She straightens her back and casually taps her long, perfect, pink-shellacked fingernails on the sill like she’s playing a piano. “Maybe keep,” she says, as if it has just occurred to her, but I am not fooled.
“Does Ian know?”
She nods. “Knows. Not happy.” She hesitates, stops tapping. “Very,” she says.
“Very not happy? Or not very happy?” I ask, even though I’m not sure the distinction will be clear to her. As usual, she’s tracking me just fine.
“Not very happy,” she says. “But so-so happy.”
“Really?” I am shocked. I would not have expected him to be any kind of happy; he has always seemed so content, so immutably rooted in bachelorhood.
“Why surprise?”
“I don’t know. I just—”
“I know,” she says, and turns to me. “Người Mỹ.” American. She leans her forehead into mine, locks eyes, kisses my cheek and floats swan-like away in her silky white áo dài to go back to work.
I get another semicold Tiger beer from Tho, watch the cyclos a bit longer as the rain lets up, and eventually return to the pool table, where I sometimes belong. It’s getting late, but I am not ready to go back to my place yet, out on Cách Mạng Tháng Tám, Boulevard of the August Revolution, needing something closer to pure exhaustion to sleep in this heat, and the noise that almost never stops. I could probably go to the Rex and sleep with the Aussie, listen to his cherished CD collection on his fancy stereo in his hermetically sealed room, but the beers are closer — and warmer by a long shot. Besides, I hate just showing up; I like at least to be invited.
More people wander in — not regulars, tourists — trying, I would guess, to make some sense of this awkward and bewildering city they had surely envisioned differently. Maybe with real sidewalks, traffic signals that people actually abide, or white sand beaches and cabana boys, full-time electricity, food you can eat with impunity. I always say, Where the hell did they think they were going? But I didn’t have any idea either, so I guess that’s not entirely fair. I was, however, not expecting cabana boys or a Gray Line tour. I have been here six months now, and finally what is here is just what belongs. Meaning some part of me has acclimated, planted a little flag, and I can barely imagine — at least when I am awake — going back.
Last week one of the kids, hunkered down on the floor at the shelter, paused while scooping rice from his bowl to his mouth and looked up at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Where you town?”
At first, I always said California, as that is the place they have all heard about, seen pictures of, imagine America to be, if they imagine America at all. I haven’t tried yet to explain Montana — the perpetual expanse and frigid beauty of it. “Sài Gòn,” I said. “Người Vietnam.”
He looked back down at his bowl, dismissing me. “Nói dối.” Liar. He finished the rice, picked the last grains out of the bowl with fingers that seemed to move independently of the rest of him. “Người Canada.”
“Nope.” I shake my head. Not Canadian.
“Ở đâu, rồi?” Where, then? “Say true.”
“Không biết.” I don’t know.
“You crazy. Maybe American. American crazy. America number one.” He set his bowl down hard on the floor and left me then, without even a fleeting glance back, to wonder if I should even attempt to process either of his pronouncements, or any of mine.
• • •
Tonight my pool partner is Clive, of June’s, another ratty expat bar between here and the river, a few blocks away. He is another Brit, always barefoot, and, at fifty-something, fairly old as local gringos go. June is his Thai wife, a fading beauty, all business and hard as bone. Rumor has it that the taxi-girl trade at June’s is its main concern, not a sideline like it is here, and June the presumptive madam. Clive is also rumored to move a lot of drugs through the country by paying off the cops and the customs, and partnering with the right guys from Cholon, a less risky trade here so far than in Bangkok. Back in Manchester he worked the steel mills, and when they shut down went looking for something better than the dole.
“Shite work,” he told me the first time we talked. “Bollocks and shite not having any.”
“I imagine,” I said, though I couldn’t.
“Bloke I knew in Thailand sent me a postcard. Said the birds were everywhere. And easy. And it was warm. They had this thing called a sun.”
He found June in Chiang Mai, conducted a courtship of sorts, and married her in a little beachside ceremony.
“Was she one of the easy ones?”
He turned his head side to side two or three times, slowly, as far as it would go. “Nowt easy about her.”
“So why’d you marry her?”
He chalked up, bent down to take a couple of shots, and, after missing the last one, leaned back against the edge of the pool table, tossed his cue stick between his hands and looked up at the grotty ceiling. “The way she said no. Like she’d never been asked such a stupid question. I knew she was the girl for me.”
“What was the question?”
“I believe it was ‘Would you care to dance?’ ” He grasped the cue with both hands, waist-to-shoulder-width apart, and commenced a spin, his bare feet executing a remarkable pirouette.
“Your shot,” he said when he stopped revolving. “Though ya don’t have one.”
He was right. He’d snookered me good.
Clive seems to like me, despite my refusal to snooker him or our opponents when I don’t have a shot. It drove him crazy for a while, but now I get a little grudging respect for trying to hit something of my own, no matter how hopeless it may look or how many rails I’ll need to carom perfectly off of to get there. We are a good team, in any event, and win far more often than we lose. The taxi girls root for us, applaud when we pull out a victory in the final lap.
Tonight we are playing an American from Texas and a chubby Taiwanese businessman who are apparently involved in some sort of rare-monkey export concern that I don’t really care to think too much about. About what they do with the monkeys once they get them out of the country. The Chinese guy insists on yelping “Lucky!” every time I make a shot, no matter how simple or how complicated it might be, or how many shots I make in a row.
The Texan responds each time with a lively, drawled “Damn straight, podner.”
I would like more than anything to slap them both with one clean swipe.
Clive knows I go off my game when I let myself get rattled by the opposition. He keeps reminding me to focus on the table. “He’s blinkered, mate. And that Texas twat is just trying to wind you up. Ignore them.”
“I’m trying, but that is so fucking annoying. You notice they don’t do that to you.”
“Cor,” he says, “Flippin’ gormless. Keep your pecker up.”
“No pecker,” I say. “That’s the problem.” But I do get the gist.
“Shoot,” Clive says. I make two respectably difficult ones and then miss a dead-easy four ball in the side. Clive says, “Quit pissing around.”
“I made two.”
“My two,” he says.
Between shots, I lean sweaty and slick against the wall, and the temptation to unlock my knees, just give in and slide down to the floor, is almost overwhelming. In spite of the rain, it is at least ninety degrees in here, and the humidity might be even higher, if that’s even possible. I resist the inclination to perch on my haunches and instead focus on Clive’s feet as he pads around the table. No one has ever asked, at least within my earshot, why he never wears shoes, but I suspect it is because he can’t find any here that fit. His feet are not big, in the usual sense, but extremely wide. They look like hairless bear paws.