Mai Chim was digging into a steak the size of her native country. She was wearing a pink skirt, low white sandals, and a pastel blue blouse cut in a V over her breasts. Her long black hair fell loose on either side of her face. Long silver earrings dangled from her ears. A thick silver bracelet circled her right wrist. She looked very American and very Asian. She also looked very beautiful. And she was eating like a truck driver. Her appetite continued to astonish him. But what astonished him even more was the fact that she was so slender. He wondered if she ate anything at all when she wasn’t with him. He wondered, too, what she’d meant about never being busy. A woman as beautiful as she was?
“It took me a long time to learn how to use a knife and fork,” she said. “I’ve learned pretty well, don’t you think?”
Commenting on her own voracious appetite, making a joke about it. He suddenly wondered if she’d ever gone hungry in Vietnam. Or afterward.
“I’m a pig, I know,” she said cheerfully, and forked another slice of steak into her mouth. Chewing, she said, “I was going to call you, in fact.”
“Oh?” Matthew said. “Why?”
“To teach you some Vietnamese,” she said, and smiled mysteriously.
The old man had been off by only a hair, but it wouldn’t be long before someone got him talking about that license plate he’d seen, got him rambling, and bingo! Someone would make the connection.
Seeing the car hadn’t been part of the plan.
The car was supposed to remain the big secret, pick it up at Kickers, drive it to Little Asia, park it in the shadows under the big pepper trees lining the street, and then go in all yellow and bright to do bloody murder. The car wasn’t meant to be seen. Only the yellow jacket and hat. In and out, slit your throats, good night, boys, sleep tight. Put out your eyes, cut off your cocks, oh what a horrible sight.
But the old man had seen the license plate.
Seen it wrong, as it happened, but seen it nonetheless, close but no cigar. So now the old man had to go. No witness, no license plate, no tracing it back to you know who. Goodbye and good luck, please give my regards to your recently departed countrymen.
There.
Walking past the marina entrance now.
Getting dark out there on the bay.
Wait.
Wait for blackness.
“Do you remember my telling you about diacritical markings?” Mai Chim said.
“Yes. The cedilla and the umlaut.”
“Which, by the way, I looked up. And you were right, that’s what they are.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you told me. But I thought our marks would be easier to understand if you could see them. Some of them, anyway. So I Xeroxed the Vietnamese alphabet from an old grammar I have. Which is why I was going to call you,” she said, and smiled. “Would you care to have a look?”
On her tongue, the words care to have a look seemed foreign somehow. Just a trifle off the money.
“Sure,” he said.
She put down her fork and knife and reached for the handbag hanging over the back of her chair. She unclasped the bag, took out a folded sheet of paper, unfolded it, said, “I copied it at work,” and handed it to him:
a ã â b c d đ e ê g h i k l m n o ô σ p q r s t u ú v x y
The alphabet seemed foreign, too, just a trifle off, even though the letters were written just as in English. Perhaps the marks accounted for that.
“Of course, this only shows the basic order,” she said. “There are also marks for tonal distinctions. I can draw them for you, if you like, but they would only look like chicken tracks.”
“Hen tracks,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a very complicated language, I told you. A million marks in it. Well, not that many. But plenty. You can keep that, if you like.”
“Thank you,” he said, and refolded it and slipped it into his pocket.
“For your next visit to Saigon,” she said, and rolled her eyes heavenward to show how remote a possibility this was. She picked up her utensils again, cut another slice of steak, and was raising it to her mouth when she asked with sudden and genuine concern, “Is the fish okay?”
Okay.
The way she said it.
The lilt of it.
A bit strange. A bit foreign. Like everything else about her.
“Only so-so,” Matthew said. “My partner says it’s impossible to get a good fish anywhere in Florida. The boats have to go out too far for it, and by the time they come back in, the fish isn’t really fresh anymore. So speaks the oracle.”
“I never eat fish here,” she said. “In Vietnam, I ate fish all the time, but never here. The fish is not so good here. I think your partner is right.”
“So do I, actually. But please don’t tell him.”
“Do you like him, your partner?”
“Oh, yes. Very much.”
“Is he married?”
“Yes.”
“Happily?”
“Well… let’s say they’re still working on it.”
“Were you happily married?”
“No.”
“Which is why you got divorced.”
“Actually, it was more complicated than that.”
“That means there was another woman.”
“Yes.”
“And is there a woman now? In your life?”
“No one serious.”
“Someone unserious?”
“Just a few women I enjoy seeing.”
She had finished her steak and now she placed her fork and knife horizontally on her plate, the way someone had undoubtedly taught her to do here in America, and sat sipping her beer and looking out over the bay, where the sky had turned a violent purple. In moments, the sun would drop into the sea, and it would be dark. She was silent for what seemed a long time, the color of the sky growing steadily deeper behind her.
“You see,” she said at last, still staring out over the blackening water, “I’ve been wondering why you called.”
“Because I wanted to know you better,” he said.
She nodded.
And was silent again.
And then she turned to him and said, “Does that mean you want to go to bed with me?”
Her gaze demanded honesty.
He risked honesty.
“I guess so,” he said. “Eventually.”
“When is eventually?” she asked. “Tonight? Tomorrow? Next month? Next year?”
“Whenever,” he said. “If ever.”
“And when is that?”
“Only if and when we both want to.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Then we won’t.”
“And then we’ll never get to know each other better.”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“I’m Asian,” she said.
“I know.”
“Is that why you want to go to bed with me? Because I’m Asian?”
“I haven’t asked you to go to bed with me,” he said. “I asked you to dinner. And that had nothing to do with your being Asian.”
“Because there are men who want to go to bed with me for that reason alone, you know. The fact that I’m Asian.”
He felt as if he’d been led down a jungle path by a beautiful woman who’d suddenly turned Vietcong, raising her hands high over her head to reveal primed hand grenades tucked under her arms.