The Size of the World Read online

  Bydex had been easier. A place full of engineers is used to pale, cranky, obsessed guys who won’t leave their desks. Here I was meant to tell breezy stories at lunch and parade my status, and I had no gift for this at all. But I was glad for the fat salary. Toon had stopped working after the wedding—I thought this was only right—and her sister still had schooling to be paid for and her mother needed an operation on her foot and some cousin was always wanting a handout.

  And I was only in my mid-twenties. Every so often my mother wrote to me from Florida, I certainly hope your many in-laws do not just think of you as Mr. Moneybags, or I admire your generosity, which is not what everyone would do. Already my mother seemed to be from another part of the planet, mingy and sour and sorely ignorant of basics. Every night I came home to my cocoon of allegiances, my web of favors and fondness. I liked my household.

  AT CHRISTMASTIME, I brought Toon to the office party. “Haven’t you adapted well?” my secretary said to me. She and a lot of the others thought I’d married a bar girl from Patpong, though Toon was wearing a staid little suit.

  “Very sharp cookie,” a vice president said to me after having the mildest of conversations with Toon.

  Everyone assumed, at the least, that she’d married me for my money. Nobody thought this was insulting to me either. They were wrong about my marriage, which was a contract of true feeling. As it happened, Toon didn’t care all that much about money and was in fact much more religious than I’d known at first.

  Toon was pleasant to all and pretended to not quite follow the boorish jocularity or to care if some of the wives didn’t talk to her. She was silkier than I’d seen her be. You could not have told, from the passing flashes of her shy smile, how irritating some people’s questions were. It reminded me that Thailand, as all Toon’s relatives liked to tell me, was the only Southeast Asian nation never colonized by the West. And why was this? “Too smart, too slippery,” Toon’s mother said.

  Slippery was actually a recognized historical theory. A talent for compromise, a willingness to yield just the needed amount, and an avoidance of open conflict had kept the Siamese from takeover. They gave the English a nice trade treaty in 1826 and nobody needed to conquer them. The British decimated the teak forests and took out a lot of tin. But the Siamese king stayed the king.

  Sometimes I thought of this theory around Toon, forthright though she generally was. We hardly quarreled—she was so gentle no opposition flared in me—and she had a dispiriting way of shrinking from me if I was being disagreeable. This was her method with the group at the office party. That night in our room she said, “Those people not worth much but could be worse.”

  EVERY MORNING, while I got dressed, I’d watch Toon on her knees in front of a small brass image of the Buddha, resting on his dark wood altar. It always startled me to see her touch her forehead to the floor, muttering whatever she muttered. In those moments she was sheathed in aloneness and would not have answered had I spoken. I wasn’t jealous of the Buddha, but it sometimes surprised me that I was allowed to watch her. How proficient she was at this routine that was none of my business. Afterward she’d give me a reassuring smile, more polite than I needed.

  MY JOB WAS SO EASY I could slip out for long lunches and catch the temple dancers at the Erawan monument or take the ferry a few stops along the river. Somebody spread a rumor that I was going to Patpong, whose girlie bars were not even open at that hour. My having been in Vietnam got this idea going. One of the higher-ups decided I was goofing off and put me on new projects any dumb clerk could do in a second. My days became hours of enraging, ennervating boredom. What bothered me was the way I handled it, attending to every miserable detail, joshing merrily with the creep who was my overseer. Probably nobody liked me better for it either.

  “Someone who can’t even read thinks he’s reviewing my figures,” I complained to Toon. “I’m surrounded by morons.”

  It had not been like this in Vietnam, where Ernst and I went about our work with full independence, with everyone making way for our critically needed brains. I could not believe I was waxing nostalgic over Vietnam. And if I liked working for the military so much I could still do it. There were seven American bases by now in Thailand, with more than a few civilian engineers attached to them.

  But I didn’t want to be in the war. In the last month, when Ernst and I were just hanging around waiting to go home, I’d let myself slip over into being appalled. I didn’t have to keep it a secret either; there were plenty of soldiers who not only hated the war—everyone did—but thought it was the world’s ugliest mistake, a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing-here bloodbath from hell. Even then there was a right and a left among the soldiers.

  Ernst and I had shredded our friendship on this question. Well, it was more than a question, wasn’t it? At work, they called me Toby Fonda because of my opinions. At home, my Thai relatives were too polite to speak about the war in front of me, except for Toon, who really was a good Buddhist and shuddered at all violence, and Uncle Lek, who believed in necessary force, despised Communists, and liked to goad everybody in his twinkling way.

  ONE MORNING, my secretary, Miss Brandt, was sarcastic about my bad handwriting, which made me think she’d heard I was out of favor. At home I was sullen. Uncle Lek tried to jolly me with wisecracks, and I let him pour me some sustaining shots of liquor. Perhaps I would become one of those men who idled away his nights in masculine joking and cozy alcoholic distraction.

  So we had our rounds of Pok Deng—two or three cards were dealt, and the closest total to nine won—it was the simplest of games, and I thought of how men all over the world played forms of this with stones or bones or coins. Lek said I was clever when I won. “Me,” he said, “I’m not good with money.” When he had a store, everyone stole from him. Now he still had debts. Many debts, he needed a loan. Maybe from me? When I didn’t answer, he said in English, Thirty thousand baht. Perhaps he’d gotten a translation in advance.

  This was a substantial amount he wanted, more than we spent in half a year. I didn’t understand most of what he said next, a long wheedling list of all he needed. I don’t have any friends, I thought. He’s not my friend.

  When I told him I would have to think about it, something strange happened to his jaw—it jutted out in amazement, then it lowered in cringing hatred. He got up and went to his room. The room he used in my house.

  I KNEW, EVEN as I argued with Toon, that I had no choice but to pay and that my balking was coarse and unforgivable. “Talking like child, I think,” she said to me. “Greedy for just you.” Toon wept because I didn’t understand something so obvious it could never be explained. I had never heard her cry before, and it was a painful shock to hear that helpless, mewling sound come out of her. What had I done to her? I would always be in the wrong, as long as I had money in my wallet.

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  “No good to tell you,” she said. “You don’t listen. Ever.”

  I lay that night next to a cold and shallow Asian woman who had once been my sweet wife. She breathed her alien puffs of air, while I sweated my smells in the sheets. I could not imagine how the two of us had come to dwell in indecent proximity in the same house.

  I was in a house of strangers and I would never get out, they would weave themselves around me and hold me down. Ernst would have laughed his ass off to see me. I was ashamed before the thought of Ernst. I might have learned from him and I hadn’t.

  AND I HAD TO get up early the next morning to go visit a bottling factory in the south. They sent a driver at dawn to take a few of us down there, along a highway that was ugly at first and then edged with depths of beckoning palms. The factory wasn’t any worse than I had expected, except for the shrieking loudness of the machines and the tiny-bodied youth of some of the workers, their arms moving in pace with the conveyer belt’s shrieks. We walked through the noise, sweating in our suits. What a big fat foreigner I was. I hated my size, my feeble friendly words in Thai, my terr
ified heartiness.

  Nobody was interested in my questions about safety measures, and they took us for dinner in our hotel, a pink stucco hulk that had once been a tin miner’s mansion. The next morning when I woke up, I noticed I really, really didn’t want to go home, and I told them all I was sick as a dog—never should have had that catfish curry—and needed to rest, would take the train back later.

  I SAT OUT ON the balcony of my hotel room, looking down at the town, with its vendors selling fruit and sweet drinks and its stores open to the street, and I was unspeakably glad to be alone. What would Toon’s life have been if she’d never met me? She’d had one sweetheart before me, a doctor who went around performing eye operations on rural kids. A far nobler profession than being a corporate stooge, and Toon probably thought so too. He’d ditched her for another girl, and maybe I was her rebound choice, the splotchy-skinned, doltish American. Perhaps she was always making the best of it, with me.

  So I thought to myself, riding the rinky-dink local bus to the national park that was not very far away at all, and why hadn’t I been to the countryside here, what sort of hemmed-in existence did I have? All along the winding road was lush forest, clusters of trees with unfamiliar shapes.

  When the bus got to the park, I could see that the hiking paths were muddy grooves cut through thickets of shrub and cascading branches. The silt was too slippery under my office shoes. What I wanted anyway was to take a boat out on the lake. I had always lived near water. A boy with a face like a sleepy cat rented me a canoe.

  I had the lake to myself, and the water was a pearly green-blue with a faint mist hovering above it. On the banks were palm trees sticking up above a brushy grassland, and beyond the farther shore was a ridge of limestone peaks. The current was mild, I might have been paddling in a bathtub. I saw something move on the shore—somebody’s dog? It was a monkey—there were several monkeys, gray-brown and lightly angular—walking on all fours, loping, chasing each other into a grove. This glimpse excited me, and I thought how much more clearly I saw things when no one was with me to block the beam of my best attention. I moved the canoe very slowly, listening to bird cries and a birdlike sound that was probably the monkeys.

  Later I paddled out to a dead tree in the middle of the lake, and, like a boy, I tied the boat to a stubbed branch and climbed the tree to look out, king of the hill. I almost fell in when I was getting back in the boat, and a burning panic went through me, but if there were crocodiles or snakes, I didn’t see them. And then I paddled back while the light was still strong, and the lake had turned glassy in the glare.

  When I brought the canoe back, I bought a postcard. It showed my lake, or one like it, with a blurry but unmistakably striped tiger swimming in it. Tigers could swim? I wrote to Ernst: Who’s afraid of the jungle? Behold my bathing buddy—he’s a splasher. Your intrepid pal, Toby.

  IT WAS LATE IN the afternoon when the bus took me back to the hotel. I sat on the balcony, eating fish cakes with cucumber and hearing the music someone next door was playing on the radio. A station was playing Thai pop and then a familiar American tune came on—a singer with a deep, scratchy voice was oh-babying his woman to please come back, he needed her so bad. I’d listened to songs like this all my life. Love and more love; you’d think no one in the world did anything but yearn or fuck or swoon or pine every single hour. I knew all the words too, but I had lost my understanding, all at once, of why this was the only version of a full life.

  What about monks? What about those stories I read as a boy featuring solitary genius inventors, working away at their crazy later-famous tasks, uninterrupted by plaguey human contact? What about the Ernsts of this world?

  It did occur to me that I could get a job in the park. I didn’t have to go back to Bangkok. They always needed someone who could do what I could do. I was not an engineer who knew about roads or bridges or water systems, but I could become one. I could learn more Thai. There would be years of free time to study the innumerable species of birds and monkeys and snakes. To know a mere fraction of what went on in that forest of palms and rattans and grasses would be a rich existence. I fell asleep in my chair on the pure white wing of this ambition.

  WHEN I WOKE it was night, and when I stood up, one of my legs was swollen and hot, painful to stand on. I had the crazy idea that it was my old wound from Vietnam, which had long since healed. But it looked more like some kind of nasty insect bite. I went down to the hotel desk to see if they had any magic Thai medicine for it.

  The boy at the desk was asleep with his head on his folded arms. “Hello!” I said. “Hey! Sawatdee krap!” No shouting woke him, and I tapped him on the back of the head, really quite gently. He looked up in alarm, finally—what was the matter with me? I knew never to touch any Thai on the head, not even a child, it was a sacred part of the body. I said I was sorry, in Thai, I could not think what else to say while he muttered at me. I had never heard a stranger angry here. I tried in both languages to ask for what I wanted. I bared my leg and pointed. He had no idea what I meant and gestured at me to keep my voice down. I realized what an imbecile I was making of myself and how poorly I managed in this country, how complicated it was really.

  When I went back to the room, I missed America so badly I couldn’t remember why I had wanted to leave it in the first place. I would just go home now. Back to Florida. That was what I would do. If my leg didn’t fall off first. The simplest things were too ridiculously intricate here. Outsiders thought it was so easy but it wasn’t. My mistake had been to leave home to get married.

  HOURS LATER, the sound of a car horn outside jolted me awake. I was in a pitch-dark chamber, lying on the bedcovers with a hard-on, thinking of Toon. Her voice with its soft Thai lisp was in my head, the oval of her chin was hovering over me. I was a miserable creature, a sad hairy carcass of longing, deprived of Toon. In the damp heat of that hotel room, I shivered with loneliness. How could I go on this way? I couldn’t. I was a fool: the oldest song in the world.

  I went down to the lobby to see if anyone knew when the next train was. When the clerk finally found a schedule, my phone call to Bangkok had to be on reverse charges, and I kept shouting my name over the reception desk telephone so that Lek, who answered, would understand and not hang up. “Please, no shouting,” he said.

  TOON DIDN’T KNOW what to make of my rampant effusiveness once I was home, my constant need to clasp her to me when we were alone (I was Thai enough not to do it in front of the others). But I thought she was glad of it. When I’d slip up behind her and cross my arms around her waist, she’d dimple and laugh. In my overflow of happiness, I called her my sweetheart, my bird, my angel, my perfect girl, and then she shrugged and made a face: too much. “Okay, Toby, okay.” She didn’t mind any of it, but she took me with a grain of salt. For all her gentleness, she was very practical, my Toon.

  It was a good time for us. And I wasted no time in giving the cash to Uncle Lek. I saw that I was forever tied to him, whatever my passing opinions; we were knotted into the same net. And every Thai knows the Buddha considered generosity first among perfections, so I gained a little merit for my next life, which it surely needed. Another positive effect of my payment was that Lek and his wife moved out. Toon’s sister Supa was back in her own room when I came home one night.

  At my job, I wrote a memo about the bottling plant I’d seen and how shorter work hours and more breaks were actually safety factors that would augment profits. Fat chance of anyone rushing out to follow suggestions from some newcomer punk with a touchy conscience. I came home at night tired and stupefied, sorry at times that Lek wasn’t around for booze and cards. “Too much work,” Toon’s mother said.

  I thought she meant me but she meant Lek. The old buzzard had not only paid off his debts, he’d set up another store, selling silk ties in the lobby of a hotel. I tried to ask Toon’s mother how he managed that so fast. “Doing very well,” Toon’s mother said.

  TOON SAID THE HOTEL looked like a giant lace doily but the res
t of the family loved it. For a country that was proud of never falling to a foreign empire, Thailand did love its own royal charm. They took me one Saturday to visit its soaring spaces, which were really very tasteful—whitewashed colonnades and spectacular greenery. Lek’s glassy alcove had its goods sinuously on display, the ties rippling with a soft metallic glow. Lek had a sheen now too, in his creamy white shirt and a very good haircut.

  And he was thrilled when our paths crossed the hotel manager in the lobby. As Lek introduced me, this blue-eyed farang who was his nephew, he managed to suggest, in his joking way, that I was the fattest of fat cats, the world’s most modest millionaire. And I felt quite happy then too, returning the manager’s subtle bow of a wai with a little nod, a foreigner at his ease in the country. Toon thought she might be pregnant, she was surer every day. My adult life was spangled with good fortune. “This is such a very well-run hotel,” I told the manager. In Thai—my Thai was better now. It was not like me but I oozed graciousness.

  Lek showed up a week later at our place with a box of expensive napoleons from the hotel bakery, exotic treats. Toon, who really was pregnant, ate hers with such abandon she came near to choking when Lek kept saying he thought her husband had already filled her to the brim with enough sweets, hadn’t he? Her mother got a little bawdy too, and the bashful sister couldn’t stop laughing.

  WHEN I WENT TO WORK the next morning, my supervisor called me in for a “long-overdue” talk about what a major disappointment I was as an engineer. “You’re nowhere near as smart as you think you are,” he said. I was given a month’s notice. I stared when he told me, like the boob they thought I was.