The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach

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СКАЧАТЬ it was like being back in that helicopter months before, hearing the bullets like tiny hammers beneath her and wishing she could run.

       Then don’t go.

      Marc would tell her this late at night as they lay in bed. It was his answer to any hint of worry or doubt, any concern at all about things that happened—the chopper being hit, the awful night on the search-and-destroy mission. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything. Or she wasn’t supposed to admit it.

      But I want to go, she said. She didn’t say that it was he who had woken her with his restless audible dreams, that she would not be up late at night worrying if he hadn’t startled her in the night with his voice. When he talked in his sleep he did not sound like himself. The first time she heard him she was frightened, waking momentarily to the thought that she was elsewhere, with a stranger, listening to a voice that seemed wholly detached from the man beside her.

      He kept whiskey by the bed, always a glass of it, or a mug or paper cup. He took a long swallow now, then searched the ashtray, using a penlight so he could see. I’ve got a jay in here somewhere. Hand me those matches. Look, you go back to sleep. You’ll feel better later. It’s always worse at night.

       What is worse?

      She looked at him slyly. She wanted him to admit he had the same fears as she, though it would do no good even if he did. He shook his head, pushing himself up, so that his back leaned against the wall. He had a pillow on his lap, the ashtray on the pillow. Everything, he said. He might have said more, about how the dreams rise with you in the morning, that you eventually find there is no rest, but he did not. He sat in bed and smoked diligently until she fell asleep. In the morning he told her it was nice that she slept so well. He told her he was jealous.

      Like everything in Vietnam, their relationship seemed to be on fast forward. They’d met for the second time at the party, and after that night he’d disappeared up north again and she was forced to put him from her mind. His face, which she had known from television when she used to watch from her apartment in Chicago as he broadcast from Vietnam, was now part of her daily thoughts. She associated him not with a network but with that bunker in Con Thien, that hotel room where they stood by the window, an electric storm, a particular song that kept being played on the record player. Back when she watched him as part of a news report, it had seemed as if he was broadcasting from a world far away and unreachable. Now it felt as if the television image of him was from another world, a ghost of him that visited the living rooms of people across America. She thought of him altogether too often, and then one day he arrived unannounced at her door, telling her he knew a very good restaurant, and asking if she had time for a bite.

      She wasn’t all that shocked to see him. He’d somehow managed to get a cable to her, letting her know when he’d be back in town and asking if it would be all right to get in touch. Apparently, get in touch meant come and fetch her from her room.

      It’s three in the afternoon, she said.

       Should I come back later?

       No.

       Am I allowed in? Or are we going to stand here in the hall?

      We’re going to—She didn’t know what they were going to do. She had a page of copy in her hand. Her fingers were stained from fixing typewriter ribbon that had gotten twisted. She wondered if there was black ink on her face. She wanted to appear bold, decisive, to be someone he would take seriously, who could surprise him. We’re going to your hotel, she said. I prefer it.

      He tried not to show his delight. He looked around him—at the peeling walls, the scuffed floorboards with tiny holes throughout from some kind of insect damage, at the bare bulbs and places on the ceilings where water from long ago leaks, had stained the paint. I think I agree with you, he said casually.

      She would have changed her clothes but there was nowhere in the room to undress except in the bathroom and Son had crowded photographs in various stages of development there. She ended up brushing her hair and checking her face with a hand mirror.

      I didn’t know you were a photographer, he said.

       I’m not.

      He indicated all the black-and-whites clipped along the walls.

      She told him they belonged to Son. I think you know him, she said. Now his expression changed and so she added quickly. It isn’t what you think.

       Where is he now?

      Son? She thought for a moment. I have no idea.

       He just pops in when he feels like it?

      She smiled. She didn’t like the way the conversation was going. He doesn’t have anywhere to live. No money. He sleeps on the floor, on a mat. I know it must seem very odd.

      Very. He took her hand. You’ll need an umbrella, he said.

      He wasn’t especially tall but in her recently purchased flat canvas sandals he seemed so to Susan. He guided her as they walked along the sidewalk, which smelled like a mixture of overripe fruit and urine. He told her about his most recent story. He offered her a cigarette. Whenever the conversation strayed from the subject of the war—what was being said, where he’d been, descriptions of the men in the company he’d gone out with, or who he’d recently spoken to from an embassy—he seemed all of a sudden nervous. She let him talk, learning from him but feeling, too, that this is what she could expect, a wildly attractive tutor, an alluring purveyor of knowledge about the war.

      Where are you from? she asked.

      New York, he said quickly. Then told her how he’d grown to prefer Danang to Saigon, how he really didn’t like it down here any more.

      You’re married, aren’t you? Her question, injected into the conversation as it was, made him lose his train of thought.

      Currently, he answered.

      She didn’t mind. Not at first. In the circumstances in which they found themselves, it didn’t make all that much difference.

      Marc was what Son politely called “not so cautious,” by which he meant the guy had a death wish. Susan’s and his was a misguided amorphous, sprawling kind of relationship with no obvious direction or end in sight. In other words, perfect for the time being. They met between stories, holing up in his hotel or anywhere else they could find, disappearing for a day and then emerging again, rushing out to get another story. It was exhausting and addictive. And among many other things, it had the effect on Susan of knocking away whatever remnants of common sense and perspective she had. She went out on more missions. She took more risks.

      I’m thinking you might get killed soon, Son said one night. They were sharing a meal at the Eskimo, sitting shoulder to shoulder, eating off each other’s plates and talking about something else entirely—how the Americans had brought over enormous pigs from the States in an effort to increase the size of Vietnamese pigs, a silly operation that had resulted in no demonstrable gain as the smaller pigs ran away from the atrocious, slow monsters from the West. In the middle of laughing, Son had suddenly gone quiet and then issued his concern. If something happens to you—he began.

      Nothing will, she interrupted. That was on the eve of an assault mission they covered. СКАЧАТЬ