A voice behind her made her turn. Darrow stood with Linh in the doorway, talking to a Special Forces lieutenant.

When Darrow saw her, he bowed his head briefly, then came forward. “Why are you here?” He had hoped to hear news of her departure, heading back to California. Her presence irked him. When she was gone, he would stop wanting her.

“You treat this like your personal war. Think I’m crashing a funeral?” All of her longing for him instantly turned to dislike. She regretted Linh moving off to give them privacy.

Darrow stared at the coffin, kneading the back of his neck. She had gotten further than he would have thought. He couldn’t imagine MacCrae befriending her, exactly the kind of amateur he loathed. “We were good friends.”

“Robert said-”

“Frank,” he said, “was part of the old guard. The men here are the last of it.”

She fingered the beaded sheath on her belt. “He left this for me.”

So Frank hadn’t quite dismissed her. Of course, he was human, too. A pretty face must have appealed to him. “He must have thought you needed protecting.”

“I left my camera for him.” She looked around. A lonely way to end. As if he read her thoughts, Darrow reached out his hand and laid it on top of hers. An impartial hand. She let it sit there for a moment, warming her skin, then pulled away before she got used to it. She would stay a little longer because Frank had taken her aspirations for real, not wanting to let his faith in her down.

With a shock Helen realized she had stayed till Christmas, a disreputable and wistful holiday in the tropics. A large dinner party was organized for all the journalists stranded in-country. A hot and rainy afternoon, but the evening held a touch of coolness, a token of it being the dry season. As Helen waited in the hotel lobby for Robert, it could not have felt less like Christmas Eve.

The party was being hosted in one of the rented old French villas near the embassy. When Robert and Helen walked in through the gates set deep in the high walls surrounding the compound, the courtyard was crowded with overgrown plants-heavy, succulent leaves, overblown blossoms beginning to wilt, heavy rotting mangos and papayas fallen on the ground from the overhead trees-all of it lit by thousands of small candles flickering throughout the grounds. White-coated Vietnamese menservants greeted them in the doorway with silver trays of champagne.

Everyone in the expat community was there. The few that had them brought family. The majority brought doll-like Vietnamese girlfriends who wore either garish Western dresses or demure ao dais. They giggled like children and wrinkled their noses at the taste of eggnog. Helen had invited Annick, and Robert had brought along a friend as her date. The four of them sat on sofas and drank rum-laced eggnog while Frank Sinatra played on the record player. A pine tree from Dalat had been helicoptered in, hung with items from the PX: packs of chewing gum and cigarettes, tubes of lipstick, decks of cards.

Dinner was served at two long tables with white linen tablecloths that resembled long galley ships. The tables seated twenty each, while the rest of the people went through a buffet service and balanced plates on their laps. The prime rib, mashed potatoes, and candied yams, all cargoed in from Hawaii, weighed down and crushed with nostalgia all in attendance.

Someone down the table asked where Darrow was.

“Oh,” Robert said, “probably in some foxhole below the DMZ, warming up C-rations with a match.” Laughter from the table. “During incoming fire.” More laughter. “In the rain.” Everyone laughed. Helen gave a tight smile. She had not seen him since the funeral. “Making us all look bad,” Robert continued. “Especially when he gets the cover of Life next week.”

After dessert, guests went back into the living room. A Santa-dressed reporter handed out gifts, mostly bottles of scotch and brandy. Helen had gotten up to get coffee when Darrow walked in. His clothes so caked in dirt that only the deep rumpled creases were clean. His forehead had a few long bloody scratches across it, and the beginning of a brownish purple bruise was swelling under one cheekbone. She almost laughed because it seemed an extension of Robert’s joke, and he saw her smirk and turned away with no acknowledgment.

“Where have you been, Darrow?” the host shouted.

“I have an announcement to make,” he said, pausing to cough into his fist. “Jack was killed to night. We were ambushed in a jeep patrol in Gia Dinh.”

The holiday mood destroyed, the host clapped a hand on his back and then poured him a drink. They went off to the kitchen.

“The war doesn’t stop for long,” Robert said.

“It’s been that way forever,” Annick said, and finished a full brandy in one gulp. “A land of continuous siege.”

“Jack knew that. He said it didn’t matter who we backed, that the people didn’t care. So why do we?” Helen said. She herself felt trapped, too scared to go out in the field, too scared to give it up and leave. “I mean… we have a choice. Why don’t we leave?”

Nobody spoke.

“I’ll be back.” Robert went to the kitchen.

Annick leaned over. “Is that him?”

Helen nodded.

Annick shook her head. “Poor Helen.”

Lights were turned off in the living room, and small white candles were passed out. “ ‘Silent Night.’ In memory of Jack.”

Helen looked at the faces around the room, at the makeshift decorations, and felt closer to the people in that room than to people she had known all her life back home. It had only just begun for her-people disappearing from her life. Not only people she loved, but people she knew only casually, people whom she knew only by sight. The familiar world chipped away each day.

After dessert, guests made excuses to hurry away. No one could rebound from the news. Robert came and said they should get back to the hotel before curfew. Helen nodded, hoping that Darrow would come out, would take her away again to the crooked apartment, but, of course, that was all over.

In her hotel room, Helen kept the lights off. With difficulty, she banged open the rusted window to let in fresh air. In Vietnam everyone wanted windows shut to keep things-heat, humidity, bugs, bullets-out. After midnight, the only noise the swish of a police jeep blading down the wet streets. The male reporters were still enjoying themselves inside bars or in the brothels that locked their doors till dawn.

She took off her clothing and, with the deliberateness that came from drinking too much, hung each piece on its hanger. In the morning, she’d go out to Ben Cat and tag along on a sweep made by combined forces. She would eat Christmas Day rations with the soldiers. The thought of the greenish half-gloom under the trees depressed her. Already sick of the war. The overhead fan creaked as she paced the room, smoking and drinking bottled water to stop the spinning in her head.

She had gotten used to water at room temperature. Annick could spot Americans across a room because of their insistence on having ice. Ice tinkling in glasses. Anything to deny the crazies-inducing temperature. The military had contracted out the manufacture of ice-making plants to keep up with the insatiable American demand for ice cubes, ice cream, anything frozen, and now the Vietnamese were beginning to have an appetite for it. Helen had taken picture upon picture of Vietnamese children eating ice cream, and those were the ones always printed-they made readers happy, an example of America ’s civilizing process.

She longed for the refuge of Darrow’s room, but she denied herself its Spartan comforts. It was true-the soft beds and rich food and even the ice cubes, all of it a kind of game, keeping her from feeling things. The beginning of some kind of understanding had come as she sat in the tin-roofed school house at MacCrae’s funeral, but it had been too ephemeral, had disappeared before she could get her mind around it.