“You must have said som — Oh, you were anxious, weren’t you?” He nodded. “And when you’re anxious your eyes water.” He nodded again. “And they thought you were crying and in desperate need to pray.”
“It was stressful,” he confessed.
I could picture the scene. Arny steps out of the truck. He’s surrounded. He panics. The detectives decide the only reason a one-hundred-kilogram brick barn would burst into tears is if he’s in desperate need of salvation. See? I knew there was a reason to bring Arny along. I climbed up his left side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He liked it.
Four
“ Information is moving. You know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it’s also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets.”
Two or three nights a week I’d phone Sissi in Chiang Mai or she’d phone me. We’re probably as close as two siblings who have nothing in common can be. I love her but I keep expecting that phone call where she says, “Jimm, I’ve decided you’re only pretending to like me so I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” That would bring her close-friend count down to exactly zero. To explain her temperament I’d need to go back a ways with this story.
When I was growing up it took me a while to realize that boys and girls were different. I’m not talking anatomically here, I mean, my brother Somkiet and I were one creature, and it was decidedly pink. We co-wore all my clothes but never his. We giggled and slapped a great deal. We had dolls and we spent an awfully long time looking at me in the shower. Mair started off angry. “You take off that nightie at once, mister, and clean your football boots.”
Granddad Jah bought him boxing gloves and enrolled him in the local gym. But over the years I felt a gradual decline in their resolve to divert Somkiet from the flowery path he skipped along. In fact it was Mair who gave him the final push.
At sixteen, Somkiet was at that crossroads we hear so much about and was in desperate need of good advice, preferably from a father figure. But all he got at home was Granny preparing herself for nirvana, Granddad Jah moping about his lack of advancement through the ranks of the police force, and me, hopelessly in love with Liu De Hua, the Hong Kong TV star. Nothing seemed as important to me as Liu. Even I had abandoned Somkiet. Once she’d given up her happy life, Mair waded through several years of depression. She lived like Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Her world started at the pavement in front of our shop and ended at the spirit house at the back fence. We weren’t much of a support group for a girl in a boy’s skin.
Somkiet’s two years at high school were probably miserable. He loved to study. He was smart and could have turned his hand to anything. But he was one of a small gaggle of what they call
Before his high school graduation, Somkiet ran away from home. Actually, Mair packed him lunch and gave him a brown paper bag full of money. She no longer knew how to reason with him so she became an ally. I think at the back of her mind she believed her son would ‘get over it’ and become one of us again. Somkiet changed his name to Sissi and worked his way up through the transvestite cabaret ranks: pot man, waiter, back-row male lip- sync chorus, male dancer, back-row female lip-sync chorus, front-row dancer, specialist dancer, and, at last, every young boy’s dream — specialist lip-sync female lead. And it was there that the glamor began to wrap itself around his/her life. The regulars flashing their eyebrows and their wallets in the front row. The busy secretaries passing on the name cards of their businessmen bosses who’d like a fling — fee not negotiable.
But still Sissi’s star continued to soar. Now began the beauty pageants: Miss David’s Cabaret, Miss Transworld Bangkok, Miss Tran Pan Asia, all the way to Miss San Francisco Pride, all expenses paid, first runner-up. From this to spreads in straight magazines and fashion shows and advertising contracts, even a brief appearance on a television drama. Serious offers from government officials and military officers and film stars to be set up as a minor wife in her own luxury condominium. She was a sex symbol and everyone wanted her.
And then, at last, love.
An architect. A German called Walter. He courted her, followed her around, not stalking exactly, more romantic perseverance. And, most important of all in Sissi’s mind, he wasn’t gay. He didn’t want her as a man in a dress. He wanted her as a woman and he had an unlimited budget to make it happen. No more weird sex tourists and perverts for Sissi. This was a ‘normal’ relationship.
I remember the day Sissi arrived at the shop looking like Marilyn Monroe with her hair permed into a platinum bouffant and heels as tall as oil platforms. She had a real diamond on her ring finger. A Benz with a driver was parked opposite on our small street, blocking traffic and not caring. I ran to meet my new sister, stubby me with my Bermuda shorts and unruly hair and sleepy dust still caked around my eyes. We hugged until the rhinestones on her jacket started to gouge into my bra-less chest.
“I’ve come directly from the hospital,” she told me.
“Are you sick?” I asked.
“No. I’m one of you now.”
For a wedding present, Walter had bought Sissi the gender she’d dreamed of. I screamed with delight and we danced around the shop and she air-kissed Mair who’d remained smiling behind the counter, and she went back to her limo and was gone. I wondered why Mair had taken it all so calmly but learned soon after that she and Sissi had engaged in numerous telephone consultations leading up to the big snip. It takes a special mother to talk her son through the stratagem involved in becoming a woman.
That day was significant for me too. Once Sissi had pulled away I went back to my room, her old room, and I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and I phoned Yot and told him I’d changed my mind and I’d marry him after all.
Yot was a friend who was desperate to be married to anyone, which wasn’t a great premise for a life together. Marriage to him was those paint advertisements. The dopily smiling couple in chinos and matching Lacoste. Two slightly overweight but comatose children, all sitting together on the overstuffed white leather couch. Iggy the lovable pedigree golden retriever holding back his drool for the photograph. A genuine Navajo throw rug made in Phuket. A large pot that real children and a real dog would have destroyed in seconds. Spring sunrise and clotted-cream walls inside a house that looked exactly like the one on the front of the brochure. A neighborhood of well-adjusted couples who wave and say good morning and never fart or vomit gin cocktails into the trash can at three in the afternoon because they were too drunk to make it to the bathroom.
I didn’t even have any keepsakes at the end of my 3.7-year marriage to Yot the Siam Commercial Bank teller. We made no kiddies, entranced or otherwise, because I didn’t want any. Who’d risk children when there are strangers with soundproof cellars driving around in panel vans? He thought he’d talk me out of that one but it wasn’t open for negotiation. He thought he’d talk me out of work, too, and have me standing beside his cooked dinner in my pinafore when he came home from a hard day of bare-handling the banknotes of people with skin diseases and disgusting habits. He thought he’d coax me into feminine dresses and long tong-curled hairstyles. Call me slow, but it took me a while to realize he’d married the wrong person. He’d had her in his mind all along and he believed it was just a question of breaking me in, getting me used to the nip of her high-heeled shoes.
Once he realized his blunder I suppose he didn’t have any choice but to re-advertise the post. He lied about the affairs. There were four that I knew of. I was disappointed about the first affair and for perhaps three months into the second. Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t thrown into a whirlpool of misery and I didn’t really care. I had a nice house to come home to and cable TV and a washing machine and dryer. What did I need a husband for? All I
