“Ka, not really. I can’t imagine anybody doing that...unless he just didn’t want to worry you. Maybe he didn’t want to worry you about if the idea was right or wrong financially. I bet he has friends there and they’ll help him to locate work.”
“Yes, it is the best thing. I’ve been going to the temple to give food to the monks and blessings will follow. I’m sure of that. I’ve never gone on a flight. Where are the two of you going?”
“To Montreal.”
“Where’s that?”
“To Canada.” She smiled but the word, favorable as it was, didn’t have the flavor of Paris or cities in America.
“What will you do there?”
Nawin wondered what she would be doing there. She had escorted him around galleries, parties, and auditoriums where he gave speeches. Bangkok gossip columnists had sometimes even mentioned her presence with him. What would she be doing in Montreal while he attended post-graduate classes? That was a fundamental question he had no answer for. He had granted unto her a new profession where she didn’t have to spread her legs to anyone but him. He had rescued her from stripping and whoring in a bar in Patpong but perhaps that would not be enough. Nobody was content. Like any animal, a human always yearned for more. They were trying to build up on themselves so that they were free of all discomfort. A woman was more that way than even a man based on his judgments and to be left alone in an apartment in a foreign country would be one major discomfort she would not tolerate. He began to miss his wife: she didn’t need anything—not even sex with him. She was free to love other things than him—higher things and he was free to love higher things than her as well as the lower things like Porn. It was for this reason that he loved her but he didn’t desire her so much except as an intellectual companion. This one he desired and that love certainly had more thrust than the former one. At least it appeared to be stronger.
The sky had tubes of light paint oozing out into the darkness and the sky could not ascertain if it wanted a moon or a sun in its presence. The ride was just beginning and yet it was monotonous in the darkness and the light of the street lamps that refracted glaringly. The three of them still remained as little conscious of the moon or, dependent on the limitation of their eyes, the corona of the moon, that they happened to glimpse as accompanying them on their early morning departure as they were of the monarch, Ramkhamhaeng, that was the source of the road’s name. The taxi driver was near-sighted so to him, as most things at a distance, the reality of it all was begotten as a blur.
The back-seated Nawin with the cigarette fuming and the legs sprawled out and thumping to his portable CD player and his model or whore with her hand again on one of his legs had their thoughts parted once more in the kinetic movements of linguistic moans.
“What airline will you be flying out of?” asked the taxi driver. Following patriarchal social etiquette he was addressing the man instead of the girlfriend despite not liking the smoke. The man was more than a customer but a member of the more affluent class and this by Thai, although not Buddhist standards, was well revered. How swift one’s encroaching aloneness was purged and thwarted in the retreat engineered by the batons and water cannons of one’s linguistic moans. The whore, whose self-image had been disparaged by the unconventional positive endorsement of her activities by the wife, was grateful to gain the parting of her thoughts from the driver’s voice. She was pleased to be once again hearing anything—even the least little unenlightening fact-about their trip. She smiled. After all, it was the land of smiles.