It had been too long-over a month. As the taxi threaded through the raucous traffic she wondered yet again what it was that drew her to him and, again, decided that it was purely physical. She was a beautiful woman with an appeal to attract almost any man she wanted, but she was also a woman who craved and demanded sexual satisfaction and in Munger she had known a man who could give her that like no other. In a way it was frightening, for it gave him power over her and she resented that power. She tried to analyse her feelings. Did she love him? She laughed at herself. No. Maybe she hated him. His detachment, his hardness, his independence and his mental isolation. He needed no one. Maybe that was the attraction. She was a naturally dominant woman but found the fruits of domination uninspiring. As soon as she had a man under her spell she lost interest. She had known Munger for over a year and the physical need for him had never abated. She felt again a surge of anticipation. She had met Ram Foster at the airport on his way to Hong Kong and he had told her that Munger had recently returned with the remnants of a Special Forces patrol near Vinh Long. So she knew he would be in Saigon for some time. She was a little puzzled. Foster had also mentioned that as far as he knew Munger had not filed any snaps. He was acting a little strangely and drinking a lot, even for him.
The taxi pulled up at the Continental Hotel. She paid the driver and asked the doorman to collect her bags and, with a wave at a group of familiar faces on the terrace, strode through to Reception. The first thing she did after signing the register was to glance up at the row of room keys. 204 was missing, so Munger was in his room. She did not wait for her bags but went straight to the lift. The Vietnamese receptionist watched her appreciatively. She was wearing a beige shirt dress of Shantung silk - a tall, elegant woman with long, blonde hair coiled high on her head.
At the door of room 204 she paused, reached up behind her and pulled a long silver pin from her hair. It tumbled down, falling almost to the outer curve of her buttocks. She tapped on the door, heard an interrogative grunt, and opened it.
He was lying half-propped up on the bed in the corner wearing just a robe. His cheeks had the stubble of several days’ growth. Automatically she said:
‘Ça va, Dave?’ before the impact of his appearance hit her. ‘Are you ill?’
He shook his head.’ No. Ça va, Janine.’
She crossed the room, saw the waste paper bin beside the bed and smelled the odour of burnt paper.
‘What is it, Dave? What’s the matter?’ She bent over, kissed him tentatively on the lips and sat down beside him. He did not reply, just shrugged resignedly. She looked into the metal bin and saw the charred ashes of negatives and prints.
‘What are they?’
‘Some snaps I took.’
‘Why did you burn them?’
Again he shrugged.
She reached down and found a print that was only partially burned. In the top corner she could just make out the face of a man. It was contorted, the lips peeled back from the teeth. At first she thought it showed fear or agony, but then, abruptly, she realized it was lust-sadistic lust. She looked up at him.
‘You took this on your last assignment? What happened? Who is it?’
He took it from her and glanced at it, then reached for his lighter on the bedside table and put a flame to the charred print and dropped it back into the bin. She watched the smoke curl up.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘No, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it’s finished. I’m packing up,’
‘Packing up what?’
‘The whole game.’
Her face showed amazement. ‘Your work? You’re giving it up? Why?’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Tomorrow I’ll go to Hong Kong, leave my camera with Chang to be auctioned and then I’ll leave the East and try something else - somewhere else.’
She shook her head as if to clear it from a daze and then studied him closely. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Suddenly she felt she was watching a child - a lost child. First it astonished her and then, being the kind of woman she was, it intrigued her.
‘Won’t you tell me about it?’ she asked persuasively.
He shook his head emphatically. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
She did not press it. She stood up and paced the room, getting her thoughts together. On the table she saw the Nikon with its disfiguring attachment. With that camera Munger had become a legend. Why would he give up and sell it? That only happened when a photographer died. She turned to face him.
‘OK Dave, we’ll talk about it later. You look exhausted.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I ate on the plane. Are you hungry?’
‘No.’
She smiled. ‘Then we’ll sleep.’
Her hand moved to the front of her dress and slowly, provocatively, she undid the row of buttons. He watched as her long, tanned body came into view. She laid the dress over the back of a chair. Now only a thin wisp of white silk stretched across her hips. She walked to the edge of the bed and, as she looked at him, her fingers pushed down the silk and revealed the fair triangle exactly matching the colour of her hair. She slid into the bed beside him, loosened his robe and ran her hands down his body.
‘It’s been too long,’ she murmured. ‘Far too long. Whatever’s on your mind, I will erase it. Believe me.’ For the first time a look of animation came into his eyes, followed by hope. He reached for her, pulling her close, burying his head into the curve of her neck.
Ten minutes later she was laughing. It was not a pleasant laugh.
‘You can’t do it! What the hell’s wrong?’ She was squatting beside him, his flaccid penis in her hand. The haunted look was back in his eyes.
‘What happened to you, Dave?’
Now there was a tone of triumph in her voice. He heard it and shrank away from her. She laughed again and climbed off the bed.
‘Dave Munger - impotent!’ she taunted, reaching for her dress. Abruptly her laughter stopped and she turned.
‘Or is it only with me?’ Her face was clouded with anxiety but then it cleared as she saw him turn his head away to the wall.
‘No, you must have tried with others.’ Again the vicious laugh.
She buttoned herself into the dress, coiled up her hair, took the pin from her handbag and pierced it into place.
‘You were only any use to me for one thing,’ she said. ‘It was good while it lasted. I will buy your camera at the auction. It will remind me of the man you used to be.’ With another laugh she strode to the door and went out.
Munger remained lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Very slowly his hands came up and covered his face.
Duff Paget was to remember the date very well: October 26th, 1969. The auction was three days before his first wedding anniversary to Ruth and it was the cause of their first full scale stand-up, nose-to-nose row. It was also the incidental cause of much else.
He got the word just after 8 o’clock in the evening. A terse telephone call from Chang the bartender at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. There was to be an auction of photographic gear at 10.30 that night.
‘Whose?’ Duff had asked.
‘Munger’s,’ Chang had replied in a tense voice. Duff felt his guts twist.
‘He’s dead?’
‘No, Mr Paget. He was here an hour ago. I was just told to put the word out.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Duff hung up and then stood for several minutes looking out of the picture window at the moving lights in Hong Kong harbour below him and the static lights of Kowloon beyond. His first reaction of shock had been replaced by urgent curiosity. An auction of photographic equipment was not an unusual event during that period. He had attended one only a month ago for Hasagawa’s gear. The Japanese man had been photographing the Marines on a sweep towards Con Thien when a stray mortar shell (if any shell can truly be termed ‘stray’) had blown him apart. He had a young wife living in a tiny apartment in Happy Valley and, as he had been fr
eelance and had spent most of his earnings on new equipment, his photographic gear represented the bulk of his assets.
Duff well remembered how the widow sat still and quiet and composed in a corner, her eyes never leaving the long table on which were lined up the rows of cameras and lenses, tripods and filters. They had gleamed black and silver in the noisy auction room. Ruth had visited her in the afternoon and found her cleaning them carefully, dry-eyed, while a six-month-old baby boy had lain asleep in a cot in the corner. It had been Ruth’s first exposure to the stoicism of the Eastern mind.
‘She showed no emotion,’ she told Duff. ‘No tears. She made me a cup of tea and talked practically about the baby and the price of airline tickets back to Japan. Then she showed me the camera he’d been using when he was killed. It was all smashed and twisted. She said it was probably no good for the auction and she laughed. She laughed, Duff! I guess it was to hide her feelings - a sort of escape valve.’
Duff had covertly watched her as Bennet, the bluff English insurance agent, who had once been a clerk at Sotheby’s, called out the lots and pushed the sympathetic bidding higher. As each piece had been sold and laid aside, her delicate head slumped lower on her fragile neck. Those pieces of precisely machined plastic, metal and glass were her last link with her dead man.
This auction would be different, for Munger was alive, and why should any combat photographer, especially one like Dave Munger, sell the tools of his trade? It was akin to a healthy man donating his eyes to medical research and handing them over immediately.
As he pondered the question, a cruise liner, lit up from stem to stern, moved sedately through the harbour. He could faintly hear a band playing a welcome from the apron of the ocean terminal. Then Ruth’s voice cut into his thoughts calling him to dinner.
He watched silently as she laid the dishes, one by one, onto the large ‘Lazy Susan’ in the centre of the round table. There was chicken in walnut sauce, sweet and sour pork, sliced abalone, a green vegetable of indeterminate type in a brown sauce equally mysterious, deep fried minced crab, pink boiled prawns and in the centre a huge bowl of steaming chow fan. On the periphery were several little dishes containing soy sauce, vinegar, mustard and hot chilli sauce. She finally laid down the bowl of cold thin tea which the Chinese use for washing the fingers after eating. Then she sat opposite him and waited expectantly. He leaned forward and sniffed appreciatively.’
It smells and looks delicious, darling.’ He said it with great sincerity. She had, after all, just completed a six-month course in Cantonese cooking at the American Club and this meal, in a sense, was her thesis. Inside he was yearning for a large, thick, juicy steak, singed black on the outside and bloody and succulent in the centre, bracketed by deep fried onion rings and a fat jacketed Idaho potato topped with chives and sour cream.
It had taken him all of six months to admit to himself that he didn’t like Chinese food. It had been a difficult admission. His colleagues in the press corps treated it with the reverence of a mystical religion. If sailors have a girl in every port, a foreign correspondent or photographer on the Far Eastern beat has a favourite little Chinese restaurant, be it in Cholon or Vientiane, Penang or Phnom Penh. There seemed to be an axiom that the smaller and dirtier the place the better the food.
‘This is where the coolies eat,’ Duff had been repeatedly assured as he was pressed into a rickety chair in some fly blown hole in the backstreets of half a dozen Asian cities. He saw it as a contradiction and had often wanted to ask ‘Why don’t we eat where the rich Chinese go?’
But he was young and green and had tried hard to assimilate the enthusiasm of men whom he often respected and assumed had highly developed and discerning palates.
Now Ruth had thrown herself so enthusiastically into learning Cantonese cooking, he could not bring himself to tell her that he would rather have a steak.
For a moment doubts crossed his mind yet again about the wisdom of marrying just before this assignment. Being honest with himself, he knew the doubts went deeper - into the very essence of marriage. He had discovered much about himself during the past year. He had learned for example that at twenty-seven the restless spirit that had dominated his youth was not going to dissipate with age. On the contrary, the excitement of the past months had highlighted that spirit and in a way shattered the chrysalis and let him fly free. But his marriage had been the culmination of a march of inevitability. He had first met and fallen in love with Ruth during his third year at Cornell University. He had been majoring in political science, she had been studying psychology. It had been an old-fashioned courtship; they were almost oblivious to the young Sixties ‘swinging’ all around them. Both came from small conservative mid-western towns: his father was a circuit judge, her’s a republican mayor of longstanding. The only major difference between their backgrounds was that his family was of Protestant stock from the earliest settlers and her people were second generation Polish Jews.
In spite of a similar conservative upbringing they had sharp differences of personality which only now were beginning to emerge. In simple terms he was a romantic and she was not. In spite of his abhorrence for exotic foods, that antipathy was confined to his taste buds. He could look out from their apartment high in Victoria Peak and see and smell an exciting and mysterious world below. Meanwhile Ruth would be more concerned about organising and running the household. She had taken a part-time job helping out the doctors in the Sandy Bay Childrens’ Hospital. It specialised in complicated spinal surgery, and she advised on the mental rehabilitation of the children.
Now as he gingerly fingered the chopsticks, selected various morsels from the spread in front of him and made enthusiastic mouth filled noises of approval, he realised with sudden clarity that the success or failure of their marriage would depend on their ability to accept and compartmentalise their differences and, more importantly, to express that acceptance. He was confident in his own ability to do so. Not so much in genuine acceptance, but in sincere expression, for he knew that he was an accomplished, indeed gifted, liar. It was not an attribute which bothered his conscience. He had long convinced himself that the bulk of his lies, or half-truths, or simple omissions, were a genuine effort to avoid avoidable problems or damaging the sensibilities of others. It was the notion of a romantic, and so he was able to chew on a piece of slippery, rubbery abalone and at the same time mumble ‘Delicious, darling,’ in tones of gut-felt sincerity.
Ruth on the other hand never told a lie or bisected the truth. He remembered the first time he had brought her home to meet his family. His father had long had a penchant for brewing his own beer. With the enthusiasm of the dedicated amateur he had pressed it on the rest of the family and close friends for years and had been repeatedly assured that it was far superior to anything the commercial breweries turned out. It so happened that Ruth, with some justification, considered herself to be a connoisseur of beers. Her own grandfather had been a brew master in southern Poland before emigrating to the States. In her household beer was drunk, and discussed and criticized at length. On hearing this the old judge had rushed down to his cellar, poured her a glass of his latest brew and watched with anticipation as she took a sip.
Her lovely face had twisted and a second later her lips uttered the never-to-be-forgotten words, ‘Yuck! You can’t be serious!’
In a way the rest of the family was grateful. Not another drop of beer was ever brewed in the house. Being a judge, of course, the old man had commended his future daughter-in-law on her transparent and forthright honesty; but Duff suspected that thereafter he never truly approved of the match.
As he tried to bite through a piece of long, green vegetable he was half inclined to spit it out and use her own words: ‘Yuck! You can’t be serious!’ But he chewed manfully on, reflecting that it was a pity that Ruth didn’t concentrate on the cooking she knew best. From her mother and grandmother she had learned how to make those Jewish dishes renowned in Central Europe. Duff was an addict of such food but Ru
th had insisted that if they were going to live abroad then she would learn to cook and enjoy the local cuisines. Anyway, in a few days he would be leaving again for Vietnam and would be away at least a month. There were several excellent French restaurants in Saigon and he could always get good prime steak in any of the U.S. bases he would be visiting. He felt a twinge of guilt at his duplicity but quickly squashed it with the thought that it would be unfair to leave her in an unhappy frame of mind. He truly believed that his love for her justified his attitude. He had first used this rationalisation just after their engagement. He was about to graduate and it had been assumed by Ruth and both their families that he would enter the Foreign Service. He had already been favourably interviewed two months earlier. It was after his second interview that he dropped the bombshell. He had decided, he told her, not to go into government service after all, but to take up photography as a full-time profession. She had been disconcerted. Certainly she knew of his interest in photography. He had been secretary of the university photographic society for two years and had won several prizes in their competitions, once winning with a misty pensive shot of Ruth herself. It was a secret joke between them. The chairman of the awards panel had commented that her expression evoked a sense of transcendental innocence. In fact Duff had depressed the shutter bare seconds after having given her one of the more outstanding orgasms of her young life.
She had assumed though that his interest in the art had been a mere youthful hobby and not the stuff of a serious career. However, he was determined and sent off portfolios to several well-known newspapers and magazines. She had been surprised and truly impressed a few weeks later when a small but influential right wing Eastern weekly had offered him a job as a staff photographer, at what to her appeared a generous salary.
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