“I didn’t wake you?” he said, startled at the sight of her undressed.

“No, no. Is everything all right?” Helen asked, looking behind him.

“I’m going to work for you now.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Sam asks me to give you this.” Linh handed her an envelope.

“Come in. Sit down.” She motioned him to a chair and tore open the envelope.

Helen of a Thousand Ships,

Congratulations! Even though you bumped me from a cover and almost got yourself killed in the bargain. Since you’re determined to play the boys’ game, at least accept a life preserver-Linh. He will be invaluable to you.

Love,

Darrow

Linh stood by the window staring out. When she spoke to him, he kept his face turned away, and she guessed her slip embarrassed him. She put on a robe. Still he was pensive.

“How do you feel about this?” she asked.

“It’s important to Sam that I work with you. I’m hoping you are strong. I am thinking this is going to be a very long war.”

SEVEN. Hoi Chanh

Defectors

A week after the dinner where Linh was first introduced to Helen, he went to Darrow’s hotel room and was surprised to see a picture of her on top of a stack of prints on the table. Darrow never joined his reporter friends with their Vietnamese bar girls at the various clubs. Linh knew about a few native women, including the one in Cambodia, but Darrow never openly had a girlfriend.

Perhaps Darrow preferred Western women, but there, too, Linh had observed a fair number try to capture his attention with no success. Was he struggling to stay faithful to his wife back in America? He never talked of her in the way a man talks of the woman he loves. But then Linh himself had never spoken of Mai until she was gone.

Which made the picture of the beautiful photographer all the more startling-a single bloom sprung up on a parched riverbed floor.

Linh examined more closely, saw she was wearing a flak jacket and camouflage pants, that the palms behind her were water palm fronds. Darrow had not mentioned going out on a mission with her, and Linh felt a pang of betrayal at the omission. He had become possessive over Darrow’s company, as well as his confidences.

“Oh, you remember the freelancer from the States?” Darrow said, turning away, obviously irritated at Linh’s attention and the necessity of explaining himself.

“A very striking freelancer.”

“You’re right. I’ve got to straighten myself out. Breaking my own rules.”

“Everyone gets lonely. Even the great Sam Darrow.”

“Don’t make me feel worse.”

Linh shrugged and finally forced himself to look away from the picture. He hated the fact that he had forced this admission; he was becoming a prude. Darrow had rescued him at his lowest point, and he was determined to repay the kindness.

The next time Linh saw her, she was sprung to life from the picture, pacing Darrow’s hotel room. When she shook his hand, he knew she was blinded by Sam’s rough treatment. Darrow was in the process of breaking her young heart, and Linh quickly escaped the carnage.

At the hotel bar he stood drinking a citron pressé and asked Toan, the bartender, an old man who had relocated from Hue, about his oldest son just drafted into the Saigon army. Toan complained that the cost of bribes to get a safe desk job had doubled from the year before. During the whole conversation, Linh imagined Darrow and Helen upstairs, negotiating their way through their love. Although he had seen and suffered much, he did not find them frivolous; in fact, he found it more than optimistic that in the middle of war, people could still think about such things. Didn’t that mean the world could still recover?

Although Linh took his time finishing his drink, still he was too early returning and witnessed Helen, like a tien, fairy, crying alone in the hallway. As a youth, he had made a great study of all the Vietnamese myths, and a tien was often an essential feature of each hero’s story. When she saw him, she fled.

Months passed and neither Sam nor Linh brought up the subject of Helen again, although now a new picture of her was framed on the table. In one of his favorite fairy tales, that was exactly what happened to the tien: She disappeared back into a picture. Probably Helen had returned to her country, the romance of the war quickly tarnished.

Linh and Darrow were both surprised by the pictures of the execution, and Darrow admitted he had been keeping track of her. The way he said it revealed even more.

“She has made an impression on you.”

“I see her going through all the things I went through.”

“Yes?”

“And I don’t want her to do it… I see each step where I could have stopped.”

He had been with Darrow long enough to see that he was the best at his profession, and he cared passionately about it. There was the sadness, but he thought that had more to do with the personal. “I don’t understand…”

“ Gary has offered her a staff position with the magazine. I don’t want her getting herself killed making some stupid mistake. Work with her.”

“What if she doesn’t accept?”

“She will.”

From the tone of voice, Linh understood it was a lover’s assurance. “I prefer to work with you.”

“It would mean the world to me, my friend.”

When Linh came to her hotel room that night, she seemed embarrassed. She lit a cigarette, offered him one, then sat on the bed.

“We haven’t gotten off to the greatest start,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Me making a fool of myself.”

Linh shook his head as if shooing away a pest. These Americans still took getting used to, their bald honesty, their constant confessing of deficiencies. In Vietnam, etiquette prevented such things from being talked of. He had been married for six months, bringing Mai sheet music every week, but she never sang the new songs before having him sing them out loud first. When he got angry at her, she finally admitted she couldn’t read; he thought she meant read music, but then it dawned on him she had also been memorizing his words.

Now he looked at Helen and was shocked by her naked admission. And yet it was disarming and made him feel protective of her as over a small child who was helpless and too trusting. “I saw you for the first time at the restaurant. You come in drenched from rain.”

Helen made a face. “Another bad impression.”

“No. A hungry woman, I thought.” They laughed. Why had he omitted the true first time he saw her, getting out of the military jeep in front of the hotel, while he sat at the bar with Mr. Bao? Was it because he did not wish to be remembered in Mr. Bao’s company? Or was it that he wanted to keep his first glimpse of her private? Or, worse, was it because the habit of deception had become so ingrained in him, he preferred lies to truth?

The next morning Linh walked to her hotel and spent the whole day seeing the city again through her eyes. This happened each day, day after day; the realization dawned on him that now he was showing her his home.

Her first request was to learn enough Vietnamese so she could put the people she photographed at ease. No other American, not even Darrow, had made such a request. During the monsoon downpours, they would duck inside small tea stalls. She would hold a ceramic cup laced in her long fingers, listening to the drumming of the rain on the tin overhang of the roof while they practiced speech. Often children gathered at the sight of the foreign woman in their neighborhood, still a novelty, and giggled at her mispronunciation. They sat on the ground around the battered table, loose pieces of plastic wrapped around thin shoulders against the rain. Helen called over a food vendor and bought banh da, rice cakes with sesame seeds, for everyone. Linh was sure they, too, felt as if they were in the presence of a tien.