In the next picture, Nong and the tall American stand on either side of a wheelchair holding Bobby da Silva, minus his legs. On da Silva’s face there is a cripple’s look of extreme contempt for the world and its bitter disappointments. On Nong’s face is a grim determination that this, too, was something to be endured and overcome. I look up and stare at my mother, whose mood has changed now that she has begun to remember.
“Your wife practically begged me to talk to you about this, which is why we’re here, but I didn’t think it would hit me this way.” She gestures toward the picture with the amputee. “You don’t realize how soft you get-I could take it when I was twenty, but not anymore.” She looks me in the eyes. “And you have to think about my strategy as a mother. How easy would it have been to show you a picture of a man you would never meet?”
She is right. I really cannot get my mind around the idea that the man in the picture is my father, and yet remains unreachable. I try to think which of the old men in the ward he most resembles, and realize the attempt is useless. Even without bandages a man of seventy or so does not necessarily resemble that same man aged twenty-the distance is too great, the changes wrought by a harsh world too extreme. Maybe some kind of clever isometric software would do it, but I feel helpless. Maybe Chanya was right after alclass="underline" in some part of me I really don’t want to know. Nong is watching my features, reading me effortlessly.
Despite her reluctance, she hands me another photo. Unlike the other pictures, it has been taken surreptitiously and seems at first to make no sense. It was taken through the open door of what appeared to be a hospital ward or activities area, but there is only one human figure. I cannot say for sure who it is, for it could have been any man-which was just another way of saying it is him: a man still evidently young sitting in a tubular chair, bent forward, turned slightly to the camera with both hands pressed insanely against his ears so that his whole face is squashed as if lamenting the loss of his soul. There are a pile of medications on the table next to him.
Now I really cannot take any more. Nong nudges me and shoves under my nose the photo of her and my father and his friend in the very early days together.
“Look, will you!” She puts her finger on my father, aged about twenty. “Is that an angel or an alien, I never could decide?” I look at the bright-too bright-face, that full smile that seems like an exaggeration to non-Americans; the expression suggests he was wired more into the higher cosmos rather than the Earth. “See, Bobby da Silva is innocent, too, but it’s a different kind. He’s in his body and sex is not a source of torment for him, it’s a thirst he knows how to quench.”
I borrow a cigarette from her, which she lights for me. I lie back on the futon, take a toke on the cigarette, and then raise myself for a good long slug of the rice whiskey.
“So, you were living with my father but not screwing him?”
She shrugs. “Living with? He and Bobby were staying at a cheap hotel while he was on R amp;R. This all happened in the space of a few days.”
I nod. “Okay. So what happened?”
“What happened? What always happens when a man is confused in that way? All of a sudden, the night before we were supposed to say goodbye, he snapped and jumped on me. It was totally clumsy and he was finished in less than a minute, the whole buildup of the past five days popped in a single spasm. Blood, pain, and sperm is what happened. Then he was gone. But he’d come inside me. Good boys are always the most dangerous. A whoremonger would have banged me the first night and used protection and we all would have lived happily ever after.”
Of course, that makes me feel just great. She catches my forlorn eye and leans over to pat my head. “But then I would never have had you, would I?”
I grunt.
“And I thought afterward the bump that was growing in my womb was a kind of claim of ownership by a man who didn’t want to admit he was made of flesh and blood.”
I cannot say I am overly thrilled to be the product of an incompetently managed spasm that lasted maybe ten seconds-exactly the kind the girls in the bar make fun of after they’ve been paid and the john’s gone home. On the other hand, I wonder who on earth is not the end result of an unsatisfactory beginning. Were you planned, yourself, R?
“So he left you like that? Did he send money?”
“Sure. This was an honorable white boy, sure he sent money. He sent the little money the army gave him, and he even found a close friend in the States who wired me five thousand dollars, which was a huge sum for a Thai girl at that time-and of course I had half the money he’d paid the mamasan. And he wrote every day. Promised he would come see me the minute they discharged him-or the war ended.” She pauses and stares into space. “I couldn’t believe it. Every single day he tells me he’s totally crazy about me, keeps my picture next to his heart, I’m the only reason he can carry on fighting in the filthy war. To a Thai country girl, this is Hollywood dreamland stuff. I couldn’t believe he was serious.”
“But you replied?”
“Sure.”
“But you told me you didn’t know his family name.”
She makes a scoffing noise. “Don’t turn into a junior detective all over again. I had enough of that when you were at the academy. Listen: I didn’t know his family name because I didn’t know about farang family names, and anyway I couldn’t write in English any more than I could speak it. You know very well I still don’t write it. I had someone read me the letters.”
“Who?”
“I took them to the Wat and asked Phra Tatatika-you remember that farang monk?”
I remember: her favorite monk was an American former marine, almost the first in a trickle that became a steady stream of farang men looking for a way of escape in a Thai monastery. I guess a former marine would not have been shocked by my father’s letters.
“But you said you replied?”
She takes a pen out of her box. Carefully and slowly she writes down one of the few phrases she knows in written English on the back of one of the envelopes: I miss you. I smile. It is a translation of exactly the Thai phrase she would have used. We tend to say I miss you where farang might say I’m crazy about you.
“That’s all you wrote, each time?”
“Once a week. There was no use writing in Thai, was there?”
“And during that time, were you-”
“No, I wasn’t. So long as he sent money and paid my bar fine after the down payment ran out, I didn’t work. I was a good Buddhist girl, a deal is a deal.”
“But the envelope,” I exclaim triumphantly. “How did you write the address?”
“Huh! Some detective after all! You need to check your facts. Nobody in the world could remember such an address, with all those military numbers, codes, stuff like that. He sent stamped addressed envelopes, the military stuff was already printed on the front.”
“Every day?”
She opens her arms. “Maybe there was nothing else to do. You know what they say about war, ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent terror? He couldn’t keep writing to his mother to tell her not to worry and that he’d be home soon.”
“But he did write, just like he said he would. He did love you?”
“Was it love? I don’t know. I’m not sure either of us was mature enough to use that word, but we were very excited by each other. And of course I thought I’d escaped the poverty trap for life on my very first night on the game. I was in a kind of dream.”