The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [115]
"This is for your mother," Bão said, placing the red pouch in Minh Still the Sous Chef's hands. "Bình wanted her to have it back."
"Who?"
"Bình. Your youngest brother—"
"That's not my youngest brother's name," Anh Minh replied.
"Oh," Bão said, opening his mouth in a long silent laugh, relieved in the end to hear that the kitchen boy was not the only fool on board the Niobe. "Doesn't matter," the sailor said to no one in particular, and he turned and walked back toward the sea.
I never meant to deceive, but real names are never exchanged. Or did my story about the man on the bridge not make that code of conduct already clear? I saw him again the other day. He looked younger than when we first met. The same lips, though fuller than I had remembered. The same eyes, alive and inquisitive. Eloquent even, if I am to believe that the eyes can tell the entire story of a man. The same shock of hair parted on the left but a bit longer, more like that of a poet in a Left Bank café than a scholar-prince in a teak pavilion. I have looked for him on the avenues, on the quays, on the park benches of this city. I have even gone back to the restaurant on the rue Descartes and stood across from its red-lanterned entrance, but two months ago I went there and found the lantern gone. The chef, I imagined, had gone back to Vietnam to see his mother, or maybe he experienced a second bout of wanderlust and was again roaming the world. I have heard that at a certain age men either renew a longing for the bosom of the woman who nursed them or those of distant mountains. I have also gone back to the bridge where we met, hands on the railing, face turned to the river. There have been times when I have stood there until my legs felt as if they too were remembering the persistent motion of water. Usually that meant that it was very late, and I had had too much to drink.
The last place I expected to find the man on the bridge was at Lené Studio. Of course, I went back there, the same Sunday that I received Lattimore's note in fact. I wanted my photograph. I had earned it fair and square, as he would say. I could always cut it in half, I thought, and hide his face away for when a knife blade is no longer sharp enough and his smile will have to do. Also, I thought the photograph was already paid for. I was wrong. Lattimore had been required to leave only half of the cost as a deposit. Unfortunately, this simple matter of a deposit and partial payment took almost half an hour to extract from the clerk, who kept running back and forth between the front office and the back room, where the photographer Lené was presumably in the middle of a session. It did not help matters that the pointy-nosed clerk had little patience for my accent. The French prick kept looking at my receipt and asking, "But, where is Monsieur Lattimore?" Instead of telling the clerk that "Monsieur Lattimore is in the goddamn photograph!" I dropped into my most servile French and begged Monsieur Prick to ask Monsieur Photographer whether I might pick up the photograph now and continue to make the other half of the payment in weekly installments. It was understood, at least on my part, that the weeks were not necessarily going to be consecutive.