The Strange World of Richard S.

Even after our third meeting at Gulliver's on the edge of the Arab quarter and not far from where I was staying in Bangkok, I could not decide what word or words best describe Richard S. Masochist, obsessive, curious, intelligent, odd, charming, sadomasochist. He is, perhaps, all of these.

What first comes to mind when I think of Richard are the meticulous notebooks, which he shared with me at our third meeting, thinking that by doing so he would remove any lingering doubts I might have about his claims, the validity of the details he was providing me, and my evident disbelief that someone would do what he was doing, and with such utter, obsessive dedication. The Inquiry-and this is probably what it should be called--involved sixty-three Bangkok bargirls over a period of three years and one month. This number barely hints at how much work Richard put into his effort, for in order to get involved with this number of them in the way he did, and with such care to what he was looking for, he spent time-intimate time-with 421 of them from Patpong, Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy, and even a few from Soi Zero, Soi 22 and the Bier Garten on Soi 7. This was an average of around 140 prostitutes a year, a statistic that hides the fact in 2004 Richard went with 168 of them in order to get the twenty-nine that year to which he gave special attention.

Yes, these astonishing notebooks, the likes of which I have never before seen, even among the best of empirical scientists I have known over the years since I formally began my own professional life as a scientist. For each of the sixty-three girls who became one of Richard's subjects of special interest, he had a name; an age; information on where she was from and the size of her family and the children she had-if any; how much he had paid her each time they were together; his pulse rate and blood pressure at various times in the relationship; and then a narrative in longhand of the kind of sex they had and exactly how he felt about his performance and the effect it was having on the girl and on himself. This narrative of captivating detail even included the kinds of lies he told to keep her engaged and on the hook so he could manipulate her, allow himself to observe how she behaved when supposedly committed to him and yet with another customer. This was crucial, for there he was when she was with someone else and ostensibly committed to him--somewhere in the background darkness of a bar or go-go joint, taking notes on what he was seeing and what he was feeling, probing every aspect of his volatile state of mind.

Richard's aim was clear, and always tightly focused. It was, simply, that of discovering the very nature of that most human of emotions--jealousy. And the subject, always the subject, was principally Richard himself. He wanted not just to understand this emotion that he saw as both necessary and highly destructive in just about all relationships, but exactly how it rivaled that of other emotions that were present-lust and love in particular, the latter, of course, the more elusive of the two concepts.

It is perhaps best to begin by sketching what I learned of Richard's background and how he came to his most unusual form of self-analysis, which will then allow me to give you the reader some sense of his present state of mind, and where this leaves him as I write these words on a simmering day beside the pool at the Matahari Bungalows in Kuta, Bali, where I am taking a break from a long-term study I am doing.

***

Richard had been a very successful student in anthropology at Melbourne University, and he had plans to pursue an academic career of teaching and research. But in his final year at university, his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she died three months later. His father, to whom he was not as close, had died the previous year of a massive heart attack while drinking a double martini in a hot tub with his mistress. Richard was the only child, and when his mother passed away he inherited the entire estate. Quite successful in land development and speculation, his father had amassed a sizeable fortune, including a home in Toorak-one of Melbourne's most exclusive areas, another home on Spain's Gold Coast, a private jet, and an enviable portfolio of international stocks and bonds. There was, then, upon the death of Richard's mother, no need for him to ever have to work.

At graduation, Richard decided to travel throughout the South Pacific. He spent time in the Solomon Islands, the highlands of New Guinea, Papua, the Lesser Sunda Islands, the more remote regions of Sumatra, and he explored the better part of South Island, New Zealand on foot and bicycle. He often found himself among backpackers, but he was not really one of them. In fact, he often avoided them. He was unable for long to tolerate their lack of curiosity about local cultures, their pettiness, their insularity, the hours they would spend looking for the cheapest meal and accommodation for the night. Unlike so many of them, Richard did not burden himself with a large and cumbersome backpack; rather, he moved about with one fairly small bag that contained little more than clothes, some basic toiletries, and two leather notebooks. He had no interest in photography, so there was no camera to add to his light load. Photography, he claimed, was too impersonal, and, for his tastes, as he put it, "too undiscriminating."

At the age of twenty-six, and feeling exhausted after more than four years on the road, and increasingly uncertain what to make of these experiences, he returned to Melbourne. There, with the help of people his father had known, Richard took a good job in investment banking, with a high-profile firm on Collins Street. He quickly discovered that he liked this life much better than he had imagined he would. By his third year with the firm of Coxton and Monroe-he was now twenty-nine-he was working sixty and seventy, sometimes eighty-hour weeks. His social world, not surprisingly, was small. He did, however, go to the occasional party put on by someone from the large office in which he worked. It was at one of these, a two-day affair at a resort in the Snowy Mountains, that his met his future wife, Naomi. She was five years younger than Richard. She was, he said, "beautiful and yet plain in ways that matter." By "plain" he meant unpretentious, and with tastes that were refined. She loved the Dutch Masters and the Impressionists. Coming from a wealthy family, Naomi had no compunction about flying to New York or Paris or London, or any other place for that matter to attend a major art exhibit.

Richard and Naomi did not spend large blocks of time together. He was working, or Naomi was with friends and family in Sydney (she had a fine arts degree from the University of Sydney), or going to or coming from an art exhibit in Perth or Adelaide or some distant destination that would keep her away for four or five days at a time. But, despite their separations, this lifestyle seemed to work well for both of them. They told each other that not being with the other person on a continual basis allowed for a greater and deeper expression of love and understanding when they were together. Their sex life, Richard thought, was good, but not spectacular. Naomi could not let herself go; there was always the need for "preparation" before sex. Naomi demanded predictability in what she could expect in bed from Richard. "No surprises," was her motto. If Richard wanted to try something different with her, she wanted to know why, or where he got the idea, or why he wasn't satisfied with what they had been doing all along.

Two months and four days after their third wedding anniversary, Richard was scheduled to fly to Perth to spend three or four days helping train some new people in one of the firm's branch offices. Four hours before his evening flight, and working in his office until it was time to leave for the airport, he got a call from the Perth office saying that two of the three new people he was to be training had just been in a head-on collision. One of them died on the way to the hospital. The trip was cancelled. But rather than call Naomi and tell her that he would be home in a hour or so and they could go to one of their favorite Middle Eastern restaurants, he decided to surprise her with a half dozen orange roses that he could pick up from a flower shop near his office. He made late dinner reservations, bought a dozen red roses instead of the orange ones, and headed home. To his surprise, Naomi was not there as he had expected. He went into the kitchen to put the roses in water and a vase before calling her on her cell phone. But as he looked for an appropriate vase in cabinets in the adjoining dining area-a foreign land of glass and silverware and oddments that Naomi had collected on her many trips--he came upon a black address and appointment book. It caught his attention because it seemed to have been purposely hidden behind some seventeenth-century glassware that Naomi had purchased on a recent trip to Brussels. Anxiously, Richard opened the black book and realized that it contained the names of some of his associates as well as those of several other men he did not know. He also came upon the names of hotels and restaurants that the two of them had never visited, and, in a couple of cases, on dates when he was out of town or working late. It did not take Richard long to conclude that his wife was having affairs. His first reaction was one of surprise, then hurt and anger. Presently, he began to feel as if he were having an anxiety attack of the sort that he had only experienced three or four times in his travels, times when he was certain that he was in danger of being mugged and robbed.

He finally settled himself down with a strong drink and got a hold on his emotions. He found himself asking questions, wondering how his emotional state would change were he to see for himself Naomi with another man, and without her knowing of his presence. How would he react to seeing her smile lovingly toward someone else? Or reach for his hand and caress it? Or kiss him on the lips in public as she had done so often with him in the first year or so of their marriage? Why he wanted to witness his wife doing these kinds of things, why he wanted to punish himself this way-and he did see that this is exactly what he would be doing-he did not know. Was it to get first-hand evidence that he could then use to confront Naomi with and use in a divorce settlement? He didn't think this was the reason. Then what was it? Was it curiosity about his own state of mind? There was some history for this, as when in his travels he would go to great length to analyze why he continued to travel in remote and poor areas of a country or region where he would often get bouts of diarrhea that would last for weeks. The reasons he did travel to more remote locations, he concluded, was that he wanted to see how he would emotionally respond-as when finding himself among lepers or begging street children who were missing an arm or a leg. Did he feel empathy? Did he feel disgust? Or was it a feeling of indifference upon seeing people who were in one way or another greatly disadvantaged?

The night of his discovery of Naomi's infidelities, Richard got a hotel room on the west side of the city, and in the morning, just as he had promised, he called Naomi and said that he was in Perth and at the office. He said that there was a change of plans and that he would have to stay in Perth for as long as seven or eight days and perhaps up to two weeks rather than the four days as he'd originally told her. Naomi expressed what he took to be genuine surprise, and she came forth with seemingly heartfelt expressions about how she would miss him. She told him, however, that he should do what he must, but that he shouldn't work too hard. She said she looked forward to being with him on his return to Melbourne, and that she loved him as she always had. Richard found himself going back over the phone conversation he had with Naomi, and the more he thought about it the more he thought that there was a profound hollowness in her words. But was this merely a byproduct of what he now knew about her? Or was it that her heart now belonged to someone else? He didn't know the answer to these questions, and he turned away from them and began entertaining a strong desire to see Naomi in the presence of another man when she did not know he was about or watching her. He wondered how he would react in such a situation. What might he do? Would he be capable of doing anything at all? Yes, he thought. With planning and cunning he could catch glimpses of Naomi in restaurants and other public places with other men.

And this is what he did on three separate evenings when he was supposed to be in Perth and was, in fact, standing near a restroom or on the edge of a paneled wooden pillar; or, on the third and final time before his official date to return home, sitting at a table not far from where Naomi was dining with an associate who had an office just down the hall from him. As the dinner came to an end and Naomi and the business associate finished their second bottle of wine, having held hands across the table and kissed several times, Richard made himself visible by moving to a closer table and in the direct line of Naomi's field of vision. Almost immediately after sitting down, she saw him. As soon as she did, he raised a half empty wine glass in a toast, one with his lips together and smiling, and then gestured with a small but knowing nod. Naomi reacted with notable surprise, and what appeared to be fright in her eyes. And then, in attempting to bring a hand to her forehead in reaction to what she was seeing, she hit her wine glass and knocked it to the floor. Before Naomi and her date could catch a waiter's attention to clean up the mess, Richard was at the cashier's desk and paying his bill.

Following each of these spying endeavors on Naomi, Richard returned to his hotel room and took careful notes on how he reacted to what he had witnessed. He noted exactly how he felt on first seeing Naomi with someone he didn't know, or knew quite well as a business associate. He noted how he felt when he saw his wife holding another man's hand, or kissing him, or moving her body into him as they waited at the curb for a taxi. He had not yet gotten to that point of measuring changes in his pulse and heart rate under each of these different conditions; this would not happen until he got into his dedicated study of Thai hookers.

Richard made no mention of this telling restaurant encounter to Naomi when he returned home on the day he had told her he would in an alleged cell phone call from Perth. He greeted her as he always had, proposed they go out to dinner that evening-and they did so; and at dinner he talked of what he had supposedly done in Perth. He inquired about what Naomi had done in his absence, but only in the most perfunctory and non-threatening way. Naomi was obviously tense, and at several points he thought that she was on the verge of tears. Somehow she managed to hold herself together. That night, and with great purpose, Richard made love to Naomi, an effort by design on his part neither better nor worse than she was accustomed to. He wanted her to believe that either she had been mistaken in seeing him in the restaurant, perhaps because she had had too much wine, or that he had seen her and it meant absolutely nothing at all to him.

All went well, and without words between them, for exactly five days. But during this period of time in which the two of them behaved as if nothing at all had happened, Richard was hard at work on his exit plan.

On the sixth day of his official return from Perth, Naomi flew to Sydney to spend the weekend with her parents. It was to be their thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, and Richard was to have gone with Naomi. But he begged off, saying that he simply had too much work at the office. Naomi left on a Friday night and returned at midday on Monday, while Richard was supposedly at work.

When Naomi got home she took her travel bag into the bedroom--Richard would later learn from a friend, and then she went into the kitchen. There on the long rectangular cutting board in the center of the sprawling room where, oddly enough, they had some of their most amorous moments, were a dozen red roses in one of Naomi's favorite vases. And propped against the vase was her secret black address and appointment book. Lying in front of the book was a plain card that showed the profile of a Papuan male with a huge bone through his nose and wearing a penis gourd and an elaborate headdress made of bird of paradise feathers. On the inside of the card, Richard had written a note that read:

"When a wife is unfaithful, the husband ties the wife's lover to a tree and slices off his scrotum and penis. They then tie the cheating wife to a nearby tree so that she can see her lover bereft of his manhood. The cuckolded husband, as soon as his wife is tied up, approaches his wife and asks which of her breasts she favors. He asks her until she expresses a preference. He then takes a sharp knife and removes the favored breast. The husband then goes to a fire that had previously been built midway between the cheating wife and her lover. He puts the penis and scrotum on one stick and the breast on another one and cooks them until well done. At this point, he takes the penis and scrotum to his wife and forces her to eat them. He then turns to her lover and forces him to eat the cooked breast. The cuckolded husband now sits on the ground in front of a nearby tree, a position from which he has a good view of his wife and her lover. He chants a love song until his wife and her lover have bled to death."

Richard did not sign the card. On the facing page he had written a telephone number, and nothing more.

Late that afternoon, Richard would learn from a friend, Naomi tried to call him on his cell phone. But it was turned off, and in fact it was, at that very moment, lying in a garbage tip in the airport. She called his secretary, only to be told that Richard no longer worked for Coxton and Monroe. His last day had been Friday. His office had been cleared out, and he had instructed his secretary and those he had worked with that he had no forwarding address or phone number at which he could be contacted at any point in the future. His whereabouts would not be known to anyone, save a trusted friend and an attorney who would act as an intermediary in that rare instance where there might be reason for him to be reached. No matter Naomi's needs or condition-health or otherwise-she would not be able to find or reach him.

Naomi would learn the day she found the roses and the scary note about revenge in an unnamed South Pacific society that all of Richard's possessions were gone from the house. The following day she received a hand-delivered special delivery envelope informing her that the house was now solely in her name, that she had title to half of their assets, and she would, within the next couple of weeks, receive a signed divorce agreement. Once again, she was told that Richard did not have an address and that his whereabouts were not known. A call later that day from a person purporting to talk on behalf of Richard told Naomi that it would be in her best interest to consider him dead.

Richard returned to the road that he had known after leaving the university and following the death of his mother. The few possessions that he did not sell or give to charities he put in storage in a locker under a pseudonym. The possessions amounted to little more than could be put inside two crates containing medium-sized refrigerators.

He had not visited Thailand prior to ending forever his relationship with Naomi, and he first heard about Patpong and the other prostitution venues in Bangkok one night over a beer on Khao San Road, famous for its backpackers, cheap street food, tourist trinkets and hippie clothes. His interest in the prostitution venues was peaked less for the sex that was paid for and all the attractive and available young girls than for the spectacle, this idea--this amazing fact--that so many men from the West would come to Thailand and pay for, and get emotionally involved with, go-go dancers and bargirls that are ten, twenty and thirty years their junior. He thought he would go to Patpong or Soi Cowboy (it proved to be the latter) and make a few mental notes, and then travel south toward Malaysia. Since leaving Naomi he had virtually no interest in women or sex; he didn't feel hostility toward women, he just didn't find them of interest sexually or emotionally after being betrayed.

But Richard was more vulnerable than he imagined, and on the second night he went to Soi Cowboy he met a go-go dancer in Suzie Wong by the name of Lek. She was twenty-two, had no children, and was taller than most of the girls. She fell into Richard 's arms as soon as she sat down beside him. It was, he would later conclude, Lek's convincing show of affection that broke his will and got him to pay her bar fine and take her to a hotel for the night.

Richard did not have sex with Lek that first night, and it was not because she was unwilling or he could not get an erection. He simply did not want to break from the embrace that began in the bar; nor did he really want to do what he knew all other men were quick to do in this circumstance. In the morning, he paid Lek 2,000 baht and said goodbye. She asked if she would see him again. He said he wasn't sure, that he had some business to take care of and it might take him out of the city that very day. He did not in fact know at this point whether he would return to see her again.

He thought about Lek all day, most of it spent lying in bed in his hotel room. He wanted to have sex with her but even more than this he wanted that feeling of warmth he had felt during the night, an arm across his chest, a leg between his legs, her head on his shoulder. This is not how Naomi had ever behaved; he had not known what he had missed, or really wanted in a woman. Or so he thought this day after spending a night with Lek, this gorgeous and pliable young thing from Chiang Rai with lighter skin than most of those he saw in the few bars he had thus far frequented.

That night he returned to the Suzie Wong. Lek greeted him with a large smile and open arms as he came through the door. His will was broken, his self doubts vanquished. He immediately paid her bar fine and they left Suzie Wong. He took her out to dinner, they returned to the hotel, they had sex twice before midnight, and then, just as she had done the previous night, she wrapped herself around him and they slept that way until morning. On leaving, he gave her 3,000 baht, she wai-ed him, kissed him on the lips and said she wanted to see him again. He said he would come for her that very night.

And he did. But when he arrived, a little more than forty minutes after the bar opened, he came through the door and saw Lek in the second row of raised seats sitting with an overweight bald customer. Lek had an arm around the man's shoulder, and just as Richard took a seat near the door, his eyes on Lek, she kissed the customer on the lips. Richard felt his pulse quicken. He could feel his heart beating unusually fast. He felt jealous, and possessive. Yes, she was a prostitute, but she had been his for two days, and he had believed, even knowing better, that her nightly shows of affection were genuine, and that she would be waiting for him since he had told her that he would be coming for her. But here she was with another man, looking no different than she must have looked to others when she was with him. He felt betrayed, and not unlike how he felt in that restaurant watching Naomi that night enjoying the presence of another man.

Mere minutes after he saw Lek kiss the customer, Lek turned and saw Richard. She smiled and nodded, and with one arm still on the other man's shoulder she waved. She called the mamasan to her table and whispered something in her ear. The mamasan then approached Richard and said that Lek would be free in ten minutes. Richard was ambivalent about what he should do. Should he wait for her, or should he leave? He paid the bill for the beer from which he'd taken a single sip and left.

He slowly walked down Soi Cowboy and around an elephant that was being fed by a tourist. He stopped at a stand where insects were sold. He helped himself to two fried grasshoppers and gave the vendor a 20 baht note. He thought he might go to the end of the street and get a taxi and return to his hotel and go to bed. At My Place he stopped, looked down at his feet and then back toward Suzie Wong, which was now out of sight. He shook his head and began chuckling to himself, then laughing as he went into My Place. He ordered a drink and watched the dancers for several minutes, made some mental notes, and then called over the mamasan and pointed to two of them. He told her that he wanted both of them to join him.

One sat on either side of him, and he bought them both drinks. He teased them that he was going to take them back to his hotel. They seemed receptive, and then eager when he said that one could wait in the bathroom while he was having sex with the other one. He bought them a second round of drinks, and another beer for himself. He continued to tease them about what they might do in the room, about the large room with two double beds that he had-a lie, and then about a friend he had to meet in the next ten minutes before he could bar fine them-another lie. He kissed them both on the cheek, handed each of them a 1,000 baht note, paid the bill, and left.

Richard headed straight for Suzie Wong. Lek was waiting for him near the door. She warmly embraced him and kissed him, and she said she was sorry, that she only wanted to have a drink with the man while she waited for him to show up. Richard barfined Lek that night, and the following night, and on both nights he had sex with her. She cuddled with him as she had from the beginning. For the first of these nights, their third and fourth together, he paid her 4,000 baht, and then on the second of these nights 5,000 baht, more than double what she would normally get. He had her hooked. She told him she no longer wanted to work in the bar, that she only wanted to be with him. Lek said she loved him; she said it several times. In the morning, after the second of this pair of nights together after he'd seen her with another customer, he kissed her on each cheek at the door and said, You were great and I'll never forget you. He never again seriously entertained the thought of seeing or barfining Lek.

And that was the beginning of Richard's long-term study, and the very first set of detailed notes that he kept on a Thai hooker that he fell for, sufficiently to feel the pain, the anxiety, the tug and the depressing low of that gripping emotion called jealousy.

The study continues, not because Richard needs yet more data on how he feels about conditions largely of his own creation, but because it has become a small way of life, an obsession, a need. And, as I noted at the very beginning of this narrative, a kind of masochism or sadomasochism, the choice of term, I guess, depending on whether or not one feels any sympathy for girls whose very business, and success, depends on their ability to feign love and commitment, and to deceive as convincingly as Richard is now able to do so in his quest for yet one more addictive and self-revealing thrill.

Naomi called the telephone number I left on the card describing a primitive ritual of revenge that was nothing more than pure invention on my part. The number belonged to a trusted friend to whom I had given instructions. The instructions were these. Should Naomi call, she is to be told that if she is able to find the tribe that practices the revenge ritual I described, and she can return with its name and location and verification that the ritual exists, she is to be given two million Australian dollars.

Nine days ago I received an e-mail from my good friend, Peter. He wrote: "I heard today that Naomi died from an acute form of malaria that she got two months ago in the Gauttier Mountains of Papua."

Korski

© Korski. All rights reserved by the author.

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