Martiya several times tried to suggest in the most oblique way possible to Farts-a-Lot that she would be willing, if he wanted, to move into her own hut and liberate him from the burden of hosting her. One evening, she brought out the bottle of tequila that she had lugged all the way from California at Joseph Atkinson's suggestion. Remembering that more than once she'd been convinced to do things under the influence of tequila that she otherwise wouldn't have done, she poured out a hefty shot for Farts-a-Lot. She even found a lime. Why was it no surprise how easily Farts-a-Lot got the hang of tequila shooters? After about four shots, Farts-a-Lot began to sing.
"I mean," Martiya said, "there's no reason I couldn't have my own hut, and save you so much trouble. I'm so grateful, but …"
Vinai was translating for her. Farts-a-Lot said something in a loud, slurry voice. "He says, ‘I love you,' " Vinai said.
"Really?"
"He says something else," Vinai said, and blushed.
Later that night, Farts-a-Lot vomited on Martiya's notebook.
That's when Martiya decided that the time for action had come. Nobody was going to make jokes in the graduate lounge about Dyalo van der Leun.
THREE. SUCH A YOUNG MAN
NOT LONG AFTER WE CAME BACK from Pak Nai, Rachel stayed late at school supervising a soccer match and I met her for dinner at a riverside restaurant we favored called Noi's Place. The owner of the restaurant, the eponymous Noi, had worked for many years in the Thai film industry as a set designer, and had bought the place on a whim during the glory days of the 1990s, before the Thai economy collapsed. He intended the restaurant chiefly as an amusement for his wife, who complained of boredom when he was away on business. But the devaluation of the baht had left Noi out of work, and nowadays he had little to do but moon around the restaurant he had bought as a diversion, waiting for the fax to ring. The walls of the restaurant, lined with oversized photos of Noi on the sets of various films, from Bombay to Bangkok to Los Angeles, testified to better times. There was a photo of Noi with Mel Gibson: Noi was nestled in the star's armpit; the two of them were smiling broadly at the camera.
Noi and I had bonded over our underemployment, and I asked him if he had found work yet.
"Maybe this week," he said. Noi had been saying this now for over a year. "I've been hearing big things."*
The restaurant was in the open air but protected from the sun in the
*In fact, what Noi said is that he had been "healing" big things, Noi, like most Thai, having some trouble with the distinction between the letter "l," as in "a little light lunch," and "r," as in "a really rough recipe." (Noi, who had learned the language from the lips of Hollywood stars, always spoke in English with us.) But given that I had only so much as to say a warbling "Sawatdee-kap" in Thai to receive a flood of congratulations from the locals on my mastery of the language equal in effusiveness and genuine pride only to the congratulations my own parents offered me when I mastered the potty; given that of the Thai language's five tones, I could perhaps produce two properly; and given that on being introduced to a revered and august, possibly enlightened, local Buddhist abbot, I accidentally employed a form of verbal address I later learned was appropriate only to dogs and pigs — given all that, I think that I will refrain, here and in the future, from mocking the complete inability that Noi shared with so many of Asia's teeming millions to distinguish between what are really two very similar liquid consonants. What's more, I hereby set down as a challenge to those who would so mock: go to your neighborhood Thai restaurant, your Siam Garden or your Bangkok Kitchen, and ask the waitress there to teach you to pronounce in Thai, "New silk does not burn, does it?" If you can repeat properly what the waitress tells you, a single sentence which to the untrained occidental ear sounds something like "Phaa mai mai mai mai," if the waitress does not laugh and smile and correct you two dozen times, then and only then will you have my permission to laugh gently at little Noi healing big things.
hot season and the rain in the monsoon by a high aluminum roof from which hung a bank of spinning ceiling fans. A hardwood patio overlooked the lethargic brown river, and on the far side of the river, there was an undeveloped lot overtaken by bamboo, palms, and banana trees, where a flock of Chinese cranes nested in the cool season. At night, Noi lit the restaurant with a hundred candles, which reflected on the muddy water. Noi's Place was the way we imagined that all of Chiang Mai would be when we first came.
The waitresses had just finished lighting the last of the candles when Rachel arrived, a little after sundown. The front of her white cotton dress was flecked with blood, and she was scowling.
"Little fucker had a nosebleed," Rachel said, before I could say anything.
"A nosebleed?"
"Yeah, a nosebleed. Nat kicked some big kid in the shins, got punched in the nose, saw the blood, and freaked. Two seconds later, the little creep is crying his eyes out and rubbing his snotty, bloody nose all over me. The kid thought he was going to die. Naturally, the whole school was locked up, I couldn't even get a towel, blood everywhere."
All year long, Rachel had come home from school complaining about Nat. We had a running debate over whether Nat was just a little immature for a six-year-old, as I grandly maintained, or whether Nat was plumb stupid, as Rachel argued. "You know, stupid people were once stupid kids," she said.
"Was Nat okay in the end?"
"Of course he was okay in the end. The little weirdo has a nosebleed once a week. Kids get nosebleeds all the time. Morris picks his nose too much and gets a nosebleed, he raises his hand, says ‘Miss Rachel, I go bathroom now, okay?' gets himself some toilet paper, and puts his head back. But every time Nat gets a nosebleed, the freakazoid thinks he's dying and starts howling."
I sympathized with Rachel on her day, then we sat in silence for a while, listening to the radio. You will find it explicated nowhere in the extensive anthropological literature dedicated to the Siamese people, but there is something about the pop music of the early 1980s which is particularly attractive to the Thai: that spring, the theme song from the long-forgotten film Arthur was playing on every radio in every bar, in rotation with the Bee Gee's greatest hits. "If you get caught between the moon and New York City," the voice on the radio sang, "The best that you can do — the best that you can do — is fall in love." So true.
"They want to know if I'm coming back next year at school," Rachel said.
"What did you tell them?"
"I told them I'd think about it and let them know. I'm not sure I can take another year of first grade."
"You don't have to teach first grade. I mean, couldn't you teach second grade? Or third grade, even?"
"I'm not sure I want to teach another year of anything in Thailand."
"I thought you liked the first grade."
"I want us to have a real life," Rachel said, in precisely the same tone she used when Nat threw an eraser at Morris. "I don't want to end up like them. I don't want us to end up one of those people who stay here so long they discover they can't go anywhere else."
We'd had variants on this conversation since coming home from Pak Nai. When I had told Rachel about Laura Walker and her lifelong desire for a comfortable home, Rachel had empathized profoundly. "Poor woman," Rachel said. Rachel was sure that she did not want to stay in Thailand forever; and she wondered how we would cope when we returned to the States. Now she began to wonder, as my dinner-table conversation came to consist of little but dead missionaries and anthropologists, whether we shared the same goals at all. Before I met Martiya and fell in with the Walkers, I thought we did. I hadn't imagined staying much longer in Thailand.