The Hot Countries (3 page)

3

The Bamboo Telegraph

The prevailing color
is the fraudulent, slightly chemical purple that jelly makers have chosen to represent grapes, but the hue has faded. In fact, it's had time to fade so much that he asks himself why he never noticed the prints before, when they were fresher.

There are half a dozen purple ghosts, slowly disappearing into the general grime of the elevator: quite clearly handprints, and in defiance of reasonable expectations when one is confronted by grape-jelly handprints, the hands are adult size and too high for children. Two distinct sets, perhaps a man and a woman, who got into this elevator after, apparently, eating grape jelly with their bare hands. The sight of the prints is so dismaying that he checks for other signs of decline as the elevator climbs toward his floor.

They're
everywhere
: a sticky sheen of finger dirt around the buttons; a name in Thai, “Kaew,” chiseled into the cheap wood above
the control panel; a cobweb draped like an elf's cape over one of the
fluorescents; chipped corners on the square black-and-white floor tiles. Mottling the white tiles are spills that might be coffee and red wine. Ancient cigarettes have left their vile wisp in the air. How could he not have noticed all this—this
decay
—before? His family lives here.

Ever since Rose realized she was pregnant, they've been talking about getting a bigger apartment. Rafferty, who had traveled his entire adult life looking for a home, had dug in his heels: he was here now and happy about it, and he wasn't moving. Rose had put his hand on her still-flat belly and walked through his resistance as if it had been a patch of sunlight, and now they both take it for granted that a move is in the future, although Rafferty has been assuming that they'd just choose a different unit in this building, where they've lived together as a family. But as the doors slide open, he's made a decision. You don't bring a clean baby into a dirty building.

In keeping with the theme of the moment, the light in the hallway seems dimmer than usual, the carpeting a bit sticky underfoot. Before he puts his key into the lock, he presses an ear to the door, listening for a British accent or the upswelling of romantic music that usually signals tears and lace and candlelight, some man patting a woman's shoulder or saying something stiffly reassuring and missing the emotional boat altogether. Eighty percent of British literature, he thinks, and ninety percent of British television, is based on how little men understand women.

He knocks twice, fast—his signal—waits a polite moment, and goes in.

Miaow looks up from the white hassock, a thin paperback book in her lap. She's got her back to the flat-screen, so it's off. She gives him the tiny eyebrow raise that's her current greeting. Minimal, nothing overboard:
You're here, now what?
He returns it to her and gets the grin he's fishing for, although it looks a bit like charity, since they both know that no one is as cool as a kid. Still, he'll take it. For a while there, a few months ago, Miaow had smiled so seldom that it was almost possible to forget she was Thai.

He says, “So what's happening?”

She closes the book, her finger marking her place. “Mr. Slope
is going after Eleanor, who's clueless, like all nice girls. Mr. Slope is
such a grease spot.”

“Mr.
Slope
?” He locks the door. “You're watching
Barchester Towers
?”

Her lower lip pops out, and she gives him a little shrug, acknowledgment that he's surprised her by knowing the title. “Sure,” she says. She reaches up to scratch her shoulder, and he sees that she's wearing black nail polish. Scratching furiously, she says, “Mr. Slope?”

He waits. “What about him?”

“In this show he's Alan Rickman—you know, the one who played Snape in the
Harry Potter
s.”

“From Snape to Slope. What a stretch.”

“He's the best actor in anything he's in,” she says, with some heat. “Always.”

“Fine. You want something from the kitchen?”

“Whatever you think I'd like.”

“Oh,
sure
,” Rafferty says over his shoulder. “You bet.
Whatever I think you'd like.
That'll work out great. Is he better than Colin Firth?”

“Colin Firth belongs to Rose,” Miaow says in her almost unaccented school English. “The one I'm standing in line for is Benedict Cumberbatch.”

“If you've learned to pronounce it,” Rafferty says, “you must be serious.” He opens the door of the refrigerator to find that Rose has once again rearranged its shelves into her preferred supermarket-after-an-earthquake mode. It takes him a moment to locate a landmark. “Vanilla yogurt?”

“Yogurt tastes like something a cow couldn't keep down.”

He secretly agrees, but Rose, after a lifetime spent, like many Thais, avoiding most dairy products, has recently developed a pregnancy-inspired mania for yogurt, and the refrigerator is jammed with it. “How about some grapes that are kind of flat on one side?”

“That sounds
fabulous
. You try one first.”

He says, “No, thanks,” and pushes aside some tall items so he can see behind them. “Where's your mother?”

“In the bathroom. She has to pee a lot lately.”

“Well, if you had a little weight lifter sitting on your bladder, you'd have to pee a lot, too. Got some mango slices.”

“Cool. And some of the yogurt, too, I guess. Maybe on top of the mango.”

He pulls out Miaow's requests, fans the mango slices on a plate—quite artistically, he thinks—and then grabs a big Singha for himself. With the bottle chilling his hand, he administers a brief sobriety field test and then puts the Singha back. For a count of three or four, he stands irresolute and then reaches for a small bottle, pops the cap, gets a spoon and the carton of yogurt and Miaow's plate, and carries all four items, intentionally making it look harder than it is, back into the living room. “Slop your own yogurt,” he says. “What are you reading?”

“The play.
Small Town
, you know?”

“Still? You're opening in a week. If you don't know it by now
 . . .
”

She watches him make a production of juggling the food, but she doesn't try to help. “I've been ready forever. But then Dr. Srisai asked me what the play was about, and I said it was about a young girl who dies.” It had amazed Miaow when she landed the role of Julie, the young female lead in the school play; she'd assumed it would go to the beautiful Siri Lindstrom, the school's most obvious future movie star. Rafferty knows the play because, when he was in high school, he'd played Ned, the boy Julie falls in love with. He worries vaguely about the boy playing opposite Miaow in this production, because Poke himself had spent much of his senior year tied in a series of adventurous
Kama Sutra
knots with
his
Julie.

Putting the dishes on the glass-topped table, he says, “I thought it was about a boy who has to survive the death of the girl he loves.”

“See?” Miaow says. “We were both doing it. We were both looking at the whole play like it was all about our character.” With her right hand, she flicks her index finger on the cover of the book with a solid
thwack
. “But it's not. It's about everybody. Dr. Srisai says we make the same mistake with life—we think it's just about us, but it's about all of us. We're all part of everything.”

Rafferty says, “Mmmm,” and pushes the plate with the mango slices closer to her.

“So I'm reading it like I would if I was going to play all the characters,” she says. “And you know what it's really about? It's about how people don't know how many blessings they have, and how sad that is.”

“Wow.”

“I knew you'd go all gooey about it.”

“Mango?” he says, and when she reaches for the plate, he stretches out the hand with the beer in it and touches its base to her fingers. “What's this?”

She turns the back of her hand to him and wiggles her fingers. “Nail polish.”

“I got that far.”

She drags a black-tipped finger through the yogurt and licks it. Makes a face that's mostly wrinkled nose. “It's to see how it makes me feel. Dr. Srisai has been talking about a kind of acting from the 1800s or sometime, and the idea was that a movement or a piece of clothing was supposed to bring up the emotion you need for
 . . .
for whatever you're doing.”

“The Delsarte method,” Rafferty says. “Cross your hands at the wrists and raise them to your mouth, and it'll summon up horror. Okay, what's this?” He stands with his left leg behind him and extends his arm parallel to it, fingers extended and palm aimed downward, then turns his head in the opposite direction.

He's just beginning to feel silly when Miaow says, “Rejection?”

“I have talent after all,” he says. “There was a pose, a physical attitude, for every emotion. Most classical actors worked that way until—I think—the late 1930s, when Stanislavski started to become influential outside Russia.”

He gets a dubious look. “How do you know that?”

“I read a lot. So I guess Dr. Srisai is working out.”

Rose glides in, glances at Rafferty's beer, and sticks her tongue out at him. No alcohol and no cigarettes for the past three months, with another six months stretching bleak and thorny before her, have given her some new issues. She pads past the two of them, barefoot, and heads for the kitchen, looking, to Rafferty, as wastefully beautiful as a sparkler in the sunlight.

“He's great,” Miaow says. She drags a slice of mango through the yogurt and sniffs it. “He was in the theater for years and years
in England. I mean, he actually
did
things. Mrs. Shin says he was in
plays with
everybody
. Alan Rickman, even.” Mrs. Shin, who teaches English, Korean, and drama at Miaow's international school, is the director of
Small Town
and also directed the former semester's production of Shakespeare's
The Tempest
, which Miaow stole in the role of Ariel. When his daughter was at an emotional low point and needed some distraction, Rafferty had promised to find her an acting coach. Mrs. Shin recommended Dr. Srisai.

“So does it work?” he says. “Do the black nails make you—”

“Not really.” She looks at her fingernails again, her mouth pursed critically. The mango slice in her other hand drips yogurt onto the glass table. “I chose the wrong thing. It was supposed to make me feel sad about, you know, Julie dying, but it's sort of like my hair, when I dyed it red, remember? It's just a girl who wants attention. It reminds me of me.”

“Of the way you used to be.”

“It was
only
a few months ago.” She waits, glancing up at him quickly and then giving her attention to wiping up the yogurt spill with her fingertip, knowing he has more to say and that it's about her.

“You're not the same person,” he says. “You took something that hurt, and you
used
it.” He doesn't want to get specific, doesn't want to push what he and Rose privately call “the Andrew button”
—
named in honor of her first real boyfriend, Andrew Nguyen, who is no longer in Bangkok—but Rafferty's been waiting for an opportunity to say these things, and this one is too
good to pass up. “You didn't sit around and sulk or feel sorry for yourself. You took all that crap energy and you turned it into good energy and used it to do something creative. You're working on acting, you're working on yourself. You've changed.”

“She has, hasn't she?” Rose says, coming in with a glass of water and a small dish of deflated grapes.

“Because I've been watching Maggie Smith,” Miaow says. “She's so good it's sick.”

Rose says, “Which one is Maggie Smith?” To Rafferty, who's sitting in the center of the couch, she says, “Scoot.”

“The dowager countess,” Miaow says. “The Countess of Grantham. Professor McGonagall.”

“Oh, yes,” Rose says. She touches her finger to the tip of her nose and tilts her head back haughtily. “
That
lady.”

Moving over, Rafferty says to Rose,
“Scoot?”

“You taught me that,” Rose says. She sits and leans toward him, gives him wide, earnest eyes, and puts a hand on his arm. “The things you've taught me,” she says, in very slow, dramatic English.

“Like this,” Miaow says, pressing the back of her hand to her brow and closing her eyes halfway. “The
things
you've taught me.”

“Oh, Peter,” Rose says,
oh
coming out
euh.
“Euh, Peter, Peter, Peter.”