‘I haven’t told them,’ I say.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Fair enough,’ says my friend Shay, who loves a sad little gymnast and gets her to load his dishwasher for him, every night of the week.
I wonder about my husband’s wife; if she too was disappointed by the smallness of her life, before it suddenly got very small indeed. I don’t know. I know that I am jealous of her, sometimes; a woman who was born twenty-five years before I was, and who is now long dead. I think that he must have loved her more than he loved me. I say this to him one morning when I wake up and find him sitting by the window in the dawn light. He looks out at the sky for a few moments.
‘She was very nice,’ he agrees, and thinks about her for a while.
‘I don’t remember her so well,’ he says finally, in his careful sing-song. ‘Je ne me rappele bien d’elle.’
I realise that I have no idea what it was to love a woman — or just to marry her — in Saigon, in the middle of the war. I have scarcely any idea what it is to love the man that I love now.
‘So tell us,’ says Shay. ‘What brought him over here?’
‘What brought him here?’
I start to laugh. Then I stop.
My husband sleeps in the afternoon. When he wakes, he folds the duvet at the bottom of the bed. He is a creature of routine. But he does not shout or cry if the duvet gets messed up again. He does not sit, as Shay’s wife might sit — weeping, at the state of the house and the destruction of all her dreams.
‘Well,’ I say carefully. ‘He always liked France. He is a Francophone.’
I talk about him some more and Shay starts to realise how old Hoa is. He does the thing men do when they think I might not be getting the ride; amused but surprisingly vicious, too. I’d fuck you.
And I smile.
My husband sleeps every afternoon, quite simply. Sometimes I wander in and out again, without noticing that he is there. I cannot hear his breathing. He might as well be a sheet of paper — a blank sheet of paper — stretched out on the bed. Then he opens his eyes, and sees me.
‘So how old is this guy, actually?’ says Shay. We are drunk, now. It has come to this.
‘Old enough,’ I say.
And he lifts his glass to that.
‘Here’s to love,’ he says.
Fifteen minutes later he is making chopping motions on the table with his fat, large hand. He says all our partners can’t be refugees or have cancer or what have you but the implication is there — the implication is there — that some day they might be, and that we will still love them, we will still be married to them, no matter what. And I can’t disagree with that. I am about to say so, but Shay takes my intake of breath as a stab at recrimination and he fights on.
By now I am almost done with Shay. I watch him and wait for the ruin of our love — the secular, ordinary, drinkers’ love we have always had for each other. He is unbearably coarse now; the texture of his skin, the big expressions on his big face. He knows nothing, he says — well, he knows very little — about the history of it all and what went on, but it is important in all of these situations, complex as they are, fucked up as they are, to know who did what. At the end of the day, he says, it is important to know what your husband did during the war.
I light another cigarette. Shay sees the look on my face, and subsides.
After which there is truculence, regret, a slow, bitter apology — each of which I have to jolly him through, because this is all my fault, after all. He is depressed now. The whole business of accusing me has worn him out.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, because he seems genuinely hurt by it all. Besides, I will never get rid of him unless I confess to something, whatever it is — the nameless thing that I have done wrong — my refusal to live in Epsom and mourn.
Which is all very well, I think, as we hug and separate outside the little café, never to see one another again. Which is all very well, I think, as I walk home to a man who can not pass an Alsatian dog without wetting himself, a man whose left foot and ankle were broken in fifteen different places; an ordinary old man from Vietnam, who snaps at me sometimes like I am a servant girl, and spends ten minutes every morning in a shoulder-stand in order to cure his piles.
Which is all very well.
I turn down rue Rataud and look up, as I always do, at one of the buildings halfway down the street. I saw a man with a gun up there once. It was in one of the corner apartments, and he was leaning over the little balcony. He pointed this large ugly pistol down the cross street. Then he swung around and pointed the gun at me. Or past me.
Those corner apartments are so beautiful; such enviable places to live. I mean, this was the 5th Arrondissement. It was the wrong place for such a thing to be happening — though there was no doubt that it was happening. It was very real. The timing was odd, and there was no soundtrack, and everything about it was too banal. I did not look up again — I did not want to attract his attention, I suppose — and in a few moments I had walked through the intersection in a very ordinary way. Down off the kerb, across the cobbles, up on to the opposite path. I did not look behind me, to check that he was pointing the thing somewhere else, or that he was gone.
I still walk down the street most evenings. And every time I do this, I think about a bullet in the back — about the fact that most of the time, it does not happen to me.
I walk home to Le Quang Hoa, thinking about his body in death; neat and beautiful on our marriage bed. I open the door and wonder if he is real. And if he is still alive.
HONEY
When she tried to think what they looked like, the women who stood in front of him at wine receptions, or at his desk, or at the door of his office, the nearest she could come up with was ‘drenched’. They stood with their arms slightly lifted from their sides, as though their fingers were dripping water. Like a childhood picture of the Princess and the Pea, when the princess arrives at the palace door; her dress a sopping sheet, and rain trickling out of her little green shoes.
Of course there would be other things going on — chat, or laughter, or the way they worked their eyes, but none of it so remarkable as this straining stillness; standing at his threshold, or placing some file quickly on his desk, or interrupting his small talk in a crowd to say, quite wordlessly, ‘Fuck me again. You must. You must fuck me again,’ because this was very clearly what was going on — or what had gone on and would not, at a guess, continue to go on, any more.
It was bad for business, in a mild sort of way. Catherine was a client, after all — but these women ignored her; they just couldn’t wrench their heads around to be introduced. And she did feel herself to be elbowed aside: ‘You must not speak to her, whoever she is. You must fuck me instead. Now. Any time.’
It happened three, perhaps four times, in the few years she dealt with him. Mostly Catherine was amused by it, though she did find the women really very rude. Each of them so beautiful and distinctive. Of course they didn’t last. And she might have felt aggrieved on their behalf — for the way they were pushed out while he continued to make his way up — were it not for their ambition, which was so open, almost livid. Catherine had never slept with anyone for gain, in her life. If you could call it gain.
She wondered if she was missing something. She felt so ordinary beside them, fuddy and intellectual. There was too much pleasure, for her, in the way he just looked at them steadily, and carefully spoke, and then turned back to her to say, ‘Sorry, sorry. Go on.’