Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“Rishus!”

I thought, Life could be this simple.

That night I continued to drink after dinner. Nhu had a waitress’s instinct for appearing from nowhere when my glass was empty and asking if I wanted more.

“Sit here,” I said.

She resisted, then she sat on the edge of the chair, like a bird teetering on a branch.

“Drink?”

She said yes with her eyes and a certain motion of her head, and then, “Bland.”

“This brandy is twenty-five years old,” I said.

“Lie me!”

The way she perched and drank made me anxious, for she seemed to be balancing rather than sitting. But after she had two more drinks, her manner of perching seemed a good indication that she could hold her liquor, a rare thing among the Asiatics I had done business with.

I put my arm around her. She stiffened and moved so that she was perched on an even smaller portion of the sofa, as though about to take flight. She faced forward and said, “Nup.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You want sess? No can do sess wee me. We flen. If we do sess, I no can wuck, no can crean, and wha. No be flen.”

I remembered with shame the shocked and disgusted way she had said, Him tuss me. So I poured her another drink, which she held in her hand, and she looked serious.

“If we do sess, me pain here,” and she touched her heart.

We had another drink and then she said good night and went to her room, and to my shame I heard her double-lock her door, the key, the dead bolt. Now I was another employer of whom she could say, Him try tuss me.

But she stayed. I was careful not to presume upon her, and after a while I began to feel a certain relief knowing the limits of my friskiness and the boundaries of my friendship. I reminded myself that I was her employer and how much she mattered to me, how essential her good humor and efficiency were to my well-being on this island.

That was how things stood between us for several summer months. In those months we worked out a routine: she cleaned, I read the paper, then did my desk work. On rainy days we had lunch at home — Nhu eating in the kitchen, me in the dining room. On good days we had lunch on my boat and then went for a run, and I drank beer and steered, and she fished, trolling from the stern. She was good at it — knew the lures, knew the bait, knew the best speed. After a while I would anchor on a shoal and she’d cast for stripers, and now and then caught one, or bluefish, or pollock. She drank beer, too, and after a few would tell stories about the islanders she knew — about cruel husbands, or drunken wives, or unruly kids. She seemed to know most of the people on the island, the millionaires as well as the locals. She did not envy a single one of them, nor was she dazzled by their wealth; her stories were always pitying or gently patronizing.

She was fishing one day on a shoal, the boat anchored, the ebbing tide bubbling with rockweed making the current visible over the shelf of rocks, the greeny-black water purling and frothing. With nothing to do, I propped myself on a cushion and drowsed.

I did not hear her fall over the side, the shoal was so splashy and loud. But something made me mutter to her, and getting no response I tipped up the bill of my cap and saw the empty afterdeck. Then I called out and heard nothing but the current coursing past my hull.

I ran to the side and saw, some distance off, her little head and sprawling hair and one reaching hand, being slapped by the chop and bobbing among the standing waves of the shoal.

I threw out a life preserver on a fixed line and leaped in after it, holding the line. I was yanked in her direction and easily reached her, because I was swimming and she wasn’t. I snatched at her, lost her in the foam, then swam forward and found her kicking foot, so small I could get my whole hand around it. Then her ankle and arm, and soon I had her upright and she was choking and coughing — a good sign, I thought.

Keeping her faced away from me for safety, I held her under her arms.

“You okay?”

“Blaup!” She gagged, she spat, she struggled.

I gave her the life ring to hold, and still she choked and spewed water. We floated for a while in the stiff current of the shoal, and when she was calmer, breathing more easily, I tugged her back to the boat.

She tried not to show her fear, she said she was fine, yet the terror was on her face and in her eyes. She had never looked more like an animal, more helpless, colder, more frightened. She sat wrapped in a blanket — she would not take off her clothes in front of me — modesty even in a near-death experience. We went home without saying much.

I said, “You didn’t catch anything.”

“Catch coh. No fitch.”

She insisted on making dinner for me, and it was a special dinner, stir-fried prawns and bamboo shoots and water chestnuts from her stock of delicacies and imported provisions. Soup made with fresh-picked lemongrass from the pot outside her door, mango pickle, and salted duck eggs from God knows where.

I had not noticed how she was dressed until after I finished eating and she came to me in the living room, wearing her Vietnamese ao dai, her blue and white gown, and looking angelic. I was on the sofa, working on my fourth whiskey, half stupefied from the meal and the boat trip and the effort of the rescue.

“Wan somefin?”

My glass was half full. I said, “This is fine.”

“Wan some uvver? Uvverfin?”

I was bewildered. I was not hungry and could not understand her pampering manner, for I was fine. She was the one who had had a scare, not me. She lifted the sides of her gown and sat beside me.

“Want tuss?”

Only then I realized she was offering herself. I said, “You don’t want that.”

She nodded with such solemnity that I smiled.

“You say me.”

“You were easy to save.”

“You say my lie.”

“I was glad to.”

“Can tuss,” she said, lowering her eyes in a way that was both coquettish and demure.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. But I also thought, If she feels that way, it’s money in the bank.

That was a defining day. It was as though she was saying, You saved my life, and so I am here because of you, and therefore my life is yours. But I did not take advantage of her. I was careful to remind her that we were still friends, that she was an employee, that I was grateful to her for helping me. Of course she remembered my drunken and indecent proposal from earlier in the summer, the thing I had wanted. She was willing to grant that to me now, out of gratitude.

All I wanted was to sit beside her, drink with her, hold her hand sometimes, watch the terns diving over the marsh grass at sunset. And sitting there, I thought: This is perfect. I don’t need that big house. I am happy here, doing this.

“You are Buddhist.”

“Ya.”

“But no temple on the island.”

“Temper hee,” she said, and touched her heart.

We had short conversations, and afterward long silences. The silences were the most telling, because they expressed our deepest contentment. I wanted nothing more and for nothing to change.

Not long after that, she woke me in the middle of the night, startling me until I saw her small figure shivering beside my bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Canna slee.”

“Why not?”

“Bah dree.”

“What kind of dream?”

“Folly offa bow.”

A drowning dream.

“Say me. Plee, say me.”

She got into my bed, and as with the business in the ocean, and the way we hung on to each other in the water, it wasn’t just me, it was something both of us badly wanted.

Days of bliss followed. Weeks. We were more than a couple, we were a team! After we started sleeping together I didn’t know whether to pay her more or to stop paying her entirely. I asked her. She said, “Same.” More money was like prostitution, no money was presumption. I wanted to do the right thing, because I didn’t want this to end.