The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (6 page)

At 7:58 the American’s black car purrs to a stop in front of the Frangi and he sidles out wearing a crisp black suit. I can tell that my wrinkled blue oxford is a little damp under the armpits and smells like stale beer. I open the door for him, stammering out an excuse for running behind schedule, but he is looking past me, at something over my shoulder. The American gives a low whistle. “You sure know how to pick ’em, Phi.”

I turn around. She is standing at the foot of the stairs, her hand resting lightly on the banister. The edges of her black and silver ao dai undulate gently, as if there were a breeze in the lobby, and her hair falls over her shoulders, so dark it almost looks blue.

“Oh no,” I say. “This isn’t—”

Her high, clear voice cuts me off: “Hello,” she says in halting English. “I will be escorting you this evening.”

The American shoulders past me and walks over to her with his hand outstretched. “A real pleasure to meet you,” he says. When he reaches her, she looks down at his hand with an amused expression but does not shake it. The American recovers, sweeping his arm out and making a funny bow. “What is your name?” he asks her.

With a sudden jolt I realize that it hasn’t once occurred to me to ask her this myself. She appears to be giving the matter some consideration. After a pause, she says, “You may call me Tien.”

“Well, Miss Tien,” the American says, butchering the pronunciation, “shall we?” He starts to offer her his arm, then thinks better of it and makes a flourish in the direction of the
door instead. She smiles and walks across the lobby—I’ve never seen her walk before, and oh, can she walk, swaying slightly, her little heels making no sound on the tile, as if she’s drifting above it. Without giving me so much as a glance, she sashays out the door to where the shiny black car is waiting, the American close behind.

For a moment I stand there, stunned, until I hear Loi’s clomping footsteps on the stairs. “If Candy from the massage parlor ever shows up, she’s all yours!” I call to him, and nip out the door in time to hear the American saying:

“I hope you’re hungry!”

And her reply: “You can’t even imagine.”

The driver is waiting for me with the door open. I duck inside the automobile, running my fingertips over the buttery leather of the seats and inhaling its scent deeply. Then the door closes with a soft click, and we pull away into the sea of motorbike headlights drowning the streets of the city.

T
ONIGHT, THE
A
MERICAN HAS
abandoned his pursuit of the Real Vietnamese Experience and is clearly trying to impress “Tien” instead. His car delivers us to a restaurant behind the opera house that has no name, just a gold sign above the glass door with the engraved image of a lotus. We enter the foyer and—as I obviously don’t belong and will never set foot in the place again—I gawk at the surroundings without shame. Giant orchids line the walls and dangle from wires, while live orange-and-blue butterflies float around the room or rest on
the flowers. I look down: Marble tiles gleam beneath the unevenly worn-down heels of my cheap shoes. The dining area is through another glass door, and it is dominated by a cascade of water at the center of the room, which falls from some unseen source in the ceiling into a circular pool in the ground. I hope that Tien isn’t in one of her thirsty moods.

The waiter who seats us looks familiar—I’m pretty sure his mother runs a beauty salon on Hàng Quạt. He may be wearing a suit that costs more than the Frangi’s yearly electrical bill, but he’s still a plebe like me underneath it. Our boy suavely pulls out Tien’s chair for her, simpers at the American, and gives me a very special sneer. There is no menu. The American asks for a certain kind of wine, our boy nods, fetches it, pops it, and pours, and then the food just begins arriving—food I’ve never even dreamed of: a cool, creamy soup, pink slivers of tuna that melt on the tongue, a duck on a bed of dainty greens, oysters still trembling in their shells, a faintly musty cheese … the plates keep on coming.

I glance around the room at the other diners and am not surprised to see that it’s mostly middle-aged Western businessmen and ambassador-types with younger Vietnamese women. I am the only Viet guy here, apart from the waiters, and the only male in the room without a necktie on. The men are all in black or gray suits and swigging wine liberally. Some of the women are in ao dai, and some wear slinky Western dresses. Their eyebrows are all identically arched, and they pick at their foie gras with their forks in the exact same way. They are nothing compared to Tien.

Tonight she is radiant and she knows it. Tonight she is a thing of jewels and precious metals: gold skin, onyx hair, silvery dress, and eyes like diamonds—shining and hard and cold. I haven’t said a word to her all evening because she has been too busy charming the American to let me get anything in edgewise. Tien doesn’t even touch her food; she chirps nonstop in the English I didn’t know she could speak, spinning endless stories about the history of the city or telling the American to drink more wine. I’m not touching alcohol tonight—not after yesterday. The American is half-drunk already, and laughing at everything Tien says, his gaze never leaving her face. While she chatters and he laughs, I devour my food as if there’s no tomorrow. I am perfectly aware that I am wolfing down my meal in a way that is most unbecoming for such an establishment and don’t need our boy’s continued stare of disapproval to tell me. When I ask him for chopsticks so I can eat even faster, he just glares at me.

Maybe an hour later, I am polishing off the last course—a tart with candied fruit that oozes chocolate—and the American is utterly smitten. While I scrape the plate with my fork, he motions the waiter over and wordlessly hands him a credit card. It’s disappointing; I had been hoping to hear the astronomical price of the dinner. Tien dabs at her mouth delicately with a napkin, which seems silly because she hasn’t lifted her fork to her mouth all night.

As we pass through the foyer again on the way out, I wonder briefly if the butterflies ever accidentally escape, and whose job it is to chase after them when they do.

O
UTSIDE, THE
A
MERICAN GOES
to wave over his car from the corner where it has been waiting, but then Tien surprises both of us by suddenly placing her hand on his arm to stop him.

“Actually,” she says sweetly, “I was hoping that we might take a little walk. It’s a cool night, and the only way to really know my city is by foot.”

The American grins. “What a coincidence! I’ve always thought the same thing!” he says. He motions for the car to stay put, and Tien lets him place his huge arm around her waist. She looks so fragile next to him. I trail behind them as she starts to lead us in the direction of Hoan Kiem Lake.

It’s Friday night and the streets are so crowded that the people—revving their motorbikes, stumbling out of bars in one another’s arms, buying and selling things that no one needs—just become noise. There are so many people that I don’t even see them anymore. The streets are so crowded that they are empty. No one notices the girl wearing a black and silver dress and a secret smile, the man with stars in his eyes who follows her, or the boy in a dirty shirt behind them both.

We are standing at the southern edge of the lake in the shadow of the willow trees. I look out across the water with its rainbow sheen of oil and feel the light and sound pulsing at its shores.

“It’s beautiful,” says the American, who has forgotten that I am here.

“It is my home,” says Tien.

I say nothing.

“You’re beautiful,” says the American.

“Is that so?” says Tien.

I still say nothing, but a vague sense of uneasiness is creeping in the back of my mind.

The American, his face so earnest it hurts, turns to her. “Of course you’re beautiful!” he exclaims. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. When I’m with you, I feel … I feel … I can’t even describe how I feel. But I would do anything for you.”

A slow smile begins to blossom on Tien’s face, causing a little spike of fear to run through me. “Do you really mean that?” she says. “Would you really do anything for me?”

“I would. In a heartbeat.”

“Do you promise?”

No. No, No.

“I promise.”

Tien’s smile widens. “Let’s test this, then,” she murmurs. “Look across the lake, toward the middle. Do you see the old tower there? On the little island near the center? It’s not very far away, is it? I bet even an old man could swim to it and then back without any trouble.”

The intrepid American is already taking off his jacket: “Well, Miss Tien, I’m gonna do it for you.” He steps out of his shoes and lines them up so that the toes are facing the lake. People mill about on the shore, but no one sees and no one cares. As he goes to step into the water I make a move toward him, but Tien sinks her fingernails deep into my forearm and
the pain is so sharp it stops me from even making a sound. The American wades out five feet before he turns and calls to Tien over his shoulder.

“Time me,” he says, laughing, before pushing off into the darkness with powerful strokes, the moonlight on his back.

The girl and I watch him from the shore. Eventually she extricates her nails from my arm.

“You made me bleed!” I cry.

She either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. “It’s a shame,” she says cheerfully. “He would have made it, you know.” Without taking her eyes from the American in the water, she lifts her fingers to her mouth and licks them off one by one.

“Why won’t he?”

She steps delicately into the lake. I jump in after her. It is much shallower than I expected. “Why won’t he?” I ask again, more urgently. “Answer me!” Her black and silver dress is turning into moonlit ripples on the water, and her hands are covered in scales. She turns and gives me a triumphant smile, or maybe she is just baring her teeth.

“Oh, Phi,” she says. “You’ve broken your promise.”

I stop with my shirt still dry. She slips away until only her head is still visible.

“Why not me?” I whisper to the lake because I have already lost.

“How funny,” she says before vanishing beneath the surface. “Your father asked the very same thing!”

And I find myself alone, standing waist-deep in the water.

M
RS
. T
RAN HAD BEEN CONSIDERING
it for a long time, but she made up her mind for certain when she found her younger daughter Thuy in the kitchen, crouched like an animal in front of the open refrigerator, ripping off chunks of a leftover chocolate cake with her bare hands and devouring it. Calmly, Mrs. Tran took the cake from Thuy’s hands, lowered it into the trash can, then went and made one of her rare ten-cents-a-minute calls to Grandma Tran in Vietnam to make the arrangements. That very day she booked both of her girls round-trip tickets—Houston to Ho Chi Minh City, twenty hours with a three-hour layover in Seoul—leaving that very weekend and returning at the end of the summer holidays three weeks later. Thuy and Kieu’s father, who lived with his new wife and children in Atlanta, paid for the plane tickets because he owed the girls birthday presents. Mrs. Tran told Thuy and Kieu that the trip was a chance for them to rediscover
their roots, but Thuy knew the real reason: Her mother was sending her away in the hope that she would lose fifteen pounds on a diet of fish and rice, maybe even more if she could catch a bug from the street food or dirty ice. Vietnam was Fat Camp.

Kieu complained at first. She wasn’t like Thuy—
she
had friends and boys waiting to flirt with her and pool parties to attend in spangled bikinis. Their mother, however, was unyielding; Thuy couldn’t possibly go alone. Mrs. Tran would go herself but she couldn’t take all that time off work. Besides, Grandma Tran wanted to see both of her grandchildren—she was getting on in years and wouldn’t live forever.

Thuy also suspected that her older sister—the skinny sibling, her mother’s accomplice in everything—was being sent along to monitor everything that Thuy ate. Kieu was an obedient calorie snitch, always quick to notice if there were potato chip crumbs on Thuy’s shirt or incriminating spoon marks in the tub of ice cream, but she was no match for Thuy, the junk food mastermind. As she packed her suitcase, Thuy planted several decoy chip bags near the top, hidden in an easy place for Kieu to find when she searched it later. Satisfied, her sister would overlook the box of cookies stashed near the underwear at the bottom, the chocolate bars in the toiletries bag, and the packets of cheesy snacks tucked carefully into each of Thuy’s sneakers.