Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“We were about to leave.”

“I got divorce papers out of the blue. He wasn’t thinking straight.”

“He asked you in Saigon.”

“He never asked such a thing. We argued when he was coming home. What kind of father doesn’t see his son?”

“I came for the boy’s sake. You didn’t even know him. Everything that was most important about Sam, you didn’t know.”

“I’d say neither of us was his first love.” Lilly leaned back and spread her arms out, encompassing the room. “But at least I have this. His home. I’m his grieving widow. At least I have Sammy.”

“Yes.”

Lilly moved closer till Helen could smell her perfume, could see her eyes narrowed on her, and understood for the first time how angry she was, and how hard she was working at controlling that anger. “Women like you I can’t figure out. Was that little part of him really enough for you?”

Dizzy, Helen shook her head. “We had the war.”

“I loved him, you know. I loved him when he was himself. He lost himself over there, in that horrible little country, but that didn’t make me stop loving him.”

The kitchen had turned shadowy and cold. Helen shivered in her thin cotton shirt, she was always cold now, but Lilly had sweat across her pale, high forehead; she glowed with a mineral kind of heat. Finally Helen saw-this place had nothing to do with Darrow, except for the boy. It was their life, and the war inside it, that was real, and she had simply not understood.

“I hated you in Saigon,” Lilly said. She seemed weary from the long afternoon. “But I don’t anymore. You’ve lost more than I could ever take away.”

A month passed. Helen had returned to working in the bakery. Something had been solved in her mind regarding Darrow, and she lived with the past more easily. When Robert drove down from Los Angeles, and they walked arm in arm along the boardwalk in the cool, damp evening air, life almost seemed normal. The street along the beach was lined with slow-moving cars, teenagers cruising. Robert looked ten years younger than he had in Saigon.

“Peace has been kind to you,” Helen said.

“Can you believe we made it? Seems too good to be true,” he said. “Every morning I wake up, and I feel so grateful for the smallest things.”

She didn’t tell him about opening Linh’s letter. How the glow over the ocean was purple, the room dark, and as she opened the envelope, the pool of light from the reading lamp shone on the sheaf of gold rice stalks as they fell out onto her lap.

How instantly she was transported, and what relief she felt.

The paper on which Linh wrote had the faint outline of a lotus blossom in pale yellow, and his writing in black ink on top of the image reminded her of the streets of Saigon, the constant juxtaposition of beauty with necessity.

“It seems so far away.” She eyed the crawling line of cars. When the one nearest them backfired, she flinched.

“Remember the first night I took you to dinner? And you tried to free the ducks of Vietnam?”

“How could I have been so stupid?”

“I thought you were charming. And that you’d never last.”

“I went to see Darrow’s ex-wife.”

“Why?” He frowned, tired of her constant exhuming of the past.

“My whole experience was clouded over there. We were in a dream. It was so vivid, I thought it wasn’t real. But it was. Truer than anything here.”

“Peace is kind to everyone, Helen. Except you.”

She led Robert out to the sand, and they sat against a large rock, watching as the waves dissolved from view in the near dusk. The kelp had drifted in, and a strong brine smell blew down from the north part of the cove. “Nothing compared to nuoc mam, huh?” The fermented fish sauce smell was a staple of any local Saigon restaurant one entered. She grabbed Robert’s hand, intertwined her fingers with his. “It feels good to be with you. You know, someone who gets it. Don’t you miss it just a little?”

Robert sighed. “Saigon? Happy to have gone through it and survived.”

Helen rested her head on his shoulder. “I don’t mean the war. Of course not.”

“Come to work in L.A. The story Darrow and you did on Lan was a big success. They want a follow-up on her here in California.”

“Local?”

“I’m not sending you back to Vietnam, if that’s what you’re asking.” He had never been one of them, had not understood MacCrae, or even Darrow, for that matter. The war had never captured his imagination. “What happened in Saigon… what didn’t happen… things were crazy. But I thought maybe we could try seeing each other under normal circumstances.”

Helen gave a small laugh. “Is that what this is? Normal circumstances?”

“Yeah. Not a war zone.” He pulled back, irritated. “You know, I don’t buy the ‘weren’t those the days’ crap about the war. The war was shit, Saigon was shit, and we’re lucky to be out of it alive.”

“Sure.” She could not share, after all, waking up in the middle of the night and pretending that she needed to get up for a mission, could not share her midnight patrols of the neighborhood with Duke.

“I gave you the benefit of the doubt over there. That you were out of your element.”

“Have you heard from Linh?”

Robert was silent for a long minute. “A couple of times. He’s on staff. I offered him a transfer, American citizenship to boot. He turned me down.”

“I thought he married.”

“Linh? No, that’s not it. He’s either patriotic or really patriotic, if you know what I mean. Darrow always joked that he was working for Uncle Ho’s side.”

“Whatever he is, I’d trust him with my life.”

Robert said nothing.

“Do you remember that first night? When I left you at the restaurant? I thought you’d hate me, but you didn’t.”

“Didn’t we go to some lousy Chinese place… in Cholon? I don’t remember.” But, of course, he did remember each thing from that night, and he had hated her, but it didn’t hold.

“Remember Darrow saying they were lucky because there was always another war? I thought it was just macho posturing. But now I wish he was here so I could tell him I finally understand.”

They got up and walked back to the boardwalk. The sky overhead black, a pale moon casting a sterile light on the water, on the houses in the hills behind them.

“There are plenty of twenty-year-old guys thinking they’re immortal. You and I know better,” Robert said.

“I’ll take the assignment.”

“Good girl.”

She nodded and took his hand again, brought it to her lips. “Sometimes I wish I could just be back there an hour. Just enough so that I could really love all this again.”

That night she opened the window while she changed for bed. After seeing Robert, she was confident that the dreams would come that night. She undressed in the dark, listening to the sliding of the ocean as she pulled the white, veil-like nightgown over her head. She put her hair back chastely in an elastic. Only then did she turn on the light, look at the pictures on the walls that were already in her head, then quickly turn the light back off. The dreams had begun to go away, and when they did come, they were less intense, and she found she needed to jog her memory before she fell asleep to meet Darrow again in that vast darkness. But instead of Darrow, the dream of the children came to her. She was kneeling this time, an unknown man beside her, lying prone, and the group of Vietnamese children approached and circled the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but again when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Even while dreaming, she was trying to remember where the image had come from-it was a more threatening feeling than that day on the beach with Linh in Vung Tau-but she couldn’t place it.