I found it soothing during my lunch break to call Sam’s home number and listen to her answering machine. “Hey there, stranger,” she said. “You know what to do.” Teaching geometry to tenth-graders had trained her to speak in a gentle and pleasant way. Sam was popular with her students, like my father with his. He was a high school guidance counselor, and every Christmas, alumni would send dozens of cards to the man they affectionately called Mr. P, updating him on their careers and families. I doubted if Mr. P’s students ever imagined that he had mistresses, or that once, in his past, he’d jumped out of airplanes and commanded a battalion of paratroopers. To the students, he’d merely say that he’d been a soldier once. He was a modest man who didn’t like to talk about his other life with acquaintances or his own children any more than I told my coworkers about how, at the end of the day, I drove to a convenience store parking lot and changed in the front seat, wriggling into gray slacks and a red polyester blazer. My coworkers knew me to be a customer service manager for a company in Burbank that sold hearing aids, oxygen tanks, and motorized wheelchairs, but by night I was a watchman at a luxury high-rise on the Wilshire Corridor near UCLA. No one could say I was lazy, as Sam had conceded during one of our arguments last year.
The job was perfect, because after Sam left me and my mother died, I could no longer sleep. Nights at the high-rise were quiet and didn’t require much of me. Every now and then I got up to walk the hallways, stairways, and underground parking garage, but mostly I sat in the marble lobby, watching every corner of the building on a bank of video monitors. When I wasn’t reading one of the several newspapers I’d brought, I played solitaire. In between games I would draw a random card from the deck, and if it was the ace of spades, I called Sam. If she answered the phone, I said nothing, waiting to see how many times she said “Hello?” before she hung up.
She was a patient woman, but her patience ran out last year, when she turned thirty-four. We had gone to Palms Thai restaurant on Hollywood for her birthday, because she was a fan of the Thai Elvis who shimmied and shimmered onstage in a different costume each night. That evening, he was wearing a gold lamé pantsuit as he sang a passable version of “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” pushing rose-tinted sunglasses up his nose with a jeweled finger every now and then.
“I want a child, Thomas.” Sam tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear, almost shyly. “And I want to have it with you.” The strand was dyed purple, while the rest of her hair was its natural brunette. A diamond stud the size of a pinhead glittered above her left nostril, and my initials were tattooed in blue ink on her right wrist, serving as a reminder of me, she said, whenever she checked the time. For some reason her rebelliousness had charmed my father, so much so that after our divorce, he said I was to blame.
“I don’t know if I’m ready yet,” I told Sam. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. “I don’t know if I’ll be good with children.”
“Get over it, Thomas. You’re not going to turn out like your father.”
My father was someone who, for the better part of a decade, woke my brothers and me from our sofa bed at dawn to perform calisthenics with him. We did push-ups with one of our sisters sitting on our backs, and sit-ups clutching a Webster’s unabridged dictionary to our chests. We ran through an obstacle course of old tires in the backyard and used the branch of an oak tree for chin-ups, straining and grunting until we fell off the limb. After that, we practiced marksmanship with a BB gun, plinking away at Budweiser cans filled with sand. Then we ran for miles, not stopping until one of us vomited, proof that my father was succeeding in his goal of making us into men.
“He’s insane.” I thought Sam would see the risks. “Aren’t you worried I’ll start my own army? Or keep a girlfriend on the side?”
“Like I said.” Sam poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. “You’re not your father.”
My shift ended at dawn. It was a forty-minute drive from the Westside to my Eastside apartment, on a side street off the up-and-coming stretch of Sunset, not far from where the boulevard became César Chávez. Stolen cars and hovering police helicopters were commonplace here in Echo Park, where I’d moved after the divorce. By the time my mother passed away during the summer, I knew what loneliness was like, and on the day after the funeral, suspecting my father might be lonely too, I invited him to come live with me. I hadn’t expected him to say yes.
Today was my day off from both jobs, but after sleeping for only two hours, I got up, showered, shaved, and dressed in fifteen minutes. Half an hour later, I had crossed from Echo Park to Mimi’s neighborhood, the Chinese mecca on Atlantic and Valley boulevards. She opened the door wearing a pink velour tracksuit. My father was showering after his morning run, and she insisted on preparing me a cup of coffee. I heard him singing in the bathroom as Mimi returned with a glass of ice in one hand and, in the other, a second glass with the condensed milk, a stainless steel filter perched on top. While we waited for the black coffee to drip, she smiled and said, “Your father speaks highly of you.”
“Not as highly as he speaks of you.”
“He says you work in the medical industry.”
“I sell hearing aids. In the evenings I’m a night watchman at a high-rise.”
“I see.” We heard the running water stop.
“It’s an expensive apartment building,” I offered. “The women wear fur coats just because they can afford to.”
When Mimi smiled at me again, a gold tooth glinted in the far reaches of her mouth. “It’s not good for a boy your age to be without a woman,” she said. “Your father tells me you’re not even dating.”
“I’m recovering.”
Mimi ignored my comment and began describing the young women she knew at her temple, as well as the ones from her old neighborhood in Can Tho, everyone searching for husbands with American passports. Vietnamese women, she informed me, leaning close and putting her hand on my knee, were much better mates for men than American women, who were fickle and demanding. Vietnamese women took care of their men, doted on them, and these same women wanted men like me, neither too American nor too Vietnamese. She nodded at my father, who had appeared in the doorway, already dressed in a button-down shirt and wrinkle-free slacks. Ignoring her, he looked at me and said, “Today we’re going to rent a car.”
“Are you coming back tonight?” Mimi asked.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Now hurry up and drink your coffee before the ice melts.”
As soon as I’d finished, he ushered me out. He said nothing to me in the car, jingling the keys in his pocket until we came to a complete stop where the Harbor and Hollywood freeways crossed. A squadron of news helicopters circled lazily over the freeway some distance toward downtown, its towers only ghostly silhouettes hidden by a curtain of smog. I lit a cigarette, and my father rolled down his window. After my mother died, he quit his pack-a-day habit, even though she’d never objected to his secondhand smoke; she just complained about the migraines that forced her to turn off the lights in her bedroom and lie down. “It’s my head,” she would moan. “It’s my head.”
“When was the last time you talked to her?” he asked.
“Who?” I thought he meant my mother.
“Sam.”
“Months ago.” I blew smoke out the window. “She called to say she was sorry about Ma.”
“How will you get her back if you don’t talk to her?”
“None of your business.”
“You give up too easy.” Sam told me the same thing soon after we first met, our senior year in college. “Look at you,” he said.
I checked myself. “What about me?”
“You’ve gained weight. You haven’t combed your hair.” He plucked at my pants. “And you haven’t ironed your clothing. A man must always iron his clothing.”
“I thought Ma pressed your clothes.”
�
��The point is that you look terrible.” He slapped his hand against the dashboard for emphasis. “How many of those cigarettes are you smoking every day?”
“Six or seven.”
“Put it out.” When I did nothing, he snatched the cigarette out of my mouth and tossed it out the window, then grabbed a handful of the fat around my waist, squeezing it hard. “You even feel like a woman.”
“Jesus Christ!” I pushed his hand away. “Don’t do that!”
“You’re never getting Sam back looking that way.”
“Who says I want her back?”
“Don’t be an idiot. You were only half a man before you met her, and you’re back to being half a man now.”
Through my window, I could see into the low-slung Mitsubishi next to us, where miniature television screens, embedded in customized headrests, broadcast a scene of a crowded highway. The camera zoomed in on a team of highway patrolmen in tan uniforms with their guns drawn, surrounding a car. It was our highway, captured live from a news helicopter.
“What about you?” I said. “Are you going to marry that woman? And then find yourself another one on the side?”
Someone behind me began honking, and soon cars all over the freeway took up the noise. I remembered my mother pulling me aside once, when I was eleven or twelve, demanding to know where my father disappeared to on Friday nights. I had no idea. For some reason her question terrified me more than the time she chased him into the bathroom. When he locked the door against her, she tried to beat it down with a chair, the legs leaving fist-sized holes in the hollow door.
“Sam’s a good woman.” My father reached over and pressed the horn once, twice, and a third time. “You should never have let her go.”
As if to prove how little of a man I was, I started crying.
My father stared straight ahead, and I knew he must be thinking of the funeral. He hadn’t shed a tear during the mass, and neither had I, but when I drove him from the church to the cemetery, something broke inside me, and the tears gushed out. My father had stopped speaking then, too. He was worried, I think, about the chances of my crashing the car. Only when I finished crying did he resume talking about the wake. But today, with horns honking all around, my father sighed and said, “That’s enough. It’s time we did something about you.”
Traffic began moving. The horns stopped, and my father turned on the radio, picking a soft-rock station where Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder were singing “Ebony and Ivory.” I didn’t know what he meant by “doing something,” which was what he said whenever he was about to punish my brothers or me. It was also what he said the time I came home one day in the fourth grade and reported that a kid up the street had spat on the lunch of sardines and rice my mother had packed. Then the kid called me a slant-eyed fag.
My father wasn’t yet a high school guidance counselor at that time. He was a night-shift janitor in a downtown office building and a part-time student at Cal State L.A. Wearing his janitor’s uniform, he made me walk him from our apartment to the other boy’s house, where I waited on the sidewalk as my father went up the stoop and knocked on the front door. The man who came onto the porch was taller than my father by six or seven inches, and wore a mechanic’s blue overalls unzipped to the bottom of his paunch. Curly brown hair sprouted from the back of his hands, and over the top of his T-shirt, and from his ears—everywhere except for the top of his head.
I didn’t hear what they said, both of them speaking in low, angry tones, until the moment the other father said, “Like hell I will.” My father kicked him in the groin without another word or warning, and, when the man doubled over, punched him in the throat. After the man fell facedown onto the porch, I saw his son standing behind the screen door, wide-eyed. My father didn’t bother looking behind him as he walked back toward me. There was no joy or excitement on his face as he put his hand on my shoulder, and for a moment I thought he was going to make me fight the man’s son. But all he did with that hand was to steer me home, gently patting me the entire way, saying nothing.
We picked up a rental car from the Enterprise lot in Los Feliz, a Ford the size of a golf cart and only a little more powerful. Then my father took me to his barbershop in old Chinatown, in an alley off Broadway, where a man with orange hair and a studded belt ran clippers through my hair and chuckled over his good times with the twenty-dollar whores in Saigon. After he was finished, I wasn’t sure which was uglier, the rented Ford or my haircut, so short I looked as if I’d been discharged from the army. I could feel the breeze on my scalp that evening, blowing in over Baldwin Hills to Sam’s doorstep. She had moved here after the divorce, to a town house on the heights above La Cienega, overlooking a field of oil derricks.
“This is a mistake,” I said.
He knocked on the door. “We haven’t seen her in a long time, and we’re just going to talk.”
My father had said we would have the advantage of surprise, even though we were on Sam’s territory. But he was getting old, because this was the extent of his plan to do something about me. He’d forgotten to reconnoiter or prepare for a worst-case scenario. Still, even if he had remembered, I don’t think he could have been prepared for the fact that when Sam opened the door, she would be wearing a maternity dress with ruffles of crepe-like material, making her swollen belly look like a piñata.
“Oh,” she said. Her hair was shorn into a blond pageboy, its brown roots showing. “You’re the last people I expected to see.”
“You’re pregnant,” I said.
“It’s kind of you to notice, Thomas. Hi, Mr. P.”
“Well,” my father said. “Look at you.”
“It’s good seeing you, too.” Behind her, someone was talking on the television in the living room. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you should have called.”
“We were just taking a drive,” I said. “And we thought we’d stop by.”
Sam knew my father and I never drove together just for fun, but she beckoned us in anyway. I expected another man to be there and entered cautiously, checking either side before stepping in. Stacks of student exams were arranged by grade on the avocado shag carpet, at the chrome feet of a couch made from fake black leather that we’d shopped for together in the Korean shops on Western Avenue. “Sorry for the mess,” Sam said, easing herself onto the couch.
My father occupied the armchair, and I was forced to sit on the far end of the couch from hers. I toed a stack of exams, one with a red “C” on the topmost sheet. “They’re not doing so well.”
“I think I’m losing my touch,” she replied.
People say a pregnant woman glows in a beautiful way with love and expectation. I’d always imagined this glow as a kind of aura, but the shine on Sam’s puffy face was only a reflection from a glaze of oil and sweat. “I’m not as energetic in the classroom as I usually am,” she went on. “It’s rubbing off on the students.”
“A teacher must lead by example,” my father remarked.
“So you’ve always said, Mr. P.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were tired. “If you’d like a beer, you can help yourself. Getting me up almost requires a crane.”
“You have beer?” I said.
“I keep it for guests.”
We should have refused out of politeness, but my father immediately went to the kitchen for the beer. Sam rested her hands on her belly and gave me a neutral look. “What have you been doing, Thomas?”
“Working. And sleeping.”
“Me, too.”
“My father moved in with me.”
She laughed. “That must be interesting. Who does the cooking?”
“He’s the cook, of course.” My father returned with two bottles of beer, a bowl of pretzels, and a glass of water. “The master of instant noodles.”
“Thanks, Mr. P,” Sam said when my father handed her the glass. “I need to cool down. I’m having a
hot flash.”
We lapsed into silence and watched the show on television, about the cruelty of the meat industry’s practices. When my father broke the silence and complimented her on the house, Sam explained that most of the decorations belonged to her roommate, another teacher who was out for the night. My father pointed the tip of his beer bottle at the television, on top of which was a pipe, carved from teak and in the shape of a dragon with a ball of opium in its mouth. “From where did you buy that?”
“Hue.” She spoke the city’s name with the correct rising accent. “But you can’t actually smoke anything with it.”
“You went to Vietnam?” my father and I said at the same time.
“Last summer. I didn’t teach summer school and went backpacking instead. Sometimes”—she paused—“a girl just needs a vacation.”
“Did you think about me?” I said.
Sam shifted her weight on the couch, uncrossing and crossing her legs, the ankles and calves swollen. “Of course I thought about you.” She smiled at me as if I was one of her students. Then she looked at my father, who was studying the cottage cheese ceiling. “And you, too, Mr. P.”
“I will never go back.” He rapped his bottle of beer on the coffee table. “You do not know the Communists. I know the Communists.”
“They’re not so bad. They just want to move on with their lives.”
My father shook his head emphatically. “You are a foreigner. You know nothing. They take your money and say nice things to you.”
The Refugees Page 13
