Anyway, my Vietnamese bluntness suddenly made me stop rubbing my temples and lean near to Eileen and say, “Tell me. Do you understand why our husbands seem to be hitting it off so well together? What does Frank say about Vinh?”
Eileen kind of jiggled her head like she was trying to unclog her ears. And her voice got pinched and even a little whiney. “My husband never had anything against Vietnamese people. He hated the Vietcong, of course, but he knew that there was a difference between them and the others.”
“Of course,” I said firmly, like I knew this all along. And maybe I did. That wasn’t really what I was getting at, I decided, though I couldn’t quite say what was.
“And how about your husband,” Eileen said and her voice was brittle. “What does he say about Frank?”
I leaned closer and smiled my warmest smile. “Like your husband. He knows how to see the individual.”
There was no reason for this bit of empty rhetoric to soothe Eileen’s hurt feelings and make things right between us again, but that’s just what it did. She and I had done a pretty lousy job of understanding any of this, but at least we were smiling at each other again and she said, “Do you want to find them now? Maybe we can get them in a cab and take them away to the movie set.”
“Sure,” I said and we gathered up our things and walked along the pool and past the hot tub — the rest of the game-show people had not made their appearance yet, much to my relief — and we went down some stone stairs and stepped onto the beach.
Immediately the vendors in white clothes and straw hats surrounded us. They were selling white clothes and straw hats, and somewhere jostled in the crowd I saw the girl with the iguana on her shoulder. Eileen and I no-graciased our way into the clear and we looked around. The men weren’t in our immediate view and we both seemed to become distracted by the water at the same moment. Without a word to each other, we trudged through the sucking sands and down to the water’s edge.
Down here beside it, the bay seemed enormous. I wondered if the music I’d heard last night would have been more powerful here, too; I wondered what if Vinh and I had been in this spot when the boat passed. Would he have done more than ask what it was? Would he have taken me in his arms and waltzed me over the sand? But that’s a vision of romance the easy way, I thought; I should remember the soaps, where everything is hard. There’s another contradiction, on the television that I watch. Can we believe both these things? The Love Boat docks and everyone finds what they’re looking for; and the next day’s installment of “As the World Turns” always brings more disaster.
“I see them,” Eileen said.
She was right. The two men were walking along the shore far down to our left. They were walking side by side, heading away from us, and my husband had his hands clasped behind his back, a thing he does when he paces around during business meetings. He was wearing his tan Bermuda shorts and his one purchase for our trip, a rough-weave red cotton shirt from Pakistan. Frank Davies was dressed all in black — I didn’t realize until I saw him that they made Bermuda shorts in black — and he was moving his arms, gesturing. We couldn’t hear a word, but we saw his hands rise up above his shoulders and flare open and fall.
“I know that story,” Eileen said with a sigh. “An ammunition dump has just exploded in Qui Nhon.”
“I hope no one was hurt.”
“My husband was quite a hero in the aftermath, is the way I understand it.” Eileen turned to me. “Listen, Gabrielle, I’m sorry if I seemed upset a little earlier.”
“Upset?”
“When you asked about how our husbands were getting on.”
I wish I’d been blunt right then and pressed for the two of us to figure out the men in our lives a little better. But I can’t imagine that we would have made any sense at that point. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to anticipate what happened later on. But for whatever reason, I didn’t push it. I just said, “That’s okay, Eileen. No problem.” And we made off down the beach in pursuit of our husbands.
We caught up with them when they turned around and continued their walking discussion back in our direction. Eileen called out Frank’s name and both men looked up at us with a start. At just that moment some young Mexican men shouted at us and motioned us a little farther along the beach. We all followed the Mexicans’ gaze high into the air and saw a parasail swinging off the bay and over the beach, and one of the young men blew a whistle and the man hanging beneath the sail reached up and grabbed the rope above and to the right of his head and he pulled. The sail began to veer to the right, angling toward the beach before us, and it was coming down fast. I heard Frank’s voice say, “You were airborne, that right?” Vinh grunted in affirmation but I did not look at the two men. I kept my eyes on the parachute, the great red and yellow scoop, tight with air, carrying a man down from the sky. I could do that, I thought.
The whistle blew again and the man let go of the rope and he was coming down fast, and the young men on the ground rushed forward, reached upward, and the parasailor landed with a little run and his chute crumpled behind him.
“Hey, guys,” Eileen was saying. “Guys.”
I thought for a moment that she was talking to the Mexicans, that she wanted to go up into the air. But I looked and she had pulled the attention of our husbands to her and she said, “Gabrielle and I want to do something. All of us together.”
“That’s good,” Frank said.
Vinh just looked at me with a faint rebuke in his eyes. He hated to be taken off guard like this. I should have talked to him privately first. I understand his feelings, I suppose. An airborne ranger is always prepared. A successful businessman, too. But I just blew his little grimace a kiss and he forced a chuckle to show his good nature. I didn’t much care, to tell the truth. I couldn’t keep my eyes from slipping back to the Mexicans and their parachute. I knew I would feel disappointed to see anyone get onto that chute right now. It was meant for me. I was just a few moments away from soaring high over the bay, over the whole city, far above all of this.
“Don’t you agree, Gabrielle?” Eileen’s voice dragged me back to her. She was looking at me meaningfully, like it was time for me to nail this thing down.
“Of course,” I declared, not knowing exactly what she had said but sure from the way she was looking at me that this was the right response. She waited, wanting more, and I said to the men, “Let’s go. I really want to.”
Vinh said, “Is this the place you were telling me about? The iguana thing?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
Now I could see Vinh turn up the heat in his eyes. Who were Liz and Dick to him, after all? Only a product of what he had big trouble tolerating in America. I knew I was supposed to persuade him now. He was persuadable about these little interests of mine, but he always made me work for his approval. Well, I didn’t feel like it at the moment. That was for certain. All I knew was that the great red and yellow parachute was lying slack on the beach and I wanted to excite it, wanted it to fill up full of this warm morning air and carry me into the sky.
So without a word I stepped past Frank and Eileen and Vinh, and I asked the young Mexican man holding the harness how much and he told me and I paid it and I turned around and the man put me in the harness, and all of this was so unexpected and it was done so quickly that nobody could react. Frank and Eileen and Vinh just stood there in a row and gawked at me and finally, just before I took off, Vinh choked out a “Gabrielle what are you doing?” and Eileen suddenly smiled and cried something that wasn’t quite a word, like “hurrah” or something. And the Mexican was telling me about the whistle and about the rope up there over my right ear and the boat was moving and the tether went taut and there were hands on me briefly, helping me rise, and then there were no hands and I was soaring into the air.