The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (15 page)

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 entree 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 maitre 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 cafe 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.