The Man From Saigon (42 page)

He looks as though his frame has been stretched, every tendon showing, the muscles in his face prominent, his ribs
protruding so that he can see them even through a shirt. This seems perfectly normal to him now; he has spent so much time in the field, where everyone begins to look the same, with the same V of red against a white chest, the same saggy, sweat-stained uniforms, the same starved-dog look. One soldier Marc knew refused to carry the C-rations required for him to even maintain his weight, preferring the lightness of his pack and allowing his body to take what it needed from the minerals in his bones. That one was on his way to a medical discharge, he was sure.

“Christine,” he says, the name coming slowly, a pit he sucks on before allowing it out of his mouth. He wants to say,
You look fat
, but he knows she will take this as an insult when what he means is that she looks lovely, healthy, glowing. He finds himself gazing at her as he’s seen the village girls staring at Susan, some of them actually approaching her to touch the curve of her upper arm, the outer muscle of her shoulders, amazed at the strength. And Susan is tiny compared to Christine, a scrappy package in her fatigues, easily mistaken for a boy. Christine stands at the airport as though she’s been teleported from some other world entirely. She, who blends in perfectly on a New York street, might have been a movie star at Tan Son Nhut. He hardly knows how to approach her.

“My God,” she says, upon seeing him. “Your hair has gone blond—”

She puts her hand against his collarbone, into the hollow there. He reaches down to take her suitcase and accidentally brushes her belly with his hand. Even though he has been prepared for this, for the inevitable change in her shape, it is a shock to him. She lost the first pregnancy—nobody’s fault, the baby stopped developing after the eighth week; even during the Lisbon honeymoon, it had already been dead—but this baby was clearly very much alive. He could feel the structure of her belly, the way her body harnessed its mass.

All at once Christine is flustered. She puts her hand on top of his, then says, “The doctor takes a measure every week. He is growing like gangbusters.”

The airport is a mass of confusion. A flight is being called and people dash toward one of the terminals. In the midst of this rush, his hand rests on a hard mound of flesh, like a muscle flexed to its full, and he thinks he can feel the curve of the baby’s spine beneath his palm.

“You look well with it,” he says.

“I heard you were ill,” she says. She has long, light eyes, strawberry-colored lips. He wants to tell her please not to wear any lipstick. The red makes him think of hookers. They all wore that particular shade. But he stops himself from speaking—thank God. “And nobody seemed to know where you were! The bureau was calling
me
to ask. I mean, me!”

He explains he’d been checking something out, down in the Delta.

“Can you believe it was snowing in New York when I left? I think you need a break from this place. A nice Christmas at home. What do you think? Marc?”

It is then that he realizes why she’s here. To ensure he goes home, of course. She has been told to get him out of the country, to amuse him in Saigon for a few days, collect the exit visa, and leave. The executives in New York would never have guessed how transparent she would be. He wonders when the bureau was going to let him know he is being rotated out. They’d undoubtedly find some other job for him, forgetting that it wasn’t clear he could do any other job.

“I think Christmas at home is a great idea? Don’t you? Marc?”

At night he sleeps with her, or lies with her trying to sleep, his arm sometimes curled around her belly where the baby grows. His baby. It is this stranger whom he knew about but who he had not truly believed existed, this fluttering life inside the
recesses of his wife’s body, that stops him telling her about Susan. He feels he knows the baby, that they have met before, and the one thing of which he is certain is that its life is more powerful than his own. With the baby arrives a whole tide and expression of existence that is at once familiar and entirely, unimaginably new. Next to his sleeping wife, feeling the snug tightness of her womb pressing against the muscle of her belly, he senses the need not to disturb her, as one might feel when discovering by chance a wild bird nesting on a forest floor. He rises slowly, sitting at the end of the bed, his arms and legs folded like a religious man, like one of the Buddhist monks he sees on the streets and whose temples rise up in a kind of fairyland beauty from mountains, or from stilts perched along glassy waters. He watches her, wondering what to do. What on earth.

She sleeps deeply, exhausted in pregnancy. He occasionally glances at his desk where the typewriter waits for him. Even if it were only to transcribe his notes or remember a particular event—a battle, a mission, a trip in convoy between cities, anything—he should be making a record. Nothing has been pressed upon him more strongly than the need to bear witness to that around him, to formulate some kind of history that might be read on its own one day or along with hundreds of other accounts, each one important in its own right. During the day he writes letters on Susan’s behalf.
Non-combatant, politically neutral, British citizen.
But now the story is fading from interest. There’s no print space available any more for the two missing reporters. They will say something more about them when they are found or when they are dead.

His typewriter remains otherwise undisturbed, the room itself feeling like a museum of some other time before now, before Susan went missing, before the baby. Instead of writing about firefights, taking care to get the names and ranks and home towns of the men whose stories he longs to transcribe, he spends his energy pushing away thoughts of Susan and those
of the new baby, a little spirit housed in the elaborate garden of his wife’s body. As long as she is pregnant, he will say nothing about Susan, though her life, too, holds him.

“What is troubling you?” he hears now. Christine’s voice. So she had been awake. He wonders for how long.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“You aren’t…yourself.”

“No.”

“I don’t see how anyone can be in this place. I keep seeing the most awful things in the streets here. There was a man, a full-grown man, defecating on the curb. Right in front of me, right in the middle of everything. Can you believe it?”

“That’s not so disturbing,” he says.

“Well, you
have
been here a long time! I think you’ve been here too long.” She rises and sits next to him, her thigh resting beside his. She takes his arm, and says gently, “I keep thinking the war will be over soon, but—”

“Ha!” he snarls. “It will never be over.”

“Marc, don’t. There are some people in our government who do know what they’re doing—”

“Who told you that?”

“Marc!”

He wonders briefly how she might couch Susan’s capture, what reasonable, equitable explanation she would offer. Would Christine imagine the woman had been
borrowed?
Or that she had willingly tagged after the Vietcong as a reporter? He is being unfair. Of course, she’d be horrified. She’d lean into him, touch his shoulder, say, “Oh no, Marc, no. The poor girl. Someone needs to find her.” She’d care. She was a caring person.

“There have been two reporters,” he begins, “missing now for quite some time.”

“Missing?”

“Taken prisoner.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He would like to tell her more, but of course he cannot. It isn’t just that he can’t tell her about Susan; he doesn’t even feel comfortable talking about what has most likely happened to Son. That he is dead now, and has probably been dead for days.

“They’ll find them,” she says. “I’m sure they’ll find them.”

“No, they won’t,” Marc says. He watches the confused look on her face as he continues. He thinks she really is so naïve. “They aren’t even looking.”

“Well,
you
would know,” she says, sounding cross now, fed up with him. Who can blame her? He doesn’t blame her.

She abandons herself to sleep and he gets out another Valium and lies beside her, waiting. She seems to him something of an impostor, a woman replacing another. He no longer knows what to think, to feel. She is carrying his child, and the fact of this new life, of some part of himself, slumbering within the safety of Christine’s sumptuous body, pleases him in a way he would not have expected and cannot express. At the same time, he wishes she would take herself and the baby back to America. He cannot, would never, say as much.

He can see her hair, slippery across the pillow. She had something done to it for the trip. And she is wearing a nightgown that loops around each shoulder with little fastenings made from delicate gold chains, a nightgown he has never seen before, wide enough to cover her bump. He wishes her gone and yet another part of him believes she could save him from what is around him—the exhausted soldiers, the dedicated, clueless officers, the nervy, hyped-up fatigue he inhabits. He has deepened his tendency to become overly annoyed at small matters—an obnoxious official, a critical telegram from his producers—so that now when such things occur they dig into him such that he can barely focus at all until he gets out into the field again and the war forces him once more to
concentrate every thought, all his energy, stripping everything else away. At times in the field, he is grateful for the intense isolation that the soldiers loathe, the white heat that boils every thought away save that of water and shade. The long, bare hours during which they played cards or listened to the radio, the singularity of purpose that regulated their activities, their lives reduced to a kind of animal existence—eating, moving, resting, hunting—was often a relief. In some awful way, it soothed him. In the field he felt sane and whole; then he returned to Saigon and began once more to unravel, to throw his drink at someone whose remark he didn’t like, to do everything possible to piss off an information officer. It was as though he was feeling his way toward a ledge, looking for a way of throwing himself off, even hoping he might get pushed. Maybe Christine would be able to save him from that, too, the excessive risk he both loathed and depended upon, his own manic ambitions, his anger. Mostly that. The anger has become a second head pinned at his shoulder, willing him this way, then that.

Look at her now, he thinks: asleep, relaxed, healthy, while he waits to be released to his own version of sleep, which is never so peaceful as hers.

He looks at the nightgown, which in moonlight takes on a glow, some kind of celestial drapery. She probably bought it specially for this visit with him. He imagines her moving carefully through the cool, perfumed air of a Manhattan department store, stepping cautiously beneath the store’s vaulted ceilings, her heels making little tapping sounds over the polished wood, trailing her lovely fingers across the garments and tags. The thought of the care she has taken, the precision with which she tries to please him, has always tried, overwhelms him now. He finds himself almost tearful as she sleeps. He tries to imagine Susan in such a place, in the department store with the cool air, the wafts of perfume—but he cannot. He cannot think of
her at all right now, cannot bring himself to imagine her face. She once left a card on his bed, handmade rice paper, in which she quoted a letter from General William Sherman to his friend, General Ulysses Grant. It said,
I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come
—
if alive.
She left it on his pillow before going north for a story about a hospital in which she had taken an interest. He didn’t know where she’d found the quote, where she’d read it or heard it, but it touched him. He believed it to be true. Now he sits in a hotel room with his wife, who loves him as best she can, and he is stymied, unable to think or move. The card, which is not hidden, but rests with a stack of photographs in the top drawer of his desk, makes him terribly sad. It seems to him another fact, along with the careful purchase of a nightgown, that he finds heartbreaking.

He wakes Christine in the morning. “I’d come home with you,” he says, “but you don’t want to know everything that has gone on here.”

His face is wet. She sits up slowly, taking in this fact, wondering why he has a wet face, then realizes he has been crying.

“Oh, darling, what? What do you mean?”

And so he tells her. He tells her about Susan, about the ambush. About where he has been, sent around like an errand boy this past week by the US military. He tells her, too, of the fighting and the dead bodies and how he was once speaking to a man who was suddenly shot dead in front of him, blood emerging on the man’s tongue where there had been words. He tells her that he cannot sleep normally and that he lives hour by hour with the help of tablets. He sweats so much the room seems to fill with his smell. He gets up and splashes cold water on his face, then comes back to the bed and continues his confession. He tells her everything, laying it out the way he had once long ago laid out a bridge hand, explaining what the cards meant, and what you could do if you held such a hand.

“You should divorce me and start again,” he says, then glances at her belly. “Of course, you can’t. I’ve messed up all your choices. Everything.”

But Christine has her own stories.

“It’s not your baby,” she says. She speaks in a measured tone. It is all very difficult for her, but she carries on. “It’s…someone else’s. I was going to tell you, I promise, but they begged me to get you home and I thought, How else can I get you to come? If I told you it was another man’s, that I’d been with another man! Why would you come with me then? You’d never come!” She pauses; her hand claps over her mouth, but the words have a momentum now. They come faster, more information than she’d planned. “Ask Don! I rang him when they told me at the bureau that you were practically on a suicide mission out here. I didn’t want to get on a plane. I didn’t want to come to this dreadful place pregnant! I mean, really—! But I did what I was supposed to because they told me to come. I thought, It’s my duty. We are all asked to do something, aren’t we? For the country or for our men.”