Saint Jack (23 page)

“It's a popular room,” I said.

“Vientiane,” said Shuck, using the monotone of reminiscence. “That's a wide-open place. Lu-Lu's, The White Rose. First-class hookers. They do tricks with cigarettes. ‘Hey, Joe, you wanna see me smoke?' I had the strangest experience with a broad there—at least I
thought
it was a broad.”

“But it wasn't.”

“No, but that's not the whole story,” said Shuck.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Shuck. “I'm not finished.”

“I've heard it before.”

“No, you haven't.”

“About the bare-assed waitresses in The White Rose in Vientiane, and the girl that was really a feller, and the nympho you used to know? I've heard it before. Now, if you'll pipe down and excuse me—”

“Jack,” said Shuck, “sit yourself down. I've got some good news for you.” Buzz, buzz.

S
EX
I
HAD SEEN
as a form of exalted impatience, trembling as near to hilarity as to despair—just like love—but so swift, and unlike love, it happily avoided both; that was a relief, grace after risk. And the strangest part of the sex wish: you wore all of it on your face. This assumption had been the basis of my whole enterprise. Paradise Gardens, Shuck's good news, made me change my mind about this.

“Here she comes,” I said, and Ganapaty scrambled to his feet. I was standing in bright sunshine at the end of the cinder drive by his sentry box, squinting down Adam Road where, at the junction, the shiny bus had stopped at the lights. I folded my arms. The first fellers were arriving. Behind me, glittering, was Paradise Gardens, known in District Ten as a private hotel.

It was a new three-story building, long and narrow, white stucco trimmed with blue, and with a blue square balcony and a roaring air conditioner attached to every room. The usual high whorehouse fence, this one strung with morning-glories and supporting a hedge of Pong-Pong trees, concealed it from Dr. B. K. Lim's bungalow on one side and a row of semidetached houses (each with a barbed-wire fence and a starved whimpering guard dog) on Jalan Kembang Melati on the other side. On our cool lawn there were mimosas and jasmine and the splendid upright fans of three mature traveler's palms. In the secluded patio out back we had a small swimming pool.

The idea of Paradise Gardens was Shuck's, or perhaps that of the United States Army, who employed him and now me. The design was my own; I had supervised the construction. The catering contract was Hing's, and the glass-fronted shops in the arcade—the entire ground floor—were run by Hing's relations: a tailor (I was wearing one of his white linen suits that first day), a photographer, a curio seller (elongated Balinese carvings,
wayang
puppets, and a selection of Chinese bronzes ingeniously faked in Taiwan), a druggist with a
RUBBER GOODS
sign taped to his window, a barber, and a news agent. My orders had been to design a place that a guest—Shuck told me ours would be GIs when it was done—would check into and stay for five days without having to leave the grounds. It was an early version of the tropical tourist hotel which, more than a place to sleep, contains the country, a matter of size, food, decor, and entertainment. I had a vision of luxury hotels underpinning the rarest and most exotic features of a people's culture, the arts and crafts surviving in the Hilton long after they had ceased to be practiced in the villages. Tourism's demand for atmosphere and authentic folklore would force the hotel to be the country. So I made it happen. We had Malay and Chinese dances every night, and traditional food, and we were scrupulous about observing festivals. It took two days for our Mr. Loy to cook a duck; outside Paradise Gardens the Chinese ate hamburgers standing up at lunch counters or in their parked cars at the A & W drive-in. Once a week we put on a mock wedding in the Malay style. It had been years since anyone had seen something like that in Singapore.

“The bus coming,” said Ganapaty.

“She's full up,” I said.

Ganapaty came to attention, a crooked derelict figure with a beautiful white caste mark, a finger's width of ashes between his eyes. It pleased me that at Paradise Gardens I was able to employ everyone I owed a favor to: Yusof tended the big bar, Karim the smaller one; the room Shuck called “your theaterette” was run by Henry Chow, a blue-movie projectionist who had been out of work since the raids; Mr. Khoo, my old boatman, I employed as a mechanic, Gopi picked up the mail—though the post office was only across the street, his limp made what I intended as a sinecure for him a tedious and exhausting job. And the girls; the girls were no problem—fruit flies from Anson Road, floaters and athletes from the shut-down massage parlors, the sweet dozen from Dunroamin, and Betty from Muscat Lane—all my quick and limber daughters.

Shuck wanted to see their papers: “We're not taking any chances.” He made me fire three who had been born in China, one with a sore on her nose, and a Javanese girl, a willowy fellatrix with gold teeth, reputedly a mistress of the late Bung Sukarno.

Every five days, as on that first day, the bus swayed into the driveway and I could see the young faces at the green-tinted windows. I waved. They did not wave back. They stared. I learned that unimpatient stare. It was a look of pure exhaustion focusing on the immediate, fastening to it, not glancing beyond it. It was new to me. Once, I had been able to spot a likely client thirty yards off by the way he watched girls pass him, the face of a feller running a temperature wearing helpless lechery on his kisser; with that telling restive alertness as, turning around with tensed arms and eager hands, sipping air through the crack of a smile starting to be hearty, he looks as if he is going to say something out loud. Each fidget was worth ten dollars. But the faces of the boys on the buses that deposited them for what Shuck called “your R and R” were expressionless and kept that bombed uncritical stare until they boarded the same bus five days later. The boys sat well back in their seats; they didn't hitch forward like tourists, and they didn't chatter.

I expected uniforms the first day. Shuck hadn't mentioned that they would be wearing Hawaiian shirts, but here they were getting off the bus with crew cuts, bright shirts, the white socks that give every American away, and staring with tanned sleepy faces.

“Jack Flowers,” I said, stepping forward. “Glad you could make it, fellers.”

“It's sure as hell—” a feller began slowly.

“Excuse me, sir,” another butted in. “Are those girls—”

“The girls,” I said, raising my voice, “are right over there and dying to get acquainted!”

Florence, May, Soo-chin, Annapurna, and nutcracker Betty, hearing me, responded by ambling into the sunlight on the arcade's verandah. The other girls moved behind them. The fellers carried their duffel bags and handgrips over to the verandah and dropped them, and almost shyly walked over to the girls and began pairing off.

“We're in business,” said Shuck.

Later they walked in the garden, holding hands.

 

The soldiers' five-day romance was a rehearsal of innocence, and then they went back to Vietnam. This all-purpose house was the only gentle shelter, halfway down the warpath, with me at the front gate saying, “Is there anything—?” My mutters made me remember: in the passion that caged us the issue was not escape—it was learning gentleness to survive in the cage, and never loutishly rolling against the bars.

“For some of these guys it's their first time with a whore,” said Shuck. “What do you tell them?”

“Don't smoke in bed.”

Was I serving torturers? I didn't feel I had a right to ask. I believed in justice. The torturer slept with harm and stink, the pox would eat him up, his memory would claw him. I wanted the others to wrestle in their rooms until they were exhausted beyond sorrow—a happy bed wasn't everything, but it was more than most worthy fellers got.

I write what I never spoke. Conversation is hectic prayer; it deprived me of subtlety and indicated time passing. It didn't help much. At Paradise Gardens, by the bar, showing my tattoos and joshing the girls and soldiers, I was a noisy cheerful creature. But the mutters in my mind told me I was Saint Jack. Edwin Shuck, saying so casually, “We're all whores one way or another,” was parodying an enormous possibility that could never be disproved until we had rid ourselves of the habit of slang, the whore's own evasive language, a hard way to be honest and always a mockery of my mutters. I simplified, I used slang; I was known as a pimp, the girls as whores, the fellers as soldiers: none of the names fits.

I kept Paradise Gardens running smoothly, and what made me move was what had stirred me for years, my priestly vocation, my nursing instinct, my speedy hunger and curiosity, my wish to head off any cruelty, my singular ache to be lucky; and I did it for fortune. I had seen a lot of fellers come over the hill, and as I say, the drift then was away from all my old notions of sex. In Singapore my suggestions had long since been overtaken by wilder ideas, pictures, movies, devices, potions, acrobatics, or complete reticence; my vocabulary was obsolete and words like “torrid,” “fast,” “daring,” and “spicy” meant nothing at all. What had once seemed to me as simple as a kind of ritual corkage became a spectator sport or else an activity of nightmarish athleticism. It made me doubly glad for Paradise Gardens. The soldiers were happy with a cold beer and the motions of a five-day romance. I made sure the beer was so cold their tonsils froze and had Karim put four inches of ice in every drink. All afternoon we showed old cowboy movies in the theaterette. Some of the fellers taught the girls to swim. Every five days the bus came, and for five days most of the fellers stayed inside the gates. When they wandered it was up to the university, close by, to try out their cameras.

One group of GIs bought me a pair of binoculars, expensive ones with my initials lettered in gold on the leather case, and a little greeting card saying
To a swell guy.

“Now I can see what goes on in your rooms,” I said.

They laughed. What went on in those rooms, anyway?
Aw honey
, the purest cuddlings of romance, pillow fights; they tickled the girls, and they never broke or pilfered a thing.

“You won't see much in Buster's,” one said.

I turned to Buster. “That right? Not interested in poontang?”

“I can't use it,” Buster said, with a lubberly movement of his jaw.

“Buster's married.” The feller looked at me. “You married, Jack?”

“Naw, never got the bug—ruins your sense of humor,” I said. “Marriage—I've got nothing against it, but personally speaking I'd feel a bit overexposed.”

“Where's your old lady, Buster?” the feller asked.

“Denver,” said Buster, shyly, “goin' ape-shit. How about a hand of cards?”

“Later,” a tall feller said. “My girl wants a camera.”

My girl.
That was Mei-lin. They all wanted cameras; they knew the brands, they picked out the fanciest ones. When the fellers boarded the bus for the ride back to the war the girls rushed to Sung's Photo in the arcade and sold them for half price.

“Used camera,” said Jimmy Sung, when I challenged him.

“Cut the crap,” I said. It was a shakedown. From a two-hundred-dollar camera Sung made a hundred and the girl made a hundred; the soldier paid. But Sung ended up with the camera, to sell again.

“Full prices for the cameras,” I said to Sung, “or I'll toss you out on your ear.”

In the kitchen Hing made up huge deceitful grocery lists which he passed to Shuck without letting me see, and he got checks for items he never bought. The arcade prices were exortionary, the girls were grasping. No one complained. On the contrary: the fellers often said they wanted to marry my girls and take them back to the States, “the world,” as they called it.

I did what I could to reduce the swindling. The arcade shopkeepers saw it my way and “Sure, sure,” they'd say, and claw at their stiff hair-bristles with their fingers when I threatened.

In Sung's, on the counter, there was an album of photographs, a record of Paradise Gardens which thickened by the week. Many were posed shots Sung had snapped, tall fellers embracing short dark girls, fellers around a table drinking beer, muscle-flexers by the pool, group shots on the verandah, candid shots—fellers fooling with girls in the garden. There were many of me, but the one I liked showed me in my linen suit, having my late-afternoon gin, alone in a wicker chair under a traveler's palm, with a cigar in my mouth; I was haloed in gold and green, and dusty beams of sunlight slanted through the hedge.

Shuck was right: the news was good, almost the glory I imagined. I was surprised to reflect that what I wanted had taken a war to provide. But I didn't make the war, and I would have been happier without the catastrophe. In every picture in Sung's album the war existed in a detail as tiny and momentous as a famous signature or a brace of well-known initials at the corner of a painting: the dog tag, the socks, the military haircut, the inappropriate black shoes the fellers wore with their tropical clothes, a bandage or scar, a particular kind of sunglasses, or just the fact of a farm boy's jowl by the pouting rabbit's cheek of a Chinese girl. In the lobby it was a smell, leather and starch and after-shave lotion, and a nameless apprehension like the memory of panic in a room with a crack on the ceiling that grows significant to the insomniac toward morning. “Saigon, Saigon,” the girls said; we didn't talk about it, but the fellers left whispers and faces behind we could never shoo away.

And Sung's photograph album, the size of a family Bible and bound with a steel coil, was our history.

 

A sky of dazzling asterisks: the Fourth of July.
The fellers set off rockets and Roman candles in the garden with chilly expertness, a sequence of rippling blasts that had Dr. B. K. Lim screaming over the hedge and all the guard dogs in the neighborhood howling. The fellers ate wieners and sauerkraut, had a rough touch football game; that night everyone jumped into the pool with his clothes on.