“Spit it out.”
“One of the bedrooms — the air-conditioned one — faces the Prime Minister’s house. Some afternoons you can see him on his putting green. At night, around this time, you can get a look at him through the window. While you’re in the saddle, you know? Strictly for laughs. But since you’re interested in Asian affairs—”
“I think I saw him,” Shuck said later at the Pavilion where we had agreed to meet for a drink. “He was talking to a guy with a goatee and a shirt like yours. That takes the cake,” he said, smiling to himself. “But the hooker kept telling me to hurry up. Is that the usual thing? God, it put me off.”
“It’s a popular room,” I said.
“Vientiane,” said Shuck, using the monotone of reminiscence. “That’s a wide-open place. Lu-Lu’s, The White Rose. First-class hookers. They do tricks with cigarettes. ‘Hey, Joe, you wanna see me smoke?’ I had the strangest experience with a broad there — at least I thought it was a broad.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No, but that’s not the whole story,” said Shuck.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” said Shuck. “I’m not finished.”
“I’ve heard it before.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“About the bare-assed waitresses in The White Rose in Vientiane, and the girl that was really a feller, and the nympho you used to know? I’ve heard it before. Now, if you’ll pipe down and excuse me—”
“Jack,” said Shuck, “sit yourself down. I’ve got some good news for you.” Buzz, buzz.
10
SEX I HAD SEEN as a form of exalted impatience, trembling as near to hilarity as to despair — just like love — but so swift, and unlike love, it happily avoided both; that was a relief, grace after risk. And the strangest part of the sex wish: you wore all of it on your face. This assumption had been the basis of my whole enterprise. Paradise Gardens, Shuck’s good news, made me change my mind about this.
“Here she comes,” I said, and Ganapaty scrambled to his feet. I was standing in bright sunshine at the end of the cinder drive by his sentry box, squinting down Adam Road where, at the junction, the shiny bus had stopped at the lights. I folded my arms. The first fellers were arriving. Behind me, glittering, was Paradise Gardens, known in District Ten as a private hotel.
It was a new three-story building, long and narrow, white stucco trimmed with blue, and with a blue square balcony and a roaring air conditioner attached to every room. The usual high whorehouse fence, this one strung with morning-glories and supporting a hedge of Pong-Pong trees, concealed it from Dr. B. K. Lim’s bungalow on one side and a row of semidetached houses (each with a barbed-wire fence and a starved whimpering guard dog) on Jalan Kembang Melati on the other side. On our cool lawn there were mimosas and jasmine and the splendid upright fans of three mature traveler’s palms. In the secluded patio out back we had a small swimming pool.
The idea of Paradise Gardens was Shuck’s, or perhaps that of the United States Army, who employed him and now me. The design was my own; I had supervised the construction. The catering contract was Hing’s, and the glass-fronted shops in the arcade — the entire ground floor — were run by Hing’s relations: a tailor (I was wearing one of his white linen suits that first day), a photographer, a curio seller (elongated Balinese carvings, wayang puppets, and a selection of Chinese bronzes ingeniously faked in Taiwan), a druggist with a RUBBER GOODS sign taped to his window, a barber, and a news agent. My orders had been to design a place that a guest — Shuck told me ours would be GIs when it was done — would check into and stay for five days without having to leave the grounds. It was an early version of the tropical tourist hotel which, more than a place to sleep, contains the country, a matter of size, food, decor, and entertainment. I had a vision of luxury hotels underpinning the rarest and most exotic features of a people’s culture, the arts and crafts surviving in the Hilton long after they had ceased to be practiced in the villages. Tourism’s demand for atmosphere and authentic folklore would force the hotel to be the country. So I made it happen. We had Malay and Chinese dances every night, and traditional food, and we were scrupulous about observing festivals. It took two days for our Mr. Loy to cook a duck; outside Paradise Gardens the Chinese ate hamburgers standing up at lunch counters or in their parked cars at the A & W drive-in. Once a week we put on a mock wedding in the Malay style. It had been years since anyone had seen something like that in Singapore.
“The bus coming,” said Ganapaty.
“She’s full up,” I said.
Ganapaty came to attention, a crooked derelict figure with a beautiful white caste mark, a finger’s width of ashes between his eyes. It pleased me that at Paradise Gardens I was able to employ everyone I owed a favor to: Yusof tended the big bar, Karim the smaller one; the room Shuck called “your theaterette” was run by Henry Chow, a blue-movie projectionist who had been out of work since the raids; Mr. Khoo, my old boatman, I employed as a mechanic, Gopi picked up the mail — though the post office was only across the street, his limp made what I intended as a sinecure for him a tedious and exhausting job. And the girls; the girls were no problem — fruit flies from Anson Road, floaters and athletes from the shut-down massage parlors, the sweet dozen from Dunroamin, and Betty from Muscat Lane — all my quick and limber daughters.
Shuck wanted to see their papers: “We’re not taking any chances.” He made me fire three who had been born in China, one with a sore on her nose, and a Javanese girl, a willowy fellatrix with gold teeth, reputedly a mistress of the late Bung Sukarno.
Every five days, as on that first day, the bus swayed into the driveway and I could see the young faces at the green-tinted windows. I waved. They did not wave back. They stared. I learned that unimpatient stare. It was a look of pure exhaustion focusing on the immediate, fastening to it, not glancing beyond it. It was new to me. Once, I had been able to spot a likely client thirty yards off by the way he watched girls pass him, the face of a feller running a temperature wearing helpless lechery on his kisser; with that telling restive alertness as, turning around with tensed arms and eager hands, sipping air through the crack of a smile starting to be hearty, he looks as if he is going to say something out loud. Each fidget was worth ten dollars. But the faces of the boys on the buses that deposited them for what Shuck called “your R and R” were expressionless and kept that bombed uncritical stare until they boarded the same bus five days later. The boys sat well back in their seats; they didn’t hitch forward like tourists, and they didn’t chatter.
I expected uniforms the first day. Shuck hadn’t mentioned that they would be wearing Hawaiian shirts, but here they were getting off the bus with crew cuts, bright shirts, the white socks that give every American away, and staring with tanned sleepy faces.
“Jack Flowers,” I said, stepping forward. “Glad you could make it, fellers.”
“It’s sure as hell—” a feller began slowly.
“Excuse me, sir,” another butted in. “Are those girls—”
“The girls,” I said, raising my voice, “are right over there and dying to get acquainted!”
Florence, May, Soo-chin, Annapurna, and nutcracker Betty, hearing me, responded by ambling into the sunlight on the arcade’s verandah. The other girls moved behind them. The fellers carried their duffel bags and handgrips over to the verandah and dropped them, and almost shyly walked over to the girls and began pairing off.