Two major events occurred in the first week of the new year. The first major event was finally bedding Miss Sucheeda. The second was getting down the Thai alphabet. I will forever associate the two, mostly because I felt the need to say something other than Thank You when we finished.
It wasn't just from out of the blue, this bedding Sucheeda thing. I had wanted to do it for a long time. I even made it obvious by bringing her gifts. Once I bought a bag of strawberries for her. Another time, I gave her a copy of “Notes From The Underground” in Thai. She had never heard of Dostoevsky. She knew what strawberries were, though. The gift giving stopped when Sangwan told me she was married. I didn't believe her until Miss Wanida confirmed it.
“Oh, yes. Kruu Sucheeda marry a policeman.”
I went on a two-day bender to kick her out of my system. Everything pointed to a life of massage parlor girls. On the following Monday, I avoided talking to her. She guessed that something was up.
You're married,” I told her.
“I no marry.”
“Everyone says that you are.”
“No,” she whispered. “I say I marry because many man teachers here want to love me. I no want to love them.”
“So you're not married.”
“I not.”
That did it. Sucheeda was back in my system. The bender hadn't really worked anyway. I still didn't know whether a loving relationship with a Thai girl was possible, but it wasn't enough to stop me from trying. Besides, Sucheeda was older. She had lived in Chiang Mai and she had lived in Bangkok. Her English was fair and she really yelled at the kids when she taught. Not in anger, she just seemed to enjoy yelling. I finished earlier than she and I could hear her every day from my bedroom window.
“I HAVE A HAT! I HAVE A DOG! I HAVE AN UMBRELLA!”
I often masturbated listening to her rattle off all the things she had.
One day she gave me a note with a map. A treasure map. The treasure was Miss Sucheeda. But on the map, X marked the hotel we were to meet at. That Friday, we exchanged smiles as we passed in the hallway and I gave her the nod. It was all set. I went to the department store before nightfall and spent two hundred baht on a tube of SPORT shower cream. I clipped my toenails, yanked all the hairs in my nose, and cleaned my ears with a Q-Tip. A strange mixture of fear and excitement occur when you know you're getting dressed to eventually get undressed and have sex. The excitement was that I would get to undress Miss Sucheeda. The fear was that she would undress me, scream, and bolt.
I arrived at the hotel at our scheduled time, ten o'clock. Sucheeda didn't show up until eleven thirty. I paid for a room and we walked up the stairs together.
“I am sorry I late,” said Sucheeda. “A friend come to visit and I cannot meet with you before she leave.”
“Have you told anyone that you're seeing me tonight?”
“I no tell.”
We sat on the bed and shared a bottle of water. Then we started to kiss. Pornpimone had not known how to kiss. Her mouth didn't want to move. That had been both endearing and uncomfortable. Sucheeda knew how to kiss, almost too well. We made out for a half hour straight, then took off our clothes and got under the sheets. There was something about Sucheeda's body that she didn't want me to see. Of course, I tried to look every chance I was given but she stuck close and wouldn't let me stray beneath her breasts. I wasn't doing it to be cruel, but whatever was down there, a scar, a mole, a tattoo of the Jolly Roger, needed to be seen and explained and then forgotten to get on with the business at hand, namely, sex. I didn't want to make an issue out if it though, not on our first night together.
So we went at it with the ceiling fan going whir whir and the bathroom faucet going drip drip and the motorcycles out our window going choke choke. Something was truly amiss. I could sense it from the moment I stuck it in. Everything up until then had been going so well; the kissing, the caressing, and then — Sucheeda started to fuck like a whore.
“Baby,” I said. “Take it easy.”
“Shh,” said Sucheeda.
What was happening? I lay there on my back with Sucheeda on bended knees, moving from left to right, bouncing, grinding, with an expression on her face that lay somewhere between physical pain and mental anguish. Her eyes were shut tight; her teeth clenched. But the worst, the absolute worst part, was when she spoke.
“Ooh, it big!”
“Yes you good!”
“Ooh, I come!”
Whoretalk.
I was becoming so sick and depressed lying there; I began to lose my erection, which only got Sucheeda hopping more frantically.
I felt the condom pop off. I completely lost it. Sucheeda wouldn't quit. “Ooh, ooh.” She was hurting me. I spoke her name. I spoke it twice. She couldn't hear me. Or, if she could, she wasn't paying any attention. She tried to massage my balls with her left hand. I didn't know what to do. So I cried. I don't mean sniffle; I mean bawl. The tears just kept coming. My nose was running. I couldn't breathe. I hadn't cried since my dog, Dopey, was hit by a car when I was thirteen years old. Now, I thought, the next time I cry, I'll say “I haven't cried since I tried to make love to that beautiful girl in Thailand who fucked me like a whore!”
“Sucheeda! You've got to get off me!”
She didn't shush me again. Not after seeing the state I was in. She got off and wrapped the sheet around her. All those tears must have really freaked her out because the next thing she did was run for the door as if to leave. When she realized she'd have to get dressed first, she hurriedly gathered all of her things, some of mine as well, and dumped them next to the door.
“I sorry very much,” she said. “I sorry!”
Meanwhile, I had stopped bawling. I began turning it over in my mind.
“Sucheeda, have you ever had sex before?”
Sucheeda looked at me. At first, I thought she didn't understand. Then she started to cry. I was tempted to start again too but one of us had to be a man. So I sat her down and put my arm around her and waited. There were only two reasons a girl her age would fuck like a whore. Number one: she used to be a whore. Number two: her sexual history was limited, except for a few really bad experiences with men. I waited and I rocked her and I said “It's OK.” Once she stopped crying, she told me the story. We had to use a dictionary to get it straight. It was a good thing I had remembered mine. It all happened in Chiang Mai, some seven or eight years ago. She had been a secretary as well as her boss's mistress. He gave her a watch and let her drive his car. But he was a pig and wanted her to be his mia nawy, his minor wife. Sucheeda refused. The pig sent some goons to her apartment. The goons raped her. She became pregnant. She had no love in her heart for the child and it died within her. Sucheeda tried to kill herself, but only ended up in the hospital. The scars she was trying to hide weren't scars at all but stretch marks from her pregnancy.
I sat and listened to her and when she finished I put my hand on her stomach and told her that I thought she had a beautiful body. I wasn't kidding. She really did. But then she wanted to know why I had been crying. How could I explain? How could I tell her not to fuck like a whore? When kids play rough, you slap their hands and say “Quit your rough housing!” It wasn't so easy with a woman who regarded sex as an act of aggression. And then there was that story, hanging in the air like a big dead carp. I was trying to play the part of The Man but I couldn't fathom what The Man would do. Buy a gun and go after the bastards? If I were caught, they'd deport me for sure. I didn't even have my work permit yet.
“Turn over,” I said.
Sucheeda was still hiding her tummy in the sheets.
“Turn?” she said.
“Over. Turn over.” I helped her flip onto her stomach and began to rub her shoulders. She was uncomfortable at first with the idea of a massage so I livened it up with kisses and bites until I gracefully slid a new rubber on and gently moved her into position. The ceiling fan caught the wind just right and supplied the strings to an Allegro by Beethoven, with the faucet and motorcycles outside making up the remainder of the orchestra. There wasn't anymore whoretalk. Not from Sucheeda, at least. I slipped once when she bit me too hard and said “Oh you goddam whore!” but other than that, everything was roses.
§
We couldn't continue meeting in Ayutthaya. Sucheeda was worried that we would be seen. It would expose the lies she had told to all the teachers at school and would probably cost her job. We decided to meet in Bangkok where one can move about incognito among the people and traffic and dust. I'd leave Ayutthaya early Saturday morning and rendezvous with Sucheeda in the afternoon. A tuk-tuk drove us to a cheap hotel in the Soi Ngam Duphli district, where we'd spend the day, night, and part of the next morning exploring the pleasures and annoyances of a Thai-American relationship. The pleasures were obvious. The annoyances ran slightly deeper.
The issue of protection, for example.
Sucheeda didn't want me to wear condoms. I told her I was going to wear condoms. That was my bottom line.
“OK, I understand. You don't love me.”
“No, baby, I love you, I love you. It's kids. I adore kids, don't get me wrong, just so long as they're somebody else's.”
“I no want baby too.”
“Then it's settled. I'll wear a condom.”
“If I have stomach, I eat medicine. Baby go away.”
“You eat medicine? Are you crazy? They don't make that kind of medicine. Not without a skull and crossbones on the label. Look, I'm happy with a condom.”
“OK, we finish.”
That was her phrase for breaking up. We finish. But despite our lack of understanding, we never got around to it. I usually tried to steer the conversation in a different direction, which wasn't easy considering we had so little in common. One of my sure fire ways to bring her around was to talk about the spirits of Thailand. I told her my ghost story. She liked that. There was a wealth of other supernatural creatures, and I got to know them all through Sucheeda. Her favorite was named Mae Nark of Prakanong. Mae Nark was the young wife of a soldier in Bangkok. She died in childbirth after her husband went off to serve in the army. Her spirit, however, refused to leave, remaining out of love to wait for his return. When he did come home, he found his wife waiting for him. Now the story gets good. Mae Nark didn't want her husband to go out since she was afraid someone would tell him that she, Mae Nark, was actually dead. So she cooked all his meals for him at home. Poor hubby eventually found out his wife's “secret” and decided to test her by making her reach for a lemon to add to her naam phrik. She reached all right. Her arm stretched from the second floor of their home all the way into the cellar and back up again.
The other big monster was called the graseur. Sucheeda became a little more quiet and afraid at the mention of it. What it was, was a woman's head and entrails that flew around terrorizing people. There was a movie made about the graseur and one old fellow became so afraid watching that thing fly around — on strings, I suppose, that he had a heart attack right in front of his TV set.
There were more. Beautiful women who became horrible witches at night. Ghouls who ran around eating excrement. Ghosts, vampires, zombies, you name it.
“But all the major ones are women?” I asked.
“Thailand have man graseur. Name gahaan.”
“But he didn't get his own movie. He didn't say boo and kill off any old men.”
“No.”
“At least women take the lead in something here.”
This was no understatement. Sucheeda's tales of woe seemed to mount with each meeting — all due to the fact that she was a woman. There was a man who wanted to marry her and threatened to go to her father if she refused. There was another man, a teacher at the school in fact, who knew she was unwed and lying about it. He threatened to tell all if she didn't marry him. Sucheeda didn't volunteer any of this information. I had to drag it out of her.
“You must to understand,” she said. “I old now. In Thailand, girls marry when they twenty-two or twenty-three. Nobody want marry a girl twenty-seven.”
Marriage was out of the question. Yet it seemed the only direction Sucheeda and I were headed. If I weren't going to pop the question, I'd simply be fucking her on weekends until someone found out and decided to cause trouble. We might have broken up after a couple of weeks but we saw each other so little, once, sometimes only twice a month after our original passion, that the thought of breaking up became pointless. During the school weeks, we had to keep the whole thing a secret from the other teachers. So we passed each other in the hall in our horrid polyester uniforms, children swarming, bells ringing, sun sweating, and there would be a LOOK and that look was SEX and I would nod, she might smile, and it was off to class to teach “What time is it?” thinking all the while “It's sextime, god dammit! Sextime with Miss Sucheeda!”
Even Bob noticed my consternation.
“Why don't you consider marrying her?” he said one day. “You can still ditch her anytime you like.”
“Keep thinking, Bob.”
“I'm serious. Marriage may sound scary, but think of all the free sex. I've thought about taking on a wife myself.”
I wanted to ask who in their right mind would marry Bob but I knew that there were plenty of Thai girls who would jump at the offer. Even Monty could find someone to tolerate his weirdness if he set his mind to it. There was a lot of acting in Thailand. A lot of pretending and seems like. Everything seemed like the thing it was supposed to be, but it wasn't, no matter how close you held it to the light and turned it over in your hands. Those folks on the mountain seemed like a Hill Tribe. The massage girls seemed like they really dug you. And Sucheeda and I had something together that really seemed like a relationship.
On one evening, we sat beneath a tree behind one of the lesser-known temples, holding hands and kissing heavily because we hadn't seen each other for a month. The moon was out and crickets chirped and the dust had settled for the night. Sucheeda smelled great.
“We have no meet for long time now,” she said.
“Four weeks. I missed you.”
“I think maybe you have other girl.”
I shook my head. “Only you.”
“You know it is very difficult for me meet you.”
“Yes, I know.”
“If you love another girl, I understand.”
“You understand what?”
“I know about man.”
“Oh you do, do you?”
“Man Thai have two, sometimes three wife. You know mia nawy? I never want to be mia nawy but I no want you to wait long time for me.”
“Sucheeda, I love you. I don't want to be with another woman. I only want to be with you.”
Sucheeda smiled and we kissed. At our feet, a frog said gop! and jumped into a puddle. Two centipedes made love. A gecko lizard momentarily drowned out the crickets with a song stranger than anything ever written.
The next day, I fell in love with another woman.
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