Now a problem arose. Sober, Mitch had difficulty keeping still for hours on end. He could take the pain but not the boredom. Ishy grew irritated. He would not have his masterpiece ruined by American impatience. An obvious solution offered itself. Mitch would smoke a few pipes of opium before each session, which would keep him happily comatose for nearly eight hours. The tattooist was delighted. His concentration was such that he could easily work almost nonstop for the full eight hours. What he thought would be a two-week job could be accomplished in one, so long as Mitch remained stoned.
Chanya was not allowed into the bedroom, now an artist’s studio, while Ishy worked. It was her duty to keep one bottle of sake warm at all times, that being the only sustenance the artist would tolerate while on duty. Finally she was amused at the way the tattooist emerged from the bedroom every couple of hours, went to the sake bottle, and returned to the bedroom without so much as acknowledging her existence. She had begun to understand that this was not bad manners so much as the behavior of a wild thing, a denizen of the electronic jungle that had never been socialized. To test her theory one day, she stood topless in the kitchen while the artist emerged from the bedroom, gulped some sake, and returned to his work, pausing only to remark at the door that her nakedness would benefit from a horimono-perhaps a blue dolphin over her left breast?
“Dolphins are old,” sneered Chanya when he reappeared. He grunted, but the next time he emerged from the bedroom, he brought a sketch of the most beautiful dolphin she had ever seen. The proportions were entirely consistent with her charms. Now, in between the long sessions with Mitch, Ishy worked on her bosom while she sat in a chair. She was astonished at the gentleness of his touch, embarrassed by the swelling of her nipples, enthralled by this guided missile of ruthless concentration. She had not realized how erotic male passion could be when raised above the level of sex. Or how elusive. She found herself exaggerating the pain a little. He ordered her to cup a hand underneath her left breast to keep it firm: “You’re not hurting that much. Tits are not so sensitive except near the nipple. It’s mostly just fatty tissue.”
By the end of the week Mitch’s tattoo was finished, and she and Ishy had become lovers. What can one say? The sexual preferences of prostitutes can be eccentric, I of all people should know that. She was ashamed of herself, ashamed to betray Mitch in this way, but what could she do? Mitch was a prisoner of a million rules and regulations, most of them contradictory; Ishy was a wild thing who knew no rules, not even of conversation. In terms of raw sex appeal there was no contest. And then there was the donburi, that outrageous and indelible challenge to the universe. The abused and desecrated skin that had appalled her at the beginning of the week was exercising a mesmeric appeal by the end. As a lover he was extraordinarily feline; the flashes of intense color when he paid silent homage to her body burned into her mind long after he had left her. Every night she dreamed of gigantic, vividly colored nagas: snake gods who possess an almost unendurable sensuality. Every day when they coupled again, she thought of the American lying in a trance in the other bedroom, exactly as if she and Ishy were protagonists in his erotic opium dreams.
For the first time the balance of passion lay in her heart. When Ishy returned to Bangkok, she ached for him. She convinced herself that he needed her, that she alone with her street wisdom and undefeatable toughness could save this lost man-child who stumbled through life under the burden of a gigantic talent. But he did not reply to her text messages or her e-mails. This was a first. It had never occurred to her that when she finally fell for a man in this way, he might not respond. She went through the hackneyed stages of volcanic yearning, fury, a quaking in her guts, a sense of loss of power, and a conviction that his lack of response was connected to the onset of her third decade and/or her unsavory profession.
Her final attempt to contact her beloved consisted of a telephonic text message of the kind he favored: Y the F don’t U kal? There was no electronic response, but a few days later an envelope arrived with a single sheet of paper. In the most elegant tradition of Thai calligraphy, a single sentence:
Because I am not worthy of you.
In addition to the single sheet of paper, Ishy included the last segment of his remaining pinkie. The sly reference to a certain Dutch impressionist was entirely lost on her, but not the message. Now she was ashamed for a different reason: she found her passion quite bourgeois compared to his. This great artist would sacrifice his hands for her. All she had done was yearn and groan. Thumbing the message feverishly into her mobile, she freed her heart from all restraints and resorted to the vocabulary of Oriental extravagance: I would give both my I’s to see U again.
Ishy: U don’t No what U ask.
Chanya: I don’t kare. I want U.
With apparent reluctance Ishy agreed to see her in Bangkok, not in his home-which remained mysteriously anonymous-but in a bar on Sukhumvit. Finding his attitude incomprehensible and therefore all the more alluring, she arrived early, drank three tequilas to steady her nerves, and had no idea what to do about the great quaking in her stomach when the bashful genius walked awkwardly into the bar, ordered sake, and sat next to her. What could possibly be the matter? His eyes were on fire with desire for her, but he refused to take her to his apartment. He tried to explain, but his stutter was worse than ever and quite incomprehensible. Only after he had consumed three bottles of sake could she begin to understand what he was saying, but by then they were both too horny for words.
“I know a short-time hotel around the corner,” she confided.
“I don’t have any money.”
Eagerly: “Don’t worry, I’ll pay.”
In the heavily mirrored room, which was encumbered by the obscenity of a gynecological chair to serve those perversions that require it, she laid him on the bed and covered him and his outrageous tattoos with her flawless body, made him her own in the way so many men had done to her-or tried to. Now for the first time in her life she understood men and their need to possess in a total way through the act of sex. (She finally understood Mitch.)
She could not recall for how long they made love-it seemed to go on all afternoon. From time to time she sent out for warm sake for him, cold beer for her. It seemed they were satisfying a hunger accumulated over lifetimes. When their passion finally began to ebb, they switched on the TV monitor, which automatically played a hard porn video. Finally sated, with him drunk enough to lose his stutter, he talked as they lay on their backs, staring at their bodies in the ceiling mirror. What she saw there was a woman lying naked next to an extraterrestrial. She could not say why she found comfort in this juxtaposition, except that he seemed the male expression of herself at that moment; after all, for her as for him, there was no society of human beings worth belonging to, merely a torn cobweb of hypocrisy best avoided.
Ishy explained: Only through his work could he escape for a moment from his appalling sense of inadequacy, which stemmed from that lifelong problem with people. But what happened when there was no work, as was often the case? If he did not work for more than a day, he began to suffer mental torture of the most excruciating kind, a sense of suffocation-worse, of annihilation. His very existence was thoughtlessly eclipsed by people happily chatting together, by the merest glimpse of that effortless camaraderie to which Thais-especially our women-are particularly prone. Two old ladies nattering could send him into a jealous rage. (He was capable of envy provoked by the mutual grooming of cats.) His sense of isolation was of a degree no human should have to endure. He experienced the insane need to tattoo everyone around him, that they might carry proof of his existence all the way to the grave. After more than two days without work his mind filled with violent fantasies. On the inside of his skull, just above the eyes, cartoons of extreme sadism, murder, and death played out. There was only one activity that in its intensity could replace the solace of creativity.