Bangkok Knights (23 page)

“Don’ t think I haven’ t thought of that, not to mention
the fact that he’d also take a bit of the heat off of
me
— did I tell
you Lek’s uncle is going in for another hernia operation? And Pow, her youngest
brother, is starting at Chiangmai University next term.

“But it’s my feeling you don’t want to meddle with stuff
like that, not when it’s in the family. Anyway, I wouldn’t like to think all
Trevor’s work on that computer has been for nothing. It’s going to be
interesting to see what he comes up with, don’t you think?”

Well, it looked like what he’d come up with was Dinky Toy,
from what Eddie had told me. And if that was the case, then what was
really
going
to be interesting was what Lek was going to come up with for Eddie. He’d better
only hope there were lots of dogs around at the time to take the heat off. When
the kicking started, I meant

“Eddie?” Lek’s voice issued forth from the house like a
whiff of tear gas.

“Listen,” said Eddie. “I’ve got a bit of painting to do in
the kitchen, put in some tiles and stuff. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?
Things might be more pleasant by then. Say around 11:00? I’ll make pancakes.”

The brunch was excellent, with just a
soupcon
of
Singha beer adding this
je ne sais quoi
to the pancake batter, and the
remainder of a large bottle doing the same for Eddie. He offered to open a
second bottle to help the sausages down, but I passed in favor of coffee.

Meow poured the coffee. She wasn’t dressed in her usual
tatty old sarong and flip-flops; she was decked out in a nice short skirt and
what looked like a brand-new pearl-gray silk blouse. And I’d never seen her in
high heels before. She didn’t dress like that when I came around. Of course I
wasn’t twenty-four years old and blonde, with an almost moustache and money in
the bank. Not to mention an accent just like Prince Charlie’s, if only Prince
Charlie came from Norwich.

“He is also clean and polite,” Eddie reminded me.

Trevor was back, though just where he ‘d been and what he’ d
done he wasn’t saying.

“I would’ve thought Trevor would want something more
romantic than your patio, here, for these assignations,” I told Eddie. “More
private, at least.”

“Naw, not for the preliminaries. It’s better to do it this
way, he says; he can stay more objective, keep his wits about him.”

Without being unkind, you could suggest Trevor needed any
help he could get in keeping his wits about him, given his record on the
courtship front, at least.

But his ears had flamed fiercely and he’d gazed sternly
into the distance as he resolved that the very next champagne breakfast would
in fact be his engagement party. It only remained to find the lucky lady who
would be the guest of honor.

Right at that moment he was engaged in earnest
conversation with a Thai woman of indeterminate age but very determinate
ambition, judging by the intensity of her regard for Trevor. She only took her
eyes off him when she had to bat them or else roll them about in what she
probably thought was an alluring manner. Trevor, meanwhile, kept asking
questions and writing things down in a legal pad on the table in front of him.
Just looking at him, you could see he was all business, stroking at his upper
lip with brisk concentration as he listened to the lady’s responses, stabbing
at his notepad to record same. It was all very impressive.

“One sister, then? And no brothers.
One
sister?”
Trevor was getting to the essentials.

Lek, meanwhile, was busily watering all the plants around
the patio, some of them twice or three times, in fact, never getting out of
earshot of the proceedings. Meow had her attentions divided between the
interview and the trick of simply staying upright on her fancy shoes.

The only other people on the patio were two husky American
women. They were sitting there decked out in the tattered uniforms of the
Southeast-Asian backpack traveler; they also flew every sign of indignation at
the scene they were witnessing. They evidently felt there was something outre
about Trevor’s project. Judging by the loud and somewhat belligerent comments
they were coming up with, anyhow.

”This is ugly. It’s
degrading*”

They had been going on a bit, rather loudly and quite
evidently for the benefit of everyone present. It seems they’d gone to Patpong
the night before, and had been thoroughly disgusted at the exploitation they’d
witnessed, the sex shows, the young girls for sale. They’d seen it again and
again, in show after show. And all these Western men, mostly middle-aged and
overfed, buying love, pumping up their puny egos with First-World dollars and
deutschesmarks and francs, penny-ante Diamond Jim Bradys cutting a swathe
through the deprived women of the East. Emotional retards. Unable to cut it on
equal terms with real women. Arrested adolescents with living, breathing
playthings bought and paid for with peanuts, by any real standards. And so on;
you get the drift. Spineless, weak-kneed apologies for real men who could only
be comfortable with passive objects of their feeble lusts, willing slaves to
their every command, downtrodden by centuries of oppression and poverty.

Yeah; just ask Eddie, I thought.

These ladies were welcome to their own views on things, of
course, but they could’ve kept them to themselves a bit more. Maybe toned them
down out of the strident range, anyway. After all, Eddie himself was married to
a Thai, and Lek was no bargirl; she wasn’t even noticeably passive and
oppressed. And Eddie was no social deviant. Or if he was, it was merely in
little ways that only added to his charm, once you got to know him.

But their extensive researches on Patpong Road had shown
them every Thai woman in Bangkok was a whore and every Western male in their
company an emotional moron, or so you’d have to believe, listening to this
pair. And now they were down on Trevor.

“Can you
believe
that? He’s actually in Bangkok shopping for a
wife.
Like you’d choose a piece of meat at the supermarket.
It’s
disgusting”

At the same time here sprawled these
farang
traveling
ladies, robust emissaries of the Right Way, even though they’d never had to be
a single young man resident in Kuwait. Or a young woman with very few options,
if ever she was to have hope of any security in this life, one of these options
being to team up with a lonely young traffic engineer from Kuwait.

”There ought to be a law; look at that pig — he’s
interviewing
her. He’s actually interviewing a bunch of
hookers,
and he’s going
to
marry
one of them!” These sentiments were delivered in tones just
loud enough f or all of us to hear, only it didn’ t seem to register on Trevor;
he was preoccupied.

Lek and Meow were used to it — they had to be, running a
guesthouse. But the average Thai woman would’ve been shocked and offended.
Somebody who hadn’t seen that many
farang
up close might have been
forgiven for thinking these two were prostitutes. Legs spread wide with no
doubt liberated abandon, cigarettes waving about, braless bosoms shaking and
heaving with indignation compounded by smoker’s cough. Voices brassy in
opinionated celebration of the secure grip they had on the Way Things Should
Be. No problem, back home; that’s the way it’s done these days, at least in
some quarters. But in Thailand this behavior was the antithesis of everything
people thought of as pleasing. So it was East was East and West was West once
more, and everybody thought everybody else was a trollop.

Meow was still tottering around having a great old time on
her high heels. Then she sort of lost her balance for a minute, and before you
knew it she was doing this tricky little sideways shuffle — something like that
dance routine the vaudeville types used to call ‘Going to Chicago’, or maybe it
was Detroit, I can’t remember. She didn’t make it to Chicago, anyway, because
she ran right into the table where the American ladies were having breakfast
and making critical noises about Trevor’s current enterprise. Now they made
more critical noises about the hot coffee all over them, instead.

“That kind is never happy without something to bitch
about,” was Eddie’s opinion.

But now the Western trollops were wet and unhappy, and
they went upstairs to change. It was safe to say all of us remaining on the
patio were not sorry to see them go, and Lek for one would’ ve poured hot
coffee all over them herself if she’d thought of it first, or so she said.

Now we could get back to the business at hand, which was
getting Trevor hitched to the woman of his dreams, whoever this might be. So
far, in the poll Lek and Meow were running on the wifely candidates, two of
them had been judged passable material as maids, perhaps, though never wives,
while the other two you wouldn’t have wanted to trust with the silverware. And
then of course there were the children and extended families and even husbands
one or the other evidently had stashed away, probably wanting to surprise
Trevor later, maybe in case he started to get bored right after the honeymoon.

Lek and Meow had made sure he wasn’t taken in by first
impressions. Candidate # 1, for example, had had a ring mark on her wedding
finger. Or so Lek said, anyway; Trevor hadn’t noticed a thing. In any case, it
certainly wasn’t unusual for a Western man to marry a Thai only to discover
subsequently she was already married, and he was being viewed more or less as a
belated dowry for the Thai husband. Candidate #3 had looked good for a length
or two out of the starting gate. In fact Eddie had offered me two to one odds
she’d at least get to go to dinner with Trevor. But it was not to be.

“Feel her hands,” Lek advised Trevor at one point, when
the lady in question went in to the toilet. “Like stroking a carp, just you
see.”

“Mai suay”
Meow elaborated. “Not beautiful.”

This was unfair. Number Three was a capable looking type —
the sort of bird Gauguin would’ve painted, had he ever gotten to Thailand. Quite sweet, I thought. But the Gauguin had been dismissed as a washerwoman.
Probably in a sleazy hotel, as well, though how Lek deduced this latter
proposition she never did say. Meow pointed out she was dressed in the cheapest
clothes from Pratunam Market, but I couldn’t see how this put her in a cheap
hotel, since half the women in Bangkok were dressed the same way, and Meow was
no fashion plate, herself, except maybe for today.

Anyway, I was proud of Trevor; he was unmoved by these
objections. “I don’t care if a woman’s poor,” he said, talking through his hat.
“I want someone who is honest and gentle and who will be a good mother to my
children. Someone I can introduce to my parents and be proud of. And she has to
speak English.”

“Did Meow tell you she’s studying English at A.U.A.?”
interjected Lek, just by the way.

”If she
did
tell him,” Eddie said to me out of the
corner of his mouth, “it must’ve been in Thai, A.U.A. language course or not.
Nixon has a better grip on English than she does.”

“I think she’s pretty nice,” said Trevor, not yet willing
to leave off his consideration of the Gauguinesque charlady. “Her English is
good.”

“She has a moustache,” Lek said.

“A
moustache!”
Eddie looked surprised. To tell the
truth I hadn’t noticed this feature either. Of course it’d taken me a while to
notice Trevor’ s moustache, too. And these women did pick up on things we males
were often blind to, you had to admit it.

“And she has stretch marks,” Lek added.

“Stretch marks?” Trevor looked confused. He’d probably never
even heard of stretch marks before.

“She has children.” Lek and Meow nodded at each other with
satisfaction. “Sure.”

To them, maybe, but to me it wasn’t obvious at all.
Candidate #3 had worn a long dress with the collar buttoned modestly to the
neck. Where were these stretch marks they’d spotted? On her ankles?

In any case, they had managed to put Trevor off. “Are you
sure she has a moustache?” he asked, kind of wistfully.

When she came back from the toilet Trevor, Eddie, and I
all stared surreptitiously at her upper lip, and, sure enough, she had a
moustache. Even if it wasn’t really bushy or anything, you could probably
expect it to grow ever more luxuriant as the years went by.

Now Trevor was talking to Candidate#5, an item named Noi
who said she was from Songkhla, and who exuded all the energy and excitement of
a water buffalo. She had big soft bovine eyes that swam myopically in the calm
repose of her broad face, and her solid frame sat still and composed. Lek
stopped by our table briefly, and she expressed the opinion Miss Noi remained
so impassive mosdy because she was afraid if she smiled or anything like that,
her makeup would crack and fall off in slabs.

Trevor had already gotten through the details of her
educational background, and was talking to her about her family now. She was
relating in a soft voice the various catastrophes and cruel turns of Fate that
had left her to fend for herself in this vale of sorrows. You could see she was
doing well; Trevor liked a woman with a soft voice.

I had never given Meow the credit I guess she deserved,
never figuring her for the necessary equipment to be devious; but she proved me
wrong. She suddenly appeared in the doorway and called out in Thai: ‘There’s a
phone-call for Miss Noi — it’s important. There’s illness in the family and a
dozen or two of her uncles and aunts and cousins have got the plague or food
poisoning or something. They’re all very sick.”

This is anyway what Eddie tells me she says.

“What? How did...? Oh, no.” Noi shot up out of her chair
just like she really believed she had all these sick relatives, even though
weknew she hadn’t any, because she’d only aminute before told Trevor she was
all alone in this world and he’d almost fallen right into the great limpid
pools she’d made of her eyes.