The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  "I'll miss you," she said.

  As Linh walked away, a soldier was arguing with the doorman, and Helen was distracted by his loud voice. When she looked back to the spot where Linh had stood, it was empty. But as the cab pulled up to take her bags, he reappeared.

  "Everything's fixed. I can come see you off."

  They rode in silence. Again he offered no explanation for his change in plans, and Helen, hurt that he had not wanted to see her off, now wondered why he had changed his mind.

  As the plane rose steeply on takeoff, the passengers remained quiet, but as it swung out over the South China Sea applause broke out. Helen was the only one not smiling. Below on the dark sea, squid boats floated like carnivals, bright with light.

  After Helen left Saigon, Linh sat alone in the crooked apartment. No sister-in-law, no children. When he had turned down Thao's proposal of marriage, she had promptly set her sights on a mechanic and was now living on the other side of town with him and the children. Linh still sent them money.

  Linh had stood helpless at the gate of the plane; he had broken his own discipline and confused her by his actions. In his weakness he asked Helen for something to remember her by, but it was too late. All she had was a gold scarf around her neck that was brand-new and not hers yet, but she took it off and handed it to him. Now he held it to his nose, but there was no scent of her on it. Slowly he twisted it and wrapped it tight around one wrist, when someone knocked at the door. He did not want to answer, did not want to endure Mr. Bao at this moment, but to continue to avoid him would be worse. He opened the door.

  Mr. Bao walked through the room, now needing a wooden cane, taking in each object although only the bare furniture remained. "Now it seems I must come to you. It's been months since we've talked."

  "There are no developments. Other than my being a staff photographer."

  "That is very good. Keep your ears and eyes open."

  "That's my job."

  Mr. Bao looked at him sharply, his small eyes behind the glasses magnified. "Don't forget whose side you are on. Sentiment is turning to our side. Men like you are credited with helping that. Don't make us doubt you."

  "Why pretend? It's not as if this has been voluntary on my part. How is the heroin trade? Prosperous?" It amazed Linh how naive the North still was about the Americans, not realizing Westerners' quest for news was more powerful than anything he could have ever led them to.

  Mr. Bao picked up a figurine of a Buddha, a trinket from the markets, left behind. "So your little adventuress is gone?"

  "Yes."

  "Too bad. Why didn't you convince her to stay?"

  "I have no control." The truth was, and he felt shame in his pride over it, that he could have persuaded her to stay. But his loyalty to Darrow outweighed his love and his anger. The Americans did not yet realize that they would lose the war. There was a kind of hopeless certainty in Linh that no harm would come to him in this war, that he was one of the charmed, although he did not particularly care about that survival. He was angry that he had not been with Darrow, thwarted his death.

  "It doesn't matter. Better to not deal with a woman anyway. What if she falls in love with you?" Bao chuckled and eyed the scarf. "What's that?"

  "She left it behind." He saw Bao's eyebrows rise, and quickly added, "She asked me to deliver it to a friend to send on to her."

  Mr. Bao reached out and touched the fabric. "Then you shouldn't wrinkle it so. Too bad. It is good quality--my wife would have liked it."

  FOURTEEN

  Back to the World

  Helen refused to attend the memorial service for Darrow in New York City. She considered it a hijacking of his wishes and would not be party to it. She would not be party either to her moniker of other woman. Gary and the others thought her callous not to go, to represent his colleagues in Vietnam. No. They expected her to be a good sport, to let the past stay in the past, but it was not within her to do it.

  She flew from Tokyo to San Francisco, and felt a childish excitement as she looked down through the clouds, the idea of home suddenly real after such a long absence. Home would fix things. On the plane to Los Angeles, the last leg, she sat with soldiers still in uniform who had processed out of Travis and were going home. Could it be as easy as walking off a plane to leave the war behind?

  Her mother, Charlotte, met her at the gate with a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. She saw her own face in her mother's, softer and more fragile now. How she had missed that smell of Joy perfume. She pushed away the guilt she felt, her mother resigned to the whole selfish tribe she had raised. As they hugged, Helen watched the returning soldiers heckled by a small group of antiwar protesters. A stringy brunette wearing tattered jeans and a suede halter top stood in front of the soldiers, blocking their way. Her long brown hair was tangled, a feather dangling from a braided strand of it. With barely a glance, one of the soldiers shot his arm out to shove her aside.

  The girl's eyes widened until the whites were visible, and she yelled, "Who do you think you are touching me?" But the soldiers ignored her and moved off.

  "Let's leave," Helen said.

  "You're so thin," her mother said. "I hardly recognized you."

  Helen put her arm around her mother's thickened waist as they walked by the brunette. She slowed and stared at the girl, who returned a flat, dreamy gaze. A look with no contradiction, not the smallest doubt. "Think peace," the girl offered, then turned to drink from a soda can.

  Helen stopped, transfixed. Her mother tugged at her arm.

  The girl looked back now, flushed. "What?"

  "That's real brave... what you're doing here."

  "I want to leave," Charlotte said.

  "Gee, thanks," the brunette said with a nervous giggle and turned to the two men she was with.

  "You're really making a statement... standing in an air-conditioned airport."

  "Look," the girl started. "My boyfriend was drafted. Were you there?" "Yes."

  The girl's eyes widened. "That's so cool. Did you see them bayonet babies?"

  Helen shook with a rage she didn't know was inside of her. Charlotte dragged her down the walkway.

  "What was the point of it?" the girl yelled, gaining confidence at their retreat.

  Helen stopped, unable to think. No one had ever asked her the question before.

  When they reached the house, Helen first went around to the back and stood staring at the view she had grown up with--ocean waves breaking on the rocks down below. Then she walked from room to room, marveling how big and clean everything looked. Nothing had changed since she'd left except for herself. It was hard to imagine what had burned in her to leave this place and go halfway around the world. She wanted to return to what she had been before she left, but better, smarter, more content.

  "Come and look," her mother said, and showed her the pile of magazines and newspapers with her photos. "This just came." She held the magazine with the NVA boy soldier on the cover. Inside was an editorial announcing Darrow's death with the picture Linh had shot of him in the Special Forces camp. "So horrible, so sad."

  Helen said nothing. If she told about her relationship with Darrow, it would boil down to the elements of a dime-store romance. How she had wanted to bring Darrow here, to meet her mother and see where she grew up.

  "Please put them away for now."

  Her mom fidgeted with her hands, shy in front of her daughter. "What was it like there?"

  "Scary and depressing. Alive. Parts were wonderful."

  "I can't imagine."

  "Yeah."

  "Did you find what you were looking for?"

  No answer.

  "I'm just so glad you're back. I'm proud. People say things about Vietnam behind my back. But my brave girl went."

  Helen stared at the floor. "That means a lot to me."

  "I invited some of our friends over," she said. "Everyone is so anxious to see that you're in one piece."

  "Not just yet."

  Charlotte stoppe
d in the middle of the room. "This part of life is important, too." She bit her lip. "All of you acted like the war was the only real thing that mattered."

  Helen hugged her, then stretched out on the couch.

  "Take your shoes off the sofa. Don't be a lazy bones. Come see your room. I haven't changed a thing." The comforting assurance one gave an invalid, when everyone knew that nothing at all stayed unchanged. Her room still had the white-painted twin bed, the flocked coverlet with pastel flowers sewn on. The walls papered with the pictures of Indochina she had collected as a teenager--broad swaths of the monsoon across the plains, long sun-drenched valleys, two figures wearing woven conical hats sitting in a fishing boat in the watery distance. Unreal and movieish; had this bit of fakery really started her on her way to Vietnam? How impossibly naive she had been.

  Helen laughed, and her mother's face looked hopeful, but the laugh continued too long, became raucous and then bitter, and her mother's face fell as she escaped from the room.

  Beneath the pictures was the box of Darrow's personal things from the Cholon apartment. Helen avoided the box for days, and then broke down one afternoon, tearing it open, savoring the faint, sweet-rotten smell of Saigon inside. As strange and unsanitary as a full-grown Cholon rat. She loved it now in direct proportion to how she hated it then. Helen sat by the box, transported back to her crooked apartment, the Buddha door, the creaky stairs, the faded lamp. She closed her eyes and dreamed she could hear the street noise outside, longing for that life in this silence and hum of air-conditioning.

  The magazine had taken care of his official things in the hotel, but Darrow's wife made a request for all his personal belongings. "Do what ever you want," Gary said. Helen would have ignored the wife, but the idea of the boy made her pause. As a young girl, she had studied in detail everything that related to her father for some clue to herself.

  She made her slow way through file after file of prints and negatives. Any combat photographer as far forward as Darrow ended up with huge numbers of unprintable photos--material so gruesome that no magazine would publish it. But the photographer had to take them, nonjudgmental until he returned to the darkroom. Looking through his whole oeuvre, she saw that he had gone from a mediocre photographer in his early days in the Congo and Middle East to what some called a genius. Something had come together for him by the time he arrived in Vietnam, and the place itself had spoken to him. An astonishing achievement bought at an astonishing price. Helen kept the gruesome photos back, selecting the ones surrounding his published spreads. He had been notorious for taking many rolls for each intended shot, and these showed his artistic method at work. A child should know that about his father.

  She came across the photos done at Angkor, stunned by their loveliness. So unlike anything he had done before. A photo of Linh among a group of Cambodian workers. Although he was smiling, he looked too young for the pain in his eyes. Helen also kept out all the shots of herself. She included his cameras, his equipment, his fatigues, holding back only one shirt with his name on white tape above the breast pocket. The sum of his life fit in one box.

  When family friends came over for a homecoming, Helen walked out wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, and only her crooked gait, unused to dress shoes, gave her away that she hadn't just been off at a women's college. When the conversation turned to the war, she changed the subject, told jokes, asked about neighbors' children, vacations, anything to give the pretense that all was normal. She didn't want to be treated like a quarantined animal.

  A former tomboy, she cooked for the first time in her life. Whole days lost in the kitchen, poring over cookbooks, pages dusted in flour or glazed in sauce. She and her mother sat down to feasts and staggered away from the table. Her mother laughed, only the lines around her eyes giving away her worry. They had so much food they invited neighbors over, a family of Irish redheads; the mother, Gwen, owned a catering business. After she ate three pieces of Helen's chocolate velvet cake, she sought Helen out in the kitchen, washing dishes. "This is so good. You should come work for me."

  "This is therapy for me." The idea of the job so alien, so ridiculous to Helen, that she considered it.

  But it was their teenage boy, Finn, who kept trying to get Helen's attention, who kept her from pretending. The boy's hair was a soft golden-red, his hands and feet puppyish, too big for his frame. Helen remembered that long-ago boy with the strawberry-blond hair, killed in that first ambush that Linh had saved her from.

  "What was it like?"

  Helen turned to him. "Don't let them draft you. Go to Canada."

  "Well, I think service--" the father said.

  "What kind of cocoa did you say you used?" Gwen interrupted.

  Helen would not be deterred. "If you go, they will use you up like a piece of meat."

  The tightness in Gwen's face revealed a conspiracy of women trying to keep the war away.

  "Did you see real combat? Did you see anyone get killed?" the boy asked, tenacious.

  So for Gwen and Gwen's son, Helen opened the spout, ever so slightly. She talked, her voice low and flat, the words themselves enough, the words fire.

  With a hollow drop of her heart, Charlotte noticed that it was the first time Helen seemed alive that day. After fifteen minutes, the room emptied except for the boy, listening rapt.

  "They don't learn," Helen said, after he had left. "The pictures and the stories--we didn't, either."

  Sometimes Charlotte entered a room she thought empty only to find Helen there, staring off into space, her face broken apart, her daughter the Picasso woman. Helen sat on the couch, legs curled up, tears rolling down her face, and all the mother could do was take her child in her arms, rock back and forth for hours, pretend her daughter was still a child and could be soothed, merely frightened of the dark.

  Darrow's wife requested Helen bring his belongings in person. Although Helen suspected some final score settling on the wife's part, she had not yet decided what to do. The easiest thing was to give the box to Robert and have the magazine make arrangements, but still she held on to it.

  At first the house and the small beach town that she had longed for while in Vietnam had seemed calcified, dead, as white and clean as bone. But slowly it came to life, or she came to life within it. But it wasn't the life she wanted.

  The sight of people going about their days, shopping in markets, eating in restaurants, playing with children in parks, laughing and drinking and talking, created a deep resentment inside her. Perfectly happy living their lives, Helen thought, which is all anyone should want, and yet how blind, how oblivious to the biggest story in the world. Didn't they see that Vietnam was the center of the world at that moment? Seen from back home, her pride seemed monstrous. Vietnam monstrous and the acts committed there inconceivable. Her face burned at the thought of the risks she had taken for those photos, burned at the waste.

  It was in the dead of night when she felt most herself. Come three or four o'clock, she would be wide-awake in her bed, pretending to herself that she had to get up for a mission, and she would try to remember details--the smell of the room, the temperature, her sleepiness--until they became so vivid she actually felt a fluttering of adrenaline inside of her. Sometimes she would carry it to the point of rising and going to the bathroom, washing her face, and looking into the mirror. Had she gone crazy?

  A letter from Linh arrived. In it a picture of Linh and herself. When she unfolded the letter, a sheaf of gold rice stalks fell into her lap. The letter detailed his new activities as staff photographer. She didn't know if it was his awkward use of written English, but the whole letter was disappointingly impersonal. Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the grass reappears. She studied the photo more closely. The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course. She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn't be over for her until she saw that grass r
eappear on those scarred hills.

  This is what happened when one left one's home--pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.

  But what could she do with such knowledge? Even to her, the idea of going back to Vietnam was madness. So she trudged on through the mystery of building a life. She started at Gwen's catering business, baking cakes and pies. Woke up at dawn and went down to the shop early, made coffee and sat in the bright light of the kitchen. Gwen, heavy-handed, brought a cousin to buy rolls--a setup. His name was Tom, a real-estate agent, a former USC football player. They had made small talk over coffee and muffins, and he asked Helen out. Helen was not friendly. She took his number, not intending to use it.

  But she wouldn't give up trying to live a normal life. In the evening she ran on the beach and noticed a family playing Frisbee with a dog, and, in a burst of inspiration, she went down to the pound and picked up a golden retriever puppy. When she brought him home, spilling over in her arms like a too-large bouquet, her mother held the door open and laughed, shaking her head. "A dog? A dog! Why not? High time for a dog in this house."

  "Yeah, it is." She stroked the gold velvet ears and tried to ignore her mother's intent gaze.

  "What'll we name him?"

  "Michael always wanted a dog named Duke."

  Her mother nodded. "Duke, then."

  "How come we never had one before?"

  "I don't think your father liked them. Didn't he get bit when he was a kid? Something like that."

  "But you never thought of getting one after he was gone."