"Well, I…yes. Sure. That's why I asked."
She leans back some more and then straightens. For a moment he thinks she is not going to answer him. "Getting married is much more complicated than just sleeping with me."
"Why?" He thinks he knows some of the answers, but they have to talk about them sometime.
She breathes out sharply in exasperation and turns to him. "How far is it from me to you right now?"
This is not what he expects. "I don't know. Six, eight feet."
She throws the pencil onto the desk. "It's a million miles, Poke. And more than miles. It's what we believe, what we've done, who we are. What we need to do."
"If it's that far," he says, trying to make light of it, "we should get started early."
She claps her hands, just once, to get his full attention, and he feels his shoulders straighten. "Listen to me. You're a fine-looking man. You're sweet. You have a good heart. Any woman in her right mind would be happy you asked. I don't know, Poke. Maybe you should ask one of them." She gets up and walks to the sliding doors and then past them, the city lights framing her.
"That's silly, Rose. This isn't a raffle. I don't want anyone except you."
"And I suppose I want you." She stops in midstride and gives him both eyes in a gaze that seems to focus about four inches beneath his skin. "But that may not be enough."
Rafferty wants to stand, too, but he is afraid to. The connection between them is suddenly so tenuous that almost anything could sever it: a disturbance in the air, a beam of light coming in through the window. And, fragile as it is, it's a bridge he has to cross. "If that's what we have, it's what we have," he says. "And I'll do whatever it takes to make it enough."
"I know you'll try. But can you do it? I don't know. And I don't know whether I can either."
Rafferty starts to reply, but the words are carried away by a cold breeze that seems to blow straight through him. He can feel his heart contract. He has made a tremendous mistake. He's been so focused on Miaow that he hasn't taken the time to look at all of this from Rose's perspective.
Or even to recognize that he doesn't have the faintest idea what Rose's perspective is.
The room, with all its familiar features, suddenly feels like someplace he's never seen before. An unknown place in an unknown country.
His hands are in mid-air before he knows consciously what he is going to do. He brings his hands together, palm to palm in a gesture of prayer, to make a wai. He raises the wai face high to express respect and says, "Forgive me."
Keeping her eyes on his, she turns her head slightly to the left, as though she might be able to see him more clearly this way. She looks wary. After a moment she says, "I have forgiven you many times. What am I forgiving now?"
"I'm an American," he says. "As much as I love you, as much time as I've spent here, I'm still an American. And I've made the classic American mistake."
She doesn't even blink. "Which is?"
"To think that everybody is really just like us, even if they don't act that way. Or that they want to be like us, they would be like us if they could just shake off all the stuff that makes them seem different." He is choosing his words anxiously, picking one, discarding others, knowing how limited his Thai is, how unequal to this challenge. He hadn't worried about it until this moment, convinced that the most important part of the conversation would be heart-to-heart. But now he knows he doesn't understand Rose's heart either.
"If it's really a million miles from me to you," he says, "please help me to cross it."
Rose pulls her head back fractionally, less than an inch, as though she has been struck by something very soft. Her hands go into the pockets of her jeans, and she stands there, considering, while Rafferty holds his breath. Then she says, "I believe in ghosts, Poke. Do you?"
"I don't know."
"I believe that trees and stones have spirits living in them. I believe that people have light inside them, even the worst people. I believe that the lives we are living now lead us to our next life, and the lives we led before led us to this one. Do you believe in your next life, Poke?"
"I don't know how I'm going to get through my current one."
"No, you don't," she says. "And that's a problem for me. I have problems, lots of problems, that you can't see, Poke, and some of them are about you. I see things in your life and mine, and Miaow's, that can't just be fixed." Her hair has fallen forward, and she pulls her hands from her pockets, slips them beneath the long fall of hair, and throws it back over her shoulders, a gesture he has always found compellingly beautiful. "You see a problem and your response is to fix it, like it's a broken air conditioner, or forget about it. I can't do that. That's not how life works for me. The things we do, the things we don't do, they carry forward into other lives. Lives that come after this one. And they affect other people's lives, now and in the future."
Rafferty's head feels like it weighs fifty pounds. He lets it drop forward so his chin almost rests on his chest. "Give me an example."
"My life before I met you." Her voice is defiant.
Poke had expected this subject, but not in this context. "I know all about that."
"Do you? I don't think you do. You know about it the same way you'd know the story of a movie you watched." She raises her hands to her shoulders and brings them straight down, putting herself inside an invisible frame. "She danced, she went with men, she quit. End of story, except that you get to feel good about yourself by putting it all in the past, by saying it doesn't matter anymore. But it does matter."
"I know this is probably the wrong thing to say, but it doesn't matter to me."
"Do you understand the damage I did to myself? Do you know what I have to carry with me? That I danced up on that bar night after night with my rear end showing, so men could say, 'Send me Number 57,' like I was a sandwich? That I went to their hotels, no matter what they wanted-whether they wanted to make a pornographic video, or have me pee on them, or give it to me in the ass? I did that, Poke, I did all of it. I took money for it. I could have walked out of those rooms at any time, and I didn't."
She stops herself and draws two deep breaths. Her shoulders slump, and suddenly she is sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch. She picks up a pack of cigarettes, works one out, flicks the lighter, and looks at him over the flame.
"There's nothing I can do about that," Poke says, "except to love you and to understand why you did it."
"Yes," she says. She inhales hard, brightening the coal at the cigarette's tip enough to cast a red glow on her cheekbones. "You do understand that. I did it for my family."
"And that makes merit," Poke says. He has both hands on the edge of the table, leaning forward with enough force to whiten his knuckles. "That has to mean something. It has to…I don't know, cancel out some of…some of the other stuff."
"I'll carry it with me as long as I live," she says. "And beyond." The cigarette dangles loosely from her fingers, forgotten. "And I bring that damage into your life. Into Miaow's."
"We need you," he says.
"You think you do. And you think I'll be good for you and you'll be good for me, and that will fix me, just like adopting Miaow will fix her, just like you want to fix the boy. That's good of you, Poke. It's generous. It comes from a warm heart. But we're not air conditioners. We are who we are because of who we've been, in this life and in the past. It's too deep to tinker with, and you can't see that, even though to me it's a wall fifty feet high." She rediscovers the cigarette, puts it to her lips, and lowers it again without taking a drag. "And it will be here, that damage, in this house."
And then she's up again, walking away from him. "You think you understand about my family," she says without looking back. "You know I worked the bars because of my family. But if I did that for them, Poke, what else will I do?"