The Refugees(7)

“No, not very bad.” Liem spoke with nonchalance, even though the prospect of rehearsing his story one more time flooded him with dread. In the four months since he’d fled Saigon, he’d been asked for his story again and again, by sailors, marines, and social workers, their questions becoming all too predictable. What was it like? How do you feel? Isn’t it all so sad? Sometimes he told the curious that what had happened was a long story, which only impelled them to ask for a shorter version. It was this edited account that he offered as Marcus drove the car through the parking garage, into the streets, and onto the freeway. Casting himself as just one more anonymous young refugee, he recounted a drama that began with leaving his parents in Long Xuyen last summer, continued with his work in a so-called tea bar in Saigon, and climaxed with the end of the war. Even this brief version tired him, and as he spoke he leaned his forehead against the window, watching the orderly traffic on the wide highway.

“So,” he said. “Now I am here.”

Parrish sighed from the front seat of the sedan. “That war wasn’t just a tragedy,” he said, “but a farce.” Marcus made a noise in his throat that might have been an assent before he turned up the volume on the radio a few notches. A woman was uttering an encomium to a brand of furniture polish, something to bring out the luster without using a duster. “You’ll find the weather here to be cold and gray, even though it’s September,” Marcus said. “In the winter it will rain. Not exactly the monsoon, but you’ll get used to it.” As he drove, he pointed to passing landmarks, the standouts in Liem’s memory being Candlestick Park with its formidable walls, and the choppy, marbled waters of the bay. Then, as traffic from another freeway merged with theirs and the car slowed down, Parrish lowered the volume on the radio and said, “There’s something you need to know about Marcus and myself.”

A white passenger van, accelerating on the right, blocked Liem’s view of the bay. He turned from the window to meet Parrish’s gaze. “Yes?”

“We’re a couple,” Parrish announced. Out of the corner of his eye, Liem saw the white van edging forward, past the shrinking blot of moisture left by his forehead on the window. “In the romantic sense,” Parrish added. Liem decided that “in the romantic sense” must be an idiomatic expression, the kind Mrs. Lindemulder had said Americans used often, like “you’re killing me” and “he drives me up the wall.” In idiomatic English, a male couple in the romantic sense must simply mean very close friends, and he smiled politely until he saw Marcus staring at him in the rearview mirror, the gaze sending a nervous tremor through his gut.

“Okay,” Liem said. “Wow.”

“I hope you’re not too shocked.”

“No, no.” The small hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stiffened as they’d done before whenever another boy, deliberately or by chance, had brushed his elbow, sometimes his knee, while they walked hand-in-hand or sat on park benches with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, watching traffic and girls pass by. “I am liberal.”

“Then I hope you’ll stay with us.”

“And open-minded,” he added. In truth he had no other refuge but Parrish’s hospitality, just as there was nowhere else for him to go at the end of the day in Saigon but a crowded room of single men and boys, restless on reed mats as they tried to sleep while breathing air humidified with the odor of bodies worked hard. “Do not worry.”

“Good,” Marcus said, turning the volume up again, the way one of the boys would around midnight, on his transistor radio, when everyone knew but wouldn’t say that sleep was impossible. Liem’s eyes were closed by then, but he couldn’t help seeing the faces of men he knew casually or had watched in the tea bar, even those of his own roommates. In the darkness, he heard the rustle of mosquito netting as the others masturbated also. The next morning, everyone looked at each other blankly, and nobody spoke of what had occurred the previous evening, as if it were an atrocity in the jungle better left buried.

He thought he’d forgotten about those nights, had run away from them at last, but now he wondered if the evidence still existed in the lines of his palms. He rubbed his hands uneasily on his jeans as they drove through a neighborhood with bustling sidewalks, trafficked by people of several colors. They were mostly whites and Mexicans, along with some blacks and a scattering of Chinese, none of whom looked twice at the signs in the store windows or the graffiti on the walls, written in a language he’d never seen before: peluquería, chuy es maricón, ritmo latino, dentista, iglesia de cristo, viva la raza!

After turning onto a street lined with parked cars jammed fender-to-fender, Marcus swung the sedan nose-down into the sloping driveway of a narrow two-story house, upon whose scarlet door was hung, strangely enough, a portrait of the Virgin Mary. “We’re home,” Parrish said. Later Liem would learn that Parrish was an ambivalent Catholic, that the district they lived in was the Mission, and that the name for the house’s architectural style was Victorian, but today all he noticed was its color.

“Purple?” he said, never having seen a home painted in this fashion before.

Parrish chuckled and opened his door. “Close,” he said. “It’s mauve.”

Mrs. Lindemulder had squeezed Liem’s shoulder in the San Diego airport and warned him that in San Francisco the people tended to be unique, an implication he hadn’t understood at the time. Every day for the first few weeks in Parrish’s house, Liem wanted to phone Mrs. Lindemulder and tell her she’d made a huge mistake, but Parrish’s generosity shamed him and prevented him from doing so. Instead, he stood in front of the mirror each morning and told himself there was nobody to fear, except himself. He’d silently said the same thing last year, at summer’s end in ’74, when he bade farewell to his parents at the bus station in Long Xuyen. He hadn’t complained about being dispatched alone to Saigon, several hours north, where he’d be the family’s lifeline. As the eldest son, he had duties, and he was used to working, having done so since leaving school at the age of twelve to shine the boots of American soldiers.