Behind the Moon (20 page)

She and Bucky did not talk about these things because their love was not based on words but on laughter and kindness and, above all, the tactile pleasure of fingertips smoothing over sweat-damp flesh, the ebb and flow of movement through and around each other’s bodies, their love buoyant on a sea of sexual pleasure. They traced the outlines of each other’s bones through slick skin. She wrapped herself around his back and kissed the vertex of his shoulderblade, watching it ripple under the skin, shaped like the wing of a duck in flight. He turned around and ran his fingers over her collarbone, so fragile that he sometimes feared he could snap it in his careless urgency when he needed so badly to be inside her, when he was chased by his unmentionable fear of the world beyond the circle of her arms.

One morning, Linh wriggled out from under the torn mosquito net and slipped on Bucky’s green army T-shirt. Weak rays of light diffused through the shutters and fanned the room. She padded over to the window and opened it. As the wooden shutter creaked and scraped over the pitted concrete sill, flakes of paint rained down onto the street below. She was a woman who liked to look out of windows. She leaned her forearms on the ledge and gazed out to the distance.

Cap Saint Jacques hugged the ocean. Nestled among the lush greenery of the hill were the crumbling walls of old French villas, their terracotta roofs flashing in the sun. By the busy Vung Tau foreshore, grey naval vessels lolled together with the rusting hulls of container ships. On the shingles, net-draped fishermen’s boats clustered, black eyes painted on the red planking just below the bow of each boat, so that it might see its way back to safe harbour. In the far distance, junks tilted and sampans oared out towards soft clouds. Children laughed as they played at the end of a rocky promontory, tumbling stones into the sea, clambering up onto the highest boulders and screaming gleefully as they flung themselves into the calm blue ripples. In that drop between sky and sea, they thought no more of war. Life was merely sweet with the honeyed warmth of holidays and the generous largesse of the Americans in the form of sweets, chocolates, gum, cards, and the occasional cast-off army hat. Down in the street below, hawkers were calling out ‘
pho
!’ and rumpled heads poked out of apartment windows to order breakfast.

She turned around to look at Bucky dozing in her narrow bed, replete from early morning sex. She felt anew the marvelling delight that he could be hers, that he would want her in return. How she had yearned to belong to someone. As a young girl she had become accustomed to the pleasure of being safe, knowing she was owned and that she owned someone in return. It was the wonderful feeling of snuggling under a warm silk blanket during the monsoon season when rain sluiced down outside her bedroom window and the eaves dripped musically. She had missed the security of someone in authority over her, taking care of her and telling her what to do. She had missed the giddy exhilaration of coaxing and cajoling until she gained her own way because she was so extravagantly loved.

‘All right, you shall have whatever your heart desires,
con gai
, my little plum branch with your snow-pure soul,’ her father used to say indulgently. In the old days of plenty, before the escalation of the American war, all the men of her family—her father, her older brothers— lavished love and trinkets on her unstintingly. She had grown up accustomed to the pleasure of serving those she loved. How they had appreciated her! She wanted to serve her husband in the same way. She longed to fuss over someone, to pluck some morsels of fish to drop into his rice bowl, gently admonish him to take better care of himself so that he would glance up from his meal, smile at her and hold out his hand in tenderness.

She cooked Bucky an omelette for breakfast and as he sat and ate, she asked in her careful English, ‘You love me?’

‘Yeah, sure thing. Don’t worry so much, you.’ He reached for her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘I could never leave you. I want a future with you as my wife one day, when this war is over and we get to go home.’

‘You marry me? Is true?’

‘Of course. I’m not just taking you for a ride,
chère
. I love you and nothing can change that. Believe me?’

She studied the ill-assorted features of his face and found reassurance in his ugliness. ‘Yeah, sure thing,’ she said, consciously adopting his casual American speech. ‘I also love you.’

He rejoined his unit shortly after that. A few weeks later she received a scrawled letter informing her that his tour of duty would be up by the end of the year. He didn’t want to wait any longer; he had found a priest and was making arrangements to marry her.

An AVO and a Wedding

How much he toiled and strove to win my love!

But grown attached to me, he’s marred his life.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Tien felt as though she was losing control of her own wedding. Her mother seemed barely interested in the preparations, while Stan and his mother were only too eager to hijack the whole thing. She hardly had any say in what she was going to wear or where they were going on their honeymoon. She felt a rising sense of panic that her life was being invaded and taken hostage.

It surprised her that, for a man, Stan was unnaturally interested in wedding matters. He had already decided on two wedding ceremonies: a traditional Chinese/Vietnamese one, and a Western white wedding. He relished the thought of seeing Tien decked out in a red
ao-dai
with the traditional red frisbee-shaped headpiece. He would invite his arty Anglo friends along to the traditional ceremony so that they could marvel at the ritual and the spectacle, just as he had when he accompanied Tien to her cousin Van’s wedding.

He could imagine his solemn arrival to the celebratory gunshots of stuttering firecrackers, accompanied by various uncles and relatives all bearing bridal gifts. He and Tien would bow to heaven, bow before the Ho family altar, ask the blessing of the ancestors as well as protection from that quaint god of marriage, the Old Man in the Moon, bow to her mother, then perform the tea ceremony in rooms decked out with red gladioli and red banners embossed with gold characters. He did not subscribe to the beliefs underlying such rituals; he firmly believed his ancestors were serenely interred in Hong Kong or long expired in thick plumes of smoke and coarse-grained ash. But he prided himself on being a man who appreciated the maintenance of tradition and culture. It appealed to him on an aesthetic level.

The white wedding in the afternoon was for his mother. Mrs Wong hankered after a ceremony in a sandstone cathedral and photo ops in front of the Sydney Opera House. She was already collecting faxed menus from various Chinese seafood restaurants in Chatswood and Chinatown for the wedding dinner. She did not know whether to order a set menu with lobster, or one with abalone. She felt stressed. She needed to go shopping. She haunted Double Bay boutiques and bought numerous outfits, handbags and shoes to suit all possible permutations of heat, cold, humidity and rain that might occur in the fickle autumn weather. She wanted to wear a corsage. She admired baby’s breath and believed red and pink to be an entirely natural combination of colours for flowers and bridesmaids’ dresses. When she met Tien’s mother for the first time, she offered to take Linh shopping for a red or pink suit. When Linh politely declined, Mrs Wong was not so much
offended
as
hurt
. Her sensibilities were fragile. She was used to getting her own way.

‘What’s wrong with your mother?’ Stan demanded, annoyed. ‘You’d think she’d be happy her only daughter is getting married, but she’s not into it at all.’

Tien privately agreed, but she felt compelled to defend Linh. Her newly brokered truce with her mother was still in its nascent stages and she did not want to do anything to jeopardise their relationship. She cast around for an excuse, came up blank and blurted out the truth.

‘She’s very stressed at the moment because she’s being stalked. I think it’s getting worse.’

‘Stalked! Your mother has a stalker? I don’t believe it. Who is it?’ He was intrigued and incredulous, caught between the thrilling novelty of a stalking and the irritation of having something so outlandish interfering with his wedding plans.

Tien said reluctantly, ‘Gibbo. Nigel Gibson.’

‘Jeez, that figures. Your feral westie friends! Unbelievable.’ But when he had cooled down and given it further consideration, he was determined to do his filial duty by his future mother-in-law. ‘Leave it to me,’ he ordered confidently. ‘I’ll speak to your mother and take care of things.’

Linh could not help feeling that she was partly to blame for Gibbo’s infatuation. She had been lonely then, and Gibbo needed a friend. She had always liked Gibbo. A woman who could find beauty in the distorted cubist features and jutting teeth of Bucky Thibodeaux could also look beyond a young man’s blubbery body and flushedfaced fumbling ways to see the earnest desire for human connection underneath. She felt sorry for him, and she responded to his need for friendship.

She believed that she had handled their friendship deftly until the day he took her to the Swans game. They had both been so excited, their first AFL game, their shared baptism into Australian religiosity. She met him at a café in Oxford Street, Paddington, and they had lunch together. Eggs benedict for him, focaccia with bocconcini and tomato for her. Another first in her life. Even though Tien now lived in Bondi, she herself had not crossed the psychological barrier of the city to venture eastwards. It was a lovely sun-dappled spring afternoon. They walked over to the Sydney Football Stadium and Linh felt pleased with Gibbo’s company, pleased that she had somebody to do these things with. It made her feel like a normal Australian.

Inside the stadium, people were milling about, buying fast food, hailing friends and acquaintances, finding their way to their seats. The air was sharp with the tang of salt, vinegar and tomato sauce. Gibbo grabbed hold of her hand. He did not want to lose her. She was so tiny that it would take him ages to find her again. She let her hand lie passively in his as they climbed up to the top of the stadium to their cheap seats.

After the game was over, when the dipping sun gilded the stadium and seagulls wheeled and squalled overhead, she let Gibbo take her hand once more as they climbed down from the stands and filed towards the exit gates. Even when they were clear of the crowds, he did not release her hand. She was surprised but not particularly alarmed or uncomfortable. It felt quite companionable.

Gibbo was raving on about the game. He understood for the first time its magnetic attraction for his own father, the way your whole life arrowed down to the tug and pull between two teams; the godlike hubris of your team winning, the feeling of exhilaration and invincibility, as though life finally mattered, incandescent with meaning because you were swallowed up by something bigger, something triumphant to which you belonged. He felt, for the first time, able to connect to something that mattered to Bob, and it was all because of Linh. He would never have considered going otherwise, he told her.

Linh listened absent-mindedly to his chatter and wondered what she should cook for her dinner. Mentally, she ran through the ingredients in her fridge: lemongrass, ginger, garlic, chillies, mint, bean sprouts. Did she have some meat, beef or chicken in the freezer? Perhaps she had some prawns and sugarcane to make
chao tom
.

‘That was so great. We’ll have to do it again soon,’ he enthused as he dropped her off in front of her apartment. ‘Shall I get tickets for another game?’

She looked at him with surprise then. She could not understand his exuberance over this game. Perhaps it was an Australian thing, she thought. It had been an enjoyable afternoon because of its novelty, but did he really expect her to go to another game with him?

‘Thank you for taking me, Gibbo,’ she said, one hand already on the door handle, poised for the transition from this interlude to real life. ‘I had a very nice time.’

He leaned over to kiss her and she presented her cheek, for she knew this was what her daughter did with her Australian friends, both male and female.

What a shock it was, then, to find Gibbo sucking on her lips. Wet. He was a very wet kisser, was all she could think. It was like having your face mopped by the tongue of a golden retriever. But to her even greater surprise, she found herself yearning—not for him necessarily; just to be kissed. She had forgotten the flavour of a man’s mouth, the taste of his tongue. She leaned back and let him in. He licked the ridge of her teeth, slowly slid his tongue around the smooth wet cave of her mouth. She closed her eyes and smiled, heart-softened by his clumsy fumbling.

A car backfired further up the street and Linh sat upright, pushing away from Gibbo. Flustered, she mumbled a quick thanks, then she scrambled out of the car and ran into her apartment. She thought of what Tien would say, how Ai-Van and Phi-Phuong would snigger behind her back. She was ashamed of herself. She was a tough woman; she’d had to be in order to survive. Why didn’t she slap him?

But who could understand what it was like to be desired once more? She could not control the unexpected gush of soft feelings he’d uncorked. So when he’d kept bombarding her with messages of his devotion, she compounded her idiocy by agreeing to dinner with him in order to explain gently that she was not interested in him. She had been so apprehensive, so afraid of hurting his feelings if she didn’t do it tactfully. How sorry she had been for him, with his trite declarations of love that sounded like a television commercial or a thousand B-grade films. I love you, I love you, I love you, he said, until the words twisted and tangled into a meaningless foreignness.

The worst thing was that the more he said or wrote it, the more she would be reminded of how she and Bucky used to wreathe the phrase around each other with their questing mouths and twining limbs. I love you. It was everything to her then, but now she didn’t know what it signified and she began to doubt her relationship with Bucky. The great love story of her life wobbled and refused to stay fixed in its meaning. Gibbo had done this to her.

When Linh went to dinner with Gibbo ten days after the football game, a slight resentment was already simmering inside her, but she was determined to be nice. She sat in his car in long-suffering silence and let him peck sticky kisses on her lips and cheeks at every red light. She briefly debated whether she should say something to sort this out. It was not the best time; not when he was driving through the pouring rain, when the pain or anger of rejection might distract him into an accident. Then he was busy looking for a parking space in The Rocks and he was not paying attention to her.

It was even worse when they got to the restaurant because she could see that he had gone to a lot of trouble to make the evening romantic. Had she returned his feelings in any way, she would have been grateful. As it was, her heart sank and she lost her appetite. The waiters hovered by, drinks were served, the water glasses and bread basket were constantly replenished, entrée, main and dessert circulated efficiently from kitchen to table, and she was miserably conscious of listening ears and watching eyes. In between courses, he grabbed hold of her left hand and clasped it in his sweaty palm. She wondered with growing exasperation how he expected her to eat one-handed.

It was only when coffee came and the waiters finally left them alone that she felt able to broach the subject. ‘Gibbo, I’m so sorry but I don’t want to go out with you anymore. I’m too old for you and you should be hanging around with people your own age.’ He didn’t want to listen. He called for the bill and settled it, calculating the tip and signing the credit card slip with an extravagant flourish.

They walked back to the car in silence and he grabbed hold of her hand again. It was time to make a stand, she thought. She tried to tug her hand away but he just tightened his grasp. Afraid of making a scene, perhaps even a little afraid of him now and, above all, deeply embarrassed for both of them, she desisted.

‘I’m very tired, Gibbo, and I have an early start at the hospital tomorrow. Can you please take me home now,’ she’d requested. Politely. She was always polite to men, no matter how young or old.

She was so polite that, instead of driving her home, he drove her to Bronte Beach. It had stopped raining by then. He got out of the stuffy car and said, ‘Let’s talk on the beach.’ She had no choice but to follow. She tottered across the grass in stilettos, felt the heels sinking into the damp soil and balanced herself like a stork to slip them off. She felt gritty wet sand slipping in between her stockinged toes.

They sat on a park bench. He turned to her and poured out another declaration of love. He would not listen to her. He would not be diverted from his urgent compulsion to confess love repetitively, endlessly, excruciatingly. She was horrified to realise that love could be so boring. She told him tiredly that she could never love him in return, that he must stop bothering her like this. He burst into tears and buried his head in her lap, sobbing for all the women who had rejected him throughout his lifetime, conflating her with her daughter, mourning the loss of female friendship. Linh felt the seat of her panties soaking up water from the rain-wet bench, while the front of her skirt soaked up Gibbo’s tears. His head was heavy on her lap, his snuffling breath hot on her thighs. Sighing, she closed her eyes and listened to the rhythmic roar of waves beating down on the beach. She would get through this. She was a woman who could get through anything.

Then she woke up one morning to the sound of fists thumping against the glass door of her balcony. She lived on the ground floor of her apartment block. She had always thought that was convenient. Now she realised she was vulnerable. She got out of bed, shoved her feet into slippers and shuffled over to the window. She tugged the curtain slightly and saw Gibbo knocking on her door. When he noticed her peeking out at him, he held out an armful of roses as red as a blood-gash in his chest.

‘Why can’t you see how much I love you?’ he cried. ‘I’d do anything for you.’

‘The bastard! No woman deserves to be harassed like that,’ Tien said when she found out. She was fuelled with righteous indignation and a need for vengeance. ‘No means no. This is Australia, not Vietnam. Women have rights in this country, you know.’

In her eagerness to integrate into mainstream Australian society, Tien often disparaged her mother’s culture in order to distance herself from her ethnic and cultural roots. She had never visited Vietnam and knew little of its history or culture, yet she felt herself qualified to pass judgement. It was true that she didn’t speak Vietnamese very often now, but hadn’t she grown up with Uncle Duong and Auntie Ai-Van? Didn’t she celebrate all the festivals with the family? Hadn’t she served in Uncle Duc’s restaurant? Of course she knew Vietnamese culture!