The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham Read Free Book Online

ancestral estate, in its orders and values. I always felt more at ease going to the market or to new eateries with Anh. Everywhere we went, folks welcomed her like kin. She had a natural confidence entirely different from any girl I had met. The way she moved, how her long-fingered hands danced when she talked. I never got tired of looking at her. I especially liked the way she smiled whenever she caught my eyes.
    We shared a tiny wooden bench, our backs to the mildewed wall. The man brought us a pot of tea and two tin espresso presses set atop small glasses with a finger’s worth of condensed milk.
    Anh said, “I know you don’t usually drink coffee, but it’s a real treat in this weather. Try it, for me.”
    Caffeine made my heart race. “It’ll probably give me a heart attack, but, for you, why not?”
    She smiled, the whole of her canted toward me, a bundle of warmth in the dancing wind, in her hair a scent of lily.
    She said, “You won’t forget my address in Saigon, will you?”
    “Didn’t I tell you I’ve got a photographic memory?”
    Anh looked dubious. “Then tell me again, how you’d get to my uncle’s house.”
    We had made no promises to each other. It would have been improper to speak of our feelings. Before any of that, I must tell her about my family, our history, and my father, who spent most of his days sprawled on the floor with his opium pipes, smoking away the final vestiges of our ancestral rice fortune. I must tell her of the squalor of our lives, of my crushing study loads at two schools, of my struggle to help support my family on a meager tutoring salary. There was another whole troublesome world out there that I did not want to let invade this moment. I wanted our hours encapsulated until the sweetness of these days had become an unimpeachable part of the past.
    I repeated her precise directions from the Main Post Office at the center of Saigon to her uncle’s house in a middle-class neighborhood on the opposite side of the city from mine. Then I said that on my first day back in Saigon, I would get a haircut and a shave. I would put on my best shirt, buy the prettiest bouquet of flowers, then take a cyclo to her house because, after all, the man she’d met in Dalat was a handsome cadet and I didn’t want to look like a disheveled, sweaty bum who had walked across the city.
    Anh giggled, squeezed my hand, and showed her pleasure by preparing my coffee. She lifted the lid of the espresso press, turned it upside down on the table, placed the press on top, and stirred the condensed milk at the bottom of the glass until all of it had turned into a caramel swirl. She presented the glass with both hands, then waited for me to taste it before preparing hers. These were traditional gestures of affection, and for the first time in my life, I allowed myself to revel in them.
    I was twenty-four and had never been with a woman. I knew nothing about love, and everything I knew about sex I had seen while managing our inn in Hanoi. For a young lad who hadn’t so much as held a girl’s hand or even seen adults kissing, the sight of peasant girls rendered homeless by war and desperate by hunger prostituting themselves to the French soldiers was shocking. They were no different from the girls I had grown up with in the countryside. The experience tainted not only my idea of sex, but also my general view of women. Since then I resisted the advances of girls. I feared I was ruined.
    I had thought I would never marry.
    It was a miracle to meet Anh and feel my insides flip-flopping about. I was desperate to hang onto her, if only to make these emotions last a little longer. I liked the way I felt when I was near her.
    I gave her the thin package I kept under my coat. It was a silk scarf I had seen her admire. She gave a sharp cry of delight that made everyone turn around. She bound her long black hair in it—which somehow made me immensely pleased.
    Holding hands underneath the table, we huddled like