The Hot Countries Read online

  In keeping with the theme of the moment, the light in the hallway seems dimmer than usual, the carpeting a bit sticky underfoot. Before he puts his key into the lock, he presses an ear to the door, listening for a British accent or the upswelling of romantic music that usually signals tears and lace and candlelight, some man patting a woman’s shoulder or saying something stiffly reassuring and missing the emotional boat altogether. Eighty percent of British literature, he thinks, and ninety percent of British television, is based on how little men understand women.

  He knocks twice, fast—his signal—waits a polite moment, and goes in.

  Miaow looks up from the white hassock, a thin paperback book in her lap. She’s got her back to the flat-screen, so it’s off. She gives him the tiny eyebrow raise that’s her current greeting. Minimal, nothing overboard: You’re here, now what? He returns it to her and gets the grin he’s fishing for, although it looks a bit like charity, since they both know that no one is as cool as a kid. Still, he’ll take it. For a while there, a few months ago, Miaow had smiled so seldom that it was almost possible to forget she was Thai.

  He says, “So what’s happening?”

  She closes the book, her finger marking her place. “Mr. Slope is going after Eleanor, who’s clueless, like all nice girls. Mr. Slope is such a grease spot.”

  “Mr. Slope?” He locks the door. “You’re watching Barchester Towers?”

  Her lower lip pops out, and she gives him a little shrug, acknowledgment that he’s surprised her by knowing the title. “Sure,” she says. She reaches up to scratch her shoulder, and he sees that she’s wearing black nail polish. Scratching furiously, she says, “Mr. Slope?”

  He waits. “What about him?”

  “In this show he’s Alan Rickman—you know, the one who played Snape in the Harry Potters.”

  “From Snape to Slope. What a stretch.”

  “He’s the best actor in anything he’s in,” she says, with some heat. “Always.”

  “Fine. You want something from the kitchen?”

  “Whatever you think I’d like.”

  “Oh, sure,” Rafferty says over his shoulder. “You bet. Whatever I think you’d like. That’ll work out great. Is he better than Colin Firth?”

  “Colin Firth belongs to Rose,” Miaow says in her almost unaccented school English. “The one I’m standing in line for is Benedict Cumberbatch.”

  “If you’ve learned to pronounce it,” Rafferty says, “you must be serious.” He opens the door of the refrigerator to find that Rose has once again rearranged its shelves into her preferred supermarket-after-an-earthquake mode. It takes him a moment to locate a landmark. “Vanilla yogurt?”

  “Yogurt tastes like something a cow couldn’t keep down.”

  He secretly agrees, but Rose, after a lifetime spent, like many Thais, avoiding most dairy products, has recently developed a pregnancy-inspired mania for yogurt, and the refrigerator is jammed with it. “How about some grapes that are kind of flat on one side?”

  “That sounds fabulous. You try one first.”

  He says, “No, thanks,” and pushes aside some tall items so he can see behind them. “Where’s your mother?”

  “In the bathroom. She has to pee a lot lately.”

  “Well, if you had a little weight lifter sitting on your bladder, you’d have to pee a lot, too. Got some mango slices.”

  “Cool. And some of the yogurt, too, I guess. Maybe on top of the mango.”

  He pulls out Miaow’s requests, fans the mango slices on a plate—quite artistically, he thinks—and then grabs a big Singha for himself. With the bottle chilling his hand, he administers a brief sobriety field test and then puts the Singha back. For a count of three or four, he stands irresolute and then reaches for a small bottle, pops the cap, gets a spoon and the carton of yogurt and Miaow’s plate, and carries all four items, intentionally making it look harder than it is, back into the living room. “Slop your own yogurt,” he says. “What are you reading?”

  “The play. Small Town, you know?”

  “Still? You’re opening in a week. If you don’t know it by now . . .”

  She watches him make a production of juggling the food, but she doesn’t try to help. “I’ve been ready forever. But then Dr. Srisai asked me what the play was about, and I said it was about a young girl who dies.” It had amazed Miaow when she landed the role of Julie, the young female lead in the school play; she’d assumed it would go to the beautiful Siri Lindstrom, the school’s most obvious future movie star. Rafferty knows the play because, when he was in high school, he’d played Ned, the boy Julie falls in love with. He worries vaguely about the boy playing opposite Miaow in this production, because Poke himself had spent much of his senior year tied in a series of adventurous Kama Sutra knots with his Julie.

  Putting the dishes on the glass-topped table, he says, “I thought it was about a boy who has to survive the death of the girl he loves.”

  “See?” Miaow says. “We were both doing it. We were both looking at the whole play like it was all about our character.” With her right hand, she flicks her index finger on the cover of the book with a solid thwack. “But it’s not. It’s about everybody. Dr. Srisai says we make the same mistake with life—we think it’s just about us, but it’s about all of us. We’re all part of everything.”

  Rafferty says, “Mmmm,” and pushes the plate with the mango slices closer to her.

  “So I’m reading it like I would if I was going to play all the characters,” she says. “And you know what it’s really about? It’s about how people don’t know how many blessings they have, and how sad that is.”

  “Wow.”

  “I knew you’d go all gooey about it.”

  “Mango?” he says, and when she reaches for the plate, he stretches out the hand with the beer in it and touches its base to her fingers. “What’s this?”

  She turns the back of her hand to him and wiggles her fingers. “Nail polish.”

  “I got that far.”

  She drags a black-tipped finger through the yogurt and licks it. Makes a face that’s mostly wrinkled nose. “It’s to see how it makes me feel. Dr. Srisai has been talking about a kind of acting from the 1800s or sometime, and the idea was that a movement or a piece of clothing was supposed to bring up the emotion you need for . . . for whatever you’re doing.”

  “The Delsarte method,” Rafferty says. “Cross your hands at the wrists and raise them to your mouth, and it’ll summon up horror. Okay, what’s this?” He stands with his left leg behind him and extends his arm parallel to it, fingers extended and palm aimed downward, then turns his head in the opposite direction.

  He’s just beginning to feel silly when Miaow says, “Rejection?”

  “I have talent after all,” he says. “There was a pose, a physical attitude, for every emotion. Most classical actors worked that way until—I think—the late 1930s, when Stanislavski started to become influential outside Russia.”

  He gets a dubious look. “How do you know that?”

  “I read a lot. So I guess Dr. Srisai is working out.”

  Rose glides in, glances at Rafferty’s beer, and sticks her tongue out at him. No alcohol and no cigarettes for the past three months, with another six months stretching bleak and thorny before her, have given her some new issues. She pads past the two of them, barefoot, and heads for the kitchen, looking, to Rafferty, as wastefully beautiful as a sparkler in the sunlight.

  “He’s great,” Miaow says. She drags a slice of mango through the yogurt and sniffs it. “He was in the theater for years and years in England. I mean, he actually did things. Mrs. Shin says he was in plays with everybody. Alan Rickman, even.” Mrs. Shin, who teaches English, Korean, and drama at Miaow’s international school, is the director of Small Town and also directed the former semester’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Miaow stol
e in the role of Ariel. When his daughter was at an emotional low point and needed some distraction, Rafferty had promised to find her an acting coach. Mrs. Shin recommended Dr. Srisai.

  “So does it work?” he says. “Do the black nails make you—”

  “Not really.” She looks at her fingernails again, her mouth pursed critically. The mango slice in her other hand drips yogurt onto the glass table. “I chose the wrong thing. It was supposed to make me feel sad about, you know, Julie dying, but it’s sort of like my hair, when I dyed it red, remember? It’s just a girl who wants attention. It reminds me of me.”

  “Of the way you used to be.”

  “It was only a few months ago.” She waits, glancing up at him quickly and then giving her attention to wiping up the yogurt spill with her fingertip, knowing he has more to say and that it’s about her.

  “You’re not the same person,” he says. “You took something that hurt, and you used it.” He doesn’t want to get specific, doesn’t want to push what he and Rose privately call “the Andrew button”—named in honor of her first real boyfriend, Andrew Nguyen, who is no longer in Bangkok—but Rafferty’s been waiting for an opportunity to say these things, and this one is too good to pass up. “You didn’t sit around and sulk or feel sorry for yourself. You took all that crap energy and you turned it into good energy and used it to do something creative. You’re working on acting, you’re working on yourself. You’ve changed.”

  “She has, hasn’t she?” Rose says, coming in with a glass of water and a small dish of deflated grapes.

  “Because I’ve been watching Maggie Smith,” Miaow says. “She’s so good it’s sick.”

  Rose says, “Which one is Maggie Smith?” To Rafferty, who’s sitting in the center of the couch, she says, “Scoot.”

  “The dowager countess,” Miaow says. “The Countess of Grantham. Professor McGonagall.”

  “Oh, yes,” Rose says. She touches her finger to the tip of her nose and tilts her head back haughtily. “That lady.”

  Moving over, Rafferty says to Rose, “Scoot?”

  “You taught me that,” Rose says. She sits and leans toward him, gives him wide, earnest eyes, and puts a hand on his arm. “The things you’ve taught me,” she says, in very slow, dramatic English.

  “Like this,” Miaow says, pressing the back of her hand to her brow and closing her eyes halfway. “The things you’ve taught me.”

  “Oh, Peter,” Rose says, oh coming out euh. “Euh, Peter, Peter, Peter.”

  “Peetah,” Miaow supplies.

  Rose says, “Euh, Peetah.”

  “This is exactly what I was afraid of when I bought the television,” Rafferty says. “How are your grapes?”

  “Poor little things,” Rose says, prodding one. “How was your night out?” She touches her index finger, cold from the grape, to the back of his neck.

  “Girls galore, just lining up right and left, pushing each other out of the way to reach me. Took half a dozen cops to get me out safely.”

  “Next time don’t take any money. They won’t even see you.” Rose picks up a grape, examines it, and puts it down again. To Miaow she says, “Give me your spoon. You’re not using it.”

  “I was at the Expat Bar again,” he says. “It was kind of sad.” They look at him without replying, so he goes on. “They’re getting old, and some of them are dying, and, you know, they don’t have anyone except each other, and they don’t even like each other very much.” Rose sits back, putting a little more distance between them, her eyes still on him. Miaow is watching Rose watch him. “And they’re a million miles away from their real homes, their families, people who speak their language . . .”

  “Whose fault is that?” Rose asks. She dips the back of Miaow’s spoon into the yogurt and licks it.

  “I’m not talking about fault.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? I’m not judging them. I’m not qualified to judge them. Jesus, I might have been one of them.”

  “Never,” Rose says, skimming the yogurt’s surface with the back of the spoon again.

  “Because I met you.”

  “A lot of men met me,” Rose says, in Thai that sounds as if the words have been clipped apart with tin snips. “But you knew what you were looking for, not like those old fools.” She sips her water and makes a face. “They’re elders now. They should be earning respect and balancing their life’s karma and setting an example, and they’re still chasing their dicks around.”

  Miaow follows the conversation like someone watching a boxing match. They’ve rarely talked about this in front of her before, at least not so frankly.

  “I know,” he says. “And that’s sad, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Rose says. She plants the spoon deep in the yogurt and lets go of it. “Name one of them.”

  Rafferty pauses. “Why?”

  “I want to see if I remember any of them. Just name one.”

  “This is silly.”

  “So I’m silly. One name.”

  “Okay. Bob Campeau.”

  Rose looks past him, riffling through the bar girl’s mental Rolodex. Most of the women who work the bars—the successful ones anyway—can dredge up years later the name of a man they met for ten minutes. “Mouth like . . . ?” She draws an upside-down U in the air with the tip of the spoon and then mimes a comb-over, brushing her hand forward and sideways above her head. “Hair . . . ?”

  “That’s Bob.”

  Rose shakes her head. “He was old when I started working.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s older now.”

  “And you like him?”

  “I didn’t say I liked him.” Rafferty feels like a tourist who’s accidentally violated some esoteric cultural taboo. “I’m not defending him. I’m not defending any of them. I just said—”

  “Right, you feel sorry for them.” She takes a handful of hair on the top of her head and yanks on it, something he has often seen her do when she wants to focus her thoughts. “Well, then, Bob, let’s talk about Bob. At my first bar, when the girls on the stage saw him come in, nobody would look at him, because they didn’t want him to point at them to come sit with him. But somebody had to sit with him, so a game of rock-paper-scissors would start at the front of the stage and go all the way around, and the girl who lost had to sit with your friend when she got off the stage.”

  “He’s not my—”

  “At my second bar, no one would sit with him at all unless it was a new girl who didn’t know anything and another girl was mean enough to say he was okay.” She’s avoiding Poke’s eyes now, and Miaow is watching her with her mouth partly open. “So the poor, dumb new girl would get Bob. Or some older or uglier girl who hadn’t been bought out all month and needed to get the bar fine or she might get fired. And do you know why nobody wanted to go with him?”

  Rafferty says, “He’s not very pleasant, but—”

  “Because Bob, your friend Bob, he thought he was Wonder Man. He liked the girls to call him Wonder Man. Miaow, put your fingers in your ears.”

  Miaow says, “Oh, come on.”

  “Do it loosely, then. Just satisfy me.” Rose waits until Miaow’s fingers are in the general vicinity of her ears, and then she says, “He had to do it three times. Because he was Wonder Man. Every time he took a girl. She couldn’t leave until he’d had his three wet little pops.”

  Miaow’s eyes have doubled in size.

  “And then, after all that work, he paid her small money. She spent practically the whole night to get this old wreck up and keep him there. She lost two or three other customers, and he gave her eight hundred baht, a thousand baht. And if she argued, if any of them argued, he shouted at her. He slapped two or three of them.”

  Miaow says, one finger still in an ear, “How do you know?”

  “The Bamboo Telegraph,” Rose says, not l
ooking at her. “That’s what the farang used to call it. Everybody in the bars knows everything. A customer tells a girl he’s going to go only with her, and early the next night he goes butterfly with a girl from another bar. By the time he walks into his sweetie’s bar at midnight, it’s like the two of them were on TV. Or a customer is a pincher or a biter or wants something disgusting. Every woman in every bar district knows who the good and bad customers are. Some girls try to keep the best ones to themselves, but sooner or later they brag to a friend, and the next time the guy comes in, the friend is sitting on his lap, and at that moment every girl in the bar makes a note. Bob, he’s famous. He’s been a mean, bad-hearted cheap Charlie for years and years.”

  “I don’t like him any better than you do,” Rafferty says, wondering how he got himself into this position. “But it’s still sad. The whole group is sad. I mean, they sold their lives for something they probably outgrew or got sick of or can’t even do any more, and now they’re stuck here. And the ones who haven’t outgrown it, they’re the saddest of the bunch.”

  “You can have all of them,” Rose says. “You can tie them together with a rope and push them into the river.”

  “Fine,” Rafferty says. “My, my. This bottle of beer is certainly empty.” He gets up and heads for the kitchen.

  Miaow says to Rose, “When you were working there, you didn’t like the customers?” Rafferty keeps going, but figuratively cocks an ear.

  “It was business,” Rose says. “Some of them were better than others. But most of them? I hated them.”