XXThe Hiss Quarterly || Volume IV, Issue 3

Yarek speaks little English, beyond “yes, madam” and “where’s toilet?”; a recent Polish immigrant, toiling for money for a potato farm. In his paint-spattered white coveralls, his grip on the apple he brought loosens. It falls at our feet, rolling underneath the radiator, quelled by the density of coagulating desire.

Yarek came, in between jobs, for the ladder I held hostage; I point at the unvarnished marble floor, eggshell-white, and his eyes rotate, half-lidded under a thick fringe of lashes, from the fan in my hands, my tangerine high-collared ao-dai to the finger stanching the bead of sweat down my coiled neck. He musses his hair, as if deeply frustrated; one foot crosses the doorway, the other dangles in half-step. One hand braces against the doorjamb, the other reaches out for me.

Girls whose names begin with A. Ava. Audrey. Paul, my husband, likes the alphabetical order in his little black book.

Max Beerbohm has two self-portraits, one entitled “The Theft”, depicting a dapper, well-heeled gentleman in tweed and bow-tie stealing a library book in 1894, the second entitled “The Restitution”, a portly, dark-suited, crooked-kneed, white-bearded man cane-walking the book back in 1920.

In 1991, late night at the Floater, the Americans celebrated Halloween in the discotheque. I had vagrant, uncoordinated thoughts about Paul. About time and luck. About inflammable desire. Did the Americans pilfer Guy Fawkes for Halloween? Instead of carved pumpkins, straw-stuffed effigies with conical hats littered the entrance, red patches for cheeks, carrot noses, broom bodies. Is this the American nod to atonement, for going astray, for the War of Independence?

Old juxtaposed with new, change with stability. In the middle of Saigon, a giraffe escaped from the central zoo and cantered over rarified buildings. A catacomb of tunnels led from the Reunification Palace, escape twinned with capture, stealth with a headlong trust in labyrinthian fate. Paul said Saigon accommodated them all. But the Americans still haven’t made complete reparations, I said.

In 1991, we met at the BP Raffle, sitting opposite each other, Paul like a somber don in a tuxedo, I fresh out of Oxford. I watched him with Cara, his Vietnamese wife. The cadence of their whispers in each other’s ears reached me as purloined desire.

Girls whose names begin with C. Cara. Mine. Cilla.

Yarek underestimated Paul’s knowledge of the isotropy of marble. I am Paul’s representative. We bargain, jockey, square off. “This is not Macael marble.”

“You have to pay first. 90% of work finished.” Yarek’s representative is an uncouth brutish yob from Essex.

“Tell him to redo the floor. We paid for Macael marble.”

Girls whose names begin with M. Mia, Michaela. I should have known his black book doesn’t stop at C.

We are all from the gutter, but who is minding the stars? Is desire just a form of appropriation, of rapacity, everyone swindling everyone else for a breath of celestial mystery? Restitution or retribution; is it ever clear?

Yarek has no choice. He replaces the marble tiles he embezzled; it takes him and his crew the better of two weeks. In acknowledgement of his restitution, I release his ladder. When he leaves, he takes an apple out of his pocket. His eyes slide over as he opens his mouth wide.

Paul is pleased with his wife. “These Eastern European guys are always looking to screw you.” He winks, then gives me a cold comfort cuddle.

Two years ago, in a market square in Saigon, past the age of Cara, Paul turned his back to me, and began to bargain in Vietnamese with the embroidery vendor for bedsheets arrayed with star clusters. Suddenly, there she was, Cara, like the daughter of Nyx, Nemesis, wisping by, hair jet-black as always, her magenta ao-dai shimmering in dazzling sunlight. She hailed a cyclo, and as she got in, I saw that in her hand she held a Colt .45.