But then something in me said, Wait. It’s not just me. Vinh, too, has been distracted by the American culture. He is a seller of Swedish meatballs and cocktail franks, after all. He wears his dark gray suit and he studies his spreadsheets and he flies here and there carrying a leather briefcase with all the other Americans and he makes much money from food that people eat with toothpicks. But in Vietnam, in the war, there was passion. And there is a passion still inside him. He did fight with this man today.
I lay there for a few minutes more and I don’t know what it was, exactly, that moved me to think about stepping onto the balcony. The sunlight on the wall had darkened into peach and I stood up and faced the breeze from the bay. It was lovely out there, with the sun nearing the horizon. A tight little family of pelicans drifted past and I moved through the sliding doors and leaned on the balustrade. I watched the pelicans wheel off to their right and head out to sea.
But my eyes stayed with the shore and a parasail rising there. I sent my body out to float with the sailor. I didn’t need to be on the parachute myself; I could stand here and let myself separate from my body, from all the strangeness that had come upon me, that made up my life, and I could glide in the long angle of this sun and feel at peace. And so I watched the parasail swing around and head this way. The chute was red and yellow and it was as high as my balcony now and I closed my eyes briefly, remembering the green wake of the boat far below me, and I rode over those waves smoother than any ship.
I opened my eyes and the parasailor was drawing almost even with my hotel, right at my eye level, and I, of course, expected to see the dangling bare legs of someone in a bathing suit. But these legs were clothed in long gray slacks. And my eyes went instantly to the face and it was Vinh. He was holding the ropes and at first I wondered if he was being an airborne soldier again. But it was very much different from that. I had failed to understand his face when he was standing before me, but this much I could tell now as he glided past me strapped to a parachute. He was looking down with the calmest of pleasures. The angle of his head, lolled to the side like I was scratching his neck up under his ear like I used to; the loose hold of his hands on the ropes with one elbow even tucked comfortably into his side; the slight boyish kick in his legs: all this told me he was enjoying himself. He was high above Puerto Vallarta and the sea and he was happy now.
And finally he was eye to eye with me. The boat went on down the coast, into the glare of the sun, but then it swung around, and when Vinh came past once more, he turned his face to the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel and he saw me on the balcony and he smiled. I could see the smile very clearly, and when I waved at him, he raised his hand and threw me a kiss. He drifted past and I looked out to the setting sun. Just like in the movies. A beautiful sunset at the end of this very strange day. Night was coming on and my husband was about to return to earth. And so was I.
A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN
H
Chí Minh came to me again last night, his hands covered with confectioners’ sugar. This was something of a surprise to me, the first time I saw him beside my bed, in the dim light from the open shade. My oldest daughter leaves my shades open, I think so that I will not forget that the sun has risen again in the morning. I am a very old man. She seems to expect that one morning I will simply forget to keep living. This is very foolish. I will one night rise up from my bed and slip into her room and open the shade there. Let her see the sun in the morning. She is sixty-four years old and she should worry for herself. I could never die from forgetting.
But the light from the street was enough to let me recognize H
when I woke, and he said to me, “Ð
o, my old friend, I have heard it is time to visit you.” Already on that first night there was a sweet smell about him, very strong in the dark, even before I could see his hands. I said nothing, but I stretched to the nightstand beside me and I turned on the light to see if he would go away. And he did not. He stood there beside the bed — I could even see him reflected in the window — and I knew it was real because he did not appear as he was when I’d known him but as he was when he’d died. This was Uncle H before me, the thin old man with the dewlap beard wearing the dark clothes of a peasant and the rubber sandals, just like in the news pictures I studied with such a strange feeling for all those years. Strange because when I knew him, he was not yet H Chí Minh. It was 1917 and he was Nguy
n Aí Quc and we were both young men with clean-shaven faces, the best of friends, and we worked at the Carlton Hotel in London, where I was a dishwasher and he was a pastry cook under the great Escoffier. We were the best of friends and we saw snow for the first time together. This was before we began to work at the hotel. We shoveled snow and H would stop for a moment and blow his breath out before him and it would make him smile, to see what was inside him, as if it was the casting of bones to tell the future.
On that first night when he came to me in my house in New Orleans, I finally saw what it was that smelled so sweet and I said to him, “Your hands are covered with sugar.”
He looked at them with a kind of sadness.
I have received that look myself in the past week. It is time now for me to see my family, and the friends I have made who are still alive. This is our custom from Vietnam. When you are very old, you put aside a week or two to receive the people of your life so that you can tell one another your feelings, or try at last to understand one another, or Simply say good-bye. It is a formal leave-taking, and with good luck you can do this before you have your final illness. I have lived almost a century and perhaps I should have called them all to me sooner, but at last I felt a deep weariness and I said to my oldest daughter that it was time.
They look at me with sadness, some of them. Usually the dull-witted ones, or the insincere ones. But H’s look was, of course, not dull-witted or insincere. He considered his hands and said, “The glaze. Maestro’s glaze.”
There was the soft edge of yearning in his voice and I had the thought that perhaps he had come to me for some sort of help. I said to him, “I don’t remember. I only washed dishes.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I decided it was foolish for me to think he had come to ask me about the glaze.
But H did not treat me as foolish. He looked at me and shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said. “I remember the temperature now. Two hundred and thirty degrees, when the sugar is between the large thread stage and the small orb stage. The Maestro was very clear about that and I remember.” I knew from his eyes, however, that there was much more that still eluded him. His eyes did not seem to move at all from my face, but there was some little shifting of them, a restlessness that perhaps only I could see, since I was his close friend from the days when the world did not know him.