Sleeping in Texas - Death of my first wife - The patient - With winter in each pocket - A rite of passage in Saigon

SLEEPING IN TEXAS
Paul Christensen

My mind glows like the Chihuahua desert--
columns of rock milky with light,
quartz-deep against
the blunt iron, the lava flows.
I can’t sleep. I roll from side to side
probing the pillow
to keep from sliding .
The air tight around my eyes.

In each crevice sprawl bones,
a voice foggy as my mother sleeping,
muttering her dreams.
My father sucking wind into
his thundering lungs, groaning to unload
his cargo of desires. The dead
are everywhere, looking up
as I pluck sleep from an overhanging rock,
desperate not to fall. Below,

the fires of El Paso, and beyond,
black hills rolling into Mexico.
Each crater of silence
hiding villagers, fear clinging
to their ankles to keep them
from emigrating. The voice of famine
whispers over the arroyos
as sleepers turn. The evening
stretched on poles over us,
creaking with the old moon.

DEATH OF MY FIRST WIFE
Paul Christensen

All those years piled up like rags
in dark corners. I knew her once,
gliding among the shafts of
summer sun that snaked
through our apartment windows.
It was August, and her anger
hung like laundry on the air,
moist and warm from all the lye
of her imagination. And tender,
too, after making love. Her white
arms crossed at the table, her
thoughts folded neatly in her head.

The crib creaking with the boy
who surprised us in August
just as the bowls were breaking
on the shelf, and the earth
was shaking our wooden bed apart.

So rational, she couldn’t
stop the love that froze in her,
that floated like an ice berg
in her words and sunk my little
steamship chugging toward her.
But that was then, and the dust
is heaped like sand dunes
on her memory. Except for death,
which comes like a fly buzzing
in the window, upsetting
the silence I had laid her in.

THE PATIENT
Paul Christensen

She was ill, a tumor hidden in the pancreas.
She vowed to fight sliding into the CAT-scan.
The men were distant at times,
mouths full of marbles when they spoke.
Charts grew, the medicine red, then green,
something called vin Christine, coating
the sordid ball of death inside her.

She was a kind of Christmas tree
of black ornaments, grape clusters
in her lungs, prunes in her throat,
a black potato in her gut, inoperable.
The nerves were strung over
the ruins, like Italian laundry lines.

Help me. Her eyes spoke in small words.
Her wrists were perforated.
The bed white, abstract with her thin
arms spread over it. Her legs were slow.
Weakness was a blessing that lifted her
above the smell of iodine,
the cold linoleum glare squeaking with shoes.

Silence in the rollers of beds, the soft
close of doors, the darkness
that dropped over the dead.

Published in Tex! Spring, 2006

WITH WINTER IN EACH POCKET
Paul Christensen

You know you’re in love
when grackles storm the Wal-Mart
parking lot like lost notes,
each shrill cry piercing
the heart. You may be
heaving for each breath
as you near the car, but the day
is flaming at its edges,
birds everywhere, scattering
through the shambles of the sky.

You know you’re in love
when the bills come due
with late fees, a warning
to disconnect the juice,
the house warm as an island
in the Pacific, your lamps
glowing like ripe mangoes –
and birds drifting in the winter air.

Such birds, so many birds,
each a face of someone you used
to know, or loved, or wanted to –
your heart aches, as if a
drunk surgeon opened it with
razor-beaks, and pried out
your secrets one by one,
a grackle for each sorrow,
a black bird’s croak for every
word you didn’t say.

A RITE OF PASSAGE IN SAIGON
Published in The Connecticut Review in 1991.

In the old days, back before the American war broke out in Vietnam, there was a small American community in the heart of old Saigon. The year was 1960, and I was seventeen years old. The kids all attended a correspondence school set up in some concrete buildings near the airport, where a few wives of the diplomats volunteered to conduct school, which meant overseeing the opening of our school packets and keeping us quiet while we filled out the multiple answer sheets during tests. A small library had been set up in a rusty corrugated iron shed; a gallery ran along the side leading to classrooms, and behind was a dusty playground.
We got there by taxi and cyclo, a kind of motorized rickshaw, and when school let out by two, we headed back to our villas and apartments. My father was high up in the embassy chain and received a planter’s house for his residence, on Rue Cong Le, the main road leading from the airport to the palace, and down to the landings of the Mekong River. After lunch I would read a while in my bedroom, and when it had cooled down a bit, I would make my way across town on foot to my friend Richard Turner’s house. He was already a painter and was usually at work on some large, crudely painted abstraction he had set up in his yard. It was always fun to go there and find him pretending to be a kind of mad, entranced Jackson Pollock, slopping globs of primary color here and there with oversized brushes. He would be covered in paint, and his sister, a plain-faced bosomy girl my age, would be hanging around. Occasionally I would flirt with her, but cautiously. Richard was very protective of her.
I was home for good after spending a disastrous year in the Philippines, at a boarding school for delinquent rich kids from all over Asia. The discipline was medieval, and I spent many a weekend shoveling pig manure from one bin to the next working off demerits I had accumulated through the week. All for love of a crinkle-eyed girl named Diana Lewis, who lived with her engineer father on the island of Cebu. I wrote poems to her, showered her with compliments, and was usually caught holding her hand under a Banyan tree on campus – a violation of rules worth two hours in the pig parlor. When she threw me over for a Spanish boy, I brazenly lit a cigarette in the courtyard and blew smoke in the face of one of my teacher’s, a bow-legged man with a Dr. Spock face and the mind of Torquemada. I was expelled and sent home.
Lovesick, roiling in puberty, all elbows and shins, I walked a long and rambling path through side streets and city parks to my friend Richard’s house most afternoons. Saigon was like a dreamscape – with the sun breaking through wild fig trees and royal palms, and the squawk of tropical birds and spider monkeys jangling out of the local zoo. Girls floated along on black bicycles with their cone hats slung back on their shoulders, their silky shifts floating behind revealing slender brown legs in silk so sheer their underwear glowed. They would smile and blink their black eyes and give a polite laugh and sail on again, leaving me blushing with eagerness. A few French girls would go along with briefcases, blue uniforms, singing or giggling. They were mostly metisses, beautiful hybrid girls half-Vietnamese, half French. Their hair was as dark as jasper, their faces light olive, with round French lips and pug noses. They studied at a genuine French lycee, and could go on to a local branch of the University of Paris near the palace. I dated the daughter of the rector of the university briefly, a wild, unpredictable pure French whose way of dancing matured every boy into manhood in two slow waltzes.
It was after a few months of my strolls that I began to notice a slender Vietnamese woman I guessed to be in her mid-twenties, whom I usually found puttering in a tiny garden. Her house, facing the park was small, a dark little dwelling with balconies and vines, and a few flowers struggling for sunlight. She would water, dig here and there, pick a few leaves of herbs she was growing, and always look up with that subtle, seductive curiosity that still burns in my imagination. I would slow when I got near her fence, and look for the bobbing of her straw hat. If she were there, she would rise, put down her shovel, pat her black silk trousers, as if looking for her house keys, then smile. She knew I was watching, aching. She would smile and look off again, as if she were merely amused at her own thoughts.
I couldn’t know, couldn’t be sure. But I was beginning to think she might like me. I wondered how I would make a first move. What sort of schmoozing does a young Vietnamese woman go for, I wondered? I was shy, very inward at the time, which I now interpret as mere lack of confidence. On I would go, past the house and across the street, slowly. If a bus came by, I would use the excuse to look over my shoulder, but she would be back at work again, concealed by her hedge.
We had had a run of maids in the house, sturdy, sinewy women in white tunics and loose black pants, who took their shoes off at the door and came in to slap cold rags around the tile floors and to wash up dishes. They spoke a kind of French patois, twanged through their noses. Most came to work for us from embassy referrals and were in their mid or late thirties. The younger ones got into trouble now and then and were sent to the countryside to become prostitutes. My mother kept a close eye on hers and made sure the work was done early; the maid would then go out to her own little house in the back of the garden, to fix her supper. On weekends she would visit her children and come back with little bags of vegetables from her country garden.
Once, when she had a day off, our maid had her mother over. The two women stood in the back yard talking. They were both slender, with lean attractive faces. But the one had pulled up her hair into a tight, ferocious bun that raised her eyebrows and gave her the look of something ancient, turned to stone. And she wore a black tunic over black pants, a fact that seemed to age her even more. She now looked Chinese, and matronly in a subtle, equatorial way of slender women. I gathered she wore her hair up as a fashion of her generation. I did not know it was something all Vietnamese women do when they reach a certain age.
Later, when I mentioned this woman to a friend of my father who had spent many years in Saigon, he became interested in me as something more than a generic embassy brat. He put down his martini (I volunteered as waiter at my parent’s cocktail parties) and took me aside. We sat down on the rattan couch in the next room and he proceeded to explain to me this rite of passage of traditional women.
They reach the age of forty, he said, or thereabouts, and it is agreed by all one day that it is time to accept old age. So the woman who looks very young and becoming with her long black hair draped in a fall behind her, will now submit to having her hair washed and combed by relatives and friends at a kind of party. They sit around reminiscing as they as they run their hands through her black hair, perhaps speckled with a few gray strands. All this with mirth and green tea, and rice snacks in the cool of the garden. Then one of them gathers up the hair in her powerful fingers and pulls it taut as banjo strings, seeing what pressure to apply by the look of the woman’s face. When the brows rise sufficiently, the hair is twisted round into a circle and rolled back hard to the scalp in a flat ring. No stray hairs are allowed to dangle down of her former self. The moment this occurs, she is old. She was young moments before, now she enters the ranks of the aged. Her white tunic is removed and she puts on a new black one. Her skin loses something, thereby; its luster, its firmness, its youthful sexuality.
“Is she sad,” I asked? I was concerned, struggling with all my western assumptions about the powers of youth.
“No. She is happy, in fact, quite happy,” he said.
“But she has lost everything. She is no longer desirable,” I said.
“Ah, but she has gained something in the bargain. She is now an authority on matters of sickness, death, and trouble. She is to be trusted with sorting out family problems; people will come to her for advice. She won’t do all the work now, only some of it. She will advise, guide, she will join the ranks of the other old women of her neighborhood and share a culture of those who rule.”
It was like a promotion, he said. You give up some things, like the world of admiring men, and a kind of vanity that comes with being beautiful and delicate, and you acquire the power to make decisions. But you can not appreciate the desire to make this transition, the eagerness of awaiting this moment, unless you also accept that death is not fearful, dreaded. Buddhism prepares you to accept death, my friend told me. It is another promotion to something higher, even more liberated from toils and routines. So, this is the first bridge, the first stopping point on the journey toward death. And it is greeted with quiet joy and satisfaction. You have lived honestly, virtuously, happily in your modest life, and now you are rewarded with old age.
So with old age you walked more slowly, and people deferred a little. You got on the bus without having to shove; you received a cut rate at the hucksters’ stalls. You were called old woman in an affectionate way that conferred authority as well as prestige. You were growing old against a backdrop of eternity and reincarnation, a universe of souls slipping out of things and returning to them charged with new spiritual missions. You had only crawled like an insect past a leaf node, no more. The journey was forever, so what was a bit of hair pulling and a black shirt? Nothing.
Meanwhile I began dating an American girl at school who lived out in a compound run by a road-building company called Johnson, Drake and Piper. She asked me to come out to her house one day so I hired a cyclo and followed her directions passed the golf course and into the hinterlands. When we came up on a rise of ground I beheld an American suburb floating over the rice padis, a maze of low-pitched roofs and cul-de-sacs, with a launderette and a convenience store with gas pumps. I got down and walked to the control gate, was checked over and called in, and passed through to Orchard Court, then Tamarind Drive, and finally Tulip Drive where she lived. Inside her dim, ice-cold house with its modern furniture and rugs, was a kitchen reconstructed out of some magazine ad, with the dishwasher rumbling and a box of Cheez-Its on the counter. We had Cokes and cookies, and sat talking with the television down low. When dad came home with his yellow construction hat and boots, we greeted briefly and he seemed to approve. Mom came from a bridge party and life as it can only be fantasized from American sit-coms went on peacefully at the edge of the jungle.
I left stricken with culture nausea. I was young, but even I could sense when things had gotten out of control. My one look back at this fantasy suburb told me my own people were culture paranoids, and that this expensive reconstruction of Falls Church was something out of nightmares and deliriums. What was American afraid of? And why did it turn its back on an old, friendly, mystical place like Vietnam?
Inside the house was every comfort to make life painless and uneventful. I could sense it in the mushy feel of carpet in a hot climate. The air conditioning smelled like zinc and mothballs, and dead air recirculated six months or more. The food looked pale and imported, pulled out of a long moldering career in freighter holds and warehouses. Everything seemed slightly tainted with the desire to import the alien into a tropical lushness, a tangy freshness of equatorial abundance. The Coke tasted like cough syrup; and the cookies were crumbly Brillo pads in my mouth.
When Darlene’s mother came in, she looked strangely younger than her daughter, as if they were competing for the role of teenager. She wore a short cheerleader’s uniform, modified for tennis, I guess. Sneakers and rolled socks, and a bouncy walk as she went over and poured herself a big goblet of Kool-Aid. She said cool a couple of times, and looked me over. I was wearing an odd combination of clothes, shiny tailored pants from downtown Saigon, a barong tagalog, the Philippine hangout dress shirt, and a pair of plastic sandals from the wet market. I guess I looked too native. She wrinkled her nose and humored me.
It was a relief to smell the rank odors of the gutters on the way back to town, and to feel the heat of the city come up over the last hill. The noise and gas fumes were welcome reminders I lived in the heart of town. Then the roar, the confusion, the laborers jogging along with big cans on poles, the fish market with its din of shouts and clangs, ice thrown into the street, birds wheeling overhead.
I went home and stood looking out of my bedroom window into the neighbor’s yard, an exotic-game collector who supplied European zoos. Six slender men in shorts were teasing something with bamboo poles. I couldn’t make it out at first but it was an enormous boa constrictor that lay sprawled like fire hose all over the pebbled driveway. It finally coiled a little, slowly, in a sleepy sort of way, and then a head appeared from under the ferns, raised slightly, pivoting about at the men. They pricked the coils and the thing moved along toward them, as they backed up. They wore loose sandals, and were hardly prepared for any emergency. Finally the big mottled shape tried to strike someone, and the sticks pinned it down coil by loop, as someone gathered up half of it and lugged the snake toward a large metal cage. It was stuffed little by little into the cage and the door was dropped and padlocked. Off it went to Turkey or Spain for a new life.
A large brown spider monkey sat out on the balcony of the house and screamed like a peacock all day long. Other animals came and went. These were big houses with high walls and gates, a once glamorous neighborhood before the French war. Now it was rental villas, with a less distinguished clientele, but still rich. I once pitched a few stones with a friend of mine as we talked at my own gate to the street. A few weeks later I saw a pink envelope in the old mailbox in the gate pillar. I pried open the door and read a note in an elaborate script asking that “missiles not be sent to the cardinal points ending the tranquility of our quarter.” Addressed to “Esteemed Neighbor,” and signed modestly, “A Friend.” Nothing had changed much from the 19th century in the colonial part of town.
The rooms of such houses smelled of orchids and papaya. The high ceilings were spotted with little geckos waiting for nightfall. The furniture was cane and mahogany with light cushions; the tables were copper trays on tripods, with no rugs. The light came through half-tilted shutters, sunlight filtered through vines and plane trees. The rooms were etched in pale golden shadows, with sounds coming softly out of the neighboring yards: bird calls, the click of the geckos, an occasional dog bark, twangy native talk among the maids. The kitchen held a large crock on legs which filtered the tap water. The sink ws huge, and the refrigerator a little box that rarely hummed. Everything sedate, old-fashioned, timeless.
There was no sense of time at all; it had vanished long ago. The stationery shop downtown sold quills that had been imported thirty and forty years before. The clerk would blow the dust off, wipe with a damp rag, open the box of nibs and fountain pen bodies, select the dark blue one and try on nibs and give you a big bottle of ink to try it out with. The paper was yellow from age, thinner than onion, so thin you saw your thumbs holding it up. The notebooks were from the turn of the century, bound in thick boards and carefully covered with stitched cloth. They smelled of death and decay, a good smell when you are young. Boxes of notebooks filled the shelves behind the high wooden counter. The pencils came from England, some from Paris, so labeled. Thick wooden pencils with very hard lead. You wrote in a spider-web script with them, designed for large ledger books – also on sale in another department. I ordered things in French, the market speech of Saigon. English was rare. I asked for gomme, eraser rubber, and a large ball of raw, spongy rubber was taken from an elaborate wrapper of waxed paper, with strings and seals attached. Chinese. Maybe fifteen cents our money. A pen was a dollar, a pad of paper, fifty cents. All in the local piasters. A big, ribbed paper wrapping held my purchases of the afternoon, lovingly bound with twine. I went home to write some poetry in honor of my lost Diana.
Trucks rolled by our house each night now from the airport, big camouflaged troop transports from the C-5s landing at the airport after midnight. American soldiers bound for the jungle stations on the new roads Johnson, Drake and Piper were building under the deceptive heading of foreign aid. They rolled for hours, caravans of them, with the soldiers hidden behind drawn tarps. They went past the palace and out into the sweeping six-lane freeway heading north, where huge military camps were under construction. My father knew all about this, even wrote reports on some bridge collapses and prepared evidence for federal lawsuits on the construction. Everyone knew the war was in preparation years before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. War with the north, which had infiltrated its soldiers all the way down to Saigon’s suburbs. Americans were told not to travel anymore, not even out to the peripheries of town. A lot of quiet Americans were turning up in the padis and ditches, out in the shanty towns, where displaced farmers lived and forced their daughters into prostitution.
Even if the noose were tightening in this pre-war era, with Americans showing up in larger numbers now, and bar girls beginning to speak slangy English – the town was still indolent, slow-pulsed, decadently refined. My friend Richard and I held poetry readings in the little house next to the maid’s, where I had moved my things. It was a narrow room with a very high ceiling, and no air-conditioning, where we lit candles in old Chianti bottles, and read our versions of the new Beat style of poetry. Stuff about radiation and atomic warfare, and urban blues – all faked and pretentious. He played bongos, and I poured dollops of gin I bought from the PX store at the embassy. We were hip, man.
Richard, or Rique, as we called him sometimes, had a girlfriend and never seemed to run out of neat things to do. I was a loner and had no luck with girls. I dated a few times but usually got dumped for being moody. So I ambled along to his house on weekday afternoons looking for something to do. And I would take my sweet time roaming through back streets and crowded squares, maneuvering through bicycle traffic and cyclo stampedes. Always with my heart beating for a glimpse of a straw hat and a face I had grown to love with all my powers of fantasy. Her black eyes would be looking over at me, as she stood up to pat her legs for those house keys. She would be smiling, as if to say even a western boy has enough sense to admire my beauty. We all knew Saigon’s women were the most beautiful in the world, and that a blond was nothing beside even the plainest of them.
I had turned eighteen and felt mature, ready to try my hand at cross-cultural romance. I was thinking this was the day I would stop, lean over the hedge and hold out my western hand. I meant to talk to her in my pidgin French, to not let her go. I would fix my eyes on her, I would be smiling innocently enough, but I would not let go her hand if she should give it to me. I would hold it until she kissed me. I promised myself this one recklessly bold move today of all days, in honor of my maturity.
When I got closer, I found I was panting slightly. My nerves were taut, I knew I would go through with it and risk utter humiliation and rejection. That was my worst fear – she would go cold on me, run into her house! It would bring shame on her to have me be so public with my emotions. It wasn’t done. So, perhaps I should slow down a bit, be more subtle, engage her in conversation. Ask about her garden, maybe request a taste of an herb? That would work, or was I backing out of my dare? I would hold her hand, maybe not aggressively, but hold it. Caress it, perhaps.
My mind was raging when I approached the fence. My palms were moist, and my chest ran with trickles of sweat. I would hold her hand, I repeated like a mantra. I would save myself from Johnson, Drake and Piper and all the Darlenes of the world. I would fall in love, and she with me, and we would become lovers in that dark, cool house, with her breath scented with mint and parsley. I would be different, perhaps stay on in Saigon when my parents left for home. I would become a citizen of this strange country, I thought.
When I arrived at the garden and could see over the hedge, there was no hat to be found. Only an old woman toiling at her garden, who looked up briefly with her flat, uninteresting face to study me a moment and go back to hoeing with a hand tool. She had that detached, slightly condescending look of old women, due to their raised eyebrows, their pained foreheads. It made their mouths go flat, with no teeth showing. Only those high cheeks, those distant eyes to look out of. She must have been the woman’s mother, grandmother, perhaps. No sign of the woman I had spent many a desperate hour holding in my mind. My poems had shifted over to her, and I called her my beloved Hai, the name of my maid. I couldn’t think what name she might go by, but how I dreamed of our introduction, of hearing her redolent, herb-rich name for the first time. Now there was only this old crone digging up a root, getting her feet black with mud. She had looked up with that quizzical, almost querulous expression of indignation at finding a western man staring at her. She even stood up briefly, patting her legs! As if all women did this, I thought morosely. Perhaps the one inside had never intended to flirt with me, only stood from habit when a man came near.
I stepped back, considering what next to do. My dare was still hot in me. Should I go to the door and ignore the old lady? She might protest, but at least the other would come out, hands wet, smelling of greens and melon, to let me bathe my eyes in her gaze. But no. It isn’t done. I had no rights. I must move on. I must get my feet off this cement where I had become glued. I looked down one more time, as if a tunnel had opened and I had been swept into it, howling with fear! I walked away quickly, gasping to myself. Not even bothering to look both ways as I dashed across the mad street to the park. It was her! It was her! I kept whispering, the tears spurting from my eyes. It was her!