The next morning, Mrs. Khanh was standing at the stove preparing brunch for their eldest son’s visit when the professor came into the kitchen, freshly bathed and shaved. He took a seat at the kitchen counter, unfolded the newspaper, and began reading to her from the headlines. Only after he’d finished did she begin telling him about last night’s events. He’d asked her to inform him of those moments when he no longer acted like himself, and she had gotten as far as his lunge for the dance floor when the sag of his shoulders stopped her.
“It’s all right,” she said, alarmed. “It’s not your fault.”
“But can you see me on the dance floor at my age?” The professor rolled up the newspaper and rapped it against the counter for emphasis. “And in my condition?”
Taking out a small blue notebook from his shirt pocket, the professor retreated to the patio, where he was writing down his errors when Vinh arrived. Fresh from his graveyard shift at the county hospital, their son wore a nurse’s green scrubs, which, shapeless as they were, did little to hide his physique. If only he visited his parents as much as he did the gym, Mrs. Khanh thought. The edge of her hand could have fitted into the deep cleft of her son’s chest, and her thighs weren’t quite as thick as his biceps. Under one arm, he was carrying a bulky package wrapped in brown paper, which he propped against the trellis behind his father.
The professor slipped the notebook into his pocket and pointed his pen at the package. “What’s the surprise?” he asked. While Mrs. Khanh brought out the eggs Benedict, Vinh stripped off the wrapping to reveal a painting in a heavy gilded frame evocative of nineteenth-century Europe. “It cost me a hundred dollars on Dong Khoi,” he said. He had gone to Saigon on vacation last month. “The galleries there can knock off anything, but it was easier to frame it here.”
The professor leaned forward to squint at the painting. “There was a time when that street was called Tu Do,” he remarked wistfully. “And before that, Rue Catinat.”
“I hoped you’d remember,” Vinh said, sitting down next to his mother at the patio table. Mrs. Khanh could tell that the subject of the painting was a woman, but one whose left eye was green and whose right eye was red, which was nowhere near as odd as the way the artist had flattened her arms and torso, leaving her to look less like a real person and more like a child’s paper doll, cut out and pasted to a three-dimensional chair. “There’s a new study that shows how Picasso’s paintings can stimulate people like Ba.”
“Is that so?” The professor wiped his glasses with his napkin. Behind him was the scene to which Mrs. Khanh was now accustomed, an entrance ramp rising over their backyard and merging onto the freeway that Vinh would take home to Los Angeles, an hour north of their Westminster neighborhood. Her boys used to pass their afternoons spotting the makes and models of the passing cars, as if they were ornithologists distinguishing between juncos and sparrows. But that was a very long time ago, she thought, and Vinh was now a messenger dispatched by the rest of their six children.
“We think you should retire from the library, Ma,” he said, knife and fork in hand. “We can send home enough money every month to cover all the bills. You can have a housekeeper to help you out. And a gardener, too.”
Mrs. Khanh had never needed help with the garden, which was entirely of her own design. A horseshoe of green lawn divided a perimeter of persimmon trees from the center of the garden, where pale green cilantro, arrow-leafed basil, and Thai chilies grew abundantly in the beds she’d made for them. She seasoned her eggs Benedict with three dashes of pepper, and when she was certain that she could speak without betraying her irritation, she said, “I like to garden.”
“Mexican gardeners come cheap, Ma. Besides, you’ll want all the help you can get. You’ve got to be ready for the worst.”
“We’ve seen much worse than you,” the professor snapped. “We’re ready for anything.”
“And I’m not old enough for retirement,” Mrs. Khanh added.
“Be reasonable.” Vinh sounded nothing like the boy who, upon reaching his teenage years, had turned into someone his parents no longer knew, sneaking out of the house at night to be with his girlfriend, an American who painted her nails black and dyed her hair purple. The professor remedied the situation by nailing the windows shut, a problem Vinh solved by eloping soon after his graduation from Bolsa Grande High. “I’m in love,” Vinh had screamed to his mother over the phone from Las Vegas. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Sometimes Mrs. Khanh regretted ever telling him that her father had arranged her marriage.
“You don’t need the money from that job,” Vinh said. “But Ba needs you at home.”
Mrs. Khanh pushed away her plate, the eggs barely touched. She wouldn’t take advice from someone whose marriage hadn’t lasted more than three years. “It’s not about the money, Kevin.”
Vinh sighed, for his mother used his American name only when she was upset with him. “Maybe you should help Ba,” he said, pointing to the front of his father’s polo shirt, marred by a splash of hollandaise sauce.
“Look at this,” the professor said, brushing at the stain with his fingers. “It’s only because you’ve upset me.” Vinh sighed once more, but Mrs. Khanh refused to look at him as she dabbed a napkin in her glass of water. She wondered if he remembered their escape from Vung Tau on a rickety fishing trawler, overloaded with his five siblings and sixty strangers, three years after the war’s end. After the fourth day at sea, he and the rest of the children, bleached by the sun, were crying for water, even though there was none to offer but the sea’s. Nevertheless, she had washed their faces and combed their hair every morning, using salt water and spit. She was teaching them that decorum mattered even now, and that their mother’s fear wasn’t so strong that it could prevent her from loving them.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The stain will come out.” As she leaned forward to scrub the professor’s shirt, Mrs. Khanh had a clear view of the painting. She liked neither the painting nor its gilded frame. It was too ornate for her taste, and seemed too old-fashioned for the painting. The disjuncture between the frame and the painting only exaggerated the painting’s most disturbing feature, the way the woman’s eyes looked forth from one side of her face. The sight of those eyes made Mrs. Khanh so uneasy that later that day, after Vinh went home, she moved the painting to the professor’s library, where she left it facing a wall.
It wasn’t long after their son’s visit that the professor stopped attending Sunday mass. Mrs. Khanh stayed home as well, and gradually they began seeing less and less of their friends. The only times she left the house were to go shopping or to the Garden Grove library, where her fellow librarians knew nothing of the professor’s illness. She enjoyed her part-time job, ordering and sorting the sizable collection of Vietnamese books and movies purchased for the residents of nearby Little Saigon, who, if they came to the library with a question, were directed to her perch behind the circulation desk. Answering those questions, Mrs. Khanh always felt the gratification that made her job worthwhile, the pleasure of being needed, if only for a brief amount of time.
When her shift ended at noon and she gathered her things to go home, she always did so with a sense of dread that shamed her. She made up for her shame by bidding good-bye to the other librarians with extra cheer, and by preparing the house for emergencies with great energy, as if she could forestall the inevitable through hard work. She marked a path from bed to bathroom with fluorescent yellow tape, so the professor wouldn’t get lost at night, and on the wall across from the toilet, she taped a sign at eye level that said flush. She composed a series of lists which, posted strategically around the house, reminded the professor in what order to put his clothes on, what to put in his pockets before he left home, and what times of the day he should eat. But it was the professor who hired a handyman to install iron bars on the windows. “You wouldn’t want me sneaking out at night,” the professor said w
ith resignation, leaning his forehead against the bars. “And neither would I.”
For Mrs. Khanh, the more urgent problem was the professor coming home as a stranger. Whereas her husband was never one to be romantic, this stranger returned from one of the afternoon walks he insisted on taking by himself with a red rose in a plastic tube. He’d never before bought flowers of any sort, preferring to surprise her with more enduring presents, like the books he gave her every now and again, on topics like how to make friends and influence people, or income tax preparation. Once he had surprised her by giving her fiction, a collection of short stories by an author she had never heard of before. Even this effort was slightly off the mark, for she preferred novels. She never read past the title pages of his gifts, satisfied at seeing her name penned in his elegant hand beneath those of the authors. But if the professor had spent his life practicing calligraphy, he’d never given a thought to presenting roses, and when he bowed while offering her the flower, he appeared to be suffering from a stomach cramp.
“Who’s this for?” she asked.
“Is there anyone else here?” The professor shook the rose for emphasis, and one of its petals, browning at the edges, fell off. “It’s for you.”
“It’s very pretty.” She took the rose reluctantly. “Where did you get it?”
“Mr. Esteban. He tried selling me oranges also, but I said we had our own.”
“And who am I?” she demanded. “What’s my name?”
He squinted at her. “Yen, of course.”
“Of course.” Biting her lip, she fought the urge to snap the head off the rose. She displayed the flower in a vase on the dining table for the professor’s sake, but by the time she brought out dinner an hour later, he had forgotten he bought it. As he nibbled on blackened tiger shrimp, grilled on skewers, and tofu shimmering in black bean sauce, he talked animatedly instead about the postcard they’d received that afternoon from their eldest daughter, working for American Express in Munich. Mrs. Khanh examined the picture of the Marienplatz before turning over the postcard to read aloud the note, which remarked on the curious absence of pigeons.
“Little things stay with you when you travel,” observed the professor, sniffing at the third course, a soup of bitter melon. Their children had never acquired the taste for it, but it reminded the professor and Mrs. Khanh of their own childhood.
“Such as?”
“The price of cigarettes,” the professor said. “When I returned to Saigon after finishing my studies, I couldn’t buy my daily Gauloises any longer. The imported price was too much.”
She leaned the postcard against the vase, where it would serve as a memento of the plans they’d once made for traveling to all of the world’s great cities after their retirement. The only form of transport Mrs. Khanh had ruled out was the ocean cruise. Open expanses of water prompted fears of drowning, a phobia so strong that she no longer took baths, and even when showering kept her back to the spray.
“Now why did you buy that?” the professor asked.
“The postcard?”
“No, the rose.”
“I didn’t buy it.” Mrs. Khanh chose her words carefully, not wanting to disturb the professor too much, and yet wanting him to know what he had done. “You did.”
“Me?” The professor was astonished. “Are you certain?”
“I am absolutely certain,” she said, surprised to hear the gratification in her voice.
The professor didn’t notice. He only sighed and took out the blue notebook from the pocket of his shirt. “Let’s hope that won’t happen again,” he muttered.
“I don’t suppose it will.” Mrs. Khanh stood to gather the dishes. She hoped her face didn’t show her anger, convinced as she was that the professor had intended the rose for this other woman. She was carrying four plates, the tureen, and both their glasses when, at the kitchen’s threshold, the wobbling weight of her load became too much. The sound of silverware clattering on the tiled floor and the smash of porcelain breaking made the professor cry out from the dining room. “What’s that?” he shouted.
Mrs. Khanh stared at the remains of the tureen at her feet. Three uneaten green coins of bitter melon, stuffed with pork, lay sodden on the floor among the shards. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”
After he’d fallen asleep later that evening, she went to his library, where the painting she had propped by his desk was now turned face forward. She sighed. If he kept turning the painting this way, she would at least have to reframe it in something more modern and suitable. She sat down at his desk, flanked on either side by bookshelves that held several hundred volumes in Vietnamese, French, and English. His ambition was to own more books than he could ever possibly read, a desire fueled by having left behind all his books when they had fled Vietnam. Dozens of paperbacks cluttered his desk, and she had to shove them aside to find the notebooks where he’d been tracking his mistakes over the past months. He had poured salt into his coffee and sprinkled sugar into his soup; when a telemarketer had called, he’d agreed to five-year subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and Cosmopolitan; and one day he’d tucked his wallet in the freezer, giving new meaning to the phrase cold, hard cash, or so he’d joked with her when she discovered it. But there was no mention of Yen, and after a moment’s hesitation, underneath his most recent entry, Mrs. Khanh composed the following: “Today I called my wife by the name of Yen,” she wrote. She imitated the flourishes of the professor’s penmanship with great care, pretending that what she was doing was for the professor’s own good. “This mistake must not be repeated.”
The following morning, the professor held forth his coffee cup and said, “Please pass me the sugar, Yen.” The next day, as she trimmed his hair in the bathroom, he asked, “What’s on television tonight, Yen?” As he called her by the other woman’s name again and again over the following weeks, the question of who this woman was consumed her days. Perhaps Yen was a childhood crush, or a fellow student of his graduate school years in Marseille, or even a second wife in Saigon, someone he’d visited on the way home from the university, during those long early evening hours when he told her he was sitting in his office on campus, correcting student exams. She recorded every incident of mistaken identity in his notebooks, but the next morning he would read her forgeries without reaction, and not long afterward would call her Yen once more, until she thought she might burst into tears if she heard that name again.
The woman was most likely a fantasy found by the professor’s wandering mind, or so she told herself after catching him naked from the waist down, kneeling over the bathtub and scrubbing furiously at his pants and underwear under a jet of hot water. Glaring over his shoulder, the professor had screamed, “Get out!” She jumped back, slamming the bathroom door in her haste. Never before had the professor lost such control of himself, or yelled at her, not even in those first days after coming to southern California, when they’d eaten from food stamps, gotten housing assistance, and worn secondhand clothes donated by the parishioners of St. Albans. That was true love, she thought, not giving roses but going to work every day and never once complaining about teaching Vietnamese to so-called heritage learners, immigrant and refugee students who already knew the language but merely wanted an easy grade.
Not even during the most frightening time of her life, when they were lost on the great azure plain of the sea, rolling unbroken to the horizon, did the professor raise his voice. By the fifth evening, the only sounds besides the waves slapping at the hull were children whimpering and adults praying to God, Buddha, and their ancestors. The professor hadn’t prayed. Instead, he had stood at the ship’s bow as if he were at his lectern, the children huddled together at his knees for protection against the evening wind, and told them lies. “You can’t see it even in daylight,” he’d said, “but the current we’re traveling on is going straight to the Philippines, the way it’s done since the dawn of time.” He re
peated his story so often even she allowed herself to believe it, until the afternoon of the seventh day, when they saw, in the distance, the rocky landing strip of a foreign coast. Nesting upon it were the huts of a fishing village, seemingly composed of twigs and grass, brooded over by a fringe of mangroves. At the sight of land, she had thrown herself into the professor’s arms, knocking his glasses askew, and sobbed openly for the first time in front of her startled children. She was so seized by the ecstasy of knowing that they would all live that she had blurted out “I love you.” It was something she had never said in public and hardly ever in private, and the professor, embarrassed by their children’s giggles, had only smiled and adjusted his glasses. His embarrassment only deepened once they reached land, which the locals informed them was the north shore of eastern Malaysia.
For some reason, the professor never spoke of this time at sea, although he referred to so many other things they had done in the past together, including events of which she had no recollection. The more she listened to him, the more she feared her own memory was faltering. Perhaps they really had eaten ice cream flavored with durian on the veranda of a tea plantation in the central highlands, reclining on rattan chairs. And was it possible they’d fed bamboo shoots to the tame deer in the Saigon zoo? Or together had beaten off a pickpocket, a scabby refugee from the bombed-out countryside who’d sneaked up on them in the Ben Thanh market?
As the days of spring lengthened into summer, she answered the phone less and less, eventually turning off the ringer so the professor wouldn’t answer calls either. She was afraid that if someone asked for her, he would say, “Who?” Even more worrying was the prospect of him speaking to their friends or children of Yen. When her daughter phoned from Munich, she said, “Your father’s not doing so well,” but left the details vague. She was more forthcoming with Vinh, knowing that whatever she told him he would e-mail to the other children. Whenever he left a message, she could hear the hiss of grease in a pan, or the chatter of a news channel, or the beeping of horns. He called her on his cell phone only as he did something else. She admitted that as much as she loved her son, she liked him very little, a confession that made her unhappy with herself until the day she called him back and he asked, “Have you decided? Are you going to quit?”