The Size of the World Page 3

  “Fine,” he said.

  People around us died all the time—I didn’t know why I’d thought we were any safer. I felt like a fool, like the most naïve person in the country. I was a fool in a hole with a bear.

  “If we stay here long enough,” I said, “we’ll be around for Christmas when Bob Hope comes to visit.”

  Ernst wasn’t doing any smiling yet.

  “Maybe Ella’s coming. You think she would?”

  I wasn’t glad to be the one asking these questions. Why wasn’t Ernst asking me? Who in the whole world did I have to lean on? Soldiers had each other in a war, but I didn’t have shit.

  He shook his head. His helmet nudged the mattress.

  “Does she have views about the war? You know anything about her views?”

  I didn’t give a fuck about Ella’s politics, if she had any, and the USO always had girlie shows anyway, not middle-aged black singers with glasses.

  “Did she have a contract dispute with Verve?” I said. “I thought her manager owned it. Why did she leave them?”

  The noises outside had stopped. We sat waiting for more.

  “After ten years with one record company,” I said.

  I was talking to myself. What did I expect? I was the one who knew not to expect Ernst to be different.

  “I hate Capitol,” I said. “Why she’d go to Capitol?”

  How long had it been quiet? I didn’t trust the quiet.

  “Money,” he said.

  It was a small victory for me when I heard his voice. Training my attention on Ernst, trying to bore a hole in his wall of silence, took me out of myself just a bit and gave me some relief. It occurred to me that Ernst never felt that kind of relief. Not ever.

  The noise of firing had been worst to the east of us, on the other side of the airfield. “You know Ella was only twenty when she recorded ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’?” I said. I pulled the mattress off of us—we were going to suffocate if we didn’t get blown up.

  “Twenty is young,” I said. Ernst, in his helmet and vest, unfolded himself and stood up. Then he was walking toward his own room.

  “Leaving so soon?” I said. “Leaving me to my own post here?”

  He murmured, “Good night,” with his back turned. I was the one who knew not to expect him to be different. But I was angry at him for not being more human. Just this once, this time of all times, couldn’t he have fucking managed it?

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, when the first haze of light was showing through the window, I heard Ernst talking, through the wall. Either he was talking to himself or he was praying. Anything was possible. “…fine,” he said. There was a whir behind him. “It’s pretty hot and the rainy season is starting, which doesn’t really cool things off.” He was making a tape. “The food is not too bad. I haven’t been writing so I decided to send a tape. Maybe Susan has a cassette recorder or you can buy one. We can send tapes back and forth. Last night we had to get our protective gear out because there was a rocket attack in our area. You have the address. Signing off now. Bye.”

  He probably hadn’t written to his family in years. One of the little-known facts about him was that he had trouble writing—he was a terrible speller and his sentences were always short and childish. He must have been shaken to the bone, to send them a tape now. His family would be glad and scared to get the tape.

  I DIDN’T THINK we were going to be there long enough for anyone to answer him, but they kept us in Da Nang another three weeks. The roads on the base turned to mud when it rained, and I slipped into a crater left by a rocket and I banged up my leg—the last straw, I thought. And Ernst and I were arguing every night, when we were alone, about the war. I hadn’t actually stopped being afraid of Communists—no, I was more afraid, I was properly scared of almost everything now—but I’d stopped seeing the point, I thought the point had been lost. At great, great cost. I said we were spreading evil instead of containing it. “What does that mean?” Ernst said. He talked about the Red Chinese and the Soviet Russians, did I know how many people Stalin had killed in the gulags? Seven million disappeared in just four years of the purges. “What does that have to do with it?” I said. We went around and around. He held (I knew) to his principles. Nothing I said about Fifth Uncle softened him. He said I was too emotional. It was hard to argue with someone who ruled out the claims of feelings. He must have thought he’d won every time.

  WHEN ERNST GOT an envelope from his parents, he waited until night to play the tape, and I lay in my bunk and listened as the voices came through the wall. Wonderful surprise to hear from you, his mother said. Very glad you’re enjoying your work, his father said. The dog is getting so fat,his sister said. You could hear they were very careful around him.

  Every time I asked Ernst if he’d answered them yet, he shook his head, but he played the tape night after night. Through the flimsy wall, I got so I recognized the sequence of their voices, the different pitches in order.

  BEFORE WE WENT BACK to the States, we got flown to Bangkok for two weeks of R&R. We didn’t know whose idea that was, but we landed in Thailand in a state of amazement. What a palmy, good-natured city it seemed to us. The streets were every bit as hot and fetid as Vietnam, maybe hotter, but the crowds seemed wonderfully gentle and sunny. Nobody hated us, as far as we could tell. I couldn’t get over it. It made me feel light and crazy just to walk around.

  Our hotel had a small garden in the courtyard, and Ernst liked to sit out and drink the sweet Thai coffee they made with condensed milk. He could knock off a few hours just reading the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune. He wasn’t up for photographing any gilt-encrusted temples or schoolchildren in uniforms—“No new data,” he said—but I was restless, I wanted to wander.

  It was all quite dreamlike. I got lost in the streets, I rode a ferry on the river, I fed myself on snacks of grilled bananas and seared noodles. On the third day, my leg that I’d gashed and scraped falling into a rocket crater in Da Nang began to throb and feel swollen, and I had the nasty sense that Vietnam was still claiming me. Was I a little feverish? Maybe I was. I sat down on a bench in Lumphini Park and drew up my pants leg. There was an old gauze bandage on my shin, and when I lifted a corner, the skin was oozing and gave out an odor. Why did I think I could forget the place that fast?

  I was so interested in my revolting little wound that I didn’t see the two youngish Thai women coming toward my bench until they called out, “You all right? We don’t think you all right.” I was embarrassed to be caught baring my hairy Western leg; my manners were worse here. “You hurting?” one of the women said. They did not look like hookers—they were dressed more like office workers, in crisp little blouses and narrow skirts.

  “We nurses,” one said. “Is okay we look? We don’t hurt you.”

  They lifted the bandage and clucked and muttered—what a mess I was. They were quite sure that they should take me back to the hospital they had just left. “No trouble,” they said. “No problem.” I rode in an open-sided tuk-tuk next to their smooth-skinned, smiling selves. One of them was Bua, a girl who’d come down from the north to study here, and the other was Toon, who lived on Thanon Wisut Kasat with her family and who later became my wife.

  ON THE RIDE to the hospital, when I got a better look at Toon, I was thinking what a very fine day I was having. I thought the two women were going to just drop me off at the hospital, but I’d at least have the imprint of Toon to keep, like a good wish for my future relationships in the States. Though I did but see her passing by, / Still I love her till I die. We’d sung that in school. I had the traveler’s idea that something fleeting was blessing me.

  IT WAS MORE complicated than that. My family thought I was nuts when I came home to America just to quit my job and turn around and go back to Bangkok. They thought that the war had done something to me, which it had. Hadn’t my nice girlfriend Kit always tried to get me to settle down, but I was Mr. Too-Cool, Mr. Don’t-Fence-Me-In? But now I wanted to nest.

  It was tru
e that Vietnam moved me toward Toon. Constant fear can make you see the real drawbacks to going through life alone. Though I wouldn’t say Ernst especially took that lesson from it. He said, “If that’s what you want,” when I told him about my engagement, and he thought well of Toon too.

  IT HASN’T ALL BEEN an idyll, of course, my marriage and my life on another continent. It’s had its hills and valleys. My job difficulties have strained us and we’ve had problems with our son. During one of my worst times, I was seeing a therapist, a fairly smart guy from Chicago, who happened to say I was an unusually private person, which made me wonder if I was like Ernst after all. I spent some time explaining Ernst to the therapist (on my nickel) and he told me that, as far as he could tell, Ernst sounded like someone with Asperger’s syndrome. A neurobiological disorder—like having a pinch of autism. Many people probably had it. “Well,” I said, “there are all sorts of ways of being human, aren’t there?” I wondered how Ernst would have felt about his personality having a material cause—perhaps he would have been affronted, though he did prefer the measurable world.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who say Einstein had Asperger’s. I’m not sure I believe in geniuses anymore—in a superspecies of mental giants—but I think Ernst was probably brilliant. In our last days in Vietnam, we had to file reports about the defective screws (God knows what became of these reports), and Ernst wrote a few lines of tirade in capital letters against the fraud of the manufacturers. LETHAL CHEAPNESS. GREED KILLS. Bydex, who’d bought the screws for cheap, would not have been pleased. What a pure, unsullied life Ernst led, in his way.

  I HAD A VERY NICE wedding in Bangkok, not big but flowery and pretty, and I sent a set of photos to Ernst, who was back at Bydex in Phoenix. I don’t know if he ever received them, since he didn’t send any word back. I picked the ones in which Toon looked especially wonderful and I didn’t look too geeky. He didn’t envy me, I knew that, but I wanted him to see.

  Behold the giddy American, I wrote. What is that sucker doing? Ernst must have thought when he looked at them, at me surrounded by the smiling strangers who were my in-laws, by the unheard lilt and spit of all of them talking. I imagined him shaking his head over the smeary mess of a future I insisted on wanting. How stubborn he was. Always when I thought of him a kind of envy spread through me. In spite of everything, it just did.

  II.

  It surprised everyone, including me, that I was in such a hurry to marry Toon. My family in Florida couldn’t understand why I was heading back to Southeast Asia, when anyone who’d been to Vietnam wanted to get the hell out of that part of the world. I had some trouble explaining that Thailand, site of rest and recovery, was to me the opposite of Vietnam. “It’s nice there,” I said. They didn’t get it. And Toon didn’t want to leave her home. My family thought she’d be dying to move to the U.S., but she wasn’t. She had her own family.

  Marrying her was a bold move on my part, and I was never what anyone would call a bold man. But the months in Vietnam put enough fear into me to make everything else small potatoes. So I was going to live in Bangkok and I didn’t speak a word of Thai, so what? So I was swearing to live forever with someone I hardly knew, why not? Leftover horror made me bolder.

  What did Toon think? She had reason to be wary of Americans, but she was a nurse, a steady girl. She’d seen danger and I wasn’t it. She probably thought of me as some sort of lovable doofus. And then I was bleeding love for her, she could tell that early on. I was a sodden mess of leaking devotion. How had that happened to a nerd like me?

  I asked myself that question every day, in Bangkok after I met her and the months I was back in the States and the strained and giddy days after I returned. She wasn’t the only female I’d ever met—what was it that unsprung me? She was so calm and kind and mild that first afternoon, in the face of my smelly, festering wound and the whole sweating bulk of me. Perhaps any pretty nurse might have been the same, but actually I don’t think so. “No trouble,” she kept saying, though we had to wait hours in the hospital till some doctor finally released a cache of antibiotics. Bua went home. Toon was still shrugging and smiling. Soon soon. I felt that she could wait for days and it would not humiliate her.

  It made me patient just to be with her, and when I went back that night to the hotel, I hardly knew how to be next to the exasperated grunts and sporadic mumbles that were Ernst. How had I stood it before? Hanging around with him that night, I was in exile from enchantment, pissed off, carrying my desire like a precious souvenir. When I went to find Toon the next day, I didn’t care how pathetic I was.

  SOMETIMES YOU HAVE ideas based on no information, and they’re still right. Toon was one of those ideas. When I turned up again, she laughed softly at the sight of me. “Hello, Mr. Toby.” She couldn’t talk at the hospital, but she let me come back at her break. “You eat a good Thai lunch,” she said, “you never want to leave my city.” We ate at a street stall and she tricked me into swallowing a hot chile, an ancient bit of slapstick that caught me off guard because she was so gentle. I had never flirted with an Asian woman who wasn’t a hooker, and it made me shy, which (lucky me) was endearing.

  So I became her bumbling boyish admirer, haunting her workplace, nodding at the table of her incomprehensible family. I tried to bring her gifts—paperbacks in Thai (she was a great reader) whose covers I liked, a ghost story and a soupy romance. Her own taste (I learned) was higher, but she had a soft heart and my eagerness got to her. But any touching, any kissing, had to be hidden—in a movie theater, in a car in a parking garage—and I’d go home afterward to my adult fevers, my lustful private worship of the memory of Toon. Only when I proposed did she find her way to my room at the hotel, and the astounding, sly presentation of her bared and unfolded self, the heat of her utter interest, broke me open entirely. She hummed a contented little tune as we lay in bed afterward—what a funny, peeping singer she was—and I was the one knocked out, cut to ribbons by too much sweetness.

  I had to leave the next day and I could hardly remember which was my luggage or how to get in line to get on a plane. And once I was home in Florida I could not really keep track of what anyone said. Key West and Bangkok both felt like dreams to me, faded films playing exclusively in my own head. When I telephoned Thailand in the middle of the American night, Toon would say, “Toby, you okay, yes?” and I’d say, “You’re there?” in idiot relief at the sound of her voice.

  Maybe neither of us really thought I’d come back, but little by little, Toon brought me along. The ever-clearer outlines of plans entered our expensive conversations. How else could I have married? I had no clue really how to live with another person. Toon let me know what I was supposed to do.

  It was not hard either. I had to get a job—even I knew that—and after a bunch of ragged interviews in Atlanta, I found an unexciting gig with an American soda company’s office in Bangkok. It paid fine—most things paid fine for Americans in Thailand—and I was only just starting to brag about this to my Florida friends when Toon found us an apartment. Not just us, I should say. I would have lived anywhere, but this was near where she’d always lived, in an unpicturesque part of the old city, and it was big enough for her mother to have her own room and her younger sister too.

  SO I HAD ROOMMATES when I first settled in, a smiling audience who formed a fond tittering garland to my happiness. Even without language I could tell her family traded little rowdy female jokes about us newlyweds. Toon would giggle and I’d pretend to preen—we were one long charade of silent-movie overacting, and I didn’t mind it either.

  Sometimes an aunt and uncle showed up, and the sister moved into the mother’s room. I liked the uncle. He would sit with me at night while Toon was chatting in Thai with her mother and aunt. Even without much English, he taught me a basic card game called Pok Deng and he poured me shots of Sang Som (he called it whiskey but Toon said it was rum). My efforts in the game made him strike his head in comic defeat or move his hand like a snake when he was being clever himself. It wa
s a game that rested on luck but we pretended otherwise. I looked forward to our matches at the end of a long day. Uncle Lek would glint at me in sly amusement, old rogue that he was. He won a few baht off me most nights.

  Whose life was I in? Where was I? When Toon’s mother said good night and the others slipped away, Toon would bring out little squares of coconut candy for the two of us to eat, and then we’d go off to our room, whispering about the day’s events while we took off our clothes, and then, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, Toon would fold back the top sheet for us and I’d be a man in bed with his wife. I couldn’t get over it, that this had been given to me. We had simple, ardent sex—neither of us was very schooled, the sheer elemental friction still stunned us—and then we lay curled around each other, bodies washed up from a whirlpool. We said tender things in both languages, and I went to sleep grateful.

  I WROTE TO ERNST at Christmas: Living well here—everything is cheap—and a whole squadron of Thai relatives is catering to my every little whim. Lord of the manor! Room for one more if you ever want to visit.

  BUT I DIDN’T LIKE my work. I was reviewing the systems that operated the machinery in the bottling plants, to make sure things were running properly and see if any procedures needed to be redesigned. I should say I was not really qualified to do this, but no one else was either. They kept wanting me to go out into the field and look at more bottling places.

  “Like Dickens,” I told my secretary, a Miss Brandt from Chicago. “He worked in a bootblack bottling factory when he was a child. A terrible place.”

  “That was a long time ago,” she said. At least she knew who Dickens was. I wasn’t going to any factories. Even if they were good, for Asia, I knew they had things in them I didn’t want to see. Practices I didn’t want to put my name to, as it were. Word spread that I was jumpy and odd from being in Vietnam.