“Mr. Easyman, a note for you. See?” Nestor produced the note from his pocket.
“Who’s it from?”
“The woman. Channing.”
“Well, give it here. And take some money, I mean it.”
Nestor went over to the desk for his tip, but the boy hesitated. He opened the drawer and shut it, not taking anything. Even he understood he had a human duty. Eastman was touched by the boy. Nestor ran out of the room.
Channing’s note was curious, a reversal of what he understood as her rejection, declining to come to his room the other night. Had the note only arrived sooner he might have avoided this afternoon’s fiasco. Written in very beautiful hand, it said:
Still interested in seeing what Saigon is all about? I’m free tomorrow afternoon if you are.
• • •
He knew how love could enter his life at any moment, how it could renew his mind and body. In the past he had used love as a healing method, and sex could always help him regain his footing.
Channing was perhaps only showing an interest in him as a colleague, he wasn’t sure. He woke up the following morning eagerly looking forward to touring the city with her. Maybe he’d also fall upon something to add to his first dispatch. Staying in his hotel room wasn’t getting him anywhere and the thought of failing Broadwater, of all people, was beginning to eat at him.
In his room, he tied a blue bandanna around his neck to cover some of the bruises he’d sustained. And in the afternoon he met Channing in the hotel lobby and from there they took a taxi together along the Saigon River, south, toward Cholon.
She wanted to show him civilian life of all kinds, the absolute poor, the refugees, monks and temples. They continued along the outskirts of the city, to view the shantytowns that collected and grew and expanded the city limits. A city of scrap metal and huts, refugees living under tin and tarp. Naked children playing in muddy alleyways. Old men sitting on stools, smoking. Women selling all types of edibles from street kitchens. In some of the huts he could see the glow of television. They had wired electricity throughout the shanty villages, stripped it off the main lines, one of the reasons for the frequent power outages—twenty thousand people siphoning off power from the rest of the city. They drove past mounds of garbage, clusters of ARVN roadblocks, foul-smelling canals. In one of the worst alleys, Channing stopped the taxi and they got out.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“You wanted to see the real Saigon,” she said.
They started out on foot and Eastman felt the eyes on him at the intersection, where men gathered around a soup stand run by two hunched-over women.
He welcomed the stares. It made him feel uncomfortable and rightfully so. To go where you didn’t belong—wasn’t that the correspondent’s duty?
They walked for a long time in the middle of narrow streets, from the shanty villages to Cholon. Channing called out restaurants she had eaten in, landmarks and temples.
Eastman was thirsty and tired but talkative. He liked listening to her as they passed the places she knew, the boulevards she liked to walk late in the day. They passed a two-story, yellow apartment building at a triangular intersection, and Channing pointed to the second floor. It was the apartment of an embassy man she knew. “There used to be great parties up there,” she said. “Long, drunken nights where people stayed up into the morning hours talking and laughing, waiting out the curfew.”
The way she referred to this time, with immense nostalgia, made Eastman suspect that she had once had a relationship with the man who lived there. She spoke of it as a place she would no longer return to. So he didn’t press her on the subject.
“I thought about moving there once,” she said. “He rents it out from time to time when he’s back in the States. I missed having a kitchen. Things like boiling water. How I’d love to have a kettle. But I decided it wasn’t worth giving up my room at the Continental.”
“You’re so close to the bureau.”
“That’s right.”
They ended up at a quiet corner café, drinking water and coffee on ice. Channing spoke a little elemental Vietnamese to the proprietor. Eastman toweled the sweat off his neck and forehead. The humidity seemed to suck it all out of him.
“Wheeler told me you haven’t been feeling well,” she said.
“Is that what he said.”
“He said you had taken ill in your room.”
“I had a little accident. My back went out. I don’t know what he indicated, but he’s most likely exaggerating. Anyway, I was wrong about him. Wheeler’s all right. He was a great help to me. Happened to be passing by when I was in need.” Eastman desperately wanted to change the subject from yesterday’s events. The mere thought of it embarrassed him. He was blushing. “Can I be honest with you? It may seem like I’m not in the greatest mood lately. You might have picked up on it. You’ve met me at a strange time in my life. My marriage is breaking up, and it was a good marriage, but before I came here it all sort of went to shit.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“She left me for another man.” He was careful not to use Penny’s name. “That’s the short version. We have two boys together, so that’s where it gets complicated. It’s hard to keep myself from imagining how it happened. Her meeting him. I thought coming to Vietnam would help get my mind right.”
“You thought coming here would do that for you?”
“The work. The clarity. Staying busy, that’s what they tell you.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your marriage. That’s really quite sad.”
“Ever married, Channing?”
“No. Never.”
“Ever thought about it?”
“I’m a single woman past the better part of her thirties; of course I’ve thought about it. I think I’ve moved past it.”
“You don’t seem like the type to rely on other people.”
“Don’t you find that other people always let you down?”
“I suppose I do. I’ve been reliant on too many people for too long. Especially the women in my life, I’ve always felt closer to them than men. My mother over my father. My sister. And now my daughter, Helen, who I’m just getting to know. She grew up in Mexico with my first wife and attends Vassar now. In Helen’s case, I suppose I’m the one who has let her down. Come to think of it, I’ve let all of them down at some point.”
“I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You can’t possibly blame yourself for what’s happening in your marriage.”
“No. I don’t blame myself. Right now I blame her. I blame him.”
“It’s not his fault, is it? Maybe he didn’t know.”
“He knew. They always do. Ever have an affair, Channing? Bodies don’t lie that well. Even if you’ve been misled, the truth comes out. Especially as things progress.” He was making her uncomfortable, he could see it. She looked down at her feet. He shouldn’t have asked if she had ever had an affair. There was the possibility that she wasn’t as advanced sexually as her years let on. She could never have been in love, possibly why she was liberated from the idea of marriage.
“I met him,” he said. “Outside my home. In the middle of the street. The man my wife is fucking. We came face-to-face.” A little lie.
“My God, what happened?”
“I don’t normally do things like this, I have to say. But he was dropping my soon-to-be former wife off from a date at eight o’clock in the morning. I was at home taking care of the children.” There he was, bending the truth. Though it could have happened this way. “They had just slept together, it was apparent. I could smell her on him. I looked into his eyes. We were at a standoff in the street. Asked him if he knew who I was. He said he did. And then I asked him if he knew what he was doing. No. He admitted he had no idea. He was out of his depth. ‘Are you prepared to take this all the way?’ I asked hi
m. I don’t know what I meant, I was losing my mind. I could have knocked him in the teeth. I was a boxer, you know. Not bad, either. Good left hook. I could have clocked him. I could have done a multitude of bad things. But I didn’t. I backed off. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of demonizing me.”
As he lied to her he began to see his mistakes. The more he lied, the worse he felt. He was trying too hard and it humiliated him. He was trying to entertain her, or worse, to win her pity.
“So what happened?” Channing said.
“Nothing. I frightened him. He got back in his car, scared. He put the car in reverse and drove backward the entire way down our street.”
“Remarkable. I don’t think I could restrain myself in that way.”
“Years of practice.”
They finished their coffee, paid the bill, and started walking again, turning onto a main boulevard.
“So now you know something personal about me,” he said. “It’s your turn. I don’t know anything about you.”
She smiled and shook her head. “The man I told you about, with the apartment we passed. The embassy officer. I guess you could say we were together for a bit. He was much older. He had a wife. I didn’t feel terrible about it, either. Is that wrong? Being here things are different. It’s as if what’s back home doesn’t matter.”
He wished he could feel the same, but it all mattered to him—Penny, her affair, his children, his life and career. He couldn’t think of anything else as important, and he supposed that he hadn’t really been present in Vietnam at all. His mind and moods were dependent on what happened back in New York.
As they continued to walk, he got the lowdown on Channing. She came from a long line of Quakers who had settled in California. Vallejo, Petaluma, Santa Rosa. She had a father still out there and an older sister somewhere in Seattle. College, she went out east to Vassar, and then journalism school followed at Columbia. That was the midsixties, and Eastman wondered if they had ever passed each other on campus when he was participating in Vietnam protests. He had spoken in Morningside Park the day students took over Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus. “I remember,” she said. Channing was there, but documenting the whole thing as part of her journalism classes. She felt as if she’d missed the sixties because already she was reporting, churning out copy.
He was curious as to why she had been in Vietnam for so long. He’d been here for a short time and knew he wouldn’t be staying. He’d sit and wait out his marriage until things cooled down. “What is it about Saigon that’s kept you here?”
“I like it,” she said. “I have good friends, and I’m so accustomed to the pace of things. That thing they say about adrenaline is true. You probably know that.”
“I’m no journalist. I write books, long ones, and it takes years. There’s no rush in what I do. I may have started out as a correspondent, but having seen what you and the others do, I’m not that. Never was. When I was covering the war in the Philippines it was already over. I was there collecting details for my book. I never had any investment in reporting.”
“The Philippines must have been similar. You write the larger picture. I’ve read your work, remember.”
“Not like here,” he said.
He was gratified. There was no quicker way to Eastman’s heart than to flatter him over his work. His stance began to perk up, he grew confident, and he was now playing the great writer, the famous documenter of war who had left his mark on the world. He wanted to say that he had read her work, too, and admired it. But he found himself reluctant, hesitant.
“Tell me more about this book you’re writing,” he asked her.
“God, I’m ashamed to talk about it. I’ve been spending half my time here collecting tape.” Channing had been interviewing soldiers and civilians since before the American withdrawal, compiling interview after interview. She wanted to write about the people she met, the individuals. A book that would work as a collage. “Not anyone’s story in particular,” she said, “but a compilation of all of those lives, a collection of personalities.”
Eastman thought it was a fine project. “It could put you on the fast track,” he said.
“Hah,” she said, smiling, obviously pleased.
“I have to tell you,” he said. “I don’t read many books by women. I find that they don’t understand my perspective and so I shy away from their work. I’m ashamed of this. It just so happens that’s the way I read. I find women’s prose distracting. I say this because this is what you’ll be up against. People will see you, a woman, writing the war, and they’ll not want to listen. They’ll dismiss it and think there will be too much sentiment, too much eye shadow where there should be blood and guts.”
“You don’t read women because you find them too sentimental? I have taken my share of crap for being a woman here, believe me.”
“Overly sentimental. I’m just being honest with you. As a woman, though, you’re more in touch with emotion. Something men lack. That’s where your book can be major. Where others are writing about power and the struggle for power—the larger picture, as you say—you can concentrate on the power of the people, their thoughts, their feelings, who they are. Woman is our child bearer, our seductress, our priestess, the mother who cares for us, gives us life. If you can match those instincts with prose that’s not too sentimental, or too feminine, you may just have something.”
She was offended, shaking her head, and rightfully so. Eastman realized he had made a faux pas, letting his mouth run like that. What was he thinking? Just when they were making a connection. As soon as she had complimented him, he suppressed his weaknesses and allowed his massive navigator to take over and direct him. She was so taken aback that she needed to stop in the street for a moment and assess what was being said.
“Do you really believe the bullshit you’re spouting?” she said.
“I know it’s hard to swallow, but this is how you’ll be read. Many readers won’t take you seriously, and not just men. Women, too.”
“You really do believe this, don’t you? I am shocked that a writer like you can be so blinded by his own convoluted hype. I have been here for eighteen months, in and out of combat. I have seen what men have seen, and I don’t think when I write it there is a single difference.”
“That’s short reporting, so maybe not. But in book length. The kind of book you want to write. Listen, I’m only trying to help.”
“You’ve helped by pointing out the kind of reader I won’t be writing for.”
“I’ve pointed out the majority of readers. I’m trying to explain the way it is.”
“The majority of readers? Eastman, this isn’t 1953. There is no basis for your thinking. Not all women are protectors and mothers for you. Not all women write sentimental romance.”
“Forget I said anything. It was a mistake.”
“I will not forget you said anything. I think you are grossly misinformed and the fact that you think this way leads me to believe that you don’t understand the world at all. When you look inside yourself, you must feel completely alone.”
Eastman couldn’t help thinking that Channing was right. Inside he was alone. The need to enlighten the world with Eastmanisms was exhausting and erroneous. Where did this habit of enforcing his ideas come from? And when did he stop believing that he could be mistaken? His urges were totalitarian. He knew it came from a dissatisfaction within himself. It was dangerous not to have humility, and Eastman knew that if he continued he would certainly end up on the wrong side of history. But Channing had no right to say such things. He had to attack her, to knock her off her high horse and bring her back down to earth.
“I’m not going to debate women’s lib with you,” said Eastman, “because that’d be a fool’s errand. This is the book business, honey, and I’ve been in it for twenty years. I’ve made my living.”
“Writing is a man’s job to you, is
n’t it? I’m well acquainted with the notion. It’s been rubbed in my face all my life.”
“Oh, forget it. I’m sorry I said anything at all.”
“I hope you are. And I hope you reconsider your position.”
“You got it, sister.” He walked on ahead of her. Easier than to say it to her face.
“You’re patronizing me?”
“If I did you would know. You’d be in hysterics.”
“Hysterics. Listen to you. The classic hysterical woman, isn’t that what would prove everything for you?”
“Right on, sister.”
Channing quickened her pace, overtaking him and leaving him behind her. She walked purposefully up the boulevard, past the markets and soup stalls. Eastman increased his pace in order to keep up with her and it caused him to become winded.
“Will you wait, Channing,” he shouted.
She stopped, reluctantly, and allowed him to catch up. They continued their walk along the boulevard back toward the city center. They said nothing. Channing had been offended and he wasn’t up for apologizing. For what? he now thought. He had been offering his advice to help harden her. To protect her from how people would likely read her work. Oh, forget it, why should he help anyone? Besides, there was a major chance that he’d never hear from her again once he left Vietnam and that there would be no major book on the war by Anne Channing. How many aspiring novices were plotting the exact same thing? Sure, she was a good correspondent, showed no fear the other night in the square. But he saw her now as insignificant, just one of many. He began to feel better as he maliciously predicted her failure.
From the boulevard they found their way to Tu Do Street and then on back to the Continental.
• • •
But he felt absolutely terrible. Once he was alone in his room he thought things through. Channing had been kind enough to take him around the city, to spend her Saturday afternoon with him. He realized that this was probably her only day off and she was spending it with him because, in some sense—romantic or not—she liked him, as he did her. What a fool, what a stupid prick, talking about her readership. And what had he done lately that was so special? He had written several critical failures, good efforts but not his best. His game was undoubtedly off. He thought he was playing to his strengths, offering what he knew, but she wasn’t interested. She was right, this wasn’t 1953. Twenty years had gone by. Rock and roll, the Kennedys, Vietnam, Watergate, even the damn feminists were more relevant. He had become clouded, irreverent and irrelevant both. He didn’t know how the American public would read her; he only knew about his own select tastes.
Eastman Was Here Page 22