Chapter 7

She Frets

 

It was a funny key, big, brass, old-fashioned. Must be French. Was it night before last? Three nights ago? A New York hotel room with a simpler key. Hotels seemed to be a staple in her life lately. Move on to make room for the new girlfriend. She stumbled over a suitcase before she found the switch on the strange little Oriental bedside lamp with its minuscule bulb. Enough light from the neon outside, she hardly needed to bother. Why bother, indeed? Just drop her clothes on the floor and pull the covers over her head. Switch the lamp off and then she wouldn’t have to look at all the unpacked suitcases and detritus of former lives strewn around. Yeah, well, leave it on long enough to locate the pull chains on the overhead fans. God, this heat was relentless. A major pointer for the new life: Don’t turn off the fans when you leave the room no matter how long you think you’ll be gone. But leave the balcony door open? I don’t think so! Nothing is safe around here. She’d probably find a Viet Cong, or more likely a drunken correspondent, in her bed when she got back. She opened the louvered shutters, then folded back the metal ones, and so what. There didn’t even seem to be enough air moving to catch the stale stuff being shoved around by the ancient, creaking fan blades. Scotch was next. Another major pointer, always keep a bottle in your room. Where had she packed it? When she’d stuck in the flask as a last minute thought, she’d felt a bit silly, pretentious about it. A flask, my dear, for going to war? But she couldn’t very well get on a plane lugging a fifth in her handbag.

She pawed through a bunch of underwear and short-sleeved blouses, just piling them on the floor as she went. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t pick herself up and find the energy to put this stuff in a drawer? At least the things she’d already dragged out of the suitcase. Ah ha, here it was. Nice smooth feel, concave, it was sterling, had been her grandfather’s. A present from Mother. Not Mom, or Momma, like other people said. But Mother. Well, for once, Mother, you came through. Must drink to that. Switch off the light, ignore the mess, sit down in my new house that’s not a home and drink to Mother out of a silver flask. An image of her mother as a young teen on her polo pony, Angela’s grandfather grinning at her side, flashed in Angela’s head. The picture had forever stood in a silver frame on her mother’s desk. Her petite mother, her dark hair hidden by her riding helmet, brimming with confidence and self-assurance, basking in the glow of yet another medal she had won. The photo in the ornate frame was black and white, the contrast between me and Mother, Angela mused. She’s dark and petite. I’m big and red, like Pops. So, here I am in my new home, a hotel room in Saigon. A home I am going to have to make for myself, not by relying on Peter.

She’d made her first big home-style decision before she came. Get a room in the Continental on the second floor. She knew the hotel was where all the correspondents hung out. Hoped something might rub off, that it would make it easier to make friends. Fat chance. They all just wanted to hit on her. And she knew from research that the second floor was where Graham Greene had written “The Quiet American.” Hoping what would rub off there? Her best shot, probably, was ending up like Fowler, a burned out, lying hack of a newsman. Now wasn’t that a romantic notion. But she’d forgotten that since everything was French, what they would call the second floor would really be the third. An extra flight of stairs to climb every day for a romantic notion. Story of her life. Always made it difficult for herself, choosing a path that no one else took, much less wanted. She might as well have joined the French Foreign Legion.

Mother seemed to think that was just about what the prodigal daughter had gotten herself into. “Seems like a low-life profession to me. But if you must do it, it makes sense to go where the big story is, be the best.”

That was one bit of motherly advice that was good. She didn’t have the experience or connections to land a proper news job. No one wanted a woman in the city room, anyway. How many times had she seen old coots in green eyeshades look up from a copydesk and flinch when she walked in looking for a job. Or how about the guy who said, “If you’re a woman, lady, the deal’s off,” after sending her a note to come in for a tryout. He had responded to a resume from A.A. Martinelli. An age-old, female writers’ trick: use initials, not a tell-tale first name. She could have been stuck forever toiling away on the women’s pages, proof-reading recipes and covering bridal showers for the little Gazette.

Incredible, the light outside. It’s nearly midnight. Neon, neon, neon. The GI bars apparently stay open all night. What a place. Would she ever get used to it? Would she ever fit in? The whisky was good, warmed her throat. Only thing you’d want warm in this weather. But warm in the throat felt good, comforting. Or maybe it was just the glow the whisky gave, made the heebie jeebies, the fear, seem less. So what was she afraid of? Failure? Loneliness? Isolation? She’d faced all that, so what the fuck. Getting shot? That felt pretty remote.

She walked out on her little balcony, overhung by the feathery leaves of a Tamarind tree. You couldn’t see much from the room when you were sitting down. Just the balcony railing and through it, glimpses of the Caravelle Hotel across the way. The setting for her coming-out party this evening among the swells of Saigon. But looking down, there were still all sorts of lights and traffic and rickshaws and motor scooters. That bunch of drunks up in the Caravelle rooftop bar were probably still going strong.

“I’ll lift my glass to this,” she said out loud to the scene below, flashes of colored neon playing across the bare white walls and unpacked luggage of the room behind her. “Let me make a new life. I’m the house I live in.”

She threw back her head and laughed at the irony of those wise words of Jackson, the guy whom she had left because she felt they had no home. She needed a home, a place to feel safe. She thought she had found that in Peter – he baked bread, taught her how to plant a tree – before he left her.

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