the Lotus Eaters

by Tatjana Soli

  Raising her head, she saw that the trees were eucalyptus, lined like the windbreaks back home between the citrus groves. The familiarity of the trees, malevolent in this setting, doubly disturbed her.

  Home. She longed for the clean quiet of her mother's house, the mildew smell of closed rooms from being so close to the beach. All those surf days of beating sun and rolling water, dried out and happy, licking her child's lips of salt, of ice cream. The crowded boardwalk along the beach, the pink-burned tourists and the tanned locals, giggling with her friends over the browned, lean torsos of older boys playing basketball, always shirtless, always ignoring them. Walking past the restaurants with their unfurled umbrellas, their white tablecloths, and cheap bottles of wine on the table to entice customers, the waiters leathery and bored.

  Her mouth was dry, air scraped the shallows of her lungs, as the reality of where she was took hold. Shivering from the foreign rush of terror, she felt a warm, wet sensation, and burned at the realization that she had peed herself. She pressed her cheek into the dirt, the lip of the helmet--a man's small but still too big--cutting into her ear. The sharp scent of burned grass combining with gunpowder and the sweetish smell of her own urine shamed her.

  Nothing had prepared her for the smallness of the action. The moment-to-moment boredom. Intellectually, yes, there were people on the enemy side trying to kill them, American men might die, but that was all television stuff. Being on the flat land, pricked by the dying grass, the idea that she herself could be the target of a bullet became real. But the whole time she lay there she mostly fretted over the embarrassment of wetting herself, solving the problem by spilling the water from her canteen over part of her pants.

  Minutes passed. She heard a cry in front of her. A soldier had been hit in the thigh. Helen crawled up to the group as the medic bandaged him and gave him a quick prick of morphine. Movement was better than paralysis. The boy was lying on his back, wild-eyed and jabbering.

  "He's fine, mostly nerves," the medic said, shrugging. "First time out."

  The soldier's lips twisted in sarcasm. "They say that to anyone who isn't dead."

  "What's your name?" Helen touched the boy's hand.

  "Curt."

  "Shut up, Curt," the medic said. "We should call you Yellow."

  The bullets stopped, and half an hour later the patrol was back together, waiting on an opened dirt road for an evacuation helicopter for one wounded. The thick marsh slime dried stiff and dark on their fatigues in the scalding air. Helen's own darkened pants went unnoticed. Against regulations, soldiers took off their flak jackets, smoked cigarettes, and wrung out socks while they waited.

  Helen joined a group sitting under a tree. She took off her helmet. In herpanic and then relief that the encounter was over, she realized she hadn't shot a single frame, had, in fact, forgotten all about the camera. Years later, her biggest regret was not taking the shot of Darrow in the marsh. It remained the one image etched in her mind, perhaps because she did not have the film to refer back to. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.

  Curt was talking and joking too loudly. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told him to keep it down. "It's not a goddamned party that you're going to the hospital."

  "Oh, yes it is," Curt mouthed behind his back.

  "That was a nothing." Darrow crouched a few feet from Helen and took her picture. "How'd it go, Prom Queen?"

  She wiped her face and made a grimacing smile. "All right." The way he looked at her, she knew he guessed that she had frozen.

  "More excitement than we expected. It's cleared till it's not, till it is again. End of lesson today. Take this ride out."

  "No!" If she left now, it would be empty-handed, without a single exposure taken, the risk all for nothing.

  "No bodies in the tree line. That means they retreated, probably back to the hamlet, waiting for us. It's no longer Peace Corps stuff."

  "I can handle it."

  "Enough for today. I'm asking, but Shaffer will order you."

  Helen braced herself as the helicopter pitched, then rose. She crawled, crablike, along the corrugated metal floor over to Curt. Away from the other men, he looked even younger--clear blue eyes slightly dilated from the morphine and a child's rosy lips.

  "Looks like you and me got a ticket out of there," he shouted in her ear above the roar. "Aren't we smart?"

  "You wouldn't believe how I worked just to get here."

  "What's wrong with you?"

  She shrugged. "Where're you from?"

  "Philly."

  "I'm from Southern California."

  "Oh man. When I get out of here, I'm going straight to Hermosa Beach and learn to surf."

  "My brother went there all the time."

  "Is it great?"

  "Surfing capital."

  She thought of the water off the pier back home, how one day she finally couldn't bear sitting on the beach with all the girlfriends. She had paddled out on a borrowed board to hoots and howls from Michael and his friends. She had tumbled in the surf, frightened, pounded against the sandy bottom again and again, but she wouldn't stop trying. The first time she got up on the board and saw the beach ahead of her, she had felt invincible. Everything had happened so fast during the firefight and now her failure was settling in.

  "I can't wait," Curt said.

  "Do you want me to take your picture? I'll send it to you."

  "Okay."

  She picked up her notebook and as she wrote his dog tag number he grew quiet.

  "You promise you'll send it? Maybe to my parents in case I'm not around."

  "If it's in this book, you'll get the photograph." Helen talked briskly, pretending she had not heard his last words. "They'll send it to your local paper. You'll be a hero back home."

  "Fuck the people back home. This wound'll be patched, and I'll be back out in the boonies in a few weeks. I promised myself I'd go out and kill me at least one dink before I left here." He leaned back, and they both remained silent the rest of the way.

  When she returned to the hotel that night, she took a long, hot shower. Her first action after returning from the Cholon apartment had been to throw her copy of The Quiet American in the wastebasket, but her room boy, a small, thin-shouldered boy with the long eyelashes of a girl, dug it out of the trash and put it back on the table. Inconceivable to him that a perfectly good book would be thrown out. Now he knocked and gave her a note from Robert that a group of them was having dinner at the hotel dining room and inviting her. She couldn't face them down to night, especially not after the afternoon's disaster. She looked at the boy. "I'm done with the book. Would you like it?"

  "You sell." He gestured with his hand, and she was struck by the grace of his movement.

  "You sell, keep the money," she said.

  He looked the book over carefully, gave a tender shrug.

  "On second thought, leave it here to night. Take it in the morning." Although she had read it at least a dozen times, she longed to lose herself in it to night, to rest in Fowler's certainties or Pyle's innocence. To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book. She had always been an avid reader, but as an adult her reading habits had changed, and only after she had reread a book many times did she claim to begin to understand it.

  Her head ached. She had been lying paralyzed in a field earlier that day and now stood in this room the same night, and the two parts were not meant to fit. She slipped into slacks and a loose cream blouse. At first she put on loafers but decided instead on suede pumps. Impossible to be alone on such a night even if it meant joining Robert and that ambivalent crowd. Her saving grace was that only Darrow had witnessed her failure. She poured herself a glass of water and her hand shook as she raised it to her lips. The old-fashioned ceiling fan shuddered above her head. She stared at the shabby bedspread and remembered the glare of the sun on the paddies, making it impossible to see; the fields bleached by the fierceness of the sun. The only vivid color she coul
d recall the red of blood on the young soldier's thigh. Darrow's point, of course, that no matter what group she traveled with, one went out alone, hand in hand with only one's own fear.

  Michael. Determined to follow in their father's footsteps. To outdo him if possible. Graduated with honors. He could have done anything, but he wanted only to be in the elite corps. Because Dad wasn't. Her father would have been dismissive of what she was doing, unless, of course, she succeeded. But Michael would have been bemused and not surprised at all at his big sister, always trying to play catch-up.

  She drank down the glass of water and poured another. The niggling humiliation that she had not snapped even a single picture. The second glass of water gulped down so fast it dribbled down her chin and onto her blouse so that she had to change again. When she finally managed to make her way to the hotel dining room, she couldn't hide her disappointment that Darrow wasn't there.

  Ed, the straw-haired man from the previous night, grinned. "So how was the maiden voyage out, love?"

  She said nothing.

  "It's always a bear, the first couple times," Gary said.

  "Maybe next time you can bring film," Ed said, laughing.

  "You don't need film where you go, Ed," Robert said. "Everyone knows the inside of your girlfriend's thighs."

  The table broke up in laughter. Helen ate quickly, not tasting her food, then excused herself. Had they known because she didn't make the rounds of the wires to sell her pictures? Or had Darrow told them?

  Robert went after her and stopped her in the lobby. She had gone out with Darrow and returned with no pictures, and he hoped that mortification would give him back the upper hand. Time to hang on a man's arm. He had decided to pretend the previous night, and his defeat, had not happened. "Are you okay?"

  "I need sleep is all." She needed so many things, putting any one thing into words seemed inadequate. "I failed."

  "It's not a place for a woman. I'm just grateful you came back whole. I'll check on you in the morning."

  She was so relieved to get away, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. He backed away for a moment, startled, then moved closer.

  "Should we have a drink?"

  "I need to rest," she said.

  Robert stepped back into the restaurant, stopping at the entrance to light a cigarette. He hadn't taken her for the sort that fell for a guy like Darrow. Usually his women were the type who for one reason or another couldn't ask for much. With her intelligence, she must guess the string of women that Darrow discarded. The gold band on his finger a kind of shield against commitment. He watched Helen in the lobby, fumbling through her purse. He would take her down Bourbon Street; they would laugh and dance all night. He liked her. A possibility for that house in his mind, filled with children. But Helen didn't move toward the elevators; instead she left the hotel and waved down a waiting cyclo. Of course, he thought, he could be wrong.

  At the meeting place of silk and lacquered bowl streets, Helen found the moon-shaped entrance of the alley, still puddled from the rain, retracing her path as if she could return to the time before her failure that day. Reckless, she ran through water the color of ink at the alley's mouth while men stood at the corner and stared, ran through a cacophony of incense and spice smells she could not yet name. Past stores that sold only twine. What had before seemed strange now became soothing. We are hardwired for the comfort of familiarity, she thought. Again, the airless effect of buildings so packed together, the lights within storefronts dim, darkness and closeness smothering her.

  She ran down the narrow, murky throat of the path till she saw the yellow building that listed to one side, darkened like a sweat-stained shirt. Looking up, she saw the glow of the lampshade in the window, and the weight on her chest grew lighter despite her anger. Wanting to forget the day, she pushed open the lacquered door, unable to see the peacocks and tigers painted on it, and felt her way up the black, groaning staircase that smelled of cedar and fish.

  As she knocked on the door, the sounds of jazz inside and the high staccato of female laughter, made her feel like a fool--the idea that just the sight of Darrow would heal her childish wounds. She turned to escape before anyone came, but the door swung wide open to Darrow holding a glass of scotch in his hand.

  "Helen of a Thousand Ships." He smiled, a victorious plea sure in his eyes.

  She stood, unable to move. He was a stranger to her.

  "Who's there?" a voice called.

  "Come in," Darrow said, taking her arm, pulling her inside. The air thick with the grassy smell of pot.

  "Jack, it's our new... intrepid girl reporter."

  Nothing else to do for it, so she hauled back and punched Darrow in the face as hard as she was able, closing her eyes at the point of contact so that when he bent, she wasn't sure what she'd managed. His glasses flew off, and blood trickled from one nostril.

  "What the hell?"

  "You ordered me to leave. I had no choice. And then you come back and tell everyone I didn't take any pictures."

  "I didn't."

  "Everyone knows."

  "Everyone knows because everyone's interested in watching you fail, girlie," Jack said.

  Jack was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, a fat, hand-rolled roach pinched between his fingertips. Next to him, a Vietnamese woman was kneeling on a cushion. She had a wide, acne-scarred face, and she winked at Helen, her bright orange lipstick smudged.

  "You ignored me. You didn't help me at all, show me anything."

  "That's because I treated you out there like a man. No special treatment. Decide what you want."

  "So that's cleared up," Jack said. "Introductions."

  Darrow blinked, a napkin against his nose. "That is..."

  "Tick-Tock," Jack said.

  Darrow pursed his lips, and she could tell he was drunk. "Formal introductions, please. That is Miss Tick-Tock."

  Jack patted the woman's thigh. "Just in time for the party. Here, Helen, have a puff of Cambodia's finest."

  "Let me pour you a drink," Darrow said and led Helen to a chair. "Let's not corrupt her all in one day."

  "If I was wrong, I'm sorry."

  As she sat down, Jack pointed to her feet. "Didn't anyone tell you not to wear heels in the paddy?" He burst out laughing.

  She looked down and saw her ruined suede shoes. Darrow went to the armoire and got a towel. He sat on the floor, took off her shoes, and rubbed her feet. No one had explained how to deal with the residual fear of physical danger; she felt five years old and in need of someone's arms around her. His eye was red and beginning to swell. Unable to stop, she reached out and ran her fingertips across his cheek. In the most illogical reasoning, she had chosen him because he wouldn't nurture her like kind, dependable Robert.

  "Well, folks," Jack said. "I'll leave the joint with you, but I'm going to have to push off."

  "You don't have to go," Helen said.

  "Actually, we do. Come along, Tick-Tock."

  No one said anything.

  "No, please, don't try and stop me." Jack got up. "See you around."

  Alone, Helen kept sitting in the chair, Darrow on the floor. He looked at her steadily, waiting.

  "Are you okay?"

  "No. Not okay. I froze today. Forgot the damn camera was there."

  Darrow touched his eye and winced. "When I first started... You either get over it or you don't."

  "I feel humiliated."

  "I'll give you this--as scared as you were, to night I thought you'd be on the first plane home."

  She shook her head. The idea of sealing off her failure for all time was unthinkable. "I'm not going home."

  "Why? You have a criminal record or something?"

  She smiled. "Am I going to make it?" She was surprised at the calm and matter-of-factness in her voice.

  "Try again. See what happens." Darrow stood, took her hand, and led her to the bed. "You aroused a bit of curiosity, you know. It's better for you if I don't protect you."

  "No one will give me
a chance now."

  "It's always better to beat low expectations."

  "I don't love you," she said. "Couldn't love someone like you." She kissed his collarbone, his chest above his heart. After all the elusiveness of the last few days, things slipping out of her grasp, this felt right. His skin cool under her lips. No magic, no heart pounding. Just lust, taken neat. Probably he would break her heart in the long run, but she did not quit. Would not give up this moment to avoid that future one. She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather that they fell in love through repetition, just the way someone became brave. She did not love him yet.

  Darrow said nothing, only kept pulling her in.

  The sickle of moon angled down the narrow alley, lit the precarious room, the ramshackle bed. Darrow traced her profile with his fingertip. He was falling in love in his own way, building a legend that was not quite her. "When I saw you for the first time at dinner, do you know what I thought?"

  She turned toward him, her body a smooth spoon of moonlight. "Tell me."

  "I thought, There is a woman who has never been in love. And I wondered, Why? You could have any man at that table. Hell, Robert is ready to marry you and settle down in the bayou." He had wanted to say something romantic, but he had lost the knack for romance, if he ever possessed it.

  On this night she would have preferred the tenderness of lies.

  After she had fallen asleep, Darrow rose, put on his glasses, and lit a cigarette. His eye throbbed. Had to hand it to her: She had a good punch. He was a man who always wanted to reach the end of things, stories or people, to understand in order to put them behind him and move on. It had been like that since he was a teenager working in darkrooms in New York, when he heard for the first time the magical names--Pearl Harbor, Mount Suribachi, Tarawa--spoken in the hushed tones one would use in church. Those men who came in with unshaven faces, rumpled clothing, weary eyes. Smelling of leather. Their pictures harsh with white light like a stage: blinding white beaches and billowing, translucent clouds; shadows on palm trees, uprooted coconut logs; shadows on soldiers' equipment and along the folds of uniforms that gave them the density of monuments. So formative that ever since then he had distrusted oceans and beaches, had felt their menace, always found himself scanning the surf for danger. Many of those men had been past soldiers longing for the heat of battle. He had failed the physical exams--glasses, crooked spine. Photographs were his only entree to this world of war, a pass to be in the center of the most important story in the world at any specific time.