Inside the nail salon, the powerful smell of acetone washed away whatever madness had possessed Mia. She would not think about Tuan. She would walk the long way back to the consulate so she wouldn’t pass the motorbike shop. After work she would go to the market and buy vegetables for dinner. Mia selected a pale, pinky-gold bottle that she had used before and handed it to the manicurist.
“Hmm. Pretty color,” the woman said.
S
HOPPING AT THE LOCAL
market was always a stressful event for Mia, but there was no logical reason to go to the large, Western grocery store on the far side of town for produce when she could buy it around the corner. Charlie liked the fray of the marketplace for some reason. He even liked the
way it smelled, calling it “pungent,” which really meant that it stunk of dead things and pickled things and dirty hands touching dirty food. He didn’t mind when he stepped in puddles that could have been water or could have been fish juices. He enjoyed haggling over prices with the old, pajama-clad ladies, and he just laughed when giant rats ran across the top of the butcher’s stand in plain sight. But going to the market made Mia feel almost physically ill.
Clenching her teeth, she ducked down and entered the shantytown of tarp-covered stalls. Immediately, it felt about ten degrees hotter. Here space was even harder to come by than on the street. Mia had to hunch to avoid hitting her head on the tarps above, which sagged with rainwater, and navigated the stalls and towers of precariously balanced produce like she was picking her way through a minefield. The paths through the market were less than a foot across, but this did not discourage the Vietnamese from trying to drive their motorbikes down it. But what Mia loathed most was that everyone stared at her: the white woman who had crossed into this most sacred of cultural spaces. Temples and pagodas she could explore at her leisure without a second glance. Those were the places where tourists were supposed to be. But here, Mia felt all their eyes on her. The eyes of the vendors, the eyes of the people buying from them, and also the glassy eyes of the fish in their baskets, the eyes of dead chickens hanging upside down from hooks, the eyes of the still-live frogs in plastic tubs waiting to be skinned.
The ladies who sold vegetables started cackling to each
other when they saw Mia approaching their stalls. “Hellooooo! Madame, you buy from meeeee?” they crooned, and then giggled themselves silly.
Mia pointed to the carrots and held up three fingers. “Okayokayokay!” said one of the ladies, the one who always wore the same polka-dotted pajama set. While she put the carrots into the bag Mia pointed to the tomatoes and held up five fingers.
The lady with a large mole on her neck grinned. “Five!” she said, and put them in another bag. “Wan too ta-ree fo five!”
“You can put them with the carrots,” said Mia before she could stop herself.
“Yes?” said Polka-Dotted Pajamas.
“The same bag. You can put … in there? Together?” Mia made a halfhearted attempt at an explanatory gesture.
“Yes!” said Neck-Mole, and then she and Polka-Dotted Pajamas burst out laughing again and tied the bags closed.
“Fifteen thousand Vietnam dollar!” they shouted in unison between cackles. Mia pulled one ten-thousand and five one-thousand crinkled bills from her wallet and counted them carefully; in the past she had accidentally confused hundred-thousand bills for ten-thousand ones. She really didn’t see why Vietnamese currency operated in such big figures in the first place. Fifteen thousand was about seventy-five cents. When Mia was handing over the money, Neck-Mole leaned over the vegetables and grabbed a lock of her hair. As she waited for the woman to lose interest and stop stroking, Mia imagined
that this must be how dogs who lived in households with small children felt all the time. Neck-Mole finally released her and Mia turned, hunched down, and fled directly into the path of a motorbike roaring up behind her.
The hot pink Yamaha beeped furiously but did not stop. Mia darted back in time to avoid being hit, but the bike’s tailpipe brushed the side of her leg, searing the skin instantly. The tears welled up before she could control them, and she dropped her bag of tomatoes. Her vision was blurry but she could see the driver—a very long, dark ponytail hanging down her back—weave around a pile of cucumbers and disappear into the maze of stalls.
Mia wiped her eyes and began gathering the scattered tomatoes. None of the vegetable ladies were laughing at her now.
T
HE COIN-SIZED BURN MARK
was a dark red color by the time she made it back to the apartment. Mia hadn’t thought that her day could get any worse, but waiting outside to greet her, lurking by the trash cans on the corner, was the hideous cat.
“Why hasn’t someone eaten you yet?!” she yelled at it.
The tabby gave one of its pitiful yowls and tottered toward her. Mia could see that the thing was limping now. She hoped it was because it had fallen off the drainpipe. That would discourage it from climbing. Mia ran to the door, wedged herself through, and slammed it shut behind her.
Charlie was by the stove, boiling water for pasta. Mia
dumped the carrots and the bruised tomatoes on the counter and tried to respond with some enthusiasm to the kiss he greeted her with, but couldn’t manage much.
“Mmm … long day?” Charlie asked and patted Mia’s head absently. “Hey! What was that?” His hand on her hair had made her flinch. “Am I that disgusting?”
Mia forced a laugh and nibbled his ear in what she hoped was a convincingly playful manner, then escaped to the bathroom to find some burn cream and a bandage for her leg. While she was alone, she took the grubby receipt from her handbag and tucked it into the enamel box that held her jewelry, a bottle of perfume that her parents had mailed her for Christmas, and four other receipts, each with the same ten digits written across the top in pencil, all of the sevens crossed. Mia returned to the kitchen, fished a knife from the drawer, and reached for the carrots but had the sudden urge to seize all her blond hair in a fist and start chopping at that instead.
Charlie’s phone buzzed while they were eating. “The people want to go out,” he said to her after he had finished reading the message. “Pub or club?”
“ ‘The People’? How very Socialist Republic of you,” Mia said, half to herself. She rose from the table and took her mostly untouched plate into the kitchen.
“Pub or club?” repeated Charlie louder from the living room table, not to be deterred.
“Pub. Don’t you have your early class tomorrow?” Mia was over by the window, scanning the sides of the building and the street below for any sign of the cat.
Charlie didn’t answer because he had lifted his plate up to his mouth and was shoveling in the rest of his dinner. When it was empty he brought it into the kitchen and dropped it into the sink. “I’ll wash up later,” he said, giving her a little smack on the rear. “Go get your shoes on.”
Before they left, Mia checked the window twice to make sure that it was locked.
T
HEIR FAVORITE BAR
had changed ownership four times during the year and a half that Mia had been in Vietnam. Its name had switched, too, from the Tiger Cage to B52 Bar to the Hairy Guerrilla and then back to the Tiger Cage, but the interior always remained the same. The back wall was taken up by a lovingly rendered mural of Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh frolicking together in a swimming-pool–sized bowl of
phở
. Marx was wearing water wings and a snorkel. The remaining walls were covered in the graffiti of permanent-marker–wielding patrons: names, phone numbers, vulgar doodles of an anatomical nature, poetry and profanity in English, Vietnamese, French, German, and at least ten other languages. The tables arranged haphazardly around the room were long and low, and everybody sat on cushions on the hardwood floor, but somebody’s architectural miscalculation had resulted in the bar itself being absurdly high. The bartenders stood on crates behind it, and even Mia had to crane a bit when she ordered drinks—she would never admit it, but this usually factored into her decision to wear heels. The Tiger Cage’s most striking
feature was the chandelier at its center, constructed from barbed wire, naked lightbulbs, and empty gin bottles. Charlie and his friends had wandered in by drunken accident one night, looking for a different bar down a different dark alley, and liked the light fixture so much that they ended up staying.
When they entered the Tiger Cage, heads turned, but Mia didn’t mind these stares because no one was just looking at her, or at Charlie, but at the couple they made. Individually they were each tall and attractive and Teutonic-looking, but together they were even more striking. They were like a pair of gods who had accidentally alighted on the wrong world, aquiline-nosed and with hair so pale it looked white.
“I swear, you two emit fucking
light
!” said Charlie’s friend Neil, standing to welcome the two of them when they reached the table. Neil gave Charlie a sloppy hug/backslap and squeezed Mia on her side, right on her little handle of hip fat. Mia didn’t know why he thought this was an appropriate way to greet his friend’s girlfriend, but Neil was Canadian and perhaps this sort of gesture was more acceptable there. Tonight the usual crew was assembled, but there was also a new face among them. A pretty Vietnamese one. The girl was wearing a very complicated blouse that was simultaneously high-necked, short-sleeved, ruffled, and cleavage-revealing, accompanied by a pair of microscopic shorts.
“Introductions!” said Neil. It was clear that he had been imbibing for at least an hour already. “Mia, this is my little friend Barry. Barry, this is the lovely Mia, and you already know Charlie.”
Mia looked from Neil to Charlie to the girl, then back to Charlie. “Oh, really?” she said. There was a hot, squirmy pain in her gut. Barry stood. She came up to Mia’s shoulder in her platform sandals, the straps of which were—Mia noticed grimly—also ruffled.
“I am Strawberry,” the girl said, and beamed broadly, revealing an impressive set of crooked, brown, tombstone-shaped teeth. She had difficulty pronouncing most of the consonants in her name, and Mia gathered that this was why she had become “Barry.”
“Did you pick that out yourself?” asked Mia.
Charlie cut her a side-eye. “Don’t condescend,” he warned softly. But Barry hadn’t noticed; it was unclear whether or not she had actually understood Mia’s question. The rest of their friends had automatically shifted so that Charlie could sit at the head of the table with Mia and Neil to his right and left, but Mia decided that she didn’t want to be near either of them. She linked arms with Barry.
“Boys are so boring. Let’s go have girl-talk,” she hissed conspiratorially, and led Barry—who was wide-eyed with panic as she was steered away from Neil—to the other end of the table.
Almost immediately it was confirmed that Barry’s English was almost as bad as Mia’s Vietnamese. Girl-talk lasted about two minutes—“You’re friends with Charlie?” “I am friend of Charlie!” “I like your shoes.” “I like shoes!” “Where did you buy them?” “I buy!”—before Mia gave up and ordered tequila shots. They were followed by a gin and tonic, a glass of
something pink that one of the bartenders had invented, and several Long Island iced teas, which Barry discovered she liked after Mia let her try hers. She abandoned Mia shortly after that to go sit on Neil’s lap. Mia also observed that the hand she didn’t have wrapped around Neil’s neck was creeping in the direction of Charlie’s thigh.
After drink number four, Mia started Splitting. That was how she had begun referring to it in her head. It was nothing strange: Once she had attained a certain degree of tipsiness, her consciousness underwent a kind of mitosis. She continued to chat with the girls, exchanging work grievances and gossip, pausing intermittently to cheer with the boys or partake in suggestive banter with Charlie to make their single friends jealous. But simultaneously she was watching them all, herself included, from a distance, like a pair of invisible swiveling eyeballs in the corner. This Split-Mia could see all of the tiny gestures, the glances, the twitches of lips when someone went to speak but then thought better of it, which Stuck-Mia could not. Mia had only started Splitting after coming to Vietnam, but she was sure that it must happen to plenty of other people. Still, she hadn’t told anyone about it.
Tonight, while Stuck-Mia spent five minutes showing off her new manicure, Split-Mia turned her attention to a small commotion at the other end of the table. Whenever Charlie drank liquor his face turned into a beetroot, and Neil found this hilarious.
“Dude’s got the Asian Flush!” he was shouting at anyone who would listen, and slapping the arms of those who wouldn’t
until they did. “Whiteboy caught the Asian Flush! That shit’s contagious! It’s an STD!” Neil dropped his head and stared at Barry’s breasts. “I want your disease!” he yelled down at them. Split-Mia noticed Stuck-Mia eavesdropping. Suddenly, an uncharacteristically serious look came over Neil’s face. Keeping one hand positioned on Barry’s thigh meat, only partially for balance, he leaned over and spoke to Charlie in what he thought was a confidential whisper:
“I’ve been kind of worried about you, man.”
Charlie could barely focus his eyes anymore but still managed to look cagey. “Yeah?”
“Let’s face it, dude, you’ve turned. You’ve gone domestic.” He waited for a protest from Charlie, and when it didn’t come he continued: “Now don’t take this the wrong way. I
love
Mia, you know that. She’s, like, Consular Barbie and everything. But don’t you miss the
freedom
?”
Charlie chewed on the cocktail straw in his whiskey-Coke but said nothing.
“Remember back in the beginning?” Neil pressed. “When we were here because we were sick of the shit we got back home? Like, rules and expectations and people asking what the hell you were planning to do with your college degree? We didn’t have to give a fuck because we were in Vietnam! The food was cheap, the booze was cheap, and all the local ladies wanted to get with us. Don’t you miss that? Because now you’re part of this perfect couple and it feels like you two are halfway down the aisle and getting ready to make your perfect neon-blond babies and—”