Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

Leigh was eager to please Hing — that was plain. He had not found out it was no use. And who was he, this accountant from Hong Kong? A clerkly fugitive, laying low after an incautious embezzlement in London? Sacked by a British bank for interfering with a woman in Fixed Deposits, or for incompetence; and like many ang mohs in the East, seeking cover in a Chinese shop, consoling himself with clubby fantasies and the fact that he was too far away to be of concern, an alien at a great distance, the bird of passage who mentioned from time to time when things got rough that there was always Australia? He had lied about his clubs — the first time anyone had tried that on me — but so had I, three times over. It could not be held against him.

The feeling I had for him was an inward clutching at self-pity. There was so much I could have told him if only he had been friendly and stopped calling me Flowers. Go away and save yourself, I wanted to say; I could have watched him do that and watching him given myself hope. I had my girls; I knew the limits of employment; I had faith in extraordinary kinds of rescue, miraculous recoveries; I knew a thing or two about love. What was his alternative? I decided to watch him closely, this version of myself; his nervy question still rankled, and pity prevented me from asking him the same. He was not aware of how much I knew.

Seeing me engrossed, Gopi left, shoulders heaving. His arms did not swing or give him motion. They dangled uselessly as he pedaled. He was a small man, and sometimes I believed that without him I would have floundered.

I dialed another hotel for Gunstone and got another refusal. That was the last of his Victoria Street favorites. It was nearly lunchtime, so I called the Belvedere. I was at the airport, I told the receptionist, and did they have an air-conditioned double room for one night?

“All our rooms — we got eight hundred plus — they are all air-conditioned,” she said.

“That’s very nice,” I said, and made the reservation. “If Hing asks,” I told Gopi, leaving him holding the can as usual — but who except the meekest man would hold it? — “tell him I’m down with the flu.”

Since it was going to be lunch at the Tanglin, then off to the Belvedere, I thought I’d better change my duds.

“Why the black suit?” Gunstone asked.

“My others are at the cleaners,” I said, still rolling “I’ve just come from a funeral” around on my tongue. He would have asked who died, or perhaps have been spooked by the announcement. I had the fluent liar’s sense of proportion and foresight. Gunstone was calmed.

Lunch was the Friday special, my favorite, seafood buffet. I followed Gunstone, taking the same things he did, in the same amounts, and I soon realized that I was heaping my plate with oysters and prawns, which I liked less than the crab and lobster Gunstone took in two small helpings. I put some oysters back and got a frown from the Malay chef.

At the table I said, “I hope I haven’t boobed, Mr. Gunstone, but I’ve fixed you up at the Belvedere this afternoon.”

He stabbed a prawn and peeled off the shell and dunked the naked finger of pink meat into a saucer of chili paste. “Don’t believe we’ve ever been to the Belvedere before, have we, Jack?”

“The other places were full,” I said.

“Quite all right,” he said. “But I ate at the Belvedere last week. It wasn’t much good, you know.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Gunstone,” I said. “That food is perfectly hideous.”

“Exactly,” said Gunstone. “How’s your salmon?”

I had not started to eat. I took a forkful, smeared it in mayonnaise, and ate it. “Delicious,” I said.

“Mine’s awful,” he said, and he pushed his salmon to the side of his plate.

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it does taste rather—”

“Desiccated,” said Gunstone.

“Exactly,” I said. I pushed my salmon over to the side and covered it with a lettuce leaf. I was sorry; I liked salmon the way it tasted out of a can.

“Lobster’s pretty dreadful, too,” said Gunstone a moment later.

I was just emptying a large claw. It was excellent, and I ate the whole claw before saying, “Right again, Mr. Gunstone. Tastes like they fished it out of the Muar River.”

“We’ll shunt that over, shall we?” said Gunstone. He moved a lobster tail next to the discarded salmon.

I did the same, then as quickly as I could ate all my crab salad before he could say it was bad. I gnawed a hard roll and started on the oysters.

“The prawns are a success,” he said.

“The oysters are—” I didn’t want to finish the sentence, but Gunstone was no help “—sort of limp.”

“They’re cockles, actually,” said Gunstone. “And they’re a damned insult. Steward!” A Malay waiter came over. “Take this away.”

Demanding that food be sent back to the kitchen is a special skill. It is done with panache by people who use that word. I admired people who did it, but could not imitate them.

“Yours, Tuan? ” asked the waiter.

“Yes, take it away,” I said sadly.

“Want more, Tuan? ” the waiter asked Gunstone.

“If I wanted more would I be asking you to remove that plate?” Gunstone said.

The waiter slid my lunch away. I buttered a hard roll and ate it, making crumbs shower down the front of my suit.

“That steward,” said Gunstone, shaking his head. “The most intelligent thing I ever heard him say was, ‘If you move your lump of ice cream a bit to the right, Tuan , you will find a strawberry.’ God help us.”

I laughed and brushed my jacket. “Still,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind joining this club.”

“You don’t want to join this club,” said Gunstone.

“I do,” I said, and saw myself lying in the sun, by the pool, and one of those tanned long-legged women whispering urgently, “Jack, where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s all set. ”

“Why, whatever for?”

“A place to go, I suppose,” I said. The Bandung’s only publicity was the matchboxes Wallace Thumboo had printed with the slogan, There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung!

Gunstone chuckled. “If they can pronounce your name you can join.”

“Flowers is pretty easy.”

“I should say so!”

But Fiori isn’t, I thought. And Fiori was my name, Flowers an approximation and a mask.

“Now,” said Gunstone, looking at his watch, “how about dessert?”

Gunstone’s joke: it was time to fetch Djamila.

The old-timers, I found, tended to prefer Malays, while the newcomers went for the Chinese, and the Malays preferred each other. The Chinese clients, of whom I had several, liked the big-boned Australian girls; Germans were fond of Tamils, and the English fellers liked anything young, but preferred their girls boyish and their women mannish. British sailors from H.M.S. Terror enjoyed fighting each other in the presence of transvestites. Americans liked clean sporty ones, to whom they would give nicknames, like “Skeezix” and “Pussycat” (the English made an effort to learn the girl’s real name), and would spend a whole afternoon trying to teach one of my girls how to swim in a hotel pool, although it was costing them fifteen dollars an hour to do it. Americans also went in for a lot of hugging in the taxi, smooching and kidding around, and sort of stumbling down the sidewalk, gripping the girl hard and saying, “Aw, honey, whoddle ah do?” Later they wrote them letters, and the girls pestered me to help them reply.

Djamila—“Jampot,” an American feller used to call her, and it suited her — was very reliable and easy to contact. She was waiting by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank with my trusty suitcase as we pulled up in the taxi. I hopped out and opened the door for her, then got into the front seat and put the suitcase between my knees. Djamila climbed in with Gunstone and sat smiling, rocking her handbag in her lap.