The Fear Artist

11

The house still smells of Anna’s perfume.

Pim opens the back door to let in some air and pads through the empty rooms to the front, which she also opens. For good measure she raises the windows in the living room. It’s drizzling and cool, but at least it doesn’t smell like her out there.

Gasoline and exhaust and wet dirt smell good to her.

She goes slowly through the dining room, not looking at the remains of the breakfast. It was bad enough to have to cook it and serve it; now she’s supposed to clean it up, too. In the kitchen she stops at the table where she eats alone while they sit together, out in the dining room, and she picks up her half-drained mug of tea. After looking down into it for a few moments, she holds it over the center of the table and slowly tilts it, soaking the stack of paper napkins. Then she straightens the mug and repositions it over a full sugar bowl and pours the remaining tea into the bowl until it overflows.

When the mug is empty, she lets her arm hang loosely and stands there, looking at nothing, with the mug dangling from her finger. She glances down at it, goes to the back door, and throws the mug halfway across the yard, and then she sits down in the doorway and lets out a sigh she doesn’t even hear. The flowers she’s planted and nature has watered so plentifully are in full bloom, so gaily and brightly that it looks like sarcasm.

She’s roughly scrubbing her cheek with the heel of her hand and sniffling before she consciously identifies the tickle of a tear. He didn’t need her help to stop drinking, and he certainly didn’t need her to talk to. And he hadn’t seemed any happier either, until … well, she thinks, swallowing-until a few days ago. When he met Anna. Before she came to the door, all he needed was food when he was hungry, and he did even that himself at first, forgetting she was in the house and then guiltily adding more rice or vegetables to whatever was on the stove to try to make her think he’d been cooking for both of them.

She has no business crying about any of this. He’s just someone to work for-that’s all he ever was-just someone to pay her money she can send home to her parents. One more sad, worn-down middle-class man, like the ones she’d gone to the hotels with, men who were baffled by their lives, who looked at them as though they were rooms they didn’t remember having entered, who clung to some detail-a way of combing the hair, a mustache, a shirt far too young for them-something that made them feel that they still had possibilities. When it was obvious at first glance to any woman that it was all behind them and the only thing they had to look forward to was more, or rather less, of the same.

That’s who she’d thought he was, one of those, until she began to understand the vastness of the hole his wife’s death had blown in his life.

The missing sea, she had thought one night. She’d been in bed and on the verge of sleep, but the thought had pulled her up into a sitting position. What missing sea? And what about it? A picture, a picture in a book she’d seen at Poke and Rose’s apartment: an enormous desert somewhere in the American West, ringed with spiky mountains, the farthest of them so distant they were like solid haze. The printing below the picture, Rose had told her, said that the desert was once the bottom of an inland sea, now gone for millions of years. And immediately it seemed to Pim that that emptiness was like the hole in Arthit’s life, that he had filled it with love, and that all of it was gone now, evaporated into nothing. She saw him as a man who was capable of an enormous amount of love.

From that point on, she began to see his truthfulness, his decency, his fairness. The size of his heart. And then she was lost.

Idiot.

There are weeds among the flowers. All she has to do is turn her back for a minute and things go to pieces. She gets up with a grunt, makes a detour through the wet grass to pick up the cup, and at the border to the garden she sinks into a crouch and begins listlessly to pull weeds. Some of her happiest hours here were spent crouching among these flowers as though she were back in the village. She’d believed that the flowers would …

She’s been a fool, she thinks, tossing an armful of weeds out of the flower bed. She’s too ugly, she’s too young, she’s too uneducated, she’s a street girl. She could stay with him for years, take care of him for years, and she’d still be that dumpy little onetime whore who sweeps up and makes the beds.

She throws the weeds into the trash can and hangs the cultivator on the nail driven into the weathered board where it always hangs. When she turns toward the door, there’s a man standing there looking out at her.

She’s inhaling when she sees him, and she produces an anguished little squeak and a spasm of coughing. The man holds up both hands, as though to show they’re empty, and smiles at her.

“Please,” he says, “please don’t be frightened. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Why are you-” She wraps her fist around the handle on the mug, which is the only weapon she has. “Why … why are you in there? I mean, what are you-”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He smiles at her again, and she sees this time what a nice smile it is. “I saw the door open in front. I called out a few times, but no one answered, and I was afraid something might be wrong, so I … well, I came in. I was hoping to talk to Arthit.”

“Does he know you?”

“Does he-Of course he knows me. We work together.” He shakes his head and steps back. “Look, I’m going to back up, and you can come in out of that wet. Wouldn’t that be better, Pim?”

Pim doesn’t take a step. “You know my name?”

The smile again, a wall of white teeth. “Well, of course I do. Arthit talks about you all the time. Come on, come on in.”

“He does?” Pim asks. As he retreats, she goes up the steps slowly, gripping the mug like a stone. At the top step, she pauses, still not coming into the kitchen.

“Oh, my, look at this,” the man says, eyeing the dripping table. He’s taller than most Thais, handsome almost in a movie-star way, with his hair combed straight back from a widow’s peak as though to accentuate perfect cheekbones. The man takes a dishrag from where it hangs over the faucet in the sink. “Arthit says that you’ve made this place a home again.” He turns to the table and begins to mop it.

“I’ll do that,” Pim says quickly. She puts the mug on the counter and starts toward him.

“Do you have paper towels?” he asks, turning toward her. “I’ll use this on the table, and you can put some paper towels on the floor to soak up the-What is it? Tea?”

“The cup slipped,” Pim says. Her eyes drop to the brimming sugar bowl. “Twice.”

“Life is a chain of accidents,” the man says. “I guess I just missed Arthit.”

“Did he really say that?”

“What?” He’s wringing the dish towel into the sink.

“That I-Never mind.”

“Oh, that. Of course he did. Pim this, Pim that. He’s been talking about you ever since he was smart enough to realize what he needed.”

“What was that?” Pim asks, and she can barely hear her own voice. “That he needed, I mean.”

“Someone like you, obviously. Someone with a good, generous heart who could bring his spirit back to him.”

“Did he …?”

“Say that? Yes. I’m telling you, we’ve talked about you a dozen times. More than a dozen.”

Pim says, “Oh,” and pulls a fat roll of paper towels from under the sink.

The man is mopping the underside of the table to stop the dripping. “How long ago did he leave?”

Pim stops unrolling the towels, thinking. “Fifteen minutes? Twenty?”

“Well, how far can he get in this traffic in fifteen minutes? He must have forgotten I was coming. Tell you what, you get the tea off the floor and I’ll phone him. Maybe he can come back.”

“Okay.” She drops a wad of towels onto the puddle in the floor and moves it around with her foot as he turns away and dials his cell phone, ambling toward the dining room as though he’s been here a thousand times. When the papers underfoot are sodden, she drops another handful, listening.

“No good,” the man calls to her from the other room. “Voice mail.” He lowers his voice to a conversational level. “Arthit, this is Prem. I’m at your house, talking to Pim. She’s even prettier than you said. I have the information and the charts you wanted. I’ll stay here a few minutes, and if I don’t hear from you, I’ll just go over to the station.”

He reappears in the doorway and says, “Well, let’s finish this up.”

“Charts?” Pim asks.

“Yes, some things he asked for last night. You know, he’s worried about Poke.”

“Uh,” Pim says. “He worries about a lot of things.”

“You must be worried about him, too. That’s a good technique, just pushing the towels around with your foot like that.”

“I was … I was thinking.” Her face is flaming as she drops to her knees and puts more towels down.

“I don’t blame you. We’ve all got a lot to think about these days. Anyway, maybe Arthit will come back and you’ll hear us talking, so-Oh, I don’t know why I should keep secrets from you. He asked me to see if I could get a list of the cheap hotels our patrolmen were being sent to watch, and I got it and made a sort of chart of them. Just to make it easier for him to visualize them.”

“Sent to watch,” Pim says.

“Well, sure. The people who want Poke figure he’s staying in some cheap place, probably a short-time hotel, where he won’t have to show identification. So they’re dispatching cops to keep an eye on places in a few areas where a foreigner wouldn’t draw too much attention. Arthit wanted to know which hotels and where. Maybe so he could tell Poke. I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.”

She gathers the wet towels and balls them up. “Where?”

“The Nana area,” he says. Then, watching her closely, he says, “Around Khao San.”

Pim’s hands tighten on the ball of dripping towels.

“And around Soi Cowboy.”

Pim says, “Ahh,” and gets up.

“So he asked me to come by and show him this stuff this morning. I guess he forgot.”

“He was busy,” Pim says, dropping the towels into the wastebasket. “He had something on his mind.”

“Like you do,” he says, smiling again. “Like all of us, with this situation.” He looks at his watch, which is made of gold. “I don’t know what to do. He hasn’t called back. Maybe I should just go to the station.”

“You can leave the charts with me.”

“No, I’d better take them so he can look at them. Otherwise he won’t see them until tonight, and he said it was important.” He looks at the table. “I think everything’s fine except the sugar bowl.”

“I’ll fix that …” she says, but he’s already leaving. She follows him down the hall to the front door.

Over his shoulder he says, “You should be more careful. Don’t leave doors open like that. I could have been anyone.”

“I needed … I mean, the house needed to be aired out.”

“Well, it’s nice and airy now.” He stops at the door and looks down at her. He’s wearing some sort of aftershave that smells like mint and lavender put together. “You’ll remember to tell him, won’t you? I mean, if he calls or you talk to him before I do?”

“I promise,” Pim says.

He grins and holds up a crooked little finger. It takes her a moment, but she crooks hers through it, and they both give a little yank to seal the promise.

“About?” he asks, their fingers still linked.

“Those hotels.”

“Good,” he says. He lets go of her hand and touches her shoulder, and his smile broadens. “And where?”

She smiles back at him and says, “Khao San.”