“I should never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human.

The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick.”

    The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

The apartment manager didn’t see Melanie approaching. She was busy filing rent receipts stacked in yellow piles on the desk in front of her so her back was to the door. A tinkling bell, a small, silver one the building’s owner tied onto the doorknob the day before, officially announced the arrival of the new tenant. The manager, a stick-figure-of-a-woman with thinning, black hair worn in a messy bun high on the head like the plumage of a sickly bird, continued with her filing; blithely ignoring the inpatient feet shuffling behind her.  

Melanie’s floral scented perfume, a fragrant blend of gardenia, honeysuckle and magnolia, wafted through the room, carried on the stream of warm air blasting from the a/c unit mounted above the door, The manager sniffed the air and frowned disapprovingly. She glanced over her shoulder to glare at the large, red-faced, farang woman mopping her forehead with a tissue.

“You ta woman want apartment. You ta woman call Khun Suwannarat, ” the boney faced woman barked at her.

Melanie didn’t know whether the manager expected a verbal response or not.  Finally, it dawned on her that the woman wasn’t really asking her a question. She was merely stating the facts as she understood them.

“Chi, Chi, Yes, uhm, uhm, I do want the apartment but, uhm, of course, I need to see it first,” Melanie said speaking very slowly the way westerners tend to do when they aren’t sure how much English a Thai native understands.

The manager looked at the heavyset, farang woman dressed in a white and smiled vacantly. Melanie, not wanting to appear rude, smiled back. She hoped their brief information exchange meant it was time to get down to the business of leasing the apartment.

The office was unbearably hot even with the a/c blasting full force. Rivulets of perspiration ran down Melanie’s face and neck and begin to pool in the narrow space between her breasts and bra.  She dabbed at the wetness with a fresh tissue pulled from a small packet inside her pant’s pocket.

It was at that moment, she noticed the manager looking her up and down in the “covetous” way a customer looks at a mannequin in a shop window. It made her uncomfortable. No, it made her feel self-conscious.  After all, she wasn’t a dress shop dummy. She was Melanie Bacon-Smith from Plano, Texas; a respectable town where well-bred women are admired at a distance and not shamefully ogled or subjected to inappropriate displays of lewd “wantonness”.

Granted, she had wanted to make a good impression on the apartment manager, who as the owner’s representative, she surmised, had the power to refuse to lease the apartment to her. So she had carefully selected a casual outfit she could “dress-up” to wear to the appointment.  

However, things hadn’t work out as planned. The merciless heat and humidity of the “hot” season in Thailand turned her efforts into a fashion disaster. The long, white, sleeveless tunic, she wore over a pair of matching white slacks, clung to her body like a wet rag. Her medium length, red hair smartly pulled back with a bright green, silk scarf earlier that morning, hung limp and damp about her shoulders.  In Melanie’s mind, it made absolutely no sense for the manager to look at her, as she was doing, with such greedy eyes.              

“ You tat red hair nurse on television!” the manager suddenly exclaimed.

“What? Red hair nurse! What red hair nurse on television?” Melanie asked, slapping her hands against her forehead in exasperation.   

“Nurse Pree-ch-ard. Nurse Pree—ch-ard. You know, “Young Doctors In Love”?  Cable TV.” The manager said, bouncing up and down behind the counter like a kangaroo.

  “Young Doctors In Love”, “Young Doctors In Love”, Melanie said to herself. The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“Ahhh!! “Young Doctors in Love”!” she said finally recalling why the name sounded familiar.

“Young Doctors In Love” had been a popular but short-lived television series in the United States several years before. And, just as the manager said, a red haired nurse named, Maybelline Pritchard, had been one of the show’s lead characters.  Nurse Pritchard had been the resident “floosie”.  She managed to sleep with all the young doctors and a few of the nurses before the series was cancelled.

“You Nurse Pree-ch-ard!” the manager squealed.

“No, No, I’m not! Sorry, I’m not her,” Melanie said grabbing the woman by her shoulders and shaking her firmly to try to calm her down. “I’m not her.”

In fact, she thought she looked nothing like the actress who played Nurse Pritchard.

“Not Nurse Pree—ch-ard” the woman whined.

“No,” Melanie replied, “I’m not her. I’m not an actor. I’m an English Teacher.”

“An English Teacher,” the manager echoed with a far-off look in her eyes. She made no attempt to hide her disap-pointment.

Melanie was not Nurse Pritchard so there was nothing left to say. The manager shrugged her shoulders and returned to her filing duties. “Oh, no, you didn’t just turn your back on me, again! ” she exclaimed loud enough for the manager to hear. The woman carried on with her filing as though she hadn’t heard a single word. Ignoring westerners, treating as though them as though they were invisible, was a Thai art form. It infuriated Melanie. She began impatiently tapping her fingers on the bamboo front counter, all the while staring at the manager hard enough to bore a hole in her back. She had hoped it might finally occur to the unfriendly and odd woman that she was a prospective tenant, a person whose remittances would help to pay her salary. In other words, she was a person entitled to more professional treatment.  “If this was anywhere but Thailand” she thought to herself, “I would have already given that obnoxious woman a piece of my mind!” 

 “Urgh!” Melanie muttered throwing up her hands in exasperation. She WAS in Thailand. That was the point. She was now living in Thailand. An Asian country where politeness and correct public behavior were deeply ingrained values. Every Thai person she knew tried to avoid unpleasant social interactions that resulted in a “lose of face” so if she ever hoped to rent the apartment-- a spacious, partially furnished, two bedroom space which would be a major upgrade from her cramped studio apartment-- she couldn’t make a public scene by becoming a pushy, demanding American.

  For the sake of the apartment she desperately wanted, Melanie fought to regain her composure. Most importantly, she held her tongue and quietly waited for service. Fortunately, the manager provided her with a bit of unexpected entertainment to make the time pass faster.

  She watched with detached amusement as the frail woman attempted to shut the heavy, overstuffed, metal cabinet drawer. Backing several feet away from the cabinet, she ran forward and thrust the full weight of her small frame against the open drawer.  Creaking loudly, the drawer slid inside the cabinet a few inches then stopped. A few seconds later, it violently recoiled sending her flying backwards.

She landed against the long, bamboo counter that divided the small office work into two distinct spaces: an interior work area and an exterior customer service area. The legs of the counter momentarily bowed outward, creaking loudly, as bamboo ribs flexed to absorb then redistribute the manager’s weight throughout its sturdy frame.

          “Oy!” the Manager exclaimed as she surveyed the damage done to the drawer’s contents.  Several mangled folders had torn apart and spewed hundreds of yellow receipts onto the floor. Others were compressed into odd shapes with rippling protuberances that seemed ready to burst open.

          The worried woman looked at the mess strewn on the ground and contemplated whether she should to attempt to close the drawer again. The possibility she might turns weeks of filing work into a hailstorm of yellow paper kept her frozen in thought.

“Maybe you should, uhm, take, uhm, some of the folders, uhm, out of the drawer,” Melanie politely suggested. In fact, as she had watched the sequence of events unfold, she wondered why the manager hadn’t seen the obvious solution to the problem: Too many folders to fit into a small space. Remove excess folders.  

The manager looked at her and shook her head “no”. “I cannot! Owner say all receipts go in ca-bi-net, kah,” she wearily explained pounding her hands on the top of the metal cabinet for emphasis. “Work all finished but ca-bi-net no good. Oy! No good cab-bi-net!” she complained. 

“I think I can help you with your problem, “ Melanie volunteered.

         The manager looked at her and smiled. “Chi, Madam. You big! Big! Strong! Gnat little. Little! You close drawer.” she chirped excitedly.

      “So your name English nickname is Gnat, “ Melanie said chuckling, “Hmmm…interesting.” “By the way, my name is Melanie,” she said pointing to herself. “Me-lan-ie,” Gnat repeated slowly. She motioned for her to come behind the bamboo counter, which Melanie did in short order.

         The filing cabinet was a standard grey metal model about five feet tall and four feet wide. It had six sliding drawers with a built-in locking system. So long as all the drawers were closed, a master key could be inserted into the built-in lock, securing all six simultaneously.

         The first thing Melanie did was open each drawer to conduct a quick inventory of the contents. Five of the six drawers contained folders of yellow receipts. The sixth contained what appeared to be hundreds of pages of legal documents and correspondence. She also noted that the contents of the top five drawers were organized in sequential order, each holding receipts for a 2-year-period. 

Melanie stepped back from the cabinet with a finger pressed to her lips and thought about what to do.

         “I know how to solve this problem,” she finally said,  “You just need to a little reorganization.”

While doing the initial inventory, she observed the first and third cabinet drawers appeared to be full but weren’t. It was obvious to her sloppy filing was the culprit and, with a little effort, she was convinced additional space could be created.  She quickly reorganized the files in the first and second drawers. Next, she grabbed several stacks of file folders from the front and back of the overstuffed second drawer and placed them in proper sequential order in the one of the other two reorganized cabinet drawers. Though all three drawers ended up being overloaded with file folders, Melanie managed to slide each one back into the filing cabinet.

“Viola!” she said proudly as the last drawer slammed shut.

“Kapunakah! Madam, thank you. Thank you,” Gnat said cupping her hands together and touching them to her face while bowing low, in a traditional Thai wei, to show her respect.

 A sly smile etched its way across her face. “Do you think I can see the apartment now?” she asked.

“Chi! Madam! I sorry to keep you waiting. My boss say filing must be done today. Now it finished. Thanks to you,” Gnat said. She grabbed a set of keys from her purse, walked over to the door and flipped the office “open” sign over so it now read “closed”.

“Follow me, Kuh Melanie,” she said holding the door open for her.  Melanie walked out into the lobby and waited for Gnat who stopped to lock the office.

“Apartment is nice. Big rooms. Clean. You like, Gnat make you good deal. You nice to me. Now Gnat be nice to you,” the gleeful manager said taking her by the arm and pulling her toward the elevators located at the back of the lobby.

         Although Gnat was small in stature, she was surprisingly strong. She had a tight grip on Melanie’s arm and the larger woman had to walk fast to keep up with her.  When they reached the elevators, a young African couple was waiting on the elevator, too.   The woman’s face and hair were covered with a black veil.  Her large, black lined eyes were all that were visible. 

Melanie smiled to herself when she realized the woman was wearing a brightly colored, long skirt made from the same material as the thin comforter wrapped around an infant she was cradling and the pair of shorts a little boy of three or four, presumably her son, was wearing.  “A woman after my own heart,” she thought, “very resourceful—let nothing go to waste.”

The doe-eyed-boy had a red string bracelet tied around his wrist. He looked at Melanie and Gnat with an innocent curiosity. Melanie smiled and waved at him. He smiled and waved back. The floor bell rang and the doors to the elevator on the right opened.  The African family entered the elevator first, followed by Gnat.  However, when Melanie stepped into the elevator a buzzer sounded.

         “Madam, you too big!” Gnat said laughing. She poked the fleshy rolls around her waist and gave her a gentle shove out of the elevator back into the lobby. “Apartment on 3rd floor. Take next lift,” she squawked.

         As the elevator doors were closing Melanie noticed the African man was undressing her with his eyes.  When he saw her looking at him, he smiled at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. She thought about it for a moment and realized he hadn’t smiled at her—he leered at her.  

         She waited in the lobby for the next elevator feeling both fat and horribly naked at the same time.