"Do you think so? But then what is beauty? An overweight middle aged man can be considered appealing to an anorexic and her thinness, sadness, and youth can seem beautiful to him if both lack qualities that the other possesses, or have qualities mirrored in the partner which makes them feel less alone. That is my theory, for what it is worth."
"You are a deep one, aren't you?" asked the stranger.
He thought of his own limited sex symbol status. In this decade and a half of being glossed onto covers of esoteric art magazines and the photographs of him with articles being emblazoned on the back pages of Sunday newspapers, this married but eligible hedonist with a sensitive stroke was considered handsome and debonair, luminous in sensuality, jaunty and recalcitrant, and an empathic sufferer for those whom he studied and represented. He was alluring for these qualities and most importantly for being fully comfortable with himself as such. He, "Naughty Nawin," was a luminosity in artistic circles who was more desirable for having been desired by others; and yet in all this time he sensed it for the inferior illusion that it was. In a world of complete illusions, a plausible reality was really the thing that was most desired and clung to and so he had clung to Noppawan, a girl who hated family as much as he did, and yet by clinging he had made a family with her. He had forfeited bachelorhood, as much as a Patpong artist could, and had slipped himself into their union only to find that the woman he was married to could not conceive a child and that by her being infertile his days of bachelorhood (except at least on a legal piece of paper) would be as perennial as the wild flower days of his life. He knew illusions so well, for they were his art to convey truth in fiction and reality in abstraction. He liked producing color on canvasses that would act as a mirror of indictment on this world, where the weak were depicted as abused and falling prey to illnesses like the dogs that were born in the streets, kicked, starved, mange-ridden, and dead early and hideously. He saw this perennial cycle of victims going on forever and only nuclear bombs falling like cleansing rain stopping it. He knew how like a magician he could cast a spell on others through his canvass, but he also understood the potency of words and by words he might now circumvent any suspicions about his sexuality which, the way he saw it, was "straight" and intact, despite a few strange caprices that blew in here and there.
"Supermodels and actresses are considered universally beautiful but I don't think it has much merit. I think that beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder for the earlier reasons that I gave. It is only because of the extent of their physical curves of femininity which are beyond the normal range for most men to find in a partner that supermodels and actresses are depicted and believed as some type of a universal beauty. They would only be considered slightly more beautiful were it not for their fame. The fame makes their style of beauty become embedded into minds as something supernatural. In most cases, I think, beauty is just what we lack. As I am a man, I lack the tender touches and graces of a woman, those gentle curves and scents, and responding like a man I want to thrust myself into that gentility whose hands worship a man's physique. I want to rivet and devour." He knew that his words would be considered outlandish in Thai society where everything was done with maximum freedom but never spoken, and he knew that his turgid words, spoken as if he were the professor of beauty, would bore the most pedantic. Still, that was the aim: he wanted to take the stranger on a meandering path of circumlocutions that would shake him from earlier thoughts and deposit him in this concept that he, Nawin Biadkang, the prostitute artist, was and forever would be a lady's man. "Women are the viand of a man's eyes, the fruit for the bon vivant." He used French words that were retained in English without being Anglicized to give puissance to what he thought of condescendingly as his befuddled mother tongue. In that respect he was no different than any supercilious upper class American or Englishmen who required superior utterance even though to most of the contemporary world's populace the elite language was base English itself. Then he glanced toward the aisle and surrounding seats for although not really embarrassed by his words, ensconced as he was in his role as a libertine, he was deferential enough to worry that he would inadvertently bludgeon a listener with his peculiar thoughts. He then became inexplicably reticent although no one was listening.
With conversation continuing to seem cogent, moving on stretched, unraveled ends, Boi was on the verge of accepting Nawin as a womanizer and might have possibly done so were it not for the artist's cowardly withdrawal into himself which befuddled the befuddlement. Nawin had turned away and was staring at the fan clipping speedily at the air. There could be no other interpretation other than that this Nawin (on the birth certificate, Jatupon, a word that still thrust a cold chill down his spine as cold slackened his pace, freezing him to danger), feeling uncomfortably seated on exaggerated truth, was becoming fixated on these rotating blades dicing the air the way the second hand of a clock seemed to suggest the dicing of a man's life incrementally. Due to the extent of his boredom, to Boi he was a suspicious character, an ambiguous puzzle needing to be solved and a landscape of contrasts to set his claim upon. Nawin sensed this intrigue but gained no satisfaction from it. All that he wanted, he told himself, was to relax and not think so much when thinking was such morbid drudgery like an impoverished gold seeker sifting through mud and obtaining merely that. "Wasn't my reason for coming here to purge people from my life, and live purely in complete empty space without needing others to plug up my loneliness," he thought. "And yet here is one more bit of dross stuffing my gutter."
He realized the impression that he was making and so he smiled and looked into the stranger's face. "So, did you like the paintings? —not that as slides held up to the light anyone could see them all that well."
"They were done well."
"Unlike you who have probably gained a lot of various skills in your labor, I don't have many practical skills. I can't fix anything. Not even a drawer that is ajar in a night table. Never learned to cook anything but noodles from my parents' restaurant and my brothers' noodle stands. But I know how to draw naked whores. That is for sure. I guess it is my gift."
"If those slides are your own work, you do, my friend. You draw them so well, so exquisitely, so astoundingly with all the feminine curves and wiles just right; and I am sure that after you paint and love them they sometimes like to watch you sleep and you like to watch them sleep. But that was not the nature of my query. I am meaning someone whom you don't know all that well looking down on you. Like I was earlier this morning, you are not quite asleep and so you hear him—yes a man, as it is a man's breathing that you hear. Earlier I was lying alone here in my bottom bunk drowsy but not asleep when I swear I heard someone drop from an upper sleeper and got the sense that he was examining my body, wanting it. Strange, huh?"
"I would imagine that it would be," said Nawin.