“Neither do I,” I answered, my eyes locking on his dark ones for several seconds.
He looked at me differently after that. We went to the Café du Soleil and stayed for four hours. By the time we left, I was quite sure I was in love with him.
Our affair started a week later. I wanted desperately to call off my engagement to Arnaud as soon as I tumbled into bed with Khoi, but Khoi advised against doing anything irrational. He pointed out that I wasn’t due to be married for a year or more, and that perhaps there would be other ways to handle our love by then. That’s how he said it: “handle our love.”
What I didn’t know then, and what would take me months to figure out, was that Khoi could never marry a Western woman. He was from a very prominent Annamite family. His marriage would be an arranged one, with a girl as close to him in social stature as possible, and if he resisted his parents’ wishes, he would lose everything he stood to inherit. They were in the silk business, he said, and had managed to hold on to everything despite the rapid French colonization that began nearly forty years before. Not many Annamite families had been able to hold on to their land, their factories, or increase their wealth; perhaps five or ten thousand in a country of nearly twenty-three million had managed. I quickly got the impression that the silk Nguyens were in the upper echelon of those families, although that, losing that stature, he said, wasn’t what weighed on him. What he didn’t want to lose was his family.
But until he went back to Indochine, we could pretend that the world wasn’t against us.
We made the most of our time. We made the most of being in love. And almost as impactful for me as being in bed with Khoi, as breathing in, trying to absorb such a fascinating person, was the shift out of Arnaud’s moneyed but incredibly boring world into Khoi’s passionate, academic life full of people as wonderful and as curious as him. And because Arnaud was far more focused on work than he was on me, he didn’t even notice my dramatic turn away from him.
I would not have found myself in Indochine years later if it hadn’t been for the little community Khoi had built in Paris. Khoi shifted my world, but his friends were the ones who managed to spin it in circles.
A month after Khoi and I met, he woke me up abruptly at four o’clock in the morning. I wanted to chastise him, but he was grinning and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but laugh.
“You want that, this early?” I said. “I should send you to Pigalle instead.”
“An innocent foreigner like me? A docile Asiatique? I don’t even know where that is,” he replied, lowering his body on top of mine.
“And I do want that, I always want that with you,” he said, and I could feel just how much he did. “But that’s not why I woke you up. I thought it was time you get to know a bit more about me. And the best way to do so is to meet the misfits I’ve been keeping up with in Paris.”
“You? Misfits?” I said, trying to imagine Khoi fraternizing with anyone who wasn’t the height of sophistication, as he was. “But what would Nguyen Van Thanh think of that?” I said, referencing his father, whom he had only recently told me about.
“My father would swim here with a pistol tied to his hand if he knew, but that’s why I keep my letters home mostly about my studies and the weather. My parents think it rains every day here. I’ve told them that it helps me stay studious.”
“Studious indeed,” I said, my hand moving down his naked body.
“This first,” he said, moving it all the way between his legs, “and then I will show you why I woke you at this cruel hour.”
We made love as quietly as two people who have just started making love could, and while still breathless from having climaxed, Khoi pulled me out of bed and helped me put on my dress from the night before, as it was conveniently on the floor. I pulled on my coat and a hat and watched as Khoi wrapped a scarf around his neck.