The night was lovely at curfew time, the rain just barely condensing out of the hot black sky like drops of sweat, motorbikes purring down the street. A woman pedaled slowly in the rain. It was very nice to see how her wet blue skirt stuck to her thighs. He passed the new market and saw a disco's dark doorway evilly serendipitous; I'll have to tell the photographer about that, he thought. (He didn't go in. The gaggle of taxi girls and motorbike drivers sitting hands on thighs, or looking sweetly, palely, over their shoulders, daunted him like pack-ice black and grey and all in a blue of mystery.) Every little chessboard-floored restaurant had become a movie theater of chairs packed with mothers and children raptly watching a TV screen placed high in the corner; two naked children, brother and sister, sat on the sidewalk staring in through a grating; every cell in the honeycomb was a cutaway world made expressly for the journalist to stare into and long to be taken into, just as the TV screens were for everyone else. Crossing a pitch-dark street he dodged cyclos and bicycles (all headlightless, almost silent). No one paid much attention to the curfew anymore; even so, as the hour shrank, more and more steel accordion-diamonds stretched taut to meet and lock everything into darkness. Girls leaned out of their terraces; doors opened to show darkness or brightly turning fans. The girls put both hands on the railings and leaned, their watch-dials white like fire; they gossiped across at each other, enjoyed the hot night's raindrops, watched the street where a boy crossed with long slow steps, the scrape of his sandals a continuous sound, his blue shirt glowing like a night aquarium. Lizards waited head down on hotel walls. The girls looked at the journalist and waved; he waved back. A black dog scuttered across the street like a moving hole.
In the hotel there were paintings of bare-breasted girls in butterfly-winged skirts standing waist-deep in the mist before science fiction palaces. The night was so hot that his face felt as if it had peered into a steaming kettle. He went into the room, turned the air conditioning on (he and the photographer, being boys of high morals, always traveled first class), and took a shower. He was standing naked in the cool water when the photographer came in with two whores.
They were from that same disco he'd passed, as he soon learned (the photographer's soul always gushed when he'd made a novel score). - I was gonna take the tall one because I kept thinking how it would be, you know, with her legs around me, but as soon as we got into the street the short one took my hand, so that's that. - I guess it is, replied the journalist, toweling himself off while the girls screamed and looked away. - They went through all his pills and medicines first, sniffing the packets, going nnnihh! giggling at the condoms, whispering and pointing like schoolgirls. The photographer's girl was already in the shower and out, halfway demure in her towel. The journalist's girl stayed dressed. She did not seem to like him very much, but then that didn't seem unusual to him because girls never liked him; was it his fat legs or his flabby soul? Fortunately this was an issue he'd never be called on to write a newsicle about. - Look at 'em! shouted the photographer. They're as curious as fucking monkeys, man! — With great effort they mouthed the Khmer words in the dictionary section of his guidebook; they opened the box of sugar cubes, which were swarming with ants, and ate one apiece. The journalist's girl had a beauty spot over one eye. When she opened and closed everything, her eyebrows slanted in elegant surprise. She wore a striped dark dress. There was something very ladylike about her: she intimidated him slightly. He lay sweatily on the bed watching them; when they'd completed their inspection they neatened everything up like good housewives, so that it took the journalist and the photographer days to find their possessions. Such well-meaning young women, though. . They stared with satisfaction into the mirror, the photographer's girl tilting the purple tube of lipstick and drawing it along her lower lip like a gentle loving penis while her earrings and necklace shone gold, her hair spilling black and pure black like squid's ink. Suddenly she turned toward the photographer, her nose's beauty spot spying on him, something shiny and watchful in her eyes and tea-colored face in the darkness as she made her hair into braids for him, smoothing the electric blue dress down over her tits; but the journalist's girl never looked away from the mirror; she smiled into it or she leaned her nose against it so as not to have to look at anything else; only the gold glitter around her dark breasts like drops of light in the humid darkness of the hotel room, her face level or low, maybe satisfied after all; or maybe the smile was only some resigned grimace.
The photographer's girl got ready right away. But after half an hour the journalist's girl was still silent in the bathroom with the door closed. She stood staring at the back of her little mirror, which had a decal of a man and woman together. .
He communicated with her mainly by signs. She liked to smell his cheeks and forehead in little snorts of breath, but not to kiss him; whenever he tried, she'd whirl her head away into the pillow, so he started Buddha-ing her in just the same way that Oy had steepled her hands very quickly together for good luck when he'd bought her out, she probably hoping he wouldn't see, probably praying that he'd give her a lot of money; so he did this to the Cambodian girl; he'd seen the beggars do it; he'd do it to say please, then he'd touch his forefinger from his lips to hers — and she'd Buddha him back to say please no. Sometimes he did it anyway, and she'd jerk her head away, or let him do it only on her closed lips. Then sometimes he'd steeple his hands please and point from his lips to her cunt, and she'd wave her hand no, so he wouldn't do that; he'd pray to kiss her again, and she'd pray him no; so he'd pray and point from his crotch to hers and she'd nod yes.
He smiled at her as affectionately as he could. He wanted her to like him. It just made things easier when the whore you were on top of liked you. - The truth was, he really did like her. He traced a heart on her breast with his finger and smiled, but she looked back at him very seriously. Then suddenly she ran her fingernail lightly round his wrist and pointed to herself. - What did she mean? So many prostitutes seemed to wear religious strings for bracelets; was that what she meant? Somehow he didn't think so. .
Give 'em more Benadryl; come on, give 'em more Benadryl, the journalist whined as the photographer's girl turned on the light giggling for the fourth or fifth time that night; he didn't know exactly what the hour was, since his watch had been stolen in Thailand, possibly by Oy. . The photographer's girl loved to watch the journalist making love. Even when the photographer was screwing her she'd always be looking avidly at the other bed, hoping to see the journalist's buttocks pumping under the sheet; whenever she could she'd sneak up and pull the sheet away to see the journalist naked with a naked girl; then she'd shriek with glee. It was very funny but it got a little less funny each time. - Fortunately they obediently swallowed whatever pills the journalist gave them; the photographer told them that the journalist was a doctor and the journalist neither confirmed nor denied this report, which most likely they didn't understand anyway. So he gave them Benadryl; one for his girl, three for the other, who was hyperkinetic. Even so they both kept turning the lights on to see what time it was; they wanted to leave by the end of curfew. - The journalist's girl lay against him, her cool weightless fingers resting on his chest. Her face smelled sweetish like hair-grease. In the morning she pulled a towel about herself and slid into her gold and purple dress. Then she sat in a chair, far from the bed, making up her lips, using her eyebrow pencil, occasionally uttering brief replies to the other girl's babble. The other girl had a voice like a lisping child. The girl in the chair ran the lipstick very slowly over the outside of her lower lip. She saw the journalist looking at her and smiled guardedly, then raised the pocket mirror again. She smoothed her hair away from her cheeks and began to apply more of the sickly-sweet cream.