"No, I"m going back to sleep. If it didn"t bother me the first time I can sleep on it again. Leave it for the maids. It makes something new in their days."
"You"re going to go back to sleep?"
"Soon. I did you long and hard but if there"s no blood you aren"t torn up."
"Okay, good; now can we talk about something else?"
"If you want. What were you staring at when I woke up?"
"I don"t know--a post card I didn"t finish writing; the telephone; a gecko crawling above the bed stand; the corners of the room which are filthy--the room must be infested with insects." Nawin smiled abashedly, chuckled, and then stared directly into the face of the paramour with a baffled expression. "You keep grinning. Why?"
"I"m happy."
"Happy?"
"The happiest. The happiest I"ve ever been."
"Well, good for you...I mean if you were happy before you"ve got more of it. If you weren"t I guess you have less of it...unhappiness that is, negated negatives."
The paramour laughed. "You"re a comedian. I love that; I love you," he said as his fingers slid into the elastic of Nawin"s underwear. Nawin laughed incredulously careful not to release a cynical laugh out of fear that, although unlikely, the paramour could possibly mean that which he said.
"Don"t you think it is a bit early to feel that way. It"s certainly too early in the morning to say a lot of nothing."
"It"s not nothing," he said, snapping the elastic--he himself wearing nothing but his grin. "No, that"s not how I think. You just have to do things. If there is a good feeling ride it fully, you just have to throw yourself into it and live it. If you stand back and pick things apart because you don"t know 100 percent you might as well be dead because what you"re living isn"t life."
"Is that so?" Nawin said. It was cogent enough to him who would have had the need and thus the gullibility to believe such things were it not for the countenance, the melodramatic tone of he who promulgated this holy maxim, and the circ.u.mstances that went contrary to the putative sentiments.
24
Sensing that a bit of enlightenment could accompany a binge of debauchery and provide him with not only wind but ablution into the cellar of his musty mind, he was given a reason for intimacy, not that this reason or any other would have to prevail in creatures so p.r.o.ne to irrational caprices as he now concluded that he was. So a man would seek less alien companionship with another man after a girlfriend had jumped from the eleventh story of a university building and a wife who had subsequently broken his arm with an iron frying pan now kept him locked out of their home--this attributing of men as less illogical and more steady presences, rightly or wrongly, and identifying solely with them was reasonable enough; but to succ.u.mb spellbound to the brevity of frenzy, knowing well such intimacies to be spectacles as brief and garish as the puffs of aerosol he and a college roommate used to spray and light so that they might experience an inferno of the air, to know and yet to do it nonetheless, was inane.
Now seated and stationary on this bed in this room and in this mind, groping for contours of objects in dark and curtailed s.p.a.ce among ant.i.thetical thoughts and caprices, putative reality seemed nothing but the most tangible of the intangibles. As a result he became even more reticent, pondering what the right combinations were to live life fully: inward versus outward explorations; feeling versus logic; work versus leisure; silent reverie versus boisterous revelry; digressions into the future and the past; savoring the present moment as in lying on a bench at Wat Arun watching clouds overhead, sensing the breath enter and leave his frame, and feeling a sense of awe that he was even cognizant of all this; conversely, doing and having agenda and purpose about the affairs of man, interaction which allowed one to avoid the intrusiveness of too many unwanted, distracting thoughts, all of which confirmed his inconsequence even in the here and now. There had to be a harmony of these incongruous elements but he did not know how or to what degree.
"And I suppose you will always be there for me," Nawin asked with a sardonic smile on his face. He now wanted levity and the substance of sound, even his own, to dispel, or at least obfuscate the longevity that was in each and every minute to distract him from the realization of the hours until sunrise, and to preoccupy him during the time, still unknown, until departure of this intimate stranger.
He, the womanizer he once was, reproached himself for being here with this man in a chagrin of manhood, a mortification and yet a mortification of what he could not say. Perhaps there was no reason for mortification at all, he countered in a retort of thought. Perhaps this was a cleansing and a freeing of himself from a false sense of what manhood should be. Still, he had all these explosions of intimacy in the knowledge he would feel this vacuity afterwards, and that upon feeling it any moment could make him a perpetrator of indifference who rudely discarded this delusion rather than built a multi-story make-believe castle upon it; intimacy bedazzled him for a time before his return to a more subdued and substantive state; this time in an effeminate role of mute intercourse not to his liking but which he needed nonetheless; exacerbated s.e.xual tension abated but not entirely extinguished in post-s.e.xual melancholy. To know such matters and yet to interact this way regardless like any biologically programmed automaton thwarted by early childhood experience was an inane life.
So he concluded and re-concluded, with his thoughts becoming increasingly redundant, twisted, and plaited. To gain some solace and respite he hummed the melody of Beethoven"s Ninth Symphony. Thinking as he did so that the whirlwind he would create by repeating it thrice therein should clear away all dross he instead found that the debris remained even as it dragged circuitously although less tediously in music.
"And I know that you will always be there for me," Nawin remembered himself saying facetiously. It occurred to him that this lover, this sprawled figure so near to him, was like a dog he had seen recently near Gaysorn Department Store lying on its back at the base of a Brahma statue, its genitalia an oblation to that deity. At that time, while he was chuckling at a deity aptly profaned and pondering how our pantheistic awe of nature had been overtaken by these artificial weeds of dogma, false stories and tradition, as with the alleged bones of the Buddha that were enshrined in a temple near the Silpakorn University branch in Nakhon Pathom, he was re-entering Gaysorn intent on purchasing a 38,000 baht watch so as to have it shine opulently upon his handsome albeit dark dirt-brown skin.
Shopping was only adjunct to the instinct that prompted the switching on of one"s breath. Of course he would do it naturally for man"s energy was not to be self-contained, but instead was continually changing in changeable containers, and in desperate moments he would barter what he had for intimacy--barter with what he had. And if he knew not what he hoped to gain from a spiritual journey already thwarted in activity similar to the perversity of his youth, all he needed to do was to look at the obvious. From it, there could be no other interpretation but that he wanted to be taken back to a feeling of ravaged youth when he had perverse hopes that the physical penetration would stop while at the same time he would be recognized as permanently married to his brother. Being taken back home to a foundation of dilapidated innocence, but an ingenuous foundation nonetheless, he sought a return to himself that was the ends and not the means.
In this guest house in the city of Nongkhai, this was what he had to have, and it was now his. Whether he would have to pay for it with money or time remained to be seen. It seemed to him that there were just these two payments, each a type of direct or indirect pleasure. If the stranger asked for money, then it would be proof that a contract of brief employment had taken place in which he was hiring him not to be his master but a slave. If this were true, the nature of the relationship would be unambiguous enough: it would be that of hiring someone to do a bit of drudgery which they would not want to do or would not think pleasurable enough to do if the pecuniary rewards were not there, and after receiving the sum, departing from his life like a pizza delivery boy. This, Nawin thought, would be best for his own purposes. However, if no money was transferred he might be thought of by this one as a female surrogate who by one intimacy made an implied contract of continual intimacies as the sole favored supplier of pleasure.
The intimate stranger looked irritated. Then he smiled bitterly.
"Sure, something like that. I like being kind to the elderly."
It was a delayed response to Nawin"s flippant comment of "I"m sure you will always be there for me."
"Elderly?"
"Khrap" he said with a wai. "Can you tell me your age. I mean how old are you honestly?"
"Thirty something." Honesty did not always come out despite being summoned.
"Elderly, as I said. How old do you think I am?"
"I"d hate to know."
"Seventeen."
"Seventeen, really? Hmm." He pursed his lips thoughtfully.
"Single, and barefoot free. I am married, you know."
"Married? Well, married men have to get it too."
"I suppose so." Nawin sn.i.g.g.e.red mutedly while feeling both amus.e.m.e.nt and aversion at being in this guest house and in this company, this effeminate role to which he found himself in, and of becoming so old despite feeling youthful physically even with all this distorted emotional stretching over the past month. He sensed that the stranger knew that he was trying to sabotage the possibility of their intimacy becoming a relationship and he felt compunction over it. Still, to sabotage and extricate himself from debauchery thick, viscous, and onerous to his spiritual pursuit (although he did not believe in the spirit) seemed the wisest course of action, and so he could hardly disabuse himself of such an idea.
25
At first the word "elderly" seemed, if not ludicrous, exaggerated and distorted, an irascible utterance of the intimate stranger that a playmate twice his age would not be a more gullible victim of scheme and schemer. But then he questioned his judgment on this matter as well for as he could not think of anything that he knew absolutely, how could he trust his own conjecture about one whom he was not familiar with beyond some scant words and vacuous physical intimacies and had no intention to try to know by speech or the intercourse of minds, beyond that which was thrust upon him? Considering the fact that every morning when a man slipped on his pants, usually after one sordid nocturnal adventure or another, he also put on a belief that he really did exist and was himself and not someone else (in his case that which he called Nawin, this free and thus debauched libertine-artist, not that he was so hard- pressed for entertainment that this issue of absolute knowledge that he existed, this epistemological speculation more comfortably set in humor than horror and resembling a confounded baby playing with his fingers, should be much of a subject of speculation) he then thought how little he knew with absolute certainty and how frightening this really was. He smiled at his friend with that strange, contemplative longing that introverts projected to belie their disdain for the outside world, withdrew, and looked away.
Then that which was thought to be mendacious and absurd seemed to be true in the perennial mutating, albeit perhaps, in terms of truth, non-evolving thoughts of the mind. Even if the exaggerations of the youth were noted and culled from memory and perception one truth would be irrefutable: Nawin was undoubtedly forty which made him marginally but undeniably a middle aged man; and if not old now he soon would be, just as he already was within the perception of his definition of youth. Loss of what he once was, just as loss of who he once was when with others who once were, was the inexorable forward movement of it all, toward what aim no intellect could even begin to guess and to which, apart from death, he knew of no escape. Nine seemed an insurmountable age to one who was five, and of a forty year old boy an inordinate amount of humanity would think of as near the precipice of old age and death; but, he told himself, he did not live by others perception of him, or if he did, he did unwittingly and it was as ineluctable as day meets night, there was surely solace to be found in not having one strand of grey hair on his head or elsewhere and in being without a single wrinkle. In the judgment of the mirror skewed by that which he wanted to see there was a collaborative work of biographical fiction not so far from reality and given credibility from the obvious fact of feeling physically no different than he ever had. According to this collaborative fiction, little had changed over the past twenty years except the increasing amount of people who came and went from his life so vertiginously.
Body conceived and mounted on the barren rock of the planet; mind peopled like speckled icing on a rich boy"s birthday cake so as to have meaning; meaning that was stripped and denuded in change; and for all his consternation in this dizzy state it did nothing to redeem or resurrect them to his life once again. All came and went leaving only diminished, diminutive copies of themselves cl.u.s.tered there in the brain as furtive shadows digressing the reality of the present into that which once was.
And even if Kimberly were to de-decompose with cremated remains rea.s.sembling to allow her to rise from the dead with all continuing as before there would be the knowledge that she had chosen death to separate herself from him ineluctably, and this alone would thwart what they had into perfunctory roles of financial provider and taker. How she could jump like that as if he had never been there for her or any of his entourage of women, he did not know. He may have wanted to be thought of as a nonchalant playboy to the outside world, as newspaper articles smudged him as being, but if one were to examine the portraits of those women whom he both played and portrayed it would be clear that solemn grey empathy, the only real love there was, sullied the reds and oranges of his pa.s.sions into the pain of empathy--not that with each day of adulthood he did not find bits of his sensitivity chafed and weathered away in time like an image of a face sculpted in a mountain.
Despite both women having concocted the plan and being signatories to this doc.u.ment agreeing to surrogate motherhood, he was an adulterer according to both, not so much for the other women that he had been with, but by being the natural father and husband of one and the legal husband of the other. Thus they provided him with evidence that "adultery" was just a perception like everything else and from it that a h.o.m.os.e.xual encounter was, as his brother had called their activity together, cheap dates more aligned to sport. Relationships of this nature were not acts of adultery any more than masturbation in the shower was adultery with water. At least, he told himself so to feel less guilty and the words were a successful a.n.a.lgesic. And as for Kimberly and his wife whom he as philanderer nonetheless had many years of shared friendship, how could he be domesticated and exclusive to either one when exploration of the study of the sadness and rapture of human existence still beckoned him? These were tenable arguments that pa.s.sed successfully through the scrutiny of his mind permeating all regions and though he had not isolated it completely his beliefs were: 1. that he was born the sole owner of his p.e.n.i.s and twenty years after his birth, when he signed a marriage certificate that was deliberately spilled ink on paper meant, as strange as it was that spilled ink meant anything, to show enduring friendship toward Noppawan and a wish to have a shared life together, he had not sold his anatomy to her; 2. that conversation with a female friend at a coffee shop (in the past this usually being a student or colleague at Silpakorn University on those rare semesters when he was not on a sabbatical) could be much more intimate than half hours of ecstasy which were not intimacy but a delusion of intimacy in which, when innate hungers were subdued, the man would at least in thought return to his wife and then the following day be able to pursue real intimacy with her; 3. that s.e.x was exercise and just as he did not need permission from his wife to exercise at a fitness center he could think of no reason he would need permission to exercise his p.e.n.i.s and be exorcized of his primitive hungers that would take over his higher thoughts and agenda if not released; 4. that a man was programmed to, as the Bible declared, "be fruitful and multiply"
and so one could not oppose his basic biological urges; 5. as it would take so much energy to restrain instinct, this coerced restraint was a wasted resource that might be used more constructively, and 6. that the only reason a woman got angry at a man for his nocturnal adventures was because in antediluvian times a woman was scared that she would lose her hunter, for clearly back then women were not physically capable of hunting, nor were they able to even gather fruit from trees or berries from vines if they had to take care of their babies, and thus they became angry and jealous of a man"s other s.e.xual encounters because they were threats of losing their economic provider.
Humans in these 30,000 years did not change so if it was true in earlier times, it would have to be true now no matter what memory-bugaboos of the past spooked him to cling to another by a more common and domesticated lifestyle--bugaboos that made him now see outlines of ominous forms in the corners of both the room of the guest house and in its amorphous darkness.
He might question whether the mirrored image of himself that he saw daily was real or refracted light made into a roseate image of the mind, but at the very least his face, unlike many middle aged men he knew, did not look like a squished shammy that he used to burnish the shine of his Mercedes Benz GL sports utility vehicle, that same vehicle which he had abandoned in the drive a few weeks ago for that emergency taxi ride to the hospital.
He thought of how he had importuned her, this stoic wife of his, to drive him to the hospital, of her obdurate refusals even when she had been the perpetrator of his broken arm and spintered clavical, and how it was from guilt his silent recriminations had mutated to hate in that taxi ride to Siriaj Hospital, that hospital that in youth they had gone to be with the abused dead of the anatomical museum.
Then he tried to channel his thoughts from hate filled digressions to how in the vicissitudes of life among so many shammy faced people a face like his maintained a fairly stable look. He smiled, amused by himself and the peculiarity of being here within this sordid black adventure in a guest house in Nongkhai. Then he sank himself in the depths of sullen night and sullied denouement.
He wanted to sleep off whatever time lapsed until the stranger left. His wallet was in a drawer of a night table near his side of the bed. He was a light sleeper when circ.u.mstances dictated, so any noise would awaken him unless it were that accompanying a fatal blow, but this was not America. The opulence of Bangkok might entice poor school girls in uniform to become wh.o.r.es of old Chinese-Thais and straight men to be serpentine prost.i.tutes, but few were the Buddhists who would kill their servants of their pleasures. Still, even with the probability of being snug and secure in his den of decadence, the croaking of those incessant frogs outside ensured that no sleep was possible for a city dweller who deemed traffic to be a purr when hearing the harangue of the jungles.
At one moment, he wanted the creaking ceiling fan that was turning incessantly to peel with the plaster so that the metallic arms might fall and embrace them both mincing them and this scene into pulp. At another moment, however, he thought about how good it was to be here with the distraction of another being on such a day as Father"s Day, a day that diced people like him in the wistful sentiment of early family. That family had never been more than bits of stinking sc.r.a.ps of sweetness tossed out to his scoffed, kicked, and abused existence; but starved, emaciated dog that he at that time was, he had been given enough that was kind to keep the hateful experiences of childhood embedded in his head while reminding him that he was born one of a countless litter of dogs trashing the sidewalks of time. Dysfunctional families might be more prevalent in Thailand than most people believed but their members could ignore this fact unless they belonged to extreme cases, and under the "good deeds beget good deeds" philosophy of the Buddhists a wretch like him must have done something monstrous indeed to know nothing but the breaking of family. With virtually everyone paying homage to fathers and all genuflecting to majesty there was such loneliness for members of extreme cases on such a day.
Telling himself that he should not treat the intimate stranger with indifference, he half-slapped, half-clasped, the foot of his companion as though shaking hands with him. It was a gesture no less awkward than any of his other tepid nons.e.xual attempts to relate to him and came from a nervousness at parting from his masculine ways and returning to effeminate ones, and from thrusting his will to allowing himself to be a p.a.w.n to the will of another. Then he returned to the freedom of darkness and silence.
If by this encounter he profaned his wife, if she were still anything other than proscribed by legal doc.u.ment alone, so be it. If his actions were adulterous, it seemed to him that, as they were undertaken in sport, they were mildly so (his brain, being a large circular ma.s.s had thoughts that went around in circuitous...o...b..ts as if nothing were ever resolved) and thus his private parts were not to be circ.u.mscribed to pacify the jealous instincts of women who long ago in antediluvian pre-history feared the loss of a provider. If ethical, he told himself, a man should be mildly self-restrained allowing some movement of the libertine, without allowing all actions and thought to degenerate to appet.i.te alone. This was logical restraint.
26