The House on Dream Street (26 page)

The tenants had gotten away with more than the $2,000 they still owed in rent. Mr. Huey had brought total disaster on Tung and Huong in a way that any of us should have suspected.

Mr. Huey hadn’t paid for a single phone call since the day, more than a month earlier, when I’d seen him and Tung take a bag full of 5,000-dong notes to the central telephone office. Since that time, he’d made calls to Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Sometimes several times a day. When the June phone bill had arrived on Friday, the day after Mr. Huey left for Saigon, it added up, once again, to $5,000. Tung’s name was on the bill.

A middle-class American would have to owe something like $50,000 for this calamity to have the same effect; $5,000 was all the money Tung had managed to save in three years of hard labor in Germany, and he’d spent much of that building his house. The debt would eat up his entire savings.

      A gloom settled over the house. Tung spent half of every day rushing around town searching for a solution to the crisis. The rest of his time he sat motionless on the couch, his face as blank as that of a man determined to let himself drown.

Huong and her family went into permanent conference. She spent mornings whispering with Nga. Later, she’d stand for an hour on the front steps, discussing matters with one or another of her older brothers. In the evenings, she and her mother stared at the television set, rarely bothering to turn up the sound.

“Mr. Huey was so polite,” Huong said to me one evening when I’d joined them.

“He sure dressed well,” I said.

On the television, three dancing swans were singing songs for children. Huong turned and faced me. “There was something
in his eyes, though. I could see it. He had eyes like the Mafia.” She leaned her head against the couch and gazed at the dancing swans. “I told Tung, but he wouldn’t listen. He trusts too easily,” she sighed.

I’d noticed Mr. Huey’s Mafia eyes, too, but I hadn’t said a word. I felt as if a friend had just committed suicide and I could have prevented it. Mr. Huey had always seemed just a little bit slippery to me, but I’d never expressed my suspicions. How could I, a foreigner with no business experience, judge the honesty of wheeler-dealers in Vietnam? I wished there was something I could do to help, but the only thing Huong asked was that I promise not to tell anyone what had happened. That included Phai, which made the promise more difficult to keep.

After months spent working my way toward a single kiss, I was now obsessed with the question of when Phai and I would finally be able to sleep together. Like many Americans, I regarded sleeping together—not merely sex, but
sleeping together
—as a necessary step in the development of an intimate relationship. But I lived in a country that forbade me to have such a relationship with a Vietnamese. I wasn’t even supposed to kiss Phai, much less invite him over to spend the night.

We hadn’t told anybody what had happened between us, but people might have guessed. We were suddenly showing up all over the place together. One night, I took Phai with me to the third-year death anniversary of Linh’s father-in-law, a big family dinner celebrated in the dead man’s honor. Linh’s life as a single woman hadn’t lasted more than a month, and now she was back to her old life with Son, happier, perhaps, but still complaining. If she had to go to her father-in-law’s death anniversary, then, she insisted, I had to go too. I dragged Phai along with me. Linh’s family was gracious toward him, politely including him in their conversations, but they were obviously quite puzzled by my
choice. Although Vietnamese had lived through forty years of socialism, ancient Confucian attitudes toward education and class were still central to the way they assessed one another. In the same way that I might guess the background of another American within a few seconds of meeting him, Linh’s family took one look at Phai and knew that he wasn’t educated.

During those weeks, I lived what seemed to be a 1950s version of life. In the evenings, Phai and I would ride out to the shore of the West Lake, where dozens of couples stood kissing in the moonlight and necking beneath the trees. I’d never been to a lover’s lane, even when I was in high school, and it was fun, for a while, to sneak around. But that only lasted a couple of weeks. I was nearly thirty years old. I didn’t want to act like a teenager anymore; I wanted Phai to spend the night.

Phai was perplexed for completely different reasons. He came from a culture in which spending the night at your girlfriend’s house was not an option. Not only did he personally have no experience with such activities, but he’d never heard of any other Vietnamese having such experiences, either. In Hanoi, unmarried couples rarely slept together. Certainly, they had sex, but seldom in the bedroom. Whose bedroom would it be? Most unmarried Vietnamese lived with their parents, and the entire family slept together in a single room.

Such circumstances, understandably, gave bedrooms a low ranking as sexy places in Vietnam. The couples who had sex in their bedrooms were married, and even they would have to have it quickly and on the sly. Linh and Son had efficient relations at three or four in the morning while their young sons lay fast asleep beside them. Married couples with older children, I’d heard, didn’t have much sex at all.

Unmarried couples in Hanoi didn’t have the luxuries of soft mattresses and privacy, but they could be nearly as sexually active
as their counterparts in the States. They just had to be more creative about the location. Some couples frequented the “hugging” cafés, where proprietors used poor lighting, thin partitions, and leafy plants to provide privacy between tables. Many cafés rented their customers tiny cubicles equipped with narrow pallets and even doors that shut. Less affluent couples made do, weather permitting, in the great outdoors. The particularly dexterous, I’d heard, could complete the act of intercourse while balanced together on a motorbike. And then there were Hanoi’s many tree-filled parks, and the banks of its lakes, which provided ample—if rather too public—space. An American photographer friend of mine once visited Hanoi’s Lenin Park at dusk, hoping to discover a peaceful setting in which to take pictures. Instead, she found herself the only solitary person in a park full of embracing, and copulating, couples.

And unlike most other couples in Hanoi, one of us was foreign. As an American, I was used to privacy. But, also as an American, I was even less likely than a Vietnamese person to find it in such venues. If Phai and I rented a cubicle in a hugging café, the proprietors would be telling friends about it for years. If we found a cozy-looking tree in Lenin Park, we’d have a mob of seven-year-olds surrounding us in minutes.

Something else bothered me more than the possibility of prying eyes, however. Sneaking around felt demeaning.

Luckily, I did have my own room and a habit of inviting my Vietnamese friends to visit me in it. As long as Phai only visited during the day, no one in the house or neighborhood would suspect a change in our relations. Besides, Tung and Huong were so preoccupied with their own problems that they hardly noticed anyone else. For a time, we enjoyed a privacy unimagined by other couples in Vietnam.

Whole afternoons passed with the two of us locked inside
that room. Once, we lay side by side on our backs while I dragged my Vietnamese through ridiculous contortions to explain menstruation, the biology of intercourse, and the creation of a baby. I’d long known that Phai was sexually inexperienced, but I was shocked, and somewhat unnerved, to discover that he knew almost nothing about the facts of life.

“There’s blood every month. This thing goes in here,” I told him, indicating the appropriate locations on our bodies. “A baby grows right here.” My hands floated everywhere, pointing, gesturing, demonstrating. The two of us stared at my hands as if they were characters in a foreign film. After a while, he pulled one out of the air and kissed it.

Phai was learning in another way as well. By now, the two of us had spent a good bit of time in bed together. He now knew, quite well, what he was doing.

Once, when I opened my eyes, he was watching me, smiling. That afternoon, I split in two. Half of me lay in bed with Phai. The other half stood a few feet away, incredulous. What was I doing to myself? To him? Where did I expect this thing to go? Would I marry him? The me in bed wouldn’t respond. She had never thought someone like Phai could happen. She could hear the questions, but she couldn’t answer them.

Not surprisingly, those afternoons of privacy didn’t last long. Eventually, Huong discovered the truth. And she might never have suspected had Phai and I not given it away.

      No one paid attention to what time Phai arrived and, as long as he went home in the afternoon, they didn’t notice him leaving, either. If he left at six, the family, already leaning over the coffee table eating dinner, would simply invite him to join them. A seven o’clock departure might attract a curious
look, but only if Phai left my house alone. If I went with him, they’d assume he’d dropped by to pick me up for dinner. If Phai left at eight, and alone, we were cutting it close.

Early one evening, we fell asleep. By the time I woke and looked at the clock, it was 10:30. I lay back down on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, panicked. Tung and Huong would be brushing their teeth already, getting ready for bed. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I’d laughed at the restrictions imposed on people’s lives by the government. Once, a friend had asked me what kind of government permission he’d need in order to stay overnight at my house in San Francisco. I’d answered him seriously, but I’d had a hard time keeping a straight face as I did so. Though I was willing to abide by such laws while living here, I’d done so with a sense of their absurdity.

Now that I’d lived in this country for almost half a year, my perspective had changed. Rights that I’d always taken for granted as an American now struck me as privileges, luxuries even.

Phai wasn’t nearly as upset as I was that it was too late for him to leave my house. “It doesn’t matter,” he told me, more interested in running his fingers across my forehead.

“You won’t say that when I get kicked out of the country,” I told him.

Phai laughed. I couldn’t help but think how much better he functioned in this place than I did. He not only accepted the repressive laws, but he had a very well developed ability to subvert them. His twenty-nine years of experience had made him a much better sneak than I was.

Phai promised to leave without waking anyone up the next morning. I couldn’t imagine how he would do so, because the stairs, which ran outside the house on the top three floors, slipped inside the house and passed right by Tung and Huong’s sleeping quarters on the way down to living room, and front
door. The architecture of the house offered no other route to the street. When I tried to question Phai, however, he changed the subject. My mind hadn’t made the leap yet, but his had. For the first time, he was going to spend the night.

He nudged me awake at a little after six the next morning. He already had his clothes on, and his hair was wet from the shower. When I got up and opened the door for him, he gave me a quick kiss, then leaped up to the iron railing that separated the outdoor staircase from the three-story drop to the ground below. “Watch out,” I whispered.

Phai grinned, balancing so easily that I remembered how I’d once been stunned by his agility and grace. “I’ll come over tomorrow,” he said. Then he stepped along the top of the railing, leaped across a two-foot gap to my neighbor’s roof, then disappeared around a corner of the building. I ran back into my room, then out to the balcony at the front of the house, which overlooked the street. After about five minutes, Phai emerged from an alley.

After that, we didn’t see any reason why Phai couldn’t spend the night quite regularly. And so, on three occasions over the next week, he utilized our newly discovered escape route across the neighbors’ roofs and down the trellises that clung to their balconies.

After the fourth morning, Huong knocked on my door. Grandmother Nhi’s son, she told me, had come over that morning with a worried look on his face. “Your friend Phai,” he’d begun. “Do you know that he’s been creeping around here early in the morning? The next time we see him, we’re going to call the police.”