Vinh said, “Why don’t you sit in the front, Frank.”
“Hey there, Major, you outrank this soldier by quite a lot. You should take the favored place.”
“I always rode in the backseat as a major,” Vinh said, and there was just a little sharpness in it. But then he added, “Besides, you’ve got the longer legs by quite a lot.”
Frank laughed and so did Vinh. Then Frank turned to us and said, “You watch out for that man back there.”
I wanted to hear more of this. Was Frank kidding my husband over some stories they had shared about women? I looked at Vinh and his face was blank and then the taxi driver said, “You are American?” and the conversation moved on.
Vinh motioned first Eileen and then me into the backseat and he climbed in last. Frank was talking to the cab driver as he circled the car and I felt Vinh pressed against me in the crowded backseat. I never thought of my husband as being the kind of man you had to watch out for as a couple of women in the backseat of a car. I was sure it was just a typical male joke, a natural frame of reference for Army men. Vinh had never given me any reason to doubt him. I had always watched those parts of the soap operas about adultery with some detachment. He had always been with me whenever he wasn’t working. He wasn’t the kind of man to go out on his own. He was a very conservative man. His work was his mistress, I knew, and that was hard enough for me, I guess. But it was odd how my mind kept working at this silly joke Frank made. All the silence between Vinh and me, all the formality, all the waiting for him to take my hand: Would it be better for him if I was someone else? If he was with someone else? Elizabeth Taylor had had a husband and he was a singer. Richard Burton had had a wife, too, though she was less famous. I listened again to the voices bumping around in the taxi.
“Mismaloya Beach?” the driver said, turning his head alarmingly far around, a hundred degrees or more. He looked at Eileen, who I suppose had just told him where we were going. Then he looked at me and I was afraid he would force his head still further, a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty, until he could see Vinh sitting to my left. But I guess I should have been more worried about the car than about the man’s neck snapping. He was rolling down the long drive from the hotel and not watching at all. He said, “You know that you are going to a very special place?”
“We know,” Vinh said firmly.
“You know about Liz and Dick?” the cabbie said.
“We know,” Vinh said, and I could hear in his voice how little my husband wanted to sit through this story again.
“It all put this town on the map, you know. I was just a teenage delinquent hanging around the beaches all day and trying not to work hard like I do now. We loved it when all the world started looking at our Vallarta.” By now, the man’s eyes were back on his driving and he turned onto the main road we’d taken in from the airport.
In making the turn, he stopped speaking for a moment and Frank said, “Hell, it must have been nice to be a teenager just goofing around the beaches. Living in a place like this. When I was a teenager all I cared about was turning myself into a goddamn soldier some day. That’s another kind of teenage dumb.”
I was a little startled at how far Frank had to reach to pull the conversation around to his military experience. I wondered if he was doing this for Vinh’s benefit, having picked up, too, on how my husband hated all the talk about Burton and Taylor. Vinh said, “When I was a teenager the beaches and the war were all in the same picture.”
He said this like he’d topped Frank. He could get wound up about the war, I knew. I’d heard him with our Vietnamese friends. But was this the kind of thing he and Frank had been doing together? Is this what I’d missed? Just the two of them jerking the conversation around to top each other? Or was this a little instinctive game that would keep our cab driver quiet and us two women out of the conversation?
I didn’t know. But our driver wasn’t picking up on any hints. “The airline, they tried to start it. This was some sleepy godforsaken place when I was a little guy, you know. Then Mexicana Airlines started landing a DC-3 on a dirt strip where the center of town is today.”
Frank turned himself half around in his seat. “You ever fly in a DC-3, Vinh?”
“Sure. They were using some DC-3’S as troop transports when I was a recruit.”
There was only the slightest of pauses after this, like Frank was just taking a little breath before he spoke an answer, but Eileen had wonderful reflexes — probably the key to her success on the buzzer of her game show — and before Frank could open his mouth, she said to the driver, “We know the basic Burton and Taylor story, but tell us something about it we might not know.”
Frank rolled his shoulders and turned to the front and I felt Vinh shift a little bit away from me, and the driver said, “Have you seen the house they stayed in?”
“No,” Eileen said. “Can we?”
“Sure,” the driver said, and to their credit, the men did not protest. “It’s in Gringo Gulch. That’s where all the rich people came when they found out about us. Leonard Bernstein, you know that man with the orchestra?”
“Yes,” Eileen said. “You know about him?”
“Sí, señora. I like good music. I lived in your country three years, in Los Angeles. That’s how I speak English like you. I listened to the radio all the time and I liked the good music.” The driver raised his hand like a conductor and sang, “Da da da dum,” the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Daily Double Audio Clue only last week on “Jeopardy.” “But don’t worry,” the driver added quickly. “I’m just a regular Joe. I liked the bad music, too, in Los Angeles.”
“Who else lives in Gringo Gulch?” Eileen asked, afraid, I suspect, that if our driver strayed too far, the men would reclaim the conversation. Not that I would have minded that, really. I wanted to hear them connecting to each other, though it was even very interesting to me just observing this shared silence between them. They were both looking out windows and I’m sure each man was conscious of the other.
The driver said, “There was some lord and lady from England. The Queen even came in her yacht and visited them. And also living in Puerto Vallarta is a very important American I bet you don’t know.” The cabbie paused for a moment, like we were supposed to guess.
“I bet it ain’t Westmoreland,” Frank said.
“Any clue?” Eileen said.
The cabbie made an exaggerated nod. “I will tell you his name and it will still be hard for you. Milton Gunzburg.”
Frank hooted at this. “The famous Milton Gunzburg is living in Puerto Vallarta? Hell, you remember him, don’t you, Vinh? He’s the guy who landed his chopper in the middle of Tu Do Street, got him about four bargirls, and took off again for Vung Tau and some Air Cav Rand R.”
Vinh grunted, Frank laughed, and the driver said, “That must be another Milton Gunzburg.”
Eileen leaned forward. “Don’t you pay any attention to him, señor,” and she dug her knuckle into Frank’s shoulder. He flicked at her hand but without any anger, just a casual little flick like a mosquito had buzzed him.
I started feeling disloyal to Eileen. I’d been happy just to sit back and watch all this, but she needed some help. So I asked the driver, “Who is this Milton Gunzburg of Puerto Vallarta?”
The driver turned his face way around to look at Eileen and me. “The inventor of 3-D movies.”
I pointed to the street in front of the driver, just to remind him that this was all in 3-D, too. He took my hint and looked to the front just in time to curve around a slow-moving pickup truck full of collapsed and bundled cardboard boxes. He didn’t even flinch.