by Kim Fay
“There was nothing uncertain in my asking to stay last night,” she said.
“I have never met anyone like you. I have never met a woman who knows so clearly what she wants.” The day’s heat had recoiled into the trapped hollows of the city, settling into this fugitive lane. “Who isn’t afraid of wanting.”
They emerged into the lamplit boulevard across from the Petit Hotel du Cap-Ferrat. The tall shutters of Irene’s room were open behind the branches of the mango tree, and she saw the gauze drapery of the canopy bed tumbling down. Marc’s face was flushed above the pale linen of his shirt. She touched her lips to the wisp of a scar on his cheekbone. “There is nothing uncertain about this either,” she said, and her mouth traveled over the lids of his closed eyes. He pulled her closer, and his eyelashes grazed her temple. Her hand traveled across his face, the uncharted territory of him. Her lips met his, and it was like reaching a still harbor at a journey’s end.
Rain trampled over the slope of the roof, waking Irene. Her skin flickered in the golden glow of candles burning down. Wax dripped into stalactites beneath the windowsill. Marc lay on his stomach, his long, muscled legs tangled in the white sheets, his back exposed. A dark circle on his shoulder caught her attention, and she examined the tattoo, a sharply etched compass rose. Pointing north, the spine of its emerald needle looked as if it pierced his skin. “What does it mean?” she asked.
He woke into the whisper of her question. “I killed the man who killed my wife.”
“You’re having a nightmare,” she said.
But as he shifted onto his side, his voice had the precision of one who is wide awake. “I would spend all day doing nothing but sitting in the garden staring into the windows at the back of our house. It was like an abandoned stage. I could see the bassinet. And Lara’s dressing gown over a chair. That was why I killed him. For my daughter, who never slept in that wicker basket. For Lara, who never put that gown on again. For my life. A new life I was ready to begin once my daughter was born. And the sun kept rising, but there was never any heat. Just the white winter light of Shanghai and air as cold as it was that night when I found that bastard sucking on a pipe in an opium den on Soochow Creek.”
Irene laid her hand over the uneven beating of his heart, as if she could touch his grief and ease it. But even as he wrapped his fingers around hers, accepting her gesture of solace, his sorrow was inaccessible. She, of all people, understood this.
“I knew that I’d lost my way,” he said, each word a hard stone polished with bitterness. “Not when I pulled the trigger. That I took pleasure in. No, I lost my way long before, to have reached a place where I could take pleasure in doing such a brutal thing. After it was over, I got drunk. One day I woke up and realized that I’d been drunk for more than a year. I realized that I needed to be either dead or sober. I wasn’t ready to stop remembering them, so I quit drinking and discovered how empty a man’s life can be. Then one night I passed a tattoo parlor in Blood Alley. I thought, There must be a way to draw the poison out of my body. I chose a compass to help me stay my course. I’m lucky I’m not covered in tattoos. The pain was unambiguous. I wanted it to last forever.”
He was sitting up, and Irene leaned toward him, resting her forehead against his. “Is this the reason I will be sorry for being with you? Because you’ve killed a man?”
“No,” he said, quietly. “Irene, Henry Simms is my father.”
She opened her mouth to say I don’t understand, but that would not have been true.
“Whenever he was away from Shanghai, he sent letters,” Marc continued, “and when he was in Seattle he wrote about a girl who lived in a museum. She crept around his house searching for hidden treasures and danced like a young goddess when she thought no one was looking. I thought he just wanted to entertain me, and I was young myself. I didn’t understand that the girl was real. Of course, I knew about you later, but it was still disconcerting when we met, as if a fable from my childhood had come to life. And when you told me that he loved you because he’d never had a child of his own, it was as if I was being told that I had never existed. You hadn’t heard of me, but I knew so much about you. I’ve been trying to figure out why.”
Irene slid her legs over the side of the bed and stared at Marc’s body cast in wavering shadow on the wall. It was as if with his confession a darkness within him had been freed and taken a shape of its own. “Have you? Figured it out?”
“No. We’ve never been close, but why would he keep me a secret from you?”
“He acquired priceless works of art and never told anyone.”
“He told you. He told you everything. Except about me.”
At the resentment in Marc’s voice, apprehension swept through Irene. “Is that why you came for me? If you can find a way to hurt me, then you can hurt him too?”
He shook his head. “When I heard about the overdose, when I thought something had happened to you, I realized that I want to keep knowing you.” He drew her in to him, his heartbeat soft against her back. “You’re a part of me.” He kissed the arc of her shoulder. “For some reason, he made sure that you’ve always been a part of me.”
In the scant middle-of-the-night light, Irene left Marc asleep in the bed and put on her dressing gown. Kneeling on the floor, she opened her satchel and piled her maps of Cambodia, all but the one drawn by Reverend Garland, beside her. Each of her maps was unique, not in the way the cartographer had shaped the country, or the locations of villages and mountains and rivers, but because it was its own adventure that she had undertaken as a girl. She had brought them with her because she thought she would need her childhood quests to help her find her way. How wrong she was. There was no trace of this new journey in the countless journeys she had taken so long ago.
She lifted the top map from the pile. The contours of its topography were faint over the countryside, and she was able to locate the smallest of towns only because she had memorized their positions long before time faded the cinnamon ink. It was the map her father gave her right after her mother died. She rubbed her thumb along the threadbare border, where Cambodia washed into the Gulf of Siam.
She struck a match. Flame burst from the matchstick, and she watched as it burned down to the tip of her thumb and forefinger. She blew on the dart of fire, and it vanished, then reappeared as a fleur-de-lis of smoke. Behind her, Marc stirred. She lit another match. It faltered and expired. She lit a third.
She moved the flame in a circle beneath the map, and the paper grew translucent. Then she held the match still, until a brown stain flowered beneath Siem Reap. The dusty, chicory odor of the paper seeped into the air. Her hand trembled, and the map tilted precariously close to the fire. The paper split apart along the road that led to Angkor Wat. She shook the match out and dropped it to the floor.
As Marc sat beside her, his fingers grazed the bare skin between her neck and shoulder where the collar of her robe had slipped down. He asked, “What are you doing?”
“This is my past,” she said, whisking the flame of a new match against the edge of the map. An ember spread, and a hood of fire rose above the page. “I’ve drawn it so tightly around myself that I can’t see where I’m going. I can’t see that there might be a different path to take, other than the one I started out on.” She watched as an orange river flowed toward Stung Treng, and Cambodia’s shadowed gray countryside shimmered beneath the fire. “At least I thought this was my past. Now it seems I was part of a past I didn’t even know about.” She carried the blazing paper to the washbowl beside the bed and dropped it into the water. It hissed, leaving a scroll of black ash.
“Do you wish I hadn’t told you?”
“I wish he’d told me years ago. All that time I could have known about you, the way you’ve known about me.” Feeling the loss of this chance she’d never had, she took the next map and continued to light the limitations of her history on fire. She burned another, and another, until all of her maps except one were gone, and the room reeked of scorched
paper.
——
As morning broke over Saigon, Irene began to pack. She unstrapped her map case from its hiding place in the bureau and tossed it on the bed. The buckle wasn’t secured, and the flap fell open, displaying Reverend Garland’s diary, her mother’s watercolor tablet, and Anne’s gun. Its coral handle shrank in Marc’s grip. “I didn’t take you for the type to carry a weapon.”
They had spoken only a few words to one another since she had destroyed her maps, and she felt dazed as she told him, “I don’t even know how to shoot the thing. Anne gave it to me after Simone and I killed Roger.”
“I suspected that it was the two of you.”
“He was going to shoot me, and she stabbed him, and then I hit him with a car.” The room smelled of smoke, and Irene opened the window. Rain slunk through, relieving the sticky, closed heat. “We didn’t mean to do any of it,” she said, savoring the dampness on her skin. “Or maybe we did.” After last night, the murder and its motives seemed more distant than ever.
“Why is this expedition so important to you, Irene? You say it’s about your reputation, but I’ve checked around. You may have been cut out at the Brooke Museum, but you’re well-regarded. You already have what you need to claim a new place for yourself—a good place—in the art world. You don’t need the scrolls.”
She turned to him. “What are you talking about?”
“Tell me the real reason, for both of you, you and Simone.”
“The reason we share?” She gathered up the costume she had bought to impress Louis. “It’s where we’re from,” she said, running her fingers over the blue buttons. “It’s what shaped us. Finding the history of the Khmer is like finding a missing part of our own histories. It’s a way of making ourselves complete.”
“And this is why you don’t leave her behind?”
“I wish I could, I do, even though it would be against Mr. Simms’s wishes. She’s made such a mess of everything.” Irene could not help but laugh at how absurd the situation had become. “But that’s not it. No, I was foolish enough to show her the map. She knows where the scrolls are. There’s no way I can outrun her, not with Louis on her side. They could easily beat me to the temple. Or they could send off a telegram. That’s all it would take to have every official in the country after me.”
As Marc reflected on this, he searched for his shirt among the sheets. His tattoo was dark and unforgiving on his shoulder. “It seems to me you need someone on your side.”
“Are you … do you want to come to Cambodia with me?”
“Do you want me to?” he asked.
She was listening for a trace of the desire they had shared, but she sensed, instead, caution. As he dressed, she watched him. Tall and fair, Marc was the closest Irene would have to family once Mr. Simms died. The closest she would have to being known without having to explain where she’d come from, who she was. She trailed her fingers through the slush of ash in the washbowl. She could see the remains of her blackened country, the daub of a charred village bereft of its surrounding landscape. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I do not know if many men have from childhood, as I have had, a presentiment of their whole life. Nothing has happened to me that I have not dimly foreseen from my earliest years.
PIERRE LOTI,
A Pilgrimage to Angkor
Chapter 13
Not a Mirage
Beside Marc, in the front of the Pierce-Arrow sedan he had borrowed from his aunt, Irene tucked her feet up onto the seat, her bare toes resting against his leg. She gazed out at the sunrise brushing the morning chill from the leaves of rubber trees, planted in even rows along the newly paved highway heading west toward Cambodia. Light welled on the horizon, and the radiant green of an occasional rice paddy emerged from beneath shawls of white mist. Rolling down her window, she let the wind cool her face, still warm from Marc’s lingering touch in her hotel room hours before.
Simone sat in the backseat with Louis. They had taken her from the hospital against her doctor’s orders, and although she was drowsy and silent, Irene was aware of her attention as Marc lowered his hand from the steering wheel and traced his finger over her ankle. Always such a private person, Irene scarcely recognized herself as she laid her hand over his, not caring that she was being observed, while the landscape around them brightened and opened wide, the coconut and rubber plantations giving way to the flat, exposed countryside monotonous with rice fields. She didn’t care about anything right now except the memory of the previous night and the reddened highway leading her toward the home of the ancient Khmer.
Sitting next to Marc, Irene noticed the way he listened to every word spoken to him with undivided attention, and how he was not self-conscious when she caught him watching her, and her attraction for him flared like the incandescent blue kingfishers startled to flight with the passing of the car. She thought about her feelings for the Khmer and how she had nurtured them so diligently over the years. She had not known that passion could take root without being sown, and the discovery was intoxicating. She laid her head back on the seat and gazed out at a flock of egrets, their silky wings dragging feathered shadows over the surface of the fields. The sun burned her wrist, exposed over the edge of the door. She knew she should pull her hand inside, but she was engrossed by the deepening color, as if she were being shaped at that very moment, like an unformed piece of clay.
“I should be drinking Pernod over ice on the terrace at the Manolis by now,” Simone declared, waving her Gitane with one hand and a rice-paper fan with the other, to whisk the smoke from the car.
Ice. Irene’s mouth watered for it as she sat in the front seat watching Marc, who was drinking coffee in one of the nipa stalls, beneath strings of drying cuttlefish. They had been stopped for almost an hour along the low shore of a delta tributary, waiting for the ferry. It was nearly noon, and the sun was a flat white haze, as if it had smoldered into the molten pallor of the sky. Irene knew it was dangerous, the compulsion to give parts of herself to Simone, but she could not resist the urge to talk about her feelings for Marc. And Simone of all people would not judge her for what she was going to say. “I don’t know why, but I always chose men I could live without. Men I wouldn’t miss when they were gone.” She confessed, “I was engaged once, and when he wrote from the Somme to tell me that he had fallen in love with a Parisian girl, I was overwhelmed by how relieved I felt—that I wouldn’t have to be the one to call off our marriage.”
Having yet to ask why Marc was with them, Simone nodded and said, “It can ruin you, wanting someone too much.”
The car’s doors were open in the vain hope of a breeze stirring through, but the air was too heavy to move. The muddy brown river was as motionless as the landscape. Irene thought about how tenderly Louis had helped Simone from the hospital to the car, and how she had slept for a while with her head on his shoulder. But there was also a coolness between them. If they had reconciled, they had not done a tidy job of it, and the effect this problem could have on the expedition concerned Irene. “Is that how you feel about Louis?” she asked.
Simone gazed up the road, where he stood in front of a stall displaying bottles of sun-warmed cola. “That was how I felt about Roger.”
“You loved him more than you loved Louis?”
“It was different. Roger came along when I needed him to. He rescued me from the heartache of my parents’ death. He gave shape to my longing. He taught me how to understand my country in an entirely new way.”
“He beat you.”
“Yes, he did that too. But he had strength. He had conviction. He never would have let me go. But Louis did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive him for that.”
Seeing no advantage in arguing against Simone’s logic, Irene watched Marc. He was close enough for her to see the dusting of crumbs that had fallen onto his shirt from the baguette he was eating with his coffee, but still, in the newness of her craving for him, he was too far away. She asked, “Was there ever
a time with Roger when you didn’t feel fragile?”
“Not a moment. And I’ll be honest with you, Irene, I never felt more alive.” Squinting, Simone cast her gaze out across the river. “Merde, if that ferry doesn’t arrive soon, I’m going to crawl out of my skin.”
——
Out in the open of the ferry landing, Irene could not touch Marc the way she wanted to. She could not even look at him the way she wanted to, and she certainly could not ask the things she wanted to ask with Simone and Louis around. The restraint was making her edgy. “It’s hot as hell out here. I have to do something besides smoke. Teach me how to shoot the gun.”
“At anyone in particular?” he asked, tossing a piastre coin beside his empty coffee cup. He surveyed their surroundings, beyond planks of fly-infested boar fat, past a group of women, half-asleep, having abandoned their bamboo poles festooned with trussed, listless chickens. He led her around these obstacles toward the ridgeline of dried mud that ran along the bluff above the sluggish river. His loose shirt and trousers could have been bought in the Chinese quarter in Shanghai. They were so unlike the tailored suits favored by Mr. Simms, and she wondered if this was deliberate, or if he was simply that unlike his father. His father. Strange, how easy this was to accept.
As the food shacks fell into the distance, their soft drinks and baskets of shriveled vegetables growing indistinguishable on their counters, Marc put his back to the river and scrutinized a dehydrated sea of low, wiry trees and tufts of woolen scrub. His eyes settled on a lone banana palm a few dozen yards away. “That will be your target. Give me your gun. Do you see the blossom?” he asked, using the pistol to point it out, as if shooting was the only reason they had walked so far from the others.
