has been told, never fit. He leafs through it. 'Here,' he says. 'In Chiang Mai.' He folds the magazine back and carries it over to her.
'Oh,' she says, looking at the picture. 'Dawk goolap.'
'In English, rose,' Howard says. 'Rose. It's the queen of flowers. That's what farang people say. And you're the queen of-'
'Of what?'
Howard leans down and kisses her on the lips, very lightly. 'Of everything.'
'Pahk waan,' she says. 'Sweet mouth.'
'You're Rose to me. You can be anyone you want when I'm not around, but for me you're Rose.'
Kwan says, 'Rrrrozzzzze.' She looks up at him, and he grins and nods. 'Okay. In the bar, everywhere. I Rrrrrozzze.'
Howard says, 'What would you like to eat, Rose? You can have anything in Bangkok.'
Rose says, 'We in Bangkok, na? We eat Thai food, okay? Phet maak maak.' Very spicy, which Howard hates.
Howard goes to the closet to get a clean shirt. He changes his clothes all the time. He says, 'What a surprise.'
She tries, not very hard, to reach her purse and comes up short. 'Can I have coat?'
'It's not cold.'
'Have cigarette in coat.'
'Make a deal. You can smoke a cigarette if I can eat American.'
'No problem. You eat American, I eat Thai.'
'You win.' He takes the jacket off the hanger and says, 'Why so heavy?'
'Oh,' Rose says, remembering. 'Nothing. You just bring, okay?'
But he already has his hand in the pocket. 'What in the world is this?' He holds up a smooth, dark stone.
She looks at it in his hand, remembers picking it up that morning. She says, 'For luck.'
'Fine,' Howard says. 'I suppose it's lighter than a horseshoe.' He starts to put the stone back in the pocket.
'Throw away,' Rose says.
He stands there, jacket in one hand and stone in the other. 'Are you sure?'
'Yes.' She gets off the bed and goes to him, takes the stone, and drops it with a thunk into the wastebasket. 'Now I Rrrozzze. I no need luck.' THE RAIN PELTS down outside, and the fluorescents are flickering, suggesting a power failure in the near future. Thai music stutters through the speaker system. Every few minutes a sopping farang opens the curtains over the doorway, peers in, sees the women smoking and putting on makeup, and backs out again. 'I'm just saying it, that's all. Oom ran away from him. Maybe she knew something you don't.'
Fon helps herself to some dried squid, a heap of which is creating a spreading grease spot on a fold of paper towels. All over the club, girls look into mirrors as they apply makeup or sit still with their eyes closed as their friends do it for them.
'You don't know what happened with Oom,' Rose says. Unlike the others she is neither made up nor making up. She won't be working tonight, because Howard has paid the bar fine for weeks to come. She just stopped by to talk with Fon.
Fon nips off a length of squid and says, 'And neither do you.'
'They had a fight, just before he left the country. He didn't think it was important, but when he came back, Oom wasn't anywhere he could find her.'
'A fight about what?'
'About nothing. Howard wanted to take her to Singapore, and Oom didn't want to go.'
Fon regards the squid skeptically. 'Why wouldn't she want to go?'
'How would I know? He'd helped her get a passport. He said she never argued about getting the passport, just about using it.'
'Right. She didn't want to go to Singapore.'
'You saw him. You saw how upset he was.'
'I saw how fast he took you out, too.'
Rose surprises herself by bringing a flat hand down on the tabletop with a crack that snaps every head in the bar toward her. Fon jerks back a few inches, blinking. 'We didn't do anything,' Rose says. 'Not for months. He just wanted to talk. He bought me out and took me to dinner and talked, and then he gave me money and I went home. You should know, I was always home before you got there. It was eight or nine months before we even kissed each other. We just talked.'
'Talked about what? About Oom?' This is the first time Fon has ever gotten angry at Rose. 'What is there to say about Oom for all those months? 'Oh, no, she's gone. I looked everywhere. I miss her. I don't know why she left.' How long did that take? Five seconds? And she was pretty, Oom was, but nobody would call her interesting. So what was there to talk about all that time?'
'What's wrong with you?'
'I don't like it, that's all.' Fon snatches another piece of squid as though she expects the paper towel to be yanked away at any moment. 'How do we know what happened to her? She's here one night and then she's gone forever.'
'They fought,' Rose says patiently. 'She didn't want to see him. So she didn't come back to the bar. She went someplace where he wouldn't find her.'
'He loves Oom so much and then, bang, he loves you.'
Rose looks away and sees rainwater seeping in beneath the curtained doorway. Drunk men will slip and fall later. She draws a slow, long breath. 'One more time. Oom left him. What's he supposed to do, cry for the rest of his life?'
'There's something wrong with men who fall in love with prostitutes,' Fon says. 'They're missing something.'
Rose feels a worm of unease in her gut, but she says, 'Maybe he doesn't think of me just as a prostitute. Maybe he thinks of me as a person.'
Fon starts to say something but shakes her head. 'Up to you. Just be careful, that's all. I don't want to have to nurse you through a broken heart.'
'Howard can't break my heart.'
Fon studies the squid as she shreds it between her fingers. 'You even let him change your name.'
'Rose is better. Farang men can remember Rose. Nobody remembered Kwan.'
'So what?' Fon says. 'They just came in and asked, 'Where's the tall girl?' That worked, didn't it? We always knew who they meant.'
'Not the same.' Rose rummages through her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. 'Anyway, what do you care?'
'What do I care?' Fon places her greasy fingertips, widely spread, in the center of her chest. 'We're supposed to be friends.'
'We are,' Rose says, reaching over and taking Fon's wrist, tugging the hand off her chest and stroking her own cheek with it, leaning against it and smelling the squid. 'You're the best friend I ever had.'
'That's not fair,' Fon says, pulling her hand away.
'What's not fair?' Rose lights her cigarette.
'Going all sweet like that. I'm serious. I don't want you getting hurt. What do you really know about him?'
'I know a lot about him.'
'Where he's from,' Fon says, 'if it's true. What he does for a living, if it's true. What he wants with you, if it's true. You don't know whether anything is true.'
'I know a lot more about Howard than I do about the strangers I go with every night.'
'You think.'
'Fon.' Rose closes her eyes and leans on her friend's shoulder. 'I don't want to go with different men all the time. I hate it. I don't want to have customers staring at me while I'm dancing, wondering what I'll let them do to me in bed, or how much hair I have down there, or whether I'm wearing a padded bra. I don't want to smile at men
