She was supposed to meet a man named Lin this morning in the lobby and she didn’t know what he looked like. She still had some time, and from her window she saw an ARVN soldier leaning up against the stone balustrade bordering the park. He could have been part of the National Assembly detail, the men who guarded the old Opera House in the square. But since he stood at some distance from the other men, she decided he wasn’t. He was taking a break, smoking, no rifle. She could see the top of his head and his sunglasses, his hair cut like so many of the other Vietnamese men, cropped short from the neckline and jutting out at the ears, so that the top formed a mushroom of black hair. She watched him for a moment and thought that there was always somebody watching something happen, especially in the war. There were no fallen trees in the woods that no one heard. No bombings that went unwitnessed. Everything was getting reported, everything was getting seen. Even this man, were he to be Lin or not. She was watching him as he looked at the Hondas and cyclos go. He was watching over the square, the passersby, the women and children, the stray dogs. He was taking it all in while she watched his head turn side to side, smoking.
Her mornings were like this; it took some time to get out into the world. There was a lot of waiting, waiting like you wouldn’t believe.
When the ARVN man put out his cigarette and looked at his wristwatch, she had a hunch he was the man she was waiting for, so she stubbed out her butt and readied herself. She dressed and put on a sun hat and sunglasses. She was downstairs in a minute flat, taking the stairs to the lobby.
Mrs. Nguyen, who worked the desk in the mornings, tried to stop her as she walked by. “Ms. Chain-ning, you have message.” And Channing signaled her—never mind.
She stepped out onto the sidewalk and saw the ARVN man walking toward the Continental. He was slow, walking with a limp. She didn’t want to greet him out in the street, so she went back into the hotel, past the lobby boy on the stool, and went over to the desk by Mrs. Nguyen.
“I’ll take my message,” she said.
“Very well, Ms. Chain-ning.”
She had two messages, in fact. The first was a note from the news bureau in New York alerting her to the fact that the celebrity would be arriving today at the Continental, and if she didn’t mind would she so kindly set him up on his feet. Kindly had been underlined in the telex. The second message was handwritten on hotel stationery from Bob H., the bureau chief, and the message was the same. Alan Eastman coming to the Continental. Do what you can for him or do nothing. Up to you.
The man came inside after a word with the lobby boy and stood as a shadow in the open doorway. He took off his sunglasses and looked around. When he saw her, she approached him with her hand out. Like so many Vietnamese he was hesitant to touch her.
“Are you Lin?” she asked. “I’m meeting Lin.”
The soldier nodded, speaking politely. Yes, he was Lin, here to meet Anne Channing. His command of English was strong, and his eyes had a certain intelligence. She brought him over to the sitting area in the lobby and they were seated. She got out her pad and pen. A waiter came over and brought them some iced tea.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?” she said.
Lin seemed a little uneasy in the lobby, looking around at the staff. Mrs. Nguyen was nosy and watched the both of them out of the corner of her eye. Channing didn’t want to bring Lin up to her room, because she knew Mrs. Nguyen would tell somebody she had a Vietnamese up there. It was better for her if they spoke in the lobby, but she could see that this was going to be difficult.
Lin said he was twenty-one but he looked younger. She was put in touch with him through a friend named Davis, who worked for the embassy. Channing had put the word out that she wanted to interview North Viets who were in Saigon, and Davis had recommended Lin, an ARVN soldier who would know about such things. Channing wanted to talk to anyone who was in Saigon from up North, former prisoners who were reeducated and released, politicians, even spies. Davis had suggested by the embassy pool one evening that spies were easier to come by. And now that the majority of American troops had left, she might find one or two intent on speaking to journalists, anonymously, of course. They probably would speak to her under a pretense of sorts, hoping to spread propaganda into the American press.
“Davis tells me you may know someone,” Channing said. “Someone from the North who is in Saigon who’d be willing to talk to me.”
Once again Lin looked around.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We can talk here. It is safe.”
“There’s a cook in Cholon that you want to meet. He also wants to talk with you.”
“He wants to talk to me?”
“Yes. To American press. He’s willing to talk to you but you cannot use his name.”
“If that’s what he wants, of course.”
“He’s the cook, they call this man.”
“Why do they call him that?”
“He cooks at a restaurant in Cholon. I will take you. First we meet him at restaurant, and if he likes the looks of you then he will meet you another time. A second time.”
“Why can’t we just talk at the restaurant? If he works there he’ll feel safe.”
“It is not the case. Lots of American are eating there.”
“When can we go?”
“I can take you this afternoon. We eat lunch.” Lin adjusted his bum leg so that it looked straighter as he sat forward.
“What happened to your leg?” Channing asked.
“It was near the border near Cambodia. I was hit in two places. Here in my hip and here in back of the leg.” He pointed to just above his calf muscle.
“You were lucky, then,” she said.
“I am lucky.”
Lin seemed embarrassed, so Channing smiled as an attempt to put him at ease.
“Lin, I would also like to hear your story very much. I have time to talk more now, before lunch. And then you can take me to Cholon.”
Lin shook his head. “I don’t think I have anything to talk about.”
“You can start with what happened to your leg.”
“I’ll come back to the hotel to pick you up for lunch.”
She took that as a polite no and they set a time for when Lin would return. They shook hands and Lin straightened his leg as he got up. He walked out of the lobby, again moving slowly, dragging his foot behind him. Channing sat there finishing her tea and took some notes in her pad. She considered the book she was writing, in addition to her work for the bureau. The interview with the cook was something she hoped she could use were it to go well. She had been absorbing people, sites, and stories for the last eighteen months. She didn’t want to explain Vietnam, there were enough newsmen doing that. She wanted to single out a feeling in time, using those she met and spoke to. A moment in time was a simple way to wrap one’s head around a book about war.
To do this work took a certain degree of arrogance. The other newsmen displayed this arrogance and mistook it for bravery. Channing tried desperately to mask her arrogance from her subjects, particularly men in combat.
These were the issues she often struggled with up in her room, whenever there was stillness and nothing to do but wait. She was sitting, noting this down on a pad in the lobby of the Continental, when the celebrity entered, with more luggage than anyone else she’d seen in Vietnam. How he got through Tan Son Nhut Air Base with a matching set of suitcases and a portable typewriter was unimaginable to her. The men who received him must have had a chuckle at his expense. He was much smaller than he looked on television, here in his safari shirt with pens and pads and passport sticking out of each pocket. He seemed to disrupt even the breeze that was passing through the open wooden doors. A lobby boy came to his assistance and relieved him of some of the luggage. His typewriter case he kept on him.
When Mrs. Nguyen recognized him she came out from behind the front desk
to welcome him. Bob H. must have shown her a photo on his way out and left instructions.
The celebrity could have been nicer to Mrs. Nguyen. She didn’t come out from behind her station for just anyone. “I need my room,” he said. “Can someone show me to my room?”
“Welcome, we are so pleased to have you with us,” said Mrs. Nguyen. “Yes, your room.”
“Is it up this way? I haven’t slept. I need my room.”
“Of course, you’ve been on a long journey. Did you have an escort?”
“From the plane? Yes. That all went fine. Does the room have an air conditioner?”
“Indeed, sir. You are staying at the Continental Palace.”
“Then the room, please, check me in.”
It was like watching a mental patient being processed into a psych ward. The celebrity ranted, shuffled, scratched at himself. He could have been on amphetamines.
Channing didn’t want to have to introduce herself while he was in this state. But she had lingered a bit too long in the lounge area of the lobby and couldn’t possibly slip away without being seen. Then Mrs. Nguyen brought him over to the waiting area, where Channing was seated. He was to wait here, Mrs. Nguyen instructed, and someone would bring him his welcome drink and the room deposit form.
Channing could have left then, gone back up to her room, but it was all too pitiful to abandon now.
He sat down across from her, not directly, but adjacent. Mrs. Nguyen returned to the front desk. Out of his chest pocket he pulled a handkerchief and dabbed the sweat on his forehead. His head looked enormous. His face was handsome but appeared pink and bothered. His temples immediately dampened again with humidity. A waiter came with a tall glass of sweetened milk tea on ice. The celebrity took it with no thank you and proceeded to stir the tea with the spoon, clinking the glass disruptively. She had once read a column he had in the Village Voice, in which he referred to his height as five foot ten. But he was a good deal shorter than that, maybe by four inches, which would make them the same height.
Resting the tea on the side table, he produced a little pill tin out of his pocket and took two of whatever was in there, washing it down with the milk tea. He didn’t cease drinking until he had finished the glass, choking a bit at the end. A line of milk trailed down the side of his mouth and under the chin. He gasped after swallowing. An annoying habit, Channing thought. Must drive his wife mad.
For someone so attuned to detail in his books, he didn’t seem to notice her sitting there across from him.
Only when he turned to look out the window did he finally see her. Channing had her sunglasses on, and had placed her hat on, too, in order to disguise herself. Her lenses were dark and so he couldn’t see her eyes. With her black hair and pale features, he probably didn’t know if she was Vietnamese or American, though from her clothes—jeans and blouse—he should have known that she was American.
She had the request from her boss on her lap. The note on a 3 x 5 index card. Do what you can for him or do nothing. And at this moment she was very much of the mind to do nothing.
But he did notice her now and he wasn’t the kind of man to turn away or play coy or polite. He was invasive, and she’d sensed this as soon as he had stepped foot into the Continental. As a challenge, she didn’t turn away from him, although with her shades, she had on a kind of shield, a way to view without being too self-conscious. However old or loud or pigheaded the celebrity seemed to be, his gaze on her was thrilling. It felt as if they were on a New York subway car and he had been staring at her, trying to communicate something deeper. She hadn’t come across his type in Vietnam before, this mixture of naiveté and hubris, not from another correspondent.
It took some willpower to hold his stare. Before she knew it she was playing a game with him. He really wasn’t going to turn away. She grew tired of this, and when she saw that Mrs. Nguyen was returning, Channing nonchalantly turned away from him as if it were nothing. Which it was. She caught herself being as egotistical as he was, defending her line of sight, her own airspace. She should have just ignored him to begin with. In fact, had she ignored him and left the lobby before he sat down, she thought, she might have been able to save herself.
10.
The eight districts of Saigon were clustered together like the arrondissements of Paris, an illogical urban spiral of shantytowns and French quarters and low-lying apartments, and on the outskirts of town it was green, green, green. Inside it stank of colonialism, giving him intimations of New Orleans. Still, Saigon was a beautiful mess of a city, and at the center of it was the square in front of the National Assembly, with the two hotels facing off across the bustling plaza—the Continental Palace and the Caravelle—both seemed to be competing for journalists. Stringers, correspondents, newscasters, novelists. The Continental, of course, had its famous terrasse, where newsmen as far back as one can recall came to drink away their nerves. But the Caravelle, the more modern of the two, was a tower in comparison and had its rooftop bar, where everyone ended up at some point in the night. There was a curfew going, but the nights were still long, and if you were caught staring into your ice when the lights came on, one could still find the way to one’s room at the Continental, zip across the square if need be, say hello to the night boy, and fall into the coolness of one’s feather pillow.
The journey from New York to Saigon had been tolerable. Eastman cried a bit on the plane with a sleep mask over his eyes, thinking of Penny and the boys. It had been harder to leave them this time, more so than any other trip. Going away meant that Toby and Lee would be left in their mother’s care. They would get used to his absence as their lives returned to a kind of normalcy. There would be bright days of summer without him, Penny airing out his soul from the house. He would mean nothing to them by the time he got back.
Somehow he needed to be present while he was away, so during the flight he took out a pen and paper and began composing a letter to the children. My Dear Boys, I’m calling on you from thirty-nine thousand feet, moving at five hundred knots or close to it. Ask your teachers about knots. A commercial airliner like the one I’m on cruises somewhere in the area of 450–500 knots, which if you learn the conversion is somewhere near six hundred mph (miles per hour). Fact-check that for me. . . . I’m thinking of you guys, remembering the time the four of us flew to San Francisco when I was to cover the Democratic National Convention. We took both of you when you were quite young and your mother and I were nervous for Toby, especially, who was only three and had never been on a plane. Lee must have been seven. Your mother was sick with a yeast infection and I was struggling to hold it together by the strength of my fingernails. And not a peep out of Toby, no airsickness even through turbulent winds. He slept over the entire Midwest. It must have been the first time you both sat eye level with the clouds. I remember because I told you that clouds were just masses of condensed water vapor, no more. The same matter that flows out of your mother’s humidifier in the winter, the one by her side of the bed. He remembered the four of them on that particular plane, seated in two rows, Toby and Penny together. He and Lee behind them. He had been explaining the cloud condensation to Lee. Penny turned around and said, “Way to be a killjoy, Alan. Let him enjoy the view. Can’t clouds just be clouds?” “Yeah, Dad,” said Lee. Eastman enjoyed being their stick-in-the-mud. “Sure,” he said, “clouds can be clouds. What do you both see out there? What does that one look like to you?” He pointed to a cluster of white clouds in the distance, far enough away to appear unmoving. Lee looked out and said he saw a person’s face, sad, like it had been crying. “You see,” Eastman said to Penny. “He has so much empathy. He could be a shrink when he grows up.”
“Don’t patronize him,” she said. Penny looked out her window over little Toby, who was fast asleep. “And you, what are you seeing?” he asked her, a little miffed.
“I see several horses. They’re crossing a bay so I can only see their heads.” She co
unted out three of them. Eastman looked out at the clouds and he was desperate to find what Penny was imagining. He wanted to be inside her head so often, to see what she saw, to feel what she felt. He wanted to get as close to her as possible. And she, he felt, wanted the same. She had the ability to guess what he was thinking by the look on his face. The right person, he believed, tended to know every variation of you. “Did you find it?” Penny asked. He couldn’t find the horses she saw in the clouds but said yes anyway. “I see them, sure.”
As he finished the letter to his boys on the plastic meal tray, his voice began to sound false to him. He was now aware that Penny would be reading over the boys’ shoulders and so he began to take advantage of the situation. I still love your mother, unconditionally, and it was on that trip just a few years ago, which I am reminded of now, when I discovered my true potential as a man, and it had much to do with family. A man has reached only half of his potential if he hasn’t felt a true love. Love of a woman. Love of his children. I could have climbed a redwood the day we went to Muir Woods with the strength I had drawn from the three of you. My attitude toward your mother has not changed since that day even if she thinks otherwise. I only wish she could believe that. Boys, how shall I convince her?
I want her to have what she wants. That’s always been my wish for her. I won’t give up the fight, men, and I will do everything in my power to keep us together. I’m hopeful that when I return from Vietnam I can win her back and prove that I am the one for her. I look forward to more deliberations on the matter.
He ended his letter with a recollection from that same trip to California, when the Eastmans drove south along Highway 1 toward Big Sur. What he remembered, vaguely, as a happy time, he colored in with scenery he couldn’t actually remember. An unworldly sunset, a few cliffs above a chilly California beach, the children playing in the sand, and two parents in the distance, watching them. The mother takes the father’s hand. The father holds it for a long time. It made him tear up all over again.
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