The Time in Between (David Bergen)

by David Bergen

  Elaine was alone at a table that overlooked the harbor. She was drinking tea. When she saw Ada she smiled and lifted a hand in greeting, and as soon as Ada sat down, she said, “Look, the other night at Thanh’s. I’m sorry.” Her long fingers worked at a napkin, smoothed it on her lap, plucked it up again. “Married people do that sometimes. Have their outbursts that should be private but unfortunately aren’t.”

  She seemed tired, her face was more delicate than usual. She touched it now, narrow index finger with a bright red nail. It was her eyes as well. More furtive, but some other quality, as if she expected to see herself reflected in others.

  Ada waved a hand as if to dismiss Elaine’s concerns and then said that she had had a good time at Thanh’s. Jane had been sweet and Sammy was adorable.

  “Isn’t he?” Elaine said, too brightly. Then she said that she was determined to salvage something from this experience in Vietnam. “I will not run.” She called over the waiter and ordered a plate of shrimp. Ada asked for a Coke.

  Elaine said that she and Jack knew an American doctor in Hanoi who had lived in Southeast Asia for many years and whose wife had just died in a car accident. A horrible thing. They had two young boys. “And this man is planning on staying in Hanoi,” Elaine said. “Most of us might throw up our hands and go home, but he’s staying. I admire that. The tenacity, the bravery, even the foolishness.” She paused and then said, “I want to be brave like that.”

  “You are,” Ada said. “I look at you and I see bravery.”

  Ada wasn’t sure if this was true, but she knew that Elaine was pleased because she shook her head and smiled.

  “You were away,” Elaine said.

  “I went to Hue,” Ada said. “Coming down through the pass on my way back, I kept imagining my father on that same train. I remember you told me that you took that trip with him.”

  “Yes,” Elaine said. Then she said, as if this were a sudden revelation, that after that trip, she had not seen Charles again, though she had tried. “He believed something about me that he wanted to protect me from.” She leaned forward to take a cigarette from Ada’s pack.

  “Here,” Ada said, and offered Elaine a light. She saw the small mole on Elaine’s jaw. Almost imperceptible. The clean skin, the tiny flaw. Ada felt both empathy and aversion.

  Elaine exhaled and said, “Your father was lost to himself. I think I recognized this in him.” She turned to gaze out at the harbor and then said softly that she had heard Jon was in Hanoi. Thanh had told her. She smiled slightly and said, “Thanh keeps me informed.” She said, “At Thanh’s the other day, when I saw Jon’s hands, I was amazed. He has Charles’s hands. Exactly.”

  Ada said that Jon wanted her to go to Hanoi but she was thinking she wanted to go home. She said she thought she had been trying to find something that was still out there.

  Elaine sat up straighter and said, “Who’s the brave one now?” She put out her cigarette, then took a shrimp, slid the plate toward Ada, and said, “Your father told me once that he wanted to go to Hanoi. He didn’t say why.” Ada was suddenly aware that her father had revealed little to Elaine about himself. They might have talked, might even have been lovers, but Elaine Gouds did not truly know Charles Boatman.

  “In his bag there was a ticket to Hanoi,” Ada said. “But it had expired.” She lifted her shoulders, conscious of the pointlessness of the comment. Elaine called the waiter over and ordered a rum and Coke. “Join me?” she asked Ada and then called out to the waiter, “Make it two.”

  When their drinks arrived, Elaine again mentioned Hanoi. She said that she knew a family who had returned to Australia for several months. “They have a house in Hanoi. It’s in a suburb near the zoo. Sammy loves it. There’s a small lake there, the streets are quiet. Before you leave, if you decide to go there and need a place to stay, let me know and I will try to arrange it.” She smiled. Lifted her glass and drank, as if cheered by the prospect of someone else’s plans.

  AT NIGHT, ADA WOKE TO THE BELLOW OF A SHIP FAR OUT AT SEA and the reply of a foghorn. She got up and went to the bathroom. When she wiped herself she saw blood. This relieved her; she had been careless with Vu, giving no consideration to any consequences. She put in a tampon and went back to bed. She lay with her eyes open and thought that the following day she would go see Vu and tell him she was returning to Canada.

  At noon, she rode her bike over to Thanh Thuy Street. The green gate was locked. She called out. Nothing. She paced the road and then stood in the shade and smoked the last of her White Horse cigarettes. As she was about to leave, Vu’s sister came home. She was walking her bike, the basket full of flowers and vegetables. She nodded at Ada. Said, “Hello.”

  Ada rubbed her cigarette against the sole of her sandal, dropped it onto the road, and stood. “I was waiting for Vu. Of course. Is he still away?” Thien nodded and invited Ada in and they walked back to the kitchen. The dog leaped on Ada and pawed at her chest, and Thien took a knife from the sink and waved the blade at the dog, who scrabbled into the next room. Thien said in broken English that Vu was still in Hue. He would be back soon.

  “How soon? Today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Thien looked at Ada, and then the corner of her mouth lifted and Ada thought she must seem foolish and desperate. She said, “I’ll go now.”

  Thien said, “Tomorrow, I am going away with my daughter. Maybe Vu will be here. You can try.”

  The following morning when she went back to Vu’s house, she found him home. He looked at her as if he had expected this visit. He said that his sister and niece had gone up north for a week or so, to see the family. He served her coffee and bread and sat across from her and watched her eat. He did not mention Hue or the manner of her leaving. She did not say what she had planned to tell him earlier, about wanting to return to Canada.

  Later, he climbed the ladder to the small loft above the house. He painted through the morning while Ada moved about the house and then sat in the garden. At lunchtime Vu walked to the street corner to pick up some food. He came back with four bottles of cold beer and pork satay and cucumber-and-mint salad. They ate in the sunshine and talked about everything except themselves. After lunch Vu took Ada up to his loft. She stood with him in the center of the room, surprised by the mess, the empty paint cans, the half-finished canvases, the abandoned drawings. The painting Vu had been working on was on the easel by the window.

  She took Vu’s hand and looked at him, then leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. He allowed this, and more. She circled him, touching him as if she were a traveler who had stumbled upon some ancient relic. She asked if they should undress completely. “Completely,” he said, not as a response, but more as if the word itself interested him. She took off her top and bra and her pants and underwear.

  “Do you like what you see?” she asked.

  He said that he liked her breasts and the curve of her hip, there, and he was amazed at the amount of her hair. “Here,” he said and touched her pubic hair.

  She said that she had her period; held up the string of the tampon and said, “See?” He said that for him this was something new; not even Elizabeth, the artist from Chicago, had shown him this. He called it a stopper and Ada said, “Something like that.”

  They lay together anyway. She was curious about his language and what things were called, and so he taught her and she repeated after him. Later, still naked, she lay down and he took a brush and traced, in Chinese ink, the outline of her body on the floor of the loft.

  Over the next days, whenever she went up to talk to him, or to find him, or to make love to him, or simply to watch him, she would see the outline of herself on the floor, and always she would be amazed by her own shape and the emptiness within that shape.

  Sometimes they slept in the back room, on a narrow cot, and at night she’d wake and listen to Vu breathing, and above her, in the loft, she occasionally heard a noise, as if a small object were being dragged across the floor.

 
“Rats,” Vu said, when she asked him. He said that he used to have a cat but it had disappeared and now the rats had come.

  She said that she hated rats.

  One morning she came back from the hotel, where she had gone for a proper night’s sleep, and she found him setting a trap in the loft. The trap was the size of a small hamster cage, with a door that swung down from the inside. Vu laid a banana at the back of the cage.

  During the night, she woke to a bang and for the rest of the night heard the cage moving across the room. She told Vu, who groaned and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll drown it in the morning.”

  Ada got up and sat in the front room. There was a little wine left from the night before, and so she drank that and smoked one of Vu’s cigarettes. She knew she could either choose to return home or continue down this strange road. She did not know why she was sleeping with Hoang Vu. Perhaps he was the country, or her father, or simply a notion of the country, or a notion of her father. She knew that she had never loved a man before, and she didn’t know if she loved Vu. She knew only what she felt, a happiness in the morning when she heard his feet on the tile, a sense of well-being as she read in the garden while he worked above her, the giddiness of throwing herself at him, the need for sex, though he was slow and not always as interested as she. With other men sex had been hollow, but with Vu, because he was curious about details—the shape of her instep, or the vein leading from her elbow to her wrist—and because he would pause to note particulars with his dark voice, sex was unpredictable.

  Vu would disappear. This she knew. One morning she would open her eyes and he would be gone and she would not find him.

  She smoked another cigarette and then went back to bed. As she slipped under the mosquito net, he said, “You,” and he placed a hand on her hip and she lay an arm over his chest and spread her fingers across his ribs.

  In the morning he drowned the rat in the trap. He filled a large bucket with water and dropped the trap into the water. The rat swam very well, chewing at the top of the cage and then diving and returning to push its nose through the holes. When, finally, it stopped moving, Ada noticed that the rat’s eyes had turned milky, or the color of dirty clouds.

  The next time they caught a rat, Ada asked Vu to take it far away from the house and let it loose. She refused to let him kill any more. She said it was a terrible thing to think of an animal drowning. Vu left on his sister’s bicycle, and when he returned the cage was empty. He sat across from her and said that her idea of how the world worked was very different from his. “You believe that there is goodness in most things and you believe that all things are equal. The president and the cyclo driver, the beggar and the writer, the rat and the dog. And because you believe this is so, then it must be. But it isn’t.” He smiled and said that for this reason he was very fond of her.

  “And for no other reason?” she asked.

  “There are other reasons, yes.”

  “But my naïveté, this you like.”

  He did not answer her directly. He said that naïveté was sometimes passed off as innocence, or the other way around. Her father too seemed to approach the world in a certain way, though in his case it was neither innocence nor naïveté. “I will tell you this,” Vu said. “Your father was disillusioned. I believe that is the word. Or disappointed, maybe. He came to this place and when he arrived he did not know why he had come. He might have thought it was to visit that village you and I went to, or to find people he once knew, or to uncover the same country he had experienced thirty years ago, or to find this, or discover that.” Vu paused and moved a hand through the air and let it fall onto his knee.

  While he had been speaking Ada had shifted forward, as if worried that Vu’s words might slip away and disappear. She said, “But it was all those things.”

  “Yes, yes, absolutely,” Vu said. “But suppose that all those things weren’t enough.”

  Ada closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Vu was watching her. He said, “You have a different beauty than I am used to.” He reached up and traced one of her eyebrows, and as he did so she pushed against his hand and bit down on the meaty part of his palm. A low moan filled the room. Ada, when she heard it, was surprised to recognize her own voice.

  Later that afternoon she told Vu that she was thinking of going up to Hanoi to see her brother for a while and bring him back to Danang. She would take the chance to see Hanoi. She didn’t know what to expect. She thought then of her father, of how she believed he had had every intention of going to Hanoi but somehow that intention had gotten misplaced. Vu lit a cigarette and drank from a glass that held a clear liquid which was not, Ada was certain, water. He said that there was nothing complicated in this. “It is simple,” he said. “Often things are more simple than we think. Go.” And then, as if to soften his tone, he said that if she needed help with something, if she was lost, or even if she wanted company one night, she should call his brother. And he wrote down his name and his work address.

  Riding her bicycle back to the hotel, she did not know why, but she began to cry. A cyclo driver passed her going the same way. He pulled up beside her and began to pretend to cry, and then he laughed and spat on the road and pulled away. At the hotel entrance, as she was wheeling the bike through the doors, she saw Yen across the street, standing in a doorway, watching. She paused and then turned away and went up to her room and packed her bags, looking out the window at one point to the place where Yen had been standing, but he was gone.

  Just down the street from the hotel were the offices of Vietnam Airlines. She walked there and bought herself a ticket for the next day, and then she called Elaine and told her she would be visiting Hanoi and was she certain it would be all right to stay at the house of her friends.

  “Yes, yes,” Elaine said. “I’ll call and tell them to arrange for the housekeeper to go and let you in.”

  “Are you sure?” Ada asked.

  “They would love to have someone there. It’s safer. You know?”

  Ada left the following afternoon, and when her flight took off it circled Danang and far below she could see the ocean and the white sands of the beach at My Khe.

  7

  THE HOUSE WAS LARGE, WITH EVERY AMENITY, AND ON THAT FIRST evening, Ada felt the pull of home and realized that the last weeks had worn her out. The maid had let her in, fixed her a cup of coffee, and explained in slow English how to lock the doors and work the gas stove. Then she had left, and Ada, happy to be alone, explored the house. The living room had leather couches and a big-screen TV. Bunk beds in one room and a large canopied master bed with white linen and a goose down quilt. The art on the walls was modern. The bookshelves were overflowing: South American authors, a tattered version of Don Quixote, some mysteries, and there was a copy of In a Dark Wood signed by the author. Unlike her father’s copy of the book, this one had a dust jacket, and on the back inside flap was a photograph of Dang Tho. He was squatting beside an empty railroad track. He held a cigarette. He appeared to be looking past the camera lens, as if there were something important happening behind the photographer.

  In bed later, reading, she turned to the section in the novel where Kiet deserts his company and walks back to Hanoi. As she read, the death of the mother and baby saddened her once again: the infant’s howl, the opening at the mother’s throat, the pink bubble. Ada imagined the complexity of her father’s response and how he might have seen himself in the story. The war had touched so many lives, even her own now. Here she was, huddled in a chair as small gray moths struck the overhead light, delving into a story that her father had also read, but understanding that even this would not allow her to see how her father saw.

  In the middle of the night she woke and called out for Jon. She heard the wind and the beating of something in the eaves of the house and she remembered where she was. She had come up out of a dream in which her mother was an old woman sitting on a chair in a corner of a room and she was calling for Ada to come to her.

  It had been
years since she had dreamed of her mother. The memory of her fell back on both the slightness and certainty of childhood recollections: the shape of her mother’s naked waist as she sat before her mirror putting on perfume, preparing to go out, leaving Ada in charge; the heat of her body beside Ada later, after she had returned, the smoky smell caught in that hollow space where her neck became her shoulder. The scarcity of flowers at her graveside on the day of her funeral.

  Ada got out of bed and went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of water. She heard again the beating of something in the eaves, and she saw, beyond the window, quick dark shapes, which in a moment of horrific lucidity she understood were tiny bats. When she went back to bed, in the moments before sleep pulled her in, she was fearful that the bats would find their way into the house and that when she closed her eyes she would dream again of her mother.

  SHE SLEPT LATE, AND IT WAS AFTERNOON WHEN SHE LEFT THE house and walked out to a main thoroughfare where she took a taxi to the city’s old quarter. She sat on a bench and watched the young boys circle the streets on their Hondas. Once, many years earlier, her father had talked about the hum of bicycles on the Vietnamese streets. A constant whirring, he had said, like the sound of many birds taking off. She did not hear that now. Instead she heard hawkers and the vehicles, the honking of horns. A child laughing. In a café she drank an iced coffee and listened to a British couple argue about the exchange rate on the dong. A legless beggar waited outside the door, holding a tin bowl.

  Later, she took a cyclo to Lenin Park. Men and boys begged to shine shoes, lovers stood looking out over the lake, and in the distance very old missiles pointed into a blue sky. Vendors sold small figures made from colored dough, toys shaped out of beer cans, and plastic flags that read, “I love you too much” or “Happy, happy, happy.” She walked around the lake and saw, beneath the shadow of a tree, a solitary man cooking a dog on a spit, feeding the fire with a rolled-up straw mat. Boats moved across the lake. A full moon hung swollen in the afternoon sky.