Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

Curt was talking and joking too loudly. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told him to keep it down. “It’s not a goddamned party that you’re going to the hospital.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Curt mouthed behind his back.

“That was a nothing.” Darrow crouched a few feet from Helen and took her picture. “How’d it go, Prom Queen?”

She wiped her face and made a grimacing smile. “All right.” The way he looked at her, she knew he guessed that she had frozen.

“More excitement than we expected. It’s cleared till it’s not, till it is again. End of lesson today. Take this ride out.”

“No!” If she left now, it would be empty-handed, without a single exposure taken, the risk all for nothing.

“No bodies in the tree line. That means they retreated, probably back to the hamlet, waiting for us. It’s no longer Peace Corps stuff.”

“I can handle it.”

“Enough for today. I’m asking, but Shaffer will order you.”

Helen braced herself as the helicopter pitched, then rose. She crawled, crablike, along the corrugated metal floor over to Curt. Away from the other men, he looked even younger-clear blue eyes slightly dilated from the morphine and a child’s rosy lips.

“Looks like you and me got a ticket out of there,” he shouted in her ear above the roar. “Aren’t we smart?”

“You wouldn’t believe how I worked just to get here.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

She shrugged. “Where’re you from?”

“Philly.”

“I’m from Southern California.”

“Oh man. When I get out of here, I’m going straight to Hermosa Beach and learn to surf.”

“My brother went there all the time.”

“Is it great?”

“Surfing capital.”

She thought of the water off the pier back home, how one day she finally couldn’t bear sitting on the beach with all the girlfriends. She had paddled out on a borrowed board to hoots and howls from Michael and his friends. She had tumbled in the surf, frightened, pounded against the sandy bottom again and again, but she wouldn’t stop trying. The first time she got up on the board and saw the beach ahead of her, she had felt invincible. Everything had happened so fast during the firefight and now her failure was settling in.

“I can’t wait,” Curt said.

“Do you want me to take your picture? I’ll send it to you.”

“Okay.”

She picked up her notebook and as she wrote his dog tag number he grew quiet.

“You promise you’ll send it? Maybe to my parents in case I’m not around.”

“If it’s in this book, you’ll get the photograph.” Helen talked briskly, pretending she had not heard his last words. “They’ll send it to your local paper. You’ll be a hero back home.”

“Fuck the people back home. This wound’ll be patched, and I’ll be back out in the boonies in a few weeks. I promised myself I’d go out and kill me at least one dink before I left here.” He leaned back, and they both remained silent the rest of the way.

When she returned to the hotel that night, she took a long, hot shower. Her first action after returning from the Cholon apartment had been to throw her copy of The Quiet American in the wastebasket, but her room boy, a small, thin-shouldered boy with the long eyelashes of a girl, dug it out of the trash and put it back on the table. Inconceivable to him that a perfectly good book would be thrown out. Now he knocked and gave her a note from Robert that a group of them was having dinner at the hotel dining room and inviting her. She couldn’t face them down to night, especially not after the afternoon’s disaster. She looked at the boy. “I’m done with the book. Would you like it?”

“You sell.” He gestured with his hand, and she was struck by the grace of his movement.

“You sell, keep the money,” she said.

He looked the book over carefully, gave a tender shrug.

“On second thought, leave it here to night. Take it in the morning.” Although she had read it at least a dozen times, she longed to lose herself in it to night, to rest in Fowler’s certainties or Pyle’s innocence. To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book. She had always been an avid reader, but as an adult her reading habits had changed, and only after she had reread a book many times did she claim to begin to understand it.

Her head ached. She had been lying paralyzed in a field earlier that day and now stood in this room the same night, and the two parts were not meant to fit. She slipped into slacks and a loose cream blouse. At first she put on loafers but decided instead on suede pumps. Impossible to be alone on such a night even if it meant joining Robert and that ambivalent crowd. Her saving grace was that only Darrow had witnessed her failure. She poured herself a glass of water and her hand shook as she raised it to her lips. The old-fashioned ceiling fan shuddered above her head. She stared at the shabby bedspread and remembered the glare of the sun on the paddies, making it impossible to see; the fields bleached by the fierceness of the sun. The only vivid color she could recall the red of blood on the young soldier’s thigh. Darrow’s point, of course, that no matter what group she traveled with, one went out alone, hand in hand with only one’s own fear.

Michael. Determined to follow in their father’s footsteps. To outdo him if possible. Graduated with honors. He could have done anything, but he wanted only to be in the elite corps. Because Dad wasn’t. Her father would have been dismissive of what she was doing, unless, of course, she succeeded. But Michael would have been bemused and not surprised at all at his big sister, always trying to play catch-up.

She drank down the glass of water and poured another. The niggling humiliation that she had not snapped even a single picture. The second glass of water gulped down so fast it dribbled down her chin and onto her blouse so that she had to change again. When she finally managed to make her way to the hotel dining room, she couldn’t hide her disappointment that Darrow wasn’t there.

Ed, the straw-haired man from the previous night, grinned. “So how was the maiden voyage out, love?”

She said nothing.

“It’s always a bear, the first couple times,” Gary said.

“Maybe next time you can bring film,” Ed said, laughing.

“You don’t need film where you go, Ed,” Robert said. “Everyone knows the inside of your girlfriend’s thighs.”

The table broke up in laughter. Helen ate quickly, not tasting her food, then excused herself. Had they known because she didn’t make the rounds of the wires to sell her pictures? Or had Darrow told them?

Robert went after her and stopped her in the lobby. She had gone out with Darrow and returned with no pictures, and he hoped that mortification would give him back the upper hand. Time to hang on a man’s arm. He had decided to pretend the previous night, and his defeat, had not happened. “Are you okay?”

“I need sleep is all.” She needed so many things, putting any one thing into words seemed inadequate. “I failed.”

“It’s not a place for a woman. I’m just grateful you came back whole. I’ll check on you in the morning.”

She was so relieved to get away, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. He backed away for a moment, startled, then moved closer.

“Should we have a drink?”

“I need to rest,” she said.

Robert stepped back into the restaurant, stopping at the entrance to light a cigarette. He hadn’t taken her for the sort that fell for a guy like Darrow. Usually his women were the type who for one reason or another couldn’t ask for much. With her intelligence, she must guess the string of women that Darrow discarded. The gold band on his finger a kind of shield against commitment. He watched Helen in the lobby, fumbling through her purse. He would take her down Bourbon Street; they would laugh and dance all night. He liked her. A possibility for that house in his mind, filled with children. But Helen didn’t move toward the elevators; instead she left the hotel and waved down a waiting cyclo. Of course, he thought, he could be wrong.