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Noot had studied History at the University of Iowa, where she was the only Thai woman on a campus of 30,000 students. When she returned to Bangkok she discovered that her master's degree qualified her to be: a) a teacher, b) a secretary, or c) the manager of a chic boutique.

Noot's personal relationships were similarly limited; the only men she could have introduced to her parents were witty but worthless inheritance jockeys, who would spend an entire evening talking about their cars or their condos or even their mistresses, and who played golf daily, but not very well. After 10 years she found herself divorced with two kids whose last names were na Ayudhaya and a job at an embassy translating the Thai press into English. Her social life was limited to a circle of gay Thai men who made presentable escorts and the occasional farang press secretary counting the days of a posting to Bangkok while he waited for something to open up in The Hague.

Then she met Jeff. The first time she saw him he was standing in front of a mural at the Goethe Institut. His thin lips were pursed over a square jaw, his warm green eyes scanned the canvas from either side of a patrician nose, and his brow was furrowed beneath a blond brush-cut just starting to gray at the temples. Noot fell for him like a brick.

She struck up a conversation and found to her delight that Jeff spoke Thai in a clear, cultured Bangkok accent. He was just as pleased with Noot's Midwestern American slant on English; Jeff was from Chicago. He was a couple of years older and worked as the senior vice-president of a firm that made office furniture; he had been here for four years and loved Bangkok. They sat talking on a comfortable settee in the hallway until the ushers came to lock the doors and turn out the lights. Before they parted company Jeff invited Noot to join him at a wine tasting the following Saturday.

Then she went home and stared into the mirror and counted the lines on her face. When she was a student, she was fresh and thin and every body part from her elbows to her eyebrows could have been described as "perky". And she was unique; the only petite, dark-skinned, dark-haired and dark-eyed female in a town full of blue-eyed and yellow-haired women. Since then her body had been assaulted by two children and a decade of gravity, and whereas in Iowa she was the only peppercorn in the salt shaker, in Bangkok she felt like an over-ripe fruit in a basked of five million identical durian.

On the evening of the wine-tasting Noot changed her dress three times and yelled at the maid until the poor woman was in tears. She kept checking her face in the rearview mirror as she drove down to the river, then once she got there the elevator had fluorescent lights and mirrors on three walls and she almost turned right around and went back home. But the thought of driving home all dressed up pushed her down the hall and into the meeting room, where Jeff seemed pleased enough to see her.

They found two seats and made small talk as they leafed through the programme. Jeff commented that Noot looked pre-occupied, and she made up a story about an upset stomach. Jeff said, "You know what Jesus said in the bible, 'take a little wine for your stomach's sake.'" Noot knew that it was actually St Paul who'd said that, in his first epistle to Timothy.

She started talking about the Dionysian mysteries. Noot told Jeff how before Dionysus moved to Rome and gained all that weight, he had been worshipped in Greece with orgies of wine drinking. He was the god of fertility and forces of nature, taking the grape vine as his symbol because of that plant's remarkable ability to grow, produce fruit and seemingly die only to be reborn the following spring, year after year.

Noot continued to lecture as they sniffed and sipped and slurped their way through four glasses of Chardonnay and four glasses of Sauvignon Blanc.

She was completely drunk and yet nervous as hell, and so by the time they got to the star of the show, an Inglenook 1946 Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley, she had led Jeff on a complete tour of grape culture in Western Civilization.

When the wine tasting ended Noot was caught in mid-sentence. Jeff went to say goodbye to friends and she stood at a window and watched the big old Chao Phrya River slide by outside. He walked her down to the car park and she prepared herself for the brush-off. Noot promised herself that she wouldn't cry in the car on the way home, that she would wait unlit she got safely into her bed before she let go. They reached her car and Noot was making her thank-you's on auto-pilot while she hunted in her bag for her keys when Jeff took her by the shoulders and kissed her once, quickly. He crushed her to his chest and said things that would seem silly printed on the pages of a book but which sent sparks flying inside her when breathed into her ear in a dark parking lot.

The upshot was, they would be seeing each other again. Noot drove home and did manage to make it into bed before she cried, but they were very different tears than she had expected. And when she finally slept she dreamed of Jeff, striding bare-chested across the Elysian fields, a bunch of grapes in each hand and vine leaves in his hair.

 

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

The author can be contacted at: shavethemonkeys@gmail.com