Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

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."

Kwan waits, her eyes on the tablecloth, until the waiter is gone. "It doesn't… bother you, talking about that in front of… I don't know, people like him?"

Fon laughs. "He knows what we do. How else could a couple of girls dressed in jeans and T-shirts afford a place like this?"

Kwan thinks, What you do, but doesn't say it. What she says is, "Why are we here? We've never gone anywhere like this."

"It's your Bangkok birthday," Fon says. "Today, for the first time, you look like you belong here."

"I'll pay you back," Kwan says. "For all of it. For Tra-La, for dinner, for everything."

"Really." Fon picks up the small crystal ashtray and hefts it, as though surprised at its weight. "With money you earn from what?"

Kwan says, "I should tell Nana I want some of what the mama-san paid her."

"She's spent it by now," Fon says. "She sold you. I wasn't sure you realized it."

"But she helped me, too. My father was going to sell me. And it would have been a lot worse than the bar."

Fon pours the last of the wine, hoists the glass, and eyes Kwan through it. "She wouldn't have lifted a finger if there hadn't been something in it for her. She'd have let them grab you without even thinking about it. Nana doesn't do favors."

Kwan pulls back her newly cut hair. "She's not so bad." She turns her head to display the earrings. "She gave me these."

Fon picks up the little lamp and tilts the shade so she can see more clearly. Then she puts it down again and says, "Real sapphires? Real gold?"

"Sure," Kwan says. "Why?"

Through a mouthful of smoke, Fon says, "Because they're turning your earlobes green."

"We're late," Kwan says as she and Fon thread their way through the Patpong crowd. Their progress is slower than usual because they're holding hands. In the village Kwan had always envied the girls who were good enough friends to hold hands as they walked, and now, for the first time, she has someone whose hand she can hold. Even here, on this street, it's a comfortable feeling.

"We want to be late." Fon slows their pace and then stops, anchoring Kwan beside her. "Take it easy," she says. "I want to do this right."