Stray Love (28 page)

By nightfall, the sky was still very bright, reflecting fire from bombs that were falling in the countryside. We brought out chairs and gathered on the balcony to watch. Oliver didn’t argue. We could see stars in the distance, pulsing, bursting. Dinh pressed up to his mother’s side. Anh had been crying—her eyes were swollen. I rested against Arnaud’s arm. Oliver stood alone—unleaning, unsupported—smoking a cigarette. But even with the spaces between us, all of us together formed a quiet knot that evening. We had never been joined like that, so tightly, without a purpose. But that’s what death did.

Joseph didn’t die at war or at peace. He died someplace in that overlap, someplace in between. The day of his death, he had lost his seat on an Army helicopter heading to a battle area. (The American Embassy, hoping to control the spread of “falsehoods,” had started forming long waiting lists, making it harder to report on the front.) Joseph did not like being turned down and decided to make his own way to the countryside. He hopped in his beat-up car and drove past ramshackle houses and rice
paddies. The roads were slick with mud. A tire blew. The car sailed through the flimsy bamboo railing and off a bridge near My Tho about forty-five miles south of Saigon.

There was no pop or crackle of gunfire. No resistance. Just quiet. Just a man falling down, down into the brown river, a man tugged under by the weight of his flak jacket, his mosquito repellent, water flask, steel-plated boots—all the gear that should have ensured his safety.

They salvaged his notebooks, the ones he had reinforced with dirty white tape. But when they opened them up, all they found was a swirl of ink.

Oliver called Joseph’s wife and son in Poland to offer his condolences. His voice was shaky.
Yes, a terrible shock … Yes, of course I’ll speak with your son. Will you put him on the line? Hello? Aleksander?
I pictured Joseph’s son in his Warsaw flat. How old was he? Was he my age?
Of course I know who you are, Aleksander. I heard about you all the time … Please, you mustn’t think that. He was your father.
Oliver’s face crumpled. Then he said, softly,
There are always things we wish we’d said.
He looked right at me and I looked back.

His eyes were asking for something. Pleading. For what? Forgiveness?

At the time I didn’t understand. I do now.

Joseph’s body was sent back to Poland for burial, so his friends in Saigon arranged for a brief Buddhist service with an empty casket. As word spread about what had happened, the lobbies of the Continental and the Caravelle began to fill up with flowers. There were wreaths and pots, bouquets and baskets. The
air filled with their sad odour. Some of these were from his colleagues but many were from local merchants and acquaintances he had made in Saigon. Everyone wanted to honour him.

As his closest friend, Oliver was asked to write an obituary. It took him an entire day but by late afternoon there was a cleanly typed sheet of paper on the table. When the obituary ran, Oliver sat with the newspaper, tracing a box around his tribute, a casket of words.

Now that he had finished the piece about Joseph, he stopped writing and began walking. In the mornings, Oliver would rise early and leave the suite.
Where did he go? What did he see?
I tried to imagine his itinerary. I pictured him walking down Tu Do to the river and yelling at the water; yelling at the deaths that never made it into the news.

I began accompanying Oliver on his walks. We went back to Givral’s and Samedi’s. We visited the rooftop of the Caravelle where I slipped in next to him at the bar. I often thought of Joseph but sometimes I forgot, for minutes, hours at a time. I would be lying in bed or having a bath or eating a croissant and I would remember and the sadness would immediately return. This ebb and flow taught me something painful and unexpected: that when people die, they don’t just die once, but rather, many, many times.

It took me years to understand that Joseph’s death had hit Oliver personally. He felt punished and roused by it. He took it as a warning. Don’t court death, don’t take stupid risks. Don’t leave things too late.

There were no more short pieces. There were no more reports of any kind. There was a fresh blank page loaded into his typewriter
but Oliver did not work. He did not even pretend to work. When he wasn’t out walking, he spent time sitting in the living room while I drew. Having lost his focal point, the bull’s eye of danger, he was cut free to notice his surroundings. His attention ranged off into corners.

One day he spotted the books Pippa had sent resting on the shelf and walked over. He pulled down
The Phantom Tollbooth
and sat down beside me and opened it to the beginning.

“We used to read to you when you were a baby.”

“You and my mum.”

He nodded.

I watched his eyes tracking the lines of the first paragraph and said, “Would you read to me now?”

So Oliver began reading to me: ”
There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself
…
Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden
…”

The next morning Oliver hired a taxi and we travelled all the way to the bridge where Joseph had died. We lay down in the grass, feeling our bodies cool and warm, cool and warm, as cloud shadows passed across the field.

That night he pulled down another book. ”
In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes
…”

Oliver began telling me stories every night before we went to sleep.

Then the night came when Oliver said, “Marcel? Can we talk tonight instead of reading?” He was sitting at the table turning a teacup around and around in his palm.

“Oh?” I said, curious, lowering my sketchbook. “What did you want to talk about?”

At first I thought Oliver had finally lost his mind.

“What? My mother?” I said when he finished. “Are you joking?”

As I said her name he reddened and shrank back in his seat. I felt everything grow still and silent, as if the entire city had stopped moving. I felt my chin begin to tremble.

When he started speaking again, I listened to him fill the air around me and above my head with words.

“Pippa?” I whispered, repeated.

“Marcel. You knew who your mother is. Why do you pretend you didn’t.”

I shook my head, swinging it back and forth vigorously. I was a fighter trying to block punches, only the punches were the crazy things Oliver was saying.

When I stopped, I felt as if I were floating. I saw objects laid around the room. A plaited basket on a chair. A blue tea towel on the table. But everything felt separate and unreal. Anh came in from the bedroom with Dinh and took my hand. They must have been listening. I looked down and could see our hands connected but I felt nothing. Dinh picked up a cloth napkin and walked over to offer it to me. He understood what could make a person not want to speak. I looked at the napkin, puzzled, until I realized I was crying.

I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face but avoided looking into the medicine cabinet mirror because I did not want to see the new person this disclosure made me. I didn’t want to be revealed the way characters are revealed in the movies. I walked back to the table, picked up my pencil
and ran it up and down the seam of my sketchbook until the lead was flat. Then I poked the flat pencil through the page. I kept puncturing the page, harder and harder. I was fairly certain that a part of me had worked its way loose and was about to break off and fly away. I was fairly certain this part of me was my heart.

“Marcel, I’m so sorry,” Oliver said. “Please try to understand.”

The longer I remained silent, the more he pleaded and the more anxious he became. From very far away, I heard him say, “We’ll send her a cable. I’ll take you back to England. Please, Marcel, I’ll do anything you want. Just say something.”

I saw his eyes fill with water.

“Please say something,” he repeated.

But I would not give him the satisfaction.

I walked around lost in thought as I disassembled and reassembled my life. I went through the motions for Anh because she had enough worries thinking about her family in the north, and I didn’t want to be the source of further grief. I was shamed by the concerned look on her face. I ate everything she put before me, ate mechanically beyond the point of fullness, unable to stop behaving as I had been brought up. When Oliver sat with us, I copied Dinh and kept my eyes lowered, pretended I was unseeing, unhearing. I had decided that until I had something to say to Oliver that I wanted to say, I would be silent. I had learned from Dinh that deep silence could be an exit, another place to go.

Meanwhile, in my thoughts, I swung between gratefulness and misery: Who was I to complain? I had no blood wounds. There was food on the table. I was not homeless.

But my family was a lie. My life was a lie. I hated them both. How could they have hidden so much from me?

I stood up from tea one afternoon and walked out of the suite, thinking,
I’m leaving.
When I realized there was nowhere to go, I stood in the corridor, shaking.

At night I dreamt I was being led through Paris on a cyclo pulled by Audrey Hepburn. I dreamt of Sophia Loren pinning bedsheets to a clothesline and Ava Gardner folding a stack of shirts and Maria Callas flying with me through the sky. I dreamt that Pippa was floating on her back in a swimming pool, swishing her arms through the water like Esther Williams.

I awoke very early one morning with a damp pillow and turned my night-table drawer upside down on my bed. I searched through all the letters I had received from Pippa until I finally found the photo she had sent of herself on Brighton beach with Stasha. It felt strange to look at her face now. I thought about her London flat and her strange existence and all those times she was coming and going at odd hours, beds unmade all day long, and tried to picture the life I would have had if I had been with her all this time. A good life? A crazy life? I flipped back and forth between the beach photograph and the one I had of me as a baby on my mother’s lap. Anh was calling me to breakfast by the time I stopped.

Then I thought of my real father. Long ago, I had been told that my father was dead and I had accepted this fact without a second thought. But what if that was a lie too? What else were they capable of hiding?

I sent Pippa’s photo to Kiyomi. I sent her the broken pieces of my heart. I wrote on the back of the photo,
Pippa is the one,
my mother
—not even waiting for the ink to dry before slipping the photo inside an envelope. I had no idea how she would react but I needed to tell her the news to make it real to myself.

Then I helped pack up the suite. There wasn’t much to keep. We had acquired so little. Anh washed the tiles and the dishes and even dusted the broom. Dinh and I carried all our old paper down to the hotel burn-barrel, just outside the kitchen. There was a breeze but the janitor was able to start a flame deep within the paper-filled cylinder. We watched as the fire took hold, and small sparks leapt through the metal screen, and we kept watching, hypnotized, until the dark curling mass was reduced to a small pile of clean, white ash. When that was done, we walked back to the suite in a bit of a trance. The air felt different, hushed, without the rustle of newsprint, without our habits of writing and setting everything down.

The next day, Anh and Dinh moved into Arnaud’s apartment on rue Pasteur while Oliver and I remained at the Continental for a few days. Arnaud had arranged to buy the record player as a gift for Anh so there was no music any more. There was only the sound of traffic and the call of the street dentist offering to pull a few teeth.

On our last night in Saigon, Arnaud, Anh and Dinh joined us for a final meal at a restaurant by the river. We were the only diners that evening and sat at a large, round table in the centre of the room. There were tablecloths and good wineglasses. The waiters wore white coats and refilled our teapots and removed the white comb of bone from our fish. It was a multi-course feast. Delicate soups. Ornate side dishes. It all seems unreal now. A short distance away, there were artillery barrages and bombing attacks and peasants being forcibly herded from their ancestral homes into gulag-like hamlets.

Halfway through the meal, Arnaud held up a glass in a toast: “To Oliver and Marcel. A safe return.”

Everyone clinked glasses, except Oliver and me. I pretended it was because my glass was empty, but when the waiter brought more Coca-Cola and ice, I still kept my hands to myself.

Anh smiled, but later, as we were preparing to leave the restaurant, she took me aside.

“Macee, you have to forgive Oliver for what he’s done. Next time, you knock his glass too,” she said. “Remember. Your family is your lie.”

It took me a second to realize that she was saying
life.
Your family is your life.

Later that night, a window flew open and street noise streamed into the suite. Soldiers laughing down on Tu Do, a little too loudly, the roar of motorcycles and bursts of car horns, women click-clacking in heels, the broken wails of a cat in heat.

As Oliver stood up to close it, I stopped him. I knew I owed him a debt for raising me but something told me he wasn’t completely heroic.

“Why did my mother leave us, Oliver?”

There was no response.

“What did you do?

“What are you implying?”

I persisted. “I don’t think she could have stayed. You never showed her any fun.”

“Think what you want, Marcel,” he said, shaking his head sadly as he headed off to his room.

“See! You always do that. You always shut yourself away.”

Oliver reached his door and stopped. For a moment, I thought he was going to respond, but he just sighed. “It’s past
eleven and I’m going to bed. Remember we have to get up early.”

The French doors were still open and the curtains floated like air, twisting and taking the shape of the breeze. Was this feeling of detachment I had what my mother felt before she left? Was this the weight of loneliness?