Into The Pool

I was sitting on my veranda the other day, smoking a cigarette, when something interesting happened. It was all very exciting, in its way.

There was a young Thai woman sunbathing poolside, which is in itself an occurrence as rare as teeth in hens. I'd seen her before, she's pretty, and she has a decent figure, but she's no Miss Thailand. The sunbathing thing, the only reason for that would be trying to attract a Farang boyfriend, Thai men run the other way when a woman even comes close to failing The Bag Test, which this woman does already. Whatever, she was out there on a lounge, face up, feet pointing away from me, displaying her secondary-sexual-characteristics in a pleasant manner, wearing the merest hint of a bikini.

I noticed her, but I wasn't staring, I saw her, but I wasn't really looking, more like glancing really, I caught a glimpse . . . I could go on, English has a ridiculous excess of words to express about the same thing.

There was no one else in evidence; it was the hot part of the day and usually it's only the odd Russian and maybe this sunbather who venture out in the April sun. (April is the only month that is crazy hot in Thailand. The remainder of the year is only very hot.)

Suddenly, there was a big splash in the pool. There are seventeen floors of condos looming above the pool, hard to tell from where the thing had fallen, or from what distance, but it was a goodly splash. The ring of waves from the epicenter were pretty high. Whatever it was, it landed in the water far enough from the building to establish that it was thrown, it had not just been dropped off the balcony. The sunbather just cocked her head a little bit to one side, as if to say, I thought I was alone.

When the wave action had died down, I could just make out that there was a cell phone lying on the bottom of the pool.

Now, one of my favorite things in this world of pain is trying to judge whether simultaneous events were related or coincidental.

So, did someone catch her boyfriend staring at the sunbather, grab his phone and toss it into the pool? Did she just catch her boyfriend on the phone with an ex-girlfriend, and the sunbather was just a coincidence? Maybe some guy got bad news from his bookie and took it out on the phone.

These little mysteries of life are really the salt in the stew, don't you think?