Love Like Hate (18 page)

“How was Phan Thiet?”

“It was fine, but I’m exhausted. I had to talk to so many people.”

“Were there a lot of people at the funeral?”

“Nearly a hundred.”

“How was Phan Thiet, Cun?”

“The beach was very beautiful.”

“Did you swim?”

“No, I did not swim.”

“I hear they have the whitest sand in Phan Thiet. Is that true?”

Cun grinned, but did not respond.

“He doesn’t know his beaches,” Kim Lan interjected. “White sand, black sand, it’s all the same to him. Isn’t that right, Cun?”

“Well, I’m very happy to see both of you back,” Sen said. “I was getting very lonely.”

A-Muoi brought Hoa into the room. Seeing her mother, Hoa was so happy she burst into tears. Kim Lan took Hoa from A-Muoi’s arms. “So you missed your mother, did you?”

“She cried the whole time you were gone,” Sen said with a
touch of reproach. “But look at her now! Look at how happy she is!”

Sen’s effusive behavior continued later on that night—in bed. Heretofore their sex life had been OK yet unvaried, with the only weirdness her penchant for sucking his nipples. While enjoying each other’s bodily warmth, they had generated no white heat. As soon as the light was out, he started to kiss and undress her. She had never seen him like this before. He went on to make love to her with surprising finesse and shocking ardor. Nudging her breasts upward, he swallowed them whole and playfully sucked on her erect nipples with his tongue. He probed each one of her holes with fingers and nose and drove his engorged
cazzo
into her tight
culo
. He serviced, enslaved and manhandled her. “Stop, stop,” she pleaded, “the servants can hear us.” But Sen would not stop. To her dismay and ecstasy, he orally pleasured her down below. Turning her inside out, he overcharged and gouged her until her mind short-circuited as the room exploded with a million flashlights. Her eyes swiveling inward, her throaty screams reverberated throughout the house and onto the street. In the next room, Cun heard everything and spilled his seed at about the same time Sen did.

After Sen was done remaking her and she lay beside him serene and happy, it made Kim Lan blush to think that it had taken her forty-two years, two husbands and two childbirths to arrive at this point. Thinking of the man in prison, she felt pity sharpened by shame. She immediately chased the annoying thought away by mounting Sen in his sleep.

24
AMAZEMENT

O
n the train Cun had discovered his dick in dramatic fashion. Now he was ready to become a man. Already he could count three dim strands of hair jutting from his upper lip. His calcium-deficient jaw had never achieved its proper width, however, forcing his mouth to trumpet forward into a snout, while his eyes stayed stuck to the sides of his head, like an herbivore, ready to be hunted by a big cat that would devour his entrails and thighs, leaving his neck and feet to the slobbering, glazed-eyed hyenas. In fact, his face couldn’t be seen from the front at all, but only in profile, like a knife or an ax. Deprived of all dairy products in early infancy, he had had to be breast-fed an extra-long time, until there were a dozen nubby teeth crowding his puckering blowhole, encouraging it to shoot out even further. Even a well-timed Manny Pacquiao left would not have fixed it. Though his balls never dropped, it didn’t matter; Cun was ready to become a man. He started to scan left and right for glimpses of smackable flesh. He studied the servant girl as she squatted on the floor washing the dishes. When she took a shower, he stood outside the door and listened to the splashing, gurgling music. He heard the red plastic ladle being whacked against the nicked rim of the red plastic bucket. He heard her rubber flip-flops plop-plopping on the wet ceramic tiles and strained hard to parse and understand the complicated audio of her cheap panties being washed and wrung. Made in Vietnam, 100 percent polyester, their one advantage was the fact
that they could be dried in the sun in no time flat. He sniffled with emotion when he heard her long, languorous sigh.
Why do we deny each other our lovely bodies, my friend?
Cun was amazed that all that separated him from transcendental experience was a thin plastic door, a very artificial thing, almost an abstraction. With the metal latch loosely screwed into rotting wood, it wouldn’t take more than a light shove for it to swing open. A strong blow from a fable pig would do it. The bathroom took up one corner of the kitchen, its walls falling well short of the tall ceiling. Cun figured he could stand on a chair and look down without being detected. As he was carrying a chair to the bathroom door one day, his mother walked in. “What are you doing with that chair?”

“It’s the lightbulb, Mother. It flickers. Something is wrong with the lightbulb.”

Kim Lan gave Cun a look that said,
I have no idea what you’re up to, but don’t you even think about it. I’m your mother and I have eyes in the back of my head
.

Wandering around the neighborhood, Cun mooned at women’s pants hanging from clotheslines as they fluttered and flagged and dripped in the warm wind. Once he snatched a pair of laced panties, still damp, from a laundry line. Only two degrees of separation, he sniffed, shuddering. He had seen the owner and thought her very pretty. He wondered, he always wondered. He despaired, irrationally, that his opportunity would never come. The promise of sex provides meaning, hope, purpose and strength to the male virgin, who’s convinced that everything will be all right once he’s in there. To maintain this pressurized optimism, it’s almost worth being a lifelong celibate. Cun noticed a dozen girls standing in front of the Protestant church each night, dressed in Day-Glo colors and high heels, their faces theatrically, almost clownishly, made-up. They were selling their asses to feed their own mouths. There were also many hostess bars nearby. One day, after drinking a Tiger beer to muster up courage, Cun walked out of Paris by Night determined to finally get it over with.

Too nervous, he skipped the first two bars he walked by. At the third he marched right in and sat down at a table next to a potted reed palm. A girl in a halter top, miniskirt and six-inch platform shoes soon ambled out. She looked about sixteen. The jungle music was loud enough to disorient and the light dim enough to make her really pretty. She smiled benignly at her youthful supplicant. “How are you doing, brother?”

Cun avoided her face and focused on her bare midriff. She had an innocent-looking innie. There was some gummy black dirt in it. “Give me a Tiger beer!”

“I just said, ‘How are you doing, brother?’ ”

“I’m fine!”

“I’ll be right back!”

Cun watched the girl’s buttocks as she sashayed toward the back. Waiting, he scrutinized the framed posters on the black walls. Two bikinied blondes, each holding a pistol in each hand, were grappling with one another on a tile floor. A pendulous and sand-flecked Brooke Burke smiled coyly behind her stringy hair. Four women flashed their white asses on the back of a red pickup truck. Already he was stiff. When the girl finally came back with his bottle of beer, she sat down right next to him and said, “So, how are you doing?”

“I’m good!” he answered. She grinned and placed a hand high on his thigh. Her bony knee clanked against his under the table. He took a long swig of beer, wiped his mouth with his hand, burped, then said, “How much?”

“Aren’t we serious today?!”

“How much?” Cun said again, but in a whisper this time.

Smiling in amusement, the girl suddenly grabbed Cun’s crotch, almost offhandedly, and asked, “How much do you have?”

He pulled out a fifty-thousand
-dong
bill.

She glanced at it. “Two of those!”

She led him by the hand into a tiny, windowless room of raw plywood. There was a damp, dismal smell of seeping liquid. If only
he had had some Tiger Balm to chase the funk away. She slipped off her panties, then undressed him like a child. Exposed, he gasped. No one had seen him like that before. Placing a threadbare towel on a hard and lumpy bed, she laid him down and slipped a green rubber onto his terrified dick. He panicked as her slim fingers closed in on his leaning member. She spat at his half erection, then sucked on it maybe three times, her moussed hair not losing its shape. It was startling to see a head down there. An ancient part of him was being excavated, a new paradigm introduced. Then she rode him vigorously without even taking her top off. Seeing his eyes glazed and unblinking, she asked, “Did you come?” Hearing no answer, she climbed off, pulled the rubber gently from his dick, threw it under the bed and got dressed in silence. It had taken all of three minutes.

“Come back again!” she yelled as Cun walked away.
Virgins
, she chuckled. Meek and nervous, they were all heads and hands, with no dominion over their lower halves. She’d been one herself just a few months ago. She enjoyed introducing these dorky cadets to the unknown regions of themselves. Some hadn’t even gotten around to peeling back their cheesy foreskins yet. Her more experienced clients could be so unpleasant. The worst were frustrated psychos who could never be satisfied.

After he got home, Cun wasn’t sure whether what had just happened counted as fucking. He hadn’t actually felt anything. He had seen her pussy, though, or at least he’d seen the absence of a penis. She had so little pubic hair that her pussy was like—it wasn’t there at all. There was nothing there, really, just smooth skin, so much smooth skin that it had nearly blinded Cun, like staring at the whitest sand on the brightest day. Maybe she was only twelve and not sixteen. Still, it amazed Cun that he’d actually had the privilege of having a pussy bouncing up and down on his dick. It seemed to him miraculous that a man could pay a woman to undress and reveal to him her nonexistent pussy.

It didn’t take long before Cun returned to the same bar. The
same girl wasn’t around so he had to pay for a different one. Each new girl meant a new set of anxieties, or, rather, the same set of anxieties
renewed
, but he had no choice because he needed it so badly. They were all very seasoned, obviously, and could compare his body and (lack of) technique to the ways of a thousand other clients. It wasn’t easy being a man. Seeing him sunny-side up and waiting for action, the fifth female he tried—at thirty, a prehistoric specimen in that establishment, perhaps the madam filling in for a sick no-show—even shouted, “You get on top of me! Come on!”

This new habit of his was very expensive. To secure enough money, he started to steal from his mom.

25
HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE

K
im Lan kept her wealth in jewelry and cash. She displayed most of her jewelry on her person. She kept most of her cash in a locked cabinet. She kept the one key on her person or hid it under her mattress. The first few times she detected a bill or two missing, she assumed she had lost track of how much she had spent. She handled a lot of money each day and could easily have lost track of a bill or two. When money kept disappearing, she immediately suspected one of her two servants. She didn’t think it was A-Muoi, Hoa’s babysitter, but the other one, a girl from Tra Vinh she’d hired recently. Kim Lan should have known. This girl had quick, darting eyes and was unusually dexterous with knives or anything metal. She had either made a duplicate of Kim Lan’s key or knew how to pick locks. Talking to Kim Lan, she always looked down or to the side, a sure sign of dishonesty. She smiled when there was nothing to smile about, another sure sign of dishonesty.

“Pha, where are you? Come here!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Look me in the eye.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Have you been doing anything against your conscience?”

“I’m still a virgin, ma’am. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“I’m not talking about that. Have you been doing anything against me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.”

“But I know. I know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not stupid! I know that you must send money home to your mother regularly. I cannot blame you for that. It’s great that you love your mother so much, but I can’t have you doing things to me—do you understand?!—right under my nose. I’ll give you fifty thousand as severance pay, but you cannot work in this house any longer.”