The Fourth Watcher

7

"Where are you going?” Rose’s smooth thigh lands atop his, warm as fresh bread. “Just turning on the light.”

“I can find what I want in the dark,” Rose says in Thai. Her hand wanders down over the sensitive skin of his stomach, heading for the chakra he has come to think of as his own personal theme park, Fun World. She grabs hold. “It’s not like it moves around.”

“That’s not what you said a few minutes ago. You seemed pretty happy with the way it moved around.”

“Thai women learn early,” she says with an affectionate squeeze, “to seem happy.”

He stretches his right arm as far as it will go, and his fingers knock against a small box and just brush the base of the lamp on the bedside table. Rose raises her hand far enough to sink claws lightly into his stomach, and he gives up and relaxes into the pillow. “I am happy,” he says, surprising himself. He can’t remember ever having said that before.

Rose bumps him with her hip and adds emphasis with a little fingernail action around the navel. “I’d be happier with a cigarette.”

“So? We’re in Bangkok, not Los Angeles. People are allowed to smoke in Bangkok.”

“They’re in the living room,” she says. Then she says, “I think I should stop smoking in front of Miaow.”

“If Miaow’s in the room at the moment,” Rafferty says, “smoking is the least of our worries.”

“Listen to yourself. After all those years on the street, do you think there’s anything Miaow doesn’t know about sex?”

“She’s probably theoretically familiar with the grunt mechanics,” Rafferty says. “But the secrets of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged, the mystical tantric sexual techniques of the masters-I doubt she knows much about those.”

“Was that what you just did? I should have paid attention.” Rose runs the tip of her tongue over his shoulder. “The ‘grunt mechanics’? Do I grunt?”

“Like a sumo wrestler.”

“You’re just being sweet.” He can hear the smile in her voice.

“We’re not getting much done, are we?” he asks.

Rose turns her head so her lips brush his chest when she talks, and the hairs on the back of his neck snap to attention. “Aren’t we?”

“Well, I was going to turn on the light. Then you wanted a cigarette. Instead we’re just lying here.”

“Actually, I was waiting for you to get up and bring it to me. It’s my happybirthday, isn’t it?”

“It was. Must be three or four in the morning by now.”

“Already?” She stretches. “I guess I did have fun.”

He jams his eyes shut tight, makes a widemouthed goblin’s face in the dark to relieve the tension building in his chest, and lets his features return to normal. “I have something for you,” he says, flipping back the covers and getting up.

“Besides the cigarette? Turn on the light, I want to look at you.”

“Not a chance. Women are the only people who look good naked.”

“Some of us actually do like men,” Rose says.

“It’s not that we’re not useful,” he says. “It’s just a different index. Women are flowers, men are root vegetables. You wouldn’t make a bouquet of turnips.”

“Sometimes I worry about you,” she says.

“Why’s that?” He is halfway to the door.

“No one can really be as much like he seems to be as you are.”

“I’ll think that over,” he says. “I’m sure it means something.”

After the darkness of the bedroom, its one small window blocked by the air conditioner, the living room is milky with the light that spills through the glass door to the balcony, Bangkok wattage bouncing off the low clouds. The remainder of the lopsided cake sits on the table. The sight of it makes him smile, despite the electric jitter that’s broadcasting random bursts of alternating current through his nervous system.

He pulls a pristine pack of Marlboro Lights from the jumble of clutter in the purse, peels the cellophane strip, and worries one out. As he passes through the open doorway into the bedroom, Rose snaps on the light. He slams his eyes shut against the glare. When he opens them again, he sees Rose, sitting up in bed with the sheet pooled around her hips, looking brown and amused. For the thousandth time, he notices how the light bounces off the polished skin of her shoulders, how the smooth muscles announce themselves in shadows on her flat stomach.

“I don’t know,” she says, giving him an appraising glance. “Maybe you could dance go-go.” Her eyes drop as he feels himself stir at the sight of her. “Wait, wait,” she says. “This would definitely disqualify you.”

“Not at the Queen’s Corner,” he says, crossing the room self-consciously and slipping under the sheets. “Last time I was in there, half the girls weren’t.”

“Weren’t what?” she says, taking the cigarette.

“Weren’t girls.”

She lights the cigarette, draws deeply, and regards it with comfortable satisfaction. “Did you think they were pretty?”

“Who?” He breathes in the smoke she exhales, seeking to soothe his nerves, wanting one himself.

“The ladyboys.” Thai transvestites have an enthusiastic following among the international cognoscenti and have become a standard attraction in many of the go-go bars.

“No. They always look like. . I don’t know, plastic fruit or something. They don’t seem to have real faces, or even a real age. They look like they might come in jars.”

“Pay them enough and I’m sure they’ll come in a jar for you.”

“Rose,” he says. His heart is beating irregularly.

“Uh-oh,” Rose says. She studies his face. “What’s happening?”

“I didn’t give you your present.” He reaches out and takes the cigarette from her and inhales it hard enough to blow a hole in his back. He is immediately sweepingly, reelingly dizzy. “Jesus,” he says. “I can’t believe I used to do that on purpose.”

Rose is bent slightly toward him, watching him closely. She takes the cigarette and looks down at it. “Most people don’t try to smoke the whole thing at once.”

“So-” Rafferty says, and stops. The silence widens around them like a ripple in the center of a pond.

“Poor baby,” Rose says, keeping her eyes on the cigarette as she mashes it in the ashtray. “All those words in your head, and they’re not there when you need them.”

“It’s almost four a.m.,” Rafferty says, in full retreat. “Coffee. Coffee is the answer.” He grabs the bubble-gum pink robe Miaow made him buy at the weekend market at Chatuchak. Between the color and the cheerful, slightly fey yellow dragon embroidered on the back, it always makes him feel like Bruce Lee’s gay stand-in. “Coming?”

She grimaces. “You mean, get up?”

“I know it’s drastic.”

“Wait,” she says, and reaches down to a small zippered bag on the floor. Her hand comes up with a tube of lipstick and a loose Kleenex, and she applies the lipstick quickly and blots it, all in one swift, professional movement. “Ready for anything,” she says. She tosses the sheets aside and rises, almost six feet of flawless naked woman. As always, she looks to Rafferty like some ambitious new stage of evolution, an inspired draft of Woman 3.0, a human Car of the Future. She turns her back to pick up the towel she invariably wraps around her, and Rafferty tears his eyes from the long shadowy gully of her spine and the tablespoon-size dimples above her buttocks, and grabs the box on the table. He drops it into his pocket on the way out of the room. Bumping against his hip, it feels as big as a watermelon.

The fluorescent lights reveal a kitchen that looks like it was used for grenade practice. Flour dusts the counters. Virtually every bowl, utensil, and platter Rafferty owns has ambled out of the cupboard, coated itself with something sticky, and assumed its least flattering angle. He pulls a bag of coffee beans from the freezer and drops a couple of fistfuls into the grinder, clearing a space on the counter with his pink silk forearm.

“One cake?” Rose says behind him. “All this for one cake?”

“But what a cake.” The whir of the grinder fills the room. Silently counting to twelve, Rafferty reaches up into the cabinet with his free hand and takes down a box of coffee filters. He drops the box to the counter and uncaps the coffee grinder. “Perfect,” he says, studying the grind. He opens the box of filters and pulls out a nest of tightly clustered paper cones. As always, the edges are stuck together. He ruffles them ineffectually with his thumb, trying without much hope to separate a single filter from the clump.

“You were going to say something,” Rose says, her eyes on his hands. The lowered lids make it hard for him to read her expression. The towel is brilliantly white against the dusk of her skin.

“Yes.” He manages to pry free a little clot of four filters, a minor triumph. He lets his hands drop to hide the palsy that seems to have seized control of them. “I was.”

“And you had a present for me.” She tilts her head to one side, watching his fingers fumble with the filters.

“After coffee,” he says, crimping the paper edges to loosen them. They are almost karmically inseparable.

“Is that my present? In your pocket?”

He meets her eyes and feels his face grow hot. “Yes.”

She purses her lips. “Not very big.”

“Well, it’s. . no, it’s not very big.” His fingers feel like frozen hams, and the filters are resolutely glued together. His mind is suddenly a large and disordered room with words piled randomly in the corners like children’s toys. “I mean, it’s not-but you said that already-and it. . it’s. .”

“Let me.” Rose crosses the room, all business, and takes the filters from his hand. She slips a nail under the edge and separates the bundle into two. Then she places the top two filters, still stuck together, between her lips and closes her mouth. When her lips part, the filters come apart neatly, one stuck to each lip, and she removes them and extends them to Rafferty. Each of them has a dark red lip print on its edge. “The answer is yes,” she says.

He has the filters in his hands before he hears her. “It is?” is all he can think to say. He stands there, a coffee filter dangling from each hand, the box with the ring in it exerting a supergravitational weight against his right hip. “It really is?” He has to push the words around the soft, formless obstruction in his throat.

“I know what I said when you asked me before,” Rose says, and now her eyes are on his. “I remember every word I said. I’ve remembered it a thousand times. I’ve walked to work, I’ve shopped for dinner, I’ve cleaned apartments, I’ve cooked food remembering what I said, trying to find the place where I should have said something that wasn’t about me, about my family, my life, my problems, me, me, me. I was terrible to you. If I’d just stopped talking for one minute, if I’d just stopped being frightened that I’d eventually get hurt, I would have said yes.”

“Ahh, Rose,” Rafferty says.

“I told you we were a million miles apart.”

“We were.”

“The only way you could be a million miles from me,” Rose says, “would be if I were a million miles from my own heart.” Her eyes go to the filters in his hands. “Just show it to me. Put those things down and show it to me.”

“Right. Show it to you.” He sets the lipsticked filters on the counter, watching his hands from a distance, as through a thick pane of glass. Feels the cool cloth of the robe against the back of his hand as he reaches into his pocket, feels the plush of the box under his fingertips, but all he sees is Rose, although he doesn’t even know when he looked over at her, and then his hand comes into the bottom of the picture with the box in it, and she holds his eyes with her own as her long, dark fingers take the box and close around it.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” she says without looking down.

“It has to be,” he says. “It’s for you.”

She puts her other hand over the box, cupping it between her palms. “Everybody wanted to marry you,” she says. “Every girl in the bar. They looked at you and they saw a house and a passport and money for life. And so did I.”

“Most of my competition was a hundred pounds overweight.”

“Stop it. Just once, let someone say something nice about you.”

“Sorry. Thanks.” He can barely hear his own voice.

“But those girls didn’t love you,” Rose says. “I didn’t love you either. I didn’t even want to love you. I didn’t want to tell myself I loved you if what I really loved was the house and the passport. I stopped working because of you, did you know that? I told myself I stopped for me, but I didn’t. And after I stopped, I talked myself out of you a hundred times. Sometimes my heart hides from me. It took everything, Poke. It took a long time, it took months of being with you, it took Miaow, even, seeing the way you are with Miaow, but I love you.”

“And I love you,” he says helplessly. The words hang in the air with a kind of phantom shimmer, a tossed handful of glitter. Rose looks at him in a way that makes him feel like a developing Polaroid: Out of the infinite potential of nothing comes a specific human face, with all its weaknesses and limitations. When she has his face in focus, or committed to memory, or transformed into what she wanted to see, or whatever she was doing, she looks down at the box and opens it.

The ring has three stones-a topaz, a sapphire, and a ruby, none of them very large. “The sapphire is your birthstone,” Rafferty says. “The ruby is mine.” It sounds puerile and silly as he says it. “The topaz was my guess at Miaow. Now we can change it, make it a ruby and two sapphires.”

“The family,” Rose says. “In a ring.” She tilts the stones toward him. “Miaow between you and me.”

“I guess,” Rafferty says, wondering why he never saw that.

“Poor baby,” she says for the second time, but her tone is very different. “You want a family so badly.”

“I want to put a fence around us,” Rafferty says. “Something to hold us together.”

Rose says, “We’re not going to fall apart. I won’t let us.” Her face is very grave. She raises the box to him, and he takes it and removes the ring and wraps the warm smoothness of her left hand in his, and slips the ring onto her finger. It sticks at the knuckle, and he pushes at it, and she starts to laugh and chokes it off, and then raises her finger to his mouth so he can wet the knuckle with his tongue. The ring glides over her knuckle. His arms go around her, and she fits herself to him, pressing the length of her body against his. Then she laughs. “Peachy is going to be so happy,” she says.

“Peachy can wait,” he says. “I want to make love with you when you’re wearing the ring.” He starts to lead her to the bedroom. “And only the ring.”

“Make the coffee first,” she says. “I think we’re going to need it.”

“Right.” Back at the counter, he glances down at the filters with her red lip prints on them, then takes the two that are still stuck together and drops them both into the basket. He upends the grinder into them.

“What’s wrong with the ones I got for you?” she asks.

“Nothing at all,” he says, feeling as though he will rise into the air, lift off, float inches above the floor. “I’ll eat them later.”

They are halfway across the living room, sipping coffee, hands clasped, when someone begins to hammer on the door.