THALIA’S FLIGHT TO Thailand took one day but landed her there two days later. Her first call on arrival was to Toula, her boss and family friend.
“How’s the future?” Toula asked wryly, knowing that the time in Phuket was eleven hours ahead.
“Rainy,” Thalia replied. Arriving in the island’s humidity felt like being suspended in the micro-climate of a bathroom, post-shower. She found herself looking for a door to open to let in some air, though she was already outside. The pandemic rules here required her to quarantine in her hotel or on “approved routes” around the island for a week before she could join her friend Cadi at a smaller island, Koh Phaghan.
While she napped in the crisp air-conditioning of her room, the front desk called to say that her required COVID test from the Phuket airport had come back negative; she was now allowed to leave her room. It was only 4 p.m. local time, and she figured she needed to stay awake at least until 9, her first chance to beat back the jet lag.
She made her way down to the hotel bar. The space was all frosted glass, orchids and marble Buddhas. At the bar, a few middle-aged men sat spaced apart, drinking coffee. Besides the Thai woman behind the bar in a crisp white uniform, Thalia was the only woman in the room. She felt the extra gravity of the men’s gazes as they landed on her bare arms and the neckline of her black knit tank dress. The bartender approached, hands folded in prayer at her face, offering a greeting that had a strong uplift of vowel held two beats long at the end. Thalia found herself reflexively mirroring the woman, gently tenting her fingers in front of her own face and bowing slightly. The bartender abruptly switched to a strongly Australian-accented English that was so unexpected, Thalia almost laughed out loud.
“What can I get you, miss?” Her eyes squished together at the corners, one of the few ways left to tell if someone was smiling under their mask. When Thalia asked for a menu, she was pointed to a QR code. Scrolling through the photographs of colorful frozen drinks, she could feel both the male gaze and the pull of the fluffy, queen-sized bed back in her room. A man in a straw fedora with pale, flushed skin, perhaps 50 years old, was the first to approach.
“You just arrived?” Thalia placed his accent as American, Southern perhaps. As a New Yorker, she had always thought of such an accent as gentlemanly but also a bit old-fashioned—maybe a bit closed-minded in how its syrupy vowels spoke of a suspicion of all things quick or forward.
“Yes, from New York,” she volunteered just as the bartender returned to take her order. Thalia looked over at the Southern gentleman’s coffee cup and noticed that it contained what looked and smelled like rum-and-coke on ice.
“COVID restrictions,” he explained, noticing her glance. “The island still prohibits alcohol sales in bars. I prefer it; makes me feel like we’re in some sort of Prohibition-era black-and-white film—secret menus and under-the-bar liquor bottles.” The bartender refilled his cup from a silver shaker underneath the bar.
“Did you decide? I make an excellent mojito,” the bartender offered. Thalia ordered a coke, for both the caffeine and the sugar. She was the only one at the bar with a real glass. To pass the time, she began to chat with her Southern companion. He was a retired electrical engineer, ex-military, and now an expat living in Phuket. Divorced twice. No kids. Thalia wondered how he could possibly be entertained by the island: retired, walking the beach and drinking covertly at hotel bars. He talked a lot and didn’t really ask any questions. He was full of meandering stories about contract work that he’d done on computer servers and infrastructure throughout China and Singapore. Thalia began to question her strategy of engaging him in conversation to stay awake.
Just as she was about to give in and return to sleep, a group of four Thai women arrived. They were all short, wearing tight, brightly colored dresses that had bits cut out of them—a hole in the back, a bite taken out of one torso’s side. She felt the energy in the room shift towards them. They walked on blocky heels to a high-top table a few feet from the bar.
She’d read about Thai prostitution and seen a few prostitutes in New York, late at night, on corners in neighborhoods with busy exits off the parkways. But she still wasn’t sure if these women were selling something or were just looking for a sugar daddy. Thalia began to consider what the difference was between the two, besides time and all the things that came with time—connection, attachment. The women were certainly beautiful and bore a lacquer of effort on top of their natural charms: their immaculate hair, glossy and full to their mid-backs, their breasts cupped and pushed forward, their eyes visually lengthened by beautiful stripes of glossy black eyeliner.
Looking down at her own hands, with their destroyed cuticles and the skin dry along her arms from the artificial air of her day-long flights, she vowed to book the Traveller’s Spa Day special with the front desk before she went back up to her room. Her black hair was straight and full—part of her Greek inheritance—and her skin remained clear, despite the traveling. She knew she was attractive enough, her own body still young and a sensitive digestion keeping her careful about what she ate and, thus, thin.
A few of the men made their way over to the women’s table and then paired off. Thalia’s own companion continued to drone on about Y2K, which she had heard of but was too young to really remember.
“Did you really not know beforehand? As an insider, did you actually think that maybe everything would crash?” she asked him. It was so easy to keep him talking; it was like kicking a ball along that was already in motion. There was only one woman left at the high-top table now, and she was staring at Thalia and her companion. What did the woman see in Thalia’s simple dress and lack of makeup? Competition? Wealth? Privilege? As Thalia glanced over at her again, the woman swung her hair, a thick braid, over her shoulder. It rested like a glossy rope against the sharpness of her clavicle.
“Do you know her?” Thalia asked, interrupting the man mid-sentence, mid-story.
“Yes, she brings women here every night,” he said. Thalia glanced around at the tables of pairs then. The men wore the smug smiles of people being flattered. She could see the appeal of receiving this kind of feminine attention. It was a kind of ego-soothing that she’d never been good at providing, though she’d watched other women do it all her life. Her friends Maddy and Sam were particularly adept at it and had advised her to “just give them lots of compliments” and “touch their elbows and their knees a lot.” Thalia had watched them employ these techniques seamlessly in high school, but it seemed sort of cheap to her. Did men really want to just be told they were desirable, over and again? A tinkling of laughter erupted from one of the tables, and Thalia saw the woman lean in and give a playful shove to her companion’s shoulder, then knee.
Following three cokes, two bathroom stops and one booking at the front desk for a body scrub and massage the next day, Thalia returned to her room’s refrigerated coolness and white noise; it was going to be a long week on quarantine island.