The Fourth Watcher: A Novel of Bangkok

4
Karma Is a Soft Drink

Rose draws the usual quota of stares as she navigates the crowded sidewalk of Bangkok's Pratunam district, threading her way between the stands of the sidewalk vendors. She slows to take a closer look at a T-shirt with a picture of the plump, fuzzy forest spirit Totoro on it. As she looks at the shirt, other people look at her. Almost six feet tall and-as Rafferty insists-hurtfully beautiful, Rose has been conspicuous since she turned fourteen. She has grown used to it.

But she feels the gaze of the extremely pretty girl who is eyeing her from two stalls away. Women look at Rose almost as much as men do, although usually for different reasons, and not for four or five blocks. This girl, Rose is certain, has been tagging along behind her for at least ten minutes.

Someone she knew at the bar, perhaps? No, she'd remember. The girl is probably hasip-hasip, literally fifty-fifty, half Asian and half Caucasian. The only hasip-hasip girl in the bar where Rose danced, back in the bad old days, was half Thai and half black. Anyway, this girl is too young. It's been a couple of years since Rose last took the stage at the King's Castle in Patpong Road, and this girl can't be more than seventeen.

Still, the face tugs at her. Rose has a remarkable memory for faces, a side benefit of her years in the bar, when a dancer's profits, and occasionally her physical safety, depended on remembering customers' faces. There's something familiar about this girl. Something in her bone structure?

For a moment their eyes meet and Rose smiles, but the girl quickly turns away, browsing yet another stall.

Rose offers one-third of the asking price for the Totoro shirt, settles in thirty seconds for half, and bags it. It's her present to herself. Although she's squeezed every baht since she moved in with Rafferty and stepped out from under the waterfall of money that flowed from the pockets of the customers in the bar, today she can buy herself a present. After all, this is her day. Then, feeling a little guilty, she buys another-girl's size eight-for Miaow. Unlike virtually all of Miaow's other T-shirts, this one isn't pink, but the child has watched the animated film about Totoro so many times that she goes around the apartment she shares with Rose and Rafferty singing the theme song in phonetic Japanese.

A glance at her oversize plastic wristwatch tells Rose that Peachy will already be in the office, and she has come to expect Rose to be on hand. She dumps the bag with the T-shirts into her purse, a leather tote the size of home base, and edges through the press of shoppers toward the soot-stained four-story office building, an architectural monument to melancholy, where Peachy and Rose's Domestics operates.

As she nears the door, she is reassembling the girl's face in her mind. Just as a tingle of prerecognition begins to build, someone swats her lightly on the shoulder, and the image dissolves.

"Fon," Rose says, feeling the smile break over her face. "Money day."

"Seven months," Fon says proudly. "It's been seven months." In her mid-thirties, dark-skinned, with a plain face made even plainer by a dolefully long upper lip, Fon is still beautiful when she smiles. She barely comes up to Rose's shoulder, so she embraces the taller woman by hugging her arm. "So the money's small, no problem," she says. "They like me, and I like them."

"They should like you," Rose says. "They're lucky to have you." They start up the stairs, and Rose resolves for the fiftieth time to sweep them sometime soon. They may have been swept to celebrate the millennium, but not very well. Grit scrapes beneath her shoes. It sounds like someone chewing sand.

"It's the kids," Fon says. "I love those kids." With two children of her own, in the care of her mother, up north, Fon has adopted the family who employs her. She stops climbing, and Rose pauses with her. "When I think I was going to go to work at the Love Star, I can't believe how lucky I am."

The Love Star is among the grimmest of the bars that line the red- light street Patpong, a dank little hole where men sit at a bar chugging beer while kneeling girls chug them. Working at the Love Star is the lowest rung on the ladder for aging go-go dancers, last stop before the sidewalk. Fon was only a few days away from spending her working hours on her knees when Rose found her a family who needed a housekeeper and babysitter. While some girls enjoy dancing in the better bars, no one enjoys working at the Love Star.

"You made your own luck," Rose says. "Anyway, that's what Poke says. 'Everybody makes their own luck.'"

"What about karma?" Fon asks, eyebrows raised. They are climbing again.

"Poke's an American. Americans think karma is a soft drink."

Fon gives her a light, corrective pinch on the arm. "How can you explain luck without karma?"

"Americans are crazy," Rose says. "But I'm working on him."

"Any progress?"

They reach the top of the stairs and start down the hall. Three women, wearing the street uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, are lined up outside the open door of the office. They look much more like domestic workers than the go-go dancers they used to be. "Some," Rose says. "He's not living entirely on meat. He's beginning to realize he doesn't know anything."

The women greet Rose and Fon at the door. Fon takes her place at the end of the line, and Rose goes in to see Peachy, looking harried behind her desk. She wears one of her memorable collection of work outfits. This one somehow manages to combine bright-colored stripes and polka dots in a design that looks like the first draft of an optical illusion. Like all of Peachy's dresses, today's is held in place by buttons the size of saucers.

"Everybody was early," Peachy says, lifting a hand to her lacquered hair without actually touching it. Her eyes register Rose's jeans and white men's shirt-one of Rafferty's-with a barely perceptible wince. "There were five of them here when I arrived."

"You look very pretty today," Rose says. The statement is not entirely truthful, but she knows how good it makes Peachy feel. If you can bring sweetness to somebody's day, Rose's mother always says, do it.

"Really?" Peachy's hand returns to the general territory of her hair. "You like these colors?"

"They're very vivid," Rose says. "Like your personality."

Peachy's smile is so broad her ears wiggle. "I wasn't sure," she says. "I thought it might be a little young for me."

"Poke always says you're as young as you make other people feel."

"And to think," Peachy says, "I didn't like him when I first met him."

"Lots of people don't," Rose says.

Peachy shakes her head. "You're a lucky girl."

"Peachy?" It is the woman at the head of the line. "I'm going to be late for work."

"Sorry, Took," Rose says, stepping aside. "Come in and get rich."

Peachy counts out the week's wages for Took, a gratifying wad of crisp thousand-baht bills and some of the friendly-looking red five hundreds and hands it to her. "Too much," Took says. "I still owe you six thousand from my advance." She gives back fifteen hundred baht. "Only three more paydays," she says happily, "and we'll be even."

Peachy sweeps Took's returned money into the open drawer and pulls out a ledger to enter the repayment.

"Lek," Rose says to the next woman in line, a girl who had danced beside her at the King's Castle. "How is it at the new place?"

"The woman's fine," Lek says, wedging past the departing Took to get to the desk. She is a very short woman whose plump face displays frayed remnants of the baby-chipmunk cuteness that tempted so many men in the bar when she was in her early twenties. Now, ten years later, she has the look of a child's toy that's been through a lot. "The man has something on his mind, but he hasn't done anything stupid yet."

Peachy's eyes come up fast, and Rose mentally kicks herself for raising the topic. When Rafferty first forced the partnership on her, Peachy had been terrified of placing former bar dancers-prostitutes, in her mind-with the firm's clients. "Are you provoking him?" Peachy asks.

"It's hard to dust without bending over," Lek says. "If I could leave my behind at home, there'd be no problem." Peachy blushes, but Lek laughs and says to Rose, "Remember the guys who always looked at the mirror behind us? He's one of them."

"I was always careful of those," Rose says. "No telling what they wanted."

"Oh, yes there was," Lek says. "Anyway, Peachy, don't worry. If he comes on too hard, I'll just ask you to find me someplace else. No way I'm going back to that." She folds her money and slips it into her back pocket. "You know how people talk about money as units? Like this many baht is so many dollars or pounds or whatever? I have my own unit of currency."

"What is it?" Rose asks, against her better judgment.

"The short-time," Lek says. "This money is about six and a half short-times. Six and a half times I don't have to pretend that the guy who's grunting on top of me is the prince I've been waiting for all my life. Six and a half times I'm not lying there reminding myself where I put my shoes in case I have to get out fast."

Rose can't help laughing, but Peachy is scarlet.

"I'm just joking," Lek says to Peachy.

"I should hope so," Peachy says. She looks like she's about to start fanning herself.

"I always knew where I left my shoes," Lek says.

"Next," Peachy says, looking past Lek.

By two o'clock all the women have been paid, and Rose and Peachy face each other over the desk. Peachy takes the remaining money, sadly diminished now, and divides it into four unequal piles: one for the rent, a smaller one for bribes to the cops charged with protecting the business, and one of medium thickness for each of them. Handling the money carefully, out of respect for the portrait of the king on the front of every bill, she politely slides Rose's money into an envelope before handing it across the desk.

"So," Peachy says, leaning back.

"You're doing a good thing, Peachy," Rose says. She stretches her long legs in front of her and crosses her feet. A silver bell dangling from her right ankle jingles. "You're making merit."

"I hope so." Her eyes search the familiar room. "I have to admit, one or two of them worry me."

"They're good girls," Rose says. "Or at least they're trying to be. Some of them probably need more practice."

"At any rate," Peachy says, "it's been an education. I knew about Patpong, of course, everybody does, but I never thought about who the girls actually were. I just thought of them as, well…" Her face colors as she searches for a term that won't offend.

"Dok thong," Rose suggests, using the name of an herb employed as an aphrodisiac in folk medicine, a word that has come to mean "slut." She adds, "Women who would do anything for a thousand baht."

Peachy makes a tiny fanning gesture beneath her nostrils, Thai physical shorthand for "bad smell," then says, "Such language."

"Well, they were," Rose says, "or rather we were." She wiggles a hand side to side. "Although fifteen hundred is more like it."

Peachy leans forward and laces her fingers. She purses her lips for a second as though trying to hold something back that wants to get out and then says, "Please forgive me. How bad was it?"

"Don't take this wrong," Rose says, "but in some ways it was fun. We weren't planting rice or hauling a buffalo around. We were in the big city. We could go to the bathroom indoors. There was food everywhere. Some of the men were nice, and we were just swimming in money. And we had the satisfaction of sending a few hundred baht home every week. That took a bit of the sting out of it."

Peachy is leaning forward on one elbow, her chin in her palm, so absorbed she doesn't notice that her elbow is crumpling a stack of money. "But then there was the other end of it," Rose says. "Going into rooms with men we'd never seen before, not knowing what they wanted. Even when it was just the normal minimum, just the basic guy-on-top, quick-getaway boom-boom, we knew we were damaging ourselves. You know, you can only sleep with so many strangers before making love stops meaning anything. You begin to wonder whether you can still fall in love."

Peachy opens her hand so her fingers cup her cheek. "You did," she says.

Rose feels the heat in her face, and Peachy courteously drops her eyes to her desk. This is territory the two women have always avoided until now. Then, abruptly, Rose laughs, and Peachy's eyes swing up to hers. "Poor Poke. I made him prove himself a thousand times. I think part of me wanted to believe he was just another customer."

Peachy's powdered brow furrows. "Why?"

"I knew how to deal with customers," Rose says. "It was love I didn't know anything about."

"Love," Peachy says. "Love is so hard." She glances down and sees that her elbow is on the king's face, and lifts her arm as though the desk were hot. She smooths out the bills. "I mean," she adds, "I mean it can be. Back when… when I was married-" She stops. "Well, obviously I'd think it's hard, wouldn't I? Considering that my marriage fell apart, that my husband… left me."

As Rose searches for something to say, Peachy straightens the papers on her desk and then straightens them again. Then she lines them up with the edge of the blotter. "Listen to me ramble," she says. "What matters is that you and Poke are happy, and that he brought you to me." She hits the stack of paper with an aggressively decorated fingernail, fanning it across the desk blotter. "Why is this so difficult? What I'm trying to say is how happy I am that we're partners, how much I appreciate what you've helped me to do." She looks directly at Rose. "This business is my family. It's my… um, my baby. So I wanted to say thank you."

Rose feels the slight prickling that announces that tears are on the way. She blinks. "That's so sweet of you, Peachy."

"I mean it. And today is obviously the right day to tell you."

Rose looks up, surprised. There's no way Peachy could know. "Today?"

"It's eight months today," Peachy says, as though it should be obvious. "This is our anniversary."

"Oh, my gosh. Is it? It doesn't seem possible."

"You forgot," Peachy says bravely, swallowing disappointment. "Oh, well. Your life is so full."

"My life?" Rose asks without thinking. "Yes, I guess it is."

"You're lucky," Peachy says.

"I suppose I am. I never thought I was. Maybe I'm not used to it yet."

"Get used to it," Peachy says, a bit shortly. "It's a sin not to appreciate a good life. Somebody should hit you with a stick. I wish someone had hit me, fifteen years ago."

Rose lowers her head. "Go ahead."

"No. What I want to do…" She hesitates and then plunges in. "I want to invite you to have dinner with me tonight. To celebrate."

Rose sees the hope in Peachy's eyes, sees a different woman from the resentful partner Poke had chained her to all those months ago. She leans across the desk and puts her hand on Peachy's. "I'd love to," she says. "But tonight is something special. Something with Poke, I mean. Can we do it tomorrow?"

Peachy turns her hand palm up and grasps Rose's. She gives it a squeeze. "Tomorrow," she says. "Tomorrow will be fine." She puts the remaining stacks of bills in the desk drawer and pushes her chair back, preparing to rise. "But what's tonight?"

"Nothing much," Rose says. "It's supposed to be for me." She stands, slipping the envelope full of money into her pocket. "But it's really for Poke."