3.
“Oh, hey,” I say in that tone that I hope makes me sound casual but also pleased.
“Looks like I’m the one who’s catching you this time,” Thalia says.
“Where are you going?”
“To the shops,” Thalia says.
She’s wearing those baggy harem pants with the elephant designs that tourists buy for just a few bucks, the kind you find folded in every market stall between here and Chiang Mai.
Thais wore these once but they’re out of fashion now, like wearing a cowboy hat in Arizona.
The top she’s wearing doesn’t match. It’s tight, black, and really more a tiny strip of fabric than an article of clothing.
A thin gold chain at her collarbone. Hair pulled up in that way where it’s supposed to look like she didn’t try.
“What do you need?”
“Fruit, mostly,” she says. “I need other bits and pieces, but I’m craving something sweet and it’s so cheap here.”
“Sure,” I say. “Hop on.”
We zip down the road to an open air market.
On Monday and Friday evenings the whole parking lot fills with stalls selling everything from fruit to cuts of fresh(ish) meat and seafood, cheap clothes, noodles made to order, loaded baked potatoes, pizza by the slice, everything really.
But right now it’s pretty much just fruit.
The place is sleepy and quiet, the vendors sitting on low stools in the shade of their tarps, fans going, nobody in any particular hurry.
A stray dog stretches himself out in the shadow of an awning and watches us arrive without getting up.
Thalia hops off the bike and shields her eyes against the glare.
“Can you come with me?” she asks. “You’re practically a local. You can tell me if I’m getting ripped off.”
“That’s the best part about Thailand,” I say. “Even when they overcharge you, you don’t care because it’s still cheaper than what you’d pay back home. But I’ll make sure they don’t take you for too much.”
We walk the stalls and a pimple-faced girl wearing a Slayer t-shirt watches us with disinterest from behind a row of pineapples. Thalia picks up an oddly-shaped purple fruit and examines it like it’s from another planet.
“Oh, what’s this one?” she asks.
“Dragon fruit. Get a kilo. They’re great.”
I grab two more and hand them over to the fruit seller. Thalia gives over hers. Next we pick out a few mangoes and a bunch of bananas. 150 baht for all of it.
“Is that alright?” Thalia asks me.
“It’s a little more than four dollars,” I say. “US dollars. I’m not sure about the Australian exchange rate.”
“Yeah, that’s heaps good,” she says.
She gives a little bow to the seller, who just stares at her. Once we’re a few paces away she asks me—
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” I say. “It’s a little formal for this kind of situation. These days most people aren’t that polite when they don’t need to be. Those people have the only fruit stand in this part of town, so they’ve pretty much got a captive market.”
She’s carrying the bag of fruit in the crook of her arm and chewing on a piece of banana she broke off while I was talking. She’s hungry and didn’t feel like waiting. I like that about her.
“You really know a lot about Thailand,” she says.
“You just pick up on things after you’ve lived here a while,” I say.
“Know somewhere we can get something hot to eat?” she asks. “This is great for a snack, but I’m not a fruititarian. Nothing too spicy, though. Or pricey.”
It’s almost noon and I still haven’t written a single word.
Thai class was one thing, but now I’m really falling behind in my schedule.
But I have a feeling that if I say no now I’ll spend the next three hours kicking myself for letting the opportunity to have lunch with her pass.
So, if you think about it, I’m actually doing the most time-efficient thing.
This one decision to have lunch with her probably saved me three hours.
I may need a nap in the afternoon after all this.
“I know a place,” I say. “Cheap, easy and pretty close.”
Nikoy’s is your typical Thai restaurant.
Everything’s a la carte. You sit on plastic stools and drink from these little tin cups.
Ice is self-service only. The big man himself is behind the counter this morning, working a wok with one hand and his phone in the other, which is a skill I’ve never been able to fully appreciate without being a little scared by it.
He’s just shaved his head, and the skin there is still pale from where the hair was, a sharp line at his ears.
I asked him about it once, the shaving, and he explained that during Ramadan some men shave as a form of discipline, a physical marker that sets the fast period apart from ordinary time.
The hair grows back when it’s over. It’s a smart move regardless, given the heat.
“Hello, Miss-Terrrr!” he says, noticing us at the door. “What you like?”
Thai doesn’t have an “er” sound but it does have an “errrr!” sound. You’d really have to hear it to do it justice. Oh, well. Guess you’ll have to wait for the audiobook.
Nikoy presumes that I want chicken pad Thai, and he presumes rightly. Thalia orders the same. He gives her a thumbs up with the hand still holding the spatula. I grab some tin cups, fill them with ice from the machine by the door, and bring them over to our table.
The whole restaurant is partially open air, plastic chairs and folding tables under a corrugated roof that amplifies the heat by about ten degrees, with potted plants hanging from the awning that are somehow thriving in a way that impresses me every time.
The open-facing side looks out over the same little creek I mentioned before.
You follow it and it takes you all the way out to the beach.
Sparrows flutter in and land on empty tables to pick at the rice diners left behind, and nobody chases them away.
Thalia looks around the room with the careful attention of someone trying to memorize a place. She’s going to describe this restaurant to someone back home, I can tell.
“This place is clean, right?” she asks.
“I’ve eaten here hundreds of times by now and I’ve never gotten sick,” I say.
I don’t mention the monitor lizard I once saw climb up the retaining wall and sneak into the kitchen. They only eat dead things anyway, which actually opens up its own disturbing line of inquiry.
“Okay,” she says. “I trust you.”
I pour us both some water from the pitcher on the table.
“This is clean, by the way,” I say. “Restaurants get filtered water delivered. You can’t drink it straight from the tap.”
“What other survival tips do you have for me?”
“Be careful trespassing,” I say. “It could get you into trouble.”
“Oh, I thought you’d forgiven me for that already,” she says.
“Nothing to forgive. Just a word to the wise.”
She sips her water through a straw. Nikoy’s son is doing homework at the end of the counter. He glances up at her, then back down at his book.
“Seems to have worked out pretty well so far.”
She looks right at me. I don’t look away.
“So you’re not here on vacation,” she says. “And you’re not a millionaire. What are you?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh,” she says.
I both love and hate those ohs—the ones that people always give when you say you’re a writer.
Yes, it strokes my ego, sure it does. But then they ask what you write, have they heard of you, would they have read anything you’ve written, and the answers I give rarely have the desired effect. Not for either of us.
“So you can work from anywhere,” she says. “All you need is a laptop.”
“Yes and no,” I say. “You can do the work from anywhere, but you still need to be close to people who buy what you write. There aren’t that many cities where you can network and find people who buy books or film scripts or whatever.”
Nikoy appears at the table with two plates and sets them down without ceremony. The pad Thai smells exactly right. They use two kinds of onions here, green onions and deep purple ones with diced roasted peanuts.
“But you’re here, right? You must have it figured out.”
“I guess so.”
She gives me this look like I’m holding out on her, like she can’t believe there isn’t more I’m not telling her.
“The truth is that coming here was a life detour for me,” I say.
“Where did you expect to be?” she asks.
“Well, I’m from Wisconsin,” I say. “The Great Lakes region, if you know where that is.”
She nods along, though I get the sense she’s placing it somewhere vaguely north and cold and leaving it at that.
“After college I moved to LA. I wanted to make movies. Then when that didn’t work out, I got into writing TV shows for a while because there were a lot more jobs doing that.”
“Whoa,” she says.
She wants to say more, but I’m keeping her from enjoying her food.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“Still listening,” she says as she digs into her noodles. She wraps the pad Thai around her fork like it’s spaghetti, which doesn’t work that well but is very cute.
“So I tried that for a few years, and it was great for a while.”
She chews, swallows.
“What kind of TV shows did you work on?”
“Well, do you watch The Pitt?”
“Mmmhhm,” she says, her mouth full of food.
“This show was like that except not as good,” I say.
“Every network had a medical drama and they kept making new episodes. When you first start out you don’t make much money.
But if you can survive the hours and keep your job long enough, eventually it starts to pay pretty well.
Not movie F-U money or anything. I wasn’t Ryan Murphy. ”
She squints a little, then laughs when I squint back at her. She puts a hand over her mouth so the noodles don’t accidentally spill out.
“He’s a famous producer, forget it,” I say. “The point is, I was doing pretty well for a while. Then I wasn’t.”
I pause to give her the chance to finish chewing. I grab the lime wedge from the edge of my plate and squeeze just a splash over my pad Thai, then squeeze the rest into my water.
“What happened?” she asks.