Stray Love (22 page)

“Actually, my advice,” he said as he stood to leave, “is to forget about people. You’re better off drawing trees.”

When I returned to the hotel room an hour later, Oliver was busy packing a large canvas bag. Laid out on the table were a canteen, a jack knife, mosquito repellent and a flashlight.

“I’m travelling to the countryside with Joseph for a few days,” he said, making it sound as if he were heading off for rolling meadows, fields of wildflowers.

“The
countryside?
“ I shot him a look. “I thought you were going to stay near Saigon. You promised you’d leave the dangerous reporting to others. Anyway, it’s
jungle,
not countryside.”

“Don’t worry, Marcel. Anyway, it’s not combat. And if there’s any danger, Joseph will protect me. We’re flying on the MACV Skytrain together.”

“Oliver.”

“How was the portrait business today?” he asked, switching the subject.

“Fine.”

“I saw you chatting with Arnaud.”

“Yeah.” I waited for him to say something more about Arnaud, but he returned to his packing.

I watched as he sorted his identification papers and money and matches into condoms and tied the tops closed. The jungle was wet and alive. There were streams and ditches all over Vietnam.

“Precautions,” he said with a wink.

When Anh arrived with dinner, the table was still edged with a row of condoms filled with Oliver’s pocket valuables.

I
T’S NOT AS IF I’M UNAWARE
. It’s not as though I don’t know how a meal can carry on as usual, thick with the unspoken.

For the past ten minutes, Iris and I have been sitting across from each other at the table having lunch. Iris has combed her hair so that it is long and loose and parted severely in the middle like Morticia Addams. She has put on some makeup that she found in the medicine cabinet.
Property of another roommate?
For the past two minutes, she has been pushing her salad around on her plate, seemingly bored and inconvenienced by the pumpkin seeds and pea shoots I tossed in for variey. The entire time I have been making random serving utterances—
more baguette? juice?
—to fill the silence. I wonder if an eleven-year-old can have an eating disorder. When did she become so quiet?

I don’t know if she is still wondering about the books, but I feel the need to say something. So, as simply as I can, I tell her the truth. I tell her that at a certain point in my life, I needed those books, I needed to see the things that were hard to look at, to gather evidence of what the war had done. There was a gap between what Oliver had seen and felt and what I could imagine, and if I was ever going to touch Oliver again, I needed to close that gap.

She pours some juice for herself while observing me steadily. “Did it work?”

“Not really.”

The worst of the images made me feel sick, a few brought a twinge of excitement, some brought horror, others brought shame. Arms torn from their sockets, babies tossed into ditches, wounds shown with laparoscopic closeness. The shame was complicated. It was the genital shame of viewing the pornographic, then it was the shame of bringing harm to the dead, of being alive, of not feeling sad enough. What I realized, in the
end, was that sometimes the gap, that unthinkable barrier, the one that war creates between men and the people they love, cannot be closed.

“So you filled your eyes with all that”—she gestures vaguely towards the studio—“for nothing.”

“Not for nothing.”

She nods but her expression is unresolved. What is it? Disbelief? Pity? Amusement?

“My mother said that you get down in the dumps sometimes.”

“Oh? What else did she say?”

“You get quiet.”

“And?”

“That you used to love each other.”

“She said that?”

“No. I guessed.”

There’s no point in disagreeing. She’s too smart for that.

“Was it long ago?” she asks, finally.

“No. Not really. I know you’re maybe too young to understand this but it was yesterday. Twenty-six years ago and yesterday. When it’s unfinished business, it’s the same thing.”

When I was twenty-four, Kiyomi and I bought a tiny flat together in Hackney. After a few years of temporary arrangements and communal houses, of living sometimes together and sometimes apart, Kiyomi wanted to create a stable home life for us—a home with fresh semigloss, matching red cups, cheerful Marimekko towels. She was turning that picture of her and me, the one we had nurtured as children, into something real.

At first I happily went along with it, but then something happened. One day I woke up and the mere act of buying a
toaster seemed like the endeavour of a madcap visionary. The simplest things suddenly became outrageous. Shopping for fruit and veg in Ridley Road. The rubbish collectors dragging
our trash
to the curb. The shadows of a tree dancing across
our wall.
The future implied by
our spare room,
however minuscule. The idea of a child seemed ridiculous, impossible.

I didn’t want to see all that delicate imagining, our dreamt future, crushed by reality. It worried me that Kiyomi might have to spring off, that there was some wildness in her that would need to be expressed, some quiet secret that would grow loud. As for myself, I was still trying to escape the grown-ups. I couldn’t see myself making much of a father, not after my disrupted childhood. So I made a pre-emptive decision.

I asked her to let me go.

How could I have known that the unwinding process would be infinite, that in the end all the ties would remain—circumstance, history, Kiyomi—tugging at me, no matter which future direction I took?

With self-preservation in mind, I walked away. I limped on, believing that fidelity was hopeless and love was a scar.

Let me go.
It is the opposite of what I want to say now. Today I want to say,
Kiyomi, I made a mistake.
I want to tell her I can’t stand the lack of her in my life. But all that seems too hungry, too needy. To speak so bluntly might upset the tentative intimacy I have felt budding between us this past week. So I need to find other words, ones that won’t go crashing into the world. Sometimes you have to have the lightest touch to lift a heavy heart, to speak at all.

Let me go.
She did this as if she had been expecting it all
along. Twenty-six years ago, we parted abruptly, coldly, and she responded with nearly a decade of silence. I copied Oliver and gave myself over to my work, thinking it would give me emotional sustenance. What eventually replaced the silence was tepid friendship (hers) and aching regret (mine).

I remember it now. Kiyomi sitting on the bed in a T-shirt and underwear. When I said
Let me go,
I hoped she would stop me.

I finally call her back and say, “Before I put Iris on the line, I was wondering if you’d come to London for my birthday.” I say, “Please, Kiyomi, just for a weekend. Come sit with me for a bit. Let me draw you again.”

There’s a pause, while we both acknowledge the erotic undertone, and then she says, “I’ll think about it,” and after another moment, “Iris seems to have taken a shine to you.”

When I get off the phone I feel a mixture of high and low, which may just be what
alive
feels like. I turn to Iris and announce that I need new books, so we head off to Waterstone’s in Notting Hill Gate.
The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
for me. Lemony Snicket for Iris. Then we go to see the Paul Klee show at the Hayward Gallery. Playful, rhyming lines. Happy paintings.

O
LIVER AND
J
OSEPH LEFT FOR THE FIELD
the next morning and seemed to take the terrace with them. The tables sat empty and as much as I wished to see him, Arnaud did not reappear. For days the hotel rattled and sighed with emptiness. I planted myself at a corner table and watched the waiters talking among
themselves, practicing their new English words, while wiping the tables, again and again—an endless, useless activity, with all the dust flying through the air.

On the street, the General spent less time marching and more time standing under shady shop awnings. The striped hems flapped in the wind above his head. Down the street, two men hoisted a big sign onto a former French grocery. The word Bunny appeared in bubbly pink letters. A second sign leaning against the wall said Club.

I carried a sketch pad but no longer bothered with the easel. I took Arnaud’s advice and tried to draw people secretly, with sly glances, sketching as quickly as I could. Sometimes I drew outside all day and when my skin began to darken as a result, Anh bought me a canvas hat to wear. My drawings began to crowd the walls of my room. Anh said it was like visiting an art gallery. At night when I lay in bed, I could feel the fingers of my right hand curling around an invisible pencil.

Oliver returned, then left on patrol. Returned and left.

Downstairs in the lobby, I began to hear new words.
Strategic hamlets, Napalm, Daisy cutters, Agent Orange, Eagle flights,
hints of the horrors to come.

I had finally started receiving very short fact-filled letters from Pippa.
Random details about your mother (part one): She taught herself French. She spent a lot of time feeding birds in Orme Square. She brought home a used bicycle when you were still a baby. The neighbours say she sang a lot.

They said nothing earth-shaking but I read them in private and hid them in my night-table drawer when I was done.

One morning Oliver went downstairs and picked up the mail before I did. When I awoke, he was standing by the balcony window, holding an envelope up to the window.

“From Pippa?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“For you?”

“No. For you.”

“Oliver, can you not do that, please? Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

Left alone again, instead of studying I began paying more attention to the shoeshine boys on the street. I watched them heckle pedestrians at intersections and disappear behind pulses of exhaust when the traffic was thick. They moved like cats. They would sidle up to the terrace, rattling their wooden boxes, and tell anyone who was sitting there how bad their shoes looked. Sometimes they would dive right in and clean and buff until they were kicked away.

“Hey, Mr. Dirty Shoe, you want a shine? Very cheap. Ten cent.”

If they were turned down, they put away their rags and black polish and combed the area for other sources of income: the wallets peeking out from gaping pockets, the cameras left on tables, anything that could be pilfered and sold.

I began to give the boys secret names. There was Mr. Ten Cent (the leader), Mr. Dirty Lung (always exhaling cigarettes) and the youngest of them, Mr. Red Cap. I guessed that they were all about my age. No one had ever told me that malnutrition could make a child look younger than he really was; and that sometimes it was better that way because a boy who looked ten was safe from the war.

I was sitting at my usual table on the terrace on a sunny Sunday morning when out of the corner of my eye I saw an object flapping and realized it was the magazine I had been reading:
LIFE,
with a smiling and sweaty photograph of Cassius Clay on the cover.

“Hey. Give that back,” I said.

Ignoring me, the boy I called Mr. Ten Cent flipped through the magazine, stopping at a shot of Clay in a boxing ring, upper body rising in a wave of victory. He tapped the picture excitedly with his finger.

“I am the muscle like this guy. I am a protector of small boys.”

Up close I saw that Mr. Ten Cent had a miniature barrel chest, and downy hair growing above his upper lip. He was small but wore an undershirt with suspenders and sucked on a toothpick in a way that made him look tough. He tossed the magazine back onto the table.

“Urrr always reading. Always sitting at the same old table. You should come wip us.”

The next morning when I was sitting on the terrace, Mr. Ten Cent returned.

“Hey, big guy, what are you gonna do today?” He planted his foot on his battered shoeshine box and spat on the ground.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Why don’t you do something?”

“I am doing something. I’m drawing.”

“Oh. Rrrr you a famous artist? Big nam artist?”

“No.”

“Ai! Ow artist suppose to make money wip no nam?” He spat again. “Forget drawing.”

A large blond man walked by.

“Hey, Mister Boston-Mass,” Mr. Ten Cent shouted after him. “Long time no see.”

“You stole my glasses!” the man yelled over his shoulder.

Mr. Ten Cent turned back to me and shrugged.

He pointed at my sketch pad.

“Okay, big guy. Tomorrow you do something. No, not with your eyes. With your feet. Now I go or Mister Alan is taking my pay because I am fucking late. But tomorrow I come here same time and take you around. You be ready, okay?”

The next morning I dressed quickly and told Anh I was going to the bookstore to spend a few quiet hours. She waved me off with a wet rag. There was a time between nine and eleven-thirty in the morning when she liked to do most of her cleaning and meal preparation for the day. During this time, she counted on me to occupy myself without supervision. As I left her that morning, I tried to feel that I was merely extending my range and not disobeying her.

The shoeshine boys led me roaming through the city, improvising games along the way. We walked gangplanks and pretended to be pirates; kicked a coconut shell and pretended to be football champions. At Cong Vien Van Hoa Park, we sat around the fountain and whistled at schoolgirls bobbing for peeled pineapples with their arms behind their backs. Two of the girls held a pole from which the pineapples swung back and forth. The shoeshine boys hooted and cheered every time someone dived in for a bite. We headed over to the Brinks Hotel, an American officers’ residence near the Continental, and pestered the men going in and out past the guards. The officers wore sweat-soaked utility shirts decorated with gold
U.S. Army
insignias. On their heads were green berets or faded baseball caps, which they removed to mop the sweat beading their foreheads. I found a Zippo lighter on the ground and put it in my pocket. An officer named Morgan (
Morgan
sewn right there on his shirt) pulled out a pack of gum and began tossing foil-wrapped sticks at us.