Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  “She lied to us,” Ben said. “All this time she said he was dead and here she was, writing to him. What was she trying to hide, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  Tuấn paused, then shrugged his shoulder. “There are many things we won’t ever understand,” he said. He finished his cereal and walked to the sink.

  “Why didn’t she—” Ben grasped for words with his hands as if they were right in front of him but he couldn’t catch any of them. “Tell us?” was what he settled on.

  “There was a war, Bình.”

  “Ben.” He stood up and followed his brother. The sun streamed in through the window over the sink; there were no blinds there.

  “Ben. There was a war, Ben. Things go horribly wrong during wars. Even without wars, things go horribly wrong all the time. You pick yourself up, you move on, be glad with what you do have. That’s the best we can do sometimes.”

  Ben stood by his brother’s side as he washed the dishes. There had to be a better explanation, he felt. What was his own brother hiding from him? And how could he stand there so calm?

  “Aren’t you angry?” Ben said then.

  Tuấn went on washing; the water was now steaming. It fogged up the window, so he leaned forward and wiped it with a sudsy hand.

  Ben continued, “It’s like, I don’t know, I’ve been seeing a ghost my entire life and now I finally see him, have proof of him—but I can’t grasp him, can’t show him to anyone else. But that ghost is more than just some dead man, some stranger. It’s me. Or part of me. All my life it feels like a part of me has always been gone, a ghost.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “And she could have stopped that from happening. But she didn’t. She didn’t, T, she didn’t!” He heard his own whiny voice and hated it. He changed his tone. “You knew the man—don’t you wanna know what happened?”

  Tuấn let the water run and looked out the window, into the distance. He squinted and Ben thought he must be hurting his eyes and wondered why he was doing that, what he was looking at, out there beyond the bright morning sun.

  “I don’t go into people’s business. I’m over that,” Tuấn told him finally. “I don’t question anybody anything. Everyone has to make choices. Sometimes there’re only bad choices, all of them, each way you look it’s a sea of bad choices, and we just have to pick one, the best one, or maybe just any one.”

  Ben balled his hands into fists, then he let them go. “You don’t understand,” he said, more sad than angry.

  “There was a war,” Tuấn said. “You don’t understand.”

  Ben looked at his brother then and swore he saw tears welling up in his eyes. The sight of his brother on the cusp of such sadness nearly frightened him. He took a step back and felt embarrassed for coming, for bringing any of this up.

  Later that morning, their mother banged on the door. As Tuấn went to answer it, Ben hid in the hall closet. Tuấn’s black eye didn’t seem to reassure her of anything. They were speaking in Vietnamese, which made it hard for Ben to understand, but she sounded angry nonetheless. She left just as abruptly as she came, probably because of work. The last thing Ben heard his brother tell her was “Whatever happened,” something more in Vietnamese, and the word “family.”

  “What you tell her?” Ben asked when she was gone.

  “I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Tuấn looked at his own watch. “She’s upset,” he said and began getting ready for work.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next month, Ben stayed at Tuấn’s. Tuấn thought he’d be helpful because he could stay home all day and be on the lookout for Thảo and the Southern Boyz, who were mad at him for wanting to leave. For two weeks straight, they came and asked where Tuấn was; Ben answered the door and told them he’d moved away and they weren’t in touch anymore.

  Ben, meanwhile, planned what he would do next. School, he felt, was out of the question. He hated it and it hated him, and if his brother did fine leaving, he, too, would carry on the (only) family tradition they had. (Tuấn said he hated that he called it that, and Ben said it was true.)

  He scrapped the plan to move to a different city for now—too expensive, even if he had a job. He kept the idea in the back of his mind; it was always a possibility later.

  A job was a good place to start. His brother worked as a busboy at an oyster house in the Quarter. He couldn’t work in the Quarter since his mother worked there, too. (For the same reason, he stopped going to Paradise altogether.) One afternoon, Tuấn came home with a flyer he found stuck in the window of a coffee shop. missing it said on the top, and under that showed a picture from last year’s yearbook. They were plastered all over the Quarter, his brother said. “I feel like I’m housing a felon here.”

  He started job hunting by circling ads in the newspapers. He’d visit the place before he applied to make sure he liked it enough, and if he did, he asked for an interview. With all the time in the world now, he encountered places in the city he never had before. The old clutter of Tremé and the Quarter gave way to the rundown housing projects in Iberville, which transformed into tall, clean buildings in the Business District, which was a world away from the Garden District and its opulent homes behind iron fences.

  The large white house on St. Charles Avenue with purple trimming and a wraparound porch was the address the man on the phone gave him. They were a couple: two professors at UNO who were too busy, the man said, to pay attention to the smaller but necessary things of life. They were looking for someone to do housework—cleaning the mildew from the shower; laundering the clothes (his word, “launder”), the bedsheets, and kitchen towels; some light food preparation now and then. They’d placed an ad in the Times-Picayune. Ben did not usually read the Times-Picayune but one day, on a whim, decided to get a copy.

  Ben walked up the steps. He tightened his tie. How odd, he was thinking when he reached the door, that this was the first time he’d ever seen a doorbell. None of the apartments in Versailles had them. Neither did any of the homes he visited in New Orleans East. He knew this was an embarrassing fact, and he swore he would not say it aloud in case they would think of him differently. He pressed the doorbell.

  The man, Mr. Lars Schreiber—no, Professor Schreiber, or was it Doctor Schreiber?—opened the door. He wore a polo shirt tucked into his pants. His arm muscles bulged under the shirt’s tightness. The head of thick hair was already graying, matching his mustache.

  “Early,” he said, pleased. “Come in!” The professor led Ben to his library. Wood shelves lined the walls, each filled neatly with books. Two leather wing chairs sat near the window, which looked out into the street. Between the chairs was a large marble globe. It was what Ben expected from a professor.

  The interview commenced. What experience did he have with cleaning? Did he have experience in housekeeping? Laundry—did he know not to wash clothes on Hot? Why was that? Did he know how to treat a spot? The man had a light accent. It was vaguely European, not English or French, but something else that made his words topsy-turvy. What has he cooked? No real matter. Could he follow directions? That’s what this all really is: directions. When could he start? Great.

  “Great,” Ben said, shaking Schreiber’s hand. He had a strong grip, and Ben was tempted to squeeze back even harder, though he knew he couldn’t. Up close, Ben noticed, the professor had a strong woodsy, earthy scent, some type of cologne. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow,” Schreiber repeated as he waved goodbye and closed the door.

  Ben arrived at Schreiber’s every weekday at eight in the morning. The first day, he was given the key to let himself in. On the kitchen counter, a note would be left telling him what needed to be done. Sometimes the Schreibers would be gone; often they were still getting ready for work. Over time, the job turned out to be more than housework. Sometimes, they had him outside d
oing yard work. Other times, they had him help with their research. Mrs. Schreiber—Elaine—was an art history professor and asked him every now and then to go up to NOMA to take photos of art or look up books at its library and photocopy pages. Schreiber, on the other hand, was a literature professor. When he asked Ben to go to the UNO library to check out a few journals, Ben told him he couldn’t: he wasn’t a student, being a high school dropout and all. Schreiber said he would take care of it and the next day gave him a library card to UNO. It had Ben’s name and a barcode, and under it all, Special Assistant/Guest of Faculty.

  “You’ve been, how they say, upgraded,” Schreiber said.

  Because the library was bigger than any other he’d ever been to, Ben used the card to his advantage. As he checked out archive copies of The Comparatist or the Journal of Modern Literature, he also borrowed books he meant to read: Jane Eyre, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Germinal—books assigned to seniors in high school. He could enjoy them now. He went through them at his own pace without having to wait for the dumb students to catch up. He read them during his lunch breaks in between mopping the floors and having to catch the bus to the museum to take a photo.

  Schreiber didn’t even know about his reading habits—Ben didn’t feel he needed to know—until nearly a year after hiring him, before the start of the fall semester, when Ben had to return to the professor’s house; he’d left his copy of Madame Bovary.

  He rang the doorbell, and Schreiber answered. They were about to sit down for dinner. The professor asked if he needed anything. Ben didn’t answer (they were at that stage of their relationship, employer and employee, but also friendly and casual—Ben did clean their bathrooms, three of them, after all), but walked past the professor and into the library. He searched the desk, then the chairs.

  “Did you leave something behind?”

  “Madame Bovary. I left Madame Bovary behind.”

  “Oh, I shelved it,” said Schreiber, walking over to the bookcase. His fingers glided over Faulkner and Fielding and Fitzgerald and stopped at Flaubert. “I thought it was mine.”

  “The spine sticker should’ve been a giveaway,” Ben said. He took the book and threw it in his backpack. Before he left for the door, he said, “Sorry.”

  Ben would read several pages each night. Each morning, before heading off to work, Schreiber would ask him how the reading was going, what he thought about this aspect of the book or that, what kind of ideas did he have about what it was trying to say and how it was going about saying it. What was it saying? He must have seen him as some type of novelty, Ben thought: an immigrant boy who dropped out of high school who cleans houses (one house) and reads books. He was not a novelty, he was not some monkey. It reminded Ben of the tourists in the Quarter, pointing and staring at everything. The professor was no better. Ben answered the man’s questions. When he finished the book, the professor gave him another: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Crime and Punishment, and, for the sake of diversity, the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. By the end of the year, when Ben was looking at the instructions for putting up a Christmas tree, Schreiber said: “You’re an intelligent young man. Very intelligent. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Your house?”

  “Putting up a tree. Sweeping kitchens. Laundering.” He was drinking whiskey, but he was not drunk.

  It was the first time anyone had called him that: intelligent and young man. “Don’t waste a life. Let me help you.” Schreiber said.

  With Schreiber’s help, Ben passed his GED test after his eighteenth birthday and got into Delgado Community. Two years later, he quit his position as the professor’s assistant and started at UNO as a junior, thanks to Schreiber’s pulling of a bureaucratic string here and moving a stack of papers there. Ben came to UNO with a scholarship for gifted literature scholars with Schreiber his strongest advocate.

  Ben remembered thanking the professor so many times when he learned about being accepted into UNO. He felt silly—“embarrassed” was more the right word—for being overly thankful. But he was.

  “No one has ever cared so much,” he wrote in a Hallmark card. He never had a chance to mail it off or give it to him. It sat in a drawer in his desk in his dorm—his very own room, the first in his life.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of his first semester, Ben was invited to Schreiber’s year-end dinner. It came as a surprise to Ben: the dinner was just for the professor’s graduate students. He was the only undergraduate, but Schreiber said, “You’re on their intellectual level.”

  He arrived at Schreiber’s place early, a tub of store-bought cookies under one arm. He thought it was important to bring something.

  There was one other student when Ben arrived, a girl who had curly brown hair and orange freckles on her pale cheeks. The frames of her glasses made her eyes look bigger than they really could have been and her turtleneck shirt made her look skinnier and taller than she was.

  Schreiber introduced her as Stella and then he pointed at Ben with his hand and said, “The junior I’ve been telling you about,” which made Ben blush. Elaine was explaining to Stella about the art they collected. While her specialty was modernism, she collected Asian art—ceramics, lacquerware, woodblock prints. Ben followed them around the living room as Elaine talked about her collection.

  The doorbell rang and two other students came in. They introduced themselves and were pouring bottles of wine when the doorbell rang again and another student entered. All of them were white, and Ben had trouble telling them apart. For the evening, he noted a particular feature each had and in his mind called them that. The guy wearing a blue cardigan was called “Cardigan.” The other guy who had a nose ring became “Rings.” And the girl wearing knee-high, multicolored socks was named “Socks.”

  “Tati is not feeling well,” Cardigan announced. Ben could not imagine anyone among them being named Tati and assumed it must have been short for something else.

  They had all come from across the country to work with Schreiber. Most of them were studying poets and their works. Rings and Socks were both doing their dissertations on Emily Dickinson, while Stella interjected to say that she didn’t care for Dickinson that much.

  “Take away my feminist badge!” she trumpeted. “I don’t like her experimentations. It just isn’t my taste. If you’re gonna say something, say it straight, don’t stay it slant, for Pete’s sake.” Stella, Ben learned, was a second-year PhD student, and she was the outlier out of all of them. Her dissertation was going to be about more contemporary writers. She liked the dirty realists most of all. (“I would let Raymond Carver fuck me,” she would say later that night.)

  Cardigan, who threw away his research and was starting all over again on something about Flannery O’Connor, held up his wineglass to say that he agreed and that he didn’t like the political correctness of the day and that it hindered good, serious scholarship. If only Bob Dole were president, Cardigan said. He’d voted for Bob Dole, and life would have been different if Bob Dole had won. Sometimes he called Bob Dole “Bobby.”

  The dining room was set with eight plates for the six students plus the hosting couple. Elaine took away one set since Tati wasn’t able to make it, which she said was “a shame.” The smell of what must have been roasting chicken drifted out from the kitchen as both Schreibers ran back and forth between the kitchen and dining room, each time carrying a bowl or plate of food for the table. When they got up, Ben felt, as if by reflex, he had to get up, too. The first time he did it, Elaine patted his hand.

  Before dinner started, Professor Schreiber said he wanted to have a word.

  “Every year at the end of the first semester, I love to bring together my best pupils for a dinner celebration. A life in academia is not easy. It’s thankless work. And obscure work!” Here everyone laughed. “But we are doing important work. We’re adding some great and ne
cessary thinking to our fields, and the canon will be better for it. This dinner celebration is not only for what we have done but what we will do.”

  “Hear! Hear!” someone said.

  “To the stuff of life!” Schreiber said, and everyone raised their glasses and drank.

  It was not the first time Ben drank alcohol, but it was the first time he tasted wine. It surprised him how sweet it was, how very unlike the beers he’d had. And with that, the dinner began.

  * * *

  —

  At one point, after the main course but before the dessert—a choice between pecan and apple pies, frozen because the couple still didn’t have time—Cardigan, who wasn’t wearing a cardigan anymore, asked Ben what it was that he was studying.

  “You’re the undergrad he’s always yakking about in class. The one doing comparative lit,” he added.

  “That’s him?” Rings asked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “We’ve read your paper, you know,” said Stella.

  “I remember the title: ‘False Temporalities in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: The Misuses of Time and Realism and the Advent of Postmodernism,’ ” pronounced Socks.

  Ben blushed. Outside of the library, outside of Schreiber’s office, it sounded ridiculous. Who out there cared about Madame Bovary or Flaubert? His mother had wanted them, Tuấn and him, to one day have proper, practical jobs. Ben would be a lawyer, she told him, and Tuấn would be a doctor. They would use their minds and skills to make the world a better place. None of that happened. Nothing ever happened the way you wanted.

  “I only liked the title,” Cardigan was saying.

  “It was a bit underdeveloped,” said Socks. “I mean, it seems clever on one level but then unsubstantiated on another.” She used her hands as if to diagram the situation in question, her right one atop the left.