“French and fat. It’s how I like them.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gregoire, if you can believe it.”
The two women laughed.
“And what about Nat?”
“Natalie?” Ximena handed back the joint that she had hoarded for a while. “What about her? She’s a hotel manager, but her money is independent. She’s married to a perfect jackass, though. He’s a lawyer. Have you ever met one who wasn’t a jackass?”
Sarah took a slow drag and began to feel it overwhelming her completely.
“I’m sure they never have sex,” Ximena went on. “I see him in the elevator but he never says hello to me.”
“Which floor are they on?”
“The twenty-first, in one of the penthouses. They have some serious money. I’d much rather play poker on her balcony but the husband makes it into such a drama.”
“So she never brings him?”
“To our girls’ night? No. I think she’s relieved to get away from him for a little late-night fun.”
“All the same,” Sarah thought aloud, “maybe not having sex is a good basis for a marriage.”
At that moment the doorbell rang.
It was Mali bearing a bottle of sake and dressed in a black skirt two inches above the knee hemmed with matching brocade. She looked as if she had just returned from dancing on a table at a club. Her face was flushed with the corridor’s heat, and when she saw Sarah she let out a long and welcoming cry. Though the rain outside had not yet started, her hair sparkled with intact water drops, and her skin was misted as if sprayed, like the surfaces of supermarket peaches, Ximena thought, not yet knowing how to decode the physical details of the Thai girl from the fourteenth floor. She had given the newcomer the impression that she knew Mali quite well, but that was not at all the case. To her, Mali was as novel as she surely was to Sarah. The Thai girl’s slow, wary eyes were still surprising, her affected English still curious.
“So, you two have been chatting,” Mali said as she came in her bare feet out onto the deck. “Are you friends yet? How are you getting on?”
“Like a house on fire, by arson,” Ximena said, “and almost burned to the ground.”
* * *
—
Sarah was by now pleasantly high. She looked up to see an indolent moon hanging just out of reach of the city’s glare, moving in and out of rolling clouds as they dispersed slowly around a starless zenith, their edges flickering with lightning. In the immense rain trees swarms of bats swooped around the towers as if disoriented.
Inside, they rolled another joint and Mali sat with her feet curled underneath her while they drank another round of the yadong from cut-glass tumblers. She told them about her trip to the gold markets in Chinatown to buy T rings. It was a popular form of investing here. Sarah thought she was just as swaggering—if that was the word—as she had been the first time they met. Like something rolling downhill at high speed but with no end in sight. They ate some lasagna that Ximena had made, and waited for Natalie to show up before breaking out the cards.
It was ten o’clock before she did. And then in strode a tall and shaky-looking British woman of about forty carrying a black leather tote bag, thin and fleshless, with a large nose that made her ponderous and melancholy-looking. A stork, Sarah thought at once, even as she regretted the cruelty of the thought.
Natalie saw the newcomer at once and made a beeline for her, one hand extended, a little cold: “I’m Natalie.”
“Sarah.”
She was in hotel-manager gear: black tights and shoes, a dark green silk skirt with a matching jacket. She was drenched with rain and sweat, and after the handshake she went to the bathroom to towel herself dry. When she came back, she appeared brighter and less tense. They dealt the cards, lit up a third joint, and began to play a round of poker. Natalie, having taken her place, unfurled her long legs under the table and her foot brushed against Sarah’s calf. Their eyes met. The bottle of yadong was soon half empty and they were on their fourth, then fifth joint. The ganja seemed to be inexhaustible. Ximena’s supplier, it turned out, was Mali, who had family connections in the north and could get Green Demon, the best leaf from the hills north of Chiang Rai.
“So you’re new here,” Nat said to Sarah as they were making a toast. “I think I saw you on the street the other day.”
Her eyes contained a strange hint of vendetta, Sarah thought to herself.
“No one knows anything about Sarah,” Mali said with a smile. “She’s the most mysterious tenant in the Kingdom. She’s renting directly from the Lims.”
“Who was in your place before?” Nat asked. She turned to Ximena. “It was that Japanese couple, no?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I’m sure I remember them. I wonder if the Lims had an exorcism after they left.”
“Why?” Sarah asked. “What was wrong with them?”
“Nothing at all,” Ximena said. “The Lims are just famous for having exorcisms. They’re superstitious. Or so I’ve been told. They’re the richest landowners in the city, or one of the richest. The great-grandfather was a Chinese tax collector back in the day. They made their money in pharmaceuticals later, and then tobacco. Now they’re a decaying dynasty. The children are all wastrels and known to the nightclubs.” Natalie threw back her head and laughed.
They went on playing their cards. Out of the darkness came a chorus of tree frogs, their lowing like tiny cows that got on Sarah’s nerves. She was thinking faster than she talked, listening carefully to the others and trying to interpret them. Were they just bored foreigners with Mali as an extra?
It was unclear what they thought of her. She controlled her rising tension and tried to enjoy herself for a change and forget about Laverty, the letters, and the nagging guilt that inevitably came with contemplating them. She let her legs stretch themselves. The lightning on the horizon had become more neurotic, one part of the sky silently flaring for a moment, and a second later a different part. The flashes lit up random buildings in the distance, towers that she hadn’t noticed before. And then haggard trees, forgotten walls, temple spires that didn’t seem to exist in daylight, dogs in the streets shuddering and moving away. The great shaggy mulberry trees around the Australian School shivered in the same way.
It was at these moments, which came upon her with stealth, that she realized how unknown this spiritual landscape was to her, how little she spoke its languages or understood its symbols. All she knew was its weather. She told herself that a city like Bangkok was full of interlopers, con men, professional strangers and wanderers. But unlike most of them she had enough money to buy herself a perch that would probably keep her safe for a while. Like them, however, she was still an escapee. And like them she had slipped out of a class system that had bedeviled her all her life, shadowing her, keeping her in line.