Bangkok Haunts

stare at the topless girl in the poster for a couple of beats. “I was still in the walk-into-the-sunset, midpubescent phase when she came to live with me in the States. We hadn’t been married a month, though, when she disappears for most of one Saturday night. I’m calling emergency services, I’m going out of my mind thinking she’s been raped or murdered or both, or been run over, all the crap that drives a man crazy when he’s in love. Then she walks in about four in the morning with a great big grin on her beautiful, cynical face and lays out more than a thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Sheeze!”
    This last is a kind of yelp, caused by severe backbite of heartburn. He has to gulp a couple of times. “She didn’t care so much about the money as the power, the very liberating act of walking out at about seven P.M . in a big strange land and coming back more than a thousand dollars richer a few hours later. That turned her on a lot more than I could.”
    He has to pause to steady himself, then appears to regain sovereignty over his mind. “She tossed me half the money and told me how it was gonna be. I’d never seen that side of her before. It was frightening and very unnerving. I cried like a baby for two whole days, but it didn’t affect her at all. She had seen men bawling like that plenty of times. No way was she going to change, and she wasn’t afraid of violence. I didn’t even threaten to hit her—she was way too tough for that. Kick her out? And spend the next months in mental torture wondering about what she was up to in the States?”
    He scratches his chest hair, lets a couple of beats pass. “After I’d quit bawling my eyes out, she started talking reality. She told me about her childhood. I mean, she told it like it is in a way you never hear Thai people talking unless you’re one of them. I started to see the world with her eyes. It was a total personal revolution for me, what it must do to your head, growing up like that. In the West all our problems are social and psychological these days. But suppose you were programmed in a totally different way, suppose your very existence was constantly under threat, and there was no way out—
no way out.
That was her message. She didn’t give a shit that she could make a lot of dough in the States—that didn’t alter the fact that all her people, everyone she had ever known and been fond of, they were still there, trapped, hungry, impotent.” Waving a hand: “At least that’s how she put it at that stage. She admitted she was in America to work, not to play at love. She said she had a family to look after. Turned out she was talking about her kid brother. I don’t think she gave a shit about anyone else.”
    A long pause filled with heavy sighs. He does seem to be going through something. “At first I only went along with it to keep her from leaving me.”
    “You became her pimp?”
    “Not really, but the law saw it that way. In the technical sense I suppose I was, but that lady didn’t need a pimp. What she needed was my house and me as a secretarial service.” A pause while he fidgets with something on the table. “Then later to hold the video camera while I was standing in the wardrobe and she was performing with the john.” Looking me full in the eye: “Within six weeks she had a full diary for every day, starting at lunchtime and going through to about two A.M. Word of an exciting new game spreads real quick in a small town in America. She had the local movers and shakers lining up—the male ones, that is—practically begging for the privilege of hiring her body. Big shots who owned chauffeur-driven limos arrived at our house in hired cars and taxis. Within a few months we were in a position to blackmail most of the leading local lights, including judges and prosecutors. That’s why I only did six months’ jail time and she only got deported. It was a deal. If they’d have gotten heavy, we would have started flashing video clips. As it was, we made three hundred thousand dollars before they closed us down.”
    He’s walking around his small room, fidgeting with this and that, pretending the poster of Angkor Wat needs adjusting. My eyes rest on it: the vast, sinister jungle temple with its five phallic towers at the center. I think we have arrived at yet another psychologically interesting moment, when there’s a knock on the front door. Baker cannot disguise his relief and says with an apologetic smile,