by Paul Theroux
But the answer was no—no to the cupola, no to Nhu’s staff quarters, no to the bocce court, no to the helipad, never to this lovely home.
I said, “If I’d listened to people who said ‘never’ to me, I wouldn’t have gotten to this island in the first place.”
My rage made the committee members smile, they enjoyed the illusion that they were more powerful than me, thumbs-down to the Junk Man. And yet what pleased them most was the thought that, deep down, they knew they were all exactly like me—parvenus and opportunists.
“We wish we could help,” Rotberg said smugly. The others agreed, they moved on to other business, and I drove home, still furious.
Nhu was at the kitchen counter, sorting beans.
“I need a drink. Vodka.”
“Olinch?”
“On the rocks. Splash of tonic.”
“Was a messis fom da pumma.”
“About the Jacuzzi?”
“No. Hakoochi wuck okay. Da pumma fom da Bidding Mittee.”
“I just left there. The Building Committee turned me down.”
I felt a little self-conscious confiding my defeat to my Vietnamese housekeeper. But she didn’t flinch, did not react at all, so I went on.
Just then the doorbell rang—Nickerson, the plumber from the committee. I looked at him and thought, “Ecosystem,” “impacted,” “parameters.” I blocked the entrance of my house with my body and said, “Yes?”
He looked a bit chastened, facing me on his own.
“The thing is, Mr. Barghorn, you can resubmit your plan with appropriate changes. You left the meeting before we explained that.”
“Why would I want to make changes?”
He blinked at me. “That way you might get your permit. Your plans have to conform.”
“You mean I have to please you?”
“So to speak.”
I laughed and banged the door in his face.
But the moment I was alone I felt isolated, as though I had shut myself out and was stuck here. I hated living in someone else’s idea of a house. Yet to amend my blueprints, to build a house to someone else’s specifications, was not how I had lived my life. I wanted my own or none at all, yet I could not summon the strength to fight them. And I began to think that I might have retired to the wrong place.
So I sat, uncomfortably, mentally rejecting them all, and I heard an almost inaudible cluck and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a creature in the doorway—Nhu.
“Soy,” she said softly in a tone of regret. “Vey soy.”
I was moved to think that she who had nothing was trying to share the disappointment of someone who had everything.
“Never mind,” I said, embarrassed at being consoled by this skinny little doll crouching in the corner.
“Me may noodoo.”
“Thanks.”
“You wan nudda drin?”
“One more vodka.”
“Olinch?”
“Orange would be very nice.”
She brought the drink. I sat and felt calm. She brought noodles and some dishes on a tray, stir-fried shrimp and bamboo shoots.
“Where did this come from?”
“My foo.”
She crouched by my chair while I ate and drank, and we watched a rerun of an old episode of I Love Lucy, and Nhu murmured with satisfaction. And while all this was happening I thought, I don’t need them, I don’t need anyone. And I slept better that night.
The next day Nhu was up early, baking muffins. She toasted one and served it to me, with green tea, on the deck overlooking the Sound.
I said, “They wouldn’t let me build my house.”
She shrugged.
“And they said no to the staff quarters, where you were going to live.”
She shrugged again. She had a very convincing shrug that conveyed utter indifference. This was the First World but she was from the Third. Her mode of survival was: Learn to do without. Don’t get angry. Don’t show emotion. Beware of needing anything.
“I have the feeling they want us to leave the island.”
“No can sweem.”
Funny! She made a face, wrinkled her nose—clever doll. But her lesson was salutary. I was the needy one. If I was to stay here, I had to learn to be more like her.
I said I had to go into town to buy groceries.
“I geev lees.”
“Don’t bother with a list. Why don’t you just come along?”
And so she did, without a murmur, hopped into the Bronco, smiled as I drove, and at the supermarket hurried ahead of me, tossing items into the trolley that I was pushing. Back home she helped me carry the food into the house. I thought, She makes life easy for me. None of my wives had ever inspired such a grateful thought.
And what was Nhu’s life? Living in the back room, sleeping in a narrow cot, sitting with her fists against her cheeks watching a tiny TV, smoking cigarettes, and slurping noodles. Or else it was fish heads and rice, and early to bed.
We drove one day to Siasconset, and parked facing seaward, and I sat looking for shore birds with my binoculars. Then she drove slowly along the coast, so that I could watch an osprey building a nest on top of a dead tree. I was eating a NutRageous bar. I gave her a piece.
“Rishus!”
I thought, Life could be this simple.
That night I continued to drink after dinner. Nhu had a waitress’s instinct for appearing from nowhere when my glass was empty and asking if I wanted more.
“Sit here,” I said.
She resisted, then she sat on the edge of the chair, like a bird teetering on a branch.
“Drink?”
She said yes with her eyes and a certain motion of her head, and then, “Bland.”
“This brandy is twenty-five years old,” I said.
“Lie me!”
The way she perched and drank made me anxious, for she seemed to be balancing rather than sitting. But after she had two more drinks, her manner of perching seemed a good indication that she could hold her liquor, a rare thing among the Asiatics I had done business with.
I put my arm around her. She stiffened and moved so that she was perched on an even smaller portion of the sofa, as though about to take flight. She faced forward and said, “Nup.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You want sess? No can do sess wee me. We flen. If we do sess, I no can wuck, no can crean, and wha. No be flen.”
I remembered with shame the shocked and disgusted way she had said, Him tuss me. So I poured her another drink, which she held in her hand, and she looked serious.
“If we do sess, me pain here,” and she touched her heart.
We had another drink and then she said good night and went to her room, and to my shame I heard her double-lock her door, the key, the dead bolt. Now I was another employer of whom she could say, Him try tuss me.
But she stayed. I was careful not to presume upon her, and after a while I began to feel a certain relief knowing the limits of my friskiness and the boundaries of my friendship. I reminded myself that I was her employer and how much she mattered to me, how essential her good humor and efficiency were to my well-being on this island.
That was how things stood between us for several summer months. In those months we worked out a routine: she cleaned, I read the paper, then did my desk work. On rainy days we had lunch at home—Nhu eating in the kitchen, me in the dining room. On good days we had lunch on my boat and then went for a run, and I drank beer and steered, and she fished, trolling from the stern. She was good at it—knew the lures, knew the bait, knew the best speed. After a while I would anchor on a shoal and she’d cast for stripers, and now and then caught one, or bluefish, or pollock. She drank beer, too, and after a few would tell stories about the islanders she knew—about cruel husbands, or drunken wives, or unruly kids. She seemed to know most of the people on the island, the millionaires as well as the locals. She did not envy a single one of them, nor was she dazzled by their wealth; her stories were always pityin
g or gently patronizing.
She was fishing one day on a shoal, the boat anchored, the ebbing tide bubbling with rockweed making the current visible over the shelf of rocks, the greeny-black water purling and frothing. With nothing to do, I propped myself on a cushion and drowsed.
I did not hear her fall over the side, the shoal was so splashy and loud. But something made me mutter to her, and getting no response I tipped up the bill of my cap and saw the empty afterdeck. Then I called out and heard nothing but the current coursing past my hull.
I ran to the side and saw, some distance off, her little head and sprawling hair and one reaching hand, being slapped by the chop and bobbing among the standing waves of the shoal.
I threw out a life preserver on a fixed line and leaped in after it, holding the line. I was yanked in her direction and easily reached her, because I was swimming and she wasn’t. I snatched at her, lost her in the foam, then swam forward and found her kicking foot, so small I could get my whole hand around it. Then her ankle and arm, and soon I had her upright and she was choking and coughing—a good sign, I thought.
Keeping her faced away from me for safety, I held her under her arms.
“You okay?”
“Blaup!” She gagged, she spat, she struggled.
I gave her the life ring to hold, and still she choked and spewed water. We floated for a while in the stiff current of the shoal, and when she was calmer, breathing more easily, I tugged her back to the boat.
She tried not to show her fear, she said she was fine, yet the terror was on her face and in her eyes. She had never looked more like an animal, more helpless, colder, more frightened. She sat wrapped in a blanket—she would not take off her clothes in front of me—modesty even in a near-death experience. We went home without saying much.
I said, “You didn’t catch anything.”
“Catch coh. No fitch.”
She insisted on making dinner for me, and it was a special dinner, stir-fried prawns and bamboo shoots and water chestnuts from her stock of delicacies and imported provisions. Soup made with fresh-picked lemongrass from the pot outside her door, mango pickle, and salted duck eggs from God knows where.
I had not noticed how she was dressed until after I finished eating and she came to me in the living room, wearing her Vietnamese ao dai, her blue and white gown, and looking angelic. I was on the sofa, working on my fourth whiskey, half stupefied from the meal and the boat trip and the effort of the rescue.
“Wan somefin?”
My glass was half full. I said, “This is fine.”
“Wan some uvver? Uvverfin?”
I was bewildered. I was not hungry and could not understand her pampering manner, for I was fine. She was the one who had had a scare, not me. She lifted the sides of her gown and sat beside me.
“Want tuss?”
Only then I realized she was offering herself. I said, “You don’t want that.”
She nodded with such solemnity that I smiled.
“You say me.”
“You were easy to save.”
“You say my lie.”
“I was glad to.”
“Can tuss,” she said, lowering her eyes in a way that was both coquettish and demure.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. But I also thought, If she feels that way, it’s money in the bank.
That was a defining day. It was as though she was saying, You saved my life, and so I am here because of you, and therefore my life is yours. But I did not take advantage of her. I was careful to remind her that we were still friends, that she was an employee, that I was grateful to her for helping me. Of course she remembered my drunken and indecent proposal from earlier in the summer, the thing I had wanted. She was willing to grant that to me now, out of gratitude.
All I wanted was to sit beside her, drink with her, hold her hand sometimes, watch the terns diving over the marsh grass at sunset. And sitting there, I thought: This is perfect. I don’t need that big house. I am happy here, doing this.
“You are Buddhist.”
“Ya.”
“But no temple on the island.”
“Temper hee,” she said, and touched her heart.
We had short conversations, and afterward long silences. The silences were the most telling, because they expressed our deepest contentment. I wanted nothing more and for nothing to change.
Not long after that, she woke me in the middle of the night, startling me until I saw her small figure shivering beside my bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Canna slee.”
“Why not?”
“Bah dree.”
“What kind of dream?”
“Folly offa bow.”
A drowning dream.
“Say me. Plee, say me.”
She got into my bed, and as with the business in the ocean, and the way we hung on to each other in the water, it wasn’t just me, it was something both of us badly wanted.
Days of bliss followed. Weeks. We were more than a couple, we were a team! After we started sleeping together I didn’t know whether to pay her more or to stop paying her entirely. I asked her. She said, “Same.” More money was like prostitution, no money was presumption. I wanted to do the right thing, because I didn’t want this to end.
The routine suited me—paperwork and phone calls after breakfast, a nap after lunch, a drive to the dunes after the nap, and birdwatching or else fishing, some effort in order to stimulate a thirst, a drink before dinner, and then early to bed, Nhu beside me.
One day early on in this blissful period, we went clamming at low tide out on the harbor flats. She dug a bushel. Her first time handling a clamming fork and she’s hoisting twenty pounds of littlenecks and quahogs and I am hooting in admiration and hugging her.
“Why you lie me?”
“Because I’ve never known anyone like you,” I said. “You’re always, ‘Okay, boss!’ You don’t bitch.”
She was much too cheerful to care how I praised her and I could not explain how much she meant to me. She washed my car, she trimmed my hair, she mixed drinks for me, she cooked for me, she caught fish and fried it, she made me laugh, she aroused me.
How old was she? Mid-twenties, maybe, as she’d said—no memory of the Vietnam War but intimate knowledge of its aftermath.
“My fadda take me to jungoo. He see snae, bih snae! He catch snae and—yum! yum!”
Snake-eating in the thickets of the Delta.
“He plan rye. Me hep.”
Father and daughter, knee-deep in the paddy fields, bending over their reflections.
“And then you came here.”
“Bludda come. He hep me come affa.”
Less than half my age but she had lived as much as I had. We were made for each other. When I was with her I forgot who I was, and I had the impression that when she was with me she was similarly euphoric. I hardly considered the strangeness of it all, that I was a multimillionaire cohabiting with my maid in a mansion on Nantucket, for I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
You tend to see yourself most objectively when you imagine how other people see you; other people’s eyes are colder. But there were no other people around. We were isolated enough here so that I seldom thought about our living arrangement, and when I did think about it I was just grateful. More weeks went by, but time moved at a different pace now, because I was happy. I had stopped thinking about building the grand house on the Neck. I was reconciled to living on this island in this secondhand mansion, because this woman was making me happy, and this was possible because she was happy.
I wanted nothing more. She wanted nothing more. The Buddhists are right: eliminate all desire and you’ve found peace.
“I lie you. You happy. No worry.”
When the person you love returns your compliments, you know all is well.
All would have been well—nothing would have changed—if we had stayed in the little clapboard paradise we had made, of meals and naps, noodles and clammin
g, early to bed and up at first light. All was well, but there came a change.
The Figawi Ball at the Club was an annual islanders-only gala, held around Memorial Day after the big Figawi Race from Hyannis, before the summer people arrived. I had avoided the event, because as a youth I had been a waiter and a hired hand at the Club, and I knew it would bother me to see the members and be reminded of the suffering menial I had been.
Going was Nhu’s idea, but she raised the subject as an example of pure irony, which was how I knew that it meant a lot to her. We were at the market and she saw the Figawi Ball poster taped to the front window.
“Crab dan.”
“A perfect way of describing it.”
“We go togevva, yah!”
The very idea of going was out of the question, and so she joked about going, even joked about what T-shirt she would wear, and which sneakers, to the great island event, open to Club members only, the tickets hard to get and expensive. Even the Brazilian menials knew about it and tried to work at it, just to be part of the glamour.
“You want to go?”
“Crab dan?”
“Right.”
“Yah. For dan and seen. Ha!”
Understanding the profound impossibility she was suggesting with this mockery, I said, “Okay, we’re going.”
We were in the car by then, driving back to the house. She went silent, she was pale, I saw she was terrified.
“No can,” she said. Then she pleaded, “No crab dan.”
“You’re my guest.”
“No got dreh for way.”
“I’ll buy you a dress.”
“Cannot for dan.”
“No dancing. We’ll just sit. We’ll eat. We’ll drink wine.”
“Adda peepoo!”
But she knew all the other people on the island—more than I knew, and she knew them intimately.
I had made my peace with the island. I had given up the idea of building my mansion on the Neck, but I had no intention of leaving. I thought: If I’m going to live here, these people will have to get used to me. They’ll have to understand who I am and what I do. I am proud of my life. This was not a summer fling with my housekeeper. Winter had come and gone. Spring was here. Summer was coming. The rest of my life was coming.
