T. Parker - Little Saigon

When the lights went on, Frye caught his breath and felt his heart dissolve in one instant. Cristobel stood at the garden pool, about to step from her robe, her head cocked slightly as if she’d just heard a rustle from the two men spying on her from the trees. It was the angle of her head that caught him, the long gentle plane from ear to shoulder, white in the light and set off by the blue water of the pool. Her hair was tied up loosely, a strand or two escaping down and across her face, almost hiding the eyes that looked to the ground, both innocent and suspecting at once. Something in the angle of her head caught Susanna’s indecision and doubt. Her arms were already lowering the robe, her neck and shoulders already bare. Frye considered the sculpted roundness of her limbs, the uninterrupted perfection of her back, and a leg, barely visible where the loose white material gave way with Cristobel’s step to the water. He barely noted the lurking men, the trees, the bench beside her on which rested three small vessels and a folded towel, or the two servant girls disappearing in the background toward a house. The breeze moved her robe, just slightly, and Frye saw her hair brush her cheek. The lady beside him whispered something, but he ignored her. He hated the sniveling, cretinous elders, though he felt like a third. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me? He shifted in his seat. What odd compulsion had brought Cristobel to this tableau and its shadows of seduction, rape, betrayal? What’s going through her mind right now, with a thousand elders’ eyes fixed on her body?

For a moment he swore her gaze wandered across the seats to him, but that was silly. Her leg was imponderably lovely. Was she getting cold? His body felt light and his mind distant, as under hypnosis. I could sit here all night. But the lights began to dim and he watched in genuine sadness as Cristobel’s form lost its clarity and dissolved, slowly vanishing into the dark.

He met her outside the stage door an hour later. Her hair was still up and she was wearing a loose blue dress, tied at the waist with a sash. Two men he assumed were the elders walked with her, and she said good night to them at the bottom of the steps. They looked at Frye with a protective air, then headed down the sidewalk different ways. Cristobel ran down the stairs, smiling, and threw her arms around him. “Can you believe what Lucia did? It’s just the best thing I could have heard tonight.”

“It sure is. My jaw dropped when I watched the news.”

“I’m just so... there’s no way to say. Did you like my piece in the show?”

“Not bad...”

She stopped and regarded him, askance. “The rain got our timing off and made everything slippery.”

“It changed my life, really.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“Yes. Get some coffee?”

“I’d prefer a little motion. All that posing makes me want to move.”

They walked up Broadway, slick with rain and littered with eucalyptus leaves. The storm had left in its wake a clear dry sky, with stars emerging deep in the west. Cars hissed along the boulevard. Frye noted that the savings-and-loan thermometer read seventy-one. Even from two long blocks away he could hear the rumbling surf, and when a big wave hit it sent tremors up the sidewalk and into his toes. They tickled.

“Feel that?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.”

She took his arm. Frye felt an immense pride as he walked down Broadway with Cristobel, secretly desiring that anyone who’d ever wished him harm could be here for this march of triumph. He would be humble in victory, though: signing autographs, giving advice, laying on hands, and what have you. They crossed Coast Highway and headed up the boardwalk toward Heisler Park.

“Must be kind of hard playing Susanna, considering the recent past,” he said.

Her arms stayed in his. “I showed up for the audition, and they offered me Susanna,” she said. “I was shocked. Then I thought about it, read the story in the library, and decided it might be therapeutic. Kind of like you going out on a two-foot day, maybe. Just to get wet again.”

“That’s it. One step at a time. First night kind of rough?”

“I wanted to run. The applause helped. It’s all a matter of getting comfortable with myself again. When something like that happens to a woman... well, I felt... unclean. Spoiled and dirty. Somehow you have to get the shame out of your head. Time helps. And putting your toes in the water again. And being made love to by you.”

“You were beautiful. All I saw was you.” Frye stopped and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry about what I did, what I said. Both times.”

“I am, too. Sorry you found out I had this obsession about you. I was going to play this very cool. Now, I’m busted.”

He kissed her. People on the sidewalk had to move around them, but Frye didn’t care. I could get lost in this woman, he thought.

She broke away and looked at him. “There’s something dark in you right now, Chuck. What happened?”

They lay on his living room floor and let the warm breeze pass over them. She rested her head on his chest. Frye stared at the ceiling.

“You can’t keep it all bunched up inside,” she said.

“I know.”

A moment later, he was spilling it. The Secret Army, the tape, the tunnels, Eddie and Loc, Minh and Wiggins, Hanoi’s POW revelation, Bennett’s transcontinental grudge match with Colonel Thach. He left out the details, in deference to his brother, his family, his own sense of what you tell someone and what you don’t. “The biggest worry I had last Sunday evening was getting a job,” he said.

“How come you always think you have to solve it all and fix everything? Seems to me you lay a lot of blame for things right on yourself. That’s either foolishness or arrogance, Chuck. You know that?”

“Who the hell are you, Toni Grant?”

He felt the muscles in her jaw tighten. She lay still.

“Sorry,” Frye said.

“I know it’s there, Chuck. I can feel it. But what is it? What is it that eats at you so bad?”

He closed his eyes and felt her head on his chest and smelled her rain-damp hair. He listened to the cars whisking by on Laguna Canyon Road. He could hear the power lines buzzing below, aggravated by the rain. Then, the sounds seemed to fall an octave and all he heard was a faint ringing in his ears. He could see it. He could see her. He could hear the seagulls yapping overhead.

“I had a sister, Cris. Her name was Debbie and she was a sweet kid. Two years younger than me. Kind of skinny, built like me, Nice smile. Hair like straw. Freckles. Tomboy, I guess. I imagine that she’d have grown into a good woman.”

Cristobel’s fingers moved through his hair.

“We were close in a lot of ways. Closer than me and Benny, because he was five years older than me, and you know how older brothers are.”

“I sure do. They ignore you.”

“Yeah. Well, Benny taught me to surf and I taught Debbie. Other kids had little league or powder puff or whatever. We had waves. We were close enough to the beach, we could ride down the whole peninsula on our bikes and find where the break was best. All summer that’s what we did. When school was in, we’d get up at six, surf an hour, then make it home for breakfast. After school, back out again if the wind hadn’t picked up too much.”

“Mike and I had horses. Same kind of thing.”

“When I look back now, I can see she worshipped me. Me. I just tolerated her, but that’s how brothers treat sisters. She’d always do what I was doing — wear the same kind of clothes, get her hair cut like mine, pick up the slang I got from my friends. I think the first word she learned was bitchin’. Hell, she asked Mom if she could get braces when she was old enough because I had the damned things.”