Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

And we do not separate our bodies for a long while. At some moment we turn onto our sides, still joined, a world spinning on its axis, but we neither of us want to let go after what we’ve done, and we lie without speaking, and whenever she makes some slight movement, the shift of a leg, the slide of an arm, the tiniest adjustment of her face against my chest, it surprises me a little and then it delights me, she is someone other than me but she is me as well, I feel the movement of her body as my own movement and I am not only whole, I am multiplied, I am rich with limbs and flesh and voices.

“I love you,” I say. I do not expect to say it, though I mean it, and I wait for my other voice to reply.

He says the words that I realize I would myself have said in just a few moments. I pull my face back so I can look at him. His cheek is red from the neon and though his eyes are in shadow, I can see how steady they hold on me. It is very easy to find an answer for him, but I have to struggle to undo a great, hard knot in my throat in order to let my voice through. I say, “I love you.”

“Is that true?” he says.

“It is true.”

“Are you sure?”

“One of us had to say it first.”

“I didn’t expect to say it,” he says.

“Did you not realize?”

“Not till I said the words.”

“I am glad you said it first. Is that selfish of me?”

“No.”

“I knew my own feeling for certain, and since you spoke first, I could be certain of yours.”

He straightens his face before mine and his eyes are very dark. “You can be certain,” he says.

“You can be certain, too,” I say. “Of me. This is why you asked is it true. You spoke it first.”

“I didn’t really doubt you. I think I asked you if it was true to make you say it a few more times.”

“I can do that,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

“I love you,” I say. “I love you.”

“Is that selfish of me?”

“No. I am happy to say it. I say it only three times in my life to a man.”

I could sense him counting.

“The answer is three,” I say.

“Just now?”

“Yes. You are the only one.”

His eyes slide away from me and his head angles into the shadow.

“Is there anything wrong?” I ask.

“No,” he says, though I know there is something.

I say, “I understand that there were others for you.”

He nods at this, though I feel there is still more.

I grow a little afraid. “Is there someone now?”

“No.” He says this quickly, a hard little rock of a word, and I believe him.

“I feel something troubling you.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s funny. The only thing I can think of that’s like this feeling is when I was on the plane that would take me away from Vietnam. You believe you’re going to die at any moment and you’ve believed it so long and so hard that it seems like you’ve always believed it. Then suddenly you know you’re going to live. That’s what I’m feeling right now.”

I draw him to me and hold him and he holds me. We do this for a while. Then he pulls a little bit away, so he can look into my face.

He says, “It’s been two years since I’ve touched a woman. The touching had all become so bad that I was certain I’d die from it. But I got a test and I’m okay. You can know that. I have nothing in me that will kill us from making love.”

I kiss him briefly on the lips and I say, “If you were not sure, you would not have done this thing. I know that.”

“How could you know that?” He asks this not like I am a foolish person. I think he wants to understand how it is that I can know to love him.

I say, “I looked into your eyes and I saw all the gentleness I had dreamed for.”

“You know so little of me.”

“I could say the same thing.”

“Ask me,” he says. “If there’s anything that might frighten you about me. Anything you want to know about me. Ask.” And he sits up to show me he is serious.

I sit up, too, and face him. “You are free to love me?”

“Yes. You asked that before.”

“Have you been married?”

“Yes.”

“Is she dead?” I ask, and my face grows hot from the shame of the question. I wish for it to be so.

“I don’t think so. I haven’t heard anything about her for some years.”

“Did you love her very much?”

“No. Not very much. As much as I could at the time, I guess. It was my fault. As much as I could wasn’t very much, is all. I came here, to Vietnam, and then I went home and I’d watched her when I was in high school. She was. . I don’t know. There was something pretty about her, but not soft. That was a kind of thing that I wanted then. I’d watched her in high school and she’d watched me and I guess she saw something in me she liked, but we never got together. Then when I got back from Vietnam, she was working in a dime store and I was living with my parents and when we watched each other again, we could imagine life being better, more interesting, if we lived in some little place together. That was all. And it was better for a time. Better than the heavy days. The way the days just went on, back then. I don’t know if this means anything to you, what I’m saying.”

It means something to me, I think, when Ben says all of this. I think I know about heavy days. I think it is the same for me, when I am not thinking about what I owe to the country or to the ghost of my father or to the people who come to Vietnam to understand it and I speak to them in English about what we are. In the other times, the days I do not work and my prayers are done, there is some heavy thing in the center of me. I can sit in this very room and I listen to the sound of the motorbikes going by and going by and when there is a little bit of quiet from them, there is a place in the roof of this building that catches the wind and hums a low hum and it just goes on and on and the day is very hot sometimes and I want to sweat but I cannot, my skin fills with my sweat and does not let it go, and this is all there is to my life, just these little sounds and my sweat held in and I grow sad in some dull way. I think this is what Ben is talking about. I have this feeling, too. He and I are the same. But I do not say any of this to him on this night of our first touching. There is something else that trails into my head with his wife, like the smell of her perfume. I say, “Did you have children?”

“We were together more than ten years. But we never had a child.”

“Can you have a child?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. Mattie and I never checked to see what was the matter. It might’ve been me. It might’ve been her. It might’ve been we just didn’t try hard enough. We never did try, exactly.”

We are sitting before each other on my narrow bed. Our legs are crossed and we are still naked and a feeling comes into me that I never have before. I feel that place between my legs as an opening into me, a way in. But without him inside, I sense the break of me there, and there is the flow of him, cold now, from inside me, and I close my eyes for a moment and there is a spinning in my head. His hands are on my shoulders.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

I open my eyes and things steady. “I am okay now,” I say.

He takes his hands away and we are facing each other and I have not looked at him yet. I have not seen that special part of his body. I can cast my eyes down now, I know, and I will see, but as I think to do that, I feel the spinning begin inside again. I will wait to see him there. I will wait. It is enough for now that I can feel my own body in this new way. And there are many things I still want to know.