‘Who knows? It was only supposed to be a month or so, but he seems to be enjoying himself and I can’t see any reason for him to rush back. If you can’t spend a few months bumming around drinking too much cheap beer at eighteen, then when can you? Though I’m sure his mother would prefer him to do so anywhere but here.’
The doorbell rang and Matthew excused himself again. Henry chattered about the sweetness of the fruit and I ate without hunger. When Matthew returned he was trailing Kerry and Amanda, who were each carrying a bottle of champagne, and Cal who was dressed now in baggy jeans and a tight white t-shirt. His hair was wet, his feet bare.
‘Doesn’t this look divine!’ said Amanda. She turned to Cal and poked his shoulder. ‘I hope you realise this is all for your benefit. Matthew never does anything like this for us.’
Cal grunted and dropped into a seat across from me. ‘Better have left me some pancakes,’ he said.
‘Ooh! Me too,’ Kerry said, sliding in next to him. ‘I am famished. I’ve had a night you will not believe.’
‘Another backpacker?’ Henry asked.
‘Much, much better.’ Kerry stacked her plate as she spoke. ‘You know that thing I’ve been organising for months? The millennium-development-goals thing with all the NGOs and diplomats and blah, blah, blah?’
‘Oh, yes, the blah, blah, blah thing. How’s that going?’
‘Actually, it’s going marvellously. We’ve come up with this terrific program where corporate sponsors—’
‘Ugh, boring. Get to the good stuff.’
‘Right. So, the delegates arrived yesterday afternoon and we had a meet and greet, wine and finger-food shindig and I got talking to this South African fellow, thinking he was one of the admin, policy-type hangers-on, because – my oath – he was young and fit and bloody, bloody, bloody gorgeous and so he couldn’t possibly be anyone important. So anyway, we went back to his hotel and shagged up a storm, then we’re lying there spent and his phone rings and he starts speaking fast and I can just barely follow, but at some point it becomes clear that he’s the freaking CFO of this enormous pharmaceutical corporation that I didn’t even know had agreed to attend the conference, and in hindsight, I should’ve realised he was corporate because he was dressed way too nicely to work for a non-profit and he fucked way too well to be a diplomat.’
‘How do diplomats fuck?’
‘Cal.’ Matthew swatted him on the head. ‘Thanks, Kerry. I was hoping you’d discuss your sexual exploits in front of my child.’
‘Oh, Matty, he’s a great, big grown man.’
‘Yes, and besides, we shouldn’t all be deprived of hearing Kerry’s insights into diplomatic fucking just because you want to protect Cal’s innocence, which by the way is probably long-since destroyed, if not back in the land of boozy bronzed goddesses then here in the land of two-dollar blow-jobs.’
‘Charming, Henry, thanks so much. Cal, please don’t listen to another word from these revolting and corrupt individuals. I can’t for the life of me remember why I associate with them.’
‘Because you’re more corrupt and revolting than the rest of us put together.’
‘That, dear Amanda, is impossible,’ Matthew said. ‘Mischa, you’re terribly quiet. Say something. Please, before Kerry starts up again.’
‘I was just thinking about those flowers. For as long as I’ve been in Hanoi I’ve been meaning to ask someone about where all these glorious, rice-cheap flowers come from every day. I mean, look at those colours. And I bet they didn’t cost you more than a hundred thousand, right?’
Kerry guffawed as Matthew admitted to paying twice that.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Henry said. ‘Later, I can tell you more than you’d ever want to know about Hanoi’s floristry, but right now I want to know how diplomats fuck.’
‘Inoffensively.’
‘Ha. And your South African big-shot?’
‘Big shot is exactly right. I tell you he was—’
‘Be right back,’ I said. In the bathroom, I splashed my face with cold water. In the mirror, I saw a face I hadn’t seen for years. My cheeks sagged under puffy eyes cupped in blue. Insomnia, I used to tell people after those nights when Glen kept me up with detailed, interminable explanations of how I’d disappointed and hurt him.
Standing in the relative dark of the doorway, I told my friends I was feeling sick. Matthew walked me to the street and put me on a . At home I crawled into bed and immediately fell asleep.
I was woken by my phone. ‘Are you home? I’m around the corner.’
‘It’s not a good time.’
‘Is there someone with you?’
‘No, but—’
‘I’ll be there in a sec.’
I watched from my bedroom window as Cal sloshed through the stream of water running down my street towards the church’s forecourt. It must have rained again while I slept. In this river-bordered city of lakes and haphazard drainage systems, the difference between wet roads and flooded homes is about fifteen minutes and it looked like this outburst had stopped just in time. In July, Hoàn Lake had overflowed after only half a day of rain, and people spoke in slightly thrilled tones about how Hanoi was built below the wet-season river level, how if the dykes broke the city would be inundated and become an enormous, debris-filled swamp within days. But then the rain stopped and the streets dried and by December we had all forgotten our vows to move away before typhoon season, before now.
I went downstairs and waited for him in the open doorway.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, sliding off his shoes and stepping inside.
I closed the door and then pushed the hall mat over the wet splotches his feet had made.
‘I needed to lie down for a while.’
‘I thought you were trying to get away from me.’
‘No.’
‘No? But you didn’t want me to come over. And you can’t even look at me.’
I looked at him and goddamn it I shouldn’t have. Was I ever that young and transparent? Did I ever look at a lover with such undisguised yearning?
‘So this is it? You’re done with me?’ Oh, had anyone ever sounded so hurt?
‘Cal, listen. This morning was torture.’
‘Because you don’t want to be around me or because you do?’
‘Neither. Are you intentionally being dense about this? Your dad is one of my best friends. I can’t bear thinking about—’
‘Don’t then. Don’t think about it.’
‘I can’t help it. Keeping secrets, telling lies, it makes my skin crawl.’
The sympathy in his eyes broke me open. I pulled him against me, we kissed and I was instantly calm. I knew, of course, that I couldn’t trust myself when it came to sex, that my brain was just another opiate-addicted hunk of meat that would do anything to get its fix. But when your brain tells you, at the touch of a particular person, that everything is exactly as it should be and, at that same touch, your heart begins to pump blood through your limbs faster, it seems, than it has ever done before, and within minutes your cunt is aching to be kissed, well, what else is there? If the parts of which I am made are so convinced, then what is left of me to protest?
‘When I left here last night, or, actually, this morning,’ Cal said, sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, a bottle of Tiger nestled in the crook of one naked knee, ‘it was pitch black out but I wasn’t worried. I knew I could make it home on my own, without a driver or a map or even light. There were a few scurrying noises as I walked, rats or cats I suppose, but I wasn’t bothered. I just walked and walked, tripping over a pothole or broken gutter here and there. I couldn’t stop smiling. Mostly, because of you – us – but part of it was that I was walking through this city at three in the morning in total darkness and feeling as safe as I’ve ever felt in my life.’
‘I know exactly what you mean.’
‘I didn’t know I wanted to feel that until I felt it. That sounds stupid.’
‘No. It’s how I feel, too.
It’s exactly right.’
Cal drained his beer and added the bottle to the small collection by his side. ‘But then the really amazing thing happened. I turned a corner, I forget the street name, but you’ll know where I mean, I turned a corner and – boom – all these people rushing down narrow concrete aisles under bright overhead lights and it sounded like there were ten different radios playing and men yelling and right on the corner closest to me was a thick wooden slab with a whole damn skinless cow on it and while I stood there this tiny old lady walked up to it and – swish – with an axe and its head dropped into a bucket. And she just kept swishing that axe carving the thing up. I’ve never smelt anything like it in my life. It was brutal. But then I walked on and there were tables of fluffy green something that smelt like a cross between mint and fresh cut grass and then barrels of the pinkest apples I’ve ever seen and then – whoa – a little guy with a wheelbarrow as big as him nearly runs me over and while I’m apologising I look down and see the barrow is filled with heads and hooves and I just kept walking and in a minute or two I was past it and I turned another corner and it was dark and empty and silent again.’
‘Ah, Hanoi.’
‘Yeah. I understand better now why Dad lives here. That feeling I had last night – I can understand wanting to chase that.’
I must have smirked, because Cal narrowed his eyes and said, ‘What?’
‘Just thinking about chasing the feeling I had last night. And yesterday afternoon. And half an hour ago.’
‘You don’t need to chase it.’
‘No. I do. This is a hard town for an old white lady.’
‘Yeah, so you’ve said, but I don’t believe it. Come on, I want specifics. How many blokes have you been with since you’ve lived here?’
‘Counting you? Three.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Nope. For the first couple of years it was voluntary. I was recovering from my marriage. But once I was ready to date again I discovered that the stereotypes are true. Vietnamese men aren’t interested in western women over thirty and neither are the western men.’
‘Including my dad?’ Cal picked at the label on his empty beer bottle.
‘Honestly, I don’t know. Whatever he does on that front, he keeps it to himself.’
‘Have you ever seen him with a woman?’
‘No.’
‘And he’s never made a move on you?’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I was a mess when we met. He was a wonderful friend to me.’
‘My mum says he lives here because he can’t function in Australian society. She says he needs to be where no one has any expectations of him. Where he can do what he likes and not have to answer to anyone.’ He rolled the bottle between his palms. ‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘That’s probably true of half the expats in Vietnam.’
‘But they don’t all have families living somewhere else.’
‘Cal, darlin’, I’m really not the right person to talk to about your relationship with your dad. I feel bad enough about seeing you behind his back. I don’t want to have to feel guilty about psychoanalysing him behind his back as well.’
‘I just don’t get him, you know? He’s always made it clear he loves me. Sent letters and emails all the time. Cried at the end of every visit. But . . .’ He opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness. ‘He chooses to live here. I’m trying to understand. Even that amazing feeling I had last night . . . You don’t leave your family for that, do you? There has to be something more.’
I wish I could report that I said something insightful or comforting or even well-intentioned, that I had been kind. Once I started up with him, I wasn’t myself, or maybe I was more truly myself than I’d been in decades.
There’s a Vietnamese expression: an gia bua. To eat with a vengeance to make up for what you have missed.
‘Listen, if you really want to keep talking about your dad, despite the fact I have absolutely no intention of getting involved, then you’re going to have to put on some clothes. I can’t hear anything you say when you’re naked.’
‘Fine.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll get dressed.’
‘Damn. That backfired.’
‘You want me naked, but silent. Is that right?’
‘Not silent.’ I crawled to him and kissed his silky feet. ‘I like it when you make noise.’ I kissed his ankle bones and then his calves. I had never thought of a man’s legs as erotic before, but now I flooded with heat at the idea of sliding my cunt over one of his shins, smashing my clitoris into the bone. I moved my mouth to the inside of his thigh and felt him surrender.
I fucked his shins and his feet. I fucked his knees and his thighs. I used his limbs the way I’d used my bedroom furniture when I was thirteen. When I felt my orgasm approaching I ground hard and took his cock in my mouth. He came in seconds, spurting into the back of my throat just as I began to shudder.
I caught my breath, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, closed my eyes against the shine of his legs. I felt foolish and ashamed. Like one of the fat old men who pay pretty young Vietnamese girls to watch them masturbate.
‘Mish?’
‘Mmm.’
‘I want to tell you I love you, but I know you’re not going to say it back and normally that would make things awkward. But since you can’t hear anything I say when I’m naked, then I can tell you right now and you won’t even know it.’
‘Cal.’
‘Look at me, please.’
I did. He was beautiful and I smiled because I couldn’t help it.
‘I am crazy in love with you, Mischa.’
‘Crazy is right.’
‘I’m going to put pants on now.’
‘Don’t. I want to not-hear what else you’ll say.’
‘Really? Okay, well, that thing you just did? Freaky, man. And I’m not saying you’re heavy, but you were humping hard. I thought my leg was going to snap.’
‘Get dressed, arsehole.’
Cal would never be terribly convincing when he enthused over my looks; he did a little better when he praised my character, though he’d find my placidity infuriating. What it came down to, I suppose, was that his lizard brain or DNA or whatever unfathomable system it is that causes one human body to feel electrified by a specific other had chosen me and his twenty-first-century, over-educated, rom-com-trained young mind was already busy trying to justify that choice. For all his easy talk about fuck buddies, Cal now turned out to be remarkably romantic about sex. Lust, in his mind, was meaningful. If he felt it for me, then there must be something there. Something else. Something more.
Cal would argue that this was love, true and blinding and intense. I liked how insistent he was on that point, not because it was flattering to me – as I argued back several times, it is less flattering to be loved for something you’re not than to be desired for your actual self – but because when he insisted on his love he reminded me of myself at his age. That sounds condescending, and a little bit creepy. That’s okay, I am both those things. This is the woman he said he truly loved.
There was a new building site across from my house. There was a new building site across from almost everybody’s house that year, but this one on my street employed four of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. If I left my bedroom curtains open I could wake to the sight of them, dressed in the thinnest of cotton pants, their torsos bare, heaving, hammering and occasionally dousing each other with water from a beaten-up red bucket.
Walking to and from work I noticed the way that young couples on motorbikes nuzzled and whispered and sometimes groped each other as they sat in the traffic. Around the shores of the lake, each tree seemed to shelter a grasping, necking couple. In the corner table of my favourite coffee shop, I saw a young man’s hand go all the way up a girl’s skirt while she coolly sipped her . Another couple sat across from them, kneading each other’s thighs. Walking home one night, I heard grunting coming from a side-alley. I peered down and saw a man
grinding somebody into the wall. I stayed a moment, to reassure myself that nobody was being hurt and then I stayed longer because, I suppose, that’s the kind of woman I had become.
When I told Cal about the couple in the alley he was excited. He said he wanted to do exactly that, to fuck me up against a wall, knowing that any minute someone might walk past and see us. I told him it was impossible. We could go to jail or be deported, publicly shamed. It would be a stupid, pointless risk given we had the privacy and comfort of my apartment and the money to pay for any hotel room in the city if we wanted a change of scenery. That’s a shame, he said.
A few nights later as I walked him home (not all the way home, his father might see) he pulled me into an alley and pressed his hard-on into my hip. Please, he breathed into my ear, I can’t stop thinking about it, please please. I made him promise to be fast and quiet and to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction if anyone interrupted us. I stepped out of my underpants and unzipped his jeans. He opened me up with his fingers and said he was worried he had pressured me and we didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. Something about his sweetness combined with his unashamed desire sent me out of my mind. I swear the presence of Uncle Ho himself couldn’t have stopped us.
It was after three when I got home. I showered and climbed into bed and lay in the dark, too high to sleep. I dragged my laptop from the bedside table. I wanted to describe what was happening to me, to put my elation into words.
There was an email waiting, from Mel.
Darling Mischa,
I tried to call earlier, but the line kept dropping out before the second or third ring. We’ve had some bad news, I’m afraid. As you know Margi has been unwell for a while now & we finally know why. It’s cancer of the bladder. Grade 4. The whole goddamn nightmare. She didn’t want to tell you, as you are far away & can’t do anything but worry, but I reminded her of how devastated she and I were when we discovered that you’d been keeping the extent of Glen’s violence from us. So she consented to my telling you, but only if I also told you that there’s no need to worry, that she has great doctors & a positive attitude & will be right as rain before you know it.