I don't fucking believe it, said the photographer in the most genuine amazement that the journalist had seen in a long time.
The two of them went back to Joy and Pukki's to sleep. They couldn't afford the Hotel 38 anymore except on special occasions; it was 300 bhat. (They'd given Joy twenty dollars apiece, each without knowing what the other had done; but all the same, Joy told them that they owed the landlord 200 bhat per night. .) Her room was an oven at night, bright and bleak and reeking of insecticide. Splashing sounds came from the hall where ladies took turns doing the laundry. In the corner crack, a foot or two below the ceiling, a hairy curled wire protruded. The wire began to vibrate. After awhile the photographer got up and pulled it; something squeaked; it was a rat's tail. .
While we are waiting for Joy and possibly Pukki to come back from work, while the two sexist exploiters sleep (at rest, the photographer's face still looked almost sweet sometimes the way his eyelashes curved and his lower lip swelled; his cheek rested against his bent-back fingers), I may as well describe Joy's place, which one gained by going down a dark corridor deep in toilet-smelling water; then, just at the foot of the stairs where another girl stood scratching her shoulder-bites, one turned right down a hall whose left wall was a barred partition behind which a family lived with big slow rats (one as big as a piglet); on the right were tiny padlocked doors like entrances to storage lockers. Joy unlocked one of these. The room, whose walls were part concrete and part wooden slats, was maybe ten by twelve feet. The floor's grey cement was partly covered by a sheet of green plastic patterned like bathroom tiles. On the wall hung a broom; Joy and Pukki kept their room very clean. In the corner was a one-piece unit of open wire shelving, then a beaten-up card table on which the two women kept their purses, some lotions, a photo of Pukki with her English boyfriend; then there was a wastebasket where they kept their dirty laundry, and a narrow vinyl "wardrobe" for all the clothes. These items were all ranged along one wall, on the bare concrete. On the green plastic, which covered most of the cell, there was nothing but a fan, an ashtray, a box of matches, and in the corner a folded length of ticking too skinny to be called a futon. Joy kept her stuffed animals there. - This baby for me, she said, squeaking her soft pink teddy bear. I love. - That was everything. There were no pictures on the walls. (On the ceiling was a mobile of shells, it's true, hung from the same beam the bare incandescent bulb was mounted on. I'd forgotten that.) The rent was 900 bhat per month.
My place no good, said Joy softly. You no angry me?
She came in at four in the morning, staggering, falling, laughing, stretching her long legs over the pillow, her brown toes soaking up light, saying: I drinking too much! I'm sorry I drink two beer, three whiskey, one champagne, two vodka -
It's OK, said the journalist. You're a good girl -
Thank you, she whispered.
Early in the morning a rat squeaked upstairs, and the monsoon rains came steadily down, eating all light except for a dreary brown or khaki luminescence that showed the clothes hanging outside the window-bars and then the stairs, underneath which was the toilet on its raised platform. Pukki had never come home. She'd had to go to Pattaya for an Australian boy's holiday. (The girls seemed to dread those "holidays" more than anything else, probably because they could never get away from their assignment then and always saw the same things, just beaches or hotel ceilings. .) Joy and the photographer were lying very still. The journalist waited as long as he could, the sweat gushing from every inch of his body, and still they slept; he got up and put his sandals on. Outside, the alley was now a gutter calf-deep in brown water through which sandaled people slowly splashed; radios were playing beside the families on the open platforms brushing their teeth and spitting into that canal; scraps of newspaper floated by; there was the usual crush of flies, as eager as boys (or girls) at Pat Pong; men sat on their wooden porches which had become docks; ladies splashed steadily from stand to stand, buying food; awnings stretched across the narrow sky, almost meeting each other, and beneath them ran the unreal canal city. By ten in the morning it was hot and sunny, the street bone-dry.
He went back inside, down the hall, past the toilet and right to the tiny door with the padlock; when he pulled the door open he caught a gleam of thrusting buttocks and said: I'm sorry but Joy said his name and said no problem.
Back to the National Museum he went alone, to enjoy an hour of beauty without love, but he was just like the photographer who'd shouted on the bus: I can smell a pussy a mile, away! because after a diversionary visit to some bird's head swords he found himself sniffing out Khmer art (there was more here than in Phnom Penh! — the Khmer Rouge hadn't forgotten much); raining his fever-sweat down on the courtyard grass, he stood lusting for the Bayon-style Dvarapalas of the early thirteenth century.
The stone head leaned forward and down, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, the balls of its eyes bulging out like tears. Too familiar, that face; he wished now that the photographer were here, to take a picture of it. - Marina? — Maybe. Yes, Marina, plump, blurred and round. Her mouth was definitely grimacing. He stepped back, stood a little to the left so that her eyes could see him. She looked upon him sadly, without interest or malice; this Marina was long dead. Her nose was eaten away as if by syphilis, her breasts almost imperceptible swellings on the rock, her navel round and deep, her vulva a tiny slit that may have been vandalism from the same axe that cut off her right hand and left arm. . She stood square-toed and weary in the heat.
Beside her was another Dvarapala in the same style, stunningly beautiful, the contours too soft to be human; her face, neither a Buddha nor an Egyptian deathmask, merged eerily into her sweep of hair and bust; she could barely see him; her thick lips smiled; to make her smile at him he stood slightly to the right to meet her gaze; she smiled the way a whore smiles when you didn't pay her enough -
She looked into the photographer's face very earnestly. - You boyfriend me, or you butterfly? If you butterfly, we finit.
I love only you, the photographer grinned. Me no butterfly. Me suck only your flower. You my sweet rice girl.
That night while the photographer went to turn his cruel hawkeyes on other bargirls until Joy should arrive, the journalist sat drinking and preparing the final draft of his article, which would surely appear on the front page of the New York Times: Thailand's 3 main cash crops: rice, fish and women…and he started to feel something crazy lurching up inside him just like that time in Phnom Penh when Vanna wasn't there and he hopped on the back of the cyclo driver's vehicle and started pedaling the driver crazily down the street, the driver covering his eyes and smiling in dismay, everyone else laughing and pointing and staring, and the journalist had been full of spurious mirth that made him pedal desperately until he crashed the cyclo; now, knowing that something similar was about to happen, he left his friend, made his speedy escape from the square white, red and yellow lights of Pat Pong glowing down the alleys like soft drink signs. He didn't take Noi because she'd gone home early. The bartender said that a man had bought her too many beers and she'd gotten drunk and puked. For every 55 bhat per beer that the man had paid, Noi received 20 bhat, and she was required to drink it down to make the man happy; otherwise how could she wheedle another one out of him? — The journalist was sorry. He'd been thinking all day about what a tight pussy she must have. (But he loved only Vanna, of course. .) Sitting in the tuk-tuk, he smelled the blue smoke of the stalled traffic; he watched a lady with shoebutton eyes sitting side-saddle and miniskirted on the back of a motorbike, carefully gazing at nothing; then his tuk-tuk driver switched the motor on; the golden bulb lit up the naked green LADY OF HIGHWAY decal guarding the driver's back and the bloodspatter decals on the window; now they were moving so fast that the breeze was actually cold. Stop again. More blue smoke. Another side-saddle girl beside him, this one staring wide-eyed through her crash helmet. He saw other faces suspended behind the dark windows of taxis. Then the tuk-tuk growled off again. They turned by the lighted garden of the World Trade Center, bound once again for the Hotel 38.