“You’re pretty.”
She stroked her face with her fingertips. “What country?”
“America.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He felt reckless enough, no one was looking — who cared in this place? He was as anonymous here as he’d once been in the waiting room of the railway station. He winced at his memory of it.
But, drunk, with his drunken sense of sliding slowly out of control, he felt that he was at the edge of a dark pit, a wide bowl of night, about to tumble in face-first. When he leaned to pat the girl’s knee she recoiled again. That reaction made him hesitate and sobered him a little.
He drew back and said, “I have to go home.”
She smiled. She said, “Everybody always go home,” and as he left, staggering into the noise and fumes of the street, Osier reflected on the minimalism of her barroom wisdom.
Back at the hotel, alone with his guilt, he felt he ought to call Joyce. His cell phone was not in his pocket. The girl had stolen it. He deserved the anguish he felt. He used his room phone to call the emergency number to cancel his cell phone account. He was put on hold. Music played. He thought, I am off my head. He called his own number. After a few rings, a smoky voice.
“Hello.”
“Who’s that?”
He heard smoky laughter but no reply.
“You have my cell phone. I need it.”
“I give you tomorrow.”
“When? Where?”
She spoke the name of a bar, she repeated the street, but even so, writing it down, Osier was not sure he’d heard the name correctly. Free had to be three. What was nigh?
The next day was Saturday. Osier hailed a taxi after lunch and read the scribble he had written. The driver said, “I know, I know,” but he didn’t know. They discovered the soi in Sukhumvit, but he guessed at the bar — Siamese Nights.
From the outside, it was indistinguishable from six other bars nearby: neon sign, opaque window, strings of beads hanging at the entrance. But inside it was large, vault-like, and quiet, gong music playing softly, like the melody in a children’s toy. Out of the back window he could see a canal, and plump lotuses in it, floating on their outflung petals, light falling across the water. He was looking into a Bangkok that was enclosed and placid and pretty.
She wasn’t there; hardly anyone was in the bar. He sat in the mildewed air of midafternoon and drank lemonade — it was too early for alcohol. Besides, a beer would tire him, and this being a Saturday, he planned to spend the rest of the afternoon walking — not to the railway station or the big flea market, but simply to exhaust himself in the heat — then an early dinner and bed.
At a quarter past three he saw her. She entered the bar and without hesitating walked straight to him. He was reminded of the directness of the man-woman at the railway station who’d confronted him.
He was relieved to find her manner the same as the previous evening: assured, casual, undemanding, as though they knew each other fairly well. He was glad the place was dark. He’d thought of taking the cell phone and leaving, but now he felt like lingering. He loved her piercing eyes, her thick hair, her height — even sitting down she was almost his height, their eyes level. She was not a sprite, not kittenish like the other girls, but a cat-like presence.
“Lemonade,” she said to the waitress.
A shaft of sunlight slanted through some boards near where they sat, and he could see through that crack the brightness of water, the glittering canal, the floating flowers, the bubbly stagnation shimmering in the hot afternoon.
“This is nice.”
“Everything nice for you!”
She remembered that he’d said she was nice, but what he wanted to say was that he was less lonely. Her accurate memory made her seem intelligent, impatient with small talk.
“I meant it’s quiet.”
“Other bar too noisy. Too many people. Crazy people. Farang ba-ba boh-boh. This better.”
“What’s your name?”
“I Song. What you name?”
“Boyd.”
“Boy,” she said.
He smiled. “That’s right.”
The gong music seemed to slip through him and beat like a pulse, relaxing him. A small boy in a red shirt approached, selling single flowers. Osier bought one for Song, and he felt as he had on his best night at the railway station — serene, calmed, triumphant. The sunlight glancing from the klong glimmered in a bright puddle on the ceiling. He thought, This is all wrong, but this is bliss.
“I’m happy.”
“Why not? Life too short.”
She’d heard that from someone, another farang, and yet it pained him to hear it. It was true. He felt absurdly tearful, thankful to her for saying that.
And now he remembered himself at the railway station, mourning, seeing the travelers leaving on life-altering journeys while he sat sketching their faces, as though grieving for them. He had believed his waiting was a death watch for them, but no, he was grieving for himself, as he waited for retirement. I don’t want to go, he thought, and glancing across at Song, he was creased by a pang, something deeper than hunger, like the foretaste of starvation.
“You’re so young,” he said, and heard fear in his voice.
“Khap khun ka. Thank you. Look young, but not!”
“How old?”
“I hate this question.”
Impressed by her rebuff, he said, “Me too. Any children?”
She laughed and tapped his arm as if gratefully, and said, “No children.”
“None for me either.”
“We same!”
Bar talk, flirty, facetious, but a little more than that, with the revelations of foolery, Song emerging as clever and gentle and self-mocking.
Then Osier remembered. “My cell phone,” he said. “Where is it?”
Song took the phone out of her bag but she didn’t hand it over. She said, “You give me?”
“Why?”
And because he’d hesitated, she gave it to him.
But because she gave it to him so quickly, he said, “Why do you want it?”
“So I can talk you.”
He loved that. He tapped her arm as she had tapped his. He said, “Yes. I’ll get you one. Let’s go.”
He still sat. He didn’t want to leave this shadowy place, Siamese Nights, the coolness of it, the girls huddled on the banquette, laughing, their knees together, the one other farang at the bar shaking dice onto the counter out of a cup and talking to the bartender. The watery light from the klong outside dappling the ceiling gave its fishbowl completeness an illusion of life’s essence.
This is who I am, this is where I belong, this is a place where I can tell the truth. Guessing that Larry and Fred were consoled by places like these, he understood them better. He told himself that he had no wish to possess Song, but only to ease his famished soul by being with her, to relieve his gloom.
But this was peaceful. He thought, I have someone I can tell this to. He told her. She listened with bright eyes, saying nothing, not judging him, her skin so lovely he wanted to stroke her like a cat.
And when at last they were on their way to the cell phone shop, in the traffic and the heat, he wished he were back in Siamese Nights, sitting with Song, looking over her pale shoulder at the canal beyond the back window. Song had sat placidly with her hands on her lap. Osier liked her size, not one of those tiny bird-boned Thai sprites, but rather tall, angular, with a deep laugh, and a presence he hadn’t associated with the Thais he knew. Song was a woman confident in repose, sweet without being submissive, with the melancholy he’d first seen that made him think of a fallen angel.
He said, “Why don’t you have a phone?”