The Language of Men (6 page)

I look across the table at Vanessa, wondering where to begin.

"A woman from the clinic works at a massage parlor," she says.

"I doubt it's the same place."

Vanessa shakes her head. "Guys are so weird."

I laugh. "What does that mean?"

The waitress comes over and nods. We nod back.

"Nothing," Vanessa says.

We eat the rest of our meal in silence, though inside I am defending not just my father, but all males, all across the world. But my defense seems shallow and cliched, founded on random phrases I've said myself, or that I've heard my father or my brother or my guy friends use when confronted with a direct question about sex or gender:
It's a guy thing. Chicks don't understand. ALL dudes do it.
Or, like my father said about his "extracurricular activities" during the war:
Still stateside. Wasn't necessary yet.

Through the front doors of the restaurant, I see the other family across the street trying to convince customers that they really are deaf and mute. I look back at Harvey Keitel and his family standing by the bar, backs straight, hands clasped, lips pressed tight. I imagine the fake family practicing their routine at home. "We must not talk. Listen, but do not let on that you can hear."

When we leave the restaurant, the rain is pounding hard. Beneath each awning, huddled in every store entrance, are packs of tourists, some laughing and cheering, gazing up at the rain as if it were a fireworks display. Others are Saran-wrapped, like leftovers, in thin, brightly-colored ponchos, their faces scrunched. Even the motorbikes acknowledge the rain and idle at the curbs and street corners. Some cars pull over; others plow through the flood, tires almost completely submerged, their hazard lights flashing.

Vanessa and I are still in front of the restaurant when Harvey Keitel's little girl comes rushing out. I think she may have found my passport or wallet beneath the table, but instead she offers to sell us a poncho. We shake our heads and smile. She pulls out an umbrella.

"No, thank you," Vanessa and I say in unison and move beneath the awning of the neighboring restaurant.

The water is sloshing over the curb, spreading onto the sidewalk, lapping at the entrances to stores, restaurants, bookshops, travel agencies. Many of the entrances have no doors, only open airways connected to the street by concrete ramps. The water moves up the ramp like an incoming tide, and I can feel a shallow yet powerful undertow around my ankles. I think about how I used to beg my mother to let me swim in our pool during rainstorms. I loved sinking under the water and staring up at the boiling surface. As long as there was no lightning, my mother said it was okay.

There is no lightning now, the sky expending its energy solely on the rain. We watch Vietnamese boys and girls splash in the water or fill up plastic squirt guns and spray each other. Soon, tourists inch out from beneath awnings and entrances and step gingerly into the water. Some laugh and hold on to each other. Others grit their teeth as if sinking into a hot bath. I put my arm around Vanessa.

"After you, m'lady."

She smiles. "Yeah?"

We look up and down the street, men and women and children carrying their belongings over their heads, taking high, exaggerated steps. The water on the sidewalk is as deep as the middle of the street.

"I don't think we have a choice."

She holds my hand tightly as we step down the ramp. I feel the warm water move up my thigh. At its deepest, the water hugs Vanessa's waist and ripples outward like a vast black skirt. Her eyes are wide. She gives me an uncertain smile, but I don't think my expression is doing her any good.

But we warm up to it. We take big steps like the rest of the people in the street, sometimes stumbling, but for the most part, our footing is sure. I slip and fall forward and nearly go under, but another tourist grabs my arm. We laugh and I thank him in English and he says, "No worries, mate." I imagine this is what it's like in Spain, during the running of the bulls or the big tomato fight. Or like Mardi Gras or Carnival, the right place, the right time where something that seems irrational in everyday life suddenly becomes a care-free experience where everyone lets loose. For the first time since I've been in Vietnam, I feel a part of something.

"What is that?" Vanessa asks, pointing to a white piece of material bobbing in front of us. We move closer. It's a dirty diaper. "Oh, gross," I say. "Head that way."

To my right are clumps of dead cockroaches. To my left is another dirty diaper. We move quicker and the water feels deeper. Sweet'N Low packets and coffee filters and egg shells. A bloody tampon wrapped in tissue. Chicken bones and more roaches. Cigarette butts and an unopened box of Trojans and water-logged books. We step faster, harder, but our movements are slow and awkward, the way one runs in a dream. I look to the sidewalk and see how high the tide has risen, flooding all the stores and restaurants, and each time the water laps at the concrete ramps, the undertow pulls the insides out.

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, Vanessa helps the clinic prepare for a sexual health and reproductive rights conference in Hanoi. She takes off from work a week early, and we buy tickets for a three-day bus ride north. The bus drives through the night. We stretch out as far as we can on the five-foot-long sleeper beds, the driver blasting loud Muzak nearly the entire ride.

I put my earphones in and listen to my father. He talks about one of his last days in Basic Training where the sergeant takes all the guys to a mock Vietnamese village behind the obstacle course.
That there gave ya a li'l slap in the face, reality-wise.
The sergeant led them through several thatch-roofed huts. I imagined the scene as if it were in a museum, my father peeking over a velvet rope at a wax family gathered around the hearth. He reaches out to press a red button beside a plaque on the wall and from somewhere a voice tells the family's story.

All the soldiers stood in front of the village, the sergeant droning on and on about always being alert, keeping all your senses tuned to the war. My father stretched his neck and licked the sweat from his lips. He put the butt of his rifle on the ground and leaned on the barrel like a cane. Then from beneath piles of dry grass, two Vietnamese men in conical hats sprang up and unloaded their AK-47s. My father and the rest of the men dropped to the ground and covered their heads. When the rifles were silent, my father heard laughter and looked up to see two Army sergeants remove their conical hats. The bullets were blanks.

Then they took, us to the dream room and the dream room was where you picked the country you wanted to go and the occupation you wanted to do. They had all places where the U.S. was stationed, all over the world. So I put down Korea, cuz I figured dat was close to Vietnam and I said. I'd be a medic or a cook. So, they said I gotta pick one, so I says, all right, cook. The orders get cut and he calls your name and what you gonna do. Johnson, 11-bravo. Hernandez, U-bravo. Those are all infantry. Calls me, says 94B20. Never forget that number. This li'l hodee drill sergeant, he looks at me and says,
"You a spoon, boy. You ain't nuttin' but a greasy spoon."

Around two in the morning, I hear the
Titanic
soundtrack. I roll over to see Vanessa rolling over to look at me. Outside, yellow and red lights flash like lightning bugs, but it is too dark to see where they are coming from. I look out the windshield. The bus's headlights seem to bounce off the night as we follow the highway's sharp turns; the driver toots the horn to alert oncoming traffic. Motorbikes' headlamps burn like spotlights. I can hear the driver gently singing along with Celine Dion as he accelerates into a blind turn.

"How are you?" I whisper to Vanessa.

She smiles and stretches her shoulders up to her neck. "Good. You?"

"Good. This music is god awful."

She laughs. "And it's everywhere."

Sometimes Vietnam was a peaceful backdrop, a pleasant hum in my ear: a street vendor's sizzling wok or the Mekong patting the side of a basket boat. Other times the country was invasive and relentless: engines and horns and yelling and rain pounding on metal roofs. Speakers attached to telephone poles blasted tinny music and daily announcements from the government at six in the morning. The owner of one hotel told us the announcements say things like
Keep our country clean; do not spit on the sidewalk.
At first, Vanessa and I did not know where these announcements were coming from, but after we discovered the speakers, even when they were silent, the gray, bullhorn-shaped plastic cones appeared poised to shout.

"Are you nervous about the conference?" I ask.

"No, not really," Vanessa says. "One of the women was scared because she thought I was going to show everyone her paper vagina."

I laugh and want to ask her more questions: What else are the women scared of? What do they do when they're not at work? What kind of music or movies do they like? But several people on the bus are talking on their cell phones and the Muzak seems to get louder and the bus engine roars and the tires slam down into potholes as if pounding out a brain-jarring Morse code. We look at each other, silently agreeing to close our eyes and fake sleep.

We arrive in Da Nang at four in the morning. One of my great uncle's colleagues, Teddy, picks us up in his 1984 Chevy Cavalier. Never has a stranger been so excited to see us. He nearly claps his hands as he scurries out of the car, grabs our bags, and tosses them in the trunk.

"Welcome! Welcome to Da Nang!"

"Thank you," I say. "It's great to meet you."

He bows. Then he opens the back door for Vanessa, the front door for me.

We drive through the center of Da Nang. Strands of white lights stretch over the street, which Teddy explains are from last week's festival. When I ask what kind of festival, he says there are too many to remember.

"China Beach," he says, pointing to the dark shoreline.

I smile and think of the television show of the same name, a team of female Army nurses stationed along the coast. It is too dark to see what the real China Beach looks like. But even if it were mid-day, I wouldn't see the beach Teddy saw. For him, it is the place where he met the first American Marines who landed in Da Nang in the mid '60s. Teddy was in his late teens, and he hung around the base looking for work. His outgoing, funny personality caught the soldiers' attention. They never called him Phan Ngoc Thiet, but instead nicknamed him Teddy.

"'Teddy Bear,' they say to me. 'Come here, Teddy Bear.'" He smiles.

Perhaps Teddy's China Beach is not the real China Beach, either. Perhaps the real China Beach is the one described by Eliseo Perez-Montalvo, an air force sergeant whose oral history depicts China Beach as two beaches: American and Vietnamese, separated by razor wire. Marines bought sheets from the PX and gave them to the Vietnamese women on the other side. The women draped half of the sheet over the razor wire, propped up the other half with a stick, and dug a two-person wide trench. At night, the moon rippled across the ocean, and Eliseo watched green pants bunched around black boots twitch within the trenches.

The television series
China Beach
didn't show Teddy's beach or Eliseo's beach or the beach known by small Vietnamese boys, the ones who collected used condoms off the shore, washed them in seawater, stuffed them into little containers and resold them to fresh Marines, along with Zippos and t-shirts and pins.

Teddy's tour is epic, his voice loud and animated. Vanessa and I feel sleep deprived. We drink coffee at breakfast and lunch. I feel bad because I want to see everything, but after a long bus ride, a nap is much more tempting. We make it through, though, and Teddy doesn't seem to mind when our eyes glaze over.

We pick up his wife that night, and she rides in the back with Vanessa. I turn around and make brief eye contact with Vanessa, but she seems far away. Teddy circles a large parking lot in front of Da Nang's many seaside restaurants. As he eases his Chevy into a parking spot, the
Titanic
soundtrack bubbles to the surface. Teddy hums a few notes and shuts off the engine.

I can't take it anymore. I ask him why that music is always on the radio.

"I haven't heard it on U.S. stations in years," I say.

"I'm not sure," he says. "American things sometimes come late."

After dinner, Teddy takes us to his home. The first thing I see is his impressive collection of shot glasses on top of his grand piano.

"Coke and Jack?" He points at me, then at Vanessa.

We nod and his wife leaves and returns with mini bottles of Jack Daniels, the kind served on airplanes, and two cans of Coca-Cola. She mixes our drinks, hands us our glasses, and walks out of the room. We don't see her again.

"My favorite drink," he grins, proposing a toast. We smile and thank him.

He finishes two Coke and Jacks and leaves to grab another bottle. When he returns, he sits at the piano and uncovers the keys and begins to play
The Star-Spangled Banner.
The song booms off the marble floor, and he turns and grins as if he were giving the crowd their money's worth. Tilting his head to the ceiling, he sings louder. He stares back at us and motions for us to stand. We glance at each other, then stand, holding our sweaty glasses, and sing. I feel like an elementary school kid reciting the pledge of allegiance. Teddy adds a long interlude, like at a Billy Joel concert; his fingers dance a cartoonish ditty after he sings the final words. Silence. Vanessa and I set down our drinks and clap.

"Now!" he says, out of breath. "The best part!"

Best part of what?

He leads us upstairs to a door at the end of a long hallway. The door handle is stainless steel, unlike the ornate glass knobs on the other doors. He reaches into his pocket for his keys.

Tiny red and green lights blink in the center of the room. A fan whirs. Teddy tells us to wait in the doorway. He flicks a switch and a massive model airport comes to life, taking up nearly the entire room. Sounds of air-traffic controllers and planes landing and taking off blast from little speakers. A metal sign on the wall reads:
Phan Ngoc Thiet International Airport.
Teddy stands with his arms spread like a magician.