A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (34 page)

The next morning I left Vinh snoring faintly in the bed. It was pretty early. I wanted him to have at least the pleasure of sleeping late on this vacation that I’d given him, so I put on my bathing suit and eased the room door shut behind me and I went down to the pool. The lounge chairs were all upended and the Mexican boys with their white trousers rolled almost to their knees were mopping up, and one of them was skimming the surface of the water with a thin screen at the end of a pole. I stood there not wanting to go back upstairs. The morning sun felt very nice—a soft kiss on my forehead that wouldn’t stop—and finally one of the boys saw me and he bowed and put one of the chairs on its legs and motioned me over. I thanked him and stretched out there and I looked back up the facade of the hotel and tried to figure out which was our balcony. But I caught myself at this. Did I hope to see Vinh’s face looking down at me? This hope made me angry at myself for some reason. So I closed my eyes and thought of the cruise boat on the bay last night and the anger just sharpened. This surprised me and I wished I could step outside of myself and look back. Maybe I could see something that would give me a clue about what I was feeling. But all I could see was the fall of dim light-shapes in my closed eyes and then a woman said, “Can I sit beside you?”

I opened my eyes and found Eileen Davies. “Of course,” I said and I got up and helped her put a lounge chair beside mine. I sat back down and watched her take off her robe and she had a one-piece suit on, a little frumpy, though her figure was pretty good in the way that Americans like their women. That was my first impression, but as she folded her robe very carefully and put it inside the large canvas bag at her feet, I could see that her bottom was probably a little too large and the pocks that the TV ads call “unsightly cellulite” were beginning to appear on the backs of her thighs. All of this was, no doubt, a development in the last few years. When her man was in Vietnam, I was sure that her figure had been very fine indeed.

She was beside me now and she smiled over at me and said, “We’re the early ones.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a habit I can’t break.”

“I like the mornings,” she said. “You can feel sometimes that you’re all alone in the world.” After a moment Eileen seemed to hear how that sounded and her hand fluttered out toward me as if to grab back any inference I might have made. “Just for a little while,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to feel like that for more than maybe an hour or so.”

“An hour’s about right,” I said.

“I love my husband.” Eileen did not need to declare this to further explain the alone-in-the-world remark. I figured it must’ve come from the same place that made her give him that look I’d seen a couple of times.

For myself, I could have replied in a number of ways. I could have just stayed silent or I could have made some little nod or uh-huh or something. But instead I said, “I love my husband, too.”

My saying this didn’t seem to strike Eileen as odd, though it certainly struck me that way. She just nodded and laid her head back and pulled her sunglasses down from her forehead. I lay back, too, but if we were going to grow quiet and sleepy side by side here in the sun, I didn’t want to leave off speaking on such a strange note. So I tried to make small talk. “Have you ever been down here before?”

“No. Have you?”

“No.” This still wasn’t enough and I tried to figure out how to say more about never being here.

But for some reason I’d lost control of all my social skills and the silence persisted and before I could think of some new track of small talk, Eileen said, “The Love Boat stopped here.”

I should have known what she was talking about. As I said, I love American television. But at first I thought she was talking in a metaphor or something. “What’s that?”

“The television show,” she said. “‘The Love Boat.’ It always stopped in Puerto Vallarta.”

I laughed. “Of course it did.”

“Do you believe in romance, Gabrielle?”

I turned my head and looked at her. I hadn’t thought about the subject really, and yet I felt like I would say something. I actually wondered what would come out of my mouth, like I was sitting in a chair behind me and eavesdropping. This was getting a little strange. “Romance?” I said. “I’m not sure. Not in the easy ways, I don’t. Not for anybody over the age of twenty.”

“The easy ways.” Eileen repeated this phrase thoughtfully and I turned it over in my mind, too. The Love Boat, for instance. And a lot of the other things I could easily get weepy over on television. Reach out and touch someone. I always choked up at the telephone company ads. Pick up the phone and two people could love each other no matter what might’ve happened between them. The easy ways. I knew it wasn’t easy for Eileen and Frank.

“Never in the easy ways,” she said and her voice was firm, like the thought was her own now.

But, of course, it was easy to say it was never easy. I kept my mouth shut about that, though. And Eileen said, “Puerto Vallarta is a very romantic place, you know.”

“Yes?”

“They made a movie here.”

“ ‘The Night of the Iguana,’” I said. “I know all about it.”

“It wasn’t easy for them.”

“Liz and Dick?”

“Liz and Dick. It wasn’t easy for them,” Eileen said and she lifted her sunglasses and turned her head and looked me in the eyes.

“You’re right,” I said.

“The ruins of the movie set are still there. Near Mismaloya Beach.” Eileen sat up straight. “Why don’t we go down there.”

“Just you and me?” I asked, not sure what I wanted to do about that.

Eileen lifted her eyebrows and pinched her mouth tightly shut. She didn’t say anything right away. Finally she let her face relax and put her sunglasses back down. “We can try to take them.”

“Is that what we want?”

She lay back down and thought this over and I was struck by how odd it was that we were treating the two men like they were somehow the same. This was something that I really didn’t see at all. It was why I’d asked Vinh in the dark last night about his impressions of Frank. I’m not the kind of woman who thinks that men are men, all alike in certain basic ways.

Eileen said, “Sure, it’s what we want, isn’t it? They’re our husbands. Wouldn’t it be nice to go poke around that place with the men in our life?”

“Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced. But we let it drop at that. Eileen said no more and we both just soaked up the Mexican sun for a while. A long while. I’d even fallen asleep, because I was suddenly startled by a great red and yellow bird passing before me. I blinked and it was gone and I was twisted on my side on the lounge chair; I’d moved into my natural sleeping position and I sat up and looked in the direction of the great bird and it was one of the parasailors, lifting higher and higher on his tether and veering out to sea. I looked at my watch and saw that nearly two hours had passed.

As if she read my thoughts, Eileen said, “You were sleeping pretty hard.”

My head felt oversized, the contents not really fitting inside my skull, threatening to squeeze out my ears. I turned to look at Eileen. The back of her chair was angled up and she was sitting with a straw hat shading her face and she was holding a copy of “People” magazine before her. She said, “You missed an interesting sight.”

“What was that?”

“Our two husbands apparently found each other in the lobby. They walked by about half an hour ago and waved at me and they went on down to the beach.”

I rubbed at my temples and tried to take this in. Vietnamese people are funny in a few ways. Sometimes they can be very indirect. (Maybe that’s the Chinese influence in our culture, though we’d rather think that such an influence does not exist.) But at other times, Vietnamese can be very blunt. This is true. Americans have their own contradictions. All peoples do. Sometimes indirect and sometimes blunt is maybe a little less disturbing to everyone concerned than sometimes tolerant and sometimes intolerant, though I’m not trying to be critical of my new country.

Anyway, my Vietnamese bluntness suddenly made me stop rubbing my temples and lean near to Eileen and say, “Tell me. Do you understand why our husbands seem to be hitting it off so well together? What does Frank say about Vinh?”

Eileen kind of jiggled her head like she was trying to unclog her ears. And her voice got pinched and even a little whiney. “My husband never had anything against Vietnamese people. He hated the Vietcong, of course, but he knew that there was a difference between them and the others.”

“Of course,” I said firmly, like I knew this all along. And maybe I did. That wasn’t really what I was getting at, I decided, though I couldn’t quite say what was.

“And how about your husband,” Eileen said and her voice was brittle. “What does he say about Frank?”

I leaned closer and smiled my warmest smile. “Like your husband. He knows how to see the individual.”

There was no reason for this bit of empty rhetoric to soothe Eileen’s hurt feelings and make things right between us again, but that’s just what it did. She and I had done a pretty lousy job of understanding any of this, but at least we were smiling at each other again and she said, “Do you want to find them now? Maybe we can get them in a cab and take them away to the movie set.”

“Sure,” I said and we gathered up our things and walked along the pool and past the hot tub—the rest of the game-show people had not made their appearance yet, much to my relief—and we went down some stone stairs and stepped onto the beach.

Immediately the vendors in white clothes and straw hats surrounded us. They were selling white clothes and straw hats, and somewhere jostled in the crowd I saw the girl with the iguana on her shoulder. Eileen and I no-graciased our way into the clear and we looked around. The men weren’t in our immediate view and we both seemed to become distracted by the water at the same moment. Without a word to each other, we trudged through the sucking sands and down to the water’s edge.

Down here beside it, the bay seemed enormous. I wondered if the music I’d heard last night would have been more powerful here, too; I wondered what if Vinh and I had been in this spot when the boat passed. Would he have done more than ask what it was? Would he have taken me in his arms and waltzed me over the sand? But that’s a vision of romance the easy way, I thought; I should remember the soaps, where everything is hard. There’s another contradiction, on the television that I watch. Can we believe both these things? The Love Boat docks and everyone finds what they’re looking for; and the next day’s installment of “As the World Turns” always brings more disaster.

“I see them,” Eileen said.

She was right. The two men were walking along the shore far down to our left. They were walking side by side, heading away from us, and my husband had his hands clasped behind his back, a thing he does when he paces around during business meetings. He was wearing his tan Bermuda shorts and his one purchase for our trip, a rough-weave red cotton shirt from Pakistan. Frank Davies was dressed all in black—I didn’t realize until I saw him that they made Bermuda shorts in black—and he was moving his arms, gesturing. We couldn’t hear a word, but we saw his hands rise up above his shoulders and flare open and fall.

“I know that story,” Eileen said with a sigh. “An ammunition dump has just exploded in Qui Nhon.”

“I hope no one was hurt.”

“My husband was quite a hero in the aftermath, is the way I understand it.” Eileen turned to me. “Listen, Gabrielle, I’m sorry if I seemed upset a little earlier.”

“Upset?”

“When you asked about how our husbands were getting on.”

I wish I’d been blunt right then and pressed for the two of us to figure out the men in our lives a little better. But I can’t imagine that we would have made any sense at that point. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to anticipate what happened later on. But for whatever reason, I didn’t push it. I just said, “That’s okay, Eileen. No problem.” And we made off down the beach in pursuit of our husbands.

We caught up with them when they turned around and continued their walking discussion back in our direction. Eileen called out Frank’s name and both men looked up at us with a start. At just that moment some young Mexican men shouted at us and motioned us a little farther along the beach. We all followed the Mexicans’ gaze high into the air and saw a parasail swinging off the bay and over the beach, and one of the young men blew a whistle and the man hanging beneath the sail reached up and grabbed the rope above and to the right of his head and he pulled. The sail began to veer to the right, angling toward the beach before us, and it was coming down fast. I heard Frank’s voice say, “You were airborne, that right?” Vinh grunted in affirmation but I did not look at the two men. I kept my eyes on the parachute, the great red and yellow scoop, tight with air, carrying a man down from the sky. I could do that, I thought.

The whistle blew again and the man let go of the rope and he was coming down fast, and the young men on the ground rushed forward, reached upward, and the parasailor landed with a little run and his chute crumpled behind him.

“Hey, guys,” Eileen was saying. “Guys.”

I thought for a moment that she was talking to the Mexicans, that she wanted to go up into the air. But I looked and she had pulled the attention of our husbands to her and she said, “Gabrielle and I want to do something. All of us together.”

“That’s good,” Frank said.

Vinh just looked at me with a faint rebuke in his eyes. He hated to be taken off guard like this. I should have talked to him privately first. I understand his feelings, I suppose. An airborne ranger is always prepared. A successful businessman, too. But I just blew his little grimace a kiss and he forced a chuckle to show his good nature. I didn’t much care, to tell the truth. I couldn’t keep my eyes from slipping back to the Mexicans and their parachute. I knew I would feel disappointed to see anyone get onto that chute right now. It was meant for me. I was just a few moments away from soaring high over the bay, over the whole city, far above all of this.

“Don’t you agree, Gabrielle?” Eileen’s voice dragged me back to her. She was looking at me meaningfully, like it was time for me to nail this thing down.