‘You can look now.’
Andie had skimmed off a layer of thick foam and fashioned a bikini out of it: bubbles shining on her wet skin like sequins sewn onto a body stocking.
The water sloshed around as I climbed inside the tub. I lifted aside a handful of wet hair pressed against her shoulder blades, strands of kelp left on white sand at high tide. The strap of lather on one shoulder had split. I nipped and rasped my teeth along the ridge of a collarbone until I reached the notch at the base of her neck. I dipped my tongue in, the skin tasting salty the same as the mussels at dinner a few hours before. The rest of the makeshift bra had dissolved, exposing her tiny rosewood nipples. My hand reached between her thighs and sought out her niche, fingers discovering that her hole was as shallow as a navel. Andie gasped and shoved me back with the contained violence of a self-defence class. We slid in rhythm against the wall of the tub. Male sea snakes cannot disengage from females until mating is complete.
My livingroom had a built-in marine aquarium, equipped with backlit glass, harsh and vivid like a screensaver. The cleaner shrimp from my shop were servicing a blue-striped angelfish.
‘Humans think they can study animals in tanks and cages, and put them into categories.’
Dressed in a terry-wrap robe, Andie walked over to the window, her profile slashed into shadows by the Venetian blinds. Her rants began like our lovemaking, a sharp tangential stab in a random location, growing in intensity as she located an available target.
I tried to distract her. I pointed to the aquarium. ‘Are you talking about my fish?’
‘You make them sound like they’re your property.’
I went over and put my arms around her to soothe her displeasure.
‘You don’t own me-I’m not one of the fish in your shop.’
‘I have a duty to my shop.’
‘Your shop is your property, which has its own set of conditions. She loosed the belt on the robe and opened it before taking my hand and pressing it on her soft breast, ‘Duty is unconditional. When you’re with me, you are beyond all that.’
‘No.’ I struggled to deny my body’s responses. ‘Can we talk about you?
Or us??’
Andie rolled her eyes at me and pushed me back towards the sofa.
‘Remember the deal, Jack? You don’t ask dumb questions about me or anything. We enjoy what we can when we can.’
On the sofa, the bathrobe fell down around Andie as she climbed above me, a goddess holding up the canopy of the night sky with her body. It was dim under her robe as the moist velvets of our mouths mingled. When she placed her mouth around what she humourously called my ‘seahorse’, I forgot about duty or business.
Andie was right; my shop was my property and my duty although I had been neglecting it. Dead live food drifted in plastic basins, air pumps broke down and filters clogged up with algae and gave off the metallic tang of nitrates.
My courtesy transformed into curtness with customers. As families waited for a table outside the dim sum restaurant, they allowed their children to wander into my shop. I shooed them away with a broomstick, annoyed that these conventional lives and their offspring had intruded into my floating world.
A man entered the shop, tall and white-haired, his skin so tanned that it gave off a violet lustre in the strip lights of the fish tanks. His appearance attested to a life spent under the sun. The juxtaposition was odd; what was his interest in an indoor hobby like aquarium fish-keeping? I realized the connection when he put a plastic bag on the counter; the cleaner wrasse was swimming inside.
‘I’m returning the wrasse. My wife told me she bought it from here,’ he said with a faint European accent.
I did not answer and tightened my grip on the broom handle. Andie had lied to me about her marital status. Deceived as I was, I had no desire to be killed by a jealous husband.
‘Okay, relax.’ He held up a gnarled hand to assuage me. ‘My ex-wife.
Well, not until she signs the papers. If she signs them.’
I waited for him to get interrogative. Would he ask me to step outside for a fistfight in front of the dim sum restaurant? When I still did not speak, he said, ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘Andie has no real friends in KL. I suggested a change of scene to her.
We even bought a studio apartment in Mont Kiara last year.’ He pushed the wrasse towards me. ‘Since no one’s going to live there now, there’s no need to decorate it.’
I opened the till to give him a refund for the fish.
‘No, please. I insist.’ He refused the money. I asked him what was his job. ‘I own a scuba-diving school in Thailand. Hey, maybe you should try it one day.’
I ignored his offer and blurted, ‘Do you still have feelings for Andie?’
He smiled as if I had articulated something he could not admit to himself.
‘We live apart, but we are not separated. She goes and returns. Nothing’s definite with her and that’s the deal.’
‘I know.’ I agreed and thought of the male and female shrimp inside the Venus Flower Basket, an arrangement of complete security but defined by soft translucent bars.
Andie sent a blank email with a photo attachment to my business mail address; a fuzzy snapshot of sea snakes mating, taken with an underwater camera. I replied with a brief thank you and never heard from her again.
My customers thought I had closed my shop for a month. Instead, I renovated it and got rid of the marine fish and invertebrate tanks. I applied for a license to sell dogs and cats. The shop was noisier with barks and meows, but at least it distracted me from thinking about Andie. My new employees did not understand why I was obsessed with checking the sex of new puppies and kittens. I was looking for recurrences of Andie’s condition in nature.
Of course, I never found any, but conventional family life found me when a petite woman walked into my shop one evening, tearful that her boyfriend had stood her up outside the dim sum restaurant.
However, my fiance baulked at making love in the bathtub. She told me I could get hurt. She did not understand when I replied that I had already been hurt that way.
MAD FOR IT
Erich R. Sysak, Thailand
So I’m in Phuket, Thailand, just a few weeks and I get a job teaching English.
I need a clock to remind me to wake up. I want a big damn clock on the wall ticking like crazy. I go to Tesco in my tie and blue silk shirt and see an amazing Thai girl, about 27. Hair cut to the shoulders, wide mouth, a narrow waist that makes her hips and heavy breasts pull your eyes. Some women have this sexual power, like a love potion that people drink up. Karl Jung says it is a projection of the soul or anima. Walt Whitman says steer for the deep waters only.
Enter Goy and my first chance at exotic True Love. A long neck.
Yearning in the face and dark eyes. A relaxed, nurturing vibe amplified by our struggle to communicate as she shows me how to work the clock. My arm brushes against her nipple as she winds up the mechanism. I’m happily swimming out to dark waters. A puff of her cream and cinnamon smell rises to my nostrils. But when I take the clock home, I just can’t get it to work.
A few days later I come back, see her in jeans and a red blouse with SAME SAME on the curvy front. Somehow I get her in the mood and a short while later we’re upstairs in the cafeteria eating Japanese dumplings and fish sauce. She crosses her legs and laughs at me staring. Her toes are painted black. Even her feet are candy.
Her ex was a butterfly. She has a 3-year-old daughter back in Isaan.
Phuket has all the decent jobs, but she misses the rubber tree farm back home.