Текст книги "Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1"

Автор книги: O Thiam Chin

Соавторы: Stephen Leather,Alison Lester,John Burdett,Aaron Ang,Hari Kumar,Yusuf Martin,Christopher Mooney-Singh,Jonathan Lim,Erich Sysak,Annabel Pagunsan
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

MAD FOR IT
Erich R. Sysak, Thailand

So I’m in Phuket, Thailand, just a few weeks and I get a job teaching English.

I need a clock to remind me to wake up. I want a big damn clock on the wall ticking like crazy. I go to Tesco in my tie and blue silk shirt and see an amazing Thai girl, about 27. Hair cut to the shoulders, wide mouth, a narrow waist that makes her hips and heavy breasts pull your eyes. Some women have this sexual power, like a love potion that people drink up. Karl Jung says it is a projection of the soul or anima. Walt Whitman says steer for the deep waters only.

Enter Goy and my first chance at exotic True Love. A long neck.

Yearning in the face and dark eyes. A relaxed, nurturing vibe amplified by our struggle to communicate as she shows me how to work the clock. My arm brushes against her nipple as she winds up the mechanism. I’m happily swimming out to dark waters. A puff of her cream and cinnamon smell rises to my nostrils. But when I take the clock home, I just can’t get it to work.

A few days later I come back, see her in jeans and a red blouse with SAME SAME on the curvy front. Somehow I get her in the mood and a short while later we’re upstairs in the cafeteria eating Japanese dumplings and fish sauce. She crosses her legs and laughs at me staring. Her toes are painted black. Even her feet are candy.

Her ex was a butterfly. She has a 3-year-old daughter back in Isaan.

Phuket has all the decent jobs, but she misses the rubber tree farm back home.

She’s been working at Tesco five months and dealing with 12-hour days. She sends roughly one hundred dollars home each month. Half her salary.

She lives in a one-room apartment and eats cheap dinners. She’s looking for the right man to save her. Show her the good life. And she’s a swimmer.

Her one day off: Sunday. She doesn’t believe I’ll take her to the beach, which is just as sweet as milk, so we find a shop and I pay for a white bikini. She puts it on at the back of the store and pulls the curtain back for three seconds to let me peek. Time slows. I see deep into her eyes. I see the dark circles of her nipples. I think red wine and French movies. Deserted beaches. Crazy, deep sex. TL.

Time goes on and life is paradise. Better than selling hard drives and meeting co-workers for after-dinner mimosas at Bennigans in America. I never think of the NFL or sitcoms or politics. She teaches me Thai. I teach her English. I feel deep, emotional thrumming in my stomach when we fuck.

Until she comes home one night a different woman. Wouldn’t talk. Shrugs off my hands. Pouts like a little girl and it isn’t sexy. There’s a cold, white pallor to her face that just looks mean. Says she doesn’t like work. The other girls gossip about her because she’s with a farangand not married. She wants to quit work and take care of me. She wants money. Maybe move back to the farm and build a house in a rice field. Her parents need funds for everything: hospitals, food, booze, happiness. And then there’s a dowry. A big one. I can’t live without beaches and the ocean. I don’t eat much rice.

And I didn’t leave California with my pockets full of gold. About 20k in the bank and an old Taylor guitar on my back. I chew on dowryfor a week or two, but she doesn’t like delays. I came to Thailand because I can live in a bungalow near the beach, swim every day and eat mango, coconut and banana. Drink red wine. She locks herself in my bedroom and talks on her cellphone for hours. Comes out in a denim mini-skirt and heels and leaves me alone until midnight. I’m licking paint off the walls. She gets distant. Starts the going out thing a few times a week. I try to follow her once, but get lost in the mountains. I’m on a steep, dark incline. No streetlights. Weird sounds from the forest. A cool and ominous wind shakes the trees. I’m the only man on the planet. On the way down, I crash into a guard rail. Call her for help, but she doesn’t answer. I know she’s fucking around. But it feels like a way out. I didn’t come to Thailand to be a wingman.

That night, I put her on the couch and yank at her twenty-dollar satin panties until she cries. I want proof. I want revenge. She buries her face in my shoulder. Tears soak through my shirt. I find her lips. My heart thumps.

She sits on my lap and does this squeezing thing she can do with her vagina I don’t understand and I let it go.

But it isn’t back to normal. So I give her 500 dollars for her parents to do whatever. It makes her happy for a while. Pancakes and cheeseburgers fly out of our little kitchen. She buys a bus ticket home to deliver the money and quits her job. Which isn’t exactly what I want, but the sex is so damn magical.

She’s so high on things, so full of trust that she brings me a piece of paper with ‘You’re a very special person. I don’t want to lose contact with you’ written on it in her handwriting. She says her friend got it as an SMS and she wants to know what it means. Yeah, right. I tell her what it means and wave goodbye as she climbs on the midnight bus to Korat.

I can’t let it go. When she gets back, I demand to see her cellphone messages. She is good with the phone and when she opens the inbox, she deletes the first two before I have a chance to read them. Everything else is in Thai. I make her drive to DTAC and get the phone records. I read them standing in the mall and the names are all Thai. Maybe I was wrong. I feel bad.

So I walk through the mall and see a travel agent. A lot of colorful brochures and long-tailed speed boats. I buy two tickets to the Phi Phi islands. Promise I will teach her to SCUBA dive. On the way back, she says, ‘If you ever catch me lying, throw me out.’ That really hits me. I was all wrong about her. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known inside and out.

I buy two gold rings and carry them around in my pocket for a week.

There is no place I can hide them in the house. She knows every spot. I walk around with my fingers in my pocket and dream.

On the night before the trip, she asks me when we have to leave. I say 7 a.m. She says she needs to go to the market before we take off, about 6. I ask her what she needs to buy. She says I don’t know. Doesn’t sound right at all. So in the morning, she’s getting dressed and so am I. What are you doing, she asks. Going to the market, I say. She has a fit right there. Throws a coffee cup against the wall. Coffee splatters all over my art books. Glass on the floor. I think love is going to kill me. She goes alone and I just know what it is. I know.

When she’s gone, I check my mail and the Internet saves me. She doesn’t flush her cache from the night before because we were packing and eating and talking and I see where she was browsing: on this hook-up site called Tagged. Her profile just pops right up. She’s got pictures I took of her in that damn bikini at the pool in the clubhouse. Says she likes a man who knows what he wants and hip-hop music. She’s got friends. Lots of young European dudes with crew cuts. They look like football stars.

When you’re 53, you know what’s good for your soul. I’ve got a long history of great failure and great success. Western Digital paid me buckets to run the marketing. And I had a network of clients that locked me in. Took eleven years to go from copy writer to Big Dick. And when I got to the top, I didn’t want to be there. I couldn’t stop thinking about teaching music to kids or learning to sail, diving the reefs off the Catalina Islands. The trend went all the way back to Little League baseball. Best player on the team and then my mind turned to reefer and sci-fi novels which turned into a stint of guitar playing and modal jazz. I’m good for ten seconds at everything, and then it’s over.

So I have my life-size epiphany in Stowe, Vermont, at this big marketing dinner paid for by Compaq with too much wine. I raise my hands to silence the table, then throw the question out. What’s the absolute best thing in life?

Everyone quickly agrees: true love.

It was all the proof I needed. Proof that the one thing I really wanted was TL. A deep, serious, honest connection with a fantastic woman was the one consistent theme of my life. And I admit Thai women had a certain appeal, a promise of youth and good odds. But I wasn’t taking the exploitation angle seriously. Have you ever known one thing to be the way you hear it on the news or in the hallways at work? For me, never. I have to see things for myself.

But I’m not angry with Goy. What’s the point? I just want to get rid of her now with as little conflict as possible and get on with my quest. I do love her, but I can’t live with her. She’s a devil. You know what I mean. We go to Phi Phi and I have the best three days of my life. Snorkeling in the glassy water. She takes me into the bushes behind the beach. Not a soul around except us and she fucks me as I sit on a pile of sand. She sucks my cock right there and her mouth is wet and shiny. She looks up at me with those tender eyes. And I lift her into my lap. Her cheeks feel damp on my fingers. I spread them and pull her close to my bulge. She groans and puts her hands on my shoulders. My cock juts out to find her hole. I feel her muscles squeeze in on me.

When she pulls my head down to suck her nipples, I see two Thai girls behind a coconut tree watching us. Goy looks, too, and she twitches somewhere deep inside. She looks back at me with a lewd smile on her face as I explode to the rhythm of a frantic popping sound coming from her groin.

This is one woman it will be hard to forget.

On the last day, we’re sitting in the restaurant. I’m drinking from a coconut.

She’s nibbling at sour mango. ‘Goy,’ I say, ‘I will never be a rich man. You deserve a rich man who can take care of you and your family. I’ll help you find this man. I can help you decide.’ That’s when I did become a wingman, but for a woman.

She confesses to wanting more on the financial end. It isn’t her exactly, but her family that demands she marry someone wealthy to take care of them back in Isaan. An American woman just wouldn’t think this way, but Thai women do. It’s a different culture and you can’t fight it. I wouldn’t fight. I would use it.

When we get back, I look over her profile on Tagged. She shows me her friends, which ones she likes. We feel closer than ever now that the truth is out between us. I even read her messages from hundreds and hundreds of men. We’re a desperate bunch. When I look at those messages to Goy I see us as conniving, weak, blathering wimps. It’s just as ugly to me as it is to Goy and I imagine any other woman who reads such junk. First, I change her pictures. Not so sexy, more Bambi-esque. She really can hook you with those big eyes and smile. I re-write her profile. She wants a little danger in her life and she can’t afford it on her own. She wants sunset cruises and a candy-apple red Honda Jazz. Are you the man for her?

The replies flood in. The liars are easy to spot. As we read the messages, she sits on my lap and I put my hands on her breasts and pull her big nipples.

I get hard every time we do this. She tells me I have the biggest cock she’s ever sucked. She can be so nasty. We read messages from doctors who can’t spell simple words. CEOs who offer to send money right away. They offer plane tickets to Ireland, Norway, California, Geneva.

It’s the moderate replies that I read with interest. The guys who want to know more and don’t tout money. If you have it, you usually keep quiet about it or at least don’t think about it too much.

I steer Goy to a retired, South African internist. Fifty-six. Says his wife died six years ago from cancer. He’s retired to Phuket. Been living on the island one year. Knows just enough to want a cute Thai girl haunting his condominium hallways and bedrooms. Looks to be in good shape. Gray hair, but lots of it. A wedge-shaped haircut full of expensive gel. Big shoulders.

Deck shoes. An honest smile. It is the smile that gets Goy. Says he looks kind. Whatever.

Goy agrees to meet him at the Natural Restaurant in Phuket Town. I drive her there and drop her off at the corner. She wobbles on her white heels up the sidewalk and I feel a terrible pain at the thought I’m making a crucial mistake I can’t fix. Too many of these crucial mistakes and life kills you for sure or gives you psoriasis.

I’m up all night staring at the guy’s profile on Tagged. I click the pictures over and over, looking for something and I don’t know what. I walk up and down the living room floor with a hard-on and keep looking at my cellphone to see if I’ve missed a message. An hour is like five thousand years.

We didn’t talk about sex. We didn’t agree on any rules. It’s about her.

About her finding the right guy. Two-thirty, there’s a little knock on the door.

I’m wide awake. Savage in the eyes. She walks straight past me. I smell wine on her dress, the ocean at midnight. I call to her. I want the story. I want the details, but she shakes her head no and goes to the bedroom, shuts the door and locks it.

I go back to the computer right then. I know all of the buttons on Tagged and whip up my own profile. I post the picture from Phi Phi when I looked away from Goy in disgust as she happily snapped pics with the digital camera I bought for her. You can see the beach and the waves as a reflection in my Ray-Bans. I have my hands clenched in an expression of ultimate confidence.

I find three more pics and load them up. Nothing sweet. They are manly, active pictures of the beach, a sailboat and me feeding rice to a neighbourhood stray dog. I have one pic with a Toyota 4x4 behind me and the door open. It looks like mine, but it isn’t. I load that too.

Then I write a message. I cut and paste it and send it to almost fifty women who live on the island and grade at least a seven out of ten. It’s a theory. The Wild 7. The tens are too beautiful and in Thailand, their beauty is a major asset. Perhaps all they have. And a lot of the other important qualities may not be there: humility, wit, sincerity. It’s the slightly under-appreciated woman who has long-term possibilities. I want a girl who isn’t a slave to her family. Who swims. Who doesn’t worry if her skin gets too dark.

Then Goy appears from the bedroom. She sits in my lap and stares at my new Tagged profile on the computer screen. A wounded look appears in her little-girl eyes. I feel her satin panties against my thighs. She slides her arms around me. She lifts her brown nipple to my mouth. Her skin is soft and sends pulses of light through my body. I take her nipple in my mouth and it swells. I love the brown color, the rubbery feel of it in my teeth. Every part of her touches a part of me. She kisses me deeply and I regret it all as her hand pulls my throbbing cock out. I love her. She has it all. She pulls at it and I feel her long fingers curling around my head. We finally agree to stop torturing each other. She says she won’t meet any more men on Tagged and I won’t meet any women. She takes her soft fingers away just before I come.

She’ll get a job at one of the hotels and save money. I promise to help her more when I can.

She shows me an SMS from the doctor that proves they didn’t have sex.

The doctor says in the message that he wishes they had made love in the hot tub that night. Next time, he says. But there won’t be a next time for him. I’m taking his next time and the next one too. TL isn’t easy. But you have to hold on to it when you get it. She pulls her other leg over my head and lifts her ass.

I guide her down onto my shaft and moan as I enter her. I am young again and will be inside of her forever.

But the truth is, we are living in a romantic dream that lasts only a few more weeks. Because she can’t turn away from her own damaged search.

And I know every good romance ends in death. It starts with a love potion.

And the potion confuses everything that’s real. The potion makes you do things that just don’t make sense. Then you have a story and the story is full of lies and full of truth and there’s no way to untangle it without a lot of difficulty. True Love. Whitman says, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

Six months have passed, and Goy has what she wants now. She was on Tagged all along and that’s no surprise. She lives in a mansion at Nai Harn Hill just above my favourite beach with a retired millionaire. He’s Dutch.

The owner of a shopping mall. He’s overweight, hideous and shrewd. Goy hates him and gets everything she wants: a monthly salary, cooking school, that awful Honda Jazz and driving lessons. When I swim out to the bay, I can look back at the hill and just see the silver top of her water tower. I float in the bay and look up at it shining.

I’ve seen her a few times since she moved five months ago. We have sex sometimes and she cries after, but won’t tell me why. When I see her, I feel elated, and when we part, I feel relieved.

On my 54th birthday, I get an SMS from her. It says: I will always love only you.

And I will love only her, but she is gone from me and we will never have those beaches again. My madness is wanting her again, but knowing she is all wrong. What have I learned? Whitman was right about everything.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH THREE MONKEYS
Christopher Mooney-Singh, Singapore

He kept thrashing and crashing around on top of her, making the required efforts to reach his record-time orgasm. If there had been an Olympic category for ‘wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am’ sex, he would have easily made the team, she thought. It happened all too often: the big build-up over dinner and hanging out at Bar None had led to another unsatisfying conclusion. Now the performance was over. He withdrew himself, limp and spent, rolled off to his side of the bed, sweating on the sheet. Francisca had learned not to expect fireworks, yet she did hope for slow, practiced arousal-or perhaps a little humour along the way.

He let out a deep yawn. “Very tired, lah.”

He looked across the room, taking in the easel next to the dresser. “Hey, you also paint, ah. Very sexy! This one, who, ah?

She cringed. Oh God! What to tell him? But before Francisca could answer, he had turned over and was off to count sheep or naked pole-dancers, or whatever he did to fall asleep. She half-muttered to herself, “ Yes, why don’t you make yourself at home, ‘Stud’!”

He was asleep now, but his words echoed on like the ghost of an insincere idea. Did he not see her resemblance in the unfinished portrait?

Well, what do you expect! You didn’t hook up with an art lover, did you?

Francisca’s sagging, forty-eight-year-old body had been raging and partying for years, progressing like flaming octane through the clubber’s long, dark night of the soul.

She left the bed and went to clean up in the bathroom. When she returned, she sat down at the dresser-mirror. Soon, the numbskull sparrows would be up in the Flame of the Forest tree outside her window. Before long, the tropical sun would be getting her and the workers off to their office blocks for another day’s spreadsheets and marketing campaigns and the food courts would be queued up with hung-over monsters craving for kopiand kayatoast. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and sour margaritas.

She looked at the black waterfall of her hair draped over the red silk gown embroidered with tigers. Ah, her smeared mascara. At the end of her life, would she be still picking up guys in bars until the last round of drinks?

She really was too old for this now. Her biological time-bomb was beginning to tick louder between heartbeats. Too old for kids. She had some cash in the bank for a trip or two, but to where and with whom? The “who” in bed, reflected in the mirror, was just another jerk in post-coital whale-slumber.

The sex and booze had done the job for him: out like a light. Typical!But she was still turned on like flashing neon.

Next to her on the easel was the nearly finished canvas. She stood up to look at it-a voluptuous nude. She flashed back to the mirror-then to the canvas, then the mirror again. She undid the red silk dressing gown at the waist and opened herself for objective appraisal. Who is this person? Do I still know her?The breasts were certainly not as perky as a twenty-year-old’s and she saw the evidence of a little-dare she say it-paunch! My God!

A man’s word for a woman’s tummy. What is happening to me?There was some shadow of fuzz on the upper lip, a stray hair or two on the chin these days growing faster between tweezer attacks. Yes, Francisca was losing her soft feminine edge to a menopausal creature known as Fran the frump. She was becoming thick brush strokes, like a Rouault painting: man-solid, deep-vowelled.

Yet it wasn’t the bagginess of her skin that disturbed her so much as what it all stood for: no partner, no family, no orthodox identity except an executive position which was now under attack from those “Hello Kitties” scratching at her heels. She had to keep on top, swat them like flies… She was known as a tough nut to crack in her industry, but under that hard shell, she was sensitive: someone who tried to manifest her realness through one-woman shows in a friend’s art gallery. Alas, she was only a part-time artist in a Sunday-painter country with little art appreciation or market potential.

Francisca reached for the cleanser and tissues and began clearing up the mascara-disaster area.

“Oh God,” she shuddered, closing her eyes in fright. She stood up, turning to look at the bed where the whale-man was snoring. She turned her back, leaning against the window, looking at the self-portrait. She needed comforting, so she closed her eyes again and let a well-trained finger stray below the embarrassing belly to the bearded-lady lips of herself and, imagining her finger as a delicate paintbrush, started doing what she normally did at the easel: shutting out the left-over white noise of her workday to look for that other Face, the ideal woman within herself. She then began to re-create its lines and contours, working her finger-brush this way and that.

The sexual heat began to build like the first kindling placed on a match-blaze. It grew gradually with focus and effort to twig-bright redness. She kept her eyes closed and felt her left calf muscle going taut as a bowstring as her body remembered this fiery dance for one-all the while dwelling on the image of the younger woman she knew so well, the one she had starved, exercised, then bounced through nightclubs and parties with European men and big expense accounts.

This laughing, joking woman had been the wild one with a reputation for doing the most daring things in beachfront chalets all weekend long. She warmed to that bright young image as she worked the finger-brush, painting a face like a miniature portrait on the red ruby of her clitoris-a face all lips and tongue now finding the sweet-spot. Rising on her toes she embraced the full force of her orgasm, shuddering with hot, delicious stabs.

Feeling revitalized, she imagined a new beginning with a clean slate and felt her feet soften into the floor again. As she opened her eyes to the reddened cheeks of a woman flashed sideways in the mirror, Francisca realized she was still that empowered woman. She was not down-and-out. She didn’t need the man-whale beached in the bed behind her. No one had ensnared her in any domestic tussle. She had a job, she had her house (almost paid off), she had her CPF savings. All was not lost. Above all, there was her art. Yes, that had always served even if it didn’t make any money. She could still paint, could still create. Francisca still had a way of being honest with herself, despite the prowling diversions of her tiger-woman lifestyle.

The morning light was just beginning to do its little halo-dance around the outlines of apartment blocks. A shaft of it began to walk a finger through the slit in the curtain. Francisca took it as a signal to action and stepped up to the canvas. She lifted a brush from the Chinese inkstand on the table next to the easel where she kept her materials. She looked at the green soapstone piece carved with three monkeys ascending a mountain. The pool at the bottom was the muddy pot that she now dabbed into like a water-bird taking a morning drink.

How strange!The climbing monkeys now seemed to be laughing and joking. How foolish one can be, possessed by moods and darkness. Francisca grabbed her palate and felt like flinging it up like pizza dough, but restrained herself. Instead, she squeezed out some colour onto its paint-scarred face, then began intoning her mock mantra as she did before commencing any work at the easel: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Such a silly saying, yet for her it meant that she could turn a blind eye to the necessary sins of her day job. She didn’t have to listen to the bleating voices of family expectations and she wouldn’t ever have to speak again to this latest jerk slumbering in her bed, once she sent him off without breakfast .

She focused her eyebrows as if she was a mathematician searching for a way to crack the formula.

With her brush, she added a few final touches around the lips and softened the lines of the painted tummy, then signed the portrait in the bottom right hand corner. Then she moistened her finger with her own wetness, dipped it in the red paint on the palate and, with a flourish, dotted the “i”.