A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (32 page)

I was happy that no one noticed. I rose up and gasped quietly to myself while the others talked all at once. The Mexican woman was looking at me, but I nodded to her that I was all right, and after a slow, contemptuous look at the three Americans, she closed her eyes and put her head back once more, though this time she turned slightly to one side as if to ask her lover to kiss a new spot, just under her ear. I was ready to get out of the tub, away from all the excitement, but I lingered for a time watching this woman, so comfortable in her body, so relaxed with matters that touched on sex.

A little later Vinh and I were walking along the beach. It was the Mexican woman who stayed in my mind, not the game-show winners. I knew I was seeing them too flatly. They were complicated human beings, like all of us, in spite of how hard they worked at making their surfaces simple. But they bored me right now. I thought about the Mexican woman and I wished I could take Vinh’s hand. Perhaps this was foolish of me, to have this hesitation. I am a smart woman, a modem woman. Vinh has never said a word to me that would discourage me from doing something like taking his hand as we walked on the beach. But there are forces in me that are very strong. Just as strong as the forces that make the two women from Northern Louisiana and Minnesota speak and dress and act the way they do. They have no control of those things. I doubt if they could change any of those things even if they were conscious of them and wanted to. I spent the first twenty years of my life living in a country and a culture that expected certain attitudes from women and men and you can’t just put all that aside because your mind says, Why not? Nobody’s mind is that strong. You have to wait. Things have to change from the inside.

Like Vinh. He walked beside me on the beach and the waves rustled near us, running up now and then and licking our feet, and there was bright sun and a blue sky overhead while across the bay, the mountains had disappeared into a dark gray sky and there were leaps of lightning over there and the contrast between this sunny beach and that storm-dark mountain was very romantic. But Vinh could not see these things. He was brooding again, thinking about Delta Airlines or the Superdome or the Hilton hotels, thinking about five hundred chicken dinners or a thousand Swedish meatballs. A man strapped into a harness beneath a parachute was rising from the beach just ahead of us, a cable running out to a speedboat in the bay going taut and dragging him into the air, and I stopped to watch it rise and Vinh realized what I did and he, too, stopped, following my eyes into the air but not really seeing anything, because he said, “Can you remind me to call Nicholson when we get back? They’ve got some big engineering conference coming in.”

“Okay,” I said, still watching the man on the parachute getting smaller and smaller in the blue sky, and I thought that this was something I might like to do. To get up there above all of this and just float around.

“You’ll remember?” Vinh asked because I had answered without looking at him. It wasn’t in irritation that he said this. It was just that I was important to him in this way. He depended on me. I have a very good memory.

I lowered my eyes and he was looking at me with a face that seemed eager, almost like a child. Sometimes he seemed to really enjoy the work he did. I was glad for that. I said, “I’ll remember. You know I’m like an elephant.”

My Vinh smiled at this. I have said this same thing to him many times and it always makes him smile. And that always makes me smile, that this should amuse him so. I smiled and then a young Mexican girl appeared at Vinh’s side and she had lizards on both shoulders and on the top of her head, large lizards.

“You take picture of you and iguana?” she asked. “Very cheap.”

Vinh looked at her and stepped back, startled, I think, at these large green creatures crouching on the girl. “No, gracias,” he said.

“Like in the movies,” the girl said.

“Where’s your camera?” Vinh said, and the girl shrugged and looked toward me. I was carrying a bag large enough, I suppose, to hold a camera. Vinh said to her, “You should have a camera. If you want to make money, you get a camera and shoot the picture yourself. Comprende?”

I don’t think the girl comprended. But even if she did, making an investment in a camera to improve her business probably was worthless advice. I said to Vinh, “She never has that much money at one time, to be able to buy a camera.”

Vinh nodded and sighed. “She’ll never get anywhere.”

By now I’m sure the girl thought we were both a little cracked, so she drifted away. I came to Vinh’s side and we walked on. “Iguanas,” he muttered.

I said, “Do you know why iguanas?”

He shook his head no.

I said, “Because Puerto Vallarta is a very romantic place, and it has to do with iguanas.”

Sometimes I will surprise my husband with a piece of information, and though it usually has something to do with the parts of American culture he has little patience for, his natural curiosity gets the better of him. This was one of those times. He looked at me sideways, not exactly turning his head to me; he was trying to say that he wasn’t really interested in this but I’d better tell anyway. In these situations I don’t say anything immediately. I choose to ignore this look of his. I make him ask for it. The culture I grew up in does give a woman certain subtle ways of maintaining her dignity.

“There’s a reason?” he finally asked.

“A reason?” I said, as if I’d already forgotten about it.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “A reason for the iguanas on the beach.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and I waited.

Vinh stopped walking abruptly. I took a few more steps, as if I didn’t notice. “Gabrielle,” he called after me, and I stopped and turned and looked surprised not to find him beside me. I returned at once, being the good wife that I am. When I got to him, he settled himself so as not to seem too eager to hear whatever this was that I knew. He even used the casual form of my name, though he said it with the French pronunciation and I don’t think he has ever learned that in English he could have a little joke on me with it. “Gaby, why is it that they think tourists want to have their pictures taken with iguanas?”

“It’s nothing really. It’s just a foolish thing.”

“Gabrielle,” he said in the voice I was waiting for. My husband is very attractive at this sort of moment. Someone else might get angry or imperious or dismissive or whiney. But Vinh turns gently urgent, like he is a child with a little pain that his momma has to make better. “Please tell me,” he said.

So I told him about Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” is a wonderfully beautiful girl. Even later, in “Cleopatra,” she is very beautiful. You might think that a Vietnamese would not appreciate that kind of full-bosomed beauty. But people often admire qualities that are quite different from their own. And Richard Burton of that same time is equally attractive, say in “Look Back in Anger” or “The Bramble Bush.” His voice, particularly, can thrill a woman. He, too, was in “Cleopatra” and that, of course, is when the story I told Vinh really began. Liz and Dick—Cleopatra and Antony—fell in love, and since they were both married to other people and that was in 1962, there was a big uproar. Then the next year Richard Burton came to Puerto Vallarta to make a film. (I didn’t tell Vinh the name of the film at this point so that I could hold back the big answer to his question and keep his attention. He was still wondering about the iguanas.) Elizabeth Taylor followed him to this place and they rented two houses with a bridge between them, over a cobbled street, and the world was watching that bridge very closely for months. By now Vinh was getting a little impatient, I knew. Just impatient enough—I always could sense when I was about to lose his attention. So I told him that the name of the movie was “The Night of the Iguana” and there were Puerto Vallarta iguanas featured in it and that’s why the little girl had her business.

Vinh was disappointed at the payoff of this story. I knew he would be. He almost always was. His brow wrinkled up and he pursed his lips and I wasn’t upset at his reaction. I liked it very much that he continued to insist that I finish these little stories even though his deeply practical self almost always ended up finding them trivial or foolish or simply incomprehensible. He still always asked me to go on. He insisted. And I don’t exactly understand it, but I took it as a kind of faithfulness to me.

“Iguanas,” he muttered and I heard the word again late that afternoon, across the lobby lounge in the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. Vinh and I had a handful of drink coupons, an unexpected extra benefit from curtain number two, and we’d come down to the lounge in the open-air end of the lobby facing the sea. The three American game-show couples were already there, and I could feel Vinh tense up because they were loud and they were having a frivolous good time and I knew that what pleasure Vinh hoped might be squeezed out of this trip had to do with being quiet and peaceful.

Northern Louisiana and her husband were at the bar and they were both facing into the lounge, their elbows thrown back behind them onto the counter. The husband was young and so blond his hair and mustache seemed almost white, made even more pale by the deep tan of his skin. I was thinking his work kept him out in the Louisiana sun, but Minnesota and her husband were sitting in overstuffed chairs at a little table nearby and he was at least thirty years older than Mr. Northern Louisiana and his hair, though thinned out quite a bit, was just about the same bleached white color and his skin, though more leathery, was just as tan. I couldn’t see him sweating under a Minnesota sun, so I figured maybe they both went to the same franchise of tanning salons that turned all their clients out like this.

The Tic-Tac-Dough woman was at an adjoining table and she was smiling and speaking to the others and it was from her that I heard the word “iguana.” She was probably telling them the same story I’d told Vinh, since her specialty (I’d been right about her) was question answering and this was a set of those countless facts that clung to her mind. I have a similar static-cling mind, and as I watched her, her husband crossed my sight carrying two drinks from the bar. He handed one down to her and turned to sit and his T-shirt had a map of Vietnam and the words I’VE BEEN AND I’M PROUD. This didn’t surprise me because I’d felt certain I’d read the sign of the dog tags correctly. The veteran sank into the overstuffed chair, and as he was trying to arrange himself, he glanced our way. Vinh was tugging at my elbow. He wanted to leave, I’m sure, but I kept my attention on the veteran, whose eyes widened slightly at us and then slid away as Minnesota laughed loud and said to his wife, “Eileen, honey, nobody today would even give them a second thought. What’s a little adultery anymore?”

Vinh had my elbow in a strong grip now, but I leaned near to him and said, “We’ve got free drinks coming and I need one right now.”

Vinh whispered, “I’d rather pay in a quieter place.”

I answered, “There is no such place.” This was a little gamble. I didn’t want to turn him more strongly against the vacation, but I did want to sit and watch these people. It was like television, like the games and the soaps were mixed together.

Vinh sighed and nodded to me that it was all right, that as long as he was stuck in this whole thing, he really couldn’t do anything but go along with me. So I took him to a table not next to the three couples but not far from them either. Vinh turned his chair at a right angle to all the other people and he faced the line of bougainvillea at the end of the lounge and the sea beyond. I listened carefully for a while.

Minnesota went on about how acceptable adultery had become and I watched her husband and he seemed to be trying to figure something out about the ice in his drink and I suppose he was used to this kind of talk and she finally grabbed his arm and said that present company was of course excluded. And then Northern Louisiana told a story about how one of the game shows she’d tried out for turned her down because she wouldn’t let the host kiss her on the lips and this had come out in a discussion with the director of the show, who was prepping the contestants, and he said that the host always kissed the women contestants on the lips. Not her, she’d told him, and that’s for damn sure, honey, they didn’t do that where she came from. And then the question-and-answer woman, whose name apparently was Eileen, said that she wished she’d gotten on “Jeopardy” that was the show she really wanted to get on, and it didn’t have anything to do with not wanting to kiss somebody. If something like that had prevented her, it wouldn’t have been so disappointing.

And somewhere along the way, as I was sipping the drink that the waiter brought and feeling invisible, I realized that the veteran was glancing now and then in my direction. I wondered if he’d learned enough about us over there to recognize a Vietnamese when he saw one. I knew he was thinking about it, wondering if Vinh and I were from Vietnam. And after a time I began to worry just a little bit what his attitude might be. The very visible veterans I’d encountered were unpredictable. They seemed to be one extreme or the other about us. We were fascinating and long-suffering and unreal or we were sly and dangerous and unreal. I kept my own eyes on his wife, who was certainly pitched to a lower key than the other two women and whose sense of disappointment about the show she had appeared on intrigued me. I would have expected her to feel only proud of winning at whatever she did. Though maybe this expectation is my own little prejudice showing through. Why shouldn’t this American woman have the same sort of disappointment of dignity that I myself felt? She interested me. She felt disappointed and she hadn’t even had to dress up as a duck. To overcome a slight lull in the conversation, Northern Louisiana declared how wonderful a coincidence it was that they should all meet, all Americans and all game-show winners. At this, the veteran turned to me and said, “Are you from America, too?”

This took me by surprise. When I first saw the movie “The Invisible Man” with Claude Rains, it got me to thinking about what it would be like to be invisible. And the scary part was always getting yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be and then suddenly becoming visible again. Well, that’s how I felt at that moment. The man had a loud voice and the attention of all these people suddenly swung around to me. And to Vinh, as well. Before I answered, I looked at him, to see if he wished to speak for us. He glanced over to the veteran, but his gaze returned to the sea and I faced the group and I tried very hard to make my pronunciation just right and I said, “Yes, we’re from America. I won this trip on ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’”