Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

Naked Screw

My apartment in Singapore is immaculate. All the walls are clean and white, except for the one with the naked screw sticking out of it, where I took the wedding photo down. I’m the one who took the picture down; I know what that screw is doing there. But every day it catches my eye, and my brain needs to reassure itself again that the aberration on the wall isn’t a threat, a spider or a cockroach, a thing-that-shouldn’t-be-there. The broad windows sparkle, the pale grey-and-white marble floor shines so well it reflects perfect rectangles of sky. Now and then, the Singapore Air Force flies its planes overhead, and the reflection of the tiny fighters mimics running cockroaches so well I always speed over to see if I need to stamp on them, just in case.

Once, the shouldn’t-be-there thing was bigger. Much bigger.

I’d had my swim and my shower, and was making my usual undressed trip from my bedroom to my kitchen for some juice and yoghurt. I enjoy the cold marble on my feet and the hot sun on my belly and butt as I move through the room. I like to air-dry.

I’d forgotten the building was being painted. Three dark men, South Indians or maybe Bangladeshis, were standing on a suspended platform, staring at me through my living room window. I stopped to think: go to kitchen for food but get stuck there until they descend to paint the lower floors? Or retreat to bedroom and return clothed but still naked in their eyes?

I turned and retreated, but I’d had a good look at them in my moment of indecision. One was so shocked his heavy lower lip hung open, practically flapping in the breeze. One looked wicked to the core. One stared calmly, apparently unruffled, with something just a little fierce around the eyes. As I walked back into the bedroom I felt a strange urge to let these three chocolate men in through the window, into the refrigerated air of my home, so that they wouldn’t melt.

I dressed in a khaki skirt and T-shirt and crossed the living room again, aware of the men’s shapes suspended behind the couch but not looking at them. Once in the kitchen, I fought the urge to close the door, since I couldn’t stay there forever. The alternative was to close the living room curtains. I spooned out my yoghurt and poured my juice, left the kitchen to put them on the dining table, and crossed the living room to the window. I went to the corner where the curtain begins and pulled it across. When I arrived in front of the painters though, I had to stop.

I’d never come this close to a foreign labourer before, window or no window. I’d bought vegetables and ginger from shopkeepers in Little India, but those Indians weren’t new to Singapore, or temporary. My gas man is a Chinese Singaporean named Jacky Chan, who complains of having no girlfriends while the movie star has so many. My plumber is a Malay Singaporean named Rosli, who prays in the mosque near my apartment and appears to have no idea that his ring tone is actually the tune to Hava Negila.

I pass foreign labourers in the car and glimpse them digging roadside ditches or pruning the magnificent fecund trees that divide Singapore’s expressways. In the evening rush hour, I see them being returned to their sleeping quarters in the backs of open trucks, even when it rains. They have the richest, silkiest hair in the country, and the best hairstyles. They have the roundest muscles. They trump the bespectacled locals for sex appeal. But we don’t meet, and we don’t talk.

They were so funny, this trio of strangers with paintbrushes. They were working on the stretch of stone under the window, so I could see them from their shoulders up, and their heads were roughly level with my breasts. That’s where Mr Flappy Mouth was looking. The devil in the middle was talking, smiling, flashing his white teeth, gesticulating; I understood he was trying to convince me not to close the curtain. The third worker continued to consider me calmly. Even when I looked him straight in the eye.

He’s the one who came to the door at lunchtime.

He didn’t take off his shoes and make ‘may-I-come in?’ motions. He stood and stared at me again.

“Hello,” I said.

“You offend me,” he said. “I am a married man.”

“What? It’s my apartment.”

“Cover yourself,” he said.

“I am covered.”

“Cover yourself all day,” he said. “Every day. Everywhere.” Then he turned to walk back to the elevator. Turning around released the body odour from his clothes. He stank so badly it made my nose itch. It wasn’t a street-person stink; it was stewed spices and garlic oozing through his skin on waves of sweat. It touched me that he held his head so high while smelling like he was fermenting.

“Wait a minute,” I demanded, wanting revenge.

He turned.

“Was your marriage arranged?”

He nodded.

“Were you allowed to see your wife before you married her?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it have been nice to see her through a window first?” His head started back as if I had thrust something at him-a snake, or a burning torch-and he turned the corner.

As I prepared my seminar outline that afternoon-I give a kick-ass workshop entitled “PowerPoint Perfection”-I kept thinking about the guys at the window. They live so far from their families if they are married and from potential partners if they are not. I just assumed that they were constantly randy. You can easily get that impression from their curly eyelashes and proud noses. They look imperious, ready to command a woman’s favour, even as they inhabit the lowest of the lower echelons of Singapore’s workers.

I never expected to be anything less than desired, particularly by guys from the sub-continent. Hindi movies make it clear that they’re not afraid of the bigger girl. And now here’s this guy telling me I’ve got it wrong. All afternoon, as I was getting the timing right on the section of my presentation entitled ‘Understanding the Human Attention Span’, I was thinking this guy must, from time to time, let his mind travel beyond the shores of his wife’s body. But I made myself drop the subject when it started feeling like that cliched argument you listen to at every third or fourth cocktail party in Singapore, the one about the superiority of arranged marriages or love marriages. Not only are these discussions boring, but I’m divorced so I’ve got no leg to stand on in either camp.

I didn’t plan to pursue the subject, with myself or anyone else, but in the early afternoon of the next day, I was walking back to my building from the parking lot when I passed the trio from my window napping on newspapers on the grass by the entrance. Well, the other two were napping. The offended one had his eyes open, and I stopped and looked down into them. I wondered if he’d been thinking about me.

“Why are you not married?” he asked after a moment.

I thought about it. “I’m too tall,” I told him.

He laughed. He actually guffawed. The wicked one’s eyes rolled a little, but he didn’t wake up. Mr Flappy kept on drooling into the sports section.

“Aren’t you lonely?” he asked. His consonants sounded as if he were bouncing them off rubber.

“Not really. Aren’t you?”

His face clouded over, and he looked away.

“Maybe you have pictures of your wife with you.”

He shook his head slightly.

“What about of other women?”

“Stop,” he said, and turned onto his side, facing away from me. Like my husband used to, at the end of a bad day.

I went inside. I hadn’t swum that morning because I’d been in meetings, pitching my workshop, so I hurried back downstairs in my Speedo, testing myself to see whether walking past him in a swimsuit and towel would make me feel ashamed.

He wasn’t there, which made me angry. I did twice as many laps as usual, took a bath, and had a cup of tea standing naked at the living room window.

Once I’d calmed down, though, I was ready to let it go again. He and the boys moved on to Block D, I shot up to Hong Kong to deliver my two-day intensive seminar to the sales team of a major clothing manufacturer, our paths didn’t cross. Then, when I got back, I saw him, coming out of the men’s toilet by the pool as I was approaching to do laps. When he saw me, he looked like he wanted to turn around, but pulled himself together. We walked toward each other and stopped.

“Hello,” I said. I had wanted to sound a bit cold, but it came out warm.

I was happy to see him.

“Hello.”

“Nearly finished with the painting?”

“No. It is ongoing,” he said formally.

“That’s work, isn’t it? It goes on.”

“You are not working.”

“I do work.”

“Sometimes.”

“It pays nicely. And I’m only supporting myself.”

“You are completely alone.”

“With my thoughts.”

He nearly smiled. We were quiet for so long that we either had to say goodbye or open a new subject.

“You went to university, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Technical college.”

“And what did you study?”

“Electricity.”

“Uh-huh? So, tell me, when you were studying, did they give you diagrams of electrical connections to help you understand?”

“Of course.”

“Pictures of women also help you understand.”

If his skin hadn’t been so dark, I’m sure I would have seen him colour in anger.

“We were having a nice conversation. Why did you ruin it?”

“We were having a boring conversation,” I said. “Think about it. Excuse me.”

I went around him and padded over to the pool. As I dove in and started to pull myself through the water, I had to wonder if I shouldn’t be a bit more respectful of his culture, a little more gentle with his sensibilities. But a few laps later I concluded that I was really thinking of his wife. I married a prude myself. They need lessons.

I was ready, then, when he appeared at the end of the pool as I approached for a turn. I stopped, and he asked me, looking straight down his nose, “What is it you want?”

I told him without hesitation: “I want to be your sexy photos.” He looked confused.

“Like in a magazine?” I said. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“I understand. I understand,” he said. Then he turned and left, pulling at his lip, looking at the ground.

“Wait!” I shouted.

He stopped without looking around.

“More like in a temple. Like in a Tantric temple.” He turned his head to speak to me over his shoulder.

“You know Tantra?”

“I went to an exhibit in a museum. I went twice actually.” It was a few seconds before he walked off again.

I was so excited by what I was proposing that I swam for longer than usual again. It wasn’t until I got in the elevator to go back home that I felt like the complete idiot I was. The headline behind my eyes read: SUPER-SIZED WHITE WOMAN OFFERS EDUCATION AND INSPIRATION TO INDIAN ELECTRICIAN, under which hung the tag line: He’s studied the Kama Sutra, lets her down lightly. I was red with horror at myself from forehead to shoulders by the time I closed my apartment door behind me. I should stick to multimedia presentations. I should go back to the States where we’re all as full of ourselves as I am.

And then the doorbell rings. This time I’m not at all prepared that it’s him; I’m sure I look just like his pal Mr Flappy when I open the door.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

He nods.

A beatific image forms itself in my head, and I know what to do. “Follow me,” I tell him, and lead him to the bathroom.

My bathroom is small, but pretty. You enter through narrow double doors and are facing the sink and mirror. Next to the sink is the toilet. If you sit on the toilet, you are facing the shower, which has two walls of tile and two walls of Plexiglas. I ask the painter to wait outside the door until I’m ready, and close the doors behind me.

Once I’ve stripped off my swimsuit, I brush out my wet hair so that it hangs down my back, and feel the need to adorn myself. I remember the Tantric statues at the Smithsonian-not only for their buxom figures, their hips cocked to rock against their consorts, and their peaceful, joyful eyes-

but also for the detail of their accessories. They were garlanded, with strings of beads or flowers which rested on the upper slopes of their breasts and hung around their rounded bellies, below the navel and above the yoni. I’ve never in my life seen stone breathe so forcefully.

I start putting on my jewellery, all of it. All my rings, all my bracelets, all my necklaces, pearls, Swarovski, gold and silver chains, and a long, green, beaded belt which I tie around my hips, the feel of which excites me more than a hand could right then.

I step into the shower, then tell him he can come in.

The painter sees where I am and comes to stand in front of the toilet, just a few feet from me. I’m a little nervous, but before I turn on the water, I remember what I teach all my clients about delivering their presentation with confidence and commitment. I look him straight in the eye, surprised to see that this is where he is staring at me as well. I hold up my hands so that he will focus on them, then lay them on my neck and glide them down my body, over my breasts and belly, just as I would have if I’d been allowed to touch the museum sculptures I desired so much.

When I turn the water on, I keep it tepid so that the Plexiglas won’t steam up and obscure me. The cool water assures that my nipples will stay erect and my breasts rounded. I soap myself luxuriously but naturally, thinking more of my own pleasure than of his, teaching him about women, about women alone. Then I take the showerhead off its hook to rinse myself. I pull my left leg up and press my knee against the wall, opening myself completely for view. For the first time in my life, I’m convinced beyond any doubt that my pussy is something sacred, something to be adored, worthy of sculpture and ceremony.

The painter thinks so as well. He sits on the toilet seat and opens his trousers, untangling his hard-on from his flimsy boxer shorts and letting his cock stand on view, like a statue, like me, before starting to stroke himself.

He watches as I move the showerhead all over my head and body. I want to touch myself as well, but I don’t. The sculptures don’t, so I don’t. They just look healthy and contented, so I am too.

The painter’s climax is a quiet event. I know that when I experience the pleasure of climax, my face shows pain. Ecstasy as excruciation. But his face remains calm, and his eyes stay on my body.

Whatever he feels when he comes, I certainly feel released from something.

While he cleans himself up, I turn off the shower and stand inside it, the light sparkling on the wet links and crystals, until he is finished. He fastens his trousers again, and stands in front of me with the clear door between us.

“Thank you,” he says seriously, just like a student would, and leaves.

Once I’m dry and wrapped in my towel, I go out to the living room, but he’s gone.

I don’t expect to see the painter again, and I don’t mind. He turned out to be a should-be-there thing. Like the screw. It’s an aberration, but it’s useful. I can put up a new picture whenever I want.