A couple of years after we were married, I was working in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I had been there a week or so and Claire was going to meet me in Singapore when I was done in Kuala Lumpur. But it turns out that she got an earlier flight to Kuala Lumpur the day before I was due to leave and we had decided to take the train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. The afternoon that she arrived, I picked her up at the airport and took her to the Embassy while if finished up there. She left her suitcase at the embassy because the embassy driver was going to pick us up and take us to the train station the next day. She only took her “overnight” bag with her to the hotel.
Since I’d been there for a week, all the hotel staff knew me and they all greeted Claire with a smile and a bow. We went out to dinner that night and when we came back to the hotel, the room boy knocked on the door and wanted to know if we’d like to have some champagne or something. Since we’d just had dinner, I said no.
As luck would have it, during the night, I got a phone call that something had gone wrong at the embassy and I’d have to stop by before I left. The next morning, I told Claire to go ahead on to the train station with the driver and the luggage and I’d catch up. After she left, I went downstairs to wait for another car to take me to the embassy. While I was waiting, the room boy came up to me and said that the next time I wanted a Western woman to visit me, to let him know, because he could arrange something much better than I had done on my own last night.
I couldn’t wait to get on the train and tell Claire what the room boy had said. I think her response was something like, “I doubt that very much.”
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