Fools' River Read online

  Customers.

  She waves the thought away. So even if Peetapan is supposed to be a boy, he’s always played by girls, and Dr. Srisai, who knows everything, certainly knows that. If he said she was a good Peetapan, that’s what he meant. He meant she was good in a part that girls always play.

  Maybe.

  But wouldn’t it be awful if she had to play boys?

  In a moment of panic, she checks her backpack to make sure she remembered her wings and her violet dress, packed up when she put on the denim shorts and the green T-shirt she wore as Peetapan; she was elated enough to have forgotten anything. The wings had been perfect. The only thing Dr. Srisai hadn’t liked was the gesture with the arms that Miaow thought up for her. He’d said it felt “external,” whatever that meant. Lutanh would like to ask Miaow about it, but she knows she can’t tell her friend that Dr. Srisai criticized her idea. Miaow is so much easier to hurt than she pretends to be. If she likes you, you can hurt her.

  She looks around quickly, seeing movement again at the edge of her vision, but then it’s gone. Making sure that no one is looking at her, she spreads her arms and does the three long leaps, her legs free and unencumbered in the shorts. She concludes the movement with the half-airborne twirl she’d used to get onto the stage. It really feels like she’s flying.

  She’s acting.

  What a shame Edwudd didn’t see her.

  When she first decided, back in the village, that ultimately she would live as a girl, she’d had a dream of what her life would be. She’d seen newspaper pictures of the glittering katoey pageants at Thailand’s Alcazar Theatre, each girl ravishing from the top of her jewel-covered headdress to the hem of her trailing, spangled gown. It had been so easy to imagine herself gliding across the stage as the spotlight followed her helplessly, enslaved by her charm, and a thousand people in the audience craned their necks to see her every move.

  It took about two minutes during her first and only visit to the Alcazar, soon after she ran away, for the truth to rear itself up like a cobra and spit in her face. The girls were all so much taller than she was, and more beautiful in a formal, shiny-page-magazine way. They had a kind of gorgeousness that was grown up and at its peak, while hers was still changing, still a young girl’s beauty and a short young girl’s beauty at that. And maybe, although she hates the idea, less beautiful than cute. So no more Alcazar. The vision of the brightly lit stage, the intake of breath from the audience, the adoration from a safe distance across the footlights, was replaced by the cramped confines and stinking bathroom of This or That Bar, with farang men pissing on the ice cubes in the urinals or pooping in the cubicles, the same cubicles where she sometimes holds the broken door closed so she can use the toilet or, once in a while, cry for a couple of minutes, then fix her makeup and go back out, smiling, into the light. Where the customers were waiting.

  But now she’s acting. Now Dr. Srisai has said she was “excellent.” And she can’t help glimpsing a new dream, a universe away from This or That Bar and its poop stench and its customers pawing at her.

  All because her favorite farang, Leon Hofstedler, had introduced her to Rafferty, and when Rafferty wanted her to pretend to be someone else for a few hours, Miaow had come to her tiny room to show her how to do it—how to change her walk and the way she held herself, and to explain why the person she was imitating behaved that way. Lutanh had a lot of experience with pretending—trying to stop being the sissy the bigger kids tripped and tormented whenever they felt like it, trying to make customers believe that she enjoyed her time with them—so the pose had come easily and the deception had worked, even though the man she was fooling that night punched her before he was killed. And then Miaow had taken her to Dr. Srisai’s class, and Rafferty’s policeman friend and his wife had offered to pay for the lessons, and the Alcazar had dried up in her imagination and blown away. In its place is the famous Lutanh, Asia’s first katoey movie star, just fabulous costumes and big close-ups with tears gleaming in her eyes, one heartbreaking story after another, boys like the one she used to be, the one who beat her up, packing the theaters and crying their eyes out all over Thailand. No more customers hauling her into cheap hotels. She won’t even have to be in the same room as the customers. No more scorn from her older brother. She’ll be able to lend him money, and nothing establishes relative status like that does.

  Feeling almost as though she really can fly, she makes the turn onto a main street, glancing at the time on her phone, scanning the traffic for a moto, and thinking again about Edwudd. She doesn’t see the heavily tattooed farang in the tight white T-shirt who comes out of the side street half a minute behind her and watches, hands on hips, as the moto slows and she jumps on.

  As the moto pulls away, he lights a cigarette. He’ll get something to eat now. He knows where she’ll be later.

  6

  Scraping a Little Skin Off You

  The air conditioner whumps into action, and Rose says into the phone, “He’s gone.” She’s lying down flat in bed with her knees up to ease the ache in her lower back, an ache that’s come and gone for days now. The lights of the city gleam with all the reassurance of a badly told lie in the top half of the window, the half the air-con doesn’t block. “I can’t believe it, but he’s gone.”

  “You’re awful,” her friend Fon says. “You have a rich, handsome husband who loves you and never hits you and treats you like you’re made out of glass because he thinks you’re the only woman who ever got pregnant, and you—”

  “He’s not rich.” She feels the tug in her back as she reaches over to replace the remote for the air-con on the table. “When you were carrying Oy, didn’t you have times when absolutely everything seemed to scratch?”

  “Scratch?”

  “Like . . . like everything was scraping a little skin off you.” What’s not on the table, she sees for what feels like the thousandth time since she became pregnant, is her giant ashtray, the ashtray that had been beside all her beds in the years since she ran south to Bangkok. And she smells the stale smoke from the carpet, and the desire for a cigarette raises its black serpent’s head somewhere inside her and looks around, its tongue flicking the air.

  “No,” Fon says. “I loved being pregnant. I wish I were pregnant now. I wish I could be pregnant for a living.”

  Rose rolls a little to her right, looking for a better position and trying not to think about a cigarette. She rolls back again. “You’re no fun. I want someone to tell me I’m right.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. Can’t I ever be right about everything?”

  “No. Tell me something you specifically want to be right about.”

  “It’s okay for me to want to be alone sometimes.”

  “Absolutely. You’re completely right. It’s okay for you—”

  “Then why do I feel guilty all the time?”

  Fon doesn’t say anything.

  “Fon?”

  Fon clears her throat. They’ve been friends long enough for Rose to know that throat-clearing means Fon is about to tell a lie. “How would I know?”

  Maybe, she thinks, if she brings her knees up a little more, it’ll ease the pangs from her back. “Well,” Rose says, “I do feel guilty all the time.”

  Fon finds a way to approach it. “So why do you think you feel guilty?”

  Rose says, “You know why.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Fon says, so promptly that she’s obviously been waiting for it. “It didn’t have anything to do with him. You didn’t even know him.”

  “It’s not exactly that,” Rose says. “We’ve been together almost eight years now. He knows who I was and what I did. He even knows some of the men I went with.”

  “Who?”

  “Why do you want to—”

  “Oh, come on. Who?”

  “This is embarrassing.” Rose says. “Do
you remember Bob Campeau?”

  “Old Power Man or Juice Man or whatever he called himself? Old Triple-Pop?” Fon laughs. “You mean to tell me you went with—”

  “So did you. So did everyone who could move one foot at a time on the stage and didn’t have a bunch of missing teeth and weigh four hundred pounds. He went through the bars like a bus. He would have fucked the crack of dawn if it had held still.”

  “Poke knows about him?”

  “He does.”

  “You told him you went with—”

  “I didn’t tell him.” Without knowing she’s doing it, she begins to rub her abdomen in small, light circles. “Old Triple-Pop did.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. He’s combing his hair forward—”

  “Probably from the middle of his back,” Fon says, and then she laughs. “Do you remember how much hair he had on his—”

  “And he’s old and wrinkly and dried up.”

  “If anybody should be dried up, it’s him. For years he was like a soap dispenser, just squirt, squirt, squirt.”

  “But anyway, that’s not the problem.”

  There’s a pause, and then Fon says, “No. Of course not.”

  “I’m all alone when I most need someone with me,” Rose says, “and it’s my fault.”

  “You mean you’re alone with—”

  “Being frightened.”

  This time Fon is silent for so long that Rose says, “Hello?”

  “I’m here. I know what you mean. I’m not going to say I know how it feels, but I know what you mean.”

  Rose is getting cold, and she thinks, I deserve it. “I should have told him the night I knew I was pregnant.”

  “But you didn’t,” Fon says, “so forget that. You can’t go back there and make it right. Whatever you can do to fix things, you have to do it now.”

  Rose lets her eyes roam the room. This was their bedroom even before they formally adopted Miaow. When they talk about moving—for the baby, for the baby—this is the room she wishes she could take with her, dreary and cramped and cold as it is, with that damned air-con. “I get cranky with him, I snap at him. And he knows. He can . . . he can see when I feel something that isn’t right—”

  “When you feel something you think isn’t right.”

  “He can feel it the second I get frightened, and all I can do is tell him there’s no problem, just go away. I can’t tell him now. I can’t tell him why I’m frightened.”

  “Maybe you can. Maybe you should.”

  “Right now,” Rose says, as though Fon hasn’t spoken, “I have a backache, and it’s scaring me to death.”

  “Everybody has backaches. I had a backache the whole time I was carrying Oy. I spent the last two months lying down with my knees up.”

  “I know that. But it’s early. It’s too early. I’m only in the fourth month.” Rose feels something blocking her throat, and she swallows it down. “Last time it was in the fourth month.”

  “You’re fine.”

  “It’s the only secret I’ve kept from him,” Rose says. She shivers against the cold, looks down at her arm, at the goosebumps, the tiny hairs tugged upward. “The only one that matters anyway.”

  “Kwan,” Fon says, using Rose’s real name, her Thai name. “Just because you lost one baby, that doesn’t mean you’re going to lose another one.”

  “Two,” Rose says.

  Silence clogs the line for a moment. Fon says, “Two?”

  “I . . . I think so. When I had only been working a few months, I missed a month and then another month, and then, a week after it was supposed to have come, I had a heavy—”

  “But that doesn’t mean . . .” Fon says, and she trails off.

  “I don’t want to lose the baby,” Rose says. She gets her voice under control. “I don’t want to . . . to lose the . . . all of it. Him, Miaow, the baby. All of it.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “I lied to him. I never told him I’d lost a baby. He was so happy when I said I was pregnant. His eyes got all watery. I thought if I told him about . . . about those times, he’d . . . I don’t know, keep me in bed for nine months. Worry at me, stand over me when I eat, make me drink milk.”

  She breaks off because Fon is laughing.

  “He would have,” Rose says. “He’s never bossed me around before, but you should hear him about the baby.” She blinks a couple of times, surprised to find her eyes full of tears. “I won’t let him talk about names,” she says. “I tell him it’s bad luck. Miaow named the baby Angelina as a joke months ago, and he’s dying to change it, and I . . . I can’t . . .” She rolls over and pushes her face into her pillow to blot her eyes and, still lying on her stomach, says, “He wants this baby so much.”

  “And you’ll give it to him,” Fon says.

  Rose just closes her eyes.

  “I know,” Fon says. “Tomorrow I’ll take you out to lunch. Anywhere you want to go that won’t cost more than three thousand baht. For both of us, I mean. And you can eat anything, as long as it’s not expensive and you don’t drink or smoke.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll come get you at noon.”

  “Choose someplace in between us and I’ll come to you. If you come here, he’ll want to go with us,” Rose says, and she laughs and then blots her eyes again.

  “Well, he can’t. It’ll be good for him. Americans always think they can have anything they want. This will give him a chance to grow emotionally.”

  “Fine,” Rose says. “And thanks.”

  “We both survived Old Triple-Pop,” Fon says. “We can get through anything.”

  “Fon?” she says.

  “What, honey? What is it?”

  “I lied to you, too. It’s not because I knew how he’d fuss over me, that’s not why I haven’t told him.”

  “I know,” Fon says.

  “It’s because, when he . . . when I said I was pregnant and he acted the way he did, like something had just happened that had never happened before to anyone before, just to him and me . . .”

  “I know,” Fon says again.

  “I couldn’t tell him—I mean, even after he knew about Campeau, I couldn’t tell him I’d had another man’s child inside me. Two other men’s children. Before his.”

  “Kwan,” Fon says. “He has the best, the most beautiful woman I know. And he has Miaow.”

  “He loves Miaow so much.”

  “He loves both of you. And now he’ll have a baby. Your baby, his baby. He’s not a terrible-looking man,” Fon says, laughing, “and you’re you. Imagine what the baby will look like. You’re going to make him so happy.”

  “I hope,” Rose says, thinking, I don’t like the way my back hurts.

  “You will,” Fon says. “Just don’t worry. See you tomorrow.” She hangs up, and instantly Rose is lonely again.

  She rolls onto her side and grabs Poke’s pillow, the lumpy one, hugs it to her belly, then rolls onto her back again. Out of nowhere comes a fragment of a thought: If this was the last time I could look at this place . . . And she pulls the cord that turns on the little light on her bedside table, right where her ashtray used to be. What did Poke do with my ashtray?

  The lampshade is a powdery blue she loved in the store but hated the moment she got it home, and the light that filters through it is both dim and cold. It’s cold enough, in fact, to make her pick up the remote and turn off the air conditioner. She settles back against her pillow, the good one without the lumps because Poke forced it on her when he learned about the baby, and she closes her eyes. From the center of her body, she can feel every square foot of the apartment, each of its four rooms: the kitchen with its dining counter and stools; the long, awkwardly shaped living room now bisected by the huge flat-sc
reen that Poke bought her the night she told him she was pregnant and that he now hates because it blocks their view of the city through the sliding glass door to the balcony they’re all afraid to sit on; and Miaow’s room, dark and windowless, across the short hall with the bathroom at the end of it. She and Poke have made love in every room except Miaow’s. Poke proposed to her, back when she was saying no, in every room except Miaow’s, including the bathroom. She was in the kitchen when she accepted the ninth or tenth proposal, after hours of seeing the ring box bulging in the pocket of his robe and saying silently yes, finally yes, until he took the little box out at last and asked her.

  She opens her eyes. The room’s corners are pools of gloom, but she doesn’t need to see them to know what’s there. Poke’s four pairs of shoes live in a straggling, constantly changing formation in the far right corner. Across the room stands the chest of drawers she shares with him, two drawers for each of them, and in the top drawer are the smelly Singha beer cans he dumps his change into every night so that he can count it all up once a year and pour it into a lopsided tin bucket for Miaow’s birthday, a date they established in committee, since no one has any idea when she was actually born.

  Poke had guessed that Miaow, who had spent five of her first six or seven years begging for, and sometimes stealing, money in very small denominations, would be more thrilled by a big bucket of small money than by a thin wad of bills. The first year they’d given it to her, she’d let out a shrill yip they’d never heard before and then covered her face with her hands, instinctively hiding her joy, something she did for almost a year until she understood that where she was now, no one would steal whatever it was that made her happy. Poke had looked helplessly over at Rose when Miaow’s hands went to her face, and Rose sometimes thought that she’d have fallen in love with him at that moment if she hadn’t already loved him.