“Not, um, too bad,” he said, still kicking his leg. “Say, I really think we must—”
“Jack,” said Betty.
“Yoh?”
“He got one this big!” She measured eight inches with her hands. It was a vulgar gesture — the feller winced — but her hands were so small and white, the bones so delicate, they made it graceful, turning the coarseness into a dancer’s movement. Only her open mouth betrayed the vulgarity. I saw a tattoo on her arm and reached over to touch it.
“That’s pretty,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
“No,” she said. She covered it.
The feller coughed, stood up, and started for the door.
“See you next time,” said Mr. Sim.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Don’t mention. Bye-bye, mister,” he called to the feller. Then Mr. Sim drew me aside. “You taking girls out to ships, some people they don’t like this but I say forget it. Everybody know you a good fella and I say Jack my friend. No trouble from Jack. Two hand clap, one hand no clap. But you listen. You don’t pay kopi-money. You don’t start up a house, or—” He rubbed his nose with the knuckles of his fist and looked at the floor, saying softly, “Chinese fella sometime very awkward.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
“Would it be safe to take a taxi?” the feller asked when we got to the corner of Sultana Street.
“Oh, sure,” I said, and flagged one down.
On the way to the pier I said, “It’s rather late for intros, but anyway. My name’s Jack Flowers — what’s yours?”
“Milton,” he said quickly. “George Milton. If you’re ever in Philadelphia it’d be swell to see you. I wish I had one of my business cards to give you, but I’m fresh out.”
“That’s all right,” I said. He was lying about his name, which on the I.D. card in his wallet was W. M. Griswold; and his address was in Baltimore. It might have been an innocent lie, but it hurt my feelings: he didn’t want to know me. I had rescued him, and now he was going away.
“The first thing I’m going to do when I get down to my cabin is brush my teeth,” he said. The taxi stopped.
“I don’t blame you, George,” I said.
“Will you take twenty bucks?”
“Now?” I said. “Yes.”
“Be good,” he said, handing it over.
It was still early and I was within walking distance of the seafront bars. I strolled along the pier, stepping carefully so I wouldn’t get my shoes dirty on the greasy rope that lay in coils between the parked cars and taxis. At Prince Edward Road, near the bus depot, two fellers were standing under a streetlamp trying to read what looked like a guidebook. They were certainly tourists, and probably from Griswold’s liner; both wore the kind of broad-brimmed hat strangers imagine to be required headgear in the tropics. It gave them away instantly: no one in Singapore wore a hat, except the Chinese, to funerals.
I walked over to them and stopped, rattling coins in my pocket with my fist and negligently whistling, as if waiting for a bus. Their new shoes confirmed they were strangers. I could tell a person’s nationality by his shoes. Their half-inch soles said they were Americans.
“Kinda hot.”
They turned and enthusiastically agreed. Then they asked their reckless question in a mild way. I nodded, I whistled, I shook my jingling coins; I was the feller they wanted.
It was so easy I could not stop. I hustled at a dead run until the streets were empty and the bars closed. New to the enterprise, I had the beginner’s stamina. It wasn’t the money that drove me; I can’t call it holy charity, but it was as close to a Christian act as that sort of friendly commerce could be, keeping those already astray happy and from harm, within caution’s limits. I raided my humanity to console them with reminders of safety, while reminding myself of the dangers. I was dealing with the very innocent, blind men holding helpless sticks; their passions were guesses. It especially wounded me that Griswold had lied about his name: in my conscientious shepherding I believed I was doing him, and everyone, a favor.
Guiding rather than urging, I paid close attention to a feller’s need and was protective, adaptable, and well-known for being discreet. In those days it mattered, and though I acted this way out of kindness, not to impress anyone as a smoothie, it won me customers. There were so many then, and so grateful. I shouldn’t remember Griswold among them, for he was so typical as to be unmemorable — something about the very desire for sex or the illicit made a feller anonymous without trying. But Griswold had lied; the lie marked him and identified his otherwise nameless face and brought back that evening. His distrust made me relax my normally cautious discretion, and for years afterward if a feller said he was from Baltimore I replied, “Know a feller named Griswold there?” Some knew him, or said they did, and one night a feller said, “Yes, we were great friends. That was such a damned shame, wasn’t it?” And I never mentioned him again, this man who had refused my grace.
6
THE HOUSE on Muscat Lane was one of several in Singapore that did business in the old way. Any port is bound to cater to the sexually famished, but the age and wealth of a city, until recently, could be determined by how central the brothels were. Once, in old and great cities, they were always convenient, off shady boulevards, a stone’s throw from the state house; in the postwar boom they went suburban to avoid politicians and high rents; then they moved back to the center — Madam Lum’s place was near a supermarket — and it was no longer possible to tell from their location the city’s age, though prosperity could still be measured by the number of whores in a place: the poorest and most primitive, having none, made do with forced labor, blackmail, or unsatisfying casual arrangements in ditches and alleyways and in the rear seats of cars.
Singapore was very old then, not in years but in attitude and design because of the way the immigrants had transplanted and continued their Chinese cities, duplicating Foochow in one district, Fukien in another. As a feller who had seen Naples and Palermo duplicated down to building styles, hawkers’ cries, gangster practices, and patron saints in the North End of Boston, I understood that traditional instinct to preserve. The completely Chinese flavor of vice in Singapore made it attractive to a curious outsider, at the same time releasing him from guilt and doubt, for its queer differences (Joyce Li-ho had the tattoo of a panther leaping up her inner thigh) made it a respectable diversion, like the erotic art anthropologists solemnly photograph, maharani and maharajah depicted as fellatrix and bugger on the Indian temple. The sequence of activities in a Chinese brothel parodied Oriental hospitality: the warm welcome — the host bowing from the waist — the smoke, the chat, the cold towel, then the girl — usually the feller chose from one in a parade; money changed hands in the bedroom when the feller was naked and excited; then the stunt itself, and afterward, a hot towel and a glass of cold tea on the verandah while some old amahs ironed bedsheets and yapped beyond the rail.
It was the Chinese host’s puritanism, his ability to make pleasure into a ritual, that added so much enjoyable delay to it. And though the Chinese customers with a harelike speed treated the whole affair with no more concern than we would in popping out for a quick hamburger, the fellers I took along, mainly gawking travelers bent on carrying away an armload of souvenirs, welcomed the chance to enter, and more than enter — participate — in a cultural secret, to be alone with the exotic Oriental girl in a ceremonial state of undress, and later to have that unusual act of love to report upon. It was much appreciated because it was perfect candor, private discovery, the enactment of the white bachelor’s fantasy, the next best thing to marrying a sweet obedient Chinese girl. I could provide, without danger, the ultimate souvenir: the experience, in the flesh, of fantasy.