He says, “It’s still one chance in twenty-five thousand, isn’t it?”
“It is no chance,” I say, and as soon as I say it, I do not believe it. As soon as I say it, I flare hot and all the strength goes from me and I lean into him and the tears are still flowing and as weak as I feel now, my chest begins to heave and I can hear myself sobbing.
“Tien,” he says. “Darling,” he says. He holds me tight and I so much want his nakedness upon me but I am also afraid of it now. And I suddenly know what is happening in this room. It is my father’s ghost. He is a jealous man. He has been curling the invisible smoke of his soul around us, making us breathe him in, and he has wisped his way into our brains, filled us with these fears to keep us apart.
I clench at these sobs, stuff them back down in my throat, I go hard now. I will not show him my tears. Not again. I wept for him for years. I knelt before his shrine and I prayed for his soul and I burned the incense and offered him food and a place for his soul to rest so that it would not wander the land of the dead in loneliness and fear. I was a bargirl to him. I did not offer my body but I offered everything else. More than my body. He was an American GI and he was in a foreign place and I held him close with my prayers and my smoke and I said, Do not be afraid, do not be lonely. And this is how he repays me.
My eyes are dry. I lift my face to Ben. I will hold only this man now. My hands go to the buttons on his shirt and I am whispering to Ben without speaking: Do not stop me, please my darling, put these fears aside, they are from my father speaking to us, my true father who cannot bear to let me go to another man, please my darling let me touch you now.
And Ben does not stop me. I lean forward into him, pulling at the sleeves of his shirt, hugging him and stripping the shirt from him in the same gesture. And in my mind I am speaking now to my father: See this. See what I do. See my nakedness and the nakedness of my lover. You must accept this or I will never say another word to the gods for you.
I feel the sheet over my ankles and my feet, and I kick it away. I want no part of my body to be covered. I do not care if my father is watching. I will show him all of my nakedness and he will know it is not for him but for this man I love. I square around and I am pulling at the belt on Ben’s pants. My hands tremble. The belt will not yield. Ben’s hands come down and they cover mine, hold me still for a moment, and I am afraid he will stop this again. “Please,” I say.
His hands hesitate. Then he puts mine aside and pulls open the belt and then the button on his pants and the zipper goes down and my own hands help his, my thumbs hook inside his underpants and I am helping him pull all of that off him at once. I sense his nakedness, catch the faintest sideways glimpse of the dangle of him. But I do not look. Not yet. He turns his back and he bends and he takes off his socks and he is naked and I lie back on the bed and he comes over me and I put my hands on his bare back and I draw his full weight onto me, kissing his mouth, wanting his mouth to yieid, to give me that opening into him. But his lips stay closed. They are kind to me. They are soft. They kiss me on the lips, on the cheek, but they stay closed. And then his face moves to the side of mine, his body shifts and slides off the top of me. I cling to him. I will not let him separate from me. And he does not. He stops. But his arms stay about me. His body presses against my side. His face comes to my throat, buries itself there. I hold him. I am breathing very fast. My throat is tight.
I look toward the ceiling of my room. I look for a face there that I have never seen. I think I might be able to see it now. I want to speak aloud to him. But I cannot explain this to Ben. Still, I do not need to say the words for my father to hear them. If he is in my head giving me these fears, and in Ben’s head, then he can hear me like this, and I say to him, Go away. Go away now and never return. Go find the woman you loved. Be with her. She is alive somewhere. Go to her and live on her prayers for a while.
I move my hand. I have not seen that part of Ben yet. I will wait until the time is ours alone. But I move my hand. I hope my father is watching. I should feel shame at that, but I do not. I move my hand and I reach and I lay my palm against the point of Ben’s hip. He is lying on his side facing me. His arm is around me and his hand is on me, just below my breasts. His lips are pressed against the side of my throat. I wonder if he can feel my heart there. It is beating fast for him, for the thing I want to do. I move my hand over his hip and across the tight curls of his hair and I open my hand wide, like my mouth wanting a deep kiss, and he is in my palm and my fingers softly curl around this part of him that I am not ashamed for the ghost of my father to see me touch but that I have trouble speaking a word for.
Penis means nothing to me. Cock means nothing to me. In my language this part is ngo.c hành, a word that is acceptable for a person to say if there is a good reason, but when I hear this word as a girl I am very puzzled, for it is made up of two words: ngo.c, which means a gem or a precious stone, and hành, which means an onion. These things contradict each other, it has always seemed to me. And neither thing is what I am touching now with my own hand, with my own will and my own desire. The street word for this male part, the word that my friend would whisper in the hidden place inside the banyan tree where we would talk, is cu, a word that it is not acceptable to say. It means turtledove. And this is the word now. Ben’s secret part is a turtledove to me, a fragile thing, a soft thing, very soft, and it moves in my hand, a bird caught sleeping in its dark nest and I feel a very tender thing for it, and I know it is Ben’s cu and this is why there is tenderness and why I feel my heart in my throat and I hope he can feel my heart, too.
I move him in my hand, the sweet softness of the flesh spilling between my fingers. He makes a sound. I tell my hand to be still. “Does this hurt you?” I say.
His face pulls away from my throat. He takes a deep and ragged breath. I do not want to stop touching him.
“I will hold my hand still,” I say. “Please do not make me let go of you.”
There is that little sound again, deep in his throat. I do not know if it means yes or no. But he says no words. I do not move my hand. My palm has grown as sensitive in its own way as the secret part of my own body, another part that I hesitate to name.
Her hand is on me and all day long I wandered the streets of Saigon, around and around, and I yearned for this moment and I dreaded this moment and my head is telling me now that it’s okay, we’ve talked this out, it’s come down to odds, that’s all, one in twenty-five thousand, as easily ignored as the possibility I’d die each time I stepped into the cab of my truck in America and eased out onto the interstate. But I can’t just go on like before. Her hand is on me and I should either touch her in return or I should tell her to stop and keep on trying to reason this out. But I can do neither thing, all I can do is say nothing and lie still and let her hand stay where it is.
But it’s clear to me that my body won’t respond. The part of me that’s still out there in the street afraid to come up to this room and face what might be a terrible thing, is glad for that. The other part, the part that desperately wants a future in this woman’s life, in her body, lifts my free hand and puts it on the top of her thigh. But can move it no farther. Tien and I lie there a long while like that. I am slack beneath her hand and my own hand is dead and distant.
Then she says, “Do you know what my sexual place there is called in Vietnamese?”
“No.”
“It is âm-d-a.o. They are two words. m means secret. -Da.o means path. It is my secret path. I think that is so, do you agree?”
“Yes,” I say.
“But it is not a secret for you,” she says. “To all others, yes. But not for you.”
My hand moves at last, but not to this place on her. Instead to her face. I turn her face to me and I kiss her there. On the forehead. On her eyes, which she closes quickly for me, happily. One in twenty-five thousand. I want to kiss her mouth, too. This kiss on the forehe
ad, as sweet and soft a place as this is on Tien, is a kiss that carries the shadow of that other thing. I want to open her mouth with mine and kiss her like the woman she is—she is a woman, she is no one’s child—but I can’t, I can’t, her hand still clutches my penis softly and my kiss animates her there, she kneads me gently and I wish I could rise to her touch, I wish I could accept this secret she offers, but I am clenched there instead, from fear.
She says, “So this part of you must be a secret traveler then. Yes?”
Her voice is small and sweet and is talking around the edges of her desire for me. This pain now in me, a clear pain that has begun in my temples, will not let me answer.
She says, “Asleep at the edge of the forest. Resting for a while before pressing on.”
I finally will these words. “You know I love you.”
“I do?” She says it with the lift of a question in her voice.
“I want you, my sweet Tien. I want to be inside you very much.”
“Oh please,” she says with a rush. “I am not a girl who demands a man’s body to do this or that when I say so. Please. I did not mean to criticize the sleepy one. I adore him.”
She lets go of me and she sits up, my hand falling from her hip, my other coming from around her. She is straightening and now bending forward. She means to kiss me there, I realize. I cry out.
“Wait,” I say. I slide up to sit before her. Her face is wide-eyed with shame. I grasp her hand. “Please don’t mistake me, now. You were about to do something that . . .” Her hand is warm from touching me. I have trouble saying what I know I must in order to reassure her, not because it isn’t true but because it is: I can see her in my mind completing the gesture, leaning forward and putting her lips on me there and she would kiss me with the same delicate indirection of her voice and she would be so utterly herself in that gesture and I want that very badly and that is why I can’t bear to have her do this, can’t bear to have even this image of her doing it, until who she is and who I am are clear and certain.
“You don’t like that?” she asks.
“I like it too much. Too much, my darling.”
“You are still thinking the terrible thing.”
“Yes.” And admitting it, I suddenly let all the questions back in. “The chances aren’t one in twenty-five thousand,” I say. “I found you here, didn’t I?”
“This is where I live.”
“Didn’t you say this is the place where your mother left you?”
“Yes.”
“You lived here when she was working as a bargirl?”
“Yes.”
“And where was her bar?”
“I don’t know. She never took me there. Never.”
“Near this place?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know.” I say this too loud. I can hear myself at once. She has flinched, drawn back a little. I reach to her. I take her hands in mine. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She squeezes my hands. “Ben. It is my father causing this trouble.”
I can’t figure how to make sense of this.
“He is in this room,” she says and I go cold, the place in my head that’s been pounding goes sharp cold, mountain-pass cold.
She seems to understand. Her hands leap to my face, press at my cheeks. “No. No. I don’t mean you. His ghost. My father is dead. Please believe that. His ghost is here trying to come between us.”
I close my eyes. I’m still cold. I feel some asshole in me from Court TV boring on, filling my mouth with words when all I want in the world is just to do what Tien says, just believe her and go on with my life. I say, “I came to this street—you found me sitting downstairs—because this is where I knew the woman called Kim. This used to be a street full of bars. If your mother worked near here, then the chances turn into something really troubling.”
No worse than that I’ll have cancer growing in some part of me in the next twenty years, no worse chance than that, and I never think about that possibility: this is how I argue back. But I can’t get warm again. I begin to shiver.
Tien leans forward and puts her arms around me. I say, “I have to know.”
“How?”
I don’t know for a moment. My mind thrashes its way toward obvious answers. “There are tests.”
“You mean tests of the blood?”
“I think those are too broad. They won’t tell us for sure. There are others.”
“My darling, this is something I cannot say in my job, but we are in my bed naked, so I think it is okay. We do not have even enough medicine in Vietnam. We do not have enough doctors. We do not have laboratories for these things. I doubt we could even do the test of the blood. But surely not something more difficult.”
I bow my head, close my eyes, focus on the stretching at the back of my neck. I think, How fragile these bodies are.
“There is one way,” she says. She lifts at my face with her hand. I yield. Her eyes are very dark. The light is almost entirely gone from the room and the neon has not started up outside. She asks, “We must do this?”
I try once more to shake this thing off. I lift my hand. I touch her cheek. I think about kissing her mouth. Here in the gathering dark. The path is so secret that only she and I will know. Everyone I know in my life but her is an ocean away. All the Vietnamese on their motorbikes rushing past out in the street are ignorant of us, utterly ignorant. And if her father’s ghost is in this room with us, then at least he isn’t me. I bend to her. I bring my mouth to hers. Slowly. I feel her breath on my upper lip. Then we touch. Soft. And I hope she is right. And I think—part of me does, in this good moment, it thinks—she is right. But the very sweetness of this kiss makes me let it go and I pull back just out of the touch of her breath and I say, “Yes. I must know.”
Do I even know myself how much I love this man? Until this moment I do not. I say, “I think my mother maybe has returned to her home village. It is near Nha Trang. We can try to find her.”
He sits back. His face, though I cannot see it clearly now in the darkening room, seems suddenly blank. He does not want to do that any more than I do, I think. This makes me happy. Whoever this Kim might be, he does not want to see her again.
Though she is not my mother. She is not. This is something I still blame on my father’s ghost. He puts all these confusing things inside Ben and me.
And then suddenly there is one more confusing thing. I have spoken of my mother’s village to Ben without thinking, because it is true that she could easily have gone there, because if he must have some proof that is not in his own heart about this, then to find her is the only way. But I think now: Is she alive?
Sometimes in these past nineteen years I have wondered this. I did so when I served tea to Ben, his first time in this very room. But when I am thinking I will never know for sure, I will never see her again anyway, it is a distant idea. But now it comes to me very strong. She might be dead. And I argue with myself. She was not harmed by my government. I know that. None of the prostitutes for the Americans was harmed, not even here in Ho Chi Minh City, where some of them shamelessly remained and offered themselves to the liberation forces. These women simply were sent to be reeducated and none of them was harmed. And my mother would—I don’t even know for sure how old she was when she left me; no more than thirty, I think—she would be perhaps fifty years old. No more. Perhaps still less. Not a woman ready to die of her years.
But she never came back. Even when it was clear—and it was quickly clear—that no harm would come to her, she never came back. She never even wrote a letter to my grandmother and me. She might be dead.
I feel a sudden chill. Not in me. In the room. I turn my face to look. There is nothing. The dark. The faceless shrine across the way.
“Do you think she might be there?” This is Ben�
��s voice. He sounds very far away.
“Yes,” I whisper and I listen for her. She might be in this room. It might be her jealousy, not my father’s, causing this trouble.
“You haven’t seen her since . . . ?”
I am hearing these words, I am even hearing the way he does not finish his sentence so that it becomes a question to me. But I am still straining to feel if she is in this room. I do not answer.
“Tien?” he says.
I turn to him.
He says, “If you don’t want to do this, I understand.”
“Do?”
“Find your mother.”
“You have decided you need this thing?”
“I don’t know. I want to just forget all this. I do. I want that more than anything. Just to touch you now.”
He says this and I am watching his eyes. They do not move to my body, though I am still naked before him. And I know we must go to Nha Trang. The chill is inside me now. I am very conscious of my body. In the old way. I shrink before him even though he is looking only in my eyes. I fold my arms across my chest, hiding my nipples.
He says, “You haven’t seen her since you were a child?”
“Eight years old,” I say.
“Can you do this?”
“If it means we can love each other again. Yes.”
“I love you now,” he says.
“You know what I am saying.”
“Yes,” he says, and he looks away, toward the window.
I rise. His face suddenly turns pale red, as if he is blushing from the sight of me. But it is the neon that has come upon him like a ghost, from the outside, from the hotel across the street, lighting up for the night. Still, I find that I am hoping Ben will keep his eyes turned away from me until I cross the floor and disappear into the bathroom.
The Deep Green Sea Page 11