The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Page 11

  After six months of primarily intoxicated dates, Charlie moved out of his boardinghouse in District 2 and into Mia’s consulate-provided apartment with unreliable electricity. He didn’t have much, even though he had been in Vietnam a year longer than Mia: one box of books, one bag of clothes, his computer, and a large ceramic bust of Ho Chi Minh with a broken ear that he had fished out of a trash can on a whim and grown attached to. He managed to move everything over to her place in a single motorbike trip—the book box between his knees, Mia on the seat behind him with Broken-Ear Uncle Ho cradled in her arms, and the bag with his clothes and laptop between them. But though he lacked material possessions Charlie wasn’t hard up for cash, nor was he a “hippie-dippy love-child commie apologist,” which was what Mia’s father would have called him had he known Charlie existed. Charlie just didn’t accumulate things. Mia, on the other hand, did not travel light. She had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with three suitcases of clothes alone, but half the items were impractical for the heat and the other half didn’t fit her after the first month because she wouldn’t eat Vietnamese food and her weight plummeted. It was Charlie who took her to get her clothes tailored and coaxed her to eat at restaurants she would have never gone into by herself and persuaded her to sign up for a language course even if he couldn’t make her practice.

  He was good to her, but he wasn’t perfect. Mia looked over at his lanky body next to hers, sprawled belly-up in a pair of checkered boxers. His face and forearms and lower legs were tanned gold, but the rest of him was pale, splotched pink in places from the heat. He was the color of some sort of Italian dessert, she thought. Mia was very aware of the fact that Charlie had had relationships with several of the female Vietnamese teachers at his school, and at least once with an older student. Everyone in their circle knew, and Charlie had never tried to hide it from her. She remembered going out for ice cream on one of their early dates and seeing Charlie’s face suddenly freeze in horror, mid-lick.

  “What’s wrong?” Mia had asked, and turned, following his gaze, to see a Vietnamese girl, young (but they all looked so young—even the middle-aged ones—didn’t they?) and quite beautiful, with a waterfall of dark hair, looking at Charlie with tragic eyes from across the room. He had hustled Mia out of the café promptly.

  “An ex,” he explained. “A crazy one.” She had worked in his foreign language department, he told Mia, and used to practice her English with him. She was cute and had seemed like a normal girl. A modern girl. They would go out together for drinks and karaoke and it was fun at first. “But after we slept together once she just assumed I was going to marry her,” he said flatly. He had been honest with her—other guys would have played along for the sex and then dumped her later on, he said. But Charlie told her straight out that he wasn’t looking for a wife and gently suggested that they break it off, since they wanted different things. “And then she went completely insane!” he said. “She scratched my face up and stormed off, but then for months afterward she kept calling me and showing up at my place, banging on the door and screaming how much she hated me or how much she loved me. It was scary. I don’t want her to jump you with a knife or something. Not that I think she really would,” he had added quickly, seeing Mia’s face.

  According to their male expat friends, most of whom had been with a local girl at one point or another, all Vietnamese women were unstable and prone to fits of jealous rage. “Which means that you’ve got a whole horde of angry Asian ladies in this city to watch out for,” one had jokingly warned Mia on some drunken night, before Charlie nudged him in the ribs and he fell silent. When Charlie first found out what Mia’s job was, he had sworn to her, unprompted, that he had used a condom with each of his Vietnamese girlfriends, no exceptions. But that didn’t stop her from scrutinizing the face of each half-Asian infant that was thrust upon her; from looking, despite herself, for the features that she knew well.

  CHARLIE GROANED ON THE kitchen floor. “Too. Hot.”

  “I have a sweat puddle underneath me,” said Mia.

  “I have a sweat lagoon.”

  “Cold shower?”

  “By the time we dry off we’ll just be sweating again.”

  “Then where can we find air-conditioning?”

  “Free air-conditioning or air-conditioning with a price?”

  “I don’t care how much it costs. I would sell my soul for a breeze.”

  “Movies then. Best air-conditioning in all of Southeast Asia.”

  Charlie drove them on his secondhand motorbike, snaking through traffic and speeding down the wider streets to create wind for her. Mia still didn’t know how to handle a bike; Charlie’s last attempt at driving lessons had left her with cuts up and down her arms and raw knees. They got tickets to a movie that had come out back home three months earlier and bought Vietnamese popcorn that they both agreed was terrible. In the blessedly cool dark of the theater, Mia rested her head on Charlie’s shoulder and wondered if his other girlfriends had ever done the same or if they had all been too short to reach.

  ON MONDAY MORNINGS CHARLIE taught early and needed to leave the apartment by 6:45, but he could rarely get himself out of bed before 6:30. It was Mia who woke up, fumbled around for the off-switch on the alarm clock, and picked out a clean pair of slacks, button-up, and necktie from the dresser. She laid them out on the bed, then went into the kitchen to start coffee in the expensive machine she had purchased despite Charlie’s protests that she could buy a cup of Vietnamese cà phê on literally any street corner for about fifty cents. It wasn’t about the money for Mia, or even the taste—what she needed was the routine of measuring the grounds, of listening to the coffee gurgle, and timing herself to make Charlie’s sandwich before it finished brewing. If the process was disrupted it would spoil the rest of her day.

  As she was opening the refrigerator, Mia heard a pathetic mewling from the kitchen window. The neighborhood’s resident stray cat had climbed up the drainpipe again and was trying to get in. It was a wormy-looking tabby with bald patches in its coat and half its tail gone, and Mia hated it.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Go away!” It had no effect on the cat, who just whined again and pawed at the windowpane, but the noise had successfully awakened Charlie. Mia heard him making low, muffled, morning groans into his pillow, and a few moments later his footfall on the way to the bathroom. She turned her attention back to the cat and was repulsed to see that it was now standing upright on the ledge, balancing on its two hind legs and scrabbling at the window with its forefeet. Its head was perfectly level with hers. “Hey!” She slapped the glass repeatedly. The cat wasn’t usually this persistent. Mia had to resort to banging with both fists before it finally gave up and lowered itself back onto all fours. But before skulking away, the creature stared at Mia through the window for a long moment, its yellow-green eyes unblinking. Then, as if it knew the reaction it would provoke and relished it, the cat slowly leaned forward and pressed its nose against the pane with a dull, rubbery sound. Mia shuddered.

  The coffee machine beeped gently to signal that it had finished brewing, and Mia flicked her eyes over to the yet-unassembled sandwich ingredients on the counter. When she looked back at the window the cat was gone.

  After she had seen Charlie out the door, Mia lingered over her coffee. She showered and then wandered around the apartment in her towel, her hair in a wet tangle that dripped onto the carpet. Their landlord had fixed the air-conditioning on Sunday, and before leaving for work Mia stood in front of the vent for five minutes to try to soak up as much of the cold as she could. It didn’t work—she started sweating the moment she stepped out the door.

  Mia viewed her walk to the consulate as a video game where the goal was to make it to work without accidentally touching anything, or having anyone touch her. In Ho Chi Minh City everything spilled into everything else or was stacked on top of it, and Mia could barely go a step without almost tripping over a fruit stand or a noodle cart or a sleeping dog or a sleeping homeless person. Eve
n on the sidewalks she was in danger of being run over by a motorbike because traffic didn’t stay in the roads. There was no concept of personal space, either. Strangers would come up to Mia in public and tug at her blond hair, pinch her pale skin, even follow her home, just because she was so obviously, obtrusively foreign. Her very physical presence in their country was baffling. Here, the people were small, quick, and compact, able to maneuver the clutter and crooked corners of their world. Mia was too gangly, too loose of limb. She simply did not fit.

  This was proven anew to her when she reached the office. Mia knocked an elbow on the door frame coming in, and when she jerked away in pain, she hit her thigh on the corner of a desk. There were three desks in the room even though only Mia worked in it; she didn’t know to whom the other two desks belonged, why they had been deposited in her office, or why her requests to have them removed went unmet. Her co-workers on the third floor didn’t know, either, but didn’t mind because they used the mystery desks and the area around them as a place to dump extra paperwork and odds and ends that wouldn’t fit in their own, cramped offices. Today she was sharing the room with two new chairs, a broken lamp, a stack of crates, and somebody’s rice cooker. She checked that she was alone, then hiked up her skirt and crawled under her desk to get to her chair, because it seemed like less effort than the gymnastics required to go around it.

  Mia kept a framed photograph of Charlie on the windowsill, but when she had appointments with the mothers she would hide him in a desk, then put him back up after they were gone. She both liked and did not like it when her female Vietnamese co-workers saw his picture and told Mia how handsome he was.

  This morning she needed to finish typing up statements made by Nguyen Thi Thanh Ha, age twenty-eight, Vo Thi Ly Huong, age forty-one, and Phan Thi Thu Trang, age nineteen. She did the second case first so she could get it over with and forget about it quickly. Ms. Huong, according to her story, was supposed to be the mail-order bride of a wealthy, older American. He had flown over to meet her, stayed for three days, and in that time got her pregnant. He returned home and then, months later, as the translator put it, “canceled the transaction” with Ms. Huong. Desperate, Ms. Huong had tried canceling the product of the transaction that was now growing in her womb, but instead of going to a doctor she sought out the help of a healer in her neighborhood. The concoction of herbs that Ms. Huong drank did not terminate the pregnancy, but did—she discovered after giving birth—hideously deform the child. When Ms. Huong had first brought her baby to the consulate to make her claim, Mia hadn’t been able to resist the urge to recoil from it. She still felt guilty. Mia didn’t know why Ms. Huong thought that American citizenship would help the twisted, drooling infant in her arms, but it wasn’t her job to worry about things like that. She only listened, took careful notes, and asked questions, and then typed it all up later. Before she left the office, Ms. Huong had placed the child on Mia’s desk and gestured at it, saying something in rapid Vietnamese.

  “It’s the hair,” the translator told Mia. “She wants you to look at the hair.” The child’s head—though too long for its body and misshapen, and with a lower jaw that could not close—was covered in soft, dark hair. Not straight, black, and coarse, like its mother’s, but fine, with a slight curl to it and a color that changed to polished chestnut when the sunlight hit it. “She says that even though the baby is wrong, it has beautiful hair.”

  DURING HER LUNCH BREAK, Mia went out for a manicure. She had been avoiding it for almost two weeks but couldn’t put it off any longer. If her nails weren’t done she ended up chewing them off or picking at her cuticles until they bled. Mia hated that she couldn’t get rid of the habit and had sworn to herself that she would never let Charlie discover it.

  The nail salon was only a few minutes’ walk from the consulate, but to get there she had to first pass the motorbike repair shop. Mia smelled the shop before she could see it—the ripe mix of rust and oil and tire rubber in the sun—and her pulse quickened as she approached. She tried to hide her face with her hair before remembering that her hair was arguably an even more distinguishing foreign feature than her face. It didn’t matter in any case, because he had already spotted her.

  “Mia! My Mia!” Tuan was leaning on a partially assembled yellow Honda. He wore a pair of low-slung, cutoff fatigues, and his hands and forearms were streaked black with axle grease. “Finally you come to see me!” he called out languidly.

  Mia knew she should just hurry past without a word like she did most of the time, but she could feel the way her blouse was sticking to her back and for some reason couldn’t bear the thought of him staring after her enormous sweat patch as she walked away. She stood facing the shop from the street, unable to move.

  Mia saw Tuan’s face light up once he realized that she was stopping. He checked his reflection quickly in the Honda’s side mirror before sauntering out to meet her. The other greasy, shirtless workers looked up from their motorbike parts and grinned or waggled their eyebrows at him as he passed.

  “Hi, Tuan,” Mia said evenly. He was tall for a Vietnamese man, but they were still exactly the same height.

  “My Mia.” Tuan tacked on the possessive so casually that she barely noticed. “Why you do not call me?” He had given her his number four different times during their fleeting lunch break interactions (she would not let herself call them flirtations) and pressed her regularly to go out with him for dinner, coffee, Vietnamese lessons, and occasionally the euphemistic-sounding “getting to know you specially.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mia, which was not an answer.

  “Perhaps you lost?” he asked with a half smile. Mia wasn’t sure if he was being purposefully cryptic or if it was just his English.

  She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and he stayed silent, too. For half a minute they stood there quietly, only about a foot apart, simply observing each other. Was this normal here? Should it feel wrong? Mia didn’t know. Miraculously, she had stopped sweating, but she could guess how clammy and pink her face still was. Tuan’s face was deeply tanned, and broad and gently sloped in the places where hers was sharply angled. Looking at him was like looking into a mirror that, instead of her reflection, presented the image of her exact physical counter. His eyes were narrow and dark and reminded Mia of tadpoles, which wouldn’t sound like a compliment, even if it was.

  Without speaking, Tuan reached into his pocket. The movement took Mia by surprise; in her mind she had still been imagining him as her reflection, so it was a shock when he moved without her. He pulled out a faded receipt and a stubby pencil. Though both were already dirty, he wiped his hands off on his shorts and wrote with the pencil held lightly between his thumb and third finger because they were the least greasy. When he was finished, he offered the receipt to Mia and she took it from him without letting their skin touch. She slipped it into her handbag without looking at the ten digits scrawled across the top; she already knew that he wrote his ones the way she wrote her sevens, and he wrote his sevens the European way, with a little dash in the middle of their stem.

  “You will call me,” said Tuan. His voice was teasing, but there was something pleasantly chilling in his words. Prophetic, almost. Mia didn’t want to leave, which made it all the more imperative that she did. But before drawing away from him, Mia (though to her it felt like her body was acting of its own accord) raised a finger—pale and thin, the nail peeking out through its chipped polish—up to his face and gently closed his eyelids, the left first, then the right.

  “Don’t move,” she said each time. “Don’t move.” She wasn’t sure what reaction she had been expecting from him. Shock, perhaps. Confusion. Discomfort. But Tuan calmly accepted her touch. It almost seemed as if he expected it. He did not open his eyes once she had shut them, but she felt them tremble beneath her finger. It was like touching a butterfly wing. Mia took a step back. She wasn’t quite sure what she had just done. The other workers inside the shop were calling something out to her but all she
heard in her head was buzzing. Tuan remained motionless. Mia wondered if this was what he looked like while he slept. Then she broke away and hurried away down the street. Before turning the corner she looked back. Even in the painfully bright midday sun, she could tell that his eyes were still closed.

  Inside the nail salon, the powerful smell of acetone washed away whatever madness had possessed Mia. She would not think about Tuan. She would walk the long way back to the consulate so she wouldn’t pass the motorbike shop. After work she would go to the market and buy vegetables for dinner. Mia selected a pale, pinky-gold bottle that she had used before and handed it to the manicurist.

  “Hmm. Pretty color,” the woman said.

  SHOPPING AT THE LOCAL market was always a stressful event for Mia, but there was no logical reason to go to the large, Western grocery store on the far side of town for produce when she could buy it around the corner. Charlie liked the fray of the marketplace for some reason. He even liked the way it smelled, calling it “pungent,” which really meant that it stunk of dead things and pickled things and dirty hands touching dirty food. He didn’t mind when he stepped in puddles that could have been water or could have been fish juices. He enjoyed haggling over prices with the old, pajama-clad ladies, and he just laughed when giant rats ran across the top of the butcher’s stand in plain sight. But going to the market made Mia feel almost physically ill.

  Clenching her teeth, she ducked down and entered the shantytown of tarp-covered stalls. Immediately, it felt about ten degrees hotter. Here space was even harder to come by than on the street. Mia had to hunch to avoid hitting her head on the tarps above, which sagged with rainwater, and navigated the stalls and towers of precariously balanced produce like she was picking her way through a minefield. The paths through the market were less than a foot across, but this did not discourage the Vietnamese from trying to drive their motorbikes down it. But what Mia loathed most was that everyone stared at her: the white woman who had crossed into this most sacred of cultural spaces. Temples and pagodas she could explore at her leisure without a second glance. Those were the places where tourists were supposed to be. But here, Mia felt all their eyes on her. The eyes of the vendors, the eyes of the people buying from them, and also the glassy eyes of the fish in their baskets, the eyes of dead chickens hanging upside down from hooks, the eyes of the still-live frogs in plastic tubs waiting to be skinned.