Breathing Water (11 page)

R
ose starts to laugh when she smells the pigpen.

Her reaction startles Rafferty, and he’s further surprised to see a grin put dimples in Dr. Ravi’s face. The swan cart has carried them in grim silence across the grounds thus far, even when they drove past a dramatically lit Garden of Eden. Rose is in agony over what she’s wearing, a white, flowing, two-piece outfit she bought to meet Rafferty’s father in. He thinks she looks beautiful, but she behaves as though she’s wrapped in a rice bag.

But the pigpen makes her laugh out loud.

“How long?” she asks, wiping her eyes. “How long since he had it cleaned out?”

“
Weeks
,” says Dr. Ravi. “Imagine their faces,” and the pair of them go off again. Dr. Ravi has a falsetto laugh that flutes along half an octave above Rose’s alto. Together they sound like a pair of mice on the keyboard of an organ.

“Oh,” she says, half gasping for breath, her fingers splayed over her heart. “This is enough, Poke. You can take me home and my evening will be complete.”

“No you can’t,” Dr. Ravi says. “There’s something you’ll want to see.”

“What?”

“A surprise. You’ll love it. I promise you, it’s going to be worth it.”

Rose says, “I doubt it.” She looks down at herself and tugs at the sleeve of her blouse with an intensity of loathing that Rafferty can hardly comprehend. They are obviously deep in female territory.

“Besides,” Dr. Ravi says with the secure air of someone who knows he’s got a first-class closer, “Khun Pan would kill me if I allowed someone as beautiful as you to leave without at least an introduction.”

Rafferty says, “What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“He’s jealous?” Dr. Ravi asks.

Rose drops her sleeve like a rag that’s been dipped into something disgusting and says, “He can’t believe his good fortune.”

“I can’t either,” Dr. Ravi says.

“Hey,” Rafferty says.

“And here we are.” Dr. Ravi pulls the swan to the bottom of the broad marble steps leading up to the front porch. The double doors have been thrown wide, and even at this distance Rafferty can feel the cool air pouring out. A small orchestra is cricketing away inside, and he hears the usual party montage of conversation, laughter, and ice cubes hitting glass. Two women wearing, as even Rafferty can tell, several thousand dollars’ worth of clothing apiece float across the doorway on a cloud of privilege.

“Absolutely not,” Rose says. “I can’t go in there.”

“Oh, come on,” Rafferty says. “You look beautiful. And, Jesus, look at me.”

“He’s right,” Dr. Ravi says. “You’ll be the most beautiful woman in the house.”

“What I’ll be,” Rose says, “is a dark-skinned, big-footed peasant girl wearing a dust rag.” She puts a hand on Rafferty’s arm. “Poke. I want to go home.”

“Well, well,” someone says from the top step. Rose turns at the sound of the voice, and her jaw very discreetly drops.

“You
are
surprising,” Pan says to Rafferty. “You must have strengths you haven’t shown me. Goodness,” he says, turning to Rose. “What jeweled box does he keep you in?”

Rose says, “Oh, my.” Her nails dig into Rafferty’s arm.

“You said she was pretty,” Pan says, coming down the steps, “but you
didn’t tell me she was stunning.” Halfway down, he tosses his partially smoked cigar to smolder on the marble. He wears bright yellow silk slacks with burgundy patent-leather shoes, lavender socks, and a shirt of a vibrating grass-snake green, the precise color to set off the pink lips. He looks, in all, like a newly successful pimp who hasn’t found the right haberdasher yet. Rafferty would bet everything he owns that the look is intentional, down to the last agonizing detail. “I have a show planned that will curl their hair,” Pan says to Rose, “but nothing compared to you. You’ll drive them completely crazy.” He puts a hand on Rose’s shoulder and studies her face as though he were memorizing her bone structure. “You’re Isaan, of course. Where?”

Rose’s face is flushed with embarrassment. “About a hundred kilometers from where you were born.”

“We were neighbors,” Pan says. “This
farang
is lucky that I never saw you when you were growing up. I’d have stayed in Isaan, and he’d never have laid eyes on you.”

“Of course,” Rose says. “You’d be loafing barefoot on some hammock while I nag you to feed the chickens.”

Rafferty says, “Go ahead. Talk as though I’m not here.”

“Get used to it,” Pan says. “No one’s even going to notice you.”

“Since someone has to have some manners,” Rafferty says, “this is my wife, Rose. Rose, this is—”

“I know who he is,” Rose says. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

Pan says, “And you’re the…” He pauses, screws up his eyes, and says in English, “…
whipped cream
on the evening. You’re so beautiful it’s almost wasteful.” He glowers at Dr. Ravi. “Why didn’t you think of this?”

“I hadn’t seen her.”

“No, of course not.” Pan looks at Rose again and actually rubs his hands together. “I’ve made a life out of excess,” he says. “Improving the lily—”

Dr. Ravi says, “
Gilding
the lily.”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “it’s ‘painting.’ Painting the—”

“Oh, fuck the lily,” says Pan. He leans in toward Rose as though to whisper in her ear. “I have an idea for you, something that will ruin the evening for most of my guests. We know they think of Isaan as mud. Let’s remind them that mud is where the lotus grows.” He turns and says over his shoulder, “Please, please come with me.”

Rose and Rafferty follow Pan’s broad yellow bottom up the steps as Dr. Ravi climbs back into the swan and heads for the gates. Pan leads them at an angle, chatting with Rose all the way, partly in Lao, which Rafferty doesn’t understand. They top the steps to the left of the door and follow Pan around the side of the house. Halfway back they come to a marble wall with an iron gate in it. Beside the gate is a combination pad, which Pan prods with a sausagelike index finger for a second, and then Rafferty finds himself in the garden he’d seen that morning from Pan’s office.

“This will take me a minute,” Pan says, shoving a glass door aside and motioning them to file into the office. He comes in behind them and closes the door. “But, believe me, it’ll be worth it.” A few steps take him to a corner, where he opens a closet door, revealing a safe the size of a refrigerator.

“I don’t give up easily,” Pan says to Rose as he twirls the dial, “but I was beginning to think I’d have to return these. You’ll know what I mean at a glance. Not just anybody can wear them. They’d look ridiculous on someone who isn’t tall, for one thing. How tall
are
you?”

“Almost two meters,” Rose says.

“You should think about modeling, except you’d have to kill eight or nine society girls to get a job.” The door swings open without a murmur, although it must weigh three hundred pounds. “And even most tall women would disappear behind these. Just vanish, like the stars when the sun is out.” He pulls out a long, gray box covered in velvet and pops it open.

Rose emits something that sounds like a long hiss.

“They’re canaries,” Pan says, looking closely at her face. Draped over the swirl of burns on his fat little hand is a concentration of golden light: solid yellow drops of brilliance chained together somehow. “Average size is four carats,” Pan says, “but the one in the center is six. Canary diamonds this size are very rare, I’m told. I don’t know anything about it. I just thought they were pretty.”

“Why…why are you showing me these?” Rose asks.

“To wear, of course,” Pan says. “Oh, don’t worry,” he says to Rafferty. “I’m not trying to dazzle your wife with presents, although I would if you weren’t here. These are a loan for the evening, just to give those snobs out there something to stub their noses on. Let’s show them an exquisite Isaan girl, the most beautiful woman in the room,
wearing three million dollars’ worth of yellow diamonds.” He holds up the necklace. “What do you say?”

Rose reaches out a hand and says, “Let’s make their teeth hurt.”

RAFFERTY’S FIRST IMPRESSION
when Pan plunges into the thick of the gathering, dragging him and Rose in his wake, is that everyone is surface, brought to a high polish. Everyone shines, everyone glistens, everyone seems to reflect everyone else. Gold, jewels, hair, the shimmer of fabrics, the mysterious gleam of money. He practically squints in self-defense.

The men are a mixed lot, although all have the sheen of power he noticed in the poker game. Despite the occasional immaculate uniform, glittering with medals, most of the men wear suits, sober garments with the effortless drape achieved through highly paid effort. The men are mostly in their fifties and early sixties and look like they would put on a suit to pull a dandelion.

Seen from six or eight feet away, the women seem younger than the men, and some of them actually are—trophy wives or favored
mia noi
, “minor” wives who have been towed into public as a treat. Silk is everywhere, bordered at neck and wrists by the hard sparkle of precious stones. Young or old, most of the women are variations on a theme. They are grimly slim and brilliantly made up. Noses too broad in the bridge have been subtly shaded to appear narrower. Thin lips have been plumped up and thick lips minimized. White skin is the ideal, and those who do not have it wear pale, almost ghostlike powder to simulate it. Hair is architectural: sculpted, layered, lacquered against gravity. Perfume is everywhere. In the midst of the crowd, Rafferty feels like he is being attacked by flowers.

Rose, her face scrubbed and gleaming, the diamonds dazzling at her throat, towers above the women and most of the men as Pan hauls her and Rafferty along behind him, introducing them right and left as proudly as if he’d just whipped them up in the kitchen. He pretends not to see the stiffness with which they are met.

It usually takes a moment for the stiffness to set in. Rafferty can almost see the thoughts chase each other through people’s heads as they first look at Rose:
She’s beautiful. Maybe she’s someone I should recog
nize. Hmmmm, very dark-skinned, low bridge of the nose—Isaan. Oh, of course, she’s one of Pan’s little popsies.

Pan not only ignores the stiffness, he intensifies it. He has a trick of taking between both of his hands one of the hands of the woman he is greeting and then, when he introduces Rose, putting Rose’s hand into the woman’s. Some of the women manage the situation; their breeding comes to the fore, and they hold on to Rose’s hand and make conversation as though they had grown up neighbors, rather than on the opposite sides of one of the world’s widest gulfs of power and possession. The others—mostly, Rafferty thinks—those who fought their way into rooms such as these, go rigid. They actually tilt slightly backward, as though Rose smelled bad, and they snatch their hands away the moment Pan lets go.

At first Rafferty is worried about how Rose will handle the rejection, but this is a woman who stepped onstage nightly in a crowded, testosterone-filled bar, wearing little more than an attitude. The women who try to escape her learn that she is eagerly friendly, that she will follow them, puppylike, as they back away across the marble floor. She asks them the kinds of questions they would be asked in a small village: How many children do they have, how old, were the births painful, how
do
they get their hair to do that?

The woman Rafferty likes least retrieves her hand and wipes it on her thigh. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then back to Rose, and he can almost see the word “whore” form in her mind. “I’ll bet there’s a
fascinating
story here,” she says in English, for Rafferty’s benefit. “Where in the world did you two meet?”

“The King’s Castle,” Rose says, the English name of the Patpong bar she danced in.

“The Royal Palace,” Pan translates into Thai.

“Really,” the woman says, her eyebrows elevated. “Were you on a tour?”

“Oh, no,” Rose says. “I worked there. For years.”

The woman hesitates for a second, weighing the probabilities, then says, “Doing what?”

“Guest relations,” Rose says with her sweetest smile.

The woman says, “Ah.”

Pan says to Rose, “You don’t need me,” and disappears.

Rafferty snags a passing waiter and grabs two flutes of pink champagne, and he and Rose wander the crowd. There is no question that Pan was right: Rose is easily the most beautiful woman present. The yellow diamonds throw hard little points of golden light on the flawless skin of her neck and the underside of her chin. Most of the men follow her with their eyes, and most of the women watch the men, although their gaze eventually floats to Rose. But Pan was wrong about one thing: Even when Rafferty is standing right beside Rose, there
are
people who pay attention to him. Men, three of them. He can feel their eyes on him and see them slide away when he turns.

They are scattered throughout the crowd as though some sort of territorial imperative were in operation, keeping them apart. Orbiting each of them is a muscular little knot of men, three or four of them, wearing dark suits of anonymous cut. These men keep their eyes in motion. Some of them wear discreet earplugs. When one of the men in the center wants a drink, one of the satellites peels off and goes to get it. When the drink bearer returns, he stands like a human tray with the drink extended until the top dog condescends to notice him.

The three men’s eyes keep flicking to Rafferty.

At eight-thirty the little orchestra, which is seated on a raised platform midway down one of the room’s walls, strikes up the triumphal march from
Aida
, and two long screens, painted with gold bamboo and blindingly iridescent hummingbirds, are folded back to reveal a room filled with food and white-jacketed waiters. There is a general movement toward the buffet, and Rafferty takes advantage of the shift in focus to navigate through the crowd to Pan’s side.

“Three men,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to describe them, but don’t look for them while we’re talking.”

“I won’t have to,” Pan says. “It’s good business to know your enemies.”