A Good Scent from a Strange Moutain Part 6

My sister and I dressed up like ducks and our sign said DON'T DUCK A DEAL and so I ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with my husband. This was the deal my sister and I made after the show. She would take the money that went along with the special vacation package that turned out to be behind curtain number two, and I would take my husband to Puerto Vallarta. If we'd had a chance to make the deal just before ours, I would have won a car. I could see a very slight bulge just to the left of center in curtain number three, and sure enough, when they opened it to show the couple dressed like killer bees what they'd pa.s.sed over, there was a Ford Escort, which was pulled up just a little bit too far. They do that sometimes. I noticed it. The killer bees did not notice it and they won the goat behind curtain number one, a goat that nibbled the hem of the electric-blue dress on the beautiful blond model holding the goat's leash. Everyone laughed except the couple dressed like bees, and my sister and I laughed, too, though when I leaned over to my sister and told her that I had known where the car was, she slapped her forehead in distress and stopped laughing. I am very observant. This is a good thing, I think, though in Vietnam, where I was born and raised, it is not thought to be a good trait in a woman, unless she keeps it to herself.

My husband is of two minds on this matter. Sometimes I will notice something that will help him in his business. He is a very fine businessman. He is a very big success in America, just as he was when he was in Vietnam, even though he had to start over again from the beginning in this country. In Vietnam he made much money in the export of duck feathers. This is what inspired my costume on "Let's Make a Deal." Duck feathers were the fourth largest export business in the Republic of South Vietnam and they make very soft pillows and very warm blankets. Once, a man who my husband trusted came to the office and said that he was dealing only with my husband, but I observed a duck feather in the cuff of his trouser and that duck was not one of ours. My husband was very proud of my observations on that day, but I know I make him nervous because he thinks there is a great deal that I can see and know about him at all times.

It's true that I know quite a few things from what my eyes tell me. It's true that I was happy to have a chance to bring him to Puerto Vallarta and that I myself struck the deal with my sister that made this possible. We flew in over the mountains and he was sleeping beside me and I watched out the window. The mountains were covered in a lush green that looked like velour and it was very much like Vietnam. There was a river running over the mountain, a brown river, as brown as a Mexican child, and our plane followed it until I could see the city out ahead of us strung along the sea. It was very beautiful coming in and I nudged my husband, hoping he would wake and bring his face near to mine and watch with me. But he became instantly concerned with finding his shoes, which he always slips off when he sleeps, and by the time he felt like nothing was lost and he was not being caught off guard by anything, we were too low for romance and all I could see outside were ragged fields and a neighborhood of poor houses, tin and wood, also like Vietnam, like the places all around Saigon, which is the city I am from.

The airport was pretty ragged, too. All the strips of land in between the runways were overgrown and the airport building was long and low and it looked mostly like cinder block, which they tried to hide by giving big sections of the outside walls a different texture, a certain roughness, but it reminded me of crepe paper and they painted these parts in bright colors, red and yellow and lime green. It just all seemed pretty cheap, and I could see my husband's eye for business picking up on that right away, along with all the weeds. He'd been to the slick American places-Las Vegas and Miami Beach and Lake Tahoe-and he knew what the customer expected. In the taxicab he was snorting at the potholes in the road-the cab had to slow almost to a stop several times-and at the occasional piles of stony rubble and at all the weedy fields. This whole corridor to the fancy hotels should be done up right, he was thinking. And he wasn't all that happy about doing this trip anyway, I knew. He was sorry to be away from his work, even for a week, and he didn't like my sister being his benefactor. Especially not since she and I had dressed up like ducks.

I didn't like that either, really. I must admit I love the game shows. I love American television in general. The soap operas. You'd think I would've had enough of daily disaster, but the soaps remind me that somewhere somebody knows what life can really be. It makes me enjoy even more all of this wonderful lightness before my eyes in America. And I particularly like one of the soap operas with an older woman character. This actress has been around for years, and even though the shows are taped, she always seems to me on the edge of disaster. The actress personally. She is saying her lines and I can sense some light go out in her brain and you can see her eyes slide just ever so briefly off camera. She's looking for the prompt cards, you see. She's forgotten her lines. And this must be happening to her all the time, for these moments to be left on the tape, even if they are subtle, and maybe I'm the only viewer in the country, other than perhaps another professional actor, to notice. There's always this real-life drama going on. I like her very much. This woman has guts, continuing to act without a memory. Sometimes she gets the other actor in the scene positioned just right and her gaze lifts over the actor's shoulder and you can see the faint scanning of her eyes as she reads. It is very subtle, this movement, but I can see it, and at those moments I feel very good for her. She can see what there is to say. But I also feel good for her, a little thrilled even, like watching an ice skater doing a leap, when her character suddenly becomes chatty and slightly unfocused and it's because she is cut off from the prompt cards and she's improvising around until she can find her way back to the script. This is what's good about America. There is always some improvisation, something new, and when things get strained, you don't fall back on tradition but you make up something new.

Still, if I could have been part of all that without dressing up like a duck, that would have been better. I wish I could have won Mexico by answering questions or solving puzzles or guessing prices. Something like that. I'm very good at all those things. Just last week I did several things that no one else could do-I identified Jeremy Brett as playing both Sherlock Holmes on public television and Freddy in the movie "My Fair Lady" and I read the phrase "Desperation Tactics" even without any vowels and I knew that a KitchenAid dishwasher and a year's supply of Toast 'Ems cost between six hundred fifty and seven hundred dollars. But you have to try out for these shows and they stay away from people who have an accent. I put the words of English together as well as most Americans, but you can hear my foreignness in my p.r.o.nunciation.

And only once did I get as far as the tryout anyway. I finally had sense enough to turn my name around and leave out the middle two. I turned Trn Nam Thanh Gabrielle into Gabrielle Tran. My parents had given me a French name because they had always admired the French, for their food and for their riding club in Saigon, mostly. But arranging my name like Gabrielle Tran won me a tryout-I guess the producers thought I might be like Nancy Kwan, the actress who I enjoy on the old movies and who can speak English very clearly when she wants to.

I was very good at doing what they asked when exciting things happened in the game. You'd think that they'd have long ago gotten used to asking for this. But the man with the headphones and a clipboard seemed almost shy when he got around to it. Like we were on a date and he was asking for something s.e.xual and a little strange. There were three of us trying out at once, three women, and he said, "When something very good happens, could you . . ." And he stammered around for a bit and then said, "Could you show it physically. That is, could you kind of, you know, bounce up and down? Jiggle around." So we all laughed at this, but then we did it and I did it very well. He even stopped us and put his hand on my shoulder and said to the others, "Yes. Like this. Watch Mrs. Tran."

I was very good, you see. And it was natural to me. I was having fun. But then when they started talking to us, asking our names and where we lived and such, I could see the little squinting that went on when I spoke. They asked questions and I got them right and I bounced up and down, but I knew I wasn't going to make it. And I think I probably talked a little too much, as well. I even kidded the host-I won't mention his name-about the kiss he gave his hostess during a break. They had both disappeared while the director walked around setting cameras, and when they returned, they did it without looking at each other at all and the host's TV makeup was smudged around his lips. It's not as if I said this on the air, but instantly I could tell that it wasn't the thing to do.

My husband told me that it was all I should have expected. In America he is in the food-service business. Not restaurants. He thinks that's like being a trained elephant in a circus, running a Vietnamese restaurant in America with paper lanterns and China soup bowls and all of that. He thinks it's just putting on your foreignness and playing a part. Instead, he makes food for inst.i.tutions that need meals-like hospitals, schools, airplanes, banquet facilities. He is a very good businessman. He appreciates America very much for being the sort of place where a man like him can succeed. But he has no use for the things I like about America. He said that I should have known the game shows would never take a woman who has my face or my voice.

But in a way I proved him wrong. The proof was that he and I were going up in the elevator at the five-star Fiesta Vallarta Hotel in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, where we would spend an exciting four days and three nights. The crowd at "Let's Make a Deal" knew the value of this. They let out a long sigh of envy. I know they'd been asked to make this sound, just like the winners had been asked to jump up and down. And it's true that I'd seen shows when the crowds made long sighs over an electric coffee maker or a lava lamp and they didn't even laugh at themselves afterward. They were playing this wonderful game in this wonderful world where these things can make people happy. When your coffee drips through a filter in the morning and it tastes so good, you sigh. Or you turn off the lights, all but your lava lamp, and these wondrous shapes rise beside your bed and you turn to your husband and say, Look how beautiful. And you say, I won that. We got that for free. Well, the trip was really worth a Sigh, and I won that.

So my husband and I went up to the tenth floor and we entered our room and the gla.s.s doors in the far wall were open and the filmy white curtains were fluttering and we stepped through them, out onto the balcony, and there was a wonderful view, the sharp ocean horizon, Banderas Bay a jade green out far, and to the left was the curve of the sh.o.r.e, the hotels all nestled there and also the distant city with its red-tiled roofs and palms and the mountains rising behind, thick with trees. It was very nice. I had seen but I did not look at the band of brown water, maybe seventy-five meters wide, stretching along the beach. I supposed it was the tide-drifted water from the mountain river I'd seen coming in, water full of mud and leaves from the jungle. Sort of romantic, if you think about it, jungle water hugging our sh.o.r.e. But of course my husband's eyes went straight for this stain on the bay and he didn't see any romance in it. He just shook his head.

"Look," I said and I pointed to half a dozen pelicans flying past at our tenth-floor level, very close, their necks curled back and their wonderful flappy lower jaws somehow tucked in. We could see their eyes and I said, "Look, Vinh," and they wheeled around for me and pa.s.sed by again.

We live in Louisiana, in New Orleans. Pelicans are the state bird, but we never see pelicans in Louisiana. Here were six of them almost at arm's length. But Vinh only nodded and he leaned on the rail of the balcony, his arms stiff, and I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder. I see many things, and I knew that somewhere inside, part of him was unhappy that the businessman could not stop running his mind. How do I know this? Because this sigh he made was not just in exasperation that these businessmen had not done better in Puerto Vallarta. A neater airport, better roads, a nicer corridor of elegance to get us to the hotels, a beach with perfect white sand and green water. What were those things to my husband that they should make him sigh? Even though I knew that these were the thoughts on the surface of his mind. He even said, as his elbows stayed locked, "They should do better with this place."

I nearly reminded him that this was free. But I did not want to give him more reason to diminish what I had done. I said nothing, and I almost raised my hand to put it on his shoulder, but my husband is old-fashioned, really. He would rather touch me first. So I simply nodded at his words. They were true. And we both looked down at the pool, shimmering with sunlight, and the sun was hot on our faces and we were soon floating there on red, white and green Fiesta Vallarta inner tubes, and all about the pool were hibiscus with their yellow flowers and elephant-ear plants and philodendron and bougainvillea and my husband paddled near to me and said, "The pool is very good. They take care of it very good. The water is clean and not too much chlorine." He paddled away and I felt like he had just embraced me. He is a good man. He was telling me that I had done all right, that he was going to try to enjoy this vacation, even that he was a little bit sorry he had been brooding so far. This is his way. It is a good thing that he is married to an observant woman.

I looked around the pool and three other couples caught my eye. All of them were American. I could see that from their faces and the way they held themselves, loose but every once in a while like somebody told them to stand up straight. And more than that. Somehow I knew that they were all game-show winners. They didn't know this about one another yet, but I did. And it didn't surprise me, really. For a long time, an exciting four days and three nights at the five-star Fiesta Vallarta Hotel in beautiful Puerto Vallarta was a prize on just about all of the game shows. I had already imagined a hotel constantly full of game-show winners, and so when I saw these three couples around the pool, I knew at once what they were. Not to mention the fact that each couple had at least one person, usually the wife, with a very animated face, and one woman who actually jiggled up and down in excitement when her husband unexpectedly brought her a drink from the pool bar.

They didn't yet know about one another what I already knew about them. They were scattered about and I floated near them in turn and I played a little game for myself, trying to figure out which type of show each had been on. One woman was wearing a black two-piece suit and she still had on jewelry, a pair of hammered silver and turquoise earrings and a heavy matching necklace, and even the bra of her suit was held together by a metal brooch. She was maybe fifty and hoping to look in her thirties and her hair was bleached a blond so shiny and light that in the glint of the sun it seemed almost the color of her hammered silver. She seemed easy for me to place on one of the puzzle-solving shows, not just because she was working a crossword puzzle in a tightly folded newspaper but because of the smugness of her smile as she did it and the fact that she was doing it in ink.

The next was a young couple, and this was the woman who jiggled up and down about the drink and she flashed blinding smiles all over the pool. But when she lay back on her lounge chair and I floated past the wrinkled bottoms of her feet, I knew they'd logged many hundreds of miles in shopping malls and I figured she was from one of the price-guessing shows.

I paddled around to the other side of the pool, which was quite big, and I pa.s.sed an American man playing with great patience with a little Mexican girl wearing water wings. The child's father was standing a few meters away in the water and the little girl would swim from her father to the American and back again with great glee. The American was very loud and very gentle in his encouraging the girl and the father was pleased but a little nervous, as well. The American was bald with a big laugh and a big blond mustache and he was wearing dog tags. His hair was too s.h.a.ggy for a current military man and he was perhaps in his early forties, and I knew from his age and the dog tags that he was a Vietnam veteran, one of those who was either unable or reluctant to forget where he had been. But it was his wife who I realized was the game-show woman. She was sitting on her lounge chair and she was reading a book and I know she was the veteran's wife because of the looks she gave him now and then as he grew particularly loud. His voice bellowed, "Swim, little darling, swim over there to your daddy now," and the wife lowered her book and her head angled slightly to the side and there was something around her eyes and her mouth that was very hard to read. Like she loved this man and was distressed by him in such equal parts that there was only something very small and placid that she could ever show about him. Or maybe even feel.

I looked toward Vinh and he was still floating on his inner tube, though his stomach was not visible, like he was slowly sinking through the hole. I wondered if this was comfortable for him, if I should go over and try to help him adjust himself on the tube. If I just let him float and slowly sink, he might finally decide to slip into the water and feel refreshed and then comfortably readjust himself and he would like this place even more. But he might sink farther until he felt stuck and it would irritate him and make his business mind reawaken and criticize these people for offering inner tubes instead of inflatable mattresses and this would be the final little irritation that prevented him from having a moment's real enjoyment for the rest of the trip. It could go either way. So I watched his tube slowly turning and he was very still and I looked back to the wife with the book and I decided she'd appeared on a question-answering show.

As it turned out, however, I was wrong about two of the three. The one with the jewelry turned out to be from the pricing game and the young one who jiggled was a puzzle expert. I know this because after a while the three women, each in her own time, ended up in the hot tub at the side of the pool. As each arrived, there were little h.e.l.lo-to-a-stranger nods and I didn't want to miss any of their talk, so I pulled myself from the pool and plucked the bodice of my one-piece up into place-I am happy to be very slim but I am small-chested-and I approached the hot tub. A beautiful dark-skinned Mexican woman was ahead of me going up the steps of the hot tub. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece suit and was in the process of making it skimpier, twirling and tucking the cloth of the panties of it into the separation of her own very lovely bottom so that it was now like a string bikini, and the eyes of the three American women rose and then whirled like the steam from the water. The Mexican I settled into the water and the three others moved just a little bit closer to one another in the shared put-down they'd felt from the flamboyant s.e.xiness of this woman.

They hardly gave me a glance as I eased into the hot water in the s.p.a.ce between them and the Mexican, who had thrown her head back and closed her eyes as if the most handsome lover in the world had asked her if he could kiss her throat. The Americans could hardly say what they had on their minds, for fear that this woman spoke English, but at least her presence broke the ice between them.

The bouncy one that I had pegged as a shopper spoke first. She looked at the other two and said, "Well, y'all look like you're from the same side of the border as this little old girl."

I looked at the Mexican woman and she did not move; she kept receiving the kisses of Valentino's ghost or whoever and I myself felt downright invisible. This wasn't a bad feeling, but I did glance out into the pool, and at moments like these a sense of Vinh's no-nonsense business eye was something of a comfort to me. He could always see through anything, it seemed to me, and I could imagine myself standing beside him on a hill above it all.

This all happened in a brief moment and when I looked back to the others, they were chuckling at the remark, though the woman with the veteran for a husband was covering up the laugh with her hand, like she was a little guilty about it. The woman wearing the jewelry said, "You don't sound like you're too far over the border. Texas?"

"Louisiana," the bouncy one said, and I sank lower into the hot tub, some sort of reflex. Then she said, "Not New Orleans either. I'm from up north, where the real Southerners are."

The one with the jewelry said, "So you don't do Mardi Gras?"

"No way, honey. That's for the people with no shame whatsoever." And her eyes moved to the Mexican woman and the eyes of the other two followed, though the woman from the question-answering show was the last one over and the first one to look away again. When she did, she saw me and it seemed to be with a little shock, like she hadn't noticed me before. Maybe she hadn't. Or since I was submerged now to my chin, maybe it looked like I was just this disembodied head floating on the surface of the hot tub. I smiled at her like she was the red light on the camera.

"I bet you're from California," Northern Louisiana said to the woman with the jewelry.

"Minnesota," said the other. "Not Minneapolis either. I'm from up north, where the real Northerners are."

Everybody laughed and I wanted to sink a little deeper, but I'd run out of submergible parts. I thought about getting out of the tub, but I still wanted to hear them discover the game-show connection, and fortunately that happened very quickly, Northern Louisiana asked Minnesota what it was that brought her to Mexico, no doubt eager to let these women know that she was a winner on a show. But Minnesota got the first chance. She declared that she'd won on "The Price Is Right" and Northern Louisiana jiggled up and down in excitement and proclaimed her own triumph on "Wheel of Fortune." I pouted briefly at getting these two wrong, and the third woman finally spoke and said she'd won on "Tic, Tac, Dough" and then I nearly drowned in the hot tub because they all three began to jump up and down in the excitement of this revelation and the waves of hot water rushed over my face, splashing up my nose and into my mouth and eyes.

I was happy that no one noticed. I rose up and gasped quietly to myself while the others talked all at once. The Mexican woman was looking at me, but I nodded to her that I was all right, and after a slow, contemptuous look at the three Americans, she closed her eyes and put her head back once more, though this time she turned slightly to one side as if to ask her lover to kiss a new spot, just under her ear. I was ready to get out of the tub, away from all the excitement, but I lingered for a time watching this woman, so comfortable in her body, so relaxed with matters that touched on s.e.x.

A little later Vinh and I were walking along the beach. It was the Mexican woman who stayed in my mind, not the game-show winners. I knew I was seeing them too flatly. They were complicated human beings, like all of us, in spite of how hard they worked at making their surfaces simple. But they bored me right now. I thought about the Mexican woman and I wished I could take Vinh's hand. Perhaps this was foolish of me, to have this hesitation. I am a smart woman, a modem woman. Vinh has never said a word to me that would discourage me from doing something like taking his hand as we walked on the beach. But there are forces in me that are very strong. Just as strong as the forces that make the two women from Northern Louisiana and Minnesota speak and dress and act the way they do. They have no control of those things. I doubt if they could change any of those things even if they were conscious of them and wanted to. I spent the first twenty years of my life living in a country and a culture that expected certain att.i.tudes from women and men and you can't just put all that aside because your mind says, Why not? n.o.body's mind is that strong. You have to wait. Things have to change from the inside.

Like Vinh. He walked beside me on the beach and the waves rustled near us, running up now and then and licking our feet, and there was bright sun and a blue sky overhead while across the bay, the mountains had disappeared into a dark gray sky and there were leaps of lightning over there and the contrast between this sunny beach and that storm-dark mountain was very romantic. But Vinh could not see these things. He was brooding again, thinking about Delta Airlines or the Superdome or the Hilton hotels, thinking about five hundred chicken dinners or a thousand Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s. A man strapped into a harness beneath a parachute was rising from the beach just ahead of us, a cable running out to a speedboat in the bay going taut and dragging him into the air, and I stopped to watch it rise and Vinh realized what I did and he, too, stopped, following my eyes into the air but not really seeing anything, because he said, "Can you remind me to call Nicholson when we get back? They've got some big engineering conference coming in."

"Okay," I said, still watching the man on the parachute getting smaller and smaller in the blue sky, and I thought that this was something I might like to do. To get up there above all of this and just float around.

"You'll remember?" Vinh asked because I had answered without looking at him. It wasn't in irritation that he said this. It was just that I was important to him in this way. He depended on me. I have a very good memory.

I lowered my eyes and he was looking at me with a face that seemed eager, almost like a child. Sometimes he seemed to really enjoy the work he did. I was glad for that. I said, "I'll remember. You know I'm like an elephant."

My Vinh smiled at this. I have said this same thing to him many times and it always makes him smile. And that always makes me smile, that this should amuse him so. I smiled and then a young Mexican girl appeared at Vinh's side and she had lizards on both shoulders and on the top of her head, large lizards.

"You take picture of you and iguana?" she asked. "Very cheap."

Vinh looked at her and stepped back, startled, I think, at these large green creatures crouching on the girl. "No, gracias," he said.

"Like in the movies," the girl said.

"Where's your camera?" Vinh said, and the girl shrugged and looked toward me. I was carrying a bag large enough, I suppose, to hold a camera. Vinh said to her, "You should have a camera. If you want to make money, you get a camera and shoot the picture yourself. Comprende?"

I don't think the girl comprended. But even if she did, making an investment in a camera to improve her business probably was worthless advice. I said to Vinh, "She never has that much money at one time, to be able to buy a camera."

Vinh nodded and sighed. "She'll never get anywhere."

By now I'm sure the girl thought we were both a little cracked, so she drifted away. I came to Vinh's side and we walked on. "Iguanas," he muttered.

I said, "Do you know why iguanas?"

He shook his head no.

I said, "Because Puerto Vallarta is a very romantic place, and it has to do with iguanas."

Sometimes I will surprise my husband with a piece of information, and though it usually has something to do with the parts of American culture he has little patience for, his natural curiosity gets the better of him. This was one of those times. He looked at me sideways, not exactly turning his head to me; he was trying to say that he wasn't really interested in this but I'd better tell anyway. In these situations I don't say anything immediately. I choose to ignore this look of his. I make him ask for it. The culture I grew up in does give a woman certain subtle ways of maintaining her dignity.

"There's a reason?" he finally asked.

"A reason?" I said, as if I'd already forgotten about it.

"Yes," he said firmly. "A reason for the iguanas on the beach."

"Oh, yes," I said, and I waited.

Vinh stopped walking abruptly. I took a few more steps, as if I didn't notice. "Gabrielle," he called after me, and I stopped and turned and looked surprised not to find him beside me. I returned at once, being the good wife that I am. When I got to him, he settled himself so as not to seem too eager to hear whatever this was that I knew. He even used the casual form of my name, though he said it with the French p.r.o.nunciation and I don't think he has ever learned that in English he could have a little joke on me with it. "Gaby, why is it that they think tourists want to have their pictures taken with iguanas?"

"It's nothing really. It's just a foolish thing."

"Gabrielle," he said in the voice I was waiting for. My husband is very attractive at this sort of moment. Someone else might get angry or imperious or dismissive or whiney. But Vinh turns gently urgent, like he is a child with a little pain that his momma has to make better. "Please tell me," he said.

So I told him about Liz and d.i.c.k. Elizabeth Taylor in "National Velvet" is a wonderfully beautiful girl. Even later, in "Cleopatra," she is very beautiful. You might think that a Vietnamese would not appreciate that kind of full-bosomed beauty. But people often admire qualities that are quite different from their own. And Richard Burton of that same time is equally attractive, say in "Look Back in Anger" or "The Bramble Bush." His voice, particularly, can thrill a woman. He, too, was in "Cleopatra" and that, of course, is when the story I told Vinh really began. Liz and d.i.c.k-Cleopatra and Antony-fell in love, and since they were both married to other people and that was in 1962, there was a big uproar. Then the next year Richard Burton came to Puerto Vallarta to make a film. (I didn't tell Vinh the name of the film at this point so that I could hold back the big answer to his question and keep his attention. He was still wondering about the iguanas.) Elizabeth Taylor followed him to this place and they rented two houses with a bridge between them, over a cobbled street, and the world was watching that bridge very closely for months. By now Vinh was getting a little impatient, I knew. Just impatient enough-I always could sense when I was about to lose his attention. So I told him that the name of the movie was "The Night of the Iguana" and there were Puerto Vallarta iguanas featured in it and that's why the little girl had her business.

Vinh was disappointed at the payoff of this story. I knew he would be. He almost always was. His brow wrinkled up and he pursed his lips and I wasn't upset at his reaction. I liked it very much that he continued to insist that I finish these little stories even though his deeply practical self almost always ended up finding them trivial or foolish or simply incomprehensible. He still always asked me to go on. He insisted. And I don't exactly understand it, but I took it as a kind of faithfulness to me.

"Iguanas," he muttered and I heard the word again late that afternoon, across the lobby lounge in the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. Vinh and I had a handful of drink coupons, an unexpected extra benefit from curtain number two, and we'd come down to the lounge in the open-air end of the lobby facing the sea. The three American game-show couples were already there, and I could feel Vinh tense up because they were loud and they were having a frivolous good time and I knew that what pleasure Vinh hoped might be squeezed out of this trip had to do with being quiet and peaceful.

Northern Louisiana and her husband were at the bar and they were both facing into the lounge, their elbows thrown back behind them onto the counter. The husband was young and so blond his hair and mustache seemed almost white, made even more pale by the deep tan of his skin. I was thinking his work kept him out in the Louisiana sun, but Minnesota and her husband were sitting in overstuffed chairs at a little table nearby and he was at least thirty years older than Mr. Northern Louisiana and his hair, though thinned out quite a bit, was just about the same bleached white color and his skin, though more leathery, was just as tan. I couldn't see him sweating under a Minnesota sun, so I figured maybe they both went to the same franchise of tanning salons that turned all their clients out like this.

The Tic-Tac-Dough woman was at an adjoining table and she was smiling and speaking to the others and it was from her that I heard the word "iguana." She was probably telling them the same story I'd told Vinh, since her specialty (I'd been right about her) was question answering and this was a set of those countless facts that clung to her mind. I have a similar static-cling mind, and as I watched her, her husband crossed my sight carrying two drinks from the bar. He handed one down to her and turned to sit and his T-shirt had a map of Vietnam and the words I'VE BEEN AND I'M PROUD. This didn't surprise me because I'd felt certain I'd read the sign of the dog tags correctly. The veteran sank into the overstuffed chair, and as he was trying to arrange himself, he glanced our way. Vinh was tugging at my elbow. He wanted to leave, I'm sure, but I kept my attention on the veteran, whose eyes widened slightly at us and then slid away as Minnesota laughed loud and said to his wife, "Eileen, honey, n.o.body today would even give them a second thought. What's a little adultery anymore?"

Vinh had my elbow in a strong grip now, but I leaned near to him and said, "We've got free drinks coming and I need one right now."

Vinh whispered, "I'd rather pay in a quieter place."

I answered, "There is no such place." This was a little gamble. I didn't want to turn him more strongly against the vacation, but I did want to sit and watch these people. It was like television, like the games and the soaps were mixed together.

Vinh sighed and nodded to me that it was all right, that as long as he was stuck in this whole thing, he really couldn't do anything but go along with me. So I took him to a table not next to the three couples but not far from them either. Vinh turned his chair at a right angle to all the other people and he faced the line of bougainvillea at the end of the lounge and the sea beyond. I listened carefully for a while.

Minnesota went on about how acceptable adultery had become and I watched her husband and he seemed to be trying to figure something out about the ice in his drink and I suppose he was used to this kind of talk and she finally grabbed his arm and said that present company was of course excluded. And then Northern Louisiana told a story about how one of the game shows she'd tried out for turned her down because she wouldn't let the host kiss her on the lips and this had come out in a discussion with the director of the show, who was prepping the contestants, and he said that the host always kissed the women contestants on the lips. Not her, she'd told him, and that's for d.a.m.n sure, honey, they didn't do that where she came from. And then the question-and-answer woman, whose name apparently was Eileen, said that she wished she'd gotten on "Jeopardy" that was the show she really wanted to get on, and it didn't have anything to do with not wanting to kiss somebody. If something like that had prevented her, it wouldn't have been so disappointing.

And somewhere along the way, as I was sipping the drink that the waiter brought and feeling invisible, I realized that the veteran was glancing now and then in my direction. I wondered if he'd learned enough about us over there to recognize a Vietnamese when he saw one. I knew he was thinking about it, wondering if Vinh and I were from Vietnam. And after a time I began to worry just a little bit what his att.i.tude might be. The very visible veterans I'd encountered were unpredictable. They seemed to be one extreme or the other about us. We were fascinating and long-suffering and unreal or we were sly and dangerous and unreal. I kept my own eyes on his wife, who was certainly pitched to a lower key than the other two women and whose sense of disappointment about the show she had appeared on intrigued me. I would have expected her to feel only proud of winning at whatever she did. Though maybe this expectation is my own little prejudice showing through. Why shouldn't this American woman have the same sort of disappointment of dignity that I myself felt? She interested me. She felt disappointed and she hadn't even had to dress up as a duck. To overcome a slight lull in the conversation, Northern Louisiana declared how wonderful a coincidence it was that they should all meet, all Americans and all game-show winners. At this, the veteran turned to me and said, "Are you from America, too?"

This took me by surprise. When I first saw the movie "The Invisible Man" with Claude Rains, it got me to thinking about what it would be like to be invisible. And the scary part was always getting yourself into a place where you shouldn't be and then suddenly becoming visible again. Well, that's how I felt at that moment. The man had a loud voice and the attention of all these people suddenly swung around to me. And to Vinh, as well. Before I answered, I looked at him, to see if he wished to speak for us. He glanced over to the veteran, but his gaze returned to the sea and I faced the group and I tried very hard to make my p.r.o.nunciation just right and I said, "Yes, we're from America. I won this trip on 'Let's Make a Deal.'"

Everyone laughed very loud and I was certain that it was friendly laughter, all of it, laughter at this sudden extension of the coincidence, no laughter at me, no one imagining me dressed up like a duck, no one thinking how absurd for this Asian woman to be a game-show winner. Minnesota cried over the laughter, "Four" winners. What a hoot."

The Vietnam vet seemed particularly pleased. I could tell, though, that there was still a question in his mind about our home country, but his hunch about us was getting stronger. All of this was in his face, the way he finished laughing before the others and began to squint at us with a little smile. At least I could read him enough to know he wasn't a Vietnamese-as-the-enemy type of veteran. I looked at the faces of the others as the laughter faded and they were all friendly, and I mean no disrespect or arrogance when I say this, but I felt a little bit proud of them, like they were children who behaved really well when you didn't expect it.

The veteran said, "May I ask where you're from?"

I understood what he meant, but I chose not to show it all at once. "New Orleans," I said. Perhaps not to betray my little game with the veteran, I did not look at him directly when I answered. I glanced across all the other faces and the young woman from Northern Louisiana could not hide a little jolt of distaste over this. Even that pleased me somehow. These were human beings and they had to have their own narrowness, their own prejudices. This woman showed it to me not because I was an Asian claiming game-show equality with her but because I was from New Orleans.

"I mean originally," the veteran said, and he added, "You don't mind me asking?"

I was turning back to the man and ready to smile at him and say I didn't mind at all and let him wait a few more moments before I confirmed his hunch, but before I could say a word, I was surprised to hear Vinh's voice, not hostile or angry but still very firm, say, "We are from the Republic of Vietnam originally. Now we are American citizens and so are our children and so will be our children's children."

For him to take over and answer the question would not surprise me. But the elaboration of it, talking about our children and our children's children (though in Vietnamese culture the unborn and even the unconceived children are already thought to be part of the family), this is what surprised me. He was looking directly at the veteran and the veteran was looking directly at him, and maybe Vinh thought he was drawing a line, like the man does, the male animals do, here's the line of my territory-look at it and don't get too close. But maybe not. Because when the veteran suddenly smiled broadly and jumped up and strode the few steps over to us and bent and insisted on a handshake from my husband, Vinh gave his hand without hesitation and he was very intently looking into the face of this American, as if he was a man who needed a thousand baked chicken dinners and hadn't decided who to buy them from.

The veteran said, "I'm Frank Davies and this is my wife, Eileen." He checked back over his shoulder and his wife was looking a little confused, not knowing whether to continue to talk with the other Americans or to come over to us, as her husband was motioning for her to do. Then the pinch of confusion was gone and the face I saw at the pool returned, the placid face exactly in between exasperation and affection. "Come on, honey," Frank Davies said, and the couple at the bar turned to get the bartender's attention and the woman from Minnesota said something to her husband and Eileen Davies rose and came over and shook our hands and she and her husband sat down with us.

I saw no discomfort on Vinh's face at all of this. I could tell if he was really wishing to make a quick escape, and he wasn't. This interested me greatly. He turned slightly toward these two people but not all the way. He was still angled more toward the balcony and the bougainvillea and the sea than he was toward the veteran and his wife, but he clearly accepted their being with us. He did not look away from them, and there was not a single little glance to me as if to say, Look what you've led me into now. He was apparently content.

Frank Davies said, "I was in Vietnam, as you can see," and he thumped himself on his chest. Vinh and I both dutifully read his T-shirt once more.

Eileen's hand came out now and fell lightly on her husband's as it returned from his chest and landed on the arm of the chair. The gesture seemed to be a reminder not to say certain things that he had said many times before. When he felt her hand, Frank looked at his wife and he began, "My wife . . ." But he paused, again measuring his words. I expected him to tell us that his wife didn't like him talking too much about all of that, but apparently even this was something he'd agreed not to say, for he finished the sentence: " . . . she's the winner in the family."

This was a reference to her game-show victory, but when Frank heard himself say this, you could see his face flinch as he unexpectedly interpreted his own words in another way. He could not resist: "I wish I'd been part of a winner for you folks."

Eileen smiled faintly and I looked at Vinh and he thought for a moment and then he squared around in his chair, leaving the sea. "What are you drinking?" he asked.

"Coca-Cola," Frank proclaimed. "I've given up the hard stuff."

"And you?" Vinh smiled over to Eileen, and she looked at me before she answered. Her eyes searched my face for a moment and it seemed like she was trying to see if it was okay with me for her to answer him, if there was some sort of hidden protocol from our culture that she needed to observe in requesting a drink from my husband.

I felt so sure that this was what was going on that I was about to remind her that we were from New Orleans, but before I could speak, she looked back to Vinh and said, "White wine."

Vinh called over the waiter and ordered the drinks and Frank caught the waiter by the sleeve before he went to get them and said, "Coca-Cola from a bottle. Not a can, por favor."

The waiter nodded at him as if he understood this request and Vinh said, "You've given up cans, too?" When Vinh was in his sharpest business mood, he could probe people like this, and it was not always with a friendly intent. But Frank laughed loud and he said that he sure as h.e.l.l was. Vinh smiled and nodded, and this may be surprising, but I was having trouble now reading his mood. I make so many presumptions about people from the things I observe, and I'm usually right. But I've been around Vinh long enough to observe when he has made his feelings invisible to me, and this was one of those times.

So the drinks came and we talked, Vinh and me and this proud-to-be Vietnam veteran and his wife, Eileen. We asked where Frank had served and it turned out that he'd been a helicopter mechanic in Qui Nhon. He told us a story about how he'd had trouble with a "b.u.t.ter bar" because Frank was going up on his own time as a door gunner and he was supposed to be just a mechanic. When I got a chance, I asked what a b.u.t.ter bar was and he said a second looey and that was not much help. It had to be some kind of Army man, perhaps a rank. But as his words flowed on, I was sitting there thinking about Frank Davies going into the place where the Army men eat their meals and there was an incident at one of the tables, Frank was arguing with a bar of b.u.t.ter and they came to blows and Frank squeezed the bar and it was oozing through his fingers and all the men were sighing like a game-show audience, but Frank was in big trouble.

Then Eileen was at my elbow. She'd moved her chair closer to mine and she leaned near and she said in a low voice, "The men do go on about the war, don't they?"

This snapped me out of my little fantasy and I looked over to Frank and he had turned his attentions strictly on my husband, and Vinh was listening to him, leaning slightly forward and listening as if with great interest. He spoke to Frank and I didn't catch the words, but Frank nodded vigorously and said more and I turned to Eileen and replied, "My husband doesn't often talk about all of that."

"Was he a soldier?" Eileen asked.

"Yes," I said, "a very good one. He was a major in the airborne. But later, about a year before the end of the war, he was rea.s.signed to Saigon City Hall, where he worked in a special program to develop business in the city. They were trying until the very end to make the economy work, to make people want to defend their way of life. Everyone respected my husband."

Eileen looked over to her husband and pursed her lips. "Frank was a good soldier, too. He wanted to do so much. He really felt like he was responsible for everyone."

I looked at Frank and his hands were before him, gesturing, shaping some point. He was talking about helicopter engines. I said, "He has so much energy."

Eileen Sighed softly, in both appreciation and exasperation, it seemed. "I just wish I could get him to focus it where it's needed."

I wondered where that might be, but I did not ask. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps Eileen had something she needed to talk about and she was waiting for me to ask. But I did not. I have no trouble intruding on people's lives by reading the things that they show. But I have trouble asking my way in. So I sipped my own gla.s.s of white wine and Eileen and I watched the men talking for a while longer and then she leaned forward and touched her husband on the arm and said it was time to go.

Frank turned to her and looked at his watch and said she was right. He rose and shook our hands-his hand taking mine was large and hard but surprisingly gentle-and Eileen thanked each of us and said she hoped we could speak again soon and they moved off. I watched them carefully. Frank led the way with an air almost of determination, like weaving between these tables and overstuffed chairs took the skills of an experienced tracker. Eileen followed two paces behind. Pa.s.sing by, Frank b.u.mped one of the chairs and kept on moving and Eileen paused to straighten it.

When he was clear of the lounge area, Frank stopped and turned and waited for his wife, but when she drew near him, he was looking out over our heads, back out to the sea, and she spoke a word to turn him and they walked off. They were side by side now, but they did not hold hands, though American couples often do.

Vinh and I remained in the bar for only a brief time. In the elevator, we were alone, but as the doors were closing, a young couple got into the car with us. She had one of those hairdos that looked like she'd slept standing on her head, full of wild waves and wrinkles. The man had a very thick neck and they were both wearing bathrobes. But their hair was not wet and they did not smell of suntan lotion, so I knew they'd spent the day in bed. Newlyweds. And I knew at once that they, too, were from a game. When they entered, the wife's robe fell open at the top and showed a lot of bare cleavage, and the husband clamped it shut and looked at me and said, "She's like that." "So are you," she said, slapping at his hand. "My little show-off," he said and he tried to kiss her on the cheek. She turned her face in mock anger and then kissed him and I looked to the front of the car. "The Newlywed Game." Unquestionably.