“The kid brother,” Lee says, and logs off. Secretaries will take care of the rest.
Off Soi 4, Sukhumvit, Bangkok, Monday, February 28, 2005
Lalita has the Internet café print a copy of McKay’s picture to take to the clairvoyant monk at Wat Tanorn, then logs off. A little overwhelmed by the events of the past few days, she slumps in her chair to think for a moment.
It was her sexual frigidity that was getting her the sack from the go-go bar, before McKay burst into her life. Customers had started to complain. Her technique, pre-McKay, had consisted of apologizing that she was menstruating, so would a hand job do for tonight? Usually she got away with it, counting on the customer’s guilt and pity, but some of the old hands had caught on to her and complained to the mamasan. The mamasan, a good Buddhist, had been kind in suggesting that Lalita was just not cut out for this type of work: Why not serve behind the bar? Lalita would have loved to work behind the bar, but there was the problem of her mother’s cataracts — she would be quite blind in three months if Lalita did not pay for the operation, not to mention her father’s heart condition and her younger brother’s boarding school fees. Girls who worked behind the bar made three hundred dollars a month, max. Girls who were good at selling their bodies made nearly a thousand dollars a month. Lalita wasn’t making anything like that, but not because she wasn’t attractive. She looked outstanding, everyone said so, and at the beginning men had almost lined up for her. Then word got around that she loathed sex, which was true. When she couldn’t avoid intercourse she would lay on the bed more or less inert and let him get on with it. Girls like her can make a man impotent, one of her customers had explained in exasperation.
“Listen,” the mamasan had said, “there’s one thing you can do. It only works for girls like you, because any man with sense can see you’re no natural to the Game, to say the least. So you find the best prospect you can, give him everything he wants from you, and allow yourself to fall in love with him so you don’t have to keep faking it. Nine times out of ten the faran will fall for you too and marry you or at least take care of you and your family for a few years, which is a lot better than selling your body in a bar.”
How to fall in love? She shared a room with three other girls, all from Lalita’s home village near Surin on the border with Cambodia. Together they spoke in a dialect of Khmer, which made things feel cozy and happy. The three others knew all about Lalita’s problem with sex, for they told each other everything. After her little chat with the mamasan, Lalita had gone home to her friends and burst into tears. It was so frustrating. If only she could open her legs and screw with exaggerated abandon like the others, she would be able to save her mother’s sight and her father’s life and her brother’s future in less than a year. Nong, her best friend, realized that a radical solution was called for.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Lalita replied. “You’re going to say that I should aim for one special guy and give him everything so he can’t live without me — but I don’t have a clue how to do that.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say at all,” Nong countered. She took a DVD out of her handbag and inserted it into the DVD machine they had all bought together. It was Japanese hard porn, very professionally produced with unusual camera angles. As Nong had guessed, Lalita had never seen hard porn before. Of course, Lalita knew what other women did for their clients from the general conversation, but she had never actually seen a woman in action like that, really working the john. It made her feel sick and she told Nong to turn it off. “No,” Nong said, “you’re going to watch it to the end.”
“Now what?” Lalita asked when the movie finally ended in an unconvincing crescendo of groans and moans, the girl’s face dripping with his goo.
“Now you’re gonna watch it and watch it and watch it, and you’re gonna make sure you get every move, and then you’re gonna figure out how to refine it because you’re much more sensitive than that whore in the movie and a lot smarter, so when you’ve got the idea you can easily do better than her, depending on the john’s personality. And then you’re gonna ask yourself how many tequilas you need to do that. And then, because no way you’re gonna be able to keep up that kind of performance night after night, you’re gonna—”
“Find the right john and lock him in,” Lalita supplied.
“Right,” said Nong.
So it all pointed to luck after all. For luck you need an expert. The monk at Wat Tanorn was from Surin; he spoke to her in her own Khmer dialect and liked to discuss the rice harvest and other agricultural matters.
“The sow under the house is pregnant,” she told him, “due in a week’s time.”
Phra Tanatika knew Lalita’s mother and father, both of whom were highly respected: poor but devout and dependable. Nobody wanted to see her mother go blind, or her father die, if it could be helped. In other words, he had to balance spiritual duty with community service. He tried to use his gift of clairvoyance wisely, in a way consistent with spiritual evolution. Lalita never told him she was a prostitute; she didn’t need to.
“I’m having trouble making ends meet but I do work in a field where I meet farang men quite a lot, and I’m wondering if astrologically this is a moment when I can expect to meet my Number One, or someone close to it,” Lalita explained.
“Tell me again your date and time of birth?”
In Thailand everyone uses the Chinese horoscope, with some Hindu flourishes. Lalita was born in the year of the metal rabbit. This meant that although sensitive, smart, and more than a little inclined to freak out when life got tough, she nevertheless had about her a persistence, even a stubbornness, which no one ever saw except in extremis Then there was the hour of her birth, which in the young was at least as important as the year. Phra Tanatika was impressed with her dragon rising. It was tremendously well aspected at this moment and he told her so. But when she looked up at him, there was something else in her eyes, something that made him very sad.
“This isn’t easy for you, is it?”
“No,” Lalita admitted.
“You have to be careful. You might not know it, but at this moment you wield extraordinary power, especially over men. And as we know, the world is balanced by duality. The other side of the coin is that you will have to give something from your heart.”
“Enthusiasm?”
“More than that,” the monk said, still feeling slightly depressed, for he was beginning to get serious signals concerning her future. “Look, I’ll give it to you straight. The man you are going to meet in the next few days is, well, someone who can help you much much more than you think, but the only way to really keep him is to give him something special.”
“What’s that?”
“You already know.”
The monk, divining with little effort that Lalita was one of those pure souls who tend to take sexual love far more seriously than is healthy, decided to tell her about an interesting recent event. Soon after his alms round a few mornings before, when he had been eating the food his flock had prepared for him, he saw the astral body of Old Tou, whom he knew to be on his deathbed. Old Tou had led an averagely debauched life — a great womanizer in his youth, an alcoholic as he grew older, just another lost, self-centered soul. Phra Tanatika had watched in fascination while Old Tou’s astral body entered the body of a puppy who had just been born to one of the temple dogs. The puppy didn’t have a name yet, so Phra Tanatika called him “Tou.”
“We copulate because karma forces us to,” the Phra explained with a smile. “Like Old Tou, everyone needs a body to inhabit — that’s all it amounts to. Humans make love for exactly the same reason dogs do.”