Frank’s first stone or two flew wildly past Vinh and Vinh did wait, he waited and set himself and he threw the large stone and it hit Frank in the pit of the stomach. I knew this because Frank doubled over and then there was a moment of suspension. Frank’s knees bent and he put one hand on the surface of the roof so he didn’t fall over, and Vinh stayed in the crouch he’d assumed after the throw. The two men were suddenly frozen there, like props left over from the movie.
“How truly lovely,” Eileen said.
Then Frank lifted his face a little and I guess he saw the stone that Vinh had used. It must have been lying there before him. He looked up at Vinh and I think he said something, probably some angry name, and then he lunged forward and Vinh tried to sidestep him but only got partly out of the way and Frank glanced off him, scooping wide with his arms, but Vinh was turning away and slipped Frank’s grasp, although he did fall backward, even as Frank spun and hurtled on and also fell on the rooftop.
I hoped that that was the end of it, but both men bounced to their feet very quickly and there seemed to be no question of what to do now. They rushed at each other immediately and Vinh, being smaller, got under Frank’s grasp and he butted Frank in his stomach with his head. Frank fell backward and Vinh fell on top of him and they rolled over immediately, first Frank on top and then Vinh, and arms were flailing and legs and the two men were fighting hard.
“A great white duck,” Eileen said. “I had one just like it when I was a child.”
I looked into the sky and sure enough, there was a white cloud passing overhead that looked like a duck. You could see its bill and its long neck and even its wings.
I sat down and chose curtain number three—the sea. I glanced at the men, still rolling around on the roof, and I chose the sea. The sea was bright and flat and it crumpled along the shore and I just watched that for now. How silly it had been for me to think I’d understood them. Neither of them could stomach the feel-good culture. But that was hardly all of the feeling between them. They had shared something once, something important—rage, fear, the urge to violence, just causes, life and death. They’d both felt those things in service of the same war. And neither of them wanted to let go of all that. But even finding this connection between them didn’t really explain everything.
Don’t ask me what did. I watched mostly the sea for the next few minutes, and when I finally peeked back in the direction of the brick building, I saw them sitting about ten feet apart, their backs to each other, their legs spread and their arms lolling in exhaustion. Frank was facing the woods and my husband was facing the sea. He seemed to be looking very intently out to sea. Just like I was.
We took separate cabs, the two couples, back to the beautiful Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. Vinh had come up the hill first and he was a mess. He had forgotten his red shirt, but he wouldn’t have been comfortable wearing it over all the abrasions anyway. Eileen screamed when she saw him. “It’s all right,” I told her. “They’re both all right.” I didn’t say any more. I just went with Vinh along the path and left Eileen on the hilltop ready to kill Frank, I think. She was already assuming the worst.
I didn’t say anything to Vinh as we walked back to the beach or rode in the taxicab or crossed our hotel lobby and entered the elevator or even when we first stepped into the room. Nor did he say anything to me. When our door clicked shut and we were out of the eye of the public, I turned to him, but he averted his face and dipped his head and I knew he could say nothing about this anyway. Still, I yearned to know what it was that he felt, what he may have learned.
He said, “I’m going to wash up.”
“Do you need some help?”
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
I nodded and he stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.
I crossed the room and the curtains ruffled before the open balcony doors. It was getting on to late afternoon now and the light looked very nice on the floor beneath the curtains and so I opened them. The sunlight was suddenly thrown against the wall and the shadow of a potted plant on the balcony was pressed there, too, like it was trying to sneak in without anyone noticing. A silly impression, a hangover from the scene I’d witnessed at Mismaloya. I sat on the end of the bed and looked at the wall. The light was really very nice. A pale, buttery yellow, and the plant dipped and rose there, the broad, shapely leaves of a croton.
I’m not sure why all this was occupying my mind. Maybe because of Vinh’s silence. Maybe it was the weariness that had come over me again. All this fresh air, hilltops and beaches—I wasn’t used to it. It made me want to sleep. I thought to lie down on the bed, but I heard the water running in the bathroom and I waited. I sat on the end of the bed and I waited, and the shadow of the croton crept across the wall and then at last the bathroom door opened and Vinh stepped out.
He was dressed in gray slacks and sneakers and one of the short-sleeved dress shirts that he usually wears to work in the hot Louisiana summers. His hair was wet and combed down neatly and the battle showed on his face only in a dull red abrasion the size of a silver dollar on his cheek. He looked at me for a moment and I strained to see some clue there of something, anything. His mouth was relaxed but unsmiling. His eyes were steady on me and all I could sense was that whatever he had felt this afternoon was not yet put aside. Then he moved to me and stood over me where I sat on the bed. I felt I should stand up before him; perhaps he would take me in his arms. I was about to do that, but before I could, his hand came out and brushed a lock of hair off my face.
That was all. Was he trying to say that since he was cleaned up now, I should pull myself together as well? I didn’t know. Then I thought there was something nice about his hand, but before I could identify it, he took the hand back and said, “I’m going out.”
I nodded and he turned and he was across the room and out the door quickly, closing it behind him with the softest of clicks. I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling and I wished it was a sky full of clouds, full of ponies and ducks, and I put my forearm over my eyes. But the thinking did not stop. Where was he going? I had lived with my husband for nearly twenty years, and I should have been able to guess where he was going after the events of this day. At first I thought he was going to Frank’s room to make up with him. But that didn’t feel right. Perhaps tomorrow, running into them as if by accident in the lobby. That would be the time to shake hands. My husband would not seek the man out at this moment.
Then the thought struck me that from all of this purging of the war, he was now free to do something special. There had been tenderness in his hand when it scolded my stray lock of hair. I thought that perhaps Vinh was going down to get into a taxi and go to Liz and Dick’s bridge and buy me a copa de oro, a cup of gold. He had denied me a flower earlier and all of sudden he realized it; he had even denied me that flower in chorus with the man who he went on to fight to some resolution on this day. I tried to imagine Vinh coming through the door and bringing the flower and putting it into my hair, the very hair that he had arranged before he left.
But this was the thought of a woman who could weep over television commercials. I realized that very quickly, lying there alone on the bed in the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. And then I thought that Vinh would never return. He had walked out of this room and he had decided never to come back to me. He had put his passport and his ticket into the pocket of his gray slacks and he had walked out forever.
This I believed for perhaps ten minutes, and they were the worst ten minutes of my life in America. I suddenly knew that it was I who had withdrawn from Vinh. I had embraced this culture with such intensity that it isolated me from him, made it impossible for him to find a way to touch me anymore. Even Frank, this poor American living in the past, knew enough to pull away from the excesses of the empty-headed culture around him. That must have been terrible for Vinh, that even this man who he would fight was more accessible than his own wife. I was, for about ten minutes, as black and still as the water that ran beneath the river sh
acks of Saigon. My skin felt like it could be wiped away with the slightest touch, like the skin of the leper beggars who did not even have a river shack. Could I not remember these things?
But then something in me said, Wait. It’s not just me. Vinh, too, has been distracted by the American culture. He is a seller of Swedish meatballs and cocktail franks, after all. He wears his dark gray suit and he studies his spreadsheets and he flies here and there carrying a leather briefcase with all the other Americans and he makes much money from food that people eat with toothpicks. But in Vietnam, in the war, there was passion. And there is a passion still inside him. He did fight with this man today.
I lay there for a few minutes more and I don’t know what it was, exactly, that moved me to think about stepping onto the balcony. The sunlight on the wall had darkened into peach and I stood up and faced the breeze from the bay. It was lovely out there, with the sun nearing the horizon. A tight little family of pelicans drifted past and I moved through the sliding doors and leaned on the balustrade. I watched the pelicans wheel off to their right and head out to sea.
But my eyes stayed with the shore and a parasail rising there. I sent my body out to float with the sailor. I didn’t need to be on the parachute myself; I could stand here and let myself separate from my body, from all the strangeness that had come upon me, that made up my life, and I could glide in the long angle of this sun and feel at peace. And so I watched the parasail swing around and head this way. The chute was red and yellow and it was as high as my balcony now and I closed my eyes briefly, remembering the green wake of the boat far below me, and I rode over those waves smoother than any ship.
I opened my eyes and the parasailor was drawing almost even with my hotel, right at my eye level, and I, of course, expected to see the dangling bare legs of someone in a bathing suit. But these legs were clothed in long gray slacks. And my eyes went instantly to the face and it was Vinh. He was holding the ropes and at first I wondered if he was being an airborne soldier again. But it was very much different from that. I had failed to understand his face when he was standing before me, but this much I could tell now as he glided past me strapped to a parachute. He was looking down with the calmest of pleasures. The angle of his head, lolled to the side like I was scratching his neck up under his ear like I used to; the loose hold of his hands on the ropes with one elbow even tucked comfortably into his side; the slight boyish kick in his legs: all this told me he was enjoying himself. He was high above Puerto Vallarta and the sea and he was happy now.
And finally he was eye to eye with me. The boat went on down the coast, into the glare of the sun, but then it swung around, and when Vinh came past once more, he turned his face to the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel and he saw me on the balcony and he smiled. I could see the smile very clearly, and when I waved at him, he raised his hand and threw me a kiss. He drifted past and I looked out to the setting sun. Just like in the movies. A beautiful sunset at the end of this very strange day. Night was coming on and my husband was about to return to earth. And so was I.
A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN
H Chí Minh came to me again last night, his hands covered with confectioners’ sugar. This was something of a surprise to me, the first time I saw him beside my bed, in the dim light from the open shade. My oldest daughter leaves my shades open, I think so that I will not forget that the sun has risen again in the morning. I am a very old man. She seems to expect that one morning I will simply forget to keep living. This is very foolish. I will one night rise up from my bed and slip into her room and open the shade there. Let her see the sun in the morning. She is sixty-four years old and she should worry for herself. I could never die from forgetting.
But the light from the street was enough to let me recognize H when I woke, and he said to me, “Ðo, my old friend, I have heard it is time to visit you.” Already on that first night there was a sweet smell about him, very strong in the dark, even before I could see his hands. I said nothing, but I stretched to the nightstand beside me and I turned on the light to see if he would go away. And he did not. He stood there beside the bed—I could even see him reflected in the window—and I knew it was real because he did not appear as he was when I’d known him but as he was when he’d died. This was Uncle H before me, the thin old man with the dewlap beard wearing the dark clothes of a peasant and the rubber sandals, just like in the news pictures I studied with such a strange feeling for all those years. Strange because when I knew him, he was not yet H Chí Minh. It was 1917 and he was Nguyn Aí Quc and we were both young men with clean-shaven faces, the best of friends, and we worked at the Carlton Hotel in London, where I was a dishwasher and he was a pastry cook under the great Escoffier. We were the best of friends and we saw snow for the first time together. This was before we began to work at the hotel. We shoveled snow and H would stop for a moment and blow his breath out before him and it would make him smile, to see what was inside him, as if it was the casting of bones to tell the future.
On that first night when he came to me in my house in New Orleans, I finally saw what it was that smelled so sweet and I said to him, “Your hands are covered with sugar.”
He looked at them with a kind of sadness.
I have received that look myself in the past week. It is time now for me to see my family, and the friends I have made who are still alive. This is our custom from Vietnam. When you are very old, you put aside a week or two to receive the people of your life so that you can tell one another your feelings, or try at last to understand one another, or Simply say good-bye. It is a formal leave-taking, and with good luck you can do this before you have your final illness. I have lived almost a century and perhaps I should have called them all to me sooner, but at last I felt a deep weariness and I said to my oldest daughter that it was time.
They look at me with sadness, some of them. Usually the dull-witted ones, or the insincere ones. But H’s look was, of course, not dull-witted or insincere. He considered his hands and said, “The glaze. Maestro’s glaze.”
There was the soft edge of yearning in his voice and I had the thought that perhaps he had come to me for some sort of help. I said to him, “I don’t remember. I only washed dishes.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I decided it was foolish for me to think he had come to ask me about the glaze.
But H did not treat me as foolish. He looked at me and shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said. “I remember the temperature now. Two hundred and thirty degrees, when the sugar is between the large thread stage and the small orb stage. The Maestro was very clear about that and I remember.” I knew from his eyes, however, that there was much more that still eluded him. His eyes did not seem to move at all from my face, but there was some little shifting of them, a restlessness that perhaps only I could see, since I was his close friend from the days when the world did not know him.
I am nearly one hundred years old, but I can still read a man’s face. Perhaps better than I ever have. I sit in the overstuffed chair in my living room and I receive my visitors and I want these people, even the dull-witted and insincere ones—please excuse an old man’s ill temper for calling them that—I want them all to be good with one another. A Vietnamese family is extended as far as the bloodline strings us together, like so many paper lanterns around a Village square. And we all give off light together. That’s the way it has always been in our culture. But these people who come to visit me have been in America for a long time and there are very strange things going on that I can see in their faces.
None stranger than this morning. I was in my overstuffed chair and with me there were four of the many members of my family: my son-in-law Thng, a former colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and one of the insincere ones, sitting on my Castro convertible couch; his youngest son, L’i, who had come in late, just a few minutes earlier, and had thrown himself down on the couch as well, youngest but a man old enough to have served as a lieutenant under his father as our country fell to the communists more t
han a decade ago; my daughter Lâm, who is Thng’s wife, hovering behind the both of them and refusing all invitations to sit down; and my oldest daughter, leaning against the door frame, having no doubt just returned from my room, where she had opened the shade that I had closed when I awoke.
It was Thng who gave me the sad look I have grown accustomed to, and I perhaps seemed to him at that moment a little weak, a little distant. I had stopped listening to the small talk of these people and I had let my eyes half close, though I could still see them clearly and I was very alert. Thng has a steady face and the quick eyes of a man who is ready to come under fire, but I have always read much more there, in spite of his efforts to show nothing. So after he thought I’d faded from the room, it was with slow eyes, not quick, that he moved to his son and began to speak of the killing.
You should understand that Mr. Nguyn Bích Lê had been shot dead in our community here in New Orleans just last week. There are many of us Vietnamese living in New Orleans and one man, Mr. Lê, published a little newspaper for all of us. He had recently made the fatal error—though it should not be that in America—of writing that it was time to accept the reality of the communist government in Vietnam and begin to talk with them. We had to work now with those who controlled our country. He said that he remained a patriot to the Republic of Vietnam, and I believed him. If anyone had asked an old man’s opinion on this whole matter, I would not have been afraid to say that Mr. Lê was right.
But he was shot dead last week. He was forty-five years old and he had a wife and three children and he was shot as he sat behind the wheel of his Chevrolet pickup truck. I find a detail like that especially moving, that this man was killed in his Chevrolet, which I understand is a strongly American thing. We knew this in Saigon. In Saigon it was very American to own a Chevrolet, just as it was French to own a Citroën.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Page 23
