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decreaseBack down the row to Blue Door and there's Ohe awaiting, a-smile. Even her smile is wan, beat, far from the normal Siamese flashbulb grin. Dress her in a black turtleneck, chop the hair just a little more Euro and she could be a denizen of some Left Bank existentialist salon, a half-Tonkinese Sorbonne tristesse, circa 1965. Irresistible.
My gift was a coil of hematite beads with river-pearl at each end. She wore it around her neck, where a chain always hangs, along with a thin circle of black lace ribbon.
We went up the stairs hand in hand. The room was filled with sunlight. There were card players in the barnyard below, where the papa-sans raised gamecocks. Ohe stripped without shyness and, poised, all beige and warm in a cylinder of afternoon light, she was,in that point-instant, a vision of simple elegance.. She led me to the water room and washed my sex with dippersful of cold water from the huge jar with dragons painted on red clay.
I was breathing heavily from the long climb up the stairs, from the shock of the water and the cool handling of Ohe's expert fingers.
--Jai yen-yen, she whispered.
Heart cool-cool. She knelt beside on the narrow bunk and ran her palms slowly over my chest and thighs. Bending, she licked with heat the passion I had brought to her. The curve of her eyes, the sheen of her short black hair with the garnet-shining highlights. I flashed for a moment on Remi, the mestiza from Luzon who had the same cat-like languor.
The thought took me to a late night in Barrio Bee, coming back from a quietly ecstatic carouse through the love shacks of Subic City, when we, the men in the jeepney bus, all looked at the moon over the South China Sea and a current of gutful detumesced blessed satisfaction passed through each of us and all of us together, and a guy said in reverential tones, --It's a good night to be alive.
And no man among us cared to disagree.
ganesh
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