They were all Vietnamese, with two female lead singers in sequined minidresses, and a male backup band in black vests and wide lapels that looked like they’d gotten lost on the way to a gig at the Holiday Inn Albuquerque. They were pretty good, too, jamming on a familiar tune, although with the muddy amplification and the singers’ strange inflections, I couldn’t quite place it. Then it clicked—the Supremes, “Someday We’ll Be Together.” The lead singer pulled a Diana Ross and reached out to the small, attentive crowd, holding her hand upside down and delicately pursing her fingers together as she sang, as though she were holding a small hatchling in her palm. She opened her fingers as the chorus ended, and the bird flew away. I’ve never felt so alone in my life, even decades later, divorced and living out in the desert with no one else miles around. I was completely, utterly bereft. The band launched into a version of “Love Child,” and I closed my eyes.
———
Richard stopped reading. His mouth and throat were a barren stretch of hell, his tongue smacking loudly into the mic with every syllable of every word. “Sorry,” he said. “Could I get a glass of water up here, or something?” Vance scurried out of the room, and he stood there, looking down at the blurred type, a mass of infuriating black squiggles. He wiped his forehead with a green sleeve and became conscious of the pooled sweat on his back trickling down into the crack of his ass. For an event he’d idly looked forward to his entire life—reading from a successful book to a room full of interested people—it was surprisingly torturous. A beseeching glance at the director yielded a discreetly signaled ten minutes. Vance returned with the water, and Richard forged on:
I awoke to someone shaking my shoulder. It was a small man with a large smile, outsize sunglasses crowning a sleek black head of hair. The band had finished playing, the equipment was gone, and the club had emptied out. It was dark outside, and I realized I must have been asleep for hours.
“You GI?” said the man.
“Huh. No.”
“Yes, you GI,” he told me. “You want a good time?”
I didn’t want a good time. I wasn’t horny for the first time since I’d turned twelve. “I’m looking for something.”
“You look for girl? I find you girl.”
“No. I need to find U.S. Army Command.”
“Ussami? Camahn?” The man played with the words, trying to arrange them into the plausible name of a familiar whore.
I scanned the dingy club, for someone who could help me. Just an elderly man bent to his broom, and a prostitute glancing over with a look of avid boredom. “Army headquarters,” I tried. He looked at me without comprehension, and I was aware at that moment of how stupid I was being, but it seemed that, having started this line of conversation, I was somehow obliged to see it through. “U.S. Army Command,” I said slowly, as though he was hard of hearing or stupid, though, of course, I was the stupid one.
He repeated the words again, then smiled and nodded. “Ahmy,” he said, pointing at an imaginary row of medals on my chest, then doing a salute, mock serious. He stretched his arms to his sides, doing a credible impression of a large building.
“Yes.”
“Okay, come on. You got ten dollar? Need ten dollar.” I pulled out my wallet and gave it to him. He examined the bill with a look of surprise that narrowed into mild contempt as he folded it into his pocket. Reading his mind was not hard: You dumb, fucking asshole. He wasn’t wrong.
We trudged down the Rue de Gaulle, past a small square writhing with pigeons, so thick with shit that the old stones looked whitewashed. My tour guide walked quickly, and with my forty-pound bag and dead legs, I struggled to keep up. At first, I thought he was trying to rip me off, disappear with my money, but then I realized if he wanted to do that he would already have been gone; he was simply moving with the efficiency and speed of a man who knew his city, and who had other places to be. At certain moments I had to resist the urge to call out, as his small form turned a corner or rapidly edged into a crowd of people, many of whom were also clad in tan trousers and thin, white cotton shirts. I kept my eyes on his sunglasses, still perched on his head, which marked him out and occasionally glinted with the reflection of a passing streetlight.
As we walked, we seemed to enter a distinct, different neighborhood. The broad streets grew narrower, and electric lanterns hung from storefronts covered in pictograms: a bear, a child, a car, a laughing man—Berlinger. Vendors cooked fish in large pans over open flames; the smell of fish was, in fact, everywhere, and, having spent two days in San Francisco before my flight to Vietnam, it occurred to me that this was Saigon’s Chinatown. The streets grew narrower still, like a mountain crevice tapering into nothing, and for a moment I panicked at the thought of being led into a dead-end ambush. Then the street opened up again, and there, improbably, across a large stone plaza overgrown with green weeds, squatted an enormous building. MACV HEADQUARTERS—MILITARY ASSISTANCECOMMAND, VIETNAM—according to the peeling wooden sign in front of us. I wouldn’t have known the place on sight—I didn’t know anything then, much as now—but I could read, at least.
The man smiled and gestured at the building with a grandiose sweep of his arm, like a game-show host presenting a fantastic prize. Then he was gone. The area was eerily silent and devoid of activity—the locals must have known to cut it a wide berth. In the darkness on the far-left edge of the plaza, there was a small, crumbling brick structure, a neglected former supply shed for the main house. I picked my way into the dark ruins. There, behind a diagonal wall of sloping brick, I found a good place to wait and watch.
HQ was located in a formerly grand nineteenth-century three-story French colonial, still impressive, but with an air of decay, of reclamation by time and the local elements. Its façade was painted an unhealthy mustard yellow, cracked and blistered by the heat. A shutter on the second floor hung at an angle off faulty hinges. Two large flagpoles sprouted from an unkempt circular grass disk in front. The U.S. and South Vietnamese flags drooped overhead in the stifling, hot breeze that blew through the city like a close animal’s breath. A long, wide bi-level staircase led up into the building—twice as many stairs to the first landing, then a smaller top staircase that led to a first-floor portico and courtyard. Two guards shared a smoke on the landing, their guns propped against their shoulders with such nonchalance that they almost looked unarmed.
I sat there for a long time, obscured by darkness and shadows, watching them. At some point during my vigil, one of them left and was replaced after a minute or two by another soldier, a difference I could tell because the new man was around a foot taller, a hulking goon whose jutting lantern jaw was visible from seventy-five yards. I put my hand inside my field pack and ran my fingers across the smooth pebbling of the grenade. I imagined tossing it, the thing skittering across the wide landing, the moment of horrible recognition, the compression of air, then the blast that would come, the smoke and shouting.
But no. It would have been satisfying, but it wasn’t why I was there. I felt around in my field pack for the 9-mm service revolver, grabbed it, brought it out, and held it in my lap. I brought a T-shirt out, rolled it up, and put it between my neck and shoulder. I leaned sideways, propped in the crook of the wall, and dropped into a thin, itchy sleep. In this way I passed the night: jolting awake every now and then, scanning the area, and falling asleep again, waiting for daylight and Lieutenant Christopher Endicott, waiting to shoot him dead.
———
The auditorium rang with applause for what seemed like an absurdly long time, even though he knew it was entirely sincere. He asked the audience if there were any questions. After a few awkward seconds, an older woman in the front row raised her hand, and said, “Do you mostly write at night or in the mornings?”
“Uh. Mornings, I guess. And afternoons. Not at night.”
There was another long pause. The director raised his hand. “Yeah,” said Richard, still not remembering the man’s name. “Go ahead.”
The director shi
fted in his seat to address both Richard and the crowd. He said, “This is your sixth book. You’ve been at this for three decades, working on the fringe. Now, in your fifties, you have a book getting serious acclaim. Perhaps you could talk a little about what it’s like to finally be getting the recognition you might have felt you deserved all along.”
“It’s pretty strange.”
“I imagine so.”
Richard stood there for a few moments, during which the director rearranged himself in his seat, propping his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand, in a parody of anticipation. “It’s pretty fucking strange,” Richard ventured, but this also didn’t seem sufficient. “I don’t know what to say about it. I wrote a bunch of books no one gave a shit about, and now they finally do. It’s nice, but it’s a little late. I wish this had happened twenty years ago, when I still had lots of books left in me.”
He wiped the sweat from his forehead again and looked forward to the drinks he would have afterward, the way a condemned prisoner might look forward to supping on sweet manna in the promised land. The director turned and asked if there were any more questions, and Vance raised his hand.
“Yeah. Vance.”
Vance, again sounding as though he’d rehearsed the words for days, slowly intoned, “Mr. Lazar, what advice would you give young writers trying to get started?”
“My advice would be don’t do it. Learn how to fix cars or computers, something worthwhile that people need. Spend as much time on vacation as possible, kiss lots of girls. Thank you.”
———
There was no wine at the reception that followed in the English department lounge, but a buffet table loaded with silver banquet dishes of satay skewers and Swedish meatballs and hot-dog mini-croissants attracted enough people from the reading to pack the room. Richard shook hands with an endless parade of faculty and students, all of whom, infuriatingly, had different names. Afterward, the director and his wife—a petite woman who put her hand on his forearm when they talked and looked at him with such a horrible, bright avidity that he felt sure he was forgetting a previous meeting or tryst or possibly a marriage—and a few other professors all took him to dinner. Vance sat at the corner of the table in stony, intimidated silence. The restaurant was an Italian place decorated in high-cheeseball, opulent Florentine-villa style, with fabric billowing from the ceiling and pillars placed randomly throughout, and a brilliantly colored fresco of cavorting cherubim and nymphs over the open kitchen. The food was not very good, but there was a lot of it, and it was free. The waiter seemed to appear every five minutes with a new bottle of wine. Toward the end of the meal, the director pinged his wineglass, said some nice things, and everyone cheered loudly. Richard was relieved no one asked him for a speech, since he was, by this point, more or less completely stupefied by alcohol.
They piled back into their cars and went to the director’s nearby home for some superfluous nightcaps. We have ouzo, the director’s wife had told Richard at dinner, with great feeling. We have grappa. The house was located at the summit of a large hill that seemed to take fifteen minutes to ascend. Inside, African masks angled down from the walls in gaping disbelief. Someone put on a bebop record with an incendiary saxophone, greatly increasing the room’s ambient confusion. A sequence of joints went around. Richard sank into the depths of a voluminous couch, having conversations with people he didn’t know, saying things he forgot almost as soon as the words left his mouth. He talked at Vance for a while, feeling like a cartoon character with an empty speech bubble next to his mouth. Then he spent a long time listening—or rather, cunningly, pretending to listen—to a fellow wearing a tyrolean hat with an actual feather in it, who had apparently also written a book, or the chapter of a book, or the foreword, or a blurb, or maybe he’d just read a book once; it was hard for Richard to tell, what with the music and drink and also his intense lack of interest. The director’s wife walked by and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“Your husband said something about you taking off your shirt.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “He hates that.”
“I bet.”
At an indeterminate point later in the evening, her shirt was off, a fact that inexpressibly gratified him. Then it seemed the party was over, and he was being escorted out, out into the cool, quiet night. Insects skronked their own alien jazz in the trees. He didn’t know what kind of trees they were. He had, shamefully, gotten to be almost old with virtually no knowledge of the plant kingdom. He couldn’t tell the difference between an oak and a poplar, if there was one. Vance maneuvered him into the car. Then they were driving. They dipped under a railroad trestle, festooned with graffiti: PEZ LOVE VALERY in big ornate script, bright red. True love, dangling upside down with a spray-paint can. He forced Vance to stop at a liquor store, where he bought a pint of something brown. Driving again, Vance said, “Did you really mean that stuff you said tonight?”
“What stuff.”
“To fix cars instead of writing. That it’s worthless.”
He sipped the whiskey. It was so delicious. “Yeah, I did.”
“Why have you spent your whole life doing it, then?”
“Because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been remotely good at. Believe me, if I could have been a lion tamer, I would have.” Vance said nothing, and Richard said, “Listen, it’s not just the writing. It’s all worthless, everything. Sorry to break the news to you.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Well, I hate to pull rank here, but what do you know?”
Back at the hotel, he got out of the car and nearly listed over like a ship in high seas. He took a few exploratory steps with his feet set wide apart, almost fell, stopped, and sat down on the pavement. He couldn’t get up and felt it wouldn’t be so bad to make this his new gig. He’d be the parking-lot guy from now on. Then Vance was beside him, pulling him up. Together, they made the door. Then there was the task of getting the key in the lock, yet another gauntlet to run. Ten or so minutes later, the door creaked open, and a blast of cold air escaped. He pushed his way forward and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Are you okay,” said Vance, standing in the threshold.
“First-rate. Tip-top.”
The kid didn’t say anything, just stared into the room.
“Listen, just forget everything I said, okay? Who cares what I think? I’m a pile of shit. Do your thing, you’ll be fine.” He would have continued in this vein, but Vance wasn’t paying attention, was looking past him. He looked where Vance was looking and saw the manuscript, where he’d left it, in the trash. By the time he looked back around, Vance was already slouching out into the dark lot. Richard tried to climb to his feet, but through the window he saw the kid get in his car and pull away. It sped quickly down the hotel’s access road and was gone.
The TV, left on all day, now played a nature show featuring falcons, or perhaps they were condors, attacking goatlike creatures that nibbled obliviously on the sparse grass at the edge of a sheer mountain face. The birds swooped down the craggy cliff faces and grabbed the goat things by their legs, then dropped them down hundreds of feet to their deaths. Without volume it was unclear whether this was done for food or fun. He looked again at the painting over the bed, the likeness of his daughter. After a sportive minute of his wrangling with the phone, it began to ring on the other end.
“Hello?” she said. He could hear a TV loud in the background, canned shrieking laughter.
“Cin, hi. It’s your father.”
“Oh.” The TV volume lowered.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Listen, they’ve got me on this book tour.” In an effort to sound less drunk, he spoke slowly and overenunciated every syllable like an octogenarian Brit commentating an antiques show.
“Yeah, Mom said.”
“Did she?” He was gratified to hear that Eileen had spoken of him, even though it was probably in bad terms. There
was silence on the other end, and he found himself already struggling to keep the conversation afloat. “The book’s doing really good,” he tried.
“Mazel tov.”
“How are you?”
“Same as when you asked ten seconds ago.”
“Oh, right. What are you doing?”
“Right now? Getting ready for work.”
“I forgot you work nights.”
“Well, I’ve only been doing it for eight years.”
More silence. Finally, she said, “I’ve been looking for another job lately.”
“Spying on degenerates losing its shine?” She lived in Las Vegas and worked casino surveillance, a job he found both improbable and distasteful. He would rather she’d have become a teacher or professor, like her mother. Or a drug dealer.
“Jesus. What do you want?”
It was a good question: What did he want? What didn’t he want? He lay back on the greasy synthetic floral-print comforter and noticed a halfhearted repair job someone had done on the ceiling directly over the bed. Some caulking agent that resembled shaving cream or Cool Whip was smeared over a hole the size of a large serving plate. What might lurk in the crawlspace over the small hotel room did not bear examination. He closed his eyes. “Do you remember when we bought you that bike? I think you were eight?”
She said, “Are you drunk?”
“Don’t change the subject. We bought you a white-and-pink Huffy Mongoose from Toys ‘R’ Us.”
“I remember,” she said.
“I bought it for you, because Eileen was at a conference that day. I remember walking down the aisles for an hour, trying to pick one out. How do you know the right bike to get a little kid? I guess you just pick one you think’s pretty sharp looking, which is what I did. But when we gave it to you, I remember the look on your face surprised me, like you were almost disappointed to get the thing, even though you’d asked for one. Or I think you did, but don’t all kids want bikes?”
The Grand Tour Page 3
