Authors: Alfredo Vea
There was a second picture frame hanging directly over the center of the headboard. It was a black-and-white photo surrounded by a handmade frame of lacquered bamboo and hammered brass. The last photograph ever taken of Trin Adrong was trapped there behind the glass. There is a brightness in his eyes, the beginnings of some strange desire. In the background is the Tu Do Café. Mai was smiling now. Two soldiers from opposite sides of a terrible war were now sharing space in the same bedroom in San Francisco. All of the old thoughts that were flooding back to Persephone had also caught Mai in their thrall. As it always happened, the deluge of thoughts was hers, too.
Mai cooking in the kitchen and Persephone dressing in the bedroom were soon loving at once, swaying softly at a heart’s rhythm and pace to supple patterns, edgeless shadows, enchanted glimpses of times long past. Here, in this memory, is the click of a heel on pavement, the dissolving ghost of a warm breath against glass, the confident taste of a man’s voice, now the sharp pinch of bamboo grass beneath her naked back, now the wistful shadow of an unknowing last glimpse … graceful, graceless, awkward … suddenly over. There is a glimpse of Hong Kong and of the French Quarter. Here, in this memory, are the faces of four sisters: a bride and her bridesmaids. There, in that recollection, is a tattoo in the shape of a spider and violin. Candles flicker on pavement in this burst of memory. There is asphalt and heat and the blinding flash of a reflection from a passing windshield.
There is shapeless, weightless longing in their captured souls, the last enduring embers from the furious and desperate friction of moistened skins. The two standing women are sighing, sweating lovers now, stretched out in far-flung beds, caught in the thrash, pitch, and lurch of the single being with two bodies. They are surrendering simultaneously to the living, dying thing above them, beneath them, between them. In their ears are the voices of two recumbent males, two separate tongues whispering promised things into the cooling darkness of two bedrooms, worlds apart, and into two sets of symmetrical, unremarkable ears.
“When the war is over for me, we can open up the restaurant,” said a deep baritone that resounded with the elongated drawl of the Louisiana river delta and the bayou. “This time my paychecks will be sent directly to you. That way I can’t spend it all like I did on my last tour of duty. This time, when I leave the Nam, I’ll rotate out at Fort Lewis and jet straight on down to you, Persephone. I ain’t gonna re-up again, I promise. No more U.S. Army for me. I’ve had it. I’ll even do the cooking every other day. You know my crab cakes are the best.”
These joyous, chameleon words always made Persephone so sad. She had seen through his promises to the true color of his feelings. A. B. Flyer had seemed almost anxious to go back to Vietnam.
“When the war is over, I will march victoriously down Lê Loi Street with my comrades.” It was a soft Thuong dialect from the Central Highlands, the voice of an excited, nearsighted young man about to leave for Hanoi. “I will return and reclaim my bride when the new order has come to power. And I will protect your family and the Tu Do Café, I promise.”
The two women’s spirits met as they strained to reconstruct that final glimpse. Was it on the gangway? Was that Amos smiling through that small window of the airplane that would take him so far to the west? Was it the front door of the Tu Do Café? Was it a hasty salute, or had it been a final wave of Trin’s hand when the cadre leaders came at midnight to take him so far to the north?
Neither woman had ever seen or heard from her man again. There had been a few letters from Amos, but they had been strange and rambling. His last letter had gone on and on about bebop ballet at the Pas de Calais. Try as she might, Persephone could not decipher the meaning of it.
They both knew in their minds, if not their hearts, that their men were dead. Neither woman failed to fall asleep each night without wondering how her husband had died. Neither knew when they were killed or under what circumstances. Sergeant A. B. Flyer was listed as missing in action somewhere near the Free Fire Zone where Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam converged.
Twenty years after his disappearance, the army moved him from the missing-in-action category to the missing-and-presumed-dead. Persephone had received some of his personal effects, but aside from that final letter, nothing from his last days, and nothing truly personal to him. The things that came in the mail were from his hooch in Dong Ha. There were letters and books, things that Persephone had sent to him. There had never been a grave site to visit; there was nowhere to place a bouquet of flowers.
Along with most of his company, Trin Adrong had never been found. His entire battalion had been annihilated somewhere in the highlands. A small, unmarked package of his belongings had been left at Mai’s home in Saigon just before it fell. There was no information in the package, just a few small personal items that were charred black and smelled of cordite and damp earth.
There had been a pair of melted Russian-made wire-rimmed spectacles, a melted Chinese watch, and a small Catholic Bible whose cover had been removed and replaced with a cover from a book of Chairman Mao’s bad poetry. Communist or not, Trin would always be a Catholic. Trin and Mai had been married by a priest. Inside the package, Mai had also discovered a single bloodstained scrap of paper with some strange incomprehensible writing hastily scribbled on it. The yellowed paper had been wrapped around a small, smooth sliver of dark-green jade.
Though she could not read the printing, Mai felt that it was something of great significance. At first she had attempted to memorize the strange writing, but its intricacies eluded her. She had even placed Trin’s piece of jade on her tongue, but even then, the scrib blings would not reveal their secrets. When the writing and the paper began to decompose, in desperation she had located a sewing needle and some black ink and she had tattooed the markings into her own forearm. A year later the captain of a company of Vietcong would demand to know what the letters and numbers meant. Wasn’t it written in English? Wasn’t she a spy? Three years later a Thai captain in a squalid refugee camp in central Thailand would place a gun to her head and demand a translation … among other things. Wasn’t it proof that she had been a whore for the Americans?
While Persephone and Mai grew a day older with each rising of the sun, their two lovers were still trapped in that time before the Têt offensive, green and adamant and sheltered by a callow shield of youthful immortality. They had become men steeped in strategies, clandestine movements, radio call signs, azimuths and quadrants. They were men who kept secrets that inevitably leaked out, made meticulous plans that always fell to pieces, played hunches that invariably ended in misery. They were romantic men who had pushed their women away to go groping for a weapon.
Both Persephone and Mai hated that moment in their memories, that moment when young men left to prove themselves, to prove something. As a result of this hatred, neither woman could bear to watch most American movies. “Soft rape,” Persephone would call them, countless movies about postpubescent men winning sexual license by rescuing the once unattainable, now helpless girl-woman, by using daring and violence to skirt around acts of intimacy, words of communication and commitment.
“Kill enough people and you qualify for a waiver of the courtship requirement. Don’t take her to dinner and talk to her,” Persephone would scoff. “Heaven forbid! Just use kung fu on all of her sweaty assailants! Save her from all those scowling bad guys in sunglasses and Italian suits, then walk in all bloodied and bruised and sweep her off her feet! It’s funny, isn’t it? Here Amos went off to shoot at your husband so he could get some kind of macho sexual license, and before he left, Amos hadn’t touched me twice in two years.” Persephone would fall silent, then whisper to her friend, “The men never go home, Mai. They never go home.”
Suddenly a vision of Persephone’s father rushed into her mind. The old man is sitting in the center of the kitchen back in the family home in Louisiana. His four daughters are busily preening and primping him—making him look years younger so that the old fool widower could go off and seduce a child bride.
“Men never stay home,” she spat out. “They just ride off into the sunset. And there ain’t no damn responsibility in the sunset.”
Persephone sighed her wonted sigh. Mai, in the kitchen, spoke toward the photograph of Trin as though the image could hear.
“I have made love to no one,” she said. Her voice was calm and reassuring. “I have made love to no one.”
Amos and Trin were young men who couldn’t have known that the time would come when they would trade it all—their rank, their male tribes, their war, everything they had—for a taste of Mai and Persephone’s magical spaghetti. Mai’s and Persephone’s memories always came together at this particular place: at an unimaginable death in a lonely and unmarked place.
Together, they pored over maps of Vietnam and longed to know where and how their lovers had perished. Was it a painful death? Did they think of their wives? It was the single most important mystery in their lives. Had it happened west of Pleiku? Did it happen south of Khe Sanh? Had their two lovers passed each other in the jungle? Both longed to be there at the end, lending comfort, giving companionship into the next world.
“I’d walk into hell to get him back,” said Persephone. “As God is my witness, I’d walk into hell.”
“I would go there with you,” murmured Mai.
On the front porch of the Amazon Luncheonette was a small wooden table that, once a year, served as an altar. On the night of the full moon in the lunar month that corresponds with July, the tall white candles and the long rods of incense were lit. The table was covered with fresh fruit and pastries, newly baked moon cakes, and a bowl brimming with Creole pralines. Each year, Mai or Persephone would go downtown and buy a Monopoly game, remove the play money, and ceremoniously burn it on the front porch. Both women now observed Lê Cúng Cô Hôn, the traditional offering to the lonely dead and to deceased soldiers.
“Ma‘am, can I buy a pot of sauce?”
“Beg pardon, Miss Persephone, is the Amazon Luncheonette open for business?”
When Mai looked up from her doorway in Saigon, and Persephone glanced sideways from her gate at Travis Air Force Base, they were startled to see a long line of hungry, expectant people, pots and jars in hand, waiting patiently at the door of their restaurant-to-be. The two lovers shook their heads clear of memories, smiled at each other, and went to work.
When the two huge pots were empty, Mai shut the front door and leaned wearily against the glass. A thin layer of sweat matted some of her hair to her forehead. Behind her the last customer was trudging off toward home with two warm jars of sauce in his arms. Persephone busied herself by scraping the pots before washing them. As usual, a single jar of sauce had been set aside for the local homeless man. Mai placed the jar, along with some French bread, on a wooden bench in the back-yard garden. After setting the hot food down, she cupped her tiny hands to form a megaphone and shouted the man’s name twice in two languages into the night sky.
“Mr. Homeless, Ông Không Nhà! Mr. Homeless!”
As always, the jar would be empty in the morning. It would be washed, rinsed, and upended on the bench to drain. Neither woman had ever caught more than a fleeting glimpse of Ông Không Nhà, but his presence was unmistakable. To pay for the food, he would weed and cultivate Persephone’s flower garden, repair the clothes-line, mend the fence, and wash the windows, among many other chores.
Mai had once noticed an odd behavior in the man as she strained to see him in the dark. He seemed to be dodging and squatting as he moved about the garden. Only months later did she realize that this man was trying so hard not to damage the fragile, silken spiderwebs that adorned the entire garden.
Sometimes they heard a strange, indecipherable mumbling—a singsong buzzing coming from the back yard—and knew that it had to be Ông Không Nhà. He was a man who always worked in the dark, and though Mai found his presence a bit unsettling, it somehow comforted her. The living shadow in her yard felt like a fond memory.
“We sold over sixty quarts of sauce,” said Mai with a tired smile. “Not had, but we could’ve served almost two hundred dinners with that much sauce. With a green salad, pasta, and a drink, that would be a lot more money.” She sighed as she placed the night’s proceeds into a cigar box near the bed. “We’ll need to get a deep freezer so we can serve dessert. Scoops of
cà rem dâu.”
She laughed to herself at the word
cà rem.
It was obviously the French word
crème
that had been Vietnamized. “Strawberry ice cream. Won’t be long. All we need to do now is hire a dishwasher, some nice boy from up on the hill.”
As she spoke, two young men appeared at the front door. One was slightly taller and very lean, while the other was shorter, with a rounded face. They were both from the projects up on the hill. The taller one smiled, then began to rap loudly at the door. He then placed both palms on the glass door and playfully began to push, insisting that he be let in. The smaller boy had a pot in one hand and a lid in the other. He smiled shyly.
Mai smiled broadly when she saw him. She recognized the shorter young man and decided then and there to offer him the dishwashing job. On two or three occasions she had caught this same young man stealing the Vietnamese pastries that she had put out for Mr. Homeless. Over time she had developed a warm feeling for this young thief.