Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [43]
“Not tonight, Larry.”
“Sumbitch!” But he let go of me.
On the Seconal, I got a great deal.
Ham and Larry. Larry and Ham. I spent a lot of time with each of them, because I wanted to. It wasn’t about sex, and it wasn’t about self-discovery as it had been with Frankie. Frankie’d looked exotic, but acted familiar. Ham and Larry were harder for me to read. They were the true exotics, coming of age as they’d done in contrary times. Larry’d napalmed villages; Ham’d impresarioed love-ins. And Bio-Mom? She’d embroiled herself and me in messy mysteries.
Like Ham and Larry, she would be in her fifties now. She must have started out romantic, must have floated into the sixties in a haze of sex, drugs and the sanctity of rebellion. Then the war had snuck up on her as it had on Larry and Ham, an apocalypse segregating hawks from doves, cynics from idealists, setting up areas where women couldn’t follow. Vietnam had plucked a slow, shy kid from a Central Valley farm and provided him paranoia and cheap arms. Peace had coarsened a draft resister to deal maker on the minibudget Bay Area film circuit. We know how our men had reacted. Vietnam had been their central experience—you couldn’t escape their blasted faces on the streets—they’d coped or they’d been gutted. War had blessed them with terrible clarity.
But what about the women? What about that flower fräulein, Bio-Mom? Should I envy the mother who had put her bad karma behind her in an Indian prison, dumped her bastard child on Hindi-speaking nuns and moved on? She’d done what’d felt good, what’d felt right at the time, and consequences be damned.
For her and Ham as much as for Larry, Vietnam ended on the roof of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. Scramble into choppers, then pull up the ladders! Teach the Statue of Liberty to catch up to speed!
But what about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.
I quit my cocktail-waitressing job in midshift the night Fred Pointer came into the club looking as though he’d wandered in from a Mylanta ad.
Fred ordered a glass of house red and shoved an airmail envelope in my face. I didn’t grab the envelope from him. The more nowhere a country, the prettier its stamps: been-everywhere Frankie’d taught me that. The stamps of dingy, deforested, microscopic hills with the Indian postmark on Fred’s envelope weren’t exotic, which meant India saw itself as a world power. That cheered me. I concentrated on the stamps. Saplings sprouted out of the brown hills. I felt the universe was communicating messages of hope to me.
I brought Fred his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon from the bar, and sidled in beside him on the banquette. Beth was tending bar that night. She aimed one of her go-slow-on-the-fraternization frowns at us. “Cheers.” I raised an imaginary glass.
Fred stretched his legs out under the table. The legs were very long. The Gucci loafers stuck way out into the aisle. “Are those Mona Lisas on your socks?” I asked by way of small talk.
Fred peered at his own feet, amazed. He lifted them a foot off the floor. “Aliens have begun a slow takeover of my body,” he said.
“Don’t do this to yourself, Fred.”
“I don’t have to. Jess is doing it for me.”
“Jealousy doesn’t suit you. I’m not giving Ham a hard time about …”
I stopped myself before I said, “Jess.” What happened at Vito’s between them, the circumstances that made me leave Ham on the dance floor and cadge a ride home with Fred that night, whatever mean streak made me even consider punishing Ham and Jess by seducing Fred, those feelings were unworthy of me. I wasn’t a victim and I wouldn’t become a codependent. Jesus, Mama DiMartino used to say, made a cornerstone of the very stone that builders had the dumbness to reject. Matthew 21: 22: The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. I needed Fred’s help. Which meant I had to stop his