It wasn’t long after their son’s visit that the professor stopped attending Sunday mass. Mrs. Khanh stayed home as well, and gradually they began seeing less and less of their friends. The only times she left the house were to go shopping or to the Garden Grove library, where her fellow librarians knew nothing of the professor’s illness. She enjoyed her part-time job, ordering and sorting the sizable collection of Vietnamese books and movies purchased for the residents of nearby Little Saigon, who, if they came to the library with a question, were directed to her perch behind the circulation desk. Answering those questions, Mrs. Khanh always felt the gratification that made her job worthwhile, the pleasure of being needed, if only for a brief amount of time.
When her shift ended at noon and she gathered her things to go home, she always did so with a sense of dread that shamed her. She made up for her shame by bidding good-bye to the other librarians with extra cheer, and by preparing the house for emergencies with great energy, as if she could forestall the inevitable through hard work. She marked a path from bed to bathroom with fluorescent yellow tape, so the professor wouldn’t get lost at night, and on the wall across from the toilet, she taped a sign at eye level that said flush. She composed a series of lists which, posted strate-gically around the house, reminded the professor in what order to put his clothes on, what to put in his pockets before he left home, and what times of the day he should eat. But it was the professor who hired a handyman to install iron bars on the windows. “You wouldn’t want me sneaking out at night,” the professor said with resignation, leaning his forehead against the bars. “And neither would I.”
For Mrs. Khanh, the more urgent problem was the professor coming home as a stranger. Whereas her husband was never one to be romantic, this stranger returned from one of the afternoon walks he insisted on taking by himself with a red rose in a plastic tube. He’d never before bought flowers of any sort, preferring to surprise her with more enduring presents, like the books he gave her every now and again, on topics like how to make friends and influence people, or income tax preparation. Once he had surprised her by giving her fiction, a collection of short stories by an author she had never heard of before. Even this effort was slightly off the mark, for she preferred novels. She never read past the title pages of his gifts, satisfied at seeing her name penned in his elegant hand beneath those of the authors. But if the professor had spent his life practicing calligraphy, he’d never given a thought to presenting roses, and when he bowed while offering her the flower, he appeared to be suffering from a stomach cramp.
“Who’s this for?” she asked.
“Is there anyone else here?” The professor shook the rose for emphasis, and one of its petals, browning at the edges, fell off. “It’s for you.”
“It’s very pretty.” She took the rose reluctantly. “Where did you get it?”
“Mr. Esteban. He tried selling me oranges also, but I said we had our own.”
“And who am I?” she demanded. “What’s my name?”
He squinted at her. “Yen, of course.”
“Of course.” Biting her lip, she fought the urge to snap the head off the rose. She displayed the flower in a vase on the dining table for the professor’s sake, but by the time she brought out dinner an hour later, he had forgotten he bought it. As he nibbled on blackened tiger shrimp, grilled on skewers, and tofu shimmering in black bean sauce, he talked animatedly instead about the postcard they’d received that afternoon from their eldest daughter, working for American Express in Munich. Mrs. Khanh examined the picture of the Marienplatz before turning over the postcard to read aloud the note, which remarked on the curious absence of pigeons.
“Little things stay with you when you travel,” observed the professor, sniffing at the third course, a soup of bitter melon. Their children had never acquired the taste for it, but it reminded the professor and Mrs. Khanh of their own childhood.
“Such as?”
“The price of cigarettes,” the professor said. “When I returned to Saigon after finishing my studies, I couldn’t buy my daily Gauloises any longer. The imported price was too much.”
She leaned the postcard against the vase, where it would serve as a memento of the plans they’d once made for traveling to all of the world’s great cities after their retirement. The only form of transport Mrs. Khanh had ruled out was the ocean cruise. Open expanses of water prompted fears of drowning, a phobia so strong that she no longer took baths, and even when showering kept her back to the spray.
“Now why did you buy that?” the professor asked.
“The postcard?”
“No, the rose.”
“I didn’t buy it.” Mrs. Khanh chose her words carefully, not wanting to disturb the professor too much, and yet wanting him to know what he had done. “You did.”
“Me?” The professor was astonished. “Are you certain?”
“I am absolutely certain,” she said, surprised to hear the gratification in her voice.
The professor didn’t notice. He only sighed and took out the blue notebook from the pocket of his shirt. “Let’s hope that won’t happen again,” he muttered.