Eastman Was Here

by Alex Gilvarry

  Helen was sympathetic. “Why didn’t you call me right away?” She sat down on the bed with a look of confusion and slight abandon. People were cruel to each other, he had taught her this when he cheated on her mother. All Helen could do now was shake her head.

  “I’m never getting married,” Helen said. “I’m sorry to bring it up but this whole ordeal sounds too familiar. People do this again and again to each other and where does it end? I wish I were a lesbian.”

  “That wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, ours is a family that believes in procreation. It could have all ended for us in Europe. Your job, young lady, besides being a crack psychologist, should be to think about continuing the lineage.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m not bringing children into this world. So they can be sent off to some war and die? Or if they’re lucky enough to be girls, wait home with babies while their men fulfill themselves by other means. Nuh-uh, none of it sounds appealing in the least.”

  “Don’t turn this into a women’s lib argument.”

  “Dad, I’m here on this earth because of you and Mom, I’m aware of that. And I’m grateful. But life in this country is the worst it’s ever been. How can I even think about procreating? I should be thinking about fixing the country first.”

  “You can’t fix the world, it isn’t an automobile. And it’s been in worse shape than it is. You’re up at Vassar getting a great education, one that you couldn’t get anywhere else, and you can be whoever you want. Freedom. Choice. This is the greatest goddamn country in the world and there are things you can do to ensure a better life for your children.”

  “Yeah, like not have any. And become a lesbian.”

  “I’ve had it!” He stormed out.

  “Dad!” Helen called after him.

  He felt bad, instantly. She was developing her own philosophies, outlooks, opinions on the way to live her life. God bless her. The boys were making a racket downstairs and he went to quiet them.

  For dinner they grilled fish and corn and foil-wrapped potatoes in the backyard. Helen was a vegetarian but ate fish, and he had sense enough to defrost two red snappers that Penny had left in the freezer. The boys were unhappy having fish two meals in a row. After dinner, while his children adjourned to the living room to watch television, he went into his study in the next room and closed the door, settling into his reading chair, where he had spent so much time rehashing his final days with Penny.

  His own happiness was not something he constantly took gauge of, and this was the difference between Penny and himself. She was convinced that she was unhappy and that this state must be brought on by him, and that another man could bring her a higher level of happiness, and that this transition to another person, once undertaken, would bring those levels of happiness up. It was utter nonsense.

  Perhaps it was his upbringing. The Eastmans were not happy people and they were not concerned with happiness. Success was paramount, and happiness was the outcome of that success. His grandfather Aaron building his own sporting goods company and then selling it to the Hermans, moving the family to Long Branch, New Jersey. From there his mother was able to go to a good high school and have a true American life. If you plummeted, you were unhappy; when you rose and stayed aloft, you were happy.

  There were exceptions to the way he thought about happiness, but for the most part the feeling was in tune with life’s successes. But concerning women’s lives, in particular, this was no longer the case. Women commanded their own destiny, unlike in his mother’s time. In fact, this is what he most admired about the women in his life. All of his past lovers had some big, commanding presence, an outward destiny, that made him feel the need to attach himself, for maybe that’s what made him happy. To be with a woman who was going places even if his own life felt stagnant. Yes, being with such a woman provided him happiness.

  He decided to compose a letter to Penny, a love letter, of the kind he hadn’t written to her since they first met. He would leave it for her in the house. It seemed an excellent way to get his feelings across. Her in the home among their things, his absence looming.

  Dear Penny, it is awful how much I am hurting for you and I know how you must be hurting too. We are connected, the two of us, and I know that when I feel something you have the same ache in your heart, the same pain and longing that I feel. First I must apologize for my behavior the other morning in the street outside your mother’s house. No—home. He wanted the language of the letter to be subliminal. A home is what she has thrown away. I acted irrationally. I was in the wrong and I admit it. I came to bring Toby his favorite pillow and yes, I confess, I wanted to see you too so that we might speak to each other like man and woman. No—husband and wife. The boys were still asleep and I did not want to wake them. I also did not expect to catch you coming home at that moment looking like a complete whore. He struck that last part. He would rewrite the letter in a final draft before sealing it for her. He might as well get it all out now. You looked so beautiful, I thought to myself when I saw you coming across the lawn. You had been fucked thirteen different ways from Sunday by Arnaud Fleishman and still, barely able to walk, the hair on the top of your head in a permanent nest from being on your back while he laid you . . . This letter was going to utter shit, he couldn’t be honest, there was too much anger. Did you still have his cum inside you that morning as you walked to me? Could you feel the wetness between your legs as you looked your husband in the eye and scolded him? And for what? For what did I do but love you and come to see you and get our family put back TOGETHER? The all capital letters was a sign of madness and would have to come out. Why was I scolded and you important enough to do what you want? Whatever you want. Why when I was there to salvage what is left while it is still salvageable? I will make an agreement. Fuck as much as you want while I’m away in Vietnam, reporting on a very important mission of NATIONAL IMPORTANCE. Fuck him good, suck his cock, get it, let him eat your cunt. I will assume you are doing it all unless you tell me otherwise in a detailed letter of your own. Let him open up your asshole with oiled fingers and then jam his cock inside. I hope he comes in your swollen ass. Swallow every load he gives you while I’m away. I will allow it, Penny. I will allow all of it—anal, coitus, bondage, masochism . . . anything that suits you. I will allow you to jack him off in a porno theater. I will allow him to choke you, as you like. I hope he chokes you till you turn purple, then I won’t have to. Get as much of his dick as you can swallow, take every inch till you gag, because when the time comes, it’s over. It’s over when I return, and we will not speak of it any longer. And this little affair will be behind us and maybe we can get on with our lives as two adults who made a promise to each other long ago. Happiness is a concept that is not real, but a word for a momentary feeling that we have experienced time and time again. Your concept of happiness has been clouded, baby. Happiness could just as easily be called satisfaction. Get satisfied. Get your cunt satisfied. And when you are sore from his limp prick, once you have used it for every one of your purposes, in every hole you could take pleasure from, then we will hear no more of it. I will accept you as you are. Fuck you, rancid bitch. Love, Alan.

  The letter he crumpled up into a ball.

  • • •

  On Sunday night he said good-bye to Lee and Toby and Helen. The weekend had passed easily, and by Sunday afternoon he was stirring with anticipation and impatience. He wasn’t yet ready to get used to the feeling of sitting put and watching his children. And there was nothing real about Vietnam yet. Nothing tangible until he got there. He spoke to Broadwater on the phone before he left, and all the necessary papers, a visa for the Republic of South Vietnam, were in his possession, except for a visa to the North, which Broadwater said they were still working on and that he shouldn’t worry, they would get it to him in Saigon. With a few bags and some clean clothes, he parted ways with his children. He didn’t leave a letter for Penny. He couldn’t bring himself to write any
thing dishonest and besides, he didn’t know how a letter would be taken, but he knew how his absence would. He had been wallowing in her absence for days on end; it was a prison sentence.

  By the time he got to the airport he already missed his children. Knowing he wouldn’t be seeing them at least for a couple weeks affected him greatly. If he called them before he left he could say good-bye one more time and he might even catch Penny as she came home.

  He rang them from a pay phone at the terminal and Helen answered.

  “It’s me,” he said. “We’re waiting to board. Normally I would call Penny if I was flying somewhere. You know. In case anything happened. I love you, darling. I don’t know what I would have done without you this weekend. Will you think about coming down from school more often?”

  “Daddy,” Helen said. “Don’t say ‘in case anything happens.’ It’s bad karma.”

  “I’m sorry I won’t be around for your birthday,” he said.

  “I’ll be spending it up at school anyway.”

  “I’ll try to call you.”

  “Only if you can. After all, you will be in Vietnam.”

  He asked about Lee and Toby, and Helen called the boys to the phone. Hearing the three of his children in the house together was humbling. He said good-bye and sent his love once again. He told Lee to watch over his little brother and not to let Mom go out too much. “And tell me if she has any guests over.”

  “Who, like Grandma?” said Lee.

  “Yeah, Grandma Cathy. A girlfriend. Or anyone else. Keep a mental record if you can. The address of the hotel is on the kitchen counter if you want to write me.” Leaving the address was more for Penny’s benefit. He hoped if she saw it she would be compelled to write him. And just as he was thinking this he heard Toby in the background call, “Mom’s home! Mom’s home!” At the same time, an announcement was made that his flight to Bangkok was now boarding. From there he would catch a connecting flight to Saigon.

  Helen got back on the line. “Penny’s here. You want to talk to her?”

  “Okay.”

  He stood by and listened to the household without him. It was crushing to hear. The children and their mother reuniting. Helen holding out the phone to Penny. A feeling welled up inside of him, one of bitterness and affection. Why did it have to happen this way? She wanted passion? She wanted him to act? Action was getting on a plane and leaving for a dangerous place where no one was waiting for him. He could get some perspective in the Far East instead of remaining in New York on the edge of losing control.

  Penny took the call. And as he heard her voice say his name in a concerned tone, much gentler than when they last spoke, he hung up on her without saying a word.

  II

  Bao Chi

  9.

  The Saigon bureau of the paper was on the second floor of the Continental, room 32. When Channing wasn’t there, she was in her room on the same floor. In the mornings she woke up with the stale taste of tobacco and the impending heartache of anxiety, even when she didn’t need to be out in the field. She took her breakfast outside in the courtyard at the same table under the banyan trees, in the shade, where she could be left alone until David Wheeler came down to join. That morning, Wheeler came down at the leisurely hour of eight, reeking of whiskey and prostitutes. He didn’t eat or say anything, he just sat there and looked up through the tree branches. It was an understanding they had. If he was going to sit at her table in the courtyard he wasn’t going to say shit. If he were to say shit, she would carefully remove herself and take the remainder of her coffee in her room. At which point Wheeler would usually apologize and ask her to return.

  Then he would just sit and shut up, listen to some bird chirp in the branches above, that was it.

  Channing was in the middle of composing a letter to her father, who lived in Oakland. It took concentration to write her family. She spent most of her time writing dispatches, where you looked outside yourself, at others, at what was happening around you. To focus on herself, this was a hard thing. She hadn’t written her father in six months. In her last letter she had described to him a walk through Saigon along Tu Do Street, and what a day was like at the Continental, in and out of the bureau, the people she met, the soldiers she spoke to. At the beginning of her term here it had been all American boys. Then what was left of the MACV. Now it was the South Vietnamese ARVN. She neglected to tell her father about the combat and dead bodies she had seen in villages as close as thirty kilometers from Saigon. Anyway, she knew he kept up with the paper and got hold of whatever she wrote at the local library.

  Wheeler grew restless in his chair and made motions that he was going to break the silence. “I have something that you may just want to hear at this ungodly hour,” he said. “It’s about someone who may interest you.”

  “Sounds like a lead you’re too hungover to follow and want to pass off to me.”

  “No, I’m just making small talk. But it can wait. I know you have your routine. I have a routine, too. A regimen I like to stick to. I’m practically religious about it.” He squinted into the sky. “I like to sit here in silence. Let the morning overtake me. Let the sun shine on. Breathe the air.”

  Wheeler couldn’t seem to shut up this morning, which meant he was excited about something. “He’s a celebrity of sorts,” Wheeler said.

  “So it’s a he,” she said.

  “Take a guess.”

  “Walter Cronkite.”

  “Not of that caliber.”

  “Marlon Brando.”

  “Not as famous.”

  “Marcello Mastroianni.”

  “Now you’re just naming men you want to sleep with.”

  “I’m naming men I’ve already slept with,” she said.

  “David Wheeler,” he said.

  “Full of shit.”

  “Alan Eastman,” said Wheeler. “Come to collect his Pulitzer Prize.” Wheeler sank low in his seat and raised his eyebrows in a type of mock amazement.

  “I never read him,” she said, not knowing why she lied. She had read Eastman in college, and then reread him in journalism school. Maybe she just wanted to end this conversation with Wheeler and get back to her letter home. But it was too late, she had already lost her train of thought, so the letter would have to wait. Eastman wasn’t one of her favorite writers by any means, but he was a celebrity writer, shooting his mouth off about feminism and race on television, and yet he retained a sort of dignity that followed men like Eastman around. It was unfair, really, when she thought about the man and his reputation. How a man could say so many stupid things and be exonerated after a short commercial break. But why was she thinking about him now? The young photo of him on a book jacket. The wild, unhinged prime-time talk-show guest who babbled incoherently. She was daydreaming about him though she couldn’t even remember the last book he wrote.

  It was time for her to go. She didn’t have a second coffee as usual. She gathered her things and left Wheeler, who suddenly looked as if he were asleep with his eyes open.

  “Stay, Channing,” said Wheeler. He wasn’t good at being alone. He spoke of his wife in Philadelphia often, not by name. Every morning he woke up well before he needed to in order to sit with Channing at breakfast. He was often in the bureau, just lounging around, smoking. He hardly went out into the field these days but seemed to linger around Saigon more and more. He’d be on the terrace in the evenings, drinking “33,” if not with other newsmen then with a prostitute on his lap and a vial of cocaine in his jean pocket. He was still of some value to the paper, having shown he could weather the culminating years of this war in unsavory places.

  Back in her room she turned on the rattling air conditioner and took off her sandals, placed her feet on the cold tile. She sat in her green lounge chair next to which was the pile of ten books she had flown here with. Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, Tolstoy, a copy of Lenny Bruce’s autob
iography. Resting on top of that was an ashtray. She called a room boy to bring up another cup of coffee, and when he did, she smoked in the chair, her thoughts returning to the celebrity.

  She took a shower, and there was still a minute of hot water left so she was able to wash her hair. She got out and toweled off. She had her hair cut short to keep soldiers from daydreaming, to not get her caught up anywhere, to keep it out of her face when she was in a dustoff helicopter.

  She had landed in the country with long black hair and not only was it a discomfort in the heat but she was asked once by a soldier in Da Nang if he could touch it. He was being sincere and didn’t mean any harm, she knew, and when she had said no she felt guilty, like it was a gesture she should have permitted because who knew what would happen to him. The soldier told her she was beautiful and she thanked him. When she got back to Saigon she cut it all off. That was more than a year ago, the soldier in Da Nang, and her hair had now grown to the length of her chin. She’d become unrecognizable, she thought, at least to anyone who knew her back home.

  She stayed in her towel awhile and finished her coffee before getting dressed, in no hurry to get anywhere. She turned on the radio and listened to some rock and roll, then went by the window, where she smoked her last cigarette of the morning and watched Lam Son Square begin to liven. The French windows were crossed with masking tape to keep them from shattering in case of shelling. She had moved the bed and desk away from the windows to the farthest corner of the room, closest to the door and the bath, so that her room looked particularly empty except for the lounge chair, the pile of books, and the cassette player with a stack of tapes. Country Joe and the Fish, CCR, Neil Young.

  From her room overlooking the square she could see the park, the National Assembly, the roof of the Caravelle, where she would sometimes end up. Prostitutes with their boyfriends or handlers crossed the square back and forth at night, but right now it was sparse with cyclos and bicycles, a few men in green fatigues lounging around the National Assembly, looking playful.