Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“If I give you money, do you promise not to go to the bar?”

She leaned toward him. “You think I like bar? You think I like men touch me?”

Her mouth twisted in disgust at tuss me. Osier, pleased by the energy in her response, was encouraged by her indignation, which was like proof of her morality.

“What about me?”

She touched his arm, then made affectionate finger taps on his hand. “My friend.”

“I give you money. No bar.”

“If I have money, I don’t need bar.”

He soothed her, saying, “I have money,” and never in the whole time he’d known her had he enjoyed such rapt attention, Song’s eyes fixed on him, her pretty lips moving as though murmuring a prayer, or soundlessly counting. Feeling powerful, taking his time, Osier agreed on a sum, the amount Song suggested, more than he had imagined. But he paid; he wanted to be certain of her. He couldn’t bear to think of her being pawed in the bar.

Song said, “This for my mudda.”

When he kissed her at the taxi stand that night she held him tightly.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

All the next day he was so distracted by his work that he had lunch later than usual, in the empty cafeteria, eating as the staff was finishing the dishwashing and stacking the chairs for the mopping. Osier sat at the only free table, and as he began to eat he saw Fred Kegler enter the room.

“Mind if I sit here?” Fred was holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and already seating himself. “You’re having the chili prawns. I love the chili prawns.”

This sort of chat made Osier anxious, because he felt sure it was intended to put him at ease. There was more of it: weather, an upcoming holiday, Fred’s son in Little League, all insistently casual.

Then he began laughing softly, and said, “Spent the weekend in Pattaya. I know a guy there, American, married a local girl.”

“It seems to happen a lot,” Osier said.

“Big mistake. He’s miserable. I’ve got this theory.”

Someone announcing a theory was always unstoppable and usually wrong. Yet Osier listened, because his reputation was for being mild, a listener.

Still holding his Styrofoam cup of coffee, Fred said, “The more polite and submissive people are outside in cultures like this, the more rude and domineering they are at home.” Fred was nodding, meaning to go on. “I’m talking about the women. These smiles, this sweetness. That’s all for public consumption. In private it’s the opposite, like they’re taking revenge. Like they’re corrupted. And not just here. I did a tour in Japan, different company. Those sweet little geishas turned into dragons at home.”

Osier, hearing crupted, disbelieved him, and said, “That’s a theory, but what’s the proof?”

“My friend is the proof,” Fred said, and sensing defiance in Osier, he seemed pained. “Hundreds of guys here are the proof.” He lowered his head and spoke in a whisper, “Some of these girls here, let me tell you, they’re not really girls. They’re dudes.”

This obvious warning by Fred had only made him more defiant. Larry had not said anything, but Osier had noticed that while seeming to avoid him, Larry was ever more watchful.

He could only call Song in the late afternoon. Song said she was in her room. He had no reason to doubt her.

He said, “I miss you.”

“I miss you.”

This echo worried him. Did she mean it as much as he did? He felt with such a person that they were only pretending to speak the same language.

“I want to see you.”

“I want to see you.”

I’m insane, he thought. But he didn’t have the power to stop, because the worst of it was that she was stronger than he; she was dominant. She didn’t need him, she could find the money from someone else. And she was a freak of nature, a kind of unicorn: he’d never find anyone like her.

He had never seen her room. He wanted to see her in it, to know her better. He waited for night to fall, then took a taxi to the address she had dictated to him. The room was in an old building smelling of fish sauce and hot cooking oil. But it was swept, it was tidy. What struck him about the room itself was the enormous calendar, the portrait of the king bordered in yellow for the royal jubilee, and the shrine in the corner, an image of Buddha, a flickering candle, some blossoms in a dish, a pair of amulets laid out side by side, and between them a slender tube of ivory chased in silver.

He was glad for the darkness, for the rattly air conditioner, because its noise killed conversation.

Song pulled the blinds and led him by the hand, like a child, into the bathroom. Dressed in a bathrobe and standing just outside the stall, she gave him a shower. Afterward she dried him and put him to bed. While he waited, buffeted by the air conditioner, it seemed to him that he was not in a room at all but another dark tunnel, being propelled toward its end and unable to do anything but allow himself to be tumbled.

Song had taken her shower, and in semidarkness she lay beside him and held him. She was the protector, she was active, while he lay safe, thinking, I am flesh, I am insane, I am happy, hold me.

“Magic knife,” he said, touching her.

But she hadn’t heard.

That became the pattern of their meetings: her room, the separate showers, the drawn blinds, the roaring air conditioner; and the pattern turned into a ritual without words. As a ritual, everything was allowable, and later he never thought about what had happened, having left everything in the dark: life with the lights out.

His floating dream-like indecisive life away from the precision of work matched the city with its smothering heat. The clasp of humidity and the gutter smell gagged him, and yet his mood swelled him with buoyancy. This, with the whole hot city pressed on his eyes, blurring everything around him, made him feel like someone bumping forward under water.

He stopped his diary, stopped sketching anything except market stalls and boats on the river, or the pepper pots of Buddhist stupas and the daggers of temple finials. He did not dare to draw any people for fear of being reminded how different he was from everyone else. Abandoning the diary and doing fewer drawings, he shook off the spell he’d cast on himself in his sketching.

That perplexed, oversimplified cartoon figure he drew to represent himself, wearing glasses, a startled question mark over his head, trying to make sense of Bangkok, no longer appeared on the pages of what was now a cluttered sketchpad. He could not bear to depict his confusion. He wanted to be a blank page. Ceasing to account for his days, he clouded his memory — memory, the useless ballast that gave the slow passage of his aging a heaviness that dragged him down. He was renewed each day by not remembering, stewing in a pleasurable anticipation of seeing Song, savoring the foretaste of desire, a creaminess of vanilla on her skin.

Now he knew why he had spent so many nights at the railway station. That waiting had been an evasion of this settled mood of acceptance. In a discarding frame of mind, flipping through the pages of his pictorial diary, he found a sketch he had made early on of the man-woman who’d demanded money from him. It had been done weeks before she’d accosted him, when he’d seen her as just another of the station’s loiterers. He’d drawn her as a fussed and fretting creature, bird-like with her beaky nose, in a Gypsy skirt with a bright shawl. He had not seen her distress or the spittle on her lips. The sketch was colorful, even merciful. He let it stand.

Putting all his earlier life aside, not thinking of Maine, concentrating on the present — himself and Song — he was happy. He still called Joyce every day, or she called him. Song said, “Who?” because the calls were so frequent. He never said, “My wife.” He denied he had a wife — he told himself he was sparing Joyce the indignity of mentioning her.