The Man From Saigon (16 page)

Son said,
Never mind about that, whether they are generous or not they will seethe photographs and decide!
He had a youthful, almost innocent aspect to him that was fetching.

You learned English from a Brit, didn’t you?
she said.

Who told you so?

Nobody told me
, she said.
It’s the way you pronounce your vowels.

Ah, yes, of course. The BBC. I’ve been copying it for years.

You learned English from the BBC?

Indirectly. Directly, I learned English from a Vietnamese actress who always hoped to go to London and star on the stage. The West End. Can you imagine?

No, she could not.
Did she ever make it?
she asked cautiously.

No, but she had a little dog and one day a famous English actress came through Saigon for some reason and saw the little dog and bought it from her. So the little dog went back to England and the story goes that the little dog became a stage celebrity! So, the actress teacher did not become famous, but she had a famous dog. We were all so happy!

Son, are you unusual or are all Vietnamese like you?

We are all of us unusual
, he said.
But, Susan, surely you want to know the dog’s name?

How would she know to stay away from such a man? There were no clues, except if you took that single, facile, ignorant one that she would never adopt: that he was Vietnamese.

Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature.
The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy above, allowing no breeze. Her hair, her clothes, stay wet and wetter still with no chance of drying in the humid air. Even in the cool mornings, the foggy mist is wet. During the sticky heat of noon, the air is wet. She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son, who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.

She feels best when they are passed by scout planes, droning above them like giant insects. Sometimes they are so low she cannot believe the pilots do not spot them. She looks up longingly, wishing she could signal.

“Stay perfectly still or else we will shoot you,” they tell her.

Or, “Don’t run or we will fire.”

“Where exactly would I run?” she says. She wants to put her arms up and embrace the plane. She wants to jump so high she can catch it.

Long into the night, she is scheming how she will make it through the jungle. She wishes she had a gun, but the gun would do no good at all—she doesn’t know how to shoot straight and she isn’t sure she could kill a person anyway. She might try, but she’d be too late. To kill a man in Vietnam requires complete conviction that this is what you must do now. Otherwise, he will shoot you. She has no such conviction. She has never considered the possibility. She feels that in many ways she is no different from the Saigon women in their tennis dresses, or all those overfed French women along the beach who smiled up at the pilots. She hadn’t really thought she’d need to know so much, or do so much.

She wishes she had her compass. Wherever you are in the jungle you are in the center of it. There is no way of getting
any perspective except if you climb a tree, and the trees are hundreds of feet high. She remembers interviewing some of the soldiers in Mike Force, a mixed bag of mercenaries and Montagnards, a few Aussies thrown in, who apparently crawled along the brush, unwilling to stand, often stopping to evaluate the next twelve inches in front, looking for trip wires before continuing, burying their waste. She thinks now about all the questions she wishes she’d asked them.

Once, with Son, she’d visited a captured Vietcong village which had been made into a training ground for new recruits. The traps were set up so that you stepped over a trip wire with your right foot, but missed a different one with your left. The doors were rigged, the grass alive with explosives. It is hard enough to see a full-grown man in a jungle, much less the wires of American mines, or the vines of the Vietcong’s. In the ersatz village she had set off ten explosives in almost as many minutes. She thinks about this as she lies awake now, concentrating her thoughts, already separating herself mentally from the four men around her, sleeping.

If she could find a road, she could set up a kind of ambush, wait for ARVN or the Americans to come along, and try to get their attention and identify herself before they opened fire. With this in mind, she could make a white flag out of some bamboo and her underpants. But then she thinks how they have not crossed a road in four days of marching; she thinks she would tire of dragging the pole. The previous night, she washed her underpants in the water of a tree stump. They dried in a stiff shape as though starched, smelling of earth. She picked ants off them, then put them back on and discovered that the elastic had stretched. That, or her thighs were much thinner; the pants sagged on her as though they belonged to another woman. What was she going to do when they wore out completely?

Commonplace things—roads, plates, bedclothes, running
water—feel unreachable, the thought of them absurd. Where would she find new underpants? She falls asleep for a few minutes, dreaming of fresh water and roads.

Son always said he hated the jungle, even though he would agree that the view from a helicopter is beautiful.
There are two times when it is best to avoid the jungle
, he joked.
Night and day.

A few weeks ago, what feels like years now, she told Marc that joke, pretending it was her own. He didn’t laugh. Instead, he said,
You don’t have to go.
He wasn’t trying to discourage her. He was issuing information. He routinely accompanied soldiers into the field, carrying his recording equipment strapped to his back or chest, his pocket stuffed with batteries, cables, film. He was thin, no extra meat. He sometimes smoked while he walked. He sunburned badly. He went because if you didn’t stay with the troops you would listen to all the crap being said in Saigon and begin to believe it. He went because the only way to properly cover the war, he said, was to film it. Otherwise nobody would believe what you reported. You’d contradict the stories from the military, stories that were repeated by the hundreds of reporters who did not leave the city. If you contradicted those stories without proof, without footage or at least some photographs, you appeared misinformed, that was all, or as though you simply hadn’t observed correctly. The camera was key. But he didn’t want her to go.
Why don’t you stick a little closer to home for a while?
, he said to Susan.
You don’t need to be out there all the time.

This was a night when he was a little drunk. He sat close to her, breaking their recent agreement to avoid each other, to put their relationship on hold, to check it back. They were supposed to be only “friends” now. His wife had written him that she was pregnant. However abstract that felt—an unborn baby thousands of miles away—the affair had to end. But they were
finding it difficult to end it. Sitting together, she could feel the proximity of their bodies by the small change in heat between them. If they touched, the places their skin met would grow moist as though they were melting together. She knew this, just as she knew that if he ran his hand through her hair, his fingers would stick, and that, undressing, their clothes would peel away from their bodies like a rind. Once, after making love, they’d bathed together and she remembers tasting the water and being surprised by the salt in it, as though they’d produced their own kind of brine. Perhaps he, too, was remembering this. He looked at her for a long while, then he said,
Come see me. Who knows? Things may have changed.

If he had made some small gesture, laced his fingers through hers, pushed her hair back, placed his palm against her cheek—something, anything—she might have been more kind. If he had said,
I want to do whatever it takes to keep you.
Or,
Please, I want to see you so much and we could talk about a solution
—she would have given in. It really would not have been difficult to hang on to her, if that was what he intended. And no, she didn’t expect a solution, not really.

But all he did was issue an invitation for her to take a chance, come and see, poke around once more in his life and decide for herself whether it was safe to come in. That’s the way he makes nothing his fault, she thought then. He made suggestions. He made proposals. He believed entirely in an individual’s responsibility to himself, to his own life and aspirations, and took no responsibility for another’s choices. It seemed to her there was a certain deceitfulness in this.

She preferred Son’s way of being, how he tried so hard to please her. He would arrive in her room, having raced up the steps, carrying something he’d found for her in the market.
Here is a new teacup and saucer for your collection. Do you like it?
He took responsibility for everything, would ensure she had the right bug spray, apologize when they got caught in a rain-storm.
There was a woman in Hué whom he loved secretly and sneaked off to see. He claimed it to be his fault, his fault that he was so devoted, that he could not leave her alone. She, too, was married. They were both of them in love with married people.
Why do we always love the wrong ones?
she asked Son one night. They were sharing her last cigarette. She’d already gone from three a day, to five a day, to ten a day. As she turned the butt of the cigarette in his direction, he brushed her hand.
That is our nature
, he said.
And not the worst of our nature, I am afraid.

From Susan, he asked nothing. Sometimes she thought he must find her ugly or ungainly, for he almost seemed not to have noticed she was a woman. For her part, she was completely at ease in his presence, taking his arm sometimes as they walked, trimming his hair, a flowery towel draped over him like a cape, her scissors a delicate bird hovering at his ear. Much of what they did was more intimate than anything that happened with Marc. And yet, she was in love with Marc.

In the bar, the last time she saw Marc, sitting so close to him so that there was no mistaking they were lovers, hearing his fractured invitation, she said,
I’m sorry, Marc, but please explain: what would have changed? You have a wife, and now a baby on the way.
She spoke in a rational, logical voice that did not match how she felt. She could picture herself as he must see her, sitting stiffly in her chair, the chill of the air conditioning reflected in goosebumps along her bare arms, a tight smile, a slightly dark, wise look in her eyes.
I mean, I can’t see how anything would have changed
, she said.
Or even, let’s face it, that you want it to change.
She did not allow him to see how he hurt her, but she regretted the words, or rather the way they had come out, stinging, bitter, with no purpose other than to wound. It made her feel shrew-like and therefore less attractive. She kept thinking that if she were just a little more beautiful, he wouldn’t be so casual about her. A man who her father introduced her to years
ago, a colonel like himself, once looked at her from across the dinner table, and proclaimed,
Young women are wasted on young men.
She’d taken it as a line of simple flattery, but now she saw there was a certain truth in what he had said. We are all in such abundance, she thought, like shiny fruit in a market stall.

I’m sorry
, she said, a little softer, though she was not sorry.

He was silent.

If there was someplace we could go with this
—she began. Wasn’t he a man who liked order and logic? Who made decisions easily by weighing up alternatives? But there was no place to go that brought them to the end they wished for. She didn’t want to hurt him. She wanted some kind of purpose and that was the one thing he could not offer. There had been talk early on of his getting a divorce, but that was gone now.
It’s probably better to leave it this way
, she said. She didn’t mean it, but she didn’t want a man she had to bargain for. And she didn’t want to think of what a divorce would mean for his wife, for the baby. She wasn’t sure how she felt. Without a vote, is how she felt.

Marc nodded. He gave her the beer he’d just ordered and got up to get another for himself. The bar was full of journalists, most of whom he did not like. It was an odd truth that while the camaraderie among soldiers increased, that between correspondents sometimes splintered and died. Susan watched him negotiate a small circle, trying not to get snagged into conversation. She remembered how he once told her never to trust anybody. That had been an evening on a firebase when they lay together and watched tracers blazing overhead. You could pretend they were fireworks on a hot July night. You could pretend the man next to you was your husband.
Don’t trust anybody
, he said. She shook her head. The pot made him paranoid, she thought. He’d been smoking earlier with two guys on his crew. He had his face in her hair, his arm across her stomach.
Don’t trust the kids or the laundry maid or the plantation owner
, he said.

Shall I trust you?

Me? Of course you should trust me. On second thought, don’t.

She laughed.

For practice.

She sat in the bar, remembering that previous conversation, how they watched the sky and he told her not to trust anyone, and then explained what was being fired and where.
That’s just H&I. Our guys having a little party. Nothing to worry about, Stay near me. I can’t remember when I’ve been happier to be on a firebase. It’s fun with you. It will be even more fun if we don’t get hit tonight.

She’d turned to him.
Will we get hit tonight?

He made a puzzled face. She’d honestly thought he would answer the question, that he could know such a thing. She understood this wasn’t possible, but it didn’t stop her from asking, asking earnestly as though he could tell her.