when I heard him, I felt a little amused and I felt a little wary. Now I look back on it I smile how my impressions shifted – from the way he talked on the phone I thought he must be in his fifties. He spoke American with a softness of accent that seemed a little British and that reassured me. He was a man of many nations. He told me that he used to work for a newspaper, so I imagined an older journalist, maybe left over from the Vietnam War, maybe a correspondent who was no longer up to date and chose not to return to the Western life. Drinking gin tonics and relaxing into another rhythm. He talked to me with an old-fashioned American politeness, and he listened to me so that I felt less like a total stranger. Who had just flown in from another continent. Who he was meeting to discuss playing BDSM with.
But what did I know? I had only been here for a few hours.
I fought it but I did fall asleep again, just woke up in time to stagger up and put on my lucky red velvet t-shirt. And go out, into the smells and the sounds and meet him. In a place I would have to find without a map.
Crickets were waving a carpet of silver sound the night we first met.
The night we first met, boats and stars threw lanes of golden light on the river.
They did, they did.
Mosquitoes danced to their deaths.
Exotic rum circled our blood.
This is not the kind of observation that makes people take you seriously, and so maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it is true. It was that kind of night.
I walked through the evening crowd, pavements submerged under stalls selling more smells, and many colours, swimming through the reef of people who belonged here. I didn’t, but I did not feel out of place. I just floated along with them. I could see the bar at once, it was quite big, open air, very loud. The sun had already set, at 7 p.m. in the summer, and the mosquitoes were flirting with electricity.
I did see the bar but I didn’t see him. That is, I did see him but not the man who went with the voice of the afternoon. This was a young man’s bar.
But he saw me.
Maybe I described myself better to him than he did to me. Maybe I look more like my voice? Or maybe there just weren’t many white women of my age wearing dark red velvet tops moulded over DD breasts around. (In all my time in Bangkok I never saw more than four or six of them, including the two in my mirror.)
He called. He called my name. ‘Senta. Hi, Senta.’
I love it when I hear that name, and it means me.
‘Yes, I am here.’
‘Yes, I am Senta.’
Yes, I am Senta. You just created me. Well, I created myself. But you called me. Called my magic like a spirit.
Less than half a day in that strangest of cities and already I was Senta.
Someone had called me by my name.
I recognised the voice.
It must be him. His voice came out of a slender young man sitting by himself on a bench against the wall, a well-worn backpack by his side. He was wearing a loose white shirt, he was very pale, and he had deep, dark eyes. Later I was told by other women that he was a very attractive man, after the fashion of the day. I have to admit I didn’t see that. All I thought was: he talks so old and looks so young.
Out of shock I said ‘yes’, and there we sat, next to each other in the evening.
When I think about it, the most wonderful lovers I’ve met never made much of an impact on me with their looks.
At first I was just sitting there, looking at the young face, listening to the old voice. I decided to drink an orange juice.
He looked at me, his eyes blazing, and he drew me into easy conversation. I later discovered that he was very used to making conversation with first time strangers, even when he was a boy, and that for most of his adolescence he used to show his parents’ post-colonial friends around when they came to Bangkok. So he seemed quite fluent in this situation, making small talk, laughing with me, putting me at ease, welcoming and open, but not too smooth.
But I could also tell he wasn’t as used to dating as I was.
And that was how it would be: he was the one who lived here, who knew his way around, who had done many things I only dreamed of, and he was the one who was a little shy, and unused to things, and had never done many things that he himself was dreaming of.
He led and I followed, I led and he followed me. Not as easily, not as magically as on that first night, but always a little bit.
It was the magic of the power loop.
Looking at him, sitting in his white shirt against the wall, talking about something or other that was the custom in Bangkok, I felt suddenly very happy. This is how it was supposed to be, in other people’s books, mostly men’s, mostly fantasy, flying into a new continent and meet a lover by nightfall. And now it was happening to me.
I was by that time an expert at first dates, and I kept all the precautions. I listened for things that didn’t make sense, I tried to connect his talk about himself and his real life experience as far as I could tell, and I tuned into the feeling between us. I had developed a sensor for the kind of relationship I wanted. I asked him all the right questions, and he gave me all the proper information.
So yes, I listened to the voice of reason, but already I couldn’t hear it so well, maybe because of the night carpet of silvery mosquitoes. Under my bones, my blood was singing.
We walked over to the restaurant through a temple, no monks, no visible sign of religion except the buildings, but many people strolling around in peace and moonlight, and then we sat, outside, under a wide canopy, straight by the river.
He spoke Thai, of course, ‘I grew up over there,’ he said, waving his arm in a mysterious direction that called up visions of tropical gardens and high society ladies drinking gin tonics in the afternoons. The waiters looked astonished, he didn’t speak their language like a foreigner, but he looked like one.
He politely answered what must have been very familiar questions and then turned back to me.
‘My mother was away a lot so I learned Thai from the servants. People are confused when I speak, I speak Thai with a local accent.’
My image of him was changing. He was more relaxed in the semi-darkness, light gliding in from the river, surrounded by a whole table of food to share, exclaiming at the fact that I was vegetarian, ordering fried morning glory for me, asking the waiter to write it down, in Thai.
He looked at me more freely, and more deeply.
‘I have something for you’, he said, reaching towards his backpack and opening its top just enough so that his hand could reach in.
He gave me a fragile garland of jasmine. It was smaller than my hand. I smelled its intoxicating scent. I pressed my face into it and then looked up at him.
This is the way I look up to my Nai.
He looked back, and he didn’t smile. He held his hand out to me and I touched it with jasmine fingers.
Behind
