Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

The following night they met at Siamese Nights, Song with a glass of lemonade, Osier with a Singha beer. Song said, “My mudda, she really like you,” and it seemed to mean everything.

“She’s a lovely woman. So energetic. You know?” He motioned with his hands. “I imagine your mother in her village, and I see sunshine and green fields and chickens and fruit trees…” He described the idyllic landscape he had seen from the train on his one-day trip out of Bangkok, which he’d sketched in his diary.

When he finished, smiling at the thought of what he had described, Song said, “I understand.”

Later, at her apartment, she took charge of him, bathing him, scrubbing him, massaging him, exhausting him, being generous. It seemed that she was rewarding him for being so kind to her mother, but with a lavishness that approached debauchery.

Of course they suspected something at the plant, but they didn’t know him, or were less sure of him. He was like a man receding as they watched him, backing away, growing smaller and simpler, blurring in the distance on a long road. Osier liked that. He was strengthened by his secrets. He knew now that a kind of happiness existed that no one could even guess at — unthinkable for these techies who assumed everything was thinkable.

Joyce, too. His happiness gave her heart. She could not imagine the source of his happiness, nor would he ever be able to explain it to her, yet she would accept it, as she accepted most things. She heard that note in his voice.

“I’m glad it’s all going well.”

Pleasure made him bold, passion made him guiltless. He did not wonder how she would manage without him. Already she was managing without him, and if she wanted to know what the future held for her, she only needed to visit her mother, as she did most weekends.

Osier’s confident frame of mind made him more efficient, more observant of the routines at the plant, catching the shuttle in the morning, working on the accounts, making small talk in the cafeteria, heading back to the hotel in the shuttle with the others. Larry and Fred did not stop at the clubs anymore.

Some weeknights Osier slipped away to see Song, but that meant a late return to the hotel. Weekends, from Friday night to Sunday evening, he spent with Song at her little apartment near Siamese Nights.

One Friday at lunchtime, Fred sat heavily at Osier’s table, commanding attention in the very act of seating himself — elbows on the table, arms upraised, trapping him.

“Great news. I just found out there’s an awesome old church here on the river. Holy Rosary. Catholic. Services every Sunday.”

Fred said this with the same gusto as he had in the past, shouting in a strip club, I’ll mud-wrestle you for that one.

Osier said, “I had no idea.”

“They’ve actually got a priest. I emailed him and told him about us. The company — American company, expat staff, Catholics. He was stoked. They got a pretty diverse collection of communicants.”

Osier was not sure what Fred was saying, whether this was innocent enthusiasm or some sort of ploy. He’d winced at clection. He tried to think of an answer to the question he knew was about to be asked.

“So how about it? You want to come along?”

Had Fred suggested going to a market, or a concert, or an art exhibit, or even a Buddhist temple, Osier would have found it easy to say no. But a church service — Catholic — was another matter. He felt ambushed. He was the one who had been disapproving of the clubs, the one who had kept his nights a secret. He guessed that Larry and Fred had their suspicions. Why else had Larry harped on going back to the States? You can go home too, you know. A club would have been easy to reject, but how on earth could he turn down a Catholic Mass on a Sunday?

“Okay,” Osier said.

And now he had to explain to Song. Sunday-morning Mass meant that he could not spend Saturday night at her apartment, because that would complicate meeting Fred in the lobby at seven a.m., as he’d agreed.

“Company business,” he said, hating his lie. And sitting in Siamese Nights, he made up a story in which the boss figured.

Song listened, watching him with her smooth moonlit face. She heard what he said and nodded, but Osier knew that all her inarticulate alertness, her wordless wondering receptivity to every twitch and pulse, told her he was lying. But now it was too late for the truth. If he changed his story and honestly told her about the church service, she’d still be convinced he was lying.

She said, “When I see you then?”

“Saturday night’s out. Sunday’s a problem.”

“I understand.” And the way she said it, lightly, with no bitterness, he took to be a measure of her wounded pride.

Siamese Nights was quiet, the other girls gathered at one table, facing the front door for customers. Osier hugged Song to make a point. Normally he never touched her in public. She stiffened, resisting him as though violated, as though he’d touched her head.

“We can go to your place.”

“No. You busy.”

He wasn’t busy. He knew this was a rebuff. And a moment later his phone rang. He had forgotten to shut it off. He looked and saw Joyce’s number, and didn’t answer.

Sensitized, Song noticed that too. “You don’t want to talk to your friend?”

He said, “It’s nothing. Nobody.”

No one was more alert to a further slight than someone who felt rejected.

“Nothing. Nobody,” she said.

And to prove it was nothing, he called Joyce back, damp and breathless with shame, Song watching, and before Joyce could speak more than a few words, he said, “I’ll have to talk to you later. I’m in a meeting,” and switched off the phone. Song was wide-eyed.

“See? Nothing. Just work.”

“Nothing,” she said.

“My boss,” he said.

“I understand.”

That simple exchange made him suffer. Saturday, he called Song. She didn’t answer — no Please leave a message, either. He tried to calm himself by sitting in the garden of a temple, sketching a Buddha, but the picture was no good, the face lopsided, the eyes cruel.

No answer from Song later that night, even after five tries, the last at midnight. Imagining the most lurid scenes — scenes he himself had enacted — he couldn’t sleep. Nor did she answer in the morning. And he reflected that in all the years of being married to Joyce he had never tasted such delight or endured such anguish as in his six weeks of loving Song.

“This is Missy,” Fred said in the lobby on Sunday morning.

A woman of forty or so, freckled, in a blue dress, with kindly eyes, said, “Melissa DeFranza. I know Fred from Vancouver. I’m in sales and marketing. On my way to a workshop in Singapore.”

“I mentioned I was going to a church service and Missy jumped,” Fred said.

She said, “That’s what I need. Spiritual renewal. So nice of you guys to include me.”

In the taxi, Missy said that she hoped to do some shopping and wondered if the stores in River City were open on Sunday. Fred talked loudly about his family and said that he had managed to live as an expatriate in Bangkok because he had created— crated —a special relationship with Jesus. He talked; Osier tuned him out.

The church, Holy Rosary, near the river, had a pencil-point steeple and arches, the whole of it faced in cream-colored stucco. Osier, no longer keeping his pictorial diary, could not break his habit of drawing such buildings in his head, and it relaxed him to see that this one would have been easy to put on the page. The church was a study in straight lines. Flowers filled the altar, which was draped in white linen, its marble supports picked out in gold. The faces on the stained-glass windows had an Asian cast.