A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (30 page)

My hand trembled now as I touched her eyes with the brush, and when I held the lipstick, I pressed it hard against her mouth and I cast aside the shame at my anger and I watched this mouth in my mind, the quick smile of it that never changed in all the years, that never sensed any mood in me but loyal, subordinate friendship. Then the paint was all in place and I pulled back and I angled my face once more into the flow of cool air and I tried to just listen to the grinding of the air conditioner and forget all of these feelings, these terrible feelings about the dead woman who had always been my friend, who I had never once challenged in life over any of these thing. I thought, What a coward I am.

But instead of hearing this righteous charge against me, I looked at Th
y and I took her hair in my hands and I smoothed it all together and wound it into a bun and I pinned it at the nape of her neck. She was a fifty-year-old woman, after all. She was as much a fifty-year-old woman as I was. Surely she was. And at this I looked to the sheet.

It lay lower across the chest than I thought it might. But her breasts were also fifty years old, and they were spread flat as she lay on her back. She had never let her dear friend see them, these two secrets that had enchanted the man I loved. I could bear to look at them now, vulnerable and weary as they were. I stepped down and I grasped the edge of the sheet at her throat, and with the whisper of the cloth I pulled it back.

And one of her breasts was gone. The right breast was lovely even now, even in death, the nipple large and the color of cinnamon, but the left breast was gone and a large crescent scar began there in its place and curved out of sight under her arm. I could not draw a breath at this, as if the scar was in my own chest where my lungs had been yanked out, and I could see that her scar was old, years old, and I thought of her three years in California and how she had never spoken at all about this, how her smile had hidden all that she must have suffered.

I could not move for a long moment, and then at last my hands acted as if on their own. They pulled the sheet up and gently spread it at her throat. I suppose this should have brought back my shame at the anger I’d had at my friend Th
y, but it did not. That seemed a childish feeling now, much too simple. It was not necessary to explain any of this. I simply leaned forward and kissed Th
y on her brow and I undid the bun at the back of her neck, happy to make her beautiful once more, happy to send her off to a whole body in heaven where she would catch the eye of the finest warrior. And I knew she would understand if I did all I could to make Lê V
n Lý happy.

THE AMERICAN COUPLE

My sister and I dressed up like ducks and our sign said DON’T DUCK A DEAL and so I ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with my husband. This was the deal my sister and I made after the show. She would take the money that went along with the special vacation package that turned out to be behind curtain number two, and I would take my husband to Puerto Vallarta. If we’d had a chance to make the deal just before ours, I would have won a car. I could see a very slight bulge just to the left of center in curtain number three, and sure enough, when they opened it to show the couple dressed like killer bees what they’d passed over, there was a Ford Escort, which was pulled up just a little bit too far. They do that sometimes. I noticed it. The killer bees did not notice it and they won the goat behind curtain number one, a goat that nibbled the hem of the electric-blue dress on the beautiful blond model holding the goat’s leash. Everyone laughed except the couple dressed like bees, and my sister and I laughed, too, though when I leaned over to my sister and told her that I had known where the car was, she slapped her forehead in distress and stopped laughing. I am very observant. This is a good thing, I think, though in Vietnam, where I was born and raised, it is not thought to be a good trait in a woman, unless she keeps it to herself.

My husband is of two minds on this matter. Sometimes I will notice something that will help him in his business. He is a very fine businessman. He is a very big success in America, just as he was when he was in Vietnam, even though he had to start over again from the beginning in this country. In Vietnam he made much money in the export of duck feathers. This is what inspired my costume on “Let’s Make a Deal.” Duck feathers were the fourth largest export business in the Republic of South Vietnam and they make very soft pillows and very warm blankets. Once, a man who my husband trusted came to the office and said that he was dealing only with my husband, but I observed a duck feather in the cuff of his trouser and that duck was not one of ours. My husband was very proud of my observations on that day, but I know I make him nervous because he thinks there is a great deal that I can see and know about him at all times.

It’s true that I know quite a few things from what my eyes tell me. It’s true that I was happy to have a chance to bring him to Puerto Vallarta and that I myself struck the deal with my sister that made this possible. We flew in over the mountains and he was sleeping beside me and I watched out the window. The mountains were covered in a lush green that looked like velour and it was very much like Vietnam. There was a river running over the mountain, a brown river, as brown as a Mexican child, and our plane followed it until I could see the city out ahead of us strung along the sea. It was very beautiful coming in and I nudged my husband, hoping he would wake and bring his face near to mine and watch with me. But he became instantly concerned with finding his shoes, which he always slips off when he sleeps, and by the time he felt like nothing was lost and he was not being caught off guard by anything, we were too low for romance and all I could see outside were ragged fields and a neighborhood of poor houses, tin and wood, also like Vietnam, like the places all around Saigon, which is the city I am from.

The airport was pretty ragged, too. All the strips of land in between the runways were overgrown and the airport building was long and low and it looked mostly like cinder block, which they tried to hide by giving big sections of the outside walls a different texture, a certain roughness, but it reminded me of crepe paper and they painted these parts in bright colors, red and yellow and lime green. It just all seemed pretty cheap, and I could see my husband’s eye for business picking up on that right away, along with all the weeds. He’d been to the slick American places—Las Vegas and Miami Beach and Lake Tahoe—and he knew what the customer expected. In the taxicab he was snorting at the potholes in the road—the cab had to slow almost to a stop several times—and at the occasional piles of stony rubble and at all the weedy fields. This whole corridor to the fancy hotels should be done up right, he was thinking. And he wasn’t all that happy about doing this trip anyway, I knew. He was sorry to be away from his work, even for a week, and he didn’t like my sister being his benefactor. Especially not since she and I had dressed up like ducks.

I didn’t like that either, really. I must admit I love the game shows. I love American television in general. The soap operas. You’d think I would’ve had enough of daily disaster, but the soaps remind me that somewhere somebody knows what life can really be. It makes me enjoy even more all of this wonderful lightness before my eyes in America. And I particularly like one of the soap operas with an older woman character. This actress has been around for years, and even though the shows are taped, she always seems to me on the edge of disaster. The actress personally. She is saying her lines and I can sense some light go out in her brain and you can see her eyes slide just ever so briefly off camera. She’s looking for the prompt cards, you see. She’s forgotten her lines. And this must be happening to her all the time, for these moments to be left on the tape, even if they are subtle, and maybe I’m the only viewer in the country, other than perhaps another professional actor, to notice. There’s always this real—life drama going on. I like her very much. This woman has guts, continuing to act without a memory. Sometimes she gets the other actor in the scene positioned just right and her gaze lifts over the actor’s shoulder and you can see the faint scanning of her eyes as she reads. It is very subtle, this movement, but I can see it, and at those moments I feel very good for her. She can see what there is to say. But I also feel good for her, a little thrilled even, like watching an ice skater doing a leap, when her character suddenly becomes chatty and slightly unfocused and it’s because she is cut off from the prompt cards and she’s improvising around until she can find her way back to the script. This is what’s good about America. There is always some improvisation, something new, and when things get strained, you don’t fall back on tradition but you make up something new.

Still, if I could have been part of all that without dressing up like a duck, that would have been better. I wish I could have won Mexico by answering questions or solving puzzles or guessing prices. Something like that. I’m very good at all those things. Just last week I did several things that no one else could do—I identified Jeremy Brett as playing both Sherlock Holmes on public television and Freddy in the movie “My Fair Lady” and I read the phrase “Desperation Tactics” even without any vowels and I knew that a KitchenAid dishwasher and a year’s supply of Toast ‘Ems cost between six hundred fifty and seven hundred dollars. But you have to try out for these shows and they stay away from people who have an accent. I put the words of English together as well as most Americans, but you can hear my foreignness in my pronunciation.

And only once did I get as far as the tryout anyway. I finally had sense enough to turn my name around and leave out the middle two. I turned Tr
n Nam Thanh Gabrielle into Gabrielle Tran. My parents had given me a French name because they had always admired the French, for their food and for their riding club in Saigon, mostly. But arranging my name like Gabrielle Tran won me a tryout—I guess the producers thought I might be like Nancy Kwan, the actress who I enjoy on the old movies and who can speak English very clearly when she wants to.