Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 7

made whole in sex and love. And yet by her account she did not want to mandate his awareness. It was only by tripping on shadows and feeling vapid equanimity that came after having absurdly given oneself over so entirely to the sensation of pulling on one's genitalia that a man actually knew anything.
This whore was and was not his typical whorehouse girl. On the day of their first meeting he had been sketching runners and trees at a stadium near Assumption University where his wife taught. His head was resting in a fog until she materialized. There she was casting a shadow onto the sun that was sedating him and wrapping him into himself in sleep. There she was questioning him on his art and pointing out her mommy, a skinny and frail thing, sitting on the other set of bleachers. He found out that she was a dancer. There was no surprise there. Her flirtatious gestures and the presence of her frail mommy looking over at them and hoping the purchase would take place were tacit but undeniable clues that she was poor and wanted a male companion. That was no surprise either. Yet beyond this calculated small talk or artifice was an ingenuous mouth that glistened in guileless desire. She was a money girl. That was obvious, and yet there was more. There was infatuation and an accompanying mommy who was like an SOS. Porn was a whore, but if he hadn't been married, she could have been more. Except for Noppawan, who was a flagrant novelty, he couldn't quite decipher how whores and wives were all that different. Both baited the man for the fecundity of prosperity and progeny. It was a survival response that was selfish in base primeval instincts. It was human and beautiful. It was filled with womanity.
She turned up the volume on her tape recorder and repeated, "Excusez-moi; au revoir; oui; toilletes; papier hygienique."
"Was that the main reason for coming to your apartment: for the tape recorder?" he asked.
She turned off the machine without the least concern about a distraction deferring her scholarship. "Oui," she said, "but also my favorite blouse, jeans, a necklace-see, isn't it beautiful--lots of things. A tape recorder is rather important, I think. You don't want me to be unable to talk." He nodded his head as he frowned wishing that she couldn't speak at all. She would have been all the more beautiful mute and deaf. He had proposed getting up early initially to compensate for his slow, pokey movements but not as early as this and he resented having lost sleep for such knicknacks. He didn't feel that he should be subject to listening to her palaver in Canada. His nod was that of acquiescence the way the King Ramas had agreed with planned activities of the imperialists to divert their attention. He, however, was trying to divert a headache. He looked at the booklet that was on her lap. She was unsuccessfully trying to imitate a product published in Thailand as he had guessed a minute earlier from the fact that the speaker on the tape sounded Thai. It was the blind leading the blind, he thought.
"You do know some English, don't you?" he asked.
"No," she said. He could imagine the palaver she would be saying on the streets of Montreal and he yearned for his wife, Noppawan. He got the taxi driver to turn right and park on the side of a street. His eyes were fixed on a barren serenity of gravel and weeds that was in the vicinity of a pier. The sun was now rising fully and aided by a golden roofed temple on the other side of the river, there was a silvery and golden glaze in the waters camouflaging the sooty sediments that were diluted within. He wanted to go to the gravel and eat along the side of begging dogs of which the bodies were deflating like tires. He wanted to sit at one of the red metallic tables on a plastic stool among a group of saffron robed monks, with the scents of rice or noodles penetrating his nostrils. He had to smile that such an aversion as twenty baht meals still called to him pleasantly because they were the foundation of memories that constituted his verdant youth.
"What are we doing?" she asked
"We're eating," he said. "Come on, it will be fun to act like common people," he chuckled.
"Common. I know common. Common is having a treat of eating fried insects on the dirt road, Nawin. Common is sleeping on a rug because you don't have a bed. Common is praying for the opportunity of having one's sandals fall apart or getting them trapped deep into the soil of the rice field so as to have an