Interstitial #2
She pressed her lips to the summit of the cheekbone below my left eye. It was her favorite spot, where a star-shaped freckle
rested. My mother had tried to scrub it away with soaps and ointments when I was a child, but Justine cherished my mark. She
called it her kissing star. “You can say what you want, because I already know all that is essential about you.”
Constancy, that most beautiful and essential lie between lovers.
I pulled her onto my bed and swept her curls from her face. I rubbed my fingers on her pointed chin, the feature she most hated, but I worshipped. Would that I could have frozen us in ice, forever trapped in the moment like one of the statues she’d ordered for the fête.
Instead, with halting pauses and fumbled words, I told my story. It began with my true name. Then, it ended with my death.
Mine was a broken confession, one unworthy of documenting as it happened, but I can recall it better now, without her piercing
gaze on me, those dear lips struggling to form words in response to all I revealed.
In short—
May 17, 1943
I was sixteen when I met the man who did not like to hear the word no. He was a French soldier with eyes the color of a peacock feather and cold, knifing lips that spat like wads of tobacco.
He saw something he liked in me; or maybe he saw something he hated and wanted to destroy. At that age, I knew nothing of
men and the perils of rejection. I ignored his advances. All I wanted was to draw and be alone, away from my sister’s curious
eyes and the chatter of our neighbors. The soldier watched and bided his time.
Soon enough, there was a shed with a locked door that could not be pried open. A clammy hand held over my mouth. Splintered
wood on my back and a shuddering aloneness that would follow me until the day I met the Chaton.
After, the soldier tore open the door to the shed. His silhouette was a black flame in the penumbra cast by the sudden light.
He threw a stack of money at me. Bills fluttered around my crown like the wings of an oriole, confusing me. How had he determined
my price?
And yet, after he left, I gathered those bills and placed them in my torn waistband. I walked home with a dull static in my ears, feeling as if I’d been cut out of the fabric of life. Where I once existed, there was a slovenly rip, a dark breach.
Almost ten months after the shed, there was a baby. I named him Huy, after the sunlight that broke through a haze of clouds
at the exact moment he was born. I named him for hope.
My father had been furious when he discovered my predicament; my mother silent and unsympathetic. I was fortunate they did
not turn me onto the street, as many might have. Nevertheless, they blamed me for my carelessness. Good girls, they said,
did not find themselves in such situations.
I was never good, but I did not deserve what I got. No one ever did.
Ng?c, then only thirteen, had been flustered by the sudden storminess in our household. She understood when I began showing signs,
yet never once did she turn from me.
She’d lean her head against mine and say, “We’ll raise him together. He will be our most beloved boy.”
She was so sure he would be a boy, even before he quickened.
I asked, “And your dreams of singing at the opera?”
“We can manage. We have all the time in the world.”
Thirteen and foolish, enviable in her boundless optimism.
When Huy was born, I could not stop marveling at the sight of my beautiful boy of the wide peacock eyes, the clear forehead,
the bellowing cries. The soldier who did not like to hear the word no had been transferred back to France, unburdened by conscience or repercussion. His fate was not mine. I buried his filthy
money in an urn I kept in the bedroom I shared with my son and my sister.
For a matter of weeks, I was happy. Or, if not happy, I’d found some measure of temporary peace.
But as my baby grew stronger, so did the toxic sap that had begun to coat my mind.
It made me see things that weren’t there.
Fear beat in my veins every time I looked at Huy.
During our sleepless nights, I thought I saw in his expression the malignancy of his father.
It was all I could do not to snatch him from his hammock—
But Ng?c adored him and looked after him like a doll, kissing his brow, showering upon him all the affection I could not. I tried
not to resent my sister for so easily accessing the closeness that eluded me. My son grew robust under her nurturing. He laughed
for the first time in her presence. When he cried out, it was for her. Even at her young age, she was more of a mother than
I could ever be.
Once, as I bathed Huy, I allowed my boy to slip, ever so slightly, ever so slowly, into the water, until it seeped up to the
edge of his nostrils and he let out an angry cry that burbled in the basin. I remember that his breath created round and pearly
soap bubbles. I imagined what it might be like for him not to exist. My dreams, it seemed, had died at his conception.
Not a second later, I pulled him out of the basin, thumping his back to release the water.
Ng?c heard his cries and hurried in, taking him from my arms. She spoke into his ear with an intimacy that squeezed my heart,
“Sweet baby. Auntie will never let anything happen to you.”
I watched Huy smile up at her, tentatively at first, then with instinctive trust. A blinding purity shone between the two
of them. I thought of how I hadn’t been moved to give him even the fleeting comfort of my reassurance. Some people, like my
sister, were meant to be parents; to guide children into adulthood with tenacity and wisdom. Others found parenthood to be
no less than a living nightmare, a curse of relentless duty, one all the more potent because they had to pretend that it was
a blessing.
I did not harm my son in any lasting way, but after the incident at the bath, I knew I had no future in my childhood home.
My baby had no future with me. Until Ng?c married and began her own family, she would love Huy as her own.
(What selfishness to shoulder her with such a responsibility!
Shame finds terrible ways to escape itself.) Even my parents, so distant and unaffectionate, would muster the familial loyalty to care for Huy better than me, with my demonic cargo of emotion.
In time, I hoped our neighbors would forget me, and perhaps he would have a chance at normalcy.
My absence would be the most profound gift of his life. This is what I told myself.
A few days later, I kissed my son on his forehead and left him in his hammock. I thought he was sleeping, but when I looked
back, his eyes were fixed on me. He was silent and baleful.
Before I left, I stuffed my pockets with half of the soldier’s money from the urn. I left the remainder for my family. They
were at temple, crouched in obeisance before those heartless gods I’d ceased to depend on. I pictured them finding Huy when
they returned. Ng?c would hold him close, shaking with pity and anger. She’d wonder what kind of monster left her child behind.
She’d be right. I knew myself to be a monster. That’s what society told me I was. Maybe that is why I can’t stop painting
them. They are me, I am them. In the end, my sister’s hatred was a consequence I would bear. I believed I had no choice.
To my son, I said, “Live in the light.”
I didn’t look back once at the house by the ravine. At the river, I removed my clothes. I rested them, along with my jewelry,
on the bank. I left a brief letter. And the part of me that was a mother, a child of the delta, a girl pressed against the
wall of a shed—that part died.
The rest of me, what little was left, took a pair of scissors I’d slipped into my pocket and clipped my hair to my nape. I
shaped the style as best as I could in the reflection in the river. I wore the men’s clothes I’d taken from my father and
hid away by the bank. I bound my breasts, small as they were, with lengths of cut-up rags and rubbed dirt on my face and limbs.
No one, not even me, could find any traces of Tam lingering in the face I turned toward the world.
At first, I disguised myself because I didn’t want anyone from my old life to find me.
But why did I keep hiding, all those years later?
Perhaps I was afraid of what I might discover once I stripped the disguise.
Perhaps I understood that the path of a man would be smoother than that of a woman.
But I was never a man; I was always a woman with a woman’s aching heart. A pretender.
After I left my hometown, I walked until I found the nearest train station. In Hanoi, I found work cleaning for hotels and
brothels. During my rare moments of freedom, I continued to paint. It was the only instrument I found that could scrape that
black sap from my soul. Years later, an instructor from the newly formed école des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine saw my work and
presented it to someone he knew in Paris. Soon, I was offered a scholarship at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Too late,
my dreams had been delivered on a silver platter. But I seized them. I left my country and what family I knew behind.
On the banks of the Seine, I became K. P. Ly, a nonsense assemblage of letters that meant absolutely nothing to me. I was exhausted of names with meaning. Sometimes I thought
I’d never find myself again. In my dreams, I often saw my son’s eyes staring out at me from a void. Blue as sorrow. That was
the one thing that never left me; the ancient despair in his gaze, like he understood already all the ways that humans fail
one another.
May 19, 1943
Back in our Chateau des Miroirs, as I finished my story, the Chaton rubbed my back, her touch so gentle that it was all I
could do to hold my sobs at bay.
“So now you know,” I said. “And you will think I’m the worst sort of woman.”
“I think you have survived with the tools at your disposal.”