Free The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs Page A

Tung, tall, light-skinned, and buff. The other men I knew wore busy fabrics and fancy leather shoes as signs of their sophistication and wealth. Phai wore solid blacks and blues and whites, as if he’d never noticed there was such a thing as fashion. Unlike Tung, he was quiet. He listened closely, but seldom spoke. After he’d convinced his mechanic friend not to clobber the cyclo driver, I’d seen him several times in our living room. I’d never talked to him, but I could tell that I amused him. Sometimes, while struggling through some tricky grammatical turn of phrase, I would glance in his direction and see that he was watching me. I’d smile, embarrassed. He’d smile back as if we shared a secret.
    Grandmother Nhi handed me a steaming cup of tea. I knew that she was about to speak, and my brain shifted into a mode of nervous preparation. Then, it came: “Duyen, how old are you?” Easy enough. I relaxed, but before I could get the words out of my mouth, Tung answered. He proceeded to launch into a lengthy and astonishingly assured discourse on the details of my life. Within a few seconds, I had lost the thread of the conversation,but I could tell by the way he continually gestured in my direction that the subject matter had not changed.
    Tung made some sort of joke that made both Phai and Grandmother Nhi start laughing. Grandmother Nhi’s laugh was persistent and breathy, like the hiss of a water heater. Phai’s was louder, but only lasted a moment. I stared into my cup of tea, trying to figure out what had suddenly made Tung such an expert on my life. Since the night he’d brought his brother and cousin to my room, he hadn’t come upstairs as often. He was like a child, always focused on the newest toy, and my novelty had worn off. Now he was busy networking to fill the other room in his guesthouse and was often so distracted he’d barely notice when I walked by. At last, I thought, my relationship with him was becoming more normal. We still spent blocks of time hunched over the dictionary downstairs, but the time was no longer simply an exercise in language acquisition. We were really trying to say something. Tung had told me about his years in Germany, about his best friend Hans, a taxi driver from Dresden who had given him the Metallica cassette he always cranked up on the stereo. In exchange, Tung had taught Hans how to cook rice Vietnamese style (never gooey, with each grain so distinct you could pick it up with your chopsticks and see an oval as perfect as an egg). Neither one had had to teach the other about beer. That was one thing they had in common.
    Grandmother Nhi began to laugh again and from a few key words I guessed that Tung was describing the limits of my vocabulary. Tung’s most recent contributions to my knowledge included “air conditioner,” “go downstairs,” “go upstairs,” and “lock the door.” I had, most recently, taught him “it’s okay with me,” and “fuck you.” Was Tung telling that to Grandmother Nhi? He was grinning, seeming to get an inordinate amount of pleasure from making me squirm.
    Phai wasn’t laughing anymore. His eyes rested on me. As Grandmother Nhi’s amusement continued, my discomfort must have been obvious because, for the first time, Phai spoke to me. “Duyen, do you understand?” he asked, his eyes suddenly wide with worry. I nodded and shrugged at the same time, an answer that could have meant anything. Then I hurriedly finished my tea and went inside.

4. The Four Stages of Love
    I N EARLY A PRIL, THE COLD LET UP and the rains began. Hanoians called it mu’a xuân, “spring rain,” to distinguish it from the violent storms of summer. I couldn’t call it rain at all. “Rain” seemed too strong a word for this formless, weightless mist that didn’t fall from the gray sky, but condensed out of the air itself. The chinaberry trees in front of my house bloomed tiny white flowers, which fell like snow into the puddles on the sidewalk below.