'Girls are crazy,' Fon says, looking for the ashtray. She gets to her knees and hobbles dwarflike toward the three-legged table, stretching an arm out, and Kwan knots a fist in the back of Fon's T-shirt to keep her from falling on her face. Fon laughs and leans farther, and Kwan has to use both hands to keep her upright. When Fon has a grip on the ashtray, Kwan pulls her back, and when Fon lands on her rump, they're both laughing.
'It's a job, not a date,' Fon says. 'Some girls never figure that out. They keep going after the young, handsome ones, and when they get one, they lord it over girls like me, girls who make three times as much money as they do. It's as if they have to fool themselves every night that it's really about love, like the only reason they're up there is because it's the natural place to meet the solid-gold man, the handsome, good-hearted young farang with the big bank account who's waited his whole life to fall in love with some worn-out bar girl so he can marry her and support her whole family for the rest of his life.'
'But that happens,' Kwan says, feeling very young. She waits, but Fon doesn't respond. 'Doesn't it?'
'Oh, honey,' Fon says, putting her free hand on top of Kwan's and tapping the ash from her cigarette with the other. 'Not you, too. Yes, it happens. Maybe eight or nine times a year, but it never works. The guys lie about how much money they have, or they lie about not being married already, or they lie about when they have to go back home. So some dumb girl goes through the marriage ceremony, and promises her mother and father they're going to be rich, and gives it to him for free for three or four months, and then one day she wakes up and he's in Australia. Not even a note.' She takes an ambitious drag. 'And then there are the girls who marry a guy just so they can steal everything he's got. They get the fool to buy a house, which has to be in her name because he's not Thai, and one day they sell the paper on the house for half of what it's worth, empty out the loving hubby's bank account, and run north.'
Kwan says, 'It never works?'
Fon turns the coal of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray with great delicacy, shaving off a fine film of ash. 'It didn't for me.'
'Oh,' Kwan says. 'I'm sorry. I didn't know-'
'How could you? I didn't tell you. No reason to. It didn't matter. No broken heart. I didn't love him. I loved the idea of a passport, and a house in wherever it was, and money going up to my family every month. When he disappeared, the only thing that really upset me was that I hadn't been sending money home. I'd stopped working, and he kept telling me it took time for his bank in… in Germany, I think, to transfer everything he owned here. He couldn't even give my parents a dowry payment until the money arrived, and it didn't, and then it didn't some more. After a couple of months, he said he'd have to go home to handle it. And I went to the airport with him and hugged him and even managed to cry a little. And he never came back to me.'
'You never saw him again?'
'Oh, sure. About a year later. I'd changed bars, but he didn't know that. He figured he was safe as long as he stayed out of my old bar. And I was in the back room when he came in, so he sat at the edge of the stage without having any idea I was there.'
Kwan glances at the window. The afternoon is starting to fade, and the evening looms ahead of her, bright and full of noise. 'What did you do?'
'I went onstage like always, but I changed places with the girl who was dancing in front of him, and then I leaned down and picked up his drink. He looked up and saw me, and I gave him a big, friendly smile and spit in his drink. I'd been saving spit since I saw him walk in, so there was a lot of it. Then I put the drink down and went up and down the stage, telling every girl that he was an asshole and pointing at him so he'd know what I was doing.'
'What did he do?'
Fon drags on the cigarette, squinting against the smoke. 'If he'd been smart, he would have left right then, but he couldn't let me see that I'd chased him out, so he waited until my shift was over and I'd left the stage, and then he threw down some money and almost ran out. By then I'd put a wrapper over my dancing clothes, and I counted to ten or something and then went out and watched him go into the Play Pen. I gave him a few minutes, just to make sure he was staying, and then I followed him in and told the manager-' She breaks off, looking doubtfully at Kwan. 'Have you been into the Play Pen?'
'I've never been to any of the bars except the Candy Cane.'
'I'll take you around some night when we're off. Well, the thing about the Play Pen is that about half the girls are ladyboys. So I told the manager that he'd walked out of my bar complaining because it only had girls, so he should tell the ladyboys to go to work on him. There were four of them hanging on to him when I left.'
Kwan starts to laugh. Fon watches her solemnly, and then she stubs out her cigarette. 'Once in a million years, it works. Getting married to a customer, I mean. Out of maybe five hundred girls I know, two of them have done it and made it last. One of them is here, one's in America. But it's nothing you should think about. This is not about love. When you finally get up on that stage, just remember, it's a market and you're the best-looking cut of meat. Get every penny you can and forget the rest of it. What time is it?'
Kwan looks at Nana's watch. 'Four o'clock.'
'We've got two hours before work, then,' Fon says, 'and I can't look another minute at that schoolgirl haircut.'
Chapter 14
'Oh, no.' The ladyboy in front of the mirror clutches his heart as though it's stopped in midbeat. He or she is broad-shouldered and heavyset beneath the flowered gown and the cloud of scarves, and wears shoulder-length hair, dyed midnight black, curled under at the ends, 1940s style. So much black makeup surrounds his eyes that Kwan thinks he looks like he's wearing a mask. Five-o'clock shadow prickles its way through a thick layer of pancake, but his voice is a flute. 'Darling,' the ladyboy says in English, 'what did they cut it with? A lawn mower?'
Kwan decides to think of the ladyboy as 'she,' since it seems polite to let her be what she wants to be. In English she replies, 'Not understand.'
'That hair.' The ladyboy raises both hands chest high, palms out and fingers curved in, shaking them in mock terror, like a starlet confronted by the half-eaten corpse that's always lurching out of the closet in Thai movies. The gesture rattles the beads on the twelve or so bracelets that circle each wrist. 'My God, my God-that's English, by the way,' she tells Kwan in Thai, in a matter-of-fact tone, 'and you should learn it. When anyone says something surprising or when you want to pretend some customer has impressed you by, for example, the size of his equipment, you say 'Oh, my God.' '
Kwan carefully repeats, 'Oh, my God,' and gets a nod of approval. Then she says, 'Equipment?'
'Later.' The ladyboy lifts Kwan's hair and drops it. 'Terrible, terrible. Who did this to you, your mother?'
'Yes.'
'Oh, well, excuse me. I'm sure she meant well. But look at you, just look at you.' She puts her hands on the sides of Kwan's head and swivels her face toward the mirror. Kwan tries to look at herself but sees Fon reflected behind her, laughing, and she laughs, too.
'I don't want to hear any laughing at all,' the ladyboy says. 'This is serious, even tragic. There isn't enough beauty in the world to waste it this way. You may not be responsible for the fact that you're beautiful, but you are responsible for taking care of it. It makes people feel better, seeing something beautiful. Don't you want people to feel better, don't you want to lift them out of their gray, muffled, boxed-in lives for a minute or two and put a silvery little sliver of light in their souls? That's what beauty is, you know-it's tiny glimmers of light left over from the Creation. You're Buddhist, of course, but in the farang holy book, which is called the Bible, practically the first words out of God's lips, and I'm sure they were very nice lips, are 'Let there be light.' There was probably quite a lot of it, too, Him being God and all. Most of it's gone, now, of course-the light, I mean, we've pissed on the flame by living such dreary, cowardly lives-but there are still bits of it here and there. Sunsets, music, really good jewelry. A face like yours. Don't you want to share it?'
'I don't-' Kwan begins, and stops.
