Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

He says all these things and I think I understand him. I put my hand on his leg. He puts his hand on mine and he looks at our hands together. I look down, too. I say, “You tell me things that sound true.”

“I haven’t said these things before. Except to myself out over the road. I left the mill a few years before Mattie and me broke up and I started driving trucks. I drove a truck in Vietnam and it seemed a good thing to do at home. It got me away from the furniture. But it didn’t really solve anything.”

He squeezes my hand and lets it go and for a moment his hand and mine lie beside each other. “Look,” he says.

But I am already determined to say something. “My mother was a bargirl,” I say. “And I do not know if she is alive or dead. That is the truth.”

He keeps his eyes on our hands. I do not know if he is really listening to me. His voice goes soft and he says again, “Look.”

I do. He strokes his hand gently over mine and then lays it on me so that our fingertips are flared to each side like the wings of a bird. He says, “Our hands look the same.”

He says it very softly. Like how sweet this is. The light upon us is red, from the neon, and his hand is very thick and strong and mine is fragile and thin, but suddenly I see what he sees. The moons are the same. That is the first thing I see. He has wide rising moons there at the bottom edges of his fingernails and so do I. Then he slides his hand until our thumbs are beside each other and they are different, of course, in some ways, but there is something else there, a squareness to them around the tip, that we share.

“You see,” I say. “I was made for you.”

“Yes,” he says, very quiet, still studying our hands.

And I think I understand something about the quietness in him. He is sad about the way life seems to him after the war. He is sad about his father and his wife and his mother and all the miles he has to drive because he cannot find something to make life lift him up, light and sweet, and now he finds me and thinks that I am sweet and he lifts for me and we touch. These are good things. This is a good moment, and looking at our hands proves that, for our hands seem somehow to come from the same maker of hands, some maker who is a very fine artist and his work is very clearly his when you see it, even if the subjects are different.

He looks at me now and he smiles, at this sameness, I think, and I ask him, “Did you hear what I said?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About your. . mother?”

“Yes.”

“What was it you said?”

I take a breath, wishing not to say this once more. “I do not really know if she is dead. She was a bargirl.”

“Did she leave you?”

“Yes. When the liberating forces were about to enter the city. She was afraid for her life. She was a bargirl for the Americans.”

I feel a little thump of something in me at that. Like hitting a pothole in the dark. But I figure I know what it is. Tien doesn’t like what her mama did, and I don’t blame her, but I’m guilty of the same sort of thing. If Tien was a little girl feeling bad about her mama taking Americans to bed, I was one of those Americans taking a woman to bed back then who might’ve been some child’s mother. Though I knew Kim wasn’t. Still, it was the same sort of thing. That’s how I take it. And there is the reminder, too, of the difference in our ages, Tien and me. Not that it bothers me. If it doesn’t bother her, it shouldn’t bother me. I figure it all out like this. And she’s still talking and I’m missing it. But I feel okay now.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Tell me that again.”

She starts it over without a pause, without a dirty look, not holding it against me at all that I haven’t heard her for a moment. I have no clear memory, but I know this is different from what I was used to, what I came to think was normal from Mattie. That’s how my thoughts are running, to things that just make me love Tien more, at each little turn. She says, “She left me with her mother, right here in this apartment. Then she went away. I think she went back to where she grew up. Up near Nha Trang.”

“What was your mama’s name?” I ask.

When Tien says, “Huong,” I’m surprised to feel a quick little letting go of something, though I don’t stop to try to figure out why.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Tien says.

“Okay,” I say.

“She doesn’t matter.”

“Of course not.”

“She never brought me around her men,” Tien says.

“She was trying to protect you.”

“Yes. You’re very sweet to try to let me see it that way.”

“It’s true,” I say.

“She went away for that reason, too. To protect me. She was afraid my father. .”

Tien stops. I think it is just the pain about him. Her face goes hard and she looks away from me, into the dark of the room, and I figure she’s thinking about all the prayers she’s made, all the incense she’s burned. She’s never let go of him. As she sees it, he’s still in this room.

Tien says, “She made me lie. All my life. Now to you. I can’t even just speak the truth.”

“You can always tell me the truth.”

She turns back to me. She smiles. She lifts her hand and touches my cheek with her fingertips. “Yes,” she says. “My mother went away, too, because she did not want anyone to find out that my father was an American.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Your American father.”

“Yes. I would not carry a lie this far.” Tien nods in the direction of her ancestor shrine. “I pray real prayers.”

“Of course.”

We fall silent for a time. I feel like pressing this issue and I don’t know why. I don’t try to figure it out. I just feel the impulse to press her. I say, “How did you learn of his death?”

“He died before I was even born.”

“So your mother told you.”

“Yes.”

I say no more. The impulse suddenly disappears. The street is quiet, I realize. For a long moment there is nothing. The silence buzzes faintly in the room. Then there’s the distant brat of a motorbike engine. It grows louder and grates past our window and is gone. After that, there’s silence again. It’s very late.

Tien says, softly, “Do you think she lied?”

I find my mind slow now. Like I am half asleep. “What?” I say.

“My mother. Do you think she lied?”

It’s hard enough, suddenly, just to focus my eyes on Tien. It takes me a few moments to do this.

“About my father dying,” she says.

“How would I know?”

“She was a liar.”

“Was she?”

“Yes.”

“But only for reasons,” I say.

“There would be a good reason for that lie.”

“What?”

“So I would not have to think about him. So I would not feel abandoned by him. So I would not wonder what she did to make him go away and never want to see her again.”

I am very tired now. Very weary. I uncross my legs, turn and sit on the edge of the bed, my side to her.

She says, “Would those not be good reasons for her to tell me this lie?”

“What difference would it make now?”

“None. You are right.”

“You wouldn’t go to America to try to find him.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Do you even know his name?”

“She never spoke his name,” she says, and there’s movement next to me.

I glance and she’s sitting beside me now. I let my eyes fall to her breasts. The nipples are dark in this light. They are erect. My hands stir, wanting to touch them, but instead I cross my hands in my lap.

“Do you have a picture of your mother?” I ask, and the question surprises me.