Act of Deceit

Chapter 10

“Y our father called,” Janie Nguyen said, looking over from the pillow next to Donnally’s, her head backlit by the light on the nightstand. The smell of sweat and perfume and sex infused the upstairs bedroom air like wilting gardenias, overripe and cloying.

He glanced over at the bedside clock: 10:30 P.M.

“How come you didn’t tell me before we got into bed?”

Janie grinned. “You really want me to answer that?”

He didn’t.

“What did he have to say?” Donnally asked.

Janie giggled. “He asked me if I wanted to play an Asian madam in the new movie he’s planning to shoot. No lines. I just lounge around in my underwear for a couple of days. He said he was looking for the classical Vietnamese look.” She lowered the sheet, exposing her breasts. “I’m not sure he had these in mind or my face.”

Donnally knew he meant both, because his father had insinuated a hundred times that Janie reminded him of the elegant prostitutes he’d met at the Autumn Cloud Hotel in Saigon during the war, the nouveau riche “dollar queens” who wore silk in the daytime and shopped in the officers’ PX, and who were beyond the reach of the enlisted men, forcing them to settle on bar girls.

His father’s almost incestuous sexual interest in Janie made Donnally nauseated and angry. He realized that his fury showed on his face when Janie pulled away and covered herself again, as if for protection.

“What?” she asked.

Donnally shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

“If it was nothing, your jaw wouldn’t be clenched like that.”

He stared up at the ceiling, deciding how much to say and whether to risk the sort of all-night conversations that had led to their last breakup by ranging into borderlands where neither wanted to go. He felt an internal shrug of resignation, of inevitability.

“He thought it would be funny to call you a prostitute,” Donnally said. “And see how you would react.”

She reddened. “He said he wanted me to play one, not be one.”

“There’s no difference in his mind, because what thrills him is the effect his words have, not the reality behind them. He knows that if you yell fire in a theater, everybody’s going run for it, whether there really is one or not.”

Janie rolled over on her back. “So offering me the job was him yelling fire in your theater.”

“For the thousandth time.”

She sighed, leaned back, and folded her arms over her breasts.

“Now I really do feel like a prostitute.”

“W here’s the director?” Donnally asked his mother as he walked into her third-floor bedroom in the Hollywood Hills mansion late the following morning.

She looked up from her book lying on the table in front of her and rolled her eyes.

“You mean your father?”

“He tried out for the part a couple of times,” Donnally said as he approached where she sat in a recliner by the open window, “but couldn’t carry it off.”

“Maybe you should give him a new audition.”

“I’ll check the sign-in sheet and see if he’s applied.”

Donnally watched disappointment flood his mother’s face. He kissed her forehead, smoothed a few gray hairs that had been disturbed by the breeze, then sat down in a matching chair and took her hands trembling with Parkinson’s into his.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean for things to start out this way. I really just came to see how you’re doing.” He glanced out the window, over the circular drive and toward Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. “Where is he, really?”

She tilted her head in the opposite direction. “He needed a hilltop sunset for his new movie, so he went out early to meet a crew at Rattlesnake Mountain to shoot the dawn.”

Donnally tensed. That was typical of his father, filming a sunrise and running it backward just for the pleasure of deceiving the audience. He couldn’t hear the phrase without thinking of his father’s most famous war movie, Shooting the Dawn, hailed as an existential masterpiece by academic critics who misunderstood the sarcasm of the title, believing that the message was that one’s fate cannot be changed any more than “shooting at the dawn” can stop the sunrise.

For reasons it took Donnally years to grasp, this had been the theme of all his father’s movies, and his method of delivery had always been the same: Take some massacre that haunted the public conscience, like My Lai or Wounded Knee or Hue, change the location, give it a new name, blame it on human nature or the nature of war or on Asian or Indian enemies who not only killed indiscriminately, but murdered the spirit and corrupted the soul and drove anonymous soldiers into berserk orgies of revenge.

Donnally had no doubt that the dawn rising over the landscape of his father’s new movie would illuminate the same thing: men wearing army green or Union blue or Confederate gray portrayed somehow as the true victims of the massacres they themselves committed, as if the forces that drove them to violence were as irresistible as gravitation, as if no willful general in Washington or Richmond or Hanoi or Saigon had ordered them to march into villages and no sergeant had ordered them to fire on the old and the weak, children and infants, cows and pigs and goats, or had ordered the houses or teepees or thatched huts burned and the survivors concentrated in camps.

And as if they hadn’t obeyed by their own will and hadn’t pulled the trigger with intent.

It was just man’s fate to do evil, that was his father’s repeated claim. It was as natural as the sunrise. No other explanations need be given, no justifications need be offered, and no excuses need be made.

“If he’s still shooting the dawn,” Donnally said, “then I guess I don’t need to check the sign-in sheet.”

His mother cast him a fond and forgiving smile. “I think this was purely an economic decision,” she said. “Not an existential one.”

“Why? Did he put his own money into it?”

“Actually, he did. He even reduced costs by shooting some of the jungle scenes in Mexico instead of doing them all in Southeast Asia.”

“Why? The Pentagon’s movie budget got cut, so he found a way to get the Mexican taxpayer to foot the bill?”

Before she could answer, a light knock on the door drew their attention to Julia, his mother’s nurse and companion, entering with a tray of tea and medications. Donnally rose as she set it down and then gave her a hug.

“I didn’t bother asking her,” Donnally said, gesturing toward his mother, “because she won’t tell me the truth. So I’ll ask-”

“The doctor said that nothing has changed,” his mother said, then she looked up at Julia. “Isn’t that right?”

Donnally held his palm down toward his mother, but kept his eyes fixed on Julia. “Well?”

“I better seek refuge in my constitutional right to remain silent,” Julia said.

“Then I’ve got my answer.”

“S he’s been dreaming a lot about your brother,” Julia told Donnally as they stood next to his rental car in the driveway.

“Probably because Donnie’s birthday is coming up.”

Donnally looked up at his mother’s window. He watched the breeze ruffle the sheer curtains next to the bed where she lay asleep.

“I wonder how she sees Donnie in her mind,” Donnally said. “As twenty years old or as the fifty-seven he’d be now?”

Donnally felt a wave of sadness, imagining that his mother saw not how Donnie really would have looked, but as his father had looked at that age.

“Why don’t you ask her?” Julia asked.

“Because we’d get lost in a circular conversation since she’s not willing to admit to herself that if my father hadn’t sold his soul to the Pentagon, Donnie would still be alive.”

“You’re wrong. She admitted that years ago. She’s just unwilling to make the choice you want her to make between your brother and your father.”

Julia paused, then frowned and lowered her gaze.

“No,” she finally said, looking back up at him. “that’s not really it. I think I’ve been framing it wrong. The choice you want her to make is between you and your father, between how you see the world and how he does, how you imagine the past and how he does.”

“There’s no choice. The world is the way it is and the past was the way it was.”

Neither of them had to say what that past was, for it lived in the present like an unhealed wound: advertising genius Captain Donald Harlan conducting a Saigon briefing, selling the war to the press, and to his elder son.

Donnie had been so moved by his father’s story of Buddhist monks murdered by the North Vietnamese that he had enlisted in the marines, only to learn the truth eight months later when he talked to villagers near the DMZ: The monks had been executed by U.S. Korean allies.

He went AWOL and traveled to Saigon to confront his father, who claimed to have been deceived by the South Vietnamese military. Donnie returned to his unit and was killed in what the Silver Star commendation described as “a heroic battle in which he had engaged the enemy on all sides.”

It wasn’t until Donnally read the Pentagon Papers as part of a high school civics class that he discovered that Captain Donald Harlan had himself composed the lie, justifying it as having been told in the service of a greater good. He also learned that “engaging the enemy on all sides” meant in army-speak that his brother had been ambushed, led into a trap by those he believed he was fighting for.

Coming home from school that day, staggered by betrayal and quavering with rage, Donnally had resolved to make his father the model for everything he wouldn’t be.

The next day he moved out the house and got a job.

On his eighteenth birthday he went to court and switched his first name for his last.

And on the day he graduated from UCLA, he drove north and swore his oath as a San Francisco police officer.

Donnally looked past Julia in the direction of the distant mountains, imagining his father’s satisfaction as he wrapped up the shoot.

“My father still deludes himself that his fictions can be truer than the truth, when they’re just lies he tells himself.” He reached into his pocket for his car keys. “He’ll never change.”