The House on Dream Street (25 page)

“No. It’s okay,” Phai finally said. He looked up at me again. “I told you. I don’t know about these things.” He took my face in his hands and pulled me toward him.

      When I woke up the next morning, I lay beneath the covers, watching the sunlight shine through my pink sheets. I needed to think back over everything that had happened the night before. I didn’t see a way to back out now. At home, an exchange of a few kisses could be forgotten, or retracted, without causing too much damage. Even here in Vietnam, a man might have moved past a brief physical encounter with a foreign woman, viewing the experience as one more adventure among a string of them. Not all Vietnamese men seemed as vulnerable as Phai did. A couple of my American women friends had had
brief affairs here, and their reports were dismal. The “events,” as they called them, had lasted an average of five minutes, and the men had offered their partners about as much affection as might be bestowed upon a tree or a chair or some other inanimate object. I’d planted my affections on Phai, a man who, at twenty-nine, had not only never had a girlfriend, he’d never even kissed a girl. Maybe he hadn’t been entirely truthful about his history. I doubted it, though. Even in Vietnam, which was more traditional than the United States, sexual ignorance was not the sort of thing a man would lie about. He’d be more likely to lie about exploits he’d never actually had. But that wasn’t the reason I believed that Phai was telling me the truth. I’d always trusted Phai. Now that I’d kissed him, though, I had another reason for believing him. His kisses were lovely, sweet, and uncertain, as if he was tentatively exploring something absolutely new. It would be extremely difficult for a kiss like that to lie.

If either of us were to become callous about this affair, I realized, it would probably be me. Despite my sudden fear that he would break my heart, I would more likely be the one to hurt him.

Such possibilities, however, bore no relation to my present condition. I felt a debilitating need to see him. My hand slid across my cheeks and over my lips. These lips touched his lips, I thought. So many times already. First in the café, and then when we reached the front door of my house, again and again. I had no idea how long we had lingered there. Mosquitoes bit constellations around my legs. Rats zigzagged down the sidewalks, quite close by. When I finally pulled myself away from Phai, it was not out of fatigue, but from a different motive. For the first time since I’d known him, I could look into his eyes without needing an excuse to do so.

A sliding metal gate had sent a screech into the night, and
our two heads had jerked around at the same time. We both suddenly worried that a neighbor might see us. Worse, Tung and Huong could catch us. I doubted they would turn us in to the authorities, but they’d be angry. My visa to stay in Vietnam did not include the possibility of having a Vietnamese boyfriend, and my doing so could cause problems for them. Phai could be arrested for having intimate contact with a foreigner. And I could be kicked out.

We pulled ourselves apart, and I opened the gate in front of my house. Upstairs where Tung and Huong slept was dark and quiet. Phai gave me a reassuring smile, pulled his bicycle out of the living room, then carried it down the steps. Without a word, we waved good-bye.

      When I finally ventured downstairs the next morning, the front doors were shut. Nga’s dresses still hung where they had been placed for the night, even though it was well past the time that her shop usually opened. Although it was dim and silent, the room was full of people. Tung’s parents, Huong’s parents, and assorted siblings were drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. Tung was in one of the armchairs, staring at the wall. Huong sat between her mother and Nga on the couch, holding their hands.

My first thought was that Huong and Tung had seen me kissing Phai. I stood for a moment on the stairs, bracing myself for rebuke, but no one said a word. Huong’s brother Phuong sucked on a cigarette and stared at the floor. Only Nga seemed to notice me, but she said nothing. I hurried down the stairs and out the door.

By the time I came home late that afternoon, Huong was in the kitchen cooking dinner. Someone had switched on a light.
Tung was holding an open bottle of
rượu,
homemade rice wine, and pouring shots. Without saying a word, I went up to my room. I knew now that their problem didn’t have a thing to do with me. No matter how indiscreet I might have been, a few kisses between a local and a foreigner would not throw an entire extended family into turmoil. Had someone died?

The phone rang at about seven, and three buzzes on the bell in my room indicated that the call was for me.

“How’s everything going?” asked my sister, Lynne.

Her voice had traveled all the way from California, and now it sounded so close that I almost cried when I heard it. I paused before answering. I’d long ago written home about Phai, but the attraction I’d developed for a Vietnamese motorcycle mechanic did not translate well. Once, after receiving a particularly fervent declaration of my feelings for Phai, my friend Grace had telephoned. “So,” she’d begun, making her amusement quite obvious in the tone of her voice, “did you two do the monkey yet?”

“Grace!” I’d shrieked across the ocean. Slang that sounded funny and racy in America came across as obscene and cold here in Vietnam. Within the context of quick and easy American sexuality, our slow and careful courtship seemed quaint, even prudish, though it seemed to generate more heat than any one-night stand. The prospect of actually doing the monkey, as Grace would have it, had seemed not only overwhelming, but also surprisingly irrelevant.

Now, with my sister, I tried again. “Last night,” I began, “I kissed him.”

“Who?” asked Lynne.

“The mechanic.”

Someone in the house picked up the phone and began speaking loudly. I recognized the voice of Mr. Huey’s translator, Tuan. I hadn’t seen him or Mr. and Mrs. Huey since the couple’s departure
for Saigon two days before, and Tuan’s voice signaled an end to the peace I’d enjoyed during their absence. Once again, they would tie up the phone day and night.

I waited for him to realize that I was on the phone. When he continued to speak, I said in Vietnamese, “I’m on the phone. Hang up.” After a long pause, the line clicked.

“Are you still there?” I asked in English.

“Yeah,” Lynne said. “How did it happen? What happened? How do you feel?”

I paused. “We went to the pagoda,” I said, and then the translator picked up the phone again.

“Get off the phone,” I said, my tone getting sterner now.

He rambled on for a few seconds, then hung up.

“We went to the pagoda,” I repeated. “I really like him.”

The voice came on again. “Get off the phone,” I yelled. He kept talking, for longer this time, neither responding to my complaint nor yielding to it. “Get off the phone!”

When he finally hung up, Lynne said, “If he picks up again, I’m just going to hang up. I’ll call another day.”

“Will you call me soon?” I asked. I felt like I was pleading.

The translator picked up again. Beneath his sharp, guttural syllables, I could just make out the voice of my sister. “I’ll call again. I love you. Bye!”

I hung up the phone and sat staring at it for a few seconds, trying to control myself. Then I raced down the stairs. Tung was standing by the phone, his eyes locked on the translator, who was speaking to someone in Chinese. The rest of the family was watching the two of them like an audience at the climax of a film.

“Why is he so rude?” I asked. “I was talking to America.”

Tung didn’t even look at me.

“He can’t just ruin my call like that,” I said, raising my voice so that they would pay attention to me. “He doesn’t even live
here,” I added.

Without taking his eyes off the translator, Tung muttered, “Duyen, be quiet.” Huong, her face a sheet of anxiety, gestured for me to stop.

I pushed my voice even louder. “Was he quiet?”

Tung turned and looked at me. His face was so full of fury that it scared me. “Go upstairs,” he ordered, and he indicated the way with a clenched fist.

I turned and walked back up the stairs. For a long time, I sat on my bed, doing nothing. I was angry, but worse was the feeling that I’d misunderstood something essential about my place in this house. Over the past few months, I’d come to think of it as my home and Tung and Huong as my family. What Tung had said to me, the look on his face, the way he’d held his fist, told me that I wasn’t family at all. I was an outsider, a pest, just someone who gave him money. It was time, I thought, to find a new place to live.

      Early the next morning, I prepared myself to go downstairs and tell Tung and Huong that I was moving. But Huong got to me first. I heard her rattle the door at a little after eight, and when I let her into the room, she looked so pale that, instead of keeping a cool distance, I immediately took her hand. She smiled, but looked as if she could cry at any moment. “Please forgive Tung,” she said. “Something terrible has happened.” She walked into the room and sat down on my bed.

When Huong cleaned the tenants’ rooms, she picked a time when we were out. Once or twice a week, I would come home to find clean sheets on my bed, a mop-slick floor, and my toilet seat dripping from a generous dousing of soapy water. On Thursday afternoon, a few hours after the Hueys left for Saigon, Huong had picked up her wash bucket and an armful of clean
sheets and towels, then trudged up the stairs. She started at the top, in the room where the two Chinese women were staying. Then she cleaned my room. Then, finally, she moved downstairs to the Hueys’.

By the time Huong reached the Hueys’ door, the sun was low in the sky. After a morning made fresh by the storm, the heat had returned. By five in the afternoon, the sweat was rolling down her face. She pulled the keys from her pocket, unlocked the door, and, before doing anything else, turned on the air conditioner, which sat in the wall just above the door. For a few sweet seconds, she stood there with her eyes closed, letting the cool, artificial air blow down into her face. Then she opened her eyes, switched on the light, and turned around. Except for the furniture and the pot the Hueys had used to boil their rice, the room was empty.

“Tung,” she’d cried, running to the stairs. “Tung!” She was screaming now.

9. Private Rooms

T
UNG AND HUONG HAD SPENT
that Thursday night trying to stay calm. Sitting on the bed in their loft, he insisted that an empty room did not mean the Hueys had left Hanoi for good. Huong, never an optimist anyway, was already hopeless.

By Friday night, Tung began to admit that Mr. and Mrs. Huey probably weren’t coming back. On Saturday afternoon, when they had, in fact, failed to return as promised, Tung drove over to the home of the translator, Tuan, who told Tung that when he dropped the Hueys off at the airport, Mr. Huey had not made an appointment to meet him again. Although Tuan had never been civil to Tung, he was sympathetic to this new predicament. When it came down to it, the ties between two Vietnamese, even if they were a northerner and a southerner, were stronger than either of them felt toward a Chinese. Tuan came back to our house and telephoned Mr. Huey’s business contacts in Saigon. Late that night, not long after Tung ordered me to go to my room, they finally located a Chinese trader in Cholon who said that Mr. Huey had flown to Bangkok that morning.