Up Country

  Susan said, “Paul, this is your old friend, Lucy.”

  The woman cackled and put down the tray.

  Susan said something to the woman, and they chatted. Susan turned to me and said, “She was a chambermaid here when she was a young girl, and this place was a resort for the French plantation owners. She stayed on when the Americans took it over as an R&R hotel, then in 1975 it became a Communist Party hotel, and now that it’s a public hotel again.” Susan added, “In 1968, she was a young cocktail waitress, and she says she remembers an American who looks like you who used to chase her around the tables, trying to pinch her ass.”

  The old lady cackled again.

  I suspected the last part of Susan’s story was not true. But to be a sport, I said, “Tell her she’s still beautiful—co-dep. And I’d still like to pinch her ass.”

  The old lady laughed at co-dep before Susan could translate the English, and when Susan got to the ass-pinching part, the woman broke into a girlish laugh, said something, smacked me on the shoulder playfully, and trotted off.

  Susan smiled and said, “She says you’re an old goat.” She added, “She also said, ‘Welcome back.’ ”

  I nodded. Welcome back, indeed.

  Nha Trang and the Grand Hotel and the old woman had escaped most of the war, but in the end, nothing escaped.

  Susan had a gin and tonic, and I poured a bottle of Tiger beer into a plastic cup. There was a bowl of something on the table that looked like trail mix, but I couldn’t identify what trail it came from.

  I raised my glass and said, “Thanks for your help and your company.”

  We touched glasses, and she said, “Thanks for inviting me.”

  We both got a laugh out of that.

  We sipped our drinks and watched the sea. It was one of those perfect times when sun, sea, and wind were just right, the beer is cold, the hard day’s journey has ended, and the woman is beautiful.

  Susan asked me, “What did you do when you were here besides get drunk?”

  “Mostly lay in the sun and had some good food.” I added, “A lot of the guys were stressed out, of course, so we played a lot of cards, and most of us had jungle sores, so the sun and sea were good for the skin.”

  She lit a cigarette and asked, “How about women?”

  I replied, “Women, except for employees, were not allowed in the hotel.”

  “Were you allowed out of the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, ha. And were you involved with anyone from home when you were here?”

  “I was. Her name was Peggy, a good Irish Catholic Southie.”

  She drew on her cigarette and looked out to sea. “And how about in ’72? Were you involved with anyone then?”

  “I was married. It was a brief marriage, and it ended when I returned. In fact, before I returned.”

  She thought about that awhile and asked, “And since then?”

  “Since then I made two promises to myself—never go back to Vietnam and never get married again.”

  She smiled. “Which was worse? Combat or marriage?”

  “They were both fun in their own way.” I asked her, “And how about you? You’re on.”

  She sipped her drink, lit another cigarette, and said, “I’ve never been married.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Do you want a sexual history?”

  I wanted to get to dinner before eight, so I said, “No.”

  The old woman came by, and I looked at her as Susan ordered another round and chatted with her. She could have been Lucy, but Lucy existed in my mind as a happy, funny girl, who traded mock insults with the soldiers who were all in love with her, but she wasn’t for sale. Guys always want what they can’t have, and Lucy was the grand prize at the Grand Hotel. Assuming this old crone was not Lucy, I hoped Lucy had survived the war, married her Viet soldier boyfriend, and that they were happy somewhere.

  Susan asked me, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I was thinking that the last time I was here, you weren’t even born.”

  “I was born, but not toilet-trained.”

  The second round came, and we sat watching the sky darken. I could see lights in the thatched cafés and souvenir stands down on the beach. The breeze picked up, and it got cooler, but was still pleasant.

  About halfway through our third round, Susan asked me, “Don’t you need to contact someone back in the States?”

  “I was supposed to contact you in Saigon and say I’d arrived. But you’re here.”

  She replied, “The hotel has a fax machine, and I faxed Bill at his office and his home and told him we’d arrived, and where we were staying. He knows to contact the consulate, who will contact your people.” She added, “I stood over the clerk while he faxed, got my original back, and ate it. Okay?”

  “Good tradecraft. Was Bill surprised to get a message from you in Nha Trang? Or did you tell him about your trip when you called him from the Rex?”

  “I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go with you at that point.” She added, “I haven’t gotten his reply yet.”

  “If I’d gotten a message from my girlfriend that she went to a beach resort with a guy, I might not bother to reply.”

  She thought about that and said, “I asked him to acknowledge receipt.” She added, “When Westerners who live here travel, they always tell someone where they’re going . . . in case there’s a problem. Also, this is official business. Right? So he needs to reply.”

  “Or at least acknowledge receipt.”

  “Actually . . . I was feeling a little . . . guilty. So I asked him to join us here.”

  This sort of took me by surprise, and I guess my face betrayed that surprise, and maybe something else. I said, “That’s nice,” which was pretty lame.

  She stared at me in the dim light. She said, “What I really told him was that it was over between us.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there.

  She went on. “He knows that, anyway. I didn’t want to do it that way, but I had to. This has nothing to do with you, so don’t get an inflated ego.”

  I started to say something, but she said, “Just listen. I realized that I was having more fun . . . that I’d rather be in the Q-Bar with you than him.”

  “High praise, indeed.”

  I saw that I’d interrupted a moment of true confession with my big mouth and said, “Sorry. I just sometimes get . . . uncomfortable—”

  “Okay. Let me finish. You’re an interesting man, but you’re very conflicted about life and probably love. And part of your problem is that you don’t read yourself very well.” She looked at me closely and said, “Look at me, Paul.”

  I looked at her.

  She asked, “How did you feel when I told you I’d asked Bill to join me?”

  “Lousy.” I added, “My face dropped. Did you see that?”

  “It fell in your beer.” She informed me, “You’ve been giving me a hard time, and I don’t like that. You could have blown me off anytime you wanted, if you really wanted me gone. But instead, you—”

  “Okay. Point made. I apologize, and I promise to be nice. Not only that . . . I want you to know I not only enjoy your company, I look forward to your company.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Right. Well, I’m extremely fond of you, I like you a lot, I miss you when you’re not around, I know if I let myself go—”

  “Good enough. Look, Paul, this is an artificial situation, you’ve got someone back home, you’re here on important business, and this place is silently freaking you out. I understand all this. So, we’ll just compartmentalize these few days. Fun in the sun, and whatever happens, happens. You go to Hue, and I go back to Saigon. And, God willing, we’ll both find our way home.”

  I nodded.

  So we held hands and watched the night turn from purple to black. The stars over the water were brilliant, and the waning moon cast a sliver of light on the South China Sea. A boy brought oil lam
ps to each of the tables, and the veranda shimmered in lights and shadow.

  I paid the bill, and we walked across the lawn, across the road, and down to the beach, where Private First Class Paul Brenner had walked a long time ago.

  We picked an outdoor restaurant called Coconut Grove, set among palm trees and trellises.

  We sat at a small wooden table lit with a red oil lamp and ordered Tiger beers. The breeze was stronger here, and I could hear the surf fifty yards away.

  The menus came, and they were in Vietnamese, English, and French, but the prices were in American.

  Most of the selections were seafood, as you’d expect in a fishing town, but for ten dollars, I could experience bird’s nest soup, which seemed to be an addition to the menu, since it was harvested only twice a year, and lucky for me, this was a harvest month. The nest was made of red grass and sparrow saliva, but the real selling point was that this delicacy was also an aphrodisiac. I said to Susan, “I’ll have the bird’s nest soup.”

  She smiled. “Do you need it?”

  We ordered a huge plate of mixed seafood and vegetables, which the waiter grilled at tableside over a charcoal brazier.

  The people around us seemed to be mostly northern Europeans, escaping the winter. Nha Trang, which had been founded by the French, had once been called the Côte d’Azur of Southeast Asia, and it seemed to be making a comeback, though it had a long way to go.

  We kept ordering more seafood, and the waiter was kidding Susan about getting fat. This was a very pleasant place, and there was magic in the night air.

  Susan and I kept the conversation light, the way people do who have just had an intense talk that pushed the table limits higher.

  We skipped dessert and took a barefoot walk on the beach, carrying our shoes. The tide was going out, and the beach was covered with seashells and stranded marine life. A few people were surf-casting, backpackers had lit fires on the beach, and couples strolled hand in hand, including Susan and me.

  The sky was crystal clear, and you could see the Milky Way, and a number of constellations. We walked south, away from the center of town, along a widening beach where new hotels sat along the coast.

  About half a mile down the beach, we came upon the Nha Trang Sailing Club, an upscale place where a dance was going on inside. We went in, ordered two beers, and danced along with a lot of Europeans to some terrible, loud Seventies music played by the worst band anywhere along the Pacific Rim—maybe the world. But it was fun, and we chatted with some Europeans and even switched partners now and then. A few of the men pegged me for a Vietnam veteran, but that’s as far as it went; no one, myself included, wanted to talk about it.

  I don’t know if I was drunk, mellowed out, or just happy about something, but for the first time in a long time, I felt at peace with myself and my surroundings.

  We left the Nha Trang Sailing Club after one A.M. and as we walked back toward the colored lights of the cafés on the beach, Susan asked me, “Is what you’re doing here dangerous?”

  “I just need to find someone and question him, then go to Hanoi and fly home.”

  “Where is this person? Tam Ki?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I changed the subject and asked her, “Susan, why are you here?”

  She took her hand out of mine and lit a cigarette. She said, “Well . . . it’s not as important or dramatic as why you’re here.”

  “It’s important to you, or you wouldn’t be here. What was his name?”

  She took a long draw on her cigarette and said, “Sam. We were childhood sweethearts, dated through college—he went to Dartmouth. We went to B-school together—you may have seen his picture in my office, the group shot.”

  Harry Handsome, but I didn’t say that.

  “We lived together in New York . . . I was totally crazy about him, and couldn’t imagine a world without him. We got engaged, and we were going to get married, buy a house in Connecticut, have children, and live happily ever after.” She stayed silent for a while, then continued, “I was in love with him since we were kids, and right up to the time he came home one day and told me he was involved with another woman. A woman at work. He packed his bags and left.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well . . . these things happen. But I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I never saw it coming, which made me wonder about myself. Anyway, I couldn’t get over it, and I quit my job in New York and went home to Lenox for a while. Everyone there was totally stunned. Sam Thorpe was the boy next door, and the wedding was all planned. My father wanted to do an autopsy on him while he was still alive.” She laughed.

  We continued walking, and she said, “Well, I tried to get over it, but there were too many memories in Lenox. I was crying too much, and everyone around me was starting to lose patience with me, but I missed him, and I just couldn’t get myself together. Long story short, I looked around for an overseas job that no one else wanted, and six months after Sam left, I was in Saigon.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “I sure did. A few months after I got to Saigon, he wrote me a long letter, saying he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, and would I come home and marry him. He reminded me of all the good times we had as kids—school dances, our first kiss, family parties, and all that. He said we were part of each other’s lives, and we should be married and have children and grow old together.”

  “I guess the other thing didn’t work out for him.”

  “I guess not.”

  “And what did you reply to him?”

  “I didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “He broke my heart, and I knew it could never be the same again. So, to save us both a lot of misery, I just didn’t answer his letter. He wrote a few more times, then stopped writing.” She threw her cigarette in the surf. “I heard from mutual friends that he got married to a girl in New York.”

  We walked along the water’s edge, and the wet sand and surf felt good on my feet. I thought about Susan and Sam, and while I was at it, about Cynthia and Paul. In a perfect world, people would be like penguins and mate for life and stay close to the iceberg where they were born. But men and women get restless, they stray, and they break each other’s hearts. When I was younger, I thought too much with my dick. Still do. But not as much.

  I asked Susan, “Would it have made a difference if he had come to Saigon, instead of asking you to come home?”

  “That’s a good question. I went home once on leave, and I think he knew I was home, though by that time, I guess we both knew we couldn’t see each other again. But I don’t know what I would have done if he’d shown up on my doorstep on Dong Khoi Street.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that a man who did what he did, and who was truly sorry, would not have written a letter. He would have come to Saigon and taken me home.”

  “And you would have gone with him?”

  “I would have gone with a man who had the courage and conviction to come and get me. But that wasn’t Sam. I think he was exploring his options by mail.” She glanced at me. “Someone like you would have just come to Saigon without the stupid letters.”

  I didn’t respond directly to that, but I found myself saying, “Cynthia and I live a few hundred miles from each other, and I’m not making the move, though I think she would.”

  “Women will usually go to where the man is. You should think about why you’re not going to where she is.”

  I changed the subject back to her and said, “You got away from what you were running from. Time to move on.”

  She didn’t reply, and we kept walking along the wet sand. She threw her sandals onto the beach and walked into the water up to her knees. I waded in beside her.

  She said, “So, that’s my sad story. But you know what? The move to Saigon was one of the best decisions of my life.”

  “That’s a little scary.”

  She laughed and said, “No, I mean it. I grew up real fast here. I was spoiled, coddled, a
nd totally clueless. I was Daddy’s girl, and Sam’s sweetheart, and Mommy’s perfect daughter. I belonged to the Junior League, for God’s sake. But it was okay. I was happy.” She added, “I think I was dull and boring.”

  “You certainly fixed that problem.”

  “Right. I realized that Sam was bored with me. I never even flirted with other guys. So, when he said he was screwing this woman at work, I felt so betrayed . . . I should have gone out and fucked his best friend.” She laughed, then said, “Are you sorry you asked?”

  “No. Now I understand.”

  “Yeah. So, anyway, when I first got here, I was terrified, and I almost turned around and went home.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  She laughed. “My tour here can’t possibly compare to yours, but for me, this was a big step toward growing up. I knew if I went home, I’d . . . well, who knows?” She said, “I told you, you wouldn’t have recognized me three years ago. If you’d met me in New York, you wouldn’t have spoken to me for five minutes.”

  “I’m not sure about that. But I hear you. So, is your character development nearly complete?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I told you. It’s time to go home. There comes a point of diminishing returns.”

  “How do you know when that is?”

  “You have to know.” I said to her, “During the war, the military limited the tour of duty here to twelve or thirteen months. The first year, if you survived it, made a man out of you. If you volunteered to stay, the second year made something else out of you.” I added, “At some point, as I mentioned in Apocalypse Now, you couldn’t go home, unless you were ordered to leave, or you went home in a body bag.”

  She didn’t respond.

  I said, “Look, this place isn’t so bad now, and I see the attraction, but you’ve got your Ph.D. in life, so go home and use it for something.”

  “I’ll think about it.” She changed the subject and said, “We should take a boat out to those islands.”

  We stood there in the water, and I took her hand, and we looked out at the sea and the night sky.