Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 5
Maids
Loss of virginity happily bought and paid for, his experience with prostitutes expanded over the coming months, and he felt increasingly confident in the face of the opposite sex which had the effect of solidifying his ignorance of them. He came to enjoy calling them “the OS”, a seemingly objective term that held them at arms length and partly because it was not immediately recognized did not grate upon other’s ears like the usual set of pejorative words spit out with a few drops of derision. But, as is often the case with neologisms, just below its thin skin it carried a small prick of hatred and, in his case, misogynistic ire. He probably got the idea of using those initials by hearing of the “OSS,” the agency that Frank worked for in China during the war. So when someone would ask What do you mean, OS? He could answer with the accurate but only mildly emotive ‘opposite sex’, a term he would not normally like to use because the word ‘sex’, like ‘love’, embarrassed him, evocative as they were of his own obsession and secret hope, disruptive intruders into his fragile and therefore tightly held image of himself as a man. Nevertheless, the wider experience, having paid sex where love was forbidden, emboldened him to began to make sorties into the realm of non-whores, but without success.
He had already pulled one shenanigan. He lay down alongside the maids when he came back late one night, well into his cups. He had snuggled up to the nineteen year-old and tried to tickle her, only to be pushed away with soft screams and giggles and moans of annoyance while her sixteen-year-old sister beat him with a pillow. As usual, Frank was not home on this occasion, and soon his wife, Ely, got up and, thoroughly disgusted with his behavior, while threatening to send him back to the States, shooed him back to the room where he slept, at the other end of the house, as far as possible from where the maids slept.
The next day he approached the older one from behind in daylight while she had her hands in the laundry sink, only to receive stinging lye soap water in his face. He caught the younger one napping and tickled her breast with a feather-duster and watched mesmerized as she stirred awake and, joy of joys, put her hand on her breast. He won a buck bet with Mellon that he could kiss the younger one on the face. He succeeded by grabbing a sock and walking up to her, faking anger, and pointing to an imaginary hole, as if to blame her for putting it there. As she bent to examine it closely, he caught her a loud smack with his lips on her cheek. She turned red and looked as if she were about to explode. Mellon discounted the story as unrealistic and never paid.
The coup de grâce was his successful spy mission to see one of the amahs fully naked. Anticipating their evening showers, he had unscrewed the key to the lock which secured the two halves of a sliding window that opened into the bathing area from a narrow exterior veranda. This left a small keyhole and, by setting two boxes of soap on the sill to the left and right of it, he blocked the view through the lower halves of the windows, and, crouching down as he sneaked along the veranda, invisible to those inside the bathing room, he was able to raise his head and peer, unnoticed, into the room. He was rewarded by the Devil himself. The older sister, solid body glistening, was soaping herself, and when her hand moved to wash between her legs it was all he could do to keep from collapsing with excitement.
Hearing her younger sister approach the adjacent room, he had to retreat. Exhilaration was too tame a word to express his state of mind. Fortunately for all concerned, a few weeks later they moved to Hong Kong before things regressed further with the maids in Taipei, flying on Christmas day for the cheap tickets. In Hong Kong, two of the three new maids were, to him at least, old prunes devoid of sexual appeal and they kept a very close eye on the third, a teenage nursemaid. Ely had already warned them about him.
Nevertheless, these childish antics served to inflame his desire for non-whores and he added voyeurism to his burgeoning garden of vices. Specifically, he learned that the prostitutes he had been privy to were dully resigned, even sullen, or straightforward, all business, no nonsense, blatant, available, and, like meat and potatoes, fueled his voracious bodily appetite. But nice girls—as indirect, impractical, ignorant, silly, covert, off-limits as they may be—titillated his fancy for fantasy and true love, that hidden object never to be named, even to himself, except in derision of course. The entire assembly of fertile women began to appear before him, from whores to virgins and back again, sensuous, offering unlimited opportunities, beckoning him to come to them, one after the other. And he heeded as best he could the clarion call: I shall follow my prick, he thought, albeit small. In this way, he took a deviant but well-trodden path, a path directly into the deeper parts of the jungle that is the world of desire, sexual desire, perhaps desire in its steamiest setting. Many years later, in spite of his many fascinating adventures exploring the jungle, he would wish he had not taken that path because it robbed his energy for other, more important things.
But, for him, pursuing non-whores was easier said than done. If the whore situation around his home in Montana had been next to dead for fifty years, eventually the opening up of the modern nice girl ‘market’ compensated pretty well for the loss, whereas the exact opposite presented itself to the adventurous Montana boy in Taipei. In those years, the sex industry was vibrant, offering a wealth of variety, conveniently located, and inexpensive, at least to a fistful of US dollars. The availability of nice girls for sex on the other hand was tightly controlled, functioned only through certain channels, usually complicated by the institution of marriage, subject to a ton of restrictions and conditions and, and in any event, it was unquestionably off-limits to someone like him. The high stone or brick walls with sharp glass shards or inverted broken bottles plus rolled razor wire on top enclosed the better residences of such creatures amply symbolizing the message: Stay out, do not touch these women as well as providing some deterrent to the casual thief. Unfortunately, it would take him a few years to learn the simple lesson, often enjoined by even the most naive traveler, When in Rome do as the Romans do, Boy! And it would take him many years to learn the lesson of how unreliable and eventually unsatisfying sexual objects can be.
Instead, he wanted to find the whores of the east in his back yard, in the whorehouses of Wallace, Idaho when those places themselves were on life support, and he wanted to find beautiful, graceful, versatile virgins ready to go with him on a date in Taipei, when he lacked all the necessary qualifications for it.