Lisa was that kind of American girl that carefully presents herself as if every situation she finds herself in is a potential job interview. As she talked in her cutsie, valley-girl accent her hand would invariably sit in front of her chest and move forward to punctuate every point she made. She was pale with wavy brown hair that she flicked around when she wasn’t talking, saying ‘mmm hhuhh, mmm huhh’ and ‘totally, totally’ until she got to talk again. She’d sit cross legged with her back dead straight as if deliberately forcing her tits as far forward as they’d go.
We were sitting in ‘Crumble’, a small American owned bar on Bui Vien in central Saigon that was popular with the local expat community. It looked like it belonged in a hick town in the Southern states, with crumbling orange walls, dim lighting and big saloon style shutters on the windows. They played a mixture of unidentifiable sixties rock and early blues and served only one type of beer. That night, a soccer match was playing on the small TV at the end of the room, and a group of teachers were sitting round it and occasionally groaning as United totted up another big score. We sat round the corner by the window, on raised stools overlooking the street.
Four days ago, Lisa had been talking about her upcoming job hunt for a teaching position in town. The new job was supposed to be a ‘filler’ in between her highly successful career as an interior designer, which I’d heard far too much about already. She was especially interested in teaching business English, because apparently that was what interior designers specialised in.
“Oh yeah”, she’d said, “I’m just going to rent a car for the day and have them take me all over town, you know? Drive to like 20 schools, pass over my resume, just chat with them and see what they’re about, you know? If I have a car to myself, I can sit in the back, I can make notes as I’m going, I can keep myself looking cool and just make it happen, all in a day, you know? No messing about. Just go and get that job. You know?”
She’d been telling me this as an explanation as to why she didn’t have the time to come and kick back on the beach with me in Mui Ne. It was safe to say that I’d done a lot of reflecting on Lisa in Mui Ne, and now I was back I was keen to test out some of the theories that I had formed about her. Largely, I wanted to know if I was right in that she spent most her time talking shit.
“How’s that job hunt going?” I probed gently.
“Oh well. You know. It’s been good, you know. I’ve worked on my CV, made that all amazing. I had an interview. I’ve been around finding out about some schools and checked them out. You know?”
I translated this in my mind as “jack shit” and sat back contented with my own astuteness. She wittled on for a bit longer about her interview which, as I suspected, was with the school that we’d just finished a training course with together which had offered us all interviews anyway. I steadily demolished my beer whilst she rambled on, occasionally nodding and responding. Ella Fitzgerald was in the background singing ‘It’s only a Paper Moon’, and I tracked the lyrics in my mind and recalled all the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire and stared unconsciously at Lisa’s gaping cleavage. Eventually, a particularly punctuated ‘you know’ came along which told me that she was finally over talking.
“Yeah, sounds awesome. Listen, do you wanna go somewhere different? This music is killing me”, I said.
"Ohh. tell me about it. What the hell is this stuff? So where do y’have in mind?
“Well, I’ve got some pot in my room and the balconies pretty decent”, I suggested.
“Cool. Sounds fun” she replied. We slinked off, trying to avoid the glances of the handful of people we both knew that were dotted around the bar. We went back to mine and fucked, with her going “yeah, ooo yeah” the whole time and me pounding so hard as if aiming to damage her more than to please myself. As soon as I’d wiped off her cleavage, she fell asleep and I went and smoked a spliff on the balcony. By the time I woke up the next morning, she’d gone back to her place.
The next time I saw her was a month later. She arrived attached to Jeremy’s arm as he came to meet me on the Rooftop Garden bar of the Rex. The place was swankier than I’d bargained on, with lanterns subtly flooding the mahogany decks and couples dancing to a Vietnamese Falmenco band which drowned out the constant screeching and honking of Le Loi. I was dressed in a cheap polo shirt and a filthy pair of converses, whilst everyone else was sporting pinstriped designer shirts and pastel coloured dresses. Jeremy and Lisa were immaculately presented, of course. Jeremy’s white and blue shirt was rolled up round his bulging arms and Lisa wore brightly patterned dress and black bra with delicate lace frills. She’d gotten fat, though, and her thighs wobbled through her stockings.
For the first hour or so, we were confined to general small talk. Lisa rattled on about how much she loved her new job teaching kindergarteners. Jeremy talked largely about their new apartment on the 23rd floor of a tower in district one, and I spent the remaining gaps highlighting how momentous my trip to Phnom Penh had been and how much cool shit they’d both missed out on. Linda also spent a great deal of time detailing the high flying contacts she’d made on the Saigon business scene, and how these would inevitably transform into a six figure salary as soon as she was willing to give up her beloved Kindergarteners.
I guess I probably started it. She’d been talking about herself for about 20 minutes, and I guess I couldn’t have put up with it for much longer. And anyway, Jeremy was stroking her leg and pinching at the top of her stockings under the table, which made me want to puke as I thought about her flabby folds wobbling under his stubby fingers.
“So, how long have you two been together now?” I asked Jeremy. Of course I already knew the answer: they’d gotten together on the course and made a pretty big show of it at the time.
“About two months now”, he said. Lisa glared at a space just under my eyeline, as Jeremy smiled at her and continued “going good huh?”.
“Fabulous” she said, through her recently polished teeth.
“And how about you? The love of your life walked through those doors yet?” she returned.
“Nope”, I said. “Not that I’ve noticed. Few loose fucks here and there but nothing special”. Jeremy choked slightly on his beer. Linda looked unphased and continued:
“Boys or girls?” There’d been a running joke on the course that I was gay, which a select few had thought was a lot funnier than it actually was. It was a pretty low blow, considering I’d told her how much it annoyed me.
“To be honest I was too drunk to tell. Could’ve been either I suppose”, I said in as casual a tone as I could muster.
“Whatever” she said, after a long pause. I knew she’d been trying to think up some clever response and had given up. Jeremy looked over at the band, and in the meantime Linda mouthed what the fuck at me and rolled her eyeballs. After a while, she started back up:
“You know, you really ought to start looking for a job…” Fuck she really knew how to wind me up. I hate being told I needed to ‘straighten out my life’ and ‘get sorted out’ when it really has jack shit to do with anyone else. Then she did exactly what my parents do when they’re giving me advice, which is to switch unsubtly to talking about someone else who used to be a social delinquent like me but then got all ‘focused’ and is now ‘successful’, which is normally a synonym for ‘dull’, if you ask me. My parents normally focus on people I used to know at school. Lisa, of course, talked about herself.
“and you know, even I used to just smoke pot all day after college. But then one day I just got up and said that I wanted something better, you know? So I went out and got my first job for a furniture company and from there it just went up and up”.
Jeremy started chipping in: “Didn’t it feel weird to stop living on your parents money?”
“Oh yeah, but you know that’s such a good feeling, you know? After a while you’re like, 'I can’t believe I’ve been sponging off mom and dad for so long. You know? And then you’ve got a sense of purpose, you’ve got a reason to wake up in the morning, you’ve got … you know … a life”
This really fucked me off. ‘A life’. Yeah, I suppose you just don’t know the meaning of life until you’ve had a job at a furniture store. I couldn’t put up with her shit any longer. I downed my beer, told them it was getting late and went downtown to console myself with a few more drinks. I got trashed by myself, picked up a prostitute and fucked her senseless, smoked a spliff and went to bed.
I never saw Lisa again, I think she sent me a few emails but I never replied. Lisa was a case, and the kind of case that I could live without.
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