In June, after Frank had left, Claire saw monkeys, monkeys instead of people. She saw them sitting behind the wheels of cars, she saw them swinging golf clubs, she saw them doing the twist—Lock to the light, lock to the reft, she mimicked how the Thais sang, how they transported the ls for the rs and vice versa.
She, James and Frank had once spent an afternoon mimicking how, on a visit to Bangkok’s floating market, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, with both hands touching his forehead and joined as if in prayer, ignoring protocol and uninvited, was said to have jumped into a vendor’s tippy little boat. First, it was Claire’s turn, and with the serious look she might put on for a funeral, she made an exaggeratedly awkward leap next to where James was sitting in the living room. The result of this leap was to send James, as the vendor, into a violent paroxysm of rocking, while Frank, as the bystander, contorted his face to show horror. Then they switched roles. Frank was Claire and James’s best friend. Frank was a captain in the U.S. Army; he went away for long periods of time up-country not telling them where—to Laos, probably.
Claire and James made a point of living differently from the other Americans and living the way the Thais—they referred to them as Siamese—did. They took off their shoes before going inside their house, they eschewed air-conditioning in favor of ceiling fans, they went without hot water—to wash her hair which then was long, Claire went to the Royal Bangkok Sports Club. Once a week, James drove to a Chinese barber on New Road who cut his hair, shaved him and cleaned his ears—the barber inserted a thin blade deep into James’s ear, then twirled the blade. Afterward James claimed that he could hear a lot better.
They took small, single-engine planes with names like Otter and Beaver, rode on packed local buses, hitchhiked in rickety wooden trucks to places like Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Pimai. They slept on bamboo mats on the floor of raised thatched houses, they ate the eyes of fish, the testicles of roosters, thousand-year-old duck eggs soaked in horses’ urine—delicacies reserved for guests—they drank Mekhong, the raw local liquor made from distilled rice (the deposit on the bottle cost more than the liquor itself), they went to the bathroom in thickets, in paddies. They got heatstroke and sunburnt, they got soaked to the skin in sudden downpours, stung by mosquitoes and sucked on by leeches, sick the one time they smoked opium and, of course, they always had diarrhea.
Also, everywhere they went, people stared at them. In the more remote villages, the children—except for one little girl of about eight or nine who ran up and yanked two-handed at Claire’s hair as if the long blonde braid were a rope for her to swing on—were frightened and hid from them.
And Pinai? Pinai?—Where are you going? the villagers always called out after them.
In her letters home, Claire wrote about the orchids, the jasmine for sale in the market, the purple bougainvillea and the sweet-smelling frangipani growing in their yard. She described the mangoes, mangosteens, papayas, lychee nuts, the twenty-some variety of bananas—she vowed, she wrote, to try each one. Meantime, her friends, Claire imagined, were pushing carts in the supermarket, making piecrusts, changing diapers, while their husbands left their cramped houses, half awake in the mornings, to go to banks, to practice law, to sort mail—one of Claire’s friends was married to a postal clerk.
Claire played golf, she swam laps in Frank’s pool, she played mah-jongg. The Siamese women she played with, she told Frank and James—clack, clack, Claire imitated the sound of the ivory tiles—were so polite that they let her win, and Frank said, “Politeness can kill you,” going on to describe how when once he had taken the wrong road to Ubon and had stopped at a village to ask for directions, he was told that chai, chai—yes, yes—he was on the right road so that he would not lose face by turning around and going back. “Forty miles out of my way and none of it paved. Can you imagine?” Frank said.
Instead of answering, Claire began to imitate the greedy singsong sound of women counting: Yii-sip-et, yii-sip-sawng, yii-sip-sam, yii-sip-sii, yii-sip-ha.
Tow rai?—How much? Claire knew the cost of the samlaw ride from her house to the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, where she went to wash her hair—no more than fifteen baht. She was also used to how the driver sat catty-corner in his seat and drove out of their lane onto the larger avenue without looking.
Bow bow—Slow down—she shouted to him from the backseat.
Cha cha—which meant the same thing but made no difference.
James drove a Land Rover. He charged the Bangkok traffic, the cars, the samlaws, the bicycles—and all but one got out of his way. Lucky for James. The man he hit was an Indian, an Indian delivering ghee from a bucket dangling from his handlebars—the ghee had splashed all over the Land Rover’s windshield. No matter that it was not James’s fault—the Indian had turned without signaling—had he been a Thai, James would have gone straight to prison. Or he would have had to bribe someone.
Siri would have known. Siri was James’s Thai partner. Siri knew whom to give a thousand baht and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to so James and Claire could exchange their tourist visas for resident ones, he knew whom to give another thousand baht and another bottle of whiskey to so that they could get their Thai driver’s licenses without having to take the test. Siri knew all the officials and he could help James get around the red tape and do business in Thailand. And Thailand, James liked to maintain, had never been a Communist country or colonized and was still unspoiled. He could make a lot of money in Thailand and, at the same time, travel, explore, have a good time.
Sitting around his pool after swimming her laps, Claire complained to Frank about Siri and how she did not trust him.
“Siri is using James. Using James for his money,” she said.
But Frank had his own problems. A medic in Vientiane had told him to breathe inside a brown paper bag.
“Yeah, well . . .” Shrugging, Frank pointed to the two planes flying overhead.
“You know what that reminds me of?” he asked. “The time I was twelve and me and my brother were walking home from school. We were still living in South Carolina then, and I happened to look up at the sky. Two jets were flying toward each other—one plane going east to west, the other south to north—and I said to my brother: ‘Hey, Tim, look at those jets up there. Wouldn’t it be funny if they collided?’ And you know what? They did.”
“God. What about the passengers?”
“They were Air Force jets. The pilots managed to eject and parachute down, although I don’t remember exactly. But the real funny thing is when I mention the two planes colliding to Tim, he swears that he never saw such a thing happen and that I made it up. Or dreamt it. And maybe I did.”
“Let’s go and play golf,” Claire said.
The night before Frank was to go home on leave, they had dinner at an outdoor Chinese restaurant off Sukhumvit Road. James ordered beers, Claire lit a cigarette—she still smoked then—and Frank carefully placed his brown paper bag on the table in front of him.
“You just need to go home and rest for a while,” James said.
Not looking at James, Frank said, “Yeah, and guess what? I get to see my dog—my folks’ dog now more likely. A border collie. Belle. You should see her, she’s a real beauty. She likes to herd people, she’s always circling, she can drive you a little nuts, too.”
Halfway through the meal, a ripe coconut fell out of a tree next to their table, knocking over bottles and glasses, breaking their dish of sweet and sour prawns, and sending Frank, arms raised to protect his head, out of his chair and under the table.
Once seated again, Frank said, “Sorry about that,” and reached for his paper bag.
“Scared the hell out of me, too,” James said.
“Take a look at my dress,” Claire said, rubbing at the sweet and sour sauce stains.
A week later, Claire received a postcard from Frank. The picture on the postcard was of two white poodle puppies against a bright blue background. Frank had written Meow meow meow all over the message part. James, when he read it, said the postcard was a sure sign that Frank was feeling better, and Claire said she missed Frank and she was going to write him a long letter in Thai from Queen Sirikit.
In the Land Rover, on their way to visit Siri and his wife, Sunny, at their weekend bungalow in Pattaya, Claire was doing her imitation of birdcalls. Her favorites, she told James, were the striated woodpecker’s and the immature bufflehead’s. The road was full of potholes and the day was hot and humid. All of a sudden it began to rain. The rain came down hard and fast and the windshield wipers on the Land Rover were stuck—stuck with ghee, Claire guessed—and James had to work them by hand through the open window.
Claire persisted: Pawk, pawk, pawk.
“Can you be serious,” James said.
“Can you be quiet,” James also said.
Claire loved to swim but, in Pattaya, she worried about sharks. The Gulf of Siam, she had heard say, was a breeding ground for them, and she did not dare swim her usual crawl, nor did she dare swim out far. She kept her head out of the water and kept an eye out for a shark fin. Claire also kept looking back at James, who was closer to shore. Once a camp counselor, James was teaching Siri’s wife, Sunny, how to swim. Sunny was slim and pretty. She was wearing a white bathing suit. James had his arms around her and each time a small wave came, Sunny tried to stand up—she did not want to get her hair wet. She was laughing. James, too, was laughing and although Claire could never swear to this—perhaps she imagined it—it looked to her as if each time Sunny raised her head out of the water, James bent his to give Sunny a kiss.
Siri hardly left the bungalow. He liked to cook, he said. Dressed in a chef’s tall hat and a long white apron, Siri stayed in the kitchen, cleaning, cutting, chopping food. He was, he told James and Claire, making them the same special Thai dish his mother made for him—a red snapper steamed in coconut husks. Later, at dinner, to show Siri how much he was enjoying the meal, James sucked noisily on the fish bones. He also went on to tell Siri how, in Thailand, he prided himself on his ability to eat everything. Siri then said how he bet he could offer James at least one dish that James would refuse to eat.
“You’re on, Siri.” James reached across the table with his hand and said, “How much?”
During the meal, Claire asked, “How did you like learning how to swim, Sunny?”
Smiling, Sunny answered that for her cooking and swimming were very much alike and she probably would never learn how to do either one. Then she told Claire how although she had never traveled outside of Thailand, sixty years ago, her grandfather had gone to study in the United States. It took him three months to cross the Pacific Ocean by ship and he stayed away for three years. During that time, his family never once heard from him and they assumed he had drowned.
A month went by and Frank had not returned to Thailand nor had Claire and James heard from him again.
“I am going to telephone someone,” Claire said.
“Telephone who?” James said.
“I don’t know. A five-star general,” Claire answered.
Claire took a samlaw to Frank’s house. She had to ring the bell several times before the houseboy opened the gate. Dressed in a dirty sarong and still buttoning his shirt, the houseboy barely looked at Claire.
Mai mi, mai mi—Not here—he said.
Glancing past him, Claire could see Frank’s swimming pool. The water was a dark green, nearly black, with stuff floating in it. A woman with long untidy hair stood in the doorway of Frank’s house staring out at Claire. Claire heard a baby crying.
“What did you expect?” James said after Claire told him what she had seen, “Probably the houseboy’s entire family and the houseboy’s entire village have moved in while Frank’s away. As for the pool, they can clean it up in no time when Frank comes back.”
At a cocktail party celebrating the promotion of one of Frank’s fellow officers, James and Claire were told how, two weeks after he got home, Frank was taken to the nearest veterans’ hospital in Ohio, where his folks lived. Frank, the officer said, had to have electroshock treatment. For morale’s sake, the officer had been advised not to mention this, although he felt sure that Frank would be getting an honorable discharge. He would get James and Claire the address of the V.A. hospital, he said. By then Claire had written Frank several letters. In one, she had included her golf scorecard but Frank had not answered.
The golf course was where Claire first noticed the monkeys—how the foursome ahead of her on the fifth hole, the water hole, appeared to be walking on their hands. Claire had to look again. Perhaps one of the men playing had leaned down to pick up a golf ball or had leaned down to retie his shoelace, only it happened a second time. Also Claire noticed something waving in the air that could only be a tail. The tail was not a golf club—not even a slender nine iron. Later, when she went into the women’s locker room to wash her hair, the same sort of thing happened there. Noi, the attendant who always handed Claire a clean towel, had for perhaps only a fraction of a second chattered her teeth at her.
At home, she said to James, “Remember how tomorrow we were planning to go and sit around Frank’s pool and drink gin and orange juice and read Ulysses? Remember, too, how Frank said it was his turn to read all of Molly Bloom?”
“Come on, Claire, you are talking as if Frank is dead,” James said.
It was true. Frank had died by then only James and Claire would not hear about his death until later or hear how he had hung himself in his parents’ garage with Belle, his border collie’s choke chain.
June 16 was also the day Siri had planned on making good on his bet. Siri gave James the address and the directions—the place was not a restaurant. It was someone’s house across the river in Thonburi. At first, Claire said she would not go, she would stay home. She was afraid, she said, that she and James would disappear the way Frank had, only it would be different.
But, in the end, she did go, and James lost his bet. Siri broke even. The cost of the monkey, the special table with the hole in the middle, finding a place for the meal, bribing people, James said had come to at least a thousand baht—after all, the whole thing was highly illegal. Thank god was what Claire had said. Leaving the house, she had gone to sit by herself in the Land Rover. She had rolled up the car windows and put her fingers to her ears. Still she thought she could hear the whine of the electric saw.