I had not noticed how she was dressed until after I finished eating and she came to me in the living room, wearing her Vietnamese ao dai, her blue and white gown, and looking angelic. I was on the sofa, working on my fourth whiskey, half stupefied from the meal and the boat trip and the effort of the rescue.
“Wan somefin?”
My glass was half full. I said, “This is fine.”
“Wan some uvver? Uvverfin?”
I was bewildered. I was not hungry and could not understand her pampering manner, for I was fine. She was the one who had had a scare, not me. She lifted the sides of her gown and sat beside me.
“Want tuss?”
Only then I realized she was offering herself. I said, “You don’t want that.”
She nodded with such solemnity that I smiled.
“You say me.”
“You were easy to save.”
“You say my lie.”
“I was glad to.”
“Can tuss,” she said, lowering her eyes in a way that was both coquettish and demure.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. But I also thought, If she feels that way, it’s money in the bank.
That was a defining day. It was as though she was saying, You saved my life, and so I am here because of you, and therefore my life is yours. But I did not take advantage of her. I was careful to remind her that we were still friends, that she was an employee, that I was grateful to her for helping me. Of course she remembered my drunken and indecent proposal from earlier in the summer, the thing I had wanted. She was willing to grant that to me now, out of gratitude.
All I wanted was to sit beside her, drink with her, hold her hand sometimes, watch the terns diving over the marsh grass at sunset. And sitting there, I thought: This is perfect. I don’t need that big house. I am happy here, doing this.
“You are Buddhist.”
“Ya.”
“But no temple on the island.”
“Temper hee,” she said, and touched her heart.
We had short conversations, and afterward long silences. The silences were the most telling, because they expressed our deepest contentment. I wanted nothing more and for nothing to change.
Not long after that, she woke me in the middle of the night, startling me until I saw her small figure shivering beside my bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Canna slee.”
“Why not?”
“Bah dree.”
“What kind of dream?”
“Folly offa bow.”
A drowning dream.
“Say me. Plee, say me.”
She got into my bed, and as with the business in the ocean, and the way we hung on to each other in the water, it wasn’t just me, it was something both of us badly wanted.
Days of bliss followed. Weeks. We were more than a couple, we were a team! After we started sleeping together I didn’t know whether to pay her more or to stop paying her entirely. I asked her. She said, “Same.” More money was like prostitution, no money was presumption. I wanted to do the right thing, because I didn’t want this to end.
The routine suited me — paperwork and phone calls after breakfast, a nap after lunch, a drive to the dunes after the nap, and birdwatching or else fishing, some effort in order to stimulate a thirst, a drink before dinner, and then early to bed, Nhu beside me.
One day early on in this blissful period, we went clamming at low tide out on the harbor flats. She dug a bushel. Her first time handling a clamming fork and she’s hoisting twenty pounds of littlenecks and quahogs and I am hooting in admiration and hugging her.
“Why you lie me?”
“Because I’ve never known anyone like you,” I said. “You’re always, ‘Okay, boss!’ You don’t bitch.”
She was much too cheerful to care how I praised her and I could not explain how much she meant to me. She washed my car, she trimmed my hair, she mixed drinks for me, she cooked for me, she caught fish and fried it, she made me laugh, she aroused me.
How old was she? Mid-twenties, maybe, as she’d said — no memory of the Vietnam War but intimate knowledge of its aftermath.
“My fadda take me to jungoo. He see snae, bih snae! He catch snae and — yum! yum!”
Snake-eating in the thickets of the Delta.
“He plan rye. Me hep.”
Father and daughter, knee-deep in the paddy fields, bending over their reflections.
“And then you came here.”
“Bludda come. He hep me come affa.”
Less than half my age but she had lived as much as I had. We were made for each other. When I was with her I forgot who I was, and I had the impression that when she was with me she was similarly euphoric. I hardly considered the strangeness of it all, that I was a multimillionaire cohabiting with my maid in a mansion on Nantucket, for I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
You tend to see yourself most objectively when you imagine how other people see you; other people’s eyes are colder. But there were no other people around. We were isolated enough here so that I seldom thought about our living arrangement, and when I did think about it I was just grateful. More weeks went by, but time moved at a different pace now, because I was happy. I had stopped thinking about building the grand house on the Neck. I was reconciled to living on this island in this secondhand mansion, because this woman was making me happy, and this was possible because she was happy.
I wanted nothing more. She wanted nothing more. The Buddhists are right: eliminate all desire and you’ve found peace.
“I lie you. You happy. No worry.”
When the person you love returns your compliments, you know all is well.
All would have been well — nothing would have changed — if we had stayed in the little clapboard paradise we had made, of meals and naps, noodles and clamming, early to bed and up at first light. All was well, but there came a change.
The Figawi Ball at the Club was an annual islanders-only gala, held around Memorial Day after the big Figawi Race from Hyannis, before the summer people arrived. I had avoided the event, because as a youth I had been a waiter and a hired hand at the Club, and I knew it would bother me to see the members and be reminded of the suffering menial I had been.
Going was Nhu’s idea, but she raised the subject as an example of pure irony, which was how I knew that it meant a lot to her. We were at the market and she saw the Figawi Ball poster taped to the front window.
“Crab dan.”
“A perfect way of describing it.”
“We go togevva, yah!”
The very idea of going was out of the question, and so she joked about going, even joked about what T-shirt she would wear, and which sneakers, to the great island event, open to Club members only, the tickets hard to get and expensive. Even the Brazilian menials knew about it and tried to work at it, just to be part of the glamour.
“You want to go?”
“Crab dan?”
“Right.”
“Yah. For dan and seen. Ha!”
Understanding the profound impossibility she was suggesting with this mockery, I said, “Okay, we’re going.”
We were in the car by then, driving back to the house. She went silent, she was pale, I saw she was terrified.
“No can,” she said. Then she pleaded, “No crab dan.”
“You’re my guest.”
“No got dreh for way.”
“I’ll buy you a dress.”
“Cannot for dan.”
“No dancing. We’ll just sit. We’ll eat. We’ll drink wine.”
“Adda peepoo!”
But she knew all the other people on the island — more than I knew, and she knew them intimately.
I had made my peace with the island. I had given up the idea of building my mansion on the Neck, but I had no intention of leaving. I thought: If I’m going to live here, these people will have to get used to me. They’ll have to understand who I am and what I do. I am proud of my life. This was not a summer fling with my housekeeper. Winter had come and gone. Spring was here. Summer was coming. The rest of my life was coming.