by Philip Roth
After Les got out of the VA hospital and hooked up with his support group so as to stay off the booze and not go haywire, the long-range goal set for him by Louie Borrero was for Les to make a pilgrimage to the Wall—if not to the real Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, then to the Moving Wall when it arrived in Pittsfield in November. Washington, D.C., was a city Les had sworn he would never set foot in because of his hatred of the government and, since ’92, because of his contempt for that draft dodger sleeping in the White House. To get him to travel all the way down to Washington from Massachusetts was probably asking too much anyway: for someone still fresh from the hospital, there would be too much emotion stretched over too many hours of coming and going on the bus.
The way to prepare Les for the Moving Wall was the same way Louie prepared everybody: start him off in a Chinese restaurant, get Les to go along with another four or five guys for a Chinese dinner, arrange as many trips as it took—two, three, seven, twelve, fifteen if need be—until he was able to last out one complete dinner, to eat all the courses, from soup to dessert, without sweating through his shirt, without trembling so bad he couldn’t hold still enough to spoon his soup, without running outside every five minutes to breathe, without ending up vomiting in the bathroom and hiding inside the locked stall, without, of course, losing it completely and going ballistic with the Chinese waiter.
Louie Borrero had his hundred percent service connection, he’d been off drugs and on his meds now for twelve years, and helping veterans, he said, was how he got his therapy. Thirty-odd years on, there were a lot of Vietnam veterans still out there hurting, and so he spent just about all day every day driving around the state in his van, heading up support groups for veterans and their families, finding them doctors, getting them to AA meetings, listening to all sorts of troubles, domestic, psychiatric, financial, advising on VA problems, and trying to get the guys down to Washington to the Wall.
The Wall was Louie’s baby. He organized everything: chartered the buses, arranged for the food, with his gift for gentle camaraderie took personal care of the guys terrified they were going to cry too hard or feel too sick or have a heart attack and die. Beforehand they all backed off by saying more or less the same thing: “No way. I can’t go to the Wall. I can’t go down there and see so-and-so’s name. No way. No how. Can’t do it.” Les, for one, had told Louie, “I heard about your trip that last time. I heard all about how bad it went. Twenty-five dollars a head for this charter bus. Supposed to include lunch, and the guys all say the lunch was shit—wasn’t worth two bucks. And that New York guy didn’t want to wait around, the driver. Right, Lou? Wanted to get back early to do a run to Atlantic City? Atlantic City! Fuck that shit, man. Rushin’ everything and everybody and then lookin’ for a big tip at the end? Not me, Lou. No fuckin’ way. If I had to see a couple of guys in tiger suits falling into each other’s arms and sobbin’, I’d puke.”
But Louie knew what a visit could mean. “Les, it’s nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. It’s the end of the twentieth century, Lester. It’s time you started to face this thing. You can’t do it all at once, I know that, and nobody is going to ask you to. But it’s time to work your program, buddy. The time has come. We’re not gonna start with the Wall. We’re gonna start slow. We’re gonna start off with a Chinese restaurant.”
But for Les that wasn’t starting slow; for Les, just going for the take-out down in Athena, he’d had to wait in the truck while Faunia picked up the food. If he went inside, he’d want to kill the gooks as soon as he saw them. “But they’re Chinese,” Faunia told him, “not Vietnamese.” “Asshole! I don’t care what the fuck they are! They count as gooks! A gook is a gook!”
As if he hadn’t slept badly enough for the last twenty-six years, the week before the visit to the Chinese restaurant he didn’t sleep at all. He must have telephoned Louie fifty times telling him he couldn’t go, and easily half the calls were placed after 3 A.M. But Louie listened no matter what the hour, let him say everything on his mind, even agreed with him, patiently muttered “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . uh-huh” right on through, but in the end he always shut him down the same way: “You’re going to sit there, Les, as best you can. That’s all you have to do. Whatever gets going in you, if it’s sadness, if it’s anger, whatever it is—the hatred, the rage—we’re all going to be there with you, and you’re going to try to sit there without running or doing anything.” “But the waiter,” Les would say, “how am I going to deal with the fucking waiter? I can’t, Lou—I’ll fuckin’ lose it!” “I’ll deal with the waiter. All you have to do is sit.” To whatever objection Les raised, including the danger that he might kill the waiter, Louie replied that all he’d have to do was sit. As if that was all it took—sitting—to stop a man from killing his worst enemy.
They were five in Louie’s van when they went up to Blackwell one evening barely two weeks after Les’s release from the hospital. There was the mother-father-brother-leader, Louie, a bald guy, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, wearing freshly pressed clothes and his black Vietnam Vet cap and carrying his cane, and, what with his short stature, sloping shoulders, and high paunch, looking a little like a penguin because of the stiff way he walked on his bad legs. Then there were the big guys who never said much: Chet, the thrice-divorced housepainter who’d been a marine—three different wives scared out of their wits by this brute-sized, opaque, pony-tailed lug without any desire ever to speak—and Bobcat, an ex-rifleman who’d lost a foot to a land mine and worked for Midas Muffler. Last, there was an undernourished oddball, a skinny, twitchy asthmatic missing most of his molars, who called himself Swift, having legally changed his name after his discharge, as though his no longer being Joe Brown or Bill Green or whoever he was when he was drafted would cause him, back home, to leap out of bed every morning with joy. Since Vietnam, Swift’s health had been close to destroyed by every variety of skin and respiratory and neurological ailment, and now he was being eaten away by an antagonism toward the Gulf War vets that exceeded even Les’s disdain. All the way up to Blackwell, with Les already beginning to shake and feel queasy, Swift more than made up for the silence of the big guys. That wheezing voice of his would not stop. “Their biggest problem is they can’t go to the beach? They get upset at the beach when they see the sand? Shit. Weekend warriors and all of a sudden they have to see some real action. That’s why they’re pissed off—all in the reserves, never thought they were going to be called up, and then they get called up. And they didn’t do dick. They don’t know what war is. Call that a war? Four-day ground war? How many gooks did they kill? They’re all upset they didn’t take out Saddam Hussein. They got one enemy—Saddam Hussein. Gimme a break. There’s nothin’ wrong with these guys. They just want money without puttin’ in the hard time. A rash. You know how many rashes I got from Agent Orange? I’m not goin’ to live to see sixty, and these guys are worryin’ about a rash!”
The Chinese restaurant sat up at the north edge of Blackwell, on the highway just beyond the boarded-up paper mill and backing onto the river. The concrete-block building was low and long and pink, with a plate-glass window at the front, and half of it was painted to look like brickwork—pink brickwork. Years ago it had been a bowling alley. In the big window, the erratically flickering letters of a neon sign meant to look Chinese spelled out “The Harmony Palace.”
For Les, the sight of that sign was enough to erase the slightest glimmer of hope. He couldn’t do it. He’d never make it. He’d lose it completely.
The monotonousness of repeating those words—and yet the force it took for him to surmount the terror. The river of blood he had to wade through to make it by the smiling gook at the door and take his seat at the table. And the horror—a deranging horror against which there was no protection—of the smiling gook handing him a menu. The outright grotesquerie of the gook pouring him a glass of water. Offering him water! The very source of all his suffering could have been that water. That’s how crazy it made him feel.
/> “Okay, Les, you’re doin’ good. Doin’ real good,” said Louie. “Just have to take this one course at a time. Real good so far. Now I want you to deal with your menu. That’s all. Just the menu. Just open the menu, open it up, and I want you to focus on the soups. The only thing you have to do now is order your soup. That’s all you gotta do. If you can’t make up your mind, we’ll decide for you. They got mighty good wonton soup here.”
“Fuckin’ waiter,” Les said.
“He’s not the waiter, Les. His name is Henry. He’s the owner. Les, we gotta focus on the soup. Henry, he’s here to run his place. To be sure everything is running okay. No more, no less. He doesn’t know about all that other stuff. Doesn’t know about it, doesn’t want to. What about your soup?”
“What are you guys having?” He had said that. Les. In the midst of this desperate drama, he, Les, had managed to stand apart from all the turmoil and ask what they were having to eat.
“Wonton,” they all said.
“All right. Wonton.”
“Okay,” Louie said. “Now we’re going to order the other stuff. Do we want to share? Would that be too much, Les, or do you want your own thing? Les, what do you want? You want chicken, vegetables, pork? You want lo mein? With the noodles?”
He tried to see if he could do it again. “What are you guys going to have?”
“Well, Les, some of us are having pork, some of us are having beef—”
“I don’t care!” And why he didn’t care was because this all was happening on some other planet, this pretending that they were ordering Chinese food. This was not what was really happening.
“Double-sautéed pork? Double-sautéed pork for Les. Okay. All you have to do now, Les, is concentrate and Chet’ll pour you some tea. Okay? Okay.”
“Just keep the fucking waiter away.” Because from the corner of his eye he’d spotted some movement.
“Sir, sir—” Louie called to the waiter. “Sir, if you just stay there, we’ll come to you with our order. If you wouldn’t mind. We’ll bring the order to you—you just keep a distance.” But the waiter seemed not to understand, and when he again started toward them, clumsily but quickly Louie rose up on his bad legs. “Sir! We’ll bring the order to you. To. You. Right? Right,” Louie said, sitting back down again. “Good,” he said, “good,” nodding at the waiter, who stood stock-still some ten feet away. “That’s it, sir. That’s perfect.”
The Harmony Palace was a dark place with fake plants scattered along the walls and maybe as many as fifty tables spaced in rows down the length of the long dining room. Only a few of them were occupied, and all of those far enough away so that none of the other customers seemed to have noticed the brief disturbance up at the end where the five men were eating. As a precaution, Louie always made certain, coming in, to get Henry to place his party at a table apart from everyone else. He and Henry had been through this before.
“Okay, Les, we got it under control. You can let go of the menu now. Les, let go of the menu. First with your right hand. Now your left hand. There. Chet’ll fold it up for you.”
The big guys, Chet and Bobcat, had been seated to either side of Les. They were assigned by Louie to be the evening’s MPs and knew what to do if Les made a wrong move. Swift sat at the other side of the round table, next to Louie, who directly faced Les, and now, in the helpful tones a father might use with a son he was teaching to ride a bike, Swift said to Les, “I remember the first time I came here. I thought I’d never make it through. You’re doin’ real good. My first time, I couldn’t even read the menu. The letters, they all were swimmin’ at me. I thought I was goin’ to bust through the window. Two guys, they had to take me out ’cause I couldn’t sit still. You’re doin’ a good job, Les.” If Les had been able to notice anything other than how much his hands were now trembling, he would have realized that he’d never before seen Swift not twitching. Swift neither twitching nor bitching. That was why Louie had brought him along—because helping somebody through the Chinese meal seemed to be the thing that Swift did best in this world. Here at The Harmony Palace, as nowhere else, Swift seemed for a while to remember what was what. Here one had only the faintest sense of him as someone crawling through life on his hands and knees. Here, made manifest in this embittered, ailing remnant of a man was a tiny, tattered piece of what had once been courage. “You’re doin’ a good job, Les. You’re doin’ all right. You just have to have a little tea,” Swift suggested. “Let Chet pour some tea.”
“Breathe,” Louie said. “That’s it. Breathe, Les. If you can’t make it after the soup, we’ll go. But you have to make it through the first course. If you can’t make it through the double-sautéed pork, that’s okay. But you have to make it through the soup. Let’s make a code word if you have to get out. A code word that you can give me when there’s just no two ways about it. How about ‘tea leaf’ for the code word? That’s all you have to say and we’re out of here. Tea leaf. If you need it, there it is. But only if you need it.”
The waiter was poised at a little distance holding the tray with their five bowls of soup. Chet and Bobcat hopped right up and got the soup and brought it to the table.
Now Les just wants to say “tea leaf” and get the fuck out. Why doesn’t he? I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here.
By repeating to himself “I gotta get out of here,” he is able to put himself into a trance and, even without any appetite, to begin to eat his soup. To take down a little of the broth. “I gotta get out of here,” and this blocks out the waiter and it blocks out the owner but it does not block out the two women at a wall-side table who are opening pea pods and dropping the shelled peas into a cooking pot. Thirty feet away, and Les can pick up the scent of whatever’s the brand of cheap toilet water that they’ve sprayed behind their four gook ears—it’s as pungent to him as the smell of raw earth. With the same phenomenal lifesaving powers that enabled him to detect the unwashed odor of a soundless sniper in the black thickness of a Vietnam jungle, he smells the women and begins to lose it. No one told him there were going to be women here doing that. How long are they going to be doing that? Two young women. Gooks. Why are they sitting there doing that? “I gotta get out of here.” But he cannot move because he cannot divert his attention from the women.
“Why are those women doing that?” Les asks Louie. “Why don’t they stop doing that? Do they have to keep doing that? Are they gonna keep doing that all night long? Are they gonna keep doing that over and over? Is there a reason? Can somebody tell me the reason? Make them stop doing that.”
“Cool it,” Louie says.
“I am cool. I just wanna know—are they gonna keep doing that? Can anyone stop them? Is there nobody who can think of a way?” His voice rising now, and no easier to stop that happening than to stop those women.
“Les, we’re in a restaurant. In a restaurant they prepare beans.”
“Peas,” Les says. “Those are peas!”
“Les, you got your soup and you got your next course coming. The next course: that’s the whole world right now. That’s everything. That’s it. All you got to do next is eat some double-sautéed pork, and that’s it.”
“I had enough soup.”
“Yeah?” Bobcat says. “You’re not going to eat that? You done with that?”
Besieged on all sides by the disaster to come—how long can the agony be transformed into eating?—Les manages, beneath his breath, to say “Take it.”
And that’s when the waiter makes his move—purportedly going for the empty plates.
“No!” roars Les, and Louie is on his feet again, and now, looking like the lion tamer in the circus—and with Les taut and ready for the waiter to attack—Louie points the waiter back with his cane.
“You stay there,” Louie says to the waiter. “Stay there. We bring the empty plates to you. You don’t come to us.”
The women shelling the peas have stopped, and without Les’s even getting up and going over and showing them how to stop.
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br /> And Henry is in on it now, that’s clear. This rangy, thin, smiling Henry, a young guy in jeans and a loud shirt and running shoes who poured the water and is the owner, is staring at Les from the door. Smiling but staring. That man is a menace. He is blocking the exit. Henry has got to go.
“Everything’s okay,” Louie calls to Henry. “Very good food. Wonderful food. That’s why we come back.” To the waiter he then says, “Just follow my lead,” and then he lowers his cane and sits back down. Chet and Bobcat gather up the empty plates and go over and pile them on the waiter’s tray.
“Anybody else?” Louie asks. “Anybody else got a story about his first time?”
“Uh-uh,” says Chet while Bobcat sets himself the pleasant task of polishing off Les’s soup.
This time, as soon as the waiter comes out of the kitchen carrying the rest of their order, Chet and Bobcat get right up and go over to the dumb fucking gook before he can even begin to forget and start approaching the table again.
And now it’s out there. The food. The agony that is the food. Shrimp beef lo mein. Moo goo gai pan. Beef with peppers. Double-sautéed pork. Ribs. Rice. The agony of the rice. The agony of the steam. The agony of the smells. Everything out there is supposed to save him from death. Link him backward to Les the boy. That is the recurring dream: the unbroken boy on the farm.
“Looks good!”
“Tastes better!”
