Noy was sitting on the terrace playing something by Bach. I stood in the shadows watching her for the best part of ten minutes. She’s always beautiful, but there was something incredibly sexy about her when she concentrated on her violin. Her eyes half open, a look of rapture on her face as her lithe body swayed in time to the music. I wanted to rip the violin from her, to take her in my arms, to force my lips on her hers and to take her there and then on the terrace. She’d have killed me on the spot, of course. For a start the violin is a Stradivarius and worth almost as much as our apartment. And her playing is as close to perfection as you can get. Interrupting her for something as basic as sex would have been a mortal sin. So I stood and listened and worshipped.
Thailand is famous for its beautiful women, and there are head-turners in every department store and on every street corner, but my stomach still turns over whenever I see Noy. When I first met her hair was almost down to her waist, jet black and glossy, but she’s had it cut since so that it’s just down to her shoulders. She’s got high cheekbones and a cute nose and skin the colour of milk chocolate and a body with curves in all the right places. She was wearing a red dress that ended above the knee showing off one of the best pairs of legs I’ve ever seen. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t thank the Lord that I found her and married her.
Actually, she found me.
I first met Noy when she came into my shop and bought a small nineteenth-century Burmese Buddha. She asked me lots of questions about its authenticity and how it had come into the country, and then she asked a few similar questions about my own authenticity. I figured she just liked to talk and I was happy to stand and listen and gaze at her.
She came back a week later and bought a Khmer wall hanging that I’d had in the shop for almost three years. She barely looked at it and spent most of the time asking me about which restaurants I liked and where I went for holidays. I thought she just liked to talk. On the way out she gave me her card. Back then she was working for one of the glossy magazines that were full of advertisements for dresses that cost twice the national average wage. She was a stylist, whatever that meant.
I had two assistants back then, middle-aged sisters called Start and Stop. They were born two years apart and yes, the first one born was optimistically called Start but the second was delivered by Caesarean and the mother had decided that enough was enough. I’d only been in Thailand a couple of years and my Thai wasn’t up to much so when the two sisters put their heads together and started laughing I didn’t know what had amused them but figured that it almost certainly involved me.
The next week Noy was back. I was dealing with a German who wanted to take two eighteenth-century Buddhist statues back to his loft in Paris and neither my French nor my German were as good as my Thai so it was taking forever to explain the regulations about taking religious figures out of the country. Noy wandered around the shop apparently aimlessly but she always seemed to be in my field of vision, smiling, brushing her hair behind her ear, cocking her head coquettishly. Start went over to see if she could help but Noy said that she was just browsing. She browsed for a full fifteen minutes until I’d finished with the German, then started talking to me about an antique Khmer dancing figure that I had in the window. It was bronze and I was pretty sure that it was more than two hundred years old but there were some very clever forgers working out of Vietnam so I had to admit that I wasn’t absolutely sure of its provenance I’d found it in an old house in a small village about thirty miles outside Udon Thani, and persuaded the old lady who lived there to sell it to me, along with half a dozen wooden carvings that were easier to date.
We chatted for a while and she was asking me about restaurants in the area. She told me that she was thinking about changing jobs and becoming an estate agent and she asked me where I lived. Back then I lived in the small apartment above the shop but I told her that I was looking for somewhere bigger. She bought the statue and she paid me in cash. I boxed it for her and took it out to her car, a new model Porsche SUV. It was one hell of a car and I figured it must have belonged to her husband, which shows you what a chauvinist I was back then.
After she’d gone, Start and Stop came over, grinning like they knew something I didn’t. Which as it turned out, was absolutely the case.
‘She isn’t interested in the statue,’ said Start.
‘She’s only interested in one thing in the shop,’ said her sister.
The giggled like naughty schoolgirls.
‘What?’ I asked, totally confused.
They giggled even more and finally I realised why they were laughing.
‘Oh come on, why would she be interested in me?’ I asked.
It was a fair point, all things considered. I was probably ten years older than her and while I’d managed to hang on to my own hair and teeth I’d also managed to pile on a few extra pounds.
‘She was looking at you all the time, Khun Bob,’ said Start.
‘All the time,’ said Stop, for emphasis.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘Very,’ said Start. ‘You should ask her out next time she comes in.’
‘Why do you think she’ll come back?’ I asked and they both giggled.
‘She’ll come back,’ said Stop.
‘For sure,’ said Start.
They were right.
Three days later she was back in the shop, this time to look at a Japanese stair tansu, a chest in the shape of stairs. It was a good piece, the wood polished to perfection and the fittings made of aged bronze.
Start wasn’t in the shop when she came in but Stop was and she wagged her finger at me to let me know that I shouldn’t waste any more time.
I felt like a gawky teenager even thought it had been more than twenty years since anyone had described me as either gawky or a teenager. I stumbled over the words because I was sure she was going to turn me down but I asked her if she’d go for dinner with me one evening and she said she’d love to and she sounded as if she meant it.
We had dinner in a terrific Italian restaurant down the road from the shop and a few days later we had dinner again and then we went to see a Martin Scorsese movie but for the life of me I can’t remember which one because all I could think about was Noy and the fact that she was on a date with me.
Two months after we first met she introduced me to her parents. We flew up to Chiang Rai and I slept in a hotel while she stayed in their house because her parents were very traditional and, frankly, so was she. Three months after that, we were married.
Anyway, that was then and this is now. If anything I think Noy is even more beautiful now then when I met her. She’s confident, smart, and can make me smile without even trying. I can’t imagine living without her.
She finished playing and stood looking out across the Bangkok skyline, the violin at her side.
‘Beautiful,’ I said quietly.
‘Bach is always beautiful,’ she said, turning around.
‘I meant you,’ I said. I stepped forward and kissed her on the lips. She pressed herself against me, holding the violin to the side.
‘I missed you today,’ she said.
‘I missed you, too.’
‘No, I really missed you,’ she said, pressing herself harder against me.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Nice?’ she said, caressing the back of my neck. ‘I’ll give you nice.’
So what did I tell Noy? About the hospital?
Nothing.
Not a damned thing.
I carried on kissing her.
We went to bed.
We had great sex.
Then we went to sleep.
I didn’t think about cancer the whole night. Until I woke up.