little painful to talk about. He persuaded me to give men a second chance, after all that time. Five years ago he was a regular visitor to Nana. You know, one of those foreigners who come and can’t believe their eyes, get addicted for a few months, then the charm starts to wear off. He was quite a character, though. A man like that, magnificent and very black-who could forget him? He told me he was different. I’m a sucker, aren’t I? I’m surprised you didn’t find anyone else who recognized his photograph.”
“How many women stay five years in the bars? Tell me how he was different.”
“He was respectful. He didn’t have that mixture of lust, fear and contempt. He really seemed to like us women, as if we were people he could be friends with. He was very popular in all the bars.”
“He picked you up? He paid your bar fine?”
Bang. A good shot! I saw the dart pierce the center of the condom and impale it against the wall, from which it now hangs shriveled and flaccid, all passion dead.
“Certainly not. I told you, I don’t go with men, not even to sell my body. This was different. I do private parties, that’s how I really make my money, the floor show is just my shopwindow. I use an agent, and the agent tells the clients: ‘Look, don’t touch. This lady is not for sale. She does her act, she’ll socialize, maybe even sit on your lap if you really want, but that’s it.’ Usually the agent is very strong about that, really makes sure the client has understood. Anyway, it happened five years ago that the agent called me to say he had a party for me, and the money was double what I usually charge. He didn’t say why it was double, so I was suspicious. I said: ‘Farangs?’ and he said: ‘No.’ I said: ‘You told them no sex?’ And he said: ‘Yes, yes, all understood, no sex.’ ”
I’ve got into the swing of it now. The inflated condom was already in my hand, at arm’s length. Kat paused and sat up slightly. “It was in the Dusit Thani Hotel. The suite on the third floor is for hire for private functions. Very expensive, I would imagine. That’s where the party was. They even rigged up a revolving stage for me. This was soon after the first time they showed me on farang TV, and I think this party wanted the live version, exactly as they’d shown it on the documentary-it was the BBC, I think. So I do my act without paying too much attention to the clients. I have to concentrate on the balloons, after all. But how could I help but notice that a giant black man is there, with a lot of peasants?”
She uttered the word with contempt. “Not even peasants, hill people. Tribesmen down from the mountains, getting filthy drunk and out of hand. When one tried to come up to the stage to touch me, I started looking for the way out. One of the tribesmen had a familiar face, as if I’d seen him somewhere, but I didn’t know where, maybe the newspapers, I think he was one of those drug lords from the borderlands. He was the leader, he had this way of barking, and when he barked the others stopped whatever they were doing and listened. It was exactly like a movie, with some chief thug trying to control the other thugs. Two of them got so drunk, though, they were out of control, and their leader didn’t seem to care too much-they were talking about, you know, having me onstage together while the thing was going round. In all my years in this game, I’d never allowed myself to get into such a situation, and I thought: Oh no, here we go. Mentally, I prepared myself for gang rape-it’s a professional hazard and I thought it had to happen sooner or later.”
Another condom, another bang. “When they took out their guns and started comparing, I knew I was in for a brutal night. Then the black man stands up, comes to the stage, takes off his shirt-it was one of those tropical things, with pineapples and mangoes all over, and obviously it’s enormous. He puts it around my shoulders and it comes down to my ankles.” She laughed. “Then he says to the boys: ‘She’s mine, fellas, okay?’ ”
She reached in the lunch box for more darts. “And these Stone Age creeps just looked at him. No one was going to mess with this black giant. He takes me into the dressing room and says, really gently: ‘Better get out of here-how about a date tomorrow?’ ” She laughed again. “I’m not the swooning type, but I was thirty-six and wondering if I hadn’t been a little hard on the opposite sex for the past twenty years. He had saved me from a nightmare, and he was just-well, frankly, irresistible.”
The practice was over apparently. She stood up to pack away the darts, the condoms and the aluminum tube.
“How was it?”
“How was it? Strange was how it was. I thought he was a real gentleman, he took me to dinner, treated me like a lady. He didn’t seem in any hurry to go to bed with me. It was as though he wanted to find out something-I think maybe he was still trying to find out about Thai women-what makes us tick. We didn’t go to bed together until the third date.” She pursed her lips.
“Would you mind telling me about that?”
“About the sex? Is that a part of your investigation? I think he was disappointed. Like most men, he assumed I was something very special between the sheets, you know, as if I was going to have two vaginas or something? I kept hinting, explaining: Look, I developed the act exactly because I’m shy and not very good in bed-I don’t know how to please a man at all-I don’t know what men want.”