The Lotus Eaters. Tatjana Soli

behind.”

      “Where is Henry? Did he go home?”

      “He was home. He was American, but he loved Vietnam. The war tore him up. I’ll show you some of his work—he was on his way to becoming a hell of a photographer.”

      “Where is he?”

      “Died two years ago covering an operation in the delta. Henry was reckless. I refused to go out with him on assignments. But he knew the dangers. That’s one lesson of etiquette you need to learn here—never ask what happened to someone. The answer is usually bad.”

      “Not a very lucky apartment for its owners.”

      “Not a very lucky country. Henry gave me a key. It’s the one place I could escape when I needed.”

      Helen went to the open window and leaned on the sill. She smelled dust and rain, heard people walking down the alley, the tinny sound of Vietnamese pop music from a transistor radio. “Are you escaping now?” she asked.

      “Trapped now is more like it.” And then, as if in answer, the room went dark. “Great Electric of Saigon at it again.” Darrow groped his way to the table and lit a candle.

      Up and down the dark street, the slow pulse of flames like fireflies appeared.

      “Why did you bring me here?”

      Darrow stood next to her, reticent, and stared out the window as if he were waiting for something to happen. He did not want to say it was because she had appeared scared shitless tonight, woefully inadequate for what she had come to do. Neither did he want to admit he found her beautiful.

      “You see the tree in front of the building? It’s bare now, but in the spring it blooms large red flowers. Henry and his girl used to have parties each spring to celebrate the tree blooming. Very Tale of Genji, very Asian.” Darrow chuckled to himself. “Henry loved all that shit. Swore he’d never go back to the States. Said America scared him more than any war could.”

      “What happened to the girl of the red lampshade?”

      Darrow shrugged. “I don’t know. Disappeared. Found someone else. The local women don’t have much choice once they start taking up with white men.” Darrow justified his own actions with the native women that if not him, they would offer themselves to someone else. He treated them kindly and then promptly forgot them. The grand, futile gestures of renunciation, fidelity, bored him; he had become a practical bourgeois in wartime. “There’s something lovely here, yet even as we look, even as we have contact with it, we change it. So why are you going out with that blowhard, Robert?”

      “How rude. We’re friends.”

      He poured two glasses of scotch from the armoire and handed her one. The glass was heavy, square, with a solid crystal bottom.

      “Aren’t these from the hotel bar?”

      He grinned. “Keep forgetting to return them.”

      She sipped her drink in silence, listening to the outside sounds, the heaviness of the warm air moving through the room. He refilled their glasses and sat across from her.

      “I like it here,” she said finally. What she didn’t add was that it was the first time she’d felt safe since she’d arrived in-country.

      “This is the real Vietnam. When I come here, my mind slows down…I can imagine what is good about the place, what the people want to keep. The Continental and the Caravelle, the air-conditioning and room boys and ice cubes, make you forget where you are. The war groupies starting to descend. Restaurants and nightclubs booming, parties every night. Saigon is their Casablanca or Berlin. It’s the scene now. All these daughters of the country-club set descending with their copy of Graham Greene under their arm…sorry for the speechifying, I’m drunk.”

      Helen set down her glass on the floor. “You’re saying I shouldn’t be here.”

      “Should you?” His eyes took her in, coolly assessing. “Don’t ever believe that staying here won’t change you.”

      “Tell me what you really think.”

      “I’ve hurt your feelings.”

      “I had Robert take me to the dinner tonight because I knew you would be there.”

      Darrow raised his eyebrows. “Should I be flattered?”

      “All they’ve let me do so far is human-interest features—widows, orphans, wounded soldiers. I need someone to get me out in the field.”

      He blinked, not wanting to admit his hurt feelings at how unromantic her reasons were. Usually the battle-weary reporter spiel worked. “Only a handful of women are covering the war. None doing combat. It’s too dangerous, too spooky out there. The men don’t like it, either. It’s hard work. It’s hard for me. I’m forty years old, I look fifty, I feel sixty.”

      “My brother wrote me a letter before he was killed. He said no matter what happened he couldn’t regret coming. I needed to see for myself. And the only way to become famous is to cover combat, right? I dropped out of college because I was worried it would be over by the time I graduated.” Later, she would cringe at her crassness, but at the time it had seemed daring to reveal such an unflattering truth. How could she explain the years of being a tomboy, refusing dolls and dresses, always hanging out with the boys? Her father and Michael shared the idea of soldiering, and she had been left out. She cried when she had to stay in the kitchen with her mother, told to bake cookies. Michael’s taunts as they went out shooting—You can’t come, you can’t come.

      Darrow knelt in front of her. He liked her a little less now, so it made it easier to seduce her.

      “No one can say I didn’t try. Go out with me on patrol tomorrow. You’ll have your own bite of the apple. You’re going to get it anyway…right?”

      “Right.”

      This girl, filled with ambition and doubt and passion. Like himself. Utterly unlike his wife, who was cool, clear, and sharp—a constant obstacle to his doing what he loved. A mystery why she had married him just to make him guilty over what he did. Their arguments ran in circles like a dog chasing its tail: It’s the only thing I’m good at, he’d shouted, but the truth was it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

      “Are we fine? I mean, things between you and me?”

      Helen reached and gently pulled off his glasses. Despite her playacting, she was terrified by what she saw in the hospitals, and the idea of turning down a man she wanted tonight seemed ridiculous. What if she were gone tomorrow, like Henry? She frowned. “Is there something between you and me?”

      He put a hand on each side of her chair, and she noticed his hands shaking. That was good; neither was practiced at this seduction thing.

      “Nerves. I’m steady in the field. Downtime fallout.”

      She ran her fingers along the scar on his arm. “How’d that happen?”

      He shrugged. “An angry husband.”

      She laughed.

      “I think it was Algeria. Hard to remember one from another. We should discuss this. Are we open about it, or do we try to keep it secret?”

      “Cat’s a little out of the bag.”

      “True. But are you prepared? A married man’s mistress?”

      He folded the glasses into his shirt pocket. With his index finger he lightly traced her upper lip. Pressing harder, he went down her lower lip, pressing on the fleshy bottom till it spread into a dark flower. He kissed her.

      “You’re beautiful,” he said.

      She was not beautiful, but she did not correct him. She let it go that she was beautiful enough for that moment.

      “Tonight is just ours. Nothing to do with tomorrow, okay?” he said.

      She