Corpus of a Siam Mosquito | Page 7

his brain
without having to get dirty. She wanted to continuously wear the
glasses that caged her tepid orbs and to not succumb them to rapturous
non-Buddhist primal yearnings. She did not care to dodge the aloneness
of her thoughts through a rapturous delusion that she was one partial
being 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