Now that the lust for a new wife had spread through him like viremia, we can't really call him the journalist anymore, so we'll call him the husband. As soon as he had the money he'd be back in Cambodia to claim his prostitute bride in some happy morning of green leaves all around the windows, although the English teacher who couldn't speak English had said to him, in a sudden amazing gush which had obviously cost him dictionary hours: Do you want to get marry? Or you want to be still single forever? I think you are old enough to get marry. Or you want to be taxi boy? Carefully, please! You know AID? It's a bad kind of sickness. You can die by it. I'm afraid it. Therefore I never sleep with a girl at all. So I only want to get marry with a pretty girl. But I'm poor and she's rich… — Too bad, thought the husband. Through all his assignments Cambodia lurked and waited, moistening in his memories like a fungus, like an obscene orange orchid-bowl rotting between compound leaves that tapered like paintbrushes; and thinking of Vanna (whose face he could no longer see quite as readily as if she'd been tattooed on the insides of his eyelids) his heart butterflied as it did when he waited to go on studio, the second hand of left clock and right clock clicking like synchronized eyelashes, the green nipple on the wooden breast not yet glowing so that the husband could ignore life's tests yet a little longer, afloat and irrelevant like his styrofoam cup on the blue felt. - Do not consider what you may do (thus Claudius Claudianus), but what it will become you to have done, and let the sense of honor subdue your mind. - But the grammar of his particular shoulds and oughts was beyond him. Not finding answers, he asked himself the same questions; no need to know whether he lived on the left clock or the right; being in either case a second hand, he clicked round fruitlessly. Life's dreary stretch and trickle was making him forget Vanna month by month; sometimes it seemed that he remembered far more vividly the Chinese porcelain-faced girl with her head down in the darkness offering her round maggot-pale cheek so dreamily to her glass, as if she were listening, while another pallid lady who wore an ice-blue butterfly bow elongated her silver braceleted arm out toward the Chinese porcelain-faced girl in the darkness; a lady with an ice-pink artificial flower in her hair got to the husband first, grinning cautiously downward with her lip lifted from her upper teeth. - Vanna, Vanna! he shouted.
He dreamed that he was cutting his wife up with a saw, and she never cried out, not when he cut her ankles off, not when he severed her knees; but when he began to saw her heart out she wept very very quietly.
Why should we send you to Cambodia? yawned the editor. You've already been, right? And you didn't get what you went for?
Well, it's just that it's such an exciting time there, the husband blabbered, they're just now getting reliable electricity again, and soon the import-export businesses will be going; history's being made and I want to be there when it happens. .
You know what? said the editor. I really don't think I'm interested.
There was a famous writer named Ned who had been invited to read at what is called an "event" because nothing happens there; they permitted the husband to be the warmup act. The whole time he made his appeal, he thought he saw Prince Sihanouk smiling at him from the back row. Everyone else was yawning. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and two or three people clapped politely; Ned leaped up on the stage and began to crow and snort and fart while everyone shouted for laughter, and when he was through the audience was on its feet shouting madly: NED! NED! NED! NED! and Ned came back and gave them another raspberry.
No, I just don't see how we can send you to Cambodia, said the editor, a magnificent lady who was very vague. - If we made money off you it would be one thing, but you know that hardly a soul reads you. And then there are the budget cuts. That office is a minefield right now. It just wouldn't be safe to bring you up. If I did, you might lose everything. .
Well, but what should I do? asked the husband with such pathos that she couldn't duck him with brightness.
There's always Ned, she replied. You might learn a little about writing from Ned. Ned's very generous with lesser writers.
The next time he was on stage with Ned, the husband watched his act very carefully. The husband was up next. His attention hovered like a butterfly over a pool. Doing what Ned did would be pulling down his pants in public. It would be giving head. It would be doing what Vanna did.
His turn came. Tentatively, into the horn of the audience's deepening embarrassed silence, the husband began to crow.
Hello, Sien?
Yes.
This is the journalist. Any news?
No news. Not yet.
That's not too good. You think anything is wrong?
I think maybe I wait one two more week, then I send another letter. Early next month. I have backup copy.
I can see you know how to do business, the husband flattered him.
Sir, I do my best.
You think everything's OK with her?
I think maybe I send a letter soon.
He'd heard that every now and then, capriciously, the government cracked down, and the prostitutes were put in a place where there wasn't enough to eat.
His worry about her was no less than anguish; he loved her, his dear new wife as narrow-waisted as a fresh-tied bundle of light-green rice. .
After two weeks he called Sien, who said: I learn nothing sir no news of her I try again maybe one week.
(Sien, like Ned, was only doing his job; the husband reminded himself of this. Sien was doing his job as the clerks did theirs in the post office on that street in Bangkok where gems and fossils and hill tribe silverwork were sold, the placid postal clerks stamping rows and rows of little papers, and on the walls white reliefs of unknown grand gentlemen, serration-bordered like stamps. They'd done their jobs, too.)
Finally he got some post-Hungarian magazine to send him to the Arctic for a couple of weeks — lots of work and morose nose-blowing and maybe eight hundred bucks at the end of it; well, her passport out of Cambodia alone would cost two grand so he'd better start somewhere. - It's the recession, you see, the editor said. We just don't have the advertising. All the magazines are skinnier these days.
The ice's bumpy snow massaged his feet through the kamik-soles with tiny tingles, the orange sun one sun's length above the blue. Dogs wagged tails over old polar bear tracks. The low cliff-sweep of Signal Hill was already waiting for the darkness to get darker, the hill-edge closer to night than the sky, everything going storm-blue or death-blue; and the lights of the village only increased the dreariness. Thinking about his new wife, he had the usual feeling of anxious despair; hour by hour the bond between them was dissolving. She was getting AIDS. She was moving to another disco. She was in the re-education camp. She was giving up prostitution. She would never give up prostitution. She was forgetting him. The way he should have felt was exultant, because the eight hundred dollars was the first step back to her. Instead, it seemed to him that everywhere he went just got him more lost.