The man with his eyes closed is called Le Quang Hoa.
There are marks on his body. Sometimes he flinches away from things — dogs, of course, and sudden shadows, but also things that I cannot understand: the sound of ice in his glass of water will cause him to flicker, and, for the smallest moment, shut down. I am alert to these signs. I do not look for them, or fear them, but I do recognise them, and I get up and take the glass out of his hand. That is all. He does not need me to do this. He lived alone in Paris for many years, before he met me.
But I take the glass away and I set it down. I wonder what that clinking sound does to his head. And when we make love, I am rarely inventive: I do not exult, or cause pain. I do not take the ice out of the bedside glass, for example, and run it down his spine.
This is what happens when love intersects with history. This is the distance you keep. Or it is the distance the Vietnamese keep. Or old men. Or it is the way my husband and I think about distance and tenderness — it is just the way we are. Who knows? We will have no children. We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.
For the last few years we have lived off the rue Mouffetard. Every morning, when I go to work, my husband walks around to the municipal pool with his towel rolled under his arm. I think of him in the modern, blue water, swimming without a splash. He is like the old ladies you see on the French coast, who paddle out in their sunglasses and hairdos, and paddle back again, gossiping, like so many bodiless heads.
Shay gives in and lunges for the packet of Marlboro Lights. He fusses one to his mouth, and groans, long and deep. Then, when he has fully repented, he lights the match.
‘Tastes fucking awful,’ he says.
‘Well, don’t.’
But he doesn’t stop. And now that the evening is unleashed, I ask him about his wife.
‘How’s Maria?’
‘Oh. She’s up and down,’ he says.
‘Right.’
Because ‘up and down’ is Irish for anything at all — from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about it, a psychotic is more usually ‘not quite herself’.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The moving around doesn’t help. We went up to Epsom, to head office, and they talked about — well, they talked about me going to Germany actually, but I didn’t think she’d be able for it. It was a tough one to turn down. Of course, the kids were just getting settled too, in their schools.’
I roll the ash off the top of my cigarette and keep nodding. I do love Shay. He has always had a large, and broken, heart. He is the kind of guy who would turn his pockets out in the street, to show he had nothing left to give. And here he is again, flinging his poor soul on to a café table for me; throwing it down — this old rag — because it is all he has.
‘I know it’s my fault. Or it’s the job’s fault. But I still love her, you know.’
‘Well of course you do.’
‘She wants to get back to her singing.’
‘Oh? Right.’
‘Well, that’s what she was doing before.’
Was it? I remember Maria — a tiny, pretty woman — we met once and she hated me, on sight. She was very keen to tell me how she trained as a gymnast, as I recall, but I don’t remember any singing. I’m sure Shay is right. I am sure she is a singer. I am sure she is a famous singer disguised as a wife, and that it is all Shay’s fault for thwarting her, and shrinking her life. I remember their wedding — her compact little waist under his baggy hand. I think about her doing back flips at the age of nine.
‘She’s really good,’ he says. ‘She’s brilliant. But it’s not something you can just —’
And he lets the sentence drop.
It is five minutes to six. Back in the apartment, my husband has cooked, and decanted, and cooked up again, a beef broth for noodle soup. He won’t wait for me to come home. He will pour it, quite soon, and slurp it down. After which, if I am still not back, he will switch on the TV. He likes science fiction: he is especially fond of Xena: Warrior Princess. If there is none of this stuff to watch, he will sit and read from a selection of medical books he has, also quack medical books; pausing occasionally to push at a spot on his abdomen, or to flex and examine his toes.
Five streets away, I touch the back of Shay’s big hand and say, ‘It’s what happens.’
Shay looks at my fingertips, lying there. Then he lifts his large head and looks at me, like, What would I know about it? What would I know about ‘what happens’?
‘That feeling that you’re running out of road. It just hits women quicker. I mean, when they have kids, it hits them. That’s all. When they have kids.’
‘The thing I like about you,’ says Shay, ‘is you tell it like it is. “You get old, you get fat, it all turns to shit, you die.”’
‘Yeah well.’
So now it is my fault — the fact that Shay’s wife will never get on the radio, to croon her bedsit jazz. I am the one who is standing in her way.
‘It’s a very particular thing,’ he says. ‘Someone else’s dreams. It’s not something you can control.’
My husband was born in 1943. In the course of his lifetime, he survived invasion by the Japanese, the French and the American armies. At a guess, his family not only survived these occupations, they did quite well out of them. Hoa taught at the French lycée in Saigon. He was married during what we call the Vietnam War, and he had two sons. One of his sons lives over the border in Laos, and the other does not want to see his father again. When he was a young man, Hoa thought that Paris was the centre of the universe. After three years in a government re-education camp, he had no thoughts about Paris at all.
‘I got married,’ I say, suddenly. ‘Did I tell you?’
‘Christ!’ says Shay. ‘No, you did not tell me. You certainly did not tell me.’
He looks at me with great excitement. Then something drains from the back of his eyes.
The thing Shay actually likes about me — the thing they all liked about me — is that I didn’t want to marry them. I didn’t even want to fall in love. As far as I was concerned, you slept with someone or you didn’t. It was quite simple. Men really like that; or they think they do. But the only person who understood it — and perfectly — is my husband, who took me by the hand, one ordinary evening, and led me into the next room.
‘We only did it for the visa.’
This is a terrible betrayal. It is not even true.
‘So tell us,’ says Shay. But I have already told him too much. So I make a little story out of it: about my work with refugees, and how we met over a table spread with photographs and chopped-up text and sticks of glue. I could say that the photographs on the table were of this or that victim, but that there was nothing of the victim about Hoa, though I could feel, as I stood beside him, the fact of his pain and the way he transcended his pain. But I don’t say this, because Shay will think I am some kind of pervert. And perhaps I am.
He is looking at me now, smiling with a slight and social disgust. He doesn’t quite know what to say. Then he comes over all Irish and asks what they think of it ‘back home’. Well, I think it is none of their business, actually. My mother died when I was six years old, which means that we are a more than usually fucked-up family; more than usually restrained.