In Praise of Messy Lives (5 page)

They flock here, men too lonely, too fat, too ugly, too lazy, to pick up a woman in their local bar in Marseille, Duluth, or Baden-Baden. They seem to find it reassuring that the line between prostitution and normal life is blurred; that a man can go to a bar and pick up a beautiful woman who will be his girlfriend if he buys her things, and who will continue to be his girlfriend if he continues to buy her things.

One night in Bangkok at a pretty outdoor restaurant on the canal, we are seated next to a little dumpling of a man with pale blue crinkling eyes. He is wearing a crisply ironed white shirt and a black suit and his face is overwhelmed by an enormous black cowboy hat.

“You like shrimp?” he says in heavily accented English.

“Very much,” murmurs the Thai woman across from him.

“You are very pretty.”

The evening smells of smog and burning leaves. The lights of the restaurant flicker in the black water.

“More champagne?”

“Thank you.”

The eye is drawn to the improbably wide brim of the cowboy hat with its braided tassel and turquoise tips. The man flags down the waitress for another bottle of champagne. It’s clear that he is going all out. No romantic flourish will be spared. He is determined to be a man enjoying a romantic evening instead of a man paying for a woman, determined to experience seduction, even in a situation where seduction is ludicrous. This, it occurs to me, is where one can find Graham Greene. Here in the relationships between Western men and the Eastern women whose company they are purchasing or half purchasing. Whenever Greene describes the allure of the East, women are always intricately involved: he wrote, “The spell was first cast by the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers, by the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields.” And in
The Quiet American
, his British and American characters cannot help developing dangerous romantic fantasies, and his Vietnamese heroine remains cool, untouched.

Greene himself was attracted to both the idea and the reality of prostitutes and taxi girls. When he was in Saigon he frequented the House of Four Hundred Women on the rue de Catinat, which he fictionalizes in
The Quiet American
as the House of Five Hundred Women. In fact his view of ordinary romantic relationships was so bleak that it is easy to see how the simplicity of a purchased evening would appeal. For him, love affairs caused endless amounts of savagery and bitterness, and watching love fade, he observed over and over, was like death itself. Marriage, it goes without saying, was even worse; he wrote coolly, “There is nothing
so charmless as the company of a woman who is no longer desired.” And in the end, what is interesting about Greene is the strain of desperate emotional blackness. Beneath the surface of his bestselling adventure stories was a sensibility so bruised that prostitutes seemed purer than the demanding women from home. In one of my favorite photographs of him, Greene, in a cable-knit Irish sweater, is stretched out lankily on a beach blanket with his great love, Catherine Walston. But even with her he is irritable and gloomy. He could never rid himself of his obsession with the transactions beneath relationships, the transactions that we keep hidden in the West, the transactions that surface so easily here.

A few weeks later, we find ourselves in a café in Hanoi that serves lattes and cappuccinos to Westerners who have grown tired of thick, sweet Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk.

I hear a man’s voice saying, “When we get home you shower with me—I will wash your back.”

The voice is coming from a chunky American in his fifties with a long mustache and a plaid button-down shirt, short sleeves rolled up to reveal an elaborately fanged dragon tattoo. He is sitting across from a young, not quite pretty Vietnamese woman.

“Lots of the girls there want to be my girlfriend. There is one girl, I spend many nights with her. She wants to be my girlfriend.”

I can’t hear how the woman responds because she speaks too softly.

“Shouldn’t your sister be helping to pay for your father?”

She murmurs something unintelligible.

He says, “I will send you two, maybe three million dong.”

The waiter swoops down to clear their plates. The man places a ten-dollar bill on the table. “You’re staring,” my husband points
out. I have the terrible habit of turning to stare at the people I am eavesdropping on. I try to turn my attention back to my croque monsieur.

We watch countless scenes like this everywhere we go. At first, I feel a twinge of superiority, but over time this superiority dissipates. And in the end the trip is quite humbling. It reminds me of one of the ancient temples at Angkor Wat, which is made up of a series of concentric walls, each one ringed around another. The doorways carved into the stone are made progressively lower as you move toward the shrine at the center. The architecture physically forces you to bow.

From the moment I stepped onto the boat on Cambodia’s vast Tonle Sap lake I had a premonition that something bad was going to happen. For one thing, it lacked seriousness. It looked like the kind of brightly painted wooden boat that children play with in fountains. Emerging from the dashboard was an unpromising collection of wires in various states of unravelment held together by duct tape, and the usual accoutrements of safety, such as radios or life preservers, were notably missing. The windows were so small that if the boat tipped over, as it was known to do from time to time, we would all be trapped inside and drowned. And the captain had sold so many tickets that half of the passengers had to sit cross-legged on the flat roof. Sixty people were crammed with luggage into a boat made for twenty-five. Greene wrote that what attracted him to this part of the world was “the exhilaration
which a measure of danger brings to a visitor with a return ticket,” but I didn’t feel anything like that exhilaration. When the engines started and the nose of the boat began to bounce on the choppy water, and everyone else started clapping and cheering, it seemed to me that we were casually ferrying to our deaths.

After an hour or so, we were in the middle of the giant, milky brown lake. The trees were a distant fringe around the shore. And suddenly an alarm sounded, a mournful electrical cry from the depths of the water. It meant, though none of us knew at the time, that we had run aground. The reason none of us knew it at the time was that the crew spoke no English. The passengers, with the exception of one Chinese-speaking man, spoke no Khmer.

The boat sat motionless. There was nothing we could do but wait. The heat was astonishing; temperatures had been hovering around 120 degrees and the low roof of the cabin seemed to press in on us. Some of the passengers began sticking their heads out of the tiny windows to get air. Others became annoyed that they were getting less air because of the people who were plugging the windows with their heads. One man, a French chef vacationing with his parents, had a cooler abundantly packed with beer, ice cubes, and pâté sandwiches on French bread. The rest of us eyed him suspiciously. On the way to the dock, my husband and I had picked up a dust-coated bottle of water from one of the floating villages, but I noticed we only had a few sips left. I thought about our bodies swelling on the glassy brown surface of the lake, the parching of our throats, the slow blackening of our skin; my husband leafed through the
Herald Tribune
.

Eventually I climbed up on top of the boat where the younger
passengers were already roasting and pinkening in the sun. An American college student was trying to get a signal on the international cellphone his parents had given him in case of emergencies; a British woman with a kerchief around her head had taken out a water filter that she claimed would clean the typhoid and bacteria from the murky lake water. Narrow sampans glided by, little children squatting in the bows. They looked up at us with wide eyes: fat pink foreigners stuffed into an unmoving boat.

At this point the sun was still swollen and high in the sky, but in a few hours it would be dark. Even if we somehow made it to shore, the surrounding jungle was not necessarily safer than the middle of the lake. There were not necessarily roads with cars. The jungle floor was laced with land mines. The day before we left, we had stopped to listen to a band made up entirely of musicians with various limbs blown off.

The American student mentioned the possibility of the embassy sending a helicopter to lift us to safety. The British couple chuckled. The Australians exchanged glances. Here was an American attitude of the type Greene satirized so elegantly in
The Quiet American
. And of course, he was right. The assumptions about movement that we generally take for granted, namely, that there will be someone we can pay to take us to where we want to go, suddenly seemed naïve and oddly irrelevant.

If only we had flown. We had thought of flying. Most tourists, with the exception of grubby backpackers and committed bohemians, fly from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. From the sky you can see how astonishing the landscape is: Rivers the color of chocolate milk running through grassy fields. Sugar palms sticking up from the flat earth. The rich green and gold brush of rice paddies
divided neatly into squares. But then, in Cambodia even flying involves all of the country’s eccentricities: according to the local papers, a plane was recently delayed for hours by a stray dog wandering onto a landing strip.

I climbed back into the cabin because I could feel my face getting burned. I took my old seat next to my husband, who was still immersed in the
Herald Tribune
. In fact his nonchalance was beginning to attract attention. The round, merry Malaysian man on my other side started calling him “Moon Man” and “Man from the Moon,” since he was the only person on board who did not seem to be alarmed by our situation, this when he wasn’t congratulating me on having such a tall husband.

Six hours later, a rickety wooden boat with a motor tied to it with string sputtered up next to our ferry. Half of us got off and stood on the boat in the sun. There wasn’t room to sit. Water pooled at our ankles, seeping in through the gaps in the wood. The makeshift boat tugged the other boat, slowly, to deeper waters. We could see the angled silhouettes of pagodas and palm leaves against the flame-colored sky. Eleven and a half hours after we set out, we arrived in Phnom Penh.

As we stood on the dock in the gathering dusk, I felt shaken. One of the shirtless crew members standing on top of the boat with a cigarette dangling from his lips tossed my luggage to my feet. I tried to smile at him but he didn’t smile back. And I saw that what had distressed and slightly shocked me about the boat ride was the hostility, the contempt of the crew. When a group of passengers went up to try to talk to the captain, he waved them away like an emperor dismissing the girls coming to fan him with banana leaves. In fact the crew was finding it amusing, if anything,
to watch white faces turning various shades of fuchsia in the beating sun. They sat on the roof and smoked. They plumped up our luggage like pillows and sprawled across it, joking with each other in Khmer. When the resourceful British woman with the water filter tried to ask them if someone was coming to help us, they imitated her question in a shrill, mocking tone: “Excuse me, is a boat coming to help us?” Normally, when there is not a crisis, one doesn’t feel this kind of hostility; the language barrier is strong enough, the moving boat itself enough distraction, but there, stuck in the middle of the lake, in the stillness, the brilliant green of the jungle melting into the sky, it was impossible not to see. Of course, we had been experiencing this hostility, this mocking, all along: in the faces of the children hawking postcards, in the sinewy necks of the cyclo drivers who pedaled our heavy foreign bodies up hills. Of course, it’s always there in a tourist culture—when the people are poor and the tourists are rich, the power smolders and turns very easily into something ugly. It is the modern version of the rage against colonials in
A Passage to India
or
The Jewel in the Crown
. It is the contempt of the seller for those who are sold to.

During our eleven and a half hours on the boat, I conceived a desire to stay at the Royal Hotel in Phnom Penh. The Royal is more expensive than any of the hotels that we encountered on the trip, and we had encountered expensive hotels. In a city renowned for its lawlessness, a city where guidebooks warn that armed theft happens regularly—rumors abound that it may be the local police
doing the robberies—a city where the streets are still un-walkable at night, the rates are nothing short of astonishing. But this, of course, is part of the point. I picture a lobby with soaring ceilings, sweeping staircases, milk-white columns and marble floors; rooms with mahogany four-poster beds, burnished Buddha heads with tight gold curls, plates of croissants, fluffy bathrobes, and slippers with little insignia on them. I am feeling unsafe.

Even under normal circumstances, I find grand old colonial hotels infinitely comforting: the rattan chairs, the potted palms, the ceiling fans, the general ambience of gin and tonics about to arrive with a slice of lime. These hotels tend to overdo themselves, like movie sets, but the overdoing itself is what makes them comforting. The bars have names like Elephant Bar. The gift shops have glass cases, where rings and necklaces nestle in velvet cushions. The doors are manned by turbaned doormen. Outside a man prods you with his stump and smiles; the air smells of incense and rotting fruit; the sound of motorcycles pierces the night like gunfire. But the bombardment of the street is somehow framed and miniaturized by a hotel like this; it is put in perspective; it is the culture that you have flown all this way to observe, manageable as a postcard.

“Let’s stay at the Royal Hotel,” I say when we slip into the taxi. I say this knowing that my husband prefers another sort of hotel. His taste runs toward the ramshackle, the family-run. He prefers inns like the tiny three-hundred-year-old house in Hoi An where we rented a room with intricately carved mahogany walls and ceilings, and a red velvet bed draped in frothy mosquito netting. He finds the theatrical colonialism of places like the Royal off-putting, and, of course, he’s right to, but I am undeterred
in my desire for the wrong sort of hotel. I am thinking about a room without lizards climbing the wall.