The off-limits Happy Talk in Wahiawa.
The Happy Talk in Wahiawa across the bridge from Schofield Barracks.
Where Inez stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett.
Where The Mamas and the Papas sang “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
The radar specialist had been on the nod.
“I don’t need the hassle,” the radar specialist had said.
The electrician had already left the Happy Talk but had left a note with the bartender.
Da Nang going, that dude at Dalat definitely a wipe-out, the note read.
On the screen above the bar there were the helicopters. There were the helicopters lifting off the roof of the American mission and there were the helicopters vanishing into the fireball above the ammo dump and there were the helicopters ditching in the oil slick off the Pioneer Contender.
“Fucking Arvin finally shooting each other,” the bartender said.
“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said. “Harry Victor’s wife.”
“Listen,” Inez said. “It’s too late for the correct thing. Forget the correct thing.”
Which is how Jack Lovett and Inez Victor happened that Easter Sunday night in 1975 to take the Singapore Airlines flight that leaves Honolulu at 3:45 A.M. and at 9:40 A.M. one day later lands at Kai Tak, Hong Kong.
Recently when I took this flight I thought of Inez, who described it as an eleven-hour dawn.
Inez said she never closed her eyes.
Inez said she could still feel the cold of the window against her cheek.
Inez said the 3:45 A.M. flight from Honolulu to Hong Kong was exactly the way she hoped dying would be.
Dawn all the way.
Something to see, as Jack Lovett had said at the Happy Talk about another dawn in another year. Something to behold.
It occurs to me that Inez Victor’s behavior the night she flew to Hong Kong may not have been so circumstantial after all.
She had to have a passport with her, didn’t she?
What does that suggest?
You tell me.
Three
1
THE day Jack Lovett flew down to Saigon the rain began in Hong Kong. The rain muddied the streets, stiffened the one pair of shoes Inez had with her, broke the blossoms from the bauhinia tree on the balcony of the apartment in which Jack Lovett had told her to wait and obscured the view of the Happy Valley track from the bedroom window. The rain reminded her of Honolulu. The rain and the obscured horizon and the breaking of the blossoms and the persistent smell of mildew in the small apartment all reminded her of Honolulu but it was colder in Hong Kong. She was always cold. Every morning after Jack Lovett left Inez would wake early in the slight chill and put on the galoshes and macintosh she had found in the otherwise empty closet and set out to walk. She developed a route. She would walk down Queen’s Road and over behind the Anglican cathedral and up Garden Road to the American consulate, where she would sit in the reception room and read newspapers.
Quite often in the reception room of the American consulate on Garden Road Inez read about Harry Victor’s relatives. In the South China Morning Post she read that Harry Victor’s wife had not been present at the funeral of Harry Victor’s sister-in-law, a private service in Honolulu after which Senator Victor declined to speak to reporters. In the Asian edition of the International Herald-Tribune she read that Harry Victor’s father-in-law had required treatment at the Honolulu City and County Jail for superficial wounds inflicted during an apparent suicide attempt with a Bic razor. In the international editions of both Time and Newsweek she read that Harry Victor’s daughter was ironically or mysteriously missing in Vietnam.
“Ironically” was the word used by Time, and “mysteriously” by Newsweek. Both Time and Newsweek used “missing,” as did the South China Morning Post, the Asian editions of both the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald-Tribune, the Straits Times, and the pouched copies of the New York Times and the Washington Post that arrived at the consulate three days after publication. “Missing” did not seem to Inez to quite cover it. The pilots of downed fighters were said to be “missing,” and correspondents last seen in ambush situations. “Missing” suggested some line of duty that did not quite encompass getting on a C-5A transport in Seattle and flying to Saigon to look for a job. Possibly that was the ironic part, or even the mysterious.
By the time Inez finished reading the papers it would be close to noon, and she would walk from the consulate on up Garden Road to what seemed to be a Chinese nursery school, with a terrace roofed in corrugated plastic under which the children played. She would stand in the rain and watch the children until, at the ping of a little bell, they formed a line and marched inside, and then she would take a taxi back to the apartment and hang the macintosh on the shower door to dry and set the galoshes behind the door. She had no idea to whom the galoshes and macintosh belonged. She had no idea to whom the apartment belonged.
“Somebody in Vientiane,” Jack Lovett had said when she asked.
She presumed it was a woman because the galoshes and macintosh were small. She presumed the woman was an American because the only object in the medicine cabinet, a plastic bottle of aspirin tablets, was the house brand of a drugstore she knew to be in New York. She presumed that the American woman was a reporter because there was a standard Smith-Corona typewriter and a copy of Modern English Usage on the kitchen table, and a paperback copy of Homage to Catalonia in the drawer of the bed table. In Inez’s experience all reporters had paperback copies of Homage to Catalonia, and kept them in the same place where they kept the matches and the candle and the notebook, for when the hotel was bombed. When she asked Jack Lovett if the person in Vientiane to whom the apartment belonged was in fact an American woman reporter he had shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s fine.”
After that when Inez read the newspapers in the reception room of the American consulate she made a point of noticing the byline on any story originating in Vientiane, looking for a woman’s name, but never found one.
The telephone in this apartment never rang. Jack Lovett got his messages in Hong Kong at a small hotel off Connaught Road, and it was this number that Inez had given Adlai when she reached him in Honolulu the day she arrived. Because Harry had hung up mid-sentence when she called him from Wahiawa to say she was going to Hong Kong she made this call person-to-person to Adlai, but Harry had come on the line first.
“I happen to know you’re in Hong Kong,” Harry had said.
“Of course you happen to know I’m in Hong Kong,” Inez had said. “I told you I was going.”
“Will you speak to this party,” the operator had kept saying. “Is this your party?”
“You hung up,” Inez had said.
“No,” Harry had said. “This is not her party.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Inez had said when Adlai finally picked up. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that.”