Saint Jack (2 page)

Fifty: it is a dangerous age—for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn on the lights because he'll see the cockroaches he smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new—he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he's balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack. He's feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He's neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle—that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.

That was how I recognized Mr. Leigh, the man they sent from Hong Kong to audit our books. I knew his name and his flight number—nothing else. I waited at Gate Three and watched the passengers file through Health and Immigration. First the early birds, the ones who rush off the plane with briefcases, journalists and junior executives with Chinese girl friends, niftily dressed, wearing big sunglasses; then the two Chinese sisters in matching outfits; a lady with a little boy and further back her husband holding the baby and juggling his passport; a pop group with blank faces and wigs of frizzy hair, looking like a delegation from New Guinea, anxious to be met; the missionary priest with a goatee and a cheroot, addressing porters in their own language; a few overdressed ones, their Zurich topcoats over their arms. Lagging behind, a lady in a wheelchair about whom people say, “Lord, I don't know how she does it,” a man with a big box, a returning student with new eyeglasses, and. Mr. Leigh. I knew him as soon as I set eyes on him: he was the only one who looked remotely like me.

He was red-faced and breathless; and, unaccustomed to the heat, he was mopping his face with a hanky. He was a bit heavier than he should have been—his balance was wrong, his clothes too small. I waved to him through the glass doors. He nodded and turned away to claim his suitcase. I went into the men's room, just to look in the mirror. I was reassured by my hair, not white like Leigh's and still quite thick. But I wished I had more hair. My face was lined: my nap had made me look older. I was disheveled from the bus ride and looked more rumpled than usual because I had rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs. It was my tattoos. I hid them from strangers. Strangers' eyes fix on tattoos as they fix on scars in unlikely places. A person spots a tattoo and he has you pegged: you're a sailor, or you do some sort of poorly paid manual labor; one day you got drunk with your friends and they got tattooed, and to be one of the gang so did you. It did not happen this way with me, but that is the only version strangers know of a tattooing.

Mr. Leigh was just pushing through the glass doors as I came back from the toilet smoothing my sleeves. I said hello and tried to take his suitcase. He wouldn't let go; he seemed offended that I should try to help. I knew the feeling. He was abrupt and wheezing and his movements tried to be quick. It is usually this way with people who have just left a plane: they are overexcited in a foreign place, their rhythm is different—they are attempting a new rhythm—and they are not sure what is going to happen next. The sentence they have been practicing on the plane, a greeting, a quip, they know to be inappropriate as soon as they say it. Leigh said, “So they didn't send the mayor.” Then, “You don't look Chinese to me.”

I suggested a beer in the lounge.

“What time are they expecting me?” he asked. He had just arrived and already he was worried about Hing. I knew this man: he didn't want to lose his job or his dignity; but it is impossible to keep both.

“They weren't too sure what time your plane was coming in,” I said. We both knew who “they” were. He put down his suitcase.

One reason I remember the first conversation I had with Mr. Leigh (or William, as he insisted I call him, but I found this more formal than Mister; he didn't reply to “Bill”) is that I had the same conversation with every
ang moh
I met in Singapore. We were in the lounge having a beer, sharing a large Anchor; every few minutes the loud-speakers became noisy with adenoidal announcements of arrivals and departures in three languages. Leigh was still keyed up and he sat forward in his chair, taking quick gulps of beer and then staring into his glass.

I asked about the flight and the weather in—William being English, I attempted some slang—“Honkers.” This made him look up from his glass and squint straight at me, so I gave up. And was it a direct flight? No, he said, it landed for fueling at Bangkok.

“Now
that's
a well-named place!” I said and grinned. I can't remember whether it got a rise out of him. I asked if he had a meal on the plane.

“Yes,” he said, “perfectly hideous.”

“Well, that food is always so damned hideous,” I said, trying to sound more disgusted than him. The word stuck to my tongue. I wasn't telling the truth. I thought airplane food was very good, always the correct color and each course in its own little covered trough on the tray, the knives and forks wrapped up and all the rest of the utensils in clean envelopes and in fitted slots and compartments. I had to agree the food was hideous. He was a guest, and I had plans for him.

The next thing I said to him was what I said to everyone who came through. I said it slowly, with suggestive emphasis on the right syllables: “If there's anything you want in Singapore, anything at all”—I smiled here—“just let me know and I'll see what I can fix up.”

He replied, as most strangers did—but he was not smiling—“I'm sure you don't mean
anything.
”

“Anything.” I took a drink of my beer to show I wasn't going to qualify the promise.

He mopped his face. “I was wondering—”

And I knew what he was wondering. The choice wasn't large, but people didn't realize that. A tout could follow a tourist on the sidewalk and in the space of a minute offer everything that tourist could conceivably want. The touts who didn't know English handed over a crudely printed three-by-five card to the man with a curious idle face. The card had half a dozen choices on it: blue movies, girls, boys, exhibition, massage, ganja—a menu which covered the whole appetite of longing. No new longings were likely, and the tout who breathed, “You want something special?” had in mind a combination based on the six choices.

Leigh was perspiring heavily. Vice, I was thinking: it sounded like what it was, it squeezed, expressing the grape of fantasy. Gladys was free. It was possible to stop off at her place on the way back from the airport—Leigh would appreciate the convenience—and I was going to say so. But it is a mistake to make explicit suggestions: I discovered that very early. If I suggested a girl and the feller wanted a boy he would be ashamed to admit it and the deal would be off. It was always wrong to offer an exhibition—like saying, “You can't cut the mustard but how about watching?”—and if a person was thinking of having a go he would refuse if I suggested it. Most people thought their longings were original, but they weren't: they could only be one of six, or else a combination. Various as fantasy, but fantasy didn't allow for the irregular performance of man's engine. I knew the folly of expectation, and how to caution a feller against despairing of his poor engine and perhaps hitting his pecker with a hammer.

I sized up Leigh as he was blotting his cheeks and pulling at his collar, counting the whirring fans in the lounge. I took him to be an exhibition man, with a massage to follow—not an ordinary massage, something special, Lillian jumping naked on his spine. Intimacy, as the girls called it, or
boochakong
, to use the common Chinese term I preferred to the English verb, would still be a strong possibility, I was thinking. There was no such thing as impotence: it was successful as soon as money changed hands. It wasn't the money, but the ritual.

“What do you say?” I asked, as brightly as I could. Usually it wasn't so hard; when it was, it meant the feller was worried about asking for something I couldn't provide.

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, and drew a deep breath. So I was wrong about the exhibition, and just as well, I thought; I hated those monkeyshines. I guessed Leigh was slightly bent; his particular crimp was a weakness for transvestites, of which, as is well known, there is a whole sorority in Singapore. Very few fellers admitted to this yen; they were the hardest ones to handle, but over the years I had seen how they reacted to the Chinese boys who in skirts were more winsome than girls. Middle age may be an emergence of this comfort, too, a fling at play-acting with a pretty boy, a reasonable occasion for gaiety, the surprise of costuming and merry vestments. If I detected the wish I took the fellers down to Bugis Street and steeered them over to the reliable ones, Tiny or Gina. Lucy had the operation which sometimes disappointed the fellers. Your bashful fruit pretended he was talking to a girl, but just so we knew where we stood I said, “Take Gina—he's a very nice feller.” The client looked surprised and said, “You mean—?” And then: “I might as well take him home—I'm too drunk to notice the difference,” and going out would slip me ten dollars.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Leigh.

A very uncommon question. I was going to say nothing, just keep smiling in a willing fashion. But he looked as though he meant it and wouldn't tumble to my willingness.

I said, “I thought . . . if you were interested in anything illegal, hyah-yah, I might be able to—”

“Illegal?” said Leigh and put his hanky down. He leaned over and, puzzled and interested, asked, “You mean a prostitute?”

I tried to laugh again, but the expression on his face turning from puzzlement to disgust rattled me. It had been a mistake to say anything.

“No,” I said, “of course not.” But it came too late, my tardy denial only confirmed the truth, and Leigh was so indignant—he had straightened up and stopped drinking—that shame, unfamiliar as regret, tugged at my neck hairs. Through the glass-topped table in front of me I could see I was curling my toes and clawing at my sandals.

“Let's go,” I said. “I'll call a taxi.” I started to get up. I was hot; I wanted to roll up my sleeves, now damply stuck to my tattoos, revealing them.

“Flowers,” he said, and narrowed his eyes at me, “are you a ponce?”

“Me? Hyah-mn! What a thing to say!” It was a loud hollow protest with a false echo. Prostitute, he had said, pimp, whore, queer, ponce—words people use to name the things they hate (liking them they leave them nameless, the human voice duplicating the suspicion that passion is unspeakable). “I'm a sort of pornocrat,” I was going to say, to mock him. I decided not to. His incredulity was a prompting for me to lie.

The waitress passed by.

Leigh said, “
Wan arn!
” greeting her in vilely accented Mandarin.

“Scuse me?” she said. She took a pad from the pocket of her dress, a pencil from her hair. “Anudda Anchor?”

“
Nee hao ma
,” said Leigh. He had turned away from me and was looking at the girl. But the girl was looking at me “
Nee hway bu hway
—”

“Mister,” said the girl to me, “what ship your flend flom?”

Leigh cleared his throat and said we'd better be going. In the taxi he said hopelessly, “I was wondering if I might get a chance to play a little squash.”

“Sure thing,” I said, pouncing. “I can fix that up for you in a jiffy.”
Squash?
He was wheezing still, and red as a beet. Carrying his suitcase to the taxi rank he kept changing hands and groaning, and then he put his face out the taxi window and let the breeze blow into his mouth, taking gulps of it the way dogs do in a car. He had swallowed two little white pills with his beer. He looked closely at his palms from time to time. And he wanted to play squash!

“What's your club, Flowers?”

We had agreed that I was to call him William if he called me Jack. I liked my nursery-rhyme name. Now I felt he was cheating.

“Name it,” I said, and to remind him of our agreement I added, “William.”

I had an application pending at the Cricket Club once, or at least the “Eggs,” two elderly bald clients of mine, who were members, said I did. I had been trying to join a club in Singapore for a long time. Then it was too late. I couldn't apply for membership without giving myself away, for I often drank in the clubs and most of the members—they knew me well—thought I had joined years before. There wasn't a club on the island I couldn't visit one way or another. I had clients at all of them.

“Cricket Club's got some squash courts, but the Tanglin's just put up new ones—you may want to have a look at those. There's none at the Swimming Club so far, though we've got a marvelous sauna room.” I thumped his knee. “We'll find something, William.”

“Sounds very agreeable,” he said, pulling his head back into the taxi. He was calm now. “How do you manage three clubs? I'm told the entrance fees are killing.”

“They
are
pretty killing,” I said, using his dialect again, “but I reckon it's worth it.”

“You're not a squash player yourself?”