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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 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.
Heaven Lake Press (2004), 280pp.
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