"You act like you've just seen light after being pulled out of a box."
"I've been alone a lot in recent days."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I need to get away from people."
"Maybe you just need to get away from the old people."
"Maybe. Anyhow…"
"Anyhow, one in a billion."
Nawin laughed. "If you want to see it that way: manipulation of all natural forces to ensure our reunion." He spoke flippantly with a smile. Arrogant and jocular, his was more than contempt of the concept of pre-destiny in relationships, it was also derision for the human vulnerabilities of needing companionship altogether as though he were beyond it. But he too was born of the herd. He, even more than most, had to climb onto the backs of laborers to get his physical needs taken care of so as to have the leisure to see ethereal beauty. Why, he chastised himself, was he trying to repel human contact? Such behavior, he thought, was as unnatural as was the proclamation of a self- declared retirement in a still robust and virile being.
Society equated the worth of a man with doing and most specifically involvement in the generation of a commercial product for what other purpose did man have on the planet than to work toward making the world a more comfortable place? He remembered Noppawan's initial reaction to his retirement. It had been favorable enough for to her. It meant a cessation of these perennial sessions with nude models. And yet with the days, weeks, months, and years of Buddhist melting in which he wandered back from a park or stadium for dinner or more frequently walked around his acreage and sat in lawn chairs to dispense with the hours, often without a book in his hands, what could be said to him? He was reticent for not having any terrestrial concerns to impart and so he was a cockroach on her plate, an ant in her salt shaker. He remained such except in fulfilling what she importuned from him most: studding her friend, Kimberly, so that the three might have a baby.
Surely his success had not been her only motivation for marrying him. When in adolescence that which was barely alive in him fell into her life, onto her shoulders, she closed him in her arms at that freakish friendship hall, the anatomical museum at Siriaj Hospital, and years later at their marriage, the girlish pathos for a troubled friend was within her still. However, as even more time went by so her life became inextricable with her sense of his success and it could not be any more comfortably extracted than that of her teeth.