The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  I finish dressing and go out of her rooms, closing the door softly, leaning there a moment, wondering at all of this. And then I go along the outer balcony and it smells of fish sauce and wood fire and there’s a jumble of red tile roofs and straw mats and hanging laundry and the clucking of chickens from somewhere down the alley, and as I pass by an old woman crouching near the metal circle of stairs, she nods at me and puts a fold of betel leaf in her mouth.

  I go down the stairs and out into the street and I seek the sun, stay out of the shade. I walk along the street for a long way in the sun, taking it in hard and straight on my face and my arms, trying to sweat this feeling away. Then at last I hail a pedicab and the driver asks where I want to go and I don’t know. I think of my hotel, but I don’t want the empty room again, the empty bed, the paddle fan moving the wet air, and so I say the Hotel Rex, which is down near the circular fountain at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue.

  I sit in the pedicab’s open chair, the driver out of sight behind me, and there is nothing before my eyes but the street full of Vietnamese people rushing past on their motorbikes and I move as if in a dream, floating in this street that looks just like it did years ago, in 1966. How many years ago? I shape that question in just those words in my head and I expect it simply to be the prompter of a bit of elementary math—I’m talking to myself in my head in some simpleminded way—but with that question comes another question and it surprises me, it’s unwilled, it’s from some ongoing self-interrogation that’s deeper, darker, and the question is: how old is Tien? Why should the one question lead to the other? I pose this to myself and do not want an answer, I lean forward, try just to float here in this street, like in a lovely dream, yes, try to sense the tamarind trees joining overhead, try to drift through their shadows knowing I can wake at any moment, but she’s on my skin, this woman I love, she’s burning in me like incense, and the question slides forward again, even though there’s no past to reckon with, all the women I’ve ever known, as few as they are, have faded from me, it’s as if they never existed, and she has said I love you to a man three times in her life and it was only me, I am that man. Except the math is this: twenty-eight years. She can be very close to that age and it has been twenty-eight years since I’ve been in these same streets, since I’ve gone to a bar in the very street where Tien once lived with her bargirl mother.

  Her mother Huong. The woman I met and loved was Kim. Perhaps Huong’s friend. Perhaps there was this wonderful crossing of paths. Perhaps one hot afternoon I was drinking in the bar with Kim and she drifted to the back of the place, to the little room behind a curtain, where they kept a shrine with incense and fruit for the woman who once owned the bar, a woman killed one night on the street in front by a drunken Army man, and her picture was there in the center of the shrine—I remember her now, her face in a photo in the center of the shrine—and she had no family to pray for her and so her girls prayed for her, my Kim and all the other girls, and perhaps one hot afternoon the girls curled up in the booths and in the back room and took their naps but Kim was with me and so she stayed awake, drinking with me, and she stepped through the curtain and perhaps Huong was there. Perhaps I followed Kim and before me was this other bargirl whose name, Huong, I’ve long forgotten, and perhaps her blouse was open and a baby girl was nursing at Huong’s nipple, an infant, and perhaps this infant was Tien.

  I float now in the shadows of the tamarinds with this thought. The girls in white ao dais race past on their motorbikes and I close my eyes and I cannot remember such a thing happening, the nursing baby at the breast of Kim’s friend, but it might have. I could have stood before Tien’s mother with my own bargirl lover and seen the infant Tien suckling at a breast that I might have paid to suckle at, easily, if I had not been with Kim instead. And at this thought I feel a sweet rush of guilt. Sweet, yes, sweet. Sweet with relief. A thing like this is what has been troubling me. A thing like this. I am this much older than Tien. I have been this sort of man, who has paid to sleep with a woman like her sort of mother. Sweet guilt. These are my sins. Only these.

  I pass him in the street and he does not see me. I am in my Saigontourist car with Mr. Thu the driver and in the backseat are a man and woman who are husband and wife from Germany. Ben is in a xich lo and a very old man is pedaling him through the street. I see him and I am in the middle of telling the German couple something or other about Ho Chi Minh City and I stop what I am saying right away. I turn to see my Ben who is leaning forward in his seat and his eyes are closed so that he does not see me and the old man is wearing a straw hat and I begin to roll down my window. I would put my body halfway out of the car and call to my Ben, but he is gone too soon, the window is not even all the way down. I laugh. He was looking so sweet, his eyes closed, and I think that his thoughts are about me.

  I turn to the German couple. We are speaking English because they speak it well and so do I and our German-speaking guide is off with a busload from Berlin, and I say to the man and the woman, who are perhaps fifty years old, “I am sorry. I saw someone I know passing by.”

  They nod and look out the window as if they would recognize right away who I mean.

  “It is a man,” I say and the German woman turns her face to me and smiles.

  I want to say to her, I know what you feel with this man who sits beside you. We are women, you and I, and we lie with a man we love and we open our bodies and we love these men with some parts of us that only they know about and I think that they do not even know that they know.

  I want to say these things to her as we smile at each other, one woman to another woman. But instead I say that in the two thousand square kilometers of Ho Chi Minh City, more than five million people are living. Her smile fades and she looks at me thoughtfully. Her hus­band is looking at me now again, too. I am trying to be the tour guide once more. I think of those five million people and I want to speak of the great advances in housing and employment that our revolutionary government is making but I am really thinking of the half of those five million who are women and how they must all yearn to have what I now have, this kind of love. I look at this German woman’s face and she and her husband are sitting with a wide space between them, each pressed against a window, and I have not seen them touch on this day, though we have been in the Ben Thanh Market and in a pagoda and in the Military Museum where a man and a woman who loved each other very much would surely think to touch, since the museum itself—I am ashamed to say this but it is true—is very boring. And I think that no one in this city, not one of the two and a half million women here, or any of the women in Germany either, for that matter, has ever felt what I am feeling. But they want to, they want the secret places of their bodies to feel as sweetly sore from the attentions of love as mine does, they want their breaths to catch as mine does and their bodies to strive to leap through a car window as mine does at the sight of the man who has lain with them, even if he is gone in a moment and he is dozing or dreaming in the care of an old man with a straw hat. That such an odd and simple thing as this should bring such joy, they must all want that and not be able to have it. That is perhaps a selfish and reactionary thing to think, but in this moment it seems true or else these two people in the backseat would be pressed against each other even then and every woman on the street would be rushing in wild distraction to leap into the arms of the man she loves.

  But, of course, I am doing no such thing at the mo­ment. I laugh at myself for all these thoughts. The hus­band and the wife both wrinkle their brows at me.

  “I am sorry,” I say.

  For a moment I have no idea what to do with my body. I stand before the Rex Hotel and I should he doing something, I should turn one way or another and I should make my legs move, I should go somewhere, into the hotel, perhaps—I think I came here for the rooftop bar—or off in some direction along the street, perhaps now back to my own hotel. But I have no impulse at all. Nothing. I do ache for the night to come and to be ba
ck in Tien’s bed. That’s very clear. But all the moments between this one on the street and that one, still hours away, are unimagin­able to me.

  And still, I know that things are much better inside me. That’s the very reason I have this sudden emptiness. The thing that had been growling in the dark in me is silent, but the guilt that took its place was an old one and faded away at once. I’m not proud of the way my life has gone. I knew that long ago. So if Tien in some strange way was present in the past I’m ashamed of, then that’s okay. If she was, she was there as a brief glimpse of a purity and innocence that would someday return to me in the form of a woman and make me whole.

  And standing on the sidewalk on this morning in Vietnam in 1994, I think: what it must mean is, I’ve been for­given. If there is some higher power in the universe that gives a damn about guilt and shame and forgiveness, then surely for Tien and me to be brought together like this and to be made to touch like this and to feel like this—especially if she’s the child of a bargirl herself, especially if I saw her for one ignorant moment in that former life of mine—if such a power exists, then surely, for all this to happen, it shows that I’ve been forgiven.

  This is what I think for a few sweet moments. And then I decide to go back to my hotel and lie on my bed and think about Tien until it is time to go to her again. And so I cross the street into the plaza before the Rex. A photographer lopes up and motions for me to turn so that the City Hall and Ho Chi Minh’s statue will be behind me and I wave him away. A girl with handfuls of postcards takes his place, following me step for step as I move down the plaza now, heading for the fountain at the traffic circle, and I wave her away too. And then the little man with the mustache is at my side and I recognize him as the pimp on the motorcycle and he’s speaking low to me.

  “You want nice Vietnam girl? Boom boom all day all night?” he says.

  “No,” I say and he doesn’t turn away, he continues to follow me and I wonder what it is about me that he won’t believe what I’ve said.

  “She is very nice,” he says. “Do anything for you.”

  “No,” I say again and I try to make it sharper but I’m not sure it is and I know there’s no desire for another woman, a faint shudder runs in me at the thought of touching any woman but Tien now, and that makes me happy, but the very happiness of it turns at once to a dark thing and I know I’ve been thinking about bargirls too much, that’s what’s going on, this is connecting to all of that, and I want to rush away from this man but I can’t make my legs go any faster.

  “Here is she,” he says, and I look and we’re moving toward the motorbike parked at the curb and the girl is there, perched on the back of the seat, and she’s very young and her hair that was rolled up when I saw her before is unpinned now, falling long and dark, over her shoulder and down over her breast. She is looking at me with steady eyes, looking into my eyes.

  I stop. If there’s a moment in a body that’s the opposite of sexual desire, this is a thing that is happening to me now, like driving in a fog and not daring to stop on the shoulder because you know someone will crash into you from behind and not seeing enough even to find an exit ramp and knowing you can only go forward and knowing something is waiting out there that you won’t see until you slam into it and your body squeezes hard to make you very small and you feel it most in your penis and in your balls, they suck in and clench tight, and it’s like that, seeing this woman waiting for me to take her to a loveless bed.

  “She is my sister,” the man with the mustache says. “She is one virgin. You say hello to her. Her name Kim.”

  I turn to him. “Kim?” I don’t know what’s in my voice but the man flinches.

  “Sure,” he says, but it’s meek, a child caught in a lie. “You no like name Kim?”

  Whatever surprised the man in my voice is kicking up inside me now. I’m clenching tighter. Some shape in the fog ahead. I start to turn away and his hand is on my arm.

  “Wait,” he says. “She not Kim. That name Americans like, so we say she name Kim.”

  I stop. He angles his face around trying to look me in the eyes. He laughs a little laugh that is full of something that sounds like respect.

  “You know already. You know Vietnam. I see you smart GI vet. Her name Ngoc. American like Kim better.”

  I want to tell him to shut up. I’m not looking at him and keeping my face turned is just making him say more. I force my eyes to go to him and when I do he smiles broadly and he cuffs me on the arm.

  “You smart man,” he says. “All Vietnam good-time girl name Kim.”

  Now she is near me. “My name Ngoc,” she says. “I do for you special.”

  It is ten minutes until six o’clock and I get out of the car and I say good-bye to Mr. Thu over my shoulder. I am thinking of my heart, how I can feel it rushing inside me. I look to the little table where I first see him, and some men of Vietnam are in that place drinking beers and then I am in the shadow of the alleyway that leads to my rooms.

  I go up the iron stairs and I pass women crouching and playing Chinese cards. I say hello to these women every night but I say nothing now. I am sorry for that, but Ben has filled me up and he has squeezed all my words out and he is squeezing also at my chest, making it difficult to breathe, and I am loving this feeling.

  My door is unlocked, this is the way I leave it always, I tell him so just last night, so when I push open the door I am ready to be in his arms. But he is not there. I stop. I stand in the middle of the room. I look around. The sheets are thrown back. Like he has risen only just a few moments ago and he has gone into the kitchen or into the bathroom. I go to the kitchen door and the room is empty. The water drips from the faucet into my metal pan. The sound is very loud. There is no other sound. I step to the bathroom door and I know already that he is not there. The door is open and I can see this clearly. I move back to the center of the room where I live and I look to the ancestor shrine. The incense is cold. The fruit is turning dark. No face is there, either. A rooster crows somewhere out in the alley, far away. He does not like how the light is going from the sky.

  I try not to think of my father. I tell myself: Ben is not gone forever. It is not fair to think of my father because of him. For one thing, Ben will come up the stairs and along the balcony and through that door any moment. For another thing, my father is dead. He did not leave me forever without another thought, he is simply dead. And perhaps his spirit did not leave me at all. Perhaps I drew him here with my prayers long ago and he has all these years been very grateful to me for supporting him in the afterlife, as we are supposed to do for our dead ancestors, and he has wept ghostly tears because he was not able to come back to Vietnam as a man, as a father, and find his daughter. These are the things scrambling around in me as I stand here. Thoughts like these.

  But I am afraid there may be more. My face and hands have gone cold now. My heart is still rushing, but for some new reason. I stand halfway between the empty bed and the empty shrine and the beats of my heart are like pebbles, piling up, filling my chest and pushing up now into my throat. I must move from this place where I am standing. This much I know.

  I turn my body around. It is very heavy. I push against it and I am moving to the bathroom. I go in and I pull on the chain and a light comes from the bare bulb into the room, a light like on those late nights when I would lie in my mother’s bed and she would rise and go into the bathroom and I would be awake—as soon as she rose and left me alone there, I would wake—and she would go in and pull the bathroom door just partway closed and turn the light on and there would be only silence for the longest time and I do not know what it was that she was doing.

  I lift my hands to my blouse buttons and I begin to undo them. This feels good. My hands rush now. I strip off my blouse and throw it down at my feet and I unsnap my bra and it falls away and my nipples awake at their sudden nakedness. I think this will bring him
through the door. I slip off my shoes and I unzip my skirt and I dig my thumbs deep into these daylight layers of me and I drag the skirt and my panty hose and my underwear off all at once, stepping quickly from the clinging toes, and I am naked now, completely naked, and the secret lips of me pout for him and I reach up to my hair and pull out pins, throwing them down, my fingers trembling until my hair is tumbling over my shoulders and down my back.

  I listen for the door. There are motorbikes distant in the street and the laughter of the women playing cards, and I listen to the place in front of those sounds, I wait for the sound of the door. But there is nothing. Except, now, a child crying somewhere nearby, passing, just outside, and then the child is gone, and the women are silent now, and there are only the motorbikes. But the door does not open. And it is all right, because I am not clean. It is good that Ben is late. This is what I tell myself.

  I run the water into my plastic tub and I crouch beside it and I take my sponge and I soap it up with the soap that says it is 99 and 44 one-hundreds percent pure. I am far less pure than that now. But it does not bother me to think so. There is another kind of pureness possible, I think. A pureness that happens when he fills me with the part of his body I still have not looked at. I will look at that part tonight. I rub the soap beneath my arms, around my breasts, down to the place on my body that is his alone to touch. I wash myself and rinse with fresh water and I rise and I dry myself with soft pats of my towel. He would be that gentle if he were here to dry me now. I touch myself with the towel just as Ben would.