She’s been working at Tesco five months and dealing with 12-hour days. She sends roughly one hundred dollars home each month. Half her salary.
She lives in a one-room apartment and eats cheap dinners. She’s looking for the right man to save her. Show her the good life. And she’s a swimmer.
Her one day off: Sunday. She doesn’t believe I’ll take her to the beach, which is just as sweet as milk, so we find a shop and I pay for a white bikini. She puts it on at the back of the store and pulls the curtain back for three seconds to let me peek. Time slows. I see deep into her eyes. I see the dark circles of her nipples. I think red wine and French movies. Deserted beaches. Crazy, deep sex. TL.
Time goes on and life is paradise. Better than selling hard drives and meeting co-workers for after-dinner mimosas at Bennigans in America. I never think of the NFL or sitcoms or politics. She teaches me Thai. I teach her English. I feel deep, emotional thrumming in my stomach when we fuck.
Until she comes home one night a different woman. Wouldn’t talk. Shrugs off my hands. Pouts like a little girl and it isn’t sexy. There’s a cold, white pallor to her face that just looks mean. Says she doesn’t like work. The other girls gossip about her because she’s with a farang and not married. She wants to quit work and take care of me. She wants money. Maybe move back to the farm and build a house in a rice field. Her parents need funds for everything: hospitals, food, booze, happiness. And then there’s a dowry. A big one. I can’t live without beaches and the ocean. I don’t eat much rice.
And I didn’t leave California with my pockets full of gold. About 20k in the bank and an old Taylor guitar on my back. I chew on dowry for a week or two, but she doesn’t like delays. I came to Thailand because I can live in a bungalow near the beach, swim every day and eat mango, coconut and banana. Drink red wine. She locks herself in my bedroom and talks on her cellphone for hours. Comes out in a denim mini-skirt and heels and leaves me alone until midnight. I’m licking paint off the walls. She gets distant. Starts the going out thing a few times a week. I try to follow her once, but get lost in the mountains. I’m on a steep, dark incline. No streetlights. Weird sounds from the forest. A cool and ominous wind shakes the trees. I’m the only man on the planet. On the way down, I crash into a guard rail. Call her for help, but she doesn’t answer. I know she’s fucking around. But it feels like a way out. I didn’t come to Thailand to be a wingman.
That night, I put her on the couch and yank at her twenty-dollar satin panties until she cries. I want proof. I want revenge. She buries her face in my shoulder. Tears soak through my shirt. I find her lips. My heart thumps.
She sits on my lap and does this squeezing thing she can do with her vagina I don’t understand and I let it go.
But it isn’t back to normal. So I give her 500 dollars for her parents to do whatever. It makes her happy for a while. Pancakes and cheeseburgers fly out of our little kitchen. She buys a bus ticket home to deliver the money and quits her job. Which isn’t exactly what I want, but the sex is so damn magical.
She’s so high on things, so full of trust that she brings me a piece of paper with ‘You’re a very special person. I don’t want to lose contact with you’ written on it in her handwriting. She says her friend got it as an SMS and she wants to know what it means. Yeah, right. I tell her what it means and wave goodbye as she climbs on the midnight bus to Korat.
I can’t let it go. When she gets back, I demand to see her cellphone messages. She is good with the phone and when she opens the inbox, she deletes the first two before I have a chance to read them. Everything else is in Thai. I make her drive to DTAC and get the phone records. I read them standing in the mall and the names are all Thai. Maybe I was wrong. I feel bad.
So I walk through the mall and see a travel agent. A lot of colorful brochures and long-tailed speed boats. I buy two tickets to the Phi Phi islands. Promise I will teach her to SCUBA dive. On the way back, she says, ‘If you ever catch me lying, throw me out.’ That really hits me. I was all wrong about her. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known inside and out.
I buy two gold rings and carry them around in my pocket for a week.
There is no place I can hide them in the house. She knows every spot. I walk around with my fingers in my pocket and dream.
On the night before the trip, she asks me when we have to leave. I say 7 a.m. She says she needs to go to the market before we take off, about 6. I ask her what she needs to buy. She says I don’t know. Doesn’t sound right at all. So in the morning, she’s getting dressed and so am I. What are you doing, she asks. Going to the market, I say. She has a fit right there. Throws a coffee cup against the wall. Coffee splatters all over my art books. Glass on the floor. I think love is going to kill me. She goes alone and I just know what it is. I know.
When she’s gone, I check my mail and the Internet saves me. She doesn’t flush her cache from the night before because we were packing and eating and talking and I see where she was browsing: on this hook-up site called Tagged. Her profile just pops right up. She’s got pictures I took of her in that damn bikini at the pool in the clubhouse. Says she likes a man who knows what he wants and hip-hop music. She’s got friends. Lots of young European dudes with crew cuts. They look like football stars.
When you’re 53, you know what’s good for your soul. I’ve got a long history of great failure and great success. Western Digital paid me buckets to run the marketing. And I had a network of clients that locked me in. Took eleven years to go from copy writer to Big Dick. And when I got to the top, I didn’t want to be there. I couldn’t stop thinking about teaching music to kids or learning to sail, diving the reefs off the Catalina Islands. The trend went all the way back to Little League baseball. Best player on the team and then my mind turned to reefer and sci-fi novels which turned into a stint of guitar playing and modal jazz. I’m good for ten seconds at everything, and then it’s over.
So I have my life-size epiphany in Stowe, Vermont, at this big marketing dinner paid for by Compaq with too much wine. I raise my hands to silence the table, then throw the question out. What’s the absolute best thing in life?
Everyone quickly agrees: true love.
It was all the proof I needed. Proof that the one thing I really wanted was TL. A deep, serious, honest connection with a fantastic woman was the one consistent theme of my life. And I admit Thai women had a certain appeal, a promise of youth and good odds. But I wasn’t taking the exploitation angle seriously. Have you ever known one thing to be the way you hear it on the news or in the hallways at work? For me, never. I have to see things for myself.
But I’m not angry with Goy. What’s the point? I just want to get rid of her now with as little conflict as possible and get on with my quest. I do love her, but I can’t live with her. She’s a devil. You know what I mean. We go to Phi Phi and I have the best three days of my life. Snorkeling in the glassy water. She takes me into the bushes behind the beach. Not a soul around except us and she fucks me as I sit on a pile of sand. She sucks my cock right there and her mouth is wet and shiny. She looks up at me with those tender eyes. And I lift her into my lap. Her cheeks feel damp on my fingers. I spread them and pull her close to my bulge. She groans and puts her hands on my shoulders. My cock juts out to find her hole. I feel her muscles squeeze in on me.
When she pulls my head down to suck her nipples, I see two Thai girls behind a coconut tree watching us. Goy looks, too, and she twitches somewhere deep inside. She looks back at me with a lewd smile on her face as I explode to the rhythm of a frantic popping sound coming from her groin.