“Isn’t she the most beautiful goddamned thing you ever saw in the whole of your life?” Mitch Turner, red faced, suddenly demands of the waiter, who shares an astonished glance with Chanya.
They skip dessert, and she has to fend off his advances in the cab all the way back to her apartment. His greedy, strong, needing, famished hands are everywhere. When she threatens to slap him, he giggles. “It’s coming out my ears, Marge,” he whispers in that perfect-and eerie-imitation of Homer.
Once in her flat, she takes him in hand whore-style: a shower together first, when she carefully washes his private parts in cold water, with no effect on his impressive erection. Softly humming to himself, he covers her breasts with liquid soap and tries to write his name in the bubbles. In bed he comes alive in a way she could never have predicted.
In fact, he’s amazing. Twenty-five minutes in, and he’s still pumping away and she is bucking and humping under him, sustained mostly by professional pride. To his very tender “Did you come, darling?” offered in a French accent, she is compelled, as a truthful Buddhist, breathlessly to admit: “Three times.”
“Me too.” He chuckles and goes on humping. By the fourth climax she is reconsidering the Christian Bible. Maybe there’s something in it after all?
Even after he’s finally finished and she’s taken him to the shower again and they are lying side by side, that single glass of wine is still working its magic. He lies there spilling his guts like a schoolboy. After his life story (he went to a strict religious school in Arkansas, Yale, studied in Japan), he starts into Washington gossip of the most virulent kind.
It seems that Mitch Turner was brought up by strict Southern Baptists, and his father was a senator. He has a sister to whom he is very close, and two brothers, both successful businessmen and near billionaires in the telecommunications industry. But it is his strange repertoire of accents and voices that holds her attention and astonishes her with the accuracy of the mimickry. His rendering of the large range of different characters that seem to inhabit his body is so precise, she has to cover her mouth from the sheer weirdness of his theater. When he leaves, she can only shake her head. A strange fish indeed.
In her diary Chanya admits to a certain irresistible callousness concerning Mitch Turner and alcohol. She will see it work over and over again, that most amazing metamorphosis. Turner is thirty-two and loses about half of those years every time he drinks. The mysterious process renders him useless for all social purposes, but in private he’s a big, hyperhorny sixteen-year-old with a dozen different identities and a lot of fun. From now on she always keeps a bottle of red wine at home. The ritual never fails. He enters guilt-laden, tense, serious, taciturn, heavily mysterious, hinting that he doesn’t know how much longer he can go on sinning with her. She gives him a glass of wine, and within minutes he’s peeled off the whole of his adult personality and turned into a big, groping, babbling baby. After sex he invariably unloads, psychologically. The problem, though, is that this unloading involves a number of increasingly contradictory stories. In some variants of his personal history, his beloved sister disappears and is replaced by a lovable but wayward brother whom Mitch is perpetually saving from ruin. Sometimes his mother is a Catholic from Chicago. Quite frequently his father is a wastrel who abandoned the family when Mitch was four years old. (Mitch got to where he is today by dint of brilliance and scholarships.) In yet other variations, his father was a diplomat who was stationed in Tokyo for years; hence Mitch’s fluency in Japanese.
Another woman might have seen danger signals, but experienced prostitutes are used to listening to men tie themselves in knots. She assumes he has a wife and family somewhere and does not credit Chanya with enough intelligence to detect the contradictions. Slightly amused at the extent to which his prejudice has led him to misjudge her, she admits she looks forward to his visits, to witnessing his dramatic personality change, the extraordinary sex, and best of all the funny, wild, infantile babbling-in-many-voices that in her humble opinion makes him a kind of genius. Let’s face it, she’s known one hell of a lot of men, and not a single one ever made her laugh like this. True, it’s the laughter of astonishment, of disbelief, but isn’t that what men in love are supposed to be able to do to a girl? She hasn’t had this kind of fun since she was in Thailand.
The detached Buddhist side of her also notes that his dependence on her is already a little scary. Twice he has admitted that he feels reborn. Or to be accurate, born for the first time. Now that he’s known fun, Thai-style, he can see just how totally fucked up his childhood was (his expletive). Or was this simply American bullshit?
She is fascinated by the extent to which he has underestimated her and likes to trick him into ever more glaring inconsistencies.
“Mitch, tell me the truth now. Was your father really a senator?”
“Dad? Sure, one of the finest on the Hill, a fine upstanding American, the kind you’d trust your fortune to, or your wife.”
She gazes at his glass. Recently she has subtly increased the dosage. She bought two balloon-sized wineglasses that can hold half a bottle each. She has poured maybe a quarter of the Napa red into his, and he has sipped maybe a third of that.
He grins. He knows she is waiting for him to drink some more and go through his metamorphosis. Slightly tipsy already, he sniggers a bit. She smiles. He takes a gulp. Of course, he is thinking about the sex they are about to enjoy-another marathon for sure-while she is waiting with her usual fascination for the personality change. A couple more sips, and here it comes. His face flushes, a new light comes into his eyes.
“So what was he like really?”
“A total shit, a twenty-four-karat asshole,” Homer Simpson says.
She has doubled up on the sofa. It’s the dramatic shift of consciousness, so total and so blatant, coming without warning or apology. To her it’s the most literal illustration of the truth of Buddhist doctrine, which explains that there is not one personality but a million modes of consciousness. Properly understood, an individual can choose any one of them at any time, although the enlightened choose none at all.
“An asshole?” She’s laughing so hard, she can hardly get the word out.
Her laughter-the laughter of a beautiful woman whose charms, to him, have grown to mythic proportions-is highly contagious. She can see this clearly enough. (Whatever else is fake, his obsession for her is authentic, or she really has lost her knack for reading men.) He joins her on the sofa, where she is still laughing from deep in her gut, an abandoned belly laugh. “You know, once he turned the TV off because it was showing two dogs fucking?” That really sets her off. She winds up on the floor helpless for a full five minutes. But is it true? What are they both laughing at, exactly-theater or reality? Perhaps the contradictions are deliberate after all, to see if she would play this game by his strange rules. For a moment she thinks she understands: this is a variant of a kind of sex play common in men who visit whores: her function is to enter into some long-suppressed world of childhood, which is the only place he feels alive. As if to confirm her suspicions, he begins an extraordinary and hilarious five minutes when he mimicks brilliantly every TV personality whom she names.
In the middle of the hilarity, he suddenly stops laughing. She has not seen this before, although it will recur with greater frequency from now on: a hole has suddenly opened up somewhere in his mind, he is swallowing nervously, and his face is racked with some complex emotion, whether guilt or resentment or plain old fear is hard to say, and he gives no explanation. Perhaps he is unaware of his own change of mood? She reaches to his glass on the coffee table and hands it to him. He drinks greedily, finishing the glass. Within seconds the hilarity is back. She steers clear of dangerous themes and lets him undress her. She makes a note never to ask about his parents again.