Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

Leigh was dead. He had told me his plans, everything he wanted. It amounted to very little, a quiet cottage on that rainy island, a few flowers, some peace — an inexpensive fantasy. He had got nothing. His example unsettled me; and as death rephrases the life of everyone who’s near, I felt I was reading something new in my mind, an altered rendering of a previous hope. It was a correction, needling me to act. It worried me. My resolution, inspired by his death, was also mocked by his death, which appeared like an urging to hope at the same moment it demonstrated the futility of all hope. His life said: Act soon. His death said: Expect nothing. My annoyance with him as a rude stranger who messed up my plans was small compared to my frustration at seeing him dead — there was no way to reply. And worse, his staring astonished look had suggested the unexpected, the onset of a new vision irritatingly coupled with an end to speech. Behind me, clouding Upper Aljunied Road, was the smoke of that dumb prophet, made private by death, who had stared at an unsharable revelation, which might have been nothing at all.

“Where I am dropping?” Gladys’s voice ended my reverie.

“Palm Grove.”

“Air-con?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I like Palm Grove.” Gladys hugged herself. Her skinny hands and the back of her neck were heartbreaking.

“Good for you,” I muttered.

“You sad, Jack. I know. You friend dead,” said Gladys. “He was a nice man, I think.”

“He wasn’t,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Marry with a wife?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In Hong Kong. The cremation was her idea. She chose the hymn. The ashes go off to Hong Kong in the morning, by registered mail. She thought it would be better that way.” I could see the mailman climbing off his bike and pulling a brown paper parcel out of his knapsack. Your husband, one pound, eight ounces; customs declaration and so forth: Sign here, missy.

“Why you not marry?”

“That’s all I need.” Marriage! Any mention of the Chinese gave me a memory picture of a caged shop near Muscat Lane, the family seated grumbling around a table (Junior doing his homework), beneath an unshaded bulb of uselessly distracting brightness; I couldn’t think of the Chinese singly — they lived in gangs and family clans, their yelling a simulation of speech. The word marriage gave me another picture, a clinical American bathroom, locked for the enactment of marriage: Dad shaving, Mom on the hopper with her knees pressed together, the kids splashing in the tub, all of them naked and yakking at once. It was unholy, safety’s wedded agony; I had been tempted, but I had never sinned that way. I said to Gladys, “What about you?”

“Me? Sure, I get marry every night!” She cackled. My girls were always asked the same questions — name, age, status — and they built a fund of stock replies. It was possible for me to tell by the speed and ingenuity of the reply how long a girl had been in the business. I get marry every night: Gladys was an old-timer.

In the lobby of the Palm Grove Hotel a huddle of tourists gave us the eye as we walked toward the elevator. If I needed any proof that there was no future in hustling for tourists there it was: two wizened fellers gasping on a sofa, another propped on crutches, a vacant wheelchair, a white-haired man asleep or dead in the embrace of a large armchair. Struldbrugs. Like the joke about the old duffer who says he has sex fifty weeks a year with his young wife. “Amazing,” says a youngster, “but what about the other two weeks?” The old duffer says, “Oh, that’s when the feller that lifts me on and off goes on vacation.”

Gladys was no beauty, I wasn’t young; the tourists were watching, trying to determine the relationship between the red-faced American and the skinny Chinese girl. I hooked my arm on hers like a stiff old-fashioned lover and began remarking loudly on the tasteful decor of the lobby and the thick carpet, pleased that the suit I was wearing would deflect some of the scorn. Who does that jackass think he is?

Upstairs, the feller answered the door in his bathrobe.

“My name is Flowers.”

He looked at Gladys, then at me.

“We spoke on the telephone about a month back, when you were passing through on the Empress. ”

“That’s right,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten.”

“I made a note of it here,” I said, tapping my desk diary. “Anyway, here she is, skipper.”

Now he leered. Gladys nodded and looked beyond him into the cool shadowy room.

“Thanks very much,” he said. He opened the door for her, then fished five dollars out of his pocket and handed the money to me.

“What’s this?”

“For your trouble.”

“That doesn’t exactly cover it,” I said.

“It’ll have to.”

“Hold your horses,” I said. “How long do you want her for?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

Gladys was in the room, looking out the window.

“Gladys, don’t let—”

“Leave her out of this,” the feller said.

I wanted to sock him. I said, “Until tomorrow morning is a hundred and twenty bucks, or sterling equivalent, payable in advance.”

“I told you we’ll see ” he said. “Now bugger off.”

“I’ll be downstairs.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“It’s my usual practice,” I said. “Just so there’s no funny business.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and slammed the door.

At half past three Gladys was nowhere in sight. I was standing by the elevator, afraid to sit in the main lobby and get stared at by the Struldbrugs who would know what I was up to as soon as they saw me alone. Until Leigh came I had never found that embarrassing.

Next to the elevator there was a blue Chinese vase filled with sand, and bristling from the sand were cigarette ends, crumpled butts, and two inches of what looked to me like a good cigar. I was anxious, and I quickly realized that the source of my anxiety was a longing to snatch up that cigar, dust it off, and light it. What troubled me was that only the thought that I would be seen prevented me from doing it.

A fifty-three-year-old grubber in ashtrays, standing in the shadows of the Palm Grove lobby. Downtown, on Beach Road, a towkay hoicked my name and kicked his dog and demanded to know where I was. Between the cremation of a stranger and the session of hard drinking that was to come, I had obliged a feller with a Chinese girl and been handed five bucks and told to bugger off. I had kept the five bucks. I waited, doglike but without a woof, and I went on swallowing self-pity, hugging my tattoos and watching Chinese hurry through air remarkably like the smoke their own ashes would make. I knew mortality, its human smell and hopeless fancies. What was I waiting for?

“She’s not down here, skipper,” I said over the room phone. “You’re overtime.”

“You’re telling me!”

“Where is she?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“I’ll inform the management,” I said. “You leave me no other choice.”

“I’ll inform the management about you. Moo-wah!”

“Be reasonable, skipper. I don’t find that funny.”

“Stop pestering me. You her father or something?”

“Guardian you might say.”

“Is that what they call it these days!”

“I’ve just done you a big favor, pal!” I shouted. “And this is what I get for it, a lot of sass!”

“I don’t owe you a thing.”

“You owe me,” I said, “a great deal, and you owe Gladys—”

“Go away.”

“I’m staying put.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the feller said, and hung up.