signs that he is not totally resigned to nonexistence: a laptop opened and sitting on a chair; a corny but provocative poster of a Thai girl sitting topless by a river and a poster of Angkor Wat; some books. I guess Not a Lot to Show would be his category in the global pyramid, a popular level, I have to admit. They have long been a curiosity with me, these farang men who come here to be nobody, as if even that role is too stressful in their Utopia of origin. Now Lek and I are both staring at Baker, who checks his wristwatch, which looks to me like a fake Rolex. (The second hand jerks instead of rotating smoothly around the dial; for some that's all you need to know during your stopover in Bangkok.)
'I don't want to offend a cop, but I have to tell you I have an English lesson in ten minutes.'
'Where is your lesson, Mr. Baker?'
'Right here.' He looks me in the eye. 'A private lesson. You can get me on nonpayment of tax if you want, but it's the only way I can survive. The school I work mornings doesn't pay a living wage.'
I nod. 'I don't want to deprive you of income. Let's see how far we get before your student arrives,' I say.
'Right.'
'Your ex-wife, Mrs. Damrong Baker.'
He seems uncertain how to proceed. A long moment passes, and then he comes out with it, in a kind of anger burst: 'That bitch-what did she do now?'
I raise my eyes and crumple my brow. 'What did she do before?'
A mistake on my part; my response was too smart by far. He quickly erases all expression from his face and shrugs. 'I was married to her for a year. We lived together. You might as well ask what she didn't do to destroy me-the list would be shorter.'
I exchange a glance with Lek and nod at him. I know he is anxious to practice his interrogation skills-and his English.
'Mr. Baker, how did you first meet your Thai wife?'
Baker takes Lek in for the first time. There are not that many transsexual cops in Bangkok; as far as I know, Lek is the only one. On duty he takes measures to disguise his growing bosom and keeps the camp act to a minimum. When he talks, though, his body language says it all. There is shyness and female cunning in the way he does not look Baker in the eye. Baker experiments with an attitude of contempt, then thinks better of it after a glance at me. I jerk my chin: Yes, you do have to answer that question.
He grunts, and a native garrulity takes over. 'I was early thirties, getting over a relationship, came here for a ten-day vacation, met Damrong, caught her disease.' I flash him a look. He waves a hand. 'Just a manner of speaking. The disease in question used to be called passion. The only officially sanctioned form of happiness known to the West: being in love. What a con. I was gaga. Of course I sent her all the money I could so she wouldn't rent her body to another man. Of course I believed every promise she made about that. Of course she lied her head off. Of course she fucked every dude who was willing to pay her price while I was trying to set up a computing business in Fort Lauderdale for us to live happily ever after. Of course I went through all the damned paperwork U.S. Immigration threw at me, of course I married her, of course she came to live with me in the States, of course it didn't last a full year. Of course she's the only woman who has ever reached me that deeply. Of course it's because she had a better grasp of reality. Of course, of course, of course.' Waving a hand: 'I'm Mr. Average Farang. I got caught the same way they all do, doesn't matter if you're French, Italian, German, British-whatever, it's the same dumb story, over and over again. I don't need to tell you that, right?'
It seems to have been a genuine tantrum, with the usual moment of disorientation straight afterward: Did I really just say all that? He grinds his jaw with the determination of the righteous. 'Yeah, that's how it was with me and her. Mistress-slave syndrome. Want to know how I got along with my mother?'
'No, thank you,' Lek says with a look of revulsion and a glance at me to take it from there. Estrogen doesn't increase attention spans.
'You sound very bitter, Mr. Baker,' I say with a compassionate smile which he disregards by turning his head away.
'Comes with the territory, doesn't it? Know any farang men in my position who aren't bitter?'
I shrug. 'Cultural conflict has its casualties.'
He turns to stare incredulously. 'Cultural conflict? You mean between a Western man with his pathetic need for a safe womb to crawl into and a Thai whore looking for a gold mine to exploit? I guess you could call it cultural conflict if you were giving a seminar to anthropology students.' He scratches his head and shakes it. 'Total fuck-up is what I call it. Of me, by her. Period.'
I check Lek to see if he is as intrigued as me. I think he is. When a psyche is fragmented, it often experiments with different postures. What posture should we provoke now?
'Mr. Baker, let me be frank. I have checked the national database here in Thailand and sought assistance from the FBI.' I smile.
Knowing that I know causes a new Baker to emerge from the old. He snaps his head around to stare at me, then smirks. 'The Bureau? They told you about her little scam?'
'Only the criminal record part. I'd love to hear the details.'
The smirk becomes a permanent fixture, proclaiming, I think, a defiant pride. 'So I did six months' jail time after remission, for pimping. She got deported. That's how it panned out, but it wasn't what I had planned when we married.' He pauses to stare at the topless girl in the poster for a couple of beats. 'I was still in the walk-into-the- sunset, midpubescent phase when she came to live with me in the States. We hadn't been married a month, though, when she disappears for most of one Saturday night. I'm calling emergency services, I'm going out of my mind thinking she's been raped or murdered or both, or been run over, all the crap that drives a man crazy when he's in love. Then she walks in about four in the morning with a great big grin on her beautiful, cynical face and lays out more than a thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Sheeze!'
This last is a kind of yelp, caused by severe backbite of heartburn. He has to gulp a couple of times. 'She didn't care so much about the money as the power, the very liberating act of walking out at about seven p.m. in a big strange land and coming back more than a thousand dollars richer a few hours later. That turned her on a lot more than I could.'
He has to pause to steady himself, then appears to regain sovereignty over his mind. 'She tossed me half the money and told me how it was gonna be. I'd never seen that side of her before. It was frightening and very unnerving. I cried like a baby for two whole days, but it didn't affect her at all. She had seen men bawling like that plenty of times. No way was she going to change, and she wasn't afraid of violence. I didn't even threaten to hit her-she was way too tough for that. Kick her out? And spend the next months in mental torture wondering about what she was up to in the States?'
He scratches his chest hair, lets a couple of beats pass. 'After I'd quit bawling my eyes out, she started talking reality. She told me about her childhood. I mean, she told it like it is in a way you never hear Thai people talking unless you're one of them. I started to see the world with her eyes. It was a total personal revolution for me, what it must do to your head, growing up like that. In the West all our problems are social and psychological these days. But suppose you were programmed in a totally different way, suppose your very existence was constantly under threat, and there was no way out-no way out. That was her message. She didn't give a shit that she could make a lot of dough in the States- that didn't alter the fact that all her people, everyone she had ever known and been fond of, they were still there, trapped, hungry, impotent.' Waving a hand: 'At least that's how she put it at that stage. She admitted she was in America to work, not to play at love. She said she had a family to look after. Turned out she was talking about her kid brother. I don't think she gave a shit about anyone else.'
A long pause filled with heavy sighs. He does seem to be going through something. 'At first I only went along with it to keep her from leaving me.'
'You became her pimp?'
'Not really, but the law saw it that way. In the technical sense I suppose I was, but that lady didn't need a pimp. What she needed was my house and me as a secretarial service.' A pause while he fidgets with something on the table. 'Then later to hold the video camera while I was standing in the wardrobe and she was performing with the John.' Looking me full in the eye: 'Within six weeks she had a full diary for every day, starting at lunchtime and going through to about two A.M. Word of an exciting new game spreads real quick in a small town in America. She had the local movers and shakers lining up-the male ones, that is-practically begging for the privilege of hiring her body. Big shots who owned chauffeur-driven limos arrived at our house in hired cars and taxis. Within a few months
