“In Mexico,” Sarah continued. “My father wasn’t driving. They were in a chauffeured car.”
“How long ago?”
“I was ten. So you see—I’m pretty used to it.”
Ximena didn’t press the matter further. They slipped into a gentle gan-chaa high, striated swallows wheeling around the darkening towers of the Kingdom and synchronizing with their mood. The traffic was stationary in the small soi far below, as it always was at this hour, and the smell of warm rain was already in the air. Between the towering trees along the alleys they could see girls in crisp white shirts walking with stately unhurry, umbrellas already flexed. Ximena felt a calm contentment, the repose of the early evening magnified by the ganja’s hit. She found herself enjoying the idea that this slightly preposterous American girl, with her cultivated persona, was in reality a fluid and practiced liar. Yet the lie had gone down well, Sarah herself was certain, and her confidence rose. She began to talk more brazenly, inhabiting the persona that was taking shape, evolving sentence by sentence. She said how carelessly she had chosen Bangkok as a place to live for a while—though this much was true—and how the pressures of life in New York had brought her to a boiling point that now needed to be released. She had been working as a fact-checker for a magazine for years, though she was reluctant to say which one, and had been conducting a volatile and unhappy relationship with a man working in finance. She called him Peter and invented his biography on the spur of the moment, inspired by the ganja. She gave him houses, suits from Cifonelli in Paris, enormous wealth. They were all things that Ximena could not cross-check. But, she went on, all had collapsed, her heart had been bruised, and she had decided to take a sabbatical from her own life.
“That’s a bit tragic,” Ximena had to say.
“No, it’s not tragic exactly. It’s just an experiment. Did you never have the urge to pack up and leave, walk out the door?”
“Every midnight.”
“So you know what I mean.”
Ximena wondered. When Sarah asked Ximena what had brought her to Bangkok, she was reticent to answer at first because she couldn’t quite collect her reasons. She was from a middle-class family in Santiago, her father was a famous architect, her mother was a journalist. She had grown up there and in Geneva, where she had gone to school, and then university in Madrid. She had lived all over the world working in kitchens, one of the hordes by her own admission inspired by Anthony Bourdain, and she had come to Bangkok purely because of the job opening at Eiffel. It was easier to get into a good kitchen here than in a Western capital, and once you did so the life was easier. Rent was lower, the scene more fluid. The local food was more interesting to her than the French and the Italian, which she already knew; moreover there were many Westerners doing what she was doing; they had a small community. Her employer had found her the apartment in the Kingdom—apparently the Lims were regular guests at Eiffel—and she had a deal on the rent that was favorable to a bohemian existence centered on enjoying the twilight of youth. She had wanted to break out of the Western restaurant scene anyway. Too many male egos, too many hierarchies, too much bureaucracy. But maybe it was also resignation combined with hedonistic indolence that made her stay. As a known chef, she was often invited to the city’s elegant tables and it kept her distracted. The week before, for example, she had been invited to a chef’s dinner hosted by a famous chef from Moscow, where psilocybin mushrooms were served in truffles at the end of the meal. She had ended the night in someone’s room, with no idea whose or how she had gotten there. This, she said, was the only way her solitude was ever shattered.
“So, Vladimir Muhin was shuffling three kinds of caviar in little dishes like a card trick and none of us could follow them with our eyes. I got to eat trout caviar while high on psilocybin.”
She had a lot of time to herself. She had taken to walking around the city alone at night looking for novel things to eat. It was what all real chefs did. She herself liked to wander around the streets of Lat Phrao, the dormitory of the city, and especially the old market on Chok Chai 4. It was a long, gently curving street of little trees and white tenements, and at its base there spread a covered market filled with shrines. Off Chok Chai 4 lay a darker side street called Sangkhom Songkhro, where the streetlamps looked as if they had been abandoned to their fate before the Vietnam War. From here an even smaller alley, Soi Samakhom 1, led to a garden restaurant at a corner where time itself had gone off duty. It was a sukiyaki-style place with a pool and fairy lights, and in the garden old men sat with their papers and lemonade, prolonging, so she thought, the last moment of the ’60s, when they had been young. Here Ximena also sat smoking her gan-chaa and thinking over her various menus until, in fits of inspiration derived from the sukiyaki, she cracked them.
Ximena enjoyed those older neighborhoods. Their fading innocence, their streets that shouldn’t exist. The past that had already been condemned for the simple crime of being the past. It was what was still beautiful about Bangkok—the avenues like disordered reliquary shops, the decay that held a dark human nectar inside it. The neighborhoods where the illuminations after dark didn’t stun the eyes and where the people moving through them looked as if they had belonged there for centuries. They hadn’t, but they had been there long enough to give off the illusion. Soon they would all be bulldozed and the city would be turned into the new Singapore. But there were a few years of life left; life without order for its own sake.
When she was bored at the Kingdom, in similar spirit, she would take her motorbike and ride around the back streets nearby. The capillaries superior to the arteries, as she thought of them. Behind the Kingdom, Soi 31 wound its way through small outdoor malls and condo towers until it passed grander villas from another time and then melted into the mesh of alleys behind Thong Lor. It became Soi 39 and then 49, but without any logic, and the junctions became claustrophobic and chaotic. But at night it was returned to the quietness of a past age. Pressing on, she followed the road until it swung to the left, past little clubs and restaurants she had never heard of, and then ran for a kilometer toward its cul-de-sac end: an airy mosque and its courtyard, a Muslim village with the songbirds of the deep south hung in bamboo cages and the guesthouses garish with rod lights where some of her staff might well have lived. So close to the noise and glamour of Thong Lor and yet a thousand miles away in spirit. There she would sit on the steps of the closed mosque eating pickles from a plastic bag. The birds on their verandas sang even louder in the early hours.
So, she told Sarah, she might stay here for a while. Her parents were still in Chile, and she never thought about going back there. There was an entire class of people now who could not return to their points of origin. She supposed aloud that she was the only one of them who wasn’t a semi-millionaire, but even if she had been, she would have stayed in Bangkok. Her patron kept raising her salary. “I think he’s in love with me.”
“Is he French?”