Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

Nana says, "I've been waiting for you."

"Why?" Nana hadn't even seemed to notice Kwan on her earlier visits to the village.

"To talk." Nana's voice is silky, even friendly, but it doesn't sound personal. Nana could be talking to the night, to the rising moon. "Don't you ever just want to talk to someone?"

With the moon a little higher in the sky, Kwan can see that Nana is wrapped in a light blanket, probably to protect herself from mosquitoes. "I'd think Bangkok is full of people to talk to."

"Bangkok is… I can't even tell you what Bangkok is like. You have to see it for yourself. You'd love it. But it's not the same, the people there. They're not from here. They don't know what our lives were like."

"Are like," Kwan says. "I still live here. And I thought all the girls like… like you… came from Isaan."

"Most of them do." Nana wastes no energy on resolving the contradiction. Instead she picks up a pack of cigarettes from the platform and puts one in her mouth. She lights it with a slender, gleaming lighter not much bigger around than the cigarette. As she draws in the smoke, she glances up at Kwan and then lifts the lighter for a better look. "You're wearing it," she says.

Kwan's hand flies to her ear. "Please put out the flame."

"Sure." The lighter clicks off. "Who don't you want to see you?"

"Everybody. I mean, anybody. I don't want anybody to see me."

Nana draws deeply on the cigarette, her face gleaming a dull red in the coal's glow. Then she releases the smoke slowly between her lips and inhales it through her nostrils. To Kwan it looks like a magic trick. "Want one?" Nana blows the smoke out and extends the pack.

"I don't smoke. My father smokes all the time, and then he coughs all night. I think it's stupid."

"Up to you." Nana's eyes remain on Kwan's face. "I remembered right," she says. "You're getting very pretty."

Kwan has to review the sentence in her mind before she actually understands its meaning. "Me? Pretty?"

"Maybe more than pretty." Nana slides aside and pats the platform. "Sit. You can't stand there all night."

"I don't know." Kwan doesn't want to go home, but she's not comfortable with Nana either.

"I won't bite you," Nana says. She smiles. "I'm not even hungry." Then she reaches into the pocket of her blouse, finds something, and extends her hand. "Here's the other one."

"Why?" Kwan makes no move to take it. "Why are you giving it to me?"

Nana pauses and then says, "You didn't listen to me this afternoon. When someone offers you something, take it."

"That's not the way I am."

"You have so much?" Nana says. She sounds like a purring cat. "All your jewel boxes are full? You're so overloaded that you couldn't force the lid closed on a nice pair of earrings?" She drags on the cigarette again, and Kwan sees that Nana is wearing new earrings, earrings that have stones dangling on the ends of fine, thin chains.

"How many pair do you own?" Kwan asks.

Nana tilts her head to one side and looks up at Kwan. The little stones sway back and forth on their chains. "I have no idea."

"Oh." Kwan stands there, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of not knowing how many you have of anything. Finally she says, "More than five?"

Nana laughs with a lungful of smoke, then bends forward, coughing pale clouds into the night. When she's got it under control, she waves her open hand side to side in front of her face, clearing away the smoke, and then wipes the corners of her eyes. "Many more than five. Probably thirty or forty. Please. Sit down. My neck is getting stiff. And take this thing or I'll get irritated."

Remembering what Nana was like when she got irritated, Kwan sits. After a moment she reaches for the earring, but Nana withdraws her hand, just out of Kwan's reach.

"Let me," she says. Very gently, she removes the stud from Kwan's ear, drops it into her own lap, and inserts the post that holds the sapphire. Her hands are soft and smooth, not hard with calluses, like Kwan's. When she's slid the backing into place against Kwan's lobe and the earring is secure, Nana pulls away a little and studies Kwan as if Kwan were something she had just made and she wants to check the quality of her work. Kwan drops her eyes in embarrassment. Eventually Nana nods. "Get rid of that rice-bowl haircut, feather it a little, and then let your hair grow a couple of feet," Nana says. "Put about five kilos on you, get some decent clothes. Find some platform shoes that make you even taller."

Kwan says, "Taller?"

"You idiot." The word would hurt, but Nana is smiling. "You have no idea what you look like. I mean, just look at this." Nana puts out a thumb and sculpts the air just above Kwan's cheekbones, then down over her nose and across her lips. "I'd give a hundred thousand baht for your cheekbones," she says. "You'd stop traffic in Bangkok."

Kwan pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, curving her spine into the comfort of its familiar C. "You're making fun of me."

"Is that so?" Nana sticks her cigarette into her mouth. Then she puts one hand on the nape of Kwan's neck and pulls Kwan's head back, using the other hand to push the base of her spine forward. Kwan straightens, surprised at the contact. "There," Nana says. "Like that." She turns away and surveys the night, making sure no one is close enough to overhear. Then she hits on the cigarette again and flicks it into the darkness. It lands six or eight feet away with an eruption of red sparks. She leans toward Kwan so she can whisper into her ear. What she says is "If I'm making fun of you, why are you worth sixty thousand baht?"

The knot around Kwan's heart tightens again, and she feels her mouth drop open.

"Because you're ugly?" Nana continues, ignoring Kwan's reaction. "Because men won't like you?"

"It's not-" Kwan says. "That's not- I mean, it won't happen."

"It will, you know." Nana sounds neutral, as though she's talking about a third person, someone who's not there and whom they know only slightly. She's turning the steel stud over between the fingers of her right hand and combing the fingers of the left through her shoulder-length hair.

Kwan wants to argue but instead says, "How do you even know about this?"

"I didn't until I got here. I'll tell you the truth, though: I came back to talk to you."

"About what?"

"What do you think? About going back to Bangkok with me."

Kwan is searching Nana's face, looking for a hint of the joke. "Me?"

"You don't know," Nana says. "Foreign men will go crazy for you."

"You mean… I'd be doing what… what you do?"

Nana fills her cheeks with air and blows it out with a brusque little pop. "I was exactly like you," she says. "I forget sometimes how much I was like you. How could those girls do all that? How could they dance around in front of men and go with them? To hotels, I mean. And in the rooms? How could they do that, with men they don't even know? Aren't they… ashamed? When they think about their lives, don't they want to die?"

Kwan says, "Don't you?"

"Actually," Nana says, "I've never had so much fun in my life." She holds the stud up between thumb and forefinger and sights the moon past it. "I was terrified at first. So they let me go slow. They had me stand outside the bar for two weeks, dressed like a schoolgirl, just trying to get men to come in. 'One beer, eighty baht, have many beautiful girl, one beer eighty baht.' " She is speaking English. "Do you understand what I just said?" She takes a cigarette that's been bent slightly, straightens it between her fingers, and fires it up.

"Most of it."

"Well, I didn't, not then. But that's right, you're good at school, aren't you? All I ever did in school was think about getting out of this town. But the mama-san in the bar said the English words over and over again until I could repeat them, and then, after about a week, I got brave enough to take men by the arm and lead them into the bar. They'd be speaking English to me, or Japanese, or German, and I'd just say, 'Yes, yes, yes,' and sometimes, 'You so handsome,' which one of the dancers taught me, until one of the mama-sans got hold of the man's other arm and took him away from me. Then I'd stand there for a minute and watch the girls dance, thinking how beautiful they were, until somebody waved me back out into the street."