She lay hardly breathing. He could barely hear her heartbeat. Her hands lay folded between her breasts. Her nipples were very long, brown and thin.
In the morning she cracked his finger-joints and toe-joints for him; she stretched and twisted his arms and legs; she slapped him gently all over. Then she made her rendezvous with the mirror, where she stood painting her eyebrows in slow silence. When she was finished he sat her down with his guidebook, which contained a few dictionary pages. He pointed to all the different words for food, pointed to her and then to him. She just sat there. He made motions to indicate the two of them going off together. She followed soundlessly. He locked the door. She came downstairs with him, into the lobby's world of eyes which shot the weak smirk off his face, and the eyes watched in silence. She was behind him on the stairs, creeping slowly down. He dropped the key onto the front desk and she was far behind him. He let her catch up to him a little, not too much because she might not want that, and went out into the street that was filled with even more spies, spectators, jeerers and hostile enviers, and she was farther behind than before. It must be difficult for her to be seen beside him. He concluded that the best thing to do was to walk without looking, which he did for half a block, then sat down at an outdoor restaurant where they brought him tea and bread. She had not come. He drank a few sips of his tea, paid, and walked wearily back. He said to the cigarette vendeuse: You see my friend?
Market. That way, she said.
You tell her, please, if she go to hotel, she come in.
No, no. You go market. She that way.
He did, but of course he never found her.
He felt miserable all day. He didn't want to fuck her anymore, only to straighten things out. He'd find someone to speak English to her…
Again and again he circled the market's yellow-tiered cement dome. The traffic was slow enough to let jaywalkers stand in the street. He loitered among the umbrellas and striped awnings, under each a vendor's booth or table; and sometimes they tried to sell him things: moneychangers studied him behind their jagged walls of cigarette cartons; but there was only one vendeuse he wanted, and what she had, it seemed, he couldn't ever buy.
The photographer's girl, on the other hand, had stayed. The photographer was getting sick of her. He told her that he and the journalist would have to go to work soon; he pointed to her and then to the door, but the girl tried desperately not to understand. In the middle of the morning she was still there. She wanted him to buy her a gold bracelet. They were out on the street, the three of them, and the photographer said to the journalist: All right. We'll each grab a cyclo and split.
Where to?
Where to? cried the photographer in amazement. Anywhere! Just as long as we get rid of this bitch. . Oh, shit, she's getting a cyclo, too!
Finally they went home with her. She took them down a very dark narrow dirt lane, then right into an alley, then up a steep plank ladder two inches wide to a dormitory that smelled like wood-smoke and was rowed with tiny square windows for light and air. Puddles on the floor darkly reflected the ceiling's patchy plaster. Mosquitoes and fleas bit the journalist's feet. The room was filled with beds, enclosed by patterned sheets hung from strings like laundry; sturdy beds, neatly made up. People lay one or two to a bed, very quiet, some sleeping, some not. The photographer's girl said that she paid ten thousand riels a year to stay there. She lived with her aunt, in a bed against the wall.
She pulled the photographer down on top of her, tried to get him to marry her — with a gold chain -
How many times has she been married? asked the journalist.
The aunt smiled and fanned him. - Five times.
He heard the sound of a thudding mallet, saw the shadow of a woman's bare legs darkening the nearest puddle on the dirty-grey cement. The photographer lay listless and disgusted on the bed, his girl on top of him whining, working him slowly but determinedly like a cyclo driver polishing his wheels. The journalist felt sorry for her.
Now they brought another girl for the journalist to marry in the dimness; she'd gone through it three or four times at least from the look of her gold chains; she took over the task of fanning him, smiling so wide-eyed that the journalist began to feel sorry for her, too; he already had a girl — Pala, Pala! he said. - The photographer's girl knew what he meant, and she gnashed her teeth. This rejected matrimonial prospect turned away and put on a new bra, kneeling on her pallet two feet away. The disks of her gold necklace gleamed consecutively when she turned her head, like the bulbs of a neon sign. While she was away the aunt resumed fanning him. Her teeth were perfectly white except for one of gold. She wore a ruby ring from Pailin (where he had promised his editor he'd go; he had no intention of going because the Khmer Rouge were still in control of the town).
I can't stand this anymore, the photographer said. Let's get out of here.
They'll want us to take them out to lunch.
So we'll take 'em out to lunch. Then we'll dump 'em.
The aunt didn't come. So it was only the photographer and his girl and the journalist with two new ladies, each hoping and vying, who went to the nearest sidewalk restaurant. He was a little afraid of one of them, a very pale girl with a Chinese-porcelain face (was she albino, or sick, or just heavily powdered? The longer he looked at her, the more corpselike she seemed. .); she, noticing how he studied her most frequently, said something in a smug undertone to her rival, who then withdrew her solicitudes. The Chinese-porcelain girl kept lowering her head and smiling, fingering her strings of gold, while the other girl, still hopeful to a small degree, gazed lovingly from time to time into the journalist's eyes. Crowds lined up behind their chairs, staring unhappily. By and large, they did not seem to admire whores or foreigners who whored. But of course there wasn't a damned thing they could do about it, thought the journalist as the Chinese-porcelain girl peeled him the local equivalent of a grape, which had a green rind, an inner sweet grey substance the texture and shape of an eyeball, and then a round seed — did it taste more like a grape or a cantaloupe? Being a journalist, he really ought to decide the issue once and for all — oh, GOOD, he'd have another chance (she'd hardly touched her soup; she looked very very sick; quite suddenly he was sure that she was going to drop dead any minute). . She called the fruit mayen.
So after lunch they dropped the girls, and the girls were very disappointed.
The photographer had to go back to the hotel to get more ointment for his rash, which had spread from one arm to the other and itched practically as bad as scabies or crabs (which the well-traveled photographer had already experienced; of course he'd never had *** GONORRHEA *** so the journalist was one up on him there). The journalist sat waiting for him in an open square of grass riddled with wide walkways and rectangular puddles between which children ran. On the far side (this park was quite large), two-storey houses whose roofs were truncated pyramids strutted stained balconies. Between the roots of a tree, a boy was digging with a stick.
The journalist thought about the gold chain that his prostitute wore about her naked waist. He wondered who'd given it to her, and whether the man had loved her in his heart or whether he'd just paid her. Did he still see her?