ometimes the work of a subversive is purposeful, but sometimes, I confess, it is accidental. In retrospect, perhaps my questioning of Sonny’s courage pushed him to write the headline that I saw two weeks after the field maneuvers, “Move On, War Over.” I saw it on the General’s desk in his war room at the liquor store, fixed squarely on the writing pad and weighed down by a stapler. The sentiments of the headline might be hailed by some, but certainly not by the General. Beneath that headline was a photograph of a rally staged by the Fraternity at a Westminster park, with ranks and files of grim veterans in paramilitary uniforms of brown shirts and red berets. In another photo, civilians in the cast-off couture of refugees waved signs and clutched banners with the telegraphic messages of political protests. HO CHI MINH = HITLER! FREEDOM FOR OUR PEOPLE! THANK YOU, AMERICA! To the degree that the article might sow doubt in the hearts of exiles about continuing the war, and create divisions among exile factions, I knew that my provocation of Sonny had had an unintentional, but desirable, effect.

I photographed the article with the Minox mini-camera that was finally finding some use. For the last few weeks, I had been photographing the General’s files, all of which I had access to as his aide-de-camp. Ever since my return from the Philippines, I had been unemployed except for this considerable pro bono work done for the General, the Fraternity, and the Movement. Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks. Memos must be written; documents filed; meetings called; flyers designed, printed, and distributed; photos taken; interviews scheduled; donors found; and, most important for my purposes, correspondence taken and mailed, then received and read before it was handed over to the General. I had photographed the General’s complete order of battle, from the company here to the battalion in Thailand, from the Fraternity’s public parades to the Movement’s private maneuvers, as well as the communiqués between the General and his officers in the Thai refugee camps, led by a landlocked admiral. Not least, I photographed the statements of the bank accounts where the General stashed the modest funds for the Movement, raised in small donations from the refugee community, the revenues of Madame’s restaurant, and a handful of respectable charitable organizations that had donated to the Fraternity for the relief of sad refugees and sadder veterans.

All this information had been packaged into a parcel dispatched to my Parisian aunt. The parcel’s contents were a letter and a chintzy souvenir, an automatically rotating snowball featuring the Hollywood sign. This gift required nine-volt batteries, which I included and which I had hollowed out. Into each I inserted a cartridge of Minox film, a more sophisticated method than how my courier in Saigon traded information with me. When Man first told me of my courier, I had immediately conjured up one of those supple beauty queens for which our country was deservedly famous, white as refined sugar on the outside, scarlet as sunrise on the inside, a Cochin-Chinese Mata Hari. What showed up at my door every morning was an aging auntie, the lines on her face promising more secrets than the lines on her palms, hawking gobs of betel juice as well as her specialty, sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a packet for breakfast every morning, and in it there might or might not be a message, rolled and wrapped in plastic. Likewise, in the small wad of folded piastres I paid her with, there might or might not be a cartridge of film or a message of my own, written invisibly with rice water on cement paper. The only flaw in this method was that auntie was a terrible cook, her sticky rice a ball of glue that I had to swallow, lest the maid find it in my garbage and wonder why I was buying what I would not eat. I complained to auntie once, but she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary. Even the cyclo drivers hanging around the General’s villa for fares were impressed. You better marry that one, Captain, a driver missing a left arm called out. She won’t be single for long!

I winced at the memory and poured myself a drink from the bottle of fifteen-year-old scotch the General kept in his drawer. Given that I was not being paid, the General kept me happy, and admittedly dependent, with generous gifts of fine and not-so-fine liquor from his ample supply. I needed it. Written invisibly in the letter were the dates and details of Bon’s itinerary and those of the grizzled captain and affectless lieutenant, from their airplane tickets to the location of the training camp. The information was no different in substance from what I had dispatched through auntie, the classified logistics of operations that would inevitably lead to devastating ambushes. Newspaper articles would report the number of American or republican soldiers dead or wounded, but they were as abstract as the faceless dead in history books. I could write these dispatches with ease, but the one about Bon had taken me all night, not because of the amount of words, but because he was my friend. I’m coming back, too, I wrote, even though I had not yet figured out how I would do that. The better to report on the movement of the enemy, I wrote, even though what I really intended was to save Bon’s life. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.

With no idea how I would manage to betray Bon and save him at the same time, I searched for inspiration in the bottom of a bottle. I was sipping from my second tumbler of scotch when the General entered. It was a little past three, the routine time of his return from Madame’s restaurant after its midday rush. He was, as usual, irritated from his hours manning the cash register. Former soldiers would salute him, a sign of respect that nevertheless reminded him of the stars he was not wearing, while the occasional snide civilian, always a woman, would say, Weren’t you that general? If she was very snide, she would leave him the tip, the typically grand sum of one dollar, our nod to what we considered a ludicrous American practice. Thus the General would arrive in the afternoons at the liquor store, as he did today, throw a handful of crumpled dollar bills on his desk, and wait for me to pour him a double. Reclining in his chair, he would sip the scotch with closed eyes and sigh dramatically. But today, instead of reclining, he leaned forward at his desk, tapped the newspaper, and said, Did you read this?

Not wanting to deprive the General of the opportunity to fulminate, I said I had not. He nodded grimly and began to read excerpts out loud. “Rumors abound about this Fraternity and what its true purpose is,” the General said, face blank and voice even. “The overthrow of the communist regime is clearly its objective, but how far is it willing to go? While the Fraternity asks for donations to help refugees, these funds may possibly be going toward a Movement of armed refugees in Thailand. Rumors are that the Fraternity has invested in certain businesses whose profits it reaps. The most disappointing aspect of the Fraternity is the false hope it peddles to our countrymen that we can one day take our country back through force. We would be better off if we pursued reconciliation peacefully, in the hopes that one day we in exile can return to help rebuild our country.” The General folded the newspaper and laid it back on his desk in the exact same position it had occupied before. Someone’s been feeding this man some reliable information, Captain.

I sipped my scotch to disguise the fact that I was swallowing the saliva that had pooled in my mouth. We have leaks, sir, just like we did at home. Look at that picture. All those men know something about what’s going on. All Sonny had to do was walk around with a bucket catching one drop here and another drop there. Soon enough he’d have a glass or two of information.

You’re right, of course, the General said. We can keep mistresses but we can’t keep secrets. This—he tapped the newspaper—sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Reconcile, return, rebuild. Who wouldn’t want that? And who would benefit the most? The communists. But for us, the greater likelihood if we return is a bullet in the head or a long stay in reeducation. That’s what the communists mean by reconciliation and rebuilding, getting rid of people like us. And this newsman is peddling this leftist propaganda to poor people who are desperate for any kind of hope. He’s getting more troublesome, don’t you think?

Of course, I said, reaching for the bottle of scotch. Like me, it was half empty and half full. Newsmen are always troublesome if they’re independent.

How do we know he’s just a newsman? Half of the newsmen in Saigon were communist sympathizers, and a good percentage of them were just communists. How do we know the communists didn’t send him here years ago with exactly this plan in mind, to spy on any of us who made it here and undermine us? You knew him in college. Did he display these sympathies back then? If I said no and the General later heard otherwise from someone else, I would be in trouble. The only answer was yes, to which the General said, As my intelligence officer, you’re not showing much intelligence, are you, Captain? Why didn’t you warn me of this when I met him? The General shook his head in disgust. Do you know what your problem is, Captain? I had a rather long list of my problems, but it was better to simply say I had no idea. You’re too sympathetic, the General said. You didn’t see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you’ve been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent. The General’s gaze was intense. My face started to itch but I did not dare scratch. Something may need to be done, Captain. Don’t you agree?

Yes, I said, throat dry. Something may need to be done.

I had plenty of time to contemplate the General’s vague demand in the ensuing days. How could one disagree with something needing to be done? Something always needed doing by somebody. An ad in Sonny’s newspaper announcing that Lana was singing as part of a revue called Fantasia provided me the opportunity for action, although not the kind the General likely had in mind. What I needed was a vacation, if only for a night, from the stressful, solitary work of being a subversive. For a mole used to darkness, a nightclub was an ideal place to emerge. Persuading Bon to go to Fantasia to hear the songs and sounds of our gone but not forgotten country was less of a struggle than I thought it would be, for Bon, having decided to die, was finally showing signs of life. He even allowed me to cut his hair, which he afterward slicked down with Brylcreem until it matched our glossy black shoes. The Brylcreem and our cologne lent my car an intoxicatingly masculine atmosphere as we listened to the Rolling Stones, the car transporting us not only west to Hollywood but back to the glory days of Saigon circa 1969, after my return from America. Then, before Bon and Man became fathers, the three of us had wasted the weekends of our youth in Saigon’s bars and nightclubs, exactly as one was supposed to do. If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?

Perhaps I could blame youth for my friendship with Bon. What drives a fourteen-year-old to swear a blood oath to a blood brother? And more important, what makes a grown man believe in that oath? Should not the things that count, like ideology and political belief, the ripe fruit of our adulthood, matter more than the unripe ideals and illusions of youth? Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults. Here was the scene of how our friendship first became established: a football pitch of the lycée, myself a new student surrounded by older, taller ones, the prancing steeds of the school. They were about to repeat a scene rehearsed by man from the dawn of time, the moment when the strong turn on the weak or the odd for sport. I was odd but I was not weak, as I had proven against the village comedian who called me unnatural. Although I had beaten him, I had also been beaten before, and I prepared myself for a losing fight. It was then that another new boy unexpectedly spoke out in my defense, stepping forward from the ring of voyeurs and saying, This isn’t right. Don’t single him out. He’s one of us. An older boy scoffed. Who are you to say who’s one of us? And why do you think you’re one of us? Now get out of the way. Man did not get out of the way, and for this he received the first blow, a slap on the ear that sent him reeling. I drove my head into the older boy’s ribs and knocked him down, landing astride his chest, from where I commenced to land two blows before his fellow oafs hurled themselves on me. The odds were five-to-one against me and my new friend Man, and even though I fought back with all my heart and rage, I knew we were doomed. All the other schoolboys surrounding us did, too. So why, then, did Bon jump forth from that crowd and take our side? He was a new boy who was as big as the older boys, true, but even so he could not beat them all. One he slugged, another he elbowed, a third he rammed, and then he, too, was brought down by the horde. So they kicked us, and hit us, and beat us, and left us bruised, bloody, and elated. Yes, elated! For we had passed some mysterious test, one that separated us from the bullies on the one side and the cowards on the other. That very night, we snuck out of our dormitory and made our way to a tamarind grove, and under its boughs we cut our palms. We mingled our blood once more with boys we recognized as more kin to us than any real kin, and then gave one another our word.

A pragmatist, a true materialist, would dismiss this story and my attachment to it as romanticism. But the story says everything about how we saw ourselves and one another at that age, as boys who knew instinctively that their cause was to stand up for the weaker. Bon and I had not talked about that incident in a long time, but I sensed that it was in his bloodstream as well as mine as we sang songs from our youth on the way to our destination at the Roosevelt Hotel. Once a swinging establishment on Hollywood Boulevard for celebrities in the black-and-white era, the Roosevelt was now as unfashionable as a silent film star. Worn rugs masked shabby tiles, and for some reason the lobby’s furniture comprised card tables and chairs with the spindly legs of cranes, ready for games of penny poker and solitaire. I had expected some residual splash of Hollywood glamour, with paunchy porn producers in butterfly collars and powder-blue blazers, leading demi-glazed women by their bejeweled hands. But the best-dressed people in the hotel appeared to be my fellow countrymen, bedecked in sequins, polyester, and attitude as we headed to the lounge where Fantasia waited. The other patrons, presumably the hotel guests, wore plaid shirts, pediatric shoes, and seven o’clock shadows, the only thing in tow an oxygen tank. We always arrived late for everything, including, apparently, Hollywood’s fashionable moment.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere inside the hotel’s cozy lounge was buoyant. Some entrepreneur had rented out the space to stage Fantasia, and the result was a refuge without any sign of refugees, the men sharp in tailored suits and the women delectable in ball gowns. Our aspiring bourgeoisie had found forty-hour-a-week jobs with overtime and, having padded their wallets enough to sit more comfortably, were now on the hunt for wine and song. As Bon and I settled into a table at the back, a winsome singer in a bolero jacket serenaded the lounge with a heartache-soaked version of Pham Duy’s “City of Sadness.” Was there any other way to sing about a city of sadness, the portable city carried by all of us in exile? After love, was sadness not the most common noun in our lyrical repertoire? Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat? These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.

I paid for the snifters without a twinge from my dwindling settlement cash, being of the firm belief that money did not live until it was spent, particularly in the company of friends. When I spotted the grizzled captain and the affectless lieutenant standing at the bar nursing beers, I even sent them snifters of cognac. They came over to our table and toasted our comradeship, even though I had not yet brought up the matter of my return with the General again. That was my intent, though, and I was happy to buy us all another round. Cognac made everything better, the equivalent of a mother’s kiss for a grown man, and so it was that we indulged as the singers shimmied on the stage one by one. Men and women, they crooned, they wailed, they sighed, they belted, they moaned, they roared, and no matter what they sang or how, the crowd adored them. We were, all of us, even Bon, airlifted back in time by the lungs of the singers, across years and miles to nightclubs in Saigon where the taste of champagne, besides the usual flavors and hints, always carried a touch of tears. Too many tears, and one was overpowered; none, and one was not enslaved. But a drop of this elixir was all one’s tongue needed before it could utter only one name: Saigon.

That word was mentioned by nearly every one of the performers and by the emcee himself. This guide to Fantasia was a modestly built man modestly dressed in a gray flannel suit, the only shiny thing about him being his spectacles. I could not see his eyes but I recognized his name. The Poet was a writer whose works had appeared in the literary journals and newspapers, gentle and nostalgic verses about the textures of everyday life. I remembered one in particular about the epiphany to be found in the washing of rice, and while I could not remember the Poet’s epiphany, I remembered the urge in the poem to find meaning in even the meanest of chores. Sometimes, when I washed rice and sunk my hand into the wet grains, I thought of the Poet. I was proud to see that in our culture a Poet could be an emcee for a night of song and wine for the common people. We respected our poets and assumed they had something important to teach us, and this Poet did. He had written a few columns for Sonny’s newspaper, explaining the vagaries of American life or the cultural miscommunications between Americans and us, and in this vein he interspersed his introductions of the singers with brief lessons in our culture or the American culture. When it came time for Lana, he began by saying, Some of you may have heard that the Americans are a people who like to dream. It’s true, and although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state. Here, we can dream of anything, can’t we, ladies and gentlemen? I will tell you what my American Dream is, he said, holding the microphone with the care one reserved for a stick of dynamite. My American Dream is to see once more, before I die, the land where I was born, to taste once more the ripe persimmons from the tree of my family’s garden in Tay Ninh. My American Dream is to return home so I can light incense at the tomb of my grandparents, to roam that beautiful country of ours when it is at last peaceful and the sound of guns cannot be heard over the shouts of joy. My American Dream is to walk from city to village to farm and to see boys and girls laughing and playing who have never heard of war, from Da Nang to Da Lat, from Ca Mau to Chau Doc, from Sa Dec to Song Cau, from Bien Hoa to Ban Me Thuot—

The train ride through our cities and towns great and small continued, but I had gotten off at Ban Me Thuot, my hometown, hill town, town of red earth, Highland country of the finest coffee beans, land of booming waterfalls, of exasperated elephants, of the half-starved Gia Rai in their loincloths, barefoot and bare breasted, land where my mother and father died, land where my umbilical cord was buried in my mother’s meager plot, land where the heroic People’s Army struck first in its liberation of the south during the great campaign of ’75, land that was my home.

That is my American Dream, said the Poet, that no matter the clothes I wear or the food I eat or the language I speak, my heart will be unchanged. This is why we gather here tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Though we cannot be home in reality, we can return in Fantasia.

The audience applauded sincerely and enthusiastically for our diasporic poet laureate, but he was a wise man who knew that we were gathered here for another purpose besides hearing him. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, raising his hand to still the crowd, may I present to you another American Dream, our very own Vietnamese fantasy...

Now known by just one name, like John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Mary, she stepped onstage clad in a red velvet bustier, a leopard-print miniskirt, black lace gloves, and thigh-high leather boots with stiletto heels. My heart would have paused at the boots, the heels, or the flat, smooth slice of her belly, naked in between miniskirt and bustier, but the combination of all three arrested my heart altogether and beat it with the vigor of a Los Angeles police squad. Pouring cognac over my heart freed it, but thus drenched it was easily flambéed by her torch song. She turned on the heat with her first number, the unexpected “I’d Love You to Want Me,” which I had heard before sung only by men. “I’d Love You to Want Me” was the theme song of the bachelors and unhappily married males of my generation, whether in the English original or the equally superb French and Vietnamese renditions. What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac.

Listening to her sing, all I wanted was to immolate myself in a night with her to remember forever and ever. Every man in the room shared my emotion as we watched her do no more than sway at the microphone, her voice enough to move the audience, or rather to still us. Nobody talked and nobody stirred except to raise a cigarette or a glass, an utter concentration not broken for her next, slightly more upbeat number, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Nancy Sinatra sang it first, but she was merely a platinum princess whose only knowledge of violence and guns was derived secondhand from the mob friends of her father, Frank. Lana, in contrast, had grown up in a city where gangsters were once so powerful the army fought them in the streets. Saigon was a metropolis where grenade attacks were commonplace, terror bombings not unexpected, and wholesale invasion by the Viet Cong a communal experience. What did Nancy Sinatra know when she sang bang bang? To her, those were bubble-gum pop lyrics. Bang bang was the sound track of our lives.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud. As the Poet introduced the next performer, all I heard was bang bang, and when Lana returned to the table reserved for the performers, with the seat next to her left empty by the singer who had replaced her, I told Bon I would be back in ten minutes. I heard him say, Don’t do it, you stupid bastard, but without further thought I began my walk across the lounge. The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think. Not thinking is more difficult than it sounds, and yet, with women, one should never think. Never. It simply won’t do. The first few times in approaching girls, during my lycée years, I had thought too much, hesitated, and, as a result, flailed and failed. But even so, I discovered that all the childhood bullying directed at me had toughened me, making me believe that being rejected was better than not having the chance to be rejected at all. Thus it was that I approached girls, and now women, with such Zen negation of all doubt and fear the Buddha would approve. Sitting down next to Lana and thinking of nothing, I merely followed my instincts and my first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first.

I had no idea you could sing like you do when I first met you, I said. She looked at me with eyes that evoked those on ancient Grecian statues, empty and yet expressive. Why would you? I was only sixteen.

And I was only twenty-five. What did I know? I leaned close to be heard over the music and to offer her a cigarette. Fourth principle: give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me. If she declined the cigarette, as any of our proper young women should, I had an excuse to take one myself, which gave me a few seconds to say something while she focused on my cigarette. But Lana unexpectedly accepted, giving me the chance to fire up her cigarette with a suggestive flame, as I had once lit up Ms. Mori. What do your mother and father think of all this?

They think it’s a waste of time to sing and dance. I suppose you agree with them?

I lit my own cigarette. If I agreed with them, would I be here?

You agree with everything my father says.

I agree with only some of the things your father says. But I don’t disagree with anything.

So you agree with me when it comes to music?

Music and singing keep us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.

And we know we can love. She blew smoke away from me, though I would have been delighted to have her blow smoke in my eyes or on any part of my body. My parents fear singing will ruin me for marriage, she said. What they want for me is to get married tomorrow to someone very respectable and very rich. You’re neither of those things, are you, Captain?

Would you rather I be respectable and rich?

You’d be much less interesting if you were.

You might be the first woman in the history of the world who’s ever felt that way, I said. All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. A man gazing on semi-exposed breasts was not only engaging in simple lasciviousness, he was also meditating, even if unawares, on the visual embodiment of the verb “to cleave,” which meant both to cut apart and to put together. A woman’s cleavage perfectly illustrated this double and contradictory meaning, the breasts two separate entities with one identity. The double meaning was also present in how cleavage separated a woman from a man and yet drew him to her with the irresistible force of sliding down a slippery slope. Men had no equivalent, except, perhaps, for the only kind of male cleavage most women truly cared for, the opening and closing of a well-stuffed billfold. But whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t. A woman with extraordinary cleavage would reasonably be insulted by a man whose eyes could resist the plunge, so, just to be polite, I cast a tasteful glance while reaching for another cigarette. In between those marvelous breasts bumped a gold crucifix on a gold chain, and for once I wished I were a true Christian so I could be nailed to that cross.

Care for another cigarette? I said, our gazes meeting once more as I offered her my pack. Neither of us acknowledged my expert appraisal of her cleavage. Instead, she silently accepted my offer, reached forth her delicate hand, plucked out a cigarette, inserted it between her candied lips, waited for it to be ignited from a flame in my hand, and then, gradually, smoked the cigarette until it dwindled to a handful of ashes, easily blown away. If a man survived the time taken to smoke the first cigarette, he had a fighting chance on the beachhead of a woman’s body. That I had survived a second cigarette boosted my confidence immeasurably. Thus, when the permed chanteuse whose chair I occupied returned, it was with confidence that I stood up and said to Lana, Let’s go to the bar. Principle five: statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no. She shrugged and offered me her hand.

Over the next hour, in between the times when Lana scorched the earth and the hair on my forearms with a few more songs, I learned the following. She loved vodka martinis, of which I ordered her three. Each one was shaken with top-shelf liquor in whose clear solution floated a pair of plump green olives, the suggestive nipples of pimentos protruding from them. Her employer was an art gallery in tony Brentwood. She had had boyfriends, plural, and when a woman discussed past boyfriends, she was informing you that she was evaluating you in comparison with defective and effective partners past. Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her favorite singers were Billie Holiday, Dusty Springfield, Elvis Phuong, and Khanh Ly, and she believed Vietnamese people could also sing the blues. Of American cities, she believed New York was where she wanted to live if she could not live in Los Angeles. But of all the things I learned about her, the most important was this: whereas most Vietnamese women kept their opinions to themselves until they were married, whereon they never kept their opinions to themselves, she was not hesitant to say what she thought.

At the end of the hour I waved Bon over, desperate for another pair of ears to relieve the stress on mine. He, too, was punchy with cognac, its influence making him unusually voluble. Lana was not above socializing with a common man, and for the next hour they became partners on a walk down memory lane, reminiscing about Saigon and songs while I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana’s legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer. I was being held captive by the sight of them when I heard Lana say, And your wife and child? The tears trickling down Bon’s cheeks broke the spell she had cast on me, the sight rousing me from deafness. Somehow the conversation had taken a turn from Saigon and songs to the fall of Saigon, which was not surprising. Most of the songs the exiles listened to were soaked in melancholic, romantic loss, which could not help but remind them of the loss of their city. Every conversation among the exiles about Saigon eventually became a conversation about the fall of Saigon and the fate of those left behind. They’re dead, Bon now said. I was astonished, for Bon never talked about Linh and Duc with anyone but me, a function of the fact that Bon hardly talked to anyone. This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall. But perhaps this embarrassing collapse was worth it, for Lana, to my even greater astonishment, embraced him and pressed his stubborn, ugly head against her cheek. You poor man, Lana said. You poor, poor man. I was overwhelmed by a great, aching love for my best friend and this woman whose divine figure was the symbol of infinity turned upright onto its rounded bottom. I yearned to prove the hypothesis of my desire for her by empirically examining her naked curves with my eyes, her breasts with my hands, her skin with my tongue. I knew then, as she focused all her attention on the weeping Bon, who was so insensate with grief he seemed unaware of the enchanted valley exposed to his view, that I would possess her and that she would have me.