Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  I came home that first day, and thought about my life. I looked in the mirror and I saw such an ugly face, and dark yellow skin. I did not even recognise myself. I scratched my cheek and then saw black under my fingernails. I scratched everywhere and it was black—my body was sweating black, like dirt. I thought to myself, How can I touch a woman like this? I thought about my loneliness and tears flowed down my face. I had to lock myself in the toilet to hide from the other men. I promised myself that I would work and work to get out of my horrible situation. I saved money to buy crocodile logo shirts and a ticket to Vietnam, and I went back to find a Vietnamese woman.

  I wish you could see what my wife was like back then. She was the youngest daughter in a family of four daughters, so shy and small. When I visited the house, she wore a white áo dài, like a schoolgirl. She barely said a word. I asked permission to take her to a café. She sat on the back of my scooter, and when I swerved or stopped abruptly, she grabbed onto my waist. She chirped like a bird, every time, it was so sweet. I thought, oh, now I have this pretty winged thing on my back, and I should marry her.

  But my wife is so lazy, you know. She came to live with me in Paris and complained about the size of the apartment. Now she complains that I am old. She complains about everything. I made her wash my clothes, but she said that she would not touch my work clothes because my work is disgusting, the barley from the factory sticks to her fingers, and there is always grease on my pants. She thinks it is beneath her, that is the truth. She complains that she does not have her sisters around to talk to. She complains that she does not have new clothes and handbags. I tell her to go and work for money if she wants new clothes. Plenty of Vietnamese women work in hair and nail salons in Paris. So she says to me, How can you bear to bring the woman you love away from her home and make her clean the feet of white people? Such a lazy thing. She will not work and she sits at home watching Vietnamese TV shows. She does not even try to learn French. And she grows fat. The woman you love, she says. I confide in you, brother, that the thought of love had never crossed my mind.

  While we are in Vietnam, she is staying in the Sofitel in Sài Gòn. That’s where she makes her sisters visit her. With my money, she buys them bottles of Chanel perfume and crocodile shirts. She buys as much as she can, and if I try to stop her, she says, You stole my life! She says it all the time. You stole my life! What a failure am I, to have stolen something of no value.

  What’s the matter? No, I am not drunk. I am sure you are not happy with your life either. I know you. Look at this godforsaken land. Men like us, we are always dreaming, always dreaming. There is always some place we are heading for, isn’t there, or there would be no sense in suffering for it. At the end of the war, Vietnam was such a sad and ruined country, like somebody’s plaything. I thought to myself, I will go to a country where the people are rich and powerful and I will learn their ways. On the refugee boat, I was lying beside a soldier whose leg was infected with gangrene, so I tried not to breathe and I made a promise to myself: I will succeed, oh, I promise, I promise I will. It was unbearable for him, and for us all, because his leg was rotting and the rot crept higher up his body every day. Somebody told him that it would soon reach his heart and kill him. We thought about throwing him off the boat, and sometimes he wanted us to, because the pain was so great. But of course it is hard for a man to decide to die, and it is hard to tell a man to die. So in the end, we threw him off the boat.

  Will you believe that I did not feel anything? I was not his friend, I did not know his name—those things don’t matter on a boat like that. There is a lot of death, and no time to agonise. I arrived in France and life got harder every day. I told myself, this is not it, not yet. I wanted to gain riches from France so that I could return home to Vietnam, where I belonged. I wanted to change, to succeed, so that I could bring it all back home. In my mind, home was a beautiful country, kind women, and good food—food unmatched anywhere, not even by the French. This is where I am stupid, my brother. I dreamed up an ideal home. But what has become of this country, rotten with the Communist gangrene?

  On nights like this, I ask myself where I am heading. Have I reached my destination? Is it this yard in a stinking fishing village in the south? Is it Sài Gòn, where my fat wife is emptying my bank account to buy perfume? Is it the apartment in Paris, so small that I hide drunk in the toilet every weekend? Or is it in America with the slaughtered chickens? That is the fate of the immigrant: always the dumb hope that we are going somewhere. Somewhere, somewhere, what a curse the word is, and yet it has infested my flesh. What do you want, my brother? Where do you dream to go? Is it somewhere with beaches, a big new house? Are there skyscrapers in the background and neon signs? How beautiful is the woman? Tell me, how soft is her hair and how does she hold you when you are worried?

  But you must be sick of me. I have been such a terrible host, carrying on all this time about my tedious story. You must hate me. And how do I feel about you? I don’t know, brother. I still cannot tell if you will rob me or not, you have been so mysterious and quiet. And here I am, I have talked myself into a drunken stupor. I am weak and you must do what you will, that is how it is. Perhaps it is not so bad, is it? Perhaps it is better that you want something of mine and it will be no different afterwards, except that you will have the things instead of me. If I could just have one request, it is that, if you rob me, if you take my shirt and my phone and my money, please take my wife too. Be thorough. Take my passport. The French will not be able to tell us apart and it will be easy for you to live my life because I have just told you how. Now my head is heavy and aches for the net of the hammock. Nothing will be better than to sink into it. I will wake in the morning with no clothes on, my mouth crusted with squid and saliva and my skin red from this fire. Unless you incinerate me in it, and those sap trees nearby melt down to rivers of glue and cover the whole village in black smoke. What a pair we make, you and me, brother, two robbers in the night.

  I was dating a new guy. He was on my mind as I stirred a saucepan of black beans and water in my little kitchen in Arlington County. I had said something terrible to him. The white eyes of the beans were magnified beneath the water and filled me with sudden paranoia. I turned down the heat and let the pot simmer.

  For our first date, Sean had taken me to an Italian restaurant in DC, where my vegetables were puréed and squeezed out into flowers around my plate. I couldn’t tell what they were, maybe a blend of squash, peas and Brussel sprouts, whipped into a cool blue cream. What would he think if he saw me picking at a week-old rotisserie chicken or manhandling a jumbo-sized bag of frozen peas from Capitol Supermarket?

  Sean said I smelt of madeleines. I’d been testing a new mix of essential oils: four parts orange zest, one part lemon, one part vanilla, and a touch of lavender. Sean told me how, on his way to high school in New Haven, he used to pass a French patisserie where they sold orange-peel madeleines in white boxes with gold lettering. The day after our first date, he sent a box from the Georgetown Bakery to my workplace. Two golden discs nestled in blue tissue paper and a simple card: ‘Areej.’ I assumed somebody at a stationery shop had written my name, but later Sean told me he did it himself. His handwriting was exquisite. I ate the madeleines on the train home.

  I had a lot to think about as I watched the water bubble. Did I have any tomatoes left? I had been thinking about tomatoes all day. Yesterday at work, Guillermo, the new intern, showed me Neruda’s ‘Oda al Tomate’ and in the evening, I ran around the Wakefield High School track in Arlington, thinking about the tomato juices in the poem, cold and fresh, la totalidad de su frescura, and imagining lying down on the conference room floor with Guillermo next to the watercooler that bubbled like a forest stream. After the run, I got ready to go to Sean’s.

  The beans were overcooked; I could smell it in the smoke from the pot. But when I tasted them, I decided that the smokiness worked with the flavour, and the crispy edges were a nice texture.

  I balanced the pot on
the arm of the couch, where the faux leather was already cracking and ripped. I wondered where Sean was now. Probably still at the Dupont Circle bar since happy hour, rubbing a sheen of orange Buffalo wing sauce onto his phone screen. I had told him that I was busy tonight, that I had promised to Skype my dad.

  ‘Send him my regards,’ Sean had said as I was leaving his apartment this morning. I don’t know if anybody has ever sent Dad their regards before. Certainly not a senator’s staff assistant.

  I sniffed as I shook out my hair from its bun: it reeked of garlic. When I worked part-time at Dad’s takeout shop in Sixteen Mile Stand, Ohio, my hair always smelled of garlic, from the garlic-batter shrimp curry.

  Dad took everything he could from Grandma’s traditional Punjabi kitchen and deep-fried it in buttermilk batter. Even the rice was tossed in oil, cloves and chicken salt.

  ‘You know what this is, Areej?’ Dad used to say, pumping oil out of a plastic canister. ‘This is fusion Pakistani-American food. You should take notes.’

  His accent dragged down the u in ‘fusion’, adding four more beats to the word, like a handful of garam masala tossed into a bowl of cornflakes. I laughed and did take notes on how to avoid his accent. In DC, ‘fusion’ was pronounced with the curt, funnelled u and the dishes were deconstructed on long rectangular plates, with slices of pickled ginger on the side.

  Send him my regards…Sean looked at me in the same earnest way he did whenever he asked me why I was laughing. He asked it all the time. The first few times, I said, very sweetly, ‘At you, you knob.’

  This morning, as he was eating me out, he asked again. I was laughing because he was stroking my legs. I was ticklish and I screamed, ‘At you, you fuck!’ He stopped and looked at me. I just wanted to finish. He went back down and stroked the length of my thighs to my calves, where his fingers encircled my limbs. I wanted to thrash from the feeling of his cool tongue inside me, but he had me pinned. He stroked the nook under my right knee, pressing deeper and deeper as I came, laughing and screaming. As he leaned up to kiss me, I tasted sourness on his lips and decided to be kind to him.

  Afterwards, we were sitting on the lawn of the Washington Monument, where the Navy Band Northeast was playing Prokofiev badly. He took my hand.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said.

  I looked up and was shocked at how unfamiliar his face seemed. His bright blue eyes, the hue of blue sports drinks, were so concerned (What are you thinking? Are you having a good time?). I lifted my hand to close his eyelids, but stopped myself just in time.

  ‘What?’ he whispered.

  I rested my hand on his cheek.

  ‘What,’ he said again, even more softly.

  So I said:

  ‘I love you.’ I laughed, and went home to cook the black beans.

  I woke up later that night with my face in the cracked leather and my breath smelling like garlic. I had fallen asleep with Breaking Bad still playing on my laptop. My housemate, Payal, back from parent-teacher night at Wakefield High School, where she was a careers counsellor, was swearing loudly in the bathroom. I got up to investigate and found her wrestling with the large bucket I had left by the sink. I helped her pull the bucket upright and the red liquid sloshed over the floor.

  ‘What the fuck is this, did you period into this thing?’ said Payal.

  ‘No, fuck you. It’s the wine I’m making. It’s not supposed to be opened for another month,’ I said.

  I squatted over the bucket, shoving the thick lid back into its seal, even though I knew it was too late.

  ‘You could have warned me. I’m not cleaning it up,’ said Payal.

  She had taken off her underwear and was stepping into the bathtub. ‘Fucking wine in the bathroom,’ she muttered.

  I mopped up the wine with an old shirt from the laundry basket, but most of the spill had already seeped into the exposed concrete where the tiles were cracked.

  As I bent over, my head began to spin. Heaving, I leaned into the toilet bowl, globs of spit dangling from my tongue. Payal stood under the shower, watching me.

  ‘Why do you drink when it makes you such a fucking mess?’

  ‘I didn’t drink that much.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, just feel kinda weird.’

  ‘Tell me and I’ll help you clean this up.’

  ‘Don’t treat me like one of your kids.’

  ‘Tell me in one word.’

  ‘What? I don’t know the word,’ I said.

  ‘Think harder.’

  ‘Payal, I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s it feel like?’

  ‘Disgust.’

  ‘What are you disgusted with? Sean?’ she asked.

  ‘You said one word.’

  Her shoulders drooped. ‘Okay…Have you had dinner? I was gonna make a cheesy-potato bake.’

  I was so hungry. We went into the kitchen, where I watched her peel eight potatoes and slice them into thin disks. I felt better as she lined up the disks in a tray and poured in a milk-butter-mozzarella batter.

  The next evening, at a ball in the Library of Congress, Sean introduced me to his boss.

  ‘Areej. Is that Arabic?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Pakistani.’

  ‘I mean, what language do you speak?’

  ‘English,’ I said, enjoying the panic on Sean’s face.

  Everyone Sean introduced me to that night had asked where I was from. I took a passing hors d’oeuvre and bit into the hard bread topped with chopped tomato, herbs and black vinaigrette, which dribbled to the sides of my mouth and stung. I washed it down with champagne.

  ‘Your people have such a rich and interesting culture,’ she said, and turned to Sean. ‘She’s so beautiful.’

  ‘She’s an Institutional Philanthropy and Partnerships Officer at the International Rescue Committee,’ he said.

  Sean had also been reciting that line all night. In a city where everyone spoke in acronyms, I couldn’t help thinking that Sean was spelling out my title, and the IRC, in an attempt to justify my presence there. Some people feigned interest, but an NGO couldn’t make them pay attention the way a political office did. His boss didn’t acknowledge it.

  ‘Well, I hope you enjoy your evening here…’ She smiled. She had already forgotten my name. ‘It’s a gorgeous space.’

  ‘It really is,’ Sean said amiably, and looked up at the ceiling as though just inspired to take it in.

  The Great Hall in the Library of Congress was lined with tall Roman columns, arching into the murals of its marbled ceiling. We were standing by the side of the grand staircase, where a plaster bust of a historical figure I didn’t recognise was set into the wall. (Washington? Jefferson? Adams?) Positioned at eye level, his head on a slight angle and his brow furrowed, he appraised the guests in the room.

  ‘We’re lucky to be here,’ said Sean’s boss.

  I leaned across Sean to stop a passing waitress, took another flute of champagne off her tray and drank most of it in one gulp.

  As his boss left, Sean leaned in to kiss me. I knew my breath was rancid from the vinaigrette, but I muttered into his mouth:

  ‘If you don’t take me home right now, I’ll break up with you.’

  I wanted to say more. I was drunk. I wanted to keep speaking, just so he could smell the sourness.

  The vinegar made me think of all the smells I hated, especially the curries that used to stain my plastic lunchboxes, stick to my clothes and follow me down Montgomery Road from school to Dad’s takeaway shop. I spent evenings by the sink scrubbing my lunchboxes and then, later on, scrubbing at my armpits.

  It was too early to tell Sean about my childhood. I could tell he assumed my upbringing was similar to his, because that was all he knew, from suburban New Haven to Harvard for college, to a career at the US Capitol. He made me feel as if I was constantly pretending to fit into his world: the way he ate, the way he talked about travel, about college, and the casual references to family money that e
very civil servant and NGO employee in DC made. The assumptions everyone held were so strong that I had to either make dramatic confessions to correct them or play along. It was easier to play along. I wasn’t ready to talk yet, and I couldn’t stand to see Sean’s reaction to any of it.

  The first time I tried to leave home at sixteen, I came back two months later. I was at my skinniest and my friend Sarah was sick of me.

  ‘You look disgusting,’ Dad said, when he opened the door. I had on the old tracksuit I used to wear at home.

  Behind the flyscreen, Mom stifled a moan. She started sobbing when Dad led me to the living room and gestured to the couch.

  ‘You have worried your mother sick.’

  I fingered the loose skin around my wrists.

  ‘You think we don’t know where you’ve been?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Your mother wants to die because her only daughter is sleeping like a dog on the street.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she tell me?’