The Oriental Wife (25 page)

When she got to the office on those evenings she would begin conscientiously, sitting at her desk in the little alcove with her red pencil in hand. Sooner or later, though—unable to focus on the laws pertaining to agriculture in Cambodia in 1954, or defeated by the sheer impenetrability of the prose—she would get up and stand in the doorway to Khim’s office, as though the polished desk with its brass drawer pulls and square crystal inkwell, the gray velvet couch, the carved chair, the lacquered cabinet, contained the answers to some urgent question she had not formulated yet.

A Giotto print hung behind the desk: a luminous angel standing with bowed head among the shepherds, against a sky so blue it seemed to eat up sunlight. It had disconcerted her the day she’d gone there for her interview, as Khim himself had disconcerted her—the fierce straightness of his back, his hands and mouth and gleaming hair, his very elegant tie that did not fit with her ideas, such as they were, about Cambodians. And then the furniture did not belong in that room; green paint was peeling off the walls of his office, and the radiators were chipped and rusty. She had felt clumsy, off balance, the whole time.

One night when she was alone in the office she went and opened the top drawer of his desk, very quickly, as though it were not herself but someone else who was doing it. She told herself she was only curious to know how old he was. It was so difficult to tell. There might be a passport in there, a visa application. In fact all she found were paper clips, some pencils with blunt ends, a cheap fountain pen, and an envelope
containing a single, heavy sheet of paper covered with characters she could not read.

One day in February when her father was being irradiated with a new sort of machine at the New Haven hospital, she just caught him, as she entered, gripping the rails of the bed, his head thrown back, his teeth bared in a grimace of pain, but when he saw her he let his hands drop and said, “Well, well, look who’s here,” in that labored, hearty voice he adopted for her visits. He brushed aside her questions about the treatment and asked her instead what manuscript she was working on at the moment, what Mr. Eath thought of the latest news from Laos; he always inquired respectfully about Mr. Eath’s views on the situation in Indochina.

It was not what she’d wanted to talk about with him. But there was no way in, there was never a way in. She found herself telling him, in phrases as stilted as his own, about the sixteen-year-old guerrilla fighters in the Cambodian countryside and the shockingly low rate of literacy among Cambodians under French rule. He nodded gravely, with seeming deep interest, gripping the rail of the bed again, until his knuckles were white; he shut his eyes and then opened them quickly, as though not to be caught out. She went into the white-tiled bathroom to refill the Styrofoam pitcher by his bed, and as she came out a spasm passed over his face.

“What happened to the prince’s brother?” Sweat was pouring down his forehead.

“He went to France. Shouldn’t I go ask someone to give you a painkiller?”

He shook his head. Without his glasses, his eyes looked soft and milky, the eyes of a ruminant animal. Until he got
sick, she had never known that his eyelashes were longer than hers. It seemed the most intimate thing she had ever discovered about him.

“I don’t see why you’re torturing yourself like this.”

“Don’t you?” he said mildly. “Well, I’d like to cling to the remnants of my mind just a little longer.” He had listened to a program on QXR that morning, he told her, his breath coming in gasps, about old people in the city whose rents were taking up most of their Social Security checks. The reporter said some of them were living on cat food. From there they got onto the subject of health insurance.

That same evening Khim arrived back unexpectedly at the office, very formal in a dark overcoat and a pale gray silk scarf. “Silly man did not show up,” he said crossly.

“I’m almost at the last chapter of the Seng manuscript,” she told him, but he ignored this.

“You have been crying.”

“A little.”

“More than a little. You visited your father today?”

“Yes.”

“Come into my office. I give you something to drink.” She followed him in, and he gestured toward the velvet couch. “Please be seated.” He hung up his overcoat and scarf in the closet before going to the lacquered cabinet and taking out the Scotch. Even for him, the tie he wore was exceptionally beautiful: lush-looking white silk, with a pattern of deep pink peonies and dark leaves. Some woman gave him that, she thought.

He handed her a heavy crystal tumbler and sat in the carved chair opposite with an identical glass. She noticed how his upper lip curled over the rim, seeming to grip it, as he drank.

“Your father had the radiation?”

“Yes.”

“And how is he now?”

“He’s not very well.”

“What did you speak about with him?”

“About the literacy rate in Cambodia in the fifties. And the prince’s brother.”

“Surely this is not his main interest.”

She shrugged. “No. We talked about the homeless too, and old people eating cat food. He said it was tragic that the richest country in the world can’t manage to provide health care for its citizens.”

“And this is always how you talk?”

“Yes. We used to talk about Watergate a lot. He was fascinated by the hearings.”

Khim gave a sharp nod of approval. “I too. To me they seemed the best of America, not only worst. Showing is true democracy after all.”

“That’s what my father said.”

“Good. Americans must recognize this more. Not just the corruption, but that they expose it.”

“My father isn’t exactly an American. I mean, he is now, but he was born in Germany. He came in the thirties.”

“Ah. An immigrant, like me.” He laughed, a harsh cawing sound. “Maybe I could understand him better than you.”

“Maybe,” she said sullenly, looking down at her glass.

“You hardly drink anything.”

“I don’t really drink very much.”

He nodded in satisfaction. “That seems to be true of many Jews, I have noticed. Correct?”

“I think so.”

“You see, I did not know that you were Jewish, until you said your father was coming from Germany in thirties. Then I assume it. I did not think that Jews had this color of hair. Auburn, yes?”

“Yes. I inherited it from my mother.”

“Is your mother as well Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“So this must be why you hardly sip at your drink. Or maybe it is because you are alone here with me.”

“Of course not,” she said. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“No? It would be only natural, after all.” He stood up. “Shall I take you to supper? Your crying will have made you hungry.”

They went to a small French restaurant on Twelfth Street, where the headwaiter bowed and greeted him by name. “Are there no Cambodian restaurants?” she asked, when they were seated.

He gave her an ironic look. “Not enough of us here yet. In later years, maybe.”

“All those things Mr. Nimol wrote in his book … the cadres of sixteen-year-olds marching into villages and killing the women and children, the training camps in the jungle … that’s all true?”

“Yes. Too many eyewitnesses now to say it’s lies. People who escaped.”

“But you got out before all that?”

“I am like Mayflower immigrant, for Cambodian. Came five years ago.” He took a sip of his water and leaned back, watching her closely. “When they kill my father.” Then he snapped his fingers expertly at the waiter, who came hurrying
over. After that he became very merry, teasing her for what he claimed was her air of noblesse oblige. “When you came to my office that day, I say to myself, this woman thinks of work as moral obligation, not for money. Something for the greater good.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, stung. “I absolutely need the money.”

“It is nonetheless how you appeared. Nothing wrong with that.” He too had studied philosophy, he told her, when he was at the Sorbonne; he too had abandoned his graduate studies, and returned to Cambodia. Why had he quit? she asked him. “Because it was gobbledygook. I was like you, wanting to know the nature of good. I supposed my professors would be gods of enlightenment, showing me true path. Imagine!” He blew on his soup. “They were little monkeys, those men, only posturing. But real disillusionment was with myself, for thinking such questions were important. Good does not matter. Has no power.”

“But it survives,” she said. “It may not win, it may never win, but it can’t be killed, either. Not completely.”

He looked at her expressionlessly for a moment. “Maybe you are right. Maybe you are quite wise after all.” Some giddiness of sorrow seemed to fill the space between them, that felt remarkably like happiness. Then he leaned across the table and brushed a crumb of coquilles St. Jacques from her upper lip.

Later he walked her back to her apartment. As they crossed Astor Place and headed east, he stopped, frowning around him at the sagging storefronts and the grimy-looking people on the pavement, vaguely Dickensian in their tattered clothing and long greasy hair. Two sunken-chested
men in bright bell-bottomed trousers edged them out of the way, springing along on their skinny legs, laughing the high manic laugh of speed freaks. “Your father would not like you to live in such a neighborhood,” Khim said sternly, the first of what would be many references, over the next few months, to her father’s wishes as he divined them: her father would want her to wear pretty dresses, he wanted her to achieve something with her life, he would not approve of her swearing. When they turned onto her block, a bum who sometimes slept in the vestibule of her building, a grizzled man with many filthy scarves wound around his neck, veered toward them and asked her accusingly what she was doing with a Jap. She felt Khim stiffen by her side, and when she turned to look at him his face was stonier than ever. Then she pushed open the door to her building, and he followed her up the dingy stairs.

When he stepped toward her, inside the apartment, she had a moment of panic: she had never planned on this, never wanted it, she must not allow it to happen. The bed was right opposite the door, a few steps, which they took clumsily, in lockstep. He was squeezing her too hard. And then suddenly it was exactly what she wanted, the only thing, as though her body had been waiting for him all her life. They stood apart to shed their clothes, and when they lay down images tumbled through her head, of a river, trees, some place left behind a long time ago, long forgotten; the current gathered force; the sounds coming from her were not her own. By the end there was not a single bone in her body, only blind heat, and his breath moving through her.

Afterward she wanted to go on touching him, when she stroked his skin the pleasure was so acute she had to shut her
eyes, but he moved away and lay silent, his arms folded under his head. She withdrew her hand as though he’d slapped her.

“Don’t be expecting too much,” he said after a minute.

“What do you mean?” But she knew very well what he meant.

“You must not rely on me too much.” You might have mentioned that before, she wanted to say, in a sudden flare of anger. Or even, which he would mind more, you seem to have mastered the New York clichés. But she didn’t trust her voice. A moment later the sound of his breathing told her he was asleep.

It was the only time he came to her apartment. After that they always went to the handsome, clean, boxlike room, high above the city, that he had furnished almost as a replica of his office: here again there was a carved chair, a gray velvet couch, a lacquered cabinet, a massive desk; but there was a table too, with two spindly French-looking chairs. The bed was a platform with a thin pad on it. The walls were painted a dull gold—the color, he told her, of the mud walls in the peasant villages of Cambodia. Windows ran all along one wall, but no sound entered from the junction of Broadway and Columbus below, the apartment was too high up for that.

Sometimes he would cook rice and dried fish for their supper and tell her stories of his childhood. His father had brought his mother a wristwatch from Phnom Penh, and Khim, never having seen such a thing before, had taken it apart to see how it worked and could not put it together again. It was the only time his father ever hit him. A young monk had fallen in love with his sister, and written her poems. Where is your sister now? she asked. The muscles of his face tightened; she
thought he was going to say she was dead. But no. She was in Laos, he told her, and stood up from the table.

“Tell me about your father,” she said.

“He was enlightened man, reformer, quite well known in region for this. So Communists try to get him on their side. When he refused, they kill him. End of story.”

When he bit off his words like that, when his voice grew clipped and flat, she knew not to trespass further, she knew she was risking his anger. But it was at those times that his grief became a living presence to her; the whole atmosphere of the room seemed charged with it. It was as though he was carrying an overfull glass, holding it upright with immense vigilance, to keep its contents from spilling. Only she must not mention it, she must go on pretending not to notice, though she thought her heart would burst.

The other time he grew angry was when she criticized America. “This is merely the stupid fashion for your generation. You are only spoiled.”

“For God’s sake. Look at the horrors America has inflicted on your country. The illegal bombings. The destruction. The murders. How can you possibly defend it?”

All that had nothing to do with her, he said, over her protests. “You must be grateful for your own good fortune in being born here.” He told her the story of a Latvian woman, newly arrived in New York, whom he had once taken to Macy’s.

“But why you? How did you know her?” she interrupted, and he waved the question away. It seemed the woman from Riga, when she saw a dress she liked, meant to take it without trying it on; it had not occurred to her that the dress would come in more than one size.

“But that’s just capitalism you’re talking about,” she said. “The glories of the capitalist system.”