Street Music Page 2

  “So sleep,” she says, pronouncing it saleep. She extends her arms for the bag. “Give me.”

  “I can’t just sleep in the middle of the day.”

  She takes the bag and heads for the kitchen and he follows, feeling like the extra puppy, the one people step on occasionally. “Can sleep any time,” she says.

  He knows that’s literally true for many Thais. He’s seen them out cold, head resting against the driver’s back on a motorcycle taxi that’s weaving wildly through traffic, inches from death by glass and steel. He says, “Is Rose asleep?”

  “Maybe. Baby, him cry maybe one hour. Now quiet.” She pulls out the formula packets and regards them critically, her nose wrinkled and her mouth pulled to one side. “This good, no good?”

  “It’s not, uhhh, Baby-Lac. That’s the one you’re supposed to avoid.”

  The glance she gives him has doubt dangling from it like Spanish moss. “Who say?”

  “A woman who works in our bank,” Rafferty says.

  “Woman work in bank?”

  “That’s what I—”

  “Okay,” Fon says with a decisive nod. She pulls the other packets out and then the diapers.

  “Wait a minute,” Rafferty says. “Why would you believe a woman who works in a bank when you’re not sure you believe—”

  “Her woman,” Fon says, as though speaking to a four-year-old. “Her work in bank. Have school too much.”

  “I went to school.”

  “Yes? You are woman? You work in bank?”

  “No. Forget it.”

  Fon is Rose’s oldest friend, the veteran bar worker who took her in hand and into her heart when Rose, a bewildered, unworldly seventeen-year-old from a tiny dirt-road village deep in the rice country of the Northeast, was towed down to Bangkok by a bar worker who had skipped over the specifics of being nice to customers. After the bewildering and painful evening in which Rose lost her virginity to the first man to take her out of the bar—an influential cop who went back and complained about her performance—Fon moved Rose into her apartment, opened Bangkok for her, and taught her what Rose came to think of as the dog tricks: sitting up, rolling over, panting, wagging your tail, and so forth, to shore up the customers’ ids and keep them asking for her. Fon also eased Rose into the rockier aspects of her new life, both emotionally and spiritually, by reminding her over and over that she was following an essential Buddhist precept by helping her mother and father, and that the money she was sending home would keep her younger sisters in school, sparing them their own trips to Bangkok. There were times, during that first year especially, when that was almost all she had to hang on to.

  And the night the baby came, after Rafferty bundled Rose into the back of a cab to get her to the hospital, trying to remember the name of the hospital and where it was, trying to look like he wasn’t paralyzed with terror as he fidgeted beside her in the backseat, Rose had said, “Call Fon,” and Fon had arrived before they did, no small feat in Bangkok traffic.

  Fon had seen the baby at the same moment Rafferty did. She had held it before he did.

  Standing there, looking at her, Rafferty can’t believe how he’s been taking her for granted. She’s small for someone with so much good in her, dark-skinned and blunt-featured, a little rounder than she used to be and almost morbidly conscious of it, and solid gold. He says, “How are you, Fon?”

  She looks a little startled. “How I am? No problem. Why?”

  “Just, you know, you’ve been such a good friend. All these years—”

  “Never mind,” Fon says, shutting down the conversation.

  “But I need to say this.”

  “Say what?” Rose says.

  Rafferty says, “Oh.”

  “Something I shouldn’t hear?” Rose says in Thai. She’s wearing white shorts and a blinding white T-shirt, looking as chaste as a saint’s pipe dream. She must have just put them on, because he’s heard her complain about how quickly she stains her clothes since the baby was born and she started nursing. He has, and immediately abandons, a brief hope that she put them on for him. “Has my nightmare come true? Are you running away together?”

  Fon puts her hand under the hair hanging down her back and flips it dismissively in Poke’s direction. “I only like handsome man.”

  Hand splayed over her heart, Rose says, “What a relief.”

  Rafferty, feeling like it’s the only line anyone ever writes for him, says, “The baby asleep?”

  The doorbell rings.

  “Maybe not now,” Rose says. She turns to get it, and for the millionth time Rafferty loses himself in the black shimmer of hair cascading down her back.

  Fon, though, is all business. “You sit,” she commands Rose. “I get.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Rose says, and goes to sit on the couch.

  “I’ll get it,” Rafferty says, feeling that a little male domination is long overdue.

  Fon turns back to the bag, mumbling “I’ll get it” in a surprising baritone. But she allows him to get it.

  When he pulls the door open, three women crowd through, stepping around him as though he were a pair of shoes. They all wear the street uniform of jeans and T-shirts, two of the shirts decorated with bright smiling animals and the third with a full-color print of a thousand-baht bill. They kick off their flip-flops as they enter. He knows all of them: Noi, Ning, and Cartoon.

  Rose gets up with a high squeal of happiness and the girls rush to her for a group huddle-hug as the bedroom door opens and two more women, Dao and Fanta, come into the room. Dao’s T-shirt is of a Korean boy band, all tiny waists and blinding teeth, and Fanta’s says but different, meaning she’s got it on backward, since the front is supposed to say same same. At the moment Rafferty makes that deduction, the baby, perhaps waking up to a momentary loss of attention, begins to cry. All seven women fall silent so abruptly that the soundtrack might have cut out, and a couple of the new arrivals cover their mouths and chortle with anticipatory glee as Rose leads them through the bedroom door, an unwieldy herd jostling for position. Rafferty, smelling chewing gum and shampoo and a faint citrus perfume, follows along. He stops just inside the doorway, and Fon muscles past him.

  The baby is waving his arms and squalling, red as a radish, but the moment Rose picks him up he falls silent and rolls his head around, his surprisingly blue eyes wide to take in his new fans. An unidentifiable vowel goes up from the women and then chatter breaks out, sharp-edged as dishes hitting the floor, and they gather so closely around Rose they might be competing for the baby’s autograph. One of them, Cartoon, says in Thai, “So handsome,” and Rose, her eyes finding Rafferty’s over the heads of the women, says, “Looks like Poke.”

  Two of the women glance back at him for a second and catch him in full blush, but it’s no contest: the baby wins in a walk. He stands there, taking in the adoration of new life, and male life, at that, by women who have been victimized by men at so many turns in their own lives, and he finds he’s getting a little teary. Fon would make merciless fun of him if he sniffled, so he leaves the crowded room and turns aimlessly toward the bathroom. From behind Miaow’s closed door he hears voices, low but not whispering—energized, in fact, even urgent—and he pauses, considering for a moment, indulges himself in a sniffle Fon won’t hear, and then knocks.

  The back-and-forth dialogue on the other side of the door continues as though there’s been no interruption, so he knocks again, waits, and pushes it open to see Miaow sitting at the head of her bed with her back to the wall and her legs stretched in front of her. She has a paperback book open and balanced like a little personal roof on her head, and her ridiculously handsome school friend and not-so-secret love, Edward, stands at the foot of the bed with a matching book. Miaow’s gaze darts to Rafferty and then back to Edward, and she says, “You’re no gentleman, you’re not, to talk of such things. I’m a good girl, I am; an
d I know what the likes of you are, I do.”

  Her Cockney accent is much improved—amazingly so, considering that she first heard it less than two months ago in a 1930s movie adaptation of the play on YouTube.

  In a ridiculously deepened voice, Edward says, “We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs. Pearce. If she gives you any trouble wallop her.”

  “No,” Miaow says, grabbing the book off her head and jumping up. “No! I’ll—I’ll—” She opens the book and glares over it at Rafferty. “I’ll call the police, I will.” She stops, the image of someone whose train of thought has been derailed, perhaps for life, inhales deeply, and blows it out in his direction. He’s struck yet again at the spurt in height of the past six months or so: a short, slightly boxy little girl of fourteen or fifteen is turning into a slender, angular young woman. She avoids mirrors as though they were sources of contagion, and he wonders for the hundredth time whether she’s even noticed the transformation.

  “Sorry,” he says. No one reassures him that it’s no problem, so he adds, “Accent sounds great.”

  “I’ve been working on it,” Miaow says. “In fact, I’m working on it right now.”

  “Sorry. Hi, Edward.”

  “Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” Edward says. Miaow has said she thinks Edward is too polite, although that seems to be the only fault she’s perceived thus far.

  “Edward is helping me,” Miaow says. She blinks at him meaningfully.

  “Well, then. I’ll just . . .” He steps back and quietly closes the door. Instantly, he hears a stream of irritated Cockney, picking up Eliza’s speech a few lines back to give Edward his cue. When Miaow learned—in Leon and Toot’s bar, of all places—that the upcoming school play, Pygmalion, was not some old, dull Greek classic, as she had thought, but rather the story of a street girl who is transformed into a lady, she had instantly locked on the part of Eliza, which, to Poke’s total lack of surprise, she won. Edward had wanted to play the male lead, the unfeeling dialect wizard Henry Higgins, but had settled instead for Eliza’s vapid upper-class suitor, Freddy. Rafferty likes Edward, and he’s secretly happy, as the father of a girl who seems to be in love with the boy, that Edward is in some important ways more like Freddy than he is Higgins. Not that Edward is vapid; it’s just that, despite having a dreadful, compulsively womanizing father and an unloving mother, Edward lacks Higgins’s icy, unemotional core, which has greatly eased Rafferty’s mind. Someone as handsome as Edward could be a disaster for Miaow if he didn’t have a good heart.

  When Miaow announced she was going to master all of Eliza’s dialects and win the role, Rafferty had been, to put it mildly, apprehensive. The barriers seemed forbiddingly high in such a short period of time. She had spoken only rudimentary, present-tense English eight years earlier when he first met her as a smudged, lice-ridden child selling chewing gum to tourists in the “entertainment district” around Patpong. The first task she had set for herself after he and Rose adopted her—after Miaow realized they were going to keep her and that all those new shoes and nice clothes actually belonged to her—was to master Poke’s language, which she went after like a lion tamer, with a figurative whip and chair. And now here she is, speaking English like a native Californian and devouring all these new variants: Eliza’s native Cockney; the upper-class diction Eliza masters under Higgins’s domineering tutelage; and several transitional phases between the two.

  So it’s an understatement to say that Rafferty admires his daughter. He’s often dazzled by her. Until the baby’s arrival remapped Rafferty’s emotional landscape, his two strongest feelings in life had been a kind of helpless, infinitely deep love for Rose and an uncertain mixture of pride in, and anxiety about, Miaow. He was proud of how strong and even how fierce she was, and anxious about the fragility of the self-esteem beneath the thin shell of bravado she showed the world. She’d had periods of despair during her first year at the international school where Rafferty had enrolled her. Comparing herself to her worldly, upper-class schoolmates, she’d felt like an impostor, a household pet that had been briefly allowed to sit at the dinner table because it was mildly amusing, and all the time dreading the moment when the joke would become stale and she’d be banished back to the floor.

  It almost breaks his heart to look at her now and see how she’s grown; the little beggar girl he and Rose used to worry about all the time has become someone almost completely new. And, he thinks more and more often these days, someone who will soon be gone.

  Approaching the couch, he stops in his tracks. As though the thought of Miaow’s departure has had some kind of magical effect, the living room, empty for the moment, seems suddenly immense, as big as he sometimes imagines it will feel when he and Rose are rattling around the apartment alone. It takes him a moment to remember why the place seems so spacious: the giant flat-screen TV he bought Rose the night he learned she was pregnant has been pushed back against the room’s longest wall, opening up the space and clearing the view to the precarious balcony for the first time in nine months. He’s settling into the couch when he hears a unison awwwww from the bedroom, followed by a ripple of laughter.

  My son. He still doesn’t actually know how he feels about that.

  Looks like Poke, Rose had said, and he feels himself blush all over again. But he has to do something about the baby’s name.

  The name, the result of a generous but misguided impulse on Rose’s part, is Frank, in honor of Poke’s extremely dodgy father, with whom he has never been close. Still, he thinks, it can probably be changed, and even if Rose defends it, the child also has a Thai name that delights him—Arthit, in recognition of Rafferty’s police-colonel friend, with whom he’s gone through a lot. The name Frank, although it grates on him, is just a minor blemish on the new and somewhat daunting panorama of parenthood. He can tell people it’s just an English synonym for honest.

  He leans back and lets out a long breath, thinking this is supposed to be the happiest he’s ever been. And he isn’t. Not by a considerable margin.

  “What,” he says at a conversational volume, “is wrong with me?” And instantly recognizes that he’s generated at least one of his problems all by himself; he can’t blame anyone else. With a deep sigh he looks across the room and through the glass doors that open onto the balcony. The sky is the royal purple that announces bat-time and the oncoming edge of full-scale darkness. Down at ground level, certain parts of Bangkok are disguising their drab and slapdash buildings behind lurid fantasies of neon. It’s a time of day he most happily spends indoors.

  But. Whatever’s wrong with him—here’s one thing he can do something about.

  He sighs and gets up, grabs his keys, and slips into his shoes. A moment later, the front door closes behind him.

  3

  Chocolate Moose

  On Patpong, Rafferty thinks, every night is Friday night. A really cheesy Friday night.

  Patpong Road is actually two stubby, parallel, charm-free streets, imaginatively called Patpong One and Two, that connect two busy boulevards, Thanon Surawong and Silom Road. During the day they’re a dreary automotive shortcut, but around five in the afternoon the night market starts to open up, the neon stutters into life, the bar workers stream in, and an area that’s an unassuming urban Dr. Jekyll in the daytime turns, with a vengeance, into Mr. Hyde. Wearing heavy mascara.

  Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that have changed hands here over the decades, Patpong is even shabbier now than it was when Rafferty arrived in Bangkok to write his book. It had been dusty and makeshift then, as though it were slapped together at dusk every evening and taken down at dawn like a stage set. But today, Patpong One is bisected by the enormous, garish night market that metastasized from the modest row of street vendors he remembers from his early days. The bars, however—other than the occasional name change—have remained much the same.
Whatever furtive appeal the place held for him when he arrived has been replaced by a kind of rancid glimmer, the greenish sheen on meat that’s going bad.

  Dragging his feet on Silom, in no hurry to get to Patpong, he realizes he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast, so he climbs the three steps to the Baskin-Robbins store just a few yards away from the corner. Being an adult means I can have ice cream for dinner. When my wife isn’t watching.

  As he shoves his way through the swinging door into the freezing shop, the thought clobbers him for the hundredth time: I have a son.

  Well, he thinks, pushing aside the more complicated reactions as he eyes the list of flavors, I’m going to make sure the kid eats right.

  “Three scoops in a cup,” he says to the boy behind the counter, who looks all of fourteen and has a little fake diamond stud sparkling unconvincingly just below his lower lip. “Chocolate almond, chocolate chip, chocolate.”

  “Have also chocolate ripple, chocolate mint, chocolate mouse,” the kid says, counting off on his fingers, beginning with his pinky.

  Rafferty says, “Mousse.”

  “Moooozz?” the kid says experimentally.

  “Mouse is same as Mickey Mouse. Chocolate Mickey Mouse.”

  “No good,” the kid is laughing, waving away the image like smoke. “Chocolate mooooze. Give you, okay?”

  “No. I’ve got to exert some self-control.”

  “Give you free. You teach word, I give you.”

  “What the hell,” Rafferty says. “Go for it.”

  “Go . . . for . . . it,” the kid repeats under his breath several times as he digs into the tubs of ice cream, substantially exceeding the capacity of the scoop with each dredge. He stuffs all four scoops into the cup and counts, out loud: “One. Two. Three.”