The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  “Tung,” she’d cried, running to the stairs. “Tung!” She was screaming now.

  9. Private Rooms

  TUNG AND HUONG HAD SPENT that Thursday night trying to stay calm. Sitting on the bed in their loft, he insisted that an empty room did not mean the Hueys had left Hanoi for good. Huong, never an optimist anyway, was already hopeless.

  By Friday night, Tung began to admit that Mr. and Mrs. Huey probably weren’t coming back. On Saturday afternoon, when they had, in fact, failed to return as promised, Tung drove over to the home of the translator, Tuan, who told Tung that when he dropped the Hueys off at the airport, Mr. Huey had not made an appointment to meet him again. Although Tuan had never been civil to Tung, he was sympathetic to this new predicament. When it came down to it, the ties between two Vietnamese, even if they were a northerner and a southerner, were stronger than either of them felt toward a Chinese. Tuan came back to our house and telephoned Mr. Huey’s business contacts in Saigon. Late that night, not long after Tung ordered me to go to my room, they finally located a Chinese trader in Cholon who said that Mr. Huey had flown to Bangkok that morning.

  The tenants had gotten away with more than the $2,000 they still owed in rent. Mr. Huey had brought total disaster on Tung and Huong in a way that any of us should have suspected.

  Mr. Huey hadn’t paid for a single phone call since the day, more than a month earlier, when I’d seen him and Tung take a bag full of 5,000-dong notes to the central telephone office. Since that time, he’d made calls to Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Sometimes several times a day. When the June phone bill had arrived on Friday, the day after Mr. Huey left for Saigon, it added up, once again, to $5,000. Tung’s name was on the bill.

  A middle-class American would have to owe something like $50,000 for this calamity to have the same effect; $5,000 was all the money Tung had managed to save in three years of hard labor in Germany, and he’d spent much of that building his house. The debt would eat up his entire savings.

  A gloom settled over the house. Tung spent half of every day rushing around town searching for a solution to the crisis. The rest of his time he sat motionless on the couch, his face as blank as that of a man determined to let himself drown.

  Huong and her family went into permanent conference. She spent mornings whispering with Nga. Later, she’d stand for an hour on the front steps, discussing matters with one or another of her older brothers. In the evenings, she and her mother stared at the television set, rarely bothering to turn up the sound.

  “Mr. Huey was so polite,” Huong said to me one evening when I’d joined them.

  “He sure dressed well,” I said.

  On the television, three dancing swans were singing songs for children. Huong turned and faced me. “There was something in his eyes, though. I could see it. He had eyes like the Mafia.” She leaned her head against the couch and gazed at the dancing swans. “I told Tung, but he wouldn’t listen. He trusts too easily,” she sighed.

  I’d noticed Mr. Huey’s Mafia eyes, too, but I hadn’t said a word. I felt as if a friend had just committed suicide and I could have prevented it. Mr. Huey had always seemed just a little bit slippery to me, but I’d never expressed my suspicions. How could I, a foreigner with no business experience, judge the honesty of wheeler-dealers in Vietnam? I wished there was something I could do to help, but the only thing Huong asked was that I promise not to tell anyone what had happened. That included Phai, which made the promise more difficult to keep.

  After months spent working my way toward a single kiss, I was now obsessed with the question of when Phai and I would finally be able to sleep together. Like many Americans, I regarded sleeping together—not merely sex, but sleeping together—as a necessary step in the development of an intimate relationship. But I lived in a country that forbade me to have such a relationship with a Vietnamese. I wasn’t even supposed to kiss Phai, much less invite him over to spend the night.

  We hadn’t told anybody what had happened between us, but people might have guessed. We were suddenly showing up all over the place together. One night, I took Phai with me to the third-year death anniversary of Linh’s father-in-law, a big family dinner celebrated in the dead man’s honor. Linh’s life as a single woman hadn’t lasted more than a month, and now she was back to her old life with Son, happier, perhaps, but still complaining. If she had to go to her father-in-law’s death anniversary, then, she insisted, I had to go too. I dragged Phai along with me. Linh’s family was gracious toward him, politely including him in their conversations, but they were obviously quite puzzled by my choice. Although Vietnamese had lived through forty years of socialism, ancient Confucian attitudes toward education and class were still central to the way they assessed one another. In the same way that I might guess the background of another American within a few seconds of meeting him, Linh’s family took one look at Phai and knew that he wasn’t educated.

  During those weeks, I lived what seemed to be a 1950s version of life. In the evenings, Phai and I would ride out to the shore of the West Lake, where dozens of couples stood kissing in the moonlight and necking beneath the trees. I’d never been to a lover’s lane, even when I was in high school, and it was fun, for a while, to sneak around. But that only lasted a couple of weeks. I was nearly thirty years old. I didn’t want to act like a teenager anymore; I wanted Phai to spend the night.

  Phai was perplexed for completely different reasons. He came from a culture in which spending the night at your girlfriend’s house was not an option. Not only did he personally have no experience with such activities, but he’d never heard of any other Vietnamese having such experiences, either. In Hanoi, unmarried couples rarely slept together. Certainly, they had sex, but seldom in the bedroom. Whose bedroom would it be? Most unmarried Vietnamese lived with their parents, and the entire family slept together in a single room.

  Such circumstances, understandably, gave bedrooms a low ranking as sexy places in Vietnam. The couples who had sex in their bedrooms were married, and even they would have to have it quickly and on the sly. Linh and Son had efficient relations at three or four in the morning while their young sons lay fast asleep beside them. Married couples with older children, I’d heard, didn’t have much sex at all.

  Unmarried couples in Hanoi didn’t have the luxuries of soft mattresses and privacy, but they could be nearly as sexually active as their counterparts in the States. They just had to be more creative about the location. Some couples frequented the “hugging” cafés, where proprietors used poor lighting, thin partitions, and leafy plants to provide privacy between tables. Many cafés rented their customers tiny cubicles equipped with narrow pallets and even doors that shut. Less affluent couples made do, weather permitting, in the great outdoors. The particularly dexterous, I’d heard, could complete the act of intercourse while balanced together on a motorbike. And then there were Hanoi’s many tree-filled parks, and the banks of its lakes, which provided ample—if rather too public—space. An American photographer friend of mine once visited Hanoi’s Lenin Park at dusk, hoping to discover a peaceful setting in which to take pictures. Instead, she found herself the only solitary person in a park full of embracing, and copulating, couples.

  And unlike most other couples in Hanoi, one of us was foreign. As an American, I was used to privacy. But, also as an American, I was even less likely than a Vietnamese person to find it in such venues. If Phai and I rented a cubicle in a hugging café, the proprietors would be telling friends about it for years. If we found a cozy-looking tree in Lenin Park, we’d have a mob of seven-year-olds surrounding us in minutes.

  Something else bothered me more than the possibility of prying eyes, however. Sneaking around felt demeaning.

  Luckily, I did have my own room and a habit of inviting my Vietnamese friends to visit me in it. As long as Phai only visited during the day, no one in the house or neighborhood would suspect a change in our relations. Besides, Tung and Huong were so preoccupied with their own proble
ms that they hardly noticed anyone else. For a time, we enjoyed a privacy unimagined by other couples in Vietnam.

  Whole afternoons passed with the two of us locked inside that room. Once, we lay side by side on our backs while I dragged my Vietnamese through ridiculous contortions to explain menstruation, the biology of intercourse, and the creation of a baby. I’d long known that Phai was sexually inexperienced, but I was shocked, and somewhat unnerved, to discover that he knew almost nothing about the facts of life.

  “There’s blood every month. This thing goes in here,” I told him, indicating the appropriate locations on our bodies. “A baby grows right here.” My hands floated everywhere, pointing, gesturing, demonstrating. The two of us stared at my hands as if they were characters in a foreign film. After a while, he pulled one out of the air and kissed it.

  Phai was learning in another way as well. By now, the two of us had spent a good bit of time in bed together. He now knew, quite well, what he was doing.

  Once, when I opened my eyes, he was watching me, smiling. That afternoon, I split in two. Half of me lay in bed with Phai. The other half stood a few feet away, incredulous. What was I doing to myself? To him? Where did I expect this thing to go? Would I marry him? The me in bed wouldn’t respond. She had never thought someone like Phai could happen. She could hear the questions, but she couldn’t answer them.

  Not surprisingly, those afternoons of privacy didn’t last long. Eventually, Huong discovered the truth. And she might never have suspected had Phai and I not given it away.

  No one paid attention to what time Phai arrived and, as long as he went home in the afternoon, they didn’t notice him leaving, either. If he left at six, the family, already leaning over the coffee table eating dinner, would simply invite him to join them. A seven o’clock departure might attract a curious look, but only if Phai left my house alone. If I went with him, they’d assume he’d dropped by to pick me up for dinner. If Phai left at eight, and alone, we were cutting it close.

  Early one evening, we fell asleep. By the time I woke and looked at the clock, it was 10:30. I lay back down on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, panicked. Tung and Huong would be brushing their teeth already, getting ready for bed. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I’d laughed at the restrictions imposed on people’s lives by the government. Once, a friend had asked me what kind of government permission he’d need in order to stay overnight at my house in San Francisco. I’d answered him seriously, but I’d had a hard time keeping a straight face as I did so. Though I was willing to abide by such laws while living here, I’d done so with a sense of their absurdity.

  Now that I’d lived in this country for almost half a year, my perspective had changed. Rights that I’d always taken for granted as an American now struck me as privileges, luxuries even.

  Phai wasn’t nearly as upset as I was that it was too late for him to leave my house. “It doesn’t matter,” he told me, more interested in running his fingers across my forehead.

  “You won’t say that when I get kicked out of the country,” I told him.

  Phai laughed. I couldn’t help but think how much better he functioned in this place than I did. He not only accepted the repressive laws, but he had a very well developed ability to subvert them. His twenty-nine years of experience had made him a much better sneak than I was.

  Phai promised to leave without waking anyone up the next morning. I couldn’t imagine how he would do so, because the stairs, which ran outside the house on the top three floors, slipped inside the house and passed right by Tung and Huong’s sleeping quarters on the way down to living room, and front door. The architecture of the house offered no other route to the street. When I tried to question Phai, however, he changed the subject. My mind hadn’t made the leap yet, but his had. For the first time, he was going to spend the night.

  He nudged me awake at a little after six the next morning. He already had his clothes on, and his hair was wet from the shower. When I got up and opened the door for him, he gave me a quick kiss, then leaped up to the iron railing that separated the outdoor staircase from the three-story drop to the ground below. “Watch out,” I whispered.

  Phai grinned, balancing so easily that I remembered how I’d once been stunned by his agility and grace. “I’ll come over tomorrow,” he said. Then he stepped along the top of the railing, leaped across a two-foot gap to my neighbor’s roof, then disappeared around a corner of the building. I ran back into my room, then out to the balcony at the front of the house, which overlooked the street. After about five minutes, Phai emerged from an alley.

  After that, we didn’t see any reason why Phai couldn’t spend the night quite regularly. And so, on three occasions over the next week, he utilized our newly discovered escape route across the neighbors’ roofs and down the trellises that clung to their balconies.

  After the fourth morning, Huong knocked on my door. Grandmother Nhi’s son, she told me, had come over that morning with a worried look on his face. “Your friend Phai,” he’d begun. “Do you know that he’s been creeping around here early in the morning? The next time we see him, we’re going to call the police.”

  Huong had immediately thought of me. After convincing Grandmother Nhi’s son to let her investigate, she’d rushed upstairs.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, a recalcitrant teenager confronted by Mom.

  “Why don’t you trust me?” she wanted to know.

  I stared at the floor, shocked at my own inability to discuss the matter like a grown-up.

  “We could get into a lot of trouble because of this,” Huong said. “Tung and I have too many problems already.”

  I nodded.

  “You can trust me,” Huong said. “I take care of you already.”

  I looked up at her, confused. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Huong paused for a moment. Once every few weeks, she explained, secret police would come by the house to question her about my activities in Vietnam. Who are her friends? Where does she go? What does she do? Huong always professed ignorance. She was only my landlord, she’d claim, how could she know such details about my private life? Without ever actually lying, she managed to keep from them the one fact that would have made them push her harder. She never told them that she and I were friends.

  The news didn’t surprise me, particularly in light of something I’d learned from my student John only a week or two before. Late one evening, when John was driving me home on the back of his motorbike, we got into a conversation about Harry and how he’d once taken me out to Ha Long Bay. “I still don’t understand how he managed to take a foreigner outside of Hanoi without government permission,” I said.

  The motorbike puttered to a stop in front of my house, and John paused before heading home. Two dogs were poking through a pile of trash my neighbors had put outside for the street sweepers to pick up. “Harry’s very powerful,” John said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “As a scientist?”

  John laughed uncomfortably, then looked down at the ignition on his motorbike and toyed with the keys. “You can have many careers in Vietnam,” he said. “Look at me.” Although John worked every day as a physicist, he made his money on the weekends, as a guide for French and Italian tourists. With Harry it was the same thing, John explained. He was a scientist. And he was also a high-ranking member of the secret police.

  It took a moment for the idea to register that Harry—small, lascivious Harry—was also a cop. “How can he be both?” I’d asked.

  John explained that many institutes in Vietnam had employees who were also members of the secret police. It was a perfect way to keep tabs on what was going on in the country.

  I must have looked upset. John had laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Harry is your friend. It’s no problem.”

  I’d nodded, not knowing what else to say. Harry’s interest in me had suddenly seemed more complicated. He wasn’t just a student lookin
g for a date.

  Huong wasn’t critical of her government, but she was critical of me. “How can I help you if I don’t even know myself what you’re doing?” she asked me now. “You act like you want to make the police suspicious—having Phai climb across the neighbors’ roofs. Tung and I can help you.”

  Huong’s words were harsh, but her eyes were smiling. After all these weeks of secrecy, I felt enormously relieved to discover that Tung and Huong not only wouldn’t condemn my relationship with Phai, but that they would actually encourage it. It turned out that they’d been wondering when the two of us would finally get together.

  “I thought maybe you would look down on me for sleeping with him without being married,” I said.

  Huong shook her head. “You’re not like Vietnamese women. You’re an American. You always sleep with your boyfriends.”

  I started to object, but stopped myself.

  “You’re lucky,” Huong continued. “Maybe if I’d slept with Tung, I never would have married him.” She laughed loudly then, thoroughly enjoying it.

  Huong and I came up with a more practical—and physically safer—plan than the one Phai and I had figured out. Phai could spend the night, but he couldn’t leave the house before nine in the morning, an hour that was late enough to guarantee that none of the neighbors would notice.

  Huong stood up and walked to the door. Just before she closed it behind her, she looked at me again, her face more serious now. “Duyen,” she said, “Tung and I care about Phai. He doesn’t know anything about these things. You’ll hurt him if you don’t really love him.”

  I was asleep, and Phai’s words nudged me like gentle fingers. “Yêu quá,” he said. Two words that, translated, meant “so much love.” Pronouns weren’t necessary in Vietnamese. All that mattered was the noun itself, and it came out of his mouth as easily as a sigh. But my mind was clouded with sleep and, at first, the words didn’t register. I lay on my stomach and when I opened my eyes, I could only see the lower half of his body sitting on the bed beside me. As usual, he’d woken well ahead of me. A towel covered his waist, and drops of water glistened on his bare legs. He pulled down the sheet and draped a hot wet towel across my back. I closed my eyes again and fell back to sleep.