by Vu Tran
Sometimes we didn’t need an argument. She’d be talkative and affectionate in the morning, and then I’d come home in the evening and she’d seem afflicted with some flu-like melancholy that only silence and aloneness could treat. So I learned to let her be. I turned on the TV in the kitchen during dinner. I turned up the music in the car as she sat staring out the window. I spent more and more time with friends at the bar or at our weekly poker game. I slept in our spare bedroom, which was otherwise never used.
Once or twice a year, I’d startle awake in the middle of the night and find myself alone in bed, the house empty, her car still parked in the driveway. An hour later the front door would open and she’d be barefoot in her nightgown and a jacket, having taken one of her nocturnal walks through the neighborhood, God knows what for or where to. She’d crawl back into bed without explaining anything, despite my stares and my questions, and in the morning I’d notice the dirty bottoms of her feet, the stench of cigarettes on her clothes, the whiff of alcohol on her breath. One evening I came home from work and every single light in the house was on, and she was out back beneath the apple tree, curled up and asleep on the grass, empty beer bottles lying beside her with crushed cigarettes inside.
Then, after a few days, sometimes as long as two weeks, with out any hint whatsoever of reconciliation, she’d crawl into my arms while I lay on the couch watching TV, roll over in bed and bury her face in my chest, join me in the shower and lather me with soap from my head to my feet. I never knew how to feel in these moments, whether to love her back or commence my own week of silence. Not until she started talking again, recounting some funny incident at the flower shop two weeks before, or describing some movie she’d seen on TV at three in the morning, would I then feel her voice burrow into me, unravel all the knots, and bring us back to wherever we were before the silence began. Then we’d make love and she would whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, except hers sounded more like a wounded animal’s, and that would remind me once again of all the other ways I felt myself a stranger in her presence, an intruder, right back to where we were.
And yet we still kept at it, year after year of living out our separate lives in the same home, of needing each other and not knowing why, of her looking at me as though I was some longtime lodger at the house, until I came to believe that she was both naive and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean I’d never hurt her.
The night I hit her was a rainy night. I had come home from the scene of a shooting in Ghost Town in West Oakland, where a guy had tried robbing someone’s seventy-year-old grandmother and, when she fought back, shot her in the head. I was too spent to care about tracking mud across Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her yell at me when she saw the mess. Couldn’t she understand that blood on a sidewalk is a world worse than mud on a tile floor? Shouldn’t she, coming from where she came, appreciate something like that? I told her to just fuck off. She glared at me, and then started with something she’d been doing the last few years whenever we argued: she spoke in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me—but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, like she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I slapped her across the face.
She yelped and clutched her cheek, her eyes aghast. But then her hand fell away and she was flinging indecipherable words at me again, more and more vicious the closer she got to my face, her voice rising each time I told her to shut up. So I slapped her a second time, harder, sent her bumping into the dining chair behind her.
I felt queasy even as something inside me untangled itself. There’d been pushing in the past, me seizing her by the arms, the cheeks. But I had never gone this far. The tips of my fingers stung.
Everything happened fast, but I still remember her turning back to me with her flushed cheeks and her wet outraged eyes, her chin raised defiantly, and how it reminded me of men I’d arrested who’d just hit their wives or girlfriends and that preternatural calm on their faces when I confronted them, the posturing ease of a liar, a control freak, a bully wearing his guilt like armor. It made me see myself in Suzy’s pathetic show of boldness. She’d never been as tough as I thought, and now I was the bad guy.
She spit out three words. She knew I understood. Fuck your mother. She said it again, then again and again, a bitter recitation. I barked at her to shut her mouth, shoving my face at hers, and that’s when she swung at me as if to slap me with her fist, two swift blows on my ear that felt like an explosion in my head. I put up an arm to shield myself and she flailed at it, still cursing me, until finally I backhanded her as hard as I could, felt the thud of my knuckles against her teeth.
She stumbled back a few steps, covering her mouth with one hand and steadying herself on the dining table with the other until she finally went down on a knee, her head bowed like she was about to vomit. Briefly, she peered up at me. Red milky eyes, childish all of a sudden, disbelieving. I watched her rise to her feet, still cradling her mouth, and shamble to the sink and spit into it several times. I watched her linger there, stooped over like she was staring down a well. I didn’t move—I couldn’t—until I heard her sniffling and saw her raise herself gingerly and reach for a towel and turn on the faucet.
As I walked upstairs, I listened to the water running in the kitchen and the murmuring TV in the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside, and everything had the sound of finality to it.
In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a home full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. It was a testament to the weird isolating vacuum of our marriage that she was able to immediately and completely disappear from my life. Her flower shop had closed down a year before and she had been working odd jobs around town: cutting hair, selling furniture, I rarely kept up. I had known so little about her comings and goings or the people she knew that once she was gone I had no way of even finding out where she was living. Even Happy had quietly disappeared.
Months later, after the divorce was finalized, with a little help from within the department I found out she had moved to Las Vegas. I sold the townhouse and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I went on a strict diet of hamburgers and steaks.
But two years later, a few months before my trip to Vegas, I bumped into Happy at the supermarket. Instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend, which didn’t surprise me too much. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually looked a lot like Suzy without her glasses: a taller, more carefree version. She said she, too, had moved to Vegas for work and was in town for the summer to visit family. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterward she came home with me. We shared two bottles of wine and I let her lead me to the bedroom, and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized—or admitted to myself—my true reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how she quit her job and married him after knowing him a month, and how everything had been good for about a year.
“Until he start losing,” Happy declared casually, sitting back against the headboard. She fell silent and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She looked at me impatiently as though I should already know, as though anyone could’ve told the rest of the story.
“He hit her,” she said. “She hit him too, but he too strong and he drink so much. Last month, he throw her down the stair, break her arm. I se
e her two week before, her arm in a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And always he say he need her, he need her.”
“Did she call the cops? Why didn’t she go to the cops?”
I stood from the bed, my head throbbing from the wine and all that I was imagining. I knocked the lamp off the nightstand.
Happy flinched. She had put her glasses back on, as if to see me better. After a moment, she said, “Why you still love her?” There was no envy or bitterness in her voice. She was simply curious.
“Who said I did?”
She checked me with her eyes as though I didn’t understand my own emotions.
I tried to soften my voice, but it still came out in a growl: “Is it just the money? What—is he handsome?”
“Not really. But you not either.” She patted my arm and laughed.
“You know what? I’m gonna go to Vegas and I’m gonna find this fucker. And then I’m gonna hit him a little before I break his arm.”
This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and regarding me with drunken pity. “You a silly, stupid man,” she said.
I RETURNED TO FUJI WEST at 8:00, as the sun was setting. I drove this time. The parking lot was half full, mostly fancy cars, and I immediately spotted the silver Porsche in the back row. Sure enough, it had the right tag. I rechecked the five-shot in my ankle holster. My hands felt bruised from the hot, dry air.
Inside, the restaurant was cool and dark and very Zen. Piano music drifted along the ceiling beams overhead. Booth tables with high-backed wooden seats, lighted by small suspended lanterns, lined the walls like confessionals. Candlelit tables filled in the space between the booths and the circular sushi bar, an island at the center of the restaurant manned by three hatted sushi chefs in white who resembled sailors. Flanking the bar were two enormous aquariums filled with exotic-looking fish staring out calmly at the twenty or so patrons in the restaurant, most of whom easily outdressed me.
I asked for a table near the bar and ordered a Japanese beer and told the hostess I was waiting for a friend. I’d barely wet my lips before Sonny’s young Doberman appeared and sat himself across from me, as casually as if I’d invited him.
He was now dressed in a charcoal suit, set off by another beautiful pink tie, looking very ready to be someone’s best man. He waved at a waitress, who swiftly brought him a bottle of Perrier and a glass with a straw. Pouring the Perrier into the glass, he said to me, “So you did not like my advice.” His voice was gentle but humorless. He sipped his Perrier with the straw like a child. In the aquarium directly behind him, a long brown eel swam slowly through his head.
“My business with Sonny is important.”
“I’m sure it is. Except my father has no business with you.”
I drank my beer and tried to hide my surprise. I searched his face for some resemblance of the hard man I’d already envisioned in my head. “So you know who I am.”
“Miss Hong’s friend Happy is also a friend of mine. She visited me recently and mentioned that she had been seeing you. That is, until last month. You stopped taking her calls. She got worried. She told me what you had been planning to do. She did not know how serious you were, but she wanted to tell me for your sake. She likes you, Mr. Robert, and I suppose she has some womanly notion of saving you. She did not tell Miss Hong, of course, or my father. So only I know that you are here. And that is a good thing.”
“Because your father’s a dangerous man?”
He eyed me sternly, drawing together his dark handsome eyebrows. “Because my father does not have my patience.”
The hostess came by and whispered something into his ear, and Sonny Jr. looked to the front of the restaurant, where a large party had arrived, people in suits and dresses. He stood and gestured for a waiter, then gave him and the hostess rapid orders in Vietnamese. He glanced at me distractedly and went on with his instructions. He watched them walk away and continued watching as they saw to the party.
His father might have been a poker-playing gangster, or maybe a gangster-playing poker player, but for the moment Junior seemed nothing more than what he appeared: the young manager of a restaurant.
He turned back to me, adjusting his tie, his face once again as calm as the fish. “You were a narcotics investigator once. Ten years ago, I believe.”
I took another swill of my beer. “Nice detective work.”
“You did it for only two years and then returned to being a patrol officer. Why?”
“It didn’t suit me. Why do you want to know?”
“Because the answer matters. You do not strike me as someone who gives up easily.”
“I didn’t give up on anything,” I said, a little too loudly. His facts were accurate but told a meaningless story. He had no idea how good I was at prying into other people’s lives, how tedious and occasionally thrilling the job was, or how enjoying it emptied me because I didn’t care to know so much about people I cared nothing for. “It just wasn’t my cup of tea.”
He tried to puzzle me out, like he was readying a few more questions. But then he grabbed the linen napkin on the table and stood. He dabbed at his forehead with the napkin, pocketed it, and said, “I have something to show you. It will behoove you to come with me.”
“I’m guessing this something is not your father.”
Instead of answering me, he nodded toward the front of the restaurant. “You are free to go if you want. But I think you will regret it.”
I still hadn’t moved.
“You’re the police officer here,” he said. “It should be me who is nervous.”
I felt vaguely embarrassed and downed the rest of my beer before getting up. As I gestured for him to lead the way, I noticed again how much taller I was. On our way to the kitchen, we passed two private tatami rooms, each being busily prepared by the staff for the swarm of guests out front. Foolishly or not, the presence of so many people eased my mind.
The kitchen was staffed by Mexicans and Asians, all in white uniforms. No one paid us any attention as we walked to the back, toward a door marked OFFICE. Junior unlocked it, and once we stepped inside he relocked it. He approached an enormous, door-size oil painting of a geisha walking up a dark flight of stairs. There was a clock on the wall beside it, which he set to midnight, then he turned the minute hand three revolutions clockwise and two revolutions counterclockwise. The painting slowly swung open from the wall like a door, revealing a passageway and a dark descending staircase. He walked down and with a glance over his shoulder said, “It will close again in ten seconds.”
Visions of my own doom flittered through my head, but at that point I’d already talked myself into following. If he wanted to lure me into danger, he wouldn’t be this obvious about it, even if he figured me for a complete idiot. The kid seemed too smart to underestimate a cop. He really wanted to show me something, and I wasn’t ready yet to walk away.
We reached a long dim hallway and passed six closed doors, each with a keypad over the knob. At the end we stopped at a door that was set much farther away from the others. He punched a series of numbers on the keypad and something clicked. He pushed the door open completely before walking inside.
I heard soft oriental music. The room glowed bluish and shimmered.
It was no more than eight hundred square feet but felt cavernous, with a lofty ceiling and walls of glass surrounding us, behind them water and fish. I had entered a gigantic aquarium. The three walls before me each showed the flush faces of four separate tanks, framed in quadrants like giant television monitors, their blue-lit waters filled with stingrays and sharks and what looked like piranha and other menacing fish, swimming around beds of coral and white gravel. High above me were two ceiling fans, their slow synchronous spinning like the gears of a machine. I noticed then the small video camera perched in the corner, peering down at us.
On a large oriental rug in the center of the room stood a black leather couch, two dolphin chairs, and a glass coffee table. Sonny Jr. walked to the ta
ble and took a cigarette from the pack lying there, lit it casually, and approached the tank of stingrays.
I sensed something behind me. Haunting the hallway outside, in his oversize bib of an apron, was the seven-foot Mexican, his dull Frankenstein face looming beyond the top of the doorframe, nearly severed by it. Junior spoke Vietnamese to him and he stepped inside, bowing to do so, and propelled me farther into the room until I was standing by the black couch. He untied his apron and let it wilt onto the floor, then closed the door behind him.
I don’t know why it had taken this long for my nerves to kick in, but as soon as the door clicked shut, I clenched my jaw. It struck me that the Mexican spoke three languages, including Vietnamese apparently, and something about this—the fact that he belonged completely to this absurd situation—was both comical and deeply troubling.
I said to Junior, “Your father has expensive pets.”
“He is not here, Mr. Robert,” he replied and ashed into an ashtray he held in his other hand—yet another overly formal mannerism. He gestured at the entire room. “But I have brought you to meet his fish. You may already know that they are not . . . particularly legal. This one here”—he pointed at a whiskered creature over two feet long, with a golden, undulating body, glimmering in the light—“is an Asian arowana. A dragonfish. Very endangered in the wild. They’re supposed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together. Asians always love believing in that. Our clients will pay over ten thousand for a gold one like this.”
