The Queen of Patpong (9 page)

“Miaow is your daughter?” Pim says. “She’s prettier than I am.”

“It’ll change you,” Rose continues, as though no one else has spoken. “Now you’re a good girl, you’re a village girl who’s never hurt anybody. Two, three years from now, you’ll lie, you’ll tell men you love them when you can’t stand the sight of them. You’ll steal their money when they’re in the shower, then tiptoe out of the room. You’ll tell your friends to look for them outside the club so you can hide when they come in. You’ll drink and smoke and take
yaa baa
and nobody knows what else. You won’t be Pim anymore.”

“
You
haven’t changed.”

Rose tilts her head back and drains most of the beer in three or four long swallows. “I don’t even have my own name,” she says. “Now I’m Rose. Before, in my village, my name was Kwan. I came to Bangkok as Kwan, who bathed in the river under a long cloth and washed my hair in rainstorms with all my clothes on. I kept my voice down to be polite. I was a good daughter and granddaughter. I was embarrassed to be so tall. It took about six months before I turned into this person called Rose, who danced nearly naked every night and gave big smiles to men when what she wanted to do was to kick them in the face. I ate
yaa baa
like candy, and I smoked”—she looks down at the cigarette in her hand—“about as much as I smoke now. I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose—you didn’t know that, did you, Poke?” She hasn’t turned to face him. “He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it’s a good name and it means ‘spirit,’ and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong.” She laughs, rough as a cough. “The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile. Every dick every night, every guy who wants to go bareback, maybe he’s the one who’ll give it to you. So you visit the temple and you pray and you say no when they don’t want to wear one, and they slap you around until you say yes, and then you go to the temple and pray harder, and you’re terrified next time you get tested. Except you learn, when you’ve been here for a while, that all the tests are negative. Even if you’re positive, the tests are negative.” She inhales the rest of the cigarette as though she’d like to bite into it and spit it out. “Did you know that, Poke? All the tests are negative. Positive tests are too expensive for the bars.”

“I don’t think that’s true anymore,” Rafferty says.

Rose backs across the living room, drinking as she goes, still looking at Pim. When she feels her legs touch the couch, she collapses and tosses the almost-extinct cigarette butt into the ashtray. “True or not, who cares? You.” She tosses the word toward Pim as if it were a rock. “You want to spend your life worrying about condoms? You want to ride up in elevators with guys who might decide to break your fingers? You want to learn to pee on guys who need that? You want to do three-ways and four-ways and five-ways and whatever way the guy wants? You want guys to put it in your butt?”

There’s a moment of dumbfounded silence, and Pim bursts into tears. She puts her right hand on her injured shoulder and cradles it, then reaches down and grabs her ankle and just lets the sobs come. They’re big, gulping sobs, minor-key foghorn tones, sobs that lift her back and lets it drop, and they come from someplace very deep.

Rafferty says, “Great. You’ve cheered her right up.”

“I wasn’t trying to cheer her up,” Rose snaps. “I was trying to— I was trying to . . . save her.
Save
her, okay? Is that too dramatic for you? Does all the talk make you uncomfortable? You want to leave it unspoken? What do you want to believe? You want to believe that I lived on the tips from colas? That I turned down guys for all those years, just waiting for you to come in off the street?”

“It’s a little late for that,” Rafferty says, and he feels an immediate and blood-hot wash of shame.

A door bangs against a wall, and a moment later Miaow stalks into the room. Without looking at either Rose or Rafferty, she goes to Pim and rests a hand on the back of the girl’s neck. “Come on,” she says. “You can cry in my room. She’ll leave you alone in there.”

Pim gets up, looking even younger than Miaow, and Miaow puts an arm around her and leads her out of the room. This time she closes the door quietly.

Rafferty stays where he is, listening to the silence reestablish itself in the room. Rose is as still as a mannequin for the space of nine or ten breaths, and then she pulls back her arm and slings the beer bottle, end over end, spewing beer, at the sliding glass door to the balcony. The bottle explodes in a skyrocket of brown sparkles, and the pane of glass in the door cracks from corner to corner. By the time Rafferty has torn his eyes from the damage, Rose is already up and heading for the bedroom, her spine as straight as a bullet’s path, her hands balled into fists. She shoves the door aside with her shoulder and kicks it closed behind her.

IT TAKES PIM
a few minutes to stop crying, or at least to lower the volume to the point at which it’s not audible from Miaow’s room. There’s a single crash of something hard and heavy in the room Rafferty and Rose share. Then there’s nothing at all, just the steady sigh of the air conditioner, and the city dark and sparkling behind the crack in the glass door, turning the jagged seam into a long, narrow prism, shining with color like a frozen rainbow.

It seems like a good idea to clean up the broken glass. This is an area in which he can be helpful. He can think of no reason that anyone would get angry at him for cleaning up the broken glass.

He goes into the kitchen and pulls open the door of the narrow pantry, which is next to the stove, tugging it gently to keep the catch from making its snapped-finger sound and opening it only partway so it won’t bang against the handle of the oven.

A loud noise right now would, he thinks, break him in pieces.

The dustpan and the broom are exactly where they should be. There’s a sort of smugness to them, an implicit criticism of everyone and everything else in an apartment where nothing seems to be where, or the way, it should be. He picks up the items carefully, as if they were made of hundred-year-old crystal, and carries them into the living room, making a detour to the door to slip into his shoes. The shards of brown bottle glass cover a roughly semicircular area of carpet in a radius of about two feet. Some larger pieces glitter even farther away. The neck, widening at its base into a jagged crown, would make a formidable weapon. He picks it up. If he’d broken the soda bottle on John’s head, he would have been holding something as lethal as this. It’s easy to imagine bringing it up, the neck clenched firmly in his fist, to cut long, deep, bleeding scores in John’s flesh. Parallel, like rows in a field, spouting blood wherever the furrow intersected an artery.

On the whole, he decides, looking down at his knuckles, gone white on the bottle’s neck, he’s glad the soda bottle remained intact. He’d been angry enough to cut John, cut him badly. Instead all he’d done was inflict temporary damage on the man’s mucous membranes. And he wasn’t happy with himself even about that.

He isn’t really happy with anyone.

A bag. He needs a paper bag now, doesn’t he? There’s not much fucking point, he thinks—and then goes back and deletes the “fucking”—there’s not much point in picking up a few hundred pieces of broken glass without having something to put them in.

He gets up, hearing his knees pop in a way they didn’t used to, and returns to the kitchen. The paper supermarket bags are neatly folded into thirds and pressed flat, then jammed by Rose into the space between the side of the stove and the counter, in such high numbers that they’ve reached the kind of superdensity that Rafferty associates with collapsed stars. It takes him three or four minutes to tease one out, and when he’s worked the corner free and is tugging it, it promptly tears off in his hand. The rest of the bag remains, pristine and unmolested, in the cramp of brown paper between the oven and the counter.

He crouches there, the kitchen floor vaguely tacky under the soles of his shoes, and looks down at the little corner of bag in his hand. Then he gets up, deliberately drops the tiny piece of paper on the floor, and grinds it beneath his shoe. That chore done, he puts both hands against the edge of the stove and shoves it with every ounce of strength he possesses, into the side of the pantry.

The stove has only a couple of inches to travel, but it accelerates surprisingly and creates a rewarding
wham
when it hits the pantry wall. The smell of old grease wafts invisibly upward. Lazily, as if in slow motion, the bags that had been jammed between the counter and the side of the stove fan out like a hand in gin rummy and then spill onto the kitchen floor in a slippery cascade. Some of them manage to slide all the way to the counter on the room’s far side.

Isn’t gin rummy an alcoholic-sounding game?
Rafferty thinks as he uses the soles of his shoes to stretch, mark, and tear as many of the bags as possible. Gin
and
rum, all in one game—and a game that kids play, at that. Have to look into the origins of the name sometime. This is precisely the kind of thing the
Oxford English Dictionary
is for, not that he has an
Oxford English Dictionary.
What he has, at the moment at least, is an apartment that is easy to visualize as a map, complete with borders, heavily defended borders, dividing the independent nations that fight over the space: Roseland, Miaowistan, and the Kingdom of Poke. Crossing these borders involves negotiation, checkpoints, and body-cavity searches. And even then you might be turned away.

“I didn’t sign on for this,” he says aloud.

He picks up the single bag that’s survived his shoes—obviously the sturdiest bag of all, and it
has
to be sturdy to hold this much broken glass without shredding, so he can tell Rose, assuming he ever speaks to her again, that he was testing the bags to find the one that would keep them safe from the shards. Safe from the shards, safe from the shards. He totes the shard-safe bag into the living room, where he sees the broom and dustpan right where he put them a year or two ago, and he sets the bag down, sweeps some glass into the dustpan, tries three times to sweep in one larger piece that doesn’t want to be swept, bends down to
shove
it into the dustpan, and . . .

. . . slices the pad of his thumb.

In one white-hot movement, he drops the piece of glass, drops the dustpan, grabs his thumb and squeezes it, all the while straightening his knees and his back, coming up until he’s standing and whirling in a circle against the pain, swinging the bleeding thumb fast enough to create a zigzag Jackson Pollock lighting strike of blood on the white wall beside the door. He steps sideways and bangs his bandaged elbow against the wall to his left, and the next thing he knows, he’s kicking the dustpan as hard as he can and it’s sailing across the room straight and true, shedding splinters of glass as it gains altitude, until it bangs up against the door to the bedroom. It flips over and spills all the glass he’s swept up, directly onto the carpet in front of the bedroom door.

A moment later the door opens, and Rose stands there. She sees the blood on the wall, sees him folded over in pain, and steps into the room at the precise instant he realizes that she’s barefoot.

“No!” he shouts.

Rose says
“Uuuuiiiii, uuuuiiiii!”
and grabs her right foot. She looks at the bottom of the foot, and she’s bleeding.

Rafferty feels something swell inside him, low in his belly, and then there’s some kind of pressure forcing its way up, and suddenly he’s laughing. The laughter reaches down and brings more laughter with it, and he’s standing there, still bent over, injured elbow tight against his side, squeezing his sliced thumb, simultaneously laughing like a fool and blinking away tears as Rose, her foot still in her hand, glares down at the hazardous litter on the carpet in front of her, clenches her teeth, bends the knee of the leg she’s standing on, and jumps over the spill of glass. She lands on one leg, windmills her free arm to stay up, and manages to remain standing, and then she’s laughing, too, and Rafferty moves crablike, still bent forward, across the room to her, and he puts his unbandaged arm around her, pointing the bleeding thumb away to keep the blood off her clothes, and the two of them lean against each other and laugh until Rose starts to cry.

Very slowly, very carefully, Rafferty maneuvers her to the couch, Rose taking small, backward, one-legged hops, and gets her seated. He kneels in front of her and cups her face in his hands, painting a bright brushstroke of blood across her cheek, as she closes her eyes and weeps, bringing her own hands up to hold his wrists. He leans toward her until their foreheads are touching, his hands still cradling her face. She makes an enormous snuffling sound, and he laughs again, although his own cheeks are cool and wet. Rose’s sobbing turns into a laugh and then a hiccup, and Rafferty says, “Look at us.”

Rose pulls back enough to pass her arm over her cheeks and sees the blood she’s smeared on her arm. “We’re both bleeding.”

Rafferty says, “Are we ever.”

He feels a presence and turns to his left to see Miaow and Pim standing there, staring at them, eyes wide and faces wide open.

Rose snuffles again and then wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Okay,” she says. “It’s time.”

Pim backs away from the crying, laughing people on the couch. She puts a hand behind her for the doorknob and says, “Thank you for a nice afternoon.”

“You might as well stay,” Rose says. “You need to hear this as much as they do.”

“But I have to—”

Rose sails over her with a single breath. “No you don’t. You need to know about this. You must be hungry, right? Well, Poke’s going to bandage his thumb and bring me a bandage for my foot, and then he’s going down to get us all some takeout from the street vendors. You and Miaow can go down with him to help him carry it all. Get a lot, because this is going to take a long time.”

Miaow looks suspicious. “What’re
you
going to do?”