The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (16 page)

"I need to use your bathroom. I have a problem."

Annick sized her up, determining if she passed some test. The two women could just as easily have become adversaries, but something had swayed her to be Helen's friend. "Come, let's take care of you."

When Helen returned to the showroom, she was sheepish.

"Have a seat. I'll get you some water," Annick said.

"The heat..." Helen mumbled as she accepted the glass.

Annick was as impeccably dressed as if in a store on the Champs d'Elysees. Helen stared at her dress--a soft peach-colored silk, with a Mandarin collar. Annick looked at Helen's slacks, decided something, and smiled. "I have a black skirt in your size. Borrow it. It's much lighter than what you have on."

"I'm sorry," Helen said. "Where did you get that dress? I don't have the right things...."

"The unexpected social whirl, yes? The dress is made here."

"I brought all the wrong things." She felt humbled, broken, by the last days. "I mean, it's a war zone."

"There are tricks to living in the tropics."

"Really?" Helen was flooded with relief to have another woman to talk to.

"Watch the Vietnamese." Annick nodded her head toward the two seamstresses. "They move slowly. As do the French. When you walk down the street, you can always spot the Americans because they are hurrying."

"I didn't notice."

One of the Vietnamese women dropped a spool of thread, and it rolled out of reach under her chair. Carefully she laid down the cloth she was working on and stood up, gathering her skirt in one hand, the fabric rustling. Helen saw she was wearing dainty black boots with buttons going up the ankle like the kind worn at the turn of the century. The cloth she was working on was a silk hanging of a bacchanalia: figures sitting at a table with naked dancers swirling around it. Detail so fine that red thread formed the rubies in the dancers ears.

Annick laughed. "It's true. You'll never survive here otherwise. The place will wear you down. I've been here fifteen years. Very few Western women last. It's an art to master. But they never ask for help."

"I'm a mess, so I'm begging."

Annick was attractive in the Vietnamese way: simple attire, pulled-back hair, sparing makeup. Painstaking work to look so natural.

"Lesson number one: Move slowly. Lesson two: Bargain for everything. You paid double what that bedspread is worth. You didn't even find out the price. The difference will buy you a dress like mine. What do you do, Helen?"

"I'm a photographer. Freelance."

Annick frowned. "Lesson three: Vietnam is a man's world. We have to make our own rules, but always the obstacle here is the men."

Helen closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the disaster of Darrow. "I've been here two weeks and made every mistake."

"And it's only noon. What you need is a nice lunch."

Annick took her to
a favorite place, painted metal bistro tables and chairs on pea gravel in a courtyard garden. The heavy air was trapped against the walls of the building, the perfume of the fleshy, tropical flowers around them making Helen light-headed. She hid under the shade of a banana tree and drank down glass after glass of chilled white wine as pale as water.

During the main course of sauteed sole and julienned vegetables, they discussed the logistics of surviving as a Western woman in Saigon--how to find feminine products and the chronic shortage of hair spray, where to have one's hair styled, where to buy clothes, where it was safe to go alone, what kind of culture there was, how to handle the number of soldiers all around.

Demitasses of espresso and sliced mango with sticky rice were served, and Helen asked about the two seamstresses. "Do they work for you full-time?"

"Madame Tuan and Madame Nhu are sisters. They worked for a French couple who owned a plantation north of Saigon in the thirties and forties. The sisters made all of Madame's clothing so well that her friends requested dresses. The sisters put silk on the backs of all the
colons
during that time.

"It was the time before my husband and I arrived. The couple was returning from a party at a neighboring plantation when they were killed by the Viet Minh. They weren't politically important, just unlucky."

Just as Darrow had warned, better not to ask what had happened to someone. "How horrible. What a tragedy."

"Actually... quite common. Anyway, the sisters wanted to keep sewing but didn't want to open their own shop. Didn't want to deal with the foreigners directly so much. We met shortly after that."

"So how old--"

Annick giggled. "The madames? They are timeless. The great fat old
chats
perched on their chairs. They know everything going on in the city and yet never leave the shop, hardly talk. They knew all about you."

Annick lit a cigarette and watched a Vietnamese man in his late twenties, dressed in an expensive suit, pass their table, then she blew smoke out through her lips. "That suit is so fine it must have just arrived from Paris." Her eyes narrowed as she studied the man's retreating figure. "These wealthy Vietnamese around town. Him, the son of an important SVA general. You will never see such opulence and such corruption together. They can't help themselves. They made their fortunes with the help of the French, on the blood of their people. They're cursed."

"You sound like a revolutionary," Helen said.

Annick laughed, a deep throaty sound, her head thrown back and her graceful white neck bared. "Never. I love the high life. If you know how to play it, Saigon offers the best life."

"So you stayed?"

"I tasted freedom. We stay on, just hoping it will last a bit longer. The sisters will put silk on the backs of the Americans now. But they will remain long after all of us have been banished."

"I went on my first assignment in the field yesterday and forgot to shoot my camera, I was so terrified." The words come out with a rush. "So terrified I slept with a man last night I shouldn't have. Too scared to stay and too scared to leave."

Annick stared at her for a moment. "It seems I have become your friend just in time."

At first, afraid she
had started something with Darrow she wasn't sure she wanted to continue, Helen was relieved when she didn't hear from him. After several more days of not hearing from him, she realized that she had been dismissed without knowing it.

She struggled to make her way around Saigon alone, avoiding Robert in her embarrassment. When she returned to her hotel, she skirted the front desk, afraid of messages from Darrow, more afraid of none. Impatient, she frowned at the elevator, waiting for one of the bellboys to run over to her with a note: "Very important message. Mr. Darrow say urgent." But not a single word came. It occurred to her that the drawer beside his bed might be full of keys; he relied on the fact that they wouldn't be used. But she had used hers. In a rush to make the night before not seem a mistake, she had dropped off the green bedspread she had bought from Annick, gone so far as to make the bed with it. Pathetic. One more colossal blunder.

After a week had
passed, Helen found out through her room boy that Darrow had been on assignment and was back. The answer to why he hadn't called. He hadn't bothered to inform her of the fact of a trip, but she could forgive that. In her relief, she sprouted affection for him. He was at his room in the hotel. She hurriedly changed into a linen dress, brushed her hair, and applied the pale pink lipstick Annick had given her. She made herself walk, not run, to his room. When she knocked, he answered distractedly, "Come in."

Sunlight streamed through the dusty windows, opaque through the tape used to keep them from shattering from bombs. The air smelled of dirty fatigues piled on the floor, stale cigarette smoke. The desperate feelings she had talked herself into minutes before abandoned her. She again felt like a fool.

Linh, bowing his head at her entrance, sat in a chair by the window, going through contact sheets with a magnifying loupe.

Darrow didn't move toward her but stayed at a large table piled with bags of equipment. His face was drawn, eyes invisible behind the glare of glasses.

She stood in the middle of the room, fingering the rough material of her dress, searching for an excuse for her presence, cursing herself for having come there. Finally she offered up "I heard you were back."

"Yesterday," he said, continuing to unpack cameras from a muddied bag. "I spent last night developing film."

"Oh."

She noticed the tremor again in his hands as he lifted equipment. She was making a spectacle of herself, another Tick-Tock. She hated being the kind of woman to insist that a night together had meant something.

"You remember Linh," Darrow said.

Linh rose and nodded to her as she crossed the room to hold out her hand. Blinded with hurt, it was as if she were meeting him for the first time. He stood and took her hand awkwardly, and she noticed without thinking the scarred skin along one wrist. What had he done before becoming a photographer's assistant? It occurred to her that perhaps a woman wasn't supposed to shake hands with a Vietnamese man.

"I dropped some things off at the apartment. Just a thank-you for taking me along that day." Fool, idiot. Just get out of there.

"I saw." Darrow lit a cigarette and offered her one.

"Was the bedspread okay? I bought one for my hotel room. The one there was too depressing, and I figured why not get two for the price...." She couldn't stop talking, sounded ridiculous. She should die on the spot, of humiliation and bad judgment.

Silence in the room as he let her hang herself.

"It was fine. Linh, give us a minute."

"Sure." Linh, bowing even lower than he had the first time, not meeting her eyes, quickly left.

She felt stranded as the door closed behind him; she wanted to go out also, instead of staying and listening to what was coming. The lock shut so softly one only knew he was gone from the tap of his footsteps fading down the hallway.

Feigning interest, she walked over to the table by the window and was heartened to see the photo of herself on top of a pile of prints.

"Let me ask you one thing." Darrow said.

"What?"

"Did you really come halfway around the world to a war zone so you could play house with a married man?"

She pressed her fingers into the table, stared at the photograph of herself while she tried to gather her thoughts, arranged her face enough to carry herself out the room. She picked up her photograph, crumpling it in her fist.

"Don't get me wrong," Darrow said. "I had a great time, but I'm just thinking of you."

She turned and looked at him. "You had me fooled."

"Why's that? Didn't you say you would never love someone like me? So what's it now? Our Lady of Doomed Loves?"

"You are a grade-A prick."

Darrow sat on the bed with his legs crossed and took a long drag on his cigarette. "Sad fact is, Helen, baby, I can't save you."

She slammed the door behind her, hating herself for the theatrics but grateful she had at least left before tears. Relief topped mortification. Plenty of time for that later. He was right--this wasn't what she had come for.

In the dim hallway, she leaned against the wall. Sick at the absurdity of the dress and lipstick, she swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. The balled-up picture fell to the ground. When she looked up, Linh stood there. He kneeled to pick up her photo, smoothed it on his knee, and held it out to her.

FIVE
Chieu Hoi

Open Arms

Her bags remained packed
in a neat pile in the middle of her hotel room, but the days passed by, one after another, and still Helen didn't leave.

She could not face returning home a failure. A mode of being so ingrained she did not even recognize it. Her mother had remarried a year after their father's death, a close family friend who had become widowed. As like their father as could be. When Helen cried before the wedding, in jealousy, in fear, in betrayal, her mother sat her down and gave her "the speech." The speech would start with the particulars of the situation and then boil up to the universal truism that failure was not an option. Ever. "This man will be a good husband and a good father to you two. End of subject."

When Michael and Helen were teenagers, they would hide on the beach and smoke pot and drink alcohol with friends and caricature their mother, her grim pragmatism, how she buried the second husband ten years later and declared that she was done with men. " 'Failure not an option,' she probably told him in bed," Helen said, thrilled by her rebellion.

A friend of hers, Reba, curly red hair spilling down her back, who had a crush on Michael, laughed so hard at the impersonation of their mother that liquid poured from her nose.

"She sounds like a monster."

"No," Helen answered. "She's just that way." It never occurred to her that there was anything wrong with such demands.

_______

In her effort to
prove that she could survive in Saigon and function without Darrow's help, she befriended other journalists in town, went to official briefings, took the rickety blue-and-white Renault taxis out to Tan Son Nhut to photograph American and Vietnamese soldiers back from operations. She and Robert joined official army junkets that flew journalists out in transport C-130s to write and take pictures of scarred land and dead soldiers hours after the action ended. Robert was content doing his job, writing up his stories, but she found the whole process frustrating. Her pictures were no different from those of a dozen other freelancers selling photos to the wire services for fifteen dollars a picture.

The journalists were in a questionable fraternity while out in the field, squabbling and arguing among themselves, each sensing the unease of the situation. No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic: "I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker." Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other.