“They cancel. I no pay.”
The clerks in the shop were so helpful, Osier let them explain the calling plans, though he knew most of the details by heart. He chose the simplest one, a six-month plan, renewable, inexpensive. Song picked out a red phone, and Osier signed the agreement.
Side by side in the taxi, he called her number.
“Hello, Boy.”
“Hello, Song.”
“You happy?”
“I’m happy.” But he caught a glimpse of himself in the taxi’s rearview mirror and turned away from that idiot face.
“Who are you calling?” he asked, seeing her tapping numbers into the phone.
“Mudda,” and, hearing a voice, she smiled and broke into Thai. Osier heard gleeful croaking from the other end and was content.
For the next few days they called each other. He did so just to hear her voice. He didn’t want to think why she called him, but she seemed happy to hear him. He remembered how, when he’d seen her in a group of five or six girls in a bar, Song had seemed the most feminine, the most mature, the softer, the more self-possessed, the only one not reaching out, not trying to catch his eye. She had not been looking at him at all; she’d been looking at the other girls posing for him, smiling slightly, and her narrow smile made her seem strong. She was not a coquette.
Her looking away had allowed him to study her body, which was fleshier than the others’, heavy-breasted. Song sat straight, her legs crossed, and he saw that her makeup had been more carefully applied. He felt a connection: she was the first real woman he’d seen since arriving in Bangkok, and he felt as he had when he’d met Joyce long ago, a pang of desire that was like a seam of light warming his body.
In a reflex of self-consciousness he called Joyce.
“I miss you,” she said.
Burdened by her saying that, with a catch in his throat, he could not reply at once.
He said, “I miss you too,” and wondered if she heard the strain in his voice. They talked a little more, about some trees that needed to be trimmed in the yard, and then he said he had to go to a meeting.
Joyce said, “Please don’t be angry. I know how busy you are.”
Too confused to reply, he said, “Take care,” and called Song a minute later. He said, “I miss you.”
“You make me feel like a million dollar,” Song said.
“I want to see you,” he said.
“See you when I see you,” she said.
Another of her catch phrases; she’d learned these quips from men. The thought made him vaguely jealous, but he was not possessive. He wanted her to be happy.
The next time he saw her — in the friendly bar, Siamese Nights, which was like a refuge by the klong—he said, “I’m going to the States.”
“Always they say that to me.” Though her eyes looked pained, she shook her head as if she didn’t care.
“But I’m coming back.”
“They say that always too. ‘I coming back, honey. Love you!’”
“I mean it.”
“Maybe you not come back. Maybe you be glad. ‘No more Song. No more trouble.’”
What trouble? he wanted to ask. He didn’t know whether he’d be back. He hoped so. The decision was not in his hands. There was a meeting in Boston — headquarters. Then he’d drive to Maine, swing by on the way to check on Joyce’s mother. His return to Bangkok depended on the presentation of the accounts, whether his continued presence in Bangkok was justified.
Perhaps this bewilderment showed on his face. Song said, “You come me.”
He knew what she meant.
“I get taxi.”
Song gave the driver directions. They went through a district he recognized from its noodle shops and street life, not far from his hotel. Off the main road, down an alley, into a smaller lane to a courtyard and a doorway. Song paid for the taxi. A young man in a white short-sleeved shirt at the doorway gave Song a key on a wooden tag.
“You give him baht.”
Osier opened his wallet, and Song plucked out the equivalent of ten dollars.
The young man led them to a ground-floor door, showed them in, switched on the air conditioner. Osier sat on a wooden chair and saw that the room had no windows.
“You want drink?”
“Beer.”
Song left the room, and when she came back with a tall bottle of Singha beer and two glasses, she sat on the bed across from his chair and poured his beer slowly. They clinked glasses. Osier thought: This is how criminals conspire, this is how they behave, hardly speaking, over beer, in windowless rooms, rationalizing their heads off. Yet — giddy, defiant — he thought, I am happy.
Song said, “You take bath”—and she had to repeat it before he understood what she meant.
In the shower, he thought to himself, This is reckless, this is absolutely stupid. And then, Life too short.
When it was Song’s turn for a shower, she turned off the light in the room, left the light on in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar. A stripe of light from the cracked-open door lay across the bed, where Osier was propped against the pillows with his glass of beer.
Wrapped in a towel, Song crawled next to him. Her skin smelled sweetly of vanilla. Her full breasts were cool and damp against his arm. While he drank, saying nothing, she caressed him, stroked his chest. He put his drink on the side table and closed his eyes, loving her touch. And he touched her, not longingly or with any passion, but merely holding her breasts, weighing them in his hand. He made to steady her arm but she shrugged, she wouldn’t let go, her hand went lower.
When he did the same, she reacted with a sudden movement, pushing his hand away with the hand she’d used to caress him.
“What’s that?”
But she had buried her face on his shoulder, and he felt the heat as of a secret against his neck.
“It my knife.”
He became very still. He knew now, he’d heard it all, he even knew the word. He said, “You ladyboy?”
“Why not?”
He was amazed at his own calmness, and recognized a kind of strength in himself. He needed most of all to be kind. He said, “That’s all right.”
“You want me stop?”
Taking shallow breaths that he knew she could hear, he thought for a long time. He didn’t say anything. And then, when she stirred, he allowed it to happen, thankful it was night.
And it ended, a jostling in the dark — a clumsy farewell in a lane of noodle shops outside the room, Song urging him to take a taxi on his own, a sleepless night in his hotel, and he was on his way home through the silver tunnel to America, being shot from one end to the other. Lying on his narrow folded-down airline seat, half asleep in his twisted clothes, in the same posture in which he had been touched, he was flesh. Not weak or strong, but a helpless hot organism in a rapture of possession.
In a rental car, heading north from Boston, observing a ritual, Osier drove to the nursing home where Joyce’s mother was a resident. She sat, her head tipped to the side, looking hanged, in a chair by the window, not so much white-haired as balding. A tang of urine in the air made him catch his breath.
She said, “Have you come to take me away, Roger?”
Roger was Joyce’s father, her late husband.
Osier said, “No. I’ve brought you a lovely shawl, though. It’s silk.”
“I want to go home. Take me home. I don’t want to die here.”
He went cold, hearing this. He hated that she was so logical. Her house had been sold three years ago, to pay for this assisted care. He dangled the shawl to distract her, but she remained agitated and querulous.
“I want the key, Roger.”
“What key?”
“The key for my toe,” she said.
He continued north, ate a lobster roll in Wiscasset, and by midafternoon was in Rockland, driving toward Owls Head. Saddened by the leaves turning russet and yellow, by the chilly air, the dark water of the bays and inlets, he drove slowly.