And he knew that’s exactly what Mauricio would’ve called it.
Donnally checked his side mirror and pulled into traffic, the acceleration feeling for a moment like a rush of relief, for it carried with it the realization that with the death of Anna, the stain that Mauricio left had been washed away into the nothingness of the past.
But only for a moment, for he felt the vertigo of a waxing and waning tide swaying him first forward toward an unknown shore and then backward toward the depths of his own motives.
Chapter 10
“Y our father called,” Janie Nguyen said, looking over from the pillow next to Donnally’s, her head backlit by the light on the nightstand. The smell of sweat and perfume and sex infused the upstairs bedroom air like wilting gardenias, overripe and cloying.
He glanced over at the bedside clock: 10:30 P.M.
“How come you didn’t tell me before we got into bed?”
Janie grinned. “You really want me to answer that?”
He didn’t.
“What did he have to say?” Donnally asked.
Janie giggled. “He asked me if I wanted to play an Asian madam in the new movie he’s planning to shoot. No lines. I just lounge around in my underwear for a couple of days. He said he was looking for the classical Vietnamese look.” She lowered the sheet, exposing her breasts. “I’m not sure he had these in mind or my face.”
Donnally knew he meant both, because his father had insinuated a hundred times that Janie reminded him of the elegant prostitutes he’d met at the Autumn Cloud Hotel in Saigon during the war, the nouveau riche “dollar queens” who wore silk in the daytime and shopped in the officers’ PX, and who were beyond the reach of the enlisted men, forcing them to settle on bar girls.
His father’s almost incestuous sexual interest in Janie made Donnally nauseated and angry. He realized that his fury showed on his face when Janie pulled away and covered herself again, as if for protection.
“What?” she asked.
Donnally shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“If it was nothing, your jaw wouldn’t be clenched like that.”
He stared up at the ceiling, deciding how much to say and whether to risk the sort of all-night conversations that had led to their last breakup by ranging into borderlands where neither wanted to go. He felt an internal shrug of resignation, of inevitability.
“He thought it would be funny to call you a prostitute,” Donnally said. “And see how you would react.”
She reddened. “He said he wanted me to play one, not be one.”
“There’s no difference in his mind, because what thrills him is the effect his words have, not the reality behind them. He knows that if you yell fire in a theater, everybody’s going run for it, whether there really is one or not.”
Janie rolled over on her back. “So offering me the job was him yelling fire in your theater.”
“For the thousandth time.”
She sighed, leaned back, and folded her arms over her breasts.
“Now I really do feel like a prostitute.”
“W here’s the director?” Donnally asked his mother as he walked into her third-floor bedroom in the Hollywood Hills mansion late the following morning.
She looked up from her book lying on the table in front of her and rolled her eyes.
“You mean your father?”
“He tried out for the part a couple of times,” Donnally said as he approached where she sat in a recliner by the open window, “but couldn’t carry it off.”
“Maybe you should give him a new audition.”
“I’ll check the sign-in sheet and see if he’s applied.”
Donnally watched disappointment flood his mother’s face. He kissed her forehead, smoothed a few gray hairs that had been disturbed by the breeze, then sat down in a matching chair and took her hands trembling with Parkinson’s into his.
“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean for things to start out this way. I really just came to see how you’re doing.” He glanced out the window, over the circular drive and toward Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. “Where is he, really?”
She tilted her head in the opposite direction. “He needed a hilltop sunset for his new movie, so he went out early to meet a crew at Rattlesnake Mountain to shoot the dawn.”
Donnally tensed. That was typical of his father, filming a sunrise and running it backward just for the pleasure of deceiving the audience. He couldn’t hear the phrase without thinking of his father’s most famous war movie, Shooting the Dawn, hailed as an existential masterpiece by academic critics who misunderstood the sarcasm of the title, believing that the message was that one’s fate cannot be changed any more than “shooting at the dawn” can stop the sunrise.
For reasons it took Donnally years to grasp, this had been the theme of all his father’s movies, and his method of delivery had always been the same: Take some massacre that haunted the public conscience, like My Lai or Wounded Knee or Hue, change the location, give it a new name, blame it on human nature or the nature of war or on Asian or Indian enemies who not only killed indiscriminately, but murdered the spirit and corrupted the soul and drove anonymous soldiers into berserk orgies of revenge.
Donnally had no doubt that the dawn rising over the landscape of his father’s new movie would illuminate the same thing: men wearing army green or Union blue or Confederate gray portrayed somehow as the true victims of the massacres they themselves committed, as if the forces that drove them to violence were as irresistible as gravitation, as if no willful general in Washington or Richmond or Hanoi or Saigon had ordered them to march into villages and no sergeant had ordered them to fire on the old and the weak, children and infants, cows and pigs and goats, or had ordered the houses or teepees or thatched huts burned and the survivors concentrated in camps.
And as if they hadn’t obeyed by their own will and hadn’t pulled the trigger with intent.
It was just man’s fate to do evil, that was his father’s repeated claim. It was as natural as the sunrise. No other explanations need be given, no justifications need be offered, and no excuses need be made.
“If he’s still shooting the dawn,” Donnally said, “then I guess I don’t need to check the sign-in sheet.”
His mother cast him a fond and forgiving smile. “I think this was purely an economic decision,” she said. “Not an existential one.”
“Why? Did he put his own money into it?”
“Actually, he did. He even reduced costs by shooting some of the jungle scenes in Mexico instead of doing them all in Southeast Asia.”
“Why? The Pentagon’s movie budget got cut, so he found a way to get the Mexican taxpayer to foot the bill?”
Before she could answer, a light knock on the door drew their attention to Julia, his mother’s nurse and companion, entering with a tray of tea and medications. Donnally rose as she set it down and then gave her a hug.
“I didn’t bother asking her,” Donnally said, gesturing toward his mother, “because she won’t tell me the truth. So I’ll ask-”
“The doctor said that nothing has changed,” his mother said, then she looked up at Julia. “Isn’t that right?”
Donnally held his palm down toward his mother, but kept his eyes fixed on Julia. “Well?”
“I better seek refuge in my constitutional right to remain silent,” Julia said.
“Then I’ve got my answer.”
“S he’s been dreaming a lot about your brother,” Julia told Donnally as they stood next to his rental car in the driveway.
“Probably because Donnie’s birthday is coming up.”
Donnally looked up at his mother’s window. He watched the breeze ruffle the sheer curtains next to the bed where she lay asleep.
“I wonder how she sees Donnie in her mind,” Donnally said. “As twenty years old or as the fifty-seven he’d be now?”
Donnally felt a wave of sadness, imagining that his mother saw not how Donnie really would have looked, but as his father had looked at that age.