The Size of the World Read online

  THE SIZE OF THE WORLD

  ALSO BY Joan Silber

  Ideas of Heaven

  Lucky Us

  In My Other Life

  In the City

  Household Words

  Joan Silber

  THE SIZE OF THE WORLD

  a novel

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2008 by Joan Silber

  All rights reserved

  Frontispiece image © Joson / Getty

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Silber, Joan. The size of the world: a novel / Joan Silber.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07070-5

  1. Americans—Foreign countries—Fiction.

  2. Homesickness—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.I414S59 2008 813’.54—dc22

  2008001342

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  In memory of my brother, Ralph

  CONTENTS

  Envy

  Independence

  Paradise

  Allegiance

  Loyalty

  The Other Side of the World

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  THE SIZE OF THE WORLD

  ENVY

  Toby

  I.

  I USED TO MAKE my father repeat the names of where he’d fought on the Pacific Front. The complicated contours of those syllables intrigued me (Makassar, Badung, Sunda). My father said war wasn’t the best way to see the world, whatever the Navy said in their recruiting ads. But I could trace the battle lines on maps for any number of wars. That was the sort of hobby I had then.

  I liked getting lost in projects. I was a Navy brat, moved from post to post as a kid, and I got used to occupying myself without company, with a surprising degree of contentment. I liked doing things on my own. The things changed, but my habits were steady. Ernst was the one person I ever met who was better at this than I was. I was an amateur of aloneness compared to him.

  I might have turned out more like Ernst. There was a spell in my life when I made an effort to. I admired him, and in many ways he was admirable. After I settled in Bangkok, I used to write to Ernst every year at Christmas. I wrote him summaries of what I was doing at work, what my wife and kids were up to. Ernst never wrote to me—he never wrote to anyone. Why would someone who hardly spoke in person get gabby on paper from thousands of miles away? It was hard to imagine him doing such a thing, but I always hoped he would. It didn’t matter that I knew better.

  WE WERE BOTH IN our twenties when we met. Bydex was my first job, right out of engineering school, and Ernst had started a few years before me. The guy who hired me said he was putting me on a project with the company genius who was not a social butterfly, was I okay with that? When I walked into our shared office, Ernst raised an eyebrow and nodded while seeming to look over his shoulder. He shook hands, went back to whatever he was writing, and that was the end of our first meeting.

  But he loved the work. Once he’d sized me up, he made a point of taking me across the hall to meet the guy who was designing the electronics for a laser range finder that measured the distance from an airplane to the ground for accurate bombing. He thought I’d just want to see the beauty of it. I did.

  Almost everyone in the company was married except us. This was in the late sixties, in a sedate outpost of that era—we were in Phoenix, then a dusty town in the middle of nowhere. Ernst and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We played ping-pong in our married friends’ furnished basements, we played pinball in roadhouses off the highway, we drove for miles with nothing but static and Bobby Darin on the radio, we went to a shooting range and killed the shapes of ducks. No women worked on our project—we were devising tests for the guidance systems on military aircraft—or were anywhere outside the typing pool. I was so lonely I used to make surprise phone calls at noon to my high school girlfriend, who had a husband and a baby.

  Ernst and I were summoned one day to a large inner office with ugly maroon drapes, where a project manager told us what everyone knew, that Bydex systems were letting planes go off course in Vietnam, a place you definitely didn’t want to get lost over. And how would Ernst and I feel about seeing the world? Following the equipment into the field, being the company’s tech reps over there? “We can’t send mediocre drones on this,” the manager said. “We need our best, which is you.” I knew he was flattering us into believing it was a reward to be flown into a war, but I was immensely flattered anyway. I said I’d think about it, but Ernst knew right away. He tilted his head and gave his small crooked smile and murmured, Why not? It wasn’t a jaunty question—it had in it his private satisfaction that as a rule situations were as crappy as he expected.

  Saigon was not a combat zone. That was what I told my family, although they could see how jittery I was. It was a city near the bottom of a country at war—the ground fighting was mostly in the countryside (I hadn’t yet heard anyone say in-country) around villages farther north or down in the Delta. It was true that the Viet Cong had invaded Saigon during the Tet Offensive some six months before, but they hadn’t held it very long.

  I don’t know what Ernst told his family. He had one sister—who was out marching against the war, he said she’d always been an airhead—and he had a mother and father. His father owned a dry-cleaning plant. That was all I knew about them. He didn’t act as if he needed a family or understood why anyone did.

  WHEN WE CHANGED PLANES in Anchorage, I called my folks from the airport, while Ernst sat reading a Nero Wolfe mystery. The cover had a drawing of a corpse bleeding onto a carpet. My mother got very emotional, and I knew it had been a mistake for me to call. I envied Ernst, absorbed in his book. Our flights were on commercial planes filled with soldiers, and on the long middle route to Japan there was a group of Marines behind us, telling the world’s dumbest dirty jokes. But Ernst slept like a baby. His sinuses made his breathing loud—this new intimacy did not please me.

  Tan Son Nhut Air Base was teeming with soldiers. They looked very young, even to me, under their hats and helmets. As soon as we landed, I was looking for wounded ones on stretchers, or battle-weary groups covered in mud—I wasn’t hungry for horror but I had prepared for these sights the way I’d tried to learn a few words of the language. Cam on. Thank you. Phong tam o dau? Where is the bathroom? And then I did see two men carrying a heavy duffel, end by end, across the runway, and they moved with such focused deliberation that I understood this was a body bag, and I stopped in my tracks. Ernst was behind me. “Just walk,” he said.

  SAIGON WAS LOUD with traffic and smelled of exhaust fumes and hot asphalt and something faintly vegetal and pleasant. I did not see how our driver could make his way through the headlong flow of bicycles and cars. I hadn’t understood that it was a real city, with broad avenues and big boxy modern buildings and pink French colonial palaces, at the same time that it was a sprawling bazaar with people in conical straw hats carrying sacks of rice on shoulder poles and hawking packs of cigarettes and magenta fruits.

  Our car moved slowly and was like an oven. Since my dad was in the Navy, I’d lived in some hot places in the U.S.—San Diego and Corpus Christi and Key West. Saigon was definitely muggier than any of them. Sweat was running down Ernst’s face as if his pores were weeping.

  “They look cool,” Ernst said, looking through the window. The women on the street were all in long-s
leeved tunics and shirts (for modesty, the driver said) and did not seem to be sweating much, standing over their piles of auto parts and bananas and steaming vats of soup. Every item of the First and Third World was set out on the pavement—Bic lighters, bottled beer, sugarcane. In the midst of this jumble of enterprise, the vendors’ faces were distant and closed. I couldn’t tell if they were resigned or infuriated or just exhausted. It was too soon to even guess. Some of the women were very beautiful. Not the men, who looked bony and fierce-eyed to me. Even then I didn’t know what to make of the men.

  THE GOVERNMENT HAD bunked us into an old faded-glory hotel, a tiered white hulk with a soldier on guard outside. The lobby held a stiff arrangement of dark lacquered wood settees inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and we sat on these and waited with our luggage while someone checked us in. Across the marble floor, a man whose trousers were tucked where a leg had been cut off at the hip was crawling, begging from anyone who happened to be there. When he tapped my knee, I fished an American quarter out of my pocket to give him. One of his eyes was milky and vacant. Even Ernst gave him a dime.

  Our rooms were not bad, with their big rattan headboards and the windows X’d with duct tape to keep them from shattering. Over my bed was a woodblock print of a happy native paddling a boat under a willow tree. Where was that kingdom? It took about ten minutes for me to notice that nothing could make me cool in that room, not the ceiling fan, not the blinds drawn down, not mugs of ice brought up from the bar.

  From the first morning on, we worked very long hours at the air base, and when we came back to the hotel after dark, I went upstairs and lay down on my bed and listened to the noise of the street. Some of it was our noise—convoys and trucks and boisterous American voices—and some of it was theirs, the shrill and glottal syllables. I knocked on Ernst’s door to see if he wanted to go out. “You mean now?” he said from behind the door. He didn’t sound eager but he came out right away. At home he’d been like that too.

  Once we were on the sidewalks, people kept calling out to us. Men’s voices said in their half-swallowed English, “Where you going? I can take you cheap. Not safe to walk. You like young girls, how young? I can take you now, cheap for you.” They didn’t stop, no matter what we said or didn’t say. They trailed us across the avenue, around the square. “I see you before, I know you,” a girl of about fourteen said. “You looking for me?” So we took a cyclo—our two big Western bodies in a cart pushed by a skinny old man on a bike—to a bar that the corporal who was our driver had told us about. We walked into a dark basement lit by purple lights and full of soldiers and Vietnamese girls playing pool at a table in the center, with Mick Jagger singing “Under My Thumb” in the background. It took about a second to see that we were out of place in our seersucker suits and not welcome either.

  So we walked back to the hotel bar, where we drank glasses of beer with American civilians who were older and richer than we were and we let them brag to us about what they knew. “Never trust anyone. First rule. Get it tattooed on your chest over your heart.” This hackneyed lesson was intoned by a chemist who’d been setting up ice-cream factories for the troops. “But the French restaurants are good, I’ll tell you which ones.” A construction engineer who’d been in the country for years, carving up new harbors, kept trying to tell us about the huge motorcycle he’d bought for a song. He described every part of its mighty carcass, one of the few things likely to interest Ernst. I got a little jolly from the beers and the talk, but Ernst went silent, frozen (I later realized) in contempt. In the elevator I asked if he’d had a good time, and he said, “Not really. I’m not very crazy about profiteers.”

  I wiped, as my mother used to say, the smile off my face. Now I saw what he saw, how the men all looked a little oozing and overripe. Inflated and blustering.

  THERE WERE PLENTY OF other bars in other hotels, and our first nights were spent going from one to the other. And women found us, as it was their job to do. Two pretty teenagers asked us if seats at our table were taken. “You always so tall?” one of them said to Ernst. She was delicate and long-waisted, with a rough voice. The softer, plainer one picked me. Mine could speak a little English but not a lot, and it unnerved me later that night to have her small, pliant feet above my shoulders and her scent all around me and have so few words of hers I could follow. What was she saying, was she saying anything? And I didn’t even like, not really, the jolt of pleasure that arrived in the midst of my not wanting anymore to be there.

  And where was Ernst? I’d last seen him led by his girl into one of the other rooms. There’d been a tiny, awkward smirk on his face. A man like other men, I’d thought.

  Now he was waiting for me on the inner stairs of the building where they’d taken us. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “It’s late.”

  “How was it?” I said. “You liked her?”

  He didn’t bother to answer.

  Someone earlier that night, a man who was very drunk, had told me he knew Ernst was in the CIA. “He has that spook look,” he said, “that expressionless look. I’d know it anywhere.”

  Certainly no one was better than Ernst at keeping things to himself. Before we left the States, a few people we worked with had pretty much voiced the same opinion. But what did the CIA do? It gathered information, didn’t it? If this involved asking anyone questions, Ernst was not your man. He was notably incurious about other people and had no practice in exacting even a sentence. And CIA work would have required lying and disguise. Ernst hated even the small white lies of most social exchanges (Good job on that or Nice house you’ve got) and was famous for never uttering them. He had no tolerance for falsity. “Phonies,” as he (like Holden Caulfield) called them, made him shudder in disgust. The widespread habit people had of humoring each other was why he mostly chose solitude.

  WE SPENT A LOT of time at the airfield. Ernst’s hearing had already been damaged at home by the roar of engines, so I wore ear protectors, which he laughed at. The soldiers also found me hilarious. We watched the planes take off and we rode with the pilots on practice runs. Everything we checked out worked fine. We spent a lot of time rerunning the checks. Ernst was methodical.

  I was never very comfortable going up in those planes. I had enough sense to keep this sentiment to myself. Fear had settled in me as soon as we arrived. A week after we got there, a bomb went off in a nightclub in our part of town, a place I’d been to, with walls of mirrors that were now piles of slivered rubbish. My high school girlfriend, Kit, had started writing to me. Please take very good care of yourself, Toby, she said. All of us at home are thinking of you. I was thinking of me too.

  The Air Force pilots hated us. They liked to tell us the grisliest stories they could—mutilated soldiers who’d screamed the whole trip back, deadly bamboo snakes in the cockpit, kids on bikes throwing satchel charges into American trucks—and said we should talk to the infantry guys if we really wanted to hear stuff. GIs with necklaces of ears, eight-year-old girls luring men into ambushes, had we heard about those? I said, “Jesus. Holy Christ.” I thought they were overdoing the list for me (these weren’t wartime clichés yet) but Ernst didn’t flinch.

  “Planes go back out there into the thick of it every morning,” the pilot said, “early, like when you’re buying your croissants for breakfast.”

  “But we love our planes,” the copilot said. “You love this one?”

  “I do like these, actually,” Ernst said.

  The two pilots gave each other a look, and we were swooping down nose first. Only our seat belts, digging into our bellies, kept us from being thrown into the cockpit. Even Ernst was yelling, “Fuck! Oh, fuck!”

  And then we were gaining altitude too fast, our heads jerked back. The plane did a jarring, nauseating loop and then another lunge—the ride wouldn’t stop. I was shouting, “Right now, cut it out!” which probably egged them on. I thought they were going to kill all of us—why would they do that? I managed to stop yelling, “
Cut it out.” I sounded like a first-grade teacher. But why wouldn’t they stop?

  “Enjoy that?” the pilot said when we were level again. “Either of you shit yourselves?”

  We hadn’t. Ernst was white and sweating. “Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting.”

  I envied him. Everyone in Vietnam had to go through a process of hardening; even the civilians working for American contractors talked about how green they’d been in the beginning. But Ernst arrived with his own crust.

  “THOSE GUYS ARE CRAZY,” he did say, when we were back on the ground having coffee (a beverage then thought to calm you) in one of the air base canteens.

  “Why did we come here?” I said. “We didn’t have to come.”

  I thought he was going to say there was a war on. We worked in the defense industry, it went without saying we believed in the necessity of wars generally. You could not allow certain people to get away with certain things. Ernst thought the world consisted largely of such people, but he especially hated the Communists. No one could tell him they had a few okay ideas. “They’re bad news,” he said.

  “I wanted to travel,” he said now. “When Bydex hired me, they said I would travel.”

  “This is travel?”

  “You get to see people,” he said.

  He did? What people? It was true he walked around with a camera, a fancy, complicated number with extra lenses, and he used a light meter. But he mostly took pictures of buildings, as far as I’d seen—the post office, the opera house, the American Embassy with its flank of giant flowerpots. The post office had been designed by the same guy who did the Eiffel Tower and it had a very handsome arched ceiling. So what?