The Turk Who Loved Apples (16 page)

I am also not as good a friend as I'd like to be. In the years after we bumped into each other in Kentucky, Patricia and I exchanged dozens of e-mails—or really, she sent them to me, and while I read with great pleasure of Patricia's peregrinations, her sister's weirdly budding country-music career, her unrequited loves, I never responded speedily or in enough depth to continue the conversation.
In fact, it's only just now I've spotted this line in a message from her in 2011: “It's a little trying, constantly being alone. It seems like there's got to be something better than that . . . but my experience tells me sometimes solitude is the best option.”

What I should have told Patricia—what I need to tell her now—what she probably already knows—is that solitude does not last. When its walls seem thickest, that fortress crumbles. You go on Facebook, or Couchsurfing, and make contact. You buy a plane ticket and fly to Kentucky and meet someone in the gift shop. You walk down the street in Tbilisi and wind up in someone's country house. You get lucky—you connect.

And that connection does not have to last. That is, friendship is not diminished by its ephemerality. Patricia and I met, wonderfully, on the road, but what claim do we have on each other? What responsibility can we possibly bear toward everyone we meet? Along with Patricia, I've met and befriended the Signorino family of Columbus, Indiana, and Hannity in his trailer outside Columbus, New Mexico, and Mike the curly-haired Australian snowboarder in Bulgaria, and Henry and Bess, the Australians I met somewhere in Turkey, and those Peace Corps volunteers in Bishkek and the kid on the train from Urumqi to Beijing and my dining companions throughout Malaysia and all the architects and designers of Buenos Aires. There are hundreds more, and while I'd be overjoyed to see them again, in whichever city they like, I harbor no expectation that will happen. The best and most responsible thing I can do is to remember them, to honor the brief joys of our relationships as abstract souvenirs, and to cross my fingers our paths will cross once more.

Because it can happen, and in ways we'd never predict. A few months after Douglas and I became friends—after we'd explored Saigon and taken a trip to Cambodia together and shared many, many Sunday brunches at a grottily cute French restaurant—I began noticing an intriguing crew floating through the Lucy Hotel. There were about eight of them, roughly my age, Americans and Vietnamese-Americans.
Fairly well-dressed, as if they had real, important jobs. I could, I was sure, connect with them—they were my people—but I didn't know how. Or I didn't know how to do so without being obvious.

And so I waited. I had Douglas, I had Ted and Jed and the Bodhi Tree gang, I had Tom and Tâm Tâm Café, and I had Portishead and I had my novels. I was in no rush, but I would make it happen.

As the month of March began, Ho Chi Minh City got hot. The rainy season long since past, the sun roasted the concrete sprawl with ferocity that increased each day. I was at the time deep into my midday routine of pork-chop lunches followed by air-conditioned naps, but that day the heat was too much. I finished my meal, then walked downstairs for an iced coffee with condensed milk in the Lucy Hotel lobby.

As usual, it was cool down there—all those tiles and high ceilings. Across from the front desk was a round wrought-iron table with a glass top and two cushioned chairs. At one sat Lucy Nhung, a gravelly voiced forty-something with big eyes, a bad temper, and a reputation for aggressive business tactics; rumor had it she'd convinced a Korean ex-boyfriend to buy her the hotel, then wound up in full control of the place. She could be loving, but she could also be dangerous.

When Lucy saw me approach, she greeted me and vacated her seat, asking if I wanted a coffee. I said yes, and she dispatched one of her employees into the street to fetch it. I sat down where Lucy had been, directly across from a Lucy Hotel denizen whose name, I would soon learn, was Tuyen Nguyen. Tuyen was thin, almost slight, with wrinkle-free clothes and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. He spoke not only with care but with ironic detachment, and when he wasn't speaking, a small, knowing smile played across his face. He was, I knew, part of the gang I wished to join.

He lifted his own iced coffee to drink, and the tall glass left a puddle of condensation on the table. “Why,” he asked me, “don't you tuck your shirt in?”

To be fair, this may not have been the first thing he said to me, but those were the first of Tuyen's words I remember, and typical of his approach—it was a challenge, but a challenge from a friend. He was, I learned, from Bethesda, Maryland, and a fairly recent graduate of Yale who'd spent time living under the tutelage of an older artist in Spain. In Ho Chi Minh City, he was an editor at the
Vietnam Investment Review
, one of several financially minded publications that had launched in the last year or two. To me, this sounded like a very cool job.

From there, the friendships developed smoothly. It might have been that very night, or a few nights later, but Tuyen invited me to join him and his friends in his room for drinks and cards before everyone went out. And that's how I met the gang: Steve and Lien, married architects from San Francisco; Mai and Jason, journalists with bylines in the
Washington Post;
and Hanh and Ayumi, English teachers and friends from Stanford. Other people circulated in and out, but this was the core. We'd begin each evening in Tuyen's spacious room with gin-and-tonics and several rounds of
ti
n lên
, the most popular card game in Vietnam, in which players dramatically throw down long straights in an attempt to empty their hands. (There is complex betting involved.) From there, we'd move on to dinner, often at one of the chic Western-style restaurants then opening around the center of the city, but sometimes at street spots, like the riverside auto garage that, come nightfall, transformed into a seafood grill. Then off to the Czech beer garden (run by Vietnamese engineers who'd studied in Prague) for the only authentic Pilsner Urquell in the city, and maybe a little karaoke in its private rooms, where Hanh would belt out Madonna songs with utter conviction and I would find nasal solace in Dylan. After which more drinks and viciously competitive games of pool and, when we all at last gave in, breezy motorbike rides back to the Lucy.

It was a routine, and a community, and I was part of it all, as accepted as anyone else. We spoke the same language—the language
of very young people with forthright ambitions and undisclosed fears, overeducated twenty-somethings who'd temporarily turned their backs on the United States in favor of this unknown new land. Among these friends, I was an equal, and while I wasn't sure what my role was supposed to be, I also wasn't sure it mattered, so long as I was there to participate in the drinking, the gambling, the eating, the chatter.

This was utterly different from hanging out with Douglas. Here I was not the little brother, even though Tuyen might call me “Matty.” Nor did this circle have the tensions and competitions I found among the Bodhi Tree gang. I didn't need to prove myself. No one would take advantage of me. These people were the friends I'd wanted for months, and half of them had been living right in my building.

I developed crushes on all the women. Lien had a rough, sexy voice and laughed at everything with total confidence, and once, after lunch, we napped together, clothes on, in my bed; but she was married to Steve. Mai was short, with thick glasses, and was incredibly tough—she'd grown up a refugee in Oakland, California—and one night she rode pinion on my moped back to the Lucy, hugging me from behind; but she was with Jason. Hanh was cute, her face composed of perfect circles, her emotions raw and naked; but she had a boyfriend back home, and I didn't know how to approach her anyway. With none of them did anything happen, and I was glad. I was terrified of upsetting the delicate balance of this perfect ecosystem.

But for a long time, that balance was maintained by the Lucy Hotel itself, the antics of whose tenants and staff we observed with equal parts fascination and horror. Mr. Bob, the middle-aged American on the first floor, had lived there the longest, having moved over from the Philippines after the closure of the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay; red-faced, paunchy, and only too happy to show off his full set of the
Encyclopedia Brittanica
, he seemed to move through a different Vietnam from the rest of us, speaking Vietnamese with
a terrible accent (he didn't care) and enmeshed in the operations of his store, the Yankee Peddler, which sold weird, off-brand perfumes and T-shirts. Mr. Bob was also responsible for having discovered Lucy's front desk clerk, skinny Ms. Luc, who'd had a hard life; the French-speaking daughter of a South Vietnamese policeman, she'd spent the postwar decades going mad, winding up homeless, carrying her young daughter on her back as she sold lottery tickets on the street—which is where Mr. Bob had found her and given her work at his shop. At the Lucy Hotel, she was the mild-mannered rock, kind, approachable, and patient.

Which is to say, quite unlike her boss, Lucy, who could transform in an instant from girlish and helpful to pure raging evil. We guests were mostly safe, but each of us, at one point or another, had stumbled upon her in mid-rant, screaming at one of the desk clerks or security guards about some infraction or another—before she'd turn to us, flash a smile, and ask if we needed anything, bottled water, fresh fruit, new sheets. She'd pay off the police so American guys could have their Vietnamese girlfriends spend the night, and she knew where to find good deals on motorbike rentals. But she also spared no one her wrath—not even Thuy and Duyen, the sweet-faced cleaning girls, whom she fired when they asked to be paid the past two months' wages.

The next month, however, Lucy hired them back, and it seemed part and parcel of the comedy that was life at the Lucy Hotel—a dramatic but consequence-free interlude in all our lives. Or maybe just in my own naïve, innocent life.

One night, though, things blew up for serious. A Filipino engineer who lived alone at the hotel had been enjoying a visit from his wife, who'd come over from Manila for a week. But the wife's presence was a problem, because the engineer, as we all knew, had been having an affair with Lucy. For a few days, Lucy and the engineer kept up the landlady-tenant charade, but then, somehow, their cover was blown, and an epic fight began, one we could hear from up in
Mai's room on the fourth floor, where we'd begun another round of cards. And that battle ended (as we pieced it together that night and the next morning) with the engineer's wife slashing her own wrists with a kitchen knife, after which the engineer drove her to the hospital—in Lucy's car.

Even though my friends and I had observed this all from the outside, and even though it had nothing to do with us, it was a sign that seemingly stable dynamics might suddenly shift—or collapse. The next crack appeared when Lien left to return to San Francisco. Her last night in Saigon, we celebrated with a vodka-fueled party at the Siberian Hunting Lodge, and I heard whispered rumors she was on the outs with Steve. Then I took off, on a ten-day trip to Taiwan to visit Tammy, my ex, and when I got back, Lien had returned. Had they patched things up? Or was there something else going on? I heard more rumors of other hookups among our crew, and while no one showed anything on the surface, the sudden tensions frustrated me. We'd all been so good together; why did it have to end? Why did there have to be secrets among us?

The thing is, it didn't end—none of it did. It got a little harder to raise a quorum for cards and drinks in Tuyen's room, but we still went out together, still rode home to find the Lucy Hotel's security gate being groggily opened by a shirtless night watchman. New people appeared in our circle—Susie, Wynn, Hien, Khue—and old ones changed jobs. As far as I knew, there were no fights, no cut ties, no subtle breakups. Even Lucy, the engineer, and his wife worked things out somehow; the wife went back to the Philippines, and Lucy and the engineer resumed their affair. But life at the hotel was feeling different, less special.