About her finding the right guy. Two-thirty, there’s a little knock on the door.
I’m wide awake. Savage in the eyes. She walks straight past me. I smell wine on her dress, the ocean at midnight. I call to her. I want the story. I want the details, but she shakes her head no and goes to the bedroom, shuts the door and locks it.
I go back to the computer right then. I know all of the buttons on Tagged and whip up my own profile. I post the picture from Phi Phi when I looked away from Goy in disgust as she happily snapped pics with the digital camera I bought for her. You can see the beach and the waves as a reflection in my Ray-Bans. I have my hands clenched in an expression of ultimate confidence.
I find three more pics and load them up. Nothing sweet. They are manly, active pictures of the beach, a sailboat and me feeding rice to a neighbourhood stray dog. I have one pic with a Toyota 4x4 behind me and the door open. It looks like mine, but it isn’t. I load that too.
Then I write a message. I cut and paste it and send it to almost fifty women who live on the island and grade at least a seven out of ten. It’s a theory. The Wild 7. The tens are too beautiful and in Thailand, their beauty is a major asset. Perhaps all they have. And a lot of the other important qualities may not be there: humility, wit, sincerity. It’s the slightly under-appreciated woman who has long-term possibilities. I want a girl who isn’t a slave to her family. Who swims. Who doesn’t worry if her skin gets too dark.
Then Goy appears from the bedroom. She sits in my lap and stares at my new Tagged profile on the computer screen. A wounded look appears in her little-girl eyes. I feel her satin panties against my thighs. She slides her arms around me. She lifts her brown nipple to my mouth. Her skin is soft and sends pulses of light through my body. I take her nipple in my mouth and it swells. I love the brown color, the rubbery feel of it in my teeth. Every part of her touches a part of me. She kisses me deeply and I regret it all as her hand pulls my throbbing cock out. I love her. She has it all. She pulls at it and I feel her long fingers curling around my head. We finally agree to stop torturing each other. She says she won’t meet any more men on Tagged and I won’t meet any women. She takes her soft fingers away just before I come.
She’ll get a job at one of the hotels and save money. I promise to help her more when I can.
She shows me an SMS from the doctor that proves they didn’t have sex.
The doctor says in the message that he wishes they had made love in the hot tub that night. Next time, he says. But there won’t be a next time for him. I’m taking his next time and the next one too. TL isn’t easy. But you have to hold on to it when you get it. She pulls her other leg over my head and lifts her ass.
I guide her down onto my shaft and moan as I enter her. I am young again and will be inside of her forever.
But the truth is, we are living in a romantic dream that lasts only a few more weeks. Because she can’t turn away from her own damaged search.
And I know every good romance ends in death. It starts with a love potion.
And the potion confuses everything that’s real. The potion makes you do things that just don’t make sense. Then you have a story and the story is full of lies and full of truth and there’s no way to untangle it without a lot of difficulty. True Love. Whitman says, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
Six months have passed, and Goy has what she wants now. She was on Tagged all along and that’s no surprise. She lives in a mansion at Nai Harn Hill just above my favourite beach with a retired millionaire. He’s Dutch.
The owner of a shopping mall. He’s overweight, hideous and shrewd. Goy hates him and gets everything she wants: a monthly salary, cooking school, that awful Honda Jazz and driving lessons. When I swim out to the bay, I can look back at the hill and just see the silver top of her water tower. I float in the bay and look up at it shining.
I’ve seen her a few times since she moved five months ago. We have sex sometimes and she cries after, but won’t tell me why. When I see her, I feel elated, and when we part, I feel relieved.
On my 54th birthday, I get an SMS from her. It says: I will always love only you.
And I will love only her, but she is gone from me and we will never have those beaches again. My madness is wanting her again, but knowing she is all wrong. What have I learned? Whitman was right about everything.
Self-Portrait With Three Monkeys
He kept thrashing and crashing around on top of her, making the required efforts to reach his record-time orgasm. If there had been an Olympic category for ‘wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am’ sex, he would have easily made the team, she thought. It happened all too often: the big build-up over dinner and hanging out at Bar None had led to another unsatisfying conclusion. Now the performance was over. He withdrew himself, limp and spent, rolled off to his side of the bed, sweating on the sheet. Francisca had learned not to expect fireworks, yet she did hope for slow, practiced arousal-or perhaps a little humour along the way.
He let out a deep yawn. “Very tired, lah.”
He looked across the room, taking in the easel next to the dresser. “Hey, you also paint, ah. Very sexy! This one, who, ah?
She cringed. Oh God! What to tell him? But before Francisca could answer, he had turned over and was off to count sheep or naked pole-dancers, or whatever he did to fall asleep. She half-muttered to herself, “Yes, why don’t you make yourself at home, ‘Stud’!”
He was asleep now, but his words echoed on like the ghost of an insincere idea. Did he not see her resemblance in the unfinished portrait?
Well, what do you expect! You didn’t hook up with an art lover, did you?
Francisca’s sagging, forty-eight-year-old body had been raging and partying for years, progressing like flaming octane through the clubber’s long, dark night of the soul.
She left the bed and went to clean up in the bathroom. When she returned, she sat down at the dresser-mirror. Soon, the numbskull sparrows would be up in the Flame of the Forest tree outside her window. Before long, the tropical sun would be getting her and the workers off to their office blocks for another day’s spreadsheets and marketing campaigns and the food courts would be queued up with hung-over monsters craving for kopi and kaya toast. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and sour margaritas.
She looked at the black waterfall of her hair draped over the red silk gown embroidered with tigers. Ah, her smeared mascara. At the end of her life, would she be still picking up guys in bars until the last round of drinks?
She really was too old for this now. Her biological time-bomb was beginning to tick louder between heartbeats. Too old for kids. She had some cash in the bank for a trip or two, but to where and with whom? The “who” in bed, reflected in the mirror, was just another jerk in post-coital whale-slumber.
The sex and booze had done the job for him: out like a light. Typical! But she was still turned on like flashing neon.
Next to her on the easel was the nearly finished canvas. She stood up to look at it-a voluptuous nude. She flashed back to the mirror-then to the canvas, then the mirror again. She undid the red silk dressing gown at the waist and opened herself for objective appraisal. Who is this person? Do I still know her? The breasts were certainly not as perky as a twenty-year-old’s and she saw the evidence of a little-dare she say it-paunch! My God!
A man’s word for a woman’s tummy. What is happening to me? There was some shadow of fuzz on the upper lip, a stray hair or two on the chin these days growing faster between tweezer attacks. Yes, Francisca was losing her soft feminine edge to a menopausal creature known as Fran the frump. She was becoming thick brush strokes, like a Rouault painting: man-solid, deep-vowelled.