The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

And I think I understand something about the quietness in him. He is sad about the way life seems to him after the war. He is sad about his father and his wife and his mother and all the miles he has to drive because he cannot find something to make life lift him up, light and sweet, and now he finds me and thinks that I am sweet and he lifts for me and we touch. These are good things. This is a good moment, and looking at our hands proves that, for our hands seem somehow to come from the same maker of hands, some maker who is a very fine artist and his work is very clearly his when you see it, even if the subjects are different.

  He looks at me now and he smiles, at this sameness, I think, and I ask him, “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “About your . . . mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it you said?”

  I take a breath, wishing not to say this once more. “I do not really know if she is dead. She was a bargirl.”

  “Did she leave you?”

  “Yes. When the liberating forces were about to enter the city. She was afraid for her life. She was a bargirl for the Americans.”

  I feel a little thump of something in me at that. Like hitting a pothole in the dark. But I figure I know what it is. Tien doesn’t like what her mama did, and I don’t blame her, but I’m guilty of the same sort of thing. If Tien was a little girl feeling bad about her mama taking Americans to bed, I was one of those Americans taking a woman to bed back then who might’ve been some child’s mother. Though I knew Kim wasn’t. Still, it was the same sort of thing. That’s how I take it. And there is the reminder, too, of the difference in our ages, Tien and me. Not that it bothers me. If it doesn’t bother her, it shouldn’t bother me. I figure it all out like this. And she’s still talking and I’m missing it. But I feel okay now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Tell me that again.”

  She starts it over without a pause, without a dirty look, not holding it against me at all that I haven’t heard her for a moment. I have no clear memory, but I know this is different from what I was used to, what I came to think was normal from Mattie. That’s how my thoughts are running, to things that just make me love Tien more, at each little turn. She says, “She left me with her mother, right here in this apartment. Then she went away. I think she went back to where she grew up. Up near Nha Trang.”

  “What was your mama’s name?” I ask.

  When Tien says, “Huong,” I’m surprised to feel a quick little letting go of something, though I don’t stop to try to figure out why.

  “I don’t want to talk about her,” Tien says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “She doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course not.”

  “She never brought me around her men,” Tien says.

  “She was trying to protect you.”

  “Yes. You’re very sweet to try to let me see it that way.”

  “It’s true,” I say.

  “She went away for that reason, too. To protect me. She was afraid my father . . .”

  Tien stops. I think it is just the pain about him. Her face goes hard and she looks away from me, into the dark of the room, and I figure she’s thinking about all the prayers she’s made, all the incense she’s burned. She’s never let go of him. As she sees it, he’s still in this room.

  Tien says, “She made me lie. All my life. Now to you. I can’t even just speak the truth.”

  “You can always tell me the truth.”

  She turns back to me. She smiles. She lifts her hand and touches my cheek with her fingertips. “Yes,” she says. “My mother went away, too, because she did not want anyone to find out that my father was an American.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your American father.”

  “Yes. I would not carry a lie this far.” Tien nods in the direction of her ancestor shrine. “I pray real prayers.”

  “Of course.”

  We fall silent for a time. I feel like pressing this issue and I don’t know why. I don’t try to figure it out. I just feel the impulse to press her. I say, “How did you learn of his death?”

  “He died before I was even born.”

  “So your mother told you.”

  “Yes.”

  I say no more. The impulse suddenly disappears. The street is quiet, I realize. For a long moment there is nothing. The silence buzzes faintly in the room. Then there’s the distant brat of a motorbike engine. It grows louder and grates past our window and is gone. After that, there’s silence again. It’s very late.

  Tien says, softly, “Do you think she lied?”

  I find my mind slow now. Like I am half asleep. “What?” I say.

  “My mother. Do you think she lied?”

  It’s hard enough, suddenly, just to focus my eyes on Tien. It takes me a few moments to do this.

  “About my father dying,” she says.

  “How would I know?”

  “She was a liar.”

  “Was she?”

  “Yes.”

  “But only for reasons,” I say.

  “There would be a good reason for that lie.”

  “What?”

  “So I would not have to think about him. So I would not feel abandoned by him. So I would not wonder what she did to make him go away and never want to see her again.”

  I am very tired now. Very weary. I uncross my legs, turn and sit on the edge of the bed, my side to her.

  She says, “Would those not be good reasons for her to tell me this lie?”

  “What difference would it make now?”

  “None. You are right.”

  “You wouldn’t go to America to try to find him.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Do you even know his name?”

  “She never spoke his name,” she says, and there’s movement next to me.

  I glance and she’s sitting beside me now. I let my eyes fall to her breasts. The nipples are dark in this light. They are erect. My hands stir, wanting to touch them, but instead I cross my hands in my lap.

  “Do you have a picture of your mother?” I ask, and the question surprises me.

  “Yes,” she says and she gets up.

  I watch her cross the room, her nakedness coursing in me, filling me, in spite of my having made love to her already this very night. I cross my legs to cover myself when she sits down again, a photo in her hand. She scrambles to the other side of the bed and turns on a lamp on the nightstand. She scrambles back, jaundiced by the pale bulb, and I take the photo in my hand, my heart pounding. From her nakedness, I think. From the nakedness of this woman that I love. I hold the photo for a moment and something in me wants to put it down unseen. Just put it aside and touch Tien again. Right now. Enter her and live forever inside the sweetness of her body, the sweetness of her mind. But I cannot. I have to look at the photo.

  It is the photo of a child. Very simple. A girl maybe seven or eight standing in the shadow of a broad-leafed tree that’s just off camera. Maybe a banana tree. She isn’t posing. She’s hardly smiling. She looks up with her deep-cut Asian eyes into the future, at the daughter she will leave at just about this age and at the man this daughter loves. She could be anyone.

  Ben looks at my mother and I crouch on the bed behind him and look at her too. I lean against his back, put my hand on his shoulder. He feels very warm. I am suddenly frightened for him. I touch his forehead to see if he has a fever. He does not. But to touch him feels like drawing near a flame.

  “She’s a child,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Is this the only photo you have?”

  “Yes. My mother destroyed all the photos before she left. She was very frightened. She was a little crazy with the fear.”
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  He looks at my mother’s face for a long while.

  “You feel very warm,” I say.

  “Do I?”

  “I thought you had a fever.”

  “She could be anyone,” he says.

  “I never was frightened for anyone’s health before.”

  “Frightened?”

  “When I thought for a moment that you have a fever, I was afraid for you.” He reaches up and touches my hand that lies on his shoulder.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he says.

  “I am not afraid now,” I say. “You have no fever.”

  He squeezes at my hand. Then he lifts my mother’s photo for me to take it. I do. I rise up and I begin to cross the room and all my body prickles from being naked and being seen by this man I love even more than I did a moment ago, just from that little squeeze of my hand and from the way he is surely looking at me from behind as I move. And I take a step away from him and another and I am naked for him and I am feeling heavy now, my limbs are turning again to stone as I take still another step and another and I do not know why, but I am suddenly very conscious of my mother in my hand and I wonder where she is and what she would look like if I could see her right now, with my own adult eyes.

  I am before my vanity chest and I bend to the bottom drawer and I open it and I lift the lid on a small lacquer box and I put the picture away. I close the lid and I slide the drawer shut and I turn, expecting to find Ben’s eyes upon me. But he is in the bed now, lying with his face to the ceiling, covered to the waist with the sheet.

  I cross back to him, still heavy in my legs and a little self-conscious now, feeling exposed. He turns his face at the last moment and sees me and he smiles, with a very soft look in his eyes, and I feel all right again. The past is put back in its box and my body is light and I even stop for him, linger a little, knowing from his eyes that he likes to see me.

  “I’m very tired,” he says.

  “I am too, I think.”

  “I can stay?”

  “Yes. I did not even imagine you would be in some other place tonight.”

  He smiles again and looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes. I slip into the bed beside him, covering myself also to the waist, my hip touching his beneath the sheet. I feel for a moment joined to him there, like the place we touch can never be undone, like we are the twins I have read about, who come from their mother’s womb with their bodies joined. Brother and sister. Not that I want anything like the feeling of brother and sister with Ben. It is just this connection I imagine in that place on our naked hips.

  What I really want is for him to touch me again, even now. Not like brother and sister at all. I want him to touch my secret place again, even though I feel very ten­der there. It would hurt a little for him to touch me there now, I know, but I want him to do that anyway. And all this makes me think of my mother’s urgent words when I brought the story of the beginning of Vietnam to her. There were one hundred sons, she told me. My friend told me that there were fifty boys and fifty girls among the children of the dragon and the princess, and these children grew into adults and they became the ancestors of all the Vietnamese people.

  But as I lie beside Ben on this night we make love, I suddenly realize that in the story I have heard in the banyan tree, these brothers and sisters would have had to make love with each other. In this story, all our people began with a brother and a sister lying down naked to­gether and touching and joining their bodies. My mother would not let me think of this. That was behind the heat of her words. But her version of the story only explained the line of our kings. It did not explain where the rest of us came from. In her story, that remained a mystery. But the wives of these kings did not spring from the trees or from the smoke of their fires or from the earth. There had to be more. Surely such a thing as the love between a dragon from the sea and a fairy princess was meant to be­gin a whole nation and not just put men on a throne. Per­haps this was another of my mother’s lies. Perhaps these brothers and sisters lay down together and loved each other.

  I shiver at this, like I am suddenly chilled, like there is something crawling just beneath my skin and it is very cold. I have never had a brother or a sister, so the thought of this happening is just between invented people in my head, but even so, it feels very strange to me, it catches in my chest like in the early days of the liberation when the men in the streets with guns would suddenly look at you and you did not know if they recognized that you were just a little girl or they thought you were someone else and they might kill you. I feel like that.

  So I turn on my side toward Ben, breaking that place on our hips where he and I are joined, and I put my hand on his chest and I want to move my hand down to the place where we have been joined like the children of the dragon and the princess, the brothers and sisters who knew no shame from the blood between them. But I do not move my hand. Not right now. I am glad to hold back and know that I could do this thing at any moment. He will sleep beside me and I will sleep and I could wake at any moment in the night and touch him there. Knowing I can touch him and holding back is a sweet thing. That odd warmth that feels like fear, fades away. Ben’s arm comes around my shoulders and draws me tighter against him. I say, “Why did you come here?”

  There’s an answer in my head right away, to this. Like almost everything that’s been going on inside me since Tien and I made love, this answer just comes on me and it’s like I’m sitting back waiting to see what it is, myself. Things come into me and I don’t know from where. I say, “I think it was to find you.”

  This answer puzzles her as much as it does me. She says, “You knew?”

  “I didn’t know a thing,” I say. And I wait a moment to see what I mean. I look hard into the dark above us. A gecko is motionless in a shadow, just outside a stripe of neon, waiting for something he knows is coming along. I feel the warmth of the palm of her hand on my chest, the press of her body inside the circle of my arm. She seems so familiar. I think I feel that briefly. But that would happen now and then on the road. I’d slide into a town somewhere and I’d never been there in my life but it was familiar. I take it like that. I say, “I mean it was supposed to happen this way somehow.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Do you think something like a god brought you here?”

  I should have expected her to take what I said this way. It’s natural. But this is far beyond the point I think I’m making. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I’m just saying things that come into my head. Things people are supposed to say when they talk like this.”

  “I am not familiar with this custom.”

  “But I think I believe what I’m saying, too. About us.”

  “I was brought up a Buddhist,” Tien says. “Not a very good one. My mother wasn’t very religious. How could she be and do what she did in her life? My grandmother believed in her dead husband’s spirit, and the spirit of her father. But that’s not really Buddhism. That’s something the Chinese oppressors brought us a thousand years ago.”

  “Does Buddhism explain why I’m here?” I ask.

  “I do not think so,” she says. “Buddhism says that all the suffering in the world comes from desire.”

  I draw Tien closer to me, sliding my hand down to the point of her hip, letting her skin run softly into my hand and up my arm and into my head. I want things to be clear for me now, about her, about what this all means. Too much is going on in me that I wasn’t expecting. It feels like there’s something waiting in the shadow for me to come along. “Are you suffering now?” I ask her.

  “From my desire for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I said I was not a very good Buddhist.”

  “It’s only the good Buddhists that suffer from desire?”

  “They suffer from the desire not to feel d
esire.”

  “This is better, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she says, and her hand slides down my stomach and onto that place that is slack now and quiet but I stir at her touch. And almost at once the night begins to blur at its edges, just when I think I’d be waking up in my head like I seem to be doing in my body, the darkness above me billows like mill smoke and the gecko disappears and I suddenly want to let go of all I can see and hear and feel against me. I say, “I’m very tired now, Tien,” and her hand stops.

  “Is it okay?” she asks. “That I touch you?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Will we sleep now?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can you say this thing once more before we do?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “I will.”

  “I love you,” I say and I know I mean it, though this time the words come hard. From this sudden weariness. From that, I decide, because I feel the deep sea-wave of sleep rolling under me and lifting me into the dark and I don’t even hear her say the words back to me.

  And I wake in bright sun. I remember a brief moment when she kissed me good-bye. She was up early for her work and I was deep in a dreamless sleep and her lips woke me, on my cheek, on my brow, then on my mouth and I put my arm around her and she was in Saigontourist clothes and I smelled her makeup and she said, “I will come to you this evening.” Then she was gone and I blurred back into sleep.

  And now I’m awake and it’s late in the morning. The roar of motorbikes fills the room and I sit up. The sheet is twisted away from me and I’m naked and I think of Tien’s kiss, how she might have seen me lying here in my naked­ness. I stir at this. And at once my hands go out to the sheet and scrabble at the knots and pull the cloth over me. This odd surge of modesty in an empty room seems to come directly from my hands and I look at them as if they could explain.

  Then I try to doze again, but I cannot. I rise up finally and I am naked for a moment in the middle of the room, in the sunlight, and again I feel unsettled by this, again my hands drive me to cover myself. I put on my pants and my shirt and I’m breathing hard. Like I’m on a drug or something. Like something is in my body. I look around as if there’d be some proof from the night before. A mirror on a tabletop and a dusting of powder, the butt end of a reefer. Something. Anything. Though I know we weren’t even drunk, Tien and me. I know there’s been nothing in this room but the feeling between us. And that is unaffected by this sudden mood. I see her silk pantaloons on a chair and these same hands of mine that have wanted to cover me stir now with the memory of her skin on their palms, they feel the cool run of her flesh on them, right now. But still there is something.