Lotusland Read online

  "Is he your real uncle?"

  "Of course."

  "Your father's brother?"

  "My mother's."

  He waited for her to say more.

  "He lives in Los Angeles and is sponsoring me to come over."

  It was unexpected. Nathan believed what she said and yet he couldn't digest it right away. He watched her extract several pieces of folded paper from her bag and slide them across the table.

  "What's this?"

  "Since you insist on talking business over dinner . . ."

  He glanced at her before taking up the papers. Her eyes expressed a different emotion than her mouth. She was smiling, but looking at him challengingly. He read aloud the large print at the top of the page: "Immigrant Visa Procedures. Consulate General of the United States of America."

  "I made a copy for you this afternoon."

  "You want to do this now?"

  "No," she said sharply. "I'm just giving them to you."

  "I suppose you want me to fill these out."

  "Not everything. Only the lines I marked with an ‘X'."

  Flustered, he folded them into a square and stuffed it in a pocket.

  "The paperwork is half-finished," she added. "I've even had a first interview."

  Congratulating her on her plans was out of the question. He had a hard time understanding why she'd leave when her life seemed to be going well here. In America, he imagined, success wouldn't come so easily. Why trade success for struggle? After a moment he put the question to her.

  "I want to live in the world," she answered, as if it was the simplest thing to make happen.

  "Aren't you doing that here?"

  The look she gave pierced him. "Of course not."

  "What if you don't like America?"

  "Why wouldn't I like it?"

  Now he felt she was arguing for the sake of argument. "Because it's different from here. You're being naïve."

  She grew sullen, and they didn't speak for several minutes.

  The boat slipped beneath a bridge. Yellow light illuminated the pocked underside of the arch, where the scrawled names of lovers had faded into oblivion. It was like entering a cave; a chill swept over him and the buzz of traffic overhead grew muffled.

  The boat returned quickly to the open river. There were no tall buildings here, no docked ships. On both sides and straight ahead there was only teeming darkness.

  He broke their silence asking about her family.

  "What do you want to know?" she said, staring across the river.

  "Whatever you want to tell me."

  She wiped her mouth with her napkin. Then she slowly shook her head and said something he couldn't hear.

  "What did you say?"

  But again she didn't answer.

  "Do you have brothers and sisters?"

  When she looked at him there was something flinty behind her eyes.

  "My parents might have had more than one child if my father hadn't died," she said. "Most of my aunts and uncles are dead, too. Some from the war, some because life was even harder after it ended. My mother ran away to escape a sad life. I wasn't a joy to her, but a burden on top of other burdens. For all I know, she's dead, too. Dead like the leaders of my commune who raised me after she left. I've been on my own since I was sixteen."

  Questions swirled in his head but he decided not to delve deeper. He felt ashamed for having pressured her about her past.

  "My uncle's my last family, and I've never even met him. Still, he's promised to bring me to America. That's all you need to know."

  Just when he thought the evening was lost, and with it his chance to get closer to her, she reached across the table and grabbed his hand. The look in her eyes was as soft and warm, and as unexpected, as her caresses. It wasn't that she was forgiving him, for he was sure she understood his sincerity. If anything, she seemed to be imploring him not to give up on her.

  He leaned back, placing his hands on his thighs. Beneath his right palm he felt the copy of Le's visa application.

  "So when will you go to America?"

  "It could be anytime, or it could be never. It's harder now than ever before to get an immigrant visa. But I have faith in myself."

  "I didn't realize you'd done anything concrete to make it happen."

  "I haven't told anyone. Some people, if they know, will get jealous."

  He thought about this and then smiled. "But if you don't want anyone to know, why did you tell me?"

  "You're different," she said.

  He didn't push for more. The evening would be too easily lost, and the boat ride was something he wanted them to enjoy.

  As a gesture, he took her visa application from his pocket and flattened it out beside his plate.

  Le didn't like his idea of following up dinner at a riverside café in Thanh Da, or at a jazz club on Le Loi Street downtown. When he asked what she felt like doing she said: "Can I choose?"

  Immediately he agreed.

  On his motorbike, leaning into him from behind, she directed him through traffic to a building lined with Klieg lights. A small army of young women in tight red tank tops and yellow mini-skirts crowded around the entrance, handing out Red Label whiskey promotions.

  "You come here a lot?" Nathan said, amazed by her choice of destination.

  "It's been a long time, actually."

  Before he could stop her, she'd paid both their entrance fees. She handed him his ticket and drink coupon.

  "Let me pay," he said.

  "That's okay."

  "But you paid for dinner."

  She shook her head. "Business was good today."

  It wasn't strange to be treated to dinner by a Vietnamese, who took pride in the public transaction, but here, with a local woman, it was different. He was always too slow at this sort of thing. "You make me feel like a bad date."

  "Date?" A laugh was trapped in her face. "This is a date?"

  Remembering their earlier conversation, he was reminded of the difference in their expectations. "To me it is."

  She smiled bemusedly. "A Canadian guy once told me that a date means there's an obligation between a man and a woman."

  "There doesn't have to be. Why are you taking advice from a Canadian? I didn't mean anything by it."

  "No obligations?"

  "No obligations," he said with some confusion.

  "You're funny," she said, releasing her long-held laugh.

  So, he thought, she amuses like this. The boundaries of a personality were filling in before his eyes. He saw he had his work cut out for him, and the lift this gave him was something he hadn't felt in longer than he cared to remember.

  And yet, no matter how much he hated admitting it, their arrangement was based on obligations. For a moment he was afraid she was trying to get out of it.

  He followed her into the disco. He'd been here once, back when Anthony still lived in Saigon, but now he hardly recognized it. It had been remodeled since then, with a new floor added and the stage enlarged. The atmosphere in these places tended toward seediness, with prostitutes, hired by the owners, keeping their eyes peeled for foreign men. This obviously hadn't changed. Fake smoke curled around the women's high heels as they sauntered between tables, trying to sit beside customers. If they succeeded, an exorbitant "conversation fee" would be charged when the customer tried to leave. This had happened to him and Anthony. Anthony had paid the bill blithely, finding the whole scam humorous. Perhaps it was because the girl had given him her number.

  On their way to a corner table they passed a group of old, well-dressed men who broke into smiles when they saw Le.

  "Where've you been, honey?" one of them called out. "We haven't seen your pretty face in ages." The group invited her over but she hurried past.

  He couldn't tell if she was shy or
embarrassed and wondered if she would have talked with them had he not been with her.

  "You can go talk to your friends if you want," he said when they sat down. Doubting that these men had bought paintings from her gallery, he was curious about her relationship to them.

  "I used to work here," she said nonchalantly, handing their drink coupons to a waitress. Le looked at him, waiting for his response.

  "As a table girl?"

  "At first I painted designs on the walls. Then I drew pictures for their menu. But when that ended I made drinks behind the bar. Sometimes I worked the floor after a girl got fired or walked out on her shift."

  Scattered throughout the disco were easily 40 girls, many of them picking at the suffocating outfits they had to wear. He had a hard time imagining Le working in a place like this. "When was that?"

  "I quit two years ago. I was trying to make enough money to open my gallery."

  "You made enough here to open a gallery?" he asked incredulously.

  "No, I could never have made that much. Some customers offered to help me, but their motives were unclear so I refused. I made decent money, but it was dead-end work."

  Such a casual admission struck him as odd. It was so casual, though, that he couldn't believe she'd been involved in anything indecorous. Still, discos like this were known to hire girls from the countryside because they'd accept a pittance and do whatever they were told. Anything was better than laboring all day in hot fields infested with leeches and vermin. Glancing back at the men who'd called to her he shuddered at what relationships she might have cultivated here.

  "How did they try to help?" he said.

  "Sometimes they'd slip me envelopes stuffed with money. But the bills were so small that it never amounted to much. Fifty thousand dong, one hundred thousand. How can you open a gallery with so little?"

  "Then how'd you manage?"

  "My uncle," she said after a moment. "My uncle lent me the money."

  She seemed a rare combination of artist and pragmatist. If he had only half her pragmatism, he might not be saddled with so much debt. But maybe the difference between them was simpler than that: she was willing to take risks. "I haven't met many artists as pragmatic as you. Most of them want to do nothing but their art. They're poor, but they're also happy."

  Her expression tightened, as if she took offense at the word ‘pragmatic.' "The gallery is nothing but a means to an end. If I weren't planning to move to America, I'd devote myself exclusively to painting. It's probably the only thing that would bring me back to Hanoi, in fact. Vietnamese lacquer painting is a northern tradition, and Hanoi is full of poor but dedicated artists."

  "What will you do in America? As far as I know, Vietnamese lacquer painting doesn't exist there."

  "I don't know," she said curtly. "The world will open up for me there. As a painter, I can do anything."

  Suddenly, her pragmatism seemed flawed. Just like at dinner, she showed that she had no idea what awaited her in America.

  The waitress returned with their drinks, hovering behind Le afterward as if trying to discover if her pink hair was natural.

  "You don't seem to know any of the girls working here," he said.

  "I worked here a long time ago, and places like this have a high turnover."

  "Did you like working here?"

  "No. But sometimes I like to come back. It puts my life into perspective." Her expression became contemplative. "You've asked me many questions, especially about when I was young. But there's a lot I can't remember. I've forgotten so much about my childhood, for example, people say I'm like an old woman."

  "Why do you think you've forgotten?"

  She shrugged. "Maybe I don't remember things well."

  "But if you think about something long enough, or are reminded . . ."

  "Some things aren't important to remember. Other things I just forget. But that's not always true. I remember sunsets, the fields I played in as a child, and festivals in my grandparents' villages — yet I can hardly recall my father's face."

  At the mention of her father he began to speculate on her reluctance to discuss her family. He feared that her earlier obstinacy stemmed from a desire to protect him. Maybe he was only paranoid about his country's history here, but she was from the North, and the possibility existed that a few decades ago American bombers had killed them.

  From his own experience learning about the lives of Vietnamese friends, he'd heard personal accounts about family members killed by American forces. And although these accounts weren't as guilt-inducing as My Lai, they were still devastating and silenced him on the spot.

  In the end he couldn't ask her to tell him more than she already had. A time would come, he hoped, when she'd bring up the subject herself.

  She stood and looked over to the dance floor. From a gentle rocking, her body began to sway.

  "I like this song," she said. She reached for his arm and pulled him onto the dance floor.

  She moved with a grace and prowess that seemed suddenly unleashed, and he saw that everyone in the disco was watching her. She didn't notice them, however, nor couldn't, for her eyes were closed as if to keep everything far away.

  Dry ice from the stage sent white smoke across the floor, slithering around their bodies and screening them from the audience. From the disco-balls overhead, flashing colors caressed her body like a madness of hands.

  But before the next song ended he felt something was wrong. The feeling had nothing to do with where they were, or who was watching, or what words he imagined were being spoken about them. Rather, it had to do with Le's eyes, which she continued to keep shut. He felt that he, and everyone watching her, was intruding on something that would be better kept private. There was an air of intimacy to her movement, a sense of freedom not quite appropriate for this place and these people. There was nothing awkward or unfamiliar about her movements, yet he felt like he'd never observed this way of dancing before. As he looked around, the expressions on the faces in the crowd seemed to confirm this. He stopped dancing and pulled her off the floor. He could see his action was unexpected.

  "I don't like us being the only people dancing."

  She looked around but didn't acknowledge that there was anything strange or uncomfortable about all these people watching them. When she spoke, her irritation was plain. "So, do you want to leave?"

  "Yes."

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "I don't know. But I don't like this place."

  "I was having fun. And we only just got here."

  She pushed her hair behind her ears and walked out beside him. When they passed a section of tables filled with glaring Vietnamese men, she kept her head down, as if she felt collectively they were chastising her, or as if she'd come to realize that as the only interracial couple here they were something of a spectacle.

  It would be the same wherever they went. They became a spectacle again when they were back on the street and stopped at a traffic light.

  "They're all looking at us," she said.

  "Do what I do every day and ignore them." He rearranged the mirror over his handlebars so he could see her face. "And look at me all the time instead."

  It was past midnight when Le's cell phone rang. Rather than respond to the question he'd asked her — if she lived with friends or alone — she dug through her purse to answer the call.

  She stared at the number on the screen. The transformation of her face to unalloyed pleasure dismayed him. She took the call breathlessly, not with the standard "A-lo?" but with something longer and familiar, as if she were continuing a conversation.

  Without looking at him she rose from her seat and hurried down the sidewalk, away from the soup-stand's noise. Even from 20 feet away, her laugh, more buoyant than it had been all night, pushed through the noise surrounding his table.

  His nature wasn't to presume t
he worst in anyone, but it was hard to be generous right now. Who could have taken her away but a lover she'd kept secret? He tried not to let his imagination get the better of him.

  Le stood at the curb with a finger in her ear to trap the caller's voice. As the sole foreigner among a dozen people eating at a midnight food stall, he felt conspicuous. Only in her absence did he notice the attention they were paying him. At one point he heard someone mutter that any girl with pink hair and a foreigner at her side must be a whore.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tried to hear what Le was saying. But she was too far away. When a waitress passed by he paid her.

  Perhaps he'd made a mistake accepting Le's proposal, which again seemed like a dressed-up version of prostitution. And yet it didn't feel wrong. On the contrary, it felt right to him, for he thought he might really care for her after all.

  When he looked back at her, her profile reminded him of the painting she had shown him. Her gift as a painter, he thought, might in fact take her somewhere. Unfortunately, however, being Vietnamese would make it difficult for her.

  The more he considered her dream of moving to America, the more it bothered him. For someone with her talent, and a gallery in which to showcase it, what more did she need to be successful? Wasn't happiness, for her, rooted largely in her success as an artist?

  Twenty minutes later she returned, fingering the pad of her phone.

  "I'm sorry. I have to go home."

  "I figured as much."

  They walked to the parking area. She was smiling, lost in thought.

  "Where do you live?" he said.

  He thought she might live in a back room of her gallery, or somewhere on the upper two floors of the building. Many people who came from the countryside couldn't afford a room in Saigon. For five dollars a month the owner of one of his favorite restaurants let several guards and waiters sleep on the floor, or atop tables pushed together after closing.