The Lotus and the Storm by Lan Cao

the door.
    â€œIt’s Mr. Phong,” she said.
    What does he want, I wondered, and reached for the towel.
    My wife rushed toward the door. “Stay,” she said emphatically. “You lean back and rest. I’ll handle it.”
    I obeyed. In fact, I was relieved that my wife took the initiative to handle the phone call herself. I would not know what to say to him and I needed the time alone to mull over and allay my suspicions.
    Later that evening, my wife surprised me by initiating our lovemaking. The surprise was not the initiation but the timing. I was settling myself and trying to fall asleep. The neighbor’s cat yowled. A tree branch jumped against the moonlight. My wife cleared her throat softly and leaned over to kiss me. I allowed myself to be kissed, to catch up with her desires and abandon myself to her care. I raised my head off the pillow and kissed her back. As I pulled her closer, I felt a slight resistance from her that I registered but swiftly flicked away.

3
Two Sisters and One Thousand and One Nights
    MAI, 1964
    O utside the wind blows steadily and drives sheets of rain against the walls and windows. Once again our mother reaches into a straw bag and pulls out a book. Khanh is skeptical but our mother smiles and pulls her into the circle of folded arms. The overhead fan briskly stirs the air as our mother reads one story after another. It all began once Scheherazade was in the sultan’s chambers. “Shahriyar,” I whisper. Shahriyar, the sultan who out of spite married a virgin each day and beheaded her the next. Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with Shahriyar, to save herself and her sister, knowing that her sister too would eventually be next in line to be the sultan’s wife and then his murder victim.
    Our mother fixes her attention on us. I wait to discover how Scheherazade would save her own life by telling one thousand and one enthralling tales to the sultan, each one a story within a story, hypnotically interwoven. Scheherazade asked if she could be permitted to bid her last farewell to her beloved sister Dunyazad by recounting a story to her. The story would be fantastical, alluring. The sisters would take the whole of the night and, under the entirety of the moon’s glow, spin each detail until it was fully stretched, drawn and twisted, like a magical yarn whose filaments looped and enveloped, seduced and ensnared. At dawn, the cluster of knots that kept the story’s mystery suspended would not unravel. It would still be there, the complexity of cross-grained nodes that intersected and entangled, that Scheherazade would not undo until the next night and the night after that.
    And so every night brought with it another night, every moon another moon, until a thousand and one nights were strung and webbed and desire and faith conquered death. I know each story by heart, but still I yearn for every additional half hour, every quarter hour, of our mother’s time, to hold and stretch like a ribbon around us. I put my hand over my mother’s to keep her from turning the pages, hoping to slow her down, to fix her in the infinity of our present. I hold my breath as one story, then another, loops back upon itself, like a serpent swallowing its head.
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    Our father works all day almost every day. My sister and I love to watch him put on his starched, crisp uniform and polished boots. They give him an air of gravity. Sometimes I wear one of his uniform jackets around the house. Bury my face in its folds and taste our father’s valor, witness the majestic eloquence of his flight. A paratrooper’s emblem is stitched on the sleeve. You have to have a certain confidence to take your body and fling it from the sky toward the earth, to let the parachute catch and billow in an updraft of air, with nylons and canvas answering wind. I am not courageous, certainly not—I make no move without my sister’s