The House on Dream Street (41 page)

But in mid-December, I flew down to Saigon to meet Todd, and Saigon was changing even faster. When I first arrived, I walked around in a daze, staring at all the fancy cars, the sushi restaurants, the Louis Vuitton purses. Flying from North Vietnam to the South in December meant that I’d moved from autumn to summer in the course of a few hours. The heat was oppressive and, to make it worse, Saigon seemed like nothing but concrete—roads and sidewalks and buildings running up against one another, all hard, only varying in texture. It was hard to find a tree or bush, and when I did, it looked like an exotic animal, caged by more concrete. Saigon seemed less like Vietnam and more like some in-between place, with one foot in this country and one foot out the door already, moving west.

Although I’d been counting the days until I saw Todd again, now that he was almost here I panicked. The two of us had never spent more than a day or two together at one time. Now we planned to spend the next four weeks together, without a break. But what if he bugged me? He might want to skip breakfast, while I’d want to eat it. He might insist on bargaining over every cyclo ride, while I’d want to agree to the price and get on our way. Maybe he’d talk too much. Or not enough. Maybe he wouldn’t want to visit a single museum. Maybe he’d insist on going to every one. I hadn’t even seen him yet, and he was already beginning to drive me nuts.

The airport was full of people, most of whom were waiting to meet the plane from Bangkok. Everyone surged against the railing at the main terminal exit, straining to get closer to the door that would eventually spit out arriving passengers. Out of several hundred people, there were three Westerners, including
me. Right in the middle of the crowd, a gaunt, sandy-haired young man towered above the rest, hanging on to the railing like a rock fan determined to maintain his position near the stage. Over by the snack bar, a bearded guy in a summer suit sat sipping a Tiger Beer and reading the
International Herald Tribune.
He was the only person who seemed oblivious to the tension of the moment. The rest of us wore the same expression of disbelief. For me, the doubt stemmed from a fairly simple issue of physics. Just as I always felt stunned by my own ability to travel around the world in the course of a few hours, I had a hard time believing that Todd would actually show up.

My doubts had to do with logistics, but, looking at the expressions on the faces around me, I guessed that theirs had more to do with the passage of time. Many of these people were waiting for loved ones who had emigrated to countries far away, people they hadn’t seen in years, decades even. One elderly woman stood next to me, her lips trembling, her eyes fixed on the terminal doors. One hand gripped the railing separating the surging crowd from the doors of the building. The other ran up and down the front of her silk
áo dài,
as if to use these last few seconds to smooth unsightly wrinkles. No one from the plane had even appeared yet. We knew, however, that the flight had landed. A video monitor hanging above our heads indicated as much.

I pushed my way out of the crowd and walked over to a window overlooking the arrival hall. At the far end of the hall, a number of foreigners stood picking through incoming luggage. I squinted my eyes and looked at the men. A short, bald-headed guy. A Nordic-looking fellow with a backpack. Three businessmen who looked Japanese. An elderly woman wearing a baseball cap. No Todd.

“Buy flowers, madame?” A young girl stood next to me, holding an armful of roses up to my nose.

I already had flowers. Early that morning, I’d strolled through the narrow aisles of the Ben Thanh Market, which overflowed with goods I’d never seen in Hanoi: durian fruit, fresh coffee beans, Pampers, tortoiseshell sunglasses. The flower stalls offered such a variety of blossoms that nature might have developed whole new species since I’d gone to Hanoi. Squatting on the pavement, choosy as a Vietnamese mother, I’d picked out three perfect lilies, then haggled a good price for them. Back at my guesthouse, the proprietor had, of course, asked me the price I’d paid. When I told him, he’d nodded approvingly.

Still tied in their neat purple bow, the flowers were now drooping like tourists after too much sightseeing. I pulled out some money and bought the roses, then turned and put my face to the window one more time. A tall Westerner was walking toward me on the other side of the glass. He had on a wide-brimmed hat and a tired smile. He waved at me. I used the flowers to wave back. Todd was in my time zone.

      It took us a while to get used to each other. I felt like one part of my life had mysteriously superimposed itself upon another. Here was that guy I knew from Oakland, asking me how to say “good morning” in Vietnamese. It wasn’t just having Todd around that felt odd. Having anybody around was a change. I suddenly had to check with somebody else every time I wanted to sit down, turn a corner, or get something to eat.

Todd was a scholar, but he wasn’t bookish. He liked Bob Dylan as much as Shakespeare, and he liked movies even better.
Between college and graduate school, he’d spent a year backpacking through Asia. He’d been injured when a horse kicked him in Tibet, then managed to recover and hike from there to Nepal. In India, he’d lived on an ashram, traveled up and down the country, and, like so many Westerners in India, gotten very sick.

Todd was two years younger than me, born in 1964. Because he’d spent so much time traveling in the region, he associated Vietnam with Asia, not with war. Buddhist temples reminded him of China, not the monk who had immolated himself on a Saigon street corner in 1963. In the guidebook he’d brought with him from the States, he’d underlined the entries for various historical sites of the war, but he’d starred the places that looked beautiful or seemed like good places to eat. He wanted to visit Buon Ma Thuot because it was supposed to have a spectacular waterfall, not because it had been the scene of a spectacular battle.

For the first few days, we wandered through Saigon, and it quickly became apparent that he and I were traveling through two very different cities. He walked wide-eyed through a teeming third-world metropolis, while I was busy gaping at all the Western luxuries I hadn’t seen in months. Where Todd saw open sewers, I saw sidewalk vendors pushing Rolex knockoffs. He was drawn toward street stalls hawking noodle soup and rice pancakes, while I hovered near the entrances to the Apocalypse Now Bar and the California Hamburger Restaurant. He noticed the stink of dried fish reeking in the markets, and I noticed the perfume floating off the wrist of a waitress in the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel. I giggled over his first awkward climb onto a cyclo, and he rolled his eyes when I stopped to peer through the tinted glass of a Mercedes. We both tried to be patient. I didn’t mind the time it took him to take a photo of a street choked with
motorbikes, and he, in turn, never complained about the hour I spent at the Ben Thanh Market, picking out lipstick, sunglasses, and barrettes.

On our last night in Saigon, I told Todd I wanted to go to Maxim’s, a famous restaurant and nightclub that was known for its onion soup and filet mignon. Todd loved the food we’d been eating out on the streets every day, and he would have been happy enough with noodle soup for a month, but, like an urbanite anxious to please his country cousin, he agreed to go because I was so determined. Once we’d made the plan, we tried to make an event of it. I slipped on my sundress, wiped the dust off my leather sandals, and put on my brand new Cherry Red lipstick. We wanted to look nice because this was going to be an expensive night for us. We figured dinner would cost at least ten dollars. Each.

After four months eating in the noodle and rice shops of Hanoi, I felt like I was on my way to the Ritz. I wanted Maxim’s to be both glittery and dangerous. Waiters would listen to orders and, like spies, write nothing down. (I’d read too much Graham Greene.) Todd had lower expectations, and it quickly became apparent that his were closer to reality. At first glance, Maxim’s looked like the great hall of the Emerald City, redone in ruby red. Unfortunately, decades of cigarette smoke had given the decor the brownish tint of pork blood drying on a busy market floor. A heavy, balding maître’d led us past tables full of gray-suited Asian businessmen who were huddled together building towers out of empty beer cans. We sat down at a table in front of the stage, unfolded cloth napkins dotted with stains, and opened our menus, the heavy pages soft as cotton and yellow from so many years of use. Within five seconds, a scowling middle-aged waitress was standing in front of us. She pulled the stub of a pencil from her pocket, pointed at the menu, and said. “Eat. You want eat. What?”

I ordered macaroni and cheese. The waitress looked at Todd, her pencil hovering over her order book. He was squinting at the menu. Finally, he muttered, “They don’t have any Vietnamese food. And it’s so expensive.”

I’d lived in Vietnam for almost a year already. I was used to the disappointment of things being less than I’d hoped for, and so I recovered faster. But Todd looked completely disgusted by the place. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll find Vietnamese food tomorrow.”

He pointed at a line on the menu and looked up at the waitress. “What kind of fish is this?” he asked.

“Fish,” said the waitress, nodding. She scrawled into the order book.

“What kind of fish?” I asked her in Vietnamese.

The waitress looked even more annoyed. She reached over and poked a finger into Todd’s menu. “Fish. It says ‘fish,’” she snapped in Vietnamese.

“River fish? Lake fish? Ocean fish?” I asked.

“Ocean fish,” said the waitress.

“It’s fish from the ocean,” I told Todd, forgetting that “ocean fish” means very little in English. Todd wanted a word—sole, halibut, tuna—that would convey information about taste and texture. In America, one could expect such information when dining. After more discussion that went nowhere, he gave up and ordered the fish.

The waitress left and Todd took a sip of his lemonade while he looked around the room. I could tell he was frustrated, and I felt irritated that he’d had to ask so many questions. Forgetting that my own expectations had, just a few minutes earlier, been very high, I felt like reminding him that we were in Vietnam, not Paris. Why couldn’t he have just ordered a steak? He didn’t know the trick I’d learned to preserve my sanity in Vietnam. At
a certain point, you just stop trying. Okay, you tell yourself. Whatever.

The floor show started, and we turned to watch, trying to get some space from each other for a minute. Women in denim hotpants and baby blue leotard tops attempted a cancan on dangerously high heels. A man wearing a James Dean black leather jacket sang “I Left my Heart in San Francisco,” while rear-projected slides covered the back of the stage with shots of Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House. At the table next to us, a Tiger Beer pyramid had grown to eight beers across and eight rows high. Thirty-six cans of beer, divided among four Asian businessmen, all of whom were smoking cigars and downing shots of Johnnie Walker Black. The youngest of these men stood up, turned a beer can upside down to prove its emptiness, then placed it at the top of the pyramid. Even James Dean up on stage paused to look. The structure held.

“Are they Vietnamese?” Todd asked. He knew that I was annoyed with him, and now, with his head cocked to the side and a look of curiosity on his face, he was trying to smooth things out between us.

I looked at the drinking buddies at the next table and shook my head. Vietnamese didn’t dress that well. “They might be
Việt kiều,
though,” I said, referring to Vietnamese émigrés living abroad.

I told Todd about the time my student John and I had met a
Việt kiều
 man at the Shrimp Cake Restaurant on the West Lake in Hanoi. The
Việt kiều 
was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt, Wrangler jeans, and sunglasses so heavily tinted we couldn’t see his eyes. He told us he lived in Los Angeles—he called it “Los” for short. He’d escaped Vietnam by boat, leaving his wife and a couple of babies behind. After a few years in a refugee camp in Malaysia, he made it to the United States, where he managed to
put himself through engineering school at night by working as a high school janitor during the day. For ten years now, he’d worked for a defense contractor in Southern “Cal.” He told us he came back to Vietnam every couple of years now, to see his family. When I asked him why he didn’t bring his wife to the States, he said he had a new American wife in Los already. “New life, new wife, man,” he’d laughed. “Do you want to see her pic?”

John had nodded immediately, and the
Việt kiều 
pulled a picture out of his wallet. “That’s my wife. Isn’t she a babe?” he asked. The photo showed a woman lying on a beach with the sun setting behind her. She was beautiful. Blond. Long legs. Breasts popping out of a bright red bikini. She had a classic model’s physique, which was why it was such a weird picture. She really was a model. The guy had simply clipped the photo of a swimsuit model out of a magazine. I looked up at him to see if he was joking, but he was staring down at the picture, saying, “I love my wife.”