"The girls can't make it tonight."
I was stretched out on a chaise lounge at the edge of the swimming pool, enjoying the sun after a swim. I sat up at that news, putting a hand to my chest to ensure that my loose bikini top didn't fall down. Five men were seated or standing around me. They were dressed in street clothes. All of them were farangs, as the Thai call people from Western countries.
"There are riots in the streets and the government has imposed a twenty-four hour curfew. Nobody is allowed outside their homes." The speaker was Tim, the owner of the large, rambling house in the Bangkok suburbs. Tim was a lawyer who represented American firms in business in Thailand.
"Does that mean we're stuck here for the weekend?" The speaker was a new arrival in Bangkok. His name was Bill and he was tall, handsome, about thirty years old, and had a sweet innocent smile. I had already identified him as a possible sex partner for the weekend.
"I'm afraid so," answered Tim.
One of the men, whose name I had forgotten, so I'll call him "Nameless," moaned in disappointment. "I was looking forward to this. Your parties are famous," he said to Tim. So, they were. On Friday nights Tim hosted a party at his house with a few farang men, an occasional curious upper-class Thai women or round-eye (farang woman), and half a dozen Thai bar girls -- the euphemistic name for the innumerable young women around Bangkok who made a living with their bodies. A lot of sex ensued along with good food and liquor. The rule, however, was no drugs. Tim couldn't take the risk of allowing illegal drugs (and all were illegal) in his house. That was fine with me. I like alcohol and sex.
I was a house guest of Tim whenever I was in Bangkok. I enjoyed the parties -- and usually ended up with one of the men in my bed. I also liked talking to the girls. We spoke together in a mixture of Thai and English. My Thai was rudimentary as was their English.
"Well," said Jim, another of the men. "We have one woman here."
The men all turned to look at me. I clutched my bikini top tighter to my breasts. "Oh, no," I said quickly. "Get that off your mind right now!"
"Just kidding," said Jim. "But...." He broke out in laughter and the others joined in. I did too. It was a loose and relaxed crowd and I felt safe, despite the sexual bantering. Tim would protect me if anybody got out of hand. He might even fuck me. I wish he would.
"Come on Maggie," said Doug, another of the men, with a sly smile. "You can be more positive than that."
I threw him a kiss and then returned my hand quickly to my chest to hold my top on. "Maybe I'll be positive with one of you," I said with a laugh. "But five, forget it!"
"How do we decide who will be the lucky man?"
"I decide, not you," I answered definitively. "If there is one. Now, go away, I want to sun bathe in peace."
"Can I put some lotion on that boob?" asked Doug.
I looked down. One of my breasts was exposed. "Oops," I said as I pulled the bikini top over it.
The men wandered away from me and went into the house, jabbering about how the party was ruined without the bar girls. I reclined again on the chaise lounge. It was getting dark. In the tropics, there's not much twilight. It gets dark in a hurry. I got up and walked toward the house. "I'll put on my party dress and see how the evening goes," I thought to myself. I was also a little sad that the Thai girls wouldn't be there. I liked talking to them. In Thailand, poor farmers with daughters sent them to Bangkok to earn money for the family. The ugly ones became maids or construction workers; the pretty ones became bar girls.
***
I should explain who I am. In 1985, I accepted a one-year contract from a charitable organization to work in a refugee camp in Thailand. I was thirty-nine years old; married, legally speaking; and I had two children, ages eighteen and nineteen. They were both away in universities which is why I could stay away from home for a year. I planned for my kids to visit me on their summer vacation.
The refugee camp where I worked was in a remote area near the border with Burma. We didn't have creature comforts there. I lived in a hut with no electricity. Water was from a standpipe outside my hut. The bathroom was an outhouse.
The routine for the few "expats" (foreigners) who worked in the refugee camp was three weeks of work and then a one week break. Most of us took a bus to Bangkok for our week off. On my first break I went with a girl friend to Pattaya, a beach resort. There, I met Tim and two of his friends and, to make a long story short, we had a party on the beach and I fucked all three men. So did my girl friend. The people who work in refugee camps tend to be either uptight religious or loose and flexible. I had been uptight and religious six years earlier; I was loose and flexible now.
Tim and I connected immediately. He was 35, divorced, and had lived in Bangkok for five years. He was a very good person, conscientious, even-tempered, and generous. I would have married him had I been available, but he wouldn't have married me. He had a characteristic -- or fatal flaw, depending upon how you saw it: he was a sex addict, maybe not in the psychological sense of that word, but in reality. Tim lived in Bangkok because of the ready availability of bar girls who were pleasant, willing, pretty, and cheap. He fucked several of them every week and made no secret of it.
Tim's affliction -- if it was an affliction -- was not unusual among farang men who chose to live in Bangkok. Sex was a major attraction in the country and I doubt that I ever met a man there who had not had dalliances with bar girls. Farang women in Thailand had to accept that their husbands and boy friends were going to fuck around. It wasn't a big deal; bar girls were not usually a threat to a marriage or relationship. (This was 1985, before AIDS made sex a risky pleasure.)
Tim offered to let me stay at his place during my week-long vacation every month. I accepted. He had a large, rambling house with a lovely tropical garden and a swimming pool. I had a luxurious suite in a wing of the house. I anticipated that his invitation to stay with him had romantic implications. It didn't. During my first week in his house he only fucked me once -- and bar girls came into and out of his house in quick succession. I found myself cooking breakfast for them. I took my cue from Tim and fucked Doug, one of the men I had met on the beach at Pattaya. On my second break at Tim's house I fucked three men during the week. This was now my third break and I was the lone woman in the house with five men.
You would probably conclude from the foregoing that I was a slut. I had been the opposite most of my life. When I got married at age nineteen, I was almost a virgin (a penis had slipped briefly inside me once). I didn't cheat on my husband for the first fourteen years of our marriage. Tired of being poor, I began a career of my own at age thirty-three and with the job and the travel it entailed I began to enjoy sex with men I met. I never had sex with anyone but my husband in my home town. I was respectful of him. Now, however, our marriage was only a pale shadow. My husband was having an affair with the choir director of the church where he was the pastor -- and I had become, mostly by circumstance, an international aid worker in humanitarian disaster areas. Before Thailand the number of men who had shared my bed was only about fifteen -- but that number was to increase substantially in Thailand. I absorbed the atmosphere around me and went with the flow.