The first thing I ever say to her is: I think it is an orgy.
Intonation is important. The first thing I ever say to her is: I think it is an orgy.
Context is important. We’re watching a pile of pigs fuck and she’s just said to the woman next to her (me): It’s almost an orgy, isn’t it?
We are on an island known for its pigs and the woman next to me is British, with dark bobbed hair, a long neck, and a narrow face. She’s beautiful, and I am charmed. She can tell.
She laughs and says: What an intro.
I’d seen her on the boat we took to get here. She was with her husband, judging by their rings, who is compact and bespectacled and handsome, though not nearly as handsome as her, and when I saw them, I immediately imagined them fucking. More specifically, I imagined him fucking her. It was instinctual. Something about the way they hovered near each other, how he put his mouth on her neck, quickly, as he passed behind her, as if his lips were an extension of his fingertips. Watching them together, I became intensely aware of the hard bench I sat against, the rock of the waves beneath me, steady, excellent pattern recognition the way that nature usually manages, a clap clap clap against wood.
To be clear: I wanted to fuck her and not him, but more than that, I wanted to watch him fuck her, preferably hard and from behind.
On the island, you can buy fresh oranges and tomatoes to entice the pigs, and the little ones are interested, hungry. Thirsty too. They guzzle with tiny furred maws straight from votive offerings of plastic bottles of water. Display their pink bellies for a rub. The adults are not interested in any of this. Haggard and bristle-maned, they rut in a dusty pile in the shade. They are not attractive pigs. It’s ninety-four degrees outside with eighty-four percent humidity, and as sweat glides pleasantly between my breasts I can feel this other woman’s elbow almost touching mine and then actually touching it in a way that feels staggeringly intimate. She watches the animals with a lopsided smile, uncaps her own bottle of water, and takes a tidy little sip. A big, meaty sow sighs as if bored, her flank quivering beneath the effort of her mounter, and then she starts to squirm.
Eventually, the bottom pig always becomes unhappy with the situation. Squealing ensues.
On the boat back to the resort, the three of us sit together and scream-talk over the sound of the waves. The woman’s name is Beth, short for Bethany. They are 37 (him) and 42 (her). She is a social science professor on sabbatical and he develops software. He doesn’t offer more information and I don’t press, because I am busy watching Beth chew her gum. Her teeth are very tiny and straight. She guesses I’m twenty-two, eight years younger than I am, and both seem relieved, happy even, to discover I’m not. It’s not the normal reaction, relief, though many people do think I’m younger, mainly because I pour myself into chairs, feet up on the table, like a teenager. I often hide behind my hair.
I get up to take a photo of the water from the other side of the boat. I want to see dolphins. A shark. A fucking mermaid. Instead, I see a plastic bottle stuffed with what looks like shit-covered toilet paper. The sea beneath it is lovely and hyaline, and when I turn back, Beth and the man are kissing, intentionally, slowly, as if chewing, but sweetly, too. I watch as she pulls back and looks him in the eye with what can only be described as love, and he answers by lifting his hand to the brim of her hat and knocking it from her head. It flies off the side of the boat and disappears.
Laughing, she turns in mock outrage, moves as if she might follow it, and he pulls her back, kisses her again, touching her fine face with a broad, veined hand.
Okay maybe I do want to fuck him.
Maybe I want to watch him fuck her, and then have her watch him fuck me, and then her and I could fuck. I imagine different pairs. I know what I don't want, which is a traditional threesome, which I find clunky and performative. Multitasking is bad for the brain. Studies have confirmed it.
Cora used to hate when I got like this. “You ask for sex as if you’re ordering off a menu,” she once complained.
That night we go to dinner, Beth’s idea. Her husband is Lawrence though he prefers to be called Lawrey, which reminds me of Little Women, and I wonder if he too is devilish and spoiled and a breaker of many hearts, the lilied and strong alike.
The restaurant is in our hotel, which is more like an extremely fancy yoga hostel: round, upscale huts perched on stilts a good two stories up to catch the breeze. A series of suspended plank walkways and rope bridges link everything together around a square swimming pool. To get to the open-air restaurant, we have the option of crossing a frayed rope tunnel strung over a pit that contains live ostriches. This was a selling point when I booked the place. Ostriches, I thought. How kitsch. There are two of them—prehistoric, miserable-seeming things, peering up as we pass overhead. “Mind your toes,” Lawrey says. Beth looks over her shoulder at me and smiles. Her shirt is cut extremely low in the back, and I watch her shoulder blades reach for each other as she balances.
The hotel has two yoga studios on site, and as we’re led to a table, the three of us laughingly admit that we do no yoga, not now, not ever. But it’s the slow (read: hot) season, and the rates at this hotel are irresistible. Still, there are hardly any guests. I’m on day four of six and, outside of our trio, I’ve clocked a heavyset mother and her tween daughter who, in spite of the decades separating them, look so identical that I wonder if it’s wild for them to look at each other, the mother reminiscing of her youth, the daughter knowing, undoubtedly, what lies ahead. Or maybe they don’t notice at all. Anyhow, it’s us, them, and a single woman traveling alone. Though she and I look nothing alike, if someone were to try to offer the police her description, our particulars would be the same: medium build, average height, with thin brown hair and features on the mousy side. My first night at the hotel I sat at the bar and observed this woman take a selfie with her fruity drink, slice of pitaya stuck on the rim of her glass like a magenta-colored shark fin. I was two seats down and could’ve offered to take the photo for her but didn’t. I wondered who that woman would send the selfie to. Who would I send the selfie to myself? I promised myself I wouldn’t have taken that selfie to begin with, but really I couldn’t be so sure. Was she even sending it to anyone specific? Uploading it to a social feed—yolo, best life, lol Thailand bitches? Or was it just festering in her camera roll alongside a dozen others?
The woman’s loneliness darkened my mood, and I went back to my room and called Cora to cry-talk. It’s just habit by now, we’ve been doing it for so long, and I am still comforted by her voice no matter what it is saying, which is kind of sad. I cry and think of Cora in our apartment packing up boxes of books, and then the woman at the bar, taking photos of herself. I tell Cora I miss her even though it’s not really true. She doesn’t say it back. I fall asleep weeping and telling myself tomorrow will be different. But it won’t. Because here is the thing about loneliness: It doesn’t care whether or not you are actually alone. If you are a lonely person, then you’re lonely regardless of whether or not you are happily married or single, childless or a satisfied mother of six, or sitting at a table with two beautiful people who you might convince to fuck you. I wear my loneliness daily; I insert it into my body every morning like a menstrual cup and let it catch the hot, viscous syrup of my soul. It’s not an affliction, loneliness. It’s a trait; wicked, intelligent, curious, lonely. Like all distinguishing characteristics, it’s what you do with the loneliness that matters.
Back to dinner. Beth’s shirt is cream-colored linen and I order a white fish. I want a curry, but can’t risk it. No one ever gets the shits from white fish.
We ask for wine and bottled water. Unprompted, Beth turns and tells me that whenever they travel in second- or third-world countries, Lawrey drinks his own urine. “Every morning,” she says. I look at her, then at him, waiting for a punchline.
There isn’t one. He shrugs, his muscled throat tanned. “It protects you from parasites,” he says.
I look to Beth.
“Not me.” Her hands are up beside her face in self-defense.
Then Lawrey: “In Bangladesh, Bee got it bad, toilet worship for forty-eight hours. Missed our trip to Sahib’s tomb. I was fine.”
“He saw the tomb for both of us.”
“We ate and drank everything the same.”
At this, Beth simpers.
“Well, almost everything,” Lawrey says. Then he laughs.
She leans toward me, puts her hand on my wrist. Beneath the table, my clit skips. She says: “Once he drank mine.”
“Just to prove I would!”
Lawrey is looking at me, arms crossed behind his head, watching my reaction.
I stare back for a long, measured moment, and then I ask him: “What does it taste like?”
He smiles in a way that tells me he anticipated the question, and Beth laughs. She knows his answer.
“It tastes like pollen,” Lawrey says, and leans forward. “Like something in spring that isn’t fragrant but still has a scent.”
“Hers, or yours?”
Beth shakes her head. “His. He’s telling you his piss tastes like flowers.”
Lawrey lovingly removes a piece of lint from the arm of her shirt. “A weed maybe.”
I think for a moment and then I ask, “How do you drink it?”
The man is always smiling. In an even, measured voice he says: “From a glass.”
After dinner, we went to bed.
I got everything I wanted.
I’ve read two different male novelists describe sex with a specific woman being like vanilla pudding. I never really got the reference. I figured it was a penetration thing. With Beth, I finally understood. The attribution is not about texture or flavor but alchemy. When I came against her hand, I felt milky. Rich, slightly glutinous, creamed, pale. It doesn’t make sense and yet it makes complete sense, like quantum physics.
Their hut is four down from mine, linked by the little outdoor hallway that skirts high above the swimming pool. At three a.m. I walk home, carrying my sandals, so well fucked my entire body throbs. Back in my room, I fall asleep without crying.
I am in Thailand because I got divorced. I wanted to get divorced. It had been my idea. Still, I cry all the time. This part is not interesting. Woman goes through dramatic change, visits another country, goes through more dramatic change, blah blah blah. No one would make a movie about me. I am not particularly pretty or thin.
My ex-wife, on the other hand, is both—very beautiful and very boring. That’s a horrible thing to think, and I didn’t think it at first. Cora loves to laugh, and does so regularly, and early on, I considered her sly and hedonistic. Soon—though not too soon—I realized she laughed too easily, without discernment, giggling with equal fervor over my very clever observations and bad television. This disheartened me. She came easily too, but I was never disappointed by that of course. That kind of admissive enthusiasm is always welcome.
Eventually I began to resent her laughter, the very thing I’d once loved most. There are other reasons for the divorce, obviously, but they’re boring, and the laughter pretty much captures it at the macro level. Resenting your partner’s joy on a consistent basis will do it.
Of course, she wasn’t always boring. For instance: she loved going braless to summer events like barbecues or tennis games to watch men struggle not to glance at her nipples. And when they inevitably did, she would pointedly stare at them to see how they reacted. Cora found this game hilarious, and it was also a bit of a litmus test for men. It was pretty helpful actually. Cora. She really was the best for a while. Isn’t that how it goes.
So. I eat bland fish and drink two glasses of wine and fuck Lawrey and then Beth until three in the morning and wake a few hours later and go sit by the pool. The other solo woman is here, already in the water, wearing a light blue bikini. In a continuation of needless quirk, the hotel’s pool is adorned with a massive pink flamingo floatie and a hundred or so hard, plastic, brightly colored floating balls the size of fists, which bob across the water’s surface. They’re the type of thing you might see in a pit meant for children. This woman in the blue bathing suit is now organizing the balls by color, lining them along the pool’s edge—pink, purple, white, orange, green, yellow, like a toddler, or a grown-up with an addiction to turning chaos into tidied mental orchestration. I imagine if I took the trouble to introduce myself, Blue Bikini and I might become friends. Instead, I sit alone and think, unprompted, how Korean Airlines inexplicably played the Forrest Gump theme song when the plane landed in Chang Mai.
At ten a.m., Beth, Lawrey, and I meet for coffee as planned. Beth comes down first, dressed entirely in cream and taupe. She asks how I’ve slept. Her hair is fashionably mussed, possibly with product. She smells of sunscreen. I stare at the bruise my mouth left on her neck.
We share photos we took of the pigs, snapped just moments before we met. Across from us, in the lobby, the mother and daughter check out, mom looking a bit emotionally crumpled, her eyes rimmed in pink, her daughter wheeling her suitcase to the exit, ponytail swinging. Beth tells me how much of a problem she was as an adolescent, how cruel she was to her mother. How she couldn’t fathom having children for fear of karmic retribution. Eventually Lawrey joins us. He’s topless, his skin shining mahogany, his shaved head gleaming. At dinner, Lawrey told me he’d played Division One lacrosse in college. He had talked about his scholarship and the physical dedication that had been required to maintain it. Two decades later, there is still a rind of stubborn muscle on his body, entombed under an inch of fleshy disuse. With his shirt on, he seems bookish. With his shirt off, he seems like a very tiny Marvel character, a couple years retired.
Beth orders oat milk for her coffee. Lawrey announces that he doesn’t drink it at all. “A purist,” Beth teases. I picture him chugging his own piss. A kind man with silvered hair brings our drinks on a metal tray. I have questions for Lawrey and Beth that I don’t ask, one of which is: Do you often pick up young women on holidays? I want their answer to be yes. I want to imagine myself as one in a string of many, a blur in a dirty Metallica T-shirt they’ll mention a few years later. Remember that freckled woman, where were we, was it Koh Samui or Phuket? I’d forgotten about her freckles! Yes, yes, they were everywhere! This is what I want to be. A blip at the edge of someone else’s vacation photos, memorialized only by sporadic melanin.
We decide to spend the day together. We talk about the beach, but in the end, we skip it. Beth wants to shop. “I owe her a hat, apparently,” Lawrey says.
Divorce is expensive, even when it’s amicable. I’m on a budget, but I don’t mention it, because being on a budget is boring. They are not. Boring that is, or on a budget. We go to a series of high-end shops hemmed along an outdoor mall, exposed hallways strung with orchids and potted clusters of vernal palms. Beth buys earrings, a linen beach coverup (also cream-colored), a small tube of face cream. She shops deliberately, sampling lotions on the back of her hand, asking Lawrey and me for opinions. Prompted, I smell her skin and think about her husband peeling his condom off to come on her back.
The hat store is ridiculous. Mannequin heads line shelves from floor to ceiling, so meticulously positioned it feels demented, like at any time they might pivot their hard plastic necks to track our journey around the store.
I admire a flamboyant black Panama with a red band, obscenely expensive even by U.S. standards. Lawrey encourages me to try it on, and when I do, he tells me I look like Carmen Sandiego, and I respond no, the colors are inverted. Photos are taken on his phone, first of me alone, and then with Beth, who has chosen a sand-colored boater. We pout for the camera.
In moments like these—junctures of deep, intense personal satisfaction—I like to think about all of the small, offhand choices that carried me here. Cora, for instance. We didn’t meet online, like so many of our contemporaries, but in line, while waiting to use the restroom at a trendy, jungled Japanese restaurant that sat on the exact midpoint between our Ballard apartments. Cora was there on a date with someone else, while I was with a small group of colleagues that I really did not like, but with whom I needed to socialize periodically to maintain proper workplace alliances. One of them, another industrial designer just slightly my senior, had tried to sleep with me the week after I was hired, and though I rebuked him, he seemed to think his effort had solidified something between us anyway, and often gave me long, meaning-infested looks across tables. As such, I tabled with him infrequently, just enough so as not to appear frigid to the others. That evening, per usual, I was drowning myself in Veltliner and laughing at inappropriate moments. Months later, when I was deeply, stupidly in love with Cora and still puddled at the sound of her easy glee, we would lay around with knotted limbs and ask each other: What if I hadn’t had that third glass of wine and needed so desperately to urinate? What if she hadn’t noticed my telltale jiggle and let me cut ahead of her, and what if, later, on my way out I hadn’t boldly (read: drunkenly) interrupted her meal to ask for her number? And now: What if I had not chosen this hotel, or signed up for the boat trip to Koh Madsum? I have found in my life it is never the large choices that really make an impact—the apartment I took or the graduate school I attended—but the small ones. The everyday decisions I make without marination, automated as breathing.
Lawrey pays for both hats, and I am thrilled. I imagine all the places I will wear mine, looking worldly and moneyed and chicly out of character. Big, round boxes, tucked with crisp tissue, are placed in black-and-white striped shopping bags. I swing mine while I walk, talking to Beth about a vertical mouse my firm is designing, one meant to fight carpal tunnel, about form as function, about a paper she’s writing on the perpetuation of neocolonialism through population control and where she hopes to publish it. She tells me about her deep devotion to her graduate students. She has only six weeks left of sabbatical. While we converse, Lawrey strolls several yards behind, his hands clasped behind his back.
We stop by a dispensary and buy papers, a lighter shaped like a pineapple, and half an ounce of sativa called Birthday Cake. Dinner happens again, and drinks, this time not at the hotel but at a small western cafe in Karon. Beth and I rest our hat bags beside our chairs.
We discuss our flights over—theirs from London, mine from Seattle. They were stuck next to two screaming children, but I had been lucky, swaddled in dry silence. I told them about the flight attendants, how they all wore the same hairstyle (long and black and tied in a low bun), shared the same petite frame and inoffensive, oatmeal-colored nail polish. “You’d think,” I say in feigned exasperation, “the plane would go down if these women looked like real people instead of bizarre tokens of starched, sexist hospitality.” I watch Beth laugh.
What I don't admit to them is how much I’d actually liked the homogeneity of the attendants, in the same way I like watching a certain kind of rough sex in porn, aesthetically pleasing though inarguably awful. The half-dozen or so near-identical women bringing me tea or free earbuds made me feel like I was part of a very sexy science fiction story, which was further amplified by the fact—another thing I do not share—that planes always make me want to have sex. Something about the oxygenated air maybe. I was invariably pawing at Cora when we flew, in the hope she might paw me back. Occasionally she was game, but mostly I think I annoyed her. I spent countless flights rubbing myself under the thin gratuity blanket after she’d nodded off, my knees tented for privacy. Our sex life had always been a bit out of balance. Oversexed, Cora called me once during an argument. I told her there was no such thing.
Cora had been very worried for me when I made the decision to come here. It’s not safe to travel alone, she’d said, which is a thing people are always saying if you’re a woman and like to travel by yourself. But here’s the funny thing about that sentiment: it is not the alone part that is unsafe. Being alone, in actuality, is extremely safe. The unsafe bit is the other people who exist in your soon-to-be-explored environment. What is actually meant when someone says, it’s unsafe to travel alone, is, it’s unsafe to travel unaccompanied. As a species, we are meant to move in a pack. Safety in numbers, the more the merrier, united we stand, divided we fall, yada yada yada. As a woman alone, I am statistically much more likely to die when traveling through another country filled with strangers than when traveling into the deep woods where there is actually, truly, no one, where all I need to worry about is getting lost or poisoning myself or breaking a bone. What is actually meant when someone says, it’s unsafe to travel alone, is: you should be more afraid of other people.
I explained all of this to Cora, and she just stared at me for a barbed second, then another. Finally, she said, You obviously know what I meant, and left the room. Like I said: boring.
Still. I wonder if Blue Bikini feels similarly unsafe, and, if so, who in her life told her that she should.
Midway through dinner there is a shift. I am not sure what causes it, if it’s the fact that Lawrey bought the hats and the cannabis, the meal last night and coffee this morning, or that I have done most of the talking since we sat down, but his attitude begins to tilt toward sulky pretension. Twice he speaks over Beth. Not once does he lovingly pick lint from her clothing, or touch her, for that matter.
At some point, we’re talking about movies, and I ask if they’ve seen an Almodóvar film I love. “We haven’t,” says Lawrey.
“I have,” corrects Beth. Lawrey looks to her in confusion. “I saw it last year, at Lucia’s, when I stayed after Haden was born.” She turns to me and shares her thoughts on the infamous hair drying scene while Lawrey peers into his wine glass, as if there is something inside more interesting than his wife. We talk about the production design. I’ve read the Munro stories the film was based on, but Beth has not. During this part of the exchange, Lawrey sits back in a posture that can only be described as brooding. He is no longer the man leaning casually back in his chair detailing the ritual consumption of his own urine. Vanished is the guy who sauntered serenely behind us, as if we were his good-natured children.
He plucks at a dinner roll and, interrupting, says: “I don’t know why they bother with bread in this country. It’s never any good, and everything else is, so why try.”
Beth catches my eye, her gaze humored. She takes the roll from Lawrey, gives it a pointed chomp. “I don’t mind mediocre bread.” He looks at her and smiles, then kisses her before she swallows. When he pulls away, he looks at me, pointedly, as if to say: there.
It’s at this moment I decide I don’t like Lawrey and that he knows it. This doesn’t stop me from ordering more wine and when the check comes, I wait for him to pay it. It is my last night in Phuket.