19

Nok ordered me to arrive after eleven p.m., when the Parthenon would be at its busiest. The sofas are all occupied by men in dark suits with two or three overdressed girls to serve them. Nok, in her upholstered ballgown, is quite busy introducing customers to girls, taking men up to the second and third floors, returning to welcome yet more eager sperm-spenders. Even when I look directly at her, she avoids my eye. She did manage a quick grasp of my wrist as she passed by, however. It seems the big moment has arrived when the stage will finally be put to use.

The house lights darken, and an invisible orchestra is playing something saccharin-based from the fifties, the kind of music that justifies fifty girls in low-cut swimming costumes kicking their legs in unison. The show is a perfect copy of the stuff you see in old Hollywood movies featuring elaborate dance routines, with a finale that showcases the girl with the biggest breasts-these are truly gigantic-standing on a circular dais, and everyone else on their knees paying homage. Unlike in other bars five minutes from here, the choreography forbids the baring of nipples and pubic hair; it’s almost family entertainment. To keep up appearances, Nok has provided me with three young women who are delighted that I speak Thai despite my somewhat Occidental features, and they have been nattering to me about their lives to pass the time. I think they are aware that I am the mamasan’s man, however, because not one of them has made a single erotic pass. Finally, when the show has reached its inevitable crescendo and people are clapping in a distracted kind of way, Nok comes up beside me to ask if I want any of the girls sitting with me. I say no in a polite, embarrassed tone, and the girls immediately disappear. Nok takes me up to the second and third floors, where we go through the same routine as on my last visit. She then ostentatiously takes me to one of the private rooms and locks the door. She leans with her back against it, thrusting her Louis XV bosom at me.

“I thought we were going to the secret rooms.”

She raises a finger to her lips. “Don’t worry, I have a key card.” She dips into the depths of her gown to show me a plastic card with a magnetic strip. “The doorman owes me some favors. I told him you are my very special boyfriend and I wanted to make love with you in one of the secret rooms. This card is the master key: it opens all the doors over there.” I smile. “Maybe you’ll change your mind about having sex with me when you see the room.”

She leads me down a fire escape to a utility area on the ground floor, then uses the key card to open a drab door that leads into a heavily carpeted area and a lift with a padded red-leather door. The lift also has a thick red carpet and zips up to the top floor in seconds.

The doors open out into a fascinating playground. TV monitors show alternating scenes of Paris, Venice, Rome, and fellatio. Nok shows how to change channels to get the erotic image of your choice: any position from the Kama Sutra and many more not contemplated by even that optimistic text. The ceilings are high, gilded but less ornate than the public area. All in all there has been an input of improved taste in the decor, with less emphasis on velvet and crimson. The centerpiece is an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, from which steam rises in elusive wisps. It is amoeba shaped with plenty of Davids, Zeuses, and Poseidons slouching around the edges and a couple of live nymphs naked and splashing each other. I guess they got active when they heard the lift arrive. Nok waves to them through the magic mist, and they wave back.

“This is my boyfriend,” she explains.

“Want to share him?” No.

She tosses her head with a defiant smile and leads me by the hand down a corridor off the pool area. Silence save for the bustling of her gown and dripping water from the pool. I count only three doors here, and Nok confirms that there are indeed only three private rooms. There isn’t enough space for more.

I see what she means when she opens one of the doors. The room must be more than a thousand square feet with a large kidney-shaped Jacuzzi in the middle. Towels, soaps, gels, and massage lotions with Parisian pedigrees are neatly set out around it, and there are mirrors everywhere. On high shelves what look like priceless antiques in porcelain and jade stand guard. My eyes rest for a moment on a jade reclining Buddha of exquisite workmanship about eighteen inches long, which amounts to a lot of jade. “Everything’s authentic,” Nok says, following my gaze. The bed, which is larger than king size, waits about ten yards away. What impresses, however, are the LCD monitors, some of them enormous, that populate the walls like paintings. I see there are plenty of closed-circuit cameras too. I guess that armed with a remote one could zoom in on genital activity, whether one’s own or someone else’s, from any point in the room. We exchange a glance, Nok and I.

“This is Tanakan’s room,” she confesses, finally bringing herself to pronounce her tormentor’s name.

I’d not heard her attribute any of the three private rooms to any particular member before; now that she has done so, many things clarify. I want to ask more, but she takes my hand to the edge of the giant Jacuzzi and starts to undress me. “We can at least bathe together,” she says. I want to refuse, but her tone has changed from erotic banter to sad and needy. When I am naked, she quickly strips herself, leaving her gown in a heap by the side of the Jacuzzi, and pulls me behind her into the warm water.

“He brought you here often, didn’t he?”

She looks away. “You’re so intuitive. That’s how you survive, isn’t it? Pure instinct. I believe you when you say you come from a poor background. Only the poor and people in jail develop such instincts.”

She sighs. “Yes, a lot. At one time I was his favorite. He has a kind of clockwork lust. Each girl lasts almost exactly six months, before he dumps her and finds another.”

“But I thought-”

“I know what I told you. I have my pride. He was a sadistic bastard, but he was also”-she waves a hand -“incredible.”

“Damrong took him away from you?”

She gives me a sharp look. “It doesn’t work that way with the X members. The men call the shots.” A sigh. “I was coming to the end of my six months anyway. The mamasan told him about a new girl. I got the push the next day. But Damrong was very gracious about it, and she did give me half the money he gave her on her first night. A real pro and a good heart. It was a joke between us that she took my Saturday-night whipping for me.”

Suddenly, without warning, the water jets all around the circumference of the huge Jacuzzi switch on at full power. My heart rate doubles, and Nok is in my arms, naked, wet, scared, pressing her face into my shoulder. “It’s okay,” I say. “We must have triggered a switch or something.”

She clings to me for a full minute before I can disentangle her and set her down again. I have to let a few beats pass while she recovers. “You don’t know him,” she says by way of explanation.

I let a couple more beats pass. “Six months is quite a long time to be intimate with someone. You must have talked about more than the price of massage oil.” Her pain is haunting and far more attractive than her standard seduction routine. I hold one of her fingers under the water, which causes her to flash me a glance. “You were in love with him, despite his sadistic tastes?”

“He knows how to do that. How to make a woman have strong sexual feelings toward him. How to make her lust for him.”

“A lot of men would like to know how to do that.”

“With his money and power, it’s not so difficult. Little by little he takes over your whole life until there is nothing but him. You become obsessed with him, whether you want to or not. A lot of women like to be forced to focus. I suppose I’m one of them.” Looking away at the reclining Buddha: “I guess what makes it all bearable is feeling his pain, even while he’s hurting you. It’s a kind of twisted love, I suppose.”