Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

And this won for me a good husband, though he was not Lê V n Lý, nor could ever have been. But he was a good man and a surprised man to learn that my hands could also make him very happy even if my breasts did not seem so delightful in the tight bodice of my aó dài. That man died in the war which came to our country, a war we were about to lose, and I took my sons to America and I settled in this place in New Orleans called Versailles that has only Vietnamese. Soon my best friend Th y also came to this place, with her husband Lê V n Lý and her children. They left shortly for California, but after three years they returned, and we all lived another decade together and we expected much longer than that, for Th y and I would have become fifty years old within a week of each other next month.

Except that Th y was dead now and lying before me in this place that Mr. Hoa, the mortician for our community, called the “preparation room,” and she was waiting for me to put the makeup on her face and comb her hair for the last time. She died very quickly, but she knew enough to ask for the work of my hands to make her beautiful in the casket. She let on to no one — probably not even herself — when the signs of the cancer growing in her ovaries caused no pain. She was a fearful person over foolish little things, and such a one as that will sometimes ignore the big things until it is too late. But thank God that when the pain did come and the truth was known, the end came quickly afterward.

She clutched my hand in the hospital room, the curtain drawn around us, and my own grip is very strong, but on that morning she hurt me with the power of her hand. This was a great surprise to me. I looked at our locked hands, and her lovely, slender fingers were white with the strength in them and yet the nails were still perfect, each one a meticulously curved echo of the others, each one carefully stroked with the red paint the color of her favorite Winesap apples. This was a very sad moment for me. It made me sadder even than the sounds of her pain, this hand with its sudden fearful strength and yet the signs of her lovely vanity still there.

But I could not see her hands as I stood beside her in the preparation room. They were somewhere under the sheet and I had work to do, so I looked at her face. Her closed eyes showed the mostly Western lids, passed down by more than one Frenchman among her ancestors. This was a very attractive thing about her, I always knew, though Lý never mentioned her eyes, even though they were something he might well have complimented in public. He could have said to people, “My wife has such beautiful eyes,” but he did not. And his certain regard for her breasts, of course, was kept very private. Except with his glance.

We three were young, only sixteen, and Th y and I were at the Cirque Sportif in Saigon. This was where we met Lý for the first time. We were told that if Mother Mary had known the game of tennis, she would have allowed her spiritual children to wear the costume for the game, even if our legs did show. We loved showing our legs. I have very nice legs, really. Not as nice as Th y’s but I was happy to have my legs bare when I met Lê V n Lý for the first time. He was a ball boy at the tennis court, and when Th y and I played, he would run before us and pick up the balls and return them to us. I was a more skillful player than Th y and it wasn’t until too late that I realized how much better it was to hit the ball into the net and have Lý dart before me on this side and then pick up my tennis ball and return it to me. Th y, of course, knew this right away and her game was never worse than when we played with Lê V n Lý poised at the end of the net waiting for us to make a mistake.

And it was even on that first meeting that I saw his eyes move to Th y’s breasts. It was the slightest of glances but full of meaning. I knew this because I was very attuned to his eyes from the start. They were more like mine, with nothing of the West but everything of our ancestors back to the Kindly Dragon, whose hundred children began Vietnam. But I had let myself forget that the Kindly Dragon married a fairy princess, not a solid homemaker, so my hopes were still real at age sixteen. He glanced at Th y’s breasts, but he smiled at me when I did miss a shot and he said, very low so only I could hear it, “You’re a very good player.” It sounded to me at sixteen that this was something he would begin to build his love on. I was a foolish girl.

But now she lay before me on a stainless-steel table, her head cranked up on a chrome support, her hair scattered behind her and her face almost plain. The room had a faint smell, a little itch in the nose of something strong, like the smell when my sons killed insects for their science classes in school. But over this was a faint aroma of flowers, though not real flowers, I knew. I did not like this place and I tried to think about what I’d come for. I was standing before Th y and I had not moved since Mr. Hoa left me. He tied the smock I was wearing at the back and he told me how he had washed Th y’s hair already. He turned up the air conditioner in the window, which had its glass panes painted a chalky white, and he bowed himself out of the room and closed the door tight.

I opened the bag I’d placed on the high metal chair and I took out Th y’s pearl-handled brush and I bent near her. We had combed each other’s hair all our lives. She had always worn her hair down, even as she got older. Even to the day of her death, with her hair laid carefully out on her pillow, something she must have done herself, very near the end, for when Lý and their oldest son and I came into the room that evening and found her, she was dead and her hair was beautiful.

So now I reached out to Th y and I stroked her hair for the first time since her death and her hair resisted the brush and the resistance sent a chill through me. Her hair was still alive. The body was fixed and cold and absolutely passive, but the hair defied the brush, and though Th y did not cry out at this first brush stroke as she always did, the hair insisted that she was still alive and I felt something very surprising at that. From the quick fisting of my mind at the image of Th y, I knew I was angry. From the image of her hair worn long even after she was middle aged instead of worn in a bun at the nape of the neck like all the Vietnamese women our age. I was angry and then I realized that I was angry because she was not completely dead, and this immediately filled me with a shame so hot that it seemed as if I would break into a sweat.