The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (32 page)

In the morning, very early, there was a tapping at the door, and he got up sick and fat and groggy in his underwear to see who it was. He opened the door and shouted
Vanna!
with glee and thankfulness and she was glowing at him; she’d brought loaves of bread for his journey; he shared one with her. The photographer, who’d passed out puking on
the floor, lay feverish in bed; and the journalist opened the refrigerator where the photographer had left his fruit to be abandoned and gave it to her, a gift for a gift, and she smiled and took
it so that it became something special. Lying in bed beside him she peeled a fruit somewhat like a giant grapefruit, each sector of it walled off by a bitter cuticle as thick as a flower petal, the
reward inside being a mass of rubbery pale-yellow teardrop-shaped fibers with bittersweet juice; and she put the segments into his mouth, and she said:
I wuff you.

When they got back to Bangkok, the journalist said to the photographer: Well, that was it. No more whores for me. And he’d start talking about how he was going to marry
Vanna, until the photographer said: Aw, you’re driving me crazy! The photographer went and got laid. He really wanted the journalist to do it too. He looked out for him. When the
journalist’s balls had been at their worst, the photographer always got him meals in bed. But the journalist wanted to be good now; he said no. Red-boiled by the sun until he resembled a
vulture, staring blearily, grimly ahead, the harsh light of Bangkok illuminating the insides of his ears, the photographer had had a hard time getting through the daylight hours. But now all his
grace was back. Can I at least bring you back something? As ever, the journalist envied him and wanted to be like him. Oh, that’s all right, he said. You go spread one for me.

He stayed in and washed his underwear in the sink. The room was bright, cool, and quiet, with hardly any cockroaches – this being the world-famous Hotel 38, you see, which they’d
never heard of before. When he’d scrubbed his underwear, he squeezed them out and left them hanging and dripping on the bathroom doorknob. (The photographer, pitying his incompetence in
almost every sphere of life, sometimes rearranged his laundry for him. Don’t ever leave your wife, he always said to the journalist. Without her you’d
really
have problems!) He
went out and stood on the landing between the second and third floors, looking across interstellar darkness into the window of a garment factory where girls in pale uniforms sat sewing; it seemed
to him very strange and bleak; the prostitutes probably had a better life, in spite of the shame . . . Just after he’d turned the light out and gotten into bed, the light came on, and he
opened his eyes to see the photographer with someone else in the hot glowing doorway. A moment later, Joy, the photographer’s old Bangkok girl, was on the journalist’s bed, holding his
hand and hugging him so naturally like he was her brother while the photographer laughed. Only one boyfriend me! she said, pointing to the photographer. I love
him
! You are so sweet, said
the journalist in wonder, meaning every word of it, wondering how many times he’d meant it . . .

Joy went into the bathroom. Then she and the photographer went to bed. The journalist told them both goodnight. Soon he heard Joy’s soft rhythmic moans, faked or unfaked, while in the hall
a cat in heat went
aaoow, aaoow
.

What is she to you? a cyclo driver in Phnom Penh had shouted from among the crowd that encircled him as the journalist walked Vanna across the street on his last morning in
Cambodia, his fingertips gentle and careful against her back.

She’s my friend, he said.

And what
was
she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the
face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough?

When he drew sketches of the Hotel 38 maids, they kissed him on the lips and asked him to take them out dancing; later that day one said to him very tentatively: I
love
you?

The next night the photographer brought some women back for them, a sort of midnight snack; he’d asked again before he went and this time the journalist had said: Go
ahead; twist my arm. The photographer had Joy again. The journalist’s was a greedy thief smooth-shaven between her legs, and as soon as he’d stuck his tongue in her he knew that it was
a mistake. He got up and rinsed his mouth out. Then he put a rubber on. The next day his tongue was coated with white fungus and his throat was so swollen that he could hardly breathe. Over and
over a fierce fever grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him out of his dreams, then let him fall back to sleep exhausted. He remembered Vanna’s face. Well, doubtless Vanna
wasn’t celibate, either. Maybe it was then that he began to get the unbounded confidence and ease that permitted him to cut any pretty girl who caught his fancy right out of the Patpong herd
and take her straight back to the hotel, so that weeks later, when he awoke in the middle of the night, jet-lagged, he saw a woman sleeping beside him and at once, not knowing who she was, pulled
her underpants briskly down to her ankles and rubbed her fuzz and spread her until she stirred and muttered:
What
. . . ? and he suddenly remembered that this was his wife.

He wanted to say to his wife: Who am I? Only to see her expression when he said it, of course. I’m thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose
language I can’t speak a word of, he said to one of his friends. That’s very interesting, his friend said. Maybe you should sleep on it. I wouldn’t do anything drastic. How much
do you think I’d need to support her and her baby? he said. We can run through the numbers together, his friend said. A thousand a month for a two-bedroom place. You’d need that;
you’d need a room to work, a room for the kid. That’s twelve thousand. Then there’s food and health insurance. Transportation. She’d be learning English the first year;
there’d be a bill for that. Maybe daycare. Figure twenty-five grand. That’s after taxes. So you’d need thirty-five, forty grand. So much? whispered the journalist in dismay.

The transvestites, skull-grinning with black cobwebs painted over their sparkling eyes, didn’t tempt him, not even the ones with black bridles and nostril slits and
double eyebrow-slits cut into their sweating glistening faces leering sheer and sweet out of darkness, but by now he’d begun to understand De Sade’s prison scribblings when the sex
object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike De Sade he didn’t want to hurt anyone, really didn’t, didn’t even
want to fuck anyone any more particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman among the pocked and speckled and gilded and lip-pinked grinning heads that floated in flashing
darkness, cratered with deer eyes, holding Japanese-style umbrellas like darkness-gilled mushrooms; he was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of
them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn’t really loving them.

I can’t take you anywhere! the photographer cried out in anguish. Whenever a girl asks you to buy her a drink, you buy her a goddamned drink! I can stay in a bar for
hours and tell ’em all to go screw, but you’re such a pushover it just blows my mind. You’d better never leave your wife. You need someone to take
care
of you, man!

I agree a hundred per cent, said the journalist, who like the photographer agreed with everyone on everything; it was so much easier. He was feeling sick again; his balls were aching. He
certainly didn’t know what he’d done to deserve
that
. They were drinking at the Pink Panther, where the lights reflected through his mixed drink.

Then he felt contrite and said: In the next bar I’ll do better. I’ll watch my money better.

So in the next bar, just barely out of sight of the Pink Panther, a woman said to him: You buy me drink? and he said no and she said: You buy me drink? and he said: Sure, honey. If it’ll
make you happy I’ll buy you two drinks.

When at last he took all the slips from the wide teak cup and added them up, he saw that he was short by almost five hundred baht. He had to call to the photographer for money.

I don’t fucking
believe
it, said the photographer in the most genuine amazement that the journalist had seen in a long time.

The two of them went back to Joy and Pukki’s to sleep. (Remember Pukki? The journalist hardly did. She’d tried to get him to buy her out that night in Joy’s
bar when he told her he loved Oy.) They couldn’t afford the Hotel 38 any more except on special occasions; it was three hundred baht. They’d given Joy twenty dollars apiece, each
without knowing what the other had done. Her room was an oven at night, bright and bleak and reeking of insecticide. Splashing sounds came from the hall, where ladies took turns doing the laundry.
In the corner crack, a foot or two below the ceiling, a hairy curled wire protruded. The wire began to vibrate. After a while the photographer got up and pulled it; something squeaked; it was a
rat’s tail . . .

My place no good, said Joy softly. You no angry me?

He had gone alone to the National Museum to enjoy an hour of beauty without love, but he was just like the photographer, who’d shouted on the bus:
I can smell a whore
a mile away
! because after a diversionary visit to some bird’s-head swords, he found himself sniffing out Khmer art (there was more here than in Phnom Penh! – the Khmer Rouge
hadn’t forgotten much); raining his fever-sweat down on the courtyard grass, he stood lusting for the Bayon-style Dvarapalas of the early thirteenth century.

The stone head leaned forward and down, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, the balls of its eyes bulging out like tears. Too familiar, that face; he wished now that the photographer were
here, to take a picture of it. Marina? Maybe. Yes, Marina – another one of the whores he had been with in Phnom Penh – plump, blurred, and round. Her mouth was definitely grimacing. He
stepped back, stood a little to the left so that her eyes could see him. She looked upon him sadly, without interest or malice; this one was long dead. Her nose was eaten away as if by syphilis,
her breasts almost imperceptible swellings on the rock, her navel round and deep, her vulva a tiny slit that may have been vandalized from the same ax that cut off her right hand and left arm. She
stood square-toed and weary in the heat.

Short time mean we do it two time, one hour, said the Hotel 38 girl. All night mean until twel’ o’clock. Then I go home, Papa-san.

He tried to tell her that he was a journalist, just to tell her something, just to reach her, and then he asked her if she understood and she said yes, and then he wondered how many men asked
her if she understood and how often she said yes.

He showed her the rubber. You want to use this? Up to you.

Yes, she said. Good for you, good for me.

This girl cost three hundred baht. He’d told the night manager to pick one out for him, whoever wanted to come. Be good to her! the night manager had said. He tipped her two hundred. When
he saw the expression on her face, he thought:
Well, at least once in my life I’ve made another human being completely happy.

You butterfly too much, Joy said to him when she and the photographer came in that night. Too much Thai lady! No good for you, no good for her. She no good, no good heart! She
have boyfriend! Not me. I no boyfriend. I love you, I go with you; I no love you, I no go. Before, I have boyfriend. He butterfly too much. He fucking too much! (Joy was shouting.) One day he
fucking one, two, three, four. I say to him: OK, you no come here again, we finit. I say: You want marry me, see Mama me, Papa me – why? He crying. He say: I don’t know. I say: You
don’t know? You finit! Finit me!

What
did you think of
that
? laughed the photographer. Boy, you looked
scared
for a minute!

He pointed solemnly to the journalist and said to Joy: He butterfly too much!

Lying in that absurd round bed at half-past four in the morning, he blew his nose, cleared his throat, coughed, and spat on the floor, listening to the rain outside while the
air-conditioners droned and the blue curtains hung dirty, fat, and listless. It was not very dark because the rooms with round beds had windows at the tops of the doors to let hall light in,
probably so that the whores wouldn’t lose money for the hotel by falling asleep. He coughed. Finally he got up, turned on the light, and sat alone in the middle of the round bed, weary and
calm. The shrill shouts of the whores had ceased; he could hear nothing but the rain and the air-conditioner. A big bug scuttered across the floor. (In Patpong he’d seen the whores eating
bugs roasted on a stick.) The late-night feeling went on and on, and he cleared his throat and spat white fungus.

All morning and all afternoon the photographer lay in bed. The journalist wandered in and out with his heart racing for Vanna. At the park gate two men were playing checkers
with bottlecaps on a piece of cardboard, and the journalist went and sat beside the mud-brown lake as rain clouds guttered like greasy candles in the sky.

He reread her letter, as he’d done every day . . .

Joy had told the photographer that she had to see someone before she came that night, so she’d be late. Probably got to make some money, said the photographer. It’s
not like I’ve been giving her much . . .

She came at four or five in the morning, smiling and swaying. I drink too much! she giggled.