A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

by Robert Olen Butler

  I suppose my two friends were as nice to me as possible at the Continental Palace Hotel, considering what they had to do. Thy asked me to go to the rest room with her and we were laughing together at something Lý had said. We went to the big double mirror and our two faces were side by side, two girls eighteen years old, and yet beside her I looked much older. Already old. I could see that. And she said, “I am so happy.”

  We were certainly having fun on this day, but I couldn’t quite understand her attitude. After all, Lý was going off to fight our long war. But I replied, “I am, too.”

  Then she leaned near me and put her hand on my shoulder and she said, “I have a wonderful secret for you. I couldn’t wait to tell it to my dear friend.”

  She meant these words without sarcasm. I’m sure of it. And I still did not understand what was coming.

  She said, “I am in love.”

  I almost asked who it was that she loved. But this was only the briefest final pulse of naïveté. I knew who she loved. And after laying her head on the point of my shoulder and smiling at me in the mirror with such tenderness for her dear friend, she said, “And Lý loves me, too.”

  How had this subject not come up before? The answer is that the two of us had always spoken together of what a wonderful boy Lý was. But my own declarations were as vivid and enthusiastic as Thy’s—rather more vivid, in fact. So if I was to assume that she loved Lý from all that she’d said, then my own declaration of love should have been just as clear. But obviously it wasn’t, and that was just as I should have expected it. Thy never for a moment had considered me a rival for Lý. In fact, it was unthinkable to her that I should even love him in vain.

  She lifted her head from my shoulder and smiled at me as if she expected me to be happy. When I kept silent, she prompted me. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I had never spoken of my love for Lý and I knew that this was the last chance I would have. But what was there to say? I could look back at all the little signs now and read them clearly. And Thy was who she was and I was different from that and the feeling between Lý and her was already decided upon. So I said the only reasonable thing that I could. “It is very wonderful.”

  This made Thy even happier. She hugged me. And then she asked me to comb her hair. We had been outside for an hour before coming to the hotel and her long, straight hair was slightly ruffled and she handed me the pearl-handled brush that her mother had given her and she turned her back to me. And I began to brush. The first stroke caught a tangle and Thy cried out in a pretty, piping voice. I paused briefly and almost threw the brush against the wall and walked out of this place. But then I brushed once again and again, and she was turned away from the mirror so she could not see the terrible pinch of my face when I suggested that she and Lý spend their last hours now alone together. She nearly wept in joy and appreciation at this gesture from her dear friend, and I kept on brushing until her hair was perfect.

  And her hair was perfect now beneath my hands in the preparation room. And I had a strange thought. She was doing this once more to me. She was having me make her hair beautiful so she could go off to the spirit world and seduce the one man there who could love me. This would be Thy’s final triumph over me. My hands trembled at this thought and it persisted. I saw this clearly: Thy arriving in heaven and her hair lying long and soft down her back and her breasts are clearly beautiful even in the white robe of the angels, and the spirit of some great warrior who fought at the side of the Tru’ng sisters comes to her, and though he has waited nineteen centuries for me, he sees Thy and decides to wait no more. It has been only the work of my hands that he has awaited and he lifts Thy’s hair and kisses it.

  I drew back from Thy and I stared at her face. I saw it in the mirror at the Continental Palace Hotel and it was very beautiful, but this face before me now was rubbery in death, the beauty was hidden, waiting for my hands. Thy waited for me to make her beautiful. I had always made her more beautiful. Just by being near her. I was tempted once more to turn away. But that would only let her have her condescending smile at me. Someone else would do this job if I did not, and Thy would fly off to heaven with her beautiful face and I would be alone in my own shame.

  I turned to the sheet now, and the body I had never looked upon in its womanly nakedness was hiding there and this was what Lý had given his love for. The hair and the face had invited him, but it was this hidden body, her secret flesh, that he had longed for. I had seen him less than half an hour ago. He was in Mr. Hoa’s office when I arrived. He got up and shook my hand with both of his, holding my hand for a long moment as he said how glad he was that I was here. His eyes were full of tears and I felt very sorry for Lê Vn Lý. A warrior should never cry, even for the death of a beautiful woman. He handed me the bag with Thy’s brush and makeup and he said, “You always know what to do.”

  What did he mean by this? Simply that I knew how to brush Thy’s hair and paint her face? Or was this something he had seen about me in all things, just as he had once seen that I was a very good tennis player? Did it mean he understood that he had never been with a woman like that, a woman who would always know what to do for him as a wife? When he stood before me in Mr. Hoa’s office, I felt like a foolish teenage girl again, with that rush of hope. But perhaps it wasn’t foolish; Thy’s breasts were no longer there for his eyes to slide away to.

  Her breasts. What were these things that had always defined my place in the world of women? They were beneath the sheet and my hand went out and grasped it at the edge, but I stopped. I told myself it was of no matter now. She was dead. I let go of the sheet and turned to her face of rubber and I took out her eye shadow and her lipstick and her mascara and I bent near and painted the life back into this dead thing.

  And as I painted, I thought of where she would lie, in the cemetery behind the Catholic church, in a stone tomb above the ground. It was often necessary in New Orleans, the placing of the dead above the ground, because the water table was so high. If we laid Thy in the earth, one day she would float to the surface and I could see that day clearly, her rising from the earth and awaking and finding her way back to the main street of Versailles in the heat of the day, and I would be talking with Lý, he would be bending near me and listening as I said all the things of my heart, and suddenly his eyes would slide away and there she would be, her face made up and her hair brushed and her breasts would be as beautiful as ever. But the thought of her lying above the ground made me anxious, as well. As if she wasn’t quite gone. And she never would be. Lý would sense her out there behind the church, suspended in the air, and he would never forget her and would take all the consolation he needed from his children and grandchildren.

  My hand trembled now as I touched her eyes with the brush, and when I held the lipstick, I pressed it hard against her mouth and I cast aside the shame at my anger and I watched this mouth in my mind, the quick smile of it that never changed in all the years, that never sensed any mood in me but loyal, subordinate friendship. Then the paint was all in place and I pulled back and I angled my face once more into the flow of cool air and I tried to just listen to the grinding of the air conditioner and forget all of these feelings, these terrible feelings about the dead woman who had always been my friend, who I had never once challenged in life over any of these thing. I thought, What a coward I am.

  But instead of hearing this righteous charge against me, I looked at Thy and I took her hair in my hands and I smoothed it all together and wound it into a bun and I pinned it at the nape of her neck. She was a fifty-year-old woman, after all. She was as much a fifty-year-old woman as I was. Surely she was. And at this I looked to the sheet.

  It lay lower across the chest than I thought it might. But her breasts were also fifty years old, and they were spread flat as she lay on her back. She had never let her dear friend see them, these two secrets that had enchanted the man I loved. I could bear to look at them now, vulnerable and weary as they were. I stepped down and I grasped the edge of the
sheet at her throat, and with the whisper of the cloth I pulled it back.

  And one of her breasts was gone. The right breast was lovely even now, even in death, the nipple large and the color of cinnamon, but the left breast was gone and a large crescent scar began there in its place and curved out of sight under her arm. I could not draw a breath at this, as if the scar was in my own chest where my lungs had been yanked out, and I could see that her scar was old, years old, and I thought of her three years in California and how she had never spoken at all about this, how her smile had hidden all that she must have suffered.

  I could not move for a long moment, and then at last my hands acted as if on their own. They pulled the sheet up and gently spread it at her throat. I suppose this should have brought back my shame at the anger I’d had at my friend Thy, but it did not. That seemed a childish feeling now, much too simple. It was not necessary to explain any of this. I simply leaned forward and kissed Thy on her brow and I undid the bun at the back of her neck, happy to make her beautiful once more, happy to send her off to a whole body in heaven where she would catch the eye of the finest warrior. And I knew she would understand if I did all I could to make Lê Vn Lý happy.

  THE AMERICAN COUPLE

  My sister and I dressed up like ducks and our sign said DON’T DUCK A DEAL and so I ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with my husband. This was the deal my sister and I made after the show. She would take the money that went along with the special vacation package that turned out to be behind curtain number two, and I would take my husband to Puerto Vallarta. If we’d had a chance to make the deal just before ours, I would have won a car. I could see a very slight bulge just to the left of center in curtain number three, and sure enough, when they opened it to show the couple dressed like killer bees what they’d passed over, there was a Ford Escort, which was pulled up just a little bit too far. They do that sometimes. I noticed it. The killer bees did not notice it and they won the goat behind curtain number one, a goat that nibbled the hem of the electric-blue dress on the beautiful blond model holding the goat’s leash. Everyone laughed except the couple dressed like bees, and my sister and I laughed, too, though when I leaned over to my sister and told her that I had known where the car was, she slapped her forehead in distress and stopped laughing. I am very observant. This is a good thing, I think, though in Vietnam, where I was born and raised, it is not thought to be a good trait in a woman, unless she keeps it to herself.

  My husband is of two minds on this matter. Sometimes I will notice something that will help him in his business. He is a very fine businessman. He is a very big success in America, just as he was when he was in Vietnam, even though he had to start over again from the beginning in this country. In Vietnam he made much money in the export of duck feathers. This is what inspired my costume on “Let’s Make a Deal.” Duck feathers were the fourth largest export business in the Republic of South Vietnam and they make very soft pillows and very warm blankets. Once, a man who my husband trusted came to the office and said that he was dealing only with my husband, but I observed a duck feather in the cuff of his trouser and that duck was not one of ours. My husband was very proud of my observations on that day, but I know I make him nervous because he thinks there is a great deal that I can see and know about him at all times.

  It’s true that I know quite a few things from what my eyes tell me. It’s true that I was happy to have a chance to bring him to Puerto Vallarta and that I myself struck the deal with my sister that made this possible. We flew in over the mountains and he was sleeping beside me and I watched out the window. The mountains were covered in a lush green that looked like velour and it was very much like Vietnam. There was a river running over the mountain, a brown river, as brown as a Mexican child, and our plane followed it until I could see the city out ahead of us strung along the sea. It was very beautiful coming in and I nudged my husband, hoping he would wake and bring his face near to mine and watch with me. But he became instantly concerned with finding his shoes, which he always slips off when he sleeps, and by the time he felt like nothing was lost and he was not being caught off guard by anything, we were too low for romance and all I could see outside were ragged fields and a neighborhood of poor houses, tin and wood, also like Vietnam, like the places all around Saigon, which is the city I am from.

  The airport was pretty ragged, too. All the strips of land in between the runways were overgrown and the airport building was long and low and it looked mostly like cinder block, which they tried to hide by giving big sections of the outside walls a different texture, a certain roughness, but it reminded me of crepe paper and they painted these parts in bright colors, red and yellow and lime green. It just all seemed pretty cheap, and I could see my husband’s eye for business picking up on that right away, along with all the weeds. He’d been to the slick American places—Las Vegas and Miami Beach and Lake Tahoe—and he knew what the customer expected. In the taxicab he was snorting at the potholes in the road—the cab had to slow almost to a stop several times—and at the occasional piles of stony rubble and at all the weedy fields. This whole corridor to the fancy hotels should be done up right, he was thinking. And he wasn’t all that happy about doing this trip anyway, I knew. He was sorry to be away from his work, even for a week, and he didn’t like my sister being his benefactor. Especially not since she and I had dressed up like ducks.

  I didn’t like that either, really. I must admit I love the game shows. I love American television in general. The soap operas. You’d think I would’ve had enough of daily disaster, but the soaps remind me that somewhere somebody knows what life can really be. It makes me enjoy even more all of this wonderful lightness before my eyes in America. And I particularly like one of the soap operas with an older woman character. This actress has been around for years, and even though the shows are taped, she always seems to me on the edge of disaster. The actress personally. She is saying her lines and I can sense some light go out in her brain and you can see her eyes slide just ever so briefly off camera. She’s looking for the prompt cards, you see. She’s forgotten her lines. And this must be happening to her all the time, for these moments to be left on the tape, even if they are subtle, and maybe I’m the only viewer in the country, other than perhaps another professional actor, to notice. There’s always this real—life drama going on. I like her very much. This woman has guts, continuing to act without a memory. Sometimes she gets the other actor in the scene positioned just right and her gaze lifts over the actor’s shoulder and you can see the faint scanning of her eyes as she reads. It is very subtle, this movement, but I can see it, and at those moments I feel very good for her. She can see what there is to say. But I also feel good for her, a little thrilled even, like watching an ice skater doing a leap, when her character suddenly becomes chatty and slightly unfocused and it’s because she is cut off from the prompt cards and she’s improvising around until she can find her way back to the script. This is what’s good about America. There is always some improvisation, something new, and when things get strained, you don’t fall back on tradition but you make up something new.

  Still, if I could have been part of all that without dressing up like a duck, that would have been better. I wish I could have won Mexico by answering questions or solving puzzles or guessing prices. Something like that. I’m very good at all those things. Just last week I did several things that no one else could do—I identified Jeremy Brett as playing both Sherlock Holmes on public television and Freddy in the movie “My Fair Lady” and I read the phrase “Desperation Tactics” even without any vowels and I knew that a KitchenAid dishwasher and a year’s supply of Toast ‘Ems cost between six hundred fifty and seven hundred dollars. But you have to try out for these shows and they stay away from people who have an accent. I put the words of English together as well as most Americans, but you can hear my foreignness in my pronunciation.

  And only once did I get as far as the tryout anyway. I finally had sense enough to turn my name around and
leave out the middle two. I turned Trn Nam Thanh Gabrielle into Gabrielle Tran. My parents had given me a French name because they had always admired the French, for their food and for their riding club in Saigon, mostly. But arranging my name like Gabrielle Tran won me a tryout—I guess the producers thought I might be like Nancy Kwan, the actress who I enjoy on the old movies and who can speak English very clearly when she wants to.

  I was very good at doing what they asked when exciting things happened in the game. You’d think that they’d have long ago gotten used to asking for this. But the man with the headphones and a clipboard seemed almost shy when he got around to it. Like we were on a date and he was asking for something sexual and a little strange. There were three of us trying out at once, three women, and he said, “When something very good happens, could you . . .” And he stammered around for a bit and then said, “Could you show it physically. That is, could you kind of, you know, bounce up and down? Jiggle around.” So we all laughed at this, but then we did it and I did it very well. He even stopped us and put his hand on my shoulder and said to the others, “Yes. Like this. Watch Mrs. Tran.”

  I was very good, you see. And it was natural to me. I was having fun. But then when they started talking to us, asking our names and where we lived and such, I could see the little squinting that went on when I spoke. They asked questions and I got them right and I bounced up and down, but I knew I wasn’t going to make it. And I think I probably talked a little too much, as well. I even kidded the host—I won’t mention his name—about the kiss he gave his hostess during a break. They had both disappeared while the director walked around setting cameras, and when they returned, they did it without looking at each other at all and the host’s TV makeup was smudged around his lips. It’s not as if I said this on the air, but instantly I could tell that it wasn’t the thing to do.