“Thus cutting down on the frogs, and thereby the snakes,” said Henry Schultz.
“Exactly,” said Genevieve. Everyone was smiling now. The spell was cast, the panic forgotten. “For you ladies—and gentleman—who would like some guidance about a practical weekly household schedule—” They nodded; they all would. “Let’s start with Monday.”
“Big Laundry Day,” said Irene, her voice suffused with relief: after a nasty detour, the program was back on established rails. She gestured to her Number Three, who had appeared in the doorway bearing an armful of pencils and writing tablets. “You might find it helpful to take notes.”
* * *
They adjourned for luncheon, Irene’s Numbers Two and Three lifting tea towels off the humps on the dining room table to reveal platters of sandwiches and cookies. Renee Martelli’s sticky bars were there too, now stacked in an artful swirl around a design of cut fruit.
As the others went forward to take plates, Genevieve and Irene hung back.
“How are you?” asked Irene. In those words was an indictment of how badly the meeting had gone. She met Genevieve’s eyes briefly, then lifted her hand. Across the room the Number Three moved, carrying a large pitcher of iced tea to fill Mrs. Green’s empty glass.
“I think I’m starting a migraine,” said Genevieve.
“I have some tablets,” said Irene, her frown dissolving into sympathy.
“I took some earlier,” lied Genevieve. She watched a circle of ladies crowding around Henry Schultz. As usual, any man in a group of women was attended and indulged as though he were a visiting prince. “Don’t the New Ladies all look impossibly young? Or is it that we’re impossibly old?”
“You’ll never look old,” said Irene, matter-of-fact. She herself had what people called strong features, which was a nice way of saying a big nose. She wasn’t unattractive, although her self-deprecation was constant, probably a consequence of never having been the prettiest girl in any room. She lowered her voice. “I’m glad I went with a dry menu. Considering.” She darted her eyes to Joan, who was standing awkwardly by the sandwiches. She had returned from the restroom during the laundry discussion with Helen’s headscarf tied around her waist, a creative solution to the problem of the burn hole in her dress.
“Probably best,” agreed Genevieve, although she longed deeply for a cocktail. She sipped from her own glass; the tea had apparently still been warm when poured over the ice, as the liquid was tepid and the cubes were floating pellets. That servant needed to be retrained or, if it was a repeat infraction, let go.
“She should be ashamed of herself,” said Irene, looking angrily at Joan. “Frightening them like that.”
“It was lucky about that cigarette, though,” said Genevieve. “That’s all anyone will remember.”
“The dam is a humanitarian effort,” said Irene, still on her own tangent. “It requires sacrifice on our part. So what? Imagine those poor villages, not having water.”
“I don’t have to imagine,” said Genevieve. Water cutoffs were fairly common in Bangkok. She had begun to suspect that the dam project was a sham—a way to churn government money into the pockets of businessmen. Robert would never knowingly participate in fraud, but he might not even be aware of it. “Have you ever wondered,” said Genevieve, “how does it take so many people, and such a long time, to build a single dam?”
“What has gotten into you?” said Irene.
“I had to fire my driver,” said Genevieve. She abruptly felt near tears. “Fred.”
“What did he do?” asked Irene. The soft concern in her voice was unbearable.
Genevieve shook her head. They were now on the fringes of a lively group: the women, carrying plates and glasses, had eddied back toward them.
“I tried to give a monk some money yesterday,” Renee Martelli was saying. “And a total stranger slapped my arm.”
“A strange man slapped you?” exclaimed Clara.
“A woman,” said Renee.
“Oh, dear,” said Alice. “You couldn’t have known, but it’s a pretty big no-no to touch a monk.”
“I was giving him money.”
“A woman mustn’t touch a monk or anything the monk touches,” said Helen in her teachery voice. “Not even the bowl in his hand. If you want to give something, wrap it in a piece of cloth and drop it in. If he’s seated, you can drop it on his robe.”
“So even the Buddha treats women as second-class citizens?” said Renee. “Enlightened, my foot.”
The other New Ladies’ lips primmed up; Genevieve was heartened to see it. From all reports, the women’s lib nonsense that had been well underway when she’d left home was still raging there, but it seemed that most of these women hadn’t been taken in. They might be young, disheveled, and naive, but they apparently had a firm grasp on their roles here: to support their husbands and care for their families in difficult circumstances. Genevieve felt chastened by their example. What had gotten into her?
“Make no mistake, ladies,” Genevieve said, before remembering Henry Schultz, pressing on nonetheless. “Our husbands may be the ones who are officially employed here, but we are the ones who will make our time in Bangkok a success.”
“But what does that mean?” said Clara in her plaintive treble. “How will we know we’re successful?”
Before Genevieve could reply, Joan spoke, from her exile near the sandwich table.
“If you get out of here unscathed,” she said. Her voice quiet, nothing like her previous rant. She spoke without looking at anyone in particular. “When you’re on the airplane, buckled in, and your husband and children are with you, and everyone’s healthy. When you’re going home, and you’re never coming back. That’s when you’ll know your time here has been a success.”
In the ensuing silence, she lifted her glass toward her mouth, then noticed it was empty; the Number Three glided forward with the pitcher.
Chapter Eight
“A WOMAN sits up,” said Bardin, settling into the chair across from Robert. “In the middle of the night.”
“Yes?” said Robert, looking up from his paperwork, trying to rearrange his face into lines of interest. No doubt this would be an off-color story. Bardin seemed the type. But then, Robert supposed, they were all the type, when it came down to it. There was so much else they couldn’t say. Safe subjects played out fast: after generalities about weather, and distant sporting events, and the best places to get a curry or a cold beer or a handmade suit, only dirty jokes were left.
“She sits up with a little choking noise, waking her husband. Are you listening?” asked Bardin, leaning forward and tapping Robert’s desk with two fingers. “Because this is a mystery.”
“I’m listening,” said Robert.
Bardin leaned back, took a cigarette box from his breast pocket, offered it to Robert, then shook one out for himself. They each lit up with their own lighters and sighed out separate lungfuls.
“She wakes up choking,” Bardin said again, as the fan blades on the ceiling whipped the exhaled smoke into cirrus shapes, “and scrambles out of the bedclothes. Her husband wakes after hearing her fall. Maybe he thinks, with a clutch of fear, that her heart has given out. Maybe he thinks she got up to go to the bathroom and slipped. They are at that age when nocturnal bathroom trips are to be expected, and also slip-and-falls. Her husband calls to her. She doesn’t answer. He sits up in bed and turns on the light.”
“And what does he see?” asked Robert when Bardin didn’t go on.
“He sees his wife, lying in a pool of bright red blood. He gets up and goes to her, and with some difficulty—the old joints aren’t what they were—he kneels beside her. She is not breathing. The blood is running out of her mouth and onto the floor.”
“And the mystery?” said Robert, since Bardin again seemed to have stopped.
“The mystery is what killed her.”
A minute or so of silence, both of them smoking, Robert tapping his pencil against the papers on his desk. Tap-t
ap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
“Bleeding ulcer,” he said. He’d had an alcoholic aunt who’d suffered that way.
“Wrong,” said Bardin. He reached a long arm forward, deposited a few gray flakes from the end of his cigarette into the stamped brass ashtray on Robert’s desk. “She was fit as a fiddle. Never hospitalized, apart from the deliveries of her three children. Never operated upon, not even for the children, who slid out easily as fish, hardly even bruising that tender doorway.”
The phrase, so intimate and vulgar, made Robert wince; Bardin noticed, and smiled.
“She’d lived a quiet life,” Bardin said. “Her biggest adventure had been her honeymoon in Italy forty years before. She ate carefully and looked after her teeth and walked briskly half an hour a day, weather permitting.”
“She ought to have lived forever,” said Robert.
Bardin leaned forward as if to tap his cigarette into the ashtray again. It wasn’t necessary—the ash was short. Was he peeking at something on Robert’s desk? Robert laid his crossed arms on the pile of paperwork.
“That last currency drop backfired on us in a spectacular way,” said Bardin. He nodded toward the white sheaf under Robert’s elbow. “Hope we’re on to something better.”
His voice was casual, as though they discussed work in this way all the time. They never had. Bardin had been hired on the year before; Robert wasn’t even sure exactly what he did, or how or whether their work overlapped. To Robert, Bardin was only the mildly obnoxious redhead in the office next door. Or, more frequently, not in that office; its door remained closed, the pebbled glass panel dark, for long stretches at a time. When he was there, his presence could be rambunctious: Robert would hear him on the telephone, telling jokes too loudly, laughing longer than was seemly at his own punch lines. Other times, he’d be a silent apparition in the corridor after a late-morning arrival, pale under his freckles, shutting the door behind himself gingerly, as though a slam of the wood might burst his skull.
Another limey, the Boss had said, introducing them when Bardin first came, but Robert had felt no kinship. There was something of the imposter about Bardin, his respectable accent almost parodic, as if veneered over a rougher tongue. Bardin hadn’t seemed interested in Robert either. The two of them had never had a conversation more probing than one might have with a fellow air traveler, courtesies elicited by forced temporary proximity. Even when lubricated by drink at one or another of the parties, their interchanges were brief and pottered safely around superficialities.
For the most part, the men in the office worked on their own; there were few conferences or consultations. Robert’s directives arrived in buff-colored envelopes that appeared at his office door periodically, carried by that bland-faced young secretary, Miss Harch. In due course, she’d return to collect the last one and deliver the next. Robert never even knew in which direction his completed work went: Down the hall and to the left, toward other men in the office? Or down the hall and to the right, toward the Boss’s quiet room around the corner? He had tried to find out once, handing Miss Harch his envelope and then following her casually out of his office, on the pretext of getting a drink from the water cooler. He’d stood watching her go. Just before she reached the end of the corridor, Miss Harch had wheeled around and stood, one foot in front of the other, the pleats of her miniskirt flattening against the smooth forward thigh. She’d stood there, blinking slowly. He’d smiled a mask of innocence and lunged toward the water cooler, fumbling the conical paper cup from the dispenser with such nervous force that he mangled it. He filled it anyway and drank, under the eye of the blinking girl, water dripping from the damaged shape onto his toe. She had blinked him right back into his office, where he’d drained the paper cone, dropped it into the gray metal dustbin, and sat back down at his desk. After a few moments he’d heard her heels tapping away.
“So what was the answer?” Robert asked Bardin. The heat was near his fingers; he stubbed out his cigarette. “What killed her?”
“No other theories?” Bardin looked disappointed at the quick end to his guessing game.
Robert shook his head.
“She had a tear in her thingummy, her aorta,” Bardin said, miming a tube with a curled hand and knocking the fingertips against his chest. “The big artery that comes out of the heart.”
“I thought you said she was healthy.”
“Oh, she was, she was.” Nodding vigorously, taking a last deep drag and then wisping out smoke with his words as he reached to the ashtray to crush out his cigarette. “She had no idea about the internal damage. It happened during a minor incident on the honeymoon railway tour of Italy—a short stop, not even a collision. It threw her husband to the floor of the car, but she braced her arms against her seat and managed to stay in place. Her husband wasn’t injured; he dusted himself off and they carried on, not giving it another thought. What neither of them knew was that the incident had made a wee fissure in the bride’s aortic artery. The cause was actually the action she’d taken, bracing herself.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Our organs are fixed to one another in spots, did you know that? They don’t simply float around separately inside us.” Robert nodded, although he hadn’t known that. “So when she braced herself, her body stayed in place but her internal organs continued to move forward, and her aorta tore away from the place where it was fixed to the structure behind it. It didn’t tear all the way through, of course—that would have killed her almost instantly. The breach was in just the innermost layer.”
Listening, Robert felt a slight nausea, discomfited by the notion of organs slamming about inside of a person. Short stops while driving in Bangkok were a daily occurrence.
“Over the ensuing years,” Bardin continued, “while the newlywed couple settled down and had children, while those children grew up and married, during the matriarch’s menopause and the patriarch’s retirement, into their old age—all that time the blood was passing through that tiny fissure and down between the artery walls, ballooning them out. Each beat of her heart feeding the balloon.” Bardin curled his hand again, twitched the fingers to make it pulsate. “Until one night, when she was a grandmother and he a grandfather and their main concern was keeping warm in winter, she got up to use the bathroom, and the balloon burst.” Bardin opened his hand in a splay of long white digits.
Robert looked at it, then up to the vulpine smile. Was there ridicule there? Bardin was unmarried: What would he know about the constraints and surprises, the secrets and compromises, that went into a long marriage? The elderly couple in his story, probably invented but perhaps real, would have lived through their own crises and deep disappointments, their arguments spoken and unspoken. Bardin had boiled them down to caricatures, suspended them in a syrup of condescension. Perhaps only for the story, but even so it was inane. Robert himself had an ideal-appearing marriage. But beneath the surface was the desperate truth: he had married a woman he didn’t deserve, had tangled her up in a lie and jammed them both into a corner from which he could see no escape. Bardin had no idea how that was.
“And the point of telling me this story?” Robert said.
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.” A cold, tired-of-playing-along syllable.
“Well,” said Bardin, his jocularity undiminished. He furled his fingers back into a freckled fist, knocked that on the desk. “You think about it. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
Robert was still watching the place where Bardin’s hand had been when the man had arisen and left the office, when he had disappeared humming down the hall.
* * *
Robert had been struggling all morning with the latest envelope of materials; it had disgorged, among more typical items, a snapshot. Usually the photographs Robert got were official-looking head-on portraits in black and white. This photo was in color; the subject was out of focus and not fully facing the camera. To Western eyes all Vietnamese looked younger than their years, but this man looked absolutely just a boy in his casual collared
striped shirt; his sidelong face was laughing. On the reverse side of the photograph, Robert had found light penciling in English letters: NGUYEN TRAN.
Robert often received materials without explicit instructions—he was allowed a certain artistic license in his work—but this seemed beyond the pale. He pondered it. The jolly, half-turned face, the Western clothing. Too carefree for a soldier. Not a sniper either—not the type to stare his enemy down through his rifle scope and mercilessly pick out their hearts or eyes. Too young to be a farmer rejoicing in new prosperity after having surrendered to the Southern Army; too old to make a heartwarming child-reunited-with-his-returned-soldier-father tale. Robert stared at the image until the answer came: He would make the boy an informant, a spy for the ARVN. The project would require an entire dossier, which meant a lot of intricate forgery; still, Robert felt pleased with his decision. He went to work on the supporting documents for the photograph, telling himself that if the material didn’t suit, it wouldn’t be used. Someone higher up made those decisions.
* * *
When the doorknob turned again, Robert looked up. The blurred shape beyond the pebbled glass was too bulky for Miss Harch, and Robert framed a tart greeting for Bardin, something along the lines of Haven’t you any work to do? But the words died on his lips when the shape instead became the Boss, easing himself around the door and closing it behind him, lowering himself into the chair Bardin had vacated not long before.
“The Tokyo Rose stuff was very good,” said the Boss. “Just exactly what we were looking for.” The script had been easy, a cry from the heart. “Gave me shivers.” He reached out a hand and began idly to finger the neat stack of paperwork on the corner of Robert’s desk, riffling the corners with his thumb. “I saw Bardin was in here.”
What Could Be Saved Page 10
