The House on Dream Street (33 page)

He looked the same, but I felt different. I hadn’t known for sure how I would react to seeing him again. Perhaps all my love for him would wash back over me as soon as I saw him. Perhaps I’d feel confused about my feelings. But I was startled by the certainty of the emotions that flooded over me. I felt no joy, or desire, only a conviction that I didn’t want Phai now. And shame because of it.

“How are you?” I asked in Vietnamese, busying myself with my pile of suitcases.

“Fine!” Phai answered in English. His laugh was loud and somewhat hysterical. He grabbed the biggest bags and hauled them into the house.

“How did you know when I would be arriving?” I yelled after
him, in Vietnamese. I picked up my smaller bags and followed him into the house.

“I wait,” he said. “Ten o’clock morning, I here.” He set my suitcases by the staircase and sat down on the couch, motioning for me to sit down beside him.

I sat down on a chair on the other side of the coffee table.

“Where are Tung and Huong?” I asked.

“Shopping!” he said, breaking the syllables into two distinct words—Shah-ping!

I smiled at him, then laughed, then smiled again. I couldn’t speak. I was too dazed, in some way that I always am, to have moved, in less than two days, from my apartment in California to this living room in Hanoi. I wondered what Phai thought of my amazing ability to transport myself around the world, then back again. Phai had never traveled beyond Vietnam, though, and during this past year, he may never have imagined me in California. Maybe he thought of me only in Hanoi. Here. Then gone. Now, here again.

Phai reached down and unscrewed the hot water thermos that was sitting on the floor. He lifted it, pouring water into the teapot on the coffee table.

“I like your shirt,” I told him.

Phai looked up at me and laughed. “Thank you, Duyen,” he said. I’d given it to him the year before, for his twenty-ninth birthday. It had been the first birthday present he’d ever received. Like most Vietnamese, Phai and his family didn’t follow the Western custom of celebrating birthdays, which demanded more disposable income than they ever had. To him, July 27 was just a date, a set of numbers that had no more effect on his life than the numbers on my Social Security card affected mine. But I had presented him with a pile of gifts when his birthday arrived. The sheer pleasure he got in receiving those presents had
made me realize, more than ever, how few possessions he owned and how few gifts, for any occasion, anyone had ever given him. When he unwrapped that yellow shirt, he’d been so overcome that his embrace nearly toppled me.

More than a year later, the shirt still appeared brand new, although I had seen him wear it at least a dozen times myself. I pictured Phai, squatting in the courtyard of his house, washing that shirt with the kind of gentleness reserved for bathing infants. I could never treat an object with the reverence it would get from someone who had almost nothing else. Even the precious bronze Buddha had not enjoyed a pleasant transition to life in the States. When I first got back to San Francisco, I’d immediately set up a little altar for it. In front of the statue, I set a ceramic incense pot I’d carried back from Hanoi and filled, in Vietnamese tradition, with dry rice to hold the incense sticks upright. On one side of the Buddha, I’d placed a photograph of my mother’s deceased parents, and on the other side one of my great uncle and aunt. For a while I had conscientiously lighted incense on the nights of the full and new moon. But in America, it gets hard to remember the phases of the moon. A month or so after I got back to San Francisco, my altar sat forgotten, and covered, not with a fine ash of incense, but with dust. I only noticed the moon, really, at those moments I happened to walk outside and glance at the sky.

Phai handed me a cup of tea. “How you mommy?” he asked.

I held the cup to my lips and took a sip, trying not to look at him. “She’s fine,” I answered. Following Vietnamese custom, Phai spent the next few minutes asking after every relative I’d ever mentioned to him, including all my siblings, my grandmother, and the housekeeper who had worked for my mother for twenty years. I couldn’t even remember if Phai had one brother or two. “How’s your family?” I asked.

“They fine.” Phai’s face wasn’t as open and happy as it had been a few minutes before. He hadn’t missed the fact that I was sitting across the room and that I was speaking to him as if he were a casual acquaintance. He was still smiling and chatting amiably, but his eyes had grown cloudy with hurt. Last month, I’d written him a careful letter, explaining that I still cared about him, but that I didn’t want to marry him and therefore didn’t think we should continue our romantic relationship when I got back to Hanoi. Phai had written back that he understood and he hadn’t argued with my decision. Now, though, I could see that no matter what he’d said, he had still hoped. For the first time, I realized how big a mess I’d made.

I made a show of looking around the room. The house was exactly the same, except for a new wooden partition blocking off the loft space where Tung, Huong, and Viet slept. Then I noticed there weren’t any dresses. “What happened to Nga’s shop?” I asked.

Phai shrugged. “Closed,” he said, then pointed out the doorway toward Dream Street. “The street’s one-way now. Nga didn’t get as many customers coming by as she did before.”

I turned and looked outside. On the way here, I’d noticed that the driver had taken a circuitous route to my house, but so many things confused me in Vietnam that I hadn’t bothered to figure that one out. Now I could see that all the motorbikes and trucks and cars were moving from right to left. Even when I was here a year before, the municipal authorities had been implementing changes to make traffic through Hanoi a bit less chaotic, and the shift on Dream Street had probably helped to make the busy intersection at the corner less of a nightmare. But I wondered if city planners considered the indirect consequences of these decisions, like the fact that they’d put one small dress shop out of business.

“That’s sad,” I said. My vocabulary in Vietnamese had shrunk badly. I glanced at Phai, but he was hardly listening. His eyes were on me, but his mind was somewhere else.

It would be hard to imagine a worse way to reunite than the way we chose, with me pulling back and Phai feeling hurt by it, with Phai speaking impossibly bad English and me having trouble remembering even the most basic Vietnamese. I looked around the room, up to the ceiling, out the door, back to the furniture, and down to my feet without once glancing at Phai. I longed for Tung and Huong to return home.

“Good see you, Duyen,” he told me. “Happy very very.”

      Luckily, Phai and I had only been sitting in the living room for about fifteen minutes when Tung, Huong, and Viet finally drove up outside. Plastic shopping bags were dangling like pastel balloons from every handlebar and every hand. I leaped from my seat and rushed outside to meet them.

Phai had looked exactly the same, but everyone on the motorbike looked different. Little Viet had grown from a three-foot wild thing into a tall, skinny schoolkid with a sweet smile and a surprising eagerness to help carry several heavy suitcases up three flights of stairs. Huong was seven months pregnant, and, though I’d known about it, I’d had a hard time picturing her until she dislodged herself from the motorbike and tottered toward me, her full-moon belly pressing against the thin fabric of a summer shirt. Tung was altered as well, but not in ways I might have expected. Wearing the Levi’s I’d sent him and a freshly pressed button-down shirt, he looked more like a slick, self-confident businessman than ever.

As soon as the motorbike pulled to a stop, I did what Americans do, rushing outside and hugging every one of them. Viet
squirmed a bit, but didn’t run away. Tung looked embarrassed but pleased. Huong dragged me by the hand into the house, forced me to sit down beside her on the couch, and then proceeded to examine me from head to toe.

I’d tried, I really had. On this trip, I’d packed a pair of nice trousers, which I could wear with a belt and either of a couple of pretty blouses. I had a dress and a few good wool sweaters to wear when the weather got cold. I’d brought jewelry and two different shades of lipstick. I didn’t have any high heels, but I didn’t only have sneakers, either. I even had new glasses, with smaller lenses this time.

Tung noticed the glasses first. “You don’t look like an old grandmother anymore,” he said with satisfaction.

Huong sat for a moment, still making her assessment. Finally, she said, “You’re fatter,” obviously impressed.

“Huong,” Tung chided, “Americans don’t like that.”

“They hate that,” said Phai, who was, like Tung, proud of his understanding of the Western psyche.

“No, really. I don’t care,” I argued, glancing in the mirror behind the couch. Maybe I did look fatter, I thought, despairing. Then, I turned toward Huong. “You look fatter, too,” I said.

Huong’s smile rippled into a laugh that sounded like a soft breeze. She squeezed my hand with both of hers. “I’m so happy you’re back,” she said, and I began to feel less anxious.

Over the next hour, I somehow managed to keep up my end of the conversation. Since leaving San Francisco, I’d hardly slept, and now the world around me seemed wobbly, as if I were looking out at it through a shimmer of heat. My Vietnamese felt thick and awkward in my mouth, like wet wads of cotton stuck between my cheeks and gums. In all the blur and nervousness of that afternoon, however, I was able to recognize one small miracle.
They all were speaking rapidly to me in Vietnamese, and I had no difficulty understanding them.

Eventually, Huong ordered me to go upstairs to rest until she had finished preparing dinner. I tried to protest, but not very strenuously. As I got up and headed toward the stairs, Phai watched me uncertainly, as if he couldn’t decide whether to follow me or not. He didn’t.

      Six people were crowded around the little coffee table in the living room. Each person held a bowl full of noodles in a rich broth of pork simmered with bamboo shoots. In addition to me, Phai, Tung, Huong, and Viet, there was a graduate student named Paula who was renting the room on the fourth floor. Paula, an American who’d been raised in Sweden, was tall and regal-looking, but her graying black T-shirt and ratty mustard-colored pants had the same worn-out quality that my clothes had developed after too many months of hand washing. Tung and Huong must have realized that I wasn’t the only Westerner who had trouble maintaining a presentable wardrobe in Hanoi.

Even though she was obviously fatigued by the effort, Huong made the dinner herself. Sa had returned to the countryside. Her disappearance puzzled me. She’d always seemed so thrilled by the life of the city, and whenever she spoke to me about her village, she’d made it clear that she hadn’t been happy there. Her mother had died and all her siblings had married and moved away. Her father drank too much and sometimes beat her. Sa had always viewed keeping house for Huong as an escape. When I brought the subject up with Huong, she just shook her head, unwilling to discuss it.

Tung pulled out his stash of Rémy Martin and held out a glass for me. “Rémy?” he asked, and the way he pronounced the word, “Ray-mee,” reminded me of a night, long ago, when I’d gone out with my student John and some of his friends. They were a wealthy bunch, the kind of young people who wore expensive leather jackets and spent their Saturday nights dancing in discos or competing in dangerous motorbike races around Hoan Kiem Lake. One night, one of the women, a pretty young actress who had already made a name for herself in Vietnamese films, turned to me with a look of concern on her face. “What’s the proper way to say it?” she’d needed to know, her expression so anxious that she might have been asking me to supply her with a vaccine for tuberculosis. “Is it Ray-mee Mar-tun or Ray-mee Mar-teen?” I hated to see the disappointment on her face when I’d told her, apologetically, that I didn’t know the answer.

I looked at Tung and shook my head. I was so exhausted that alcohol might push me over the edge. He poured a glass for himself, one for Phai, and one for Paula. Then, after toasting to my return—One hundred percent! One hundred percent!—he told me he was planning to open a beer pub with Max, the Australian who had been living in my room. The two of them had found a nice spot across the street from Hanoi’s cathedral, and they were going to turn it into the Kangaroo Pub. They’d already made T-shirts on which a kangaroo, decked out in tourist garb, stood waving a Vietnamese flag. As soon as Max returned from Sydney, they’d open for business.