A Dangerous Friend (21 page)

He felt like a colonial himself in his ice cream suit and pale blue shirt, foulard tie neatly knotted, shoes polished. The suit fit beautifully, as the tailor promised it would. All he lacked was a pith helmet and a walking stick. When Sydney looked at himself in the mirror, he began to laugh. All Americans in South Vietnam would be better off if they dressed like planters, supervising their domain with colonial hauteur. He lit a cigarette and stood at the window watching the drizzle turn to mist; and then, giving another glance into the mirror, he went downstairs.

He moved to straighten the papers on his desk. He aligned the pencils next to the
IN
box, and then he saw the letter, bone white with the address typewritten, the sender's identity top left in raised letters, Greener, Leman & Kis, Attorneys at Law, 612 Broadway, New York. His feeling of well-being vanished at once at this intrusion from Manhattan, so distant and irrelevant. Letters from New York lawyers had no business in his
IN
box. Sydney did not open the letter but stared coldly at it, as if it might speak of its own accord. The postmark was three weeks old. Certainly it had passed through many hands, yet the envelope was pristine. The law firm was familiar but he could not place it. Then he remembered that Otto Kis was a lawyer who specialized in left-wing causes, the noisier the better. He had bad teeth, a high-pitched voice, and a manner of high martyrdom. And he was a friend of Karla's.

Otto Kis announced that he represented Karla Parkes. He intended to file a decree for divorce promptly. The grounds were desertion—and here the letter wandered into legal thickets too dense to penetrate, and Sydney had no desire to try. He looked away out the window to the street. A convoy was passing; the mist had turned to drizzle. He let the letter fall, like any beachcomber who had found an unwelcome message in a bottle washed ashore. Greetings, Sydney Parade. You're due in court! And the beachcomber wondering, How did they find me? What do they want? He thought he had been living in a parallel world beyond the reach of Earth's daily light, a black hole of sorts with its own special atmosphere and rules of engagement, and wartime code of conduct. Of course she wanted the marriage over and done with so she could get on with things. She wanted him out of her life. Their marriage was old news. It belonged to the past, which seemed to him changed utterly in the light of the present. He lived in Vietnam. Vietnam was the conjugal bed. The marriage was hers and she could do with it as she wished. The days when they had loved each other had vanished, and even the memory of them had faded. In some sense they could be said not to have existed at all. They were the notes on the score after musicians had packed up their instruments and left the stage.

He picked up the letter and weighed it in his palm; heavy official paper, the sort of stationery Stalin would use for his own decrees. The words roamed the page. Sydney noticed a snide reference to "your war" and "the inconvenience" if this and that did not come to pass. He scanned the first page and was into the second, understanding little. Then, near the end, a sentence that seemed to state plainly that his client was prepared to grant joint custody of their daughter and had no objection to visiting rights that were flexible and in the best interests of the child, et cetera ... Rosa would remain in her mother's care. That was not negotiable. In fact, none of it was negotiable, including alimony and child support. The numbers that followed seemed to Sydney quite large, but surely that was only the opening bid, a bluff. Please let me know the name and address of your attorney...

He looked at his watch. It was late. It was time to leave for Plantation Louvet.

He slipped the letter back into the envelope and put it in his desk drawer. There was no reason why Karla could not have what she wanted. Money was of no use to him in Tay Thanh, and his daughter was on the other side of the world. Then he remembered an incident with his father many years ago. Sydney was at the tiller. They were sailing in calm waters in Long Island Sound under a cloudless sky when he felt a tap on his shoulder; and when he turned he saw the thunderheads boiling in from the west. His father laughed and laughed when Sydney hastily came about and made for port. You have a tendency to ignore things that aren't in your immediate vicinity, Syd. You've got to look over your shoulder
all the time,
because bad luck's always there. So he would ask his father to speak to old Jim, his golfing partner; an avuncular sort who specialized in wills and trusts. Jim was especially good with fine print and women, and would prove more than a match for Otto Kis. He would write his father as soon as he found time; and there would be much to describe of lunch chez Armand.

Then Mai was in the room looking at him wide-eyed. She had pulled on a sweater against the chill and stood hugging herself. She had never seen him in a suit and did not know what it portended. She watched him hastily fold a map and put it in his pocket. Sydney explained that he was off to lunch with important visitors from the United States. He took a last look around, then gathered up the bottles of Beefeater and Martell, gifts for his hosts. He fetched the carbine and a black umbrella that had stood unused in the coat closet these many months and told Mai to take the day off.

The plantation house stood at the end of a long tunnel of evergreens, fat at the bottom and slender at the top. They were widely spaced. Back of the evergreens stood the bulbous palms of the plantation laid out in rows that produced a kind of optical illusion. The rows went every which way and then merged in the distance to become a dense and formless green. In the dull light of this wilderness it was impossible to know the direction he was headed. He might as well have been underwater. Yet the bungalow was in sight, exactly as she had promised it would be.

Stone turrets flanked the long drive. Atop each turret was a life-size cat in bronze, green with age and the weather; blank-faced. In the heart of the great forest the turrets and the cats seemed a fragment of the imagination of another age on another continent, or an apparition from a child's illustrated fairy tale. The mist eddied, swirling across the road so that the bungalow vanished and reappeared and vanished again. He had a sense of abandonment, of a dwelling empty of life or of purpose, a place that came and went according to the weather or the season or the time of day—or whether a guest was expected for lunch, tenue de ville, regrets only. Sydney wondered if he had misunderstood the day or the hour, but Dede Armand's invitation was clear and specific. He rolled down the window and listened hard but could hear nothing but the damp rustle of leaves in the forest.

He was filled with the sudden excitement of discovery. He had no idea what he would find at the end of the tunnel. He felt privileged, for now he would see for himself the sort of life the Armands lived in their location between the lines. As he drove slowly up the driveway he noticed beds of flowers placed here and there among the evergreens, and around the beds wooden benches. Probably that was where she watched her birds, though there was no sign of bird life or any other life. The driveway gave into a square parking area framed by a foot-high privet hedge. He saw now that there were dim lights inside the bungalow. The front door was open so he could see through a long hallway to what he supposed was the verandah; and then he remembered the photograph of Dede and Claude at the coffee table, the table laden with magazines and books, a Matisse drawing on the wall behind them, a sense of happy domesticity. The space at the end of the corridor was flooded with light, as if Plantation Louvet was provided with its own personal sun that could be switched on at will like a lamp. There were soft white curtains in the front windows and a brass-rimmed chandelier in the hallway. The bungalow was smaller than it appeared from the end of the driveway, the outside walls of stucco and wood and topheavy with a corrugated iron roof. The place had the easy, regular dimensions of a modest country house in New England. The whole was pleasant to look at and composed the way an artist composes a picture. The Land Rover was parked under a lean-to.

Sydney slid the carbine under the seat and collected the bottles. He was dismayed at the trash in his car, crumpled cigarette packs, opened and unopened C rations, an army-issue knapsack, a bag full of nails, weeks-old copies of the
Saigon Post,
all the personal effects of a working man who had no private life, unless you counted the unmailed letters in the glove compartment. In any case, they were out of sight. Out of mind, too, because they had been there for a week, neglected in the press of business; and the days had been cloudless. Such a simple matter to forget those who lived in the world an ocean away, and the reward for it was a letter from a lawyer and a bad conscience. The bad conscience arrived at predictable times and places. No one would imagine that a man in an ice cream suit and a blue shirt, a tenue de ville as specified by his hostess, his arms full of liquor bottles, would have a bad conscience because he had failed to notice thunderheads on the horizon—but such was life in Llewellyn Group.

A shadow moved in the hallway and then Dede Armand was standing on the front steps of her bungalow, frowning because the mist had turned again to drizzle, motioning for him to hurry inside. But he took his time straightening the creases in his trousers and checking the knot in his tie. He alighted from the Scout, pulling the umbrella behind him and thumbing it open. He walked slowly across the gravel to the stoop, the drizzle tapping gently on the cloth. At that moment he seemed to have lost his bad conscience. He stood a moment in the wet, looking at the American woman who stood impatiently with her arms folded, an amused expression on her face. Perhaps it was his tenue de ville, perhaps his deliberate manner. He dipped his head, offered her the package, and said sincerely, So happy to be here, Mrs. Armand.

They sat in the sunroom. Claude Armand offered a variety of gin drinks or wine, the usual Algerian plonk but drinkable when chilled. They all took gin from Sydney's quart of Beefeater. The room was as comfortable as he had imagined it, the furnishings bright and well used. Of course he recognized the poster and even the magazine covers seemed identical to those he had seen in the photograph. The room looked out on a vast gray lawn, water puddling; apparently their personal sun had withdrawn. Beyond the lawn were the rubber trees with their every-which-way symmetry. Visible two hundred yards down were the sheds where the rubber was processed. Wisps of smoke escaped from roof vents. Claude described what they did and how they did it but Sydney did not pay close attention, observing instead the workers who came and went, machetes in their belts. When he asked how many workers he employed, Claude smiled and said it varied depending on the season; more at harvest time, less during the planting. They were dependable men, Claude said. Some of them had been working on the plantation for three decades, since before the war. The wages are pitiful, he said. But they get along.

Dede disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a plate of crackers and cheese and cracked crab with savory salt. Sydney complimented them on the cheese, and Claude said his brother sent it from Comminges once every month. Asian cheese was terrible. Asians didn't eat much cheese and therefore didn't know how to process it properly. Their cows were the wrong breed. Their cheese tasted like whey and wouldn't spread. They can't make cheese and they can't make wine.

Isn't that right, darling?

Or crackers, she said. These are English crackers.

My brother sends crackers, too.

When he'd walked into the sunroom, Sydney had had a sense of a conversation just ended. The Armands were cordial enough but something remained suspended in the room. He remembered an actor's remark that grief was the other face of grace, and when Dede Armand made a hesitant motion with her hand, touching the cocktail glass on the table, her manner was laden with dolor. Then he knew that they had been talking of their twins, dead now a month or more. Claude was solicitous of her; touching her arm when he spoke, always keeping her in focus. She was present but not present also, her body here but her thoughts in some private realm.

When Claude spoke of some problem with production—a vat had broken and they were attempting to jury-rig a part—Sydney watched one of the workers trot up the lawn, slowing when he reached the bungalow. He was reluctant to intrude but finally tapped on the window with his fingernails. Claude went to the door and spoke a few words, then returned with an apologetic expression. Another problem with the vat. He would have to see to it.

Will you be all right here? he said to his wife. It shouldn't take long.

Lunch, she said.

I'll be back for lunch, Claude said.

Can I help? Sydney asked.

No, Claude said. Stay with my wife.

He kissed her on the cheek and told Sydney where the ice was. Sydney and Dede Armand watched him move off down the lawn with the worker, who was explaining something, waving his machete in disgust. Claude put his arm around the other's shoulders and for a moment they looked like father and son, the Frenchman dwarfing the Vietnamese; and suddenly Claude laughed loudly, the sound carrying up the lawn to the sunroom where Sydney and Dede Armand sat in uncomfortable silence.

Make a drink for yourself, she said. And one for me, too, light on the gin.

Lime? he asked.

I thought I would die, she said in a voice so low that he thought he had misunderstood her. She sat on the couch with her head on the back cushion, her hands crossed on her belly. It was so unexpected, she said. I never believed anything could go wrong, and then from one moment to the next I could feel them dying inside me. It felt like a stampede, some awful bucking and charging inside me. And everything had gone so well. The doctors were so pleased. I made a stupid trip to the market and one minute I was a mother and the next minute I wasn't. It took no time at all. Something had gone wrong and they still don't know what it was. Was it only that the stars were out of alignment? Not likely. We live a simple life here, Sydney. She touched her upper lip and moved her head on the back cushion as if to deny what she had said. Perhaps it wasn't so simple but we do try to live with the bare essentials. We have what we need. You were kind to me, Sydney.