"Maipenrai."
Theodore sputtered as he dabbed at the beer he'd splashed on the bodice of the young Thai woman, and then he shrank in horror in realization that his wife, Mavis, was sitting across the table from him and taking it all in. "Excuse me?" he managed in a strangled voice.
"Lek means 'never mind,' dear," Mavis interjected, her voice smooth as silk, a little tight smile on her face. "That's Thai for a whole host of meanings. Whatever, don't mention it, it's nothing, and so forth." She gave a little laugh and opened her clutch bag and extracted a compact. She opened it and primped her hair, which almost rustled as stiff as it was, with the aid of the small, oval mirror, oblivious to tableau playing out in front of her between the high and mighty and the low and subservient.
"I know what maipenrai means," Theodore muttered, still confused and much on edge.
"Let me get you another beer," Lek said as she popped up from her seat, mortified more that the Carpet King of Thailand, the farang—foreigner—who was fabulously wealthy and employed hundreds, was red-faced embarrassed in public even though it had been he whose hand was trembling so when Mrs. Sheffield commanded her to sit at the table. And even though it had been he who had spilled his beer on her. As she rose, two waiters rushed toward them from the corners of the room, both with accusing stares boring into Lek as if she'd shot one of their well-oiled patrons.
"No, no," Theodore stuttered, completely nonplused, as he half rose from his seat. "It is I who . . ."
But he stopped there, unable to go on. This was completely out of his context and his control. That never happened to him, the expatriate American businessman who ruled a good 37 percent of the world's carpet production through his foreign labor plants. He had never been in this position before. And worse, he was running along the edge of compromise before his ice princess wife, who forever scrutinized and fashioned his every move—or certainly tried to—and had done so from the moment her father had bought and paid for him by bankrolling his business empire.
Mavis had plucked him almost from the cradle—straight out of the MBA graduation line. And to this date, thirteen years later, which also represented the difference between their ages, he still did not know why. Although she was highly intelligent, both intriguing and thought-provoking in conversation, and an ideal hostess and arm candy at the theater and conventions, she had never warmed up to him in bed. And thus he had sought release and solace of that nature elsewhere, whenever he could. And until today, it had never been even a whisper of a threat to him.
And that's what had brought the three of them to this table in the café off the lobby of Bangkok's Dusit Thani hotel—he, his wife, and his mistress. And it explained his trembling hand that had led to the unfortunate accident and brought the attention of all the well-heeled foreign expatriates and rich or titled Thai lounging around in the café to their table. Even the waiters had looked on in horror as the young Thai woman, herself embarrassed beyond all belief, was ushered into the café by Theodore's wife. It wasn't that the young woman wasn't nubile and beautiful. It was because everyone there knew she was a hairdresser in the hotel's salon. Mavis Sheffield's hair dresser.
What had possessed Mavis to do it, Theodore wondered. She had her charities and all that and was outspoken in her egalitarianism, most certainly—but of course she'd never brought it home and he had no idea she would take any of it seriously.
It had all been bad timing. Theodore kept a room at the Dusit Thani for his pleasures, and it had been his bad fortune to arrive in the lobby simultaneously with Lek, by assignation, and his wife, by accident, who said she was "just dropping in for tea" on her way to an art opening at the Bhirasri Institute.
She hadn't actually caught Theodore and Lek together, but Lek had been approaching as Mavis called out to Theodore, voicing her surprise that he was here, and he was mumbling his way through an explanation.
"Ah, Lek," Mavis had said as she caught the approaching woman in the periphery of her vision before Lek could veer off to the side. "It's good to see you. I'll be in on Thursday for the usual, but how do you like how it's standing up?" Mavis had moved her head from side to side—but the hair hadn't moved a millimeter; it was standing up like a battle helmet. Mavis preferred the "every hair plastered in place" style, which, to be fair, still looked good on her. She still looked a highly polished thirty-five, which was a fifteen-year gift of the gods.
"Yes, Thursday," Lek muttered, already completely put out of whack by the unfortunate intersecting of her patron's and master's paths with hers.
"How nice to meet you both here," Mavis said with a cheery smile. "Come, I'm sure you have time, Theodore, before your . . . what, your meeting? . . . and the salon won't raise an eyebrow, I'm sure if I insist on your company for fifteen minutes, Lek," Mavis breezed on. "Come have a tea with me in the café. I don't want to sit alone. Oh don't frown so, Teddy. You can have a beer, if you want."
There was nothing else to be done. Mavis had a voice of "she who must be obeyed," and her mind was set on an adventure. It almost seemed like she wanted to set society's teeth on edge by dragging her hairdresser into the café to have tea within the stronghold of the overlords of Asia.
The adventure didn't last for very long, though. After Theodore's beer spill and finding his hands on Lek's breast in eyesight of his wife, no matter how accidental it was, Lek fled the café, declaring that, "thanks ever so much, but I've left Mrs. Winston under the dryer."
Mavis watched her retreating figure benevolently and Theodore sank into relief, almost able to taste the bullet he'd miraculously dodged. In the silence, waiters descended with napkins to mop Lek's empty chair and to set another Singha in front of Theodore while simpering and dabbing at the lapel of his raw silk suit, even though not a drop had reached that hallowed fabric. Within seconds, the atmosphere of the café had returned to civilized levels and all was right again in the life of Bangkok's upper class bubble.
Ten minute later, Mavis floated out of the café in a flurry of wait staff bowing and scraping on the way to her art exhibit opening, and Theodore was breathing a sigh of relief at the near miss in the collisions of two of his lives.
Ten minutes after that, Theodore was sitting on the side of the bed in room 1016 of the Dusit Thani, his raw silk suit neatly folded over a nearby chair, and Lek, his wife's hairdresser, was kneeling between his thighs and closing her mouth over the head of his erect cock.
