The House on Dream Street (38 page)

As soon as I saw Phai this morning, I forgot the awkwardness. I looked at him with genuine relief.

Phai said, “I’ve got my friend’s motorbike. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

It was just after eight. I still had time to make a quick trip to the hospital before leaving for Ha Long Bay. I rushed down the stairs after Phai.

It had been more than a year since we’d ridden on a motorbike together. I gripped the metal bar behind my back, and when I had something to say I yelled instead of putting my chin on his shoulder and speaking into his ear. But Phai seemed relaxed,
with none of the self-consciousness I’d witnessed in the past two months, and I eventually began to relax myself.

The hospital, not far from my house, contained the city’s largest maternity facility. The building had large, airy corridors, high ceilings, and elegant archways, but mildew was creeping up its walls and it was dark, with the only light streaming in naturally through the door. We climbed a crowded stairway, where the air filled with voices and the clatter of rubber sandals against the stone floor. The stairway led up to a landing at the head of a hall. Light from large windows flooded the area, and a wrought iron barrier kept the crowd of people at the top of the stairs from continuing down the hall. It took Phai and me several seconds to work our way to the front of the crowd. Then we stood like visitors at a prison gazing through the metal bars.

The dark hallway stretched away in front of us. I could barely see its end. To the left, we could glimpse one section of a room full of simple wooden beds. A pregnant woman in a white hospital gown was sitting at the side of one bed, slipping her feet into a pair of sandals. Another woman sat beside her, massaging her neck. A man was standing next to them, with his back to us, his arms spread out, folding a blanket.

“That’s Huong and Tung,” Phai said, gesturing toward them.

The man turned around and I saw Tung’s face. We raised our hands to wave, but his eyes were focused on his wife, who was trying to stand up. He bent over, put his arm under hers, and lifted her, while the other woman, whom I now recognized as Nga, did the same on the other side. Huong stood for a moment, breathing deeply. Suddenly, her legs gave out. Tung and Nga held her steady, keeping her from collapsing. Her face lifted toward the ceiling, her mouth opened, and she let out a wail that had no sound to it. Then her head sank down against her chest. Nga pulled a cloth from her pocket and gently wiped Huong’s face.
They walked slowly from the room, turned down the hallway, and moved away from us, stopping every few seconds for another contraction. The back of Huong’s hospital gown, I saw now, was stained with blood.

Late that night, I managed to get through a telephone call to Hanoi from the hotel where we were staying in Hon Gai City. The connection was worse than it would have been had I tried to telephone New York.

It took a long time before Ly answered the phone. “Is Huong okay?”

“Yes!” she said, giggling. Like her predecessor, Sa, Ly came from the countryside and didn’t have much experience talking on the phone, particularly on long-distance calls with foreigners.

“Did she have the baby?”

“Yes!”

I waited for a moment, thinking she’d tell me more.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I finally asked.

“Yes! It’s a boy!”

I would have to wait two days before I learned that Huong had delivered by cesarean late that afternoon, that she was in a lot of pain, but doing well, and that the baby was a good-sized boy, and healthy.

      I made it to the hospital the morning after we returned from Ha Long Bay. For five dollars—not cheap by Vietnamese standards—Tung had managed to secure the only private room the hospital had to offer. It was a dark, narrow space with just enough room for a long wooden bed, a couple of chairs, and the folding cot Tung had brought to sleep on. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. A door at the far end led out to a tiny enclosed outdoor space that contained a squat toilet.
Right off the main corridor that led from outside the building to the large communal rooms shared by other patients, the room was full of the noise of people talking and shuffling by.

Huong was lying on the bed beneath a sheet. It was mid-October, and the summer heat was finally beginning to subside, but the room was hot and stuffy. She weakly waved a paper fan in front of her face. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her skin was pale, almost bluish. She looked like someone who’d been ill for months. At the end of the bed, the baby lay, an egg-shaped swaddle of blankets squeezed between a pillow and the wall. When I leaned over to look, a tiny red face gazed up at me, then squeezed its eyes together and whimpered. His body was swaddled so tightly that I could see nothing but his face and the bright cotton cap that covered his head. His lips puckered as if he were eating. Tung picked him up and lay him down next to Huong, where he immediately latched on to her nipple and began to suck.

Huong motioned with her finger for me to come closer. I sat down beside her, picked up the paper fan, and began to fan her. “I’ve had all my babies,” Huong said. “Now, it’s your turn.”

I laughed. Seeing Huong go through labor had made me feel uncertain, all over again, about what I was doing with my life. “I think I’ll be a while,” I told her.

The baby’s jaws were moving gently as he sucked. Huong pulled off the cap, revealing thin strands of damp, dark hair. With her fingers, she stroked the top of his head.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

Huong looked up at Tung, who shrugged. “It’s still under discussion,” he said.

Huong rolled her eyes. “Tung has a hard time making decisions like that,” she said.

      I stayed at the hospital until Huong fell asleep. Then, planning to go home, I got on my bike. Instead of turning left down Trang Thi Street, however, I impulsively turned to the right toward the post office to make an international call.

Lately, I’d developed an odd habit. One day, when I’d telephoned my mother, her answering machine had picked up. I’d listened for a second or two before hanging up. At that time, a call to the States cost about seven dollars a minute, and even this short call would set me back at least a dollar, the cost of a lunch in Hanoi. When I went to pay my bill, however, the ladies behind the counter didn’t charge me. They didn’t consider an answering machine answer to constitute a real call. After that, I became a junkie. I called anyone I could think of, just to hear their voices, so long as I knew they wouldn’t be home. It was like a trick of magic to be able to cause a telephone to ring in California even when I was thousands of miles away. I called my mother when she was at work. I called my sister when she was out of town. Mostly, however, I called Todd. I didn’t feel ready to go back to the States in order to see him, but I’d come to rely on his letters. He was thousands of miles away, but he seemed to understand me more fully than anyone in Hanoi. Some cultural gaps were just impossible to bridge. Early in the morning in Hanoi, I would often give his answering machine a call, knowing that he would be teaching.

On that day, however, I must have called a little early. “Hello?” a real voice answered.

I stared out at the bustling post office, unable to speak. A meter box on the wall of the telephone booth started to tick the passing time. Three seconds. Todd and I hadn’t spoken to each other since I’d left for Vietnam nearly three months earlier. It was too expensive. Too serious. Maybe I should hang up.

Six seconds. “Hello?”

I could feel myself start shaking. “Hi,” I finally said.

“Dana?” he finally asked, and then we both started to talk. “How are you?” and “I’m fine” took up more than fifteen seconds, and then, not knowing how to go on, we said it all again. There was too much time and not enough. I told him how much the phone call cost and, feeling like an idiot for calling, said I had to hang up.

“Wait,” he said. Had I gotten the letter he sent me about two weeks earlier? I’d received lots of letters. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I wrote you,” he said. “Can I come visit?”

It took one second for that to sink in. Before I could respond, he explained that he had a break from school in December and, well, he’d never been to Vietnam.

“Yes,” I said. “Come. Okay, bye.”

“Bye,” said Todd. I hung up.

      Todd’s letter arrived a few days later. He had frequent flyer miles that he could use to come to Vietnam. Would I take a few weeks off to travel around the country with him? Two weeks later, I received another letter, this one with a flight number and a date to meet him in Saigon.

The first person I told about Todd, as it turned out, was Mr. Choi. One morning, I got a call from his secretary, Mrs. Lien, asking if I could come by the office. My article about him had recently appeared, and I assumed he wanted to discuss it. Maybe he had more material that I could use for my next column.

Mrs. Lien greeted me with her trademark friendly chatter, asked me if I’d managed to find any good French velvet, then
ushered me into Mr. Choi’s office. He was already there, seated behind his desk, but when he saw me he immediately stood up. Something was different in his manner toward me, in the way he smiled when I walked into the room. He hurried around the side of his desk, zealously shook my hand, then touched a plush armchair, motioning for me to sit down. With his jacket gone and his tie loosened, he looked less like a bureaucrat, and less confident as well. He sat down in a chair near me, then immediately sprang back up. “Coffee?” he asked.

I nodded. I was always happy to have Western-style coffee in Vietnam. Mrs. Lien went outside and immediately returned with two hot cups. I opened my notebook and pulled the cap off my pen. “No, no,” Mr. Choi said hurriedly. “This is not for an interview.” He walked over to a drawer next to his desk and pulled out a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag emblazoned with the Bright Star label. He carried the bag over to where I was sitting and offered it to me. “You’re a very nice person. I want to give this to you.” He spoke very slowly this time, looking me in the eye.

I must have seemed uncertain, because Mr. Choi sat down in a chair next to me and gestured toward the bag. “Open it,” he said, like he’d just given me my Christmas presents.

I’d hit the Bright Star freebie jackpot. Inside was a thick English-language hardback by the founder and chairman of the company, a handful of ballpoint pens, and a black velvet jewelry box, inside of which was a wristwatch with the words “Bright Star” on its face. There was also a large bottle of Rémy Martin enclosed in a gilded, embossed gift case. Of all the things in the bag, I was most interested in the watch. I needed a watch.

I couldn’t accept any of it, though. As I carefully put it all back, I explained to Mr. Choi that I was happy he was satisfied
with the article I’d written, but that journalistic ethics forbade the acceptance of gifts. It was my job to write about Bright Star, I told him. I didn’t need to be thanked for it.

Mr. Choi shook his head and raised a hand as if to try to stop me from arguing. “No, this is for you. For you,” he said, and the way he said “you” made me suddenly see this meeting in an entirely different light.