"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

FOUR. IndianCounty

At the Bien Hoa Air Base, Helen stood in the shade of a metal storage shed, a faded red stenciled BEWARE above her head; the words below disappeared, peeled off by the sun and rain. The area to be patrolled was considered a cleared one, the search of some marshland and two hamlets routine, establishing presence and nation building.

Darrow rolled his eyes at her as he harangued the lieutenant colonel into taking Helen along. She heard the words added burden and lack of facilities, but then the man gave in because of a gambling debt he owed Darrow.

Waiting for the transport, Helen fumbled with her newly acquired cameras, which were fancier than the simple Instamatics she was used to. “Would you show me how to load film in these?” she said quietly, her eyes downcast.

Darrow was speechless, with no choice but to comply. He showed her basic photographic technique in the fifteen minutes it took them to load supplies.

“Where’s Linh?” she asked, trying to act casual.

“He’s taken off for a few days. Personal stuff.”

The helicopter hovered above the ground, and the soldiers jumped and ran; Helen also jumped and ran, the soft, dull ache of the jump inside her ankles, the small bones and ligaments crushing against one another. They ran to a berm of reeds in front of the swampy marsh and crouched down on the dry land behind, waiting for the next helicopter to unload. It wasn’t until the last soldier got off that sniper bullets started hissing through the air. “That’s not supposed to happen,” she said, as the last helicopter bucked up like startled prey, nose dipping, then disappeared over the trees.

“Shut up,” a soldier hissed.

After the shudder and roar of the helicopter, the land sounded hushed and peaceful except for the percussive, insect whine of bullets past her ears. Her field of vision was reduced to the few feet between her and the berm and the tops of the far-off trees. The heat burned through her clothing; pebbles bit into her down-turned palms. The danger seemed unreal, like a movie, like being out on training maneuvers, a bored rifleman shooting blanks from behind a tree. Her heart thumped hard against her chest at the idea that there was a real live enemy hidden in front of them.

Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer crawled over to her. “Stay flat and stay here. We’re going toward the tree line.”

Darrow moved forward with the rest of the men, entering the waist-high marsh. She saw him as if for the first time, the truest image she would ever have: a dozen men moving out single file, visible only from the waist up, only packs, helmets, and upraised weapons to identify them; a lone bare head, an upraised camera. After he forgave a ninety-five-dollar debt to get her on board the plane, he treated her like a stranger, which hurt her feelings though she understood its necessity. Darrow turned his back on the safety of the rear position, on Helen, on thoughts of Saigon and possibly America; his whole attention directed toward the depth of the marsh, and the further depth of the jungle, the war, the secrets he still had not found. Not yet understanding what drove him, she already respected it. She felt stupid with fear.

Raising her head, she saw that the trees were eucalyptus, lined like the windbreaks back home between the citrus groves. The familiarity of the trees, malevolent in this setting, doubly disturbed her.

Home. She longed for the clean quiet of her mother’s house, the mildew smell of closed rooms from being so close to the beach. All those surf days of beating sun and rolling water, dried out and happy, licking her child’s lips of salt, of ice cream. The crowded boardwalk along the beach, the pink-burned tourists and the tanned locals, giggling with her friends over the browned, lean torsos of older boys playing basketball, always shirtless, always ignoring them. Walking past the restaurants with their unfurled umbrellas, their white tablecloths, and cheap bottles of wine on the table to entice customers, the waiters leathery and bored.

Her mouth was dry, air scraped the shallows of her lungs, as the reality of where she was took hold. Shivering from the foreign rush of terror, she felt a warm, wet sensation, and burned at the realization that she had peed herself. She pressed her cheek into the dirt, the lip of the helmet-a man’s small but still too big-cutting into her ear. The sharp scent of burned grass combining with gunpowder and the sweetish smell of her own urine shamed her.

Nothing had prepared her for the smallness of the action. The moment-to-moment boredom. Intellectually, yes, there were people on the enemy side trying to kill them, American men might die, but that was all television stuff. Being on the flat land, pricked by the dying grass, the idea that she herself could be the target of a bullet became real. But the whole time she lay there she mostly fretted over the embarrassment of wetting herself, solving the problem by spilling the water from her canteen over part of her pants.

Minutes passed. She heard a cry in front of her. A soldier had been hit in the thigh. Helen crawled up to the group as the medic bandaged him and gave him a quick prick of morphine. Movement was better than paralysis. The boy was lying on his back, wild-eyed and jabbering.

“He’s fine, mostly nerves,” the medic said, shrugging. “First time out.”

The soldier’s lips twisted in sarcasm. “They say that to anyone who isn’t dead.”

“What’s your name?” Helen touched the boy’s hand.

“Curt.”

“Shut up, Curt,” the medic said. “We should call you Yellow.”

The bullets stopped, and half an hour later the patrol was back together, waiting on an opened dirt road for an evacuation helicopter for one wounded. The thick marsh slime dried stiff and dark on their fatigues in the scalding air. Helen’s own darkened pants went unnoticed. Against regulations, soldiers took off their flak jackets, smoked cigarettes, and wrung out socks while they waited.

Helen joined a group sitting under a tree. She took off her helmet. In herpanic and then relief that the encounter was over, she realized she hadn’t shot a single frame, had, in fact, forgotten all about the camera. Years later, her biggest regret was not taking the shot of Darrow in the marsh. It remained the one image etched in her mind, perhaps because she did not have the film to refer back to. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.

Curt was talking and joking too loudly. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told him to keep it down. “It’s not a goddamned party that you’re going to the hospital.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Curt mouthed behind his back.

“That was a nothing.” Darrow crouched a few feet from Helen and took her picture. “How’d it go, Prom Queen?”

She wiped her face and made a grimacing smile. “All right.” The way he looked at her, she knew he guessed that she had frozen.

“More excitement than we expected. It’s cleared till it’s not, till it is again. End of lesson today. Take this ride out.”

“No!” If she left now, it would be empty-handed, without a single exposure taken, the risk all for nothing.

“No bodies in the tree line. That means they retreated, probably back to the hamlet, waiting for us. It’s no longer Peace Corps stuff.”

“I can handle it.”

“Enough for today. I’m asking, but Shaffer will order you.”

Helen braced herself as the helicopter pitched, then rose. She crawled, crablike, along the corrugated metal floor over to Curt. Away from the other men, he looked even younger-clear blue eyes slightly dilated from the morphine and a child’s rosy lips.

“Looks like you and me got a ticket out of there,” he shouted in her ear above the roar. “Aren’t we smart?”

“You wouldn’t believe how I worked just to get here.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

She shrugged. “Where’re you from?”

“Philly.”

“I’m from Southern California.”

“Oh man. When I get out of here, I’m going straight to Hermosa Beach and learn to surf.”

“My brother went there all the time.”

“Is it great?”

“Surfing capital.”

She thought of the water off the pier back home, how one day she finally couldn’t bear sitting on the beach with all the girlfriends. She had paddled out on a borrowed board to hoots and howls from Michael and his friends. She had tumbled in the surf, frightened, pounded against the sandy bottom again and again, but she wouldn’t stop trying. The first time she got up on the board and saw the beach ahead of her, she had felt invincible. Everything had happened so fast during the firefight and now her failure was settling in.

“I can’t wait,” Curt said.

“Do you want me to take your picture? I’ll send it to you.”

“Okay.”

She picked up her notebook and as she wrote his dog tag number he grew quiet.

“You promise you’ll send it? Maybe to my parents in case I’m not around.”

“If it’s in this book, you’ll get the photograph.” Helen talked briskly, pretending she had not heard his last words. “They’ll send it to your local paper. You’ll be a hero back home.”

“Fuck the people back home. This wound’ll be patched, and I’ll be back out in the boonies in a few weeks. I promised myself I’d go out and kill me at least one dink before I left here.” He leaned back, and they both remained silent the rest of the way.

When she returned to the hotel that night, she took a long, hot shower. Her first action after returning from the Cholon apartment had been to throw her copy of The Quiet American in the wastebasket, but her room boy, a small, thin-shouldered boy with the long eyelashes of a girl, dug it out of the trash and put it back on the table. Inconceivable to him that a perfectly good book would be thrown out. Now he knocked and gave her a note from Robert that a group of them was having dinner at the hotel dining room and inviting her. She couldn’t face them down to night, especially not after the afternoon’s disaster. She looked at the boy. “I’m done with the book. Would you like it?”

“You sell.” He gestured with his hand, and she was struck by the grace of his movement.

“You sell, keep the money,” she said.

He looked the book over carefully, gave a tender shrug.

“On second thought, leave it here to night. Take it in the morning.” Although she had read it at least a dozen times, she longed to lose herself in it to night, to rest in Fowler’s certainties or Pyle’s innocence. To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book. She had always been an avid reader, but as an adult her reading habits had changed, and only after she had reread a book many times did she claim to begin to understand it.

Her head ached. She had been lying paralyzed in a field earlier that day and now stood in this room the same night, and the two parts were not meant to fit. She slipped into slacks and a loose cream blouse. At first she put on loafers but decided instead on suede pumps. Impossible to be alone on such a night even if it meant joining Robert and that ambivalent crowd. Her saving grace was that only Darrow had witnessed her failure. She poured herself a glass of water and her hand shook as she raised it to her lips. The old-fashioned ceiling fan shuddered above her head. She stared at the shabby bedspread and remembered the glare of the sun on the paddies, making it impossible to see; the fields bleached by the fierceness of the sun. The only vivid color she could recall the red of blood on the young soldier’s thigh. Darrow’s point, of course, that no matter what group she traveled with, one went out alone, hand in hand with only one’s own fear.

Michael. Determined to follow in their father’s footsteps. To outdo him if possible. Graduated with honors. He could have done anything, but he wanted only to be in the elite corps. Because Dad wasn’t. Her father would have been dismissive of what she was doing, unless, of course, she succeeded. But Michael would have been bemused and not surprised at all at his big sister, always trying to play catch-up.

She drank down the glass of water and poured another. The niggling humiliation that she had not snapped even a single picture. The second glass of water gulped down so fast it dribbled down her chin and onto her blouse so that she had to change again. When she finally managed to make her way to the hotel dining room, she couldn’t hide her disappointment that Darrow wasn’t there.

Ed, the straw-haired man from the previous night, grinned. “So how was the maiden voyage out, love?”

She said nothing.

“It’s always a bear, the first couple times,” Gary said.

“Maybe next time you can bring film,” Ed said, laughing.

“You don’t need film where you go, Ed,” Robert said. “Everyone knows the inside of your girlfriend’s thighs.”

The table broke up in laughter. Helen ate quickly, not tasting her food, then excused herself. Had they known because she didn’t make the rounds of the wires to sell her pictures? Or had Darrow told them?

Robert went after her and stopped her in the lobby. She had gone out with Darrow and returned with no pictures, and he hoped that mortification would give him back the upper hand. Time to hang on a man’s arm. He had decided to pretend the previous night, and his defeat, had not happened. “Are you okay?”

“I need sleep is all.” She needed so many things, putting any one thing into words seemed inadequate. “I failed.”

“It’s not a place for a woman. I’m just grateful you came back whole. I’ll check on you in the morning.”

She was so relieved to get away, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. He backed away for a moment, startled, then moved closer.

“Should we have a drink?”

“I need to rest,” she said.

Robert stepped back into the restaurant, stopping at the entrance to light a cigarette. He hadn’t taken her for the sort that fell for a guy like Darrow. Usually his women were the type who for one reason or another couldn’t ask for much. With her intelligence, she must guess the string of women that Darrow discarded. The gold band on his finger a kind of shield against commitment. He watched Helen in the lobby, fumbling through her purse. He would take her down Bourbon Street; they would laugh and dance all night. He liked her. A possibility for that house in his mind, filled with children. But Helen didn’t move toward the elevators; instead she left the hotel and waved down a waiting cyclo. Of course, he thought, he could be wrong.

At the meeting place of silk and lacquered bowl streets, Helen found the moon-shaped entrance of the alley, still puddled from the rain, retracing her path as if she could return to the time before her failure that day. Reckless, she ran through water the color of ink at the alley’s mouth while men stood at the corner and stared, ran through a cacophony of incense and spice smells she could not yet name. Past stores that sold only twine. What had before seemed strange now became soothing. We are hardwired for the comfort of familiarity, she thought. Again, the airless effect of buildings so packed together, the lights within storefronts dim, darkness and closeness smothering her.

She ran down the narrow, murky throat of the path till she saw the yellow building that listed to one side, darkened like a sweat-stained shirt. Looking up, she saw the glow of the lampshade in the window, and the weight on her chest grew lighter despite her anger. Wanting to forget the day, she pushed open the lacquered door, unable to see the peacocks and tigers painted on it, and felt her way up the black, groaning staircase that smelled of cedar and fish.

As she knocked on the door, the sounds of jazz inside and the high staccato of female laughter, made her feel like a fool-the idea that just the sight of Darrow would heal her childish wounds. She turned to escape before anyone came, but the door swung wide open to Darrow holding a glass of scotch in his hand.

“Helen of a Thousand Ships.” He smiled, a victorious plea sure in his eyes.

She stood, unable to move. He was a stranger to her.

“Who’s there?” a voice called.

“Come in,” Darrow said, taking her arm, pulling her inside. The air thick with the grassy smell of pot.

“Jack, it’s our new… intrepid girl reporter.”

Nothing else to do for it, so she hauled back and punched Darrow in the face as hard as she was able, closing her eyes at the point of contact so that when he bent, she wasn’t sure what she’d managed. His glasses flew off, and blood trickled from one nostril.

“What the hell?”

“You ordered me to leave. I had no choice. And then you come back and tell everyone I didn’t take any pictures.”

“I didn’t.”

“Everyone knows.”

“Everyone knows because everyone’s interested in watching you fail, girlie,” Jack said.

Jack was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, a fat, hand-rolled roach pinched between his fingertips. Next to him, a Vietnamese woman was kneeling on a cushion. She had a wide, acne-scarred face, and she winked at Helen, her bright orange lipstick smudged.

“You ignored me. You didn’t help me at all, show me anything.”

“That’s because I treated you out there like a man. No special treatment. Decide what you want.”

“So that’s cleared up,” Jack said. “Introductions.”

Darrow blinked, a napkin against his nose. “That is…”

“Tick-Tock,” Jack said.

Darrow pursed his lips, and she could tell he was drunk. “Formal introductions, please. That is Miss Tick-Tock.”

Jack patted the woman’s thigh. “Just in time for the party. Here, Helen, have a puff of Cambodia ’s finest.”

“Let me pour you a drink,” Darrow said and led Helen to a chair. “Let’s not corrupt her all in one day.”

“If I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

As she sat down, Jack pointed to her feet. “Didn’t anyone tell you not to wear heels in the paddy?” He burst out laughing.

She looked down and saw her ruined suede shoes. Darrow went to the armoire and got a towel. He sat on the floor, took off her shoes, and rubbed her feet. No one had explained how to deal with the residual fear of physical danger; she felt five years old and in need of someone’s arms around her. His eye was red and beginning to swell. Unable to stop, she reached out and ran her fingertips across his cheek. In the most illogical reasoning, she had chosen him because he wouldn’t nurture her like kind, dependable Robert.

“Well, folks,” Jack said. “I’ll leave the joint with you, but I’m going to have to push off.”

“You don’t have to go,” Helen said.

“Actually, we do. Come along, Tick-Tock.”

No one said anything.

“No, please, don’t try and stop me.” Jack got up. “See you around.”

Alone, Helen kept sitting in the chair, Darrow on the floor. He looked at her steadily, waiting.

“Are you okay?”

“No. Not okay. I froze today. Forgot the damn camera was there.”

Darrow touched his eye and winced. “When I first started… You either get over it or you don’t.”

“I feel humiliated.”

“I’ll give you this-as scared as you were, to night I thought you’d be on the first plane home.”

She shook her head. The idea of sealing off her failure for all time was unthinkable. “I’m not going home.”

“Why? You have a criminal record or something?”

She smiled. “Am I going to make it?” She was surprised at the calm and matter-of-factness in her voice.

“Try again. See what happens.” Darrow stood, took her hand, and led her to the bed. “You aroused a bit of curiosity, you know. It’s better for you if I don’t protect you.”

“No one will give me a chance now.”

“It’s always better to beat low expectations.”

“I don’t love you,” she said. “Couldn’t love someone like you.” She kissed his collarbone, his chest above his heart. After all the elusiveness of the last few days, things slipping out of her grasp, this felt right. His skin cool under her lips. No magic, no heart pounding. Just lust, taken neat. Probably he would break her heart in the long run, but she did not quit. Would not give up this moment to avoid that future one. She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather that they fell in love through repetition, just the way someone became brave. She did not love him yet.

Darrow said nothing, only kept pulling her in.

The sickle of moon angled down the narrow alley, lit the precarious room, the ramshackle bed. Darrow traced her profile with his fingertip. He was falling in love in his own way, building a legend that was not quite her. “When I saw you for the first time at dinner, do you know what I thought?”

She turned toward him, her body a smooth spoon of moonlight. “Tell me.”

“I thought, There is a woman who has never been in love. And I wondered, Why? You could have any man at that table. Hell, Robert is ready to marry you and settle down in the bayou.” He had wanted to say something romantic, but he had lost the knack for romance, if he ever possessed it.

On this night she would have preferred the tenderness of lies.

After she had fallen asleep, Darrow rose, put on his glasses, and lit a cigarette. His eye throbbed. Had to hand it to her: She had a good punch. He was a man who always wanted to reach the end of things, stories or people, to understand in order to put them behind him and move on. It had been like that since he was a teenager working in darkrooms in New York, when he heard for the first time the magical names-Pearl Harbor, Mount Suribachi, Tarawa -spoken in the hushed tones one would use in church. Those men who came in with unshaven faces, rumpled clothing, weary eyes. Smelling of leather. Their pictures harsh with white light like a stage: blinding white beaches and billowing, translucent clouds; shadows on palm trees, uprooted coconut logs; shadows on soldiers’ equipment and along the folds of uniforms that gave them the density of monuments. So formative that ever since then he had distrusted oceans and beaches, had felt their menace, always found himself scanning the surf for danger. Many of those men had been past soldiers longing for the heat of battle. He had failed the physical exams-glasses, crooked spine. Photographs were his only entrée to this world of war, a pass to be in the center of the most important story in the world at any specific time.

Helen standing at the end of the table at the restaurant. Sprung from the monsoon outside. Appearing like a spirit in her dark blue soaked dress. Ridiculous, klutzy, sublime. Leaving a trail of wet footprints despite the towels the maître d’ pressed on her.

Even after making love, she evaded him, disappeared under his fingertips. This night had proved only how much of her remained a mystery. A woman who didn’t hate what he did, didn’t begrudge him his obsession, in fact had her own that might be stronger, because more thwarted, than his own. After all the affairs he had had during his four-year marriage, this was the first time he had forgotten to feel guilty.

Helen shifted in her sleep, and he went to her, and her lips formed to his before she was awake.

Helen woke at dawn, bathed in sweat, a nightmare caught in her throat, barely swallowing when she saw the accusing fact of Darrow beside her. A mistake made because she didn’t want to spend the night alone. As the nightmare drained away, it left behind a throb in her temples. Curt from Philly had become Michael on the evacuation helicopter, and the minor leg wound became a fatal evisceration, the blue and green and plum of his insides spilling out of him, and she bucking on the corrugated floor of the helicopter, trying literally to hold her brother together. Then they were on the ground behind the berm. Michael’s eyes-the pale blue recognizable, but the whites yellowed from jaundice, marbled with blood. His face skeletal, hands crusted in dirt, black under his fingernails as he pressed her into the ground as if to bury her, her face in the mud, the helmet cutting her ear, unable to breathe, urine pouring hot down the inside of her legs.

In the soft dawn light, she rose and crept to the bathroom, closed the door, and stood under the trickling of the tepid shower to wash the fact of Darrow from her, the water falling rust-colored at her feet. Michael’s fury, the idea that she was haunting him by entering his war. Her failure still raked against her this morning. Maybe she should give up, go home to California, take up the small life offered to her. Let everyone think it had only been a grand, misguided gesture. Running a washcloth across her throat, she felt her skin, tender and sunburned. She pushed the washcloth between her legs. The water had a metallic smell, like medicine. She wanted to escape down to a café on a quiet street and sip coffee alone and think. Should she return home, tail between her legs? The last part of the dream, Michael and she were inexplicably prone on the ground beside the helicopter, and a group of Vietnamese children approached, circling the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Stones began to fall.

When she opened the bathroom door, her hair wet, a towel wrapped around her damp body, Darrow was sitting up in bed. “Everyone was right about you. You’re some kind of mermaid. Always dripping with water when I see you.”

Defeated by the awkwardness of the moment, she turned prim. “I need to brush my teeth.”

“There’s a fresh brush in the drawer. Rinse with scotch, I’m out of bottled water.”

She nodded, grabbed her clothes, and ducked back into the bathroom. Once dressed, she came out and edged toward the door. “I need to go.”

He leaned over to the nightstand and picked up a key, tossing it to her. “So the door will always be unlocked.”

Glad to have escaped, she was still not ready to go back to her own room. When the cab dropped her at the hotel, she walked through the streets of downtown and along the river walk, tired and overwhelmed by the strangle of noise, movement, and people. Beggars clogged the streets, and young ex-soldier amputees with sullen, closed faces lounged in doorways and along walls. The city bristled, full of dirty children and starving animals. The tension in the air unnerved her. Even the effort to decipher it seemed crushing.

She longed to return to her room, be cool and clean, close the curtains and lie in semidarkness, but she couldn’t be alone just yet. Visions of home became more per sis tent, filled with more and more longing-the wide streets along the beach, the green mossy lawns, the Vs of pelicans flying along the cliffs. Along Duong Hai Ba Trung, makeshift vendors sold sodas, the dusty bottles lying in boxes of crushed ice in the shade. The heat made them tempting, but she was frightened by stories of ground glass put in the drinks by VC.

Walking on and on, she neglected to check street signs, indecipherable anyway for the most part. She wandered for an hour in a labyrinth, then found herself back on Tu Do and felt pleased to be back at the familiar. As she passed along a row of shops, a cool, mint green bedspread in a store window caught her eye. The smooth fabric glowed in the dimness of the store. Helen was sure that if she touched it, it would be as cool as stepping onto a dewy lawn in the quiet of early morning back home. She went inside to ask the price.

The woman behind the counter barely looked up from her bookkeeping. Dark blond hair coiled into a bun with two weaponlike black lacquered sticks to hold it in place. Her face was pale and dry and powdered, painted crimson lips. For a moment, the store was so quiet Helen could hear the buzzing of a fly at the window and forgot if she had asked for the price or not. Then the woman spoke with a French accent. “That is expensive. Hand-embroidered silk from Hong Kong.”

Again she dismissed Helen’s presence, scratching at her ink-splotched columns of figures with an antique fountain pen. After a moment, she reached under her desk and brought out a large flyswatter that she snapped at the window behind her. Then the store fell into utter silence.

Helen turned and was startled by the sight of two Vietnamese women sitting in high-backed, rush-bottomed chairs. Neither of them looked up at her, not slowing down or missing a single stitch in their sewing.

Although they both had deeply lined faces, their hair, identically done up in tight buns, shone jet black. They wore matching black silk dresses, perfectly fitted from a fashion in vogue in Paris forty years back, consisting of tight bodices and long, flowing skirts. Heads bent down, they embroidered with the tiniest, most delicate stitch on silk cloth. So intent, so silent, Helen had not noticed their presence on first entering the store, their chairs on either side of the door to the supply room like bookends in a museum.

As Helen turned away, one of them, the older woman it appeared, began to murmur under her breath in French to the other. Helen could understand them no better than if they had spoken in Vietnamese. What new event could possibly have occurred to prompt conversation in this tomb except her entrance?

She turned back to the Frenchwoman, challenged now by her dismissal. “I’ll take it.”

The woman looked up, penciled eyebrows arched. “Lovely, I’ll wrap it with a large bow. I’m the owner, Annick.”

Helen leaned against the counter, dizzy from the heat and her lack of breakfast. The seamstresses, self-contained as sphinxes, were oblivious to her distress. She looked down and saw that her blouse had half-moons of sweat under the arms, and she was even more depressed by her water-ruined shoes. The Frenchwoman had undoubtedly noticed all this; probably that was the subject of the seamstresses’ conversation also. As she turned, she felt a warm stickiness between her legs, and realized that she had forgotten her time of the month. Simply too much to bear, and in frustration, to her horror, she began to cry.

“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’Elysées. 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 sautéed 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.