6

Don O’Brien was right about the phone call from Stanton. It came in late June. And he was also right about it taking two planes to get to Mammoth Falls, Jack Stanton’s capital city: you could only get there from Washington via Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis or Dallas.

Or you could get there via Houston.

Charlie had spent several months trying not to think about what was waiting for him in Houston. He’d told only one person about it—Rathburn, and that had been an exceedingly strange experience. They’d had a late dinner in New York, at “21,” during the Mustafa Victory Tour. Linc was in a celebratory mood: instead of his usual diet Coke, he ordered a glass of Chablis. His Mustafa strategy had resuscitated Charlie’s career. And he was in no mood to talk about anything so real as what Charlie was about to lay on him—he was going on, in the musty, steaks-and-chops darkness of the Grill Room, about how Gid Reese was screwing up Stanton’s foreign policy operation, and about how stupid he thought the ancient hack foreign affairs columnist for the Times was. And—

“Linc,” Charlie said. “I’ve got to tell you something. A weird thing happened back there in Vietnam. . . .”

Rathburn looked up from his steak tartare, which he’d been delicately apportioning onto thin crackers, lined perfectly across the plate in front of him. He didn’t look all that different from the old days: his hair was still thick straw, his face was craggier, perhaps—he had aged well. He dressed precisely, an earnest Hoosier effort to emulate New York social clubwear. Tonight he was less formal than usual, a forest green tie, a brown tweed sportscoat with a white pocket square whose tips resembled a schooner’s sails. Charlie wondered how, and where, one learned to make a handkerchief do that.

“I had dinner with Quoc,” he began, “and at the end he showed me a photo of Thua, who is now living in Houston, married to a doctor named Rosenbaum. . . .”

Linc hooted. “Perfect! Sometimes people get just exactly what they deserve in life. . . .”

“There’s a child,” Charlie said. “Quoc showed me the photo. And it’s clearly not Rosenbaum’s kid. It’s—”

“Mine?” Rathburn was now fully engaged.

“No,” Charlie paused. “Mine.”

Linc uncoiled himself slowly, setting down his utensils—he grunted, or perhaps coughed—picking up his napkin, his lips quivering . . . with, what? Anger? No, he was laughing. “Yours?” he said. “Yours?”

“It happened the night you left Saigon,” Charlie said warily. “We were both pretty drunk.”

“Thua was drunk? That was a first.” Rathburn said. There was curiosity, but no real heat there. Charlie was relieved, but also not relieved: there was still some explaining to do.

“I went to see her the next day, and it was as if it never happened.”

“I’ll bet!” Rathburn said. “That girl was the most uptight . . . hey, did she let you take her clothes off?”

“Huh?” Charlie couldn’t remember. Well . . . actually, yes: she had.

“Ours was not the most romantic of liaisons,” Linc said, reading Charlie’s affirmative nonaffirmation. “In fact, it was pretty half-assed. We both, neither of us, felt right—I still had Abigail and the kids back home....”

“The point is, Linc,” Charlie said, “I have a kid.”

“Amazing!” Linc was laughing again. “Thua got herself knocked up? She’s about the last person—what was I saying about people getting just what they deserve? I was wrong! This is the last thing I’d . . . So, have you talked to her?”

“No.”

“Yeah, right,” Linc said. “I wouldn’t want to face that, either.”

“You don’t think there are political implications?” Charlie asked, pretty sure that wasn’t what Linc meant.

“Are you kidding? A child born nearly thirty years ago, in a wartime situation? Whom you were never told about? Not even Phyllis Schlafly would begrudge you that,” Linc said. “No, I was just thinking: maybe this is one of those things you leave well enough alone. If she’d told the kid, he probably would have tried to find you by now. But that’s your call.”

And so, permission to avoid responsibility was officially granted. But Charlie couldn’t quite let it go at that. His initial curiosity about Cao Van Rosenbaum curled into a furtive worry. Obviously, Thua hadn’t wanted him to know. She must have had her reasons. It might be best to respect that. But his responsibility was no longer to Thua; it was to the kid—now that Charlie knew he existed, it would be dishonorable not to make himself known. And he remembered the look, the insouciant eyebrow.

So, in late June, he called Thua.

“Hello, Thua,” he said. “It’s Charlie Martin.”

“So you know,” she said. Just like that.

“I had dinner with your uncle Quoc in Vietnam.”

“He thinks his birth father was killed in the war,” she said. “The boy.”

“That’s nice,” Charlie said, then relented. “I guess it was less confusing that way.” But it still felt awfully cold.

“Richard’s been a good father,” she said. “He adopted the boy.”

“I’m sure he has,” Charlie said, and didn’t know what to say next. “So—”

“So you want to see him,” Thua said.

“I think so. I don’t want to cause any trouble,” he replied, allowing her access to his mixed feelings, trying to seem reasonable. “What is Cao like? You think he wants to see me?”

“He’s not Cao anymore. Cao Van became Calvin. Everyone calls him that, anyway.” There was some exasperation in her voice; Calvin was not a source of unmitigated pride.

“He plays the guitar?” he asked.

“And little else,” she admitted. “From what I can gather.”

“From what you can gather?”

“He’s twenty-seven years old, Charlie. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

Twenty-seven. Charlie had known that, but he’d thought of the kid as a teenager—the picture Quoc had shown him. “Is he in school, or working, or something?” he asked.

She laughed. “Half the Vietnamese kids his age in Houston are in medical school,” she said. “The other half are getting MBAs. Cal took some courses at Harris County Community College, then dropped out. He’s got his band. He works in a record store, in a mall, down by Clear Lake.”

“Where does he live?”

“Down there,” she said, with disdain. “On the other side of town.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

“Do you know Houston at all?” she asked.

“No,” Charlie said. “The other side of town isn’t so good?”

“Look, you want his address? I’ll give it to you. I guess I owe you both that,” she said. Charlie was trying to picture what she must look like now, extrapolating from the old photos Quoc had showed him; she sounded different from the Thua he remembered, the timbre of her voice was different. She almost sounded American.

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked. “Getting in touch with him?”

“I don’t know,” she said, stubbornly refusing him a final exit strategy: if he was going to inconvenience her, raise a lot of dead memories, by calling, then she would return the inconvenience.

“Thua—”

“I’m not that Thua anymore,” she said, as if she’d been following his thinking.

“You’re—”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ve got a good life.” But not a great one, it seemed. “I did what I had to do, for me and the boy, and for Richard,” she said. “Calvin is—he’s—actually, I don’t remember you well enough to know if he’s like you. He certainly isn’t like me. He’s not a bad person, but he’s not like me.”

“I remember you,” he said.

“You remember the way I looked.”

She gave Charlie a phone number and an address. He tried the number; no one answered, and there was no phone machine. But he decided to take a flier and stop there anyway on his way to Mammoth Falls. The impulse was in the same emotional neighborhood as a WTF, but different; he was being propelled by something resembling a sense of responsibility—and by the slightest twinge of compassion, since the conversation with Thua. He’d read about how the children of American servicemen had been treated as outcasts in Vietnam. This boy was a stranger to his mother. He looked like Buzz. Charlie would search for him on Saturday.

He was scheduled to be at a Sunday photo op in Mammoth Falls. There had been elaborate negotiations between his people—the two D’s, Donna and Devereaux—and Stanton’s cast of thousands. No big airport ceremony. Stanton would greet the senator at his mansion; they’d do the photo then—Charlie would come out alone, afterward; Stanton didn’t want to be cornered into answering questions. “You get to grin like an idiot and say it was a good meeting,” said Hilton Devereaux, whom Charlie had christened D-2, much to his dismay. (Donna was now D-1, much to hers.)

“You get to come with me,” Charlie said. Actually, he’d been thinking about that. He knew he wanted D-2 in Mammoth Falls, but did he want him in Houston? No. Despite Schollwengen, there were some things a person—even a person who happened to be on the medium-short list for vice president—had to do on his own. He’d meet D-2 at the airport in Mammoth Falls on Sunday, which was good on another count: Hilton could prevaricate wonderful things about Stanton to whatever press happened to be hanging around, waiting to greet Senator Martin’s plane.

“You want to tell me why you’re going to Houston?” Devereaux asked.

“No.” But Charlie told him.

*    *    *

Charlie rented a white Taurus at Houston International. He spent the drive thinking about all the things he would tell Calvin, and ask him. He’d brought pictures of the grandparents; he’d thought about what sort of offer he might make—the Rosenbaums had, no doubt, offered him money for college. But why an offer? The moral equivalent of paying a fine for his mixed feelings? . . . What if the kid wanted to live with him? No. They were both too old for that; it would be too weird. What if Calvin didn’t want to have anything to do with his father? That would be easier, in a way.

Driving south from the airport, Charlie found himself back in the Great American Anywhere. But it was a GAA slightly askew: as he approached Calvin’s address, he noticed Vietnamese language signs in some of the strip mall stores. Nguyen Minh Cleaners next to Radio Shack next to Rite Aid next to Little Cholon Chinese-Vietnamese Restaurant. The area was a sort of denatured, Americanized Vietnam—what might have happened back there, if the Green Machine had won the war. The sky was basic Bangkok banana pulp, the air furnace hot and soggy like Southeast Asia, a thin petroleum reek wafting north from the refineries on Galveston Bay. Thua was right: it was the other side of town. It was nearly the other side of the world.

Charlie was so caught up in his thoughts, he almost missed Calvin’s apartment complex—which was one of those awful, fake neo-mansard shingled, two-story brick things that had sprouted in the seventies: Gal-Bay Villas. It looked okay from the road, but when he pulled closer it was, clearly, a slum. Toward the far end of the parking lot he saw a bunch of kids lounging about, leaning on cars, listening to loud rap music and drinking from quart bottles sequestered in paper bags; they were, he realized—with utter horror—Amerasian kids. They were wearing the unisex uniforms of disaffected youth in the nineties: baseball hats turned around, garish, ventilated team jerseys—football, basketball and hockey—baggy shorts and enormous, complicated sneakers that looked like something developed by the space program. Was Calvin one of them?

There were several young black women with stupendous sculptured hairdos, and babies in strollers; they stood chatting on the landing of the foyer to the boy’s apartment. They gave Charlie the evil eye as he pushed past: he was social services, a cop of some sort, obviously. He regretted showing up there in uniform, blue suit and tie. How silly he’d been: he’d decided to wear a Nicole Miller music tie—electric guitars, saxophones and drumsticks on a black field—rather than a serious political stripe as a way of making a connection with the boy. But to these folks, a tie was a tie—the only people who wore ties were those who could cause them trouble.

Charlie took off his jacket, flipped it over his shoulder Kennedy-style and rang the buzzer. No answer. He rang again. A sleepy voice: “Who is it?”

Good question. That’s how well prepared he was: not at all.

“Who is it?”

“Ahh, a friend of your mother’s.” Charlie was buzzed in and walked up the stairs, his knees spongy.

Calvin had the door open a crack, and was standing just behind it; Charlie saw Buzz’s eyebrow. He was big for a Vietnamese, just about six feet—almost as tall as Charlie.

“So: a-friend-of-my-mother’s,” Calvin said. He didn’t have Buzz’s voice, or Charlie’s; it was deeper.

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Charlie said. Calvin didn’t budge the door. “I used to be a friend of your mother’s, in Vietnam. I—”

“You look familiar.”

“You ever watch the news?”

“No,” he said, with a smile and a shrug, and opened the door, and there he was: a tank top T-shirt and jockey shorts, his skin pale, his hairless legs solid, long and awkward in their nakedness—although he didn’t seem very self-conscious about his near nudity; a slight stale whiff of sleep oozing off him. All of a sudden, Calvin was a little too real. “You’re on the news?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Charlie said, and extended a hand. “I’m a United States senator. Charlie Martin. You’re just getting up?”

“What time is it?”

“About two.”

“Sounds about right.” Pure Buzz. Calvin’s familiarity—this boy was literally familiar, Charlie mused—cut against the strangeness of the situation. He had never experienced this particular cocktail of emotions before: pride, curiosity, diffidence, terror.

The apartment wasn’t as bad as it might have been. There were a few dishes in the sink, but no clothes on the floor. There was a red Stratocaster and amp sitting in a corner; there was a small Sony sound system and a television; there were posters—Reggae Sunsplash, Red Hot Chili Peppers and a third:

                      I

                      N

                  INTERRACE

                INTEREST

                      R

                      O

IN YOUR FACE

                      K

Charlie found the poster beguiling, and reassuring. It acknowledged him, in a way—the INTERRACE part. It played with words. It was ironic. Calvin saw Charlie staring at it. “It’s my mantra,” he said.

“What does it mean?” Charlie asked, making conversation.

“What it says,” he said, but not edgily. “A girl I know did it.” He sat down on the bed. There was a chrome and gray Formica breakfast table near the kitchenette. Charlie pulled out a chair and sat on it. The room was air-conditioned, but not overly so. It was not an uncomfortable room. The senator reconnoitered himself: he was seriously, but not totally, freaked out. And it was now his move.

“What sort of music do you play?” he delayed.

“Basic Loud.” Calvin said. “New Wave Ska Funk, or something.”

Charlie sat there, semistumped, staring at the poster: INTERRACE, INTEREST . . .

“Look,” he said, after what seemed a pregnant pause. “I’ve seen this scene played a hundred times in the movies, and I can’t figure out a new or clever way to do it, and I know your mother told you one thing—and that probably made sense to her, and I don’t want to shock you—I mean, this has certainly been a shock for me. I just found out about it from your granduncle Quoc in Vietnam. . . .”

Charlie was losing steam. The kid was figuring it out. He was calm, but not slow. “Calvin,” he said, “I’m your father.”

The kid didn’t show much emotion of any sort. His head kicked back slightly, from the force of the revelation. But Charlie couldn’t tell if he was pleased or pissed or perplexed.

“You just found out about it?” he asked. Charlie nodded. “You mean, she never told you?” Charlie shook his head. “That must have been some kind of mind fuck . . . I mean, how well did you know her?”

Charlie could see what he was thinking. “Pretty well—as a friend. She was my best friend’s girl—and it’s: no. It wasn’t like that. He was leaving Saigon. She was angry. We were drunk.”

“I was born,” he said, neatly falling into the rhythm, a lyricist’s timing. “Not quite a love child. . . . That figures, given Mom.”

“Don’t be too tough on her,” Charlie said. “She hasn’t had an easy life. . . . She was one of the most respected women in Saigon. She had real dignity. And then her world fell apart.”

“Yeah, she married Dick,” Calvin said.

“He’s that bad?”

“No.”

“You know,” Charlie said, searching for a hook, “ ‘Not quite a love child. . . ’ isn’t a bad lyric.”

Not bad at all, Charlie Martin thought: the kid caught his drift.

“ ‘I got a right to be wild,’ ” Calvin tried. Grimaced. “Gotta be something better than that.”

“Put your pants on,” Charlie said. “If you’re not going to work or something, I’ll buy you breakfast and we’ll think about it.”

So the deal was: on first impression, confusion. Charlie liked his son—sort of. Or maybe he was just trying very hard to like him. The kid was a stranger, and also not: there was, palpably, more than a little Buzz there. In the car, Charlie told Calvin about his visit to Saigon, his dinner with Uncle Quoc. Calvin didn’t seem particularly interested, and Charlie asked him why he wasn’t.

“I know too many people who look like me,” Calvin said quietly, “who got treated like shit over there. Because they looked like me. The ones who never spent any time in Vietnam are curious about what it’s like. But the ones who remember what it was like don’t buy the rice paddy nostalgia bit. I trust their judgment, even though I don’t remember the place at all.”

“Are you treated okay here?” Charlie asked, hazarding a glance at his son. He remembered stories about redneck fishermen furious with Vietnamese refugee shrimpers on the Gulf.

“Oh sure,” Calvin replied, looking straight ahead. “But then, my father wasn’t black. You want to see fucked-up and pissed, you should hook up with some of those folks.”

They went to a Denny’s. Calvin had a Grand Slam breakfast. Charlie had an iced tea. “You don’t seem like a senator,” Cal said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Charlie said, then proceeded to answer the question implicit in his son’s statement: what being a senator was like. “It’s like being a musician, only harder—I mean, different.” He didn’t want to sound condescending. Being a father was a minefield. “Being a musician isn’t easy, Lord knows. But politics is similar: You’re out there performing. A lot of time the performance is boring and phony, but if you don’t do it right, you’re in trouble.”

“Like playing the hokey-pokey at a sweet sixteen?”

“Exactly! Although there are rewards. You do get to help people sometimes. And the other thing is, once in a while something serious happens. I knew a lot of guys who died because of decisions people made, or didn’t make, back in Washington. I lose track of that sometimes—it’s not something you really want to remember, y’know? What happened back there . . .” Charlie paused, thinking: but Calvin happened back there. And also: boy, do I sound like a self-righteous jerk.

“How come you get the music stuff?” the kid asked, uninterested in the politics or the self-justification.

“Your grandfather’s a musician,” Charlie said proudly, playing his hole card.

Calvin dropped his fork, sat back in his seat. “A father—my father—I used to think about that a lot. But a grandfather, wow.”

“You come equipped with one of those, too.” Charlie pulled out a picture of Buzz on a bandstand, back in the fifties. “Pretty neat guy, in his way. I always used to think he looked like Dennis the Menace’s father—in the cartoon, not the television show. You remind me of him, a little. Actually, more than a little.”

“Really?” he asked, whiffing on the Dennis the Menace reference. “How about a grandmother?”

“She’s dead now.” Charlie gave Cal a picture of Buzz and Clarice together, the day she was sworn in as mayor. Buzz looked bewildered; Clarice, in charge. “She was something else altogether—not at all like your grandfather. She was the daughter of a county judge. She became a politician, the mayor of Des Pointe—which is where we’re all from. But that was sort of an accident: her real vocation was chief do-good lady on the poor side of town.”

“And my grandfather? What kind of musician?”

“Local bandleader. Played a lot of hokey-pokey. Played the accordion, although now he tells me he’s moved on to an electric keyboard. He still plays some gigs.”

“And he’s how old?”

“Seventy-three.”

“Cool. How’d he make a living?”

“Gigs. Lessons. Mom was the one who kept us afloat,” Charlie said. “And you?”

“I work in a record store,” he said. “Mom thinks I’m a real fuck-up.”

“And what do you think?”

“That I’m not quite . . . Hey, how about this: Not quite a love child / not quite born to be wild. Workin’ for the man / workin’ for a while. Hard to make it giggin’ / when you got no style. . . .”

“That’s ballsy,” Charlie said, laughing. “A self-deprecating rock lyric. But not bad. Not bad at all. But . . . is that what you think of yourself? No style?”

“Sometimes,” he said. He took out a pen and began to scribble the words on his place mat. Charlie watched and thought: The kid’s a musician, and therefore oblique. Musicians were essentially feline—maybe that’s why Dizzy and Bird and the old be-boppers called themselves “cats.” It was useless to ask a musician basic questions like “Do you have a girlfriend?” or “What are you going to do for a living, now that the drummer’s overdosed and the lead singer’s become a shoe salesman?” The direct approach was mortally unhip. Charlie understood he’d have to work at Calvin the same way he did Buzz—on an angle, low-key, cool—and be satisfied whenever the kid chose to purr or rub up against him. This was good news, in a way: Calvin wouldn’t be demanding. Charlie wasn’t sure he was ready for too many fatherly demands.

“You want to hear my band sometime?” Calvin asked.

“Sure,” Charlie said, with less enthusiasm than he’d hoped to convey. “What are you called? Where do you play?”

“Wherever we can get paid,” Calvin said, retreating. He seemed embarrassed. “We’re called the Semi-nuked Gook Troopers.”

It wasn’t the sort of name that would get you a lot of sweet sixteen parties. “If I come to see you play,” Charlie asked. “Will you come to see me play sometime?”

“Washington? Whew,” he said.

“It’s not so bad,” Charlie said.

“You got a wife, kids?”

“No,” Charlie said, smiling, trying to charm the kid. “You appear to be my only immediate family, Cal.”

Calvin didn’t buy the charm. “Why’s that?”

“Boy, is that a long story.” But it wasn’t really that long. Bad luck. Limited options. Incredible selfishness. Charlie couldn’t explain it to himself, much less to Calvin, and he couldn’t stick around to hear the kid play a Sunday afternoon gig at the Clear Lake Boys and Girls Club picnic. “I’ve got to go to Mammoth Falls,” he explained. “To see Jack Stanton.”

“That’s grim.” Calvin said. “Almost as grim as a Sunday afternoon gig.”

“You don’t like Stanton?”

“I was thinking about Mammoth Falls.” Cal shrugged. “Stanton’s the guy who’s running for president?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I did, too, for a while.”

“Cool.”

“What do you think of him? Stanton?”

“He’s okay, I guess.” Charlie could tell the kid didn’t have a clue.

When Charlie dropped Calvin off, back at the apartment, they shook hands. He was going to put his left thing on Calvin’s shoulder, but the kid noticed it coming, and Charlie didn’t want to discomfort him. He hesitated, awkwardly—and then he worried that Calvin thought he was pulling back from him.

“Tough to play the guitar with that,” Calvin said.

“Unless you’re a lefty,” Charlie said, with spurious cheer. “I played the drums when I was a kid, so I haven’t missed it much. Hope this hasn’t been too weird for you, meeting me?”

“Not too weird?” Calvin laughed.

“It’s okay? We’ll do it again?” But the thought of exactly when and how another meeting might take place boggled Charlie.

“Sure,” Calvin said perfunctorily. Charlie saw that the boy was picking up on his uncertainty. “We’ll do that. If it’s not too weird for you.”

“No way,” Charlie said, letting go, hugging him—not a sappy hug, a guy hug. “Absolutely,” he added, hoping that he sounded as if he meant it. “We’ll do it soon.”