Given World (2 page)

Phượng tells me the stork story is so much baloney; she actually says, “Stork babies baloney, Chi.” Chi is what they call me here. It means big sister. Hardly anyone calls me by my actual name, but I’m used to that; I’ll answer to just about anything.

Phượng has recently been knocked up by one of our local British boys. She tells me this as we stand at the window. Ian, the father, is an old Saigon hand, having been here for three years already, captaining some kind of bamboo furniture enterprise. He is tall, blond, dubiously handsome, and wears his jaded weariness like a badge. I hear the first few years it was all he could do to stay in the country and out of prison, for uncommitted crimes.

This town is full of romantically hazardous men: Brits, Aussies, Froggies. Especially, maybe, the Froggies, with their
Ça va
s, their Gitanes, their sleepy eyes and sexy accents that require of a girl perpetual vigilance. Luc could be a poster child for these Froggies. He looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Breathless
, and rumor has it that he is indeed here to make a movie, though I have never seen him with a camera or a lighting crew, and suspect he is really here (like me) on account of a movie he keeps in his head.

Phượng tells me he has his eye on me. “Luc like you style, Chi. Think Chi beaucoup sweetie pie.”

Luc has never said more than two words in a row to me. If he thinks I am beaucoup sweetie pie, he has a funny way of showing it. Phượng says this is because he is shy. Shy and adorable. A little young. A hazard, like I said. Besides, there is that Jim Morrison Aussie, the one I became entangled with almost as soon as I arrived, and who will very soon, and surgically, break my heart—able to do that because this is Saigon, not because the reasons I am sleeping with him have anything to do with love. Love would require a part of me that I have not been able to precisely locate or properly identify the remains of for a long time now.

So that is the romantic inventory—the pertinent bits.

At least I am not pregnant. This time. I look over at Phượng, who leans her elbows on the windowsill, her chin on her interlocked fingers. I say I am sorry for bringing up the storks.

“No worries,” she says. Then, “Shit.” Softly, infinitely sweetly. She picked that up from me, I think—the word, not the delicate delivery of it. I never heard her say it before we started hanging out together at the window.

“Don’t say ‘shit,’ ” I say. “It’s not ladylike.”

“What is ladylike?”

“Like a lady.”

“Woman?” she asks. She looks puzzled, those fine eyebrows drawn together to meet above the bridge of her delicate nose. Her delicate nose that matches the rest of her delicate self. I feel like an Amazon next to her, all five and a half feet of me.

“Different,” I say. “More feminine. Ladies don’t swear.”

“
Merde,
” she says. She’s not buying it, in any language.

I swear all the time, though my favorite swearword is not “shit,” it is “fuck.” Mick taught me how to cuss when I was nine or ten, but that is not one of the words he taught me. It is one I picked up out of necessity a few years later. I try not to say it around Phượng. I do have some manners.

“What are you going to do, Phượng?”

“Don’t know. Maybe will go away,” she says.

“What? Where?” I am alarmed. For me. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She is the only truly sane person I know in this town—besides my students, for whom I must keep up some sense of decorum, meaning I cannot go out drinking with them, and Tho. But I have learned it is not healthy to become too attached to the bartender.

“Not me, silly,” she says. “
Nó
.”
Nó
means It. I still don’t know what she’s saying. “
Em bé,
” she says, and smacks my forehead lightly with her fingertips for emphasis.

“Oh.” The baby. I get it; that part I get. Maybe it’s the beer, but I don’t know what else to say; not sure if she means what I think she means. I realize I don’t have any idea what can happen here, what’s legal or accepted. I don’t know either if Phượng is Catholic or Buddhist, animist or Cao Đài; if she has family in the delta or the highlands; if her father fought with the ARVN or the Vietcong or the Montagnards. I am just an interloper, still uninitiated and incurably dopey, traits Phượng patiently abides.

She straightens her back and casually taps her long, perfect, pink-shellacked fingernails on the sill like she’s playing a piano. “Maybe keep,” she says, as if it has just occurred to her, but I am not fooled.

“Does Ian know?”

She nods. “Knows. Not happy.” She hesitates, stops tapping. “Very,” she says.

“Very not happy? Or not very happy?” I ask, even though I’m not sure the distinction will be clear to her. As usual, she’s tracking me just fine.

“Not very happy,” she says. “But so-so happy.”

“Really?” I am shocked. I would not have expected him to be any kind of happy; he has always seemed so content, so immutably rooted in bachelorhood.

“Why surprise?”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“I know,” she says, and turns to me. “
Người Mỹ
.” American. She leans her forehead into mine, locks eyes, kisses my cheek and floats swan-like away in her silky white
áo dài
to go back to work.

I get another semicold Tiger beer from Tho, watch the cyclos a bit longer as the rain lets up, and eventually return to the pool table, where I sometimes belong. It’s getting late, but I am not ready to go back to my place yet, out on
Cách Mạng Tháng Tám
, Boulevard of the August Revolution, needing something closer to pure exhaustion to sleep in this heat, and the noise that almost never stops. I could probably go to the Rex and sleep with the Aussie, listen to his cherished CD collection on his fancy stereo in his hermetically sealed room, but the beers are closer—and warmer by a long shot. Besides, I hate just showing up; I like at least to be invited.

More people wander in—not regulars, tourists—trying, I would guess, to make some sense of this awkward and bewildering city they had surely envisioned differently. Maybe with real sidewalks, traffic signals that people actually abide, or white sand beaches and cabana boys, full-time electricity, food you can eat with impunity. I always say,
Where the hell did they think they were going?
But I  didn’t have any idea either, so I guess that’s not entirely fair. I was, however, not expecting cabana boys or a Gray Line tour. I have been here six months now, and finally what is here is just what belongs. Meaning some part of me has acclimated, planted a little flag, and I can barely imagine—at least when I am awake—going back.

Last week one of the kids, hunkered down on the floor at the shelter, paused while scooping rice from his bowl to his mouth and looked up at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Where you town?”

At first, I always said California, as that is the place they have all heard about, seen pictures of, imagine America to be, if they imagine America at all. I haven’t tried yet to explain Montana—the perpetual expanse and frigid beauty of it. “
Sài Gòn,
” I said. “
Người Vietnam
.”

He looked back down at his bowl, dismissing me. “
Nói dối
.” Liar. He finished the rice, picked the last grains out of the bowl with fingers that seemed to move independently of the rest of him. “
Người Canada
.”

“Nope.” I shake my head. Not Canadian.

“
Ở đâu, rồi?
” Where, then? “Say true.”

“
Không biết
.” I don’t know.

“You crazy. Maybe American. American crazy. America number one.” He set his bowl down hard on the floor and left me then, without even a fleeting glance back, to wonder if I should even attempt to process either of his pronouncements, or any of mine.

•  •  •

Tonight my pool partner is Clive, of June’s, another ratty expat bar between here and the river, a few blocks away. He is another Brit, always barefoot, and, at fifty-something, fairly old as local gringos go. June is his Thai wife, a fading beauty, all business and hard as bone. Rumor has it that the taxi-girl trade at June’s is its main concern, not a sideline like it is here, and June the presumptive madam. Clive is also rumored to move a lot of drugs through the country by paying off the cops and the customs, and partnering with the right guys from Cholon, a less risky trade here so far than in Bangkok. Back in Manchester he worked the steel mills, and when they shut down went looking for something better than the dole.

“Shite work,” he told me the first time we talked. “Bollocks and shite not having any.”

“I imagine,” I said, though I couldn’t.

“Bloke I knew in Thailand sent me a postcard. Said the birds were everywhere. And easy. And it was warm. They had this thing called a sun.”

He found June in Chiang Mai, conducted a courtship of sorts, and married her in a little beachside ceremony.

“Was she one of the easy ones?”

He turned his head side to side two or three times, slowly, as far as it would go. “Nowt easy about her.”

“So why’d you marry her?”

He chalked up, bent down to take a couple of shots, and, after missing the last one, leaned back against the edge of the pool table, tossed his cue stick between his hands and looked up at the grotty ceiling. “The way she said no. Like she’d never been asked such a stupid question. I knew she was the girl for me.”

“What was the question?”

“I believe it was ‘Would you care to dance?’ ” He grasped the cue with both hands, waist-to-shoulder-width apart, and commenced a spin, his bare feet executing a remarkable pirouette.

“Your shot,” he said when he stopped revolving. “Though ya don’t have one.”

He was right. He’d snookered me good.

Clive seems to like me, despite my refusal to snooker him or our opponents when I don’t have a shot. It drove him crazy for a while, but now I get a little grudging respect for trying to hit something of my own, no matter how hopeless it may look or how many rails I’ll need to carom perfectly off of to get there. We are a good team, in any event, and win far more often than we lose. The taxi girls root for us, applaud when we pull out a victory in the final lap.

Tonight we are playing an American from Texas and a chubby Taiwanese businessman who are apparently involved in some sort of rare-monkey export concern that I don’t really care to think too much about. About what they do with the monkeys once they get them out of the country. The Chinese guy insists on yelping “Lucky!” every time I make a shot, no matter how simple or how complicated it might be, or how many shots I make in a row.

The Texan responds each time with a lively, drawled “Damn straight, podner.”

I would like more than anything to slap them both with one clean swipe.

Clive knows I go off my game when I let myself get rattled by the opposition. He keeps reminding me to focus on the table. “He’s blinkered, mate. And that Texas twat is just trying to wind you up. Ignore them.”

“I’m trying, but that is so fucking annoying. You notice they don’t do that to you.”

“
Cor
,” he says, “Flippin’ gormless. Keep your pecker up.”

“No pecker,” I say. “That’s the problem.” But I do get the gist.

“Shoot,” Clive says. I make two respectably difficult ones and then miss a dead-easy four ball in the side. Clive says, “Quit pissing around.”

“I made two.”

“My two,” he says.

Between shots, I lean sweaty and slick against the wall, and the temptation to unlock my knees, just give in and slide down to the floor, is almost overwhelming. In spite of the rain, it is at least ninety degrees in here, and the humidity might be even higher, if that’s even possible. I resist the inclination to perch on my haunches and instead focus on Clive’s feet as he pads around the table. No one has ever asked, at least within my earshot, why he never wears shoes, but I suspect it is because he can’t find any here that fit. His feet are not big, in the usual sense, but extremely wide. They look like hairless bear paws.

In the end we win on an amazing cutback Clive slices into the corner. He misses scratching by a centimeter. “Brave,” I say.

He pats me on the head. “No. Just good.”

“Another?”

“Not tonight, kiddo. I’m knackered. Going home to the missus.”

“Sounds lovely.” He just smiles and shuffles out barefoot into the dark.

It’s midnight, and the place is getting crowded, filling up with overflow from the Apocalypse. Phượng is delivering drinks, so there will be no window time before closing. Ian comes in, takes his usual place at a corner table, and nods at me. I nod back. I know I should get on my bicycle and go home, but the idea is too depressing. I don’t want to be lonely any night, but for some reason—maybe the twisted clarity of too many beers, or Phượng’s situation, or the music, or the rain, or my brother—I especially don’t want to be lonely this night. I wonder where James Taylor was when he wrote that song. Not Saigon, I bet. I bet it was someplace he knew and unquestionably belonged, and that he wasn’t even all that lonely.

Phượng takes Ian his beer, and I watch as he puts his hands around her tiny waist and pulls her close for a quick kiss when no one else is looking. I don’t count. I am a collaborator. And all of a sudden I want what they have, even if I don’t get to know exactly what it is, or even if I’ve been telling myself for years there is no future in it. I suspect it is something along the lines of love.

Phượng leaves for the bar and Ian waves me over to come sit with him. I am caught off guard by how grateful I feel but mostly am relieved to have at least a semilegitimate reason to stay awhile longer. On the way, I pick up a beer for him and a bottle of water for me. I already know I am going to feel like hell in the morning, but I don’t have to hammer in the last nail. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I have only one class—a sweet and ragtag band of earnest college students I will meet at the park in the afternoon—and then the eight-to-midnight shift at the shelter. I’ll survive.

Ian takes note of the water, my unfocused eyes, and says, “How many?”