iem’s plan was to walk calmly past the waiting crowd after he disembarked, but instead he found himself hesitating at the gate, anxiously scanning the strange faces. In one hand he held his duffel bag, and in the other he clutched the form given to him by Mrs. Lindemulder, the woman with the horn-rimmed glasses from the refugee service. When she had seen him off at the San Diego airport, she’d told him his sponsor, Parrish Coyne, would be waiting in San Francisco. The flight was only his second trip by air, and he’d passed it crumpling and uncrumpling an empty pretzel bag, until his seatmate asked him if he would please stop. American etiquette confused him, for Americans could sometimes be very polite, and at other times rather rude, jostling by him as they did now in their rush to disembark. The lingering pressure in his ears bewildered him further, making it hard for him to understand the PA system’s distorted English. He was wondering if he was missing something important when he spotted the man who must be Parrish Coyne, standing near the back of the crowd and holding up a hand-lettered placard with mr. liem printed neatly on it in red. The sight nearly overwhelmed Liem with relief and gratitude, for no one had ever called him “mister” before.
Parrish Coyne was middle-aged and, except for his gray ponytail, distinguished-looking, his deep-set green eyes resting above a thin, straight nose. He wore a brown fedora and a black leather jacket, unbuttoned over a generous belly. After Liem shyly approached him, but before Liem could say a word, he said Liem’s name twice. “Li-am, I presume?” Parrish spoke with an English accent as he clasped Liem’s hand and mispronounced his name, using two syllables instead of one. “Li-am, is it?”
“Yes,” Liem said, guessing that his foreignness was evident to all. “That is me.” He meant to correct Parrish’s pronunciation, but before he could do so, Parrish unexpectedly hugged him, leaving him to pat the man’s shoulder awkwardly, aware of other people watching them and wondering, no doubt, about their relationship. Then Parrish stepped back and gripped his shoulders, staring at him with an intensity that made Liem self-conscious, unused as he was to being the object of such scrutiny.
“To be honest,” Parrish announced at last, “I didn’t expect you to be so pretty.”
“Really?” Liem kept smiling and said no more. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right, but he’d learned to bide his time in situations like this, sticking to monosyllables until the course of a conversation clarified matters.
“Stop it,” the young man next to Parrish said, also with an English accent. “You’re embarrassing him.” Just then the pressure in Liem’s eardrums popped, and the muffled sounds of the terminal swelled to a normal volume and clarity.
“This is Marcus Chan,” Parrish said, “my good friend.”
Marcus appeared to be in his mid-twenties, only a few years older than Liem, who’d turned eighteen over the summer. If Marcus’s smile seemed a little disdainful as he offered his hand, Liem could hardly blame him, for compared with Marcus, he was sorely lacking in just about every regard. Even the yellowness of his teeth was more evident next to the whiteness of Marcus’s. With body erect and head tilted back, Marcus had the posture of someone expecting an inheritance, while Liem’s sense of debt caused him to walk with eyes downcast, as if searching for pennies. Since he was shorter than both Marcus and Parrish, he was forced to look up as he said, “I am very happy to meet you.” Out of sheer nervousness, Marcus’s hand still gripped in his, he added, “San Francisco number one.”
“That’s lovely.” Marcus gently let go of his hand. “What’s number two then?”
“Hush.” Parrish frowned. “Why not be helpful and take Liem’s bag?”
With Marcus carrying the duffel bag and trailing behind, Parrish guided Liem through the terminal, hand on elbow. “It must seem very overwhelming to you,” Parrish said, waving in a way that took in the crowds, the terminal, and presumably all of San Francisco. “I can only imagine how strange this all appears. Coming here from England was enough of a culture shock for me.”
Liem glanced over his shoulder at Marcus. “You come from England, too?”
“Hong Kong,” Marcus said. “You could say I’m an honorary Englishman.”
“In any case,” Parrish said, squeezing Liem’s elbow and bending his head to speak more confidentially into Liem’s ear, “you must have had an awful time of it.”
“No, not very bad.” Liem spoke with nonchalance, even though the prospect of rehearsing his story one more time flooded him with dread. In the four months since he’d fled Saigon, he’d been asked for his story again and again, by sailors, marines, and social workers, their questions becoming all too predictable. What was it like? How do you feel? Isn’t it all so sad? Sometimes he told the curious that what had happened was a long story, which only impelled them to ask for a shorter version. It was this edited account that he offered as Marcus drove the car through the parking garage, into the streets, and onto the freeway. Casting himself as just one more anonymous young refugee, he recounted a drama that began with leaving his parents in Long Xuyen last summer, continued with his work in a so-called tea bar in Saigon, and climaxed with the end of the war. Even this brief version tired him, and as he spoke he leaned his forehead against the window, watching the orderly traffic on the wide highway.
“So,” he said. “Now I am here.”
Parrish sighed from the front seat of the sedan. “That war wasn’t just a tragedy,” he said, “but a farce.” Marcus made a noise in his throat that might have been an assent before he turned up the volume on the radio a few notches. A woman was uttering an encomium to a brand of furniture polish, something to bring out the luster without using a duster. “You’ll find the weather here to be cold and gray, even though it’s September,” Marcus said. “In the winter it will rain. Not exactly the monsoon, but you’ll get used to it.” As he drove, he pointed to passing landmarks, the standouts in Liem’s memory being Candlestick Park with its formidable walls, and the choppy, marbled waters of the bay. Then, as traffic from another freeway merged with theirs and the car slowed down, Parrish lowered the volume on the radio and said, “There’s something you need to know about Marcus and myself.”
A white passenger van, accelerating on the right, blocked Liem’s view of the bay. He turned from the window to meet Parrish’s gaze. “Yes?”
“We’re a couple,” Parrish announced. Out of the corner of his eye, Liem saw the white van edging forward, past the shrinking blot of moisture left by his forehead on the window. “In the romantic sense,” Parrish added. Liem decided that “in the romantic sense” must be an idiomatic expression, the kind Mrs. Lindemulder had said Americans used often, like “you’re killing me” and “he drives me up the wall.” In idiomatic English, a male couple in the romantic sense must simply mean very close friends, and he smiled politely until he saw Marcus staring at him in the rearview mirror, the gaze sending a nervous tremor through his gut.
“Okay,” Liem said. “Wow.”
“I hope you’re not too shocked.”
“No, no.” The small hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stiffened as they’d done before whenever another boy, deliberately or by chance, had brushed his elbow, sometimes his knee, while they walked hand-in-hand or sat on park benches with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, watching traffic and girls pass by. “I am liberal.”
“Then I hope you’ll stay with us.”
“And open-minded,” he added. In truth he had no other refuge but Parrish’s hospitality, just as there was nowhere else for him to go at the end of the day in Saigon but a crowded room of single men and boys, restless on reed mats as they tried to sleep while breathing air humidified with the odor of bodies worked hard. “Do not worry.”
“Good,” Marcus said, turning the volume up again, the way one of the boys would around midnight, on his transistor radio, when everyone knew but wouldn’t say that sleep was impossible. Liem’s eyes were closed by then, but he couldn’t help seeing the faces of men he knew casually or had watched in the tea bar, even those of his own roommates. In the darkness, he heard the rustle of mosquito netting as the others masturbated also. The next morning, everyone looked at each other blankly, and nobody spoke of what had occurred the previous evening, as if it were an atrocity in the jungle better left buried.
He thought he’d forgotten about those nights, had run away from them at last, but now he wondered if the evidence still existed in the lines of his palms. He rubbed his hands uneasily on his jeans as they drove through a neighborhood with bustling sidewalks, trafficked by people of several colors. They were mostly whites and Mexicans, along with some blacks and a scattering of Chinese, none of whom looked twice at the signs in the store windows or the graffiti on the walls, written in a language he’d never seen before: peluquería, chuy es maricón, ritmo latino, dentista, iglesia de cristo, viva la raza!
After turning onto a street lined with parked cars jammed fender-to-fender, Marcus swung the sedan nose-down into the sloping driveway of a narrow two-story house, upon whose scarlet door was hung, strangely enough, a portrait of the Virgin Mary. “We’re home,” Parrish said. Later Liem would learn that Parrish was an ambivalent Catholic, that the district they lived in was the Mission, and that the name for the house’s architectural style was Victorian, but today all he noticed was its color.
“Purple?” he said, never having seen a home painted in this fashion before.
Parrish chuckled and opened his door. “Close,” he said. “It’s mauve.”
Mrs. Lindemulder had squeezed Liem’s shoulder in the San Diego airport and warned him that in San Francisco the people tended to be unique, an implication he hadn’t understood at the time. Every day for the first few weeks in Parrish’s house, Liem wanted to phone Mrs. Lindemulder and tell her she’d made a huge mistake, but Parrish’s generosity shamed him and prevented him from doing so. Instead, he stood in front of the mirror each morning and told himself there was nobody to fear, except himself. He’d silently said the same thing last year, at summer’s end in ’74, when he bade farewell to his parents at the bus station in Long Xuyen. He hadn’t complained about being dispatched alone to Saigon, several hours north, where he’d be the family’s lifeline. As the eldest son, he had duties, and he was used to working, having done so since leaving school at the age of twelve to shine the boots of American soldiers.
He’d known them since he was eight, when he began picking through their garbage dumps for tin and cardboard, well-worn Playboy magazines, and unopened C rations. The GIs taught him the rudiments of English, enough for him to find a job years later in Saigon, sweeping the floor of a tea bar on Tu Do Street where the girls pawned themselves for dollars. With persistence, he sandpapered the two discourses of junkyard and whorehouse into a more usable kind of English, good enough to let him understand the rumor passed from one foreign journalist to another in the spring of ’75, six months ago. Thousands would be slaughtered if the city fell to the Communists.
In April, when rockets and mortars began exploding on the outskirts of the city, the rumor seemed about to come true. Although he hadn’t planned on kicking, shoving, and clawing his way aboard a river barge, he found himself doing so one morning after he saw a black cloud of smoke over the airport, burning on the horizon, lit up by enemy shellfire. A month later he was in Camp Pendleton, San Diego, waiting for sponsorship. He and the other refugees had been rescued by a Seventh Fleet destroyer in the South China Sea, taken to a makeshift Marine Corps camp at Guam, and then flown to California. As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape. He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.
None of this was mentioned in the airmail he posted to his parents, soon after coming to Parrish’s house. It was his second letter home. In June, at Camp Pendleton, he’d dispatched his first airmail care of the resettlement agency. In both cases, assuming no letter would go unread by the Communists, he wrote only of where he lived and how to get in touch with him. He was afraid of endangering his family by marking them as relatives of someone who’d fled, and he was even more afraid the letters might never make it home at all. The only time his family’s fate wasn’t on his mind was during those few seconds after he woke up, in a warm bed under three blankets, remembering dreams in which he spoke perfect English. Then he opened his eyes to see a faint blue glow filtered through foggy windows, the murky and wavering shimmer reminding him of where he was, in a distant city, a foreign place where even the quality of light differed from the tropical glare he’d always known.
Downstairs, he would find Parrish and Marcus eating breakfast and discussing the local news, international politics, or the latest film. They bickered often, usually in a bantering way, about whether or not they should vote for Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, or whether Ford’s would-be assassin, a San Francisco woman, should get life or death.
When they began arguing seriously in front of him, he knew he was becoming a part of their household. Sometimes the fights seemed to occur for no reason, as happened one morning in October after Parrish asked about the date of Marcus’s final exams. “Why don’t you take them for me?” Marcus snapped before stalking out of the kitchen. Parrish waited until Marcus ran up the stairs before he leaned over to Liem and said, “It’s the terrible twos. The second year’s the hardest.”
“Oh, yes?” Liem nodded his head even though he was uncertain, once again, about what Parrish meant. “I see you both yell many times.”
“Even though he’s older, he’s not as mature as you,” Parrish said. He stirred his coffee, his spoon making figure eights instead of circles. “He hasn’t seen the things you or I have. Of course, when I was his age, I was spoiled and a little lazy too. But I’m better now. My ancestors made their money from means of which I’m ashamed, but there’s no reason why I can’t put my own to some good use. Is there?”
“No?”
“No,” Parrish said. Liem understood he was one of the good uses for the money Parrish had earned in two decades as a corporate accountant, a job he’d given up a few years before to work in environmental protection. Although Parrish refused to let Liem pay rent, Liem had found a job anyway. The week after his arrival, he’d wandered through downtown until he came across a liquor store in the heart of the Tenderloin, on the corner of Taylor and Turk. “Help Wanted” was scrawled in soap on the window next to “Se Habla Español.” The book he carried in his pocket, Everyday Dialogues in English, had no scenarios featuring the duo patrolling the corner outside the store, so he said nothing as he brushed by the shivering prostitute with pimples in her cleavage, who dismissed him at a look, and the transvestite with hairy forearms, who did not.
His shift ran from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, six days a week, his day off on Thursday. He swept the floor and stocked the shelves, cleaned the toilet and wiped the windows, tended the register and then repeated the routine. During downtime, he read his book, hoping for clues on how to talk with Marcus and Parrish, but finding little of use in chapters like “Juan Gonzalez Visits New York City and Has to Ask His Way Around,” or “An Englishman and an American Attend a Football Game.” At the end of his shift, he dragged two garbage bags to a Dumpster down an alley where people with questionable histories urinated and vomited when it was dark, and sometimes when it wasn’t. No matter how much he scrubbed his hands afterward, he sensed they’d never really be clean. The grease and garbage he dealt in had worked their way into his calluses so deeply he imagined that he was forever leaving his fingerprints everywhere.
By the time he returned to the Victorian, Parrish and Marcus had already finished dinner, and he ate leftovers in the kitchen while they watched television. As soon as he was done, he retreated upstairs, where he showered off the day’s sweat and tried not to think of Marcus’s lean, pale body. The endless hot water left him pliant and calm, and it was in this relaxed state of mind that he opened the door of the bathroom one evening after his shower, wrapped only in a towel, to encounter Marcus padding down the hallway. They faced each other in silence before both stepped to the same side. Then they both stepped to the other side, feet shuffling so awkwardly that the laugh track from the sitcom Parrish was watching downstairs, audible even on the landing, seemed to be directed at them.
“Excuse me,” Liem said finally, his back slick with sweat from the heat of the long shower. “May I pass?”
Marcus shrugged, his eyes flickering once over Liem’s body before he bowed slightly, in a mocking fashion, and said, “Yes, you may.”
Liem hurried past Marcus and into his room. As soon as he shut the door, he leaned against it, ear pressed to wood, but another burst of canned laughter from downstairs made it impossible to hear Marcus’s footsteps fading down the hallway.
On an overcast Thursday morning in mid-November, Marcus and Liem drove Parrish to the airport. He was spending the weekend in Washington, at a conference on nuclear power’s threat to the environment. As the wind beat against the windows, Parrish explained how the government buried its spent plutonium and uranium in the desert, where they poisoned land and threatened lives for millennia. “And mostly poor lives at that,” Parrish said. “Just think of it as a gigantic minefield in our backyard.” Marcus drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, but Parrish gave no sign of noticing. On the curb at the airport, his suitcase at his feet, he kissed Marcus good-bye and hugged Liem. “See you Sunday night,” Parrish said before shutting the passenger door behind Liem. Liem was waving through the window, and Parrish was waving back, when Marcus accelerated into traffic without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
“When’s he going to stop trying to save the world?” Marcus demanded. “It’s getting to be a bore.”
Liem buckled his seat belt. “But Parrish is a good person.”
“There’s a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.”
They rode in silence for the next quarter of an hour, until they neared the center of the city. There, the sight of a bakery truck entering the freeway from Army Street made Liem ask, “Are you hungry? I am hungry.”
“Don’t say I am hungry, say I’m hungry. You have to learn how to use contractions if you want to speak like a native.”
“I’m hungry. Are you?”
The restaurant Marcus chose in Chinatown was on Jackson Street and nearly the size of a ballroom, with pillars of dark cherrywood and tasseled red lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Even on a Thursday morning it was noisy and bustling; waitresses in smocks pushed carts up and down the aisles while bow-tied waiters hurried from table to table, checks and pots of tea in hand. They sat by a window overlooking Jackson Street, the sight of Asian crowds comforting to Liem. As the train of carts rolled by, Marcus picked and rejected expertly from the offerings, ordering in Cantonese and explaining in English as the varieties of dim sum were heaped before them in a daunting display, including shiu mai, dumplings of minced pork and scallions, long-stemmed Chinese broccoli, and sliced roasted pork with candied skin the color of watermelon seeds. “Parrish won’t touch those,” Marcus said approvingly as he watched Liem suck the dimpled skin off a chicken’s foot, leaving only the twiggy bones.
After the waiter swept away the dishes, they sat quietly with a tin pot of chrysanthemum tea between them. Liem rolled the bottom of his teacup in a circle around a grease stain on the tablecloth before he asked Marcus about his family, something Marcus had never discussed in front of him. All Liem knew about Marcus was that he’d lived in Hong Kong until he was eighteen, that he was enrolled in business administration at San Francisco State but hardly ever went there, and that he worked out at the gym every day. His father, Marcus said with a snort, was an executive at a rubber company who had sent him to study overseas, expecting he would eventually return to help run the business. But three years ago a spiteful ex-lover had mailed his father one of Marcus’s love letters, with candid pictures tucked into the folds. “Very candid pictures,” Marcus said darkly. After that, his father had disowned him, and now Parrish paid his expenses. “Can you imagine anything worse?” Marcus concluded.
Liem wasn’t sure whether Marcus was referring to the lover’s betrayal, the father’s plans, or Parrish’s money. What he really wanted to know was what “candid” meant, but when Marcus only sipped his tea, not seeming to expect an answer, Liem spoke instead about his own family, all farmers, hawkers, and draftees. Nobody had ever traveled very far from Long Xuyen, unless he was drafted by the army. Liem was the family’s first explorer, and perhaps that was the reason his parents were so anxious at the bus station in Long Xuyen, one of the few moments of his past he recalled with any clarity. The patch of unshaded dirt and cement was crowded with passengers ready to board, holding cartons tied with twine and keeping close watch on their pigs and chickens, shuffling in wire cages. As the heat rose in waves, the odor of human sweat and animal dung, thickened by the dust, rose with it.
“We raised you well,” his father said, unable to look him in the eye with his own bluish-gray ones, hazy from cataracts. “I know you won’t lose yourself in the city.”
“I won’t,” Liem promised. “You can depend on me.” He heard the driver shouting for passengers to board as his mother ran her hands up and down his arms and patted his chest, as if frisking him, before she squeezed a small wad of bills into his pocket. “Take care of yourself,” she said. Around her mouth, deep wrinkles appeared to be stitches sewing her lips together. “I won’t be able to anymore.” He hadn’t said he loved her, or his father, before he left. He’d been too distracted by his desperation to get on the bus, for without a seat he’d have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisle, or else risk his life riding on the roof all the way to Saigon.
“How could you know what was going to happen?” Marcus leaned forward. “You’re not a fortune-teller. Anyway, that’s all in the past. You can’t dwell on it. The best way to help them now is to help yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said, even though this was, to him, a very American way of thinking.
“The point is, what do you want to be?”
“To be?”
“In the future. What do you want to do with yourself?”
No one had ever asked Liem such a question, and Liem rarely asked it of himself. He was content with his job at the liquor store, especially when he compared his fate with that of his friends back home. The underage ones, like him, had become bar sweeps or houseboys for Americans, while the older, luckier ones dodged army service, becoming thieves or pimps or rich men’s servants. Unlucky ones got drafted, and very unlucky ones did not come home at all, or if they did, returned as beggars who laid their stumps on the side of the road.
Marcus was watching him expectantly. The idea of saying he wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman was utterly ludicrous, but the desire to appear noble in Marcus’s eyes, and maybe his own, seized him.
“I want to be good,” he said at last.
“Well.” Marcus glanced at the bill. “Don’t we all.”
The next day at the liquor store, Liem counted seconds by sweeps of his broom and rings of the register, his shift threatening never to end when only yesterday he’d hoped the day would run on forever. After he’d grabbed the check from Marcus and paid for the dim sum, they had browsed the curio shops of Chinatown together, then driven to Treasure Island to see the Golden Gate Bridge, winding up by dusk in a Market Street theater, where they sat knee-to-knee watching One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Later, eating sushi at a Japanese restaurant on Sutter in Japantown, neither mentioned the contact—they talked instead about Jack Nicholson, whose films Liem had never seen; and Western Europe, which Liem had never visited; and the varieties of sushi, which Liem had never eaten before. In short, Marcus did most of the talking, and that was fine with Liem.
Talking with Marcus was easy, because all Liem had to do was ask questions. Marcus, however, rarely asked him anything, and during those moments when Liem ran out of inquiries, silence ensued, and the hum of the car or the chatter of the other diners became uncomfortably noticeable. Neither spoke of Parrish, not even when they returned to the Victorian and Marcus opened one of Parrish’s bottles of red wine, a Napa Valley pinot noir. Never having drunk wine before, Liem woke up the next morning feeling as if the corkscrew had been driven into his forehead. He could barely crawl out of bed and to the bathroom, where, as he brushed his teeth, he vaguely remembered Marcus helping him up the stairs and easing him into bed. Seeing no sign of him before he went to work, he concluded Marcus was sleeping in.
When he returned to the Victorian in the evening, he found Marcus watching television in the living room, clad in his bathrobe and with his hair mussed. “A letter came for you today,” Marcus said, switching off the television with the remote control. On the coffee table was a battered blue airmail marked by an unmistakable handwriting, the pen marks so forceful they almost cut through the thin envelope. Liem’s father had replied to his first note, the airmail addressed to him at Camp Pendleton and forwarded by the resettlement agency in San Diego.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Marcus said.
“No,” he muttered. “I don’t think so.” He rubbed the envelope between his fingers, unable to explain how he’d dreaded the letter’s arrival as much as he’d yearned for it. Once he opened the letter, his life would change again, and perhaps he wanted it to stay the same. Summoning all his will, he laid the airmail on the coffee table again and sat down next to Marcus on the couch, where together they stared at the blue envelope as if it were an anonymous letter slipped under an adulterer’s door.
“They think we’ve got a Western disease,” Marcus said. “Or so my father says.”
“We?” Liem said.
“Don’t think I don’t know.”
Liem kept his eyes on the letter, certain his father had written no more than what needed to be said: make money and send it home, take care and be good. The message would be underlined once and then once more, leaving him to guess at anything too dangerous to be said in his father’s bare vocabulary. But whereas his father had never sought to find new words, Liem was the opposite. He looked up at Marcus and asked the question he’d wanted to ask since yesterday.
“What does candid mean?”
“Candid?” Marcus said. “Yeah, right. Candid. It means being caught by surprise, like in a photograph or a film, when someone takes your picture and you’re not looking. Or it means someone who’s frank. Who’s honest and direct.”
Liem took a deep breath. “I want to be candid.”
“I’d like to be candid.”
“Shut up,” Liem said, putting his hand on Marcus’s knee.
Afterward, he sensed things might not have gone well. First, none of their clothes came off as smoothly as he expected, because all of a sudden the buttons and zippers were smaller than he knew them to be, and his fingers larger and clumsier. His rhythm seemed to be off, too. Sometimes in his eagerness he moved too fast, and to make up for it, or because he was embarrassed, he then went too slowly, throwing them out of sync and causing him to apologize repeatedly for an elbow here, or a knee there, until Marcus said, “Stop saying you’re sorry and just enjoy yourself, for heaven’s sake.” So he did his best to relax and give himself up to the experience. Later, his arm thrown over Marcus’s body, facing his back, Liem wasn’t surprised to discover how little he remembered. His habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints, leaving him with only scattered recollections of rough lips pressed against his, and the comfort of a man’s muscular weight.
“I love you,” he said.
Marcus did not roll over or look behind him, did not say “I love you” in return, and indeed, said nothing at all. The ticking of Parrish’s antique grandfather clock grew louder and louder with each second, and by the time the patter of rain on the roof was distinct, Liem was fumbling awkwardly with his underwear.
“Can you just wait a minute?” Marcus said, turning around and hooking one leg over Liem’s body. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“No,” Liem said, trying to unpry, without success, Marcus’s leg, honed by countless hours on the treadmill and the squat machine. “I need to go to the bathroom, please.”
“You just got caught by surprise. Sooner or later you’ll figure out love’s just a reflex action some of us have.” Marcus stroked Liem’s hand. “A week from now you’re not even going to know why you told me that.”
“Okay,” he said, not sure whether he wanted to believe Marcus or not. “Sure.”
“You know what else is in your future?”
“Do not—don’t tell me.”
“A year from now you’ll be the one hearing other men say they love you,” Marcus said. “They’ll say you’re too pretty to be alone.”
Marcus pulled him closer, and, as the rain continued to fall, they held each other. Outside a car began honking repeatedly, a sound Liem knew by now to mean that someone, double-parked, was blocking the narrow street in front of the house. Then all was quiet but for the clock, and he thought Marcus might have dozed off until he stirred and said, “Aren’t you going to read the letter?”
He’d forgotten about the airmail, but now that Marcus had mentioned it, he felt it glowing in the darkened living room, bearing on its blue face the oil of his father’s touch, and perhaps his mother’s too, the airmail the only thing he owned that truly mattered.
“I never read it to you.”
“I will never read it to you. That’s the future tense.”
“I’ll never read you the letter.”
“Now you’re being petty. Don’t read it to me, then.”
“But I will tell you what I’ll write.”
“Only if you want to,” Marcus said, yawning.
Until this moment, Liem hadn’t thought about what he would write to his father and mother once their letter had arrived. So he improvised, beginning with how the tone would be as important as the content. His letter, he said, would be a report from an exotic city, one with a Spanish name, famous for cable cars, Alcatraz Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge. He would include postcards of the tourist sights, and he’d mention how funny it was to live in a city where people who weren’t even Asian knew about the autumn festival. When enormous crowds in Chinatown celebrated the lunar new year, he’d be there, throwing down firecrackers at the feet of a dancing lion, hoping his family was doing the same. The crunch of burned firecrackers under his feet would remind him of his boyhood at home, and the letter he’d write would remind him of times when the family gathered around his father as he read, aloud, the occasional note from a distant relative. At the end, Liem would tell them not to worry about him, because, he’d write, I’m working hard to save money, I’m even making friends. And we live in a mauve house.
He heard the steady rise and fall of Marcus’s breathing, and, afraid Marcus was fading into sleep, he couldn’t stop himself from asking the other question he’d wanted to ask since the previous day. “Tell me something,” he said. Marcus’s eyes fluttered and opened. “Am I good?”
A light drizzle tapped against the windows, the sound of Friday night on a rainy day. “Yes,” Marcus said, closing his eyes once more. “You were very good.”
This much, at least, he could write home about.
After Marcus fell asleep, Liem slid out of bed and went to the bathroom, where he stood under a spray of hot water for so long he nearly fainted from the heat and steam. He had his pants on and was combing his hair when the phone rang in the living room.
“I just wanted to see how you two were doing,” Parrish said, loud and cheerful, as if he’d been out drinking.
“Just fine,” Liem said, eyeing the letter on the coffee table. “Nothing special.” He didn’t like speaking on the phone, where body language was no help in making himself understood, and he kept the conversation short. Parrish didn’t seem to mind, and said good night just as boisterously as he’d said hello.
Liem sat down on the couch and opened the letter carefully. When he unfolded the single sheet of onionskin paper, translucent in the light, he recognized once again his father’s script, awkward and loopy, as hard for him to decipher as it was for his father to write.
September 20, 1975
Dear son,
We got your airmail yesterday. Everyone’s so happy to know you’re alive and well. We’re all fine. This summer, your uncles and cousins were reeducated with the other enlisted puppet soldiers. The Party forgave their crimes. Your uncles were so grateful, they donated their houses to the revolution. Our lives are more joyful now that your uncles, your cousins, and their wives and children are living with us in our house. The cadres tell us that we will erase the past and rebuild our glorious country!
When you have time, send us the news from America. It must be more sinful even than Saigon, so remember what the cadres say. The revolutionary man must live a civil, healthy, correct life! We all think of you often. Your mother misses you, and sends you her love. So do I.
Your Father
After he read the letter a second time, he folded it, slid it back into its envelope, and let it lie inert on the coffee table. Restless, he stood up and walked over to the bay window overlooking the street and the sidewalks, empty this late in the evening. The light in the room had turned the window into a mirror, superimposing his likeness over the landscape outside. When he raised his hand, his reflection raised its hand, and when he touched his face, the reflection did the same, and when he traced the curve of his cheek and the line of his jaw, so, too, did the mirror image. Why, then, did he not recognize himself? And why did he see right through himself to the dark street outside?
Raindrops on the glass dappled the reflection of his face. He waited at the streaky window for several minutes until he saw a sign of life, two men striding quickly down the street, shoulders occasionally brushing and hands deep in the pockets of their jackets. Their heads, ducked down low against the drizzle, were bent toward each other at a slight angle as each listened to what the other was saying. At one time he would have thought the two men could only be friends. Now he saw they could easily be lovers.
As they passed under a streetlamp, one of them said something that made the other laugh, his head tilting back so that his unremarkable face was illuminated for a second. The man’s eyes turned to Liem at that instant, and Liem, realizing he was quite visible from the street, wondered what kind of figure he must have cut, bare-chested and arms akimbo, his hair slicked back. Suddenly the man raised his hand, as if to say hello. When his partner looked toward the window as well, Liem waved in return, and for a moment there were only the three of them, sharing a fleeting connection. Then the men passed by, and long after they had vanished into the shadows he was still standing with his hand pressed to the window, wondering if someone, behind blinds and curtains, might be watching.