Sangfroid translates literally as luak yen: same phrase, same concept. I thought about that. The two most important women in my life have luak yen to an unusual degree: my mother, Nong, and Chanya. The thought leads naturally to the Third Woman. Damrong possessed an effortless sangfroid: cruel, enticing, immense, a real leopard. But there was nothing petty about her. Both my mother and I expected her to act superior to the other girls when she first came to work for us, because she so obviously outclassed them; not so. She humbled herself, bought them presents on their birthdays, showed many kindnesses, gave free advice to those who wanted to ply their trade overseas, loved them. The general consensus was that she possessed jai dee, or good heart, in great measure. My stomach is fluttering because I don’t know how I’m going to react to scenes of her naked and performing for other men. “Hi,” I say, “I’m home.”
At some level I was expecting them to be talking about me. It’s a little humbling to find them huddled together in the kitchen listening to the radio. The program is called Thinking in Modem Ways, and for Chanya listening to it has become a religious ritual. She is translating for the FBI: “You see, instead of just starting cooking and then looking for all the ingredients, you gather all the ingredients together first and put them in proper order on the bench. Now they’re talking about washing clothes. Instead of just putting all the clothes in a pile, you use three laundry baskets: one for whites, one for colors, one for delicates. See?”
Chanya turns to Kimberley with a triumphant beam. The FBI has trouble hiding her confusion. She knows Chanya is no fool, so why is it necessary to have instructions on such primitive time-and-motion issues? “Great,” she says. “Efficiency makes life easier.” She’s relieved that I’ve appeared and looks at me expectantly. How to explain that a nation which has been surviving on intuition and custom for a thousand years doesn’t pick up Aristotelian logic just like that? The revelation that “A cannot be not-A” does not come naturally to undivided minds.
It’s easier to change the subject. I go to a suitcase in the space under the stairs where I have locked Baker’s laptop. Both women stop to stare when I take it out. I bought a charger for it in Pantip Plaza so now I plug it into a socket in the living room. So they had been talking about me after all. The FBI has explained that the laptop will likely contain clips of Damrong performing with other men. The looks on their faces are a fine expression of puerile curiosity: How’s he going to take it? How much suffering are we going to see? We don’t have any chairs, so they huddle around me on the floor at the coffee table on which I have placed the computer. The FBI fishes a gadget out of her pocket that is about six inches long with a plug that fits into the USB port of the computer. The FBI switches on the gadget at the same time as pressing the boot button on the laptop. An LCD display on the gadget, which has space for about thirty digits, starts racing through numbers, letters, and punctuation marks at lightning speed. Eventually it stops at: {{jack***rongdam’t‘t’t29-=forty. I never would have thought of that. Now the Windows icons come alive, and we are welcomed with the cheery music.
In the MS Explorer screen I experiment with a few files before I realize that Baker uses the prefix X for his porn stuff. “Original,” the FBI says.
A double-click, and there we are: a close-up of Damrong with an erect penis in her mouth. Probably Baker’s, for the clip, which lasts only forty seconds, seems experimental in nature. It is quite a jolt to be taken so rapidly into the unbearable frisson of a beautiful woman practicing an obscenity with such joie de vivre. She grins at the camera whenever she takes it out of her mouth. “I’m okay,” I tell the two women, who are even more interested in my reaction than in the porn.
“She’s not even pretty,” Chanya says. This is not merely a reflex of jealousy; I think Chanya sees a very different image on the monitor: a common Cambodian face, browner than Chanya’s, with the somewhat pouting lips of the Khmer. To me Damrong’s is a gaunt, haughty beauty, whereas Chanya’s is full-bodied and jolly. But the FBI too is shaking her head. “Only men think that’s irresistible,” she grunts.
We go through all of Baker’s X files, starting with the shortest. In about ten minutes we have covered Damrong’s full sexual repertoire, without observing any demonstration of passion on her part. The men’s faces rarely appear; when they do, it is by way of hairy pink foils to her performance. I have shrugged, inwardly, and bought myself a certain amount of cheap immunity thereby. I am even congratulating myself on my Buddhist self-control when I start into the first of the two longer clips.
The atmosphere is quite different. One senses immediately that this recording has been made furtively, without the John’s knowledge. At first the couple move in and out of camera range, until Damrong has maneuvered her client to a specific position on the bed. Here she is giving oral pleasure with great enthusiasm; indeed, there is an intensity to her performance that hacks a hole in my guts. (Sexual jealousy started in the reptilian incarnations and is firmly embedded in the brain stem; its distorting effect on the personality has been studied for millennia.) “You okay, Sonchai?” the FBI says. Chanya stares at me in disgust: “He’s still in love with her, look at him.”
“I’m okay,” I croak. “Really.”
“So why have you turned green?” my pregnant partner wants to know.
“I haven’t” is the best I can manage by way of reply. I’m struggling with an internal tornado during the first five minutes of the clip, though, and don’t start to come out of it until we begin to get flashes of the man’s face.
“Look,” Kimberley says, “look how she’s moving under him to bring his face in range of the camera.”
It is very subtly done, each pelvic shift on the bed made to look like a reaction to the exquisite torture of sexual frenzy. Now he is in full view. It does not help that he is a handsome farcing with a strong jaw, auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a masterful manner. “You sucker,” I mutter, avoiding the women’s eyes. “That’s the way she worked,” I explain hoarsely. “She’s let him think he’s dominated her mind, that he’s so good and his cock’s so big she’s totally fallen for him, body and soul.”
“That’s not a technique she invented, Sonchai,” the FBI advises. Chanya nods in agreement, still maintaining a sneer for my benefit. It’s the postcoital sequence that grabs all three pairs of eyeballs, though.
“Amazing,” the FBI says.
“Genius,” from Chanya, former bar queen.
I’m rubbing my eyes. “Play it again,” Chanya instructs.
“Real tears,” from the FBI.
It’s true. Damrong has managed a delicate, reluctant trickle from both retinas, which she quickly, bravely wipes away. She pretends she cannot look him in the eye when she says, “Tom, you’re just amazing.” A slight wobble around the chin, then: “I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Tom says with a lump in his throat. “There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?” Now his eyes too are weepy. They blend the salt for a while, before starting again. This time she manages to get both his face and groin in camera range while she works on him.
“Did she use that trick on you?” Chanya wants to know. So does the FBI, to judge by the way she’s looking at me.
“No,” I say, not sure how I feel. “Not at all. I guess he has a lot more money than me.”
“Hm,” the FBI says thoughtfully, “kind of over the top, somehow, unless she wanted more than just money.”
“Like what? Not marriage, surely.”
“No,” Kimberley agrees, “not that.”