Stray Love (29 page)

I went and got my sketchbook and stood on the balcony. I decided to make one last drawing of Saigon. My pen quaked over rooftops, the sharp juttings of the Opera House, the soft uneven swoop of a broken restaurant awning, a lone tree. When I was done I thumbed through the rest of my book. Now I turned to my movie star clippings and ripped out the pages and let them go. All my fantasies and all the stupid hopes I had pinned to my mother were useless. My mother could not be anyone any more. She could only be Pippa, flawed and unpredictable. I watched the pages float down to the street—with big, slow swoops, like tired birds.

Just before we left for the airport the next morning, I made a drawing for the hotel maid. She was replacing towels and emptying wastebaskets and moving her trolley down the corridor, wiping away people’s lives with her spritzer and supply of fresh notepads and mini-soaps. I had forgotten her name but I knew it wasn’t Sue, even though the name tag on her new hotel frock said it was. I drew her a picture of a giant dao tree. For some reason, I wanted her to remember us. I went up and shook her hand and told her she was free to keep anything we had left behind.

In reality, I wanted to draw a picture for Pippa. I was eager for some meaningful exchange, anything, some swap of intimacy. Oliver’s phone calls and cables to her had gone unanswered. It
seemed cruel that after waiting so long to meet my mother, she still wasn’t within reach. I
needed
to see her. I had words to say.

Even though I had contradicted Oliver when he said it, the truth was that a part of me
had
known all along. Children always know somehow. They know instinctively but if the knowledge is too painful, they push it away. They snap their eyelids shut, hoping to make difficult situations disappear. They escape to fantasy. And not just children.

Still, from the moment I met Pippa, I saw and felt someone familiar, someone who understood me. I don’t know if it was an umbilical thread, some imprint left in infancy, but I knew.

I knew. I would tell her that.

I
N A SIMILAR WAY
, Iris has known about me. That day she snooped around my studio, the day of the war books, she found a photo.

“I was just looking for scissors. The ones in the kitchen were all goopy,” she says now.

We are sitting on my small deck sharing breakfast before we go shopping for the weekend. Iris has barely touched her eggs. There is a mystery novel by her elbow. I have been staring down at the street, watching two young boys shed their coats while their mother follows behind, warm sun on her pale underslept face.

“That person you considered marrying,” Iris now says. “Who was she?”

I feel myself stiffen. Her voice is pointed and I can see from the corner of my eye that she is leaning forward in her chair. I hear her foot tap under the table.

Then, with the gruffness of a Mafia don, she says: “How
about you write down her name and I give you back the photo?”

She takes my hesitation as compliance and rises from the table, returning with a pen and a rigid square card.

I look at the card and take a deep breath in:
It’s time for the truth now.
Then I write down the name.

She opens the novel and hands me the photo, which had been tucked between its pages.

I try to smile as I look at it: 1972. A beautiful bride and a groom who, even I can see, is still pulling himself together, impersonating a whole person.

I put the photo down and begin pouring granola into a bowl. I want my interrogator to return to her breakfast, but she obviously won’t do that. Nothing will deter her, not vodka or gin or contraband cigarettes, not eggs.

So I explain, “The photograph was taken at Kensington and Chelsea Register Office. That’s where we got married. We lived together for four years before I lost courage and left. It’s not something I’m very proud of. And there’s no way to justify it except to say I think I didn’t know how to stop waiting and wanting and to start holding onto what I already had.”

She looks at me with a frown.

“I didn’t know how to be content.”

Or maybe I wasn’t ready to reverse my unhappiness yet. Kiyomi could always be counted on to do exactly the right-wrong thing. For example, when my head was a closed box she was the one who poked it open with pinholes of light.

I look back at the photograph while Iris, channelling Marlon Brando, asks if I still love her mother. I don’t answer for a moment. I think of the way Kiyomi and I used to stay up late
dancing by ourselves in the living room, and how I taught her to drive, and she taught me to swim, and how late at night our limbs would rest together, entwined, even when we were drawn back in our own solitary thoughts, and finally I nod.
Yes.

And Iris says, “Well? Then?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

She stares at me. “Do you ever wonder why my mother sent me here?”

I don’t know how to respond.

“You’re not the only friend she could have asked.”

I nod again, while the information sinks in. My heart is nervous, fluttering. Kiyomi seeking
me
out? And then I say, “Any suggestions for winning back an old love?”

“Not really,” Iris says with a shrug. “But I think in your case it might be like drawing. Maybe it’s better not to think too much. Don’t worry so much about getting your house to look like a real one.”

Sometimes it’s better to have a lopsided but true life. I think that’s what she’s saying. I nod and thank her, even though I have no idea whether she’s rooting for me or just making an observation.

W
HEN WE CAME BACK FROM
S
AIGON
, the ground was wetter than I remembered it ever being, but not tropical. There were no swaying palm trees or parks filled with exotic flora. The cars drove in straight lines and sidewalks were not used as extra traffic lanes during rush hour.

The train fare had gone up.

The skirts were shorter.

There was a new bounciness to the way women walked, a swing to their hips. I tried not to stare.

We moved back into another furnished flat on New King’s Road with money Oliver borrowed from the Bownes. Number 51, just another house in a row of identical houses—matching doors, matching stoops—on and on.

The old phone number we had for Pippa, my mother, was out of service.

We went to the flat she used to share with Stasha but it was vacant and there were workers inside refinishing the floor. Oliver asked for permission to look around but all we discovered was an empty room, with naked hanging lights and bare walls with thumbtack holes. I breathed in the dust. I walked
around the room and found a gold ribbon wound around a doorknob with the words
You Win Gold
printed on it. I don’t know what we had imagined, maybe that we would walk in and see Pippa waiting for us on her worn settee.

“I don’t think she’s coming back,” I said, slipping the gold ribbon loose and putting it in my pocket.

“No. Maybe not.”

We took walks through Eel Brook Common, where I half expected to find her, maybe sitting on a swing or photographing a tree, but she was not there. Still, we returned each morning, slowing walking the perimeter, like patients on the grounds of a sanatorium.

We were not at our best. I walked about, feeling removed from the world. London was a giant toy city. I seemed not to be part of things. I watched children playing ball in the street or running around the playground and thought their games looked empty and futile.

Oliver avoided the grass and hedges, refused to sit on a bench with his back to the street, confused starlings for lobbed grenades, mistook the crunching sound of bicycle tires on gravel for machine-gun fire.

Some mornings he stayed in bed just because he was afraid to open his eyes and see and meet nothing but darkness. He still slept at the edge of the mattress, ready to spring up. When I saw him like that I wondered:
How do you survive the survivor?
To help calm him, I brought in the radio and turned the dial to classical music. I left the window open a crack. I thought the music and fresh air might flush him out. I knew he was stopped up with guilt.

Slowly we improved. Oliver began eating proper meals
and started grooming and venturing out more. But those were the easy transitions. The harder shift was one of identity. For Oliver this was a comic-book-hero adjustment. Having flown around the world, he had now returned to his earthly mortal form; resigned himself to the tininess of his life. (How little a mortal’s pulse raced! How few beats a mortal’s heart skipped!) To console him, I moved all the souvenirs and artifacts of his travels into his bedroom: a Moroccan table lamp; handmade soapstone chess pieces neatly arranged on his bookshelf; a geometric rug from Togo; a Kente cloth wall panel.

Strange things made us wistful. Oliver would react to a room full of men smoking cigarettes, the sight of an overflowing ashtray, in the way someone else might respond to a fragrant lilac bush that had scented his childhood. I would look at brown men walking down the street and wonder what it would have been like if my real father had known about me. Would he have stayed? Would Pippa have risen to the occasion? The thoughts were terrible. Sensing danger, Oliver and I tried to shape our nostalgia into safer contours. He began reminiscing about Coronation cakes. I asked if he would make an Irish stew he used to make years before. All our hankerings—past and present, big and small—were mixed up. But mostly we missed Pippa.

While visiting Mr. and Mrs. Bowne one day, Oliver picked up a silver-plated frame that sat on the mantlepiece and popped out an old photograph of Mr. Bowne in soldier’s uniform and slipped the frame into his jacket pocket. When he got home, he replaced it with a photograph he kept of Pippa.

Little by little, my feeling of apartness lifted. I was back in touch with Kiyomi, Natsumi and Stasha, who all claimed to miss Pippa too. I found it puzzling that no one knew her
exact whereabouts. They said she was visiting family, my family, in Montreal, Canada. They said that she was on vacation in Morocco. That she was working on a window display contract for Le Bon Marché in Paris. But they couldn’t keep their stories straight. Hoping to gather more information, I went to see Pippa’s friend Jean Cordon, who still worked in the lingerie department at Marble Arch.

Jean was busy cleaning when I arrived. At first she claimed she had no idea where Pippa was. We were standing in the slip section under bright overhead lights.

“Haven’t seen her in about two months,” she said. “She convinced the boss to hire her back for a short while, but that didn’t work out, did it.”

“Did they argue about window displays?”

“That and other things. Step over here, love. You looked squashed between those two racks.”

Jean spritzed and buffed a metal shelf while she talked. “Sorry about all this. We’ve got a Hygiene Campaign underway. Every corner spotless. A war on dirt. Long live the Marksist Revolution! Right, love?”

She took me around the counter and showed me her arsenal of cleaning supplies, and for a moment I felt so sad and heartbroken thinking of Anh I could barely speak.

“She talked about you, though,” Jean continued. “She had a photo of you in her purse.”

I eyed her for a moment. “Did you know?”

She nodded yes.

Did everyone know?

Then her face softened a bit and she said: “I’ll tell you that she came back to London because of you. She could have stayed on the continent where she had good wages and an independent
lifestyle. It was you that brought her back here. And I figure she’ll return again when she’s right and ready.”

“From?”

Silence.

“Please help me, Jean.”

“From Paris.”

I stared at Jean and nodded.

Before I left, Jean tucked two rolls of biscuits into a bag for me and gave me a hug.

“She used to say there were times that you looked at her like you knew.”

I shook my head. “I looked at her because I loved her.”

On my way out, I took one last glance at the main window before I headed for the bus. A display of mannequins in the season’s olive and brown palette, stiff arms frozen in mid-robot-dance.

I confronted Oliver now and then.

“You know, all that time I was asking about her, and wondering where she was, and you were pretending—”

“I wasn’t pretending. I didn’t know where she was.”

“But we could have traced her. Stasha, my aunt, all those people you knew in common … I bet they would have given you a phone number. We could have found her. Why didn’t you?”

“It’s complicated. I guess I felt that wherever she was, if I didn’t hear otherwise, she was probably doing well. I think she felt her life was too small when she was with us. I wanted her to
want
to come back.”

As deceived as I felt, when he said that I also felt that I had somehow failed, that I could have changed events if only I had
been more …
something.
My real father kept wandering into my thoughts. I wanted to ask about him but I was also scared to find out. The words
So where is my father, really?
just wouldn’t come. How much truth could one person bear? I needed to wait.

When we ran out of money from the Bownes, Oliver began working again. He didn’t want to return to Novus but reporting was all he knew. He placed calls and sent out a few letters and awaited a response. Days later, Oliver awoke to a ringing phone. It was his old desk editor at the
Chicago Tribune.

He was hired to write short roundups for the new international gossip section. Local events, celebrity news, sightseeing tips, small budget, nothing weighty. He started shaving more regularly, cut down on Nescafé and cigarettes, developed an addiction to boiled sweets and gained a few pounds. He even tried sleeping in the middle of the bed.

Then the Bownes bought a Philips TV-ette and suddenly weekends that might have been spent listening to the radio or playing Scrabble were taken up admiring the new box, shunting it from room to room, commenting on the BBC’s new rotating globe logo and watching the reports. Mr. Bowne, nearly finished by a second stroke, now an almost-silent haze of his former self, sat in his chair doing hand rehabilitation exercises with a tennis ball. Mrs. Bowne, slowed but still strong, carried out bowls of Burton’s potato puffs and slices of apple on a brown plastic tray. And Oliver, seated on the sagging sofa, complained about the announcers and the mechanical way they reported on deadly hurricanes and coal mine disasters and a revolution in South Yemen. He glared at that box as though the telly itself was intent on usurping him of a career in print. When the reception was snowy,
and the Bownes were busy with other things, he turned the plastic dials and shook the set with a vigour that struck me as unnatural. He complained about “distortions,” which I knew had nothing to do with bad-picture quality.

We were sitting on the sagging sofa staring at that small screen the first weekend of November 1963 when we learned that military officers in Saigon had launched a coup d'état against President Diem and that he had been executed. The camera showed many places we had visited, but they looked different in silvertone, almost unrecognizably historic and foreign. Oliver said the streets and cars looked wrong and I agreed. It was oddly consoling to see the city this way, like gazing at the moon.

Back at our flat, we eventually got through to Arnaud, who reassured us that Anh and Dinh were fine.

But the news and images from Vietnam set Oliver back. With the assassination of President Kennedy and the inauguration of President Johnson three weeks later, America was steeped in war. It disturbed Oliver to know that things were escalating in Vietnam, but I think what upset him most was knowing that it was all going on
without him.
He felt like a deserter. Arnaud called with regular updates to keep him informed, but these conversations seemed to make him feel even more helpless.

Mrs. Bowne noticed Oliver’s frustration and blamed it on his “whole miserable childhood.” She said the first sounds he had come to know were the thunder of shells and the rain of bombs and that he had stored these in his “memory bin”—the way others might store train whistles, pop melodies, the theme to
The Avengers,
the skid of a bicycle against gravel. These sounds of war were stored deep and seeped into his dreams. Mrs. Bowne said they wouldn’t kill him, but nor would they completely go away.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”

American planes kept flying over Vietnam, dropping bombs. And I kept watching, because in a strange way, war was a good way to keep my mind off things.

It was almost December before Pippa contacted us. All along she had been hiding in Paris, receiving our rerouted letters and phone calls from Stasha and trying to build up the nerve to come back.

When she finally turned up at our flat, it was the Saturday before Christmas. Her fingers shook as she unbuttoned her wool coat and slipped it off. She had lost some weight and wore a pale frock in a dingy shade of plaster-bandage pink. Her hair was clipped behind her ears with pins in a way that revealed sections of scalp.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she said, smiling and blinking apologetically. “I’ve been nervous about this. I’ve never had to meet someone I already knew.”

She carried her coat into the living room and sat down to drink the tea Oliver had prepared. She quickly downed a cup, then held it up, and said, “I remember when Mrs. Bowne gave us these.” She lifted the teapot and poured herself some more tea. I watched her hand shake a bit and the brown liquid slosh against the side of the cup. She downed it with two big gulps.

I looked over at Oliver, who was tucked in a corner of the sofa with an interested expression on his face, then back at Pippa, now on to her third cup of tea.

“I guess you’re very thirsty,” I said.

I had needed her to be vivid and exuberant. To have her arrive after such a long wait, and be gulping tea like a parched
desert wanderer, well, it made me feel almost sick with disappointment.

Finally, she turned to look at me. “Mish,” she said.

I shifted back and forth in my seat. There were small ball bearings of sadness inside me that needed to be levelled out before I could speak.

“Are you feeling ill?” she asked.

I pressed my fingertips against my closed eyelids. I suddenly felt unbearably tired.

“Sit down beside me,” she said.

I stumbled over to her. The tears were dribbling now. “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice cracking, while she wrapped me in her arms.

I pulled back a bit and gazed at her, and saw that she also looked tired. The skin around her eyes was pale and wrinkled and she had chewed her lipstick off so all that was left was a frayed red outline. I vaguely registered Oliver slipping away to leave us alone.

“I know it’s hard,” Pippa said. “But maybe we should try anyway. There are so many things I have to tell you. So many things you deserve to know.”

Pippa’s story did not come simply. The first telling that day was short and made up of simple blameless facts. It was a story fit for a child. The second time it was told, some of the gaps were filled but there were still blanks and rushed-over parts. By the third time, I realized I would have to be patient. Some stories are just hard to tell. They can take years.

I wish I had a better memory of what I learned at what point, but at some stage I sat down and stitched all of the events together. Maybe that’s what you do when truth is withheld for
so long, when you feel shattered by betrayal. You attempt to resolve the irresolvable. To me, it felt like plunging backwards into a hole, my whole world falling down with me.