As Tra-La busies herself, Kwan watches people go past the window, which faces onto Patpong. Here and there she sees groups of bar girls dart through the crowd, their hair wet and gleaming from their afternoon showers, shiny as fish, all talking at once as they go to one of the neighboring restaurants for food to take to the bar. They'll eat as they put on their makeup, and discuss last night's dreams and the lottery numbers they're playing, and say awful things about the women who haven't arrived yet. The metal pipes that frame the night-market booths have been clamped together, lights are snapping on in bar doorways, and neon is beginning to add its acid sizzle to the night. Kwan feels Fon's eyes on her and realizes that her friend has lowered the magazine and is watching with fascination as Tra-La works.
Tra-La turns and follows Kwan's gaze, and when her eyes meet Fon's, Fon smiles. "Oh, yes," Tra-La says, eyebrows arched. "I'm exactly that good."
Kwan says, "What? What does that mean?"
"You just sit there, Miss Thailand, and let me do my magic." The scissors snick near Kwan's ears, and the short, straight snips of hair accumulate in her lap, and after fifteen minutes or so Tra-La steps back and says, "Hmmmm." She lowers the hand with the scissors in it, takes several more steps back, then tosses the scissors onto the table in front of the mirror, where they land with a clatter. She attacks Kwan's hair with both hands, fluffing it, tugging it, yanking it on top so vigorously that Kwan feels her eyebrows lift. Tra-La keeps toying with Kwan's hair as she circles the chair, and Kwan realizes that the ladyboy is humming. Tra-La leans across Kwan to get the scissors, moving so fast she bumps the back of Kwan's head without even noticing, and waves the scissors around until she finds a spot to improve, just a snip here and a snip there, while Fon watches the process, not even noticing when the magazine slips from her lap. Finally Tra-La gets a dryer and spends a minute or two grabbing hold of bits of hair, stretching them out, curling them around her finger, hitting them with the hot air, shaping Kwan's head in a way that reminds Kwan of the way she patted her bag of treasure back into its teardrop shape.
Then Tra-La puts down the dryer and says, "Indulge me." She grabs a shoe box full of little jars and bottles, opens one, and spreads something soft and fragrant over the skin on Kwan's face. Kwan sees Fon get up and come closer, but Tra-La says, "Eyes closed, please," so Kwan closes her eyes, and for what seems like a long time she gives herself over to this stranger's fingers on her face, smoothing, patting, massaging, whisking soft brushes across her cheekbones and spreading a moistened thumb beneath them, toying with her hair again, and then doing something with a creamy-feeling pencil to her eyebrows and upper eyelids. "Open your eyes and look up," Tra-La says, and when she does, Kwan sees Fon leaning in, no more than a foot or two from her face, the tip of her tongue trapped between her teeth, as Tra-La draws a line on Kwan's lower lid. "Look at these lashes," Tra-La says to Fon. "Long as palm fronds. It'd be a sin to put goop on them." She purses her mouth, studying Kwan's eyes in a way that seems completely impersonal and doesn't make her uncomfortable at all. "Maybe just a little shine, what do you think?"
Fon says, "Yes," and Tra-La opens a slender tube that has a tiny brush in it and tells Kwan once again to look up. The brush barely touches Kwan's lower lashes before she's ordered to look down, and she feels the strokes, almost as soft as Tra-La's breath, on her upper lashes. Tra-La screws the brush back into the tube, and she and Fon move away. Tra-La says, "Yes, yes, yes," and drapes an arm comfortably over Fon's shoulders, and the two of them stare at Kwan as though she were a photo in a magazine.
Then Fon starts to laugh, and after a surprised pause Tra-La joins in. Fon is laughing so hard that she bends forward and rests her hands on her knees, and Tra-La wipes her eyes and smears black makeup over the bridge of her nose.
Kwan feels the heat mounting in her face. With an abrupt jerk, she swivels the chair to the mirror, looks, and stops breathing.
There is no one in the mirror who looks familiar. The once-blunt, geometrical hair is jagged and spiky, no two locks the same length, and the longest ones, on the sides, have been swept forward to frame a pair of cheekbones that have been highlighted and shaded until they almost dominate Kwan's face. Her eyes are lined in a darkness that makes them seem brighter than ever before, and her mouth has been redefined in a pale pink so that its fullness is apparent. The way her hair tapers down above her shoulders makes her neck look a yard long, and she thinks, Stork's neck, and then instantly, Swan's neck, and the words strike her like lightning. She instinctively lifts her chin to make her neck even longer and pulls open the cloth Tra-La wrapped around her, to see the way her collarbones wing out on either side at the base of her throat. She has no idea how long she has been looking at herself when she says, at last, "Is this really me?"
Fon says, "It is now."
"Darling," Tra-La says, leaning on Fon as though she's exhausted. "You are going to make a fortune."
"You are, you know. Do the job right and you'll earn so much money you can buy your whole village. If you want it, I mean." Fon pours herself an inch of white wine and offers the glass to Kwan, but Kwan shakes her head yet again, and Fon drains it. The half bottle at Fon's right hand is mostly gone, and the dishes that litter the table are empty on Fon's side and almost full on Kwan's. The food was strange to her, and anyway, she's too unsettled to eat and she doesn't want to ruin her lipstick. She feels like she's been turned into something new, like she just woke up in someone else's life.
She forces herself to remember what Fon just said. "Before I make money," she says, "I have to decide to work." Without thinking, she takes a rambutan from a pile of them in front of her and peels it by feel, her eyes roaming the room in which they sit, a room unlike any she has ever been in, although it seems familiar.
"You will," Fon says. She leans back in her chair and picks up her cigarettes.
The restaurant is a geometrical landscape of crisp, square white tablecloths and dark corners. At odd intervals, spotlighted on the walls, hang paintings of-Kwan supposes-Europe. They depict farang people in odd, old-looking clothes, and horses, dogs, and dark, hazy forests. Here and there, usually glimpsed in the bluish distance, is a house big enough to be a palace. One of the horses is white and has a horn coming out of its forehead, and dogs are leaping at it. She has seen pictures of paintings like these in school, but she never thought she'd see the real thing.
In the center of each table is a small golden lamp with a pale pink shade, and Kwan thinks the light makes Fon look younger and softer, her cute face restored to the freshness it probably had when she was sixteen. Waiters in white shirts and black slacks stand idly by; it's early still, and only a few of the tables are occupied. She and Fon have walked just a few blocks from the noise and glare of Patpong, but it could be a hundred miles. This is a different Bangkok. And then she knows why the room seems familiar: It makes her feels like she's in one of the television programs she watched in the village. She's at the edge of the life in which people have things.
"I don't know if I can do it," she says.
Fon says, "You can. You have to." She starts to light her cigarette, but a waiter is suddenly there with a lighter outstretched. Fon nods and smiles thanks as though it happens every day and says, "You're never going to make enough money to send some home until you start going with customers."