“We’re in business,” said Shuck.
Later they walked in the garden, holding hands.
The soldiers’ five-day romance was a rehearsal of innocence, and then they went back to Vietnam. This all-purpose house was the only gentle shelter, halfway down the warpath, with me at the front gate saying, “Is there anything—?” My mutters made me remember: in the passion that caged us the issue was not escape — it was learning gentleness to survive in the cage, and never loutishly rolling against the bars.
“For some of these guys it’s their first time with a whore,” said Shuck. “What do you tell them?”
“Don’t smoke in bed.”
Was I serving torturers? I didn’t feel I had a right to ask. I believed in justice. The torturer slept with harm and stink, the pox would eat him up, his memory would claw him. I wanted the others to wrestle in their rooms until they were exhausted beyond sorrow — a happy bed wasn’t everything, but it was more than most worthy fellers got.
I write what I never spoke. Conversation is hectic prayer; it deprived me of subtlety and indicated time passing. It didn’t help much. At Paradise Gardens, by the bar, showing my tattoos and joshing the girls and soldiers, I was a noisy cheerful creature. But the mutters in my mind told me I was Saint Jack. Edwin Shuck, saying so casually, “We’re all whores one way or another,” was parodying an enormous possibility that could never be disproved until we had rid ourselves of the habit of slang, the whore’s own evasive language, a hard way to be honest and always a mockery of my mutters. I simplified, I used slang; I was known as a pimp, the girls as whores, the fellers as soldiers: none of the names fits.
I kept Paradise Gardens running smoothly, and what made me move was what had stirred me for years, my priestly vocation, my nursing instinct, my speedy hunger and curiosity, my wish to head off any cruelty, my singular ache to be lucky; and I did it for fortune. I had seen a lot of fellers come over the hill, and as I say, the drift then was away from all my old notions of sex. In Singapore my suggestions had long since been overtaken by wilder ideas, pictures, movies, devices, potions, acrobatics, or complete reticence; my vocabulary was obsolete and words like “torrid,” “fast,” “daring,” and “spicy” meant nothing at all. What had once seemed to me as simple as a kind of ritual corkage became a spectator sport or else an activity of nightmarish athleticism. It made me doubly glad for Paradise Gardens. The soldiers were happy with a cold beer and the motions of a five-day romance. I made sure the beer was so cold their tonsils froze and had Karim put four inches of ice in every drink. All afternoon we showed old cowboy movies in the theaterette. Some of the fellers taught the girls to swim. Every five days the bus came, and for five days most of the fellers stayed inside the gates. When they wandered it was up to the university, close by, to try out their cameras.
One group of GIs bought me a pair of binoculars, expensive ones with my initials lettered in gold on the leather case, and a little greeting card saying To a swell guy.
“Now I can see what goes on in your rooms,” I said.
They laughed. What went on in those rooms, anyway? Aw honey, the purest cuddlings of romance, pillow fights; they tickled the girls, and they never broke or pilfered a thing.
“You won’t see much in Buster’s,” one said.
I turned to Buster. “That right? Not interested in poontang?”
“I can’t use it,” Buster said, with a lubberly movement of his jaw.
“Buster’s married.” The feller looked at me. “You married, Jack?”
“Naw, never got the bug — ruins your sense of humor,” I said. “Marriage — I’ve got nothing against it, but personally speaking I’d feel a bit overexposed.”
“Where’s your old lady, Buster?” the feller asked.
“Denver,” said Buster, shyly, “goin’ ape-shit. How about a hand of cards?”
“Later,” a tall feller said. “My girl wants a camera.”
My girl. That was Mei-lin. They all wanted cameras; they knew the brands, they picked out the fanciest ones. When the fellers boarded the bus for the ride back to the war the girls rushed to Sung’s Photo in the arcade and sold them for half price.
“Used camera,” said Jimmy Sung, when I challenged him.
“Cut the crap,” I said. It was a shakedown. From a two-hundred-dollar camera Sung made a hundred and the girl made a hundred; the soldier paid. But Sung ended up with the camera, to sell again.
“Full prices for the cameras,” I said to Sung, “or I’ll toss you out on your ear.”
In the kitchen Hing made up huge deceitful grocery lists which he passed to Shuck without letting me see, and he got checks for items he never bought. The arcade prices were exortionary, the girls were grasping. No one complained. On the contrary: the fellers often said they wanted to marry my girls and take them back to the States, “the world,” as they called it.
I did what I could to reduce the swindling. The arcade shopkeepers saw it my way and “Sure, sure,” they’d say, and claw at their stiff hair-bristles with their fingers when I threatened.
In Sung’s, on the counter, there was an album of photographs, a record of Paradise Gardens which thickened by the week. Many were posed shots Sung had snapped, tall fellers embracing short dark girls, fellers around a table drinking beer, muscle-flexers by the pool, group shots on the verandah, candid shots — fellers fooling with girls in the garden. There were many of me, but the one I liked showed me in my linen suit, having my late-afternoon gin, alone in a wicker chair under a traveler’s palm, with a cigar in my mouth; I was haloed in gold and green, and dusty beams of sunlight slanted through the hedge.
Shuck was right: the news was good, almost the glory I imagined. I was surprised to reflect that what I wanted had taken a war to provide. But I didn’t make the war, and I would have been happier without the catastrophe. In every picture in Sung’s album the war existed in a detail as tiny and momentous as a famous signature or a brace of well-known initials at the corner of a painting: the dog tag, the socks, the military haircut, the inappropriate black shoes the fellers wore with their tropical clothes, a bandage or scar, a particular kind of sunglasses, or just the fact of a farm boy’s jowl by the pouting rabbit’s cheek of a Chinese girl. In the lobby it was a smell, leather and starch and after-shave lotion, and a nameless apprehension like the memory of panic in a room with a crack on the ceiling that grows significant to the insomniac toward morning. “Saigon, Saigon,” the girls said; we didn’t talk about it, but the fellers left whispers and faces behind we could never shoo away.
And Sung’s photograph album, the size of a family Bible and bound with a steel coil, was our history.
A sky of dazzling asterisks: the Fourth of July. The fellers set off rockets and Roman candles in the garden with chilly expertness, a sequence of rippling blasts that had Dr. B. K. Lim screaming over the hedge and all the guard dogs in the neighborhood howling. The fellers ate wieners and sauerkraut, had a rough touch football game; that night everyone jumped into the pool with his clothes on.
Mr. Loy Hock Yin holding a huge Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. Fellers with napkins tucked in at the throats of their shirts. I was at the head of the table, and the feller next to me said, “How’d you get all those tattoos, Jack?” The fans were going, the table was covered with food, I had a bottle of gin and a bucket of ice beside my glass. “What I’m going to tell you is the absolute truth,” I said, and held them spellbound for an hour. At the end I showed my arm to Betty.
“What’s underneath that flower?” I asked.