The Ambassador's wife

smiled. “Be there.”

Then the lift door closed again.

By the time Tay reached his room on the tenth floor he had made up his mind. He would take his chances. He would buy a bathing suit somewhere and meet Cally at the hotel pool. He was not that great a swimmer, that was true, but he could manage and what better way to get to know Cally than to spend time with her sitting around the pool?

If he could only hold in his stomach and avoid drowning at the same time, perhaps everything would go well. It was, he supposed, worth a shot.

TAY had hardly expected to find grass and trees on the sixth floor of a Marriott hotel right in the middle of Bangkok, but lush green grass and swaying palm trees was exactly what he found. The pool was on an open deck next to the gym. A luxuriant garden surrounding water so blue Tay could have sworn it had food coloring in it.

The bathing suit he bought from a street vendor in front of a McDonald’s fit better than he had expected. It was a little big maybe, but then again so was Tay. Against all odds, he thought he actually looked pretty good in it. Cally was at the pool when Tay got there just as she said she would be. She was stretched out on a teak lounge under a tall palm tree. The pool boy dragged another lounge chair over for Tay and spread out two thick, yellow towels for him. Cally ordered a Diet Coke and Tay said he would have the same. The boy went off to get their drinks and Tay settled himself next to Cally.

From the sixth floor of the Marriott, Bangkok looked a good deal better than it did from ground level. The forest of office towers around them gleamed like columns of white marble. Off in the west the unrelenting sun had been tamed to nothing more than wisps of yellow and purple floating on the horizon and the sky had turned the color of a ripe peach. An involuntary collaboration of nature and the effluent drifting in Bangkok’s air was producing a spectacular, if less than environmentally pristine, sunset.

Tay glanced at Cally and when he saw her eyes were closed he allowed his own to linger. It was an awful cliche, Tay knew, but at rest Cally made him think of a cheetah or perhaps a jaguar. Languid and serene, but only a blink from blurring into motion.

Her body was long and sleek. Her black Lycra tank suit was cut high on her thighs and it emphasized both the length and the firmness of her tanned legs. Their shape was really remarkable: thighs slim, knees perfectly formed, calves muscled, ankles elegant; and feet … well, lovely. Tay had never before felt moved to think of anyone’s feet as lovely, but Cally’s were. There was just no other word for them.

“If you want to check out my ass, too, just say the word. I’d be glad to roll over for you.”

Tay’s eyes jumped away from Cally in embarrassment. For a moment he tried studying the skyline out beyond her lounge chair with feigned concentration but, almost at once, feeling ridiculous, he abandoned the feeble subterfuge.

“Okay,” Tay said. “You got me.”

The pool boy returned at that moment and set out their Diet Cokes, which blessedly saved Tay from having to say anything else. When the boy had gone, Cally pushed herself into a sitting position and clasped her hands around her knees.

“I don’t know about you, Sam Tay.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been looking at you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what …”

Tay felt a strong tide tugging him toward deeper water and he was powerless to swim for shore.

“I don’t know anything about you, Sam. You pull things out of other people, but you give nothing away about yourself. I think you’re hiding something.”

“Not really. What you see is pretty much what you get.”

“No, it’s not. Sometimes you’re almost scary.”

Tay had never thought of himself as particularly scary so he wasn’t at all sure what to say to that.

“You underplay yourself,” Cally continued. “You pretend to be over your head when you’re not. Why do you do that?”

“Maybe I’m just a modest kind of guy.”

“No, it’s more than that. You approach everything with the same sort of caution. I can’t quite figure out where it comes from, but I see it in your eyes. You never let your guard down.”

Tay was unprepared for the rate at which their seemingly casual conversation had turned intimate. Come to think of it, he was probably unprepared right now for any kind of intimate conversation at all, regardless of the speed at which it developed. Of course he had hopes that eventually he and Cally might reach such a point, but he had been thinking in terms of weeks, perhaps even months. In ten minutes Cally had taken them straight from small talk to a place from which both good and dangerous things were within their grasp.

He should probably stay well away from American women. That was the real lesson here. Their directness was just too alarming for him. Christ, he needed a Marlboro.

Fortunately, he had come prepared. He fished in the pocket of his bathing suit for the pack he had brought down from his room and shook out a cigarette. A breeze had come up and it took him three tries to light it, but by cupping the match carefully in his hand he was eventually able to manage the feat. The pool boy appeared at his elbow with an ashtray. Tay took it, dumped the burned-out match, and the boy scampered away. Tay was just congratulating himself on killing nearly a full minute without having to respond to Cally’s observations about him, but then he exhaled and glanced quickly through the smoke at her and saw that he wasn’t going to escape quite that easily. He may have earned himself a reprieve, but it was not going to turn into a full pardon.

“Do you want to have sex with me, Sam?”

Tay choked and began to cough uncontrollably.

“It’s a serious question, Sam. Do you?”

“No,” he stammered when he was finally able to speak again.

That isn’t right, he thought to himself, but I can hardly say yes, can I?

“See what I mean? You’re not giving me an honest answer.”

“Look, Cally,” Tay cleared his throat and stared at his feet, “I just don’t know what to say to that.”

“Am I embarrassing you?”

“Of course you are.”

“Why?”

“Why? For God’s sake, what do you expect me to say? Yes, I’d like to have sex with you? I can’t say something like that.”

Cally nodded slowly, but she remained silent.

“Besides, right now I’m …” he trailed off.

It had not entered his mind up until this moment to tell Cally about his mother, but all of a sudden that was exactly what he wanted to do.

“You’re what?” Cally asked.

“Tired. Messed up. I don’t know what.” Tay looked at Cally. “My mother died.”

“Your mother?” Cally sat up and swung her feet to the ground. “When?”

All at once it occurred to Tay that he wasn’t sure.

“Yesterday, I think. I’m not even sure. She died in New York. Some lawyer from there called me.”

“Oh God, Sam.”

Cally leaned toward Tay and took his left hand in both of hers. Tay could feel the smoothness of them. For a moment, he could think of nothing else.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so very sorry.”

Tay didn’t know quite what to say. He hadn’t planned any of this and wasn’t sure where to go with it. Cally apparently mistook his silence for grief because she gripped his hand harder.

“When is the funeral?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you can get there in time, can’t you?”

“I suppose.” He hesitated, but the truth had gotten him this far so he decided to stick with it. “It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going.”