the points of interest, introduce her to new sensations. They seemed to relish the role. When she pretended at last to enjoy herself, she could almost see them mentally patting themselves on the back. If they'd spoken their thoughts, she believed, they would have said, She'll remember me.
In fact, though, the individual man each of them had seemed to be when she first met him disappeared the moment the clothes came off. They became a kind of terrain to be navigated, some places more attentively than others. The person vanished, leaving a raspy chin, a sharp hangnail, an odor of butter or meat, too much hair on the body, fatness or flatness, a penis that needed more attention than a baby. The things Fon taught her, which she had thought of as tricks, became a kind of vocabulary, to be modified depending on the reactions they provoked. While she was doing them, she was focused only on the physical part of the man the trick involved.
She learned early not to call anyone by name during sex. While she was working on whoever it was tonight, he was indistinguishable from who it had been last night or who it was three weeks ago. Only later, when they were sitting up in the bed, he contented and satiated and Kwan with the covers tugged up to her armpits, counting the minutes until she could leave, would she venture the slightly risky Eddie or Jack.
She took Fon's advice and went mostly with older men, so she was safe from youthful male beauty. Occasionally a girl talked about how she taught her customers to get her off, how many orgasms she managed with this one or that one. They passed the best-trained ones around, either handing them on to a friend or suggesting a threesome. Kwan had no idea what they were talking about. When, about three months after she began to dance, a customer unexpectedly coaxed her into the first orgasm of her life, she lay bewildered until a flood of guilt washed over her. She had to fight tears. It felt like a betrayal, although of what or of whom she couldn't say. She guarded against it after that. For some reason enjoying the sex seemed worse than enduring it.
Most days, just after she woke in the early afternoon, she would roll over on the couch and reach down to the floor for the big leather purse she'd taken to carrying. She'd feel around in it until she found the notebook, and then she'd flip through the pages and pass her finger over all the names written there. Names, only names.
Over time the new world grew familiar. She learned its rules and pitfalls, and she made decisions about how she would live in it. She bought nice clothes, but not many of them. She kept to the first friends she had made and only occasionally added new ones. She sent money weekly to her mother. After a month of hesitation, she wrote a letter to Teacher Suttikul that was almost true, saying she was safe and well, living in Bangkok and working in a bar where she didn't have to do anything bad. Teacher Suttikul wrote back, and after that they exchanged letters every month or so. Kwan asked her teacher to keep an eye on Mai. One month she sent Teacher Suttikul four thousand baht for pens and writing paper for the students. Teacher Suttikul wrote a letter of thanks but told Kwan to keep her money. Kwan knew that the letter meant her teacher understood where the money really came from and wanted Kwan to save as much as she could so she could quit as soon as possible.
And she did save money, even as she continued to send it home. Unlike Fon, unlike any girl she knew in the bar, she walked into a bank one day carrying a wad of cash and asked how to open an account. Twenty minutes later she had a passbook with her own name on it, making it official that she had thirty-nine hundred baht in her account. She hid the passbook beneath the couch when she wasn't using it and gave the bank account its own pages in the first little spiral notebook, and then the second and the third. Every time she noted a deposit, she would flip back over the pages listing the earlier ones. She became adept at dividing the amount in the account by the number of days she'd been depositing into it, then multiplying ahead to see how much she'd have in six months, in a year. She thought of the American hundred-dollar units as 'Franklins' in honor of the bald old man whose face was on the bill. She was accumulating Franklins at an impressive pace. The bank became part of her routine, but she only went there alone. Even Fon didn't know about it.
Fon helped her economize by teaching her about makeup, showing her the things Tra-La had done to bring out her best features. As Kwan's hair grew, though, she visited Tra-La once a week to have it shaped and trimmed. The spiky look disappeared, replaced by a tapering fall of thick black hair, perfectly straight, that gleamed as though it had been oiled. Slowly, it reached her shoulders and then a few inches below.
One afternoon Tra-La lowered her scissors, stepped back, and said, 'You know what you need?'
Kwan looked up from her fashion magazine. 'Can I have a hint?'
'Hair to the bottom of your butt, blunt-cut straight across.'
Kwan looked in the mirror and slowly turned her head and shoulders. Her hair reached about a third of the way down her back, black as a crow's wing, slightly fringed on the sides. 'Do you think so?'
'Look at your height,' Tra-La said. 'And you've got the hair for it. Hardly any split ends, and it's got such good weight. Think of it. A river of hair flowing as you dance.'
She looked again, visualizing it. Mirrors no longer bothered her. She was prettier than before, she thought, but she didn't know what all the fuss was about. 'Hard to take care of.'
'Oh, and you have so much to do,' Tra-La said. 'Wash it, let the air dry it, brush it a hundred times a day.'
'That's what I said. Hard to take care of.'
'You want to know what I think?'
'Always,' Kwan said. 'Any girl who doesn't want to know what you think is stupid.'
'I think it could make you the queen of Patpong.'
Kwan looked at Tra-La's eyes in the mirror and held them. Tra-La returned the gaze steadily.
Kwan broke the contact and picked up the small hand mirror Tra-La used. Then she swiveled the chair so her back was to the big mirror, and she looked into the hand mirror to study her back, to look at the way her hair fell. Without moving her head, she flicked her eyes to Tra-La.
'Really,' Kwan said.
Oom never came back.
About nine months after the night Oom had leaped from the stage into the arms of the big man, he came into the bar, obviously expecting to see her. He stopped just inside the curtained door, staring up in surprise at Kwan, dancing where Oom usually did. Looking puzzled, he shouldered his way between the customers to the back of the bar, to the room with the lockers where Oom always sat between sets. Kwan saw him again a few minutes later, talking with the mama-san, who was shaking her head. The big man's eyes darkened as the mama-san talked, and when she held up a hand, palm up, and moved it side to side, indicating the girls on the stage, he wheeled around and stalked out. The mama-san watched him go and then shrugged her shoulders.
'Well,' Fon said into Kwan's ear, 'I guess they didn't run away together.' When Oom failed to return, the talk in the bar had been that the big man had paid her bar fine for four weeks and then they'd probably made some sort of permanent arrangement: married or almost married was the consensus. They were living in Bangkok, or in Chiang Mai, or in some small town, Nakhorn Nowhere, or maybe he'd even taken her out of the country with him. Oom was beautiful enough for something like that to have happened.
Three weeks later he came in again. This time he talked to several of the girls. Afterward they told Kwan he'd been asking them whether they'd heard anything about Oom. He said he'd been to every bar he knew of, all the way down to Pattaya, looking for her. He seemed worried, even frightened that something had happened to her.
That night Kwan left the bar around ten with a man who had taken her out three nights in a row. They turned right, heading for an Italian restaurant on Surawong. They were most of the way there when Kwan heard someone call her name. She turned, gasped, and grabbed the man's arm.
The woman behind her had two black eyes, a broken nose that was at least twice its usual width, and an upper lip swollen almost all the way up to her nostrils. When she tried to smile, she revealed a chipped front tooth. The man Kwan was with began to step between the two women, but Kwan tugged on his arm and said, 'Nana?'
'Hello, Kwan.' Nana put a hand up over her mouth as she talked, probably trying to mask the broken tooth. She said in Thai, 'You've gotten pretty, haven't you?'
'What happened to you?'
'Nothing,' Nana said. She looked up at the man Kwan was with, who was eyeing her uncertainly, as though assessing her potential risk to Kwan. 'Tell your dog here that you know me. He looks like he's about to rip out my throat.'
Kwan said to the man, 'No problem,' and paused as she tried to think of the man's name. 'Steven,' she said, finding it, 'this is Nana.'
