Excerpt
Sunan's
small, slender body seemed to shrink in size as the police
officers walked through the door, guns strapped to their
hips, walkie-talkies squawking, no-nonsense, tough faces,
staring at her, looking around the room.
“The
body’s in the bathroom,” said Calvino.
Her
lips tightened, she sat with her arms folded across her
breasts. The cops looked at her for confirmation but she
said nothing. This defensive posture must have been used
a thousand times from early childhood when confronted by
poo-yai, an authority figure. She was a Bangkok ying, who
had come from a lower-middle class family one generation
out of the rice fields. Her posture betrayed no sense of
defiance; it was one of passive submission and acceptance.
There was no hint of resistance or challenge.
Pratt
came out of the bathroom with the leather bag. He sat down
at the table and looked through the sketches. Calvino stood
over his shoulder.
“I
wondered about the porno,” said Calvino.
“Who
said it’s porno?” asked Pratt, turning over a drawing of
a nude Thai woman on a beach blanket with two farang with
handle-bar moustaches and mutton-chop sideburns. The men
were dressed in old-fashioned suits and ties.
“What’s
it look like to you?”
“Like
someone who has studied Manet. Whoever drew this used Luncheon
on the Grass as a model,” said Pratt, turning the drawing
over. “And whoever did this had talent.”
“Sunan
said 8K was a painter.”
Pratt
looked up, finding Sunan’s eyes circling the room. “Did
your friend draw this?” Pratt asked her. “Chai kha,” she
said.
While
in New York City in his early twenties, Prachai had spent
most of his time auditing classes at the Pratt Institute
when his parents had every reason to believe that he was
studying hard for a law enforcement diploma at NYU. No American
could pronounce “Prachai” and it had been Calvino who had
first started calling him Pratt. More than anything Pratt
had a burning desire to become an artist. Calvino had a
couple of Pratt’s watercolors from those days, the early
days, at the beginning of their friendship.
“You
have heard of Manet?” Pratt asked Calvino.
“Doesn’t
he run that bar on Soi 33?”
Pratt
has fallen in love with Velazquez and Goya in New York.
Seeing the drawings had taken him back to the 70s—a lifetime
ago—and now he looked up at Calvino, and remembered the
young man he had first met in Washington Square. It was
as if all those years had happened moments before.
“In
nineteenth century Paris,” said Pratt, “the Academy deemed
Manet’s paintings vulgar. Pornographic. He was kept out
of the Salon. His paintings were too real. They made people
uncomfortable. And what do people say when they see a painting
that makes them feel uncomfortable? They call it porno.”
“So
I’m not an art critic,” said Calvino.
