Fake House (16 page)

“Shoeshine?”

“Sure.”

The kid crawls under the table.
What the hell
, he thinks. He waves at a waiter and points at his empty bottle.

Eight twenty-five
P.M.
, and she is definitely not coming
. On the street the lights have come back on.
I’m drunk and I’m not disappointed. At least I’ve had a chance to experience the California Fine View. Everything in life is serendipity. If I had stayed at home, I would have learned nothing. The window of my rented room looks straight into another window across a six-foot-wide alley
. The California Fine View is now noisy with celebrating Taiwanese. Middle-aged men with teenage Vietnamese escorts. He waves at a waiter for his check.

The check tells him that by drinking three Heinekens and a lemonade alone, he has spent a week’s salary.
The hell with it
, he thinks.
Extravagance is a necessity every once in a while. You must will yourself to shift your paradigm every once in a while
. He rises halfway out of his chair, then quickly sits down again. He wiggles his socked toes for a moment, then ducks his head under the table. There is nothing on the floor but a toothpick and a soiled napkin. He
looks and looks but cannot find what he is looking for. When he is upright again, he sees the smiling waiter, Mr. Calvin Klein aftershave, clearing his table. “Is anything wrong?”

10×50

Hua Trung
. Male, 22, 5-5, 115 lbs. Dark. Bad teeth. Does odd jobs for money. Crawled into the sewer a few days ago. If made 20,000 in the morning, will spend 4,000 on noodles in the afternoon then gamble away the rest. When eighteen, molested a five-year-old girl.

Ly Lan
. Female, 23, 5-6, 124 lbs. Wears padded bras. Always joking about money. Often donates money to Buddhist temples. Gets boys to spend money on her, then leaves them. Will probably marry a Taiwanese twice her age with a missing limb. Speaks Vietnamese, Chinese, and ten words of English.

Tran Nam Thai
. Male, 31, 5-3, 98 lbs. Rejected by the army for not meeting weight requirement. Buys rusty jeep parts, then resells them. Has a son in America he’s never seen. Does not talk, but honks (with lips sticking out). Wears CK aftershave. Dates a girl who sells pork.

Nguyen Thi Thom
. Female, 21, 5-4, 130 lbs. Incompetent, illiterate domestic servant. Sleeps on the floor next to a black dog. Slurs every other word. Giggles whenever anyone says “love.” Has memorized the name of every Hong Kong movie actor. Father is a violent drunk. Very interested in Hua Trung.

Duong Quang Long
. Male, 26, 5-8, 145 lbs. Cocaine addict. Likes to surf the Internet and go to “a beer and a hug” cafés. Has a tomboyish daughter. Pregnant wife swallowed pills a month ago in an attemped suicide. Does not come home most nights. Very fond of gold fish.

Doan Thi Hoai
. Female, 19, 5-2, 106 lbs. Placed next-to-last in the neighborhood fashion show. Likes to wear see-through blouses in the evening. Has never seen the ocean, a mountain, a horse, or someone of another race. Works in a shoe factory. Is saving to buy a bicycle.

Nguyen Manh Tuan
. Male, 38, 5-4, 127 lbs. A strict vegetarian. Has a room in his house devoted to the Goddess of Mercy. Said to have a tiny penis. In early youth, hit on every boy in the neighborhood. A fan of Michael Jackson and Renaldo. Has sworn off pornography.

Bui Phung Hoa
. Female, 43, 4-10, 96 lbs. A lifelong Communist and a virgin. Good with numbers. Although first love escaped by boat from Vietnam twenty years ago, still stares at his photographs regularly. Likes to copy a long poem into a notebook before sleep. Enjoys scrutinizing maps and dictionaries.

Nguyen Huy Loc
. Male, 40, 5-7, 141 lbs. Sleeps with older women for money. Estranged from wife. Always fantasizing about emigrating to Australia to become a sheep farmer. Once locked self inside a darkened room for two months to draw pornographic pictures on the walls with a crayon. A poet.

Vu Thanh Thao
. Female, 32, 5-1, 108 lbs. Has three children fathered by two men, four abortions. Finished last in the neighborhood fashion show. In early youth, was convinced she would become a famous singer. Was mistress to a famous Buddhist monk for a year. Paints nails for a living.

T
HE
H
IPPIE
C
HICK

A
s my father would have said, “It don’t make no logical sense, spending half an hour to save a nickel.” We were sitting on beach chairs on a cement-floored veranda facing the South China Sea. Across the Pacific Ocean was our ranch home in Oregon, a mere dot on the hazy horizon. Directly in front of us, across a wobbly card table, was a platoon of peddlers. Mostly women and children, they were hawking everything from postcards of Halong Bay—a thousand miles to the north—to mangosteens, to guavas, to pirated copies of Marguerite Duras’s
The Lover
, to tiny tortoises made from snail shells Super Glued together. As my wife haggled, her face appeared distressingly old, her voice mournful and threatening at the same time. Although I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, the language, as usual, was getting on my nerves. Back home we only spoke English to each other. (Or, rather, back home we only spoke a permutation of English to each other.) The haggling had picked up in intensity. Vietnamese seems
to have been invented specifically for haggling. That, and Spanish. Before we came to Vietnam, I’d never seen my wife haggle.

Shut up already
, I thought, but said nothing. I smiled. My wife shot me a quick glare. I picked up my mug of Tiger beer and chug-a-lugged its content, ice cubes included, in one determined draft, spilling a third of it on my sunburned chest. Flakes of curled skin were entangled in my chest hair. It felt good to have cold beer on my toasted chest. I smiled again. My wife returned to her haggling, allowing me to steer my gaze toward the hippie chick, who was lying on the beach about fifty feet away.

The hippie chick had propped herself up onto her elbows. I had seen her for the first time only the night before, at the Inside Outside Bar, chatting up the young bartender in a mishmash of Vietnamese and English while drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream. She had a droning, lisping voice caused by two decades of bong hits. Wearing a low scoop-necked blouse, she would lean over the bar periodically, and dramatically, to remind us all that she was braless. She was not sitting on her stool but
squatting
on it—I’m not sure why. Judging from the crow’s-feet, she was at least thirty-five, and from her accent, Australian. And a world-class swimmer too, I must add.

There were no babes on the beach except for the hippie chick. A dozen schoolgirls were splashing in shorts and T-shirts. An old lady marched into the surf in her floral pajamas. Venice Beach it wasn’t.

Sensing my stare, the hippie chick tilted her head back and smiled. A grotesque upside-down smile.
To hell with it
, I thought,
what had happened had already happened. I did not actually do anything wrong.… She was at least partially responsible. I was bombed. We were the only two white people on Strawberry Beach
.

I had been extremely good, angelic even, for nearly a month, ever since we arrived in Vietnam, so it was very unfortunate that, with only a few more days to go, what happened had to happen.

I had certainly had my opportunities.

During our first night in Saigon, as I was circling the block of our hotel, disoriented, two prostitutes, working in tandem, jumped my bones. I was pretending to examine the façade of a huge colonial building, a theater of some sort, when a tiny hand with a very firm grip yanked me off the sidewalk and onto a moped. Before I knew what had happened, I was sandwiched in between two perfumed women and taken on a mile-long joyride.

They dragged me into a little house cocooned in an alley. There was almost nothing in the room. On the lime-green wall was a year-old calendar—1997—and the rayon sheet on the square bed had a printed pattern of cartoon whales, penguins, and giraffes. No air-conditioning. The hum of air-conditionings was the most reassuring sound in Vietnam. It meant that you were away from the rabble. I gave them a twenty-dollar bill just to leave me alone. “No! No!” I shouted, raising my hands, palms outward, to shoulder level. “No! No!”

They were certainly doable, very beautiful and very young also, but I did absolutely nothing, even after they had taken all their clothes off.

Those two girls were yakking and giggling to each other, and in the nude, too, so of course I was provoked, but I do love my wife dearly, and that’s the honest truth.

Mai Lan, that’s my wife’s name (some people call her Amy), was a student in my ESL class. That’s how I met her. It was my first (and last) stab at charity work, and I was certainly not a very good teacher. The agency promptly let me go after a semester. It
wasn’t entirely my fault. The students were idiots. Most of them were obstinately slow in picking up on even the most basic instructions: the past is past tense, adjectives before nouns. Laotians, Pakistanis, Ethiopians, etc., some were probably illiterate even in their own language.

Not to imply that Mai Lan was an illiterate, but she would be confused by very basic words, such as
me
and
you
, and use them interchangeably. Likewise
yesterday
and
tomorrow
. At first I thought it was some sort of philosophical flimflam, a poker-face witticism, before I realized that she was not capable of witticism. One day Mai Lan approached me after class and said, apropos of nothing, “Morning coffee in my home?”

We were married less than a month later. No ambivalence. No tunnel warfare between the sexes. No nothing. She wanted a green card and a husband. I wanted a wife. Just like that, we became man and wife.

Mai Lan was twenty-eight at the time. I was forty. Man to man, I will confide to you that she was a virgin. No joke. There was blood on my dick.

Not that it mattered, but considering the fact that in our society, by the time you’re thirty, you have slept with at least a hundred individuals already, creatures of every ilk imaginable: straight, gay, bi, bipolar, infants, seniors, dogs, and so forth, it was refreshing to meet someone who was genuinely
clean
.

But maybe Mai Lan was, and is, an illiterate. (She was certainly one of the worst students in my class.) I have never seen her read a book or a newspaper. And even now, three years into our marriage, we can hardly converse for more than a few seconds at a time. What does it matter, anyway, since there are so many other ways to channel one’s affection?

My wife’s broken English, to me, is her most endearing trait.

One of the biggest shocks I had coming to Vietnam was in discovering how talkative Mai Lan actually is. In her own language she could babble on to almost anyone. It was disturbing to detect a whole new range of expressions on her face. The nuances and complexities. I found myself keeping an uneasy tab on this development, to store away her hidden repertoire for my future reference in the United States.

Enough of this haggling
, I thought. I stood up. “I’m going into the water.”

“Go ahead!”

I tiptoed quickly over the hot sand. The hippie chick was lying perfectly still, apparently sleeping. She had to be exhausted from all that swimming the night before. “You’ll never catch me,” she had shouted, her head a bobbing blur in the moonlit water. I had known that she was naked although I could not prove it.

She had toyed with me. The hippie chick would disappear for a very long time, then buoy up, suddenly, on my right, then left, then right, then left, laughing the whole time. She knew I had no chance. Most of the time I was just floating in place, trying to figure out where the hell she was at. She even had the balls to grab me from below, trying to yank my shorts down! I kicked my leg out instinctively but struck nothing. How that girl managed to see underwater I’ll never know. When I could no longer see the blinking lights from the beach, I freaked out and had to swim back.