When the conversation about my brother hits the wall that is my refusal to acknowledge any reasonable probability, Phượng and I talk about something easier: in this case, the rain. “Trời mưa,” she says, a simple statement even I can understand: it is raining.
I nod. “Rất mưa.” A lot of rain. During our nightly conversations we roam haltingly into each other’s languages, my excursions considerably more hesitant than hers, but I am learning, and Phượng has had far more practice with English.
“Wet rat,” she says, and giggles at the play on words. “Wet rat bastard.” She is not really giggling anymore, but she doesn’t sound pissed either, which makes it difficult to know for sure if she has really pegged anyone in particular for a rat bastard, or if she has been watching more old American movies on Star TV and this is just another practice persona. Probably a little of each, knowing Phượng. She sounds like Humphrey Bogart in Vietnamese drag. I do not ask, and imagine she is just messing around. I am too dreamy with beer and the heat to work it out anyway, watching my own movie, the scenes dim and sputtery as a hand-cranked newsreel.
Outside, cyclo drivers on the watch for passengers pedal their three-wheelers through fitful patches of brightness. They drift strong and stork legged, all sinew and bone skinny. Dangling from their lips or fingers are cigarettes somehow still smoldering in the rain. The way they smoke, so casually oblivious, reminds me of my father — on the porch, maybe, or out in the yard at night, looking up at the sky, for weather, but it’s not as if he could miss the stars. I hear my name in his voice: “Riley…” Never loud or angry, just gentle reminders: try to grow up with some degree of intentionality and grace; try to believe the world is more benevolent than not. I wonder if he knows I did hear him. I’m sure I never said. Here I am, though, working on it. Working on something.
Firelight emanates from small blazes kept alive with jet fuel and tended on the fractured sidewalks by itinerant bicycle mechanics; these men once repaired jeeps and tanks for the Americans and now keep their tools in battered, surplus, army-green ammo boxes. They have long ago forgiven us for leaving them behind. Buddhists, they say there is nothing to forgive.
My fake-French bicycle is locked up out front where I can keep an eye on it. It is how I get around in this city of five million, to my various English-teaching jobs, to the street kids’ center where I try to offer something of relative value, and into which we try to coax them from the stoops, the rain, the robbers. But the kids are so wild — wilder than wild red pandas — and they find their protection in each other, mostly coming only to eat and then disappearing again into the night.
I try to formulate in my pidgin Vietnamese an explanation for Phượng of how the cyclo guys look like those mythological birds to me, and how some kids in America are told that storks bring babies, tied up in bandanas dangling from their beaks. It sounds even more ridiculous in Vietnamese than it does in English, and it also occurs to me how many birds there are already in this story: Phượng, the phoenix, cyclo-storks, the girls at the bar, a scrawny pidgin that is my grasp of the language, a language I am learning to love, for translations like this one, for barbed wire: “steel string with thorns.”
Phượng tells me the stork story is so much baloney; she actually says, “Stork babies baloney, Chi.” Chi is what they call me here. It means big sister. Hardly anyone calls me by my actual name, but I’m used to that; I’ll answer to just about anything.
Phượng has recently been knocked up by one of our local British boys. She tells me this as we stand at the window. Ian, the father, is an old Saigon hand, having been here for three years already, captaining some kind of bamboo furniture enterprise. He is tall, blond, dubiously handsome, and wears his jaded weariness like a badge. I hear the first few years it was all he could do to stay in the country and out of prison, for uncommitted crimes.
This town is full of romantically hazardous men: Brits, Aussies, Froggies. Especially, maybe, the Froggies, with their Ça vas, their Gitanes, their sleepy eyes and sexy accents that require of a girl perpetual vigilance. Luc could be a poster child for these Froggies. He looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, and rumor has it that he is indeed here to make a movie, though I have never seen him with a camera or a lighting crew, and suspect he is really here (like me) on account of a movie he keeps in his head.
Phượng tells me he has his eye on me. “Luc like you style, Chi. Think Chi beaucoup sweetie pie.”
Luc has never said more than two words in a row to me. If he thinks I am beaucoup sweetie pie, he has a funny way of showing it. Phượng says this is because he is shy. Shy and adorable. A little young. A hazard, like I said. Besides, there is that Jim Morrison Aussie, the one I became entangled with almost as soon as I arrived, and who will very soon, and surgically, break my heart — able to do that because this is Saigon, not because the reasons I am sleeping with him have anything to do with love. Love would require a part of me that I have not been able to precisely locate or properly identify the remains of for a long time now.
So that is the romantic inventory — the pertinent bits.
At least I am not pregnant. This time. I look over at Phượng, who leans her elbows on the windowsill, her chin on her interlocked fingers. I say I am sorry for bringing up the storks.
“No worries,” she says. Then, “Shit.” Softly, infinitely sweetly. She picked that up from me, I think — the word, not the delicate delivery of it. I never heard her say it before we started hanging out together at the window.
“Don’t say ‘shit,’ ” I say. “It’s not ladylike.”
“What is ladylike?”
“Like a lady.”
“Woman?” she asks. She looks puzzled, those fine eyebrows drawn together to meet above the bridge of her delicate nose. Her delicate nose that matches the rest of her delicate self. I feel like an Amazon next to her, all five and a half feet of me.
“Different,” I say. “More feminine. Ladies don’t swear.”
“Merde,” she says. She’s not buying it, in any language.
I swear all the time, though my favorite swearword is not “shit,” it is “fuck.” Mick taught me how to cuss when I was nine or ten, but that is not one of the words he taught me. It is one I picked up out of necessity a few years later. I try not to say it around Phượng. I do have some manners.
“What are you going to do, Phượng?”
“Don’t know. Maybe will go away,” she says.
“What? Where?” I am alarmed. For me. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She is the only truly sane person I know in this town — besides my students, for whom I must keep up some sense of decorum, meaning I cannot go out drinking with them, and Tho. But I have learned it is not healthy to become too attached to the bartender.
“Not me, silly,” she says. “Nó.” Nó means It. I still don’t know what she’s saying. “Em bé,” she says, and smacks my forehead lightly with her fingertips for emphasis.
“Oh.” The baby. I get it; that part I get. Maybe it’s the beer, but I don’t know what else to say; not sure if she means what I think she means. I realize I don’t have any idea what can happen here, what’s legal or accepted. I don’t know either if Phượng is Catholic or Buddhist, animist or Cao Đài; if she has family in the delta or the highlands; if her father fought with the ARVN or the Vietcong or the Montagnards. I am just an interloper, still uninitiated and incurably dopey, traits Phượng patiently abides.