“No, she is here. But that is not the point. The point is figuring out if you will ever need me like a wife.”
“The way Porn does? Honey, she is a businesswoman. I’m sure she enjoys you immeasurably but you would go broke paying for both of us.” She laughed. She was fully amused by herself; but then she noticed that she had caused him to retreat in silence. “Hello?” she said uneasily. She picked up the poetic story, Thao Nok Kaba Phuak (The Nightjar) that was on her bookshelf. She opened the book, which had his name and address on it when he was 14 years old and her name since he had dedicated the book to her. Her fingertips caressed the illustration of the Nightjar on the cover page.
“Yeah, I’m here. You continued to encourage me to have my relationships after we were married. It was crazy but I went along with it. I thought it was a game: playboy artist encouraged by his wife to continue to draw saddened whores. I even went to the airport with Porn thinking you would come there and stop us.”
“Surprise, surprise!” she said. She laughed lovingly. “Men explode, Nawin. They get it out of their system for a few hours but a woman percolates romantically throughout the day. She loses all sense of reason. She does everything for the sake of that relationship. She loses herself.”
“So-no one wants to reason 24 hours a day. You can’t think that people get married to stop sexual intercourse. If that was your idea I wish that you had told me before we got married.”
“Nawin, the reason I married you was not to percolate nor was it to be a recipient of your explosions when you can’t get any temporaries to service you. I realize that temporaries are more erotic than wives, Nawin, the same as temporaries are probably more erotic than husbands. Anybody new will not be like stinking socks kicked off under the sofa.”
“Is that what I am?” He remembered the stench of Kumpee. She couldn’t have chosen a more grotesque image. He again felt like the ugly dark skinned Jatupon with his pimples.
“You understand what I mean.”
“I don’t understand you at all. I don’t understand what we are, honestly. Do we even have a relationship? Do you know?”
“Of course, we’ve known each other forever. We’re just trying to figure out some new movements-our own ways of behaving.”