The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

1

Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it by claiming they were going to do a story about the Khmer Rouge.

They each armed themselves with a box of condoms. The photographer, who knew such essential Thai phrases as very beautiful!, how much?, thank you, and I’m gonna knock you around! (topsa-lopsa-lei), preferred the extrastrength lubricated, while the journalist selected the nonlubricated with special receptacle end. The journalist never tried the photographer’s condoms (he didn’t even use his own as much as he should have), but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had made the right decision from a standpoint of sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don’t want anything but morals need read no further.

Now that we’ve gotten good and evil out of the way, let’s spirit ourselves down to the two rakes’ room at the Hotel Metro, Bangkok, where the photographer always put on sandals before walking on the sodden blue carpet to avoid fungus. As for the journalist, he filtered the tap water (the photographer drank bottled water; they both got sick). There was a giant beetle on the dresser. The journalist asked the bellboy if beetles made good pets. Yes, he grinned. It was his answer to every question. Good thing for him he doesn’t have a pussy, said the photographer, untying his black combat boots with a sigh, putting foot powder on. The journalist stretched out on his squeaking bed, waiting for the first bedbug. The room reminded him of the snow-filled, abandoned weather station where he’d once eked out a miserable couple of weeks at the north magnetic pole; everything had a more or less normal appearance but was deadly dangerous, the danger here being not cold but disease; that was how he thought, at least, on that first sweaty, supercautious night when he still expected to use rubbers. The photographer had already bought a young lady from Soi Cowboy. In the morning she lay on the bed with parted purple-painted lips; she put her legs up restlessly.

Last night tuk-tuk fifty baht, she said.

So you want some more money for the tuk-tuk ride, is that what you’re trying to tell me? said the photographer in disgust. Man, I don’t believe it. You know, she already got a thousand baht – that’s why I had to get that five hundred from you.

The woman’s teeth shone. She slapped her thigh, yawned, walked around staring with bright black eyes.

Where do you come from, sweetheart? asked the journalist, flossing his teeth.

Me Kambuja.

Cambodia?

Yes. Kambuja.

We go Kambuja, said the journalist. You come Kambuja?

No.

Why?

She grimaced in terror. Bang, bang! she whispered.

2

The journalist kept thinking of the hurt look in the Cambodian girl’s eyes. What to do? Nothing to do.

3

There was a bar aching with loud American music, pulsing with phosphorescent bathing suits. He picked number fourteen in blue and asked her to come with him but she thought he wanted her to dance, so she got up laughing with the other girls and turned herself lazily, awkwardly, very sweetly; she was a little plump.

You come with me? he said when he’d tipped her.

She shook her head. I have accident, she said, pointing to her crotch.

She sat with him, nursing the drink he’d bought her; she snuggled against him very attentively, holding his hand. Whenever he looked into her face, she ducked and giggled.

You choose friend for me? he said. Anyone you want.

When you go Kambuja?

Three days.

She hesitated but finally called over another lady. This my friend Oy. My name Toy.

You come to hotel with me? he said to Oy.

She looked him up and down. You want all night or short time?

All night.

No all night me. Only short time.

Okay.

4

In the back of the taxi he whispered in her ear that he was shy, and she snuggled against him just as Toy had. She smelled like shampoo. She was very hot and gentle against him. Knowing already that if he ever glimpsed her soul it would be in just the same way that in the National Museum one can view the gold treasures only through a thick-barred cabinet, he tried to kiss her, and she turned away.

Please?

She smiled, embarrassed, and turned away.

No?

She shook her head quickly.

5

He reached over her to turn out the light, and she cuddled him. He rubbed her small breasts and she moaned. He kissed her belly and eased his hand in between her legs. She’d shaved her pubic hair into a narrow mohawk, probably so that she could dance in the bathing suit. He stuck his mouth into her like the midget in the show had, wondering if she’d push him away, but she let him.

When push came to shove, he didn’t use a condom. She felt like a virgin. When he was only halfway in she got very tight and he could see that she was in pain. He did it as slowly and considerately as he could, trying not to put it in too far. Soon he was going faster and the pleasure was better and better; she was so sweet and clean and young. He stroked her hair and said: Thank you very much.

Thank you, she said dully.

He got up and put on his underwear. Then he turned on the light and brought her some toilet paper.

She was squatting on the floor in pain.

Look, she said.

Blood was coming out of her.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m really sorry.

No problem, she smiled.

I’m sorry!

Maybe I call doctor.

He got her some bandages and ointment. She prayed her hands together and said thank you.

He gave her a thousand baht. She hadn’t asked for anything. Thank you, sir, she smiled.

Enough for doctor?

This for taxi. This for tuk-tuk.

He gave her another five hundred, and she prayed her hands together again and whispered: Thank you.

He gave her some ointment, and she turned away from him and rubbed it inside her. When they finished getting dressed she hugged him very tightly. She turned her face up to let him kiss her if he wanted. He kissed her forehead.

She hugged him again and again. When he’d shown her out to the tuk-tuk, she shook his hand.

Well, he said to himself, I certainly deserve to get AIDS.

6

I can’t help but feel it’s wrong, he said.

Well, we’re giving ’em money, aren’t we? said the photographer very reasonably. How else they gonna eat? That’s their job. That’s what they do. What’s more, we’re payin’ ’em real well, a lot better than most guys would.

7

What did the journalist really want? No one thing, it seemed, would make him happy. He was life’s dilettante. Whatever path he chose, he left, because he was lonely for other paths. No excuse, no excuse! When the photographer led him down the long, narrow tunnels of Klong Toey (they had to buy mosquito netting for Cambodia), he got bewildered by all the different means and ways, but everyone else seemed to know, whether they were carrying boxes on their shoulders or hunting down cans of condensed milk, dresses, teapots, toys; it was so crowded under the hot archways of girders that people rubbed against one another as they passed, babies crying, people talking low and calm, nothing stopping. How badly had he hurt Oy? He had to see her. Lost, the two loathsome johns wandered among framed portraits of the king, greasy little bloodred sausages, boiled corn, packets of fried green things, oil-roasted nuts that smelled like burned tires, hammerheads without the handles… But it was equally true that the johns felt on top of everything because they were screwing whores in an airconditioned hotel.

8

In the bar after the rain, the girl leaned brightly forward over her rum and Coke with a throaty giggle; everyone was watching the game board, smoking cigarettes while the TV said: Jesus Christ, where are you? and the girl said to the photographer: Tell me, when you birthday?

She said to the journalist: You smoke cigarette? so he bit down on his straw and pretended to smoke it, to make her laugh.

The girls leaned and lounged. The photographer’s girl was named Joy. She kept saying: Hi, darling! Hi, darling! Her friend’s name was Pukki.

Come here, darling, said Pukki. What you writing?

I wish I knew. Then I’d know how it would turn out, said the journalist.

He likes to write long letters to his mother, said the photographer.

You buy me out please, Pukki cried to the journalist.

I love Oy, he said. Tonight I buy Oy.

That’s real good, said the photographer admiringly. That’s the way to show ’em!

The photographer squeezed Joy’s butt and Pukki’s tits, and all the other girls cried in disgust real or feigned: You butterfly man! He bought Joy out, and Pukki screamed at the journalist: Please, you no buy me out, whaiiiiieee?

I’m sorry, he said. I promised Oy. I’m really sorry.

Why did he want Oy? Because he had hurt her?

He slipped her a hundred baht and she brightened.

9

So they went to Oy’s bar, the photographer, the journalist, and Joy. The manager came and said: Oy? Which Oy? Evidently there were so many Oys.

The photographer went and looked (he was very good at picking people out), but he couldn’t find her.

10

All night the TV went aah! and oi! to dubbed movies while the prostitute lay wide-eyed in the photographer’s bed, bored and lonely, snuggling her sleeping meal ticket while the journalist, unable to sleep on account of the TV and therefore likewise bored and lonely, could not ask her to come even though the photographer had offered because he didn’t feel right about it, the way she snuggled the photographer so affectionately (when he got to know her better he’d understand that she wouldn’t have come anyway) and besides he was worried about the growing tenderness in his balls. Then he had to piss again – that was a bad sign; as soon as he pissed he felt the need to piss again.

11

When Joy left, she was dressed conservatively, smiled blandly; she shook each of their hands. Did she become that way in the morning, after the photographer fucked her up the ass, and she saw that he was like the others? Or was her affection just an act?

Probably she’d be dead in five years. Eighty per cent of the Patpong girls tested positive for AIDS that fall. The journalist’s heart sank.

12

And what’s this injection? the journalist asked.

The doctor’s glasses glinted. Pure caffeine, he said enthusiastically.

If I wear a rubber from now on so that I don’t infect the other girls, can I keep having sex, starting today?

I think it would not be good for you, said the doctor. You see, the gonorrhea has already migrated far into the spermatic cord…

13

Receipt number 03125 (two soda waters, sixty baht) was already in the cup, and fever-sweat from the clap ran down his face. The journalist was working, and the girls sometimes gathered around to watch him write. Lifting his head from the bar, the photographer explained to them: My friend likes to write long letters to his balls.

They were in Oy’s bar. The Western video was repeating and dinner had closed because it was 6:00 now, Oy’s hour to come to work, as the photographer had kindly ascertained; and paunchy white guys grinned. The staff was getting ready for dance time.

The journalist’s teeth chattered with fever. Man, I hope you make it, said the photographer, and there was worry and sarcasm in his voice.

I’m all right, the journalist said. Do you see Oy around?

At 7:00, Toy came. She said hi, smiling; she said no Oy today. There was something so sincere about her that the journalist almost said to hell with it and asked her to go with him, but she would only have said no. He wrote her a note for Oy, showing her each of the note’s words in the English-Thai dictionary: Oy, I worry you blood that night. Are you OK?

Will Oy come today? he asked her again, just to be sure.

Toy patted his arm. Not today, she said.

You come hotel me, Toy?

No, sir.

You my friend?

OK friend OK.

Then Oy showed up from somewhere, smiling. Toy went off to dance.

He bought out Oy, saying: I just take you back. Just sleep watch TV no fucking just sleep you know OK?

OK, laughed Oy.

She seemed in perfect health. That annoyed him after all his anxiety. Oy? he said. Oy? I’m sick from you.

Oy hung her head, smiling.

The photographer went back to the other bar to buy Joy, and the four of them walked down the hot, narrow alley, the two girls in fancy evening wear, the two boys in faded clothes a little dirty; what a treat! Oy stopped in a store to buy condoms (and it never occurred to the journalist until much, much later that she might have been doing it for him); he said no need and she was happy. They got a taxi to the hotel. Joy rode in front with the driver. Oy pressed against him. He held her hand, gave her leg a feel; her dress was drenched with sweat. You hot? he said. She nodded; she’d always nod, no matter what he said.

He led Oy into the hotel while the photographer paid off the driver.

The journalist went grandly up to the desk. Two-ten, please.

All the Thais in the lobby watched silently. Oy hung back, ashamed. They began talking about her. She raised her head then and followed her owner into the humid heat and mildew smell of the stairwell. At the first landing, when she could no longer be seen, she took his hand and snuggled passionately against him.

He told her again that she’d gotten him sick but that it was OK.

I go doctor; doctor me in here! she giggled, pointing to her butt. Later, when he’d gotten her naked, he saw the giant bandage where she’d had some intramuscular injection.

The photographer came in. Same room? said Joy on his arm.

It’s OK, the journalist told Oy. No sex. Don’t worry.

That was truly his plan – just to lie there in the darkness with Oy, snuggling and watching Thai TV while the photographer and Joy did the same. Needless to say, once the photographer took a shower and came out wearing only a towel and cracking jokes about his dick, the journalist could see how it would actually be.

Oy crawled into bed with the journalist, snuggling him, and he slid a hand between her legs.

I go ten o’clock, she said. Toy birthday party. Toy my sister.

Whatever you say.

She let him kiss her a little but she didn’t like it. Her body was slender, but her face looked rounder and older tonight; her voice was hoarser. She kept coughing. After a while she started playing with his penis, probably to get it over with. He had an erection, but no desire to use it; his grapefruit-swollen balls seemed to be cut off from the rest of his body. He still didn’t plan to do it, but when he got up to go to the bathroom with just the shirt around him, the two whores sitting eating room service (the bellboy had carefully looked away when he brought it into the half-darkened room, the photographer and the journalist lounging like lords with their half-naked girls beside them), the head of his dick hung down below the shirt and they started laughing and then he started getting wild like the class clown. First he began tickling Oy. Then he started lifting her around and pulling the covers down to show her off naked; she laughed (probably thinks you’re a real pest! said the photographer, shaking his head); she kept rubbing against him to make him do something, and then she’d look at the clock…

Eventually she rubbed against him in just the right way, and then he knew he’d have to do it. What a chore! He squeezed K-Y into her and handed her the rubber. She said she didn’t know how to put it on. Wasn’t that something? She tried sincerely, but she just didn’t understand it. He did it and then thrust into her. She pretended to come and he pretended to come; he didn’t care. In the carpet of light from the half-open bathroom door the other two were doing it in the far bed; Oy lay watching them, and she clapped her hand to her mouth and snickered softly; meanwhile Joy suddenly noticed that Oy was on top of the journalist and rolled away from her trick and went into the bathroom and turned the shower on loud for a long time.

The journalist really enjoyed playing with Oy’s body, lying there relaxed and feverish, doing whatever he wanted while the TV went ai-ai. Light-headed and distant, he enjoyed snuggling up to her and smelling her, sucking her shaved armpits, pursuing with kisses her face, which sought to evade him; every now and then he’d catch her and kiss her lips and she’d laugh. Whenever he’d touch her between her legs she’d start going um um and begin swinging her hips as if in ecstasy, but she stayed dry and her face didn’t change and her heart didn’t pulse at all faster beneath his other hand. He lounged, played, stroked in a delightful fog of disease like the foggy sprawl of Bangkok he’d be leaving in four hours, soaring east over big gray squares of water going into grayness, riding the hot orange sky.

He said: Oy, you want go Kambuja?

No want! No want! Kambuja people is bad people! Thai people like this (she prayed); Kambuja people like this! (she saluted fiercely). The journalist saluted her in return, and she cowered back.

The plane sped through the morning, its shadow wafting over cooled patches of trees and rectangles of various greens and grays, all shining wet. Then they arrived in Cambodia, which seemed a no-nonsense country. There was a line of soldiers on the runway, each soldier directing the photographer and the journalist on to the next.

15

He went into the hotel lobby and took a few stacks of riels out of the paper bag. Help yourself to some money, he said to the concierge. He was hot, weak, and dizzy. Thanks to the caffeine injection, he hadn’t slept for two nights. In the wide listless courtyard and porticoes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which seemed almost empty like the rest of Phnom Penh (how many people had been killed off?), he and the photographer sat playing with their press passes, waiting for their fate to be decided. In our country, at the moment, the militia plays more of a role than the army, an official explained, and the journalist wrote it down carefully while the photographer yawned. They took a cyclo back to the hotel, and the photographer went outside to snap some land-mine beggars while the journalist lay down on the bed to rest.

16

The morning sky was a delicate gray. The journalist lay in bed, clutching his distended balls. It was warming up nicely. His underpants steamed against his ass. The hotel maid came in and cleaned. She made seven thousand riels a month. The Khmer Rouge had killed her father, grandfather, sister, and two brothers. She’d worked hard for the Khmer Rouge in the fields…

17

The English teacher wrote sixteen in standard and phonetic orthography on the blackboard while the children wrote sixteen in their notebooks, and the English teacher got ready to write seventeen but then the power went out and they sat in the darkness.

Your English is very good, said the journalist.

Yes, the teacher said.

Where did you learn it?

Yes.

What is your name?

Yes. No. Twenty-two.

Well, that’s real good, said the photographer brightly. That’s real nice. Do you know what the word pussy means?

18

How happy he was when on the third day of the antibiotics something popped like popcorn in his balls and he started feeling better! The tenderness was now in his lymph nodes, but it would surely go away from there too.

To celebrate, he showed all the hotel maids his press pass. You very handsome, they said.

19

They had an appointment with the English teacher who couldn’t speak English. The small children were silhouetted in the dark, singing A, B, C, D, E, F, G… On the blackboard it said The English alphabet. The teacher pointed at this, and the children said: Da iii-eee aa-phabet.

Why does the alphabet only go up to S? asked the journalist.

Yes, the teacher replied.

The journalist pointed to a photograph that concentrated darkness like an icon. My father is die by Pol Pot regime, said the teacher simply. He go to Angkor Wat to hide Buddha. They die him by slow pain…

For a moment the journalist wanted to embrace him. Instead he stared down at the floor, and the sweat dripped from his nose and forehead. As soon as he wiped his face it was wet again.

20

In the hotel there were paintings of bare-breasted girls in butterfly-winged skirts standing waist-deep in the mist before science-fiction palaces. The night was so hot that the journalist’s face felt as if it had peered into a steaming kettle. He went into the room, turned the air conditioning on (he and the photographer, being boys of high morals, always traveled first-class), and took a shower. He was standing naked in the cool water when the photographer came in with two whores.

21

The photographer found them in a disco. He always gushed when he made a novel score.

I was gonna take the tall one, he said, because I kept thinking how it would be, you know, with her legs around me, but as soon as we got into the street the short one took my hand, so that’s that.

The girls went through all the pills and medicines first, sniffing the packets, going nnnihh!, giggling at the condoms, whispering and pointing like schoolgirls. The photographer’s girl was already in the shower and out, halfway demure in her towel. The journalist’s girl stayed dressed. She did not seem to like him very much, but then that didn’t seem unusual to him because girls never liked him; was it his fat legs or his flabby soul? Look at ’em! shouted the photographer. They’re as curious as fucking monkeys, man! With great effort they mouthed the Khmer words in the dictionary section of his guidebook; they opened the box of sugar cubes, which were swarming with ants, and ate one apiece. The journalist’s girl had a beauty spot over one eye. When she opened and closed everything, her eyebrows slanted in elegant surprise. She wore a dark striped dress. There was something very lady-like about her. She intimidated him slightly. He lay sweatily on the bed watching them; when they’d completed their inspection they neatened everything up like good housewives, so that it took the journalist and the photographer days to find their possessions.

22

The photographer’s girl got ready right away. But after half an hour the journalist’s girl was still silent in the bathroom with the door closed. She stood staring at the back of her little mirror, which had a decal of a man and woman together.

23

He communicated with her mainly by signs. She liked to smell his cheeks and forehead in little snorts of breath, but not to kiss him; whenever he tried, she’d whirl her head away into the pillow, so he started Buddha-ing her in just the same way that Oy had steepled her hands very quickly together for good luck when he’d bought her out, she probably hoping he wouldn’t see, probably praying that he’d give her a lot of money; so he did this to the Cambodian girl; he’d seen the beggars do it; he’d do it to say please, then he’d touch his forefinger from his lips to hers, and she’d Buddha him back to say please no. Sometimes he did it anyway, and she’d jerk her head away, or let him do it only on her closed lips. Then sometimes he’d steeple his hands please and point from his lips to her cunt, and she’d wave her hand no, so he wouldn’t do that; he’d pray to kiss her again, and she’d pray him no; so he’d pray and point from his crotch to hers, and she’d nod yes.

24

He smiled at her as affectionately as he could. He wanted her to like him. It just made things easier when the whore you were on top of liked you. No, that’s how the photographer would have put it, but the journalist had a deeper thrust (if you know what I mean). The truth was, he really did like her. He traced a heart on her breast with his finger and smiled, but she looked back at him very seriously. Then suddenly she ran her fingernail lightly round his wrist and pointed to herself. What did she mean? So many prostitutes seemed to wear religious strings for bracelets; was that what she meant? Somehow he didn’t think so…

25

Give ’em more Benadryl; come on, give ’em more Benadryl, the journalist whined as the photographer’s girl turned on the light, giggling for the fourth or fifth time that night; he didn’t know exactly what the hour was, since his watch had been stolen in Thailand, possibly by Oy. The photographer’s girl loved to watch the journalist making love. Even when the photographer was screwing her she’d always be looking avidly into the other bed, hoping to see the journalist’s buttocks pumping under the sheet; whenever she could she’d sneak up and pull the sheet away to see the journalist naked with a naked girl; then she’d shriek with glee. It was very funny but it got a little less funny each time. Fortunately they obediently swallowed whatever pills the journalist gave them; the photographer told them that the journalist was a doctor, and the journalist neither confirmed nor denied this report, which most likely they didn’t understand anyway. So he gave them Benadryl – one for his girl, three for the other, who was hyperkinetic. Even so they both kept turning the lights on to see what time it was; they wanted to leave by the end of curfew.

26

Once they’d left, he told the photographer he didn’t want to see her again. Why, she hadn’t wanted to do anything! And she’d seemed so sorrowful he’d felt like a rapist. What did she expect anyway? But as soon as he’d conveyed these well-reasoned sentiments, his heart started to ache. He didn’t tell the photographer, of course. They rarely talked about those things. Why her? he wondered. But he remembered how she’d hung his trousers neatly over the chair, how she’d ordered his money in neat piles without stealing any, how before leaving she’d taken each of his fingers and pulled it until it made a cracking noise, then bent it back; this was her way of pleasing him, taking care of him.

27

At the disco that night he didn’t see her. He sat and waited while the crowd stridulated. Finally her friend, the photographer’s girl, came to the table. She was slick with sweat; she must have been dancing. He asked the English teacher who didn’t speak English to ask her where his girl was. They saw him frequently in the disco, and he would try to translate for them. The man said: She don’t come here today. Already they were bringing him another girl. He said not right now, thank you. He tried to find out more, and then there was another girl sitting down by him and he figured he had to buy her a drink so she wouldn’t be hurt, and the photographer’s girl was biting her lip and stamping her foot, and then his girl came and stood looking on at him and the other girl silently.

28

He pointed to his girl and traced the usual imaginary bracelet around his wrist. (He didn’t even know his girl’s name. He’d asked the photographer’s girl and she said something that sounded like Pala. He’d tried calling her Pala and she looked at him without recognition.) Finally the other girl got up, carrying her drink, and began to trudge away. He patted her shoulder to let her know that he was sorry, but that seemed to be the wrong thing to do, too. His girl sat down in her place, and he could feel her anger, steady and flame-white in the darkness, almost impersonal.

29

But that night when he put his closed lips gently on her closed lips, not trying to do anything more because he knew how much Thai and Cambodian women hated kissing, her mouth slowly opened and the tip of her tongue came out.

30

You got her to french you? laughed the photographer, as the two chauvinists lay at ease, discussing their conquests. Oh, good! She must have been really repulsed.

31

She almost never smiled. Once again that night she traced an invisible bracelet around her wrist, then his. He watched her sleeping. In the middle of the night he pulled her on top of him just to hug her more tightly, and she seemed no heavier than the blanket.

32

In the morning she cracked his finger joints and toe joints for him; she stretched and twisted his arms and legs; she slapped him gently all over. Then she made her rendezvous with the mirror, where she stood painting her eyebrows in slow silence. When she was finished he sat her down with his guidebook, which contained a few dictionary pages. He pointed to all the different words for food, pointed to her and then to him. She just sat there. He made motions to indicate the two of them going off together. She followed soundlessly. He locked the door. She headed downstairs with him, toward the lobby’s ocean of staring faces, which surely judged him; he could not smile as usual, and the faces watched him in silence. She was behind him on the stairs, creeping slowly down. They hadn’t even traversed the lobby yet. The faces watched and waited. He dropped the key onto the front desk and she was far behind him. He let her catch up to him a little, not too much because she might not want that, and went out, into the street that was filled with even more eyes that watched, and she was farther behind than before. He looked back to make sure that she was there. It must be difficult for her to be seen next to him. So he went half a block to an outdoor restaurant and sat down. They brought him tea and bread. He drank a few sips of the tea and paid. She had not come; she was gone.

33

He felt miserable all day. He didn’t want to have sex with her any more, only to straighten things out. He’d find someone in the city who could translate for him.

34

Night having smothered the wasted day at last, he set out for the disco while his dear friend the photographer lurked kindly in the rat-infested shadow of the garbage heap, not wishing to show himself to his girl, who’d already latched onto him. As soon as he’d been sucked into the sweaty inner darkness, the photographer’s girl came running up, seizing him by the hand, weeping, pleading in a rush of alien singsong. He shook his head, patted her shoulder (this was becoming his stereotyped Pontius Pilate act), and she stamped away in a rage. Then she was back again, snarling and groveling monstrously (did she need to eat so badly as that? what didn’t he understand?), and he wondered whether she only wanted him to buy her out so that she could rush to the hotel in pursuit of the photographer or whether she wanted him now; anyhow it was clear that she wasn’t Pala’s friend (that night she finally took the trouble to tell him that the woman he was falling in love with was not named Pala but Vanna). Did he love the idea of loving Vanna? Or did he love Vanna?

I want Vanna, he said. Excuse me, sir, said a low-level pimp or waiter or enforcer, presenting him with two other girls, each of whom slid pleading hands up his knee. I want Vanna, the journalist repeated. The photographer’s girl said something, and the others laughed scornfully. There was no possibility of finding her if she didn’t want to be found. She was a taxi girl; it was her profession to find him. If she wanted him she’d come.

At last she arrived from across the dance floor, eyeing him with what he interpreted to be an aloof and hangdog look. A man said to him: Yes, my friend!… and began to explain something to him at great length, while the journalist nodded solemnly and Vanna stared straight through everything. The journalist offered him a can of cream soda as a prize for the speech. At last the man pointed to Vanna and then to himself, joining two fingers together. Then he said something involving many vowels, concluding with the words twenty dollah. Buying a girl out was only ten. The journalist reached into his money pouch and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill. The man rose formally and went behind the bar, speaking to a gaggle of other smooth operators as the journalist took Vanna’s hand and tried to get her to rise, but she made a motion for him to wait. The man came back and announced: twenty-five dollah. The journalist shook his head. Then he took Vanna’s hand. She walked behind him without enthusiasm. Every eye was on them. The photographer’s girl made one more attempt, weeping again. He was too exhausted now to feel anything for her. Outside, Vanna shook her hand away from his. He’d already slipped her a stack of riels under the table. She picked out a motorbike and he got on behind her. The hotel was only three blocks away but she didn’t like to walk much, it seemed. When they got to the hotel she paid the driver two hundred from her new stack, and they went in. The lobby crowd watched them in silence as they went upstairs.

35

Wait, he said gently, his hand on her shoulder. He left her in the room and went downstairs.

Do either of you speak English? he asked the desk men.

Yes, they both replied in low voices.

Will one of you please come and help me? There is someone I want to talk to, and I cannot speak Khmer.

There is some kind of problem?

No problem. I just want to talk to her.

I cannot go, one clerk said, and the other clerk said nothing. Maybe if my friend comes I go or I send him. What is your room number, please?

36

OK. I go with you, the other clerk finally said.

That’s great, the journalist said with what he realized was all the enthusiasm of his nationality. I sure appreciate it.

She was standing in the middle of the room, staring into the mirror.

The journalist said: Please tell her I want to talk to her. I want to find out if she is angry with me.

The man in the yellow shirt said something, and she opened her mouth and began to reply. It was nearly the first time he had heard her speak (but as long as he knew her it always seemed that way when she said something; she talked so seldom). He marveled at the lisping syllables, the clear calm childish incomprehensible voice.

Oh, it is only a misunderstanding, the man laughed. She think you are ashamed of her, because you walk in front of her very fast.

Tell her I thought she was ashamed of being with me, because she walked very slowly.

You walk very fast, she walks very slowly; it is nothing. I told her you seem to be a nice person, a good person; she says she likes you very much.

Please ask her what she expects from me.

Well, you know she does not like to ask you for anything. She never ask. But a small gold chain, for a souvenir of you, that would please her very much. To show your… well, it makes her very happy.

Ask her if she has anything to ask me.

She says she wants to do what you want, to make you happy.

Ask her if she can stay with me until tomorrow morning.

She says she can stay until eleven or twelve. She has a job in the morning. She gets paid by the hour to work in the fields for small wage; that is no problem, to miss that; she simply won’t get paid. But after that time maybe her uncle comes looking for her. These taxi girls, you know, they do this work to make money for the family. They never tell the family what they do.

37

He’d made up his mind, as I’ve said. No sex. He just wanted to be with her. When they lay in bed that night he kept his arm around her and she drew him close, drumming playfully on his belly, pinching his nipples; but then she was very still on her back beside him and he could see that she was waiting for him to do what he usually did. He didn’t even kiss her or touch her breasts. He just held her very close, and the two of them fell asleep. All night they held each other. In the morning he could see that she was waiting for it again, so he got up and took a shower and started getting dressed. He couldn’t tell if she was surprised. She got up, too, and pulled her bra on, while in the other bed the photographer lay grinning.

You mind if I hop her while you’re in the shower? he said.

I don’t think she’d like that, the journalist said evenly.

That’s a good one, the photographer jeered.

The photographer drew an imaginary gold circlet on her wrist, and she nodded.

They went out, and he was about to take her by the hand to go to the market where he’d seen some gold things for sale, but she took him by the hand and led him to a motorbike and they got on.

They traveled far across the city. At last they reached a video arcade that was also a jewelry store without any jewelry, without anything in the glass case except for a tiny set of scales on top of a cigar box. The Chinese-looking man in the straw hat opened the cigar box and took out three gold bracelets. Vanna gestured to the journalist to choose. He smiled and signed that it was up to her. She smiled a little at him. Already a new crowd was secreting itself, like the swarm of black bees eating the sugar and flour in the market’s open bowls. Two of the bracelets were slender and lacy. The third was quite heavy and had three blocks that said ABC. That one would obviously be the most expensive. She took that one. He took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to her. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before, which she probably hadn’t. The man in the straw hat said something to her; the motorbike driver joined in, and they all began to discuss the alphabet bracelet with its every ramification. There was one chair, and she gestured to him to sit down; he gestured to her to do it, but she shook her head. The man in the straw hat gestured to him to sit down; he gave in. The man in the straw hat got a calculator from somewhere and clicked out the figure 30 and said dollah. The journalist nodded. I guess I can give Vanna a lot of change, he thought. They all talked some more. The man in the straw hat clicked out 137. They were all watching him to see what he’d do. When he got out two twenties, everybody but Vanna started to laugh. Were they happy, polite, scornful, or sorry for him? What did it matter?

The man in the straw hat brought out his miniature scales and weighed the alphabet bracelet against a weight. Then he switched the pans and did the same thing again. The journalist nodded. Vanna took the bracelet and draped it over her left wrist. He realized that everyone was waiting for him to fasten it for her. He bent down and did it, taking a while because the catch was very delicate and he was clumsy and nervous with his fat, sweaty fingers. The man in the straw hat came to help him, but he waved him away. When he’d finished, he looked up. An old lady was standing at the edge of the crowd. He smiled at her tentatively, and she stared back stonily.

Then he looked at Vanna. The smile that she gave him was worth everything. And she took his hand in front of them all.

People stared at them and snickered. A woman with her three young children was sitting on a bed frame on the sidewalk, eating rice. When they spied Vanna and the journalist, they forgot their rice. Someone called out: Does you loves her? She stared ahead proudly; he hoped that their cruelty did not touch her.

He still didn’t really want to fuck her. He just wanted to be naked next to her, holding her for the last ten minutes or two hours or whatever it would be until she went to work. He stripped and took a shower. While she did the same, he looked for his gonorrhea pills. When she came out he got into bed with her. She pointed to her watch. She had to go soon. She snuggled him for a minute, then pointed to the tube of K-Y jelly. He didn’t want to confuse or disappoint her any more. If that was what she expected, then he’d better do it. She touched his penis, and he squirted the jelly into her and rolled the rubber on and got ready to mount her, and then something in her face made him start to cry and he went soft inside her and rolled off. She was not pleased, no two ways about it. After all, it was their honeymoon. She was rubbing him; she wanted him to try again. He put more lubricant inside her and took the rubber off and threw it on the floor. The doctor had said he wouldn’t be contagious any more; sex was only hurting him, not anyone else. As soon as he was inside her, he went soft again. He was crying and she smiled, looking into his face, trying to cheer him up; he was behaving like a baby. He traced a heart on his chest, pointed from himself to her, and drew a heart between her breasts. She nodded very seriously. He made a motion of two hands joining and she nodded. He said: You, me, go America together… and she shook her head. She drew a square on his chest, not a heart, then pointed to a heart-shaped chain of gold that some other man must have given her.

She got up and took a shower. He started to get dressed, too, but she gently motioned him back into bed. She dressed very quickly. She came and sat with him for a moment on the bed, and he pointed to the number eight on his watch and signed to her to come to the hotel then and she nodded and he said: Ar kun. Then she stood up to go. She clasped her hands together goodbye and he was crying and she was waving and kissing her hands to him and then she was gone.

38

I wonder if she’s waiting for me at the disco, the journalist said. Maybe she misunderstood.

I’m sure she is, drawled the photographer. Yep, she’s just sitting around waiting for her knight in shining armor.

39

That night he had a dream that he was getting married to Vanna and everyone was so happy for him; all the street orphans were there drumming and dancing; reformed Stalinists made him fish soup; the cyclo drivers donated their vehicles to serve as chairs.

When he told the photographer a little more about the dream, the photographer said: She must think you’re a real pain in the ass.

40

The chief of protocol received them on a high porch. He was pleased with the journalist’s French. He read their dossiers and clapped a hand to his mouth in mirth.

Later, in the car, he pointed out the window and said, Ah, a beautiful girl there – did you remark her?

No, monsieur, said the journalist.

But I believe you do regard them.

Yes, I do regard them, replied the journalist in the most pompous French that he could muster. For me, every girl in Cambodia is beautiful.

The chief of protocol laughed so hard that he had a coughing fit.

Clearly it was his job to amuse the chief of protocol. In Phnom Penh, every girl is a delicious banquet, he said.

Delighted, the chief of protocol embraced him.

What did you tell him? asked the interpreter.

I said that it is very hot today, said the journalist.

The chief of protocol said something to the interpreter, who giggled.

Yes, yes, said the interpreter, and Battambang is famed for its lovely roadside flowers.

41

Riding atop the jolting Soviet tank in the rain, he saluted the staring or laughing girls, kissing his hand to them, waving to the kids, the old men and ladies, tossing ten-riel notes down into the road like bonbons (the photographer and the driver did the same; the driver was dressed in a black uniform today and wore his Russian pistol especially for the occasion); and the interpreter and the chief of protocol and the soldiers with their upraised machine guns watched the journalist, grinning, and the journalist saluted for hours as they rolled back in from the tame battlefield. He was utterly and completely happy. In Cambodia he could never disappear; now at least when people gawked at him they saw someone comic and grand, a man with a private army who gave them money; he felt like God – a loving God, moreover; he loved everyone he saluted; he wanted to love the whole world, which (it now seemed to him) was all he’d ever wanted when he had whores; his balls still felt funny; all he wanted to do with people was hug them and kiss them and give them money. His forehead glowing with sunburn and three beers, he sat against the spare tire, blessing everyone like the pope, nodding to his elders, wishing that his lordliness would never end. Most of the time they waved back. Girls on bicycles giggled to one another. Children saluted back with slow smiles. Skinny grinning men waved back. These gratifying demonstrations almost balanced those other stares they’d given him and Vanna. He ached to hold her. Since he was drunk and only a flightless butterfly, he squeezed the spare tire instead.

42

They were staying in the Hotel Victoire, which just after the liberation they used to call the Hotel Lavatoire. It had running water, electricity, air conditioning, a toilet, and screen windows. No matter that none of these worked. It cost two thousand riels a night for the photographer and journalist’s room, five hundred for the driver and interpreter’s. Sleeping at the hotel was like sleeping in a sweltering locker room.

So are you going to do one or not? the photographer wanted to know.

Not me. No whores for me. I’m going to wait for Vanna.

Oh, Jesus, said the photographer, covering his face in disgust.

Besides, my balls ache.

All right, all right.

So, said the journalist, the long and the short of it is: maybe. After all, I’ll never see Vanna again…

At these cheerful tidings the photographer brightened markedly. He came out from under the sheet, killed two mosquitoes, played with his flash, and initiated a fabulous conversation. For hours the two of them discussed the differences between Thai and Cambodian women and how many times the photographer or the journalist had been so low, cowardly, perverted, and immoral as to use a rubber. So they whiled away the suffocating hours until it was time to pick up the chief of protocol and head for the Blue River restaurant…

Ask this sixteen-year-old if she wants to marry me, said the photographer with a mirthful glance at the journalist.

She says she will bear your children, cook for you, do dishes, but she cannot marry you because she is too far beneath you.

The photographer shrugged. Tell her she is prettier than a flower.

She says a flower that is smelled too many times begins to wilt.

Interesting that the photographer, who wanted to break as many hearts as possible, and the journalist, who wanted to make as many happy as possible, accomplished the same results! Does that prove that the journalist was lying to himself?

43

Please believe me when I say that he did not want to be unfaithful to Vanna. It’s just that when anyone asked him for something, he hated to cause disappointment. I honestly think that the journalist was fundamentally good. I believe that the photographer was fundamentally good. No matter how naive it sounds, I suspect even Pol Pot must have meant well.

44

He went to the disco. The photographer did not come because he did not want his girl to know that he was around. The photographer had told him: You know what the difference between us is? There’s no difference. We’re both assholes. The journalist knew that he was starting trouble for the photographer by going in there but he missed Vanna too much; maybe he loved her; maybe he really did. As always in that hot darkness, he felt that he was doing something stupid and dangerous by being there. He could see nothing. The air was brownish-black like the tree they’d shown him at Choeung Ek, the tree whose bark was ingrown with hardened blood where the Khmer Rouge used to smash babies’ skulls. He fumbled his way to a table sticky with spilled beer.

Is Vanna here?

You want one beer?

Vanna. Girl. I want Vanna. Tall girl.

No no you miss mistake, my friend.

Vanna.

My friend…

I want to take home Vanna. Only Vanna. Vanna and me like this.

No no no!

I want to marry Vanna. I buy her gold ring.

No no no, my friend, no no!

Gripping the journalist’s upper arm firmly enough to bruise, the pimp or waiter or bouncer or whatever he was led the journalist outside. He looked back at all the faces watching him in darkness, the fat yellow cat faces.

45

Well, said the photographer, why should she come to work? You already got her a gold bracelet, for Chrissakes. She probably sold it ten minutes after she got rid of you. That money should probably last her a few weeks.

46

I used to not have enough money to spend on whores, the photographer said. Now I don’t know what else I would ever spend my money on.

47

No, sir, the boy said (he was yet another of their impromptu interpreters), I’m sorry; she’s not here today.

Then she came like a ghost in the darkness, smelling like her sickly-sweet face powder, giving him for a while her triangular face, and he had to concentrate too hard on everything to be happy but he knew that later on when he had time to remember he’d be happy, and she sat beside him and he slipped her ten thousand riels under the table, a middling stack of money that she made vanish.

Can I buy you a beer before I go? said the journalist to the new interpreter.

But, sir, I have not had any supper! the boy whined.

The journalist started to despise the boy then. He’d showed up uninvited at lunchtime; the photographer had yelled: Fuck off! Screw! but the journalist had said: All right, if you want to come to lunch you can come to lunch, but you have to pay for yourself. And then the photographer said: Aw, you can’t make him pay for his own meal; the kid’s probably got no money… and so they’d taken him out, handing the waiter rubber-banded blocks of hundred-riel notes that smelled like mildew; it was after lunch that the journalist had gotten him to write a love letter, a commission he’d fulfilled in beautiful script, even folding the sheet of paper as delicately as if he’d studied origami, so the journalist had been grateful, but this request to be bought dinner at a rip-off place was too much, especially with Vanna waiting to be taken home; he told the boy he’d buy him a beer and a dance but that was that. Then he was on his feet, following Vanna off to the hotel.

As soon as he’d closed the door of the room behind them he gave her the love letter, and she sat down to read it. (I have one sure rule for you, one of his friends said to him much later, when he told the friend about her. The rule is this: Whatever you think she’s thinking, you’re going to be wrong.) It took her half an hour to read the letter. He saw her lips moving three times or more over each word. Then he saw that instead of explaining himself to her and making the situation any easier, he’d only set her another ordeal. But he had to know. He had to know! He gave her pen and paper and waited. She smiled anxiously. She strained over her writing, sounding out every letter in her whisper-sweet, passionless voice. Then she crossed out what she’d written – only a single word – and turned the page. She tried again and again. Finally she had three or four lines for him. It had taken her twenty minutes. The next day he got his government interpreter to translate, and the man laughed and said: But it is all together like nothing, all these words! She does not know how to write! I cannot, I… uh, she say, uh, that she watch you very carefully the first time, and she is very happy with your letter, her happiness, uh, beyond compare.

48

He had lain beside her thinking she was already asleep and touched her hand, but at once her fingers closed around his very tightly. He began to play with her but she was still, she kept her legs closed. So he patted her and rolled over to sleep. Suddenly she was smiling and slapping his butt. Pretty soon he was pointing to his crotch and hers and she was nodding and he got out the K-Y jelly…

49

Back at the disco the journalist drank a Tiger beer; then he bought the English teacher who didn’t speak English a Tiger beer as well…

She came again like an apparition, looking at him.

She say she’s busy with another guest, the English teacher said. Do you want her to come to your bedroom, sir?

Oh, I dunno, said the journalist despondently. Let me think about it.

Tell her it’s OK, the journalist said. Tell her she doesn’t have to come. Tell her I’ll say goodbye.

Eyes bulging, the English teacher repeated this information in a voice of machine-gun command. Or maybe he said something entirely different. That was the beauty of it.

She said something to the English teacher, who said: She is very happy to have meeting you.

Well, the journalist thought, or tried to think, that’s it. Really, it’s just as well…

Then Vanna came to him and gave him something wrapped up neatly in a square of paper, and again he had a sinking feeling, believing that she was returning his letter, and it seemed right and fair but also very sad, and then because she was still standing there he opened it to learn that it was something very different – lines of Khmer written very neatly (possibly professionally) with loops, wide hooks, spirals, heart-shaped squiggles, everything rounded and complicated, flowing on indecipherably.

The English teacher said: She go to get free from customer.

OK, he said.

He was happy and amazed. He sat there and the English teacher sat with him.

She came back and said something to the English teacher, who said: She will go home now to dress. Please wait for her. She return in twenty minutes. She come for you.

He took the English teacher outside and sat him down in the light outside an apartment building. He asked him to translate. The English teacher looked at the letter for a long time. Then he said: I will tell you only the highlights…

Please tell me everything. Can you write for me everything? Then I go to the hotel to wait for her.

The English teacher wrote:

Dear my friend:

It’s for a long time wich you went to Bat tam bang province by keep me alone. I miss you very much and I worry to you. I think that maybe you was abandoned from Kambodia & not told me.

Why can you write so much better than you can speak?

Yes, the English teacher said.

50

She wouldn’t ride in front of him on the motorbike any more. She made them ride separately and pay both drivers. Had people been torturing her too much, or was she just lazy? His driver paralleled hers, so that all the way back to the hotel he could watch her sit sidesaddle on the bike, gripping some handle between her legs, her clown-pale face almost a toy, smiling like a happy mask.

He was desperate to know what her letter said. It was so hard not to be able to talk with her. He wondered if she’d had to pay someone to write the letter for her or whether they’d done it for nothing.

He held her, and when the photographer came in and turned on the light, he saw that she’d fallen asleep smiling at him.

51

The letter said:

Dear my friend:

It’s for a long time wich you went to Bat tam bang province by keep me alone. I miss you very much and I worry to you. I think that maybe you was abandoned from Kambodia & not told me.

Since you were promiss to meet you at hotel I couldn’t went because I can’t listen your language. So you forgive me please. In fact I was still to love you and honestly with you for ever.

After day which I promissed with you I had hard sickness, and I solt braslet wich you was bought for me. So you forgive me.

When will you go your country. Will you come here againt? And you must come Cambodia don’t forget I was still loves you for ever.

In final I wish you to meet the happiness and loves me for ever. I wish you every happiness and loves me for good.

Signature

love VANNA XXX

52

He sat rereading the letter under the rainy awning where the cyclo drivers sat drinking their tea from brown ceramic teapots with bird shapes on them; they recounted their skinny stacks of riels as lovingly as he retold her words to himself; they rubbed their veined skinny brown legs; and he thought: Am I so far beyond them in soul and fortune that I can spend my time worrying about love, or am I just so far gone?

After a quarter hour the rain stopped, and the cyclo drivers took the sheets of plastic off their cabs and dumped masses of water out of them. The proprietor of the café brought them their bills. The Khmer Rouge had put his family to work near Battambang. They’d beaten his wife and three children to death with steel bars because they couldn’t work quickly enough. He had seen and heard their skulls crunch. They did it to them one by one, to make the terror and agony stretch out a little longer. They’d smashed in the baby’s head first; then they deflowered his four-year-old daughter; then it was his seven-year-old son’s turn to scream and smash like a pumpkin and spatter his parents with blood and bone. They saved the mother for last so that she could see her children die. The proprietor was a good worker; they had nothing against him. He knew that if he wept, though, they’d consider him a traitor. He had never wept after that. His owl eyes were wide and crazy as he fluttered around the café exchanging bread and tea for money. He was like a mayfly in November. And the journalist thought: Given that any suffering I might have experienced is as nothing compared to his, does that mean I’m nothing compared to him? Is he greater than I in some very important way? Yes. So is there anything I can do for him or give him to demonstrate my recognition of the terrible greatness he’s earned?

But the only thing that he could think of to help the man or make him happy was death, and the man had refused that.

Then he thought about giving the man money, and then he thought: Yes, but Vanna is as important as he is. And because she loves me and I love her, she is more important.

As for tragedies (which were a riel a dozen in Cambodia), what about the circular white scars on her brown back, put there forever by the Khmer Rouge when as a child she couldn’t carry earth to the ricefield dykes fast enough? If he could have gotten into his hands the people who’d done that to her, he would have killed them.

53

Her face lit up, amazed at the ice-cube tray in the freezer; he knocked a cube out for her and she crunched it happily between her teeth. She was finally laughing and smiling and going psssst!… She finally trusted him; yes, she loves you, the English teacher who couldn’t speak English had said at the disco; she trusts you; you can see it in her eyes… Now she lay in bed with him singing Khmer songs in a soft voice until the photographer, who was very ill, sat up in bed and started mimicking her in the ugliest way that he possibly could, and Vanna became silent.

54

The photographer had made a mess of things. His girl lay next to him weeping because the photographer did not care whether she stayed or went – preferring, in fact, that she go, because the photographer knew it was only a matter of time before he had to puke, and anyway Cambodia wasn’t exactly his country the way Thailand was; the girls here didn’t attract him as much, and everyone seemed so docile and lazy to him, whereas he only respected people like his next-door neighbor in San Francisco whom he’d caught pissing in the hall and the photographer started yelling at him but the neighbor only swung round his bleary terrible face and shouted: Next time I’ll shit on your head! and then the photographer had to forgive and admire him; his girl in Cambodia didn’t do that, not quite; and when the time came to send her away forever because they were leaving for Thailand early next morning, the girl began to weep and grovel again, soaking his knees with tears, clinging to him; it was horrible to see her; as affectionately as he could, the journalist kissed her hand goodbye…

55

In the morning, very early, there was a tapping at the door, and he got up sick and fat and groggy in his underwear to see who it was. He opened the door and shouted Vanna! with glee and thankfulness and she was glowing at him; she’d brought loaves of bread for his journey; he shared one with her. The photographer, who’d passed out puking on the floor, lay feverish in bed; and the journalist opened the refrigerator where the photographer had left his fruit to be abandoned and gave it to her, a gift for a gift, and she smiled and took it so that it became something special. Lying in bed beside him she peeled a fruit somewhat like a giant grapefruit, each sector of it walled off by a bitter cuticle as thick as a flower petal, the reward inside being a mass of rubbery pale-yellow teardrop-shaped fibers with bittersweet juice; and she put the segments into his mouth, and she said: I wuff you.

56

When they got back to Bangkok, the journalist said to the photographer: Well, that was it. No more whores for me. And he’d start talking about how he was going to marry Vanna, until the photographer said: Aw, you’re driving me crazy! The photographer went and got laid. He really wanted the journalist to do it too. He looked out for him. When the journalist’s balls had been at their worst, the photographer always got him meals in bed. But the journalist wanted to be good now; he said no. Red-boiled by the sun until he resembled a vulture, staring blearily, grimly ahead, the harsh light of Bangkok illuminating the insides of his ears, the photographer had had a hard time getting through the daylight hours. But now all his grace was back. Can I at least bring you back something? As ever, the journalist envied him and wanted to be like him. Oh, that’s all right, he said. You go spread one for me.

He stayed in and washed his underwear in the sink. The room was bright, cool, and quiet, with hardly any cockroaches – this being the world-famous Hotel 38, you see, which they’d never heard of before. When he’d scrubbed his underwear, he squeezed them out and left them hanging and dripping on the bathroom doorknob. (The photographer, pitying his incompetence in almost every sphere of life, sometimes rearranged his laundry for him. Don’t ever leave your wife, he always said to the journalist. Without her you’d really have problems!) He went out and stood on the landing between the second and third floors, looking across interstellar darkness into the window of a garment factory where girls in pale uniforms sat sewing; it seemed to him very strange and bleak; the prostitutes probably had a better life, in spite of the shame… Just after he’d turned the light out and gotten into bed, the light came on, and he opened his eyes to see the photographer with someone else in the hot glowing doorway. A moment later, Joy, the photographer’s old Bangkok girl, was on the journalist’s bed, holding his hand and hugging him so naturally like he was her brother while the photographer laughed. Only one boyfriend me! she said, pointing to the photographer. I love him! You are so sweet, said the journalist in wonder, meaning every word of it, wondering how many times he’d meant it…

Joy went into the bathroom. Then she and the photographer went to bed. The journalist told them both goodnight. Soon he heard Joy’s soft rhythmic moans, faked or unfaked, while in the hall a cat in heat went aaoow, aaoow.

57

What is she to you? a cyclo driver in Phnom Penh had shouted from among the crowd that encircled him as the journalist walked Vanna across the street on his last morning in Cambodia, his fingertips gentle and careful against her back.

She’s my friend, he said.

And what was she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough?

When he drew sketches of the Hotel 38 maids, they kissed him on the lips and asked him to take them out dancing; later that day one said to him very tentatively: I love you?

58

The next night the photographer brought some women back for them, a sort of midnight snack; he’d asked again before he went and this time the journalist had said: Go ahead; twist my arm. The photographer had Joy again. The journalist’s was a greedy thief smooth-shaven between her legs, and as soon as he’d stuck his tongue in her he knew that it was a mistake. He got up and rinsed his mouth out. Then he put a rubber on. The next day his tongue was coated with white fungus and his throat was so swollen that he could hardly breathe. Over and over a fierce fever grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him out of his dreams, then let him fall back to sleep exhausted. He remembered Vanna’s face. Well, doubtless Vanna wasn’t celibate, either. Maybe it was then that he began to get the unbounded confidence and ease that permitted him to cut any pretty girl who caught his fancy right out of the Patpong herd and take her straight back to the hotel, so that weeks later, when he awoke in the middle of the night, jet-lagged, he saw a woman sleeping beside him and at once, not knowing who she was, pulled her underpants briskly down to her ankles and rubbed her fuzz and spread her until she stirred and muttered: What…? and he suddenly remembered that this was his wife.

He wanted to say to his wife: Who am I? Only to see her expression when he said it, of course. I’m thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose language I can’t speak a word of, he said to one of his friends. That’s very interesting, his friend said. Maybe you should sleep on it. I wouldn’t do anything drastic. How much do you think I’d need to support her and her baby? he said. We can run through the numbers together, his friend said. A thousand a month for a two-bedroom place. You’d need that; you’d need a room to work, a room for the kid. That’s twelve thousand. Then there’s food and health insurance. Transportation. She’d be learning English the first year; there’d be a bill for that. Maybe daycare. Figure twenty-five grand. That’s after taxes. So you’d need thirty-five, forty grand. So much? whispered the journalist in dismay.

59

The transvestites, skull-grinning with black cobwebs painted over their sparkling eyes, didn’t tempt him, not even the ones with black bridles and nostril slits and double eyebrow-slits cut into their sweating glistening faces leering sheer and sweet out of darkness, but by now he’d begun to understand De Sade’s prison scribblings when the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike De Sade he didn’t want to hurt anyone, really didn’t, didn’t even want to fuck anyone any more particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman among the pocked and speckled and gilded and lip-pinked grinning heads that floated in flashing darkness, cratered with deer eyes, holding Japanese-style umbrellas like darkness-gilled mushrooms; he was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn’t really loving them.

60

I can’t take you anywhere! the photographer cried out in anguish. Whenever a girl asks you to buy her a drink, you buy her a goddamned drink! I can stay in a bar for hours and tell ’em all to go screw, but you’re such a pushover it just blows my mind. You’d better never leave your wife. You need someone to take care of you, man!

I agree a hundred per cent, said the journalist, who like the photographer agreed with everyone on everything; it was so much easier. He was feeling sick again; his balls were aching. He certainly didn’t know what he’d done to deserve that. They were drinking at the Pink Panther, where the lights reflected through his mixed drink.

Then he felt contrite and said: In the next bar I’ll do better. I’ll watch my money better.

So in the next bar, just barely out of sight of the Pink Panther, a woman said to him: You buy me drink? and he said no and she said: You buy me drink? and he said: Sure, honey. If it’ll make you happy I’ll buy you two drinks.

When at last he took all the slips from the wide teak cup and added them up, he saw that he was short by almost five hundred baht. He had to call to the photographer for money.

I don’t fucking believe it, said the photographer in the most genuine amazement that the journalist had seen in a long time.

61

The two of them went back to Joy and Pukki’s to sleep. (Remember Pukki? The journalist hardly did. She’d tried to get him to buy her out that night in Joy’s bar when he told her he loved Oy.) They couldn’t afford the Hotel 38 any more except on special occasions; it was three hundred baht. They’d given Joy twenty dollars apiece, each without knowing what the other had done. Her room was an oven at night, bright and bleak and reeking of insecticide. Splashing sounds came from the hall, where ladies took turns doing the laundry. In the corner crack, a foot or two below the ceiling, a hairy curled wire protruded. The wire began to vibrate. After a while the photographer got up and pulled it; something squeaked; it was a rat’s tail…

My place no good, said Joy softly. You no angry me?

62

He had gone alone to the National Museum to enjoy an hour of beauty without love, but he was just like the photographer, who’d shouted on the bus: I can smell a whore a mile away! because after a diversionary visit to some bird’s-head swords, he found himself sniffing out Khmer art (there was more here than in Phnom Penh! – the Khmer Rouge hadn’t forgotten much); raining his fever-sweat down on the courtyard grass, he stood lusting for the Bayon-style Dvarapalas of the early thirteenth century.

The stone head leaned forward and down, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, the balls of its eyes bulging out like tears. Too familiar, that face; he wished now that the photographer were here, to take a picture of it. Marina? Maybe. Yes, Marina – another one of the whores he had been with in Phnom Penh – plump, blurred, and round. Her mouth was definitely grimacing. He stepped back, stood a little to the left so that her eyes could see him. She looked upon him sadly, without interest or malice; this one was long dead. Her nose was eaten away as if by syphilis, her breasts almost imperceptible swellings on the rock, her navel round and deep, her vulva a tiny slit that may have been vandalized from the same ax that cut off her right hand and left arm. She stood square-toed and weary in the heat.

63

Short time mean we do it two time, one hour, said the Hotel 38 girl. All night mean until twel’ o’clock. Then I go home, Papa-san.

He tried to tell her that he was a journalist, just to tell her something, just to reach her, and then he asked her if she understood and she said yes, and then he wondered how many men asked her if she understood and how often she said yes.

He showed her the rubber. You want to use this? Up to you.

Yes, she said. Good for you, good for me.

This girl cost three hundred baht. He’d told the night manager to pick one out for him, whoever wanted to come. Be good to her! the night manager had said. He tipped her two hundred. When he saw the expression on her face, he thought: Well, at least once in my life I’ve made another human being completely happy.

64

You butterfly too much, Joy said to him when she and the photographer came in that night. Too much Thai lady! No good for you, no good for her. She no good, no good heart! She have boyfriend! Not me. I no boyfriend. I love you, I go with you; I no love you, I no go. Before, I have boyfriend. He butterfly too much. He fucking too much! (Joy was shouting.) One day he fucking one, two, three, four. I say to him: OK, you no come here again, we finit. I say: You want marry me, see Mama me, Papa me – why? He crying. He say: I don’t know. I say: You don’t know? You finit! Finit me!

What did you think of that? laughed the photographer. Boy, you looked scared for a minute!

He pointed solemnly to the journalist and said to Joy: He butterfly too much!

65

Lying in that absurd round bed at half-past four in the morning, he blew his nose, cleared his throat, coughed, and spat on the floor, listening to the rain outside while the air-conditioners droned and the blue curtains hung dirty, fat, and listless. It was not very dark because the rooms with round beds had windows at the tops of the doors to let hall light in, probably so that the whores wouldn’t lose money for the hotel by falling asleep. He coughed. Finally he got up, turned on the light, and sat alone in the middle of the round bed, weary and calm. The shrill shouts of the whores had ceased; he could hear nothing but the rain and the air-conditioner. A big bug scuttered across the floor. (In Patpong he’d seen the whores eating bugs roasted on a stick.) The late-night feeling went on and on, and he cleared his throat and spat white fungus.

66

All morning and all afternoon the photographer lay in bed. The journalist wandered in and out with his heart racing for Vanna. At the park gate two men were playing checkers with bottlecaps on a piece of cardboard, and the journalist went and sat beside the mud-brown lake as rain clouds guttered like greasy candles in the sky.

He reread her letter, as he’d done every day…

67

Joy had told the photographer that she had to see someone before she came that night, so she’d be late. Probably got to make some money, said the photographer. It’s not like I’ve been giving her much…

She came at four or five in the morning, smiling and swaying. I drink too much! she giggled.

Are you happy? asked the journalist quietly.

Yes, me very happy, ’cause I drink too much! I bring something for you. Here your clothes; I wash them for you; your shirt not yet; I no iron.

The photographer lay on the bed, his eyes closed.

You angry me?

No, not angry, Joy, just tired.

Look! I got toy monkey! You see? From lady! She like me too much! You go America Friday, I go her Saturday for holiday. No make love! No make love! Only go with her. You not angry?

Nope, yawned the photographer.

He looked at the monkey on the bed for a while. Then he flung it to her, or at her; what he was doing was never entirely clear. But surely he was only playing with her.

She froze in just the same way that Thais jogging in the park freeze into rigid attention when the national anthem comes on the loudspeaker. Then she whirled on him. Why you do that? You angry me?

No. Just tired.

You no like me?

I like you fine, Joy.

Why you angry me?

After that, the photographer’s face hardened. The journalist knew that something bad would happen.

Joy stood by the mirror. She had been about to undress. She fingered the topmost button of her Patpong uniform, undoing it and then doing it up again. Then she began to speak in a rapid monotone.

You no like me? You no like me OK I go home sleep. You no like me? You no like me?

The photographer said nothing. He didn’t even open his eyes.

OK you no like me I go. I go now. You no like me. OK.

She began to pack very rapidly. The journalist lay watching her in silence, saddened to the bottom of his heart, knowing that there was nothing he could or should do, nothing to do in that long, long time when she stood by the doorway waiting and then she said: OK. I go. And she waited a little longer. Then she turned out the light, opened the door, and shut it behind her. Now she would be walking toward the stairs; the photographer could still have leaped up and caught her; now she was downstairs; now she’d be walking very, very quickly in the rain to find a tuk-tuk. Lying in the darkness, he heard the photographer groan.

68

In the morning he decided to set out for Joy’s to tell her that he was worried about her and possibly to give her flowers or money. He arrived at Joy’s with his heart in his throat and knocked, seeing light under the door. At least they weren’t sleeping.

Joy? he said.

Yes, she finally said listlessly.

He went in and said: My friend no angry you. I worried you. You drink too much. No problem. OK?

Pukki’s face had lit up when he came in, but now it dimmed. You no come for me?

I have something for you, Pukki, he said, giving her his last twenty dollars.

The girls were not their bar selves. They sat sweating and trying to rub away beer headaches. Two Thai boys (whom they vehemently assured him were not their boyfriends, and he thought: Why does it have to be my business? Why can’t they be your boyfriends? We have no claim on you; we’re only sick butterflies) were lying on the futon. Soon Pukki began to pay the journalist his due attentions. She sent one of the boys out to get lunch. When he came back she spooned the journalist’s food onto the plate for him, just right. She peeled the skin off his chicken. She poured his water while the boys ironed his shirt and blue jeans. She had him lie down, and she sat fanning him. You good wife, he teased, and she laughed in delight, snuggling against him. The boys massaged his legs, calling him Papa-san and bumming ten baht off him (he gave them twenty), and he thought: Well, I could do worse than marry Pukki; Pukki is really a dear, dear girl…

69

Before long, the photographer had made up with Joy, and they had gone to buy her some shoes with bells on them. The journalist closed the shutters finally and sat on the unmade bed. One of the photographer’s used rubbers was on the floor. A fresh one waited on the bureau, like a fresh battery pack ready to be plugged in.

The bathroom door, a little ajar, was gripped by claws of humid darkness. The dirty walls, splattered with the blood of squashed bugs, seemed his own walls, his soul’s skin and prison. How could he set his butterfly free?

Then he remembered the Benadryl and smiled.

He got up and began to search listlessly through the first-aid kit. He felt neither happy nor sad. For a long time he could not even find the Benadryl, but in the end he saw that he was holding the jar in his hand.

After a while he unscrewed the top and swallowed a capsule dry. It went down fairly easily, and so did the next, but the third one didn’t, so he took his first swallow of beer. Eventually the bottle was as empty as his heart. In the next room, someone coughed. He lay down on the bed, feeling a little sick, and stared at the ceiling for a while; then he got up and turned the light out. It was very dark. He undressed down to his underwear and got under the covers.

Later, when the dark figures bent over him and he didn’t know whether he was in hell or whether he’d simply flubbed it, he strained with all his force to utter the magic words: More Benadryl, muttered the journalist.

70

Ahem! Benadryl, you know, is only an antihistamine – not one of those profound and omnipotent benzodiazepines that can stop a man’s heart even better than a pretty whore.

No, he didn’t really know his drugs, just as he didn’t know why all the Cambodian whores had taken Russian trick names; but when he walked down Haight Street one foggy afternoon after he got back, it was all buds? buds? indica buds? get you anything? wide-eyed faces wanting to help him get high; he’d never been offered drugs so many times at once his entire life! and he thought: Has something about my face changed over there? Since I said yes to so many women, is my face somehow more open or positive or special or weak?

71

Back at the city clinic again because his balls still ached, he listened to the other victims of sexual viruses and bacteria explicating their woes: That’s what happens when you get bored … Well I tole that bitch I wanna become a personal trend… and I said please touch my mouth I’m a competitive body builder and she says I wanna hug and I says ya want anything more and I dipped her like this! and then I tole her if a man touch my doll like that I’d kill ’im!… He gimme five dollahs an’ then he stick it in me an’ now I be gettin’ these night sweats; well sistah if I was serious I was scared so I can’t be serious…

You should really take the AIDS test, the doctor said. How many sexual partners did you say you’ve had in the last month?

Seven, the journalist said. No, eight. No, nine.

Well, now, said the doctor. I think that puts you in our highest-risk group, right in this red area at the top of our AIDS thermometer. Did you know the sexual histories of all your partners?

Oh, I know their histories all right.

Well, that’s very good, Mr Doe. Because, you see, if you didn’t know their histories you might not be aware if they’d engaged in any high-risk behaviors such as unprotected sex, anal intercourse, IV-drug use, prostitution… They wouldn’t have engaged in any of those behaviors, now, would they, Mr Doe?

I don’t think they were IV-drug abusers.

Mmm-hmm. Now, Mr Doe, do you always use condoms?

I couldn’t go so far as to say that, doctor.

Well (the doctor was still struggling to keep a positive attitude), would you say that you use condoms more than half the time, at least?

I did use a rubber with one of ’em once, the journalist grinned. But it was kind of an accident.

Mr Doe, said the doctor, you really should take the AIDS test.

I’d rather not know. How about if you just wrote me a prescription for some Benadryl? I’m fresh out.

72

With all due respect, his wife was saying, maybe even because you’re so smart, I don’t know – but you’ve definitely got problems. (The journalist had just told her that maybe, just maybe, they should consider a divorce.) You need analysis, his wife said. You’ve got something to work out. You always say my family’s screwed up – well! I’m telling you, your family’s screwed up. Really screwed up. Actually the rest of them aren’t so bad. It’s you. Everyone thinks you’re a freak. All the neighbors think you’re a freak, even if they’re too nice to say it directly to me. I’m normal; I’m tired of being married to a freak.

I see that, he said.

All your friends are freaks. Either society’s rejected them or else they’ve rejected society. They’re the lowest of the low. You’ve spent years building up a crew of freaks.

I wouldn’t necessarily call them freaks, he said.

Tears were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks that all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him – why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault? They shone now with recognition of his guilt; they overflowed until her whole face, sodden with snot and tears, reminded him of a beach where something flickers pitifully alive in every wet sand bubble when the waves retreat.

And that photographer you hang out with, she said, it doesn’t do your character any good to be with someone so irreverent.

Hearing that, no matter how sorry for her he was, he could not prevent a happy brutal smile from worming to his lips, twisting his whole face; he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what she’d said and listen to him laughing…

73

He kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who this person beside him was. After she started sleeping in the other bedroom, they got along much better. Sometimes he’d see her in the backyard, gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she stormed at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel! For years he and his wife had had arguments about the air-conditioner. He’d turn it on and then she’d turn it off and he’d wake up stifling and turn it on again and then she’d start screaming. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in a blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he’d find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there any more, only the clay-eyed skulls from the killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted double loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls…