Love Like Hate, page 15
In his prime, Hoang Long would have torn into Sen—killed him with his hands, if necessary—but he had no fighting spirit left. Fifteen years of prison had conditioned him to accept any sort of humiliation with resignation. Threatened, he became speechless, his eyes blurred, and he sat still like a scolded child. Kim Lan felt so sorry, she wanted to pull him to her bosom. Seeing no reaction from Hoang Long, Sen lowered his voice. “You can stay here as long as necessary. Up to a month even. There’s plenty of room in this house. There’s no hurry.”
That night Hoang Long slept on a cot downstairs while his hosts slept in their usual bed upstairs. Kim Lan was afraid he would break into their bedroom and kill them in their sleep. All night long she listened for the creaks of the stairs, but heard nothing.
In the morning Hoang Long took Kim Lan aside to say he was leaving. “I can’t stay in the house a minute longer under these conditions.”
“But where will you go? Stay here and relax, for a month at least. We’ll work something out. I’m sorry things have turned out this way.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I’m not whispering.”
“Yes, you are.” Hoang Long shook his head and chuckled. “I’m staying in my own house as a guest, a house I bought with my own money, and my wife’s speaking to me in a whisper because she’s terrified of her new husband. She’s also terrified the neighbors will find out she’s a polygamist. That’s why I’m leaving.”
Kim Lan did not respond. She only sighed, her face hot. They stared at each other for a minute in silence. Suddenly, she understood what he wanted. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Then she went to her safe and cleaned it out, all of her savings, a very nice sum, returned and gave it to him. He took the money without saying a word, nodded and walked away.
Hoang Long took a van to Cao Lanh that afternoon. It was freakishly thrilling to see the landscape speeding by. Rice paddies had never appeared greener. Another weird sensation was to have a wad of money in his pants pocket. I lost my wife and a fifth of my life, he reflected, but I’m a free man now. Just two days ago I was without hope. The town of Cao Lanh had not changed much in the intervening years. Walking through its crowded market, he became reacquainted with many smells, shapes and colors. He paused often to inspect a once-familiar fruit or vegetable. Tempted to buy many things, he bought nothing, since he was still in awe of the small fortune he had in his possession. The sight of a policeman made his heart skip a beat. He stood still until the shopping cop disappeared. Laughing at his own nervousness, he had to shake his head. A young female suddenly brushed against him. Turning, he glimpsed her pretty face disappearing. Life is good, he thought. There’s a world of wars, prisons and hospital emergency rooms, and then there’s ordinary life, where pretty girls go shopping and bump into you. Sometimes they even do more than bump into you, he grinned at the dim memories. Everyone’s going about their business and no one cares that I’ve been in prison. No one cares that I’ve killed either. A killer lives on borrowed time. To him, life has a lurking sharpness that those who haven’t played destiny could never imagine.
Remembering the streets, Hoang Long had no trouble locating his mistress’s house. The coconut tree in the yard seemed aged and diseased, its fronds ragged, its fruits the size of oranges, but everything else looked the same. He rang the bell and waited impatiently outside the gate. I hope she’s neither dead nor married. Suddenly he panicked and touched his pants pocket. Sure enough, all the money was gone.
31 CONJUNCTIONS
Sen did not know that Hoang Long had left. To avoid his adversary and to give himself space to think, he had spent the morning at a café down the street. A month is too long, he thought. I must figure out a way to get rid of him much sooner. There’s no way I’m going to stare at his ugly mug three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, for an entire month. The longer he stays, the more comfortable he’ll get and soon I won’t be able to get rid of him at all. He’ll also grab my wife when I’m not looking. Hell, they might be doing it right now.… The guy’s also a combat veteran. He’s used to killing people. I’m surprised he didn’t fight me last night. He didn’t want to go back to prison, I guess. He’s still a killer inside, however. The next time I cross him, or look at him cross-eyed, he’ll stab me.
At lunchtime, Sen returned home undecided about what to do with Hoang Long. He sat down at the table dreading the other man’s presence. Noticing no extra bowl, he asked Kim Lan, “He’s not eating with us?”
“He’s gone.”
“He’s gone?!”
“He left this morning. For good.”
Sen couldn’t help but grin. He felt so happy, he even farted a couple of times.
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Do you expect me to cry?”
“I don’t expect you to do anything, but you shouldn’t be laughing. He spent fifteen years in jail. You should at least respect his sacrifice.”
“Listen, I don’t appreciate your lecturing me about how I should feel, OK? You should just be glad that I’m not angry, OK?”
“You angry?! What are you talking about?!”
“Why don’t you calm down for a moment? If I’m not angry at you for deceiving me, then you should just calm down, OK?”
“Deceiving you?!”
“Don’t you think I know where you went last year?”
“What are you talking about?!”
“You’re so full of it.”
“Yeah, I’m so full of it!”
Sen got up and walked away from the table. He had not touched his food.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Phan Thiet.”
Outside, greeted by brilliant sunshine, his mood improved immediately. It’s all nonsense, he said to himself. He walked briskly down the street, feeling better with each step. He knew exactly where he was going and marched right inside. As soon as he sat down, a girl in a miniskirt ambled up to him and said, “How are you doing?”
A whore ages slower than a dog, but faster than a dentist or a secretary. A two-year-old dog equals an eighteen-year-old whore or a twenty-four-year-old dentist. When Cun met the how-are-you-doing girl a year ago, she had looked about sixteen. Now she looked twenty-two. Pinched and kneaded daily by an endless procession of slobbering boys and men, entertaining them, her flesh had slackened, her face hardened and her soul cracked. A year later, people would think she was twenty-seven. Sliding quickly down the longevity grease pole, she became careless and no longer insisted that her customers use condoms. By nineteen, her real age, she was dead.
Sen enjoyed her services that day and was back at the café an hour later, feeling much better. Cun stood behind the till and A-Muoi was playing with Hoa. A-Muoi had hardly said a word to Sen all these years but suddenly she spoke to him in Chinese. “You should never trust the Vietnamese. They are all dishonest.”
Sen stared at A-Muoi’s chubby face. “You shut up, all right?”
That night Sen went up to the bedroom and lay down next to Kim Lan. Though she faced away from him, he could tell she was not sleeping yet. Feeling a mixture of guilt and tenderness, he touched her on the shoulder, but she simply said, “No.” They slept together that night and many nights after that, but they would never make love again.
In January of 1991, Kim Lan became a grandmother. Phuong’s baby boy was solid and handsome, his heft surprising considering his parents’ puny sizes. Two months later, Kim Lan gave Phuong money to open a stall at the market to sell pork. Cun got up at five each morning to help his wife pick up meat. Relations between Sen and Kim Lan were lukewarm during the day, chilly at night. She continued to feel an aversion to his touch and he no longer persisted. Whenever he was tired of playing chess, Sen would go to the hostess bar. All the girls liked him there and they even gave him a cute nickname: “Biggie Sen.”
Sen always tipped the girls a little extra. Talking to them before and afterward, he’d ask them about their villages, and whether they had boyfriends, husbands or children. He’d ask them about their family lives, about their husbands’ job and vices, and listen to their complaints.
“My husband drinks all day, Biggie Sen. That’s all he does. That’s why he can’t hold a job for more than a week.”
“How’s he in bed?”
“Not half as good as you, Biggie Sen. He’s not interested, at least not in me. He gives the money I make to other girls. You’re so nice, Biggie Sen. You’re really the nicest man who comes in here. I’ve never seen you drunk, for example. The drunk ones are so grabby. They squeeze your tits like they’re made of rubber.”
Sen had been waiting for this opportunity to debauch for a long time. But before Kim Lan stopped having sex with him, he had no reason. Playing chess all the time can give one an overgrown head, like the elephant man’s, and atrophy the rest of one’s body. Sex with Kim Lan, or with anyone else for that matter, was a necessary antidote to chess. Without sex, Sen’s penis would have become the tiniest adjunct, an imperceptible mole on his colossal head. Grown complacent with the same-old-same-old with Kim Lan, he needed to have his frayed mind recharged with virgin vistas. Every human body is touchingly beautiful and soothing to the eye, he reflected, from the most malnourished to the most voluptuous, from the most underdeveloped to the most worn-out. Appreciating the naked human form on an aesthetic level, he considered himself an artist, or at least an anthropologist. He could see through clothes now. All of Saigon became a riot of smooth, jiggling flesh in his feverish mind. Waking, sleeping, his mind was always erect. Wandering around the neighborhood, he undressed everyone: the squatting soup vendors ladling hot broth into bowls; the seamstresses behind sewing machines, their ankles moving rhythmically; and all the students coming home from school, preteens, teenagers, shoving each other and laughing. He found them all equally beautiful.
He loved to have a prostitute on all fours, on her hands and knees, her head down, her hair cascading, hiding her face, her breasts hanging down. Before humping her, he would stand to the side to admire her beautiful form.
After Sen had sampled all the prostitutes in the neighborhood, he wandered farther afield. He even went to Tran Xuan Soan Street to try sex on water. The girls there posed as vendors of hot vit lon—a delicacy of duck embryo eaten directly out of an egg. For less than three bucks (including fifteen cents for a condom), Sen got to hop on a sampan, take a brief cruise, then rock the boat beneath one of those houses on stilts bordering the river. On board there was a reed mat, beer in a cooler, and a bucket of water for sanitation purposes.
Sen heard that in the fun-loving coastal city of Vung Tau, you could even try sex in the water. During the day, a girlfriend could be rented by the hour on the beach, inner tube included. This was a rather lame arrangement, Sen figured, since you had to share the water with kids, old people and Jet Skis, a situation which made consummation a little awkward. At night, the whores came out for real on Pineapple Beach, a rocky stretch not far from the main post office. These ladies were known as “fairies,” celestial beings who would skinny-dip with your mortal self in the South China Sea for a mere thirty-five bucks. The only prostitutes Sen declined were the rare Chinese ones. It’d be like screwing your sister or your first wife or something. He didn’t care for it.
Even after Sen had tried a hundred girls, he still had a special place in his heart for Kim Lan because she was the only Vietnamese woman ever to say yes to him without expecting to be paid immediately. Also, by accepting him as her husband, she granted him real citizenship of the country.
As Sen degenerated into debauchery, Kim Lan had plenty of time to brood over the institution of marriage. Late one evening, sipping an iced beer, a brand-new habit, she mused how every marriage has its poisoned moments and unfixable permanent defects. Since people are flawed, a marriage must be flawed. Though it beats living alone, a marriage is always a misunderstanding between two dishonest people with selfish intentions, she thought, shuddering, sipping her beer. That’s why most of them end in divorce, murder suicide, or a suicide pact. Marriage is simply a justification for murder, she concluded. A good marriage, relatively speaking, is one that ends prematurely in a fatal traffic accident. All in all, I consider myself very lucky. Her own imperfect marriages she blamed on history. If history can kill and maim, then of course it can yield flawed husbands. A second here, an inch there, and each of us can be dead a hundred times over, so being badly married isn’t the worst thing. Having reached middle age, she also realized that in any maledominated society, women are forced to marry down, not to their social inferiors, but to their inferiors period. She shuddered thinking about whom Hoa might marry in the future.
Meditating on marriage, Kim Lan liked to comb the newspapers for stories of domestic violence. Feeling comforted and edified by accounts of marital disaster, she reveled in the all-too-rare incidents of wives killing husbands. She often wondered why some women retaliated against their husbands’ infidelity by splashing acid on the other woman’s face. At the market, she occasionally saw Cam Nhung, a famous singer from the sixties whose face had been destroyed by a jealous wife. Reduced to begging, she wore an old, plastic-wrapped photo of herself around her neck to convince passersby of her identity. Her unrivaled, still-beautiful hands also served as proof. Though Kim Lan always gave Cam Nhung money, she never stood around to hear the poor woman sing.
There was another acid victim in Kim Lan’s neighborhood. Kim Lan saw it happen. Mr. Quang was the richest man in the neighborhood. He had started a car rental business with money sent to him by relatives in California. It grew to three cars and four vans. His four sons worked for him as drivers. The oldest had a beautiful wife, Huong, and a daughter. Feeling fortunate to marry into such a prosperous family, Huong watched Mr. Quang’s declining health with hope and anticipation. Mr. Quang’s wife had died many years before. At seventy-six, as he was cruising steadily toward Hades, as the cypresses and stone angels came clearly into view, he decided to take a lover, a forty-two-year-old woman named Thuy. Everyone was scandalized, but Huong was furious. Failing to persuade her father-in-law to quit his shameful behavior, Huong started to threaten Thuy over the phone. “Whore, you better lay off my father-in-law, else I’ll peel the skin off your bleeding cunt!” Thuy refused to be intimidated because she also saw cars and vans in her future. That’s when Huong decided to get tough. She secretly followed Mr. Quang to Thuy’s apartment, noted the address, then hired a female goon to send her rival a message. The very next day, the goon scraped against Thuy’s motorcycle in traffic, sending her sprawling to the asphalt. As she struggled to get up, bleeding, the goon slapped her across the face, screaming, “Are you blind?!”
That will teach her, Huong thought, thinking she had solved the problem once and for all. A month later, however, as she was squatting at the market to pick out some fish, someone called her from behind. Turning around, she could only catch a brief glimpse of Thuy’s face, crazed and angry, before she found herself flopping on the ground, her clothes torn from her burning flesh. They had to splash ice water on her as she screamed and screamed. Her face melted like wax. Globs of flesh streaked down her face, her nose collapsed, her right eye dissolved. If she had opened her mouth at the crucial moment, her tongue would have been gone.
When Mr. Quang died soon after, Huong’s husband inherited the family business. They had become rich, as planned. Treatments for Huong were so expensive, however, that all the cars and vans were gone after a couple of years. Her husband never abandoned her. Since she could not leave the house, he bought songbirds to keep her company. The day she came home from the hospital, as she walked through the door, her two-year-old daughter screamed, “That’s not my mom! That’s a monster!”
Part III
1 ENLIGHTENMENT
Hoa was doing well at the New York School. She struggled with the past, present and future tenses, using them interchangeably, but her vocabulary was growing rapidly. Her teacher was a gutter punk from Staten Island named Sky. In Vietnam for three years, he had no plans to return to New York. He had gone to Vietnam to explore Buddhism, only to discover that there was no Buddhism in Vietnam. Sky had read in all the guidebooks that 80 percent of Vietnamese were Buddhists, but Vietnamese Buddhists, he soon found out, only went to the temples to pray for a winning lottery ticket. Most monks were entrepreneurs who drank beer with their mistresses in the evening. The monks and priests who tried to perform their primary function, speaking their conscience, had been sent to jail.
There is no religious instruction in Vietnamese Buddhist temples. Most Vietnamese have never heard a sermon in their lives. The religious figurines displayed inside their homes are mostly Taoist, the Gods of the Kitchen, of War and of Wealth. There may not be a Buddha. There is also the all-important altar dedicated to one’s ancestors. If a Vietnamese Buddhist owns religious texts, they are most likely pamphlets of the popular kind, sanctioned by no Buddhist organizations. In the Vietnamese universe, Buddhism is merely a thin blanket half hiding an animist demon.
Perhaps no Buddhist doctrine is more abused by the Vietnamese mind than reincarnation. Sky had bought a fifty-two-page pamphlet titled Karma Through Three Lives, written by someone called Thich Thien Tam (literally the Zen Heart Monk). The cover featured a drawing of a man being sawed in half by two demons. With the help of a dictionary, Sky tried to wrest an epiphany or two from this enigmatic volume.
The pamphlet had three sections. The first answered all your questions about karma and reincarnation. The second recounted “true stories” of reincarnated lives. The last rehashed the first two sections, but in ballpoint pen illustrations.
Question #2 asked: “Why am I riding on a horse, not sitting in a carriage?”
Answer: “Because you paved roads and built bridges in your previous life.”
Question #12: “Why do I have both my parents?”
