Fools' River Read online

  A thought approaches him on the other side of the smoked glass, and then it assumes a kind of shape. It’s a familiar shape, and it’s tinged with a familiar fragrance. He’s been here before.

  The sense of smell, he knows, drives nails through memories to hold them in place: Memories associated with scent last forever.

  He smells his fingers.

  Ink.

  The last time he woke up like this, it was light. Either daytime or the lights were on, he’s not sure. He had dark blue ballpoint ink all over his index finger. It had an odd kind of off-perfume, off-petroleum smell. He’d been holding a leaky pen. And now, if the smell is any guide, he’s done it again.

  And it’s happened more than twice.

  The thought jumps the arc, and he thinks, Money. They’re taking my money. And there’s not that much of it where they can get it.

  When I run out, he thinks, I’ll be dead.

  He thinks, How much is there? How much time do I have?

  He thinks, Edward, and the name strikes him like a blow. He yanks the cuffed hand hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make a sharp, metallic sound. Edward, he thinks again, and this time the name leads to another thought: I’ve got to get out of here.

  He hears a sound in the corridor. Someone is coming. Frantically, he fumbles with the open cuff, trying to make it look like it’s still locked. Another sound, just the give of an old floor under weight. As much as the giant doctor frightens him, he hopes that’s who it is. He’s absolutely terrified of the nurse.

  The door to the room opens.

  Part Two

  THE BEND

  13

  Time’s Wingèd Chariot

  Fran Dependahl, the wife of the man who had been found brain-dead in a klong with casts on his legs, lives in one of the new high-rise condominiums that have turned stretches of Sukhumvit into the most expensive areas of Bangkok and have sunk some long-familiar neighborhoods to the bottom of a canyon. Her place is on a floor high enough that Rafferty’s ears pop in the elevator.

  It’s a little before ten in the morning, and after the gloom of the street, its early light blocked by the upper reaches of unfamiliar buildings, he’s dazzled at the sudden sight of the sun peering through the big living-room windows behind her as the elevator doors open; she occupies, apparently, the entire floor. She sees his squint and laughs. It’s a low, effortless laugh that sounds like it comes easily and often, and it’s not what he’d expected from this woman whom he’d envisioned as a kind of widow-in-waiting.

  “Go left, go left,” she says, stepping back to let him pass. “Into the library, second door on the right. I keep the curtains drawn in there so the sun doesn’t bleach the spines of the books. Be awful to go in for a book and find all the spines blank, wouldn’t it?” She’s following him. “Like a low-budget nightmare. Assuming, I mean, that you read. There you are, the door on your right, the closed one. It’s going to seem dark in there.”

  “Dark would be nice,” Rafferty says, still trying to blink away the black circle, the sun’s negative, imprinted on his retina.

  “Men are such sissies.” She follows him into the room, both cool and dim, and snaps the light on. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases pop into existence left and right, taking up the room’s longer walls. The far wall is swathed in thick, patterned drapes. She goes to a little huddle of comfortable-looking furniture and fiddles with an angular wrought-iron floor lamp, possibly from the 1930s. The parchment-colored shade goes a bright yellow. “Yours is in there somewhere.”

  “My—”

  “Your book, silly. Looking for Trouble in Thailand, isn’t that it? You haven’t written a new one, have you?”

  “Yes,” he says. “But it’s not available here yet.”

  “Right. Bangkok is the zone of late arrivals, isn’t it? Coffee?”

  “Coffee would be a miracle.”

  “Well, browse for a minute, and I’ll be back.”

  She’s gone, snapping off the overhead lights, before he realizes he hasn’t actually gotten a good look at her. Slacks, something loose on top. He can hear her humming—he can’t quite identify the tune—as she goes down the hall, making the tock-tock sound that suggests high heels—right, high heels. At this hour, in her own house. Not in his social zip code. The floors are some kind of polished stone, marble maybe, and he can’t begin to imagine how much the place costs. He’d pictured some lonely, frail-but-valiant soul, both waiting for and dreading the funeral pyre, swathed in anticipatory black and stretching every twenty-baht note a yard long to remain here so she can keep her vigil until the shadow line between life and death has been crossed and she can burn the widow’s weeds and go home again, tourist class all the way.

  The light from the standing lamp shows him fiction shelves that are heavy on biggies, including the writers he thinks of as the nineteenth-century marathon runners: Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Brontës (cumulatively), Austen, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Twain, Henry James, and (a surprise) James Fenimore Cooper, all in volumes that look well read and well owned. Half a dozen of Dawn Powell’s acerbic novels from the 1920s and ’30s lead into a cluster of other women who wrote in the first half of the last century: Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Tennyson Jesse, Virginia Woolf. Odds and ends of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, a weedy clump of heres-and-theres—novels that seem related only by their physical proximity on the shelves—then about two feet of shelf space given to a batch of contemporary thrillers, mostly in the British paperbacks that are easiest format to find in Bangkok.

  It doesn’t feel like the library of someone who’s planning to move anytime soon.

  He finds his own book in the company of a group of travel writers, both living and dead, whom he’d love to hang around with in person. He hears the heels again and is fighting to shove the book back in when she comes through the door behind him.

  “Don’t act so guilty,” she says. “If I’d written one, I’d pull it out and look at it myself.”

  “It wasn’t that, exactly.” He wrestles the book onto the crowded shelf and turns to face her. She’s almost as tall as he is, with the kind of posture that suggests a strict grandmother lingering indelibly in her past, eyes of a deep iceberg blue, and a head of short silver ringlets, chopped in a way that looks accidental and probably costs a fortune. Her clothes are mostly gray and, he thinks, very expensive, the scarf around her neck a deep purple silk, shading to black. She holds two china cups on saucers, and she extends one to him.

  “Black,” she says, “although I should have asked.”

  He accepts the nearer one. “I always think people who take stuff in it should stick to ice cream.”

  “Or tea,” she says. “I’m sure there’s much to be said for tea, but I won’t be saying any of it. Then what was it? And please, sit down.”

  “What was what?”

  “What you were doing with your book, if you weren’t just looking at it for a little furtive satisfaction.”

  “Checking to see if it was a bootleg.” He sits in one of two leather armchairs with a small round mahogany table between them, in the circle of light from the standing lamp. “Two out of every three sold here are. Bootlegs, I mean.”

  “I was following you,” she says. “I suppose, on some obscure plane, being bootlegged is flattering.” She sits opposite him and blows lightly on the surface of her coffee.

  “I think of royalties as flattery,” he says. “Nothing says sincerity like money.”

  Up close, she’s younger than the silver hair suggests, perhaps in her middle fifties or a little more if her genes are good. Maybe she met and married the unfortunate Mr. Dependahl when she was much younger than he. She gives him a measured smile and sips her coffee, conveying politely that the banter portion of the conversation is over. She says, “And?”

  “The people who gave me your phone
number weren’t sure whether your husband was still alive.” The coffee is strong enough to make him sit up.

  “If that’s a question, yes, he is. In a manner of speaking. He’s receiving hospice care, one of the few long-term patients to get hospice care, I suppose, but it was the least ruinous way to have him taken care of.” She sips her coffee again. “Monitoring the vital signs, the drips, the antibiotics, turning him over from time to time, taking care of bedsores.” She draws a deep breath and lets it go. “A doctor comes in every few days, mainly so he can testify that everything was on the up-and-up if, when, Stuart dies.” She lifts her eyebrows in what feels like an apology. “Not something we can discuss lightly, so I thought I’d get the rough stuff over with.”

  “Must be hard on you.”

  “It’s been a mixed curse, in a way. But you’re not here to talk about me.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she says. She drains the coffee in three long swallows, then places the cup and saucer noiselessly on the mahogany table. Regarding him across the table, she purses her lips slightly, as though tasting something that she hasn’t made up her mind about, and tilts her head a bit to the right. “But,” she says, “since you ask, and since you learned about him from that bunch of free-range gonads on Patpong, I’ll tell you that Stuart pretty much lived for three things—me, money, and, oh, let’s see, we’ll just call it tail, since that’s the way he thought about it: an isolated body part, although the path to it was more pleasant if it led through nice biological scenery. It had to belong to someone previously unknown to him, because, for Stuart, novelty was a powerful aphrodisiac. You would have thought that the female reproductive organs were much more different from each other, more individual, than they actually are. Like some of them can whistle Broadway show tunes and others discuss Goethe and Proust while others are . . . oh, who knows? Quick-draw artists. As for the person who possessed them, she had to be young and otherwise unknown, but beyond that it didn’t matter whether she was an illiterate streetwalker or a Nobel laureate. No, that’s not fair. I know he never had a Nobel laureate. He would have told me about it.”

  “Would he?”

  “He told me about his poet, his ballet dancer, his corporate vice president, his stewardesses—he more or less minored in stewardesses—his charter-boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico, whom he apparently enjoyed miles from shore on the boat’s deck, surrounded by large, flopping, freshly caught fish. Showed me a cut on his shoulder supposedly gouged out by the spear of a marlin, grabbing a moment during its death throes to get even.” She smoothes the slacks over her thighs.

  “But he managed,” Rafferty says, “surrounded by dying fish and getting stabbed by a marlin.”

  “Managed?” she says. “Oh, yes, I see. Of course he managed. He could have managed on the floor of an elevator in free fall from the top of that building in Dubai, you know, the tall one. I can’t actually dream up any circumstances under which Stuart couldn’t have managed.”

  “Gee,” Rafferty says, for lack of anything more insightful. “Says a lot for being single-minded.”

  “But with it—with his perpetual potency, I mean—came his end of our shared curse, which was that he couldn’t stop testing it. Anyway, that’s why I refer to the current situation as a mixed curse, because at least I don’t have to nod approvingly anymore while he tells me about how he got it on during a parachute jump.”

  Rafferty says, “He didn’t.”

  “No, silly, he didn’t. But you wouldn’t believe the circumstances under which he did. It was Peter Pan syndrome, of course, time’s wingèd chariot and all that. He was fairly steady, almost monogamous, until he turned forty, if you don’t count eight or ten dalliances—isn’t that a pretty word? But from the moment he blew out the candles on that fateful cake, he was marching in terror to the ticking of a clock, like Captain Hook. Just feeling his potency draining away with each tick. Drip, drip, drip.”

  Rafferty sips his coffee, which has gone cold, and he barely avoids making a face. “I’d request permission to ask a personal question,” he says, “except that I think we’re probably past that point. I’m not getting much of a sense of how you felt about it.”

  “You know,” she said, “one of the most common mistakes people make is thinking they can guess what goes on between the members of a couple, especially a married couple. In spite of its misleadingly simple name, ‘monogamy’ is the most complicated thing in the world.” She sits forward, gives him a smile. “Want me to warm up that coffee?”

  “I came to write a book,” he says, aiming a thumb at the bookshelves. “That book.”

  “But you stayed.” She blows on her coffee, although there’s no reason to, since it’s already cooled. It’s a stall. “Why? You’re a travel writer, and they travel, right? This was a just business, something to process and then move on. You didn’t stay in the Philippines or Indonesia.”

  “Well, I got kicked out of Indonesia. Came up against an imam with a short fuse and a lot of friends.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” she said.

  “You didn’t actually—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  Rafferty says, “I stayed because I fell in love.”

  “Well, surely,” she says, “that’s not uncommon in Bangkok. People seem to be falling in love on every corner, if ‘love’ is the word. Makes Paris look like Akron, Ohio. Still, most people go home eventually.”

  “I’ve only been in love once. Well, twice.”

  “Both in Bangkok?”

  “Yeah. I married one of them, and we adopted the other one.”

  Her eyebrows go up a barely measurable amount. “Adopted.”

  “She was a street kid. Nobody knows where her parents are. Now we’re—” He breaks off as it occurs to him how few people he’s told about this. “We’re expecting one of our own, I mean, biologically our own, my wife and I.”

  “Your first.”

  “Yes. It’s pretty much all I can think about.”

  “But you’re here. With me.”

  “As I said on the phone, it’s for one of my daughter’s friends. His father, who fits right in with the guys at the Expat Bar, is missing. He came here, the father, for the same reason Stuart did.”

  “And you think it might be the people who—” She stops. “Who,” she says.

  “I think it probably is.”

  “Well,” she says, “if you catch them, do something slow and horrible to them, just for me.”

  “If I get a chance. Why are you still here?”

  “Let’s see,” she says, stirring the coffee again. “I like it here. The Thai people surprise me daily. And there’s Stuart, obviously. It wasn’t much of a marriage from some perspectives, but we were friends. Friendship usually lasts longer than love.” She looks over at him. “In my case, at any rate.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “You sitting here like this, waiting it out, it feels pretty permanent to me. What it feels like is love. How could friendship survive all that—what can you call it except betrayal?”

  “You do keep coming back to that.”

  “I look at you, I see a woman who doesn’t have to . . . to settle for things.”

  For a moment he thinks she’ll change the subject. But instead she says, “Why do people love each other? There are a million songs about how much people love each other, but not so many about why. We interested each other. Stuart was a very interesting man, setting aside his compulsive behavior. He almost never bored me, and I bore easily. He could pick books for me, something no one else has ever been able to do. I could pick books for him, and you probably know how infrequently it goes both ways. He went clothes shopping with me and pretended to enjoy it. We sailed from San Diego to Honolulu, just the two of us under the sails, and when a storm almost sank us, he put his arms around me and tol
d me he’d never been happier in his life. In the middle of the storm, with the hatches closed tight, he sang me to sleep.” She looks at her coffee again, as if it might have turned into something else. “On my fortieth birthday, he gave me a check for seven million dollars because he comes from the kind of family whose members automatically contest one another’s wills. I could go on like this for hours. He was my best friend. If it soothed some anxiety in his life to do the old in-and-out with strangers, what was I supposed to do? Deny myself his company? I might as well punch myself in the face.”

  “I guess.”

  She takes both cups off the table and starts to get up. “We’ve certainly pushed past small talk, haven’t we?”

  “Tell me,” Rafferty says, “how you found out about Stuart. About . . . what happened to him.”

  For several seconds he doesn’t think she’ll answer, but then she says, “In stages. First, his bank here called me in the States to say that he was overdrawn and that he hadn’t responded to their emails and phone calls. Thai banks very sensibly want several individuals they can contact for foreign accounts, and having met several of the foreign men who live here, I’d say that seems like a prudent policy.”

  She seems to realize that she’s still holding the cups and saucers, and something that looks like rage stiffens her face for a moment before she stows it away. It’s the first time he’s seen a spontaneous emotion, and it confirms his suspicion that she’s learned to keep what she cares most about locked in a small room somewhere, a skill she probably developed to survive the invisible battering she’d taken from Stuart, $7 million or no $7 million.

  When she’s satisfied with the saucers’ placement on the table, she says, “It was a frightening call, since I couldn’t reach Stuart either, so I called the embassy. Having a lot of money helps when you have to deal with the embassy. They talked to the police, who, as far as I can see, did fuck-all until Stuart was pulled from that canal. His photo, taken on some dreadful table, was sent to the logical embassies, and in the meantime someone here in Bangkok opened a newspaper and recognized the description of a tattoo Stuart had. One of those men at the bar, I think. He called the embassy, and the embassy called me. They emailed me that picture, to make sure.”