All I carried to the bus stop was an umbrella and my old knapsack that held my purse, one change of clothing, and the cigar box of trinkets and photographs I knew I would eventually have to discard, one by one.
Two weeks before this, I had come home from work to an empty apartment. It was the first time I had been there alone. I looked in the bedrooms to see if anyone might be asleep but soon found myself slowly roaming the entire apartment, picking up objects I had never dared touch, looking through drawers and cabinets and shelves, the odds and ends of people who were still strangers to me.
You must know too well now that your father’s uncle was a shy and private man. He said only four words to me when I met him at my wedding to your father, and though he provided all he could for me in those months I lived there, I don’t recall us having a conversation that lasted more than a minute.
In his bedroom closet, on the shelf above his neatly ironed shirts and pants hanging nestled against your grandaunt’s dresses, were rows of shoeboxes stacked three or four high to the ceiling. I started with the topmost ones and worked my way down. I found jewelry, old shoes, candles, music tapes, seashells, various papers, and count less photographs, mostly things that apparently belonged to your grandaunt.
One box contained stacks of old letters that had been written, in his flawless penmanship, by your granduncle to your grandaunt during the four years he lived alone in America, having escaped the country right after Saigon fell. I sat there reading them for almost an hour. Many were about nothing more than what he ate that day or what he had been doing to bring her and the children to America. Some detailed his loneliness and his longing for her, for Vietnam, for his old life back home.
Then I opened a letter that began with him asking for her forgiveness. I did not intend to, he wrote, but I’ve sinned against you and God. He had been with another woman in America, had loved her deeply, and was now confessing everything to your grandaunt as she was preparing to come to the States with the children. He explained every detail of the affair, how he and the woman had met, how his loneliness had led him to her, how awful he felt the entire time, and how he ultimately ended the relationship out of his duty to God and to her. It was quite honest, I thought. Perhaps too honest. Details no woman would have wanted to know. He ended the letter by asking again for her forgiveness and swearing to the Lord that he would spend the rest of his days making amends for what he had done. Nowhere in the letter did he say that he still cared for your grandaunt, that his feelings for her had not changed since they parted, that his love for the other woman was just a temporary displacement of his real love for her.
He sounded like an entirely different person. The man I knew was as devout as a priest, as emotional as a monk. It startled me to imagine him in a passionate affair with another woman. Did he not show his wife affection now because his love still lay elsewhere? Did he not smile or talk warmly to anyone because he had chosen a life he no longer wanted? I’ve forgotten many specifics in the letter, but one sentence has always stayed with me. You might understand, he wrote, if you can imagine a drowning man suddenly feeling thirst and then having that thirst quenched.
Your grandaunt was just as quiet a person, though more outwardly kind and curious about others. Perhaps you disagree. She must have forgiven him, I suppose, though I’m not sure what that required of her. Did she have to decide that he had not wronged her, or did she have to accept that he had and so choose to live with it? The only true way to forgive someone, it seems to me, is to forget what they have done to you and, in turn, forget them. Whether that is possible is another question.
When I heard the front door open, I quickly returned all the boxes to the shelf and came out to greet everyone. You had all gone to buy the Christmas tree, which your granduncle was now carrying into the living room as you and your cousins beamed with enthusiasm around him.
As he set up the tree and you and your cousins began decorating it, your grandaunt made tea and brought him a cup. Before handing it to him, she blew into it several times. He took it from her and nodded, and amid the laughter of all the children he watched her walk back to the kitchen, and I saw in his eyes a mixture of love and endless sadness.
He was only forty-five years old at the time, still very much a young man, your father’s youngest uncle, a man I had never known and would never truly know beyond a confession he had once written to his wife.
It was then that you finally acknowledged me. You had my red knapsack in your hands and you handed it to me. You had been using it as a book bag for school. My mother bought me that knap sack when I was sixteen, the only gift of hers I took with me when we left Vietnam. It had grown worn over the years, the edges frayed, the red canvas faded after all that time in the tropical sun, dragged through sand, soaked in rainwater and seawater as it held everything you and I owned in the world.
You said, Auntie bought me a new bag today, and you gave it back to me as though returning something broken, and then rejoined your cousins at the Christmas tree where your face lit up and you yelped with laughter.
At the bus stop, my normal bus came and went. The rain intensified. When cars thrashed past me on the watery streets and I closed my eyes, I heard the ocean.
As the downtown bus arrived, I thought I might begin crying, but all I felt as I mounted the steps was my breath quickening, a wave of oxygen and exhilaration, what a deep-sea diver must feel when he comes back up to the sunlight and the air.
part five
12
MAI WRESTLED THE JEEP into a tight parking spot at the Stratosphere, nearly running over a convertible half its size.
Once she cut the engine, I said, “Twenty minutes. That’s it. We can’t find her, we go straight to your place and get your shit and then go back to the Coronado. We put all this behind us.”
She put her hand on my arm before I could open the door. “Let me speak to her first. You know her, but I speak her language.”
“What’s the difference? We’ll be lucky if she’s even here.”
“You look like you’re ready to choke someone.”
Even inside the Jeep, we could see our own breath.
“Just Sonny,” I said, admitting to myself that I was now relishing the idea of taking his money — anything that was his.
We were on the fifth floor of the parking garage. It had taken us some time to find a spot, but as we marched toward the elevators, hurrying past a football field of cars, we didn’t see a single person and heard only Sinatra’s cavernous baritone blaring from invisible speakers.
I checked the cell phone to see if anyone had called. It was not yet six, but night had already swallowed the city by the time we drove into the garage.
As I tried to keep pace with Mai, a shiver of claustrophobia — of sudden loneliness — ran through me. Driving up into these casino garages, with their stark fluorescence and low ceilings, their serpentine corridors, felt more like a descent, a submersion into something airless.
We got into a warm, empty elevator and Mai stood close beside me, her cheeks pale from the cold. She could have been my daughter, I thought — not without regret and some anger. Before Suzy, I had been a bachelor for decades and thought little of the past and even less of the future, but that’s natural when your solitude is intentional. There’s so much of tomorrow ahead of you, so much time left to redo and rethink your regrets and forget about the rest of it.