The effect was somewhat spoiled for me by my knowledge that Terri was actually a strictly brought up sixteen-year-old girl whose prosperous father owned an import-export firm in Cairo, in the Italian Empire. Probably she’d never been allowed out of the house without a small army of guards and chaperones. All of us were fond of her but we could hardly help hoping that the day would come soon when she’d stop picking the most decadent possible roles for herself. “Do, do tell,” she added, in the most affected accent she had available.
I grinned broadly and said, “We’re getting married.”
Roger flagged down Humphrey Bogart and ordered champagne all around. Bogart leaned over the table and said to Terri, “I don’t know that I care for an underage dame in my joint.”
We glanced at his lapel, saw that he was just a program, and all said “Ignore” in unison. He walked two steps backward, came forward, said “Right away, sir,” and went to get the champagne.
I turned back to my friends and began, “We’re having a little pre-honeymoon in—” My voice stopped dead. I couldn’t seem to say either the word “Saigon” or “the Royal Saigon Hotel.” Everyone froze—but no one seemed to notice the trailing sentence, for a moment later the conversation resumed. And by way of bragging I added that we had both been hired by Iphwin, which did impress everyone.
It was a pretty nice party, with champagne that could make you happy and silly but not drunk, or rather not drunk in a way that lasted after you took the headset off, and everyone talking about their day—Terri’s life and times at the American School, Roger’s beach fishing, Kelly’s getting a role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois at the American Theater in Paris. I wanted to say that I was amazed that the French Reich would tolerate that, but the conversation moved on while I was still formulating the thought. As it wound down—Terri was going off to school, Kelly needed to bathe and dress for rehearsal, and Roger was going to bed, one of the complications in a friendship that spanned so many time zones—Helen and I made our excuses, unplugged, and went downstairs.
In appearance the Curious Monkey was extraordinarily simple—a large group of tables in what looked like an open-air setting—an air curtain kept it pleasantly air-conditioned. The rooms were simple and functional, with plain-looking tables and chairs, but if you knew what to look for you would know that every stick of furniture in the place was collectable early twentieth century. The walls held a dozen paintings of note—French impressionists mainly, but also a Mondrian, and—if you looked closely enough at the nondescript pen-and-brush of a cathedral, hanging in a dim corner near the bus counter—even an authentic Hitler. People were dressed exceptionally well, even the very famous.
There was no menu per se; the waiter would talk with you for a while, get an idea of what you enjoyed and what you were in the mood for that night, and then go back and talk to the chef, who would endeavor to surprise you with something you would never have thought of, which you would like better than what you would have ordered.
This particular waiter was a small, slim, gentlemanly man, Vaguely Eurasian in appearance, who listened to us with such great enthusiasm that anyone would have thought he really cared what we liked to eat. We chatted with him pleasantly for a few minutes, about Saigon and how we liked the place, before he said, “We had a message earlier that you are to be the guests of Mr. Iphwin. Mr. Iphwin told us to stress to you that you can have anything you would like, but he would be especially pleased if you would let us prepare Mr. Iphwin’s favorite meal for you.”
Of course we agreed at once; curiosity alone would have insured that. It turned out to be sort of a sampler of old American cooking—a platter of foods that you might have found at an American picnic in the 1920s or 1930s. There were deviled eggs, a hot dog, a hamburger, a slice of meat loaf, a Southern-fried chicken breast, mayo and mustard potato salads, coleslaw, Jell-O salad, and baked beans, arranged artfully on a wicker tray with a red checked cloth. The ketchup was real Heinz Old Recipe and the mustard was Plochman’s Yellow—both of which were extremely expensive, made only in small hand lots by those families.
Helen and I had each had some version of most of those dishes, but many of the authentic ingredients were now expensive and hard to come by. My guess was that we were eating a week’s college teaching pay. They served it with Miller, of course, the only authentic expat beer, tooth-chilling cold in a frozen mug.
Dessert was a black cow, real right down to the Dad’s Root Beer. “Do you suppose,” I asked, “that they’re ever going to completely assimilate us? I mean, here we are, third generation out of the country, and you and I—we, who not only have never set foot in America, but only knew, when we were children, very old people who had left it when they were very young—we are getting misty-eyed over how this food is just the way it should be, and of course we’re insisting on marrying expats, both of us.”
“I’ve heard the idea that what we’ve done is become the replacements for the Jews,” Helen said, scooping out a little of the homemade ice cream from her parfait glass. “You know, unassimilable people, profitable to have around, tending not to be liked by the neighbors. Can you believe they got the recipe to make this root beer, too? Anyway, we’ve become the people that can’t assimilate whether they want to or not, with no home of our own, loyal enough to whoever takes us in, hardworking, making some friends, but never exactly accepted as one of the locals. And about that... well, I’d say they seem to be right.”
I shuddered. “Remember what happened to the Jews. And I suppose Americans aren’t that scarce—we tend to forget all the Reich Americans who are still living there. Their descent is as American as ours.”
“Not really,” Helen pointed out. “We’re descended from all of America, the whole forty-eight, in the 1940s. The Reich Americans are descended from white people who could prove they didn’t have any Jewish, Negro, or Slavic ancestors. So much of real American culture was Negro, and Jewish, and big-city Slavic, and all the rest of the melting pot; the Reich Americans have thrown that all away, whereas we’re all interbred. We’re the real Americans. They’re one narrow slice.”
She left it unsaid, since we were outside Enzy, but I knew perfectly well she was referring to my black grandmother and her Jewish grandfather. Once we became expats, many old barriers had come down, and already in the Reichs there was a stereotype of the expat American as a racial mongrel, darker skinned than the Reich Americans.
Helen went on. “Think about the fact that no expat I’ve ever known has been in touch with relatives in the Reich, even though just about all of us must have some. And we’re only the third generation. On my block there’s a man who is seven generations removed from Ireland, and yet he still stays in touch with his cousins. The family that runs that good Italian restaurant downtown—the one by the park?—is five generations out of Italy and still holds a party every time a cousin back home sends them a birth announcement. It’s only expat Americans who don’t seem to keep touch with America.”
“Well, supposedly we were always very mobile, always moving over the next hill. Maybe we just find it easier to lose touch.”
“I suppose anything is possible,” Helen said, “but it’s not like the Irish or the Italians all stayed home.” I was getting bored. This was one of those things expats could talk about endlessly. I wondered if, back when the Americans were still in America, they had spent as much time as expats did now talking about what exactly it meant to be an American. It seemed very unlikely.