The Orange Curtain (4 page)

He’d heard the name Nguyen enough to be able to pronounce an approximation of the sound,
whin
. “What does Mrs. Nguyen do?”

Frank Vo puffed at his cheeks. “You might say she is a wholesaler. Or an arranger, maybe. I probably don’t want to know exactly what she does all the time, but on balance she’s a good woman and I think you’d say she was Phuong’s mentor. Talk to her. She’s a real character, more energy than a B-52. Now I really must go, I’m sorry. It seems the natives are restless.”

Jack Liffey rose and shook the man’s hand. The grip was surprisingly firm. “You’re the politest cop I’ve ever met,” he offered.

“Is this a Vietnamese area?” Jack Liffey asked. They had already settled in and disposed of a number of stiff pleasantries. Driving into the tract in the dusk, the place had looked like any other Orange County suburb of gimcrack ranch houses. There were no curly-haired stone lions on the porches or scooped-up eaves, no indications at all that it was anything but what it looked like, another Southern California bedroom for the white working class in flight from L.A.

The woman in her
ao dai
offered him a porcelain smile as she set the tray of tea down on the low table. She poured and retreated quickly.

Jack Liffey took the small warm handleless cup from Minh Trac. He got the feeling the Western furniture wasn’t used all that much. It had been pushed back into groups against the walls, like display areas in a big furniture store, though they were using some of it now, a leather sofa, leather easy chair and the low laquered table. A small bookcase full of Vietnamese books faced them on the far wall, with a giant television sitting on the floor beside it. The only wall adornment was an elaborate golden plaque with a line of Vietnamese written on ribbed velvet.

“Actually there aren’t any Vietnamese areas, if you mean in the way there are black or Latino areas up in L.A. We bought houses as they became available. And I think a lot of us who got the money together to buy wanted to be Americans.” He shrugged. “We’re scattered all through Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, even Anaheim. Maybe 100,000 of us now, but even here in Westminster I think we’re less than a third of the population.”

Jack Liffey sipped at the thin tea. There seemed to be some baffling protocol in Vietnamese culture between when to offer the watery tea common in Asia or the strong coffee the French had brought into their colony, but it wasn’t worth asking about.

“I spoke with Frank Vo. He hasn’t done much yet to look for Phuong and he didn’t seem too concerned.” He decided not to mention the boys of East Wind and the burst of gunfire. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Phuong.

“Smoothing things over is Vo’s profession. If you were on fire, he would try to convince you not to cry out because fire is a good thing that warms up those in the community around you.
I’m
concerned.”

“I understand.”

Mrs. Minh glided back in with a 4-by-5 photograph that she presented to him on two hands, as if it were very heavy but very delicate. It showed a beautiful young woman, her long glowing black hair cascading over one shoulder as she turned to smile so brightly it seemed she’d just won the lottery.

“We have other copies,” her husband said.

Jack Liffey took the flattering studio photo, wondering if it looked much like the girl, and the woman sat uneasily on the far end of the sofa, perched on the very front edge of the cushion as if ready to leap up at the slightest craving anyone expressed. Minh Trac spoke for a while of Phuong’s exemplary childhood, but the things he was inclined to relate were all so ordinary, so seamless and unexceptionable, that Jack Liffey hardly listened. He’d had enough hints of the tensions in the Vietnamese community that he couldn’t quite dismiss the possibility that some political rivalry in Little Saigon might have played a role in her disappearance. At least, it was something to eliminate.

“You said you were never a great supporter of the Saigon regime. Doesn’t that put you in an awkward circumstance here sometimes?”

The man smiled suddenly as if finding one bright pupil in a dull classroom. “The future changes the past, Mr. Liffey. And that’s not cynicism, it’s epistemology. I don’t get a chance to talk about this very much these days.”

I’ll bet you
don’t
, he thought. Clearly, the man longed to be back in the classroom. Jack Liffey settled in for whatever it was Minh wanted to expound. He was paying.

“Let us imagine my cousin Hoa, living in 1970 in an ordinary village up-country called Bu Noi. Its three hundred souls farming a big clearing along a tributary of the Dong Ngai River. The village chief was appointed by Saigon, of course. They paid taxes to Saigon, when they had to. They tacked up government notices when the armored riverboat came up once a week and they cheered dutifully whenever a general flew in on his American helicopter. Like a thousand other villages.

“There was also a Viet Cong committee in the village, most of the same men who sat on the chief’s council. They paid a fish and rice tax to the N.L.F. cadres when they came. When they were sick they went to N.L.F. doctors in a tunnel in a liberated zone up the river and they sent a few of their boys to fight with the Front. The village could have turned over at any time if it was to their benefit.”

The tidy house was suddenly assaulted by the noise of a helicopter, as if the war had come back all at once. It circled the neighborhood once, and a bright light played in a window for a moment. Jack Liffey’s hair stood on end, and no one in the room spoke until the ugly hammering sound faded away.

“Tell me the truth about Bu Noi,” Minh Trac said finally. “Which side did the village belong to?”

Jack Liffey shrugged. “The Front.”

“Really? Say the U.S. wins in the end—or Saigon wins, if you prefer. The Front sympathies, however deep or shallow, melt away without an objective sign they’d ever existed. The tree didn’t fall in the forest. By any measure, most of the village stayed loyal to the government all along.”

“Okay.”

“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Liffey, in a fluid world, you don’t find a truth like that under a rock. What I do now, or what somebody else does
today
can change the meaning of what I did last year.”

He had fidgeted and Mrs. Minh shot up to pour him more tea. “What does your past mean now?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Since I was sent to a reeducation camp, and since I came to America, ipso facto, I was always on the right side. Even if I told people differently, no one would even hear it now.
And
what’s important is that it’s not just the philosophers here who believe that, but also the ex-paratroopers who run the committees and banks and welfare organizations. To all of them I am an objective anti-communist because I’m here.”

Jack Liffey frowned. “Your theory would make it pretty tough to be a journalist.”

“Yes, indeed. You report what you think is true, and it changes under your feet,
really
changes. The only guarantee I know for never being wrong is never trying to say anything that matters. There’s a lot of that going around in Little Saigon.”

And everywhere else, Jack Liffey thought, but he didn’t want to encourage any more philosophy.

“Do you think Phuong subscribes to your theory?”

“She is as non-political as a songbird. All the children are. It means they are Republicans, of course, and water skiiers, and business majors.”

It was hard to discern his attitude to this depoliticization. “Of course.”

Minh Trac gave him a list of his daughter’s friends and their phone numbers, and a check for the retainer he had asked for. The check was written on the account of East-West Books.

“Not your personal account?”

“Most of us prefer the liquidity of cash.”

Jack Liffey rose and came face to face with the golden scrollwork. “What does this say?” he asked politely.

The teacher nodded. “Usually plaques like that in Vietnamese homes just say Good Luck; the idea of luck is very important in our culture. But mine is different. Every Vietnamese knows that line of poetry by heart. It’s one of the first lines of the masterwork of Nguyen-Du, our Shakespeare. Let’s see if I can do it justice. ‘Talent and Destiny are poised in bitter conflict.’”

He took Jack Liffey’s hand limply at the door.

“Which do you root for?” Minh Trac asked. “Talent or destiny?”

“Beats me.”

“Don’t worry. There is much suffering to go through, but at the end of the epic, a constant heart wins out. Please find Phuong for me, Mr. Liffey.”

As he left Trac’s house, he saw a car with blacked out windows following him. It stayed back, and once he got onto the 5 and headed up toward L.A. it dropped away. He passed the small absurd replica of the Matterhorn at Disneyland, all lit up on the horizon, then glimpsed the tip-top of the bell tower of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall at Knott’s Berry Farm, and then he burst over Coyote Creek and back out through the Orange Curtain smack into that overwhelming aroma of potato chips from the plant in La Mirada. He wondered if northbound commuters came to associate that smell with whatever L.A. meant to them. A cubicle job they loathed that waited in the little visible island of skyscrapers downtown that was still far ahead, an exhausting ill-paid job in some decrepit bucket shop with wired windows over the old machines. Or, in the worst case, just a forlorn search at the margins, at the exits from do-it-yourself centers, for day labor.

Dropping off the freeway finally, he saw two men standing in the bed of a stake truck dueling with shovels right under a bright yellow streetlamp. They were taking wild angry swings, clanging against one another, but he was too tired to think about it. It was just L.A. welcoming him back.

He passed up checking in at his old condo, which now served as his office, and headed home. When he’d moved in with Marlena he’d turned his condo into a de facto office because he couldn’t have got rid of it even if he’d wanted to. He’d bought it at the very peak of the market in 1989, like all the other lame-brained economic decisions of his life, and after the real estate collapse of the early ’90s, he still owed the bank more than the two-bedroom apartment was currently worth.

He parked in front of Marlena’s little bungalow and saw movement against the light at the gauze curtains. He didn’t quite think of the pleasant little shingled bungalow as his. Their relationship would have to show more signs of taking before he did that.

Before he could even get fully out of the car, the front door slammed open, and he was surprised to see his daughter sprinting happily across the scraggly lawn.

“Daddy!”

“Punkin’, what a nice surprise.”

She drew up when she saw the car and scowled. “I thought you were going to replace Hylton.”

Hylton was her nickname for his 1979 AMC Concord with one primered fender, red cellophane over the taillights and the smashed in doors and windows on the right side covered with plastic and duct tape. The doors were held shut with rope that was wound around the window pillars. The car did run, sort of.

“You have to special-order Ferraris. It takes a while to get one.”

Maeve giggled and hugged him. “And Mom wonders where I get my dry wit.”

“She’s wrong. Your wit’s as wet as it comes.”

She pounded a bit on his shoulder and then hugged him like a spider monkey. He was a bit embarrassed by how easily he felt her prominent new breasts pressing against him. He was so pleased to be talking to Maeve that he tried to delay the going-inside.

“To what do I owe the surprise visit?”

“Mom and Brad had a hot date, I guess. I’m here for the night.”

“Good for her, or should I say good for him?”

She took his arm and began steering him toward the house. “I had a hot date last week.”

He went very stiff and something chilly fell through from the top of him to the bottom. She was thirteen years old, and had only been filling out that brassiere for a few months.

“See, my wit is dry. You can relax, daddy, it was a sock hop at school and Jason just held my hand. That didn’t count as first base even in your time.”

“I don’t even like to think of boys in your on-deck circle, hon.” Especially boys named Jason, but he let it go. That terror would all come to roost soon enough. “Getting along with Marlena?” he asked.

“Sure. I like Marlena a lot.”

“So do I.”

“But not for the same reasons,” she suggested wryly.

Jack Liffey smiled as they came up onto the wide bungalow porch. He thought of some of the things Marlena did in bed that he liked a lot and was perfectly happy their reasons differed. Beyond that, there were a lot of real problems they hadn’t worked out yet.

“Would you wait out here for a minute, hon?”

“You two gonna fight?”

“I hope not.”

He found her in the kitchen, fussing over a big pot of something as she peered under the lid. She had actually lost about fifteen pounds recently, just for him, she said, and she looked a lot better for it. Another fifteen would have got her back to the regular dress sizes.

“Hi, Mar. I’m home.”

“Jackie, you didn’ call.”

“I said I’d probably be late.”

She nuzzled and clung to him when he kissed and he could sense her sniffing him for foreign perfumes. Then she took his hands and smelled at them too, one after another. Finally she wormed a hand down into his pants and grasped his penis and manipulated it in a way she had. She claimed to be able to tell if it had been used. There had been a little jealousy before he moved in, but the pathological aspects had developed after.

“Feels okay,” she said. “You know what I want to do with Big Jackie later?”

“I can think of a number of things,” he said. “Maeve’s right outside,” he added quickly.

She gave a last squeeze. “You be thinking of one you want special for Big Jackie. I got some ideas for Brown Betty, too.” Her little dog leapt between them and got his own ideas and started vibrating on Jack Liffey’s foot. “I’m steaming some tamales. You hungry?”