The Time in Between (16 page)

Charles hesitated, then said, “Eighteen.”

Elaine considered this. “I was ten when I first heard about it. I remember things. Or maybe I think I remember. The television reports. The images. That little girl running down the road screaming. The helicopters lifting off of roofs.” She touched his arm.

“I saw that photo,” Charles said. “The one of you with your horse.”

“Albany. I was older there.”

“Did you know Jack already?”

She nodded. “I did.”

“You had a good life.”

“You mean spoiled.”

He said he didn’t mean that. He said that there were times when he wished his own children could have had more.

She asked him then about his children and he gave her the bare facts of his life. Sara, the mountain, the twins, Ada. He said that he had just talked with Ada the week before and that hearing her voice from such a great distance had carved out a space inside him. “Maybe it was her worry for me. I don’t know.” He paused and then said, “We used to go duck hunting together. She didn’t like to shoot very much but she always said if she was going to eat the duck, she might as well kill it. Not a hypocrite, that one.”

“You’re lucky,” Elaine said. “I can’t get anything out of Jane. Sometimes she’ll talk to her father. Never to me. I think she’s afraid that she
is
me. Or will be me. And she loves Jack. I remember my own father, waiting for him to come home from work. The smell of him, something like ink, the feel of his suit jacket, the way it hung like a real person across the back of the chair. Sometimes I would wear one of his jackets around the house.” Elaine folded her hands and slipped her feet out of her sandals. “I don’t eat duck,” she said.

The heat of the sun had pushed Charles down into himself and her words floated about, here and there, landing, slipping away, returning. He thought she might be waiting for him to jump so that she could catch him.

She said that she and Jack would be taking the children down south to Dalat for a two-week holiday. They’d planned this a while ago. Then she said, “You get to go home soon.”

He shrugged and said he had no immediate plans. He had a three-month visa.

“So, two more months,” she said. Her voice was brighter. She stood and pulled him upward and hooked an arm into his as they walked through the grounds.

Charles said that he didn’t know much history and he would be hard-pressed to explain why the Citadel existed. Elaine said that if Jack were present he would give a running commentary on wars fought and each emperor’s most important lover and the succession of rulers. She said that she preferred it with Charles; she liked the absence of noise. “Jack likes to trample on other people’s space.”

They walked along the gravel lanes into the grassy areas and up onto a plateaulike structure that used to be a courtyard. It was a peaceful place in a state of disrepair. Further on, they found an old man working in the sun, refashioning clay carvings of swords and cannons. They stood and watched him work. A young girl sat beside him drawing in the mud with her finger.

Elaine asked Charles why he was sad. What secrets did he have?

He was quiet for a while and then said that his secrets, if he had any, were small and unimportant. “I don’t know that I am any sadder than other people. Than you, for instance.”

“I’m not sad,” she said. “I refuse to be. I think you are mistaking sadness for longing. I was imagining your caboose. How romantic it must be.” Then, before he could respond, she said that she had had enough of Hue and she thought she might return to Danang before Jack. By train. “We could travel together,” she said. “If you like.”

Charles turned, looked at her for a moment, and said that she should do what she wanted.

“You know what I want,” she said.

“Come with me, then,” he said, and he was immediately sorry. He felt he had nothing to offer her.

“That’s better.” She took his hand and held it.

ON THE TRAIN, COMING DOWN THROUGH THE PASS FROM HUE, Charles said that when he had first arrived in Vietnam he’d come down by train through Hue and on to Danang, and so he’d taken this leg of the trip before. He remembered a young girl on the train, with two birds and her grandmother. The girl had chattered. The birds were noisy. The grandmother was affectionate and seemed happy. Charles said that at that point everything felt normal and good and he’d been quite hopeful. He hadn’t known what would happen.

Elaine looked at him. “What I like best is figuring you out.”

Charles said, “The first time I saw you I thought that you were beautiful but I also thought that you were very self-centered.”

She said she was. “Always have been, in some ways.”

“And that you loved your children more than you loved him.”

“You saw that?”

“I did.”

She said, “I imagine standing at the edge of a rift, and far below there is a deep gorge. You are at one edge, I am at the other and attempting to cross a narrow and treacherous bridge.” Elaine seemed pleased by this image. She sat up and asked, “How far am I on the bridge? Near the middle or just at the beginning?”

They were seated across from a girl who wore tight white corduroy pants. She had a round face with a jag of red lipstick, and an older man, with a thin mustache, was talking to her as if he had hopes of something more than conversation. The girl’s hair was long and dark and Charles was reminded of his daughter Ada.

Charles took one of Elaine’s hands and held it. Her knuckles, the sharpness against his palm. He said, “What you want, I can’t give you.”

She turned quickly and said, “A few nights with Charles Boatman. That’s all I want. I don’t expect anything else.”

“You know that’s not what you want.”

Elaine stood and said she was going for a cigarette. She slipped by Charles, stepped out into the aisle, and walked toward the end of the car. The girl in the facing seat was watching. She probably didn’t understand English, but she was watching and Charles was aware of her curiosity, of how she feigned sleep and shifted in her seat.

Charles rose and joined Elaine, who was standing by the open door of the car. The greenery rushed by and fell toward the ocean. Elaine turned to Charles and began to finger the buttons on his blazer. Then she dropped her cigarette on the floor and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. She put her head against his chest. “Oh,” she said. Then she lifted her chin and kissed him on the mouth, tentatively at first, then deeply. Charles kissed her back. After, she stood hugging herself and said, “I’m shivering.” Far below them the water was green and azure and white and then blue. “Come,” he said and guided her back to their seats, and they sat and after a while she leaned her head against his shoulder and fell asleep. He wanted to wake her, but he didn’t. The girl across from them was still watching.

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN DANANG. THE station was cool and wet. A family of six was gathered near the last car, all dressed in formal wear. Elaine held Charles’s arm as they walked out onto the platform. She said that she wanted to see him. He could come by for dinner that night.

He felt the pressure of her hand and he lifted his head to look past her and he said, “I’m not sure.”

She did not respond, simply hailed a taxi and then pressed her cheek against his and said, “Charles.” Then she got into the taxi and was gone.

He took a cyclo to the hotel. He could still feel where her hand had touched him. Later, in his room, he lay in his underwear on the bed. He watched the ceiling fan slowly turn and recalled her expression on the train as she pushed her head against his chest and said, “Oh.” After she had kissed him and drawn away, he had seen the wet inside of her lower lip and her perfectly straight teeth and the flash of one silver filling. He fell into a light sleep and woke to the ring of the phone and the clear image of himself as a dentist bending toward her and extracting a flawed tooth. Above him the fan still turned. The phone rang and rang. And then stopped.

Much later, he sat up. Poured himself whiskey and drank. Then he dressed and went down the stairs and out into the street and walked toward the harbor. He followed Bach Dang Street till it curved with the waterfront and then he turned and walked back, stopping at a restaurant that extended out over the water where he had a beer and watched the lights of the boats in the harbor, the ferries passing by.

After he had paid he left the restaurant and followed the walkway, the water on his left now. A strong wind was blowing and bits of garbage blew across his path. For a moment he paused at the edge of the harbor to light a cigarette, and as his hands cupped the match he saw the corpse of a dog, hugely distended, moving back and forth with the waves. Footsteps behind him. He turned as three men in suits passed by. Charles stepped back. He heard the men’s sudden laughter and the wind and the clicking of the palm trees. The bloated moon. A hole had opened up before him.

In his room, with trembling hands, he took out a small pipe and a package of tinfoil, crumbled bits of hashish into the pipe, and lit it and drew. He lay on the bed and ascended with the twisting smoke, up, past the swirling fan, beyond the ceiling and into a night sky hurled through with celestial beings that blinked and disappeared and then blinked again.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING THE HOTEL CLERK HANDED CHARLES an envelope. Charles folded it into his pocket and went across the street to the café and ordered a coffee. Then he took out the envelope and opened it. It was from Elaine. She’d written, “Charles. Last night during that fierce wind a lamp standard was knocked down just outside our house and a loose wire danced across the pavement. It was all chaos and pandemonium. And the largest moon ever. Over there. Don’t be so sure that you know what is at stake here. I can look after myself. You know where I am. Elaine.”

Charles laid the note on the table. Her handwriting was lovely, black looping threads like the strands at the back of her neck when she pulled her hair up. All chaos and pandemonium. He wondered if she was aware of her own perfection. Such ease with herself and the spaces she moved through, the effortlessness of language, the expectation that she should get what she wanted. This frightened him. Outside, on the street, a boy walked by carrying his shoeshine case and Charles thought of Hanoi, of sitting by Hoan Kiem Lake and of having his shoes shined, while above him in a blue sky a balloon had lifted into the air. The night before he had had a vivid dream in which a man whom he thought looked like Dang Tho was standing and staring across a river. If Charles was in the dream at all, it had been as an observer, but he had woken shaking, his mouth dry. He put the note back into his pocket and left the café and found himself at the airline office, where he bought an open ticket for Hanoi.

The next day he rented a motorcycle and rode up past Monkey Mountain and walked down to the empty beach that curved between two points of rock. In a grove of small pines, he sat on his jacket and watched the fishermen out at sea. Several times over the next week, he returned to that same beach. Once, a young soldier approached him and said, in broken English, that he must pay. Charles said that he did not understand. The boy was carrying a machine gun and he shifted it and stared out toward the sea and then turned back to Charles and repeated that payment was needed to sit on the beach. “One thousand dong,” the soldier said. Charles considered this and shook his head. The soldier moved a black boot through the sand and then turned away to walk up the beach.

That afternoon, returning to his hotel, Charles saw Elaine step through the lobby doors and out onto the street. Her back was to him and she walked purposefully, a black bag swinging from her left hand. She turned the corner and disappeared. In the hotel the desk clerk handed him a piece of yellow paper, folded once. He climbed the stairs to his room. Inside, he sat down and unfolded the paper. She wrote, “I came by and, again, you were gone. Where are you, Charles? Why are you doing this? We are old enough to follow our feelings and I sense that you have certain feelings. I have no patience for games, if that is what you intend.” She said that they would be leaving for Dalat the following morning. “This is childish,” she wrote.

He put the note down and then picked it up and reread it. Then he took a piece of blank paper and responded. He said that his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Everly, had looping handwriting just like hers. And in the early afternoons, during quiet reading, when the sun poured through the venetian blinds, dust motes floated around Miss Everly’s head. He said that only recently had he become aware of the mercilessness of time, of its cruel push. “I’m sorry, Elaine,” he wrote. And then he signed his name.

He put the note into an envelope and wrote her name on the outside. Then he went down to the lobby and asked the desk clerk to deliver the envelope to Mrs. Gouds and he described the house and the street it was on. He gave the clerk a sum of money and asked, “Do you understand?” The clerk said that he understood. He knew the house, and he knew the American family that lived there. The letter was safe.

Charles spent the next days wandering the city. Once, he found himself in her neighborhood and he went by her house. The windows were shuttered and the front door was padlocked. One evening in a small restaurant at the north end of the city Thanh walked in and sat with him and drank iced coffee. The night was humid. Moths banged against the glass of the lanterns that hung above the tables.

“You have been absent,” Thanh said.

Charles said that he had been walking, and then sleeping, and then walking some more. “I saw Dang Tho in a dream,” he said. “He was melancholy. He was standing and looking across a deep river. There was no view of the other side.” He shrugged and said that it was, in the end, just a dream.

“Yes, but dreams can warn us,” Thanh said. “Or indicate something.” He looked at Charles and said, “You are sad.”

“You sound like Elaine Gouds,” Charles said. “She says the same thing.”

Thanh offered him a ride back to the hotel but Charles said he would walk. He was slightly drunk, but this time he did not lose his way. On a corner close to the hotel a prostitute in magenta tights and a blue skirt teetered toward him and called out, “How many days?” Then she said, “You have hunger?” and she pointed at her legs. She was close to him and he saw her dark eyes, the light powder on her cheeks and forehead, the strap of her silver purse against her wrist. In the distance, leaning against the wall of the hotel, a boy was smoking and watching. Charles led the girl back to the hotel. He was aware, as they walked, of the boy following them. They passed through the lobby, where the night clerk, lying on the vinyl couch by the fish tank, raised his head and observed Charles and the girl and then put his head back down.