The Headmaster's Wager

by Vincent Lam

  Percival closed his eyes. A storm of words battered him nonetheless. Peters was struggling with an apology, saying that Jacqueline had told him that it was over between herself and the headmaster. The scent of sex on the air made Percival feel as if he was being suffocated, his chest squeezed. Peters stammered about not wanting to jeopardize the State Department’s relationship with the Percival Chen English Academy. Had Percival been unwell? he asked. Why the bandages? Not to worry, he added, Mak was handling employment referrals. Percival opened his eyes, half-expecting that Peters might have vanished. He was there, still talking. Percival went around to the side of the bed where Jacqueline was huddled. He knelt before her. He said, “I love you.” She continued to cry. “Dearly, truly.” He went on, “And perhaps this does not matter. Maybe this has all been nothing more than a strange dream …”

  Peters was gathering his things. Jacqueline’s eyes met Percival’s for an instant, and then she reached across the bed for Peters. She took the American’s hand. “Stay, my love. The headmaster is just leaving.”

  Percival turned to go, stopped, said into Peters’ ear, “Do you know that I won her in a game of mah-jong?”

  “This is an unfortunate moment.” Peters pulled Jacqueline closer.

  “I won her like a pile of money.”

  “Now, Percy, I think you’re upset with me, so—”

  “No! I’m angry with myself. I thought it was a lucky night. I somehow forgot that she is a whore.”

  Percival walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the door, forced himself not to look back at the apartment where he had been most happy, and continued out. His leg ached. His hands shook, and his belly cramped. How long had it been since his last morphine? If he felt bad now, he told himself, it was for lack of a drug, not a woman. He pressed the elevator button. He heard the rumbling of the gears and fumbled in his pocket for a vial. The details of the bedroom floated before him: the dark hair on Peters’ bare chest, the spoiled bed. Percival managed to break open the vial, a little of the precious liquid spilled. Still he saw the spent condom on the floor near the undergarments, the gleaming black dress shoes and patterned men’s socks. The elevator door opened. Percival half-fell into it and sat on the floor, slumped against the wall. He pressed the button for the lobby. As it descended, he barely managed to get the trembling needle into the vial. He drew up the drug with the syringe, his whole body shaking like a plucked wire. He closed his eyes, but he still saw Jacqueline on the bed. Saw Peters pulling her to him. In the gesture he could see that their bodies were still awkward with one another. That would change. Summoning his strength, Percival plunged the needle into his vein and pushed the dose into himself.

  He ordered himself not to think of Jacqueline anymore. He would not think of Laing Jai, either. Dai Jai would be back soon. The past few years, his mistake of loving a métisse, the illusion of a family, must all be discarded. The elevator opened and he stumbled out into the lobby. He would need to find more morphine. Many gambling dens sold heroin, morphine capsules, and other diversions. That world was a faithful friend to anyone who could pay and it had been waiting patiently for him. Percival walked into the brightly steaming day, hailed a cyclo, and told the driver to take him to Le Grand Monde.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 25

  1975, CHOLON, VIETNAM

  On the eve of Tet, Percival shook a handful of morphine capsules out of the pill bottle in his desk drawer. He broke one with his teeth and let the bitter powder spill over his tongue, felt the warm relaxation begin to dissolve into him. He washed one down whole with water so that the drug’s caress would filter more slowly into his body. The rest he slipped into his shirt pocket for later. From the school safe, he removed a thick bundle of piastres. Enrolments were down somewhat, but there was still money in the safe and morphine in the desk. Percival called the driver, a dour Northerner, Trinh, whom Mak had insisted be hired, to take him to Le Grand Monde. He would welcome the New Year there, inviting both good luck and pleasure. He would drown out the old year with the noise of celebration.

  Lights strung over the door of the casino greeted him, winked blue, red, and white. In the old days, they had all been white. As he entered, he was swallowed by laughter and shouting, by the promises of women’s flashing thighs, by the soft glow of amber-filled glasses, and the chatter of the gambling tables. Percival entered a game of pie gou, threw a wad of money into it, won a fast round. It was good luck, an early win. A girl in a yellow dress kissed him on the cheek and fed him an oily morsel of duck from a platter. She whispered in his ear, something explicit in French that Percival half-understood. Her legs were like Jacqueline’s, an elegant length. Had he already taken her to bed? He couldn’t remember. Weeks and months folded in on themselves behind him. There was only the present. He leaned to kiss her, closed his eyes, a flickering tongue. The taste of duck clung to his mouth. He bit her lip gently, then harder. She slapped him lightly, flitted away. Now he lost a sum of money at pie gou—he wasn’t sure how much, more than he had won. He drifted to the roulette table, where he ate roast pork with one hand and placed his bets with the other. The dealer offered him a highball glass full of cognac. He settled in, drank to his wins and washed down his losses.

  As Percival played, a métisse girl in a tight blue dress smiled at him and laughed from across the room. He had a weakness for blue. Then he saw Huong making his way over through a clutch of gamblers. Since he had cast off Jacqueline, his old gambling friendships had been renewed, at least with those who were still in Vietnam, and who were still alive. Huong, who had become bald and heavy over the years, had been forced out of the Italian shirt business by cheap Indian tailors. He managed to scrape by selling Thai marijuana and hashish, mostly to the white ghosts. His gambling luck had not improved. Huong’s outstretched arms welcomed Percival. “The headmaster is here! I hope you’ve brought your luck for me. Hou jeung, old friend, what will you have? A Martell and Perrier? Champagne? I’m so glad to see you. Listen, I’ve had a run of losses tonight.” He clapped Percival on the shoulder. Percival reached into his pocket out of habit, not looking, handed over a fistful of bills. “Just thirty? Give me fifty thousand, as a loan, just for an hour. I’ll pay it back.” Percival reached into his pocket for more. Then Huong was gone, already shouting out a bet on the game of thirty-six animals.

  In profile, the girl in blue reminded him of Jacqueline. He beckoned her with a slight motion of his little finger. The dress was tight, and as she walked towards him he stared openly at the swaying of her lower ribs, the points of her nipples moving with her exaggerated steps. She came close and smiled. Straight on, close up, the resemblance to Jacqueline evaporated. He took a big swallow of cognac. Percival offered her his glass, and she drank from it. He asked her to stand to his side, kissed her cheek, and told her to sing an old Chinese song.

  She asked, “You like me?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Waiters circulated with platters of food and crates of Champagne for Tet. Percival emptied his cognac and took a bottle of Champagne. Corks began to pop, a chorus following the explosions outside, and the Year of the Rabbit had arrived. So much noise that he only saw her mouth forming words, did not hear a single one, didn’t care. A conspiratorial wink, and he said, “You are pretty, and I’m sure even nicer from behind.” He could not tell if she had heard.

  He thought she said, “What song should I sing?” though she might have said, “How long is your thing?” A lewd stare.

  “Sing ‘The Maiden at Sea,’ ” he replied.

  Her laugh was lusty, nothing like Jacqueline’s. “I don’t know any Chinese songs, hou jeung. I know Bee Gees, and Elvis.” She swayed her hips back and forth, as if to demonstrate the music she knew.

  The stereo blared the first song of the New Year, and the girl began to mouth the words. Some American rock song—it made his ears hurt. She twisted her hips, and Percival pulled her by the hand, installed himself at a mah-jong table and sat her sideways on his
lap. His fellow gamblers cheered his arrival. Percival poured a round of Champagne, drained a glass himself, caught a waiter by the elbow and ordered shark’s fin soup to be brought for the table on his tab. The players washed the tiles and began to build the walls. Making reckless, uncalculated bets, Percival soon won a big pot. Everyone shouted over the rock music as the play continued. He won another pot, and the girl leaned in to kiss his lips. He pushed her away, a reflex, but then put his arm around her and pulled her mouth to his. He lost a sum and felt lighter. She rubbed her ass on his groin, slipped her tongue into his ear, which, when she took her tongue out and blew into it, felt cold and ticklish. Percival laughed out loud, felt the tightness in his centre. Jacqueline would never have done such a vulgar thing. The girl’s hand on his back was grasping, eager. She whispered that she liked him.

  Percival said, “Then come home with me. I want to see how beautiful you can be.”

  That evening, before setting out, he had asked Mak again about Dai Jai. He had been waiting almost two years. Now he asked only from time to time, as seldom as he could bear. It was humiliating to get the same meaningless reply. “Dai Jai is coming,” Mak had said, as he always did. No, he did not know exactly when. The boy was on his way. He could provide no details. Things were complicated in Hanoi, said Mak, as if Percival would be sympathetic. Percival must not worry, Mak said, he should try not to think of it.

  There had been one letter since Mak had reported that Dai Jai had been brought out of China to North Vietnam. It had been a brief note, smuggled south. “I have arrived safely in Hanoi. I am eating well.—Thank you, father.” Was it true, that the boy was safe in Hanoi? Percival sometimes wondered. He did not allow himself to press that question upon Mak, for he did not want an answer that would cause him any further doubt. He must believe that his son was safe. At his lowest moments, Percival asked himself what did it matter whether he believed it or not? How did that change anything for Dai Jai? The impotence of this thought infuriated him, and inevitably led him to another dose of morphine. Percival now roamed the family quarters of Chen Hap Sing for hours, tolerated only Teochow cooking in the house, and left only to gamble and bring home a girl.

  At some point, Percival realized Mak had fully taken over the American contacts on behalf of the school, and in any case he was in no state to represent the Percival Chen English Academy. For a while, Mak had been busy with new friends—the peacekeepers. Percival had seen Mak with books on his desk—Basic Polish, Hungarian for Beginners, An Indonesian Phrasebook. When President Thieu declared in January of 1974 that the war between South and North Vietnam had resumed, it was the American advisors who became important to Mak once more.

  This was the second Tet that Percival had endured without Jacqueline, or his younger son. He could not stop thinking of Laing Jai that way. He would be seven today. Was he having an American birthday, with balloons and costumes? Or were costumes for a different occasion?

  After winning another round, Percival put his hand on the girl’s thigh, slid a finger under the edge of her dress. In the old days a girl might have drawn away, out of real offence or at least the attractive pretense of shyness. There were no such girls at Le Grand Monde, perhaps not even in Saigon anymore. The girl in blue took Percival’s hand from her skirt. She fondled his middle finger, lifted it, and then sucked it into her mouth from the tip down to the base. The other gamblers laughed, but no one beyond that table noticed the gesture amidst the rippling noise of celebration, the open swirl of words, flesh, money, and bluish smoke that was a sweetly mingled haze of marijuana and opium.

  Later, in Dai Jai’s old room, Percival asked the girl not to speak. He half-closed the shutters so that only the most faint, grey moonlight entered. He said, “Go on your hands and knees.” He asked her to turn her face to the side, to see her in profile. He lifted her dress, pulled off her underwear. He rubbed her gently, tenderly, until she was swollen wet and her scent rose. The smell was different—always it was different—from Jacqueline. If only he could find a girl with the same scent, he could close his eyes and the shutters and simply breathe while making love. This girl asked if he was only going to pleasure his hand, and then gave a drunken laugh.

  “Shhh,” he said, and drew close, the skin of his thighs sticking with sweat on her buttocks. When he entered her warmth, there it was already—the disappointment. His own naked loneliness. Some distant voice mocked him, did he think he could fool himself? He willed himself to stay erect. The girl arched her back and began to squirm and writhe theatrically. He said, “Don’t move so much.” She stopped. Now, she was too still. He fumbled, undid the buttons on the back of her dress, pushed it up over her shoulders. She lifted it off her head. His hands stroked her hips, explored her body. Her back was too muscular, her breasts too firm. He grabbed her pelvis on each side, and went deep inside, pulled her onto him. He swung her back and forth, her body swaying on her knees as she moaned.

  Being high and horny was his excuse, his justification, but somewhere deep, no matter how furiously he copulated, he knew this was a mockery of what he longed for. He threw his weight into the girl, screwed her to push out his thoughts, fucked her to make himself disappear, slapped his body on hers and with each thrust, each blow, he tried to know only what animals knew, and moaned with the rhythm, begged his excitement to eclipse his sadness. She reached back and grabbed his legs, dug her fingers into them. Where the old coat hanger wound had healed, he felt a stab of pain and gasped. She called his name, mistook his pain and frustration for passion.

  He grabbed her hands and roughly crossed the wrists behind her back as if she were his enemy, his prisoner, pushed her down into the bed and forced himself onto her, ground his pelvis on her ass, felt her sex contract. Her face was sideways against the mattress, but now, even in the dim light, he could not pretend. Angry, he pushed himself over and over into her wet centre, his leg hurt him but he did not slow, for now it had begun and might as well be finished.

  He heard her moan, felt her spasm grip him, and his sex discharged the angry fluid of his body. His animal rush was its own death; it did not set free a moment of abandoned pleasure, as it once had with Mrs. Ling’s introductions. Instead, the sorrow of absence entered and occupied him whole.

  There was no fooling himself, no erasing the shame of having taken his son’s lover for his own, and no way to push out his longing for Jacqueline. The ancestors’ spirits would curse him, crouched over a whore in his son’s bed, in his father’s bed, a bed where he had loved Jacqueline. He pushed away the girl. Guilty disgust. He rolled onto his back. He thought of the morphine in the desk drawer. Perhaps he should have taken some. The sex might have been better. Or at least he would have felt it less. He heard himself mumbling sheepishly, apologizing. She wouldn’t know why.

  She breathed hard for a few minutes and then slowed. She turned, sat, looked at him inquisitively but without words, and then crouched over him. She began to kiss him, slowly, down his chest and belly, took him into her mouth. He let her continue, for a while. He stroked her head gently and lifted her mouth from his shamed organ. He said, “It’s too hot,” and turned away.

  Percival went over to the desk and fumbled in the drawer. He found a capsule and bit it, let the bitter powder dissolve on his tongue before swallowing. He sat on the edge of the bed. He should take all the morphine, one last time. But then what? If Dai Jai was truly on his way, should he find his father dead? He must wait.

  Outside there were small rapid explosions. It was fireworks for Tet. He lay down, very still for a long time. Now that the screwing was done, even peering through the gathering cloud of his drug, he lamented the pointless theatre. It was a condemnation of himself to bring a girl here like this, as it was every time he did it.

  Should he pay her now? Show her the door? But that would be unkind. He had done enough wrong. He listened to the firecrackers, to the girl’s breathing, until he heard her relax into sleep. Then he got out of bed and opened a shutter, allowed the moon in. O
utside, the square was empty except for some soldiers drinking on the steps of the church. From their accents, they sounded like Hmong from the mountains—it was said that they were the bravest fighters, usually thrown into the worst battles, but now the South Vietnamese government had withdrawn several of those units to Saigon. Whenever he looked out the window, he imagined Dai Jai’s familiar frame appearing across the square. Would he come by day or night? There was no choice but to believe that he would come. Here he was, Mak’s prisoner of silence. Percival reached into the desk drawer for the bottle of pills.

  SINCE LEAVING THE HOSPITAL, PERCIVAL HAD not gone to the Cercle Sportif. At first, he did not wish to run into Peters or Jacqueline, and even after enough time had passed that they would have departed for America, Percival did not want to see any of his American contacts. Mak must have also decided that this was best and had convinced Cho of it. Percival returned to the casinos and gambling houses at night, where he took particular pleasure in winning money from gwei lo, and in the afternoons he played mah-jong at the Sun Wah Hotel with a group of old faces. It was a little group that gradually grew smaller and smaller, as one person’s French papers finally came through, as another’s daughter was able to sponsor him to Canada. Chang, who had become an importer of Swiss watches, stopped coming to play. Everyone suspected that he had boarded a boat one night and would re-appear in Hong Kong. Later, they learned that he had been kidnapped and then killed because the family was too slow in raising the ransom. Mei went to America for a police training course and did not return. He bought a liquor store in Florida, it was said, paid with cash.

  During an afternoon downpour in the middle of March, Huong sat opposite Percival on the covered patio at the Sun Wah Hotel, and shuffled cards for a game of gin. With only two players on this day, they were forced to take up cards. Huong said, “Hou jeung, I have a contact who can arrange departures. I’m going to leave. Why don’t you buy a departure too? The price is a little high, but this guy has good connections, it will be a smooth deal.”