Stray Love (21 page)

Perfect. How will I tell Kiyomi that I have lost her daughter?

I’ve just closed the bathroom door when I hear a loud thump from my studio. I walk across the hall and nudge the door open again.

“Iris? Are you in here?”

I find Iris on the floor, jammed between the bookshelf and a bedraggled ficus. She doesn’t look up when I appear.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. But she looks pale and oddly passive.

“What’s going on, Iris? You don’t look well. But, listen, your mother has good news for you.”

I scan the room for clues. Then I find what I’m looking for. The source of the thump.

Let it be said that despite poor reading habits, I have a respectably large collection of books: non-fiction doorstops, illustrated magazines, monographs, books you can depend on (i.e., no poetry, no novels). I have relied on this collection over the years for pictorial support. In subject areas where my imagination has proven limited, these books have provided the necessary details for buildings and machines and period costumes; yaks and quartz and cactii. (Increasingly, I have moved to online
sources for material, but when Corbis or Google image come up cold, I like to know there is somewhere else I can turn.)

Of all the books Iris might have chosen to examine—say, Taschen’s reprint of
The Book of Plants
or Pastoureau’s
The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes
—I discover that she has gravitated towards the least childworthy, the most unthinkable of my collection, my Vietnam War books.
Nam Massacre, Four Hours in My Lai, Death Valley
… They’re all in a pile beside her. I have no idea how far she’s waded in, what hideousness, what wounds she’s already seen.

There is nothing to do but approach her, gently take the books away. I try to keep my expression neutral, underplaying the moment because I know children tend to look to adults to judge how they should react to an injury. But with my arms now full, I feel Iris watching me, her own face still washed of colour.

“I know what’s in those books,” she says impassively.

I nod. My mind is lit with a flash. An image of a Vietnamese child trying to push the innards back inside her mother. And I wonder if this is one of those moments that Susan Sontag describes, when you are
cut in half
by what you see—Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai—when you stop and say:
Oh my God. This is what human beings can do to other human beings.

Iris. How could I have known she’d snoop around?

As I reshelve the books, I sneak peeks at her, trying to assess the damage, to understand if this is a surface injury or something deeper. (I can think of preferable transgressions: my
Big Book of Breasts,
the stash of pot in my nightstand drawer, the vodka in the icebox.) But
this.
She just looks back at me blankly. For a split second, I feel a flicker of resentment. Why does she get to be so bloody innocent? Let her suffer a bit. Then I feel
shame. Her eyes are fixed on mine. Why does she look like that? I am beginning to wish she were an opera with surtitles floating above her so I could tell what she’s thinking. Then I feel a hand swat my leg. Hard.

“Marcel. Help me up. I’m going to go see if Sarah is teaching any classes downstairs.”

“Okay,” I say, forgetting all about Kiyomi’s call.

She looks back from the door and says, “By the way, I don’t like your books.”

Her tone is adamant, non-negotiable.

“No.” I shake my head in agreement.

This gesture seems to satisfy her. She smiles a small smile before disappearing around the corner. The smile is more for my sake than hers, but I choose to see it as a good sign, a sign of emotional agility.

I
N THE ABSENCE OF OTHER COMPANY
and to occupy myself while Anh went about her chores, I sometimes visited a man people called “the General.” The General was a regular fixture on Tu Do, a decorated hero after the French defeat by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu nine years earlier. His skin was tanned a deep brown and his grey hair was shiny with Brylcreem. The story went that he had lost a son at Dien Bien Phu, then another, and then—suddenly or slowly, I couldn’t piece together all the details—he had lost his mind. Now he dressed in a faded uniform and walked about with a plastic toy rifle over his shoulder. He usually marched to and fro on the pavement by the hotel terrace. Occasionally he would stop, put his toy rifle on the ground and fiddle with the medals on his jacket. He didn’t seem to mind or notice when I paced with
him, though once he stopped and let me touch his medals, staring very clearly at me before continuing. Once in a while, the doormen would usher him off the premises but I noticed they always did so courteously.

Lately, the hotel staff was too busy to notice the General. The hotel driver was constantly travelling back and forth to the airport. It seemed there were new reporters arriving all the time. They bummed cigarettes and smoked like gangsters in the lobby. They sat on bar stools with their Vietnamese dates. I knew that Anh didn’t like any of them. She thought they were too young, too old, too nice, too mean, too stupid, too smart to cover the war fairly.

But they liked her.

I was standing by the lobby elevator one afternoon when Anh walked through the front door of the hotel. Hearing the room suddenly go quiet, I turned to see what was going on, only to discover the reporters staring at Anh as she passed. I could see their eyes skimming her thin beige dress. Anh continued to make her way towards me, her chin raised. As she got closer, I noticed that her ears had turned red. A patch of dampness had blossomed on her chest.

There were no smirks or sly grins. Men did not look at Anh in the same way they eyed the women who took mini-steps in tall shoes along Tu Do, the ones who sang in bars and wore false fingernails and red flowers in their hair. Anh’s beauty wasn’t flashy. She hardly wore any makeup and her simple clothes only hinted at her body’s outline. But there was something in the way she held herself, her head high, back straight, that brought brave boys to shout
I love you!
in Vietnamese before dashing off. She could make a room full of men explode into silence. Everyone was a bit in love with her.

At the market one day, a French man followed us and tried to convince her to marry him. He was a chef, he said. He offered to cook her a beautiful dinner. He said he made an exquisite consommé. “Be my wife! I will make you very ‘appy!”

I began holding her hand when we were out in public, so that others could see she was not free for the taking. I didn’t want anyone stealing her away from me.

At dinner one night, when the three of us were eating together, chopsticks clacking against our bowls, I caught Oliver studying her.

“More eating, you two,” she said, when she noticed the quiet.

I looked at Oliver, then back at Anh. I watched her lift a prawn from the serving bowl, place it on her rice before taking a bite. At no point did the chopsticks make contact with her lips or tongue or teeth.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked, resting her chopsticks across her bowl. Lately she had noticed that Oliver wasn’t eating his meals so much as rearranging them.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just not very hungry.”

She observed him for a moment, then picked up her chopsticks and started eating again. “I’ll make you some English food,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Thank you, Anh, but that won’t be necessary. Everything you make is wonderful.”

“I’ll make it English,” she said, ignoring him. “But not too English.”

He laughed and leaned back in his chair, studying her again.

Later, when Anh left and we were alone, I asked Oliver if he thought Anh was beautiful.

“Every woman is beautiful,” he said, smiling.

“As beautiful as my mother?”

As soon as I said this, his smile tightened.

The next morning Anh took me to Samedi’s bookshop near the hotel and found recipes in a brittle copy of
Betty Crocker
and a magazine called
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Over the next few days, she learned to make mashed potato, breaded fish, and meat loaf in a glass dish. But she insisted on preparing vegetables the Vietnamese way—sliced and julienned so finely, they glowed like transparent matchsticks when lifted to the light.

“Macee, come with me and see,” Anh said.

She had discovered a sidewalk artist a block north of the hotel, an older man nicknamed “Raphael” who sported a scraggly white beard and did large chalk pastel portraits on a portable easel. There was a sign in Vietnamese on the ground. I asked Anh what it said.

“It says he used to be a schoolteacher but he quit his job because there was not enough money to feed his children.”

As people passed up and down the street, he called out to them in a singsongy voice, flattering and praising the beauty of men’s wives and children.

When a woman sat down, I slipped into a gap in the crowd and approached the easel. He worked shockingly fast, no fiddling or underdrawing. He did all the showy things, emphasizing the woman’s best features, making her big eyes bigger, cheekbones longer. He added orangey pink skin highlights and fluttery lashes and gave her the kind of swept-up hair that made her look like women in the magazines.

I walked back over to Anh and tapped her on the shoulder. “I want to start my own portrait business,” I said.

“Okay, Macee. As long as you keep studying,” she said.

I didn’t know where to get an easel, but Anh had an idea. That afternoon she took me to the river where an old French restaurant was being turned into a new American nightclub. You could tell it was American because the entire front had been painted with pictures of eagles and motorcycles. Anh walked under the scaffold and stepped through the empty window opening. Inside, a few boys, only slightly older than me, were hammering silver siding onto a bar. When they noticed her, one of the boys stopped and walked over.

I don’t know what Anh said to him but a few minutes later, he headed to the back and returned with an A-frame pavement sign. It still had a smudged chalk list of recent food and wine arrivals by Air France (Le
beaujolais nouveau est arrivé …
) in upright French script. Anh paid him and we lugged the wooden sign back to the hotel.

The next day I was up early. I borrowed two chairs from the terrace and set myself up with my easel under a tree on the sidewalk. When my furniture was organized, I sharpened my pencils, clipped a piece of paper to the board and sat waiting. The paper fluttered in the breeze. The sun rose in the sky. Towards noon, I leaned back in my chair, watching the planes overhead and half listening to voices from the terrace, the dull
clink
of espresso cups on saucers, the
pop
and
hiss
of a bottle cap. I turned around and saw David subduing a reporter from New Zealand who was complaining about a recent altercation with a police officer. I could smell the grilled pork sandwiches they were eating and the mango and soursop in their drinks. The General stopped beside me, peered down at the blank paper with his brown leathery face, before continuing down the sidewalk. Eventually my stomach started rumbling, and I
leaned my easel against the tree trunk and went inside.

After lunch, there were plenty of people passing on the street but none of them stopped. At three o’clock, Anh came outside and coaxed two people to sit for me: an elderly fruit-seller whose trousers were so worn they hung in strips by his ankles, and the eldest daughter of the hotel manager, who kept her eyes on the pavement the entire time.

I had my first official customer the next morning: a Canadian reporter named Daniel. He kept his eyes very open and sat very stiffly, hands folded in his lap, as though posing for a school photograph. No matter how many times I asked him to make himself comfortable, he just couldn’t relax.

I had already decided that I would avoid tricks. I’d keep it simple. No emphasis on the nicer parts. No off-centre placement. My portraits would be the real thing. I couldn’t wait to write to Kiyomi and tell her I’d gone professional.

“Not bad, not bad,” Daniel said when I was finished. He paid me 20 piastres and bought me a Fanta.

When David found out what I was up to, he stood on the sidewalk shouting like an obnoxious carnival barker. “Check it out. Marcelangelo! Otherwise known as Oliver’s kid.”

Soon, every new reporter who showed up at the hotel was stopping by for a drawing.

I’d been drawing on the street for a week when I met Arnaud. The sun was shining directly overhead. I was about to take a break, when he sat down in front of me, short and dark-haired with a huge smile on his face.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. “David calls you a ‘freakish prodigy.'”

“David’s crazy,” I said, and gave him a shy smile.

He was wearing a white button-down shirt. A black cord dangled from his breast pocket.

“I thought you were Vietnamese when I saw you,” he said. “But now I can see you’re probably …”

“English,” I said.

He nodded.

“Are you Vietnamese?” I asked, unsure, taking in his narrow eyes, high cheekbones, long nose.

“Yep,” he replied. Sensing my curiosity, he added that his father was Vietnamese and his mother was French.

We chatted for a moment, further introducing ourselves. His English was fluent but there was something different about the way he pronounced the words. A mixed accent. Maybe French and something else. He asked where I had learned to draw, and when I said I was self-taught, he nodded his head but didn’t make a fuss.

“Are you an artist?” I asked.

“No.” He pulled up the black cord hanging from his pocket to reveal a small light meter. “A photographer.”

“Do you take pictures of people?”

“Yep.”

“Any tips on making a good portrait?” I asked.

“The first rule is to disappear. Find a corner and catch people without them knowing. Try a sideways look.”

I glanced over at the terrace. It was crowded with reporters, waitresses in flowing silk pants. When the terrace was deserted, when the regulars weren’t at their tables at the usual time, you knew something was up. I saw Oliver and Joseph leaning together at a corner table, holding up a creased road map. I looked back at Arnaud. He grinned, exposing a row of evenly spaced teeth.