Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"Why? Nana said-"

Fon shakes her head. "Nana's not as smart as she thinks she is. Nobody's as smart as Nana thinks she is. Because the old ones have money. They're more grateful. They're easy to please, like little dogs. Treat them nicely and they'll come back and come back. That's good, because there's always some risk-not much, but some-when you go with a new one, and if you're extra sweet, the old guys will usually give you a present when they leave. One guy named Martin, from Switzerland, or maybe Sweden or Brazil, gave me ten thousand baht the night before he went home."

"Ten thousand?"

Fon shrugs as though it were snack money. "I made him feel young. I told him he was handsome. The problem with the handsome ones is that they really are handsome." She puts a cigarette between her lips. It looks so out of place in her baby-doll's face that Kwan laughed the first time she saw Fon light up. "They feel like you should pay them," Fon says around the cigarette. "They're cheap. And they're young, too, which means they can go for longer, maybe two or three times. Thanks anyway, once is fine with me. But the big reason is the money. The money's with the old guys. But not too old, because they take a long time, too." She laughs. "Different reason, though."

The two of them are sitting on the floor of the larger of the two rooms that Fon and now Kwan share with two other women from the bar. The others are out eating a very late breakfast. After her sixth night of serving drinks, Kwan put some tip money into the pool for the weekly rent, and the next morning Fon gave her a key. With the door locked behind her and Bangkok held at bay three stories down, she almost feels at home.

Kwan says, "But most of the girls want to go with the younger ones."

"Girls are crazy," Fon says, looking for the ashtray. She gets to her knees and hobbles dwarflike toward the three-legged table, stretching an arm out, and Kwan knots a fist in the back of Fon's T-shirt to keep her from falling on her face. Fon laughs and leans farther, and Kwan has to use both hands to keep her upright. When Fon has a grip on the ashtray, Kwan pulls her back, and when Fon lands on her rump, they're both laughing.

"It's a job, not a date," Fon says. "Some girls never figure that out. They keep going after the young, handsome ones, and when they get one, they lord it over girls like me, girls who make three times as much money as they do. It's as if they have to fool themselves every night that it's really about love, like the only reason they're up there is because it's the natural place to meet the solid-gold man, the handsome, good-hearted young farang with the big bank account who's waited his whole life to fall in love with some worn-out bar girl so he can marry her and support her whole family for the rest of his life."

"But that happens," Kwan says, feeling very young. She waits, but Fon doesn't respond. "Doesn't it?"

"Oh, honey," Fon says, putting her free hand on top of Kwan's and tapping the ash from her cigarette with the other. "Not you, too. Yes, it happens. Maybe eight or nine times a year, but it never works. The guys lie about how much money they have, or they lie about not being married already, or they lie about when they have to go back home. So some dumb girl goes through the marriage ceremony, and promises her mother and father they're going to be rich, and gives it to him for free for three or four months, and then one day she wakes up and he's in Australia. Not even a note." She takes an ambitious drag. "And then there are the girls who marry a guy just so they can steal everything he's got. They get the fool to buy a house, which has to be in her name because he's not Thai, and one day they sell the paper on the house for half of what it's worth, empty out the loving hubby's bank account, and run north."

Kwan says, "It never works?"

Fon turns the coal of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray with great delicacy, shaving off a fine film of ash. "It didn't for me."

"Oh," Kwan says. "I'm sorry. I didn't know-"

"How could you? I didn't tell you. No reason to. It didn't matter. No broken heart. I didn't love him. I loved the idea of a passport, and a house in wherever it was, and money going up to my family every month. When he disappeared, the only thing that really upset me was that I hadn't been sending money home. I'd stopped working, and he kept telling me it took time for his bank in… in Germany, I think, to transfer everything he owned here. He couldn't even give my parents a dowry payment until the money arrived, and it didn't, and then it didn't some more. After a couple of months, he said he'd have to go home to handle it. And I went to the airport with him and hugged him and even managed to cry a little. And he never came back to me."

"You never saw him again?"

"Oh, sure. About a year later. I'd changed bars, but he didn't know that. He figured he was safe as long as he stayed out of my old bar. And I was in the back room when he came in, so he sat at the edge of the stage without having any idea I was there."

Kwan glances at the window. The afternoon is starting to fade, and the evening looms ahead of her, bright and full of noise. "What did you do?"

"I went onstage like always, but I changed places with the girl who was dancing in front of him, and then I leaned down and picked up his drink. He looked up and saw me, and I gave him a big, friendly smile and spit in his drink. I'd been saving spit since I saw him walk in, so there was a lot of it. Then I put the drink down and went up and down the stage, telling every girl that he was an asshole and pointing at him so he'd know what I was doing."

"What did he do?"

Fon drags on the cigarette, squinting against the smoke. "If he'd been smart, he would have left right then, but he couldn't let me see that I'd chased him out, so he waited until my shift was over and I'd left the stage, and then he threw down some money and almost ran out. By then I'd put a wrapper over my dancing clothes, and I counted to ten or something and then went out and watched him go into the Play Pen. I gave him a few minutes, just to make sure he was staying, and then I followed him in and told the manager-" She breaks off, looking doubtfully at Kwan. "Have you been into the Play Pen?"

"I've never been to any of the bars except the Candy Cane."

"I'll take you around some night when we're off. Well, the thing about the Play Pen is that about half the girls are ladyboys. So I told the manager that he'd walked out of my bar complaining because it only had girls, so he should tell the ladyboys to go to work on him. There were four of them hanging on to him when I left."

Kwan starts to laugh. Fon watches her solemnly, and then she stubs out her cigarette. "Once in a million years, it works. Getting married to a customer, I mean. Out of maybe five hundred girls I know, two of them have done it and made it last. One of them is here, one's in America. But it's nothing you should think about. This is not about love. When you finally get up on that stage, just remember, it's a market and you're the best-looking cut of meat. Get every penny you can and forget the rest of it. What time is it?"

Kwan looks at Nana's watch. "Four o'clock."

"We've got two hours before work, then," Fon says, "and I can't look another minute at that schoolgirl haircut."

"Oh, no." The ladyboy in front of the mirror clutches his heart as though it's stopped in midbeat. He or she is broad-shouldered and heavyset beneath the flowered gown and the cloud of scarves, and wears shoulder-length hair, dyed midnight black, curled under at the ends, 1940s style. So much black makeup surrounds his eyes that Kwan thinks he looks like he's wearing a mask. Five-o'clock shadow prickles its way through a thick layer of pancake, but his voice is a flute. "Darling," the ladyboy says in English, "what did they cut it with? A lawn mower?"