Bangkok Knights (30 page)

There is the piquant aftertaste of the mussel sauce,
the warm velvet night with the stars and the glow of the floodlights from the
shrimp boats on the horizon. And this warm, sweet girl with the voice like a
catfight hugged up against me as we stroll. But I am sad; I am sad thinking
about Oi’s sister who she tells me is fifteen and who works at the Caligula Club.
Her momma and poppa live in the Northeast and get money from Oi and her sister
every month. I am probably some kind of neurotic. We walk back into South Pattaya, and we go to a seafood restaurant where Oi tells me she wants more hoi, only
this time it’s not mussels she wants, but cockles and oysters instead, which
are also called hoi. We have besides this a big steamed snapper with grated
ginger, green papaya, spring onions, mushrooms, and things, and crab with
mustard sauce. Oi asks me if I want beer, and I say I don t. The waitress asks
if I want beer and I say we will have two glasses of lime juice. Oi has ice
cream for dessert, rum-raisin, while I have a plate of fruit.

Now we are back in the hotel, and Oi takes off the
ivory bracelet I bought her after dinner. She’s turning it in her hands and
rubbing it. I don t know why I bought it. Probably because we had nothing to
talk about. And because I felt sad and didn’t know how to cheer myself up. Oi
is only a bar girl, and she’ll still expect her money in the morning. What’s
wrong with me? I never buy anything made from dead elephants because this
encourages poaching, and soon there will be no wild elephants. Sunantha always
says elephants are like people, and we should never hurt them; she says this with
great sincerity, but I’m not sure what she means.

This is her lucky bracelet, Oi tells me. ‘Suay’, she’d
said in the shop when I bought it. ‘Beautiful—suay dee.’ But she’ d really
wanted the gold chain necklace. 24 carat. Thais like pure yellow gold—it’s
readily negotiable in time of need, which enhances its aesthetic value no end.
Oiputs the bracelet down on the night-table and takes her clothes off. I am
somewhat disconcerted; I haven t even kissed her yet, and she’s walking to the
bathroom in nothing but the briefest of panties and no inhibitions whatsoever.
I sit on the bed and think she is astonishingly lovely and sweet. But it is all
a bit clinical;! haven t even kissed her yet and she’s naked in my shower. She
is lovely, though, and so young and I don’t care if she is a bar girl or
not—unspoiled. I´ve forgotten to pick up some condoms. These days you’ve got to
be out of your mind not to use condoms with one of these girls. It’s hard to
imagine this little package of vitality being sick, but there isn’t necessarily
any sign, and the consequences of being unlucky can be extreme. Now what? I
wonder if they have some downstairs. Or maybe Oi has some in her bag. I don’t
like condoms, though.

To tell the truth, right now I’m thinking I would
rather be going to sleep and getting up early to go windsurfing. After all the
sun and exercise and the big feed of seafood I think I can sleep very well,
indeed. I can’t talk to this girl, and just at the moment I don t really want
to do anything else with her, though she is very ornamental and pleasant to
have about the place. Like a Siamese cat, all sculptured form and sinuous
grace. She’s sexier than a cat, though. Now she comes out of the bathroom,
clean and glowing and fragrant and surprised to find me still dressed, coy
rascal that I am. She helps me down to my underwear and escorts me to the
shower, where she invades my shorts with much giggling and nicely simulated
expressions of delight. She turns on the water and begins to lather some parts
of me when suddenly she comes up with an exclamation of a different sort,
suspicion and alarm being mostly what she means to convey. Quite rudely, I
think, she yanks my reproductive organs out for closer inspection and asks
‘What’s this?’ in a voice which reminds me what she is capable of, vocally. At
fir st I am surprised she doesn´ t know what this is, given her line of work,
and figuring her to be by no means a virgin. Then I take a closer look myself,
and I see what she means. There is a funny rash all over my groin. Like a
million ants have been grazing in the area. ‘What ho?’ I think. Then it hits me
— Sunantha’s talcum powder. Like a curse. ‘You sick?’ Oi asks, not
unreasonably, now that I’ve had a look. But I say no. No, this is merely the
aftermath of a nice rub-down with cut-rate mentholated talcum powder
exacerbated, possibly, by the stings of a giant jellyfish. ‘You sick,’ she
decides, no matter what I tell her.

It looks as though she’s going to leave, and my
feelings about this are mixed, with there being maybe more than a little bit of
relief in the mixture somewhere. But she can t leave, it turns out, because
she’ s already washed her clothes in the bathroom sink, and they won’t be dry
before morning. I tell her mai pen rai, never mind, she can stay with me, not to
worry, I won’t make her sick. She probably thinks I’m a weirdo, but she says
okay anyway, and we climb into the sack, where I have to wear my shorts. We
snuggle up spoon-fashion, and she’s asleep in one minute or less, a nice
uncomplicated girl who should be asleep back home with her sister in the
Northeast, dreaming of village dances and young suitors with many buffaloes.
All in all, I’m glad the way things worked out, I think. After a while,
however, propinquity sets in and I get to thinking this girl is considerably
more interesting than any cat, Siamese or otherwise. To tell the truth, V m
wondering if perhaps my rash hasn t gone away already and maybe she should wake
up and we can renegotiate. Only I hate to wake her up, she’s sleeping so
soundly, and I don’t have a condom. I am not uncomplicated, I guess, and
whatever innocence I still possess it is not of the kind that lets me get to
sleep easily this night.

‘What’s wrong?
Pen yang ngai?’

I have been dreaming. I have fallen face down into a
golden, dusty, sweet-smelling field of sun-dried hay, and all of a sudden I am
covered with swarms of big stinging ants, and I am thrashing about wildly
trying to get them off me. I wake up to a very dark room, and a frightened
voice beside me in the bed is asking me what’s wrong. I am disoriented for a
moment, this voice doesn’t sound like Sunantha’s. Then it comes back tome—where
I am and who she is.

But what’s this? My scalp is itching like I’ve never
felt anything itch before. I scratch, I have no choice but to scratch so hard I
am tearing my hair out. I go into the bathroom and switch on the light to
investigate.

At first I don’t recognize this thing I see in the
mirror. But then I figure out it’s me. My face is swollen horribly, lips
distended, a bright red rash running down each side of my nose. There is a bit
of drool coming from the corner of my mouth.

‘Hungh, hungh, hungh,’ I say. I sound something like a
big fat boar which has found cause for alarm. Come to that, I look more than
somewhat porcine, lips distended till they’re all but turned inside-out, piggy
little eyes trying to goggle with horror. I really want to yell ‘Holy shit!’
but it seems the requisitefacial muscles are pretty well paralyzed. That’s why
I’m drooling, and that’s why I can t talk. What I can do is waggle my eyebrows
and roll my piggy eyes about frantically. Oi is standing in the doorway now,
and I turn to her to say ‘Holy shit, get a doctor!’ but what I actually say is
‘Huh, huh, hng (slurp), uhhng!

At first Oi is surprised to see a huge porker in the
bathroom, but she quickly adjusts, and I am subjected to gales of unpleasantly
shrill laughter. It’s three o’clock in the morning, it turns out, and I pace
back and forth, occasionally going into the bathroom to grunt and goggle at my
self in the mirror. I am wondering if I should try to find a doctor somewhere.
But are there any doctors in Pattaya at 3:00 in the morning, and what can I
tell him if I find one? I’d probably get the same reaction I got from Oi. Oi
has gone back to sleep, the pacing of large pigs in the boudoir having proved
quite restful, it seems. What could it be, I wonder. Something I ate? All that
shellfish? I’m not sick, though—no headache, stomach’s okay. I feel fine,
except my scalp still itches and l’ ve metamorphosed into a pig. After a while,
I am convinced the swelling is going down a little, and l manage to articulate
“God help me” so that it’s fairly intelligible. My scalp feels better and I lie
down beside Oi and finally I get some sleep.

I gave Oi 300
baht
in the morning. She seemed very
pleased with that; I think she was also pleased to see the end of this poxy
farang
who went around turning into a monster in the middle of the night. She
didn’t laugh at me any more, though, and she suggested I see a doctor.

The swelling had gone down, leaving a residual puffiness
around the eyes and cheeks, the skin blotchy, the pores gaping at me as I
examined myself anxiously in the mirror before checking out of the hotel. My
face still felt stiff and unnatural, and my speech was badly slurred. I was
self-conscious about encountering people in the hard light of day, but the
girls at the desk seemed to find nothing remarkable in my appearance. They had
probably seen much worse in their time.

I didn’t go to a doctor, and I didn’t go windsurfing. I
got on the first bus out of town — an
air-conditioned
bus, this time. I
told myself I would see a doctor in Bangkok, if things weren’t back to normal
by the next day. It was still a mystery to me what had happened. I mean, I
never
got ill; I never had skin problems; I never had V.D.; I hardly ever even
caught a cold. And now, in the course of a single day, I had come up with
something that did a good job of passing itself off as terminal crotch rot, and
then I’d fallen victim to the dreaded Swollen Pig-Head Syndrome. And this is
not even to mention jellyfish stings, sunburn, ropeburn, and all the other
souvenirs of violent encounters with my environment I’d collected. I was
exhausted, as well, what with the lack of sleep and all.

I felt hungover, even though I hadn’t had a drop to drink.
I discerned annoying intimations of guilt and anxiety in myself, never mind my
behavior had been more or less beyond reproach. If this whole business was some
kind of Judgment, then I felt hard done by. Or maybe Sunantha
had
put a
curse on me.

But I was blameless, really, if we were to overlook one or
two little sins of only half-assed commission. Only half-heartedly contemplated
to start with, and wholly unsuccessful in the outcome. Tell it to the judge.
Sunantha would probably have argued there was also a sin of omission to be
taken into the account—I had failed to behave in the way an honorable friend
and lover would have done. ‘Huh!’ she had said.
‘Khon mai dee.
You’re a
no-good man.’

But what was the big deal? So I had decided go stay at the
beach one more day. I’d heard of worse things. Sunantha was old enough to spend
a few hours on the bus by herself.

Now that I thought about it, I wished she could’ve stayed
at the beach. I could’ve taught her some windsurfing.

Anyway, I hadn’t gotten pissed, and I hadn’t done any
tomcatting. None to speak of. I hadn’t done any windsurfing either, come to
that. If anyone should be upset, it was me. Well, yeah. Still, East is East and
West is West and Sunantha, I knew, would be in a real funk. Nothing I couldn’t
fix, but it might take some doing, this time. I hadn’t handled things very
well, I had to admit.

I wiped a bit of drool away from the corner of my mouth.
My lower face was still partially paralyzed. It must’ve been the mussels, I
thought, or the cockles. Probably the mussels. They told you to be careful of
the shellfish around here, especially if it wasn’t cooked. Well, now I knew.

I wondered if Sunantha would come home right after work. I
meant to my place. But she probably wouldn’t be expecting to see me yet.

I wanted to see her. She had been a nurse, after all, and
perhaps she would know what was ailing me. Even if she didn’t, she would know
how to make me feel better. I had a good idea — I

would stop and buy her a couple of shiny red apples from
that lady by the bus-stop. She was always saying how much she loved apples,
never mind they were exorbitantly expensive in Thailand. Sixteen
baht
apiece.

The bus wasn’t very full; not that many people travel from
Pattaya to Bangkok early on a Monday morning in the hot season. I had two whole
seats to myself and the air-conditioning was going like a blizzard. I felt
better; as I drifted off I thought I would feel a lot better again after I had
had a little sleep. And after I’d seen Sunantha.

‘You re drunk. Don’t you talk to me. First you leave me
alone, and then you come home and you re drunk.’

Even though I know the swelling has almost disappeared,
my face still feels bloated and I feel at a disadvantage. I can t talk very
well; F m still drooling and slurping a bit, and the words, after I´ve
painstakingly articulated them as best I can, are nevertheless badly slurred.
Like I´m punch-drunk or—Sunantha’s best guess— just plain drunk.

I was at first pleasantly surprised to have Sunantha
appear at my place, where she found me applying some of her cold cream to my
groin. She said she hadn’t gone to work; she’d had some things to do. These
things turned out to be coming to my apartment and packing up all her things.
Now she’s waiting for a friend who has a big car to come over and pick her up.

I can t believe this. She is leaving. I´ve spent the
last couple of months wondering how I can break it off with her, and now, just
like that, she’s leaving. I’m free.

But this isn t the way I´d  thought it was going to be.
And right now isn’t the best time. So I’m trying to reason with her, trying to
explain things. Only I can t talk very well, and my self-image as a bloated pig
isn’t fending my manner the authority it needs. It doesn´ t even help when I
put my shorts on and wipe the cold cream