Saint Jack

1

FOR AS LONG as I could remember I had wanted to be rich, and famous if possible, and to live to the age of ninety-five; to eat huge meals and sleep late out of sheer sluttishness in a big soft bed; to take up an expensive but not strenuous sport, golf or deep-sea fishing in a fedora with a muscular and knowledgeable crew; to gamble with conviction instead of bitterness and haste; to have a pair of girl friends who wanted me for my money — the security was appealing: why would they ever leave me? All this and a town house, an island villa, a light plane, a fancy car, a humidor full of fat fragrant cigars — you name it. I guessed it would come to me late: fifty-three is a convenient age for a tycoon; the middle-aged man turning cautious and wolflike knows the score, and if he has been around a bit he can take the gaff. It did not occur to me that it might never happen.

Being poor was the promise of success; the anticipation of fortune, a fine conscious postponement, made the romance, for to happen best it would have to come all at once, as a surprise, with the great thud a bag of gold makes when it’s plopped on a table, or with the tumbling unexpectedness of thick doubloons spilling from the seams of an old wall you’re tearing apart for the price of the used wood. One rather fanciful idea I’d had of success was that somehow through a fortuitous mix-up I would be mistaken for a person who resembled me and rewarded with a knighthood or a country estate; it was as good as admitting I did not deserve it, but that it was far-fetched made my receptive heart anticipate it as a possibility. It might, I thought, be a telephone call on a gray morning when, fearing bad news, I would hear a confident educated voice at the other end say, “Brace yourself, Mr. Flowers, I’ve got some wonderful news—”

Wonderful news in another fantasy was a letter. I composed many versions of these and recited them to myself walking to the 8-A bus out of Moulmein Green in the morning, or killing time in a hotel lobby when a girl was finishing a stunt upstairs, or dealing out the porno decks, or standing on the Esplanade and staring at the ships in the harbor.

One started like this:

Dear Mr. Flowers,

It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you as much…

Another was more direct:

Dear Flowers,

I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, and I’m very happy to inform you of my decision concerning your future…

Another:

Dear Jack,

I am asking my lawyer to read you this letter after my death. You have been an excellent and loyal friend, the very best one could hope for. I have noted you in my will for a substantial portion of my estate as a token thanks for your good humor, charity, and humanity. You will never again have to think of…

Another:

Dear Sir,

Every year one person is singled out by our Foundation to be the recipient of a large cash disbursement. You will see from the enclosed form that no strings whatever are attached…

Another:

Dear Mr. Flowers,

The Academy has entrusted to me the joyful task of informing you of your election. This carries with it as you know the annual stipend of…

There were more; I composed as many as thirty in an afternoon, though usually I stuck to one and phrased it to perfection, working on it and reciting every altered declaration of the glorious news. The last was long and rambling; it was only incidentally about money, and it began, My darling…

No man of fifty-three wants to look any more ridiculous than his uncertain age has already made him, and I am well aware that in disclosing this fantastic game I played with myself, the sentences above, which prior to a few moments ago had never been written anywhere but in my head, much less typed under the embossed letterheads I imagined and pushed through the mail slot of my semidetached house on Moulmein Green — I am well aware that in putting those eager (“Brace yourself”) openings in black and white I seem to be practicing satire or self-mockery. The difficulty is that unchallenged, squatting like trepanned demons in the padded privacy of an idle mind, one’s lunatic thoughts seem tame and reasonable, while spoken aloud in broad daylight to a stranger or written before one’s own eyes they are the extravagant ravings of a crackpot. You know what I want? I said to Leigh, and told him, and was made a fool by his look of shock; I should have kept my mouth shut, but how was I to know that he was not the stranger who would say, “I’ve got some good news for you, Flowers.” He might have thought I was mad. Madness is not believing quietly that you’re Napoleon; it is demonstrating it, slipping your hand inside your jacket and striking a military pose. He might have thought I was crude. But the beginner’s utterance is always wrong: I used to stand in Singapore doorways and hiss, “Hey bud” at passers-by.

Crude I may have been, but mad never; and I would like to emphasize my sanity by stating that even though I dreamed of getting one of those letters (It gives me great pleasure…) I could not understand how I would ever receive one, for I imagined thousands, paragraph by glorious paragraph, but I never mentally signed them, and none, not even the one beginning My darling, bore a signature. Who was supposed to be writing me those letters? I hadn’t the faintest idea.

The letters were fantasy, but the impulse was real: a visceral longing for success, comfort, renown, the gift that could be handled, tangible grace. That momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural — this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?

The theatrically convulsed agony of the successful is the failure’s single comfort. “Look how similar we are,” both will exclaim: “We’re each lonely!” But one is rich; he can choose his poison. So strictly off my own bat I gave myself a chance to choose — I would take the tycoon’s agony and forego the salesman’s. I said I wanted to be rich, famous if possible, drink myself silly and sleep till noon. I might have put it more tactfully: I wanted the wealth to make a free choice. I was not pleading to be irresponsible; if I was rich and vicious I would have to accept blame. The poor were blameless; they could not help it, and if they were middle-aged they were doubly poor, for no one could see their aches and no one knew that the middle-aged man at that corner table, purple with indigestion, thought he was having a heart seizure. That man will not look back to reflect unless he has had a terrible fright that twists his head around. Characteristically, he will look back once, see nothing, and never look back again. But Leigh and his hopeless last words gave me such an awful shock that driving out of the crematorium with Gladys I took a long look back — with the recent memory of imagining what my own last words might be, Is this all? mumbled in a hot room — and thought of nothing but what had brought me to Singapore, and the sinking ships I had boarded since then.

It was a bumboat. I jumped off the Allegro and there I was, sitting at the stern of a chugging bumboat, making my way toward Collyer Quay. It might have been cowardice; in me, cowardice often looked like courage by worrying me into some panicky act. I ran, and it looked like pursuit; but it wasn’t that — it was flight.

The bumboat touched the quay. The Chinese pilot pressed a finger in salute to the hanky that was knotted around his head like a tea cosy.

Having learned the trick of survival and reached a ripe old age, most fellers can look back on their lives and explain the logic of everything they’ve done, show you the pattern of their movements, their circlings toward what they wanted and got. Justifying their condition, they can point without regret to the blunt old-type exclamation marks of their footprints, like frozen ones in snow, and make sense of them. If the footprints are a jumble and some face in retreat the feller might say with a wild accompanying cackle that he had his shoes on backward and appeared to be walking away as he advanced. The explanation is irrefutable, for old age itself is a kind of arrival, but I could not say — being fifty-three in Singapore — that I had arrived anywhere. I was pausing, I thought, and there was no good reason for any of my movements except the truthful excuse that at the time of acting I saw no other choice. The absence of plot or design inspired my forlorn dream that magically by letter I would become a millionaire. My life was a pause; I lived in expectation of an angel.

My vision was explicit, and no guilt hampered it; I wished away the ego of my past — I would not be burdened by my history. But I had a fear: that I might turn out to be one of those travelers who, unnerved by the unconscious boldness of their distance — the flight that took them too far — believe themselves to be off course and head for anything that resembles a familiar landmark. Only, up close, they discover it to be a common feature of a foreign landscape on which identical landmarks lie in all directions. They chase these signs, their panic giving the wheeling chase some drama, and very soon they are nowhere, travelers who never arrive, who do not die but are lost and never found, like those unfortunate Arctic explorers, or really any single middle-aged feller who dies in a tropical alien place, alone and among strangers who mock what they can’t comprehend, the hopeful man with the perfect dream of magic, burned to ashes one hot day and negligently buried, who was lost long before he died.

2

THE BUMBOAT touched the quay. I vaulted to the stone steps and almost immediately, in a small but ingenious way, became a hustler. The word is unsuitable, but let it stand. It was an aspect of a business I understood well, for over the previous eleven months, soothed by Mothersill’s Pills, I had been crossing and recrossing the Indian Ocean in the Allegro, and at every port, from Mombasa to Penang, I had been appointed by the captain to perform a specific job for extra pay; that is, to take on supplies by contacting the ship chandler. I enjoyed doing this; it gained me admittance to a friendly family ashore, Ismailis in Mombasa, Portuguese in Beira, an Indo-French one in Port Louis, Parsees in Bombay. It was an entry into a world as mysterious for the sailor as the sea is for the landsman, the domestic life, drama in dry rooms that lay beyond the single street of seamen’s bars, the frontier that barricades harbors from their cities. At each port the ship chandler was our grocer, butcher, dhobi, fishmonger, hardware man; he would supply anything at short notice, but I believe that at Hing’s in Singapore — after I jumped ship — I could take credit for introducing a new wrinkle to one of the world’s most versatile professions. Later it was taken up by other ship chandlers and Singapore became a port in which even a large vessel could make a turnaround in six hours without the crew mutinying.

I look back and see a wild August storm, known in Singapore as a Sumatra: a high wind blows suddenly from the west and the sky gathers into unaccountable blackness, a low heavy ceiling, night at noon, the cold rain sheeting horizontally into the surf. That day I was standing in the wheel house of a rocking launch. It was warm and sunny when we left the quay, but fifteen minutes out the sky darkened, the cabin door banged, and rain began hitting the glass with a sound like sleet; we bolted the doors and breathed the engine fumes. Stonelike waves, each dark one with streaming ribbons of oil on its bumpy edges and topped with a torn cap of lacy froth, slammed into the starboard side of the launch, making the same boom as if we had run aground. I hung onto a canvas strap and wiping the steam off the back win! dow put my nose to the moaning glass.

We were towing a forty-foot lighter, the sort used for transporting bales of raw rubber; Chinese decorations were painted on the bow, evil white and black eyes, green whiskers, and a red dragon-fang mouth. The painted face with its scabrous complexion of barnacles rose and fell, gulping ocean, and the canvas cover, a vast pup tent pitched over the lighter, was being lashed by the wind; our towrope, now loose as the lighter leaped at us, now tight as it plunged and dragged, was periodically wrung of water, which shot out in a twist of bubbly spray as it stretched tight. A grommet on the corner of the canvas tarp tore free, and the tent fly burst open, unveiling our cargo, twenty-three smartly dressed Chinese and Malay girls, their scared white faces almost luminous in the gloom of the quaking shelter; they were huddled on crates and kegs, their knees together, holding their plastic handbags on their heads.

The visibility, what with the fog and rain and steamed-up windows, was very poor, and I had the impression we were thrashing in the open ocean, for no ships and not even the harborside could be made out. It was just after tiffin; no wharf lights were on. It was fearfully dark and cold, and I was dizzy from the cabin fumes. We might have been in the South China Sea.

“More to port,” I shouted to Mr. Khoo, showing him a circle I had drawn on the Western Roads of my harbor chart.

“No,” he said, and spun the wheel starboard.

“Don’t give me that!” I said, and went for him. The launch bucked and threw me to the floor. I could feel the launch turning, slowed by the weight of the lighter, and just under the whistling wind the screams of my girls. Mr. Khoo was taking us back.

I had seen seamen fight below decks during storms on the Allegro; it was something that made me want to strap on a life vest and hide near the bridge, like a child in a slum running from his quarreling parents. My fear was of seeing people enclosed by a larger struggle swept away and dying in a hammer lock. The storms encouraged fighting, and the fighting seemed to intensify the storm.

“Give me the wheel like a good feller,” I said to Mr. Khoo.

Mr. Khoo threatened me with a sharp elbow and held tight to the wheel. The wipers were paralyzed on the window; I swayed and tried to see.

“Do you know what this is costing me!” I shouted.

“Cannot,” said Mr. Khoo, refusing to look at me.

“Drop the anchor, then,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I unbolted the door and stepped into the wind. Up ahead, the rusty brown silo of a ship’s stern loomed, a light flashed, and I made out the name, Richard Everett, Liverpool.

“Oh boy, there she is!”

Mr. Khoo gave a blast on the horn; he was crouched at the wheel. He looked up at the freighter, twisting his head. I stayed on deck, waving to faces framed by yellow bonnets. It was too rough to use the ladder; some men in slickers and boots were pushing a cargo net over the side.

The launch still pitched. Mr. Khoo worked the lighter close by circling the launch around and nudging it against the side of the Richard Everett, and I had the satisfaction in a storm during which other lightermen waited at the river mouth by Cavanagh Bridge, of seeing my girls hoisted up, three at a time in the hefty cargo net, all of them soaked to the skin, fumbling with collapsed umbrellas and shrieking at the gale. The crane swung them on board and lowered them into the hold. There was a cheer, audible over the storm and wind, as the cargo net descended.

I went up myself with the last load of girls and to the sound of steel doors slamming in the passageway, had a brandy with the first mate, and played a dozen hands of gin rummy; the light softened in the porthole and then the sun came out. He paid me fifteen dollars a girl. He had asked for them on consignment, but I insisted on a flat rate. Two hours later, in sparkling sunshine, we were on our way. I rode in the lighter with the girls. We took down the canvas roof and May played a transistor radio one of the seamen had given her. Some of the girls put up their umbrellas, and they all sat as prim as schoolteachers on a Sunday outing. Junie wore a sailor hat. We cruised slowly back, enjoying the warmth and the light breeze, and docked at Pasir Panjang behind a palm grove — I could not risk arriving at Collyer Quay or Jardine Steps with that cargo.

It was not my first excursion. I had been doing it for several months, usually small loads. Sometimes only two in a sampan rowed out from Collyer Quay to an old tanker, the girls disguised as scrubwomen in faded sam-foos, with buckets and brushes and bundles of old rags, to fool the harbor police. I had always made it a practice — I was the first in Singapore, perhaps anywhere, to do so — to have a girl along with me when I delivered groceries and fresh meat and coils of rope, just in case. The girl was always welcome, and came back exhausted.

The storm made me; it became known that I was the enterprising swineherd who took a lighterful of girls out at the height of a Sumatra that swamped a dinghy of Danish seamen that same day. A week later a crewman on the Miranda buttonholed me: “You the bloke that floated them pros out to the Everett?”

I told him I was, and stuck out my hand. “Jack Flowers,” I said. “Call me Jack. Anything I can do for you?”

“You’re a lad, you are,” he said admiringly, and then over his shoulder, “’ey, Scrumpy, it’s ’im!”

I rocked back and forth, smiling, then took out my pencil and clownishly licked the lead, and winked, saying, “Well, gentlemen, let’s see what we can scare up for you today…”

The Sumatra had come sudden as a bomb, darkly filling the sky, outraging the sea, pimpling it with rain like lead shot, wrinkling it and snarling it into spiky heaves. I never let on that it hit us when we were halfway to the Richard Everett or that I had put my last dollar into releasing those girls and hiring the launch and lighter, and that to have turned back — no less perilous than going forward — would have disgraced me and ruined me irrecoverably. If we had sunk it would have been the end, for none of the twenty-three girls knew how to swim. I had not known the extent of the risk, but it was a venture — probably cowardly: I was afraid to lose my money and scared to turn back — that had tremendous consequences. The mates on the Miranda were the first of many who praised me and gave me commissions.

And Hing’s business boomed.

I had known Hing long before I jumped ship. The Allegro was registered in Panama, but her home port was Hong Kong. We were often in Singapore, and the only occasion in eleven months we left the Indian Ocean was to take a cargo of rubber to Vancouver. I thought of jumping ship there, and nearly did it, except that beyond Vancouver and the cold wastes of Canadian America I saw the United States, and that was the place I was fleeing.

Hing was the first person I thought of when I developed my plan for leaving the Allegro. At the time he seemed the kindest man. I always looked forward to our stops in Singapore, and Hing was glad of our business. Just a small-time provisioner, delivering corn flakes to housewives at the British bases and glad for the unexpected order of an extra pound of sausages, he worked out of his little shop on Beach Road; Gopi packed the cardboard cartons, and Little Hing took the groceries around in a beat-up van. We were not dealing with Hing then. Our ship chandler was a large firm, also on Beach Road, just down from Raffles Hotel. One day, checking over our crates of supplies, I saw some secondhand valves wrapped in newspaper that I felt were being palmed off on me.

“We didn’t order these,” I said.

The clerk took them out of the crate. He dropped them on the floor.

“Where are the ones we ordered?”

The clerk said nothing. The Chinese mouth is naturally grim; his was drawn down, his nether lip pouted; his head, too large for the rest of his body, had corners, and looked just like a skull, not a head fleshed out with an expression, but in contour and lightness, the sutures and jaw hinges visible, a bone with a flat skeletal crown. This feller’s head, ridiculously mounted on a scrawny neck, infuriated me.

“Where,” I repeated, “are the ones we ordered?”

He swallowed, setting his Adam’s apple in motion. “Out of stock.”

“I thought as much. So you gave us these. You’re always doing that!” I almost blew a gasket. “We’re going to be at sea for the next ten days. What if a valve goes? They aren’t going to be any good to us, are they?” I wanted him to reply. “Are they?”

Anger takes some responsive cooperation to fan blustering to rage. He would not play; the Chinese seldom did. Some fellers accused the Chinese of harboring a motiveless evil, but it was not so. Their blank look was disturbing because it did nothing to discourage the feeling that they meant us harm. The blankness was blankness, a facial void reflecting a mental one: confusion. If I had to name the look I would call it fear, the kind that can make the Chinese cower or be wild. The clerk cowered, withdrawing behind the counter.

I kicked the crate and stamped out of the shop. Next door Hing was smiling in the doorway of his shop. I was immediately well disposed to him; he was reliably fat and calm, and he had the prosperous, satisfying bulk, the easy grace of a trader with many employees.

“Yes?”

Apart from a few wooden stools, a calendar, an abacus, bills withering on a spike, and on the wall a red altar with a pot full of smoldering joss sticks, the shop was empty of merchandise. Little Hing was carrying groceries from the back room, Gopi was ramming them into a crate.

“I need some valves,” I said. Then, “Got?”

He thought I was saying “bulbs,” but we got that straight, and finally, after I described the size, he said, “Can get.”

“When?”

“Now,” he said, calling Little over. “You want tea? Cigarette? Here—” He shook a cigarette out of a can. “Plenty for you. Don’t mention. Come, I light. Thank you.”

He had the valves for me in twenty minutes, and that was how we started doing business with Hing. The next time the Allegro called at Singapore, Hing had put up his ship chandler’s sign. There was nothing he could not get; he had a genius for winkling out the scarcest supplies, confirming the claim he printed on his stationery, Provisions of Every Description Shall Be Supplied at Shortest Notice. And every time I called on him with my shopping list he took me out to dinner, a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding feed at the Elizabethan Grill, or a twelve-course Chinese dinner with everything but bears’ paws and fish lips on the table.

It was simple business courtesy, the ritual meal. I was buying a thousand dollars’ worth of provisions and supplies from him; for this he was paying for my dinner. I was an amateur. I thought I was doing very well, and always congratulated myself as, lamed by brandy, I staggered to the quay to catch a sampan back to the Allegro. I only understood the business logic of “Have a cigar — take two,” when it was too late; but as I say, I started out hissing, “Hey bud” from doorways along Robinson Road. I was old enough to know better.

During one of the large meals, Hing, who in the Chinese style watched me closely and heaped my plate with food every five minutes, leaned over and said, “You… wucking… me.” His English failed him and he began gabbing in Cantonese. The waitress was boning an awed steamed garupa that was stranded on a platter of vegetables. She translated shyly, without looking up.

“He say… he like you. He say… he want a young man…”

“Ang moh,” I heard Hing say. “Redhead.”

The waitress removed the elaborate comb of the fish’s spine and softened Hing’s slang to, “European man… do very good business for European ship. European people… not speak awkward like Chinese people. And he say…”

Hing implored with his eyes and his whole smooth face.

I was thirty-nine. At thirty-nine you’re in your thirties; at forty, or so I thought then, you’re in the shadow of middle age. It was as if he had whispered, “Brace yourself, Flowers. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time…” I was excited. The Chinese life in Singapore was mainly noodles and children in a single room, the noise of washing and hoicking. It could not have been duller, but because it was dull the Chinese had a gift for creating special occasions, a night out, a large banquet or festive gathering which sustained them through a year of yellow noodles. Hing communicated this festive singularity to me; I believed my magic had worked, my luck had changed with my age; not fortune, but the promise of it was spoken. I saw myself speeding forward in a wind like silk.

Three weeks later, I walked into Hing’s shop. He shook my hand, offered the can of cigarettes, and began clacking his lighter, saying, “Yes, Jack, yes.”

Little Hing came over and asked for the shopping list, the manifests and indents.

“No list,” I said, and grinned. “No ship, no list!” I had turned away to explain. “From now on I’m working for the towkay.”

Behind me, Big Hing was screwing the lid back on to the can of cigarettes, and that was the only sound; the tin lid caught and clicked and rasped in the metal grooves, and was finally silent.

Big Hing was grave, reflectively biting his upper lip with his lower teeth. He banged the cigarette tin onto the trestle table, making the beads on the abacus spin and tick. He became brisk. He led me to my cubicle, two beaverboard partitions, without a ceiling, narrow as a urinal, and he shot the curtain along its rod, jangling the chrome hoops. I climbed onto the stool and put my head down. I did not turn around. I knew the Allegro had sailed without me.

3

THE SECOND TIME I met Hing, when I was still buying for the Allegro and thought of him as a friend, he took me to an opium parlor, a tiny smoke-smeared attic room off North Bridge Road. It was one of the stories I told later in hotel bars to loosen up nervous fellers whom I had spotted as possible clients. I had expected the opium parlor to be something like a wang house filled with sleepy hookers relaxing on cushions; I was not prepared for the ghostly sight of five elderly addicts, dozing hollow-eyed in droopy wrinkled pajamas, and two equally decrepit “cooks” scraping dottle out of black pipes. The room was dark; a single shutter, half-open, gave the only light; the ceiling panels seemed kept in place by the cobwebs that were woven over the cracks between the panels and the beams they dangled from. The walls were marked with the cats’ paws of Chinese characters. There were some scarred wooden furniture, broken crates and stools, and low cots and string beds with soiled pillows where the derelict men slept with their mouths open. A very old woman in wide silk trousers and red clogs drank coffee out of a condensed milk tin and watched me. It was an atmosphere only an opium trance could improve. I anxiously sucked one pipeful; none of the skinny dreamers acknowledged me, and we left. In front of the opium parlor, where Hing’s Riley sat, a parking attendant, a round-faced girl in a straw hat and gray jacket, was writing out a ticket. Hing saw the joke immediately, and we both laughed: the parking ticket at the opium den. I embellished it as a story by increasing the overtime parking fine and glamorizing the dingy room, giving it silk pillows and the addicts youth.

The opium parlor was Hing’s idea. He had convinced me that I could ask anything of him; he said, “Singapore have everything,” and he wanted a chance to prove it. Faced by variety, my imagination was confounded; I chose simple pleasures, outings, walks, the Police Band concerts at the Botanical Gardens, fishing from the pier. Hing made suggestions. He introduced me to Madam Lum and her chief attraction, Mona, a girl with the oddest tastes, whom I used to describe truthfully to fellers, saying, “She’s not fooling — she really likes her work, and everyone comes back singing her praises!” Hing took me to the “Screw Inn,” a little bungalow of teen-age girls off Mountbatten Road, and he taught me that yellow-roofed taxis were the tip-off: more than two parked together in a residential area indicated a brothel close by. At Hing’s urging I had my first taste of the good life: a morning shave, flat on my back at the Indian barbershop on Orchard Road (Chinese barbers used dull razors — the sparse Chinese beard was easy to scrape off); a heavy lunch at the Great Shanghai, followed by a nap and a massage by a naked Chinese girl who sat astride me and kneaded my back and who afterward invited another girl into the room so that the three of us could fool for the whole afternoon. After tea, both girls gave me a bath and we went for a stroll; I walked them to a bar, had a last drink, then early to bed with a novel — the sequence of a lovely exhausting day, which gave me a stomach full of honey and the feeling that the skin I wore was brand new. Hing paid the bills. He had few pleasures himself, and he wasn’t a drinker. What he liked were big Australian girls in nightclubs who stripped to the buff and then got down on all fours and shook and howled like cats. He understood food; he taught me the fine points of ordering Szechwan meals, the fried eels in sauce, the hot-sour soup, poached sea slugs, steamed pomfret, and crisp duck skin that was eaten in a soft bun. He gave me bottles of ginseng wine, which he claimed was an aphrodisiac tonic, and on the appropriate festival, a whole moon cake wrapped in red paper. He said he was glad I wasn’t British, and why wasn’t I married, and how did I like Singapore?

All this time I was his customer; the ritual friendship ended when I became his employee, and at 600 Straits dollars a month I was treated as a difficult burden, crowding his shop with my bulk, wasting his time, eating his money. He stopped speaking to me directly, and if the two of us were in the shop alone he assumed a preoccupied busy air, rattling scraps of paper, pretending to look for things, banging doors, groaning, saying his commercial rosary on his abacus. He spoke to me through his dog; my mistakes and lapses got the dog a kick in the ribs. I thought I might be promoted, but I learned very early that no promotion would come my way. The job interested me enough so that I could do it without any encouragement from Hing. For Hing to thank me, something he never did, would have been an admission on his part of dependency, a loss of face: civility was a form of weakness for him. I understood this and took his rudeness to be the gratitude it was. We had no contract; after our verbal agreement Hing arranged a visa for me which allowed me to stay in Singapore as long as I worked for him. This was convenient (the bribe came out of his pocket), but limiting: if he fired me the visa would be canceled and I would be deported. He needed me too much to fire me, but I knew that to remind him of this would be to ask for a sacking, for that was the only way he could demonstrate I wasn’t needed.

But I was. A year on the Allegro and all the calls we had made at Singapore had acquainted me with most of the other vessels and skippers who called regularly, and I knew many of the fellers in the Maritime Building who managed the shipping lines. The advantage I had, which Hing had hinted at, only dawned on me later: I was white. The rest of the ship chandlers in Singapore were either Indian or Chinese. As a paleface in the late fifties in Singapore I drank in clubs and bars where “Asians,” as they were called, were not allowed. Largely, I drank in these places because I was not welcome in the Chinese clubs, and I didn’t like the toddy in the Indian ones. It offended me that I was forced to drink with my own race — later, I would not do otherwise: I couldn’t relax with fellers of other races — but in the end, this simple fact of racial exclusiveness landed Hing with many contracts for supplying European ships. I was learning the ropes: Chinese and Indians transacted all their business in offices, Europeans did it in clubs and used their offices as phone booths.

A club, even a so-called exclusive one, was easy to enter but hard to join. The doormen were Malays or Sikhs, and I had learned how to say “How’s every little thing, brother?” in Malay and Punjabi. In any case, they would not have dared to turn an ang moh away; and as for signing the drink chits, I had a number of match tricks and brain twisters that I’d spring on anyone drinking alone. The loser had to sign for the drink. I never lost.

“Just in from Bangkok,” I’d say. “Feller up there showed me a cute gimmick. You’ve probably seen it. No? Well, you put six matches down like this, make a little sort of circle with them. There. Now — I wonder if I’ve got that right? I’m a real jerk when it comes to these tricky things. What you’re supposed to do is rearrange five matches without disturbing—”

After I explained, I’d say, “Loser signs, okay?” and the drink would be as good as mine. That was a British con. Americans were easier. “Bet you can’t name the twelve apostles,” or “Whose picture’s on the hundred?” or “What’s the capital of Maine?” secured my drinks with Americans, and with a drink in my hand I could stay in a club bar for hours, making up stories, chatting, or telling jokes that appealed to the listener’s prejudices by confirming them. There were not many Chinese jokes, apart from the funny names, of which I had a long list, culled from the Singapore telephone directory (“Pass me the phone book, Ali; my friend here doesn’t believe Fook Yew and Wun Fatt Joo really live in Singapore”). There were many good Indian jokes, and these always went down well. I told Englishmen the joke about the Texan who’s accused of sodomizing animals. “Cows, pigs, mules,” says his accuser, a girl he wants to take home. She goes on, “Sheep, dogs, cats, chickens—” The Texan interrupts in annoyance: “What do you mean, chickens?”

Americans were always bowled over by the story of the Englishman whose pecker is accidentally cut off. After a painful month he finally decides to see a doctor, who says he knows how to sew the thing back on. “Just hand it over and I’ll see to it straightway.” The Englishman slaps his pockets, says, “I’ve got the damned thing here somewhere,” and gives the doctor a huge cigar. “This is a cigar,” says the perplexed doctor, and “My word,” says the Englishman, “I must have smoked my cock!”

Sometimes I clowned around, like making a great show of ordering cherries in brandy, simply to say, “To tell the truth, I hate these cherries, but I like the spirit in which they’re given!” So, even without the match tricks and brain twisters, someone was always buying me a drink and saying, “You’re a card.” And in clubs where I was not a member, fellers said, “We haven’t seen you lately — missed you at the film show,” and “Don’t forget the A.G.M. next week, about time we tackled that gatecrashers’ clause”; eventually, a feller would ask, “Say, Jack, what’s your line of work?”

“Me? I’m in ship chandling.” I never said I was a water clerk.

“Odd, that,” would be the reply.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I’d say. “But the way I figure it, this business could use a little streamlining. Methods haven’t changed since Raffles’s time, and by God neither have some of the groceries they’re flogging, from the taste of them! Shops haven’t been swept in years, bread’s as hard as old Harry, weevils in the rice — mind you, I’ve got nothing against our Asiatic brothers. It’s just as you say, they work like dogs. On the other hand, your Indian is never really happy handling meat — but you can’t hold their religion against them, can you?”

“One can’t, I suppose. But still—”

“And your Chinese ship chandler — he’ll give you a turd and tell you it’s an orchid. Shall I tell you what I saw one day in a Chinese shop? This’ll kill you—”

The feller would be agreeing with me and putting his oar in from time to time. I’d tell my valve story and he’d cap it with a better and terrifying one about defective life jackets or wormy provisions, all the while working up the indignation to change ship chandlers.

My most effective selling ploy, which I used just before mealtimes, when conversations always got around to food, was my English breakfast. This never failed. The English, I had discovered, had a weakness for large breakfasts; it might have had a literary source — a Dickens character having a beefsteak with his tea — or a tradition begun on those cold mornings when the Thames used to freeze over, or war rationing. Whatever the reason, it was an inspired way of getting a contract.

I hit on this a few months after I began ship chandling in Singapore, with a feller from the Victoria Shipping Lines. It was on the verandah of the Singapore Cricket Club, on a Saturday just before tiffin. The feller was sitting beside me in a wicker chair and we were watching some ladies bowling on the grass. This form of bowling was exactly like the Italian game bocce, which my father played in an alley in the North End every Sunday afternoon. It was the only game I knew well, and I was commenting on the ladies’ match to the feller on my right. “Gotta have more left-hand side… Not enough legs on that one… Kissed it… Never make it… She’s out for blood — it’s going like a demon—” The ladies took a rest. I turned to the feller and said, “Seems there was this Texan—”

“Very amusing,” he said, when I finished, his understatement contradicting the honking laughter he couldn’t suppress. “Have a drink?”

“Thank you.”

“Actually, I’m hungry,” he said. “No time for breakfast this morning. Ruins the day, don’t you find?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what I try to tell these skippers I deal with. Give a seaman a slap-up breakfast and he’ll do a fair day’s work. Cut down on his lunch, but don’t ever tamper with that breakfast of his!”

“My idea of a really topnotch breakfast is kippers, porridge oats, eggs, and a pot of tea — hot and strong.” He smacked his lips.

“You’re forgetting your fruit juice — juices are very important. And choice of cereals, some bubble and squeak, huge rashers of bacon, or maybe a beefsteak and chips, stack of toast, hot crumpets, marmalade. Boy!” The feller was nodding in agreement and swallowing. “It’s a funny thing, you know,” I went on. “These ship chandlers don’t supply fresh juice — oh, no! Course the fresh is cheaper and the fruit grows locally. They give you this tinned stuff.”

“You can taste the metal.”

“Sure you can!”

“Potatoes make a nice breakfast,” he said, still swallowing.

“Hashbrowns — fry ’em up crisp and hot and serve them with gouts of H. P. Sauce.”

“I’m famished,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“Me too,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a big English breakfast right this minute. I envy the seamen on some of the ships I supply.”

“All the same,” he said, “it sounds an expensive meal.”

“Not on your nelly,” I said, and quoted some prices, adding, “I buy in bulk, see, so I can pass the savings on to the customer. I still make a profit — everyone gains.”

“It sounds frightfully reasonable.”

“And that’s not all—”

Our drinks arrived, and the ladies resumed their bowling. The feller said, “I’m just the teeniest bit browned-off with my own chandler. What did you say was the name of your firm?”

I explained Hing’s name on my card by saying he was a partner who came in handy when we were dealing with Chinese accounts — I’d known him for years. “Like I say, we’re an unusual firm.” I winked. “Think about it. We’ll see your men get a good breakfast. Oh, and if there’s anything else you require—anything at all—just give me a tinkle and I’ll see what I can scare up. Cheers.”

He rang the next day. He offered me a chandling contract for three freighters, a couple of tankers, and two steamships of modest tonnage that did the Singapore-North Borneo run. At the end of the conversation he hesitated briefly and murmured, “Yesterday, um, you said anything, didn’t you?”

“You bet your boots I did.”

“Um, I was wondering if you could help me out with something that’s just cropped up this morning. One of our freighters is in from Madras. Crew’s feeling a bit Bolshie about going off tomorrow to the Indonesian ports. We’d like to cheer them up a bit, um, give them a bit of fun without letting them ashore. Are you in the picture?”

“Leave it to me,” I said. “How many guys are you trying to… amuse?”

“Well, it’s the Richard Everett. She’s got, say, twenty-three able seamen, and—”

“You’ve come to the right man,” I said. “How about a coffee? I’ll explain then.”

“Lunch,” he insisted, pleased. “At the club. And thanks, thanks awfully.”

4

AT THAT PERIOD in my life, my first years in Singapore, I enjoyed a rare kind of happiness, like the accidental discovery of renewal, singing in my heart and feet, that comes with infatuation. It was true power: mercy and boldness. I felt brave. I didn’t belittle it or try to justify it, and I never wondered about its queer origin. I was converted to buoyancy, and rising understood survival: the surprise of the marooned man who has built his first fire. I had turned forty without pain, and until Desmond Frogget came I was the youngest drinker in the Bandung.

The Bandung was a lively place: freshly painted, always full, with free meat pies on Saturdays and curry tiffin on Sundays, and a Ping-Pong table which we hauled out to work up a thirst. A stubby feller named Ogham used to play the piano in the lounge, jazzy tunes until midnight and finishing up with vulgar and patriotic songs. I can see it now on a Saturday night, the room lit by paper lanterns rocked by the fans, Wally in a short white jacket and black tie shaking a gin sling, the main bar heaving with drinkers, all of them regulars, and me in my white cotton suit and white shoes, wearing the flowered open-neck shirt that was my trademark, and Ogham in the lounge playing “Twelfth Street Rag.” Some feller would lean over and say to me, “Oggie could have been a professional, you know, but like he says, that’s no life for a man with a family.”

Ogham pounded the piano at the Bandung and never introduced us to his family, and after he left Singapore there were various explanations of where he had gone. Some said to a London bank, but Yardley sneered, “He was a lush. He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in Surrey, mending bicycles.” For Yardley no fate was worse. With Ogham gone I hacked around sometimes with the Warsaw Concerto, hitting a sour note at the end of an expertly played passage to be funny, but some fellers said I was being disrespectful to Ogham and I had to stop. Later, an old-timer wandering back through the lounge from the toilet in the kitchen would glance at the piano and say, “Remember Oggie? I wonder what happened to him. Christ, he could have turned professional.”

“Oggie didn’t know whether his arsehole was bored or punched,” Yardley would reply, believing Ogham to be a deserter. “He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in—”

The day Ogham left he got very nostalgic about a particular towpath he had played on as a child; he bought us all a drink and reminisced. I had never seen him so happy. We listened at the bar as he took a box of matches and said, “The gasworks was over here,” and put a match down, “and the canal ran along what we used to call the cut — here. And—” The scene was repeated with the others, the memory of a picnic or tram ride re-enacted at the bar before their ships sailed.

Many of the regulars at the Bandung started to leave. It was getting near to Independence, and over a drink, when a feller said he was going home you knew he meant England and not his house in Bukit Timah. So the Bandung emptied. On a side road at the city limit, it was too far off the beaten track for the average tourist to find it, and what tourists there were in those days came by ship. I spent most of my free time hustling in bars in the harbor area, places a tourist with a few hours ashore might wander into, or in the cut-price curio shops in Raffles Place. I had earned enough money in my first year to be considered a big spender in the Bandung, and to rent a large yellow house on River Valley Road, with three bedrooms and a verandah supported by solid white pillars, shaded by chicks the size of sails on a Chinese junk. As a bachelor I lived in one room and allowed the other rooms to fall into disuse. I had two gray parrots who pecked the spines off all my books, a dozen cats, and an old underemployed amah who played noisy games of mahjong with her friends in the kitchen, often waking me at three in the morning as they shuffled the mahjong tiles, a process they called “washing the tiles.” The amah had made the bed and fixed breakfast enough times to know that I was not practicing celibacy, and she was continually saying that as a “black and white” she was trained to care for children, a hint that I should get married. She sized up the girls I took home and always said, “Too skinny! You not like hayvie! Yek-yek!”

I believed that I would marry a tall young Chinese girl, with a boy’s hips and long crow-black hair and a shining face; and I’d take her away, the hopeful mutual rescue that was the aim of every white bachelor then in the East. I did not give up the idea until later, when I saw one of these marriages, the radiant Chinese girl, shyly secretive, easily embarrassed, transformed into a crass suburban wife, nagging through her nose about prices in a monotonous voice, with thick unadventurous thighs, a complaining face, and at her most boring and suburban, saying to exhausted listeners in perfect English, “Well, we Chinese—” I had the idea of marriage; as long as I postponed the action, romance was possible for me, and I was happy. Any day, I expected to get the letter beginning, “Dear Mr. Flowers, It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you—” Or perhaps the other one, starting, “My darling—”

My brief, unrewarding enterprises, evenings calling out “Hey bud” to startled residents walking their dogs, afternoons sailing two fruit flies dressed as scrubwomen (greasy overalls covering silk cheongsams) to rusty freighters — these were over. The Richard Everett episode and the notoriety that followed it singled me out. Fellers rang me up at all hours of the night, asking me to get them a girl, and one of my replies — delivered at four in the morning to an importuning caller who said he hoped he hadn’t got me out of bed — became famous: “No,” I had said, “I was up combing my hair.” In the harbor bars I was “Jack” to everyone, and I knew every confiding barman by name. What pleasure it gave me, knocking off early at Hing’s, to go home and put on my white shoes and a clean flowered shirt and then to make my rounds in a trishaw, a freshly lit cheroot in my teeth, dropping in on the girls, in bars or massage parlors, to see how many I could count on for the evening. The wiry trishaw driver pumped away; I sat comfortably in the seat with my feet up as we wound through the traffic. The sun at five o’clock was dazzling, but the bars I entered were dark and cool as caves. I would stick my head in and say in a jaunty greeting to the darkness, “Hi girls!”

“Jaaaack!” They would materialize out of booths, hobble over to me on high heels, and favoring their clawlike fingernails, hug my big belly and give me genial tickling pinches in the crotch. “Come, Jack, I give you good time.” “Me, Jack, you like?” “Touch me, baby.”

“You’re all flawless,” I’d say, and play a hand of cards, buy them all a drink, and move on to a new bar. Many of the girls were independent, not paying any secret society protection money. I called them “floaters” because when they weren’t floating around looking for a pickup I was literally floating them by the dozen out to ships in the harbor. A great number of them who hung around the bars on Anson Road — The Gold Anchor, Big South Sea, Captain’s Table, Champagne Club, Chang’s — came to depend on me for customers. They were using me in the same way as Hing, to get Europeans, who didn’t haggle and who would pay a few dollars more. The Chinese were after the ang moh trade, and it seemed as if I was the only supplier. I could get white tourists and sailors for the girls as easily as I got the club members who were in the shipping business for Hing. The floaters along Anson Road and the Hing brothers were not the only ones who depended on me; the British servicemen at Changi, the sailors from H.M.S. Terror, the club members and tourists depended on me as well: the Chinese who sought the ang mohs were in turn being sought by the ang mohs, and both, ignorant of the others’ hunting, came to me for introductions — finding me they found each other.

But the girls in the wharf-area bars forfeited all their Chinese trade when they were seen holding hands with a paleface. After that, they were tainted, and no Chinese would touch them or notice them except to bark a singular Cantonese or Hokkien obscenity, usually an exaggeration of my virility (“So the redhead’s got a big doo-dah!”), meant as a slur on the girls for being lustful, and on me for a deformity not in the least resembling the little dark bathplug most Chinese consider the size of the normal male organ.

I was resented by most of the Chinese men in the bars; they accused me, in the oblique way Hing had, of spoiling the girls. The occupation of a prostitute they saw as a customary traditional role, an essential skill. But pairing up with red-haired devils made the girls vicious — it was an abnormality, something perverse, and the Chinese men considered these girls of mine as little better than the demon-women in folk stories who coupled with dogs and bore hairy babies. And that was not all. The men also had that little-country grievance, a point of view Yardley and the old-timers shared, about rich foreigners butting in and sending the prices up. Neither accusation was justified: the girls (who nearly always hated the men they slept with) were improved by their contact with Europeans, quiet undemanding men, unlike their sadistic woman-hating counterparts in the States. The men were instructive, curious, and kind, and wanted little more than to sail home and boast that they had spent the night with a Chinese whore in Singapore. And as for the prices going up — after a decade of inflation, when the price of a haircut doubled, cigarettes increased five times, and some house rents — my own, for example — went up by 200 per cent, the price of a short time with massage stayed the same, and an all-nighter cost only an extra three-fifty. Until Japanese cameras flooded the market, a night in bed with one of my girls was the only bargain a feller could find in Singapore.

The Chinese men would not listen to reason. “Boochakong just now cost twenty-over dollar-lah” they complained. I felt loathed and large. Some simply didn’t like my face or the fact that I was so pally with Chinese girls. I have already mentioned the secret-society member, the Three Dot in the Tai-Hwa who asked me threateningly, “Where you does wuck?” Another brute, late one night, took a swing at me in the parking lot of the Prince’s Hotel. He came at me from behind as I was unlocking my car — Providence made him stumble; and later the Prince’s manager, who to a Chinese eye might have looked like me — they can’t tell ang mohs apart, they say, and don’t find it funny — was found in a back alley with his throat cut and his flowered shirt smeared with blood. Karim, the barman, said his eyes had been ritually gouged. I had to choose my bars carefully, and I made sure my trishaw driver was a big feller.

Still, I was making money, and it delighted me on sunny afternoons to have a cold shower, then make my rounds in a well-upholstered trishaw, chirping into dark interiors, “Hi girls!” and to say to a stranger in a confident whisper, “If there’s anything you want—anything at all—” and be perfectly certain I could supply whatever he named.

Being American was part of my uniqueness. There were few Americans in Singapore, and though it was the last thing I wanted to be — after all, I had left the place for a good reason — the glad-hander, the ham with the loud jokes and big feet and flashy shirts, saying “It figures” and “Come off it” and “Who’s your friend?” and “This I gotta see,” it was the only role open to me because it was the only one the people I dealt with accepted. It alerted them when I behaved untypically; it looked as though I was concealing something and intended to defraud them by playing down the Yankee. In such a small place, an island with no natives, everyone a visitor, the foreigner made himself a resident by emphasizing his foreignness. Yardley, who was from Leeds, but had been in Singapore since the war — he married one of these sleek Chinese girls who turned into a suburban dragon named Mildred — had softened his Leeds accent by listening to the BBC Overseas Service. He put burnt matches back into the box (muttering, “These are threppence in U.K.”) and cigarette ash in his trouser cuffs and poured milk in his cup before the tea. The one time I made a reference to the photograph in the Bandung of the Queen and Duke (“Liz and Phil, I know them well — nice to see them around, broo-rehah!”), Yardley called Eisenhower — President at the time—“A bald fucker, a stupid general, and half the time he doesn’t know whether he wants a shit or a haircut.” Consequently, but against my will, I was made an American, or rather “The Yank.” When America was mentioned, fellers said, “Ask Jack.” I exaggerated my accent and dropped my Allegro pretense of being Italian. I tried to give the impression of a cheerful rascal, someone gently ignorant; I claimed I had no education and said, “If you say so” or “That’s really interesting” to anything remotely intelligent.

It was awfully hard for me to be an American, but the hardest part was playing the dumb cluck for a feller whose intelligence was inferior to mine. The fellers at the Bandung reckoned they had great natural gifts; Yates, in his own phrase “an avaricious reader,” would say, “I’m reading Conrad” when he was stuck in the first chapter of a book he’d never finish; Yardley pointed to me one night and said, “I wouldn’t touch an American book with a barge pole,” and Smale ended every argument with, “It all comes down to the same thing, then, don’t it?” to which someone would add, “Right. Six of one and half a dozen of the other.” They were always arguing, each argument illustrated by anecdotes from personal experience. That was the problem: they saved up stories to tell people back home; then, realizing with alarm that they probably weren’t going home, wondered who to tell. They told each other. Stories were endlessly repeated, and not even the emphasis or phrases varied. The silent fellers in the Bandung were not listening; they were waiting for a chance to talk.

I was the only genuine listener — the inexperienced American, there to be instructed. But the funny thing was, I had a college education and almost a degree. It was no help in the Bandung to say a bright truth, for even if someone heard it he was incapable of verifying it. And on the job it created misunderstandings. I recall meeting an Irish seaman on one of my “meat runs,” as my ferrying of girls into the harbor was called. Hearing his brogue I said, “I’m crazy about Joyce,” and he replied, “That skinny one in the yellow dress?”

I said, “You guessed it!” and he went over and pinched her sorry bottom through a fold in her frock. Later he thanked me for the tip-off. He was right and I was wrong: education is inappropriate to most jobs, and it was practically an impertinence to the enterprises of the feller whom an Indian ship chandler on Market Street described as “having a finger in every tart.”

It was on the GI Bill; I was thirty-five, a freshman. I always seemed to be the wrong age for whatever I was doing, and because of that, paying dearly for it. But I was not alone. Older students were a common sight in every university in the late forties and fifties, army veterans from the Second World War and then Korea, wearing faded khaki jackets with the chevrons torn off, the stitch marks showing, and shoes with highly polished toes. My inglorious war — a punctured eardrum put me behind a desk in Oklahoma — ended in 1945. I came home expecting a miracle letter (Dear Jack, It’s good to hear you’re home and I have some fabulous news for you…), but nothing happened. I helped my father in the tailor shop, blocking hats and putting tickets on the dry cleaning, and sometimes doing deliveries. My uncle said, “There’s good money in printing,” so I joined a linotype school, which I quit soon after. “They’re crying out for draftsmen” and “A good short-order cook can name his salary” sent me in other directions.

I was reading a great deal — the serious paperback was having its vogue in the early fifties (they were thought to be somewhat salacious: “He’s just reading a paperback” was considered mockery) — and I was encouraged by the biographical notes, less frequent today, which listed the previous occupations of the author on the back cover. “Jim Sidebottom has had a varied career,” they’d begin, and go on to list twenty back-breaking jobs. I imagined my own biographical note: “After his discharge from the U.S. Army, where he reached the rank of corporal, John (“Jack”) Fiori worked as a hat blocker in his father’s tailor shop, and then in succession as a printer, draftsman, short-order cook, bartender, dishwasher, lifeguard, baker, and fruit seller. He has always considered fiction to be his chief aim, and has this to say about the present novel: ‘I believe that mankind struggled from the sea to—’” It was a good biographical note, enhanced by an imagined photograph of me smoking a cigarette over a typewriter. I smoked. I bought a typewriter and learned to use it. I typed my biographical note. But that was all: there was no book. I had nothing to write. I knew nothing beyond my name and the face I practiced. I didn’t understand danger or regret; a book was an extensive biographical note.

Twenty years later William Leigh turned up and asked me urgent questions, and died with a foolish sentence on his lips before I could reply; and I burned him to dust. So this memoir was provoked. Writing a book is a splendid idea, but it was not mine. My notion was simpler, just a picture of my experienced face and the list of jobs that made the face that way. This memoir is not the book or the work I imagined; it was urged upon me, like a complicated, necessary enchantment I did little to inspire, made mostly of terror, which forced me to learn, laboriously, to conjure: an imprecise trick, half accident, half design, begun as a deliberate memory (“Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack…”) and completed by the kind of magic that to discover thoroughly is to fail at.

I thought I could learn at college. It was my only reason for going. I found myself among a few earnest veterans and many fresh-faced kids. The older fellers never flunked out, but at the same time never excelled, resenting being lectured to and corrected by educated fellers the same age or younger, draft dodgers or fairies with leather elbow patches, whom they could only nag with the reply, “I’ll bet you don’t even know how to clean a gun!” The ones on the GI Bill lived with their harassed wives and children in gray Nissen huts, referred to as “married quarters.” Most of the older fellers were economics majors or engineers (the pocketful of pens, the slide rule in a scabbard) and had too much homework on their hands to take an interest in the college routine. Besides, they had problems at home, and so they treated their education as a job, being punctual and tidy, carrying creased lunch bags, and keeping regular hours. I saw them in the student union salting a hard-boiled egg and underlining a physics book.

Some, of whom I was one because I was unmarried and majoring in English, were accommodated by the fringe people, the art majors, would-be poets, weekend winos, hangers-on, and hitchhikers. That was the enterprise then, saying, “Aw shit, I gotta bust out” and hitchhiking in sweat shirts across the country, aiming for California or Mexico, and staying drunk the whole way by gagging down whole bottles of Tokay or Muscatel. These fellers would show up with stories of their travels (“I met this beautiful sad old man in Denver, and he says to me…”) and some poems about America which they’d shout, taking swigs out of a can of beer. The writers they respected had all been deck hands on freighters, and going to sea was the height of their ambition. Some hung around the Seafarers’ International Union in Brooklyn, hoping for a job, but few of them succeeded — they were too young and not strong enough for the work. They talked about Zen Buddhism, Ezra Pound, the atom bomb, mystical experiences. There was a little marijuana around, but the big kicks were in drinking three bottles of terpin hydrate cough syrup or washing down a can of nutmeg with a glass of milk. Or getting drunk like Dylan Thomas; or trying to grow a beard.

It was my beard that gained me entry. I had stopped shaving when I worked the night shift at the bakery and still had it the day I shambled in to register for classes. It was bright red, cut square across the bottom. They complimented me on it and I explained its redness by saying that Vivaldi’s hair was the same color.

I suppose I should have kept to myself, but I had been doing that joylessly for ten years, and I liked the company, the spirit of careless romance in the younger kids. People called them “beatniks,” already a dated word then, but they thought of themselves as “the folk.” I moved into the top floor of a coffee shop, and generally I stuck close to them, proving my friendship the only way I knew, buying beer for them, lending them money, trying to set them straight on Ezra Pound, who was a fake poet but a genuine fascist; and I kept my hot eyes on the long-haired girls who strummed guitars and wrote poems in black sweaters and dancers’ tights. I wrote poems, too, unfashionable rhyming ones:

Is that the wind? I asked my friend,

That shakes the trees and makes them bend?

In a group of six or seven grim-looking undergraduates I was the big bearded one in army fatigues, older than the others and trying to look inconspicuous; and more than likely there would be a small pale girl next to me, who couldn’t stand her parents. “When you were my age,” she would say, and go on cracking my heart, bending my ear.

It did not last long. My reading only trained me to read better. What I wrote sounded like what I read: “A cold dark November in my soul,” I’d write, and then furiously cross it out, or again and again, “I was born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians—” Then half a chapter about childhood fears — not the informed apprehension of the adult, but the impatient uncertainty of the little boy who was always made to wait, who thought he might die in his bed if the lamp was switched off and whose pleasures were his thumb, and the minutes after confession and the time spent in a slate urinal, pissing with one hand and eating an icecream sandwich with the other. To sit down and write Chapter One — Childhood was to begin a book rather than a story, a bold guarantee against ever finishing it. My character’s name was Jack Flowers, not John Fiori. A first-love chapter and an army chapter loomed, and Jack was going to discover the simplicity of love and the surprise of wealth. If the book succeeded I would write another about success; if it failed, about failure. The fellers in the coffee shop asked me what my book was about. I said, “It’s about this guy who’s trying to write a book—”

Writing bored me, and it sickened me in my attic to.be staring at a white sheet of paper (“Chapter One”) while the sun was shining outside and everyone else was at play, for every word I wrote seemed a denial of the complex uniqueness I could see just outside the window. My descriptions reduced what lacy trees and grass I could see to sorry props on the page, and my characters were either brutes or angels, too extreme and simple to be human. Still, fiction seemed to give me the second chances life denied me.

But there were other difficulties. In my short time as a student the artistic fringe people switched from getting drunk to getting high. I could cope with alcohol, but drugs baffled me, and I didn’t even know that the pills I was taking to get my weight down, little heart-shaped orange tablets, were a kind of pep pill.

“John,” a girl said, seeing me swallow one, “what’s that?”

I was too embarrassed to explain that they had been prescribed to reduce my waistline. They killed my appetite: skinny fellers had more girl friends. I said, “It’s just a tablet. I don’t even know the name—”

“Dexedrine,” she said. “Fantastic.”

“You want one? Here, take a dozen.”

“Cool.” She swallowed three.

“You won’t want any lunch,” I said.

“Crazy.” She shuddered.

That amused me. Handing out these reducing tablets won me the girl friends I had hoped to get by being thin. Briefly, I was happy. But happiness is a blurred memory of sensational lightness; fear and boredom leave me with a remembrance of particular details. I recall the discomfort: squatting or sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to long poems by nineteen-year-olds beginning, I have seen… — getting cramps behind my knees, my back aching—And I have seen… I made myself sick on that sweet wine (“Look out, John’s barfing!”) and they talked about Zen, rejection slips from quarterlies with names like The Goatsfoot, ban-the-bomb, Ezra P. I would be dying for a hot bath. I admired their resilience; they could stay up all night gabbing, eating nothing but Dexedrines and cough syrup; I’d say, “Hell, I hate to be a party-pooper, but—” and crawl off to bed, hearing And I have seen—all the way to my room. The next morning I’d see them stretched out on the floor, paired up but still chastely in their clothes, and all of them sleeping in their shoes.

They invented a past for me. I deserved it; I had not told them a thing about myself. They intended flattery, but the stories were truly monstrous: “You’ve got a wife and kids somewhere, haven’t you?” a girl whispered to me in my attic, candid in the dark after love. Another, rolling over, said, “Do anything you want to me — I know you’re a switch hitter.” I was a genius; I was a deserter; I was shell-shocked; I was a refugee; I sometimes took a knife to bed; the Germans tortured me. The stories were too ridiculous to deny, the truth too boring to repeat. I had grown to like the kids; I did not want to disappoint them. I used to make the eyes of those lovely girls bright by saying, “If I laid you once I’d turn you into a whore.”

It ended badly. The coffee shop was in a residential area, and the late nights the kids spent discussing music and poetry were interpreted by the neighbors as sex orgies. We got strange phone calls, and visits at odd hours from well-dressed men. The police raided us. I say “raided.” Two cops opened the door and said, “We’ve had a complaint about you.”

“Let’s see your search warrant,” I said. It seemed a good gambit, but they weren’t buying it.

“Out of the way, fatso,” they said, pushing past me. They went upstairs, rousing people and saying, “Nothing here,” and “Okay in here.” Soon they were back in the hall, surrounded by angry poets and pretty girls.

One cop showed me his white glove. The palm was filled with Dexedrines. “Whose are these?”

They weren’t mine. I had stopped taking them, though I still passed them around. I said, “Mine.”

“No, they’re not,” said a girl named Rita. “Those are mine.”

“They’re his,” said the cop, “so shut up.”

“Anyway, what’s the problem?” I said. “I take these things to kill my appetite. I got a weight problem.”

“You got a problem, fella,” the cop said, “but it ain’t no weight problem. Better come along with us.”

Rita screamed at him.

In the squad car the cop driving said, “We know all about you and those kids. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was charged with possessing drugs without a prescription, procuring drugs for a minor, and on hearsay, on charges of fornication, bigamy, homosexuality, and petty theft. My trial would be in three weeks. Bail was steep, but the coffee shop fellers and some sympathetic faculty members started a fund and bailed me out; they told me I was being victimized.

Jumping bail was easy; the only loss was the money. I took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, and leaving everything including my name, flew to Hong Kong and signed on the Allegro. It was not despair; it was the convenience of flight, an expensive exit that was possible because it was final. I had no intention of going back. It would have been bad for my heart, and I’m using that word in its older sense.

And: “Flowers,” said the skipper of the Allegro, reading my name from the crew list. He made a mark on the paper. “Age — thirty-eight. Single. No identifying marks or scars.” He looked up. “Your first contract, I see. Know anything about oiling?”

“No,” I said, “but I don’t think it would take me long to learn.”

“What can you do?”

“Anything,” I said. “I suppose you’ve heard this one before, but what I really wanted to do was write.”

“Take that pencil,” the skipper said.

“This one?” I selected one from a pewter mug on his desk.

“And that pad of paper.”

The letterhead said, Four Star Shipping Lines.

“Write,” he said.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Carrots, eighty pounds,” he said. “White flour, two hundred pounds. Fresh eggs—”

5

A YEAR LATER, nimble in my soft white shoes, I was guiding a deeply tanned cruise passenger in his club blazer through the low sidewalk corridors of Singapore back lanes. It was night, dark and smelly in the tunnel-like passageways, and quiet except for the occasional snap of mahjong tiles and the rattling of abacus beads — no voices — coming from the bright cracks in burglar doors on shophouse fronts. Some shops, caged by protective steel grates, showed Chinese families sitting at empty tables under glaring bulbs and the gazes from the walls of old relations with small shoulders and lumpy heads in blurred brown photograph ovals — the lighted barred room like an American museum-case tableau of life-size wax figures depicting Chinese at night, the seated mother and father, ancestral relics, and three children’s little heads in a coconut row at the far edge of the table. Sikh watchmen huddled, hugging themselves in bloomers and undershirts on string beds outside dark shops; we squeezed past them and past the unsleeping Tamil news vendors playing poker in lotus postures next to their shuttered goods cupboards. Here was a Chinese man in his pajamas, crouching on a stool, smoking, clearing his throat, watching the cars pass. Farther along, four children were playing tag, chasing each other and shrieking in the dark; and under a street-corner lamp, a lone child tugged at an odd flying toy, a live beetle, captive on a yard of thread — he flung it at us as we passed and then pulled it away, laughing in a shy little snort.

“Atmosphere,” murmured the feller.

“You said it.” There was a quicker way to Muscat Lane, but that took you over uncovered sidewalks, past new shops, on a well-lighted street. The atmosphere was an easy detour.

“It’s like something out of a myth.”

“Too bad the shops are closed,” I said. “One down this way has bottles filled with dead frogs and snakes — right in the window. Frog syrup. Sort of medicine. The mixture — two spoonfuls three times daily. Hnyeh!”

“You seem to know your way around.”

“Well, I live here, you see.”

“Funny, meeting someone who actually lives in a place like this,” said the feller. “I’m glad I ran into you.”

“Always glad to help out. You looked a bit lost,” I said. I had met him in the Big South Sea, and all I had said — it was my new opening — was “Kinda hot.”

“By the way, it’s not very far from here.”

“Wait,” he said, and touched my arm. “Is that a rat?”

A smooth dark shape, flat as a shadow, crept out of the monsoon drain and hopped near a bursting barrel.

“Just a cat,” I said. “Millions of them around here.” I stamped my foot; the rat turned swiftly and dived back into the drain. “A small pussy cat.”

“I’ve got a thing about rats.” There was a child’s fearful quaver in his voice.

“So do I!” I said, so he would not be embarrassed. “They scare the living daylights out of me. Feller I know has dozens of them in the walls of his house. They scratch around at night—”

“Please.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Not to worry. Take a left — mind your head.”

We passed under a low black archway into Sultana Street; a darkened shophouse smelling gloriously of cinnamon made me slow down to take a good whiff of the sweet dust in the air. Then we turned again into an alley of wet cobblestones where there was no sidewalk, Muscat Lane.

“I never would have found this place alone,” the feller said behind me, and I could tell by his voice that he had turned to look back. He was nervous.

“That’s what I’m here for!” I said, trying to calm him with heartiness. “I just hope they’re not all asleep.” I stopped at an iron gate, the only opening in a high cement wall, burglar-proofed with rows of sharp iron crescents instead of broken glass bristles. The house had once belonged to a wealthy Muslim, and the iron gate was worked in an Islamic design. Across the alley, four yellow windowsquares in the back of a shophouse illustrated the night: a Chinese man and wife faced each other in chairs at one; above them a schoolboy, holding a fistful of his hair, wrote at a desk; next to him, an old man looked into a mirror, scraping his tongue with a stick; and in the yellow window under the old man’s an old lady nuzzled an infant.

“It’s night,” said the feller, “but it’s so hot! It’s like an oven.”

A padlock chained to the bars held the gate shut. I was rapping the lock against a bar.

“Yes?” A dim face and a bright flashlight appeared at the side of the gate.

“Mr. Sim, is that you?”

“Jack,” said Mr. Sim.

“Yeah, how are they treating you? I thought you might be in the sack. Look, have you got a girl you can spare?”

“Got,” said Mr. Sim.

“Good, I knew I could count on you. But the thing is, we’re in kind of a rush — my friend’s ship is leaving in the morning—”

“Six-twenty,” said the feller anxiously, still glancing around.

“—and he doesn’t want one too old,” I said. The feller’s instruction meant he wanted one younger than himself; that was simple — he was over sixty, and no hooker downtown was over thirty. I went on to Mr. Sim, “And she has to be nice and clean. They’re clean, aren’t they? The feller was asking about that.”

“Clean,” said Mr. Sim.

“Fine,” I said. “So can we come in and have a look-see?”

“Can,” he said. He undid the chain and swung the gate open. “Come in, please.”

“A red light,” said the feller. “Appropriate.”

“Yes, sir, appropriate all right!” I said, stepping back. “After you.”

He was mistaken, but so pleased there was no point in correcting him. The red light was set in a little roofed box next to the door. It was a Chinese altar; there was a gold-leaf picture inside, a bald fanged warrior-god, grinning in a billowing costume, wearing a halo of red thunderbolts. He carried a sword — a saint’s sword, clean and jeweled. A plate of fresh oranges, a dish of oil, and a brass jar holding some smoking joss sticks had been set before it on a shelf. The feller had seen the light but not the altar. It was just as well: it might have alarmed him to know that the girls prayed and made offerings to that fierce god.

“Cigarette?” asked Mr. Sim, briskly offering a can of them. “Tea? Beer? Wireless?” He flicked on the radio, tuned it to the English station, and got waltz music. “I buy that wireless set — two week. Fifty-over dollar. Too much-lah. But—!” He clapped his hands and laughed, becoming hospitable—“Sit! Two beers, yes? Jack! Excuse me.” He disappeared through a door.

“So far, so good,” said the feller, fastidiously examining the sofa cushion for germs before he sat down and looked around.

He seemed satisfied. It was what he expected, obviously the parlor of a brothel, large, with too much furniture, smelling of sharp perfume and the dust of heavy curtains, and even empty, holding many boisterous ghosts and having a distinct shabbiness without there being anything namably shabby in it. The light bulb was too small for the room, the uncarpeted floor was clean in the unfinished way that suggested it was often very dirty and swept in sections. It was a room which many people used and anyone might claim, but in which no one lived. The calendar and clock were the practical oversized ones you find in shops; the landscape print on the wall and the beaded doilies on the side tables looked as if they had been left behind rather than arranged there, and they emphasized rather than relieved the bareness. The room was a good indicator of the size and feel of the whole house, a massive bargelike structure moored at Muscat Lane. Outside, the date 1910 was chiseled into a stone shield above the door; the second-floor verandah had a balcony of plump glazed posts — green ones, like urns; the tiled roof had a border of carved wooden lace, and barbed wire — antique enough to look decorative — was coiled around the drainpipes and all the supporting columns of the verandah.

The feller sniffed: he knew where he was. In the room, as in all brothel rooms, a carnal aroma hung in the air, as fundamental as sweat, the exposed odor from the body’s most private seams.

“Ordinarily,” I said, “Mr. Sim wouldn’t have opened up for just anyone. Like I say, he knows me. They all do. Not that I’m bragging. But it’s the convenience of it.”

“I’m very grateful to you,” he said. He was sincere. The house on Muscat Lane was a classic Asian massage parlor and brothel. If it had been a new semidetached house on a suburban street he would not have stayed. But when he spoke there was the same nervous quaver in his voice as when he had spied the rat. He was trembling, massaging his knees.

That made half the excitement for a feller, the belief that it was dangerous, illegal, secretive; the bewildering wait in a musky anteroom, swallowing fear in little gulps. A feller’s fear was very good for me and the girls: it made the feller quick; he’d pay without a quibble and take any girl that was offered; he’d fumble and hurry, not bothering to take his socks off or get under the sheet. Fifteen minutes later he’d be out of the room, grinning sheepishly, patting his belt buckle, glancing sideways into a mirror to see whether he was scratched or bitten — and I’d be home early. I disliked the fellers who had no nervous enthusiasm, who sat sulkily in chairs nursing a small Anchor, as gloom-struck and slow as if they were at the dentists, and saying, “She’s too old,” or “Got anything a little less pricy?”

“I wonder what’s keeping your friend,” said the feller, leaning over to look through the door. The movement made him release one knee; that leg panicked and jumped.

“He’ll be along in a jiffy,” I said. “He’s probably getting one all dolled up for you.”

“I was going to ask you something,” the feller said. “The purser on the ship said there were pickpockets here. People in Singapore are supposed to be very light fingered.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I said.

“I was just asking,” he said. “The purser lost a month’s salary that way.”

“It happens, sure,” I said. “But no one can take that fat pig-skin thing you cart around.”

“How did you—?” He hitched forward and slapped his backside. “It’s gone!”

I pulled his wallet out of my pocket and threw it over to him. “Don’t get excited. I pinched it when we saw the rat. It was hanging out a mile — I figured you might lose it.”

The explanation upset him. He checked to see that all the money was there, then tucked the wallet inside his blazer. “So it was a rat.”

“Well—” I started, and tried to laugh, but at that moment Mr. Sim came through the door with Betty, who was carrying a tray with two beers and some cold towels on it. “Hi, sugar,” I said.

The nutcracker, I called her, because her legs were shaped exactly like that instrument; she was not simply bowlegged — her legs had an extraordinary curvature, and the way they angled into the hem of her skirt gave no clue to how they could possibly be hinged. Her legs were the kind a child draws on the sketch of a girl, a stave at each side of a flat skirt.

Betty poured the beers and handed us each a cold towel with a pair of tongs. She took a seat next to the feller and waited for him to wipe his face with the towel and have a sip of the beer before she put her brave hand casually into his lap. The feller clutched his blazer, where he had stuck the wallet.

“You like boochakong?” asked Betty.

The feller looked at me. “They understand that my ship is leaving at six-twenty?”

“She know,” said Mr. Sim. “I tell her. Betty very nice girl. She… good.”

“She’s a sweetheart. She’ll really go to town on you,” I said to the feller; and to Betty, “You take good care of him — he’s an old pal of mine.” I stood up. “Well, nice meeting you.”

“You’re not going, are you?” said the feller. He plucked Betty’s hand out of his lap and stood up.

“Things to do,” I said, burying my face in the cold towel. “I’ve got to get some rest — the fleet’s in this week. Those fellers run me ragged.”

“I’ll never find my way back.”

“Can ring for a taxi,” said Mr. Sim. “Where you are dropping?”

The feller was beside me. “Stay,” he whispered, “please. I’ll pay for your trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” I said. “I just wanted to help you out. You looked lost.”

“I’ll treat you to one,” he said confidentially.

“It doesn’t cost me anything,” I said.

“I thought maybe you were doing this for the money.”

“I get my share from Mr. Sim,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“So there’s no way I can get you to stay?”

“You can ask.”

“I’m asking, for Pete’s sake!”

“Okay, I’ll hang on here,” I said. “Take your time.”

“Thanks a million,” he said, and nodded in gratitude.

“What your name?” asked Betty, steering him out of the room, carrying his glass of beer.

“Oh, no you don’t!” I heard the feller say to her on the stairs.

“He’ll be back in ten minutes,” I said to Mr. Sim.

“No, no!” said Mr. Sim. “Rich fella — old man. Halfhour or more-lah.”

“Bet you a fiver.”

“Bet,” said Mr. Sim, eager to gamble.

We put our money on the table and checked our watches.

“Quiet tonight,” I said.

“Last night! English ship! Fifty fella!” He shook his head. “All the girls asleeping now. Tired! You like my new wireless set?”

“Nifty,” I said. “Nice tone. It’s a good make.”

“The fella come back, he want me to eat a mice?”

It was Mr. Sim’s party trick. He ate live ones whole to astonish and mortify rowdy seamen; he appeared beside a feller who was getting loud and offered a handful of them. When they were refused, Mr. Sim would dangle one before his mouth, allowing it to struggle, and then pop it in like a peanut, saying, “Yum, yum!” It was a shrewd sort of clowning, and it never failed to quiet a customer.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Might give him a fright. He’s scared of rats.”

“Rats,” Mr. Sim laughed. “During Japanese occupation we eating them.”

“Rat foo yong,” I said. “Yech.”

“No,” Mr. Sim said, seriously. “Egg very scarce. We make with tow foo, little bit chilies, and choy-choy.” He wrinkled his nose. “We hungry-lah.”

“I’m not scared of rats,” I said. “But I really hate cockroaches. I suppose you could say I’m scared of them.” And what else? I thought — odd combinations: locked rooms, poverty, embarrassment, torture, secret societies, someone in a club asking me “Who are you,” death, sun-bathing.

“Aren’t you scared of anything, Mr. Sim?”

“No,” he said firmly, and he looked handsome.

“What about the police?”

“These Malay boys? I not scared. But they making trouble on me.”

“Buy them off,” I said.

“I buy-lah,” he said. “I give kopi-money. Weekly!”

“So what’s the problem?”

“These politics,” said Mr. Sim. “The other year some fella in here shopping votes—‘Okay, Sim Xiensheng, vote for me-lah’—and now they wanting close up house. Pleh!” He laughed — the insincere, unmodulated Chinese cackle, the mirthless snort of a feller surprised by a strong dig in the ribs. It was brief, it had no echo. He said, “They close up house — where we can go? What we can do?”

“Go someplace where they can’t find you,” I said. “I know a few. I’ve been playing with the idea of starting up on my own, something really fancy.” Mine would be at the edge of town, a large house with stained-glass windows — dolphins, lilies, and white horses — to keep the sun out; an orchestra in the parlor — six black South Indians with brilliantined hair, wearing tuxedos, playing violins; silk cushions on the divans, gin drinks and sweet sherbets. “Jack’s place,” they’d call it.

Mr. Sim laughed again, the same reluctant honking. “You not start a house. You get trouble.”

“Well, no more than you.”

“More,” said Mr. Sim, and he showed me his face, the Hakka mask of a tough pug, the broad bony forehead, no eyebrows, just a fold in the brow, the swollen eyes and lower lip thrust out and the hard angular jaw. He said again, “More.”

The door opened.

“Hi there,” said the feller, moving quickly toward us. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Mr. Sim looked at his watch and grunted.

“That’s mine, I believe,” I said, and scooped up the ten dollars from the table.

The feller sat down. Betty brought him a glass of tea and a hot towel. The feller wiped his hands thoroughly, then started on his chin, but thought better of it and made a face; he dropped the towel on the tin tray. “Shall we go?”

“I’ll just knock this back,” I said, showing him my glass of beer. “Won’t be a minute.”

He had crossed his legs and was kicking one up and down and attempting to whistle. What looked like impatience was shame.

“Betty… good,” said Mr. Sim.

“Very pleasant,” said the feller. But he avoided looking at Betty as he said so. To me, he said, “You must find Singapore a fascinating place. I wish we had more time here. We’ve got three days in Colombo, then off to Mombasa — a day there — then—”

“Nice watch,” said Mr. Sim. “Omega. How much?”

“Thank you,” said the feller, and pulled his sleeve down to cover it. “Er, shouldn’t we be going?”

“Plenty of time,” I said. “It’s only a little after eleven. Say, how’d it go inside?”

“Not, um, too bad,” he said, still kicking his leg. “Say, I really think we must—”

“Jack,” said Betty.

“Yoh?”

“He got one this big!” She measured eight inches with her hands. It was a vulgar gesture — the feller winced — but her hands were so small and white, the bones so delicate, they made it graceful, turning the coarseness into a dancer’s movement. Only her open mouth betrayed the vulgarity. I saw a tattoo on her arm and reached over to touch it.

“That’s pretty,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”

“No,” she said. She covered it.

The feller coughed, stood up, and started for the door.

“See you next time,” said Mr. Sim.

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Don’t mention. Bye-bye, mister,” he called to the feller. Then Mr. Sim drew me aside. “You taking girls out to ships, some people they don’t like this but I say forget it. Everybody know you a good fella and I say Jack my friend. No trouble from Jack. Two hand clap, one hand no clap. But you listen. You don’t pay kopi-money. You don’t start up a house, or—” He rubbed his nose with the knuckles of his fist and looked at the floor, saying softly, “Chinese fella sometime very awkward.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.

“Would it be safe to take a taxi?” the feller asked when we got to the corner of Sultana Street.

“Oh, sure,” I said, and flagged one down.

On the way to the pier I said, “It’s rather late for intros, but anyway. My name’s Jack Flowers — what’s yours?”

“Milton,” he said quickly. “George Milton. If you’re ever in Philadelphia it’d be swell to see you. I wish I had one of my business cards to give you, but I’m fresh out.”

“That’s all right,” I said. He was lying about his name, which on the I.D. card in his wallet was W. M. Griswold; and his address was in Baltimore. It might have been an innocent lie, but it hurt my feelings: he didn’t want to know me. I had rescued him, and now he was going away.

“The first thing I’m going to do when I get down to my cabin is brush my teeth,” he said. The taxi stopped.

“I don’t blame you, George,” I said.

“Will you take twenty bucks?”

“Now?” I said. “Yes.”

“Be good,” he said, handing it over.

It was still early and I was within walking distance of the seafront bars. I strolled along the pier, stepping carefully so I wouldn’t get my shoes dirty on the greasy rope that lay in coils between the parked cars and taxis. At Prince Edward Road, near the bus depot, two fellers were standing under a streetlamp trying to read what looked like a guidebook. They were certainly tourists, and probably from Griswold’s liner; both wore the kind of broad-brimmed hat strangers imagine to be required headgear in the tropics. It gave them away instantly: no one in Singapore wore a hat, except the Chinese, to funerals.

I walked over to them and stopped, rattling coins in my pocket with my fist and negligently whistling, as if waiting for a bus. Their new shoes confirmed they were strangers. I could tell a person’s nationality by his shoes. Their half-inch soles said they were Americans.

“Kinda hot.”

They turned and enthusiastically agreed. Then they asked their reckless question in a mild way. I nodded, I whistled, I shook my jingling coins; I was the feller they wanted.

It was so easy I could not stop. I hustled at a dead run until the streets were empty and the bars closed. New to the enterprise, I had the beginner’s stamina. It wasn’t the money that drove me; I can’t call it holy charity, but it was as close to a Christian act as that sort of friendly commerce could be, keeping those already astray happy and from harm, within caution’s limits. I raided my humanity to console them with reminders of safety, while reminding myself of the dangers. I was dealing with the very innocent, blind men holding helpless sticks; their passions were guesses. It especially wounded me that Griswold had lied about his name: in my conscientious shepherding I believed I was doing him, and everyone, a favor.

Guiding rather than urging, I paid close attention to a feller’s need and was protective, adaptable, and well-known for being discreet. In those days it mattered, and though I acted this way out of kindness, not to impress anyone as a smoothie, it won me customers. There were so many then, and so grateful. I shouldn’t remember Griswold among them, for he was so typical as to be unmemorable — something about the very desire for sex or the illicit made a feller anonymous without trying. But Griswold had lied; the lie marked him and identified his otherwise nameless face and brought back that evening. His distrust made me relax my normally cautious discretion, and for years afterward if a feller said he was from Baltimore I replied, “Know a feller named Griswold there?” Some knew him, or said they did, and one night a feller said, “Yes, we were great friends. That was such a damned shame, wasn’t it?” And I never mentioned him again, this man who had refused my grace.

6

THE HOUSE on Muscat Lane was one of several in Singapore that did business in the old way. Any port is bound to cater to the sexually famished, but the age and wealth of a city, until recently, could be determined by how central the brothels were. Once, in old and great cities, they were always convenient, off shady boulevards, a stone’s throw from the state house; in the postwar boom they went suburban to avoid politicians and high rents; then they moved back to the center — Madam Lum’s place was near a supermarket — and it was no longer possible to tell from their location the city’s age, though prosperity could still be measured by the number of whores in a place: the poorest and most primitive, having none, made do with forced labor, blackmail, or unsatisfying casual arrangements in ditches and alleyways and in the rear seats of cars.

Singapore was very old then, not in years but in attitude and design because of the way the immigrants had transplanted and continued their Chinese cities, duplicating Foochow in one district, Fukien in another. As a feller who had seen Naples and Palermo duplicated down to building styles, hawkers’ cries, gangster practices, and patron saints in the North End of Boston, I understood that traditional instinct to preserve. The completely Chinese flavor of vice in Singapore made it attractive to a curious outsider, at the same time releasing him from guilt and doubt, for its queer differences (Joyce Li-ho had the tattoo of a panther leaping up her inner thigh) made it a respectable diversion, like the erotic art anthropologists solemnly photograph, maharani and maharajah depicted as fellatrix and bugger on the Indian temple. The sequence of activities in a Chinese brothel parodied Oriental hospitality: the warm welcome — the host bowing from the waist — the smoke, the chat, the cold towel, then the girl — usually the feller chose from one in a parade; money changed hands in the bedroom when the feller was naked and excited; then the stunt itself, and afterward, a hot towel and a glass of cold tea on the verandah while some old amahs ironed bedsheets and yapped beyond the rail.

It was the Chinese host’s puritanism, his ability to make pleasure into a ritual, that added so much enjoyable delay to it. And though the Chinese customers with a harelike speed treated the whole affair with no more concern than we would in popping out for a quick hamburger, the fellers I took along, mainly gawking travelers bent on carrying away an armload of souvenirs, welcomed the chance to enter, and more than enter — participate — in a cultural secret, to be alone with the exotic Oriental girl in a ceremonial state of undress, and later to have that unusual act of love to report upon. It was much appreciated because it was perfect candor, private discovery, the enactment of the white bachelor’s fantasy, the next best thing to marrying a sweet obedient Chinese girl. I could provide, without danger, the ultimate souvenir: the experience, in the flesh, of fantasy.

By never putting a price on my services, and by joking about the enterprise the feller would take so seriously — Americans treating it, they’d say, as part of their education, continentals looking on it as a kind of critical therapy, the English preferring not to discuss it — I always came out better. I was prompt and responsive; I didn’t insist on my presence; and I had a sense of humor.

“That was quite an experience,” the feller would say, his face flushed.

“Glad you approved,” I’d say, hailing my trishaw for the ride home.

“You’ve been a great help. Really, I—”

“Don’t mention it. It’s just a question of mind over matter, ain’t it?”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t mind and you don’t matter — hyah!”

My dedication to these souls, whom anyone else would call suckers, was so complete it made me unselfish in a way that calmed and rewarded me, for paradoxically it was this unselfish dedication that was commercially useful — I was making money. I was not so much a fool as to think that the money had been virtuously earned — there was no brotherhood in a cash transaction; my small virtue was a fidelity to other people’s passion, but I would not martyr myself for it, I expected some payment. I was not a pimp with a heart of gold; however, I knew and could prove that I had saved many fellers from harm and many girls from brutes — not only from greedy cabbies, but the curfew districts controlled by the secret societies, the streets where all the pretty girls were men with kukris in their handbags, the girls with pox, the sadists, the clip joints, the houses you came away from with the fungus on your pecker known as “Rangoon Itch.” “I’ve saved a lot of fellers from Rangoon Itch in my time,” is hardly a saintly testimony, but it might be the epitaph of a practical man who gave relief the only way he could, trusting instinct and operating in the dark. I took blame, I risked damnation, I didn’t cheat: A Useful Man, my tombstone motto would go. I was a knowledgeable friend in a remote place, able to read obscure and desperate verbal signals; with a deliberately corny sense of humor — the undemanding comedy that relaxed the fellers by avoiding all off-color or doubtful jokes, specifically the ones relating to lechery, which in the circumstances could only annoy the fellers by mocking or challenging their heat.

And Singapore helped. It was that atmosphere that had been exported with the immigrants from China and the oldie-worldie style of the city’s subdivision into districts. To say that there was only one street in Singapore where you could buy a mattress is to describe the rigidness of the pattern; ship chandlers occupied one street, coffin makers another, banks another, printeries another. Brothels took up a whole block, mixed higgledy-piggledy with Chinese hotels, from Muscat Lane to Malacca Street, and the area was self-contained, bordered on one side by bars and noodle shops and on the other by laundries and pox doctors.

“It’s like something out of a myth,” Griswold had said. Without fuss, the excesses of Shanghai were available in the dream district — opium dens here, brothels and massage parlors and cockfights there — constructed by the wishful immigrant who in his homesick fantasy remembered a childhood longing for wealth and provided for his pleasure with the tourists’ subsidy. An American appropriately complimented the unreality of it by saying, “It’s just like a movie!”

“Jack, I want to tell you I feel very lucky,” the same feller went on. “Give them a few years and they’ll pull this all down and build over it — apartment houses, car parks, pizza joints, every lousy thing they can think of. Tokyo’s already getting commercialized.”

We were on Sago Lane, near Loon’s Tip-Top; through the upstairs window of Loon’s we could see two Chinese girls in red dresses, one smoking and looking out at the sky, the other combing her long hair.

“They’ll put a gas station there or some dumb thing. It gives me the creeps to think about it,” he said. “It’ll just ruin it.”

“It makes my blood boil,” I said. But I could not match his anger.

Then he said something I have thought of many times since: “I feel damned lucky,” he said. “At least I can say I knew what it was like in the old days.”

Nineteen fifty-nine! The old days!

But he was right; it was pleasant then, and it changed. Answering the squalor of the city were the girls; noiseless and glittering and narrow as snakes, they looked like anyone’s idea of the Oriental concubine. That was theatrical, a kind of costuming: the whore’s mask depicted the client’s sexual ideal — they were expected to pose that way, as in white shoes, I was expected to look like a pimp. It was the nearest word, but it didn’t describe me: I was gentle. The girls were practical and businesslike. Their obsession was with good health, and they treated their tasks like ritual medicine or minor surgery, assisting like sexy nurses, those dentist’s helpers who worked on complicated extractions, bending over a feller’s open mouth, making him comfortable and being quick when he grunted unusually. They believed in ghosts and had a horror of hair and kissing and stinks and dirt, and complained we smelled like cheese. Some didn’t feel a thing, but just lay there sacrificed and spread and might say, “You are finished, yes?” before a feller had hardly started. Most had the useful skill of the reliable worker, the knack of being able to do their job convincingly and well without having the slightest interest in it, and all had the genius to be remote at the moment of greatest intimacy, a contemplative gift. They were sensationally foul-mouthed, but they swore in English, and I was certain from the soft way they spoke to each other in Chinese that they seldom swore in their own language, and had that learner’s curious habit of finding it easy to say “fuck” in another tongue, for a foreign swearword is practically inoffensive except to the person who has learned it early in life and knows its social limits.

Dirty talk stimulated a lot of fellers, but left others cold. I remember a feller demanding to leave the Honey Bar, and as we left, saying disgustedly, “I could never screw a girl that said bullshit. Bullshit this, bullshit that. I’m not a machine. I like a girl I can talk to, a little human warmth.”

Many of the girls were modest in a conventional way, which even as a pretense was a compelling sexiness in a whore: “I couldn’t get the little doll to take her dress off,” was a frequent comment from the fellers, and as no tipping was allowed in the houses, no amount of money could persuade the girls to disrobe. Yet far from diminishing their effectiveness it made them sought-after; any variation increased desire and the silk dresses gave these cold quick girls an accidental allure, titillating by flouncy mystification, partly concealing the act in the dark, keeping enough of it quaintly secret for a feller’s interest to be provoked. A girl stark naked was not sexy. Hing was driven wild by even a clothed woman on all fours — as long as she was Australian and large; Ogham said the finest pleasure was to stick an ice pick into a woman’s bloomered bottom; and once in the Bandung, when we were on the subject, Yardley said with awful sincerity, “Jesus, I love to see a woman with her mouth hanging open.”

I knew the girls too well to think of them as kindly and cheerful, but they understood their cues and were dependable. Observe what virtue was in them: obedience, usefulness, reliability, economy — not mortification and solitary prayer. On one occasion, boarding a launch for a run out to a ship, Doris Goh (never absent, never late) stumbled and fell into the water at the quayside. She could not swim and went rigid as soon as she went under. I hauled her out; soaking wet, her dress stuck to her, her make-up was streaked, and her nice hairdo became a heavy rope of loose braid. I told her she could go home if she wanted to, but she said no and soldiered on, earning forty dollars in the wheel house while her dress dried on a hanger in the engine room. They were unambitious in some ways, but not at all lazy and didn’t steal.

So it surprised me — my amusement crept upon by an old slow fear — when I opened the Straits Times and saw, under ISLAND-WIDE VICE RING BROKEN — JOO CHIAT RAID NETS 35, a photograph of five girls being dragged by the arms toward a police van while grim Malay policemen watched, sturdily planted on widely spread bandy legs, holding trucheons and riot shields. The girls’ faces were very white from the flash bulb’s brightness and their astonished eyebrows were high and black, their objecting mouths in the attitude of shouting. That they were objecting did not surprise me — they were indignant, an emotion as understandable in them as in any harmless lathe operator yanked from his machine. But that particular raid was a great surprise: the Joo Chiat house was thought to be safe, with a Chinese clientele, protected by the fierce Green Triangle secret society whose spiderlike and pockmarked members could be seen at any time of the day or night playing cards by the back entrance, their knives and bearing scrapers close to hand. The article in the paper said this was “the first raid in an all-out campaign launched by the P.A.P. to rid the island of so-called massage parlors.”

There were two raids the following day. One at an opium den resulted in the arrests of seven elderly men, six of whose worried, sunken-eyed faces appeared in the paper; the seventh was pictured on a stretcher with his hands clasped — he had broken his leg when he slipped trying to escape across a steep tile roof. The second raid was at a massage parlor very close to Muscat Lane where all the girls, and the decor, were Thai. The raids disturbed me, but the picture I made of it in my mind was not of the girls — it was the terrifying vision of the old addict being hounded in his pajamas across a clattering rooftop.

I decided to lie low that night at the Bandung. “You don’t understand the political background, Jack,” Yates said. “I’d steer clear of Chinatown if I were you.”

“Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” said Yardley.

“I never go to Chinatown,” said Froggett. “Bloody waste of time.”

“Harry Lee’s putting the boot in,” said Smale. “I hate that little sod.”

“I was just wondering what was going on,” I said.

“Nothing that concerns you,” said Yardley. “So keep out of it.”

The next morning I went to see Mr. Sim. He seemed suspicious at my arriving so early, and reluctantly let me in. I asked him about the raids.

“Must be careful,” he said. “How Kheng Fatt is keeping, okay?”

“Hing? He’s doing all right. I’m only putting in a couple of hours a day, unless I’ve got business on a ship.”

“So what you are worried? You got a job, neh?”

“If you want to call it that. Look, I earn peanuts there — little-little money. I can’t bank on it. If they go on closing the houses down and arresting the girls I’m going to be out of luck. And so are you!”

“Better than in jail.”

“What are you going to do?”

He didn’t look at me, but he showed me his face. He said, “Funny thing. You know new wireless I got? Yes? It don’t work now. I enjoy that wireless set, but it need repair.”

“Where are you planning to go?” I asked.

He discovered his shirt and smoothed the pockets.

“They say a lot of the cops are plainclothes men,” I said. “You know, Special Branch fellers wearing shirts like mine and plain old pants, pretending they want a girl. They pay up and just before they get into the saddle they say, ‘Okay, put your clothes on — you’re under arrest.’ I think that’s terrible, don’t you?”

Mr. Sim twisted the tail of his shirt, and he worked his jaw back and forth as he twisted.

“I’ll level with you, Mr. Sim. The reason I came over is I’ve got a plan. We know they’re trying to close things up — they’ve already nabbed about a hundred people. So why wait? Why not just put our heads together and set up somewhere safe. Like I was telling you. We’ll go where they least expect us, rent a big house up on Thomson Road or near a cemetery, get about ten girls or so and run a real quiet place — put up a sign in front saying ‘The Wongs’ or ‘Hillcrest’ or ‘Dunroamin.’ What do you say to that?”

“It is a very hot day.” He went imbecilic.

“Come on, we haven’t got much time. Are you interested or not?”

“It is a hot day,” said Mr. Sim. “I am expecting my auntie.”

“No taxis allowed — only private cars, no syces. Girls by appointment. If you think the Dunroamin idea is silly we can put up a sign saying ‘Secretarial School — Typing and Shorthand Lessons.’ No one’ll know the difference.”

He had twisted his shirttail into a hank of rope and now he was knotting it. “My auntie is very old. I tell her to stop so much smoking — forty-over sticks a day! But old peoples. Kss!”

“Okay, forget it.” I stood up.

Mr. Sim let go of his shirt and leaped to the door. “Bye-bye, Jack. See you next time. Don’t mention.”

That night I brought a feller to Muscat Lane. I had met him in a bar on Stamford Road. He had asked me if I knew a good “cathouse,” and I told him to follow me. But the house was in darkness, the shutters were closed, and the red light over the altar was turned off. I rapped the lock against the gate bar, but no one stirred. Mr. Sim had run out on me.

“This looks like a washout,” the feller said. “I’m not even in the mood now.”

“They’re worried about the cops. There’s a political party here that’s putting the heat on — trying to close down the whole district. They’ve got everyone scared. It didn’t use to be this way, but maybe if we walk over—”

“I don’t know why it is,” said the feller, “but people are always saying to me, ‘You should have been here last year.’ It really burns me up.”

“That’s natural,” I said. “But you gotta understand the political background, you see.”

“Political background is crap,” he said. “I’m going back to the ship.”

“If there’s anything else you want, anything at all,” I said. “I could find you a gal easy enough. Fix you up in a hotel. Bed and breakfast.”

He shook his head. “I had my heart set on a cathouse.”

“We could try another one,” I said. “But I don’t want you to get in dutch. How would it look if you got your picture in the papers — cripe!”

“Makes you stop and think, don’t it?” he said.

“Sure does,” I said. “But if there’s anything else—”

“Naw,” he said, but saying so, he laughed and said again, “Naw,” as if he was trying to discourage a thought. I was hoping he didn’t want a transvestite — it would be hours before they’d be on Bugis Street.

“What is it?” I asked in a whisper. “Go ahead, try me. God, you don’t want to leave empty-handed, do you?”

“Naw, I was just kicking around an idea that popped up,” he said, laughing down his nose. “I don’t know, I’ve never seen one.”

“Seen what?”

He stopped laughing and said gravely, “Back home they call them skin flicks.”

The room was stifling with all the shades drawn, and the screen was a bedsheet, which struck me as uniquely repellent. We sat, six of us, wordlessly fixed on the blue squares jumping and flickering on the screen while the rattling projector whirred: the countdown — a few numbers were missing; the title — something about a brush salesman; the opening shot — a man knocking at a door. We fidgeted when the man knocked; no knock was heard. It was a silent film.

The absence of a soundtrack necessitated many close-ups of facial expressions; and a story was attempted, for both characters — salesman and housewife — were clothed, implying a seduction, the classic plot of conquest with a natural climax — an older concept of pornography. The salesman wore a tweed double-breasted suit and his hair was slick and wavy. I guessed it was late forties, but what country? The housewife wore a long bathrobe trimmed with white fur, and when she sat down the front flapped open. She laughed and tucked it back together. The salesman sat beside her and rolled his eyes. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one, a Camel. So it was America.

He opened his case of samples and pulled out a limp contraceptive and made a face (“Oh gosh!”) and shoved it back. Then there was an elaborate business with the brushes, various shapes and sizes. He demonstrated each one by tickling the housewife in different places, starting on the sole of her foot. Soon he was pushing a feather duster under her loosening bathrobe. The housewife was laughing and trying to hold her robe shut, but the horseplay went on, the robe slipped off her shoulders.

I recognized the sofa, a large prewar claw-foot model with thick velvet cushions, and just above it on the wall a picture of a stag feeding at a mountain pool. The man took off his shoes. This was interesting: he wore a suit but these were workman’s shoes, heavy-soled ones with high counters and large bulbs for toes — the steel-toed shoes a man who does heavy work might wear. His argyle socks had holes in them and he had a chain around his neck with a religious medal on it. His muscled arms and broad shoulders confirmed he was a laborer; he also wore a wedding ring. I guessed he had lost his job; as a Catholic he would not have acted in a blue movie on a Sunday, and if it was a weekday and he had a job he would not have acted in the movie at all. Out the apartment window the sun shone on rooftops, but I noticed he did not take his socks off. Perhaps it was cold in the apartment. Afterward he walked back to his wife through some wintry American city and said, “Hey honey, look what I won — twenty clams!”

The housewife was more complicated. Judging from her breasts she had had more than one child. I wondered where they were. There was a detailed shot of her moving her hand — long perfect fingernails: she didn’t do housework. Who looked after her kids? From the way she sat on the sofa, on the edge, not using the pillows, I knew it was not her apartment. She took off the fancy bathrobe with great care — either it was not hers (it was rather big) or she was poor enough to value it. She had a very bad bruise on the top of her thigh; someone had recently thumped her; and now I could see the man’s appendix scar, a vivid one.

Two details hinted that the housewife wasn’t American: her legs and armpits were not shaved, and she was not speaking. The man talked, but her replies were exaggerated faces: awe, interest, lust, hilarity, pleasure, surprise. She kissed the man’s lips and then her head slid down his chest, past the appendix scar — it was fresh, the reason he was out of a job: he had to wait until it healed before he could go back to any heavy work. The housewife opened her mouth; she had excellent teeth and pierced ears — a war bride, maybe Italian, deserted by her GI husband (he thumped her and took the children). The camera stayed on her face for a long time, her profile moved back and forth, and even though it was impossible now for her mouth to show any expression, as soon as she closed her eyes abstraction was on her face — she was tense, her eyes were shut tight, a moment of dramatic meditation on unwilling surrender: she wasn’t acting.

Mercifully, the camera moved to a full view of the room. On the left there was a wing chair with a torn seat, a coffee table holding a glass ashtray with cigarette butts in it (they had talked it over—Are you sure you don’t mind? — perhaps rehearsed it), and on the right, the face of a waterstain on the wall, a fake fireplace with a half-filled bottle on the mantlepiece — the Catholic laborer had needed a drink to go through with it. There had been a scene. If you’re not interested we’ll find someone else. And: Okay, let’s get it over with. It was breaking my heart.

There was a shot of the front door. It flew open and a large naked woman stood grinning at the pair on the floor — this certainly was the owner of the fancy bathrobe (the cameraman’s girl friend?). She joined them, vigorously, but I was so engrossed in the tragic suggestions I saw in their nakedness I had not questioned the door. It was a silent movie, but the door had opened with a bang and a clatter. The feller beside me had turned around and was saying, “What do we do now?”

7

WITH SOME kidding fictor’s touches, by changing the time of day and my tone of voice to make the story truer, by intensifying it to the point of comedy where it was a bearable memory, my escape from the blue movie raid became part of my repertoire, and within a year I was telling it at the bar of my own place, Dunroamin: “—Then the Chief Inspector, a Scotty, says to me, ‘Have I not seen you somewhere before?’ and I says, ‘Not the club, by any chance?’ and he says, ‘Jack, I’ll be jiggered — fancy finding you in a place like this!’ ‘I can explain everything,’ I says. ‘Confidentially, I thought they were showing Gone with the Wind,’ and he laughs like hell. ‘Look,’ he says in a whisper, ‘I’m a bit short-staffed. Give me a hand rounding up some of this kit and we’ll say no more about it.’ So I unplugged the projector and carried it out to the police van and later we all joked about it over a beer. And to top it off I still haven’t found out which club he had in mind!”

I walked through the bar at Dunroamin all night, chatting fellers up, introducing the girls, and settling arguments.

“If you’ve got a certain attitude toward cats, you’re queer they say. Ain’t that right, Jack?”

“Sure. If you want to bugger a male cat, that means you’re queer, prih-hih!”

As always, my clowning went over well, but like my new version of the blue movie story it was the clowning that worried me — the comedy struck unexpected notes of despair. I turned my worst pains into jokes to make myself small and to obscure my sick aches; it was my fear of being known well and pitied — my humor was motivated by humility. I sang songs like “What Did Robinson Crusoe Do with Friday on a Saturday Night?” and saying, “I wouldn’t have anyone here that I wouldn’t invite into my own home,” I treated Dunroamin — where I had moved in with my amah and pets — as another joke. But it was no laughing matter. I had plowed my whole savings into it. My refusal to admit I took it seriously was my way of guarding against anyone feeling sorry for me if it failed.

It didn’t fail; and the feature of it that I had conceived as a joke of last desperation was what saved the house from collapse. The house itself was not large, but it was walled in and set back from the road. I picked it for its high wall and rented it cheap from a superstitious towkay: it was on Kampong Java Road and the rear opened on to the Lower Bukit Timah Road cemetery. Those several acres of tombstones and the fact of the house being associated with some Japanese atrocities accounted for the low rent, but gave me headaches when it came to getting girls to live in. The joke was the Palm Court orchestra: fellers often came and paid my slightly higher bar prices to sit and listen.

Finding girls who didn’t believe in ghosts was very difficult — the house was haunted; finding South Indian violinists was easy — many were looking for work. Mr. Weerakoon was my first violinist; he was backed up by Mr. (“Manny”) Manickawasagam and Mr. Das. Albert Ratnam played the piano, Mr. (“Subra”) Subramaniam the cello, Mr. Pillay the clarinet. Manny, an impressive baritone, sometimes sang, and Subra switched to the accordian for the faster numbers. They turned up punctually at six every evening in their old-fashioned tuxedos and bow ties, smelling of Indian talcum, breathless after their hike from Serangoon Road. Their hair was neatly parted in the middle, making two patches of brilliantined waves which shook free to glistening black springs as soon as they began playing. Weerakoon, who had a severely large handlebar mustache, made them practice until seven, and he interrupted them constantly, saying, “No, no, no! — Take that from the top again,” while looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

He refused praise. I would say, “A very nice rendition of ‘Roses from the South.’”

“Hopeless. But what to do? Ratnam can’t read music.”

“It was very bouncy. I’ve never heard it played bouncy before.”

“Fast tempo — I think it suits your house. But Pillay was dragging his feet. We need much practice.” And pinching the waxy tails of his mustache, he’d add, “We shall have umple of trouble with more tricky numbers.”

Weerakoon persuaded me to redecorate the front lounge and turn it into a music room. He had me print a concert card with the selections and intervals listed on it, menu fashion: he propped this on a music stand at the door. The orchestra had the effect Mr. Sim obtained by swallowing live mice — it fixed restless seamen into postures of calm, and later they told me Dunroamin had class. I could see them from the bar, where I stood to greet fellers arriving: a row of rough-looking men with sunburned arms, sitting and listening attentively on the folding chairs. And all night the scree-scree from the music room took the curse off the banging bedroom doors and the noisy plumbing, the creaky bedsprings and quacking fans, and that loud way the girls had of washing, sluicing themselves with dippers and gargling at the same time.

The Singapore residents, clubbable ones especially, flattered themselves that the Palm Court orchestra was for them, though some complained, calling Weerakoon and the others “greasy babu fiddlers.” Some said I should sack them and get a couple of girls to put on a show. But I resisted these suggestions — sex exhibitions saddened me nearly as much as blue movies: this panicky nakedness was desire’s dead end. The Palm Court orchestra, central to what I came to think of as my little mission station — a necessary comfortable house on the island outpost — was for the seamen. I had discovered something about them that I had been too obtuse or distracted to grasp on the Allegro: most men who go to sea are quiet and conservative by nature, an attitude that is fostered by the small protected community on a ship where the slightest disorder can be fatal; even the youngest have elderly cautious tastes — pipe-smoking and hobbies — and few read newspapers; most are anxious in the company of women and very shy on land, natural drunkards and rather unsociable. It was for them that Mr. Weerakoon practiced the waltz from Swan Lake, and he encouraged them to make requests after he finished the selections listed on the concert card. Then, a seaman with a ruined face would lean over, making his wooden chair squawk, and in a gravelly voice ask for “Brightly Shines Our Wedding Day” or “Time on My Hands.”

My girls passed out cold towels from trays or leaned against the walls with their thin pale arms folded, or scuffed back and forth in the flapping broken slippers they always wore. In many ways, though it was not my wish — I was still groping to understand my job — Dunroamin was a traditional establishment, with cold towels, hot towels, glasses of tea, offering a massage at five dollars extra and all drinks more expensive than in a downtown bar; the oldest and frailest amahs did the heaviest work — yoked themselves to buckets of water and tottered upstairs to fill the huge stone shower jars, scrubbed sheets on the washboards out back, or boiled linen, which they stirred with wooden paddles, in frothy basins of hot evil-smelling water on the kitchen stove. In those same basins, after a quick rinse, they made mee-hoon soup and ladeled it out to the customers who demanded “real Chinese food.”

Dunroamin worked smoothly, but it was older than my devising: the system of payment — the chit pads in the bar, the shakedown in the bedroom — the jaga at the front gate (Ganapaty, who said, “I am a dog, only here to bark”), the thickly waxed oxblood-colored floors in the graceful white house, camouflaged by vast Angsana trees that dripped tiny yellow blossoms, flanked by servants’ quarters and a carriage shed; sloping rattan chairs with leg rests on the top floor verandah, the light knock on my back room and (though I insisted they call me Jack) the soft cry of “Tuan” with the morning tea, the skill of the Indian musicians and Weerakoon’s habit of saying “Blast” when he played a wrong note — it was all a colonial inheritance, and it had fallen to me. But if my whorehouse was a scale model of the imperial dream, I justified my exploitation by adding to it humor and generous charity, and by making everyone welcome.

What Chinese fellers visited, mostly embarrassed businessmen with names like Elliot Ching and Larry Woo, did so for the same reason the rest of the Chinese stayed away — because my girls made love to redheads. I watched from my corner of the long bar, near the telephone and Ganapaty’s emergency buzzer, greeting arrivals with, “Glad you could make it — what can I do you for?” and later watched them go down the gravel drive, each one depleted, rumpled from having dressed hurriedly — their ties and sometimes their socks stuffed in their back pockets — and wearing the pink face people associate with outrage but which I knew to be the meekness that comes after spending energy in a harmless way. It was pleasant to see them leave with new faces and I was flattered and reassured by their promises of generosity: “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, Jack—”

But I was the host. “Just settle your bar bill at the end of the month, thank you, and a very good night to you all.”

I got up early. In my pajamas at a sunny desk I totaled the previous night’s receipts and checked to see that the bar was well stocked and the rooms were clean — in each room a girl would be brushing her hair before a mirror, a houseful of girls brushing: it cheered me. It was a strenuous round of ordering and overseeing, making sure the laundry was done, the pilferage recorded, the grass cut, the house presentable; then, I took my shower, cut across the cemetery to Lower Bukit Timah Road and caught the number 4 Green Line bus to Beach Road, and climbed onto the stool in my little cubicle and took orders from Hing.

In the days when I had hustled on the street and in bars, saying “Kinda hot” to likely strangers, I was glad of the safety of Hing’s. I knew my job as a water clerk well enough to be able to do it easily. And though the money was nothing (any of my girls earned more in a week), the stool where I hooked my heels and pored over the shipping pages of the Straits Times was important. It was the basis for my visa, a perfect alibi, and a place to roost. But the success of Dunroamin made me consider quitting Hing’s.

I continued to get friendly promises of attention from the fellers who came to Dunroamin, yet my relationship with them remained a hustler-client one. I was a regular visitor to the clubs and knew most of the members; in the shipping offices of the Asia Insurance Building and in the Maritime Building, fellers called me by my first name and said how nice it was to see me. But they never stopped to pass the time of day. The talks I had with them took place at prearranged times and for a specific purpose; and I was seldom introduced to their friends. I was careful not to remind them that I knew more about them than their wives — and seeing them with their wives, by chance after a movie or at a cricket match at the Padang, it amazed me that the fellers came to Dunroamin: their wives were beautiful smiling girls (it was about this time that I had my fling with the Tanglin Club wife whom I reported as being “ever so nice”). My quickness might have disturbed the fellers. My attention to detail in arranging for girls to be sent out to ships or for club members to make a discreet visit in a trishaw for a tumble at Dunroamin could have been interpreted as somewhat suspicious, a kind of criminal promptitude, I think, the blackmailer’s dogged precision. Still, most of the fellers insisted I should get in touch if I ever had a problem.

Once, I had one. It was a simple matter. Mr. Weerakoon said he needed new violin strings and could not find any in the shops. I knew the importer; I had fixed him up on several occasions. I gave him a telephone call.

“Hi, this is Jack Flowers. Say, I’ve got a little problem here—”

“I’ll ring you back,” he said quickly, and the line went dead.

That was the last I heard from him. I asked about him at his club.

“Why don’t you leave the poor chap alone,” one of his pals — also a customer of mine — said. “You’ve got him scared rigid. He’s trying to make a decent living. If you start interfering it’ll all be up the spout.”

That was the last I heard from the pal, too. I got the message, and never again asked for a favor. But they continued to be offered. They sounded sincere. Late at night, after the larking, the contented pink-faced fellers were full of gratitude and good will. I had made them that way: I was the kind of angel I expected to visit me. They said I should look them up in Hong Kong; I should stop over some day and see their ships or factories; I should have lunch with them one day — or the noncommittal, “Jack, we must really meet for a drink soon.” The invitations came to nothing; after the business about the violin strings I never pursued them. So I stayed at Hing’s, as his water clerk, both for safety and reassurance: it was the only job I could legally admit to having — and soon I was to be glad I had it.

A young Chinese feller came in one evening. It was before six, the place was empty, and I was sitting at the bar having a coffee and reading the Malay Mail.

“Brandy,” he said, snapping his fingers at Yusof. “One cup.”

Yusof poured a tot of brandy into a snifter and went back to chipping ice in the sink.

I knew from his physique that the Chinese feller did not speak much English. The English-educated were plump from milk drinking, the Chinese-educated stuck to a traditional diet, bean curd and meat scraps — they were thin, weedy, like this feller, short, girlish, bony-faced. His hair was long and pushed back. His light silk sports shirt fit snugly to the knobs of his shoulders, and his wrists were so small his heavy watch slipped back and forth on his forearm like a bracelet. He kept looking around — not turning his head, but lowering it and twisting it sideways to glance across his arm.

“Bit early,” I said.

He looked into his drink, then raised it and gulped it all. It was a stagy gesture, well executed, but made him cough and gag, and as soon as he put the snifter back on the bar he went red-faced and breathless. He snapped his fingers again and said, “Kopi.”

“No coffee. Cold drink only,” said Yusof.

The feller frowned at my cup. Yusof reached for the empty snifter. The feller snatched it up and held it.

I heard footsteps on the verandah and went to the door, thinking it might be Mr. Weerakoon. I faced three Chinese who resembled the feller at the bar — short-sleeved shirts, long hair, sunglasses, skinny pinched faces. One was small enough to qualify as a dwarf. He swaggered over to a barstool and had difficulty hoisting himself up. Now the four sat in a row; they exchanged a few words and the one who had come in first asked for a coffee again.

Yusof shook his head. He looked at me.

“We don’t serve coffee here,” I said.

“That is kopi,” the feller said slowly. The others glared at me.

“So it is,” I said. “Yusof, give the gentlemen what they want.”

At once the four Chinese raised their voices, and getting courage from the little victory, one laughed out loud. The dwarf hopped off his stool and came over to me.

“You wants book?” he asked.

“What kind?”

“Special.” He unbuttoned his shirt and took out a flat plastic bag with some pamphlets inside.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Finish your coffee and hop it.”

“Swedish,” he said, dangling the plastic bag.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t read Swedish.”

“Is not necessary. Look.” He undid the bag and pulled one out. He held it up for me to see, a garish cover. I could not make it out at first, then I saw hair, mouths, bums, arms.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Look.” He turned the page. It was like a photograph of an atrocity, a mass killing — naked people knotted on a floor.

“I don’t need them,” I said. He shook the picture in my face. “No — I don’t want it. Yusof, tell this creep I don’t want his pictures.”

“Tuan—” Yusof started, but the dwarf cut him off.

“You buy,” said the dwarf.

“I not buy.”

Now I looked at the three fellers near the bar. The first had swiveled around on his stool. He held the brandy snifter out at arm’s length and dropped it. It crashed. Upstairs, a giggle from a girl in a beaverboard cubicle.

“How much?” I asked.

“Cheap.”

“Okay, I’ll take a dozen. Now get out of here.”

The dwarf buttoned the pamphlets into his shirt and said, “You come outside. Plenty in car. You choose. Very nice.”

I shook my head. “I not choose. I stay right here.”

Glass breaks with a liquid sound, like the instantaneous threat of flood. One feller shouted, “Yoop!” I saw Yusof jump. The mirror behind him shattered, and huge pieces dropped to the floor and broke a second time.

“Tell them to stop it!” I said, and went to the door. “Where’s your lousy car?”

A black Nissen Cedric was parked on Kampong Java Road, just beyond the sentry box where Ganapaty was hunched over a bowl of rice. He busily pawed at the rice with his fingers.

“In there,” said the dwarf, opening the trunk.

There were torn newspapers inside. I turned to object. My voice would not work, my eyes went bright red, and a blood trickle burned my neck; I seemed to be squashed inside my eyeballs, breathing exhaust fumes and being bounced.

Believe any feller who, captive for a few days, claims he has been a prisoner for months. My body’s clock stopped with the first sharp pain in my head, then time was elastic and a day was the unverifiable period of wakefulness between frequent naps. Time, like pain, had washed over me and flooded my usual ticking rhythm. I swam in it badly, I felt myself sinking; pain became the passage of time, pulsing as I drowned, smothering me in a hurtful sea of days. But it might have been minutes. I ached everywhere.

For a long time after I woke they kept me roped to a bed in a hut room smelling of dust and chickens and with a corrugated iron roof that baked my broken eyes. This gave my captors problems: they had to feed me with a spoon and hold my cup while I drank. They took turns doing this. They untied me, removing everything from the room but a bucket and mattress, and they brought me noodles at regular intervals. My one comfort was that obviously they did not plan to kill me. They could have done that easily enough at Dunroamin. No Chinese will feed a man he intends to kill. Anyway, murder was too simple: they didn’t want a corpse, they wanted a victim.

“Money? You want money? I get you big money!” I shouted at the walls. The men never replied. Their silence finally killed my timid heckling.

Grudgingly, saying “Noodoos,” banging the tin bowls down, they continued to feed me. Now and then they opened the shutters on the back window to let me empty my bucket. They didn’t manhandle me — they didn’t touch me. But they gave me no clue as to why they were holding me.

Confinement wasn’t revenge for fellers who lingered at a murder to dig out the corpse’s eyes or cut his pecker off, and risking arrest by wasting getaway time, dance triumphantly with it. I guessed they had kidnaped me, but if so — time and pain were shrouding me in the wadded gauze of sleep — something had gone wrong. Often I heard the Cedric start up and drive away, and each time it came back they conversed in mumbles. The Singapore police were poor at locating kidnapers. Even if the police succeeded, what rescue would that be? It would mean my arrest on a charge of living off immoral earnings. Some friend would have to ransom me. In those days wealthy towkays and their children lived in fear of kidnapers; they were often hustled away at knifepoint, but they were always released unharmed after a heavy payment. Who in the world would pay for my life?

A memory ambushed my hopes. On the Allegro a feller had told me a story I remembered in the hut. A loan shark had worked on a freighter with him. He called the feller a loan shark, but his description of the feller’s loans made them sound like charity of the most generous and reckless kind, and eventually everyone on the ship owed him money, including the skipper. One day at sea the loan shark disappeared, just like that. “We never found him,” said the feller on the Allegro, and his wink told me no one had ever looked.

The remembrance scared me and made me desolate, and I believed I would stay that way, in the misery that squeezes out holy promises. But that loneliness was electrified to terror the day my Chinese captors had a loud argument outside my hut. I had felt some safety in their mutters, in the regular arrivals of meals and in the comings and goings of the Cedric; and I had begun to pass the time by reciting my letters of glad news and my litany, Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, Bishop Flowers. I drew comfort from the predictable noises of my captors and their car. My comfort ended with the arguing — that day they didn’t bring me food.

I heard it all. The dwarf’s name was Toh. He fretted in a high childish voice; the others bow-wowed monotonously. I listened at a crack in the wall, as my empty stomach scolded me and the argument outside grew into a fight. It had to concern my fate — those whinnyings of incredulity and snuffling grunts, smashings and bangings, and Toh’s querulousness rising to an impressively sustained screeching. Then it was over.

That night they put the bed back into my room, but I was so hungry and disturbed I couldn’t sleep. I was drowsy hours later when I heard the door being unlocked. The morning dazzle of the sun through the door warmed my face. I started to rise, to swing my feet off the bed.

“You stay,” said Toh.

Two fellers began tying me up.

“What’s the big idea?” I said. “You want money? I get you money. Hey, not so tight!”

I considered a fistfight, working myself into a fury sufficient to beat them off and then making a run for it. I decided against it. Any rashness would be fatal for me. They were small, but there were four of them, and now I looked up and saw a fifth. I had survived so far by staying passive; I was sensible enough to prefer prison to death — to surrender anything but my life. Something else stopped me: I was in my underwear and socks — they had taken my shoes. I wouldn’t get far. If I had been dressed I might have taken a chance, but seminaked I felt particularly vulnerable. I let them go on tying me.

They roped my ankles to the end of the bed, and then put ropes around my wrists and made me fold my arms across my chest. I was in a mummy posture, bound tightly to the bed. The fifth man was behind me. I rolled my eyes back and saw that he was stropping a straight razor, whipping it up and down on a smacking tongue of leather.

“Who’s he?” Numbness throttled my pecker.

Toh was checking the knots, hooking a finger on them and pulling. Smick-smack, went the razor on the strop. Toh pushed at my arms, and satisfied they were tight, said, “That Ho Khan.”

“Just tell me one thing,” I said in a pitifully unfamiliar voice. “Are you going to kill me? Tell me — please.”

Toh looked surprised. “No,” he said, “we not kill you.”

“Why the razor?”

“Shave,” he said.

The other fellers erupted into yakking laughter. I tried to shift on the bed to see them. It was impossible. I couldn’t move.

“You’re trying to scare me, aren’t you?” I heard smick-smack-smuck.

Toh leaned over and nodded, smiling. His dwarf’s face made the smile impish. “Scare you,” he said, “and scare udda peoples, too.”

“What do you mean by that?” Smuck-smuck. “Come on, this is silly. I’m an American, you know. I am! The American consulate is looking for me!”

“Mei-guo ren,” someone said, “an American.” Another replied in Chinese, and there was laughter.

“Now I give you but,” said Toh. He scrubbed the backs of my arms with a soapy cloth. The others leaned over for a good look. One was holding a bowl, eating noodles as he watched, gobbling them in an impatient greedy way, smacking his lips and snapping at the noodles like a cat, not chewing. He peered at me over the rim of his bowl. He gave me hope. No one would eat that way in the presence of a person about to be slashed.

Ho Khan fussed with the razor. He braced his elbows, one against my throat, one on my stomach; and then, scraping slowly, shaved the hairy parts of my arms that Toh had soaped, from my elbow to the rope at my wrists. To my relief he put the razor aside.

My relief lasted seconds. Ho Khan fitted a pair of wire glasses over his eyes and took a dart-shaped silver tool which he dipped into a bottle of blue liquid. He leaned on me again and with the speed of a sewing machine began jabbing the needle into the fleshy part of my arm. He was tattooing me — biting on his tongue in concentration — and behind him the others shouted, bursts of Chinese, seeming to tell him what to write in the punctures.

8

AT NEWTON CIRCUS, by the canal, they pushed me out of the car and sped away, yelling. I found a few wrinkled dollars in the clothes they had handed over, enough for a pack of cheroots and a meal of mutton chops at a Malay gag stand on the corner. I was grateful for the night, and glad too for the incuriousness of the Chinese who wolfed food noisily at tables all around me and didn’t once look at me. My arms appalled me; I examined them in the light of the stall’s hissing pressure lamp. The shaven backs of my arms were swollen and raw, the fresh punctures tracking up and down from elbow to wrist, the small half-exploded squares of Chinese characters, perhaps fifty boxes puffed up and blue and some still leaking blood. I felt better after a meal and a smoke, and left, swinging my arms, so that no one could see their disfigurement, down the canal path, past the orphanage, in the direction of Dunroamin.

I smelled the acrid wood smoke, the stink of violence, before I saw the damage; the strength of it, at that distance, telegraphed destruction. The house was gutted. The tile roof had fallen in and the moon lighted the two stucco roof peaks, the gaping windows, the broken and burned verandah chicks. The abandoned black house looked like an old deserted factory; the fire had silenced the insects and killed the perfume of my flowering trees. No crickets chirped in the compound, a smell of burning hung in the still air. Torn mattresses were twisted and humped all over the driveway and lawn. I was about to go away when, feeling the fatigue and pause of melancholy, I decided that I would enter the house, to try to find something in the ruins that belonged to me, anything portable I could recognize to claim as a souvenir, maybe a scorched clock or the German metronome Mr. Weerakoon kept in a cupboard drawer: There’s an interesting story behind this little thing…

I stumbled in the driveway, and stumbling felt like an intruder. Stepping over the splintered front door, I passed through the bar. Broken glass littered the floor. I balanced on fallen timbers, tiptoed into the music room, and there I stood, in the decay the fire had made, not wanting to go upstairs to see what had happened to my cats. The staring shadows of the overturned chairs stopped me. I could feel the tattoos aching on my arms.

Then I saw the candle burning in the kitchen, and near it a crouching man, his face lighted by the yellow flame.

The eeriest thing about him, this old scarecrow in the burned-out house, was that he was imperturbably reading a folded newspaper. I would leave him in peace. I started toward the front door and kicked a loose board with my first step. Bang. The candle flame flickered and went out.

“Don’t worry,” I called to him. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I made my way into the kitchen, found the candle and lit it. The old man had run to the wall where a blanket was spread. He was Chinese and had the look of a trishaw driver, the black sinewy legs and arms, close-cropped hair, a small dark reptile’s face. He wore a blue jacket and shorts, and on his feet were rubber clogs cut from tires.

“You know me, eh? Me Jack.” I laughed. “This my housel” In that dark smelly place every sound was weird and my laugh was ghoulish. “You want smoke?” I threw him a cheroot. He cowered when I brought the candle over for him to light it.

“Me Jack,” I said. “This my house — Dunroamin.”

He blinked. “You house?”

“Yeah,” I said. “All finished now.”

He cackled and said something I couldn’t make out.

“You live here now?” I asked. “Sleep here, eat here—makan here, eh?”

“Mahan, makan,” he said, and picked up a small bowl. He offered it to me. “You makan.”

There were lumps of rice inside, with two yellow pork rinds on top of the rice. I took it and thanked him and choked back one of the rinds. It was a sharing gesture and it worked. The poor man was calmed. He went to a tin lunch pail and spooned some more rice into the bowl.

“No,” I said.

“Makan,” he said, and smiled.

I took the bowl and ate a few grains, chewing slowly. I pointed to the newspaper. “You read, eh? Sin Chew Jit Poh?” Naming the paper was like conversation. I thought of another. “Nanyang Siang Pau, eh?”

He nodded eagerly and handed me the paper.

I put the bowl down and unfolded the paper, looked at it, said, “Yes, yes,” and gave it back.

He didn’t respond. He was looking at my arms. He put a skinny finger on one row of tattoos, and tapping each character, worked his way down, tracing the vertical column. He frowned and tapped at another column, but faster now. “Chinese,” I said. “Chinese tattoo.”

I grinned.

He backed away, holding an outstretched palm up to ward me off; he groaned distinctly, and he ran, kicking over the tin lunch pail, and tramping the broken boards of the music room, and howling down the drive.

That night I slept on the old man’s blanket and breathed the fumes from his crudded lunch pail.

“Curse of Dogshit,” said Mr. Tan, translating in the Bandung the next day. He read my left arm. “Beware Devil, Whore’s Boy, Mouth Full of Lies, Remove This and Die. Very nasty,” said Mr. Tan. “Let me see your other arm.” The right said, Red Goatface, Forbidden Ape, Ten Devils in One, I Am Poison and Death, Remove This and Die.

After that, Mr. Tan was included in the conversations Yardley had with the others when my tattoos were mentioned. For years, Mr. Tan had sat every afternoon alone with his bottle of soybean milk. Now he was welcome. Yardley couldn’t remember all the curses and he called upon Mr. Tan to repeat them.

“Incredible,” Yardley said. “There, what about that one?”

“Forbidden Ape,” said Mr. Tan promptly.

“Can you imagine,” said Yardley. “And that one—‘Monkey’s Arse’ or something like that?”

“Dogshit,” said Mr. Tan.

“All right,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“Remember old Baldwin, the chap that worked for Jardine?” asked Smale. “He had tattoos all over the place. Birds and that.”

“You going to keep them, Jack?” asked Coony. “Souvenir of Singapore. Show ’em to your mum.”

“You think it’s a joke.” I said. “These things hurt. And the doctor says I have to wait till they heal before I can get them off.”

“You’ll never get them buggers off,” said Yardley.

“The doctor says—”

“They can graft them,” said Smale.

“Acid,” said Yates. “They burn them off with acid. I read 162 about this somewhere. It leaves scars — that’s the only snag. But scars are infinitely preferable to what you’ve got there, if you ask me.”

“Maybe they used some kind of Chinese ink,” said Coony. “You know, the kind that never comes off.”

“Balls!” said Smale. “If it was Chinese ink he’d be able to wash the flaming things off with soap and water. No, that there’s your regular tattooing ink. You can tell.”

“Monkey’s Arse,” said Yardley, laughing. “Christ, be glad it’s not in English! What if it was and Jack was in London, on a bus or something? ‘Fares please,’ the conductor says and looks over and sees Monkey’s Arse, Pig Shit, and all that on Jack’s arm.”

“He’d probably ride free,” said Frogget.

“No, I’ve got a better one,” said Smale. “Let’s say Jack’s in church and the vicar’s just given a little sermon on foul language. The lady next to Jack looks down and—”

“Lay off,” I said, rolling down my sleeves to cover the scabrous notations. “How would you like it if they did it to you?”

“No bloody fear,” said Coony. “If one of them little bastards—”

“Shut up,” said Yardley. “They’d tattoo the same thing on your knackers before you could say boo.” Yardley turned to me and said, “Don’t get upset, Jacko. They got ways of getting that stuff off. But I’ll tell you one thing — you’d be a fool to try it again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That whorehouse of yours,” said Yardley. “You were asking for it. Any of us could have told you that. Right, Smelly?”

“Right,” said Smale.

“So you’re saying I deserved it.”

“What do you think?”

I said, “I was making a few bucks.”

“Where is it now?” Yardley nudged Frogget.

“None of your business,” I said.

“Jack thinks he’s different,” Yardley said. “But the trouble is, he’s just the same as us, living in this piss hole, sweating in a towkay’s shop. Face facts, Jack, you’re the bleeding same.”

“Really?” I said, wondering myself if it was true, and deciding it was not.

“Except for that writing on his arms,” said Coony.

Macpherson, an occasional drinker at the Bandung, came through the door. He said, “Good evening.”

“Hey, Mac, look at this,” Yardley said. He grabbed my arm and spoke confidentially. “This is nothing compared to what they do to some blokes. You learned your lesson. From now on, stick with us — we’ll stand by you, Jack. And just to show you I mean what I say, the first thing we’ll do is get that put right.”

“What’s it supposed to say?” asked Macpherson.

Mr. Tan cleared his throat.

Weeks later, Yardley found a Chinese tattooist who said he knew how to remove them. We met at the Bandung one evening and he looked as if he meant business. He was carrying a doctor’s black valise. But he never opened it; he took one look at the tattoos, read a few columns, and was out the door.

“Look at him go,” said Smale. “Like a shot off a shovel.”

“A Chink won’t touch that,” said Coony.

“So we’ll find a Malay,” said Yardley.

The Malay’s name was Pinky, and his tattoo parlor was in a kampong out near the airport. He was not hopeful about removing them, though he said he knew the acid treatment. But no matter how much acid he rubbed in, he said, I would still be left with a faint but legible impression. And grafting took years.

“Why don’t you just cut your arms off and make the best of a bad job?” said Smale.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked Pinky.

“Can make into something else,” said Pinky. “Fella come in. He tattoo say ‘I Love Mary’ but he no like. So I put a little this and that, sails, what. Make a ship, for a sample.”

“I get it,” I said. He could obliterate the curse but not remove it.

“He puts a different tattoo over it, apparently,” said Yates.

“Only the one on the bottom stays the same,” said Frogget.

“It’s better than leaving them like they are,” said Yardley.

The walls of Pinky’s parlor were covered with sample tattoos. Many were the same design in various sizes. Death Before Dishonor, Indian chiefs, skulls, eagles and horses, Sweet-Sour, Cut Here, tigers and crucifixes, Mother, bluebirds, American flags, and Union Jacks. Behind Pinky, on a shelf, were many bottles of antiseptic, Dettol, gauze, aspirin, and rows and rows of needles.

“You’ll have a hard job making those into ships,” said Yates, tapping my blue curses.

“Do you fancy a dagger?” asked Smale. “Or what about the old Stars and Stripes?”

“That’s right,” said Coony. “Jack’s a Yank. He should have an American flag on his arm.”

“Fifty American flags is more like it,” said Smale.

“Hey, Yatesie,” said Coony, pointing to the design reading Mother, “here’s one for you.”

My arms were on Pinky’s table. “Chinese crackter,” he said. “I make into flowers.”

So I agreed. But on each wrist the wide single column—Remove This and Die—was too closely printed to make into separate flowers. Pinky suggested stalks for the blossoms on my forearms. I had a better idea. I selected from the convenient symbology on the wall: a dripping dagger on my left wrist, a crucifix on my right.

I went back to Hing’s. I was thankful to climb onto my stool and pick up where I’d left off: vegetables for the Vidia, stirrup pumps for the Joseph B. Watson, new cargo nets for the Peshawar. It was as if I had never been away. But what counted as an event for the fellers at the Bandung and gave the year I was tattooed the same importance they had attached to the year Ogham left and the year the bees flew through the windows — an importance overshadowing race riots, bombings, Kennedy’s death, and the threat of an Indonesian invasion — went uncommented upon by Hing. Gopi said, “Sorry mister.”

Hing’s lack of interest in anything but his unvarying business made him doubt the remarkable. He refused to be amazed by my survival or by the motley blue pictures that now covered my arms. He did not greet me when I came back. He refused to see me as I passed through the doorway. It was his way of not recognizing my long absence: no explanation was necessary. Though he was my own age, his years were circular, ending where they began. He turned the tissue leaves of a calendar that could have been blank. His was the Chinese mastery of disappointment: he wouldn’t be woken to taste it, he wouldn’t be hurt. Some days I envied him.

I moved into the low sooty semidetached house on Moulmein Green, an uninteresting affair which the washing on the line in front gave the appearance of an old becalmed boat. My aged amah found me and turned up with a bundle of my clothes and two of the cats. She wouldn’t say what happened to the others; she reported that no one had been injured in the fire at Dunroamin. My tattoos intrigued her and when her mahjong partners came over she asked me if they could have a look. My kidnaping and tatoos raised her status in the neighborhood. Now and then, for pleasure I had a flutter at the Turf Club, and it was about this time that I persuaded Gopi to be fitted for the brace, but that came to nothing. I slept much more, and on weekends sometimes slept throughout the day, waking occasionally in a sweat and saying out loud, It’s still Sunday, and then dozing and waking and saying it again.

I did no hustling. Every evening I drank at the Bandung and I became as predictable in my reminiscences as the other fellers; the re-creation of what had gone, a continual rehearsal of the past in anecdotes, old tales sometimes falsified to make the listener relax, made the present bearable. I told delighted strangers about “Kinda hot,” the Richard Everett, Dunroamin, and my tattooing. “And if you don’t believe it, look at this—”

My fortunes were back to zero, but as I have said, it was desolation of this sort that gave me more hope than little spurts of success. However uncongenial poverty was, to my mind it was like the explicit promise of a tremendous ripening. I hadn’t regretted a thing. But there was something that mattered more than this, to which I was the only witness. My stories glamorized the terror and often I brooded over my capture to look for errors or omissions. I had proved my resoluteness by surviving the torment without denying what I had done — my house, my girls — and at no moment had I gone down on my knees and said a prayer. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I ought to be forgiven. Forgiveness wasn’t necessary. I had nothing to live down. The charitable loan shark, pitched overboard by his furious debtors, had swum to shore.

9

“YOU DON’T know me,” said the foxy voice at the other end of the phone. “But I met a good pal of yours in Honolulu and he — well—”

“What’s the feller’s name?” I asked.

He told me.

“Never heard of him,” I said. “He’s supposed to be a friend of mine?”

“Right. He was in Singapore a few years ago.”

“You don’t say! His name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “What business was he in? Where did he live?”

“I can’t talk here,” he said. “I’m in an office. There’s some people.”

“Wait,” I said. “What about this feller that knows me? Did he have a message for me or something like that?” Brace yourself. I’ve got some fantastic news for you. Ready? Here goes… I braced myself.

“Maybe you don’t remember him,” he said. “I guess he was only in Singapore one night.”

“Oh.”

“But that was enough. You know?”

“Look—”

“He, um, recommended you. Highly. You get what I’m driving at?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I can’t talk here,” he said. “What are you doing for lunch?”

“Sorry. I can’t talk here either,” I said. How did he like it?

“A drink then, around six. Say yes.”

“You’re wasting your time,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Let’s have a drink. What do you say?”

“Where are you staying?”

“Something called the Cockpit Hotel.”

“I know where it is,” I said. “I’ll be over at six. For a drink, okay? See you in the bar.”

“How will I recognize you?”

I almost laughed.

“So-and-so told me to look you up.” He was the first of many. He didn’t want much, only to buy me a drink and ask me vulgarly sincere questions: “What’s it really like?” and “Do you think you’ll ever go back?” I used to say anything that came into my head, like “I love lunchmeat,” or “Sell me your shoes.”

“What made you stop pimping?” a feller would ask.

“I ran out of string,” I’d say.

“How long are you going to stay in Singapore?”

“As long as my citronella holds out.”

“What do you do for kicks?”

“That reminds me of a story. Seems there was this feller—”

In previous years the same fellers would have wanted to visit a Chinese massage parlor; now they wanted to see me. The motive had not changed: just for the experience. And evidently stories circulated about me on the tourist grapevine: I had been deported from the States; I was a pederast; I had a wife and kids somewhere; I was working on a book; I was a top-level spy, a hunted man, a rubber planter, an informer, a nut case. The fellers guilelessly confided this gossip and promised they wouldn’t tell a soul. And one feller said he had looked me up because “Let’s face it, Flowers, you’re an institution.”

I didn’t encourage them. If they wanted a girl I suggested a social escort who, after a tour of the city — harbor sights, Mount Faber, Tiger Balm Gardens, Chinese temples, War Memorial, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral — would amateurishly offer “intimacy,” as they called it. Politics hadn’t stopped prostitution; it had complicated it, taken the fun out of it, and made it assume disguises. The houses had moved to the suburbs — Mr. Sim operated on Tanjong Rhu, in an innocuous-looking bungalow near the Swimming Club. Many had gone to Johore Bahru, over the Causeway, and all paid heavily for secret-society protection. There were two brothels in town, Madam Lum’s, behind the supermarket, and Joe’s in Bristol Chambers, across from the Gurkha’s sentry box on Oxley Rise: they were characterless apartments, unpersuasively decorated, and they relied on taxi drivers to bring them fellers.

Oddly enough, the fellers who looked me up were seldom interested in girls. They were tourists who fancied themselves adventurers, bold explorers, and they had two opposing wishes: to be the very first persons to reach that faraway place, and to be seen arriving. They thought it was quite a feat to fly to Singapore, but they needed a reliable native witness to verify their arrival. I was that witness, and the routine was always the same — a drink, a stroll around the seedier parts of town; then a picture — posed with me and snapped by the Indian with the box camera on the Esplanade. All these fellers did in Singapore was talk, remarking on the discomfort of their hotels, the heat, the smells, their fear of contracting malaria. And when I told my heavily embroidered tales they said, “Flowers, you’re as bad as me!” Sometimes, with wealthy ones, I wanted to lean across the table and plead, “Get me out of here!” But that was the voice of idleness, the one that screamed prayers at the Turf Club and hectored the fruit machines for a jackpot. I did my best to suppress it and listened to the travelers chuntering on about their experiences. I wish I had a nickel for every feller who told me the story about how he had picked up a pretty girl and taken her back to his hotel, only to find (“I was flabbergasted”) that she was really a feller in a swishy dress; or the story, favorite of the fantasist, beginning, “I used to know this nympho—”

For me these were not productive years. The longer I stayed at Hing’s the more I participated in the fellers’ conversations at the Bandung: “My towkay says—” The Sunday curry was the only event in the week I viewed with any pleasure. Though Singapore was awash with tourists, and, for the first time, American soldiers on leave from Vietnam, I did very little hustling. The attitude toward sex was changing in the States and I found it hard in Singapore to keep pace with the changes; the new attitudes arrived with the tourists. Fellers were interested in exhibitions of one sort or another, Cantonese girls hanging in back rooms like fruit bats and squealing “Fucky, fucky” to each other, sullen displays of gray anatomy on trestle tables; off the Rochore Canal Road there were squalid rooms where a dozen tourists sat around a double bed, like interns in a clinic, and applauded cucumber buggeries. The feller who said “I do it with mirrors” or that he was in love with a slip of a girl meant just that; and one joker implored me to get a young Chinese boy to (I think I’ve got this right) stand over him and, as he put it, “do number two — oh lots of it — all over me.”

“Now, you’re going to think I’m old-fashioned,” I said to this dink. “And I know nobody’s perfect. But—”

I could see nothing voluptuous about being recumbent under a Chinese and shat upon, something I went through, in a sense, every day at Hing’s. I would fall into conversation with a tourist and hear myself saying, “That’s where I draw the line.” My notion of sex, call me old-fashioned, was a satisfying and slightly masked and moist surprise, unhurried, private, imaginative, and inexpensive, as close to passion as possible; neither businesslike nor over-coy, maintaining the illusion of desire with groans of proof, celebrating fantasy, a happy act the price kept in perspective: give and take, no lies about love.

The anonymous savagery of the new pornography might have had something to do with the change in the tourists’ attitude. I had always considered myself a reasonable judge of pornography, but I was out of my depth with the stuff that came in on the freighters and was good-naturedly handed over to me by the mates responsible for the provisioning. It was as unappealing as a pair of empty rubber gloves. I refused to sell it, though I still sold decks of photographic playing cards. I didn’t know what to do with the new cruel sort; I had too much of it to burn discreetly, and someone would have found it if I had thrown it in a trash barrel. I kept it at the Bandung, behind the bar. At the Bandung I was able to confirm that I was not alone in finding it grotesque.

“It’s useless,” said Yardley. “They don’t have expressions on their faces.”

“She got something on her face,” said Frogget. “Sickening, ain’t it?”

“That’s what I always look at first,” said Smale. “Their faces.”

“Do you suppose,” said Yates, selecting a picture, “that she expects that bulb to light up if she does that with it?”

“Maybe she blew a fuse,” said Frogget.

“Yeah,” said Smale, “here she is blowing a fuse.”

“’orrible,” said Coony. “A girl and a mule. Look at that.”

“Let’s see,” said Yates. “No, that’s no mule. It’s a donkey, what you call an ass.”

“Oh, that’s an ass,” I said. “Oh, yes. Broo-hoo-hoo!”

“Do herself a damage,” said Smale.

“’orrible,” said Coony.

“This one’s all blokes,” said Yardley. “All sort of connected up. I wonder why that one’s wearing red socks.”

“Are there names for this sort of thing?” asked Yates.

“I’d call that one ‘The Bowling-Hold,’” said Frogget.

“Hey, Wally, come here,” said Yardley.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

“See what he does,” said Yardley.

Wallace Thumboo came over, grinning; he glanced down at the pictures, then looked away, into space.

“What do you think of that, Wally old boy?”

“Nice,” said Wally. He looked at the ceiling.

“Cut it out,” I said. “He doesn’t like them. I don’t blame you, Wally. They’re awful, aren’t they?”

“Little bit,” he said, and screwed up his face, making it plead.

“You said they were nice, you lying sod!” Yardley shouted. Wally wrung his hands. Yardley turned to me. “You’re a bloody hypocrite, Jack.”

“These photographs are shocking,” said Yates. “What kind of people—”

“And he’s the one who sells this rubbish!” said Yardley.

“Not this stuff,” I said. “The other stuff, but only if they ask.”

Edwin Shuck asked. He phoned me one morning at Hing’s and said, “You don’t know me—”

“Yes, I do,” I said, snappishly. I had wanted for a long time to put one of these yo-yos in his place, and this was the day to do it: out in the van a consignment of frozen meat for the Strode was going soft in the sun. Little Hing was double-parked on Beach Road and beeping the horn. The Strode had a right to refuse the meat if it wasn’t frozen solid, which meant we would have to sell it cheap to a hotel kitchen. “You met a horny feller somewhere who said he was a pal of mine, right?” I accused. “And he told you to look me up, right? You don’t want to take too much of my time, just have a drink, right? And after that—”

“Not so fast,” he said.

“Friend,” I said, “the only thing I don’t know about you is your name.”

“Why don’t we have lunch? Then I can tell you my name.”

“I’m busy.”

“After work.”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t you understand? My meat’s getting all thawed out!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“My meat’s in the van,” I said.

“I won’t argue about it,” he said.

“So long, then,” I said.

“Give me a chance,” he said. “Surely the Bandung can spare you for one night.”

The Bandung was my private funk hole: “What is your name, friend?”

And: “Eddie Shuck, pleased to meet you,” he said that evening in the floodlit garden of the Adelphi. I had just come from the Strode, where I had spent the whole afternoon on a shady part of the breezy deck playing gin rummy with the chief steward.

“Hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” I said.

“Not at all,” said Shuck. “What’ll you have?”

“I usually have a pink gin about this time of day.”

“That’s a good navy drink,” he said, and he called out, “Boy!” to the waiter.

I found that objectionable, but something interested me about this Edwin Shuck. It was his lisp — not an ordinary lisp, the tongue lodged between the teeth, that gives the point to the joke about the doctor who examines the teen-age girl with a stethoscope and says, “Big breaths”; Shuck’s was the parted fishmouth: his folded tongue softened and wetted every sibilant into a spongy drunken buzz. He prolonged “Flowers” with the buzz, and what was endearing was that his lisp prevented him from saying his own name correctly.

“Got some homework, I see.”

“This?” I had a thick envelope on my lap, pornography from the Strode, a parting gift from the friendly steward. I said, “Filthy pictures.”

“Seriously?” Buzz, buzz; he lisped companionably.

“The real McCoy,” I said.

“Can I have a look?”

We were the only ones in the garden. I put the envelope on the table and pulled out the pictures. I said, “If anyone comes out here, turn them over, quick. We could be put in the cooler for these.”

“You’ve sure got enough of them!”

“They’re in sets. Get them in sequence. Ah, there we are. Starts off nice, all the folks in their skivvies having a cozy drink in the living room.”

“What’s the next one?” Shuck was impatient.

“Now we’re in the bedroom. A few preliminaries, I guess you could call that.”

“Kind of a group thing, huh? That gal—”

The waiter came over with our drinks. I flipped the large envelope over the pictures. I wasn’t afraid of being arrested for them, but the thought of that old polite Chinese waiter seeing them embarrassed me. Pornography affected me that way: I could not help thinking that whoever looked at the stuff was responsible for what was happening in the picture. That girl, that dog; those kneeling men and vaulting women; those flying bums. A single look included you in the act and completed it. Until you looked it was unfinished.

“Down the old canal,” said Shuck, guzzling his fresh lime. “Hey, is that the guy’s arm or what?”

“No, that’s his bugle.”

“His what?”

“Pecker, I think.” I turned it over. “Here are your Japanese ones.”

“You can’t see their faces,” he said. “How do you know they’re Japs?”

“By their feet. See? That’s your Japanese foot.”

“It’s in a damned strange position.”

“This one’s blurry. Can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“Wise guy.” Shuck laughed. “What else have you got?”

“I’ve seen this bunch before,” I said. “From some hamlet in Denmark.”

“I wonder why that guy’s wearing red socks?”

“Search me,” I said. “Got some more — here we are. God, I hate these. I really pity those poor animals.”

“Labrador retriever,” said Shuck. “Foaming at the mouth.”

“Poor bugger,” I said. “Well, that’s the lot.”

“Huh?” Shuck was surprised. He didn’t speak at once. He frowned and said thoughtfully, “Haven’t you got any where the guy’s on top and the girl’s on the bottom, and they’re — well, you know, screwing?”

“Funnily enough,” I said, “no. Not the missionary position.”

“That’s a riot,” said Shuck.

“It’s pitiful,” I said. “There’s not much call for that kind. Here, you can have these if you want. My compliments. Strictly for horror interest.”

“That’s mighty neighborly,” said Shuck. “Shall we eat here?”

“Up to you,” I said. “What time is your plane leaving?”

“I’m not taking any plane,” said Shuck. “I live here.”

“What business are you in? I’ve never seen you around town.”

“This and that,” he said. “I do a lot of traveling.”

“Where to?”

“K.L., Bangkok, Vientiane,” he said. “Sometimes Saigon. How about you? How long do you aim to stay in Singapore?”

“As long as my citronella holds out,” I said. “What’s Saigon like?”

“Not much,” said Shuck. “I was there when the balloon went up.”

I didn’t press him. He was either a spy and wouldn’t admit to it, of course; or he was a businessman who was ashamed to say so and took pleasure in trying to give me the impression he was a spy. In any case, hemming and hawing, a mediocre adventurer.

We had a meal at the Sikh restaurant on St. Gregory’s Place and then went on to a nightclub, the Eastern Palace, where Hing had taken me in my Allegro days. Shuck fed me questions — about hustling, the fantastic rumors (a new one: was I the feller who appeared in What’s-his-name’s novel?), the “meat run,” Dunroamin, short-time rates, all-nighters. It was the same interview I got from other fellers, the gabbing that was like a substitute for the real thing.

The Eastern Palace had changed. “Years ago, this place had a bunch of Korean chorus girls, and a little Chinese orchestra. It wasn’t as noisy as this. There was even a dance floor.”

“Tell me a little bit more about this Madam Lum,” said Shuck. “How does she get away with it in town?”

“Good question. She—” But I could not be heard over the roaring of a machine offstage. The curtains parted and in the center of the stage a girl crouched on a black motorcycle. The back wall slipped sideways — it was a moving landscape, a film of trees and telephone poles shooting past. By concentrating I could imagine that stationary girl actually speeding along a country road.

She flung off her goggles and helmet. A fan in the wings started up and blew her long hair straight back. She wriggled out of her leather jacket and let that fly. The music became louder, a pumping rhythm that emphasized the motorcycle roar.

“I don’t like this,” I said.

Shuck frowned, as he had when he had said, “Haven’t you got any where the guy’s on top—?”

The girl stood up on the motorcycle saddle and kicked off her boots and tore off her britches. She was buffeted by the wind from the fan; she undid her bra and squirmed out of her pants — they sailed away. Then she hopped back onto the seat, naked, and pretended to ride, bobbing up and down, chafing herself on the saddle.

“I’m shocked,” said Shuck.

I liked him for that. I said, “Isn’t that a Harley-Davidson?”

The film landscape was moving faster now, the music was frenzied, the engine screamed. The girl started doing little stunts, horsing around on the motorcycle, lifting her legs, throwing her head back.

She bugged out her eyes and shrieked; she covered her face with her hands. There was a terrific crash. The landscape halted, the motorcycle tipped over, the naked girl took a spill and sprawled across the machine in the posture of an injured rider, her legs spread, her head awry, her arms tangled in the wheels.

Around us, Chinese businessmen, towkays in immaculate suits, applauded wildly and shouted, “Hen hao!” which meant “very good” and sounded like “And how!”

“This is where I draw the line,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” The act had disturbed me — what fantasy did such violence promote? — and I avoided mentioning it to Shuck. Walking down Orchard Road, past Tang’s, and confounded by what to say, I asked him again about his business.

“You might say Asian affairs,” said Shuck.

“Well,” I said, “how do you expect to know anything about Asian affairs if you’ve never had one?”

Madam Lum greeted me as an old friend, with an affectionate bear hug, and with her arms around me she turned to Shuck and said, “Mr. Jack a very nice boy and he my best brother, no, Jack?”

“She’s a real sweetie,” I said.

“You want Mona?” asked Madam Lum. “She free in a coupla minutes — hee hee!”

“Who’s Mona?” asked Shuck.

“One of the fruit flies,” I said. “Rather athletic. She’s got a nine-inch tongue and can breathe through her ears.”

“Just my type,” said Shuck, looking around. “Cripe, look at all the broads.”

Over by the window, three girls were seated on a sofa, languidly reading Chinese comic books; one in a chair was buffing her fingernails, and another was eating pink prawns off a square of newspaper. No towels, no tea. It would never have happened at Dunroamin: no girls sat down if two fellers had just come through the door. “This is your newer sort of wang house,” I said to Shuck. “Not my style at all.” One of the girls put down her comic and sauntered over to Shuck, smoothing her dress.

“What your name?” she asked.

“Shuck.”

“Twenty-over dollar.”

“No, no,” said Shuck, wincing, setting his mouth so as not to lisp. “Me Shuck.”

“Me shuck you,” said the girl, pointing.

“Forget it,” I said. But I had recorded the exchange; it was ‘material,’ and it bothered me to acknowledge the suspicion that very soon, chewing the fat with an admiring stranger who had looked me up, I would be saying, “Funny thing happened the other day. I know a feller with the unfortunate name of Shuck, and we were goofing off in—”

“Mona coming,” said Madam Lum.

“Not tonight,” I said. “But my buddy here might be interested. What do you say, Ed?”

“I’m just window-shopping,” he said. Buzz, buzz. “What was the name of that other place you mentioned?”

“Bristol Chambers,” I said. “But, look, they don’t like people barging in and out if they’re not serious about it.”

“You’re a funny guy,” said Shuck. “I used to know a guy just like you.”

That annoyed me. It was presumptuous; he didn’t know me at all. I could not be mistaken for anyone else. The half-baked whoremonger in the flowered shirt, with the tattoos on his arms, hamming it up on Orchard Road (“How do you expect to know anything about Asian affairs if you’ve never had one?”) — that was all he saw. I resented comparisons, I hated the fellers who said, “Flowers, you’re as bad as me!” They looked at me and saw a pimp, a pornocrat, an unassertive rascal marooned on a tropical island, but having the time of his life: a character. I said, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Shuck.

“Well, what the heck’s wrong with that?”

“The next thing you’ll be telling me is that they’ve got hearts of gold, like these strippers that say they do algebra in their dressing rooms. They’re better than we are or something.”

“Not on your life,” I said, and feeling the prickly sensation that his judgment on them was a judgment on me, added, “But they’re no worse.”

“I guess you’re right. We’re all whores one way or another,” said Shuck, with a hint of self-pity. “I mean, we all sell ourselves, don’t we?”

“Do we?”

“Yeah. We all sell our souls.”

“Those girls don’t sell their souls, pal. There’s no future in that.”

“You know what I mean. Holding a job, people climbing all over you. It’s a kind of screw. I do it for fifteen grand.”

“Madam Lum does it for fifty,” I said, trying to wound him. “Tax free.”

Walking down Mount Elizabeth I said, “Years ago, it was better, with the massage parlors and all that. There are still some in Johore Bahru. Madam Lum’s place always reminds me of a doctor’s office. Did you notice the potted plants and magazines? The only good thing about it is that it’s convenient. The number twelve bus stops here and that supermarket over there is very good, probably cheaper than cold storage. I usually pick up half a pound of hamburg and some frozen peas before I nip over to Madam Lum’s. You can’t beat it for convenience.”

“You really are a funny guy,” said Shuck.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it in the good sense,” he said.

“I’ll take you to the Bristol,” I said. “It’s not far. But you can’t go inside unless you want some action.”

“If I must,” said Shuck, buzzing. “What’s the attraction?”

“The guy that runs it isn’t very friendly,” I said. “And the girls are nothing to write home about. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill sort of place, except for one thing.”

“Spit it out.”

“One of the bedrooms — the air-conditioned one — faces the Prime Minister’s house. Some afternoons you can see him on his putting green. At night, around this time, you can get a look at him through the window. While you’re in the saddle, you know? Strictly for laughs. But since you’re interested in Asian affairs—”

“I think I saw him,” Shuck said later at the Pavilion where we had agreed to meet for a drink. “He was talking to a guy with a goatee and a shirt like yours. That takes the cake,” he said, smiling to himself. “But the hooker kept telling me to hurry up. Is that the usual thing? God, it put me off.”

“It’s a popular room,” I said.

“Vientiane,” said Shuck, using the monotone of reminiscence. “That’s a wide-open place. Lu-Lu’s, The White Rose. First-class hookers. They do tricks with cigarettes. ‘Hey, Joe, you wanna see me smoke?’ I had the strangest experience with a broad there — at least I thought it was a broad.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No, but that’s not the whole story,” said Shuck.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” said Shuck. “I’m not finished.”

“I’ve heard it before.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“About the bare-assed waitresses in The White Rose in Vientiane, and the girl that was really a feller, and the nympho you used to know? I’ve heard it before. Now, if you’ll pipe down and excuse me—”

“Jack,” said Shuck, “sit yourself down. I’ve got some good news for you.” Buzz, buzz.

10

SEX I HAD SEEN as a form of exalted impatience, trembling as near to hilarity as to despair — just like love — but so swift, and unlike love, it happily avoided both; that was a relief, grace after risk. And the strangest part of the sex wish: you wore all of it on your face. This assumption had been the basis of my whole enterprise. Paradise Gardens, Shuck’s good news, made me change my mind about this.

“Here she comes,” I said, and Ganapaty scrambled to his feet. I was standing in bright sunshine at the end of the cinder drive by his sentry box, squinting down Adam Road where, at the junction, the shiny bus had stopped at the lights. I folded my arms. The first fellers were arriving. Behind me, glittering, was Paradise Gardens, known in District Ten as a private hotel.

It was a new three-story building, long and narrow, white stucco trimmed with blue, and with a blue square balcony and a roaring air conditioner attached to every room. The usual high whorehouse fence, this one strung with morning-glories and supporting a hedge of Pong-Pong trees, concealed it from Dr. B. K. Lim’s bungalow on one side and a row of semidetached houses (each with a barbed-wire fence and a starved whimpering guard dog) on Jalan Kembang Melati on the other side. On our cool lawn there were mimosas and jasmine and the splendid upright fans of three mature traveler’s palms. In the secluded patio out back we had a small swimming pool.

The idea of Paradise Gardens was Shuck’s, or perhaps that of the United States Army, who employed him and now me. The design was my own; I had supervised the construction. The catering contract was Hing’s, and the glass-fronted shops in the arcade — the entire ground floor — were run by Hing’s relations: a tailor (I was wearing one of his white linen suits that first day), a photographer, a curio seller (elongated Balinese carvings, wayang puppets, and a selection of Chinese bronzes ingeniously faked in Taiwan), a druggist with a RUBBER GOODS sign taped to his window, a barber, and a news agent. My orders had been to design a place that a guest — Shuck told me ours would be GIs when it was done — would check into and stay for five days without having to leave the grounds. It was an early version of the tropical tourist hotel which, more than a place to sleep, contains the country, a matter of size, food, decor, and entertainment. I had a vision of luxury hotels underpinning the rarest and most exotic features of a people’s culture, the arts and crafts surviving in the Hilton long after they had ceased to be practiced in the villages. Tourism’s demand for atmosphere and authentic folklore would force the hotel to be the country. So I made it happen. We had Malay and Chinese dances every night, and traditional food, and we were scrupulous about observing festivals. It took two days for our Mr. Loy to cook a duck; outside Paradise Gardens the Chinese ate hamburgers standing up at lunch counters or in their parked cars at the A & W drive-in. Once a week we put on a mock wedding in the Malay style. It had been years since anyone had seen something like that in Singapore.

“The bus coming,” said Ganapaty.

“She’s full up,” I said.

Ganapaty came to attention, a crooked derelict figure with a beautiful white caste mark, a finger’s width of ashes between his eyes. It pleased me that at Paradise Gardens I was able to employ everyone I owed a favor to: Yusof tended the big bar, Karim the smaller one; the room Shuck called “your theaterette” was run by Henry Chow, a blue-movie projectionist who had been out of work since the raids; Mr. Khoo, my old boatman, I employed as a mechanic, Gopi picked up the mail — though the post office was only across the street, his limp made what I intended as a sinecure for him a tedious and exhausting job. And the girls; the girls were no problem — fruit flies from Anson Road, floaters and athletes from the shut-down massage parlors, the sweet dozen from Dunroamin, and Betty from Muscat Lane — all my quick and limber daughters.

Shuck wanted to see their papers: “We’re not taking any chances.” He made me fire three who had been born in China, one with a sore on her nose, and a Javanese girl, a willowy fellatrix with gold teeth, reputedly a mistress of the late Bung Sukarno.

Every five days, as on that first day, the bus swayed into the driveway and I could see the young faces at the green-tinted windows. I waved. They did not wave back. They stared. I learned that unimpatient stare. It was a look of pure exhaustion focusing on the immediate, fastening to it, not glancing beyond it. It was new to me. Once, I had been able to spot a likely client thirty yards off by the way he watched girls pass him, the face of a feller running a temperature wearing helpless lechery on his kisser; with that telling restive alertness as, turning around with tensed arms and eager hands, sipping air through the crack of a smile starting to be hearty, he looks as if he is going to say something out loud. Each fidget was worth ten dollars. But the faces of the boys on the buses that deposited them for what Shuck called “your R and R” were expressionless and kept that bombed uncritical stare until they boarded the same bus five days later. The boys sat well back in their seats; they didn’t hitch forward like tourists, and they didn’t chatter.

I expected uniforms the first day. Shuck hadn’t mentioned that they would be wearing Hawaiian shirts, but here they were getting off the bus with crew cuts, bright shirts, the white socks that give every American away, and staring with tanned sleepy faces.

“Jack Flowers,” I said, stepping forward. “Glad you could make it, fellers.”

“It’s sure as hell—” a feller began slowly.

“Excuse me, sir,” another butted in. “Are those girls—”

“The girls,” I said, raising my voice, “are right over there and dying to get acquainted!”

Florence, May, Soo-chin, Annapurna, and nutcracker Betty, hearing me, responded by ambling into the sunlight on the arcade’s verandah. The other girls moved behind them. The fellers carried their duffel bags and handgrips over to the verandah and dropped them, and almost shyly walked over to the girls and began pairing off.

“We’re in business,” said Shuck.

Later they walked in the garden, holding hands.

The soldiers’ five-day romance was a rehearsal of innocence, and then they went back to Vietnam. This all-purpose house was the only gentle shelter, halfway down the warpath, with me at the front gate saying, “Is there anything—?” My mutters made me remember: in the passion that caged us the issue was not escape — it was learning gentleness to survive in the cage, and never loutishly rolling against the bars.

“For some of these guys it’s their first time with a whore,” said Shuck. “What do you tell them?”

“Don’t smoke in bed.”

Was I serving torturers? I didn’t feel I had a right to ask. I believed in justice. The torturer slept with harm and stink, the pox would eat him up, his memory would claw him. I wanted the others to wrestle in their rooms until they were exhausted beyond sorrow — a happy bed wasn’t everything, but it was more than most worthy fellers got.

I write what I never spoke. Conversation is hectic prayer; it deprived me of subtlety and indicated time passing. It didn’t help much. At Paradise Gardens, by the bar, showing my tattoos and joshing the girls and soldiers, I was a noisy cheerful creature. But the mutters in my mind told me I was Saint Jack. Edwin Shuck, saying so casually, “We’re all whores one way or another,” was parodying an enormous possibility that could never be disproved until we had rid ourselves of the habit of slang, the whore’s own evasive language, a hard way to be honest and always a mockery of my mutters. I simplified, I used slang; I was known as a pimp, the girls as whores, the fellers as soldiers: none of the names fits.

I kept Paradise Gardens running smoothly, and what made me move was what had stirred me for years, my priestly vocation, my nursing instinct, my speedy hunger and curiosity, my wish to head off any cruelty, my singular ache to be lucky; and I did it for fortune. I had seen a lot of fellers come over the hill, and as I say, the drift then was away from all my old notions of sex. In Singapore my suggestions had long since been overtaken by wilder ideas, pictures, movies, devices, potions, acrobatics, or complete reticence; my vocabulary was obsolete and words like “torrid,” “fast,” “daring,” and “spicy” meant nothing at all. What had once seemed to me as simple as a kind of ritual corkage became a spectator sport or else an activity of nightmarish athleticism. It made me doubly glad for Paradise Gardens. The soldiers were happy with a cold beer and the motions of a five-day romance. I made sure the beer was so cold their tonsils froze and had Karim put four inches of ice in every drink. All afternoon we showed old cowboy movies in the theaterette. Some of the fellers taught the girls to swim. Every five days the bus came, and for five days most of the fellers stayed inside the gates. When they wandered it was up to the university, close by, to try out their cameras.

One group of GIs bought me a pair of binoculars, expensive ones with my initials lettered in gold on the leather case, and a little greeting card saying To a swell guy.

“Now I can see what goes on in your rooms,” I said.

They laughed. What went on in those rooms, anyway? Aw honey, the purest cuddlings of romance, pillow fights; they tickled the girls, and they never broke or pilfered a thing.

“You won’t see much in Buster’s,” one said.

I turned to Buster. “That right? Not interested in poontang?”

“I can’t use it,” Buster said, with a lubberly movement of his jaw.

“Buster’s married.” The feller looked at me. “You married, Jack?”

“Naw, never got the bug — ruins your sense of humor,” I said. “Marriage — I’ve got nothing against it, but personally speaking I’d feel a bit overexposed.”

“Where’s your old lady, Buster?” the feller asked.

“Denver,” said Buster, shyly, “goin’ ape-shit. How about a hand of cards?”

“Later,” a tall feller said. “My girl wants a camera.”

My girl. That was Mei-lin. They all wanted cameras; they knew the brands, they picked out the fanciest ones. When the fellers boarded the bus for the ride back to the war the girls rushed to Sung’s Photo in the arcade and sold them for half price.

“Used camera,” said Jimmy Sung, when I challenged him.

“Cut the crap,” I said. It was a shakedown. From a two-hundred-dollar camera Sung made a hundred and the girl made a hundred; the soldier paid. But Sung ended up with the camera, to sell again.

“Full prices for the cameras,” I said to Sung, “or I’ll toss you out on your ear.”

In the kitchen Hing made up huge deceitful grocery lists which he passed to Shuck without letting me see, and he got checks for items he never bought. The arcade prices were exortionary, the girls were grasping. No one complained. On the contrary: the fellers often said they wanted to marry my girls and take them back to the States, “the world,” as they called it.

I did what I could to reduce the swindling. The arcade shopkeepers saw it my way and “Sure, sure,” they’d say, and claw at their stiff hair-bristles with their fingers when I threatened.

In Sung’s, on the counter, there was an album of photographs, a record of Paradise Gardens which thickened by the week. Many were posed shots Sung had snapped, tall fellers embracing short dark girls, fellers around a table drinking beer, muscle-flexers by the pool, group shots on the verandah, candid shots — fellers fooling with girls in the garden. There were many of me, but the one I liked showed me in my linen suit, having my late-afternoon gin, alone in a wicker chair under a traveler’s palm, with a cigar in my mouth; I was haloed in gold and green, and dusty beams of sunlight slanted through the hedge.

Shuck was right: the news was good, almost the glory I imagined. I was surprised to reflect that what I wanted had taken a war to provide. But I didn’t make the war, and I would have been happier without the catastrophe. In every picture in Sung’s album the war existed in a detail as tiny and momentous as a famous signature or a brace of well-known initials at the corner of a painting: the dog tag, the socks, the military haircut, the inappropriate black shoes the fellers wore with their tropical clothes, a bandage or scar, a particular kind of sunglasses, or just the fact of a farm boy’s jowl by the pouting rabbit’s cheek of a Chinese girl. In the lobby it was a smell, leather and starch and after-shave lotion, and a nameless apprehension like the memory of panic in a room with a crack on the ceiling that grows significant to the insomniac toward morning. “Saigon, Saigon,” the girls said; we didn’t talk about it, but the fellers left whispers and faces behind we could never shoo away.

And Sung’s photograph album, the size of a family Bible and bound with a steel coil, was our history.

A sky of dazzling asterisks: the Fourth of July. The fellers set off rockets and Roman candles in the garden with chilly expertness, a sequence of rippling blasts that had Dr. B. K. Lim screaming over the hedge and all the guard dogs in the neighborhood howling. The fellers ate wieners and sauerkraut, had a rough touch football game; that night everyone jumped into the pool with his clothes on.

Mr. Loy Hock Yin holding a huge Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. Fellers with napkins tucked in at the throats of their shirts. I was at the head of the table, and the feller next to me said, “How’d you get all those tattoos, Jack?” The fans were going, the table was covered with food, I had a bottle of gin and a bucket of ice beside my glass. “What I’m going to tell you is the absolute truth,” I said, and held them spellbound for an hour. At the end I showed my arm to Betty.

“What’s underneath that flower?” I asked.

She squinted: “Whore’s Boy.”

Me as Santa Claus, with a sack. Late Christmas afternoon we ran out of ice. I drove downtown in Shuck’s Toyota with four uproarious soldiers and some squealing girls. I was still wearing my red suit, perspiring in my cotton beard, as we went from shop to shop saying, “Ice for Santy!” On the way back, in traffic, we sang Christmas carols.

Gopi with an armful of mail. He said, “Nice post for you.” Postcards of Saigon I taped to my office wall. Messages: “It’s pretty rough here all around—” “When I get back to the world—” “Tell Florence my folks don’t care, and I’ll be down in September—” “We could use a guy like you, Jack, for a few laughs. This is a really shitty platoon—” “The VC were shelling us for two days but we couldn’t even see them—” “Richards got it in Danang, but better not tell his girl—” “What’s the name of that meat on sticks Mr. Loy made—?” “I had a real neat time at Paradise Gardens — How’s Jenny?” “It’s fucken gastly or however you write it — I know my spelling is beyond the pail—”

A Malay orderly in a white smock tipping a sheeted stretcher into the back of an ambulance.

“Fella in de barfroom no come out.”

I knocked. No answer. We got a crowbar and prized the lock apart. The feller had hanged himself on the shower spout with a cord from the Venetian blind. A whiskey bottle, half-full, stood on the floor. He was nineteen years old, not a wrinkle on his face.

“It was bound to happen,” said Shuck. What certainty! “But if it happens again we’ll have to close this joint.”

No one would use the room after that, and later the door grew dusty. All the girls played that room number in the National Lottery.

Flood. When a strong rain coincided with high tide the canal swelled and Bukit Timah Road flooded; muddy water lapped against the verandah. The photograph was of three girls wading to Paradise Gardens with their shoes in one hand and an umbrella in the other, and the fellers whistling and cheering in the driveway.

The theaterette. Audie Murphy in a cowboy movie. “He’s a game little guy,” I said. “He won the Medal of Honor.” A feller to my right: “Fuck that.”

A group photograph: Roger Lefever, second from the left, top row.

“What’s the big idea, Roger?”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“She came down crying and said you slugged her.”

“It wasn’t hard. Anyway, she pissed me off.”

“I got no time for bullies. I think I could bust you in the mouth for that, Roger. And I’ve got a good mind to write to your C.O. You wouldn’t do that back home, would you?”

“How do you know?”

I slapped his face.

“Smarten up. You’re on my shit list until you apologize.”

A group photograph: Jerry Waters, on the end of the middle row, scowling.

“You’re lucky, Jack. You were fighting the Nazis.”

“I didn’t see any Nazis in Oklahoma.”

“You know what I mean. It helps if the enemy’s a bastard. But sometimes we’re shooting the bull at night, tired as shit, and a guy comes out and says, ‘If I was a Vietnamese I’d support the VC,’ and someone else says, ‘So would I,’ and I say, ‘That’s for sure.’ It’s unbelievable.”

The curio shop. After a while the carvings changed. Once there had been ivory oxen and elephants, teakwood deer, jade eggs, and lacquer jewelry boxes. Then we got bad replicas, and finally obscene ones — squatting girls, heavy wooden nudes, carvings of eight-inch fists with a raised middle finger, hands making the cornuto.

The Black Table.

“I’d like to help you, George, but it’s against the rules to have segregated facilities.”

“We don’t want no segregated facilities as such, but what we want’s a table to sit at so we don’t have to look at no Charlies. And the brothers, they asked me to spearhead this here thing.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

“I ain’t asking you if you think it’s a good idea. I’m telling you to get us a table or we’ll waste this house.”

“You only have three more days here. Is it too much to ask you to simmer down and make friends?”

“We got all the friends we want. There’s more brothers coming next week, so if you say no you’ll have to negotiate the demand with a real bad ass, Baraka Johnson.”

“Haraka-haraka, haina baraka,” I said. “Swahili. My ship used to stop in Mombasa. Nataka Tusker beer kubwa sana na beridi sana.”

“Cut the jive, we want a table.”

“What if everybody wanted a table?”

“That’s the nitty-gritty, man. Every mother got a table except us. You think them Charlies over in the corner of the big bar want us to sit with them? You ever see any brothers sitting along the wall?”

“Maybe you don’t want to.”

“Maybe we don’t, and maybe them Charlies and peckerwoods don’t want us to. Ever think of that?”

“What you’re saying is there are already white tables, so why not have a table for the colored fellers?”

“What colored fellers?”

“Years ago—”

“We are black brothers and we wants a black table!”

“The point is I didn’t know there were white tables. I would have put my foot down.”

“Go ahead, mother, put your foot down, you think I care? I’m just saying we want a table—now—and if we don’t get it we’ll waste you. Dig?”

It was true. Yusof said so: we had a wall of “white” tables. I gave in. Sung’s photograph showed smiling and frowning faces, all black, and the girls — the only ones they would touch — long-haired Tamils, because they were black, too.

“Give them what they want,” said Shuck.

“Up to a point,” I said, “that’s my philosophy.”

Me, in my flowered shirt, having a beer with three fellers. A middle-aged sentence recurred in my talk. “That was a lot of money in those days—”

A group photograph: Bert Hodder, fifth from the end, middle row. He got tanked up one night and stood on his chair and sang,

“East Toledo High School,

The best high school in the world!

We love East Toledo,

Our colors are blue and gold—”

Neighborhood kids from the block of shophouses around the corner. They were posed with their arms around each other. They lingered by the gate, calling out “Hey Joe!” Ganapaty chased them with an iron pipe. The fellers chatted with them and gave them errands to run. They came to my office door.

“Ten cents, mister.” This from one in a clean white shirt.

“Buzz off, kid, can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Five cents.”

“Hop it!”

Edwin Shuck. His blue short-sleeved shirt, freckled arms, and narrow necktie; clip-on sunglasses, sweat socks, and loafers.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

I was with Karim. “The cooler’s on the fritz. I’ll be with you in a little while.”

“That can wait,” he said. “I’ve got to see you in your office.”

“Okay,” I said, and wiped my greasy hands on a rag.

Shuck poured himself a drink at my liquor cabinet. He closed the door after me.

“I spent yesterday afternoon with the ambassador.”

“How’s his golf game?” I took a cigar out of the pocket of my silk shirt.

“He spent yesterday morning with the army.”

“So?”

“I’ve got some bad news for you.”

“Spill it,” I said. But I had an inkling of what it would be. A week before, a Chinese feller named Lau had come to me with a proposition. He was from Penang and had twenty-eight girls up there he wanted to send down. He expected a finder’s fee, bus fare for all of them, and a job for himself. He said he knew how to do accounts; he also knew where I could get some pinball machines, American sports equipment, a film projector, and fittings for a swimming pool, including a new diving board. I told him I wasn’t interested.

“They’re closing you up,” said Shuck.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said. “Who’s they?”

“U.S. government.”

“They’re closing me up?” I snorted, “What is this?”

“It’s nothing personal—”

“You can say that again,” I said. “This isn’t my place — it’s theirs! So I suppose you mean they’re closing themselves up.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Shuck. “Officially the U.S. Army doesn’t operate cathouses.”

“If you think this is a cathouse you don’t know a hell of a lot about cathouses!”

“Don’t get excited,” said Shuck, and now I began to hate his lisp. “It wasn’t my decision. The army’s been kicking this idea around for ages. I’ve got my orders. I’m only sorry I couldn’t let you know sooner.”

“Do me a favor, Ed. Go down the hall and find Mr. Khoo. He’s just bought the first car he’s ever owned — on the strength of this job. He’s got about ninety-two more payments to make on it. Go tell him the Pentagon wants him to sell it and buy a bike. See what he says.”

“I didn’t think you’d take it so hard,” said Shuck. “You’re really bitter.”

“Go find Jimmy Sung. He’s paying through the nose for a new shipment of Jap cameras. Tell him the ambassador says he’s sorry.”

“Sung’s a crook, you said so yourself.”

“He knew what he was doing,” I said. “I shouldn’t have stopped him. I was getting bent out of shape trying to keep this place honest, and then you come along and piss down everyone’s shoulder blades.”

“Everyone’s going to be compensated.”

“What about Penang? You screwed them there.”

“That’s classified — who told you about Penang?”

“I’ve got information,” I said. “You’re ending the R and R program there. They’re all looking for jobs, and you know as well as I do they’re not going to find them. It’s not fair.”

“Jack, be reasonable,” said Shuck. “We can’t keep half of Southeast Asia on the payroll indefinitely.”

“Why put them on the payroll in the first place?”

“I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Shuck said. “I don’t know. I don’t make policy.”

“I can’t figure you out,” I said. “You’re like these fellers from the cruise ships that used to come to Singapore years ago, dying to get laid. Money was no object, they said. Then when I found them a girl they’d say, ‘Got anything a little less pricy?’ And you! You come in here with an army, making promises, throwing money around, hiring people, building things, and — I don’t know—invading the frigging place and paying everyone to sing “God Bless America.” And then you call it off. Forget it, you say, just like that.”

“Maybe it got too expensive,” said Shuck. “It costs—”

But I was still fulminating. “Play ball, you say, then you call off the game! You call that fair?”

“I never figured you for a hawk.”

“I’m not a hawk, you silly bastard!”

“Okay, okay,” said Shuck. “I apologize. What do you want me to say? We’ll do the best we can for the people here — compensate them, whatever they want. You’re the boss.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m the boss.” I was sitting behind my desk, puffing on the cigar, blowing smoke at Shuck. Briefly, it had all seemed real. I had a notebook full of calculations: in five years I would have saved enough to get myself out, quietly to withdraw. But it was over, I was woken.

Shuck said, “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“You’re darned tootin’ I don’t,” I said. “I had a good job before you hired me. A house, plenty of friends.” Hing’s, my semidetached house on Moulmein Green, the Bandung. There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung.

“I mean, I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“Well, you can roll your proposition into a cone and shove it. I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t even heard it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It means money,” said Shuck.

“I’ve seen your money,” I said. “I don’t need it.”

“You’re not crapping out on us, are you?”

“I like that,” I said. “Ever hear the one about the feller with the rash on his arm? No? He goes to this skin specialist who says, ‘That’s a really nasty rash! Better try this powder.’ The powder doesn’t work. He tries ointment, cream, injections, everything you can name, but still the rash doesn’t clear up. Weeks go by, the rash gets worse. ‘It’s a pretty stubborn rash — resisting treatment,’ says the doc. ‘Any idea how you got it?’ The feller says he doesn’t have the foggiest. ‘Maybe you caught it at work,’ the doc says, ‘and by the way where do you work?’ ‘Me?’ the feller says, ‘I work at the circus. With the elephants.’ ‘Very interesting,’ says the doctor, ‘What exactly do you do?’ ‘I give them enemas — but the thing is, to give an elephant an enema you have to stick your arm up its ass.’ ‘Eureka!’ says the doc. ‘Give up your job and I guarantee the rash on your arm will clear up.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says the feller, ‘I’ll never give up show biz.’”

Shuck pursed his lips. I didn’t blame him: I had told the joke too aggressively for it to raise a laugh.

“Do you know the one about Grandma’s wang house? Seems there was this feller—”

“I’ve heard it,” said Shuck. “‘You’ve just been screwed by Grandma.’”

“That’s how I feel,” I said. I split a matchstick with my thumbnail and began picking my teeth.

“Just listen to my proposition, then say yes or no.”

“No,” I said. “Like the feller says, it’s a question of mind over matter. You don’t mind and I don’t matter. Get it?”

“You’re being difficult.”

“Not difficult — impossible,” I said, and added, “Mr. Shuck,” lisping it with the same fishmouth buzz that he gave his name. I regretted that, and to cover it up, went on, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go break the news to Hing. I get the feeling Hing and I are on our way back to Beach Road. I’m not really a pimp, you know. That’s just talk.” I puffed the cigar and grinned at him. “I’m a ship chandler by profession, and it’s said that at ship chandling I’m a cracker jack.”

I winked.

Shuck glumly zipped his briefcase. “If you ever change your mind—”

“Never!”

At lunchtime it rained and the rain quickly developed into a proper storm, a Sumatra of the same velocity I had weathered in the harbor on Mr. Khoo’s launch when we towed that lighterful of girls to the Richard Everett. Ever since then, storms excited me: I could not read or write during a storm, and for the duration of the rain and wind my voice was louder; I found it easy to laugh, and I drank more quickly, standing up, peering out the window. I couldn’t turn my back on a storm. I switched off the radio and watched this one from my office at Paradise Gardens. It grew as dark at half past twelve as it was at nightfall — not sunset, but after that, dark sunless evening. I threw the windows open to hear the storm; it was cool, not raining yet, but very dark, with leaves turning over and stiff tree branches blowing like hair.

The lower part of the sky was lighted dully and all the pale green grass and the palm leaves turned olive, and tree trunks blackened. The birds disappeared: a last blown one straggled over Dr. Lim’s hedge. The fronds of the traveler’s palms parted and the larger trees swayed, and in the darkness the widely spaced drops began, as big as half dollars, staining the driveway. There was a rumble of faraway thunder. At the beginning it was still dark, but with the torrent it grew silvery, the air brightened as the rain came down, and softened to daylight as the larger clouds collapsed into the dense glassy streaks of the downpour flooding the garden. Soon it was all revolving sound and water and light; the trees that had thrashed grew heavy, the drooping leaves seeming to force the branches downward. Water foamed and bubbled down the roof tiles and flooded the gutters of Dr. Lim’s bungalow.

It continued for less than an hour, and before it was over the sun came out and made the last falling drops and the mist from the hot street shine brilliantly. Everything the rain touched glistened and dripped, and afterward all the houses and trees and pushcart awnings and bamboo fences were changed. The wetness gave everything in the sun the look of having swelled, and just perceptibly, buckled.

Some months later, in the old shop on Beach Road, Gopi the peon sidled into my cubicle, showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes, and said, “Mr. Hing vaunting Mr. Jack in a hurry-lah.” You know what for.