I move through the scrub, onto the shoulder, I look and a Lambretta is coming and a motorcycle and to the right is a provincial bus, bright yellow and green and people are clinging to the doors and hanging out the windows and my legs don’t stop, I can’t wait to cross to Tien, horns cry from both directions and I rush now, hard, I feel the wisp of a flap of a woman’s ao dai across my back from the motorcycle and the grille of the bus bloats near me I feel it on my face and I lunge and it goes by trailing voices and I stumble in the uneven earth and I fall, palms and knees going numb and then my chest in the brush.
She is beside me. Her hands on my face, on my back, my arms, touching and moving, and her voice is with them. “Are you all right, my Ben? What is it, my love?”
I’m sitting now, brushing at my chest, and she takes my face in her hands, her touches are like kisses, like we’re kissing, and for the moment it’s okay, for the moment there’s nothing of my fear, only this release of the boy in the field, only Tien’s hands on me. I take one of them and turn it and I kiss the palm.
“Oh my,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What was that about?”
“The kiss?”
“I hope I know what that was about. The other.”
“I remembered something.”
“You remembered to run in front of a bus?” She pinches both my cheeks at this, like a mother scolding a child. I am surprised at the comfort I feel from this gesture.
Her hands retreat. I look into her eyes. They are steady, soft with what I know is her love for me.
I say, “I left you without a word. I wanted to explain.”
“You would have much to explain if you died there. I would interrogate you very sharply, Benjamin Cole.”
“Do that again,” I say.
“What?”
“Pinch my cheeks when you scold me.”
She cocks her head at me, smiles that half-smile which was my first vision of her.
She lifts her hands, twists at my cheeks, though the comfort of this is gone now. She says, “My father is jealous enough as it is. Imagine if he had to share my shrine with you.”
I lift my own hands, cover hers. She flattens her palms against my face. We stay like that until a motorcycle brats past and voices cry out at us. She does not show even a flicker of recognition at the words, but she says, “This is a public place, my Ben. And this is not part of our tour package, these caresses.”
Our hands fall. I climb to my feet. I look once more across the road. The place is bland, a ragged field, distant trees.
I feel her draw near me. “Ben,” she says softly.
“Yes?”
“Should we go on? Or go back to a private place?”
I look at her. For a moment all that had been set aside. And even now the desperateness is gone. But when she asks the question, something of the darker question remains. “Did you tell me Nha Trang has a lovely beach?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “There are private places on the South China Sea.”
“We’ll go there. Maybe just for the beach.”
She does not speak, but I hear a sound from her, a soft thing, a flow of her breath that I wish was on my naked chest.
We move to the car and when we are inside, seated side by side, and my hand is about to move to the keys in the ignition, she says, “So what was it you rushed into the traffic to explain?”
I have no words for a time. I wait. I squeeze at the steering wheel and wait. Finally I say, “The past. I’m trying to let go.”
“This is very good,” she says. And her hand steals across the seat and touches my thigh and then retreats again.
It is not clear to me what we are to do after Ben tries to let go of some part of his past there on the side of the road. It is not clear to him either, I think. So I try to make myself slow down. I feel very much like a new socialist woman, an equal worker in the new social order, which means to me you can touch your husband when you want to and you do not have to wait for him to decide this. But I must consider his feelings, too.
I have thought husband. I cannot stop a smile at this word. I am telling myself how I should slow down, and even in the telling, I am going very fast. I watch out the window and I think that in Nha Trang, by the sea, in the wind off the South China Sea, all the spirits of the past will be blown far away and Ben and I can find a place alone together.
For now, I keep my hands in my lap and my eyes out the window. Perhaps I doze. I have not slept well for these three nights and my eyes grow heavy. Along the side of the highway women have spread out rice to dry and then it is manioc root drying there, the white chips they use for flour, and then it is coffee and now I know for sure I have slept, for we are passing the Long Khanh mountains, past Xuan Loc, a town which I have missed, which was a battlefield where our nationalist forces had many victories, and on the side of the road the dark brown beans are laid out to dry and the smell of the coffee fills the air.
I turn my face to Ben. I watch him for a while without him knowing. He is very intent on the road. His hands on the wheel are large, my truck driver’s hands, which know my body, which are part of my own body. There are shadows flashing over us. I look outside and we are running beneath eucalyptus trees, lining both sides of the highway, their bodies white, their thin arms drooping like mothers mourning, and beneath them some little girls in white ao dais are riding bicycles. Ben is driving slow now among these children.
It leads me to speak whatever I can find to say, just to touch him with my voice. “These are eucalyptus trees,” I say. “An oil comes from this tree that we use when we are sick.”
He does not seem to hear me at first. I watch ahead and we pass the last of the girls on bicycles and then an oxcart and we are free also of the trees and I do not expect any words in return now, but he says, “There are eucalyptus in California, along the highways to break the wind.”
These words make me as happy as if he has suddenly kissed me. But still, I can hear his voice working hard in order to speak. I watch a spot in the sky, out ahead of us, near a grove of cashew trees. It seems to be a great bird hovering, hanging motionless against the sky. We near, and the bird moves to one side and then jerks back to the other, and I know it is a kite. There is a child, invisible to us, beyond the trees.
“Tien,” Ben says, low. “I’m sorry if I’m quiet. I’ve driven half my life, nearly, and it has always been in silence.”
“I understand,” I say.
We pass the cashew trees by. The sky is empty now. I take this explanation as an act of love.
He says, “There’s a quiet place in me, since I stopped by the road. I want to keep that. I want it when we reach the sea.”
“Yes,” I say. “It is a good thing, this silent time.” I struggle with my hands, to keep them where they are, in my lap. They obey this time. I try to find that quiet place in me now, too.
And so, together, Ben and I become the landscape rushing past us. Red soil and the smoke of brick kilns and piles of brick along the road, and roof tiles. And in Phan Thiet, TV antennas on bamboo poles and in the air the smell of nuoc mam, our wonderful fish sauce that they make in the town, and then, beyond, the salt flats with their little levees of tan mud and great squares of seawater and the piles of white salt taller than a man, and then paddies again and the smell in the air of rice hay burning and swarms of ducks grazing the wet fields after the harvest, and then coconut trees and then the Truong Son mountains to the west. And the mountains slide over and squeeze us next to the sea. And the sea is there for Ben’s eyes, our first sight of it together, the South China Sea, sudden and vast coming out from behind the dunes and bright from the sun, and it is the dark green of the finest jade.
And now I steal a look at Ben, and his face is turned my way, though his eyes are far out to sea a
lready. He glances at me and out again and then to the road. “We’ll lose it again for a few hours, won’t we,” he says, and I know he means the sea.
“Yes,” I say.
And we go on. And we stop only briefly at a roadside stand to eat, and we sit on tiny plastic chairs in the shade of an umbrella and I keep my eyes away from Ben, because his knees are almost up to his ears as he sits on this thing meant for a Vietnamese, and I like the size of him and I like him looking funny and not even realizing it, but these are the kinds of things I must put aside for now. Still, I am beginning to thrill again, like on the afternoon when I was preparing to make love to him, though we did not make love on that day, the preparation was a very sweet thing, and now I am having the same feeling. We are going fast. We will be at the sea near Nha Trang before the sun is gone.
So we go back on the road and soon we are passing tobacco drying in racks, the large green leaves, like the ears of elephants, and somewhere I think they must be burning the scrap because there is a strong tobacco smell suddenly around us and Ben is moving beside me. I look and he has lifted a little in his seat to dig in his pocket, and he pulls out a pack of cigarettes. This is a surprise for me. I have never seen him smoke. He does not take his eyes off the road. He does not take out a cigarette. He holds the pack for a moment, as if thinking about it, and then he tosses it into the backseat.
And what can it be that whispers in my body at this moment? I am a practical woman, a good citizen of a serious Marxist state, and this part of me says it is the food I ate by the side of the road, upsetting my body, just that, and perhaps also the smell of tobacco, which makes me feel a little bit unbalanced, since I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. Even perhaps it is some idle idea, a public health issue, since the man I love—the man who I am believing, in some shuttered-up room in my mind, will be living with me forever —has just rejected the smoking of a cigarette. I know that the smoke from a cigarette can harm others, especially delicate others. All of these things may be what turn my face to the landscape and whisper such an important message to me, so important that as soon as the thought comes, I ignore the message itself and instead I start thinking around and around about how it might have been prompted by nothing but indigestion or some other trivial thing. And even knowing how it is that I am avoiding the thought itself, I go on trying to discredit it. It could be a trick of the mind: I have just seen a Cham woman walking ahead of us and we raced past her and I turned to see her and she was carrying a baby in a pouch on her chest. The Cham are from different ancestors than other Vietnamese. They are Hindus. They have a god called Shiva who is very powerful and very terrifying to look at and who waits to destroy the world, and I can certainly understand Karl Marx being uncomfortable with religion when I hear of this god, I do not want to believe in this god either. Maybe this woman and her god and her baby are what make me feel this thing about my body.
And how can the most important message of my life be whispered to me in a moment like this? But it can. It can. For though I am in a Saigontourist car and I am watching two ragged dogs running beside us barking at the edge of this village and though my stomach is a little queasy from the soup I had by the side of the road and my head is a little light from the smell of tobacco, it was five days ago that Ben and I made love and I told him to stay inside me and now suddenly there is something deeper in my body I clearly can feel, something, like a shifting in my bones, like a quickening in my blood, something.
But I am a clearheaded modern woman. I know things about a woman’s body. And so I count the days, a thing I have not thought to do until this moment. And from that night to my next bleeding, it is two weeks.
I sit with this for a while.
There is no thought in my head.
But there is a deep shadow all around me, a secret place inside a banyan tree where I am a child myself and I have my first most vivid thought of a woman giving birth: a princess laying one hundred eggs. I know that Ben is nearby—I feel him next to me; he is enormous there— but the world he fills is just outside the root-trunk of this tree where I am, where I listen to the tale of the dragon and the princess, and it is Tien the child who listens, but I am there, too, Tien the adult, and I am inside the child, waiting to be born from her. And we are Chinese boxes, the tree and Tien the child and me. And my baby.
I try to return now, to the car. I lean into the rush of air through the window, I squint into the bright afternoon, the air full of the smell of wood fires, some village out of sight. I close my eyes. I lay my hands on my belly and Ben is nearby. I could reach out my hand and touch him, but I do not even look at him for now. His presence makes me very happy but it also fills me with terror, for there are questions I do not even begin to let inside my head, even simple questions about where I will live for the rest of my life, in what country, questions that I cast away from me, including the question of what to say to Ben. Nothing. For now, nothing. I do not drift again to the banyan tree, but I do think of the fairy princess once more. How she took inside her the seed of a dragon, and how she must have wondered what child would come of this.
The road goes on and though there’s no white line and no flat-out running, it does me some real good. Things are clean in my head out here, with an engine in front of me and a place to go to. And Tien is still beside me. She hasn’t disappeared in order for me to feel like this. And that’s the best thing of all. I don’t have to go back to being alone to make things simple. Tien loves me. I love her. We’re on the road together. The night is coming. It’s boiled sweetly down to that.
Still, I don’t turn us back to Saigon. I don’t want to give up the wheel. Out here on Highway One, I’ll go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning with more miles to drive. Back in Saigon, it’s just the paddle fan or that room of Tien’s, which she thinks was part of my little scare, and maybe it was. Wherever it came from and however nasty it was, that panic was actually worth it, it seems to me now, to get Tien and me on the road together. Driving has been the way out for me for so long that being able to bring Tien into it was a necessary thing for the two of us to go on from here.
I’m glad my mama made me read all those books. I think I picked a few things up, hearing all those voices. But they didn’t do me jack shit when it came to the minute-to-minute drag of that life back there. I told Tien the truck driving didn’t solve anything either, and it didn’t, in the long run. That’s true. That’s why her sitting here next to me now as we go up Highway One is so important. But there was a place I’d get to inside me, sometimes, driving the highways, when the silence would feel comfortable, when being alone was a natural thing, and it was usually at night and I’d be watching the lane break in my headlights and it turned into a kind of white-line mantra and there’d just be this soft ticking in my head, with those white lines going by, and things would be okay. And then I’d hit a truck stop and I’d go in and some old woman would be dozing behind the register and maybe one or two other guys were hunched over some coffee and I’d rent a shower stall and go on back along some white-lit hallway and unlock a door and hang the key on the hook and I’d strip down and run the water and the grit of the road would roll off me and the water would feel almost as sweet and good as a shower in Vietnam, where you thought something as simple as that, a goddamn shower, could never ever feel as good again in your life. But once in a while it almost did, out on the highway.
And the sun is getting low and there’s just salt flats and shrimp ponds going by on the east side of the road. The South China Sea hasn’t reappeared. I turn to Tien. Though I’ve been conscious of her there, and happy for that, I haven’t looked directly at her for a long while. She has her hands tented in front of her, palms together, her chin resting on the tips of her middle fingers. Her eyes are closed. There’s a faint smile on her face. She could be sleeping or praying or playing beautiful music in her head, something very private. I look back to the road and keep my mouth shut.
&
nbsp; But somehow she knows. She says, “Do you wish to stop?”
I look to her again. Her hands have settled in her lap. Her faint smile has turned to me. I say, “Nha Trang isn’t far, is it?”
“Less than an hour. Do you want to stay in the city?”
“Isn’t there a more private place, by the sea?”
“We can go east up ahead. There’s a narrow road to the shore.”
“What’s there?”
“A villa once owned by . . . I was going to say a member of the puppet government of the south. I have caught myself. Am I not a changed woman?”
“Yes. And I’m a changed man.” I lay my hand, palm up, on the seat between us and her palm settles on mine and her fingers close softly and it feels like sex, for the first time in days our bodies are really touching and it runs through me fast and I punch the accelerator.
Up the highway, she motions and we turn off, and the narrow road is made of packed dirt and it’s rutted and it’s slow going, and then, at last, I can smell the salt water, and we go over a little rise and the South China Sea is before me, darkening now at the end of the day.
The Deep Green Sea Page 14