One evening, when she is in a somewhat hostile mood toward men (a spot of trouble at the sauna bath, which drew a reprimand from Samson Yip), she breaks her own rule and confronts him with the most glaring of his contradictions so far:
“Mitch, just level with Chanya for a minute. Your father was a senator, or he left you all when you were young, or he died in a traffic pileup when you were twelve?”
There’s no doubting the speed of his mind: “It’s all true. The man I call my father, the senator, was actually my stepfather, who my mother married after Dad deserted. Dad did abandon us when we were all young, and he did die in a traffic pileup when I was twelve-but none of us had seen him for more than eight years by that time.”
“And your mom: a Baptist from Texas or a Catholic from Chicago?”
“Mom? Well, she was both. She was born a Catholic in Chicago, but when she married the senator she converted. That was the one stipulation he made-after all, he was giving her one big leg up the social ladder by marrying her.”
“And your beloved sister Alice?”
A cloud passes quickly over Turner’s face as he changes the subject. “Want to know about my childhood, really? It was hell, as simple as that. Hell as in the kind of deliberate, planned, petty-minded torture of a concentration camp. Why have you brought this up? You know it upsets me.”
“Okay, okay. Why you study Japanese?”
The question brings another furrow to his brow. He does not answer for quite some time. She thinks he is wrestling with another of his astonishing and very Western demons and waits in anticipation. Finally he says it: “An old World War II vet introduced me to Japanese pornography.” She gasps in astonishment. He explains.
Then as now the Japs were way in advance of the West in this important industry, and by the age of thirteen, thanks to the vet, Mitch Turner was already a connoisseur of the genre. He and his best buddy kept a virtual library of mail-order magazines from all over the world. It took Mitch and his pal a month of intense analytical research to confirm empirically that Japanese quality control won the day, in porn as in so many other industries. You could practically feel the quality of the girls’ flesh, almost hear the moans, just by looking at the magazines. When they got into video, the difference was even more obvious. With their very artistic tattoos, the highly inventive situations so far in advance of the women-in-school-uniform cliché of the Western model, the sheer variety of the S &M, you could see why the Jap economy was doing so well. Turner saw futon after futon occupied by naked and artfully tattooed young women, all the way from Fukuoka to Sapporo.
“So why you join the-ah-thing you joined, the Company?”
Mitch Turner suddenly grins: “They wanted spies who were fluent in Japanese. At the time there was concern the Japs were stealing American industrial secrets in a government-sponsored program. And I’m a genius at passing exams, so I got through the recruitment stuff no problem.” A condescending smile: “I have a photographic memory and an IQ of a hundred sixty-five-genius level.”
“So you can be anyone you want?” She is aware how provocative this question might be and deliberately locks eyes with him, in a kind of challenge. She watches his confusion carefully, until he seems to decide on a new direction. With a thoroughly convincing beam: “You know, I don’t think I could live without you, now that I’ve found you. You’re the only woman in the world who has ever understood me.”
But the alcohol is wearing off, Mitch Turner’s metamorphosis is going into reverse, and soon the guilt and the responsibility will claim him all over again. Chanya thinks there is time for one last innocent question: “So you screwed your brains out while you were in Japan?”
Too late, the chemical reaction has reversed itself, the impermeable Outer Layer is creeping over him like rust, protecting that bizarre inner core from further oxidation. “No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
A shrug in which there is more than a little contempt all of a sudden, even revulsion. “There are better things to do during your short time on earth, Chanya. I hope you’ll see that someday. I do wish you would read that Bible I gave you. How much do I owe you for today’s massage?”
She has grown used to it. At the end of every session, even when they have spent the night together, he will suddenly pretend that he hired her for a simple no-sex massage and insist on paying her whatever she asks. She has learned to play up.
“For the massage? Five hundred dollars.” When he has paid up in crisp new bills, which he must get from the bank every time especially for her, she says: “When will I see you again?”
A somber shake of the head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure we should continue with this. It’s wrong. It’s not good for either of us, and I really do need to think about my responsibility to you, about what I’m doing to your soul. I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again for a while.”
She agrees, making the appropriate expression of regretful acceptance. She knows he’ll call again in a day or so, but does he? How lost between two minds is he?
This is a question she will not be able to answer until it is way too late. She is all alone in a big rough country, after all, and as tough as she is, there are times when a big lonely hole opens in her mind, too. Once, not thinking, she rang him at his office to tell him about that episode from The Simpsons when Marge got breast implants. She had his number because he’d made a point of giving her his business card when he was drunk. (“I want you to call me every hour on the hour, I want to hear your voice, I want to talk dirty with you for hours and hours”: of course she knew better than to use it when he was at work and sober.) Now, suddenly cognizant of what she has done, she holds her breath, not sure how he’ll react. Maybe she’s gone too far and he’ll break it off for real this time? A long pause, then: “Marge didn’t mean to get implants-it was a screwup at the hospital.” A pause. “I’ll take you to lunch. Where do you want to go?”
“Jake’s Chili Bowl?”
“That’s black, not a good idea.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.”
“Tell you what. Dress up for business, and I’ll take you to Hawk and Dove, up on the Hill. I’ll tell everyone you’re part of the Thai ecology delegation. They’re here for two weeks to try to stop Americans from buying up huge chunks of their nature reserves. Ad lib if anyone comes up to talk to us.”