I’d stop by the flower shop every afternoon during my patrol to visit her. We had two days of the week together, and we spent it fixing up the townhouse, exploring local consignment shops, trying out every cheap restaurant in Chinatown, then going to the movies (Westerns and old black-and-white detective films were her favorite) or walking the waterfront, where the smell of the ocean reminded her of Vietnam. For a long time I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the food, the sappy ballads on the tape player, her handful of “friends” who with the exception of Happy hardly spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the grue some crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead people she never talked about. That was all fine, even wonderful, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself.
But after two years, I realized she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball or cars or a nice steak and potato dinner. She hardly ever asked me about my family or my upbringing. She must have assumed, because of her silence about herself, that I was equally indifferent to my own past. She didn’t know that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when I was eighteen and the draft ended and saved me from the war, and that all of a sudden, decades later, this distant country — this vague alien idea from my youth — meant everything again, until she gradually embodied the place itself, the central mystery in my life. The least she could do was share her stories, like how happy her childhood had been and how the war upended everything, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had died in battle or survived a reeducation camp, or something. But she’d only say her life back home was “lonely” and “uninteresting,” her voice muted with hesitation, like she was teaching me her language and I’d never get it anyway.
Gradually, an easy distance settled between us. I found I loved her most when she was sick and had no choice but to let me take care of her. Feed her. Give her medicine. Keep her housebound, which she rarely was for more than a day. And since I’d apparently reached the limit of what she was willing to give me, I grew fond of any situation where she’d talk about herself, even if it was her waking in the night from a bad dream and then, in the grip of her fright, waking me too so I could lie there in the darkness and listen to her recount it.
She had bad dreams constantly. Recurring ones where I had cheated on her and hurt her in some profound way and she’s beating me with her fists as violently as she can and yet all I’m doing is laughing and laughing as she throttles me in the face. Sometimes it’s another man in this dream, though she’d never say who that might be — perhaps a lover from her past whose sins she was now mistaking for mine. Then there were the dreams where she’s murdered someone. Not just one person but a lot of people. She doesn’t murder them in the dream, she’s only conscious of having done it and must now figure out how to cover it up. In one version, she has buried them under piles of clothes in the closet. In another, she has shoved them into the washer, the dryer, that large cabinet in our laundry room where she kept all the strange pickled foods I could never force myself to like. And the entire time, all she can think about it is that she has killed people and that her life is now over.
I remember her describing one dream where she’s walking for hours through an empty furniture store and someone is following her as she makes her way across beautiful model bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms. Even as she climbs the stairwells from one floor of the store to the other, the person keeps following her, their footsteps loud and steady. I asked if she ever saw what the person looked like, and she said she couldn’t make herself stop or turn around in the dream, and that all she wanted was for the person to catch up to her, take her by the shoulder, and show their face.
To church every Sunday, she brought along a red leather-bound journal, worn and darkened with age, and held it in her lap throughout Mass like a private Bible, except she never opened it. She said it was a keepsake from the refugee camp and that it made her feel more right with God at church, whatever that meant. At home, it lay on the altar beneath the crucifix. I opened it once. The first few pages, brittle and yellowed, were written in someone else’s handwriting, the rest in Suzy’s tiny Vietnamese cursive, which was already hard to read. I tried translating the first page with a bilingual dictionary but could get no further than the opening sentence. Something about rain in the morning and someone’s mother yelling at them. Suzy once forgot the book at church and didn’t realize it until bedtime. She wanted to go right then and there to retrieve it, insisting, “Someone is always there!” But I refused to let her go. At dawn the next morning, after a long, sleepless night, she drove to church and came home with the journal clutched to her chest like a talisman, her eyes red from crying. She did not speak to me the rest of the day.
She could go an entire week without speaking. A way at first to punish me for whatever I had done to anger her, though gradually, almost every time, her silence outlasted her anger and became a retreat from me and into herself, an absence actually, as though she had gotten lost in whatever world she had escaped into. Her temper — that flailing beast inside her that she herself hated — would retreat as well, and the only thing left between us until she spoke again was what we had said and done to each other when we fought: about money we didn’t have and the children we weren’t having, about what to eat for dinner, about my poor driving and my poor taste in clothes and a million other things I can’t remember anymore. I always played my part, stubborn and mouthy as I am, my own temper always burning brightest before hers exploded. She’d go from yelling at me to lunging at me, those eyes erupting out of her face as she slapped and punched my chest or seized my neck with both hands. Both of us knew she was not strong enough to hurt me, and on a certain level I think she went out of her way to avoid it, never throwing or breaking anything in the house, never once using anything but her hands and her words. Even as I held her wrists and let her scream at me, let her kick me in the stomach or the legs, it sometimes felt as though she were asking me — with her hateful, pleading eyes — to hold her back and tie her to the mast until the storm passed. Because inevitably she’d crumple to the floor and cry herself into a numb silence and eventually into bed, where she would begin withdrawing from me and the world.
Sometimes we didn’t need an argument. She’d be talkative and affectionate in the morning, and then I’d come home in the evening and she’d seem afflicted with some flu-like melancholy that only silence and aloneness could treat. So I learned to let her be. I turned on the TV in the kitchen during dinner. I turned up the music in the car as she sat staring out the window. I spent more and more time with friends at the bar or at our weekly poker game. I slept in our spare bedroom, which was otherwise never used.
Once or twice a year, I’d startle awake in the middle of the night and find myself alone in bed, the house empty, her car still parked in the driveway. An hour later the front door would open and she’d be barefoot in her nightgown and a jacket, having taken one of her nocturnal walks through the neighborhood, God knows what for or where to. She’d crawl back into bed without explaining anything, despite my stares and my questions, and in the morning I’d notice the dirty bottoms of her feet, the stench of cigarettes on her clothes, the whiff of alcohol on her breath. One evening I came home from work and every single light in the house was on, and she was out back beneath the apple tree, curled up and asleep on the grass, empty beer bottles lying beside her with crushed cigarettes inside.