The Sympathizer

By this degree, the three call girls were troupers, which could not be said of 70 or 80 percent of the prostitutes in the capital and outlying cities, of whom sober studies, anecdotal evidence, and random sampling indicate the existence of tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands. Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI. His pants bulging with an inflationary roll of dollars and his adolescent brain swollen with the yellow fever that afflicts so many Western men who come to an Asian country, this American GI discovered to his surprise and delight that in this green-breasted world he was no longer Clark Kent but Superman, at least in regards to women. Aided (or was it invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

This trio of talented stars promised another kind of goodness altogether, the bad kind. They flirted shamelessly with me and teased Bon and the American husband with the walrus mustache, now awake. Both merely grimaced and made themselves as still and small as they could, quite aware of the grim silence of their wives. I, on the other hand, flirted happily in return, perfectly mindful that each of these demimondaines had a backstory capable of breaking my heart and, most likely, my bank account. Did I not have one of these same backstories? But performers perform at least partially to forget their sadness, a trait I am well acquainted with. In these situations it is better to flirt and play, allowing everyone the opportunity to pretend to be happy for so long that they might actually feel such happiness. And it was a pleasure just to look at them! Mimi was tall, with long straight hair and pink nail polish on all twenty digits, their tips as glossy as jelly beans. Her throaty voice with its mysterious Hue dialect compelled all my blood vessels to constrict, making me a touch light-headed. Ti Ti was fragile and petite, a fabulous beehive hairdo adding height. Her pale skin evoked eggshells, her eyelashes trembled with a hint of dew. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses. Phi Phi was the leader, her body’s curves reminding me of the dunes of Phan Thiet, where my mother had taken me for the one vacation of her life. While Mama covered herself from head to toe so she would not get any darker, I grubbed in the sunbaked sand ecstatically. That blissful memory of a ten-year-old’s warmth and happiness was aroused by Phi Phi’s fragrance, the same, nearly, or so I imagined, as from the one tiny vial of honey-colored perfume my mother owned, a present from my father with which she anointed herself once a year. So I fell in love with Phi Phi, a harmless enough emotion. I was wont to fall in love two or three times a year and was now well past due.