"I know what I said when you asked me before," Rose says, and now her eyes are on his. "I remember every word I said. I've remembered it a thousand times. I've walked to work, I've shopped for dinner, I've cleaned apartments, I've cooked food remembering what I said, trying to find the place where I should have said something that wasn't about me, about my family, my life, my problems, me, me, me. I was terrible to you. If I'd just stopped talking for one minute, if I'd just stopped being frightened that I'd eventually get hurt, I would have said yes."
"Ahh, Rose," Rafferty says.
"I told you we were a million miles apart."
"We were."
"The only way you could be a million miles from me," Rose says, "would be if I were a million miles from my own heart." Her eyes go to the filters in his hands. "Just show it to me. Put those things down and show it to me."
"Right. Show it to you." He sets the lipsticked filters on the counter, watching his hands from a distance, as through a thick pane of glass. Feels the cool cloth of the robe against the back of his hand as he reaches into his pocket, feels the plush of the box under his fingertips, but all he sees is Rose, although he doesn't even know when he looked over at her, and then his hand comes into the bottom of the picture with the box in it, and she holds his eyes with her own as her long, dark fingers take the box and close around it.
"It's going to be beautiful," she says without looking down.
"It has to be," he says. "It's for you."
She puts her other hand over the box, cupping it between her palms. "Everybody wanted to marry you," she says. "Every girl in the bar. They looked at you and they saw a house and a passport and money for life. And so did I."
"Most of my competition was a hundred pounds overweight."
"Stop it. Just once, let someone say something nice about you."
"Sorry. Thanks." He can barely hear his own voice.
"But those girls didn't love you," Rose says. "I didn't love you either. I didn't even want to love you. I didn't want to tell myself I loved you if what I really loved was the house and the passport. I stopped working because of you, did you know that? I told myself I stopped for me, but I didn't. And after I stopped, I talked myself out of you a hundred times. Sometimes my heart hides from me. It took everything, Poke. It took a long time, it took months of being with you, it took Miaow, even, seeing the way you are with Miaow, but I love you."
"And I love you," he says helplessly. The words hang in the air with a kind of phantom shimmer, a tossed handful of glitter. Rose looks at him in a way that makes him feel like a developing Polaroid: Out of the infinite potential of nothing comes a specific human face, with all its weaknesses and limitations. When she has his face in focus, or committed to memory, or transformed into what she wanted to see, or whatever she was doing, she looks down at the box and opens it.
The ring has three stones-a topaz, a sapphire, and a ruby, none of them very large. "The sapphire is your birthstone," Rafferty says. "The ruby is mine." It sounds puerile and silly as he says it. "The topaz was my guess at Miaow. Now we can change it, make it a ruby and two sapphires."
"The family," Rose says. "In a ring." She tilts the stones toward him. "Miaow between you and me."
"I guess," Rafferty says, wondering why he never saw that.
"Poor baby," she says for the second time, but her tone is very different. "You want a family so badly."
"I want to put a fence around us," Rafferty says. "Something to hold us together."
Rose says, "We're not going to fall apart. I won't let us." Her face is very grave. She raises the box to him, and he takes it and removes the ring and wraps the warm smoothness of her left hand in his, and slips the ring onto her finger. It sticks at the knuckle, and he pushes at it, and she starts to laugh and chokes it off, and then raises her finger to his mouth so he can wet the knuckle with his tongue. The ring glides over her knuckle. His arms go around her, and she fits herself to him, pressing the length of her body against his. Then she laughs. "Peachy is going to be so happy," she says.
"Peachy can wait," he says. "I want to make love with you when you're wearing the ring." He starts to lead her to the bedroom. "And only the ring."
"Make the coffee first," she says. "I think we're going to need it."
"Right." Back at the counter, he glances down at the filters with her red lip prints on them, then takes the two that are still stuck together and drops them both into the basket. He upends the grinder into them.
"What's wrong with the ones I got for you?" she asks.
"Nothing at all," he says, feeling as though he will rise into the air, lift off, float inches above the floor. "I'll eat them later."
They are halfway across the living room, sipping coffee, hands clasped, when someone begins to hammer on the door.
8
Maybe a Problem
Doesn't anybody have a goddamned wristwatch?" Rafferty stands there in a robe that has never felt pinker, holding the door open a couple of inches and looking at the two uniformed Bangkok policemen standing in the hallway. "Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?"
"We know exactly what time it is," someone says in American English. The cops part to reveal a thin, youngish man in a black suit. He steps between the policemen as though he expects them to leap out of his way, and they almost do. Behind the three of them, Rafferty is startled to see Fon, looking as though she's just learned she has an hour to live.
"Open the door, sir," the man in the suit says. He has short-cropped, receding dark hair with a part as sharp as a scar, a narrow face, and lips thin enough to slice paper. Rimless glasses, clinically clean, perch on a prominent nose. "Oh, sure," Rafferty says. "Maybe you'd like a piece of cake, too." Rose has fled to the bedroom, clutching the towel.
"Mr. Rafferty," says the man in the suit. "This is not a productive attitude. We need to talk to you and Miss… um, Puchan… Pun- changthong." After mangling the pronunciation of Rose's name, he pushes the door open another few inches before Rafferty gets a bare foot against it. "Now," he says.
"Who the hell are you supposed to be?"
The man reaches into the inside pocket of his suit coat, pulls out a black wallet, flips it open, and then closes it and returns it to the pocket. He takes a step forward and runs into Rafferty's hand, fingers outspread, in the center of his chest.
The man does not look down. "Remove your hand, sir."
"Don't call me 'sir' unless you mean it," Rafferty says. "And do that cute little wallet flip again. You're not on CSI, and you didn't get a close-up."
"The hand," the man says. His eyes have not left Rafferty's.
"The wallet," Rafferty says, "or you'll be looking at the outside of the door again. How are you, Fon?"
"Not good," Fon says.
"Sorry to hear it." To the American he says, "What about it? We need a retake on the wallet."
"I can't get to it," the man says through his teeth, "with your hand on my chest."
"Back up," Rafferty says. "So I can close the door if it's a Boy Scout merit badge."
"We're coming in," says one of the cops. He loses some face by looking to the American for approval.
Rafferty doesn't even glance at him. "Maybe, maybe not. Let's see it."
Stiff-faced, the American brings out the wallet again and lets it hang open. A silvery shield with a star in the center reads U.S. SECRET SERVICE.
"I don't know how to break this to you," Rafferty says, "but we're in Thailand."
"That's why these gentlemen are with me," the American says.