“It’s nothing really. It’s just a foolish thing.”
“Gabrielle,” he said in the voice I was waiting for. My husband is very attractive at this sort of moment. Someone else might get angry or imperious or dismissive or whiney. But Vinh turns gently urgent, like he is a child with a little pain that his momma has to make better. “Please tell me,” he said.
So I told him about Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” is a wonderfully beautiful girl. Even later, in “Cleopatra,” she is very beautiful. You might think that a Vietnamese would not appreciate that kind of full-bosomed beauty. But people often admire qualities that are quite different from their own. And Richard Burton of that same time is equally attractive, say in “Look Back in Anger” or “The Bramble Bush.” His voice, particularly, can thrill a woman. He, too, was in “Cleopatra” and that, of course, is when the story I told Vinh really began. Liz and Dick — Cleopatra and Antony — fell in love, and since they were both married to other people and that was in 1962, there was a big uproar. Then the next year Richard Burton came to Puerto Vallarta to make a film. (I didn’t tell Vinh the name of the film at this point so that I could hold back the big answer to his question and keep his attention. He was still wondering about the iguanas.) Elizabeth Taylor followed him to this place and they rented two houses with a bridge between them, over a cobbled street, and the world was watching that bridge very closely for months. By now Vinh was getting a little impatient, I knew. Just impatient enough — I always could sense when I was about to lose his attention. So I told him that the name of the movie was “The Night of the Iguana” and there were Puerto Vallarta iguanas featured in it and that’s why the little girl had her business.
Vinh was disappointed at the payoff of this story. I knew he would be. He almost always was. His brow wrinkled up and he pursed his lips and I wasn’t upset at his reaction. I liked it very much that he continued to insist that I finish these little stories even though his deeply practical self almost always ended up finding them trivial or foolish or simply incomprehensible. He still always asked me to go on. He insisted. And I don’t exactly understand it, but I took it as a kind of faithfulness to me.
“Iguanas,” he muttered and I heard the word again late that afternoon, across the lobby lounge in the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. Vinh and I had a handful of drink coupons, an unexpected extra benefit from curtain number two, and we’d come down to the lounge in the open-air end of the lobby facing the sea. The three American game-show couples were already there, and I could feel Vinh tense up because they were loud and they were having a frivolous good time and I knew that what pleasure Vinh hoped might be squeezed out of this trip had to do with being quiet and peaceful.
Northern Louisiana and her husband were at the bar and they were both facing into the lounge, their elbows thrown back behind them onto the counter. The husband was young and so blond his hair and mustache seemed almost white, made even more pale by the deep tan of his skin. I was thinking his work kept him out in the Louisiana sun, but Minnesota and her husband were sitting in overstuffed chairs at a little table nearby and he was at least thirty years older than Mr. Northern Louisiana and his hair, though thinned out quite a bit, was just about the same bleached white color and his skin, though more leathery, was just as tan. I couldn’t see him sweating under a Minnesota sun, so I figured maybe they both went to the same franchise of tanning salons that turned all their clients out like this.
The Tic-Tac-Dough woman was at an adjoining table and she was smiling and speaking to the others and it was from her that I heard the word “iguana.” She was probably telling them the same story I’d told Vinh, since her specialty (I’d been right about her) was question answering and this was a set of those countless facts that clung to her mind. I have a similar static-cling mind, and as I watched her, her husband crossed my sight carrying two drinks from the bar. He handed one down to her and turned to sit and his T-shirt had a map of Vietnam and the words I’VE BEEN AND I’M PROUD. This didn’t surprise me because I’d felt certain I’d read the sign of the dog tags correctly. The veteran sank into the overstuffed chair, and as he was trying to arrange himself, he glanced our way. Vinh was tugging at my elbow. He wanted to leave, I’m sure, but I kept my attention on the veteran, whose eyes widened slightly at us and then slid away as Minnesota laughed loud and said to his wife, “Eileen, honey, nobody today would even give them a second thought. What’s a little adultery anymore?”
Vinh had my elbow in a strong grip now, but I leaned near to him and said, “We’ve got free drinks coming and I need one right now.”
Vinh whispered, “I’d rather pay in a quieter place.”
I answered, “There is no such place.” This was a little gamble. I didn’t want to turn him more strongly against the vacation, but I did want to sit and watch these people. It was like television, like the games and the soaps were mixed together.
Vinh sighed and nodded to me that it was all right, that as long as he was stuck in this whole thing, he really couldn’t do anything but go along with me. So I took him to a table not next to the three couples but not far from them either. Vinh turned his chair at a right angle to all the other people and he faced the line of bougainvillea at the end of the lounge and the sea beyond. I listened carefully for a while.
Minnesota went on about how acceptable adultery had become and I watched her husband and he seemed to be trying to figure something out about the ice in his drink and I suppose he was used to this kind of talk and she finally grabbed his arm and said that present company was of course excluded. And then Northern Louisiana told a story about how one of the game shows she’d tried out for turned her down because she wouldn’t let the host kiss her on the lips and this had come out in a discussion with the director of the show, who was prepping the contestants, and he said that the host always kissed the women contestants on the lips. Not her, she’d told him, and that’s for damn sure, honey, they didn’t do that where she came from. And then the question-and-answer woman, whose name apparently was Eileen, said that she wished she’d gotten on “Jeopardy” that was the show she really wanted to get on, and it didn’t have anything to do with not wanting to kiss somebody. If something like that had prevented her, it wouldn’t have been so disappointing.
And somewhere along the way, as I was sipping the drink that the waiter brought and feeling invisible, I realized that the veteran was glancing now and then in my direction. I wondered if he’d learned enough about us over there to recognize a Vietnamese when he saw one. I knew he was thinking about it, wondering if Vinh and I were from Vietnam. And after a time I began to worry just a little bit what his attitude might be. The very visible veterans I’d encountered were unpredictable. They seemed to be one extreme or the other about us. We were fascinating and long-suffering and unreal or we were sly and dangerous and unreal. I kept my own eyes on his wife, who was certainly pitched to a lower key than the other two women and whose sense of disappointment about the show she had appeared on intrigued me. I would have expected her to feel only proud of winning at whatever she did. Though maybe this expectation is my own little prejudice showing through. Why shouldn’t this American woman have the same sort of disappointment of dignity that I myself felt? She interested me. She felt disappointed and she hadn’t even had to dress up as a duck. To overcome a slight lull in the conversation, Northern Louisiana declared how wonderful a coincidence it was that they should all meet, all Americans and all game-show winners. At this, the veteran turned to me and said, “Are you from America, too?”