In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn’t help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene’s seediness—he later regretted popularizing the word “seedy”—and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. TheMetropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn’t been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.
    Luckily in Greene’s case the books are everywhere. It’s almost impossible to walk down the street in Hanoi without stumbling across a sky-blue Penguin edition of
The Quiet American
. If one looks closely enough, the black-and-white photograph of a gun emerging from long grasses on the cover is slightly blurred, and if one flips through the pages the words themselves are also blurred, which is because they are pirated copies, photocopied from the originals. When I first spotted the cheerful, familiar blue covers, I was taken aback, as if my private relation to the book were cheapened; it somehow bothered me to see Greene’s morally complicated vision hawked to tourists, but then everything was hawked to tourists, and wasn’t I, when it came down to it, a tourist myself? In a way, its commercial ubiquity is something the book could have predicted of itself. The novel foretells a Vietnam in the thrall of what it calls “dollar love,” and Westerners in thrall right back.
    By the time we reached Hanoi, my then husband and I had been traveling through Asia for almost a month. I had begun to see that everywhere we went there were a million minor transactions taking place beneath the surface. At first I was oblivious to these transactions, but slowly I began to recognize them: if a driver takes you to his friend’s hotel, he is getting a cut; if a waiter sells you an expensive dish, he is getting a cut; if a guide takes you to a silk shop, he is getting a cut; and there are bound to be other people getting cuts of his cut. If you watch these transactionsclosely enough, you begin to get the feeling of an ant farm, a honeycomb, thousands of tiny gestures replicating themselves.
    On one of our first days in Bangkok we made our way to the Grand Palace. We could see the gold roof of the main pagoda glinting behind a wall. A man pointed us down a street to the entrance. It seemed a long way, so we asked again and two other men pointed us in the same direction. When we got to the end of the street, a cyclo driver told us that the Grand Palace was closed, and he would take us to another temple and then back for a dollar. An old man came over to translate his offer. In fact, the Grand Palace was not closed. The entrance was in the other direction. This scheme employed five men for an afternoon.
    After a while, we began to get used to the idea that for small amounts of money, the facts were willing to alter themselves. At a jumbled antiques store across from the Metropole, we picked up a coy-looking stone Buddha with its hands on its hips. “It is from the seventeenth century,” the woman with serious glasses behind the counter informed us. When we returned later that afternoon, it was from the nineteenth century.
    We bought it, whatever it was, and went out for a late lunch. I looked over at my husband dipping a dumpling in sauce, and I noticed that he had been physically transformed. He is one of the few people I know who looks most himself in a suit and tie. In his closet at home, he keeps wooden shoe trees in his shoes, which he polishes himself in a ritual that takes over our entire living room for an afternoon. But as soon as we arrived, he stopped shaving. He started wearing sandals that Velcroed across the toes. At some point, without my realizing it, his appearance had passed beyond scruffy into the netherworld