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

I was happy that no one noticed. I rose up and gasped quietly to myself while the others talked all at once. The Mexican woman was looking at me, but I nodded to her that I was all right, and after a slow, contemptuous look at the three Americans, she closed her eyes and put her head back once more, though this time she turned slightly to one side as if to ask her lover to kiss a new spot, just under her ear. I was ready to get out of the tub, away from all the excitement, but I lingered for a time watching this woman, so comfortable in her body, so relaxed with matters that touched on sex.

A little later Vinh and I were walking along the beach. It was the Mexican woman who stayed in my mind, not the game-show winners. I knew I was seeing them too flatly. They were complicated human beings, like all of us, in spite of how hard they worked at making their surfaces simple. But they bored me right now. I thought about the Mexican woman and I wished I could take Vinh’s hand. Perhaps this was foolish of me, to have this hesitation. I am a smart woman, a modem woman. Vinh has never said a word to me that would discourage me from doing something like taking his hand as we walked on the beach. But there are forces in me that are very strong. Just as strong as the forces that make the two women from Northern Louisiana and Minnesota speak and dress and act the way they do. They have no control of those things. I doubt if they could change any of those things even if they were conscious of them and wanted to. I spent the first twenty years of my life living in a country and a culture that expected certain attitudes from women and men and you can’t just put all that aside because your mind says, Why not? Nobody’s mind is that strong. You have to wait. Things have to change from the inside.

Like Vinh. He walked beside me on the beach and the waves rustled near us, running up now and then and licking our feet, and there was bright sun and a blue sky overhead while across the bay, the mountains had disappeared into a dark gray sky and there were leaps of lightning over there and the contrast between this sunny beach and that storm-dark mountain was very romantic. But Vinh could not see these things. He was brooding again, thinking about Delta Airlines or the Superdome or the Hilton hotels, thinking about five hundred chicken dinners or a thousand Swedish meatballs. A man strapped into a harness beneath a parachute was rising from the beach just ahead of us, a cable running out to a speedboat in the bay going taut and dragging him into the air, and I stopped to watch it rise and Vinh realized what I did and he, too, stopped, following my eyes into the air but not really seeing anything, because he said, “Can you remind me to call Nicholson when we get back? They’ve got some big engineering conference coming in.”

“Okay,” I said, still watching the man on the parachute getting smaller and smaller in the blue sky, and I thought that this was something I might like to do. To get up there above all of this and just float around.

“You’ll remember?” Vinh asked because I had answered without looking at him. It wasn’t in irritation that he said this. It was just that I was important to him in this way. He depended on me. I have a very good memory.

I lowered my eyes and he was looking at me with a face that seemed eager, almost like a child. Sometimes he seemed to really enjoy the work he did. I was glad for that. I said, “I’ll remember. You know I’m like an elephant.”

My Vinh smiled at this. I have said this same thing to him many times and it always makes him smile. And that always makes me smile, that this should amuse him so. I smiled and then a young Mexican girl appeared at Vinh’s side and she had lizards on both shoulders and on the top of her head, large lizards.

“You take picture of you and iguana?” she asked. “Very cheap.”

Vinh looked at her and stepped back, startled, I think, at these large green creatures crouching on the girl. “No, gracias,” he said.

“Like in the movies,” the girl said.

“Where’s your camera?” Vinh said, and the girl shrugged and looked toward me. I was carrying a bag large enough, I suppose, to hold a camera. Vinh said to her, “You should have a camera. If you want to make money, you get a camera and shoot the picture yourself. Comprende?”

I don’t think the girl comprended. But even if she did, making an investment in a camera to improve her business probably was worthless advice. I said to Vinh, “She never has that much money at one time, to be able to buy a camera.”

Vinh nodded and sighed. “She’ll never get anywhere.”

By now I’m sure the girl thought we were both a little cracked, so she drifted away. I came to Vinh’s side and we walked on. “Iguanas,” he muttered.

I said, “Do you know why iguanas?”

He shook his head no.

I said, “Because Puerto Vallarta is a very romantic place, and it has to do with iguanas.”

Sometimes I will surprise my husband with a piece of information, and though it usually has something to do with the parts of American culture he has little patience for, his natural curiosity gets the better of him. This was one of those times. He looked at me sideways, not exactly turning his head to me; he was trying to say that he wasn’t really interested in this but I’d better tell anyway. In these situations I don’t say anything immediately. I choose to ignore this look of his. I make him ask for it. The culture I grew up in does give a woman certain subtle ways of maintaining her dignity.

“There’s a reason?” he finally asked.

“A reason?” I said, as if I’d already forgotten about it.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “A reason for the iguanas on the beach.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and I waited.

Vinh stopped walking abruptly. I took a few more steps, as if I didn’t notice. “Gabrielle,” he called after me, and I stopped and turned and looked surprised not to find him beside me. I returned at once, being the good wife that I am. When I got to him, he settled himself so as not to seem too eager to hear whatever this was that I knew. He even used the casual form of my name, though he said it with the French pronunciation and I don’t think he has ever learned that in English he could have a little joke on me with it. “Gaby, why is it that they think tourists want to have their pictures taken with iguanas?”

“It’s nothing really. It’s just a foolish thing.”

“Gabrielle,” he said in the voice I was waiting for. My husband is very attractive at this sort of moment. Someone else might get angry or imperious or dismissive or whiney. But Vinh turns gently urgent, like he is a child with a little pain that his momma has to make better. “Please tell me,” he said.

So I told him about Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” is a wonderfully beautiful girl. Even later, in “Cleopatra,” she is very beautiful. You might think that a Vietnamese would not appreciate that kind of full-bosomed beauty. But people often admire qualities that are quite different from their own. And Richard Burton of that same time is equally attractive, say in “Look Back in Anger” or “The Bramble Bush.” His voice, particularly, can thrill a woman. He, too, was in “Cleopatra” and that, of course, is when the story I told Vinh really began. Liz and Dick — Cleopatra and Antony — fell in love, and since they were both married to other people and that was in 1962, there was a big uproar. Then the next year Richard Burton came to Puerto Vallarta to make a film. (I didn’t tell Vinh the name of the film at this point so that I could hold back the big answer to his question and keep his attention. He was still wondering about the iguanas.) Elizabeth Taylor followed him to this place and they rented two houses with a bridge between them, over a cobbled street, and the world was watching that bridge very closely for months. By now Vinh was getting a little impatient, I knew. Just impatient enough — I always could sense when I was about to lose his attention. So I told him that the name of the movie was “The Night of the Iguana” and there were Puerto Vallarta iguanas featured in it and that’s why the little girl had her business.