“Not so very many. I don’t remember.”
And this is true. I can’t remember. I have no past, either, it seems. My hand returns to that place and she opens her legs and I have trouble drawing a breath because of the gentleness of her there and because of all that has gone before, as blurred and sometimes blank as my memory is, I have a sharp sense now of the long road to this touching, this sweet and momentous touching.
Earlier she went into her bathroom, as she did the first time I was here. She closed the door and I could not sit down. I did not know I would touch her on this night and I was in a free fall inside, I was white knuckled on what- ever it is that I hold inside me in order to steer, and it felt like I’d just gone over a cliff edge and I was falling. And I found myself in front of her ancestor shrine. Half a dozen sticks of incense were stuck in a glass bowl full of white sand. I plucked out one of them, not really with anything in mind. My hands were restless and I plucked one stick of incense and then another and I pulled them all out and held them together and they were cold, the tips were black and cold, the smoke for Tien’s father long ago dissolved into the air, and I realized that my hand was trembling. Then I jumped at some sound from the bathroom and I knew I shouldn’t be intruding here. I stuck the incense into the sand and I backed away. Water began to run on the other side of her bathroom door. I stood in the center of her room and I looked back to the faceless shrine.
Here was a little monument to family history, which these Vietnamese believe in deeply. So why shouldn’t I think at that moment of my own family? Even of things that might, at first glance, seem far from what was about to happen between Tien and me. A little bit of family history that stuck with me and never went away, no matter how many miles of highway I raced over on how many days and nights in the thirty years to come. Tien said her father had died in the war. I thought of my own father, who never had a chance to die in a war and I thought of how that disappointed him. He was in his mid-thirties when the Second World War began and he was working in steel, a crucial industry, and they wouldn’t take him. He had a bad knee, too, though not bad enough that he couldn’t work the labor gang, and he was as strong as two men, and he told this to the draft board more than a few times, but they still wouldn’t take him. And if he had gone to war and he had died there, I would never have been born. He realized that. He even told me once.
It was the summer of 1965 and he’d got me a job at the mill the year before, right after I graduated from high school with not much in my head to do with my life. My mother wanted me to go to college real bad. She taught me to like books and I did, but she had come to love them, and it took something like love to want to actually study them and I think I loved my father and he loved the mill and he loved working there, so I did what he wanted of me. He was a foreman at the North Plant by then and he got me on at the blast furnace operation doing what he did for a large part of his life, working the labor gang.
It was sometime in July that year when we met one afternoon before we were due on our night shifts at four. It was at a bar just down the road from the blast furnace and the Cards were on the radio, playing the Cubs in Wrigley Field and Bob Gibson was pitching. I remember that because it made the silence between my father and me comfortable, baseball did. I was only nineteen but if you had steel toes on and goggles around your neck and you smelled like the mill already even though you were still sweating clean, before a shift, they didn’t ask any questions at the Half Moon Bar, so my father and I were nursing a couple of Buds, neither of us being real drinkers, and Harry Caray was pissed on the radio about some sloppy Cardinal play in the field and that morning’s Globe Democrat was lying faceup on the bar with a headline about the Marines in Da Nang, and it turned out this was what my father was thinking about in his silence.
Finally he said, “You think you ought to go?”
“Where?”
“To Vietnam. To the war.”
“I wasn’t thinking about it,” I said.
“I missed out.”
“I know.” I knew that whole story already, had known it for some time.
“If this thing gets bigger, they’ll need men,” he said.
I nodded at this and I turned the bottle in my hands a few times and the label was going soggy and I started peeling it away and what was going on in me was the way he said “men” and a feeling I’d had for as long as I could remember was starting up again, a feeling that had put me in that bar at that moment with steel-toed shoes on and goggles around my neck, and that was the feeling that my father thought of me as a man and he knew I could do the tough things, no question about it, and I stripped the label off the bottle and wadded it up to a dense little ball and put it down gently. It was already decided, I realized. I was going to end up in that war. I was going to do this thing for the reason I’d done about everything else up to that moment. For him. All but reading a bunch of books and trying to figure out how to control my words in certain circumstances, and that I’d done for my mother.
“I could handle that,” I said.
“I know you could,” he said, and his voice surprised me in how soft it had gone. We neither of us had looked at each other since we sat down there, shoulder to shoulder at the bar. I wanted to look at him now, but I didn’t.
He said, “Sometimes I make it sound like all I got is regrets about not fighting the war. But it was okay. If I’d gone I might not’ve come back so I could have a son.”
He said that to me. This man didn’t have a lot of words, usually. And maybe after him suggesting I should go to war and put my life on the line in a way he’d missed, maybe then he had to try to tell me it wasn’t because he didn’t value that life of mine. How could this man who was my father say such a thing? Maybe that was the way. I stood before Tien’s shrine and I turned my face away from this thing that wouldn’t even let a man die and be done with it. I didn’t want my eyes to be full of fucking tears when she came in wearing her silks and still damp from her washing.
But the memory wouldn’t let go of me. That was the time he told me about when they tried to kill him at the mill. My father had a long life before I came along. He was at the mill in the Depression, and the summer before Roosevelt won for the first time, there was a lot of bad stuff going down. My father hated the guy who owned the mill and what he was doing to the workers. So he got mixed up with the radicals. He didn’t know anything about communism. He just wanted things to be better for the men who worked the furnaces with him.
When my father said he was glad he had a son, I did turn to him. He was watching his beer. I waited for him to look my way, though it was enough he’d spoken the words. He’d been planning this for a while, I think. He had to do it the way he’d figured it out. He kept his eyes on his beer, or maybe on his hands, his great, thick hands lying there on the bar before him.
And then he told me a story about himself. He said, “In ’32, things were bad in this town. The men who work this place had enemies they couldn’t even figure out. But I was trying to. The biggest of the enemies was the owner of Wabash Steel. John J. Hagemeyer. I never made a secret of my feelings. So he sent one of his goons into the B-furnace stove with me. In those days we’d have two-men teams that went into the stove for short times to poke out the clogs of flue dust in the brickwork. We couldn’t be in there for long. It was the toughest work on the labor gang. Nothing like it. We’d go up the furnace and then into a trap at the top with nothing but a teapot lamp and a steel rod and we’d go down into the stove and it was like climbing down into the fire. But once, Hagemeyer sent one of his boys in with me and there was a place in there on one side that was an open shaft straight down to the combustion chamber. I was working near there and the goon jumped me, tried to throw me down. But I fought him a short, hard fight and it was him who went down the shaft and died. Just the thirty seconds or so of fight almost killed me in that place too. There was no way to breathe.
But I dragged myself back out of there and your mama and I eventually got away to the west for a time. Till the war came and all my enemies at Wabash Steel were either gone or dead. Even Hagemeyer. By 1941 he was just a street name. So we come back.”
It was the longest he’d ever spoken to me, I think. I was breathless from hearing his voice for all of these words, wondering when they would stop, grateful for them no matter what it was he was saying. He almost died. Fourteen years before I was born. Fighting a man. Killing a man. These were things a father might tell a son someday, but why on this day? It wasn’t until later that I wondered why, and of course I never asked him. Maybe it was because he had just told his only child that he should go to war. Maybe he wanted me to know that he had faced death himself in what he saw as another kind of war. Without that, he felt he had no right to ask me. Maybe it came up because of it being another chance for me never to have been born. He was glad I was born and he was determined to tell me and that could have been the connection in his head. And maybe all of it, all of it, including why I should go to Vietnam, had something to do with deciding what it is you’re ready to die for.
Whatever the reasons, he just said the things he wanted to say and he didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. I turned my face to my own beer and I laid my hands on the bar and there was a blur of baseball words around us and the whoosh of a semi rushing past outside and I drag my wrist across my forehead, wiping away the sweat here in Tien’s apartment, and there is no longer a threat of tears. The past is no longer a matter of tears and smoke. It’s simple now. I went away. I came back. He died. My mother died.
And this memory that came to me before Tien was about to emerge from her bath, I see now that the talk with my father was the first marker on a long road that would one day bring me to her bed. And the switchback that would have prevented it was there, too. If it had been my father who had gone down that shaft. But in those thirty seconds in the stove at B-furnace more than sixty years ago and half a world away, my father killed a man, and as a result, Tien came out of her bathroom with her hair and throat and hands still damp and she found me there, and now I have put my hand in that soft and secret place on her body and she speaks my name and I am afraid I have gone too fast but she says it’s okay and I move my hand once more to that place and touch her.
This time, knowing for certain that it’s okay, knowing that Tien and I will make love, I flare inside, I have climbed down inside the stove and the brickwork is clean and the heat seethes through and I burn. Sweetly, but I burn. I am hot in my clothes and blocked in some painful way and her dark eyes are watching me, waiting, and I bend to her and our lips touch again, and very gently I move my hand upon her and she sighs into our kiss, I feel her breath move into me as if I’ve been dragged dying from the sea and she wants to bring me back to life.
And still I’m hesitant. I must ask her first. I pull my mouth away from hers and say, “Can I take these clothes off?”
“Yours or mine?” she says.
“Both. Though I meant mine.”
“Am I ready?”
I hear how childish I sound. I should know if my own body is ready to take a man into it. It has done this thing before. No. I have spoken a true lie to Ben and I must hear its truth for myself. It is not just a matter of readiness for a man. It is this one man. No one else has been Ben.
“Are you ready?” he repeats, completely baffled by the question, and I am embarrassed.
“Yes, I am,” I say, pretending that it is his question and I am giving him my answer. This confuses him some more. “Thank you for asking me,” I add.
He stares at me, trying to figure all this out.
“Yes you can,” I say, trying to move on to the question of our clothes.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” he asks. His voice is gentle and in the neon light I can see his brow knit and his mouth shape a smile. He is enjoying me.
“Yes. I am a great kidder,” I say, though if it is true about me, then it has come about only in the past few moments.
“I’m very confused now,” he says, but there is a playful thing in his voice and there is nothing confusing about what is going on between his hand and that special place on my body. I know this for sure.
I say, “I will help make things clear for you. Yes I am ready. Yes you can remove these clothes. Yours and mine.”
He smiles again and he brings his face close and he kisses me on the lips and I like that kiss, but as soon as it is over, I say, “I am not kidding.” Because I am ready.
He nods and he says, “Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I say.
And he begins with me. He pulls back and I am already naked above the waist and I am very comfortable with that and he puts his hands on the rim of my pantaloons. And I expect things to be floating by in my head, like the bits of the jungle in the Saigon River, I expect the things I always live with in my head to just keep on passing through: my mother and my father and my grandmother and my work and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—what it is and what it expects of me—and even the dragons and the jasmine flowers of our lovely stories. But when Ben puts his hands inside the top edge of my pants and his knuckles lie warm on my hips, all those things vanish from me and there is only’ the slip of his hands over my hipbones and down the outer edges of my thighs and past my knees and my calves and my ankles, and as his hands move I feel my nakedness emerging for him in their wake, and then the silk bunches over my feet and then is gone and I close my eyes and all that I am is in my skin, all that I need ever to know opens with my pores into the moist air of this room and I wait with my eyes closed, not because I am afraid but because in this moment I have become my skin and seeing has nothing to do with that, and then Ben’s skin falls upon me, his thigh against my thigh, his chest against my chest, I open my eyes and his face is to my side and I turn to him. We touch our lips. He touches my cheek with his lips. I close my eyes again and his lips are on my eyelids, and now there is a new place of touching. A clear, hard spot on my hip and I know what part of him is doing this, and then he shifts and the spot disappears and he is over me and I wait. I close my eyes and I feel as if I am waiting beneath a jasmine flower, waiting for a drop to fall on my mouth so that I can speak for the first time. And then in that special place on my body, that place of such strange and sometimes sloppy mystery, that place that sometimes I love and sometimes I shun, Ben is beginning to nudge his way in, and I wait for this now, I wait for the rest of my life to begin, and I open a little and a little more and then there is a hard, fleshy wrenching, a bloom of pain that unfolds quick and sharp into my womb and my thighs and I gasp.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I do not want him to stop. I open my eyes to Ben. His brow is knit above me. He is not moving. I feel held open. And the pain is blunt now. And then it is tiny. And then it is gone.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks.
“Go forward for the good of the revolution,” I say and this surprises me. It is from some schoolbook from the early days of the liberation. Perhaps I am a great kidder after all. We both laugh and that special part of me clenches with the laughter and his special part moves a little, and the effect, I quickly decide, is very nice and I would like to have that effect with no laughter. “No more questions now,” I say.
And now he makes love to me. And I am close to him. I am close to this man. I suddenly understand how far away people are from each other, even passing near in the street, even brushing shoulders, even looking into each other’s eyes and speaking each other’s names, there is this great empty space between us and now there is no space at all, I clutch Ben’s naked back and he is inside me and my body is a blur, the very cells of it are twisted away from each other and perhaps they have always been like that and I am just realizing it and I gather for Ben, everything is twisted apart so that something can find
its way out and gather in me, ready for him, and now suddenly all of this, all these cells of mine, rush into focus, I am pulsing hard where our bodies are joined and everything is suddenly very clear and I am put together again.
And he is still moving and I realize that he has not yet given to me and he says, “I will come out of you now.” I know what he means and for him to spill himself outside of me seems a terrible thing. I feel him drawing out.
“No,” I say and I hold him tight. “And do not ask if I am sure.”
He slides back inside me and I am happy for that.
And on this night of the first time I make love to this man, I hold Benjamin Cole close to me. And we are naked. And we are sweating. And then I know he has given to me. And I am a cup filled to overflowing.
She does not want me outside her body and I don’t question her. What’s between us seems to call for this. She knows it and I know it. But still there is a moment just before I am about to run inside her that I think it will be like it always has been, this thing will have its own life and I am clenched tight down there, it is near to time, and I’m waiting for something to snap free, some hitch that will lose a pin and my body will rush on and I’ll be left behind in the center of an empty highway wondering where I went.
But I can hear her breathing. Short, quick, soft in my car, and she clings to me hard and our bodies are slick and I can’t sort out one part from another, there’s no single place where there’s a pin to slip and we’ll break apart, not even where I grow leaden with readiness, not even that hard dangling place is separate now, we are fused together, all up and down us, from the stroke of her breath on my face to the press of her insteps on my thighs we are one body with parts long lost, missed only in our dreams, rejoined, and I rush now and she shapes a sound and it moves through me and we open our mouths together and cry out and we press tighter and my face is in her hair and her hair is dark and the darkness smells faintly of soap and of incense and it smells, too, of diesel and of oranges and though I can see nothing of my body I know from the clutch of her and the smell of her that I am complete.
The Deep Green Sea Page 6