The Nomination (17 page)

“‘Shut up,' he said. ‘I told you to watch.'

“But I saw the tears on Bunny's cheeks and heard the way she was gagging. ‘Please, Thomas,' I said, ‘let me do it,' and I tried to pull him to me.

“I didn't see it coming. It felt like I had been hit on the side of my head with a rock. I fell backwards onto the sand. It took me a minute to realize what had happened. He had punched me with his fist.

“I refused to cry. I lay there, feeling the dizziness and the pain in my head and the sickness in my stomach, listening to Thomas groaning and Bunny making noises in her throat, and after a few minutes I felt Thomas lie on his back beside me and I heard Bunny crying quietly.

“That was the first time Thomas hit me, Mac.

“Oh, remembering is painful, dear gentle Mac. You see? Now I am crying. I will now cry myself to sleep. Good night.”

“DEAR MAC. I am finding that the more I talk to you this way the easier it is. Even what I told you last night, as hard as it was, it feels good, now, getting it out of my head where it has been lurking all these years. I am telling you my secrets, and I feel that you are not judging me or condemning me, and so I find it easier not to judge or condemn myself. I do not know if I could do this while looking into your face. But your little tape recorder is becoming my trusted friend. It does not frown or look away from my eyes. It just keeps turning around faithfully.

“Will you be able to look at me after you hear these things? Will I see pity in your eyes, or contempt, or disappointment? I'm not sure I could bear your pity, Mac. But I feel your kindness. I felt it when we met, and I feel it still.

“I am afraid of giving these tapes to you. It is becoming easier to speak these words. But the thought of your pity remains very painful to me. I could not bear it if you judged me harshly. Well, I trust you.

“It is evening again. The whole day has passed, and I have not been able to summon up the courage to continue telling you my story. I have been thinking all day about Thomas, remembering that first time he hit me, wondering how it was that I so quickly became accustomed to having him hit me, and even accepted it as his privilege. He had bought me and paid for me, and that meant that he owned me. He could treat me kindly or cruelly, as he wished. And he did treat me both ways. When he was kind and tender and generous, as he often was, I was grateful, because I knew he had no obligation to treat me that way. And when he hit me, what could I do? Sometimes I thought of going to Mai Duc and telling her how Thomas was treating me, telling her that I did not like it. But she had always been kind to me, and I did not want to disappoint her, so I said nothing to her.

“And so I began to welcome the times when Thomas was not there, when I could be alone in my rooms with my radio and my books. And as time passed, I did have more and more time alone. Bunny visited me sometimes. She, too, was lonely and frightened. Her work was difficult and dangerous. She saw horrible things every day.

“Sometimes I wouldn't see Thomas for a week or more. The war was changing, and I think his work was changing, too, although he never talked to me about what he did.

“I never knew what to expect when he showed up. Often he would already be drunk when he arrived. He would insult me and hit me, and, as I have told you, I could do nothing except allow it to happen. But sometimes he would bring me flowers and wine, and he would make love very tenderly to me and I could feel the sadness and fear in him. His war was not going well. I could comfort him, and I did, and it gave me pleasure.

“One afternoon he showed up with flowers. He was already drunk, and he was acting very happy. He told me to put on my prettiest dress. He was taking me someplace special.

“Eddie and Bunny were in the Jeep outside. Everybody was acting funny, as if they all had a secret they were not sharing with me. Eddie drove us to a part of the city where I had never been. We stopped in front of a brick building and went into an office where a little Vietnamese man was sitting behind a desk. He wore a white suit with dirty smudges on it, and he was bald and smoking a cigarette. There was a picture of President Johnson on the wall and a tiny little American flag sticking out of a holder on his desk. The man jumped up when we entered and began talking in rapid Vietnamese. He kept looking at me, and I realized I was supposed to translate.

“The man was asking which was the lucky couple. I translated, and Eddie took Bunny's hand and said, ‘Tell him it's us.'

“I did. Eddie gave the man some money, and the man took out a book and read from it very fast—too fast for me to catch all the words. But he pronounced them man and wife and produced a document which all four of us signed and which Bunny folded and put into her purse.

“Then Thomas took my arm and said, ‘Tell him to do us.'

“I looked at him, and I must have frowned, because he smiled and squeezed my arm. ‘Tell him, Annie,' he said. Annie is what Thomas called me when he wasn't angry with me.

“‘What about Mai Duc?' I said.

“‘I have already talked to her,' he said, which meant that he had given her the money that she required.

“You see, Mac? Thomas never asked me to marry him. He asked Mai Duc. That was how it worked, and I understood. I never did know why he wanted to marry me. But I knew that he did not need my consent. And so I told the little man to marry us, and Thomas gave him money, and he repeated the same words he had said for Bunny and Eddie. Then we all signed an official document, which I put into my purse.

“That should be an interesting fact for your book, Mac. Simone was married.

“No. Correct that. Simone
is
married, has been married all these years.

“Do you really think anybody cares about this? Well, you can write it into your book or not. These stories are my gift to you, my dear friend. You can do with them what you want.”

“Jill has come with my tea. I want to be with her now.”

F
our days after he visited her, Mac Cassidy called Simone.

Jill answered the phone.

“It's Mac Cassidy,” he said. “I wonder if I can talk to Simone?”

“I'm sorry,” said Jill. “She's napping. I don't like to interrupt her. She doesn't have much energy. Is it important?”

“It can wait,” he said. “I just wondered how it was going.”

“With your book, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“She's been talking into the tape recorder whenever she's awake. She's got five or six tapes filled.”

“She hasn't finished, has she?”

“I don't think so. She doesn't tell me anything about it. She won't allow me to be near her when she talks to you.” Jill laughed quietly. “That's how she puts it. ‘I'm going to talk with Mac now,' she'll say. ‘Please leave us.' I'm getting jealous.” She hesitated. “It's taking a lot out of her. Emotionally, I mean. She's more withdrawn. She tires easier.”

“I don't want to jeopardize her health,” he said.

“You've got to understand Simone,” said Jill. “Whatever she does, it's what she wants to do, what she believes she should do. Otherwise, she wouldn't do it. You or I, we have no control over it.”

“I was thinking of driving out to see her—the two of you—on Saturday. I could pick up the tapes she's finished, and I'd like to ask her some things.”

“Well,” Jill said, “it's not like we have this busy social calendar. I'm sure she'd love to see you. I can't promise you that she'll last very long.”

“It's getting worse?” said Mac.

“She sleeps more and more. After an hour or so, even just sitting on the deck, she has to nap.”

“I'm very sorry,” he said.

Jill didn't say anything.

“I'd like to talk with you sometime,” he said.

“Me? Why?”

“Your insights will be important for the book. You know her better than anybody.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't think I'd be comfortable with that.”

“I'll ask Simone about it,” he said. “Is that all right with you?”

“I can't stop you from asking her, but it goes against my grain to ... to divulge private things.”

“Sure. I understand.” He paused for an awkward minute. “Well,” he said, “please tell Simone that I'll be there Saturday around noontime. I was thinking of bringing my daughter for company. It's a long drive. Would that be all right?”

“Of course,” said Jill. “We'll have lunch. I'm sure Simone would love to meet your daughter. So would I.”

“Katie,” said Mac. “Her name's Katie. She's fifteen.”

“Katie's a sweet name,” said Jill.

“IT IS EARLY morning, Mac. Although I nap frequently and am always tired, I seem to be awakening earlier and earlier. So Jill has wheeled me out on my deck. I have a heavy blanket over me, and I am sipping tea and watching the sky turn from purple to pewter. Soon the sun will rise, but it has not yet. The air is filled with birdsong and insect buzzing, and it smells moist and cool and sweet. Two rabbits were munching grass right beside the deck a few minutes ago. Often deer wander into my yard around sunrise on a spring morning. It is a wonderful, magical time, my favorite time to be awake. The rest of the world is asleep, and I believe I have the advantage over them because I have already begun my day. It makes me feel virtuous, even though I accomplish nothing.

“I developed the habit of early rising when I lived in the convent school in Saigon. Then I was awakened before dawn to work in the kitchen preparing the day's bread. Even when I worked in Hollywood I arose early. That, I discovered, was the best time to learn my lines. My mind has always focused best before the sun comes up.

“So this morning as I sit here in the cool damp of this springtime dawn with a thick blanket covering my legs, I am remembering clearly the events that led to my leaving Vietnam. It was about survival. I always did what I had to do to survive. Surviving was foremost in my mind for much of my life. Lately thoughts of survival have preoccupied me again, although now survival seems somehow less important to me than it did when I was younger. Now I am prepared not to survive. It is actually a big relief.

“I told you how Thomas and I were married. I gave you the legal document that the nervous Vietnamese man in the dirty white suit gave me that day. I wonder if you looked at it and understood what it is. Were it not for events that followed, that civil wedding of ours would be of no importance.

“The fact that we were married did not change the way Thomas and I lived. I continued to stay in my hotel room and he continued to work in the city. Bunny often came to stay with me. As time passed, Thomas came over less and less often. When he did show up, he was either already drunk or he quickly became drunk. He hit me regularly. I got used to it. He rarely hurt me, and I understood that he needed to do something with his anger and fear. It was not personal with him. Hitting me was safe for him. He had paid Mai Duc for the right to hit me.

“That first time on the beach he punched me with his fist, but after that he only slapped me. I suspect that was his agreement with Mai Duc. She allowed him to slap me but forbade him from hitting me with his fist. Usually he had no particular passion for it. Here was Annie, his property, and she needed to be slapped now and then. That was all.

“I look back and am amazed that I accepted being hit as his right and my duty. But I belonged to him. What did I know?

“Well, Mac, like my mother and my mother's mother, I got pregnant. If I had followed Mai Duc's rules, it would not have happened. But I was drunk much of the time I was with Thomas, and so was he, and we were careless.

“I did not know what to do. I told Bunny, of course, and she said she could arrange an abortion. She knew American doctors who could do it safely. But the idea of an abortion frightened me, Mac. I had been educated by the Catholic nuns, who taught me that abortion was murder.

“I knew I had to tell Thomas. He was my husband and my child's father. I did not know how he would react. I was afraid. But I decided I would tell him, and then I would do whatever he wanted. If the decision was his, it would free me of sin and responsibility.

“I will speak more of this later, Mac. The sun has risen and the dew had dried from the grass. Already it is warm. The magic time of my spring day has passed. I don't feel like talking anymore.”

“THIS MORNING I was speaking to you of my pregnancy, Mac, and how I had to tell Thomas. I feared his anger, of course. I believed he would either hit me and demand that I abort the child or else simply abandon me.

“I had learned to judge Thomas's moods. Sometimes he was gay and laughing, and he'd take me out. We would visit a restaurant, go dancing. When Bunny and Eddie were with us, we might drive out into the countryside and Thomas and Eddie would tell us about the fighting and show us the destruction. Then when we returned to my rooms, we would make love, Thomas with me and Eddie with Bunny. The four of us often ended up in the same bed, but after that time at the beach when Thomas hit me for the first time, he never tried to touch Bunny. Afterwards we would all fall asleep naked together. We were good friends, like a pair of married couples—which we were—and I sometimes fooled myself into thinking that we had a future, that we would always be together.

“Other times, of course—most times—Thomas was angry or depressed when he came to me, and then I tried to soothe him. Sometimes that's what he wanted, and I'd hold him and caress him and whisper to him as if he were a child. At other times he had to hit me.

“Anyway, Mac, I waited for the evening when I sensed a happy mood to tell him that we were having a baby. He came in with wine and flowers and food. I prepared the food, and after we ate he turned the radio to a station that played American music and took me in his arms and danced with me. We ended up laughing, I remember, and trying to sing along with the music. Then we sat on the sofa and poured more wine, and that's when I told him. ‘Thomas,' I said, ‘I have some news.'

“He smiled, and I think he knew then what I was going to say. ‘We are having a child.' I said it as simply and quickly as I could. I braced myself for his anger. But it didn't happen. He looked at me for a moment, and I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Then he hugged me. ‘I am very happy, Annie,' he said.

“That night after we made love Thomas talked to me in a way he had never done before. He told me how frightened he was to be in my country. He told me of the friends he had lost to the war, how his responsibilities were changing, how he expected one day to be killed himself. He wanted the child, he said. He wanted to leave a child in the world when he died, and he was pleased that it was my child. He would grow to be a strong and beautiful man, Thomas said, for he assumed the child would be a boy. With me for a mother and him for a father, said Thomas, how could the child not be extraordinary?

“If he survived the war, Thomas told me, he would bring me to America where our child would be safe and healthy. We would send him to the best schools. Everything was possible in America.

“Mac, I cannot tell you how happy I felt that evening. It did not seem possible that this man loved me and wanted to spend his life with me, that I would have his beautiful child and we would care for him together.

“During my pregnancy, Thomas changed. He stopped hitting me. He was still often depressed, and sometimes I saw his anger. He did not stop drinking entirely, but he was drunk less often. He began to take an interest in my health. He worried about what I ate and about my sleep. He insisted that I stop drinking and smoking marijuana.

“When the time came, he took me to a Catholic hospital and I gave birth to a daughter. She was beautiful. I thought she looked more like Thomas than me. She had his coloring, and except for her eyes, it was hard to see my Vietnamese mother in her appearance. Thomas, I knew, was disappointed we did not have a boy. But he was tender and loving toward our girl, whom we named May after Mai Duc, but spelled the American way.

“Oh, Mac. Things never remain the same, do they? The war in my country was growing fierce. All around Saigon battles were waging. Villages were being destroyed. Young men—Vietnamese from the north and the south, and Americans—were being killed. I understood little of the war. I knew that Vietnamese were fighting against Vietnamese. I knew that the United States thought it was terribly important that the South should win. Thomas sometimes tried to explain it to me. When I asked him what was the sense of all the killing, of his risking his life, of the American government sending its boys to Vietnam to be killed, he talked about democracy and freedom, but I could tell he was uncertain and confused himself.

“After May was born, Thomas found a new place for us to live. It was in a different part of the city, an apartment with two bedrooms, one for May and one for me. I know it was expensive. I once asked him why we could not all live together like a family, but Thomas refused to explain. He continued to live separate from May and me and visit us when he could.

“I am tired again, Mac. Telling you my stories is not easy. If this is boring, well, you do not have to put it in your book, do you? But it is my life. I think most people's lives are boring.