The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  Helen standing at the end of the table at the restaurant. Sprung from the monsoon outside. Appearing like a spirit in her dark blue soaked dress. Ridiculous, klutzy, sublime. Leaving a trail of wet footprints despite the towels the maitre d' pressed on her.

  Even after making love, she evaded him, disappeared under his fingertips. This night had proved only how much of her remained a mystery. A woman who didn't hate what he did, didn't begrudge him his obsession, in fact had her own that might be stronger, because more thwarted, than his own. After all the affairs he had had during his four-year marriage, this was the first time he had forgotten to feel guilty.

  Helen shifted in her sleep, and he went to her, and her lips formed to his before she was awake.

  Helen woke at dawn, bathed in sweat, a nightmare caught in her throat, barely swallowing when she saw the accusing fact of Darrow beside her. A mistake made because she didn't want to spend the night alone. As the nightmare drained away, it left behind a throb in her temples. Curt from Philly had become Michael on the evacuation helicopter, and the minor leg wound became a fatal evisceration, the blue and green and plum of his insides spilling out of him, and she bucking on the corrugated floor of the helicopter, trying literally to hold her brother together. Then they were on the ground behind the berm. Michael's eyes--the pale blue recognizable, but the whites yellowed from jaundice, marbled with blood. His face skeletal, hands crusted in dirt, black under his fingernails as he pressed her into the ground as if to bury her, her face in the mud, the helmet cutting her ear, unable to breathe, urine pouring hot down the inside of her legs.

  In the soft dawn light, she rose and crept to the bathroom, closed the door, and stood under the trickling of the tepid shower to wash the fact of Darrow from her, the water falling rust-colored at her feet. Michael's fury, the idea that she was haunting him by entering his war. Her failure still raked against her this morning. Maybe she should give up, go home to California, take up the small life offered to her. Let everyone think it had only been a grand, misguided gesture. Running a washcloth across her throat, she felt her skin, tender and sunburned. She pushed the washcloth between her legs. The water had a metallic smell, like medicine. She wanted to escape down to a cafe on a quiet street and sip coffee alone and think. Should she return home, tail between her legs? The last part of the dream, Michael and she were inexplicably prone on the ground beside the helicopter, and a group of Vietnamese children approached, circling the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Stones began to fall.

  When she opened the bathroom door, her hair wet, a towel wrapped around her damp body, Darrow was sitting up in bed. "Everyone was right about you. You're some kind of mermaid. Always dripping with water when I see you."

  Defeated by the awkwardness of the moment, she turned prim. "I need to brush my teeth."

  "There's a fresh brush in the drawer. Rinse with scotch, I'm out of bottled water."

  She nodded, grabbed her clothes, and ducked back into the bathroom. Once dressed, she came out and edged toward the door. "I need to go."

  He leaned over to the nightstand and picked up a key, tossing it to her. "So the door will always be unlocked."

  Glad to have escaped, she was still not ready to go back to her own room. When the cab dropped her at the hotel, she walked through the streets of downtown and along the river walk, tired and overwhelmed by the strangle of noise, movement, and people. Beggars clogged the streets, and young ex-soldier amputees with sullen, closed faces lounged in doorways and along walls. The city bristled, full of dirty children and starving animals. The tension in the air unnerved her. Even the effort to decipher it seemed crushing.

  She longed to return to her room, be cool and clean, close the curtains and lie in semidarkness, but she couldn't be alone just yet. Visions of home became more per sis tent, filled with more and more longing--the wide streets along the beach, the green mossy lawns, the Vs of pelicans flying along the cliffs. Along Duong Hai Ba Trung, makeshift vendors sold sodas, the dusty bottles lying in boxes of crushed ice in the shade. The heat made them tempting, but she was frightened by stories of ground glass put in the drinks by VC.

  Walking on and on, she neglected to check street signs, indecipherable anyway for the most part. She wandered for an hour in a labyrinth, then found herself back on Tu Do and felt pleased to be back at the familiar. As she passed along a row of shops, a cool, mint green bedspread in a store window caught her eye. The smooth fabric glowed in the dimness of the store. Helen was sure that if she touched it, it would be as cool as stepping onto a dewy lawn in the quiet of early morning back home. She went inside to ask the price.

  The woman behind the counter barely looked up from her bookkeeping. Dark blond hair coiled into a bun with two weaponlike black lacquered sticks to hold it in place. Her face was pale and dry and powdered, painted crimson lips. For a moment, the store was so quiet Helen could hear the buzzing of a fly at the window and forgot if she had asked for the price or not. Then the woman spoke with a French accent. "That is expensive. Hand-embroidered silk from Hong Kong."

  Again she dismissed Helen's presence, scratching at her ink-splotched columns of figures with an antique fountain pen. After a moment, she reached under her desk and brought out a large flyswatter that she snapped at the window behind her. Then the store fell into utter silence.

  Helen turned and was startled by the sight of two Vietnamese women sitting in high-backed, rush-bottomed chairs. Neither of them looked up at her, not slowing down or missing a single stitch in their sewing.

  Although they both had deeply lined faces, their hair, identically done up in tight buns, shone jet black. They wore matching black silk dresses, perfectly fitted from a fashion in vogue in Paris forty years back, consisting of tight bodices and long, flowing skirts. Heads bent down, they embroidered with the tiniest, most delicate stitch on silk cloth. So intent, so silent, Helen had not noticed their presence on first entering the store, their chairs on either side of the door to the supply room like bookends in a museum.

  As Helen turned away, one of them, the older woman it appeared, began to murmur under her breath in French to the other. Helen could understand them no better than if they had spoken in Vietnamese. What new event could possibly have occurred to prompt conversation in this tomb except her entrance?

  She turned back to the Frenchwoman, challenged now by her dismissal. "I'll take it."

  The woman looked up, penciled eyebrows arched. "Lovely, I'll wrap it with a large bow. I'm the owner, Annick."

  Helen leaned against the counter, dizzy from the heat and her lack of breakfast. The seamstresses, self-contained as sphinxes, were oblivious to her distress. She looked down and saw that her blouse had half-moons of sweat under the arms, and she was even more depressed by her water-ruined shoes. The Frenchwoman had undoubtedly noticed all this; probably that was the subject of the seamstresses' conversation also. As she turned, she felt a warm stickiness between her legs, and realized that she had forgotten her time of the month. Simply too much to bear, and in frustration, to her horror, she began to cry.

  "I need to use your bathroom. I have a problem."

  Annick sized her up, determining if she passed some test. The two women could just as easily have become adversaries, but something had swayed her to be Helen's friend. "Come, let's take care of you."

  When Helen returned to the showroom, she was sheepish.

  "Have a seat. I'll get you some water," Annick said.

  "The heat..." Helen mumbled as she accepted the glass.

  Annick was as impeccably dressed as if in a store on the Champs d'Elysees. Helen stared at her dress--a soft peach-colored silk, with a Mandarin collar. Annick looked at Helen's slacks, decided something, and smiled. "I have a black skirt in your size. Borrow it. It's much lighter than what you have on."

  "I'm sorry," Helen said. "Where did you get that dress? I don't have the right things...."
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  "The unexpected social whirl, yes? The dress is made here."

  "I brought all the wrong things." She felt humbled, broken, by the last days. "I mean, it's a war zone."

  "There are tricks to living in the tropics."

  "Really?" Helen was flooded with relief to have another woman to talk to.

  "Watch the Vietnamese." Annick nodded her head toward the two seamstresses. "They move slowly. As do the French. When you walk down the street, you can always spot the Americans because they are hurrying."

  "I didn't notice."

  One of the Vietnamese women dropped a spool of thread, and it rolled out of reach under her chair. Carefully she laid down the cloth she was working on and stood up, gathering her skirt in one hand, the fabric rustling. Helen saw she was wearing dainty black boots with buttons going up the ankle like the kind worn at the turn of the century. The cloth she was working on was a silk hanging of a bacchanalia: figures sitting at a table with naked dancers swirling around it. Detail so fine that red thread formed the rubies in the dancers ears.

  Annick laughed. "It's true. You'll never survive here otherwise. The place will wear you down. I've been here fifteen years. Very few Western women last. It's an art to master. But they never ask for help."

  "I'm a mess, so I'm begging."

  Annick was attractive in the Vietnamese way: simple attire, pulled-back hair, sparing makeup. Painstaking work to look so natural.

  "Lesson number one: Move slowly. Lesson two: Bargain for everything. You paid double what that bedspread is worth. You didn't even find out the price. The difference will buy you a dress like mine. What do you do, Helen?"

  "I'm a photographer. Freelance."

  Annick frowned. "Lesson three: Vietnam is a man's world. We have to make our own rules, but always the obstacle here is the men."

  Helen closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the disaster of Darrow. "I've been here two weeks and made every mistake."

  "And it's only noon. What you need is a nice lunch."

  Annick took her to a favorite place, painted metal bistro tables and chairs on pea gravel in a courtyard garden. The heavy air was trapped against the walls of the building, the perfume of the fleshy, tropical flowers around them making Helen light-headed. She hid under the shade of a banana tree and drank down glass after glass of chilled white wine as pale as water.

  During the main course of sauteed sole and julienned vegetables, they discussed the logistics of surviving as a Western woman in Saigon--how to find feminine products and the chronic shortage of hair spray, where to have one's hair styled, where to buy clothes, where it was safe to go alone, what kind of culture there was, how to handle the number of soldiers all around.

  Demitasses of espresso and sliced mango with sticky rice were served, and Helen asked about the two seamstresses. "Do they work for you full-time?"

  "Madame Tuan and Madame Nhu are sisters. They worked for a French couple who owned a plantation north of Saigon in the thirties and forties. The sisters made all of Madame's clothing so well that her friends requested dresses. The sisters put silk on the backs of all the colons during that time.

  "It was the time before my husband and I arrived. The couple was returning from a party at a neighboring plantation when they were killed by the Viet Minh. They weren't politically important, just unlucky."

  Just as Darrow had warned, better not to ask what had happened to someone. "How horrible. What a tragedy."

  "Actually... quite common. Anyway, the sisters wanted to keep sewing but didn't want to open their own shop. Didn't want to deal with the foreigners directly so much. We met shortly after that."

  "So how old--"

  Annick giggled. "The madames? They are timeless. The great fat old chats perched on their chairs. They know everything going on in the city and yet never leave the shop, hardly talk. They knew all about you."

  Annick lit a cigarette and watched a Vietnamese man in his late twenties, dressed in an expensive suit, pass their table, then she blew smoke out through her lips. "That suit is so fine it must have just arrived from Paris." Her eyes narrowed as she studied the man's retreating figure. "These wealthy Vietnamese around town. Him, the son of an important SVA general. You will never see such opulence and such corruption together. They can't help themselves. They made their fortunes with the help of the French, on the blood of their people. They're cursed."

  "You sound like a revolutionary," Helen said.

  Annick laughed, a deep throaty sound, her head thrown back and her graceful white neck bared. "Never. I love the high life. If you know how to play it, Saigon offers the best life."

  "So you stayed?"

  "I tasted freedom. We stay on, just hoping it will last a bit longer. The sisters will put silk on the backs of the Americans now. But they will remain long after all of us have been banished."

  "I went on my first assignment in the field yesterday and forgot to shoot my camera, I was so terrified." The words come out with a rush. "So terrified I slept with a man last night I shouldn't have. Too scared to stay and too scared to leave."

  Annick stared at her for a moment. "It seems I have become your friend just in time."

  At first, afraid she had started something with Darrow she wasn't sure she wanted to continue, Helen was relieved when she didn't hear from him. After several more days of not hearing from him, she realized that she had been dismissed without knowing it.

  She struggled to make her way around Saigon alone, avoiding Robert in her embarrassment. When she returned to her hotel, she skirted the front desk, afraid of messages from Darrow, more afraid of none. Impatient, she frowned at the elevator, waiting for one of the bellboys to run over to her with a note: "Very important message. Mr. Darrow say urgent." But not a single word came. It occurred to her that the drawer beside his bed might be full of keys; he relied on the fact that they wouldn't be used. But she had used hers. In a rush to make the night before not seem a mistake, she had dropped off the green bedspread she had bought from Annick, gone so far as to make the bed with it. Pathetic. One more colossal blunder.

  After a week had passed, Helen found out through her room boy that Darrow had been on assignment and was back. The answer to why he hadn't called. He hadn't bothered to inform her of the fact of a trip, but she could forgive that. In her relief, she sprouted affection for him. He was at his room in the hotel. She hurriedly changed into a linen dress, brushed her hair, and applied the pale pink lipstick Annick had given her. She made herself walk, not run, to his room. When she knocked, he answered distractedly, "Come in."

  Sunlight streamed through the dusty windows, opaque through the tape used to keep them from shattering from bombs. The air smelled of dirty fatigues piled on the floor, stale cigarette smoke. The desperate feelings she had talked herself into minutes before abandoned her. She again felt like a fool.

  Linh, bowing his head at her entrance, sat in a chair by the window, going through contact sheets with a magnifying loupe.

  Darrow didn't move toward her but stayed at a large table piled with bags of equipment. His face was drawn, eyes invisible behind the glare of glasses.

  She stood in the middle of the room, fingering the rough material of her dress, searching for an excuse for her presence, cursing herself for having come there. Finally she offered up "I heard you were back."

  "Yesterday," he said, continuing to unpack cameras from a muddied bag. "I spent last night developing film."

  "Oh."

  She noticed the tremor again in his hands as he lifted equipment. She was making a spectacle of herself, another Tick-Tock. She hated being the kind of woman to insist that a night together had meant something.

  "You remember Linh," Darrow said.

  Linh rose and nodded to her as she crossed the room to hold out her hand. Blinded with hurt, it was as if she were meeting him for the first time. He stood and took her hand awkwardly, and she noticed without thinking the scarred skin along one wrist. What had he done before becoming a photo
grapher's assistant? It occurred to her that perhaps a woman wasn't supposed to shake hands with a Vietnamese man.

  "I dropped some things off at the apartment. Just a thank-you for taking me along that day." Fool, idiot. Just get out of there.

  "I saw." Darrow lit a cigarette and offered her one.

  "Was the bedspread okay? I bought one for my hotel room. The one there was too depressing, and I figured why not get two for the price...." She couldn't stop talking, sounded ridiculous. She should die on the spot, of humiliation and bad judgment.

  Silence in the room as he let her hang herself.

  "It was fine. Linh, give us a minute."

  "Sure." Linh, bowing even lower than he had the first time, not meeting her eyes, quickly left.

  She felt stranded as the door closed behind him; she wanted to go out also, instead of staying and listening to what was coming. The lock shut so softly one only knew he was gone from the tap of his footsteps fading down the hallway.

  Feigning interest, she walked over to the table by the window and was heartened to see the photo of herself on top of a pile of prints.

  "Let me ask you one thing." Darrow said.

  "What?"

  "Did you really come halfway around the world to a war zone so you could play house with a married man?"

  She pressed her fingers into the table, stared at the photograph of herself while she tried to gather her thoughts, arranged her face enough to carry herself out the room. She picked up her photograph, crumpling it in her fist.