White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘I have friends to see. Abbra Ellis for one. She and her husband adopted Sanh a couple of months ago and Abbra wants me to visit, to see for myself how quickly the three of them have become a family, and how happy they are.’

  ‘And two?’ Mike prompted. ‘You said friends, plural.’

  Her eyes slipped away from his. ‘I also want to see Chuck Wilson. He was my husband’s best buddy and was seriously injured trying to rescue Kyle. When I last saw him he was crippled… confined to a wheelchair. Since then he’s been undergoing intensive physiotherapy at Walter Reed Army Hospital. I’d like to see him again. To see how he is doing. And to ask him a few questions.’

  Chuck’s letters had been maddeningly unenlightening. He had written to her late in 1969, saying that he was moving to Washington so that he could be treated long-term at Walter Reed. He was still there, still receiving treatment, but he had never specifically said whether he had recovered the use of his legs or not.

  In her own letters to him she had also evaded certain important issues. She hadn’t told him about her meeting with Trinh. She hadn’t asked if he knew about Kylie. And she hadn’t asked the question she most wanted an answer to. Had Kyle’s affair with Trinh been serious, or had it been a casual fling?

  She didn’t want a handwritten reply to her last question. She wanted a face-to-face situation in which he would not be able to avoid telling her the truth. And so, after months of prevaricating, she was going to see him.

  ‘How long will you be away?’

  It was a Thursday, and he had just returned from his clinic at Grall. His office had a door screen made of thick inch-square wire meshing, in order to deter any grenades that might be thrown at it, and he was leaning against it, his arms folded across his broad chest. He was wearing one of his crazily coloured Sea Island shirts and a pair of faded shorts, and with his dark hair and eyes and hard tan, he looked more like a Greek navvy than a highly skilled and deeply dedicated doctor.

  ‘Two weeks, that’s all. Maybe three.’ She could hear tanks rumbling down the nearby street. It was such a familiar sound that neither of them took any notice of it. ‘Why?’ she asked mischievously, ‘Are you going to miss me?’

  A slight grin crooked the corner of his mouth. ‘Stranger things have happened,’ he said, easing himself away from the door. ‘I’m going up to Qui Nhon while you’re away. The situation there is god-awful. A camp with six thousand refugees and no facilities at all beyond a fly-infested shack used as a clinic. You’d better rest up as much as you can while you’re in the States. When you come back, we’re likely to have a lot of new inmates, all of them in a

  bad medical condition.’

  The children she was escorting were going to homes in the New York area and so, after a one-day stopover, she flew directly from there to Washington. She would visit Abbra later. After she had seen Chuck.

  Once again she visited him without giving him any forewarning. The house he had rented was similar in style to his family home in Atlantic City, only instead of being built of clapboard, the Washington house was built of red brick. She rang the doorbell and her sense of déjá vu increased. There was no reply, but she was certain that he was home.

  At the side of the house was a doorway leading through into the rear garden. She unlatched it, walking along the pathway hoared with frost, reflecting that February had not been a very sensible time of year in which to make a visit. After the heat of Saigon, the bitter cold of Washington was almost unbearable. She pulled the collar of her hastily acquired wool coat higher around her ears and turned the corner of the house.

  He sat in his wheelchair, looking out over the lawn, just as he had been the first time she had seen him. Only the flowers that were in bloom were different. Instead of a vivid blaze of black-eyed susans and chrysanthemums and calendulas and marigolds, there were snowdrops and crocuses and early-flowering Lenten roses.

  She stood very still, the cold knifing through her. He was still in his chair. He was still crippled. Nothing had changed. She cleared her throat and stepped forwards, and the wheelchair spun to face her.

  ‘Goddammit!’ he exploded, ‘Can’t you pick up a telephone and warn people you intend to visit? Do you always have to appear like a genie from a lamp?’

  Not only had the scenario not changed, his physical appearance hadn’t changed either. He was still as heart-stoppingly handsome as she remembered. Long-lashed grey eyes; well-cut thick hair growing a trifle long; faint hollows beneath his cheekbones; a mouth finely chiselled, slightly arrogant, wholly exciting.

  She stepped forwards with a grin, knowing that his wrath was only pretence and that he was as pleased to see her again as she was to see him.

  ‘If I had warned you, you might very well have run out on me.’

  His mouth twitched into an answering grin. ‘No one but you would suggest to a man in a wheelchair that he might run away!’

  The empathy that had sprung up so instantly between them when they had first met was there again, easy and effortless.

  They began to laugh, and she said, ‘What the hell are you doing out here? It’s freezing! Take me inside, for God’s sake, and thaw me out!’

  The inside of the house was decorated in early American, the rather stern decor warmed by an open fireplace and crackling log fire. ‘Is the decor your choice,’ she asked, sitting down in a deep, red leather couch, ‘or did you inherit it?’

  He had steered his chair towards a cocktail cabinet and was busy pouring two stiff martinis. ‘My choice,’ he said briefly.

  ‘So Washington is permanent?’ she asked, avoiding his eyes as he turned towards her with her drink.

  ‘Yes.’

  He was giving nothing away. The house was obviously superbly cared for, and she wanted to ask who looked after it for him. Who looked after him. How much longer he expected to be undergoing treatment at Walter Reed. When he would be able to expect to see some results from it.

  She said instead, with no preamble, ‘I’ve met Trinh, the Vietnamese girl Kyle was having an affair with.’

  He had positioned his chair so that it was opposite the couch on which she was sitting. He tilted his head a little to one side, nursing his martini, saying, ‘And you want to know if I knew about it, and if I did, why the hell I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘I know that you knew about it,’ she said, and there was an edge to her voice that hadn’t been there a moment before. ‘She told me that you had written to her, telling her that you saw Kyle alive on the ground after he crashed. But you’re right about your second question. Yes, I do want to know why the hell you didn’t tell me about it.’

  He looked away from her, staring into the fire. Slowly he drank his martini and then he put his glass down and turned towards her again. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure what my motives were. It may have been out of a sense of loyalty to Kyle, though I doubt it. After all, any dues I might have owed Kyle are more than fully paid. It may have been because of the way I felt about you. I didn’t want to cause you any further hurt. And it may have been because I thought it was unimportant. Hell, she was only a Vietnamese. It was no mammoth, earth-shattering affair.’

  All the time he had been speaking she had been watching him very closely. Now she said quietly, ‘I think you’re lying to me, Chuck. I think it was an earth-shattering affair. For him as well as for her.’

  Her coat lay over the arm of the couch. She was wearing a lavender-grey cashmere dress that clung provocatively in all the right places and accentuated the smoke-crystal colour of her eyes. Her hair was swept into a French knot, making her look very elegant, very sophisticated. He wanted her so much that his cock hurt.

  He said tautly, ‘Come to bed with me and then I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Shock flared through her eyes, and then something else, something that she couldn’t hide, however hard she tried. ‘Okay,’ she said, her breath so tight in her throat that she could hardly speak, ‘I will.’

  It wasn’t why she had visited him.
Not consciously. She had come because she wanted to ask him about Trinh and Kyle, because she wanted to know if the treatment he had been undergoing at Walter Reed had been effective. Or so she had thought. She knew now that she had been wrong. She had visited him because he was like Kyle, and she couldn’t get him out her mind. She had wanted to know if he was sexually capable. Well, she now had her answer. He wouldn’t be asking her to go to bed with him if he weren’t.

  He said thickly, ‘Come on. Into the bedroom. I no longer favour rugs in front of fires.’

  She didn’t argue. She didn’t care where they did it. It had been five years since she had last made love, and she was so sexually hungry, and so horny, that when she rose from the couch she could barely stand.

  He propelled his wheelchair swiftly out of the room, and across a hallway into another ground floor room. A bedroom. She followed, so possessed by physical need that she almost fell against the bed. It was higher than most beds, specially adapted so that he could transfer himself from bed to wheelchair with maximum ease.

  She unzipped her dress with trembling fingers, stepping out of it, leaving it where it had fallen on the floor. He was already lying on the crisply made-up bed and his shirt was off. She didn’t know how he had managed to move so quickly. She had thought she would have had to help him. Although he was as leanly built as Kyle, his shoulder and arm muscles had become powerfully developed by his having to rely on them so much. Semi-naked, he didn’t look like a cripple. He looked wonderful.

  She peeled off her stockings in desperate haste. She had kept her self-imposed vow of celibacy for five years, but she was totally incapable of keeping it for a moment longer. It had been a romantic, ridiculous vow that could not possibly have any effect on what was happening to Kyle in Hoa Lo. When she told him about it, she knew he would shout with laughter. She wondered if she would tell him about Chuck and didn’t know.

  She scrambled on to the bed beside him, hurtling into his arms. For a second she wondered if, because of his partial paralysis, she would have to be the one to take the initiative, to perhaps straddle him in order that he could enter her. He rid her of the notion within seconds.

  ‘God, if you only knew how many years I’ve longed for this!’ he breathed harshly, rolling her forcefully beneath him. ‘I’ve wanted you for years, lady! For years before I even met you!’

  His lips were hard and hungry on her mouth, his fingertips moving down over her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. He was still wearing his jeans, and she unzipped his fly and reached inside, taking hold of him. There was nothing crippled or semi-paralysed about his erection, and she whimpered in longing.

  ‘Quickly!’ she said urgently, pressing herself up against him, not wanting him to be tender, not wanting him to take his time. ‘Quickly!’

  He didn’t disappoint her. She ground her hips beneath his, moaning with pleasure. It had been so long since she had been made love to. Far, far too long.

  ‘Oh, God, that feels good,’ she panted, glorying in his size and hardness, not wanting it to come to an end, wanting it to last forever.

  He raised himself up on his arms, grinning down at her, revelling in the knowledge that at that precise moment in time, she was completely at his mercy. And then his grin died away and his eyes darkened. He, too, was no longer in control. A look almost of agony crossed his face as he thrust deeper and faster.

  Her hands tightened in his hair, dragging his head down to hers. His tongue drove past hers and the blood roared in her ears. She was coming and the relief was so colossal that she thought her heart was going to burst. It went on and on and she thrashed beneath him, her words and exhortations so basic and explicit that they tipped him over the edge. His own climax came, terrible in its intensity, and he arched his back, lifting his head, crying out like a wild animal.

  For a long time afterwards she simply lay limply beneath him, drenched in sweat, utterly satisfied, wonderfully replete.

  At last she said, ‘Were you always capable of making love? Even before you began treatment at Walter Reed?’

  He nodded, rolling his weight away from her, lying companionably at her side.

  She raised herself up on one elbow and her hair tumbled free of its chignon, sliding silkily and glossily down over her shoulders and breasts. ‘You mean you were perfectly capable of making love when we first met?’

  ‘Mmm mmm,’ he said corroboratively.

  She thought of all the wasted years, the regular trips she could have made from Saigon to Washington.

  ‘Then why the hell,’ she demanded indignantly, ‘didn’t you?’

  He began to laugh, pulling her down towards him so that her face was buried against his neck and his arms were tight around her waist. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very fast, forward lady?’

  ‘Not for a long time,’ she said wryly, thinking of the chasteness of her Saigon life-style. She ran her fingertips over his chest and said, ‘Have there been many ladies in the last few years, since you were injured?’

  Her hand slid lower and she began to caress his limp cock.

  ‘A few.’ He watched her speculatively. ‘There are some women who are disabled freaks. They really get off making it with cripples.’

  She pushed herself up again on one arm, looking down at him. ‘And you think that I fall into that category?’

  He was stiffening again in her hand. He grinned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think you’re far too way out to merely get turned on by a wheelchair!’

  She giggled and lowered her head, kissing his chest and then his belly. ‘Tell me about the ladies you’ve had while I’ve been in Saigon,’ she whispered, her lips brushing his skin.

  He folded his hands behind his head. ‘There’s only been one who mattered. Things were fine until she became pregnant. Then she couldn’t get an abortion quick enough.’ His voice had become bitter, and she paused in her ministrations, raising her head, her eyes fixed on his face. ‘I told her that as I was crippled in an air crash, it was hardly a condition that could be passed on hereditarily, but she obviously chose not to believe me. Or maybe she did believe me, but figured that though frolicking in bed with a cripple was okay, having one as the father of her child was definitely not as attractive a proposition.’ His eyes met hers, and a shadow of a smile quirked the corner of his mouth. ‘She’s history,’ he said briefly. ‘Don’t stop what you’re doing.’

  She didn’t. Desire was already stirring in her again, and this time he satisfied it as she did his, with mouth and tongue and hands.

  When at last he said huskily, ‘I think it’s time we regained some energy with another martini,’ she didn’t disagree.

  ‘Make mine very dry,’ she said, stretching out in satiated languor against the tumbled pillows.

  He grinned and swung his legs to the floor. His shoulder and arm muscles were still sheened in sweat, and she eyed them appreciatively. ‘Shaken, not stirred,’ he said, and rose to his feet and walked a trifle unsteadily from the room.

  For a second she didn’t register what had happened, and then she realized and shock hit her so hard in her chest that she gasped for breath.

  ‘Chuck! Chuck!’ She was out of the bed, running after him. ‘You didn’t tell me! You knew I didn’t know! When did it happen? How long ago? Why were you sitting in your wheelchair, you crazy bastard?’ They were in the living room, and she was in his arms again, laughing and crying at the same time. ‘How could you let me go on thinking you were crippled when you can walk, goddammit!’

  ‘I guess I figured you might be one of those ladies who are turned on only by disablement,’ he said with a grin. ‘And anyhow, I like surprising people.’

  ‘You’ve certainly done that,’ she said as he released his hold of her in order to make the martinis. ‘When did it happen and why were you in the wheelchair when arrived?’

  ‘To answer your first question, it’s happened over a long period of time, very slowly, and to answer your second question, I was in it because I still
sometimes need it, and I was reminding myself of how much I hate it and brooding about how long it would be before I could throw it on the scrap heap.’ He splashed vermouth into generous measures of gin.

  ‘And when will you be able to throw it on the scrap heap?’ she asked, taking the glass he was proffering, enjoying being naked, enjoying the sight of his nakedness.

  ‘Soon,’ he said noncommittally. While he had been talking he had crossed to a writing desk. ‘Do you want to know about Kyle and Trinh now?’ he asked.

  She nodded, her mood instantly changing. When she had left Saigon she had believed that this was the real purpose of her trip. Now it no longer seemed important.

  He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a creased envelope. ‘Kyle was in the middle of writing this to you when we were called out on our last mission. A lot of his personal possessions were put in with mine, either accidentally or intentionally, I’m not sure. I sent everything else I had of his on to his folks in Boston. This I kept.’

  She took it from him.

  Dearest Serry, Kyle had written. This really is going to be a hell of a letter to write, but it has to be done, and I know that you will understand. I’ve fallen in love with a Vietnamese girl. Her name is Trinh, and she is very beautiful … Serena’s vision was suddenly so blurred that the next few lines were indecipherable. I shall always be glad that you flew to Alabama before I left for ’Nam, he had written in large scrawls very reminiscent of her own. What we’ve had between us is something I wouldn’t have missed for the world, and something I will never forget. But I have to be able to marry Trinh. I have to be able to protect her. If you knew what life was like out here, Serry, you would understand.

  She lifted her eyes from the notepaper and stared unseeingly out of the living room window. When he had written those words he couldn’t have remotely imagined that when she read them, she would know exactly what it was like in Saigon.