The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (13 page)

They walked in silence and came to a two-story, yellow stucco colonial building that leaned to the left as if it were gossiping with its neighbor. The facade wore faded, long ocher streaks from the rains and humidity, the patina like that of the moldering buildings in Venice. The roof and the entrance portico were tiled in a cobalt blue Chinese ceramic, the corners curved upward into points like the upturned corners of a sly mouth. An unsettling mix of cultures that created a strange beauty. The front door of the building was made of lacquered wood. On it were painted squares depicting the various scenes of Buddha's enlightenment.

"Beautiful," Helen said, tracing her hand along the panels.

"A lacquer artist lived here. When he couldn't pay his rent, the landlord demanded he make something of equal value."

Helen looked at peacocks perched atop rocks, elephants striding through bamboo, tigers crouched in palms, the great spreading of a bodhi tree, and pools of lotus blossom.

"It should be in a museum."

"That's part of what I love here. Everything isn't locked away behind glass and key, you live with history as part of your life and not just on a field trip. The legend is that he worked on it a year. And when it was done, he ran away and was never heard from again."

"Why?"

"It was during the war with the French. He couldn't make a living and marry his girl, so she married a soldier. I don't know if it's true or a folktale. But the door is real. A friend of mine lived here. I still keep the place."

"I thought you had a room at the Continental."

"That's the room that
Life
pays for. My official residence. This is my real life." Darrow opened the door and waited for her to move inside.

They walked up the shadowy stairs that leaned to the right for a few steps, then to the left, as if nailed together by someone who felt ocean swells under his feet. The wood felt light and hollow like balsa, the middle of the struts bending under the weight of each footfall with a small groan.

"Are you sure these are safe?"

"This is a very old building. They've held so far."

In front of a thin, scuffed door, Darrow pulled out an old-fashioned brass skeleton key and turned the lock. "This key only opens this door and a few thousand others in Cholon."

Inside, he flipped on a small lamp with a red silk shade with beaded fringe that gently swished against his hand. The room smelled dusty and unused, like the stacks of an old library. He sneezed and walked to the window and opened it. The room was threadbare, furnished with only an old iron bed, an armoire, two wooden chairs, and a table. The only ornate decorations in the room were a large mirror in a scrolling gilt frame and the lamp.

"That's a very feminine touch," Helen said, nodding at the red glow of the shade.

"Henry, the guy who rented this place, was involved with a Vietnamese girl. It looks like it's her taste. I let her take what she wanted, but she left this behind."

"Where is Henry? Did he go home?"

"He was home. He was American, but he loved Vietnam. The war tore him up. I'll show you some of his work--he was on his way to becoming a hell of a photographer."

"Where is he?"

"Died two years ago covering an operation in the delta. Henry was reckless. I refused to go out with him on assignments. But he knew the dangers. That's one lesson of etiquette you need to learn here--never ask what happened to someone. The answer is usually bad."

"Not a very lucky apartment for its owners."

"Not a very lucky country. Henry gave me a key. It's the one place I could escape when I needed."

Helen went to the open window and leaned on the sill. She smelled dust and rain, heard people walking down the alley, the tinny sound of Vietnamese pop music from a transistor radio. "Are you escaping now?" she asked.

"Trapped now is more like it." And then, as if in answer, the room went dark. "Great Electric of Saigon at it again." Darrow groped his way to the table and lit a candle.

Up and down the dark street, the slow pulse of flames like fireflies appeared.

"Why did you bring me here?"

Darrow stood next to her, reticent, and stared out the window as if he were waiting for something to happen. He did not want to say it was because she had appeared scared shitless to night, woefully inadequate for what she had come to do. Neither did he want to admit he found her beautiful.

"You see the tree in front of the building? It's bare now, but in the spring it blooms large red flowers. Henry and his girl used to have parties each spring to celebrate the tree blooming. Very
Tale of Genji
, very Asian." Darrow chuckled to himself. "Henry loved all that shit. Swore he'd never go back to the States. Said America scared him more than any war could."

"What happened to the girl of the red lampshade?"

Darrow shrugged. "I don't know. Disappeared. Found someone else. The local women don't have much choice once they start taking up with white men." Darrow justified his own actions with the native women that if not him, they would offer themselves to someone else. He treated them kindly and then promptly forgot them. The grand, futile gestures of renunciation, fidelity, bored him; he had become a practical bourgeois in war time. "There's something lovely here, yet even as we look, even as we have contact with it, we change it. So why are you going out with that blowhard, Robert?"

"How rude. We're friends."

He poured two glasses of scotch from the armoire and handed her one. The glass was heavy, square, with a solid crystal bottom.

"Aren't these from the hotel bar?"

He grinned. "Keep forgetting to return them."

She sipped her drink in silence, listening to the outside sounds, the heaviness of the warm air moving through the room. He refilled their glasses and sat across from her.

"I like it here," she said finally. What she didn't add was that it was the first time she'd felt safe since she'd arrived in-country.

"This is the real Vietnam. When I come here, my mind slows down.... I can imagine what is good about the place, what the people want to keep. The Continental and the Caravelle, the air-conditioning and room boys and ice cubes, make you forget where you are. The war groupies starting to descend. Restaurants and nightclubs booming, parties every night. Saigon is their Casablanca or Berlin. It's the scene now. All these daughters of the country-club set descending with their copy of Graham Greene under their arm... sorry for the speechifying, I'm drunk."

Helen set down her glass on the floor. "You're saying I shouldn't be here."

"Should you?" His eyes took her in, coolly assessing. "Don't ever believe that staying here won't change you."

"Tell me what you
really
think."

"I've hurt your feelings."

"I had Robert take me to the dinner to night because I knew you would be there."

Darrow raised his eyebrows. "Should I be flattered?"

"All they've let me do so far is human-interest features--widows, orphans, wounded soldiers. I need someone to get me out in the field."

He blinked, not wanting to admit his hurt feelings at how unromantic her reasons were. Usually the battle-weary reporter spiel worked. "Only a handful of women are covering the war. None doing combat. It's too dangerous, too spooky out there. The men don't like it, either. It's hard work. It's hard for me. I'm forty years old, I look fifty, I feel sixty."

"My brother wrote me a letter before he was killed. He said no matter what happened he couldn't regret coming. I needed to see for myself. And the only way to become famous is to cover combat, right? I dropped out of college because I was worried it would be over by the time I graduated." Later, she would cringe at her crassness, but at the time it had seemed daring to reveal such an unflattering truth. How could she explain the years of being a tomboy, refusing dolls and dresses, always hanging out with the boys? Her father and Michael shared the idea of soldiering, and she had been left out. She cried when she had to stay in the kitchen with her mother, told to bake cookies. Michael's taunts as they went out shooting--
You can't come, you can't come
.

Darrow knelt in front of her. He liked her a little less now, so it made it easier to seduce her.

"No one can say I didn't try. Go out with me on patrol tomorrow. You'll have your own bite of the apple. You're going to get it anyway... right?"

"Right."

This girl, filled with ambition and doubt and passion. Like himself. Utterly unlike his wife, who was cool, clear, and sharp--a constant obstacle to his doing what he loved. A mystery why she had married him just to make him guilty over what he did. Their arguments ran in circles like a dog chasing its tail:
It's the only thing I'm good at
, he'd shouted, but the truth was it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

"Are we fine? I mean, things between you and me?"

Helen reached and gently pulled off his glasses. Despite her playacting, she was terrified by what she saw in the hospitals, and the idea of turning down a man she wanted to night seemed ridiculous. What if she were gone tomorrow, like Henry? She frowned. "Is there something between you and me?"

He put a hand on each side of her chair, and she noticed his hands shaking. That was good; neither was practiced at this seduction thing.

"Nerves. I'm steady in the field. Downtime fallout."

She ran her fingers along the scar on his arm. "How'd that happen?"

He shrugged. "An angry husband."

She laughed.

"I think it was Algeria. Hard to remember one from another. We should discuss this. Are we open about it, or do we try to keep it secret?"

"Cat's a little out of the bag."

"True. But are you prepared? A married man's mistress?"

He folded the glasses into his shirt pocket. With his index finger he lightly traced her upper lip. Pressing harder, he went down her lower lip, pressing on the fleshy bottom till it spread into a dark flower. He kissed her.

"You're beautiful," he said.

She was not beautiful, but she did not correct him. She let it go that she was beautiful enough for that moment.

"Tonight is just ours. Nothing to do with tomorrow, okay?" he said.

She nodded and pulled away from him, stood up, and walked across the room to the mirror. Back home time seemed to stand still; she was always impatient, restless. In Vietnam everything moved at a flash speed that had nothing to do with normal life. She tried to hold her breath and become as still as the room. "You didn't ask why I came here to night."

"I figured you'd tell me if you wanted to. I'll find out soon enough."

"Robert said you were one of the charmed. He said everyone tries to stick close to you because they think they will be safe." As the words came from her mouth, she realized how foolish she sounded, like a child.

"Poor Robert still believes in the Tooth Fairy."

"I already asked him to help me. He refused."

"Well, good for him."

"He said you have no morals. That you'll do anything for a picture. That you would have no scruples about bedding a woman or letting her go out in the field."

Darrow sat back on his heels a moment, winded. He got up and moved behind her, slowly unfastening the back of her dress, one button at a time. "But you came anyway. I didn't finish the passage at the restaurant to night. Last time I was out on a mission, the only paperback I had was a battered copy of
The Iliad
. I would memorize passages:

" 'Ravishing as she is, let her go home in the long ships
and not be left behind... for us and our children
down the years an irresistible sorrow.' "

A growl came from deep within the building, and the electricity struggled back on, first at half power, then all the way. Out of the darkness, plunged into light, she felt confused. Cheap, more like it. Dress half pulled off and her bra showing. Desire shrank. She pulled away, reached to refasten the buttons that had been undone. "We should be going. Robert will be at the hotel...."

"Really? Did you suddenly get frightened of yourself?" He watched her flushed face as she moved around the room, gathering her things. Not as easy as he had thought. Was he being played? Even so, she intrigued him. Perhaps at long last he had met his match in female form? "Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? Did you leave anyone behind?"

"No. If there had been anyone that important, I wouldn't have come. I wouldn't have been so selfish."

"That's where you're wrong."

"How so?"

"Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given. Don't you think it's a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?"

She walked past him and out the door. "I'm leaving... with you or without you." Down the hallway, she refused to look back, not wanting to acknowledge that if he didn't follow her by the time she reached the alley, she would most certainly be lost.

When she and Michael were kids, their favorite game was hide-and-seek. Helen would search for the most difficult hiding places possible, and time would turn into eternities; often she would fall into a daydream and forget she was playing a game. She would wait in the darkened cubby, desperately wanting to be found.

FOUR
Indian County

At the Bien Hoa
Air Base, Helen stood in the shade of a metal storage shed, a faded red stenciled BEWARE

above her head; the words below disappeared, peeled off by the sun and rain. The area to be patrolled was considered a cleared one, the search of some marshland and two hamlets routine, establishing presence and nation building.

Darrow rolled his eyes at her as he harangued the lieutenant colonel into taking Helen along. She heard the words
added burden
and
lack of facilities
, but then the man gave in because of a gambling debt he owed Darrow.