A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

by Robert Olen Butler

  My husband told me that it was all I should have expected. In America he is in the food-service business. Not restaurants. He thinks that’s like being a trained elephant in a circus, running a Vietnamese restaurant in America with paper lanterns and China soup bowls and all of that. He thinks it’s just putting on your foreignness and playing a part. Instead, he makes food for institutions that need meals-like hospitals, schools, airplanes, banquet facilities. He is a very good businessman. He appreciates America very much for being the sort of place where a man like him can succeed. But he has no use for the things I like about America. He said that I should have known the game shows would never take a woman who has my face or my voice.

  But in a way I proved him wrong. The proof was that he and I were going up in the elevator at the five-star Fiesta Vallarta Hotel in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, where we would spend an exciting four days and three nights. The crowd at “Let’s Make a Deal” knew the value of this. They let out a long sigh of envy. I know they’d been asked to make this sound, just like the winners had been asked to jump up and down. And it’s true that I’d seen shows when the crowds made long sighs over an electric coffee maker or a lava lamp and they didn’t even laugh at themselves afterward. They were playing this wonderful game in this wonderful world where these things can make people happy. When your coffee drips through a filter in the morning and it tastes so good, you sigh. Or you turn off the lights, all but your lava lamp, and these wondrous shapes rise beside your bed and you turn to your husband and say, Look how beautiful. And you say, I won that. We got that for free. Well, the trip was really worth a Sigh, and I won that.

  So my husband and I went up to the tenth floor and we entered our room and the glass doors in the far wall were open and the filmy white curtains were fluttering and we stepped through them, out onto the balcony, and there was a wonderful view, the sharp ocean horizon, Banderas Bay a jade green out far, and to the left was the curve of the shore, the hotels all nestled there and also the distant city with its red-tiled roofs and palms and the mountains rising behind, thick with trees. It was very nice. I had seen but I did not look at the band of brown water, maybe seventy-five meters wide, stretching along the beach. I supposed it was the tide-drifted water from the mountain river I’d seen coming in, water full of mud and leaves from the jungle. Sort of romantic, if you think about it, jungle water hugging our shore. But of course my husband’s eyes went straight for this stain on the bay and he didn’t see any romance in it. He just shook his head.

  “Look,” I said and I pointed to half a dozen pelicans flying past at our tenth-floor level, very close, their necks curled back and their wonderful flappy lower jaws somehow tucked in. We could see their eyes and I said, “Look, Vinh,” and they wheeled around for me and passed by again.

  We live in Louisiana, in New Orleans. Pelicans are the state bird, but we never see pelicans in Louisiana. Here were six of them almost at arm’s length. But Vinh only nodded and he leaned on the rail of the balcony, his arms stiff, and I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder. I see many things, and I knew that somewhere inside, part of him was unhappy that the businessman could not stop running his mind. How do I know this? Because this sigh he made was not just in exasperation that these businessmen had not done better in Puerto Vallarta. A neater airport, better roads, a nicer corridor of elegance to get us to the hotels, a beach with perfect white sand and green water. What were those things to my husband that they should make him sigh? Even though I knew that these were the thoughts on the surface of his mind. He even said, as his elbows stayed locked, “They should do better with this place.”

  I nearly reminded him that this was free. But I did not want to give him more reason to diminish what I had done. I said nothing, and I almost raised my hand to put it on his shoulder, but my husband is old-fashioned, really. He would rather touch me first. So I simply nodded at his words. They were true. And we both looked down at the pool, shimmering with sunlight, and the sun was hot on our faces and we were soon floating there on red, white and green Fiesta Vallarta inner tubes, and all about the pool were hibiscus with their yellow flowers and elephant-ear plants and philodendron and bougainvillea and my husband paddled near to me and said, “The pool is very good. They take care of it very good. The water is clean and not too much chlorine.” He paddled away and I felt like he had just embraced me. He is a good man. He was telling me that I had done all right, that he was going to try to enjoy this vacation, even that he was a little bit sorry he had been brooding so far. This is his way. It is a good thing that he is married to an observant woman.

  I looked around the pool and three other couples caught my eye. All of them were American. I could see that from their faces and the way they held themselves, loose but every once in a while like somebody told them to stand up straight. And more than that. Somehow I knew that they were all game-show winners. They didn’t know this about one another yet, but I did. And it didn’t surprise me, really. For a long time, an exciting four days and three nights at the five-star Fiesta Vallarta Hotel in beautiful Puerto Vallarta was a prize on just about all of the game shows. I had already imagined a hotel constantly full of game-show winners, and so when I saw these three couples around the pool, I knew at once what they were. Not to mention the fact that each couple had at least one person, usually the wife, with a very animated face, and one woman who actually jiggled up and down in excitement when her husband unexpectedly brought her a drink from the pool bar.

  They didn’t yet know about one another what I already knew about them. They were scattered about and I floated near them in turn and I played a little game for myself, trying to figure out which type of show each had been on. One woman was wearing a black two-piece suit and she still had on jewelry, a pair of hammered silver and turquoise earrings and a heavy matching necklace, and even the bra of her suit was held together by a metal brooch. She was maybe fifty and hoping to look in her thirties and her hair was bleached a blond so shiny and light that in the glint of the sun it seemed almost the color of her hammered silver. She seemed easy for me to place on one of the puzzle-solving shows, not just because she was working a crossword puzzle in a tightly folded newspaper but because of the smugness of her smile as she did it and the fact that she was doing it in ink.

  The next was a young couple, and this was the woman who jiggled up and down about the drink and she flashed blinding smiles all over the pool. But when she lay back on her lounge chair and I floated past the wrinkled bottoms of her feet, I knew they’d logged many hundreds of miles in shopping malls and I figured she was from one of the price-guessing shows.

  I paddled around to the other side of the pool, which was quite big, and I passed an American man playing with great patience with a little Mexican girl wearing water wings. The child’s father was standing a few meters away in the water and the little girl would swim from her father to the American and back again with great glee. The American was very loud and very gentle in his encouraging the girl and the father was pleased but a little nervous, as well. The American was bald with a big laugh and a big blond mustache and he was wearing dog tags. His hair was too shaggy for a current military man and he was perhaps in his early forties, and I knew from his age and the dog tags that he was a Vietnam veteran, one of those who was either unable or reluctant to forget where he had been. But it was his wife who I realized was the game-show woman. She was sitting on her lounge chair and she was reading a book and I know she was the veteran’s wife because of the looks she gave him now and then as he grew particularly loud. His voice bellowed, “Swim, little darling, swim over there to your daddy now,” and the wife lowered her book and her head angled slightly to the side and there was something around her eyes and her mouth that was very hard to read. Like she loved this man and was distressed by him in such equal parts that there was only something very small and placid that she could ever show about him. Or maybe even feel.

  I looked toward Vinh and he was still floating on his inner tube, thou
gh his stomach was not visible, like he was slowly sinking through the hole. I wondered if this was comfortable for him, if I should go over and try to help him adjust himself on the tube. If I just let him float and slowly sink, he might finally decide to slip into the water and feel refreshed and then comfortably readjust himself and he would like this place even more. But he might sink farther until he felt stuck and it would irritate him and make his business mind reawaken and criticize these people for offering inner tubes instead of inflatable mattresses and this would be the final little irritation that prevented him from having a moment’s real enjoyment for the rest of the trip. It could go either way. So I watched his tube slowly turning and he was very still and I looked back to the wife with the book and I decided she’d appeared on a question-answering show.

  As it turned out, however, I was wrong about two of the three. The one with the jewelry turned out to be from the pricing game and the young one who jiggled was a puzzle expert. I know this because after a while the three women, each in her own time, ended up in the hot tub at the side of the pool. As each arrived, there were little hello-to-a-stranger nods and I didn’t want to miss any of their talk, so I pulled myself from the pool and plucked the bodice of my one-piece up into place-I am happy to be very slim but I am small-chested—and I approached the hot tub. A beautiful dark-skinned Mexican woman was ahead of me going up the steps of the hot tub. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece suit and was in the process of making it skimpier, twirling and tucking the cloth of the panties of it into the separation of her own very lovely bottom so that it was now like a string bikini, and the eyes of the three American women rose and then whirled like the steam from the water. The Mexican I settled into the water and the three others moved just a little bit closer to one another in the shared put-down they’d felt from the flamboyant sexiness of this woman.

  They hardly gave me a glance as I eased into the hot water in the space between them and the Mexican, who had thrown her head back and closed her eyes as if the most handsome lover in the world had asked her if he could kiss her throat. The Americans could hardly say what they had on their minds, for fear that this woman spoke English, but at least her presence broke the ice between them.

  The bouncy one that I had pegged as a shopper spoke first. She looked at the other two and said, “Well, y’all look like you’re from the same side of the border as this little old girl.”

  I looked at the Mexican woman and she did not move; she kept receiving the kisses of Valentino’s ghost or whoever and I myself felt downright invisible. This wasn’t a bad feeling, but I did glance out into the pool, and at moments like these a sense of Vinh’s no-nonsense business eye was something of a comfort to me. He could always see through anything, it seemed to me, and I could imagine myself standing beside him on a hill above it all.

  This all happened in a brief moment and when I looked back to the others, they were chuckling at the remark, though the woman with the veteran for a husband was covering up the laugh with her hand, like she was a little guilty about it. The woman wearing the jewelry said, “You don’t sound like you’re too far over the border. Texas?”

  “Louisiana,” the bouncy one said, and I sank lower into the hot tub, some sort of reflex. Then she said, “Not New Orleans either. I’m from up north, where the real Southerners are.”

  The one with the jewelry said, “So you don’t do Mardi Gras?”

  “No way, honey. That’s for the people with no shame whatsoever.” And her eyes moved to the Mexican woman and the eyes of the other two followed, though the woman from the question-answering show was the last one over and the first one to look away again. When she did, she saw me and it seemed to be with a little shock, like she hadn’t noticed me before. Maybe she hadn’t. Or since I was submerged now to my chin, maybe it looked like I was just this disembodied head floating on the surface of the hot tub. I smiled at her like she was the red light on the camera.

  “I bet you’re from California,” Northern Louisiana said to the woman with the jewelry.

  “Minnesota,” said the other. “Not Minneapolis either. I’m from up north, where the real Northerners are.”

  Everybody laughed and I wanted to sink a little deeper, but I’d run out of submergible parts. I thought about getting out of the tub, but I still wanted to hear them discover the game-show connection, and fortunately that happened very quickly, Northern Louisiana asked Minnesota what it was that brought her to Mexico, no doubt eager to let these women know that she was a winner on a show. But Minnesota got the first chance. She declared that she’d won on “The Price Is Right” and Northern Louisiana jiggled up and down in excitement and proclaimed her own triumph on “Wheel of Fortune.” I pouted briefly at getting these two wrong, and the third woman finally spoke and said she’d won on “Tic, Tac, Dough” and then I nearly drowned in the hot tub because they all three began to jump up and down in the excitement of this revelation and the waves of hot water rushed over my face, splashing up my nose and into my mouth and eyes.

  I was happy that no one noticed. I rose up and gasped quietly to myself while the others talked all at once. The Mexican woman was looking at me, but I nodded to her that I was all right, and after a slow, contemptuous look at the three Americans, she closed her eyes and put her head back once more, though this time she turned slightly to one side as if to ask her lover to kiss a new spot, just under her ear. I was ready to get out of the tub, away from all the excitement, but I lingered for a time watching this woman, so comfortable in her body, so relaxed with matters that touched on sex.

  A little later Vinh and I were walking along the beach. It was the Mexican woman who stayed in my mind, not the game-show winners. I knew I was seeing them too flatly. They were complicated human beings, like all of us, in spite of how hard they worked at making their surfaces simple. But they bored me right now. I thought about the Mexican woman and I wished I could take Vinh’s hand. Perhaps this was foolish of me, to have this hesitation. I am a smart woman, a modem woman. Vinh has never said a word to me that would discourage me from doing something like taking his hand as we walked on the beach. But there are forces in me that are very strong. Just as strong as the forces that make the two women from Northern Louisiana and Minnesota speak and dress and act the way they do. They have no control of those things. I doubt if they could change any of those things even if they were conscious of them and wanted to. I spent the first twenty years of my life living in a country and a culture that expected certain attitudes from women and men and you can’t just put all that aside because your mind says, Why not? Nobody’s mind is that strong. You have to wait. Things have to change from the inside.

  Like Vinh. He walked beside me on the beach and the waves rustled near us, running up now and then and licking our feet, and there was bright sun and a blue sky overhead while across the bay, the mountains had disappeared into a dark gray sky and there were leaps of lightning over there and the contrast between this sunny beach and that storm-dark mountain was very romantic. But Vinh could not see these things. He was brooding again, thinking about Delta Airlines or the Superdome or the Hilton hotels, thinking about five hundred chicken dinners or a thousand Swedish meatballs. A man strapped into a harness beneath a parachute was rising from the beach just ahead of us, a cable running out to a speedboat in the bay going taut and dragging him into the air, and I stopped to watch it rise and Vinh realized what I did and he, too, stopped, following my eyes into the air but not really seeing anything, because he said, “Can you remind me to call Nicholson when we get back? They’ve got some big engineering conference coming in.”

  “Okay,” I said, still watching the man on the parachute getting smaller and smaller in the blue sky, and I thought that this was something I might like to do. To get up there above all of this and just float around.

  “You’ll remember?” Vinh asked because I had answered without looking at him. It wasn’t in irritation that he said this. It was just that I was important to him in this way.
He depended on me. I have a very good memory.

  I lowered my eyes and he was looking at me with a face that seemed eager, almost like a child. Sometimes he seemed to really enjoy the work he did. I was glad for that. I said, “I’ll remember. You know I’m like an elephant.”

  My Vinh smiled at this. I have said this same thing to him many times and it always makes him smile. And that always makes me smile, that this should amuse him so. I smiled and then a young Mexican girl appeared at Vinh’s side and she had lizards on both shoulders and on the top of her head, large lizards.

  “You take picture of you and iguana?” she asked. “Very cheap.”

  Vinh looked at her and stepped back, startled, I think, at these large green creatures crouching on the girl. “No, gracias,” he said.

  “Like in the movies,” the girl said.

  “Where’s your camera?” Vinh said, and the girl shrugged and looked toward me. I was carrying a bag large enough, I suppose, to hold a camera. Vinh said to her, “You should have a camera. If you want to make money, you get a camera and shoot the picture yourself. Comprende?”

  I don’t think the girl comprended. But even if she did, making an investment in a camera to improve her business probably was worthless advice. I said to Vinh, “She never has that much money at one time, to be able to buy a camera.”

  Vinh nodded and sighed. “She’ll never get anywhere.”