y looking at the postcards and talking to Lý about trips to faraway places.
I suppose my two friends were as nice to me as possible at the Continental Palace Hotel, considering what they had to do. Thy asked me to go to the rest room with her and we were laughing together at something Lý had said. We went to the big double mirror and our two faces were side by side, two girls eighteen years old, and yet beside her I looked much older. Already old. I could see that. And she said, “I am so happy.”
We were certainly having fun on this day, but I couldn’t quite understand her attitude. After all, Lý was going off to fight our long war. But I replied, “I am, too.”
Then she leaned near me and put her hand on my shoulder and she said, “I have a wonderful secret for you. I couldn’t wait to tell it to my dear friend.”
She meant these words without sarcasm. I’m sure of it. And I still did not understand what was coming.
She said, “I am in love.”
I almost asked who it was that she loved. But this was only the briefest final pulse of naïveté. I knew who she loved. And after laying her head on the point of my shoulder and smiling at me in the mirror with such tenderness for her dear friend, she said, “And Lý loves me, too.”
How had this subject not come up before? The answer is that the two of us had always spoken together of what a wonderful boy Lý was. But my own declarations were as vivid and enthusiastic as Thy’s — rather more vivid, in fact. So if I was to assume that she loved Lý from all that she’d said, then my own declaration of love should have been just as clear. But obviously it wasn’t, and that was just as I should have expected it. Thy never for a moment had considered me a rival for Lý. In fact, it was unthinkable to her that I should even love him in vain.
She lifted her head from my shoulder and smiled at me as if she expected me to be happy. When I kept silent, she prompted me. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
I had never spoken of my love for Lý and I knew that this was the last chance I would have. But what was there to say? I could look back at all the little signs now and read them clearly. And Thy was who she was and I was different from that and the feeling between Lý and her was already decided upon. So I said the only reasonable thing that I could. “It is very wonderful.”
This made Thy even happier. She hugged me. And then she asked me to comb her hair. We had been outside for an hour before coming to the hotel and her long, straight hair was slightly ruffled and she handed me the pearl-handled brush that her mother had given her and she turned her back to me. And I began to brush. The first stroke caught a tangle and Thy cried out in a pretty, piping voice. I paused briefly and almost threw the brush against the wall and walked out of this place. But then I brushed once again and again, and she was turned away from the mirror so she could not see the terrible pinch of my face when I suggested that she and Lý spend their last hours now alone together. She nearly wept in joy and appreciation at this gesture from her dear friend, and I kept on brushing until her hair was perfect.
And her hair was perfect now beneath my hands in the preparation room. And I had a strange thought. She was doing this once more to me. She was having me make her hair beautiful so she could go off to the spirit world and seduce the one man there who could love me. This would be Thy’s final triumph over me. My hands trembled at this thought and it persisted. I saw this clearly: Thy arriving in heaven and her hair lying long and soft down her back and her breasts are clearly beautiful even in the white robe of the angels, and the spirit of some great warrior who fought at the side of the Tru’ng sisters comes to her, and though he has waited nineteen centuries for me, he sees Thy and decides to wait no more. It has been only the work of my hands that he has awaited and he lifts Thy’s hair and kisses it.
I drew back from Thy and I stared at her face. I saw it in the mirror at the Continental Palace Hotel and it was very beautiful, but this face before me now was rubbery in death, the beauty was hidden, waiting for my hands. Thy waited for me to make her beautiful. I had always made her more beautiful. Just by being near her. I was tempted once more to turn away. But that would only let her have her condescending smile at me. Someone else would do this job if I did not, and Thy would fly off to heaven with her beautiful face and I would be alone in my own shame.
I turned to the sheet now, and the body I had never looked upon in its womanly nakedness was hiding there and this was what Lý had given his love for. The hair and the face had invited him, but it was this hidden body, her secret flesh, that he had longed for. I had seen him less than half an hour ago. He was in Mr. Hoa’s office when I arrived. He got up and shook my hand with both of his, holding my hand for a long moment as he said how glad he was that I was here. His eyes were full of tears and I felt very sorry for Lê V
n Lý. A warrior should never cry, even for the death of a beautiful woman. He handed me the bag with Thy’s brush and makeup and he said, “You always know what to do.”
What did he mean by this? Simply that I knew how to brush Thy’s hair and paint her face? Or was this something he had seen about me in all things, just as he had once seen that I was a very good tennis player? Did it mean he understood that he had never been with a woman like that, a woman who would always know what to do for him as a wife? When he stood before me in Mr. Hoa’s office, I felt like a foolish teenage girl again, with that rush of hope. But perhaps it wasn’t foolish; Thy’s breasts were no longer there for his eyes to slide away to.
Her breasts. What were these things that had always defined my place in the world of women? They were beneath the sheet and my hand went out and grasped it at the edge, but I stopped. I told myself it was of no matter now. She was dead. I let go of the sheet and turned to her face of rubber and I took out her eye shadow and her lipstick and her mascara and I bent near and painted the life back into this dead thing.
And as I painted, I thought of where she would lie, in the cemetery behind the Catholic church, in a stone tomb above the ground. It was often necessary in New Orleans, the placing of the dead above the ground, because the water table was so high. If we laid Thy in the earth, one day she would float to the surface and I could see that day clearly, her rising from the earth and awaking and finding her way back to the main street of Versailles in the heat of the day, and I would be talking with Lý, he would be bending near me and listening as I said all the things of my heart, and suddenly his eyes would slide away and there she would be, her face made up and her hair brushed and her breasts would be as beautiful as ever. But the thought of her lying above the ground made me anxious, as well. As if she wasn’t quite gone. And she never would be. Lý would sense her out there behind the church, suspended in the air, and he would never forget her and would take all the consolation he needed from his children and grandchildren.