The Unfaithful Wife

The smell of another man's sweat doesn't wash out with soap. I learned that early. It lives in the creases of your skin, in the fine hairs at the back of your neck, and it stays there, a ghost you carry into your own bed.

That night, it was a fisherman. He had hands like sandpaper and a laugh that rattled the cheap glass on the nightstand. He paid me in crumpled bills that smelled of brine and diesel. I took them, counted them twice under the flickering bathroom light, and then I walked home through the alleys where the streetlamps were broken and the dogs knew better than to bark. The city at four in the morning is a different animal. It belongs to the rats and the women like me, the ones who move quiet and keep their eyes on the ground.

My husband was asleep when I got in. Tuan. He slept on his back, one arm thrown over his face like he was blocking out a sun that wasn't there. His breathing was steady, a slow in and out that I used to find comforting. Now it just sounded like a machine. Something that ran without needing me.

I stood in the doorway and watched him for a long time. The fan clicked on its lowest setting, pushing warm air around the room. Our room. Two pillows, one thin mattress on a wooden frame he'd built himself. A plastic stool with his work shirt draped over it. The shirt was grey with cement dust. He worked construction six days a week, sometimes seven. Came home with his shoulders hunched and his knuckles split, and he never asked me where I went at night.

That was the thing. He never asked.

I peeled off my clothes and stepped into the bathroom. The cold water hit my back and I scrubbed myself with a bar of soap that had gone soft and yellow. I scrubbed until my skin was raw. It didn't help. It never does.

When I slid into bed beside him, he shifted. His arm found my waist, heavy and warm. A reflex. He didn't wake up. I lay there stiff as a board, staring at the ceiling where the paint was peeling in the corner, and I thought about the fisherman's hands. The way he'd grabbed my hip. The way I'd let him.

Not for the money. The money was nothing. Enough for rice and fish sauce and maybe a new pair of sandals for my daughter. But not enough to matter. That's what I told myself in the beginning. It's for the family. It's for Linh. But Linh was nine years old and she needed more than sandals. She needed a mother who didn't come home smelling like strangers.

I turned my face into the pillow and breathed through my mouth until morning.

---

Tuan left at six. I heard him pour water into the kettle, heard the click of the stove, the shuffle of his sandals on the concrete floor. He didn't say goodbye. He never did. The door closed with a soft thud and then the house was quiet except for the sound of Linh's breathing from the other room, small and even, like a kitten.

I got up and made rice. I fried two eggs in oil that popped and sizzled. I put the good one on Linh's plate, the one with the runny yolk she liked, and the burnt one on mine. She came out with her hair sticking up on one side and her school uniform wrinkled because I hadn't ironed it. She didn't complain. She just sat down and ate, her small fingers wrapped around the chopsticks, and she looked at me with those eyes that were too big for her face.

"Ma," she said. "Are you tired?"

I smiled. It felt like stretching a rubber band that was about to snap. "A little."

"You were gone last night."

"I had to work."

She nodded like she understood. She didn't. She couldn't. But she was learning not to ask. That was the worst part. Not the men. Not the money. The way my daughter was learning to stop asking questions. The way she was learning to accept that her mother disappeared at night and came back different.

I walked her to school. The streets were waking up, motorbikes buzzing past, vendors setting up their stalls with steaming pots of pho and baskets of greasy bread. The air smelled of exhaust and lemongrass and something sweet frying in oil. I held Linh's hand and she swung it back and forth, humming a song she'd learned in class. For a moment, I felt almost normal. Almost clean.

Then I saw Mrs. Huong standing at the school gate.

She was one of the other mothers, the kind who wore gold bracelets and had a husband who owned a furniture shop. She looked at me the way she always did. Like I was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe. Her eyes went from my face to my clothes to the dark circles under my eyes, and she smiled. A small, tight smile that said everything.

"Chi Lan," she said. "You look tired. Working hard?"

"Same as always."

"Mm." She looked at Linh and her smile softened. "Such a smart girl. It's a shame she doesn't have more... stability at home."

I wanted to slap her. I wanted to grab her by her gold bracelets and drag her into the alley and show her what stability looked like when you had no choice. But I didn't. I smiled back. I squeezed Linh's hand and told her to go inside.

"Be good," I said. "I'll pick you up at five."

She ran off without looking back. That was another thing she'd learned. Don't look back. Don't see what your mother's face does when she thinks no one's watching.

Mrs. Huong was still standing there. She tilted her head. "You know, my husband's shop is hiring. Part-time. It's not much, but it's honest work."

The word honest hung in the air between us like a slap.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll think about it."

I walked away before she could say anything else. My hands were shaking. I shoved them into my pockets and kept walking, past the market, past the construction site where Tuan was probably hauling bricks, past the corner where I'd met the fisherman the night before. I didn't stop. I didn't look at the spot where I'd stood and waited for him to notice me.

I just walked.

---

That afternoon, I went to the river. It wasn't a nice river. It was brown and slow and full of garbage, plastic bags floating on the surface like dead fish. But it was quiet. I sat on a concrete slab and watched the water move, and I thought about my mother.

She'd been the same as me. I knew that now. When I was a girl, she'd disappear at night and come back with money that she hid in a tin box under the bed. My father was a drunk who slept through everything. He never asked either. Maybe he knew. Maybe he just didn't want to know. Either way, my mother died young. Forty-two. Her body just gave up. I remember looking at her in the coffin, her face painted with makeup that didn't match her skin, and thinking: that's going to be me.

I told myself I'd be different. I told myself I'd marry a man who saw me, who asked questions, who stayed awake when I came home. But Tuan was just another version of my father. Quiet. Tired. Asleep.

And I was just another version of my mother.

The river kept moving. It didn't care.

I pulled out the money from my pocket and counted it again. Three hundred thousand dong. Enough for groceries. Enough for Linh's school fees. Not enough for anything else. I folded the bills and tucked them into my bra, and I stood up, and I walked home.

Tuan was already there when I got back. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, drinking a beer. He didn't look up when I came in.

"Dinner's not ready," he said.

"I know. I'll make it now."

He took a long swallow of beer. The bottle was half empty. "Where were you?"

The question hit me like a stone. He never asked. Never. I stood in the doorway, my heart pounding, and I tried to read his face. It was blank. Not angry. Not sad. Just blank. Like he was asking about the weather.

"I was at the river," I said. "Thinking."

"Thinking about what?"

I opened my mouth. I could have told him. I could have told him everything, right there, on the concrete floor of our rented room, with the fan clicking and the neighbor's TV blaring through the wall. I could have said: I'm a whore. I'm your wife and I'm a whore and I don't know how to stop.

But I didn't.

"Nothing," I said. "Just thinking about nothing."

He nodded. He finished his beer and set the bottle down. Then he looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in months. His eyes were red and tired and something else. Something I couldn't name.

"Lan," he said. "Do you think we're happy?"

The question hung in the air between us. I could hear Linh in the other room, singing to herself. I could hear the river in my head, the slow brown water, the plastic bags floating. I could hear my mother's voice, though she'd been dead for fifteen years, telling me to keep walking and never look back.

I didn't answer him. I walked into the kitchen and started peeling onions, and I let the tears come, and I told myself they were from the onions.

They weren't.