“Do you like jazz?” he asked.
“What’s jazz?” she said.
“What we’re listening to,” he said.
She listened.
Gerry Mulligan.
“Yes,” she said and nodded somewhat vaguely. “In Vietnam, there was only rock,” she said. “The streets of Saigon were full of rock music. I hate rock,” she said. “I hate raccoons, too. Raccoons look like big rats, don’t you think?”
“Only down here,” he said. “Up north they look cute and furry.”
“Perhaps I should move up north,” she said.
The word perhaps came out somewhat slurred.
“Lots of good cities up north,” he said.
She nodded again and then fell silent, as if seriously considering the move. “My father hated soldiers,” she said abruptly. The word soldiers also seemed a little thick. “Which meant he hated all men,” she said. “Because in Vietnam, that’s all there was. Soldiers. Our soldiers, their soldiers, your soldiers.” Having a lot of trouble with that word soldiers. “My father wouldn’t let a soldier come near me. He once got into a fight with an American corporal who smiled at me. That’s all he did was smile. My father actually hit the man. My father, can you imagine? This skinny little man, hitting this big, husky soldier. The soldier laughed.”
Soldier again. Tough word to wrap her tongue around.
“Could we go to my apartment, please?” she asked.
They drove in silence.
The sound of Mulligan’s saxophone flooded the automobile. Matthew was thinking he’d love to know how to play saxophone like that.
“I was afraid of them,” Mai Chim said. “Soldiers. My father taught me to fear them. He said they would rape me. They raped many Vietnamese girls, the soldiers. I was afraid they would rape me, too.”
Everything that goes around comes around, he thought.
Vietnamese girls being raped by American soldiers.
An American woman being raped by three Vietnamese men.
“But I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
“Good,” he said.
But he was thinking, Not so good. He was thinking she’d had too much to drink, and if what she’d told him earlier was true, he didn’t want to be the one who made love to her for the first time, not while she was drunk or close to it. Oscar Peterson’s piano burst into the rented Ford like a mortar explosion. He thought suddenly of Chicago and the backseat of his father’s steamy Oldsmobile where a sixteen-year-old girl named Joy Patterson lay back with her eyes closed and her breath heavy with the smell of booze, and her legs spread, either really drunk or feigning drunkenness while he explored the ribbed tops of her nylon stockings and the soft white thighs above them, and drew back his trembling hand when at last it touched the silken secret patch of her undefended panties. Pulled it back with the certain knowledge that if Joy was drunk, then this was rape.
If he made love to Mai Chim tonight, it would be rape.
Everything that goes around comes around.
They had reached the condo she lived in on Sabal Key. Zoning restrictions out here, since changed, had kept the condos at a maximum five-story height. You could actually see the ocean beyond them. He pulled into a space marked visitors and turned off the ignition and the lights.
“Will you come up for a night hat?” she asked.
This was not inebriation, this was merely an unfamiliarity with the language. And where there is no common language, she’d said, there is suspicion. And mistakes. Many mistakes. On both sides. He wondered if he was about to make a mistake now. But he thought of something else she’d said, the last time he’d seen her, Is that why you want to go to bed with me? Because I’m Asian? And he wondered about that, too, while the question hung between them in the silence of the rented car, Will you come up for a night hat?, and he thought. No, Mai Chim, I don’t think I’ll come up for a night hat, not tonight while you’re feeling all that booze and maybe not any night because yes, I think maybe that’s why I do want to go to bed with you, only because you’re Asian and I’ve never been to bed with an Asian. And that’s no reason to go to bed with anyone, not if I plan to look at myself in the mirror tomorrow morning.
“I have an early day tomorrow,” he said. “Can I take a rain check?”
A puzzled look crossed her face. She was unfamiliar with the expression.
“Rain check,” he said, and smiled. “That means some other time.”
She kept looking into his face.
“I’ll walk you up,” he said gently.
He came around to the other side of the car, opened the door for her, and then offered her his hand. She came out of the car unsteadily, looking a trifle disoriented and somewhat surprised to find herself home already. He put his arm around her to support her. She leaned into him.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
At the front door, she searched in her handbag for a key, inserted it in the lock, turned to him, looked up into his face again, and said, “Will there really be some other time, Matthew?”
“I hope so,” he said.
And wondered if he meant it.
Warren’s car was sitting at the curb outside his house. Warren was sitting behind the wheel, asleep. The window on the driver’s side was down. Matthew reached in and gently touched his shoulder. Warren jumped up with a start, his hand going under his jacket to a shoulder holster. A very large pistol suddenly appeared in his hand.
“Hey!” Matthew shouted, and backed off.
“Sorry, you scared me.”
“I scared you, huh?”
Warren bolstered the pistol and got out of the car. They went up the front walk together. Matthew unlocked the door and snapped on the lights.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
“A little scotch, please, no ice,” Warren said. “Can I use your phone a minute?”
“Sure. On the wall there.”
Matthew looked at the clock. A quarter past ten. He wondered if he should call Mai Chim, apologize or something. But for what? At the kitchen counter, Warren was already dialing. Matthew went to the dropleaf bar, lowered the front panel, and poured some Black Label into a low glass. He wondered if he felt like a martini. He wondered if he’d done the right thing tonight. Warren was talking to someone named Fiona. Matthew wondered if she was black. Fiona? Could be Irish. Fiona was an Irish name, wasn’t it? He wondered if Warren was sleeping with her. If she was Irish, if she was white, was Warren sleeping with her only because she was white? He wondered. Back in Chicago…
Back in Chicago, in his high-school English class, there’d been a gloriously beautiful black girl named Ophelia Blair. And he’d taken her to the movies one night, and for ice-cream sodas later, and then he’d led her into his father’s multipurpose Oldsmobile, and he’d driven her to a deserted stretch of road near the football field and plied her with kisses, his hand fumbling under her skirt, pleading with her to let him “do it” because he’d never in his life “done it” with a black girl.
Never mind that at the age of seventeen he’d never done it with a white girl, either. His supreme argument was that she was black and he was white and oh what a glorious adventure awaited them if only she’d allow him, a latter-day Stanley exploring Africa, to lower her panties and spread her lovely legs. It never occurred to him that he was reducing her to anonymity, denying her very Ophelia-ness, equating her with any other black girl in the world, expressing desire for her only because she was black and not merely herself, whoever that might have been, the person he had not taken the slightest amount of trouble to know. He was baffled when she pulled down her skirt and tucked her breasts back into her brassiere and buttoned her blouse, and asked him very softly to take her home, please. He asked her out a dozen times after that, and she always refused politely.