The Lost Girls (36 page)

THAI ISLANDS
DECEMBER

S
o…then what happened? Did you guys finally do it?”

I was sitting with my friend and New York City roommate Beth on an AirAsia flight headed from Bangkok to Phuket. I'd been relaying the story of what had eventually transpired between Carter and me in Laos in hushed tones between the beverage and food services. Gotta love the foreign government-subsidized airlines—even on hourlong flights, they ply you with booze, hot towels, and grub.

“C'mon, what happened?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“Yeah. We did, but…oh, Beth, it wasn't what I expected.” I sighed, cringing as I recalled how things had played out. “I held off for so long, waited forever to meet someone, and then when I did…when we did…it was just…
awful
.”

Beth looked appropriately horrified. I explained that Carter must not have had many long-term relationships, or else his last girlfriend had been a blow-up doll, because otherwise he would have understood that the wildly enthusiastic, over-the-top sex tactics so prevalent in porn films didn't do anything for a real live woman.

“I actually stopped him in the middle and asked him to
slow down,” I said. “That lasted for all of ten seconds before he cranked it right back up again.”

I'd felt blindsided. Nothing about Carter's incredible kisses or sweet, protective nature could have prepared me for our rough, emotionless liaison. As soon as he'd passed out, I'd silently crept back to my own bed. There was just no way I could sleep next to him after that.

“Did he say anything the next day?” Beth asked. “I mean, he had to notice that something was wrong if you cut and ran in the middle of the night.”

Jen stirred from her semislumber and joined the conversation. “Actually, that's the weird part. He really didn't seem to think anything was wrong, other than the fact that Amanda suddenly didn't want to hang out with him anymore. The whole time we were in Luang Prabang, he followed us everywhere…found us no matter what we did. We went to breakfast, and there was Carter at the next table. We'd go on a hike, and Carter was on the same trail. Getting a foot massage at the spa? Carter's in the chair next to us. He went from zero to stalker in point eight seconds. It was crazy. But you remember. This kind of stuff just seems to happen to Amanda.”

Beth nodded. During the time that we'd all lived together, she'd experienced the full force of random exes coming out of the woodwork to call or text me incessantly. I'd decided there must be some aspect of my personality that attracted guys who never gave up, took any communication from me—even demands to get lost—as a sign of encouragement.

Of course I wasn't unique in this; every one of my girlfriends had a type. Some were drawn to wounded birds that required endless coddling; others were catnip for lazy bastards who took advantage of their good nature; a few couldn't escape those conceited Wall Street types looking for a trophy girlfriend. I considered myself one of the lucky ones. At least
my men were consistent and could be counted on to call—and call, and call.

Though normally I'd try to lie low and ignore all stalker communications, this had proved impossible in Luang Prabang. Enchanting though it was, the small town offered only so many places to hide. After Jen and I escaped for a quick two-day hike and kayaking tour through the Hmong mountain villages north of town, we returned to our guesthouse to find Carter brooding on the porch, mechanically feeding pieces of stale bread to an owl the owners kept in a cage outside. He looked as if he hadn't eaten or even moved since we'd taken off. He glared under his brows at Jen and me as we quickly removed our shoes and left them in the cubbies at the foot of the stairs.

Feeling a stab of guilt for giving him the silent treatment, my resolve broke and I decided to just talk to the guy, to explain what had gone wrong. Maybe he'd even appreciate hearing the honest female perspective. We went upstairs to his room, and I apologized for taking off without a word. He grumbled some acknowledgment and wanted to know exactly what he'd done to make me run. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I tried, as delicately as possible, to explain how uncomfortable I'd felt the other night.

“Well, why didn't you just tell me at the time?” he asked, clearly insulted. “I would have done something, I would have fixed it.”

“I
did
tell you. More than once. You listened to me for, like, a few seconds, and then it was back to…um…well, you remember. I mean, it's like I wasn't even in the room.”

“C'mon, it wasn't that bad,” he said dully.

“Are you kidding me? Were you there? It was
terrible
.”

I knew I'd taken the whole honesty thing one step too far. Carter decided to share that I had to be frigid or mental or have some bizarre sexual issue, because I'd been the only girl
to ever tell him that he'd been anything less than stellar in the sack.

“And just so you know, because I'm
sure
you'll want to…the last woman I slept with was a Thai prostitute,” he said almost proudly, letting that fresh piece of info linger in the air for a second. “And she told me I was incredible. The best she's ever had.”

My entire body turned to ice, and I couldn't feel my hands or feet. My brain, on the other hand, raced at Mach 12, rocketing past the other unpleasant details of our night together to fixate on the only thing that seemed important right then and there.

Oh, God. Thank Christ. We'd used a condom.

Now it was Carter who knew he'd taken it one step too far. Staring at me, then back down at his feet, he asked what I was thinking.

I just stood there, unable to turn my emotions into coherent sentences. Eventually, when I forced out the words, I demanded to know how he could have kept that information from me.

Carter was instantly defensive. Seriously, it wasn't
that
big of a deal. After all, Asian prostitutes used condoms and they were probably better protected against STDs than the average New York woman who sleeps her way around the city. Plus, a million other guys had done what he did, just never admitted it to their wives and girlfriends. It had happened before we'd even met. What difference could it possibly make now?

As I wheeled for the door, Carter reached out to grab me, to pull me back. My expression must have been enough to convince him to drop my hand. “I'm sorry, Amanda. Maybe I should have told you, but…don't go like this. Let me explain.”

Carter was still talking as I flew downstairs. Slamming the door to my room, I started shoving clothes into my pack and informed Jen that we had to get the hell out of Shangri-la.

 

B
y the time I'd disclosed the final detail to Beth and our plane had touched down on the shimmering asphalt runway, I'd decided that I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. Considering I was in an entirely new country, with a thousand miles between Luang Prabang, Carter, and me, it seemed almost possible to do. I tried to look forward to our winter vacation.

Months earlier, Jen, Beth, and I had decided to spend the Christmas and New Year's holidays in the Thai islands. The same friends who had raved about Luang Prabang had vehemently recommended that we skip the resort destination of Phuket, saying that its natural beauty had already been choked out by crass commercialism, but we'd decided to check it out for ourselves.

During the forty-five-minute drive from the airport, I could see that the area had been fully colonized by multinational corporations, the original thatched huts replaced by more profitable businesses. The narrow streets were flanked by sprawling superresorts—JW Marriott; Sheraton; Novotel; Banyan Tree; Hilton—each one fortified by massive concrete walls. As formidable as these barriers appeared, even they hadn't been strong enough to hold back the deadliest and most unexpected of invaders.

Our driver, Ying, told us that the 2004 tsunami (which had claimed more than 4,000 lives in Thailand and more than 230,000 in the region) had done some serious damage to the resorts in Phuket, particularly those on the western and southern parts of the island.

As we gazed out at the Andaman Sea throwing diamonds of light in front of us and nary a petal out of place across the well-pruned landscapes, it seemed almost impossible that a twenty-
foot wall of seawater had hurtled ashore like an unstoppable freight train, obliterating everything in its path. I remembered watching in horror the video clips, the endless loop of CNN coverage showing people clinging to street signs as the deluge surged and sucked around them, the hysterical parents desperate to find their missing children, the villages that had been leveled or washed out to sea. Virtually every country bordering the Indian Ocean had been touched—and in some cases decimated—by the force of the strongest undersea earthquake recorded in modern history. How had the people here salvaged what was left, started their lives again, when some had so little to start with?

“Very terrible. Many, many Thai lose family, lose job.” Ying shook his head. “But everything in Phuket built fast-fast, make good again. Need
farangs
come here, buy hotel, use taxi, eat in restaurant, visit girlie bar. They come back, we start over.”

As we pulled through the grand porte cochere at the Chedi, a place that could have been ripped straight from the pages of the glossy travel magazines I so loved, the driver jumped out to assist us with our bags. I handed him the fare, plus 50 extra baht as a tip, and he thanked me profusely, saying that just by being here, and by coming to Phuket and spending our money, my friends and I were helping the local people. Ascending the steps of the luxury hotel we'd chosen to splurge on for Beth's arrival and accepting a tropical welcome drink offered by a young Thai woman, I hoped that—at least in some small way—he was right.

 

F
rom where we sat on the veranda of our bungalow, a tree house perched high above a sliver of beach shaded by coconut groves, it was tough to see why so many people had warned us to steer clear of Phuket. True, it wasn't exactly an undiscov
ered paradise, but that hardly seemed enough to inspire the rancor of the ranks. What exactly was it, then, that had turned people off?

Even the most cursory of Google searches would have answered my question, but I'd been spending every spare moment trying to finish my article on “Healing Secrets from Around the World.” While Jen and Beth sat by the pool, sipping pastel drinks adorned with hibiscus buds and fruit slices, I logged onto the Wi-Fi in the open-air lobby and slogged through the piece as quickly as I could. Somehow, the idea of being a glamorous international reporter, dashing off to foreign lands and filing stories from halfway around the globe, hadn't exactly panned out as I'd hoped. My editor didn't seem to understand that I wasn't sitting in front of a desk all day, with a phone and a high-speed connection at my disposal. She'd been making greater demands with each revision (“Do you think that you could go back to Laos and get better shots of the nun you interviewed? She looked kind of, you know,
mean
in her photo. Oh, and could you track down a different Kenyan traditional healer, someone we can call to fact-check the story? Great—thanks!”). More important, my heart was no longer in the game.

I was sitting there with rivulets of sweat pouring from under my arms, down my back, and beneath my knees instead of hanging out with the friend who'd schlepped halfway around the planet to see us. I found myself wishing I could jump into a time machine and delete the pitch I'd sent in Kenya. What had I been thinking? I sent off the latest (and hopefully final) draft of my article just as the sun was going down.

It wasn't until later that night, when Jen, Beth, and I hopped into a shuttle bus to explore the legendary nightlife in nearby Patong (a scene that our hotel manager cryptically described as “all shiny and glittery, with lots of the blinky-blinky lights and sounds and constant activity”) that we finally learned about
Phuket's alter ego: it was an unapologetic, in-your-face, X-rated amusement park of prostitution.

While initially the restaurants, coffeehouses, souvenir shops, T-shirt stalls, and DVD stands along Beach Road appeared moderately legit (Starbucks, Häagen-Dazs, and McDonald's have all set up camp here too), things made a lascivious turn once we veered onto the pedestrian thoroughfare of Bangla. The wide arcade was heavy with foot traffic, and night had been blasted into fluorescent-tinted day by neon marquees, hanging lanterns, scarlet stage lights, and an enormous sign welcoming visitors to Patong in green, red, and amber Christmas lights.

In doorways and out on the street, Thai women costumed in bandeau tops, microscopic hot pants, schoolgirl kilts, and half-buttoned white shirts used singsong baby voices to call out to potential customers: paunchy, sunburned Europeans, nervous-looking college boys clutching cans of Singha beer, wide-eyed young couples, Japanese businessmen, and old men who looked like forgotten war veterans. Inside the dozens of beer halls, go-go bars, and dance clubs lining Bangla and the smaller side streets, girls pirouetted, ground their hips, giggled, and did their best to act provocative. Some danced with their arms and legs hooked around poles, while others worked the seamier, darker corners of the floor. Several appeared to be having fun, hamming it up for guys taking video, while others didn't do much to hide their boredom.

Back on the street, gorgeous half-dressed transvestites, also known as lady boys, or
katoey
s, catwalked through the red-light district. Even as I watched, a lady boy in an enormous tulle prom dress approached a group of guys, all wearing matching Same Same but Different T-shirts, and requested that they take a group photo together. Clearly, the guys didn't grasp that the lady was really a dude, because when she turned around and lifted her crinolines they all freaked out—the moment captured forever on someone's digital camera.