But the next time I went to that bar, the lady who'd had ten husbands said: Your darling no come today. Hurt her leg motorcycle accident. Hospital. Never go back here. So. You buy me, ten thousand baht?
Never mind, I said. But I'll buy you a drink.
After I'd paid I got up and went to the corner where the deaf and dumb girl had sat. There was a lipsticked napkin, almost certainly not hers, which I turned over, half hoping to find a flower ballpointed on the other side; of course there wasn't anything. It was only a variation of the game I'd played with the woman who had ten husbands, the sad game of searching for something known not to be there.
A few days later, a friend of mine visited that bar. He told me that she was back. He assured me that he'd seen, touched and danced with her. And that wasn't all. He'd found another bar in the same alley, a better and friendlier bar where the drinks were cheaper and he'd met two beautiful deaf and dumb girls, one of whom was a midget. He highly recommended the midget. He said that lately he'd begun to notice deaf and dumb girls everywhere. They were discreet and they were cheap. I myself never saw them.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that every day I thought upon the one I had cared for, but sometimes I wished that I could be with her just an instant, just to make her utter for me that cry which I had so greatly longed to believe expressed perfect happiness.
* About U.S. $40. Although in 1993 some bars in Pat Pong charged 1,500 baht or more for a girl, a small establishment such as this one would have asked between 300 and 500.
They caught baby birds and held them. One bird they passed too many times among them and it ended up with a broken wing. They threw it repeatedly into the air to see if it could fly, but it only tumbled crazily down into the moss, flapping its good wing in desperate silence. Finally they dropped it into the campfire. They did that where life was green and muddy and stony in late July; they did it on their low brown mass of island with its pale-eyed lakes and skinny long wispy streaks of snow across gullies and mounds; they did it in their streaky whiteness between capes, but he'd done it down south with Reepah, picking her up one time too many so that she loved him and couldn't fly away, then dropping her and when her wing got better seizing her again. He'd never drop her, though, never. Besides, she'd started it.
He felt terribly nervous and gloomy as he waited for Reepah at the airport. She was now above the blue and green squares and rectangles of fields half hidden by bright northern clouds (small irregular puddles of forest among them); now if she looked down she'd see the lovely indigo of the Saint Lawrence River mirroring clouds between the pincers of its islets where the river darkened between the flat gray bellies of thunderheads; it partook of the wide grace of rivers suddenly tinged by hot dark clouds.
Thank you for Montréal, she said.
It was a July day, a sunny day of rain in Montréal. The maple trees sparkled. Red trucks were so red and the fresh girls as bright as wet stones, striding umbrellaless in the rain.
She wanted him to buy her cigarettes. She said: Secrets is my best friend.
She didn't really want to talk to him or be with him. When they met a drunken Inuk lady on Rue Sainte-Catherine, Reepah talked with her for hours. Him she ignored.
She wanted him to buy her beers until she got drunk. He didn't want to. She looked at him with a hard and nasty viciousness he'd never seen before and shouted: You want to fuck me tonight? If you want to fuck me, I want drunk. I want
Fine, he said. You don't have to fuck me at all. I'll get you drunk and you can do whatever you want.
After her second or third beer she got louder and happier and she said: I like you. 'Cause I'm drunk.
Every few blocks some spectacle would come out of the summer darkness, like the fantastically roofed houses shooting steep and narrow above the dark street. Purple-plumed clowns mimed by candlelight. They passed the fountain where Reepah had wanted to swim in the afternoon, and she didn't remember it. Everybody was sitting around it; its water fell with a glow; and people sat on the grass listening to musicians and smelling the sweet summer night. Reepah dipped her hand in and wanted to go get drunk. Fullbreasted girls in sundresses floated on the grass's emerald darkness. On the lighted cobblestones a pancake-made-up twelve-year-old was singing humorous French ballads in an exaggerated mincing voice while her father played the guitar; then suddenly the songs grew serious and he could tell that she had a magnificent voice. Reepah smiled faintly for the first moment. Then she sat scratching and staring at her empty beer.
