This was a line he had heard a dozen times—the unhappiness of the kept woman—and he never found it convincing. Usually, out of friendship, he commiserated with her, but today her words grated on him. Having lost his own foreign benefactor the previous year and now working in a massage parlour, struggling to keep afloat, he found it hard to sympathize with her poor little mistress number.
“Well, you can always go back to your old life,” he said cattily.
Nong Maew was annoyed at this remark. Even though Pi Nok was her closest friend and confidant, her “gig”, he had no right to be unkind. She did not ever want to be reminded of what she had done or what she had been.Without answering him, and with a petulant swish of her young, lithe body, sheathed in its blue polka dot dress, she turned and headed straight for the escalator.
Pi Nok walked behind her and said, teasingly: “Don’t be so touchy. You know you’re beyond all that now.”
“Oh, you’re such a bitch today. I don’t believe it!” she half-whispered, and they both laughed out loud.
As she looked up towards the floor above, she stopped in her tracks and, to Pi Nok’s surprise, took hold of his hand and squeezed it tightly. Without turning around, she said in panic: “That’s him with his wife. And that must be his grandson. Don’t look, they’re coming down. Oh no! What do I do? Where do I go?”
Without hesitating, Pi Nok pulled her gently onto the escalator. Now he too looked up and saw a man with grey hair carrying a yellow plastic shopping bag. He was in a dark, well-cut suit and looked like a businessman taking time off from the office to do some shopping with the family. Next to him was a stout woman in a Thai silk outfit, wearing thick sunglasses and a complicated, stiff hairdo, and behind them a small boy whose hand was touching the man’s shoulder. As they came closer, to his utter astonishment Pi Nok recognized the man’s face. “It’s destiny,” he thought to himself, suddenly remembering the fortune teller’s prediction. Nong Maew had never divulged her patron’s real name. She always referred to him as Darling, using the English word but stressing the last syllable so that it sounded Thai. It was the way they addressed each other, she had said when she first told Pi Nok about the man who had picked her up in the club two years earlier and who then, one day, out of the blue, proposed that she should be his mistress. She had added that he was good-looking and fit for his sixtyeight years, and that, naturally, he was loaded. This last detail was the most important one. For why else would she be wasting her youth on a married man nearly four times her age who had no intention of committing himself to her in a million years? As the family passed Nong Maew and Pi Nok on their way down to the second floor, the man she referred to as Darling looked over in their direction. The woman was turning the other way while the boy’s attention was drawn to a colourful film poster that was hanging off the balcony. Nong Maew did not return the gaze. Instead she put on a hard, artificial expression of indifference and fixed her attention on the space in front of her. In doing so, she was unaware that it was not at her that Darling was directing his gaze, but at her companion, for as they passed each other with only the two feet between them, he too recognized Pi Nok and in that moment, involuntarily, his whole face lit up with a spontaneous expression that can only be described as remembered pleasure.
They were in a Japanese restaurant on the ground floor. Pi Nok swallowed his mouthful of sushi and said nothing for a while. His fine features registered a moment of choked sadness, enhanced by the pungency of the wasabi dip. He had been explaining to Nong Maew, who sat in attentive silence, how he had met her “Darling” Khun Taworn two years before she did, what had gone on between them and how they had parted company.
“He went to China, on business, and the club was closed down overnight while he was away. That’s why we lost touch, and after that I never saw him again,” he said, continuing his tale and addressing these words to his own reflection in the window as if reminiscing a private and painful episode. If Nong Maew was surprised by what she was hearing, she managed not to show it. She had long suspected Darling of being bi, but she had not expected her intuition to be confirmed by such a personal connection. With her best friend, of all people! And now Pi Nok was trying to paint what must have been a professional encounter into some kind of grand love affair. She kept her composure on the outside, but her mind was swirling, especially when he had the nerve to try convincing her to share Darling with him.
“Come on, he’s got enough for both of us,” he pleaded unashamedly.
Nong Maew, who had hardly touched her food, took this as the cue to comment on what Pi Nok had been saying. She chose her words with care and put on a fine show of well-tempered indignation. In a high-minded tone she told Pi Nok that the supposed romance between him and Khun Taworn had taken place in a gay brothel, albeit a high-class one, but a brothel nevertheless. And how dare he try to muscle in on her good fortune when she had done all the running? But even as she was discouraging him from making a play on her Darling, Nong Maew was well aware that Pi Nok, given his hunger and lascivious nature, was probably already planning his moves. Khun Taworn, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Thailand, was a prime catch for any ambitious hustler. Nong Maew herself could not believe her luck when, true to his word, he installed her in the condo by the river, because she had not made any effort at all to lure him exclusively to herself. He had picked her in the “Twilight”, an exclusive private club where she was one of the part-timers who worked there for extra cash. You had to be both beautiful and discreet because the clientele consisted of the very rich and powerful of the land. Khun Taworn had chosen her out of a roomful of young women who looked like starlets, and in their first sexual encounter in the VIP suite he seemed pleased with her services. After three visits he asked her out to dinner, which was quite normal and encouraged by the management since it reinforced the illusion that the girls were not professionals but companions who were sufficiently attracted to accept the invitation.
That night, in a candlelit French restaurant, Khun Taworn had explained that he was thinking of returning to politics, reminding her that ten years earlier, when she was only a young girl, he had been tipped to win the election to be leader of his party. But he had been betrayed, he was quick to add. Now he was ready to return to the fray. Because of this he could no longer risk being seen anywhere that could cause a scandal for him or his family. He had decided not to go to places like the “Twilight” anymore. But he wanted to continue seeing her. And that was when he asked her outright to become his mistress. Without letting her have time to think about his proposition—as though, in the style of men used to having their way, he was sure that she would not resist—he went on to give her the details of the arrangement that he had worked out and which, in fact, were so generous that she would have been foolish to have refused.
Nong Maew had been overwhelmed by his offer. It meant the end of having to make all the effort of going to work and worrying about paying off the debts that she had accumulated and living in shared, cramped accommodation. It would give her time to go back to finish her university degree, if she chose to do so. And if she played her cards well, she could even set up her own business one day. Suddenly the future was wide open. Everything was possible, and all she had to do was to give pleasure to a man whose vanity, with the help of Viagra, was soothed by possessing her firm, trim body. So, without thinking of the consequences, she accepted.
At first she had been drunk with her new life. Moving out of the small rented apartment she shared with two other working girls into a pad in an exclusive condo with its own small swimming pool on the balcony and a view of the city spreading out in all directions was like arriving in the Deva realm of the angels. Khun Taworn visited her three or four times a week, often bringing a bottle of champagne and a little gift. They never went out again after that evening in the French restaurant, but delicious, elaborate meals were ordered in from the best establishments in Bangkok. In those early days, when he had finished talking about himself, he would ask her about how she was spending her spare time and whether she was happy. But as the months rolled slowly by, he became less and less interested in what she did or thought or felt. He would arrive and take his pill and wait for the effect to kick in and then fuck her as though he was offloading some pent-up aggression. Then, afterwards, while she massaged his back, he would ramble on about politics or his family life. Often he would tell her how difficult his relationship with his wife was. It seemed that she hated him. Once Nong Maew made the mistake of giving him her opinion about his dysfunctional marriage, but the way that he cut her short made her realize that he required neither her response nor her sympathy. He merely needed her to be there as a beautiful trinket to bolster his selfesteem and as a receptacle into which he could pour his artificially stimulated desire.