In the soft dawn light, she rose and crept to the bathroom, closed the door, and stood under the trickling of the tepid shower to wash the fact of Darrow from her, the water falling rust-colored at her feet. Michael’s fury, the idea that she was haunting him by entering his war. Her failure still raked against her this morning. Maybe she should give up, go home to California, take up the small life offered to her. Let everyone think it had only been a grand, misguided gesture. Running a washcloth across her throat, she felt her skin, tender and sunburned. She pushed the washcloth between her legs. The water had a metallic smell, like medicine. She wanted to escape down to a café on a quiet street and sip coffee alone and think. Should she return home, tail between her legs? The last part of the dream, Michael and she were inexplicably prone on the ground beside the helicopter, and a group of Vietnamese children approached, circling the two of them, pressing in, circling around and around, touching, but when she tried to speak with them, they turned their backs to her. Stones began to fall.

When she opened the bathroom door, her hair wet, a towel wrapped around her damp body, Darrow was sitting up in bed. “Everyone was right about you. You’re some kind of mermaid. Always dripping with water when I see you.”

Defeated by the awkwardness of the moment, she turned prim. “I need to brush my teeth.”

“There’s a fresh brush in the drawer. Rinse with scotch, I’m out of bottled water.”

She nodded, grabbed her clothes, and ducked back into the bathroom. Once dressed, she came out and edged toward the door. “I need to go.”

He leaned over to the nightstand and picked up a key, tossing it to her. “So the door will always be unlocked.”

Glad to have escaped, she was still not ready to go back to her own room. When the cab dropped her at the hotel, she walked through the streets of downtown and along the river walk, tired and overwhelmed by the strangle of noise, movement, and people. Beggars clogged the streets, and young ex-soldier amputees with sullen, closed faces lounged in doorways and along walls. The city bristled, full of dirty children and starving animals. The tension in the air unnerved her. Even the effort to decipher it seemed crushing.

She longed to return to her room, be cool and clean, close the curtains and lie in semidarkness, but she couldn’t be alone just yet. Visions of home became more per sis tent, filled with more and more longing-the wide streets along the beach, the green mossy lawns, the Vs of pelicans flying along the cliffs. Along Duong Hai Ba Trung, makeshift vendors sold sodas, the dusty bottles lying in boxes of crushed ice in the shade. The heat made them tempting, but she was frightened by stories of ground glass put in the drinks by VC.

Walking on and on, she neglected to check street signs, indecipherable anyway for the most part. She wandered for an hour in a labyrinth, then found herself back on Tu Do and felt pleased to be back at the familiar. As she passed along a row of shops, a cool, mint green bedspread in a store window caught her eye. The smooth fabric glowed in the dimness of the store. Helen was sure that if she touched it, it would be as cool as stepping onto a dewy lawn in the quiet of early morning back home. She went inside to ask the price.

The woman behind the counter barely looked up from her bookkeeping. Dark blond hair coiled into a bun with two weaponlike black lacquered sticks to hold it in place. Her face was pale and dry and powdered, painted crimson lips. For a moment, the store was so quiet Helen could hear the buzzing of a fly at the window and forgot if she had asked for the price or not. Then the woman spoke with a French accent. “That is expensive. Hand-embroidered silk from Hong Kong.”

Again she dismissed Helen’s presence, scratching at her ink-splotched columns of figures with an antique fountain pen. After a moment, she reached under her desk and brought out a large flyswatter that she snapped at the window behind her. Then the store fell into utter silence.

Helen turned and was startled by the sight of two Vietnamese women sitting in high-backed, rush-bottomed chairs. Neither of them looked up at her, not slowing down or missing a single stitch in their sewing.

Although they both had deeply lined faces, their hair, identically done up in tight buns, shone jet black. They wore matching black silk dresses, perfectly fitted from a fashion in vogue in Paris forty years back, consisting of tight bodices and long, flowing skirts. Heads bent down, they embroidered with the tiniest, most delicate stitch on silk cloth. So intent, so silent, Helen had not noticed their presence on first entering the store, their chairs on either side of the door to the supply room like bookends in a museum.

As Helen turned away, one of them, the older woman it appeared, began to murmur under her breath in French to the other. Helen could understand them no better than if they had spoken in Vietnamese. What new event could possibly have occurred to prompt conversation in this tomb except her entrance?

She turned back to the Frenchwoman, challenged now by her dismissal. “I’ll take it.”

The woman looked up, penciled eyebrows arched. “Lovely, I’ll wrap it with a large bow. I’m the owner, Annick.”

Helen leaned against the counter, dizzy from the heat and her lack of breakfast. The seamstresses, self-contained as sphinxes, were oblivious to her distress. She looked down and saw that her blouse had half-moons of sweat under the arms, and she was even more depressed by her water-ruined shoes. The Frenchwoman had undoubtedly noticed all this; probably that was the subject of the seamstresses’ conversation also. As she turned, she felt a warm stickiness between her legs, and realized that she had forgotten her time of the month. Simply too much to bear, and in frustration, to her horror, she began to cry.

“I need to use your bathroom. I have a problem.”

Annick sized her up, determining if she passed some test. The two women could just as easily have become adversaries, but something had swayed her to be Helen’s friend. “Come, let’s take care of you.”

When Helen returned to the showroom, she was sheepish.

“Have a seat. I’ll get you some water,” Annick said.

“The heat…” Helen mumbled as she accepted the glass.

Annick was as impeccably dressed as if in a store on the Champs d’Elysées. Helen stared at her dress-a soft peach-colored silk, with a Mandarin collar. Annick looked at Helen’s slacks, decided something, and smiled. “I have a black skirt in your size. Borrow it. It’s much lighter than what you have on.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “Where did you get that dress? I don’t have the right things…”

“The unexpected social whirl, yes? The dress is made here.”

“I brought all the wrong things.” She felt humbled, broken, by the last days. “I mean, it’s a war zone.”

“There are tricks to living in the tropics.”

“Really?” Helen was flooded with relief to have another woman to talk to.

“Watch the Vietnamese.” Annick nodded her head toward the two seamstresses. “They move slowly. As do the French. When you walk down the street, you can always spot the Americans because they are hurrying.”

“I didn’t notice.”

One of the Vietnamese women dropped a spool of thread, and it rolled out of reach under her chair. Carefully she laid down the cloth she was working on and stood up, gathering her skirt in one hand, the fabric rustling. Helen saw she was wearing dainty black boots with buttons going up the ankle like the kind worn at the turn of the century. The cloth she was working on was a silk hanging of a bacchanalia: figures sitting at a table with naked dancers swirling around it. Detail so fine that red thread formed the rubies in the dancers ears.

Annick laughed. “It’s true. You’ll never survive here otherwise. The place will wear you down. I’ve been here fifteen years. Very few Western women last. It’s an art to master. But they never ask for help.”