A short story to turn you on

1. He wrote the plot of his would-be turn-on short story for two characters, a man and a woman. The man is your run-of-the-mill draughtsman for hire. He has a small townhouse as his studio and a stall at Chatuchak which is a gallery where he exhibits his work and gets new commissions. The woman is the wife of the wealthy owner of the mansion that stands right across from his studio.

She wants him to draw her portrait in the nude, on the condition that he must draw her hair longer and slightly improve on her features, deepening the hollows and boosting the curves where it matters. He understands his models well and his work philosophy is that his portraits should look better than the originals.

She is one of his clients and no different from the others in this respect.

Location: his house and hers; the fence in between

Dialogue: circumlocutions and insinuations, but they must sound natural

Characters' features: expressive eyes for the man; the woman is no beauty but her inner "heat" must be apparent

Ending: open, for the reader to puzzle out; no love scene; only "sights" and "looks" and torrid moods

The story will begin with the two of them in their respective houses thinking of the other's behaviour. The houses are not far apart, close enough to see each other life-size or hear the other's music on the radio or cassette player when at full volume. (Maybe intersperse classical music touches as broadcast on the radio, such as "Symphony number ... by..." or "Concerto ... with three movements..." or words to that effect radio programmers use to introduce music performances.)

A few details, such as her spoken Thai being a bit off-key and peppered with Chinese intonations. Some days she puts on a tube skirt when she is at home. She has an innate love for beauty that shows in the way she dresses and in the way she has decorated her house. There may be nude scenes when she bathes and her skirt is wet.

He likes to collect old things of little value. She collects Chinese pottery, wall clocks as well as diamonds. He has always liked Thai folk songs and has lately tried to listen to classical music but he isn't at all moved by its aesthetic profundities. At first he forced himself to like it and put it on often. He didn't expect much from listening to music from old composers, but found it relaxed him and put him in a pleasant mood as he went on with his work. He has slowly come to realise that listening is art at a high level, higher than drawing pictures as he does. That's really how he feels.

He began listening to classical music after his wife left him. He has the company of music to prevent him from feeling blue.

Subject matter: expressing repressed deep sexual cravings

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2. "Concerto number ... in F major ... for trumpet, flute ... orchestra conducted by..."

Opposite a rust-eaten iron door opening on one side only, across the width of a small housing estate lane is a strong thick gate of golden alloy with a grid wrought as a Chinese dragon pushing through clouds to catch a round crystal ball. When both panels are open, the crystal ball splits into halves; when the gate is shut, the two halves are so well adjusted you cannot see the joins.

Further along the alley leading from the gate, the ground is covered with zigzag tiles over an area wide enough to park three cars easily, and a curved tiled roof running all the way to the gate turns the space into a garage. From there a path of flat stones cuts across a lush expanse of lawn.

Now if you go in through the rundown iron door that seems to be waiting for repairs, don't expect to find a garage before you come to the house. Even as you walk you feel a bit cramped. The space up front is hardly more than two metres deep, with an archway of ylang-ylang and many other species of vines growing all over the house. It's a small townhouse at the very end of its row, with a little stretch of land on the outer side entirely grown over by a jungle of sorts. The dwellers have let a variety of creepers grow all over the back as if it were a derelict house.

Whereas the verdant lawn of the "big house" is neat and bare to the eye. Everything here is different, the size of the houses, their surroundings, the status of their occupants.

Her first good look at him was on the day the alloy gate of her mansion was installed and used for the first time. She merely smiled at him as you would at a neighbour of a different social status. Their exchange of glances was friendly.

She had been married for many years but didn't look as though she would have children. At thirty-two she still looked in her prime. She wasn't really pretty. A glance was enough to know that she was of Chinese descent: slit eyes, a skin the white of a banana bole, and shoulder-length bangs making her look younger than she was. What looked unusual was a prominent nose that didn't seem to match her other features, but then it made the rest of her face look good.

The rumour in the housing estate was that her nose must have gone through plastic surgery for sure and it wasn't the work of a Thai doctor either. Housewives were heard saying it wasn't just the nose, but also other parts of her body that you couldn't see.

In any case, for a draughtsman like him, that feature in her face looked most ordinary. Even if she wasn't pretty, deep inside her eyes there was something most challenging and tantalising. That was his conclusion after he had a second good look at her.

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3. "You have a way with plants."

"..."

Etc.

She had given up her job to become a housewife when a customer of the bank where she worked made her a very fair proposal in terms of security, whether money, house, car or whatever else. Even if she kept handling the bank's public relations until retirement, there was no way she'd get as much money or property as he offered her. But for all that what he didn't give her entirely was his time: most men in their late forties who achieve success in everything related to work have gone through marriage before and are at an age where they want a "home away from home" as a token of their success. In any case he arranged for a wedding ceremony whose luxury gave her much face.

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4. That was how he began the aforementioned short story...

He hadn't written short stories for years. Before he began on this one, or even now... When he tried to build up an outline to feed on, add here, subtract there, and shape it up as a story, it sure didn't go smoothly, even though in the last three or four years he had known plenty of unusual life stories.

As soon as it started, it branched out. What he didn't want to expand just would. What was meant to grow just shrivelled. Or was it that his hand and brain couldn't work together any longer? He wrote and then stopped, took the nearest book at hand and read, and then tried again. His thoughts ran any other way...

He thought of his early days as a writer. He'd write persistently and send his stories everywhere, to any magazine of whatever kind. Altogether he'd written quite a lot, not just short stories but also poems, features and so on.

And then his name disappeared from the printed page.

The monsoon of life rained hard blows on him. His dreams and imagination dried up. He sank into dire realities. The field of his dreams grew wild with the weeds of ruin smothering his dreams almost to the point they'd never thrive again.

Is there a worse calamity for a writer than writer's block? Had he lost his ability? Had God taken away his gift? Of course not. It was waiting for good work to mature, he reassured himself. It was impossible that he couldn't write given that he had done it before. It was like riding a bicycle: even if you didn't ride every day, whenever you took it up again of course you could ride again.

He chain-smoked so much the ashtray on his desk was full to the brim and ashes fell out of it.

Some time ago, he had made a promise to a young newsman friend of his he used to work with and who was now the editor-in-chief of a recently launched magazine. His friend wanted him to write an "erotic" short story because he knew that before he was good at it and he never tired of this kind of story.

"Go ahead and write one. Anything from you I don't need to assess. It'll pass right away. Just write it and it's printed. Our fee isn't bad, you know."

He promised he would do what his friend wanted but didn't commit himself to a deadline. Now for a month he'd been unable to write, even though he had a plot waiting.

How come, he asked himself.

Yet it was a story he badly wanted to write. An inner urge compelled him to express actual, real feelings. It all broke out a couple of years ago at a time when he had yet to start writing again.

He tried to write a rough outline. He felt like changing her husband's profession from film director to what? How many children should she have, when in reality she had two? Should he describe her exactly as she was or not? Should he change her muddled Thai to the clear melodious voice of a barbet? Come on... Her skin white as a banana bole, that he wasn't going to change. Nor her slender neck. But her hair worn shoulder-length, should he make it flow down to the middle of her back?

Should he change the flower pattern of the wrought-iron bars of the window to a nightingale on a peach branch? The light blue curtains, he'd better make them pink. The blurred picture of her moving at night, should he enlarge on it and make it sharper?

And how about her husband's character? Should he describe it as it was or as different as possible? The shape of the house, the trees in the garden, the inside of the rooms he'd had the opportunity to enter - how about all that? Change them to what? Or should he leave them as they were? The makes of the cars in her house, their number, their colours, should he change that? The lamps? The gate pillars? And so on.

And what of the dialogue? If he wrote what they really told each other and she happened to read it, what would happen?

And then, what of the male character? Should he model it on himself or change it entirely?

And the love scenes? Which ones should he choose? The one when he went to do some gardening for her and she came out wearing a tube skirt to water the plants, the nozzle got loose and water splashed all over her. Even though her drenched skirt and white blouse stuck to her body, she still didn't go and change. While he was digging a hole for a new plant, she came and stood by in the fierce sunshine.

Or maybe he should write about when she invited him in to have a look at the blue and white China and the old clocks decorating the walls. Her blouse had a plunging neckline and she kept leaning over and it wasn't her pottery collection that mesmerised him. When she invited him to sit down on the sofa in the living room, her sitting posture had him breathe with difficulty. He had to raise his glass of water and drink without thirst.

Or that other time... the day water and electricity were cut off in his house. He had to run a hose from a neighbour's to shower out of a basin in front of his house, just when she was backing up her car into her own house. The headlights caught his almost naked body at close range. He had to sit down, but she still didn't want to enter her house and instead stood there engaging him in small talk. Just seeing the way she ogled him he couldn't control himself down there.

Or that other time... One night as he was about to turn in, a window in her house lighted up. She was walking in the nude by the window as if looking for something.

Or the time when they talked over the phone one night. How did she know his number? He had never given it to her. She called him after they had not seen each other for quite a while. It was a phone conversation that left him feeling unable to sleep after she told him she looked at him through her husband's field glasses. She told him that quite a few times she'd seen him walking out of the bathroom in the buff...

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5. How should it end as a short story? Actually he desperately wanted to write about those things, as they responded to some deep moods inside him. But he stalled, half-afraid, half-daring. Well, go ahead and write. Her husband was no reader of short stories anyway.

It was damn dangerous if he didn't change the settings. He wasn't afraid of any danger coming from writing short stories but he was afraid his secret would no longer be secret. On the other hand, if he totally changed settings and characters, he felt he'd lose the incitement to write this particular short story.

He sat in front of his writing table. Morning, noon and night, he tried to flesh out the story to see how it would come out. Before, he never adopted such a method. Before, when he started to work, everything took care of itself.

He began, changed the narration a little and then just put it aside...

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6. He went back to his writing table once again at nightfall. The pages on which he had written the plot and the beginning of the story were still as he had left them. He picked them up and went through them, but still didn't feel satisfied with what he'd written. He pondered as he gazed out at a window of the mansion. Just then the light inside came on, brightening the curtain. A dark shadow appeared behind it, a blurred silhouette. He stared at it without blinking but the more he did the blurrier it became. The curtain was gathered up in the middle and he saw her naked body for a split second. A moment later, the light went off.

His eyes never left the spot. His thoughts were no longer on the pages.

The telephone rang. He rose from his chair awkwardly. The story he'd begun and left unfinished he still couldn't write and still couldn't figure out how it should end as a short story.

'Rueang San Chuan Sawart', first published in 'Chor Karrakeit 21', 1995.