The Language of Men (2 page)

I tried to steer the conversation back to Vietnam. "Did you and Grandpa talk about the war after Dad left?"

"We never talked about anything," she said. "He hardly said anything to me. Like your father."

"Dad talks all the time, Gram," I said. I didn't like the way she lumped my father in the same category as my grandfather, a man who seemed much more imposing than my father. But she didn't seem to hear me. She picked at her palm as if she were digging out a splinter.

"You know, I was trying to think if Grandpa ever told me he loved me.

"He must have," I said.

She shrugged. "If he did, I never heard it."

WHEN I TOLD my parents Vanessa and I were going to Vietnam, their eyes widened. As the trip got closer, I talked to them about where we planned to stay, what sites we wanted to see, which restaurants we were going to visit. These conversations usually began like any other about a vacation; my parents were curious and excited for us. But at some point, there was a shift in tone. My mother's lips tightened; her forehead furrowed. My father shook his head.

They never asked me why I was going, which was a relief. I don't know what I would have said. I was between jobs. In a way, I was always between jobs, each temporary position the agency found for me only lasting a couple of weeks or months, if I was lucky. But it was tough to feel lucky while sitting in a cubicle, scrolling through Excel sheets for Liberty Mutual or three-hole-punching documents and organizing them into binders for MetLife's legal department. In six months, I had acquired a stack of ID cards, each one displaying my picture and job title: TEMP.

Vanessa was entering the final semester of her public health program, which meant she had to start developing her thesis. Her work focused on women's sexual health and reproductive rights. She had lived and worked in Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa. Sometimes my father asked her about her experiences. He wanted to know if the "brothas" had running water or what they ate besides grilled monkey paws.

"Dude," I said, shaking my head.

"I say something wrong?" He looked at me, then Vanessa. She smiled and told him that the people ate a few other things.

Vanessa knew I was writing about my father's time in Vietnam, so when her advisor asked her if she would be interested in leading health and anatomy classes for sex workers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vanessa agreed. Her program would cover most of the expenses, and I was able to piece together a few additional temp jobs before we left. Within a couple of weeks, we found someone to sublet our apartment in Boston. After days of photocopying pages of legal jargon, I'd linger in the travel sections of bookstores, thumbing throughVietnamese dictionaries.

The timing was perfect. I had asked my father all my questions and yet I didn't have any answers. I had stories. Bits and pieces of scenes and dialogue, but that wasn't enough. There was some other reason I wanted to go to Vietnam, some purpose I could not name: a desire to stand on the ground I'd seen only in my father's old photographs, listen to his recorded voice talk about Long Binh and Saigon and applesauce, and try to match his audio picture with the actual landscape. My father didn't live in history books or yellowed newspapers at the public library. He didn't keep a journal I could stumble upon in our attic. Scrapbooking didn't exactly fit into his routine.

My mother told me when my father was in Vietnam his personality was "amplified."

"Like Dad now, times a thousand."

I needed to splice the dialogue of the nineteen-year-old kid in his hooch with the fifty-five-year-old man speaking into my recorder. There was too much dead air in our conversation. I wanted to bring it back to life.

My mother suggested that Vanessa and I have lunch with my great aunt and uncle. She said he had served in the Vietnam War and now he goes back every year to teach. I couldn't remember if I'd met them before—my mother's side a forest of "greats" and "seconds"—but they clearly knew who I was. My uncle stood in the doorway and waved us in, then promptly began the tour of his home, which he narrated in quick declarative statements:
This is the guest bedroom. This is the master bedroom. This is the commode.
He told us that when he was fourteen, he used his older brother's birth certificate to join the Marines and fight in the Korean War. Later, he fought in Vietnam. His house was filled with lacquer paintings of Vietnamese women steering basket boats and jade Buddha statues holding unlit incense. In the basement was a red
ao dai,
a traditional Vietnamese dress, he had ordered for his wife in Hanoi. The shiny fabric, stretched over a limbless mannequin, looked brand new.

"We're going out for
real
Vietnamese food," he said and gave us a stern look:
Don't say I didn't warn you.

Saigon Palace was in a strip mall, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a dollar store. A teenage Vietnamese girl jogged over to my uncle and bowed several times, then guided him by the hand to a booth at the back of the restaurant. The two of them spoke loudly in Vietnamese and laughed. My aunt smiled and rolled her eyes.

"He's such a show off!"

We followed them to the table. The waitress nodded at my uncle, then she giggled, but I couldn't understand them. We sat down and I opened my menu and gazed at the pictures. The grainy images of shrimp and crispy pork were crooked and over-exposed, with an almost salacious quality to them. I thought about my father's Army yearbook, a cheaply-bound collection of photographs, their captions strewn with glaring grammatical and spelling errors. Beneath a picture of a middle-aged Vietnamese woman washing dishes in the mess hall:
Nut Bad.
A young Vietnamese woman typing a report:
Oh yes, ain't it Lookin' Good!
Or two Vietnamese teenagers in the middle of a group of GIs:
Get it on Girls—Do it.

"Chicken or beef?" my uncle asked us. The words sounded odd in the middle of his conversation with the waitress, the way "Coca-Cola" or an American actor's name stood out in a foreign film, as if these terms were there first and the other language grew around them. He ordered for us and nodded, then rolled his chopsticks between his palms like he was trying to start a fire.

He seemed in control leading us through the parking lot, into the restaurant, guiding us through our first exotic meal, so I didn't have the heart to tell him we had eaten Vietnamese food plenty of times. I looked around the restaurant and saw a man and woman sitting with a young boy by the window. The man tried to talk to him, but the boy pressed his chin to his chest, his face illuminated by his cell phone.

"I go back every year," my uncle said, rubbing his hand over his gray crew cut. "Three, four times. To universities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City." He sat up and patted his hip pockets, then his left shirt pocket and pulled out his business card.
Robert Dalton, Professor of Economics.
"Beautiful country. Just stunning."

"It really is," my aunt said. "At first, I was like, 'Oh, jeez, I don't know about this.' But it really is something."

"Did you notice what kind of jobs the women had?" Vanessa asked.

My aunt looked confused.

"Oh, I don't know. I didn't really notice.

"She's going into research mode," I said, rubbing Vanessa's leg.

"I guess waitressing," my aunt said. "Some had little shops and things."

"My colleague, Teddy, he'll show you guys around Da Nang," my uncle said. "Now his wife,"—he let out a long, slow whistle—"is one hell of a cook."

It was quiet for a moment, except for our chewing.

"What was it like when you were over there the first time?" I asked.

"Jeez. Well, I started teaching in '86, so..."

My aunt smiled. "No, honey. I think he means during the war."

"Oh," my uncle said, laughing. "Too many battles. They all blend together."

My uncle didn't seem to be the stereotypical Vietnam Veteran. He wasn't angry. He wasn't indifferent. But he also wasn't my father. I wondered why my uncle was so eager to go to war, why he would forge his birth certificate just to fight, and now the memories were a blur.

When my father found out he was drafted, he considered running to Canada. He decided against it because he didn't want to disrespect his father.
I couldn't shame him like that.
My grandparents drove my father to JFK Airport in 1970. My father sat in the passenger seat, his mother behind him. Their 1951 Chevy Impala hummed down the Long Island Expressway. No music. My grandfather had spent the night crawling around inside the landing gear of 747s, and though he could take the whole plane apart and put it back together again, the only time he had ever sat in one was on his flight to Germany during World War II. He pulled his Impala into the parking lot. My father stepped out and waited on the curb painted white for DEPARTURES, adjusting his uniform. My grandmother wrapped her arms around my father, told him she loved him. My grandfather stood up straight. My father leaned in for a hug. His father offered his hand.

"Guess that was about as close as we were gonna get," my father told me.

On our way to the airport, my father bent one wrist over the wheel of his 2001 Ford Explorer, his other hand tapping the SEEK button, searching for a better song. He accelerated, following signs for 495 West, the Long Island Expressway. My mother, the passenger, dragged an emery board across her nails in quick mechanical strokes. From the back seat, I watched her movements. It was as if she was preparing a meal: body hunched over the garbage can, peeling onions or shucking corn. Vanessa sat beside me, her hand resting on my backpack,
Lonely Planet's Guide to Vietnam
jammed into the mesh pocket.

He stopped on 95.9
The Fox,
home of Long Island's classic rock, though the station broadcasts from Norwalk, Connecticut, across the Long Island Sound. The DJ spoke in a throaty drawl, too tough for a station whose call letters spelled out a furry little animal. Perhaps the DJ was a sly fox, convincing all his fans, if DJs still had fans, that they were slick men on the prowl, one hand snapping out a Steve Miller tune, the other signaling to a sexy
thang
on the corner. This was my father's favorite station.

The Fox
played The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today" and for a second, I thought my father had popped in one of his mix CDs. He picked out the opening guitar riff on the steering wheel, then looked at me in the rearview mirror.

"Tell ya, boy. Never thought this would be happenin'. Not in a million years."

My father had been amazed that it was even possible to go online and buy tickets to Vietnam.
They allow that?
What seemed to puzzle him the most was that we would
want
to go, that this was our choice.

Vanessa stared out the window, the rising sun revealing red streaks in her hair. She sat low in the seat with her legs resting on her giant backpack, which was stuffed with our clothes. Frayed baggage labels hung like tassels from nearly all the zippers. Some labels displayed unfamiliar airlines, in-country flights Vanessa took in Africa or South America. I told myself the nervousness in my stomach was actually excitement.

On Vanessa's lap was a binder the health clinic in Ho Chi Minh City had sent her several weeks ago. The material included the clinic's mission statement, how they hoped to fill the gap in sex education in Vietnam. I had listened to Vanessa speak to her advisor before we left and watched her make small, neat notes in the margins about the women she would be teaching. Some were in their twenties, some closer to sixty. They worked in bars, clubs, massage parlors. Vanessa was concerned about how well she could teach without knowing Vietnamese. Her advisor told her not to worry. They would supply a translator.

Bars, clubs, massage parlors.
These words stood out each time I saw them in Vanessa's binder, as if they were written in neon. I thought about my older brother Don and me wandering through Amsterdam's narrow streets the summer I graduated from college. Our faces coated in red light, we stared at the women behind glass, daring each other. Neither one of us had the nerve to actually open the door and speak to the women. The nights were cool, and sometimes when I looked down the crowded streets at people in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, they seemed like Christmas shoppers in New York City, gazing into Macy's window display.

We walked into an old movie theater and sat in the balcony. Men in suits filled the seats around us. Through binoculars, they watched a man dressed as a gorilla pull his penis through a slit in his pants and jump on top of a naked woman. My brother and I leaned over the balcony. The woman closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. Behind his mask, the man's eyes glowed like an animal caught on the highway. I didn't mention the sex show in the postcards I wrote to Vanessa.

The backpack I used in Amsterdam was the same one on the seat between me and Vanessa. In the side pocket, pressed between the pages of our
Lonely Planet,
were two photographs from my father's going-away party. In the first photograph, everyone sits around a long table full of bread and pasta, extending their wine glasses for a toast. My aunts are slim with dark curly perms; my uncles are slim with slightly more hair. My grandmother looks exactly the same. Beside my father is his fiancée, Maddy, sitting beneath her shiny blonde beehive. My father wears a plain white t-shirt and an expression that says:
All right, Bozo, take the picture.

The second photograph looked as if it was the same moment shot from a different angle. The back of my father's head, the side of Maddy's hair. In the background, beside the wood-paneled support pole, my grandfather stands, his face half in shadow.

The end of The Chambers Brothers. The tick-tock cowbell returned, the lyrics reduced to
time...time...time.
I watched the back of my father's head as he looked from side to side, then pulled into JFK's short-term lot for DEPARTURES. He shifted the Explorer into park. My mother tried to open the door but it was still locked. Vanessa looked at me and I grinned, pointing to the radio and then my father. The song slowly wound down, and Lester Chambers and my father finished with a guttural grunt.