I WALKED DOWN Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, beyond the Strip, is not a place for pedestrians, especially in the summer. I’d pictured a Chinatown similar to Oakland’s or San Francisco’s, but the Vegas Chinatown was nothing more than a bloated strip mall — three or four blocks of it painted red and yellow and then pagodified, a theme park like the rest of the city. Nearly every establishment was a restaurant, and the one I was looking for was called Fuji West. I found it easily enough in one of those strip malls — nestled, with its dark temple-like entrance, between an oriental art gallery and a two-story pet store. It was not set to open for another hour.
Nothing surprising about Vietnamese selling Japanese food. Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the giant white-aproned Mexican — all seven feet of him — sweeping the patio, though you might as well have called it swinging a broom. He gazed down at me blankly when I asked for Sonny. He didn’t look dumb, just bored.
“The owner,” I repeated. “Is he here?”
“His name’s no Sonny.”
“Well, can I speak to him, whatever his name is?”
The Mexican, for some reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man — late twenties, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored tan suit and a precise pink tie — appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand tenderly. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the wooden pillars that flanked the patio.
“How may I help you, sir?” He held his hands behind his back and spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he’d ironed it.
“I’d like to see Sonny.”
“I’m sorry, no one by that name works here. Perhaps you are mistaken? There are many sushi restaurants around here. If you like, I can direct you.”
“I was told he owns this restaurant.”
“Then you are mistaken. I am the owner.” He spoke like it was a friendly misunderstanding, but his eyes had strayed twice from mine: once to the parking lot, once to my waist.
“I’m not mistaken,” I replied and looked at him hard to see if he would flinch.
He did not. I was a head taller than him, my arms twice the size of his, but all I felt in his presence was my age. Even his hesitation seemed assured. He slowly smoothed out an eyebrow with one finger. “I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.”
“How about this. I’ll come back this evening for some sushi. And if Sonny’s not too busy, he can join me for some tea. I just want to have a little chat. Please tell him that for me.”
I turned to go but felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness yet in his face, but his words had become chiseled. “You are Officer Robert Ruen, aren’t you?” he declared. When I didn’t answer, he leaned in closer: “You should not be here. If you do not understand why I am saying this, then please recognize my seriousness. Go back home and try to be happy.”
That last thing he said unexpectedly moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I noticed how handsome he was — how, if he wanted to, he could’ve modeled magazine ads for cologne or expensive sunglasses. For a moment I might have doubted that he was dangerous at all. He nodded at me, a succinct little bow, then grabbed the broom and walked back through the heavy mahogany doors of the restaurant.
I felt tired again. Pho always made me sleepy. I walked back to the hotel and in my room stripped down to my boxers and cranked up the AC before falling back into bed.
People my age get certain feelings now and then, even if intuition was never our strong suit in youth, and my inkling about this Sonny guy was that he was the type of restaurant owner who, if he came by at all, would only do so at night, when the money was counted. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was willing to do anything to protect his boss. I had a long evening ahead of me. Before shutting my eyes, I decided to put my badge away, deep in the recesses of my suitcase.
WHEN SUZY LEFT ME, it was easy at first. No children. No possessions to split up. No one really to care. I was an only child, my parents both years in their graves, and her entire family was either also dead or still in Vietnam. After eight years together, I’d gotten to know maybe two or three of her friends, and the only things my police buddies knew about her was her name and her temper.
She gave me the news after Sunday dinner. I was sitting at the dining table, and she approached me from the kitchen, her mouth still swollen, and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow and I’m taking my clothes. You can have everything else.” She carried away my half-empty plate and I heard it shatter in the sink.
The first time I met her, I knew she was fearless. I was responding to a robbery at the flower shop where she worked. She’d been in America almost a decade, but her English was still pretty bad. When I arrived, she stood at the door with a baseball bat in one hand and bloody pruning shears in the other. Before I could step out of the patrol car, she flew into a tirade about what had happened, as though I’d been the one who robbed her. I understood about a quarter of what she said — something about a gun and ruined roses — but I knew I liked her. That petite sprightly body. Her lips, her cheekbones: full and bold. Firecracker eyes that glared at people with the urgency of a lit fuse. We found the perp two miles away, limping and bleeding from a stab wound to his thigh. The pruning shears had done it. Suzy and I married four months later.
I was thirty-five then, an age when I once thought I should already have two or three kids, though I suspected she, at thirty-three, had given little thought to her own biology, let alone the passage of time. When I proposed, she agreed on the spot, but only if I was okay with not having children. She was not good with kids, she said, and having them would hurt too much, two reasons she repeated when I brought it up again a year later and a third time the year after that. I always figured she’d eventually change her mind.
Her real name was Hong, which meant “pink” or “rose” in Vietnamese. But it sounded a bit piggish the way Americans pronounced it, so I suggested the name of my first girlfriend in high school, and this she did give me, though her Vietnamese acquaintances still called her Hong.
When we married, neither of us seemed to have any worldly possessions beyond our clothes and the car we drove. It was like we had both, up until the time we met, lived our adulthoods at some cheap motel, so that we knew nothing about domesticated life beyond paying bills and doing laundry. We combined all our savings and bought an old townhouse near Chinatown that I repainted and she furnished — a luxury she’d apparently never had and one she indulged in with care and sincerity, down to the crucifixes that adorned every room and the two brass hooks on the wall of the entryway, the one for my coat a little higher than hers.
In our first year, we bonded over this novelty of owning a home, of living with another human being and building a brand-new life together with chairs and tables and dishes and bath towels. We were happy, I realize now, not because of what we actually had in common, but because we were fashioning this new life out of things that had never existed for either of us.