The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  I couldn’t even joke about this moment. Stepping into the room and squatting down next to the bed, I took Huong’s hand. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, but before she could say anything another contraction came on. She pushed her legs over the side of the bed and doubled over, her eyes closed, her face frozen in a wince. The contraction lasted about fifteen seconds, then she exhaled loudly, opened her eyes, and sat back against the pillow. The contractions had started at about eight that morning and they were coming more frequently, every eight minutes. Despite Tung’s comment about leaving for the hospital, it was still too early for them to go.

  I quickly realized that my presence was more distracting than helpful. I went upstairs, but came back down every hour or so to see how things were going. As the day wore on, Huong’s contractions grew more painful, but didn’t speed up. Her mother and Nga came over. Everyone talked between contractions, then fell silent, breathless, watching her face contort in pain. By early evening, Tung was gathering up their things for the hospital. Nga helped Huong down the stairs and over to the couch. I followed Tung outside, watching him carefully hang their bags on the handlebars of the motorbike.

  “Can’t you take a taxi?” I asked.

  He shook his head. A taxi would take every bump in the road, he told me. At least on his motorbike he could avoid the potholes, drive slowly, inflict on Huong the least possible pain. Tung moved methodically through his tasks, with a seriousness and confidence I never would have predicted. It reminded me of how Huong had acted after Tung’s arrest, how she had taken care of the family and the guesthouse, made trips to the jail every week to see him and bring him food. When things were good, Tung and Huong complained so much about each other that you would think only inertia kept them from divorce. Then, in a crisis, they seemed ready to sacrifice everything for each other.

  Tung finished preparing the bike and we walked back inside. He sat down next to Huong and said quietly, “We’ll go after the next one.”

  She nodded, looking straight ahead, then slipped into it.

  A few minutes later, Ly and Nga helped Huong out the door and onto the motorbike behind Tung. Huong was calm, but distant. She sat sidesaddle, with her right arm around her husband and her left clutching the metal bar at the back of the seat. Her stomach was so big that she had to lean backward just to keep her balance. Tung started the engine and carefully maneuvered the vehicle off the sidewalk and down into the street.

  I walked slowly back upstairs. Susie, Linh, and I were scheduled to leave for Ha Long Bay the next morning. Now the trip only seemed inconvenient, but I didn’t want to disappoint them by canceling. I knew I wouldn’t be helping Huong by remaining in Hanoi.

  I was still ruminating over my predicament early the next morning when I heard a knock on my door. I opened it and found Phai standing on the landing. He was smiling slightly and his eyes were filled with concern. It was the first time he’d come up to my room in more than a month. My friend Kelly, the Hanoi representative for an environmental engineering firm, had hired Phai to deliver packages, make photocopies, and take mail to the post office. Sometimes, I ran into Phai at Kelly’s and had no idea how to act. It was easier at my house, where he did the same things he’d always done: wrestled with Viet, drank beer with Tung, and spent afternoons squatting in the kitchen, fixing leaks. Occasionally, standing out on my balcony, I would see him down below, talking to Tung. He looked so normal. But as soon as I walked into a room where he was sitting, his grin would freeze, his laugh would get louder and his gestures more theatrical, and I somehow ended up responding with frozen grins, loud laughs, and theatrical gestures of my own. Someone might have guessed that we were two bad actors rehearsing for a play.

  As soon as I saw Phai this morning, I forgot the awkwardness. I looked at him with genuine relief.

  Phai said, “I’ve got my friend’s motorbike. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

  It was just after eight. I still had time to make a quick trip to the hospital before leaving for Ha Long Bay. I rushed down the stairs after Phai.

  It had been more than a year since we’d ridden on a motorbike together. I gripped the metal bar behind my back, and when I had something to say I yelled instead of putting my chin on his shoulder and speaking into his ear. But Phai seemed relaxed, with none of the self-consciousness I’d witnessed in the past two months, and I eventually began to relax myself.

  The hospital, not far from my house, contained the city’s largest maternity facility. The building had large, airy corridors, high ceilings, and elegant archways, but mildew was creeping up its walls and it was dark, with the only light streaming in naturally through the door. We climbed a crowded stairway, where the air filled with voices and the clatter of rubber sandals against the stone floor. The stairway led up to a landing at the head of a hall. Light from large windows flooded the area, and a wrought iron barrier kept the crowd of people at the top of the stairs from continuing down the hall. It took Phai and me several seconds to work our way to the front of the crowd. Then we stood like visitors at a prison gazing through the metal bars.

  The dark hallway stretched away in front of us. I could barely see its end. To the left, we could glimpse one section of a room full of simple wooden beds. A pregnant woman in a white hospital gown was sitting at the side of one bed, slipping her feet into a pair of sandals. Another woman sat beside her, massaging her neck. A man was standing next to them, with his back to us, his arms spread out, folding a blanket.

  “That’s Huong and Tung,” Phai said, gesturing toward them.

  The man turned around and I saw Tung’s face. We raised our hands to wave, but his eyes were focused on his wife, who was trying to stand up. He bent over, put his arm under hers, and lifted her, while the other woman, whom I now recognized as Nga, did the same on the other side. Huong stood for a moment, breathing deeply. Suddenly, her legs gave out. Tung and Nga held her steady, keeping her from collapsing. Her face lifted toward the ceiling, her mouth opened, and she let out a wail that had no sound to it. Then her head sank down against her chest. Nga pulled a cloth from her pocket and gently wiped Huong’s face. They walked slowly from the room, turned down the hallway, and moved away from us, stopping every few seconds for another contraction. The back of Huong’s hospital gown, I saw now, was stained with blood.

  Late that night, I managed to get through a telephone call to Hanoi from the hotel where we were staying in Hon Gai City. The connection was worse than it would have been had I tried to telephone New York.

  It took a long time before Ly answered the phone. “Is Huong okay?”

  “Yes!” she said, giggling. Like her predecessor, Sa, Ly came from the countryside and didn’t have much experience talking on the phone, particularly on long-distance calls with foreigners.

  “Did she have the baby?”

  “Yes!”

  I waited for a moment, thinking she’d tell me more.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” I finally asked.

  “Yes! It’s a boy!”

  I would have to wait two days before I learned that Huong had delivered by cesarean late that afternoon, that she was in a lot of pain, but doing well, and that the baby was a good-sized boy, and healthy.

  I made it to the hospital the morning after we returned from Ha Long Bay. For five dollars—not cheap by Vietnamese standards—Tung had managed to secure the only private room the hospital had to offer. It was a dark, narrow space with just enough room for a long wooden bed, a couple of chairs, and the folding cot Tung had brought to sleep on. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. A door at the far end led out to a tiny enclosed outdoor space that contained a squat toilet. Right off the main corridor that led from outside the building to the large communal rooms shared by other patients, the room was full of the noise of people talking and shuffling by.

  Huong was lying on the bed beneath a sheet. It was mid-October, and the summer heat was finally beginning to subside, but the room was hot and stuffy. S
he weakly waved a paper fan in front of her face. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her skin was pale, almost bluish. She looked like someone who’d been ill for months. At the end of the bed, the baby lay, an egg-shaped swaddle of blankets squeezed between a pillow and the wall. When I leaned over to look, a tiny red face gazed up at me, then squeezed its eyes together and whimpered. His body was swaddled so tightly that I could see nothing but his face and the bright cotton cap that covered his head. His lips puckered as if he were eating. Tung picked him up and lay him down next to Huong, where he immediately latched on to her nipple and began to suck.

  Huong motioned with her finger for me to come closer. I sat down beside her, picked up the paper fan, and began to fan her. “I’ve had all my babies,” Huong said. “Now, it’s your turn.”

  I laughed. Seeing Huong go through labor had made me feel uncertain, all over again, about what I was doing with my life. “I think I’ll be a while,” I told her.

  The baby’s jaws were moving gently as he sucked. Huong pulled off the cap, revealing thin strands of damp, dark hair. With her fingers, she stroked the top of his head.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  Huong looked up at Tung, who shrugged. “It’s still under discussion,” he said.

  Huong rolled her eyes. “Tung has a hard time making decisions like that,” she said.

  I stayed at the hospital until Huong fell asleep. Then, planning to go home, I got on my bike. Instead of turning left down Trang Thi Street, however, I impulsively turned to the right toward the post office to make an international call.

  Lately, I’d developed an odd habit. One day, when I’d telephoned my mother, her answering machine had picked up. I’d listened for a second or two before hanging up. At that time, a call to the States cost about seven dollars a minute, and even this short call would set me back at least a dollar, the cost of a lunch in Hanoi. When I went to pay my bill, however, the ladies behind the counter didn’t charge me. They didn’t consider an answering machine answer to constitute a real call. After that, I became a junkie. I called anyone I could think of, just to hear their voices, so long as I knew they wouldn’t be home. It was like a trick of magic to be able to cause a telephone to ring in California even when I was thousands of miles away. I called my mother when she was at work. I called my sister when she was out of town. Mostly, however, I called Todd. I didn’t feel ready to go back to the States in order to see him, but I’d come to rely on his letters. He was thousands of miles away, but he seemed to understand me more fully than anyone in Hanoi. Some cultural gaps were just impossible to bridge. Early in the morning in Hanoi, I would often give his answering machine a call, knowing that he would be teaching.

  On that day, however, I must have called a little early. “Hello?” a real voice answered.

  I stared out at the bustling post office, unable to speak. A meter box on the wall of the telephone booth started to tick the passing time. Three seconds. Todd and I hadn’t spoken to each other since I’d left for Vietnam nearly three months earlier. It was too expensive. Too serious. Maybe I should hang up.

  Six seconds. “Hello?”

  I could feel myself start shaking. “Hi,” I finally said.

  “Dana?” he finally asked, and then we both started to talk. “How are you?” and “I’m fine” took up more than fifteen seconds, and then, not knowing how to go on, we said it all again. There was too much time and not enough. I told him how much the phone call cost and, feeling like an idiot for calling, said I had to hang up.

  “Wait,” he said. Had I gotten the letter he sent me about two weeks earlier? I’d received lots of letters. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I wrote you,” he said. “Can I come visit?”

  It took one second for that to sink in. Before I could respond, he explained that he had a break from school in December and, well, he’d never been to Vietnam.

  “Yes,” I said. “Come. Okay, bye.”

  “Bye,” said Todd. I hung up.

  Todd’s letter arrived a few days later. He had frequent flyer miles that he could use to come to Vietnam. Would I take a few weeks off to travel around the country with him? Two weeks later, I received another letter, this one with a flight number and a date to meet him in Saigon.

  The first person I told about Todd, as it turned out, was Mr. Choi. One morning, I got a call from his secretary, Mrs. Lien, asking if I could come by the office. My article about him had recently appeared, and I assumed he wanted to discuss it. Maybe he had more material that I could use for my next column.

  Mrs. Lien greeted me with her trademark friendly chatter, asked me if I’d managed to find any good French velvet, then ushered me into Mr. Choi’s office. He was already there, seated behind his desk, but when he saw me he immediately stood up. Something was different in his manner toward me, in the way he smiled when I walked into the room. He hurried around the side of his desk, zealously shook my hand, then touched a plush armchair, motioning for me to sit down. With his jacket gone and his tie loosened, he looked less like a bureaucrat, and less confident as well. He sat down in a chair near me, then immediately sprang back up. “Coffee?” he asked.

  I nodded. I was always happy to have Western-style coffee in Vietnam. Mrs. Lien went outside and immediately returned with two hot cups. I opened my notebook and pulled the cap off my pen. “No, no,” Mr. Choi said hurriedly. “This is not for an interview.” He walked over to a drawer next to his desk and pulled out a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag emblazoned with the Bright Star label. He carried the bag over to where I was sitting and offered it to me. “You’re a very nice person. I want to give this to you.” He spoke very slowly this time, looking me in the eye.

  I must have seemed uncertain, because Mr. Choi sat down in a chair next to me and gestured toward the bag. “Open it,” he said, like he’d just given me my Christmas presents.

  I’d hit the Bright Star freebie jackpot. Inside was a thick English-language hardback by the founder and chairman of the company, a handful of ballpoint pens, and a black velvet jewelry box, inside of which was a wristwatch with the words “Bright Star” on its face. There was also a large bottle of Rémy Martin enclosed in a gilded, embossed gift case. Of all the things in the bag, I was most interested in the watch. I needed a watch.

  I couldn’t accept any of it, though. As I carefully put it all back, I explained to Mr. Choi that I was happy he was satisfied with the article I’d written, but that journalistic ethics forbade the acceptance of gifts. It was my job to write about Bright Star, I told him. I didn’t need to be thanked for it.

  Mr. Choi shook his head and raised a hand as if to try to stop me from arguing. “No, this is for you. For you,” he said, and the way he said “you” made me suddenly see this meeting in an entirely different light.

  The dinner invitation followed a moment later. I told him I was busy. What about Saturday? I shook my head, then leaned over and took a sip of my coffee, wondering how I could extricate myself from this room. In another situation, perhaps in the States, I might have felt more flattered and less embarrassed. But in Vietnam I had a hard time taking such attention personally. They weren’t interested in me, but in some “Western woman” they expected me to be.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Mr. Choi asked.

  I considered the question for a moment. “Yes,” I said, still unsure if I was lying or not.

  As I got up to leave, I tried to return the gifts, but he refused to take them. “For you. Please, enjoy the Rémy Martin with your boyfriend,” he told me. He waved his hand impatiently, as if he had a closet full of corporate giveaways and more important things to do than worry about his inventory. With the slightest change of expression, Mr. Choi had already become a bureaucrat again. I didn’t argue. I really wanted that watch.

  The baby still didn’t have a name when, four days after his birth, he left the hospital. Following Vietnamese tradition, Huong and Tung took him to her parents’ house, where the whole famil
y would spend the next few months. The house on Dream Street seemed very quiet. Ly spent every day with Huong and the new baby, then she rode back every night to keep an eye on the house. Tung showed up for a few minutes every three or four days, just to check on things. Other than that, there was so little activity that it felt like Paula, Whitney, and I were living in a hotel that had shut down for the winter.

  I spent a lot of those weeks sitting on my bed surrounded by piles of information on AIDS, sexually transmitted disease, and sexual practices in the developing world. Before the birth of the baby, Tung had been a fabulous source of information. I’d grilled him on everything from prostitution to drug use to extramarital affairs, and what he didn’t know—or claimed not to know—firsthand, he was more than willing to offer in the experiences of his friends. From Tung, I’d learned that in the cà phê ôm—or “hugging cafés”—on the West Lake, customers could pay waitresses to snuggle on their laps. Tung was also the one who first told me that the imported used clothing sold near the Kim Lien Hotel was known as “aó quần si-đa”—AIDS clothes—because Vietnamese worried that one could get AIDS from wearing those clothes. Most Vietnamese regarded AIDS as a scourge on foreigners, particularly loose-living Westerners, so it made sense that all the worn denim and frayed wool blazers must be infectious. After all, why else would someone give away perfectly good clothing?