The Turk Who Loved Apples (13 page)

Not quite realizing what I was getting us into, I also uncorked a bottle of local red wine I'd bought in town. And as we ate and drank, I could now see that Cassady was really blitzed. When I added salt to my rice, he sneered, saying it was terrible for you. I wanted to explain about the relationship between salt and flavor, but I kept my mouth shut, opening it only to drink my own wine as fast as possible, so Cassady wouldn't get worse.

Finally, we left the campground and, in the dark, started walking up the island's smoothly paved main road toward the party, whose hosts Cassady said he knew. I was dreading our arrival: Was he really friends with them? Or would we find ourselves in an even more awkward situation?

The awkward situation found us. Halfway to the party, bright lights appeared behind us—bright lights that turned suddenly blue and red. A police cruiser. The cop, tall, blond, and clean-cut, got out and asked us for identification. Cassady had none.

“Where are you from?” the officer asked him.

“Right here,” he said proudly. “I built that road! Where are you from, ha?”

He ignored Cassady's question and said, “You were weaving all over the road.” It was true. Cassady couldn't walk straight, and it was partly my fault. “Have you two been drinking?”

“No!” Cassady said, sounding insulted. He turned to me, his eyes pleading for backup. He looked scared—his swaggering confidence drained.

I couldn't lie, but I couldn't indict Cassady, either. “I drank some wine with dinner,” I said.

“Who are you?” the officer asked me. “What are you doing here?”

I gave him the short version: on vacation, island-hopping, camping. No mention of the
Times
. Easier that way.

“Okay, you can go on,” he said to me, handing back my driver's license. I wasn't drunk. “Stick to the side of the road.”

“I'm not leaving without him,” I said, although all I really wanted was to leave without him. Cassady was beginning to be a burden, but I couldn't treat him like one, even if it meant getting arrested alongside him. “I'm not leaving without my friend.”

“Fine,” said the cop. “You stand there.” He placed me in front of his car, with its high beams directly in my face, then led Cassady behind the vehicle. I couldn't see or hear a damn thing.

I stood there, imagining the worst: Cassady locked up, Cassady beaten up, his triumphant return home to Pender wrecked because he'd happened to run into me, a charming enabler with a video camera. And I wished, for a moment, that none of it had happened, that I could have just gone on my way, a lone traveler neither seeking nor needing companionship. But that, I knew, was a fantasy.

Ever since I can remember, I've been good at making friends, usually without consciously trying to. As a little kid, of course, I was willing to be friends with anyone who liked
Star Wars
figures or Legos; that was enough for me. But at the same time, my family was
also moving about, from Amherst to Brighton, England, back to Amherst, down to Williamsburg. And so I was, perhaps slightly more often than most children, the new kid, always introducing myself in a fresh environment and trying to find other people who played
Ultima
on the Apple II or wanted to stay up all night watching horror movies and eating Domino's pizza. Lots of people, I bet, look back on their childhoods and see themselves at the center of multiple, ostensibly antagonistic groups—jocks and nerds, rebels and preps, blacks and whites, and Latinos and Asians. This, too, was me, though not because I specifically positioned myself between them but because I didn't care all that much who my friends were. As long as there was a single point of commonality, we could get along. I didn't ask much: Be available to hang out. Laugh at stuff. Don't beat me up. (I was short, nerdy, and accustomed to harassment.) Yup, that was about it.

The unforeseen consequence of this is that while I made friends easily, I also had a lot of crappy friends—kids who might have shared my nominal interests, like skateboarding, but who too often took advantage of my craving for companionship (and my access to the family car). Some of those high school friendships ended in acrimonious breakups, and one of them in an actual fistfight (if you can call my getting punched once in the jaw a “fight”). Meanwhile, I spent less time with certain friends who were kinder people but less enthused about skateboarding, more into playing guitar.

Over the years, I've come to realize that these sorts of friendships are normal for kids. Stuck in the same classroom, the same high school, the same small town, your choices are limited, superficial, not really choices at all. Circumstances force you into friendships that, given the options of a wide world, you might otherwise never have forged. If you're lucky, the friendships can last, maturing as the friends themselves mature. But they don't have to, and that's okay.

The wider world, however, presents its own challenges.

I
f you are alone in a strange new place, where you don't speak the language, don't know anyone, and aren't sure why you're there to begin with, the last album you want to listen to, over and over and over again, is
Dummy
, by the English trip-hop group Portishead. With its slow, rumbling beats, oddly looped samples, and psychedelic instrumentation (heavy on theremin, supplemented by orchestral strings), Portishead's music evokes a world of isolation, longing, regret, and misery—all of it made unutterably sweet by the spooky-sexy voice of Beth Gibbons.

“Please, could you stay awhile, to share my grief,” she pleads on “Wandering Star.” “For it's such a lovely day to have to always feel this way.” On “Strangers,” she asks, “Did you realize no one can see inside your view? Did you realize for why this sight belongs to you?” And at the end of “It Could Be Sweet,” as the bass line thrums quietly on and the electronic keyboard repeats a tranquil melody, Gibbons lets out a final, nearly inaudible sigh that seems to express both the bliss of desire and a certain variety of resignation, the understanding that desire may never be fulfilled but that the desire itself is enough, and maybe, in the end, more delicious than its fulfillment.

For months, Portishead's music echoed in my top-floor room at the Lucy Hotel, matching, assuaging, and amplifying my own deep loneliness. I owned not more than six CDs—quirky mid-'90s bands such as Cibo Matto and Stereolab—which I played on a boom box purchased with a fair chunk of the money I'd brought from home, but it was
Dummy
that provided the soundtrack for my Vietnam life. In the morning, it reminded me I'd woken up alone. After lunch, it reminded me I'd eaten alone. And at night, under the thin covers of my bed, it told me solitude was all there ever was, ever would be. “And this loneliness,” Gibbons sang, “it just won't leave me alone.”

I was not, however, entirely friendless. At the Saigon Café, where I'd drunk my first beer on ice, I met Dave Danielson, a squinty-eyed Californian who ran an English as a Foreign Language school called
ELT Lotus. Dave had been a professional skateboarder back in the 1970s, when long-haired dudes carved surf-style across soft SoCal embankments, and I think I trusted him because we shared a four-wheeled past. Also, because I had an EFL certificate, he gave me a job at Lotus, which contracted with companies to teach English to their employees. I would be teaching an introductory course at AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and chemical concern, earning $15 an hour—about a week's wages for the average Vietnamese worker.

On my first day of work, a Friday, I set off for AkzoNobel by bicycle, and promptly got lost. Maybe not lost exactly, but I couldn't find the damn street the company was supposed to be on. It was hot, and I began to sweat in the dense traffic. Then it began to rain. I was fifteen minutes late, at least, and had no mobile phone to call the company or the school. Suddenly, the traffic parted, and there was squinty Dave on his moped. He pulled up next to me, asked what the hell was going on, and guided me to AkzoNobel, where my sweaty, scruffy appearance (tuck in my shirt? Never!) would turn out, over the coming months, not to be a function of the weather.

That night, Dave took me out to celebrate, getting me drunker—on sour BGI beer—than I'd ever been in my short life. Thankfully, I remember little but the hangover, which lasted the entire weekend, and I'm not sure I ever forgave him.

But meeting Dave proved useful, for he introduced me to another Lotus teacher, Adrian, who was dating the owner of the Bodhi Tree, a not terribly good Pham Ngu Lao café where expatriates congregated. Among them were two I thought I might be able to get along with: Jed, a sharp academic on a Ford Foundation grant, and Ted, like me a wannabe writer, but so argumentative, so New Yorky, so . . .
Jewish
(like me) that I instantly resented his presence in this country. He, I knew, would be my competition.

Among Jed, Ted, Adrian, and their other friends, I was a peripheral figure—literally. Though I knew Adrian slightly from work, I wasn't yet all that friendly with him, so I tended to sit one table over
from the gang, hoping I'd overhear a conversation I could participate in. Occasionally, I did; often, I didn't. These people, I sensed, would never be true friends.

But this was Vietnam, and I preferred to make the acquaintance of actual Vietnamese people. I was, however, unsuited to that task as well. Phuoc—Ms. Thanh's student—made an effort for a while, inviting me to lunch once or twice, and then to spend a weekend at his family's house on the outskirts of the city. Phuoc spoke good English and was a stand-up guy, so nice and normal and sweet that his biggest problem in life was convincing his Catholic parents to accept his Buddhist girlfriend. I liked him fine, but couldn't see how our interests matched up in a way that would let us be real friends. On the way to his parents' place, for example, we stopped at a sort of fish-farm café, where we drank iced coffee and sat at the edge of a man-made pond trying to hook catfish. I liked this just fine, but was this Phuoc's primary pastime? Who was this gentle character? Would he be the friend to follow me into the stranger corners of the city?

When we got to his family's house, however, I was thrown into amazed confusion. The house itself was unlike those deeper in the city: it was one tall story, wide and deep, with a
ph
stand out front, a small living room featuring the uncomfortable faux-leather sofas that are de rigueur for Vietnamese decorators, and, a bit farther in, a massive, room-filling industrial loom, fed by four huge spools of thread, beneath a high, corrugated-steel roof. I was transfixed. This . . . this was a typical Vietnamese home? What was it like to live here—to grow up surrounded by light industry?

All through my visit the loom ran, spinning thread into bolts of thin white fabric that Phuoc's family would sell to the burgeoning garment industry. Even after dinner, it kept humming, and when, on occasion, it stopped, due to an unhooked spool or tangled line, someone—Phuoc, a young cousin, a grandparent—would stroll by to fix and restart it. That night, I slept in surprising peace on the uncomfortable couch.

But the next morning, I faced a challenge that proved too much for me: the toilet. It was a squat-style toilet, ceramic and clean, and although I was for the moment free of giardia, I knew that I didn't know how to properly use it, and didn't trust my legs to keep me stable. Worse, there was no way I could really communicate this to Phuoc; we were not yet close enough for toilet talk. And so, though I was supposed to spend another day and night with his family, I bailed on them, making vague excuses, utterly ashamed at my failure and unable to explain any of it to the open-hearted guy who would now never really be my friend. The only good that came of the episode was that I began practicing my squat every day, so I'd never fail again. Pretty soon, I could hold a squat, flat-footed, for thirty seconds to a minute, not long enough to, say, fix a bicycle, but certainly adequate for any emergency bathroom situation.