ready crumpled, but there wasn’t time, so I wore generic jeans and a short-sleeve shirt instead. Chanya was wearing tight denims that squeezed her gut and clearly delineated her vagina. She looked deceptively casual in a man-style shirt that was one size too big; but she left the three top buttons undone and every second man we passed tried to see her breasts; she wasn’t wearing a bra. Normally retired prostitutes don’t play that kind of game, they know too much, but Chanya wasn’t dressing for men, she was stealing a little of each man’s power as he tried to look down her shirt. I was starting to feel sorry for Dorothy.
Who was already waiting for us in the lobby when we arrived. When she stood up, I thought I understood the problem. When she spoke, I was sure I understood it. Dorothy was about six feet tall and pear-shaped. Her hips were wide and her breasts not large; she liked food too much, so her thighs were fat, and so was her face, which nevertheless was pleasantly regular, with sky-blue eyes and topped with bright blond hair. She spoke London English with an estuary accent and carried with her that unmistakable odor of English depression, which passively asserted that despair was the only reality-but lest you think me cruel, DFR, let me right away explain that, like my partner, I also found myself irked by her for reasons that had little to do with physical appearance. Does the phrase pretentiously depressed ring a bell in regard to a certain kind of Brit? (Clinical chic? I’m not an expert, although I visited Harrods once with Mum; the john was a member of the Hooray Henry tribe whose net worth was not commensurate with his nasal vowels.) It was mostly her posture that was unattractive; indeed, her face possessed all the charm of an English daisy, with, alas, the droop of a sunflower.
She was dogged though. She doggedly stood to greet us, doggedly smiled at Chanya as if she loved her, doggedly tried not to be afraid of me when Chanya said, “This is my lover. He’s a cop and a pimp, he multitasks. Now he’s working on a big international case about human organ trafficking-the biggest suspect is a two-woman team.”
Dorothy took this not-so-subtle jibe as a mule takes a whipping: just part of being alive. Now I led us to the buffet area, and one of the waitresses showed us to the table Chanya had reserved. Chanya left Dorothy and me at the table while she went to get hors d’oeuvres for all of us. She wanted me to bond with her supervisor to see what I could discover.
Now Dorothy and I were staring at each other across the stark white tablecloth. Dorothy looked down. I said, “So, how do you like working with Chanya?”
“She’s very bright. Maybe she’s too clever for me. I don’t understand her.”
“How so?”
“All the progress women have made over the past thirty years. She seems to just want to throw it all away.” Dorothy made her blue eyes plead. “How can she accept that any woman would willingly commodify her body?”
“Newton discovered gravity,” I explained. “He didn’t invent it.” Dorothy didn’t get it, so I had to say: “She decided to study sociology because she has a scientific mind. She’s only interested in the truth. It’s important for her. She was on the game herself, she’s interested in an accurate description, not…” I let my voice trail off. Dorothy was looking more miserable than ever, so I didn’t want to say feminist fantasy. I didn’t want to point out that there were women who knew very little about women. If I could have, I would have gone deeper. I would have explained that Chanya was a country girl who left school at fourteen years old with an exclusively Buddhist worldview, which she found beautiful and comforting. She was on the game for nearly ten years and traveled to America, which made no impact on her views-if anything, it confirmed her Buddhist faith. After our son died, she had nothing much to do, so she studied sociology because I told her it was about people and society. She has an excellent brain and was at the top of her classes. The price she paid was that she had to think like a farang. It seemed to her there was something seriously missing in farang logic: it only dealt with measurable things and had no way of incorporating the Unnameable-or even basic human nuance-in its calculations. She let that pass, at considerable cost to her peace of mind and personality-you might say she sold an organ, metaphorically speaking. What she demanded in return was that farang thinking be faithful to its own terms. Things were fine up to her first and second degrees, but when she started working on her thesis, which required personal creative input and direct fieldwork, she began to discover she had been right all along: farang social science was mostly propaganda for farang dominance. In former times, DFR, you used exactly the same double-talk to justify the opium and slave trades. She went back to Buddhism and challenged the Western world from there. Starting from Emptiness, it is not so difficult to see clearly: one has less of a stake in fantasy. When Dorothy arrived on the scene, the English sociologist became her favorite pincushion.
Now Chanya was back with hors d’oeuvres for all of us: a little smoked salmon for me, some somtam for her, and a great pile of potato salad with smoked salmon for Dorothy. For a second I thought Chanya had gone too far with her sarcasm, but Dorothy tucked into the potatoes with gratitude. For the first time since we met, her mood rose above room temperature, and she was almost beaming. We ate in silence. When the time came for the second course, we each went to serve ourselves. When Chanya and I were alone, I repeated what Dorothy had said about a woman commodifying her body. “For Buddha’s sake,” Chanya said, “human beings have been commodifying our bodies since the first tattoos. What are mascara and lipstick if not commodifying agents? What about hair dye? Farang are so far gone, they are blind to the obvious.”
I didn’t want to say I wasn’t sure exactly what commodifying meant in this context. Dorothy returned with two plates, one with roast beef and roast potatoes, the other with oysters and prawns from the seafood bar. She ate quickly, putting it all away within about fifteen minutes. I paid the bill and led the way across the bridge to the Skytrain station, then down again to the other side of Sukhumvit and the tunnel that took us to Soi Cowboy. As we approached the soi, we collected more and more participants in the trade, so that now we were in a crowd of middle-aged farang men and working girls aged somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. They were on their way to work in denims and T-shirts. Some arrived on the back of motorbike taxis. When we reached the cooked-food stalls at the entrance to Cowboy, a number of the girls eating at the tables had already changed into their working gear, bar uniforms that emphasized busts and buttocks; they were about as naked as they could get without breaking the law. Dorothy turned gray, as if she’d never seen anything like it before. Chanya claimed that Dorothy had done her thesis on Thai prostitution in a pub in South London.
My mother Nong’s bar, the Old Man’s Club, was about halfway down the street, opposite the Suzie Wong, and when we arrived, the place was hopping. As a former player herself, Nong knew how to pull in the customers. Her advantage over all the other bars was that Colonel Vikorn owned most of the shares, so no cop was ever going to bust her. Consequently she allowed most forms of sexual activity, barring actual intercourse, in the corner of the bar known as the Office. (Johns could call their wives to say they were stuck in the Office and might be late for supper.) My mother’s girls tended to make more money than their rivals in other bars, so they were pretty content. The most attractive came here because we paid more: we were surrounded by beauty at its smartest and most avaricious. Chanya went up to Nong, giving her the high respectful wai due to the mother-in-law. I kissed her and introduced Dorothy.
Nong led us to a table in a dark spot at the back wall, which nevertheless gave unobstructed views of the Office and the rest of the bar. She called one of her serving girls to bring us drinks and resumed her place on a stool at the end of the bar, where she ostentatiously broke the law by chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. She still looked pretty sexy in black leggings and a bright checked cowboy shirt, with plenty of gold jewelry.
Chanya told me in Thai that she was going to call a girl over to talk to Dorothy and asked me which one would be most suitable. I said it would be better to let Dorothy choose the girl-it would look more objective that way. Chanya agreed and was about to speak to Dorothy when two farang men in their early fifties walked in and took up stools at the bar just in front of us. One of them, a blond, owned an Errol Flynn moustache, a flat stomach, and a blazing smile. Immediately two girls in bikinis slipped in between them, but they were quite small, so the farang could continue their conversation over their heads. They seemed to be civil engineers and were discussing a project up in the north, near the border with Laos; they were on leave in Bangkok for a few days.
While they were talking the girls went to work on their flies and scooped out their cocks, taking care not to damage the merchandise on the zips. (How many times in my life have I seen that search-and-seizure operation with half-cupped hand that always finds the love object sooner or later, even if it requires excavating as far as the biceps femoris?) The farang continued talking about the project for a while, each one shielded from the other by his girl and perhaps not wanting his colleague to see what was happening. Then they broke off for a moment and looked down simultaneously, then up again at each other, and burst out laughing. The girls burst out laughing too. My mother grinned sardonically. Chanya and I both checked Dorothy to see if she had seen the humor, but she was looking at Errol Flynn’s erection. Cocks don’t age the way faces do, and this one could have belonged to a much
