The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Over there,” she says, and off to the right is a large, rambling house facing the sea, and I turn into a shell drive rimmed with palms and I slide up to the front walk and stop. Tien says to wait and she gets out of the car and I turn off the engine. There’s still the crawl of the road in my head and the vibration of the engine in my arms but there’s a letting go, too. My shoulders sag and the car ticks and I can hear the sea on the other side of the villa. I lay my forearm on the steering wheel and my forehead against my arm and I wait, feeling the cloak of the road on me, wanting to take that off. I’m ready to be naked with her again.

  Then she’s at my window, leaning near. “Leave the car here,” she says. “We have a room.”

  I should rent two rooms for us, for the appearance of it, but I tell the woman who runs the guesthouse we are married, we are Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Cole, and I believe it is true, in a way. I am not sure if the woman believes me, but I do not care. I so much want Ben to sleep in my arms tonight.

  Ben and I walk around the house and beneath a gallery and suddenly the sea stretches wide before us. To the north, the beach curves toward Nha Trang, which is invisible beyond the big shoulders of some hills at a distant turning. No one is on the shore. Out in the sea is a little string of four fishing boats, heading back to Nha Trang. Their engines beat faintly over the rushing sound of the waves. I have just begun to listen to this sound, which is a familiar thing, when Ben says, “It’s like the motorcycles in Saigon.”

  I look at him. He is reading my mind now, not even my mind, he reads my ears. “They’ll be gone soon,” I say.

  He looks to the south and I do too. Perhaps half a kilometer or more away, there is some figure on the beach, but that is not clear. Otherwise there is no one. The land along the sea flattens out and stretches far away. Ben takes in a slow breath of this sweet air. Now I try to name his thought.

  I say, “We are alone on this sea.”

  “Yes,” he says. “It feels that way.”

  I was right about what was in him. I smile. “There is no one staying at this place tonight but us. The tourists who come along here go on to Nha Trang, I think.”

  He turns to me abruptly. “Come on then. There’s still some light.”

  He drops his bag on the ground and holds out his hand. I lift my own hand and I move it toward his and even before we touch, it feels as if I have a shadow body inside this one that he can see, and my hand nears his and the body inside, which normally fits snug inside me, has loosened for him and then the tips of our fingers touch and I begin to quake inside my skin. His hand grasps mine firmly and we are moving across a grassy plot and onto the beach, the sand gray and packed hard, and he lets go of my hand and he pulls off his shoes and drops them. I pull off my shoes too, knowing I will destroy my stockings, thinking to ask him to go back to the villa and into our room beneath the gallery facing the sea, for only a brief time, so I can change from these tour guide clothes. But he is groping for my hand again with an eagerness that makes me feel like we are two children and I am angry with myself, thinking of my stockings.

  He moves quickly now, almost running, and I run with him and all I am thinking is my stockings should go to hell, my life has changed, and now all that I regret about my clothes is that I have not stripped them from me.

  We are at the waterline, the waves bubbling and swiping at us, and we turn to the north, where there is not even a hint of a distant figure, and we move together by the South China Sea and the water splashes up our ankles and I say, “Wait.”

  We stop, and again I look ahead, and behind, and even the speck that might have been a person to the south is gone, and to the west there are only dunes and rocks and the creep of the mountains toward the sea. We are alone. So I lift my skirt, and I find the rim of my panty hose with my thumbs, and I grasp only the hose and not my panties underneath, and I strip them down and roll them soggy and ragged off one foot and then the other and my thighs and my legs and my ankles and my feet are naked, and I throw the panty hose into the sea—let some crab inhabit them—and I let my skirt back down to where it was. I look and Ben has squared around to watch this. He lifts his eyes to mine and he smiles and then I gasp as he falls forward and he is on his knees before me and he lifts my skirt again and he bends and I feel his lips on one knee and then on the other and I lift my face to the hunch of the distant mountains and my skirt climbs and he kisses one thigh and then the other. My hands fall to the top of his head, but lightly, so as not to discourage him. I wish now I had stripped off the panties as well. I do feel a pressure there, on that most tender of spots on my body, his mouth is there, but I do not feel the flesh of his lips on me. I lift my hands from his head, ready to take this barrier from between us, but he rises and his arms are around me and I am in his arms and his mouth is on my mouth, briefly, and then he has turned again, taken my hand again, and a great surge of the sea bumps us, rises quick up my leg, floats my hem, jealous, I think, of Ben’s kiss, wishing to kiss me there, too, and we try to stay on our feet, from the nudging of the sea, and Ben laughs and lets go of my hand and moves on ahead.

  I know I am to follow, but this sudden vision of him, his whole body at once, moving, is a rare thing for me. I have seen him very close up far more often. The sea runs away from me, too, and I move after Ben, but slowly, angling up the beach a bit, letting him go. He loves the water. I can feel this in him. He is twenty or thirty meters ahead of me now, slowing, watching out to sea. The fishing boats are tiny, about to disappear, the sound of their motors has dwindled into silence.

  And now his shirt is off, flying back behind him up the beach. And he is stripping his pants down and my breath catches, I think to do this too, throw off my clothes and run to him, but I am still loving to watch, and he strips off his underpants and my Ben is naked and his shoulders are broad like the hills at the turn of the beach and his back is straight and his bottom is small and my hands stir, this is a part of him I have not seen yet, really, and I want to lay my palms on this sweet part of him, and he is striding forward now into the water.

  He has not looked back to me. He is thigh deep in the water and now his bottom has disappeared and he is pushing hard and he still has not looked over his shoulder—it is like he has forgotten me—and something dark comes into me, an old thing, and he falls forward and I see the flash of his arms and his legs and he is lifted by a wave that does not break and he falls and he is still swimming and I know what the dark thing is, it is the dragon, how he missed his kingdom in the sea and one day simply was gone. The princess—who was his wife and the mother of his children—woke and he had gone back to the sea.

  I want to cry out to Ben. I take a step forward. He is far out now—how quickly he seems to have gone—he rises on a distant swell and the swell falls and I do not see him. He has vanished. I cry out at last, a pitiful sound, a tight pathetic sound that no one can hear, and I am rooted where I am, I cannot move and I am clothed tight and I am suddenly alone. I keep my eyes fixed there, where he was a moment ago. I wait. I wait. The sea swells again and falls and there is foam and breakers and there is a vast sky, going dark, going very dark, and still Ben does not reappear. He is gone. I touch my belly. I press there. I do not want our child to follow him.

  Then his head—far away—appears in the sea. He shakes his head sharply, clearing water from his face and now I can see him looking to the shore, he is looking for me. I lift my arm, I wave, and his arm comes up from beneath the water and he waves, and then he disappears again. But before the darkness can clutch at me once more, his body comes up and he is swimming, fast, lifting with a swell and speeding in and then dropping, but I can see him instantly again, and he swims and rises and falls, over and over, and now he angles upright and he is wading toward me, the water to his chest and then to his waist.

  I am quaking again, for it is time. I have not looked at this part of him yet and now it is time. He moves, the water fall
s, a dark splash of hair appears, but the water swells, up to his chest, pushing him to me, and then suddenly the sea dips and I can see him there. Not nearly so large as it felt inside me, this part is withdrawn into the circle of the rest of him there, like a cameo, but he is coming from the sea and I know he will grow with my touch. He is striding now from the foam of the breakers and I keep my eyes on this part of him and he quakes there like this quaking inside me and he is drawing nearer and even as I am watching him, this part is changing, growing, from the touch of my eyes, no longer a cameo but a clasp now, a great clasp to connect to me and to hold me tight and to carry me along. And he stops. And I look up to his face and he is drenched and he moves his hands on his chest, as if to wash himself with the sea, and he smiles at me, a soft smile that tells me we have all the time in the world, all the rest of our lives, and he tells me this so I won’t worry as he turns slowly around to look out to the sea once more, before coming nearer.

  And I find that I am moving toward him, faster, and I am yanking my skirt up to my waist, and I leap up onto his back. I throw my arms around his neck and I hook my legs around his waist and he laughs a loud, sharp laugh of surprise and his wrists come under my knees and lift at me, hold me up, and I think that one day he will carry our child on his back but for now I am glad it is me and he carries me forward and I know what he is planning to do.

  I laugh, and I cry, “Wait.”

  But he does not listen, he is going forward into the water.

  “Wait,” I cry again but he can hear the thrill in my voice and he does not stop. Then I bend near, putting my mouth against his wet and salty ear. I say, “Don’t you want me to be naked?” He stops. I am very conscious of those places where our flesh is touching. Beneath my leg, along my thigh, my forearms against his chest.

  He turns and he wades toward the shore and I cling tight to him and for a moment I think I know what it feels like to have a father. I am small upon him and I am glad for that because the way he is big makes me safe and makes me loved and makes it so that I am not alone, and these are good things, but I am more glad for my thighs clutching his naked sides and more glad that my true father is nothing but smoke and air and I am more glad for where we are heading, out of the water now, and he does not stop, he is heading for the top of the beach and a stretch of low scrub grass there, before a dune. And beyond, the only light in the sky is spread along a jagged line of mountains and the light has turned red and we are in the dark shadow of the dune and he puts me down on the grass and my hands go to work instantly at my blouse, the buttons, the bow, it is off me and he is before me as I am doing this and watching my hands, watching what will be revealed beneath them. The blouse is gone and then my bra and he smiles at my nipples and the skirt is gone and my panties and then we are on the grass and my hand goes to this part of his body that at last I can see in my head and it is ardent now for me, unimpressed and withdrawn as it was with the sea, and if I am so much more exciting to his body than the South China Sea, I have no right to delay him, for I am rich with my own inner sea and I will drench and wash him now and I draw him into me right away, my Ben, my love, he will come into this place where our child has begun to grow.

  How good it feels inside her, how good, there will be many more nights to go slow but on this shore on this night she wants me inside her quickly, she draws me there with her hand, and I move onto her and I look at the sea and the moon is out there, I didn’t notice it before, though it’s been there all along, hiding in its paleness, not showing itself, but now the daylight is almost gone and the moon has appeared, fat and golden.

  I look at her face beneath me and her eyes are open and she is Tien, she is herself, I move in her and there’s nothing here to fear at all. I am up Highway One in Vietnam and this alien sea lies beside me and on my skin, and there is nothing of war, nothing of death, nothing of the past, there is only this joining of me and this woman, this Vietnamese woman, this woman I love, and I am at peace.

  And then I rush and she digs hard at my back and her lips are against my ear and she cries out softly there, and only now are we related, only now, only this way, as we share one body, and then we slow and we stop and we lie still. Though I shift and am no longer inside her, this feeling between us does not change and she curls against me and I hold her, and for a long time, we lie still.

  And the sky goes black and bursts with stars and the moon rises and grows small but it turns so white it almost hurts my eyes. I think she sleeps for a while. Then she wakes with a little start. I draw her closer and she whispers, “Yes.”

  “Did you have a dream?”

  After a silence, she says, “In my sleep now I listen to my body.”

  “What does it say?”

  She is quiet again, for a long while. Then she says, “What will we do tomorrow?”

  “Make love.”

  She presses me onto my back and crawls directly on top of me, her chest hovering over my chest, her legs hugging my sides, her face eclipsing the moon. “That is a good answer,” she says.

  I can’t see her eyes in the darkness, only the silhouette of her head. I lift my hand and with my fingertips I touch her lips and then trace up her check to her brow to the bridge of her nose, to her eye, feeling her eyelid close for me, I touch her there and her eye moves beneath my finger, the sign of dreaming.

  I say, “Are you listening to your body right now?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t answer me the last time, so I move my hand from her face to her hip and I simply wait.

  “I am glad I was born,” she says.

  “I am too.”

  “My father is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  The moon flares in my eyes. Her head has moved, she slides off me now, and I can see her face, I turn to her and I move to kiss her and I see her eyes shift to me and they are black, black as the empty spaces between the stars, and I close my own eyes with the touch of our lips. We kiss and she gently ends it and I look up into the sky and draw her close.

  She says, “I almost was not born. I have always thought, now and then, that it made no difference, really. Now my body tells me that it is very important that I am alive.”

  I think of abortion. That her mother almost let Tien go. I want to tell her that I, too, am glad she is alive, but I sense something else running in her. I close my eyes against the brightness of the moon and I wait.

  Then she says, “My mother made up a fairy tale for me once. She said it was about my father so I think there was a real story behind it. I loved a certain fairy tale of a dragon when I was a child, so she made it about dragons. In this story my father dies at the end. But it was really about his father, the part where I almost never was born.”

  I open my eyes. I turn my face out to the sky over the horizon, away from the moon. I feel a tiny stirring in me, like the flicker of one of the stars out there.

  She says, “It happened that he almost died, my father’s father. And if he had, then I never would have been born.”

  Something in me says to just keep quiet now But this flicker is actually a distant burning. I say, “What is the story? How did he almost die?”

  “It is about a dragon—who turns out to be my ­grandfather —who goes every day into a fiery hole where he works . . . When I start saying this, it sounds silly. I do not know what parts are real and what parts are not.”

  “No,” I say, and whatever is driving me to hear this is working on its own. I feel like I’ve floated off a ways down the beach. I’m out taking a smoke while this other part of me does some damn stupid thing. “It’s not silly,” I say. “What’s the story she told?”

  Tien adjusts her head into the dip between my shoulder and my chest. She says, “My grandfather’s enemies try to kill him in this fiery hole. A place where he works. But he fights them and kills them instead. And it was after all this that my
father is born. So you see, if he had died there instead, my father would not have been born and then he would not have gone to a distant land and met the ­princess—this was how my mother saw herself, I guess. But then I would not have been horn. And then . . .”

  She stops abruptly, but there is already a stopping in me. The flicker is gone, the burning is gone, there is only cold now and a shift of gravity, a collapse in my chest. I try to wrench a thought from this place. The story is too familiar. Too familiar. The story my father told me about him going into the B-furnace stove in the Depression and the plant owner’s goons trying to kill him. This was my story, and Tien’s mother told her this thing just like it. Kim. Kim. But I can’t remember ever telling Kim about my father and his fight in the mill. I try now. Try hard to remember. Nothing. This is good, I tell myself. They’re different stories.

  Tien finally finishes her thought. “And then I would not have made love to you. I would not be here tonight in my body, which I am very happy for.”

  I can say nothing. I think to ask for more details from her fairy tale. But it’s about dragons and fiery holes and princesses—it is suddenly unimaginable that Kim could think of herself as a princess with me. Not even in a made-up story for her child. Never. This was a fairy tale and fairy tales are designed to make you think of your regular life. This fiery hole could be anything. But I am breathing heavily now, gasping for air. I gently untangle from Tien and I sit up.

  “What is it?” she says.

  I try to catch my breath. There is no reason for panic now. It was a fairy tale. But I realize we have to go on in the morning. We have to find Tien’s mother.

  “Ben?”

  I finally say, “We have to find our clothes before the moon goes down.”

  My hand reaches, expecting his body, my eyes are still closed but I am climbing from the dark hole of sleep and there is just bed and pillow and the South China Sea is roaring and I sit up fast. The door to our room is standing open to the sea and there are breakers and the sun is shattered all over the water. My eyes hurt from the light. I shade them with my hand. “Ben?” I say and there is nothing. I begin to feel a panic in me. “Ben,” I say louder, my feeling wound tight in the sound.