Sok pulls to the curb and starts to get out to help her with the suitcases, but she says, 'Wait,' and hands him another 500 baht. 'Stay here,' she says. 'In a minute you'll see me talking to a man. When we finish, he'll get into the cab, and you take him anywhere he wants to go. When he gets out, he will take my suitcases with him.'
Another one, Sok thinks. Maybe I should be doing construction work.
Within seconds, a cab pulls up to the curb in front of them, and Sok watches as a man gets out. He is short and dark, and there is something wrong with one of his hands. He waves his cab away with the bad hand, and when it has disappeared in traffic, the young woman gets out of Sok's cab. The man gives her a big envelope and comes toward Sok's cab. He gets in and says, 'Drive.'
Sok lets him out in Pratunam twenty minutes later. The man melts into the crowd, pulling the suitcases.
An hour after that, Madame Wing tears open the envelope and sinks her nails into the maid's eyes.
29
Madame Wing does not telephone to demand an update that night. Rafferty calls anyway to report that he has identified the Cambodian man, but Pak says she is too busy to come to the phone. 'Nothing else is happening,' Rafferty says.
'According to you,' Pak says mysteriously, and hangs up.
'Why do I have the feeling,' Rafferty asks Rose, 'that things are being kept from me?'
Rose is settled at Rafferty's desk, doing her business accounts. She has a pencil in her hand, another behind her ear, and a hank of hair between her teeth, usually a prelude to some frustrated pencil chewing. Twice a week she writes down in a ledger every baht she has earned and every baht she has spent-for food, rent, shampoo, soap, clothing, pink plastic hair clips, donations at the temple, money sent to her family, and-finally-her business expenses: tuk-tuk fares, advances to the women, new T-shirts and jeans for their interviews, cell-phone charges. The exercise does little for her mood.
'When I think of all the money I threw away when I was dancing,' Rose says, studying the numbers on the page, 'I could scream.'
Rafferty looks at the familiar terrain of her profile, at the play of light on her hair, at her straight back and at the smooth skin over the curve of her neck. At the carefully ironed shirt she wears tucked in to her jeans because the bottom is frayed and it embarrasses her. 'I haven't heard you scream in a while.'
'Since you gave me that money, I have nine thousand baht in the bank,' she says, ignoring him. 'A little more than two hundred dollars. Do you think I should send some of it home?'
'Save it for a rainy day,' he says in English.
'Poke,' she says gently in Thai, 'it rains nearly every day.'
A wave of longing, mixed with something like loneliness, washes over him. 'All the more reason,' he says, also in Thai.
'I'll send them five thousand. Half and a little bit. That will make them happy.'
'You make a lot of people happy, Rose.'
She says nothing. Rafferty can almost see the words hanging in the air between them. He feels the same breathless awkwardness he experienced in junior high, when he first asked a girl for a date. The stillness in the room presses in on him like water.
'Rose-'
'Don't confuse me, Poke,' she says. She closes the ledger with a soft pop. She still has not turned to face him.
'I'm not trying to confuse you.'
She waves the words off. 'But you are. You're making me think too much. And don't tell me I said I'd think about it. I am thinking about it.' The chair's hinged back creaks when she leans away from the desk, as though she wants to be farther from the ledger and the numbers it contains. Her right hand tightly grips the arm of the chair. 'We were fine until you started. We got along, we laughed, we didn't…we didn't ask questions. I was comfortable here. Now you want to change everything-adopt Miaow, bring the boy in, marry me. You do want to marry me, don't you?'
'Well, I…yes. Sure. That's why I asked.'
She leans back some more and then straightens. For a moment he thinks she is not going to answer him. 'Getting married is much more complicated than just sleeping with me.'
'Why?' He thinks he knows some of the answers, but they have to talk about them sometime.
She breathes out sharply in exasperation and turns to him. 'How far is it from me to you right now?'
This is not what he expects. 'I don't know. Six, eight feet.'
She throws the pencil onto the desk. 'It's a million miles, Poke. And more than miles. It's what we believe, what we've done, who we are. What we need to do.'
'If it's that far,' he says, trying to make light of it, 'we should get started early.'
She claps her hands, just once, to get his full attention, and he feels his shoulders straighten. 'Listen to me. You're a fine-looking man. You're sweet. You have a good heart. Any woman in her right mind would be happy you asked. I don't know, Poke. Maybe you should ask one of them.' She gets up and walks to the sliding doors and then past them, the city lights framing her.
'That's silly, Rose. This isn't a raffle. I don't want anyone except you.'
'And I suppose I want you.' She stops in midstride and gives him both eyes in a gaze that seems to focus about four inches beneath his skin. 'But that may not be enough.'
Rafferty wants to stand, too, but he is afraid to. The connection between them is suddenly so tenuous that almost anything could sever it: a disturbance in the air, a beam of light coming in through the window. And, fragile as it is, it's a bridge he has to cross. 'If that's what we have, it's what we have,' he says. 'And I'll do whatever it takes to make it enough.'
'I know you'll try. But can you do it? I don't know. And I don't know whether I can either.'
Rafferty starts to reply, but the words are carried away by a cold breeze that seems to blow straight through him. He can feel his heart contract. He has made a tremendous mistake. He's been so focused on Miaow that he hasn't taken the time to look at all of this from Rose's perspective.
Or even to recognize that he doesn't have the faintest idea what Rose's perspective is.
The room, with all its familiar features, suddenly feels like someplace he's never seen before. An unknown place in an unknown country.
His hands are in mid-air before he knows consciously what he is going to do. He brings his hands together, palm to palm in a gesture of prayer, to make a wai. He raises the wai face high to express respect and says, 'Forgive me.'
Keeping her eyes on his, she turns her head slightly to the left, as though she might be able to see him more clearly this way. She looks wary. After a moment she says, 'I have forgiven you many times. What am I forgiving now?'
'I'm an American,' he says. 'As much as I love you, as much time as I've spent here, I'm still an American. And I've made the classic American mistake.'
She doesn't even blink. 'Which is?'
'To think that everybody is really just like us, even if they don't act that way. Or that they want to be like us, they would be like us if they could just shake off all the stuff that makes them seem different.' He is choosing his words anxiously, picking one, discarding others, knowing how limited his Thai is, how unequal to this challenge. He hadn't worried about it until this moment, convinced that the most important part of the conversation would be heart-to-heart. But now he knows he doesn't understand Rose's heart either.
'If it's really a million miles from me to you,' he says, 'please help me to cross it.'
Rose pulls her head back fractionally, less than an inch, as though she has been struck by something very soft. Her hands go into the pockets of her jeans, and she stands there, considering, while Rafferty holds his breath. Then she says, 'I believe in ghosts, Poke. Do you?'
