Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

Still, as I lay on my bed, with Ben just behind all of my thoughts, I decided that when the time came, I would go to a pagoda and put the precious water on a jasmine flower and let it fall from there onto the mouth of my child. She would have this thing that I never had. And she would have a mother who was not forced to flee and never return. And she would have a father.

A father. I lay on my bed and my body felt things it had never felt and I dreamed of a child, and who was the fa-ther in this dream? An American. Did I imagine he would stay in Vietnam and we would live in this room where I grew up? Did I imagine I would leave Vietnam and go to America? No. I did not imagine anything except a child in my arms and Ben nearby. All the rest did not exist. I did not even think of Ben touching me. Not directly. My body dreamed of that in its own way, quaking and swelling and trembling, but in my head was only a jasmine flower and a drop of water and a child and she was beautiful and her eyes moved to mine and I could see my-self there, as in tiny dark mirrors, and then I felt another thing in my body, a flexing, a fierceness, and I wanted things for her and in that wanting I grew angry. I thought, Was it really for me that my mother stayed away? Things are different now in Vietnam. She could come to Ho Chi Minh City and she could come to the very street where she lived and she could find me in the very place where her own mother once lived and no one would harm her. The government does not care about that now. They do not care about the whores of the Americans. Is it really for my sake that she has never returned? Or is it for her own? Did she grow tired of her child?

Or is she dead. Did she die for my sake. She was right to keep my American self hidden. The children who were clearly the sons and daughters of Americans were difficult for us all to understand after the nation was made one.

But that was because the hearts of these children were still American. They still wanted the things of that country. My government believed this and they sent those children to America, where they might be happy. I was never like those others. I could keep my American self hidden because it never really existed. It died with my father even before I was born. I had no father. There was never a father. His blood was spilled before I was born and it spilled from me as well, even in my mother’s womb. His blood was gone. But did my mother’s blood fill me in its place? Or am I a cup half full?

I thought these things on my bed on the day Ben was first here and I opened my robe and I was naked and I looked to the mat where he drank tea and I had filled his cup many times and he drank and my own cup sat before me full and growing cold. I did not think of myself. I was very happy sitting there and filling his cup and watching him drink what I had brought him. And my body in its nakedness yearned now and I understood that yearning and I knew I wanted him to touch me, as if I was the lucki-est of arranged brides in the whole history of Vietnam, as if my mother and my father had chosen for me a most beautiful man and he and I had come together on our wedding night as strangers, really, as is our custom, but we loved each other instantly and we touched each other and it was very beautiful and we thanked our parents for arranging this. But the more my body yearned for him as I lay there, the more I understood all that had gone before. Yes, I was a cup only half full. Yes, my father’s blood was gone and nothing had filled me in those empty places. But with this man I felt it was possible. I did not care that he was American. I held my child and the drop of jasmine water fell on her lips and she spoke his name. Ben.

She says, “Ben.” When I put my hand on that place between Tien’s legs, she speaks my name and I think, This is the moment it will all stop. I’ve gone too fast. And I stop and I’m ready to move my hand away and I’m beginning to curse myself inside because I don’t want this to end and I’ve fucked it up now. Fucked up the most important thing of all, for even that brief touch is different from anything I’ve ever felt and it is suddenly very important. All up and down the forefinger edge of my left hand is her softness and I’m stunned by that, it’s her, it’s Tien I touch, and I touch her in a place that seems so entirely part of her and so entirely secret that I am drawn out of myself and it feels as if I’ve just discovered my hand, I’ve never had a real feeling there before, but now I do, and I rise to her and I know that I will soon find other parts of me that I never knew I had, never did have. I raise my hand from her and it’s flushed and I feel my heart beating there and Tien says something to me in Vietnamese. It’s urgent, but it’s soft. Then I think she realizes how she has spoken and she repeats it in English. “I didn’t mean for you to stop.”

“You said my name. I didn’t know.”

“I said your name because I was happy you touched me there.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“I told you before that it is all right.”

“About your breasts. I didn’t know if it applied. .”

“It does.”

“I’m hearing myself now,” I say. “I sound like a damn fool.”

“You sound very nice.”

“It feels like the first time for me, too.”

Her voice grows eager. “Does it really feel like that?”

“Yes.”

“Though you have done this many times?”

“Not so very many. I don’t remember.”

And this is true. I can’t remember. I have no past, either, it seems. My hand returns to that place and she opens her legs and I have trouble drawing a breath because of the gentleness of her there and because of all that has gone before, as blurred and sometimes blank as my memory is, I have a sharp sense now of the long road to this touching, this sweet and momentous touching.

Earlier she went into her bathroom, as she did the first time I was here. She closed the door and I could not sit down. I did not know I would touch her on this night and I was in a free fall inside, I was white knuckled on what- ever it is that I hold inside me in order to steer, and it felt like I’d just gone over a cliff edge and I was falling. And I found myself in front of her ancestor shrine. Half a dozen sticks of incense were stuck in a glass bowl full of white sand. I plucked out one of them, not really with anything in mind. My hands were restless and I plucked one stick of incense and then another and I pulled them all out and held them together and they were cold, the tips were black and cold, the smoke for Tien’s father long ago dissolved into the air, and I realized that my hand was trembling. Then I jumped at some sound from the bathroom and I knew I shouldn’t be intruding here. I stuck the incense into the sand and I backed away. Water began to run on the other side of her bathroom door. I stood in the center of her room and I looked back to the faceless shrine.

Here was a little monument to family history, which these Vietnamese believe in deeply. So why shouldn’t I think at that moment of my own family? Even of things that might, at first glance, seem far from what was about to happen between Tien and me. A little bit of family history that stuck with me and never went away, no matter how many miles of highway I raced over on how many days and nights in the thirty years to come. Tien said her father had died in the war. I thought of my own father, who never had a chance to die in a war and I thought of how that disappointed him. He was in his mid-thirties when the Second World War began and he was working in steel, a crucial industry, and they wouldn’t take him. He had a bad knee, too, though not bad enough that he couldn’t work the labor gang, and he was as strong as two men, and he told this to the draft board more than a few times, but they still wouldn’t take him. And if he had gone to war and he had died there, I would never have been born. He realized that. He even told me once.