The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross

unutterably sweet by the spooky-sexy voice of Beth Gibbons.
    â€œPlease, could you stay awhile, to share my grief,” she pleads on “Wandering Star.” “For it’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way.” On “Strangers,” she asks, “Did you realize no one can see inside your view? Did you realize for why this sight belongs to you?” And at the end of “It Could Be Sweet,” as the bass line thrums quietly on and the electronic keyboard repeats a tranquil melody, Gibbons lets out a final, nearly inaudible sigh that seems to express both the bliss of desire and a certain variety of resignation, the understanding that desire may never be fulfilled but that the desire itself is enough, and maybe, in the end, more delicious than its fulfillment.
    For months, Portishead’s music echoed in my top-floor room at the Lucy Hotel, matching, assuaging, and amplifying my own deep loneliness. I owned not more than six CDs—quirky mid-’90s bands such as Cibo Matto and Stereolab—which I played on a boom box purchased with a fair chunk of the money I’d brought from home, but it was Dummy that provided the soundtrack for my Vietnam life. In the morning, it reminded me I’d woken up alone. After lunch, it reminded me I’d eaten alone. And at night, under the thin covers of my bed, it told me solitude was all there ever was, ever would be. “And this loneliness,” Gibbons sang, “it just won’t leave me alone.”
    I was not, however, entirely friendless. At the Saigon Café, where I’d drunk my first beer on ice, I met Dave Danielson, a squinty-eyed Californian who ran an English as a Foreign Language school calledELT Lotus. Dave had been a professional skateboarder back in the 1970s, when long-haired dudes carved surf-style across soft SoCal embankments, and I think I trusted him because we shared a four-wheeled past. Also, because I had an EFL certificate, he gave me a job at Lotus, which contracted with companies to teach English to their employees. I would be teaching an introductory course at AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and chemical concern, earning $15 an hour—about a week’s wages for the average Vietnamese worker.
    On my first day of work, a Friday, I set off for AkzoNobel by bicycle, and promptly got lost. Maybe not lost exactly, but I couldn’t find the damn street the company was supposed to be on. It was hot, and I began to sweat in the dense traffic. Then it began to rain. I was fifteen minutes late, at least, and had no mobile phone to call the company or the school. Suddenly, the traffic parted, and there was squinty Dave on his moped. He pulled up next to me, asked what the hell was going on, and guided me to AkzoNobel, where my sweaty, scruffy appearance (tuck in my shirt? Never!) would turn out, over the coming months, not to be a function of the weather.
    That night, Dave took me out to celebrate, getting me drunker—on sour BGI beer—than I’d ever been in my short life. Thankfully, I remember little but the hangover, which lasted the entire weekend, and I’m not sure I ever forgave him.
    But meeting Dave proved useful, for he introduced me to another Lotus teacher, Adrian, who was dating the owner of the Bodhi Tree, a not terribly good Pham Ngu Lao café where expatriates congregated. Among them were two I thought I might be able to get along with: Jed, a sharp academic on a Ford Foundation grant, and Ted, like me a wannabe writer, but so argumentative, so New Yorky, so . . . Jewish (like me) that I instantly resented his presence in this country. He, I knew, would be my competition.
    Among Jed, Ted, Adrian, and their other friends, I was a peripheral figure—literally. Though I knew Adrian slightly from work, I wasn’t yet all that friendly with him, so I tended to sit one table overfrom the gang, hoping I’d overhear a conversation I could participate in. Occasionally,